Catton taught herself screenwriting “the nerdy way,” she says — by consulting books, including John Yorke’s guide to dramatic writing, “Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story.” She also revisited early seasons of “The Sopranos” and read the corresponding scripts. “And then the Robert McKee school is all about rewatching ‘Chinatown,’” so she did that too.
Catton estimates she wrote as many as 300 drafts of the pilot episode because, she says, “any story has infinite possibility to adaptation, so I felt like I had to try multiple approaches.”
Learning a language is a kind of practice, as anyone who’s ever learned one will tell you. It has its own drills, milestones, peaks, and valleys. Its own rituals, such as repeating phrases aloud three times so they will register in your ears, the choreography embedded into the interface of tongue and palate. The reverberations echo in your skull—even if forgotten five minutes later, a residue remains. One ploughs through printed dictionaries and delights in their idiosyncrasies, which are missing from the online versions. There are “found poems” in certain dictionary entries. There’s pleasure in the way the language lives on your tongue, in your throat, each language residing there differently.
As someone who, as an adoptee, had to perform identity, I am continually fascinated by the ways identity shifts within, and in between, languages.
Black holes are prisons of light. They are both metaphor and physical entity, mute commentary on what is known, unknown, and unknowable. Well-studied but poorly understood, like a virus.
Given the ubiquity of home-field advantage, it’s surprising that there’s not a real consensus about what causes it. The pandemic—when some leagues played at neutral sites and some did not, and some teams played in front of fans while others did not—provided a number of controlled experiments to test the leading theories.
The results of those experiments have been striking, both because of what they’ve confirmed about home-field advantage and what they’ve left uncertain.
All books open with a mystery. Sometimes it’s a mystery of plot—who committed the murder?—and sometimes it’s a mystery of character: what kind of a person is this? “Bina: A Novel in Warnings,” by the Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, dispenses plot details sparingly, so that you hardly know what has happened or why, and yet the book’s driving enigma turns out to be of the second variety. Oddly, this is the case even though Bina (“that’s Bye-na not Bee-na”) tells us, from the first sentence, exactly who she is and what her intentions are. “My name is Bina and I’m a very busy woman,” the seventy-four-year-old narrator announces. “I’m here to warn you, not to reassure you.”
As a graphic designer — of books such as Emma Cline’s The Girls and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, and of The Atlantic as the magazine’s creative director — Mendelsund is minutely acquainted with the ways pictures characterize words, and vice versa. He’s also a two-time novelist whose most recent book, The Delivery, gives sparse narration a more explicit storytelling function.
War novels are a dime a dozen, but with a female protagonist who is embroiled in the dangerous underbelly of dissident London, The Imitator adds to the canon of texts that counters the traditional depiction of wartime women as simply holding down the fort while men go to battle.
The subtitle of Atherton Lin's book is Why We Went Out, and the London-based author offers plenty of reasons in this remarkable debut. Gay Bar combines memoir, history and criticism; it's a difficult book to pin down, but that's what makes it so readable and so endlessly fascinating.
the most dangerous men