I come not to bury the word, not today, but to observe its travels and its odd, nagging magnetism — the new hive of capacious thinking it has provoked.
The longer you’re gone, the slipperier coming home gets. To reconcile the person you’ve become with the one old friends remember is as easy as telling the tide not to rise.
This dilemma lies at the core of Elias Rodriques’s poignant debut novel, “All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running.” After seven years away, Daniel has come back to Palm Coast, Fla., where he fell in love with his high school flame, Aubrey. It is her death that has impelled his return.
Sometimes that’s just what we want from fiction — a reminder that suffering is also part of life’s comedy. Other times we’d rather sleep a hundred years or see the evildoer boiled alive. For that, we have the original fairy tales. For a more civilized magic, there’s “What You Can See From Here.”
This lovely mini-narrative recontextualizes objects that were previously weaponized — open scissors as suitors, a net shopping bag that trapped the mouse’s feet — and re-envisions them as the landscape of a different life: one full of hope, in which the mouse may dream herself a better story.
Lippman’s sharp and timely thriller is a fast read, one that will surely please her many longtime devotees as well as attract new and enthusiastic fans.
The stars can save you: If you can really see them in all their beauty and mystery, they can lift you up and give you solace in even the worst times.
That's the potent lesson from A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars, the new memoir from astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi and writer Joshua Horwitz. Tracking Oluseyi's journey from the streets of Los Angles, Houston and New Orleans to graduate study in physics at Stanford University, A Quantum Life is not only a story about resilience but also about the power of science as a transcendent force for personal transformation.
While proceed with caution (or skepticism) might be the best way to read this eclectic collection, I do think it’s worth reading. These are not persuasive essays; rather, they are thought-provoking juxtapositions of facts, observations, and speculations — with a teleology. Jaffe makes interesting connections between lives and across disciplines while illuminating some of the darker corners of art history.