In February 2020, at a book party in a Brooklyn brownstone, a smiling stranger walked up to me. “We have something in common, you know,” she said. “We conceived our children without having sex.” My memory of the exchange then goes blank for a moment — I must have spluttered some confused pleasantry in response — but it quickly emerged that she had read my first novel, which explores its protagonist’s struggles with infertility, and drawn the conclusion that I myself had undergone I.V.F., as she had.
It was an audacious introduction. But I could not begrudge the assumption she had made, even if I was disoriented by the way she had expressed it. I, too, assume that much of the contemporary fiction I read is autobiographical.
“The first ghost story I ever read was ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – I remember thinking ‘Ah!’ I got the same thrill from The Haunting of Hill House. I thought: this is where you put that. This is how you rationalise and contain that feeling. By sharing it, by opening it to the light you kind of disempower it.”
The restaurant reeked of vegetable oil and frying garlic, and the grease settled on the plastic surface of every table and chair in the space. In the back corner, my mother, age twelve, barely tall enough to reach the top of the counter even with a step stool, tapped away at a faded yellow cash register. Her eyes, filling with tears, darted from the faint green numbers on the display to the hostile face of the customer in front of her, as she struggled to hold the orders in her head. The man hovered, knuckles rapping the counter.
“Where’s my change?” They were always like this, her father had warned her. Calculating and cold, waiting for the first chance of a slipup to scam the family business. She trembled as she quickly handed over the bills, certain she’d made a mistake with her calculations.
If Elmet announced the arrival of a bright new voice in British literature, Hot Stew confirms Mozley as a writer of extraordinary empathic gifts.
When John Archibald won the Pulitzer Prize for his Birmingham News columns in 2018, the citation read, “For lyrical and courageous commentary that is rooted in Alabama but has a national resonance in scrutinizing corrupt politicians, championing the rights of women and calling out hypocrisy.” Archibald dismisses this assessment in his questioning and questing book “Shaking the Gates of Hell,” a fascinating blend of family memoir and moral reckoning. “I’m a coward,” Archibald writes. “My pulpit is a pen. It is meant to provoke and to question, but it does not depend on tithes and diplomacy and butts in pews.”
To put it simply – perhaps too simply – the question Chalmers posed is, how can consciousness arise out of non-sentient matter, such as neurons and dendrites? In other words, how can a lump of squidgy grey matter think? Or to approach more closely to O’Keane’s central subject, how do our physical brains store phenomena as shimmering and evanescent as memories? Numerous solutions have been advanced, but the hard problem is as hard as ever. How would it not be? In other formulations it was already old when the pre-Socratics tackled it.
A ghost comes before Raven, as Raven
considers the moist green grass flowing
like a gentle sea from grave to grave.