In the summer of 1933, Fannie Holt, the co-founder of North Carolina’s Keystone Camp, invented an American tradition. Her invention may not have been wholly original — Yellowstone National Park, of all places, might lay a similar claim to this particular idea — but it stuck, becoming a summer tradition at Keystone and soon spreading throughout the country.
Holt’s brainchild was one of the first known celebrations of Christmas in July, a concept that has taken on a special meaning for some families in summer 2021. After a year in which many people didn’t attend in-person holiday festivities with their families, celebrating Christmas in the balmy summer is just one way to let old family traditions live on.
The disappearances on Ogawa’s fictional island may have started as a natural phenomenon, but at some point, it seems that the crystallization joined with human acceptance, gaining momentum as more and more people came to accept it. Ogawa pulls no punches with how the novel pans out; while there is some hope, the consequences of generations of forgetting are entirely, painfully realized.
There is something decidedly unintimate about calling a novel “Intimacies.” The refusal to specify (what, whose) feels like a hedge. And yet “Intimacies,” by the author Katie Kitamura, achieves a kind of truth in advertising. Kitamura pursues various definitions of the word: knowledge of, closeness with, closeness to. At times, intimacy suggests friendship—a nearness of hearts—and other times merely precision, a nearness in sense, or proximity, a nearness in space. These forms of closeness want to bleed together, and characters sweat to keep them straight, to be close to one another in the “right” ways. The result is a rich, novelistic portrait of an abstraction.
The narrative tradition of talking animals is as old as storytelling itself, of course, and he turns that archetype on its head. In a contemporary literary landscape overcrowded with stories about the power of storytelling, McDonell pulls off something better: a story that celebrates storytelling while jabbing the hubris at its core.
In the world of arts and letters, there isn’t anyone quite like Lauren Redniss. Since her poignant pen-and-ink microhistories in the New York Times’ Op-Art section, Redniss has plowed a furrow between word and text, facts and fantasy, that, for lack of a better term, might be called visual nonfiction.
The subjects in Katie Engelhart’s essential, vulnerable book, The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die, question these barriers. Since the mid-20th century, conversations on assisted suicide have grown, as laws allowing it have passed around the world. In popular conversation, Engelhart writes, people who use assisted death usually fit an archetype: elderly, secular, white people, with terminal diseases and supportive families, take advantage of rare right-to-die laws soon before their likely natural death. They throw back a lethal cocktail of liquid drugs under the watch of a doctor and their loved ones. They fall asleep, and, within a few hours, their heart stops. “While most reporting about the so-called right to die ends at the margins of the law, there are other stories playing out beyond them,” Engelhart writes. “Didn’t I know that whenever the law falls short, people find a way?”