“You can’t be telling people ‘Keep your chin up, fight on!’ and then all of a sudden you counter that by: ‘What happened to Trebek?’ ‘Oh, he killed himself. He just got too discouraged,’” the quiz show host says in an interview from his office. “‘Well, hell, he was telling us to be positive. And then he did this negative thing.’ So, yeah. That’s the responsibility that has bothered me.”
Trebek’s new memoir, “The Answer Is ... Reflections on My Life,” is dedicated to “those who are hoping to become survivors.” But as he reveals in the book — which will be published Tuesday — the burden of serving as a beacon of hope has weighed on him. When he began chemotherapy, he started having crying spurts out of the blue. He was troubled by this and confided in his oncologist about the tears. The doctor advised Trebek that they were likely a side effect of his treatment.
Perhaps broader America was ready to move on from the war, but many of its participants and chroniclers were not. “All wars are fought twice,” Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen would write decades later. “The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
This was a battle for memory. It would prove a defining one, worth revisiting today, as my generation of forever-war literati fights similar battles and, in many ways, stakes out similar paths.
You don’t know Norbert D. Larky and David D. Holmes, but you’ve definitely seen their work thousands of times in your life.
It’s the kind of thing that has existed in the brains of people who left the TV on an obscure cable channel in the middle of the night, the kind that doesn’t have 24 hours of content to fill their day.
Or maybe there was a glitch at the station and they needed to fill some airtime. What Larky and Holmes created in the early 1950s was the one of the most iconic test patterns the world has ever seen.
Here’s the thing I now know about dying. It looks like almost anything else. It sometimes looks like sitting down to eat an egg. It looks like just resting for a moment. It looks like just slowing down. The difference between the slowing down and the stopping is nothing at all.
In her new novel, True Love, Gerard continues to suss out this question of what love is, what it means, and how it functions—at times—as a weapon, as a cage. True Love often shows us what love is not, but what it is often mistaken to be. How many of us don’t have a definition of love? How many would define love the way Justice Potter Steward defined obscenity: I know it when I see it. bell hooks echoes Erich Fromm’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Love is a verb.
With her eighth novel, O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name — in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.
Alongside global Covid-19 and racial injustice, Rachel Cohen’s memoir about seven years spent reading Jane Austen may seem a welcome diversion or a silly distraction. Cohen herself, a reader of James Baldwin and the Russian poets, is initially “appalled” by her “condition” as a Janeite. But “Austen Years” is a thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another, in which Cohen, who is also the author of “A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists” and “Bernard Berenson: A Life in Pictures,” entrusts her own thoughts and feelings to a great writer’s craft.
As the first lines of short story collections go, it’s pretty hard to beat the one that opens Modern Times, the debut of Irish writer Cathy Sweeney: “There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.” This, and the darkly funny page-and-a-half (A Love Story) it kicks off, are representative of Sweeney’s off-kilter sensibility. Her writing is direct, no-holds-barred; her sentences are as taut as bow strings.
Robert’s not coming in, my boss tells me.
I’m sitting sweating in a windowless office,
a stack of résumés eye-balling me, stinking