One morning last year, early in the course of his treatment, Trebek felt so sick that he lay down on the floor of his dressing room, sobbing from the pain. Producers suggested canceling the rest of the day’s tapings, but Trebek insisted on hosting all five episodes. When he walked onto the stage and greeted the audience, he felt focused, like himself.
“Once I introduce him on that stage, he is Alex Trebek,” said the longtime “Jeopardy!” announcer Johnny Gilbert. “You can tell that that’s what he’s living for.”
Such comfort foods, according to the dominant paradigm of Anglo-American food culture, are almost invariably bad for us — balms for the soul but never what the body needs, at least not nutritionally. But there’s a paradox therein: In medieval Europe, as in many of the world’s food cultures today, comfort and health were inseparable; pleasure and familiarity were among the guideposts to maintaining the body’s equilibrium, a notion that persisted in popular thought even as medical science transformed over the centuries.
The Only Good Indians is a disturbing horror novel about revenge and sorrow that houses a narrative about identity and the price of breaking away from tradition at its core. And that identity, Native American, isn't monolithic here; the four friends are Blackfeet, and while that means being Indian, not all Indians are the same. Also, the horror is unlike anything you've read before. It goes from disturbing flashes of thing that may or may not be there to in-your-face explosions of gore and violence tinged with supernatural elements. Jones has a talent for creating unsettling atmospheres and images, but he also enjoys explicit violence; a scene where an elk calf is pulled from inside a dead woman will stay with me forever. That's a good thing.
At the center of the novel is a question: Why did Shakespeare title his most famous play for the son who had died several years earlier? (Hamlet and Hamnet are used interchangeably in parish records of the time. They were, essentially, the same name.)
The book builds toward an intriguing speculation, which I will not reveal here. As it unfolds, it brings its story to a tender and ultimately hopeful conclusion: that even the greatest grief, the most damaged marriage and most shattered heart might find some solace, some healing.
In Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, the city has no name. It could be here, or anywhere. Its location in time isn’t specified either. There’s a faintly futuristic overlay, but the narrator’s diction swings between antiquated formality and present-day slang, and, among other anachronistic details, there are both spider monkeys and henchmen on the security team. Characters, too, are referenced only by generic designation. “My wife,” “the directors,” “the taxi driver,” “the architect.” Even descriptive nouns of that kind are withheld from the study participants, who have volunteered for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. They’re granted only numbers.
We’re all living through amplified despair, loneliness, collective grief, anger. Great books about love, like this one, feel like precious and impossible gifts. We should cherish the writers who provide them. Persaud shows us the importance of allowing people into our lives who will squeeze us when we need it, rub our backs, offer us a drink, pick us up from the airport. Through her characters, she teaches us, as Walcott did: “You will love again the stranger who was your self.”
The darkness of the future may not mean that anything is possible, but it certainly means that no particular outcome is certain. This uncertainty is the grounds of hope; it also means that hope in itself is insufficient. Hope demands that we work to build a better future on those uncertain grounds.
As Suzanne Marchand shows in her meticulous new book, porcelain has been integral to German life since its reinvention in Saxony in 1708 (the Chinese perfected the craft centuries earlier). It was initially a plaything for princes, as Böttger’s incarceration suggests; Augustus and his rivals sponsored state-run factories for what one called the “splendour and prestige” of their realms. From that beginning, Ms Marchand traces porcelain’s role in German history, examining its uses from Romantic busts of Goethe to Nazi egg cups.
let’s go lurking
all city on our feet
bat swoops without fail