But for neurodiverse individuals, thinking “outside the box” means something else entirely. My protagonist taught me that we are all-encompassing and wild, genuinely wild. We represent the wildness in everyone. We embody what cannot be contained, readily defined, or predicted. We are the non-linear, confronting, polarizing, and eternally one-of-a-kind parts of you. And we have the power to bring everyone together in a way that leaves no one chasing. Rather, we can all run together.
I am always falling in love in kitchens.
Or rather, I suppose it’s not so much that I’m falling in love in kitchens but that I’m always realising I’m in love in kitchens; that the kind of love I love to fall into is the kind of love that’s most at home in the kitchen; a domestic kind of love; an intimate, easy, buttery kind of love.
I expected, after all of this, the natural tick-tock of a disaster novel. The invasion or superstorm or missiles would arrive; the characters would run for it; inevitably, some innocent would be sacrificed to the gods who demand such things from novelists. But, although the tension heightens, no such moments arrive. Where other practitioners of the genre revel in chaos—the coarse spectacle of society unravelling—Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease. This, he suggests, is the modern disaster—the precarity of American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get worse.
These swerves in the narrative remind us that we’re reading a novel by John Banville, not an Ed McBain procedural or a Dorothy L. Sayers whodunit. In “Snow,” Banville’s engagement with the genre of crime or detective novels is partial. His ambitions for his novel are more complex.
It has the same vast imaginative reach, the same gothic intricacy, and it does the same thing of creating a world that feels none the less real for all its fantastical strangeness. Piranesi was worth waiting for: the most gloriously peculiar book I’ve read in years.
A perfectly-engineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, "Leave the World Behind" combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments.
For Carey, all of these vectors — professional, personal, romantic, creative, racial, familial — intersected and often overlapped, and had since her childhood. “The Meaning of Mariah Carey” tells that story vividly and emotionally and, for long stretches, unblinkingly. It is a memoir about a determined and preternaturally talented artist focused on her craft long before she’d captured the world’s eyes and ears, and also about a young woman foiled at almost every turn when trying to feel secure in her identity.
Knowing the human matrix out of which the work arose, turns out, is a lot like shining a lamp on a relief carving — it makes the image more dimensional, deepening its shadows and raising the highlights.
I begin to dread the surf and turf. I cross
then double cross another friend off of the list. Now this,
Even C.P. Cavafy–
cynical, ascetic,
unknown in his day–