I’ve been looking at a letter from Eric Carle, written in a frail script in 2019, in which he told me that his health was failing. It was the last of many letters, some typed, others handwritten, he had sent me through the years.
Carle, who died in May, often sent me pictures, too, sometimes a collage that he was working on. One was of a yellow duck — it looked more like a chicken — that was wearing pinstripe trousers and had big light-pink feet. Another was of a man and his wife sitting in their kitchen eating cake with chocolate frosting. But the image of the man was upside down. (“It’s not a mistake,” he wrote. “It’s just how they eat cake.”) He said it was part of a “nonsense book” that he hadn’t finished yet.
“The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you. Why are we even talking about this?” Nora jams a fork into her chopped chicken salad, the one she insisted I order as well. “If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.” Nora speaks her mind the way others breathe: an involuntary reflex, not a choice. (Obviously, all dialogue here, including my own, is recorded from the distortion field of memory.)
“But the uterus …” I say, spearing a slice of egg. “It’s so …”
Matthew Specktor, author of the novels “That Summertime Sound” and “American Dream Machine,” was working on a TV pilot when he realized he just wasn’t enjoying the process.
But he knew what did sound appealing: Writing about other creative people, like the artist and writer Eve Babitz and a list that eventually included director Hal Ashby, singer-songwriter Warren Zevon and actress Tuesday Weld among them.
Omar El Akkad's knows about the cultural, historical, and political forces that drive countless people to migrate illegally, but in What Strange Paradise, he leaves those things aside and focuses instead on telling the stories of the people at the core of the migrant crisis. This book is hard to read because it brings to the page the fear, suffering, language barriers, injustices, and risk of death that come with leaving home for some other hostile place, but it's also a pleasure to read, because hope and kindness light the story in unexpected ways.
As a historical novel, and one that should resonate with Charleston readers given our shared turn-of-the-century earthquake history, “Vera” shines. Edgarian brings to life various movers and shakers of San Francisco’s political and cultural echelons, in all their splendidly corpulent corruptness. She hinges much of the story around opera superstar Enrico Caruso’s performance the night of the earthquake, an excellent foil for adding delightful costume descriptions and other tidbits of period class detail.