For generations, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary have loomed as the nonpareils of self-loathing literary heroines. For Anna, guilt over having abandoned her husband and child, paired with a jealous nature, compels her to destroy the love she shares with Count Vronsky — and head for the train tracks. For Emma, dumped by a conscience-free bachelor with whom she has an extramarital affair — and unable to repay the debts she accrues on account of her shopping addiction — a spoonful of arsenic ultimately beckons.
Lately, however, Tolstoy and Flaubert have had stiff competition on the self-harm front, thanks to women novelists intent on exploring their female characters’ propensity to act out their unhappiness on their bodies.
By the time Alec Ginsburg was 5, he knew he wanted to work at his father’s drugstore. “It wasn’t a decision, I just knew,” says Ginsburg, 29, who, along with his father, Ian Ginsburg, is now the co-owner of C.O. Bigelow in Greenwich Village. “I saw how he loved his work much more than my friends’ parents liked theirs,” Alec recalls. “He’d come home and tell me how he had met Lou Reed or David Bowie. My dad was like the mayor of Greenwich Village, and I thought, How cool!”
One man’s murder is another’s revolution. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel The Committed, his sequel to 2015’s The Sympathizer, explores the moral duality of leftist violence in a book that marries thriller and theory, racing the reader through the criminal underworld of Paris before stopping to unpack Frantz Fanon. Using suspense as a vehicle for postcolonial philosophy has a certain logic: what could be more suspenseful, at least for ex-colonies and their diasporas, than the rush towards their own futures? Theory dominates so heavily that reading at times feels more like sitting in a graduate seminar than being swept away in a story. But narrative cannot exist without theory. The stories we tell ourselves take their shape from systems of thought and power. Try to imagine, for example, any rags-to-riches tale without capitalism.
Touch needs attention, Kearney argues, precisely because in this doubleness touch cross-relates (and fully enables) all of our other senses: “When we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses. . . . We are talking about touch in a more inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. So let me repeat one of my central arguments: touch is not confined to touch alone but is potentially everywhere. It is present not only in tactility but also in visibility, audibility, and so on.”
Josie George doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. The doctors don’t know either, though for 30-odd years they’ve been coming up with different ideas. Any exertion or stimulation exhausts her. There are times when she’s too weak to leave the house. A single mum with a nine-year-old son and a mobility scooter, she never knows how her health will be from one day to the next. It sounds like the material for a misery memoir. But the miracle of A Still Life – as much a miracle as her determination to write it – is its joyousness.
In easily digestible vignettes, Menéndez — a Guatemalan-American illustrator who worked as a bilingual art teacher in East Harlem — brings to life 40 Latinas from all over Latin America and the United States, from the 1650s to the present.
has no ministry—just an office
and a phone. She sleeps diagonally
on cool sheets, her blinds raised
to the moon. Mornings,