North Dakota is the land of honeybees, the white tongues of their homes sticking up from green fields everywhere you look. Legend has it that the state has so many hives you could walk the width of North Dakota without your feet touching the ground.
It is right that honeybees should thrive in the Peace Garden State. With more than 90 percent of its land devoted to farming and ranching, North Dakota is wide open, rich with uncultivated grasslands where bees buzz and fly, marshals of the land below them. And though honeybees don’t spend all year in North Dakota, they always return. Innately, they know how to navigate to their center.
That there is big sky country, my father once said of North Dakota, where my great-great grandparents arrived from Norway in the late 1800s, drawn, too, by the promise of something fertile. I was born in North Dakota, like my father, and his parents. And though my family left North Dakota for Germany when I was three, like bees returning, back to the big sky we go. The geographical center of North America awaits. One of them, anyway.
There has been much recent discussion about how the pandemic might fuel political and social changes, about whether or not reduced travel and clearer skies will have increased our desire to protect the environment, or if new government welfare schemes will have popularised universal basic income and a world with less work. But we are also asking questions about the way we live individually. For all the mental suffering and loss this pandemic has brought, there’s a chance that we could emerge from it with a clearer sense of how we want to spend our days, how we might live happier and more meaningful lives. For many, the question now is: will we be able to make enduring behaviour changes when it ends?
It was 3:37 a.m. on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn when Lewis Miller let out a sigh of relief.
“Right here is my happy place,” the 46-year-old florist and guerrilla artist said. After zhushing a coral peony and throwing in a few gerbera daisies, he stood back to consider the framing of his six-by-four-foot orange-hued flower heart: black pavement, white crosswalk lines, a “No Turns” sign, the marquee of Barclays Center casting a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — “The time is always right to do what is right” — into the early-morning dark.
“We’re good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
On its simplest level, “Death in Her Hands” is a murder mystery. The recently widowed Vesta Gul, 72, is walking her dog in the woods when she finds a crisp note pinned under rocks. It reads: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It’s wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.”
Yet there’s no body. Who was this Magda? Who killed her? Where’s her corpse? Vesta, who reads Agatha Christie novels and lives in a secluded cabin on a lake, has lived a sheltered life. Here’s her chance to enter a whodunit, to plunge into brewing drama and into the sticky marrow of life.
The novel begins to explore what the poet Kay Ryan, in her new book of essays, calls “the small plop ordinary lives make,” and the rage against that smallness.
The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern’s sophomore fantasy novel, takes effort to read, but there are countless narratively complex works of science fiction and fantasy that amply reward such effort: N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season comes to mind as one recent, prominent example of the type. The effort of reading The Starless Sea is worthwhile (for the most part) if, like me, you enjoy deciphering narrative clues, weaving together story threads, and nodding at metatextual nuggets.
Her watch is posted from the south.
Its black box ticks the whole way.
The accident happens, the funeral.