In the late morning, on the day she planned to die, in April 2016, Avril Henry went to get the poison from the downstairs bathroom. She walked past the padded rocking chair where she sometimes sat for hours with her feet tilted above her head to ease the swelling in her ankles. She steadied herself against the countertop before reaching up to the top shelf and feeling around for the glass bottles that she had hidden there, behind the toilet cleaner and the baby powder.
“I got it imported illegally,” Avril had said of the drug supply. “It’s quite easy to do, but very risky.” She was at her home in Brampford Speke, a small village in south-west England with 300 residents, a pub called the Lazy Toad, a church, St Peter’s, and a parish council on which Avril had served several terms, earning a reputation as brilliant and steadfast, if sometimes needlessly adversarial.
But make no mistake, Ajayi Jones isn’t outlining steps to conquer or vanquish fear. That’s impossible, she says, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying to your face.
“You can’t tell me you’re walking through this world afraid of nothing,” she says. We’ll never stop being frightened, “because life doesn’t stop throwing us curveballs. Life doesn’t stop popping up things that are scary, even if they’re small.”
Lilly Hiatt’s music first found me by way of WXPN’s airwaves. In August 2017, I fled NYC for my hometown in Central PA, nursing spiritual and physical wounds from my latest emotional monsoon. A recent week-long bender had concluded with me quitting therapy and taking up self-harm instead. Scabbed remnants of the injuries on my arms and legs turned to scar tissue while my 2001 Saturn with manual locks and windows crawled towards the end of Cameron Street. There, an ad for Hiatt’s Trinity Lane proclaimed itself over my speakers, bits of the album’s title track sprinkled throughout the sonic copy stating its connection to her sobriety. “I get bored so I wanna get drunk,” Hiatt famously opens on the banger.
I didn’t know artists could be sober. That knowledge found its home amongst some latent crevice in my mind, where it laid in wait.
Big Meal is exactly what it sounds like: a meal that is large. It’s also untethered from linear time. Big Meal is not breakfast, lunch, or dinner—social constructs that no longer exist as such in my home—although it could theoretically occur at the traditional time for any of them. Big Meal comes when you’re ready to have it, which is a moment that only you can identify. For me, this is typically in the late afternoon, but sometimes it’s at breakfast. Generally, Big Meal happens once a day.
“Brood” is the sort of book that is inevitably called quiet. For me the book feels accurate. There are anecdotes here that illustrate life but have no effect on events. We live in a golden age of accurate fiction. Not realism — this could happen — but accuracy — it probably did happen. I don’t mean to suggest anything at all about the author and the inspiration for the book, only that the focus on the quotidian feels exceptionally lifelike to me. I don’t dismiss accuracy in fiction. Many people love it.
There are toxic relationships, and then there’s the relationship at the centre of Megan Nolan’s fearless debut. From compulsive beginning to violent end, the love affair between the novel’s narrator, a young university dropout in Dublin about whom we learn everything – everything – but her name, and the older Ciaran, a half-Danish poet, is supremely messed up.
Though it deals with tragedy, “My Heart” is never depressing, partly because of the beauty of the language — expertly translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth — and partly because of its depth and honesty of emotion, its intelligence and generosity of spirit, and the precision and originality of Mehmedinovic’s observations.
Ultimately, A Most Interesting Problem is a fantastic run-down of today’s understanding of human evolution and a great showcase of the scientific process. Science isn’t meant to be perfect, but its self-correcting nature makes it the best tool at our disposal for approximating reality.