“It is just kind of a coincidence, obviously,” Ottessa Moshfegh says of the importance of isolation in her fiction, from her home in Pasadena, California. “But yeah, it has been a major theme in my life.” She was due to be in the UK this summer as part of a publicity tour for her third novel, Death in Her Hands, but she had an odd sense “that something was going to get fucked up”. Clearly, she didn’t foresee a global pandemic, but her 2018 cult novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which her unnamed narrator holes up in her New York apartment, has made her the unofficial laureate of lockdown. “I guess it makes me glad that people are having a place to put their isolated misery,” she says of the novel’s resurgence in recent months.
Even before Covid-19, there was a long-running national obsession with staycations in Sweden. Here, they’re known as ‘hemester’, which comes from the Swedish words for home, ‘hem’, and holiday, ‘semester’. While hemester can mean you’re simply staying put in your apartment or house during your annual leave, it is also commonly used to talk more generally about taking a vacation anywhere within your own country. Despite a growing trend for international holidays over the past few decades (before the Covid-19 pandemic, Swedes were among the most-travelled nationalities in the world), spending time in summer homes remained a calendar staple for both wealthy families and those on lower incomes.
“I think in the Swedish mentality, it becomes something almost necessary in order to connect with nature and recharge your batteries for long, dark and cold winter,” explains Jennifer Dahlberg, a US-born blogger and author who is currently writing a book set in the Stockholm archipelago, where she’s spent summers for the past two decades.
“Tales From the Ant World” is a rapturously unapologetic hymn of praise to the roughly one quadrillion ants on the planet (here, as in earlier books and many a lecture, Wilson points out that if humans weren’t so conspicuously the dominant species on Earth, visitors from another world would immediately call this “the planet of the ants”). Wilson has encountered a great many of the world’s 15,000 ant species, both in the laboratory and in the wild, and he has genial, involving stories about all of them.
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.