There was one week to go before Telluride ski mountain opened for the season. In town, the instructors were trying out new uniforms, ticket takers were learning how to operate the scanner guns, food workers were memorizing the new menus, and lifties were filling out their first W-4s. None of it would matter, however, if there wasn’t enough snow on the slopes. The small crew making all that snow, working mostly at night, was the red-hot center of everything going on at Telluride that week. “Right now,” Scott Pittenger, the director of mountain operations, told me, “snowmaking owns the mountain.”
Are we uncomfortable yet?
Natsuko Imamura’s 2019 novel, The Woman in the Purple Skirt (out in English translation by Lucy North last month), reads at first glance as a fairly straightforward psychological thriller. The narrator obsessively watches the titular woman, taking close stock of her movements and placing herself in situations where she might possibly interact with the Woman in the Purple Skirt. The unsettling meticulousness of the attention the narrator pays to the other woman is contrasted, however, with the seemingly innocent desire she has for human connection. After introducing readers to the woman’s habits, the narrator says, “I think what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been wanting to become friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time.” The narrator’s actions are definitely depicted as creepy, and there is no question that she is behaving as a stalker. But though voyeurism is at the center of the narrator’s fixation on the woman, Imamura also explores a deeper psychological entanglement stemming from a desire to connect when social interaction feels like an insurmountable barrier.
Anthony Veasna So’s witty and sharply expressed short stories are set in the Central Valley — the “valley of dust and pollen and California smog,” where the options for Cambodian American immigrant fathers, ejected from the stories of their lives, boil down this way: “They fixed cars, sold donuts or got on welfare.”
“Believers” is a young woman’s book of wandering at a time when our human footprint on earth matters more than ever. Lisa Wells follows a cast of unruly and colorful characters who believe their work on the land and with one another is a healing force. Sometimes it is, sometimes it misses the mark. Eccentrics, New Agers, old radicals, they struggle to go beyond what the essayist Adam Phillips calls the “nostalgia” of “apocalyptic thinking.” And this is the pull of Wells’s wanderings, both her false starts and satisfying journeys: She never loses sight of her inspired objective, to restore and revive what she refers to as “the promised land.”
Nonetheless, within its limitations, and from its many specialist angles, On Essays brings breadth of context and patience of research to bear on a genre that’s hard to see clearly. Writing about the essay is like trying to photograph a hummingbird. The articles in this anthology bring to this task the equivalent of a high-powered camera with a fast shutter speed, capturing what essays meant and what ends they served in various crucial places and times.