Wait. What? No! Are you serious?
That was my knee-jerk reaction the first time I read about what are being called bookless libraries. (The name is misleading. They’re not actually bookless. There are books available in the libraries, just not the print editions.) But really, this isn’t right. Such libraries are depriving the public of the joy of discovery that I’ve already described.
Will libraries become cyber cafés? Will the sweet scent of books be replaced with a metallic smell? No. I don’t like this. Yes, I do enjoy reading ebooks. But losing print books. No, this doesn’t make me happy.
As with many everyday objects, it is difficult to determine who invented glasses, or where and when they were first used. In fact, they were not really “invented” in the sense of being a great discovery, a unique inspiration that provided a solution to a hitherto unanswered problem. It was more of a gradual process that went hand in hand with other scientific and technical discoveries—accompanied by persistent speculation and questions. In prehistoric times the Inuit apparently used a sort of protective eyewear made of walrus ivory against snow blindness. And among the unanswered questions from those early times is the matter of Nero’s emerald. Pliny the Elder wrote in his c. 77 Natural History that Emperor Nero held an emerald to his eye to observe gladiator contests: “The princeps Nero viewed the combats of the gladiators in a smaragdus.” Pliny used the term smaragdus for a variety of green minerals and made several observations about the soothing effects of green gemstones.
Writing in a prose that is spare, deadpan and yet alive, he poses questions about the nature and perception of what we choose to call reality. He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying novelist.
For culinary tourists, eating an animal that could kill you can be a kind of flex — a show of power. This follows a strain of thinking that humans are superior to other life-forms and thus destined to rule over them. Those who subscribe to this view tend to see the world with humans at the center and everything else defined by its relationship to us. And so a jellyfish isn’t just protecting itself against intruders into its domain; it’s attacking us.
Part of the fear and the desire to dominate comes from confronting anatomy that in no way resembles our own. Jellyfish are creatures without hearts or brains, and thus cast as faceless, soulless killing machines. Likewise a shark, shooting through the water smooth as a torpedo, or a snake on land, rippling like muscle, or a spider and its scurrying legs. It doesn’t matter that a moray eel, with its beady eyes and gaping maw, is shy and just wants to hide in its cave, alone. We project malevolence. We imagine monsters.
On my 18th birthday, I was still very much a work in progress — not out yet, not really sure what my big plan was. But none of that stopped me, nor any of my other friends in the midst of their own formative phases, from eagerly making all sorts of mature, adult decisions. By which I mean, we were getting lots of tattoos. My peers were permanently inking their bodies with graceful butterflies, snakes, crosses, and other random symbols to which they would later ascribe meaning. And I, too, showed up to my high school graduation beaming ear to ear with a fresh tattoo: Remy the Disney-Pixar rat, wrapped around my left calf with a bunch of tiny carrots clutched in his paws.
That’s right. I just referenced the collective human experience. I waded deep into the primordial waters, and now I’m like Henry David Thoreau or Edward Abbey. Suddenly, I have strong opinions about how you should lead your life and I want to text them to you in all caps. That nine-to-five is a hamster wheel, man. Get out and break free! Release that fluffy, domesticated hamster somewhere it can truly thrive: the wilderness.
But, while we are in the company of his creation, Mr. Doerr pulls off the crucial trick that any novelist would have to execute to make such a testament to the power of stories more than just a literary public-service announcement. In “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” he writes a marvel of a story himself, filled with gorgeous language and distinctive characters. He sweeps readers in and gives us the enveloping experience of living in another world—a Cloud Cuckoo Land, if you will, of the imagination. Put simply, Mr. Doerr shows rather than tells us readers what a great story can do.
In terms of serious literary talent we now have Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, a novel featuring a “novavirus” but also about so much more. It is a rending read, and all the better for that. The characters are so deftly done, in all their ambiguities, that the catastrophe is actually meaningful.
His humor is on full display with A Calling for Charlie Barnes, but so are his intelligence and compassion; it's a masterpiece that shines a revealing light on both family and fiction itself.
These restrictions on literature are restrictions on truth. They’re reminders of the stipulations set in place when it comes to “whose truth” we amplify, teach, and give life to. The attempt to ban books is an attempt to erase the stories in them. But what can’t be erased are the people who hold these stories.
My cousin left this message for me three months into my freshman year of college. His Chicago accent was so thick that I had to replay it a few times: Aye cuz, answer yo phone, he said. I talked to my mom, she told me you are out there doing yo thang. We were kids walking through Hyde Park, dreaming about everything we wanted to do, and you down there making it happen. I’m really proud of you cuz. I love you cuz, stay true to yourself. You’re my motivation.
Voice mail has gotten a bad rep. Antiquated and annoying, it can easily be ignored and take up too much phone storage and is a hassle if you happen to have a long-winded relative; most of us have all but abandoned it in favor of more instantaneous connections. But I did not realize what a trove my inbox had become until that day.
Sandra Lim's third book, The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton), is a continuation of her usual interests — eros and philosophy, surprising imagery and associative leaps — but most striking about this new collection is the insistence on a contemporary feminine interiority which Lim declares, poem after poem, as the source of the lyric itself.
The book is a puzzle. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian's. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.
It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.
Real people are tricky puzzles, volatile blends of self-knowledge and blindness, full of inexhaustible surprises and contradictions. Literary characters seldom achieve a comparably unpredictable intricacy because they are, after all, artifacts made by equally blinkered human beings, and furthermore they are the means to an artistic end. Franzen hasn’t always given his readers characters as persuasively flawed as the Hildebrandts. He hasn’t always tried to. But in Crossroads, his satirical and didactic impulses largely in check, his touch gentled, Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do? I didn’t think so.
And yet here’s the novel itself, and it’s a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. “Crossroads” is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations.
With its punctuationless title, “Lean Fall Stand” is a book about the slipperiness of language, that flexible and fallible vehicle for consciousness and communication on which we are so dependent. Even among those in the novel who have not suffered strokes, language at times is incommensurate with the job it is expected to perform. “I’m sorry. My thinking is pre-empted by my speaking,” a character says to Anna. Later, while drinking tea with her daughter, the conversation dries up. “Neither of them knew what to say, or how to say it.”
Some books linger long after their conclusion. So it is with “Rites: Stories,” the debut collection by Choctaw author Savannah Johnston. Centering the Indigenous peoples of rural Oklahoma, “Rites” is a master class on compression. Johnston portrays the aching, farcical nature of existence in just a few pages.
The island nation of Mauritius lies about 500 kilometers east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is best known for having been the home of the dodo, a flightless bird that was mercilessly picked off to extinction by Dutch sailors (and other invasive mammals like rats) who landed there in the late 16th century. Off its coast is the tiny island of Iles Aux Aigrettes. Since being designated a wildlife refuge in 1965, Iles aux Aigrettes has been the site of a sustained experiment carried out by the Mauritius Wildlife Foundation. Under the leadership of its scientific director Carl Jones, the MWF has been working to reestablish, as authentically as possible, the island’s pre-colonial ecology.
The dodo is gone forever, but the endangered pink pigeon, telfair skink, ornate day gecko and several other species have been carefully bred, a scrap of forest has been painstakingly restored, and non-indigenous animals (cats, for example) have been unceremoniously removed. The Mauritius tortoise is also extinct, so the Foundation imported a cousin species from Aldabra in the Seychelle Islands. These gentle giants, some over 200 years old, roam the trails as they will. They seem to think they have all the time in the world.
The first time I met Siraj, over a decade after he had set up shop here, I got lost, which felt ironic on a visit to a map-maker. But I had never been to Orangi Town before and I couldn’t find the right turning. Siraj is nothing if not a doer, so as soon as I called to explain, he jumped on his motorbike and drove around to find me and guide the car. Within minutes of parking up, he was deep into an explanation of the local criminal syndicates and the way they exploited the area, talking with the authority of a university professor. He often broke off to grab a specific document or diagram from the bundles of paper that surrounded him. I came to realize that this was how he made sense of his sometimes painful and chaotic surroundings: through evidence, order, information.
In processing all of this – in learning that not everything was a “me” problem, and that I wasn’t the only person going through it – I was able to start to heal. I am earnest again, in a way that annoys some people, but I no longer care.
This distinction between real and ersatz virtue is the central preoccupation of “Crossroads”—so much so that Franzen, who historically wears his thematic concerns on his dust sleeve (“Freedom,” “Purity,” “The Corrections”), might have titled this new novel “Goodness,” if the word didn’t double as an awkward exclamation. It is true that “Crossroads” is also concerned, like every Franzen novel, with the makeup and the breakdown of American families. And it is concerned, too, with the issues implied by the title he gave it: those moments in the lives of individuals and in the history of a nation when stark choices with permanent consequences must be made. But, deliberately and otherwise, the book returns again and again to the same question: What does it mean—for a person and, in a different sense, for a novel—to be good?
It’s the kind of book that feels like slipping into conversation with a long absent friend. It expands the Bourdain industrial complex. It’s different but familiar. If the objective is finding an answer to all the questions leading up to Bourdain’s death, of course it fails because explaining why a person takes their own life is an impossible task. But the book does succeed in showing us a more three-dimensional person, and for many fans who convinced themselves Anthony Bourdain lived an ideal life, these interviews illustrate faults many may not have realized he possessed.
In 1977 a 7-year-old girl was visiting her grandmother’s home in Anacostia. Walter E. Washington was in office as D.C.’s first elected mayor since 1871. Metro tunnels were still being laid; many residents were waiting for the Green Line to reach the Southeast Washington neighborhood. Disillusioned Vietnam War veterans had just returned to a hostile reception. The little girl and her grandmother had the lush garden in the backyard to themselves: just them amid supersized vines and vegetables.
For the girl, that visit and others into her teenage years were special. The grandmother talked about ownership, about controlling your destiny. “You must always think about which direction you’re going,” she told the girl. She shared the notion that you can steer life like a ship. Yet she recounted little of her own life, leaving many questions unanswered.
Fractals are all around us — in a fern’s feathery leaves or our own branching blood vessels. Their geometry has applications in fields including economics, medicine, and physics. Frame also sees them as a useful metaphor for visualizing and understanding grief.
Frame’s new book, “Geometry of Grief: Reflections on Mathematics, Loss, and Life,” suggests that thinking about fractals — and thinking geometrically, in general — can help us process life’s most difficult moments.
So Deep Nostalgia made me wonder: Why do we continue to pursue such efforts when the results inevitably creep us out? Why do we constantly retread the past, (re)animating dead loved ones, even when it can be painful?
Basically, why do we keep doing this to ourselves, and is this really about nostalgia?
“Shh….Listen!” Benny Oh says at the beginning of Ruth Ozeki’s new novel. “That’s my Book, and it’s talking to you.” His Book is not the only one; Benny hears the voices of all kinds of inanimate objects: fluorescent lights, coffee beans, paper cups, “the chatter of cash registers filled with all those arrogant metal coins that think they’re actually worth something.” It began the year he was 12, the Book informs us, the year his father died in a freak accident. Together, sometimes in amusing counterpoint, the Book and Benny chronicle his journey during the fraught year 2016, when he turns 14. Their tale of sorrow, danger and tentative redemption serves as the springboard for extended meditations on the interdependence of all beings, the magic of books, the disastrous ecological and spiritual effects of unchecked consumerism and more.
More than a crisis, a phenomenon is how
scholars describe the bubonic
craze that made the Dutch
desire, more than
anything, a tulip
The thing about Savage is that, in public at least, he still sometimes loves to play the asshole. (In person, he’s warm, generous, and scrupulously polite.) As I read through his vast archives—three decades of searching questions and anxious confessions and mores changing right in front of my eyes—it struck me that while he has undoubtedly grown and expanded his repertoire, his voice has remained remarkably consistent through the years. The big difference is that the onetime rebel who semi-facetiously needled “breeders” and lamented the intelligence of straight men has become an establishment figure of sorts, unwittingly ushering in a popular sexual revolution of his own. Three decades later, as the sexual landscape he confronts in his column has changed dramatically, Savage is still grappling with that responsibility.
In Seattle, when he talked through the famous controversies he’s faced and some less well-known ones, he was thoughtful and conciliatory but also seemed to be negotiating with me: Wouldn’t I agree he has a point about the erotics of power imbalances between young people and older people? Don’t straight men actually need a “safe space” for their sexuality more than ever? By the time we got to my own experience as a woman who regretted trying to be “good, giving, and game” when dating men, I’d found a new way to understand Savage’s power—and his limitations.
When he began to accept that the end was near, Amigo Bob called the founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. He wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. Compost is the basis of organic farming, so he knew a lot about it—he’d even served as an adviser for a few large composting operations. Katrina explained their process, and he seemed to find her account convincing, but it wasn’t until his final moments that he told Jenifer definitively: “This is what I want.”
He died the day after Christmas. His loved ones washed and anointed his body and kept vigil at his bedside. “He looked like a king,” Jenifer told me. “He was really, really beautiful.” She showed me a few photos. His body had been laid atop a hemp shroud and covered from the neck down in a layer of dried herbs and flower petals. Bouquets of lavender and tree fronds wreathed his head, and a ladybug pendant on a beaded string lay across his brow like a diadem. Only his bearded face was exposed, wearing the peaceful, inscrutable expression of the dead. He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauze-wrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal.
I had been thrown out of the raft at the top of the rapid, ambushed by some bit of rogue hydraulics, and recall attempting to swim against forces entirely beyond human control. I was using reserves of energy that, as it turned out, could have been better used later. Best really to just go with the flow. But the river seemed to yank me directly down as if by the feet, and I was looking up through about 15 feet of water at what appeared to be a perfectly still round pool, colored robin’s egg blue by the cloudless Arizona sky.
For a single moment everything seemed calm. I checked: my life preserver was securely strapped, good, and I was rising toward the surface, good, and there’d be a breath soon, thank God. I was low on air.
But as I rose, the calm water in the pool above began to stretch out in an elongated oval that I could see falling apart on the downriver side. And then I was tumbling unpleasantly in a lot of broken water downstream. A breath on the surface was out of the question. This seemed unfair.
“Of course, these are not literal criminal acts,” Roach writes, since “animals don’t follow laws, they follow instincts.” These natural urges bring certain animals (and plants!) into friction with human systems, with consequences ranging from the deadly to the merely annoying. In all cases, these are “simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, sh---ing, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops.”
The result is a quixotic and somewhat meandering journey of a book, but one powerfully propelled by the force of Roach’s unflinching fascination with the weird, the gross and the downright improbable.
Grau’s compilation of interviews essentially asks us not simply to rebuild, reorganize, or reconfigure the encyclopedic museum, but to conceptually reimagine such museums and their place in a globalized civilization divided into contentious nation-states.
Everyone is alive somehow
mowing dead grass and fighting
pizza boxes into a recycling bin.
If you hate heresy, stop now.
This is a story of illness, madness, and the end of what we are. I don’t recommend it. If you want to come along, we have to start with poetry and our betrayal of ourselves.
After landing at Keflavik airport and being baptized into the Icelandic way of life by basking in the geothermal Sky Lagoon in Reykjavík, it was time to head toward my destination, the Gullkistan Center for Creativity, where I’d be spending the month of September on my sabbatical writer’s retreat.
Gullkistan is located in the Southwest countryside 70km east of Reykjavík, in Laugarvatn, between mountains and a lake. A quiet village of around 200 people, Laugarvatn’s main tourist attraction is Fontana, a geothermal spa on the “Golden Circle,” a loop of landmarks not far from Reykjavík. Gullkistan provides lodging and working space for visual artists, composers, filmmakers, and writers, and has hosted more than 400 people from all over the world since the residency began just over 10 years ago.
I’m going to describe an image for you; maybe it’s something you’ve seen before. It’s a canvas filled with amorphous daubs of warm, bright color, intersecting with one another to form different hues in the overlapping spaces. There’s no discernible pattern, but the blobs still feel intentionally placed—if you squint hard enough, a few of them may converge into the implied shape of a braid, or an eye, or the side of a woman’s face. On top of the canvas, a blocky but refined sans serif spells the title and the author’s name, while much smaller text in a handwritten script reads “a novel,” or, “a memoir,” or, perhaps, “a New York Times bestseller.”
As much as anything, this July trip to Las Vegas would be a way of commemorating Erin and Neal, a means of wringing some joy from the heartbreak of losing them.
When I was young, the church folk were fond of admonishing me (seldom without my heathen lips upturned) to be thankful that God woke me that morning. Though no one has said it outright, this trip is an expression of that gratitude, of acknowledging the incontestable truth, that, with no warning whatsoever, whatever power we believe in could leave us sleep. Therefore — we damn well better appreciate one another while we still have the precious time. Therefore — what better time than the present to celebrate, with all the middle-aged abandon we can muster, the fact that we persist, at least for now. That we’ve got one more day to live.
“Cloud Cuckoo Land,” a follow-up to Doerr’s best-selling novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” is, among other things, a paean to the nameless people who have played a role in the transmission of ancient texts and preserved the tales they tell. But it’s also about the consolations of stories and the balm they have provided for millenniums. It’s a wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates. It also pulls off a resolution that feels both surprising and inevitable, and that compels you back to the opening of the book with a head-shake of admiration at the Swiss-watchery of its construction.
We live in an age dominated by our possessions. Capitalism, the internet and Amazon have ensured we can have anything we desire (and can afford). What if all our acquisitions, effortlessly acquired, started talking back to us, their voices crowding our heads as their presence clutters our lives?
The philosopher Ian Hacking memorably describes the emergence of multiple personality disorder as a classic instance of science “making up people” — creating, through its power to label, a class of humans that hadn’t really existed before. In “The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness,” Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist, is also concerned with how science makes up people. She, too, cites multiple personality disorder as a condition whose birth can be pinpointed in time but also in order to emphasize its social origins.
In the warmth of water’s caress, I lay
in a kiddie pool without plastic
walls. Upturned, my head rests
Isaac Asimov had a term for this. “In the movies and television, science fiction deals primarily with images, so we might call it image-science-fiction,” he wrote in 1979. “Since the show-business people and journalists who talk about image-science-fiction refer to it, abominably, as sci-fi, suppose we call image-science-fiction i-sci-fi or, better yet, eye-sci-fi.”
The late grand master, who reserved the more dignified abbreviation “s.f.” for literary science fiction, held out hope that one day, “visual science fiction may graduate from sci-fi to s.f.” Whether the epic spectacular described above will qualify as eye-sci-fi or s.f. would be a matter of particular interest to Asimov: it’s Foundation, the forthcoming Apple TV+ series based on what the trailer describes as Asimov’s own “groundbreaking novels.”
Virginia Woolf once mused, “I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite,” and it makes me think about the old black woman who sat in the virtual corner of my family. I suspect there is a novel to be written about her, and about my family, and about the secrets we kept. It would be a much safer thing to do that—to write a novel with its guise of fiction—rather than this. I think about the old black woman, the way she sat there wrapped in a blanket of silence and secrecy. I did not think about her much as a child, but I think about her now.
With painting or prose, it has been said that a work is completed, in some metaphorical sense, by its encounter with an audience. With code, this circuit is literal. Programs and platforms are put on display, then tweaked because of error reports and user data; in multiplayer games, the activity of other players animates the experience. It is easy to say that this diminishes the artist-developer. But what the history of video games reveals is the story of all art. Our accounts often thrive on the vision of singular minds, even though every great work relies on the sweat, luck, and talent of many people, each inflecting one another in a continuous loop. When Sid Meier began tinkering with a new game, thirty years ago, his hope was that players would see themselves in his version of our planet. It was when the audience could watch one another tinker, too, that the planet became a world.
Exploring strange new worlds. Understanding the origins of the universe. Searching for life in the galaxy. These are not the plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is building and launching the Webb in partnership with the European Space Agency and Canada.
Calvin Kasulke’s new book, “Several People Are Typing,” is the tale of a guy whose psyche gets trapped in Slack, the workplace-messaging app. Slack lends the story its setting, dictates its form (a series of conversations among co-workers), and defines the book’s voice (characters communicate in a recognizable Slack-speak). Kasulke’s proposition, which taps into the subsuming nature of Work Today, seems to be: What if Slack ate a novel? A reader’s reply might be: Why would I read that novel? And yet “Several People Are Typing” is fun, funny, addictive, and surreal. It doesn’t feel much like literature, but it does feel like any number of Slack-adjacent activities: procrastinating, eavesdropping, solving a puzzle. I blazed through it in an hour, came up for air, and then immediately blazed through it again—behavior that mystified me until I remembered how I am on Slack.
The point is the journey, to savor walking down the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow once again with the stoic Laidlaw. For that pleasure, we have Ian Rankin to thank and, one final time, the man himself, William McIlvanney.
However, before he’s put aside, what might Yeats offer the post-Tiger, virus-clenched Ireland? What does Yeats’ verse have to do with the gleaming, tech world of Dublin now? How does the fusty old poet who wrote about “the fascination with what’s difficult,” and his longing for love and a return to youth, have something to offer contemporary life?
Audiences often think of adaptations as identical, comparing and contrasting the new to the old to find the differences, often confusing the most faithful adaptation for the best. But what Morrow’s So Many Beginnings shows is that variations on a theme—even significant ones—are not betrayals of the source material. Maybe we can stop thinking of a worthy adaptation as a twin to the original and more as a sister.
On any given page, Srinivasan will leave you feeling convinced she has found a way out, only to pull the rug out from under you; whenever she says “but,” one wants to duck. Though far from exasperation, I felt relieved—even hopeful—that someone is asking the hard questions in public without asking for anything as absurd as a single answer.
By linking our industrial meat-centered food system to the most pressing issues of the 20th century, Lappé built the case for eating as a political act. The author or co-author of 17 books and co-founder of three organizations focused on hunger, poverty and the environmental crisis, Lappé continues to advocate for the practical solutions now detailed in the book’s 50th anniversary edition.
Then one day she looked up the pudendal nerve, which provides sensation to the vagina and vulva, or outer female genitalia. The term derived from the Latin verb pudere: to be ashamed. The shame nerve, Ms. Draper noted: “I was like, What? Excuse me?”
It grew worse. When her teacher handed her a copy of the “Terminologia Anatomica,” the international dictionary of anatomical terms, she learned that the Latin term for the vulva — including the inner and outer labia, the clitoris and the pubic mound — was pudendum. Translation: the part to be ashamed of. There was no equivalent word for male genitals.
That’s when she really got fired up.
Here’s what I think was happening: It hadn’t been too painful, initially, to settle into a small, circumscribed life — going grocery shopping, volunteering at our local vaccine clinic, getting together with friends outside. But it meant I’d never been forced, or forced myself, to acclimate to the virus as much as other people seemed to have done. I wasn’t learning to live within the odds. This made me uneasy — personally uneasy, because I interpreted it as a lack of toughness, but also ethically uneasy, because I knew that in a broken society like ours, my comfort came at the expense of other people’s demoralization and discomfort. Still, that’s what happened. And while I’m sure this left me with an exaggerated sense of the risks of leaving my particular bubble, the real problem was, I’d started chronically undervaluing the rewards. I’d been forgoing so much that forgoing felt easy. Too many things I imagined doing began to feel skippable, arbitrary, not a tragedy to decline. Either I was approaching some new state of equanimity and contentedness or I was depressed.
Then, as if I’d won a sweepstakes, this magazine offered me the seemingly wide-open opportunity to fly somewhere for its travel issue. By then, I’d spent almost 17 months parenting two demanding children on an insular island. I needed to get back to work. And so, I considered the befuddling risks, stresses, uncertainties, child care complications, psychic agitations and relative irresponsibility of traveling anywhere at all and asked, “What if I drove to Spokane?”
In dreams, they anticipated the moon. They anticipated flinging themselves away from the earth up to the glowing pearl in night space. They’d been dreaming this for a long time, who knows how long. The moon, earth’s shadowy white sister, is the ultimate dream object. Even if not dreamed of directly, the moon is dreamtime’s overseer, companion; it’s the quiet warden of the night mind.
Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet.
After a long hot summer of drought, plague, smoke and fire, this is a book that hymns our planet’s terrible moment — not a wake-up call but the first grim chords of a requiem.
Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling. He takes the mundane stuff of life — the need to take a leak, the joy of killing pesky flies — and essentializes them. About the details of daily existence, he manages to be, without ladling on lyricism, twice as absorbent as most of the other leading brands.
What is interesting in Leave Society, however, is not the truth or falsity of its arguments — this is marketed as a work of fiction, after all — but how such arguments inflect character.
Believe In Me is a generational saga, articulating how understanding one’s past can be a salve for the present. In many ways, it is also a story concerned with love’s opaque hues.
You don’t encounter the fiction of Joy Williams without experiencing a measure of bewilderment. Williams, one of the country’s best living writers of the short story, draws praise from titans such as George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and Lauren Groff, and many of her readers, having imprinted on her wayward phrasing and screwball characters, will follow her anywhere. But the route can be disorienting, like climbing an uneven staircase in a dream. Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking. For years, Williams has worn sunglasses at all hours, as if to blacken her vision. The central subject of art, she has written, is “nothingness.”
What qualifies as upcycled foods? According to a newly coined definition, they are ones that “use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.” Basically, it means no longer putting agricultural leftovers in the trash and into incinerators and landfills, but back on our plates.
Disgusting? Not necessarily.
In its 1,600-odd years, any number of phantasmagorical vessels have floated down Venice’s Grand Canal, often during regattas or elaborate ceremonies dedicated to the sea. On Saturday morning, a decidedly unusual head-turner took a spin: a gigantic violin, carrying a string quartet playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”
In her latest novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Rivka Galchen reimagines a real-life witch hunt that took place in Leonberg, in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, in the 17th century. The accused: Katharina Kepler, mother to famed astronomer Johannes. In her fictionalized account of a true story, Galchen neatly splits the difference between respecting the record of Kepler’s life and taking careful liberties to build out the world around her.
I do not know the whole allegory from start to finish—
at most a white maculation, vertebrae, chasm, & clatter.
The other day I was rifling through the language-related drawers of my mind trying to find a term for my recent loss of interest in cooking. I used to love to cook, but somehow the pandemic, which pushed cooking from optional joy to quotidian chore, has snuffed that pleasure out. If there is a word for this unfortunate occurrence, I don’t know it, and I began wondering if I could coin one.
The notion of dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to one, a pigeon on the ground free to move in two and an eagle in the air enjoying three.
But as we’ll see, finding an explicit definition for the concept of dimension and pushing its boundaries has proved exceptionally difficult for mathematicians. It’s taken hundreds of years of thought experiments and imaginative comparisons to arrive at our current rigorous understanding of the concept.
More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.
The formal dining room, long considered a symbol of wealth and privilege, has been the subject of much debate over the past 30 years. Some declared it dead, a relic of a bygone era when families sat down together each night for a home-cooked meal. Others clung to it as a place to welcome friends and family for holiday meals. All the while, American families turned toward eating in more informal spaces in the kitchen or — gasp — in front of the TV or on the go.
Then the pandemic hit and families who still had dining rooms began reclaiming that space for home offices or classrooms as people worked, learned and did most of their recreation from home. That put the formal dining room in the spotlight, and now people are pondering the new role it might play in our homes and lives.
The Japanese American novelist Ruth Ozeki is an animator. I don’t mean that she produces graphic novels or manga or anime, although her work does have the fairy-tale feel of some anime movies. I mean that she endows objects and animals with anima, the breath of life. Adept at magical realist fiction, Ozeki ensouls the world. Everything in her universe, down to a windowpane and a widget, has a psyche and a certain amount of agency and can communicate, if only with the few human beings granted the power to understand them.
Matthew Arnold suggested the best method of judging the excellence of literature is the amount of time it has survived. There is no greater proof of this touchstone for a novelist than Graham Greene. His books are still selling, often in terms much greater than newly published books that get intense media coverage. His books are read with enthusiasm and taken seriously. It is surprising that many of his contemporaries, many Noble prize winners included, are simply vanishing into the past, while the books of Greene not only endure but thrive.
For the modern novelist, these facts demand attention. In practical terms, in the method or craft of producing these novels, just what did Greene do? What aspects of storytelling have produced such long-term vitality?
Every so often, an apparently seismic shift in American race talk occurs — “Negro” to “black” in the 1960s, “black” to “African American” in the 1980s, and back to “black” more recently. The summer of 2020 marked the latest linguistic revolution, as a swath of major news outlets opted, as a rule, to capitalize the “B” in “black” — a change swiftly embraced in everyday use. The linguistic revolution took place over the span of two or so weeks in June, prompted by the highly-publicized police killings of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd. It was framed as part of the supposed reckoning with American antiblackness those murders — and the subsequent protests, sit-ins, lobbying, and, yes, riots — prompted. The push to capitalize was no mere aesthetic or semantic flip-flop; it was, from the beginning, political, and painted as politically radical.
In “Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy,” his 13th book, Nathaniel Philbrick brings his proven gift as a narrator to this on-the-road part of Washington’s life.
People were drinking wine out of plastic cups. The chairs were pushed close together. Bags were tucked under feet. I sat on the bookshop stage with two other writers, ready to read our ghost stories. Before we began, the moderator asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” After a pause, we spoke of doubt. Creepy incidents were related. I found myself saying that perhaps the dead might be watching us.
I’ve never seen a soul move through the air. I am not sure that we are anything more than a skin-bag of electrical impulses. But ghosts are different from the other uncanny citizens. They are only one step away from the known. To become a ghost, you don’t have to be bitten by a vampire or receive a curse or encounter a mad scientist or fall under the spell of a full moon. All you have to do is die.
Moriarty tells a great story, understands her characters and cares about them, too. Readers who have kept up with her books will adore “Apples Never Fall,” and readers just discovering Moriarty will seek out her previous titles after savoring this fresh, juicy tale.
Moving into a world of paranoia and intrigue, with a piercing critique of contemporary Western society at heart, we become involved in an affecting story that switches perspectives and brings the tenderness of friendship and the post-apocalyptic dystopia in line with Rajneesh’s critique into focus.
Neither of these titles includes the word “globalization” or even “global,” though the knitting together of the world is in fact the subject of both of them. The terms related to things global are now so clichéd that it is almost a relief not to have them brandished again. Yet what could be more vital to the interweaving of the world’s regions than credit or the movement of people? Rather than trace them, as is often the fashion, through the analysis of big data, which means statistical information gathered primarily by states, the authors of these two remarkable books approach their topics in ways that are at once traditional and original. They each begin with something seemingly small—a family, a signed slip of paper—and show how these open up much wider worlds.
Maybe you already knew that regret is a waste of time; I hear it constantly. But it’s easier to buy when you recognize that all those other outcomes would have come with their own problems. That’s what Haig so beautifully demonstrates. We tend to romanticize other variations of our lives — we would have no cares in the world, if only we had done this and that differently. Haig’s response: Of course we would. Different packaging; same us. The only thing we truly need to change is the one thing we have complete control over: our outlook.
My Sweet Girl excels on so many fronts: It's a well-written psychological thriller that kept me hooked from beginning to end (no small feat right now, as my attention span is severely limited, thanks to world events). It's also surprisingly funny — Jayatissa has a great sense of humor that serves Paloma well as she slowly reveals her full self to the reader. But the exploration of Paloma's identity and character is what really drew me to this book and has me thinking about it long after I turned the final page.
Like similar volumes, “The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway” provides a scholarly and biographical introduction, lots of illustrations and extensive marginal notes that explain obscurities, identify people and places, and provide interpretive comment. Emre, however, isn’t critically neutral; she draws mainly on the work of her teachers and contemporaries, while pretty much ignoring older Woolf scholarship.
Knee believes that investors, and many of his students, are fooling themselves into thinking that building a globe-spanning platform is a viable goal. Platforms are successful not because they are platforms, but because they exploit the same kinds of advantages that successful businesses have enjoyed for decades. It’s a boring realization, but one that Knee hopes will save his students not only from pursuing bad ideas, but from ruining their lives.
For most of 2020, I passed the pandemic alone in my studio apartment. I turned 33, then 34, and my body seemed to grow old without bringing my spirit along with it. My right knee was clearly deteriorating — I couldn’t sit cross-legged at my desk the way I used to — and because I wasn’t wearing makeup, I could track each age spot as it bloomed to the surface. When I pulled my hair back in a tight ponytail, I could see a patch of scalp. But in that same period had my life evolved at all? Had I met anyone? Surprised myself? Stemmed the tide of collective crisis? My mother often urged me to dance, just a little, by myself in the kitchen — “It’s good medicine,” she said, “despojo.”
I’ve never known what “despojo” means, precisely, though it’s a word I use with some frequency to express a physical craving for spiritual catharsis: “Necesitamos despojo, quiero despojarme.” Or, watching a friend gain momentum on the dance floor and begin to enter a self-forgetful trance: “Esoooo! Des-po-jo!” My Spanish-English dictionary has only the verb (to despoil, to shed leaves) and the plural noun (the spoils of war, mortal remains, rubble, waste). Google Translate: dispossession.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them. Maybe it’s snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I’m a secret Luddite. Maybe I can’t stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. I don’t know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful.
The American critic Malcolm Cowley summed up the German writer Thomas Mann’s fiction as “intricate formal structure” taken to its limit. Mann himself, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929, called his craftsmanship “thoroughgoing.” He packed so much physical detail and psychological acuity into his novels that some readers shy away from such strapping productions as “Buddenbrooks,” “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus,” let alone the four-volume “Joseph and His Brothers.”
Against this background, the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has managed to write an incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been.
“Bewilderment” marks Powers’s latest and perhaps furthest foray into science fiction, but it has ominous echoes of contemporary America — catastrophic weather, political unrest, a Trump-like president who tweets erratically and spouts conspiracy theories about election fraud, a deadly virus that jumps from cows to humans and spreads rapidly before it gets detected.
The novel is also a coda to “The Overstory,” whose success catapulted Powers to new levels of literary fame. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, drawing praise from the likes of Barack Obama, David Byrne, Jane Fonda and Geraldine Brooks. But while “The Overstory” changed his life and career, it also left Powers, now 64, drained and uncertain if he would write again.
I had noticed Peter’s race, and I imagine my kids did too, but we never talked about it. What I had been reading right over, and repeatedly, was what Peter’s race meant. Can it mean nothing? Clearly not—it is noteworthy and groundbreaking. Yet I was reading colorblind. Why? Was this what the author intended?
Unlike his last two books, “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” which dealt with the serious social justice themes of slavery and Florida’s segregated juvenile justice system, “Harlem Shuffle” is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York.
Everyone in our house is in tears, my son is telling me he wishes he had never been born and I’m fairly sure the neighbors are about to call social services. It’s our daily attempt at ten minutes (inevitably eventually reduced to about four) of piano practice. Why am I doing this? It’s particularly ironic given that my most feverish nightmares are about my mother standing behind me counting to four while beating the air with a ruler, while I remained totally mystified about why she kept starting again every time she got to four. Is it because I have to prove that I turned out so fantastically, and the only way to achieve this is to put my son through the same hell I went through? Is it some form of transferred Stockholm syndrome?
“I just really want him to get as much out of music as I have,” I weep to my husband, as he pats me sympathetically but, wise and seasoned man that he is, keeps totally silent, “I just want him to enjoy it, you know?” And everyone knows the best way to achieve enjoyment is through draconian, disciplinarian practice sessions and a commitment to the rigid uniformity of scales and arpeggios.
Wikipedia and Google answer questions with more questions, opening up pages of information you never asked for. But a dictionary builds on common knowledge, using simple words to explain more complex ones. Using one feels like prying open an oyster rather than falling down a rabbit hole.
To tell Glenn’s story—to convey his perspective on life and death, pain and purpose—is to share an uncomfortable truth: 9/11 was not the worst day of his life.
In her 10th book, “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” Nelson investigates freedom as conceptualized and practiced through art, sex, drugs and the climate. Rather than attempting to resolve the essential crises of those vectors, Nelson’s essays tease out simultaneous and contradictory truths, or koans.
There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we're on today is bad. Several miles inland from California's foggy coastline, we're driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late '60s and '70s: Table Mountain Ranch.
The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who'd fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he's one of Table Mountain Ranch's last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he's wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I'll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load.
Over almost half a century, in five collections of short stories and five novels, Joy Williams has been drawn to the details of final things, too. Her writing wears the trappings of realism: Her characters have unsatisfying jobs and love affairs; they go on long road trips and drinking binges. But she’s always been most interested in endings. Almost everything she has written has been haunted by death. With Harrow, her first novel in 21 years, she imagines the death of the world itself.
Equally adept with literary and historical fiction, Stephen Graham Jones is also acclaimed for tales of dark fantasy and horror suffused with slashers, monsters, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, and other creatures that go bump in the night. For Jones, a writer who also teaches courses on these figures, it seems that every day is, indeed, Halloween. His enthusiasm for such storytelling is on display in his recent full-length novel, The Only Good Indians (2020), the winner of two Bram Stoker Awards and a Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. It joins a quickly expanding body of work that makes readers recoil at what may be hiding out there in the shadows, watching from the edge of the forest, lying in wait beneath the floorboards, lurking beyond the next turn in the road, or haunting the voided spaces of colonial history. The anticipation and dread Jones’s stories provoke are amplified in his unique take on the slasher by associations with holidays such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, presented with their colonial entanglements so that the arrival of Columbus in 1492 is not seen as an occasion for historical celebration but “a storm so bad it eats the world.” Yet, whatever form the monstrous takes in Jones’s work, he is a master at creating a storied presence that settles deep into our psyches.
You might know this story, but you don't yet know it in the hands of Cassandra Khaw. They transform one last heist into The All-Consuming World: a visionary, foul-mouthed, gory sci-fi adventure, dripping viscera, violence, and beauty in equal measure.
Themes of love, fate, running away from it all and history – both family history and broader kind - are captured in Bridget van der Zijpp’s new novel, I Laugh Me Broken.
In the manner of "The Master," his celebrated 2004 novel about Henry James, Colm Tóibín has produced a fictional account of German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann — the Magician, as Mann's children sometimes called him. The novel at first seems curiously flat, biographical reportage with dialogue often sounding like stiff translations from the German; but little by little the inexorably accumulating details make Tóibín's Mann more interesting than the mere facts of his admittedly larger-than-life story.
Piesing alludes to an odd parallel between the airships and the explorers of that time. Like the hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the men pining to be “the first” have inflated senses of destiny and combustible egos. The fates of both machine and men were at the mercy of the elements: for airships, it was unpredictable weather; for explorers, it was politics, pride and jealous rivals.
When the doctor sliced open the body,
soft still to the touch, apprenticed
to expression, when the flesh
If Jonathan Strange was a riotous meeting of Austen and Dickens, then Piranesi’s pole stars are Jorge Luis Borges and CS Lewis. “I found Lewis at a very impressionable age and then he sort of organised the inside of my head,” she says. “And that’s just the way it has been ever since.”
Snow Country is episodic with no strong plot. It depends for its interest, which is considerable, on the characters and conversation. It is a novel of ideas, an exploration of the question of human consciousness.
So this is a story of survival and resilience. It is also, in many ways, a braid of love stories. It details and celebrates Byers’ love for her spouse Amy and for her twin children, Franny and Theo. It also celebrates communities of mutual care and regard that queer people have to create in an often-hostile environment, and the resilience and pride that are engendered in those communities.
No one has ever lived in the past. Every human being in the history of the world has lived in their own present. The past is now, or should be, for the characters we create to populate crime fiction regardless of the time period in which we write.
But there are challenges and pitfalls here because the past itself does not have the same shape or coherence as does the present which we inhabit. The past is filled with countless people, places, and conflicts which we turn into something called history to impose order upon chaos.
In retrospect, the disappearance of the classic anchorman after 9/11 is an issue larger than journalism itself. It speaks to the vital question of whether anybody—elected or not—will ever be able to play such an essential role in sustaining a shared and accepted informational identity for our national community. The next time all hell breaks loose, perhaps we’ll find out.
Do we want to eat food made by robots? Chain salad might be the perfect food to answer that question. Chain salad is neither bad nor good. It simply is. Whether it is made by a robot, or a person I never see because I ordered the salad on my phone and then picked it up from a shelf in the store, is largely irrelevant to the Sweetgreen Experience. At Sweetgreen, you don’t think about where your salad actually came from; instead, you think about how cool it is that Naomi Osaka is an investor.
Bad luck in small doses can cast a glittering light on the rest of life. It shows us just how close we came to smashing our heads on the bookcase, and so makes us look at the bookcase (the room, the house, the street, the town, the life) with a new sense of wonder. Sooner or later, in one form or another, the terrible thing will happen. I didn’t understand that when I was young, no matter how many nuns tried to tell me. Now, I think I do. And I’m grateful that this time I got off easy.
Because I did not attend college and spent all but one year of high school at home with arthritis following rheumatic fever, I had the good fortune to discover Shakespeare on my own. We were rural Missionary Baptists with no car and no phone — my father dead, my mother unemployed. A penciled note in a volume from a cheap set called World Famous Classics tells me that I first read “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1974. I was 16 and in a wheelchair. The first Shakespearean phrase I underlined during this period was “skirmish of wit,” about the raillery between Beatrice and Benedick, which inspired a lifelong expectation that romance must include snark.
I volunteer this personal history because Robert McCrum’s magnificent new book, “Shakespearean,” is about, in part, Shakespeare’s ability to speak to many kinds of people in many different ways. McCrum also found a new personal connection to Shakespeare through illness. In 1995, at 42, he suffered a massive stroke. “During convalescence,” he writes, “the Complete Works became my book of life. Almost the only words that made sense were snatches of Shakespeare, and next — as I began to recover — longer passages from King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and especially Hamlet, the play that rarely fails to supply a kind of running commentary to the inner dialogue of the self.”
But it’s exactly these properties that kindle and sustain Nelson’s interest in the concept of freedom. Indeed, she’s a writer deeply drawn to in-betweens, uncertainties, and the way language bends and morphs in tandem with us, materially shaping our experience of the world and vice versa.
John Burnside is, to use a good Scots word, a byordinar writer. Whether in memoir, novels or poetry his oeuvre combines the gothic, the cryptic, the mystic and the barbaric. There have been themes across his work – strange disappearances, moments of epiphany moments – that he has encircled in his own mythology. This new collection of poems is both a continuation and a radical break. The “memes” as it were are still in place, but in this book the language is riddled with religious overtones. It is a book I had to read three times, and even then I do not think I have plumbed its depths. Nevertheless, I was moved, pleasantly bewildered and more than once, dumbstruck.
These animals did not and do not “think” in the way we do, Panciroli notes, nor strive for anything but to live and help their offspring do so. Yet when an asteroid strike made earth a hellscape 66 million years ago, they easily outsmarted the supposedly supreme dinosaurs, who quickly vanished, and went on an evolutionary tear that created today’s modern ecosystems and (arguably less to their credit) human life. Despite their puny stature, she writes, “their evolutionary path is not one of relegation, but innovation. They seized the moment with endothermic gusto. … Their tale is packed with evolutionary eurekas.”
At the Phalle exhibit, I think about my mother. I think of her studio at the back of her home in Melbourne, littered with shattered plates. Her stainless steel countertop, covered in dried chips of molding clay. A menagerie of cutesy porcelain animals lining a wall-length shelf, and below them, a collection of antique tea pots. Figure heads she has sculpted from clay strewn on the workbench — cherubic faces with extra-long necks stretched to the point of severance, like bluntly cut daisies.
Outside the studio is her garden, where she has planted scarlet mandevilla, trumpet-like flowers that flare out from a creeper vine, and violet geraniums, which sag after the rain. This garden houses her finished creations: busts of fractious women, statuesque, goddess-like. They stand serenely powerful and regally adorned: Hair composed of hummingbirds and poppies and beaded undergrowth, faces of cracked porcelain and china. They have Chinese soup spoons for earrings and headpieces of layered saucers and nesting porcelain birds. Their eyes are shaded lavender and turquoise; their noses are the turned-down handles of teacups; their cheeks are dotted with flowers.
To make sense of the dizzying thought of machine writing, churning out sentences purely on the basis of probabilities, we need to understand language models such as GPT-3 not only as advances in AI and computational linguistics, but from the perspective of the interwoven histories of writing, rhetoric, style and literature too. What do probabilistic language models look like against the backdrop of the history of probable language? And what might this historical perspective suggest to us about what synthetic text means for the future of imaginative writing?
Is there an alternate timeline where America is known as the United States of the Pickle-Dealer? It seems unlikely, but there’s an element of truth to this half-sour hypothetical. Amerigo Vespucci didn’t discover the Americas, contrary to what the map-makers who named the continents believed, but his given name did end up lending itself to the so-called “new world.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Vespucci “the pickle-dealer at Seville,” a derisive label that may have stretched the truth a bit, but pointed towards a very real part of the itinerant Italian’s biography.
After nearly every point, she will complicate it — probe its weak spots and limits, ask what she's not seeing, contradict herself. While she is sharp, she is rarely certain. She doesn't write, as so many people on the internet are conditioned to do, from a position of defensiveness, an assumption of bad faith readings, a desire to make her words sleek and unassailable. The result is not fuzziness but precision, a hyper-awareness of moral shading. In On Freedom, Nelson is doing what feels like intellectual echolocation: putting out calls and seeing what answers.
“Three Girls from Bronzeville,” Dawn Turner’s first work of nonfiction, uses the trope of little Black girls inventing and reinventing themselves at certain points in history to help define the era and the country. Through the stories of three generations of women, Turner has given us a tutorial of urban decay, White privilege, poor city planning and the influence of fads and digital advances on Black urban teenagers.
Three years after the release of her novel Fates and Furies—a literary bisection of marriage and privilege that was praised variously by President Barack Obama and Amazon (yes, Amazon) as the best book of 2015—Lauren Groff was sitting in a lecture theater at Harvard University, thinking about medieval nuns. She wasn’t in the market for a new book. She usually has a dozen or so different concepts in different stages of fruition orbiting within the solar system of her mind. But something about the lecture, by the academic Katie Bugyis on the 12th-century poet Marie de France, caught her imagination, and suddenly she saw the scope of an idea laying itself out before her, striking and luminous in its framework. Sitting in the audience, Groff could feel the energy reverberating between the past and the present, “almost like a tuning fork,” she told me later. And she got up, and she started to work.
The temptation with writers who see the world clearly is to attribute some kind of supernatural sight to them when their real gift is rigorous attentiveness to humanity. When Groff detailed the origins of Matrix, her new novel, I joked that it sounded like she’d had a vision. “It was a very 21st-century vision,” she said dryly. “It was just sitting there. There were no, like, humanoid forms in the sky.” Still, throughout Groff’s career, her novels have been a good few beats ahead of the most pressing issues of the moment. Pandemics recur in her stories, as do natural landscapes ravaged by climate change, as do women who are quietly incandescent with rage. Her 2012 novel, Arcadia, about a boy who grows up in a hippie commune in upstate New York, jumps forward in its final section to 2019, when a new virus that first appears in Indonesia shuts down the planet and kills close to a million people. In the same dystopian future, coastlines are battered by storms, ice caps have melted, and formerly balmy places are unlivable. Arcadia, Groff said, was her darkest nightmare, projected onto the page. Even she didn’t expect it would so fully come true.
Lauren Groff wants us all to keep more secrets. And even though she wrote one of the most significant marriage novels of the past decade, 2015's Fates and Furies, she's not sure she wants us to join in holy matrimony, either. "I wrote the book in opposition to marriage," she says of Fates, her portrait of a relationship on fire told by a wife who knows it and a husband who does not. "Even though I am married, I don't necessarily believe in the institution — its patriarchal elements, the idea that you can't keep things from your significant other — and I was hoping to sort out the need for it."
Finland is a place of extreme contrasts. It's a land of vast arctic wildernesses and cultured civilised hubs. It is lauded for its education, quality of life and economic dynamism but its people have been prone to depression. It has long, light summers and cold, dark winters. It is fiercely independent, yet has a long history of occupation. But it is the reconciliation of these opposites that has shaped the nation, and there is a Finnish book that encapsulates the push and pull of these contrasts. It is also credited with turning Finland into one of the most literate nations on earth.
The great thing about egg rice is that it’s hardly cooking. If you can fry an egg, then you can make egg rice. And it’s filling but not too filling, perfect for that weird in-between pause after work and before dinner, when you’re so hungry you can’t imagine how you’ll even make it to dinner, let alone cook it.
It has been a point of contention among historians whether the medieval convent was a virtual prison for the unwanted sisters and daughters of the wealthy or, instead, a locus for female intellectual life. Most likely they were both. Groff is skillful at conveying Marie’s initial despair: “All will be gray, she thinks, the rest of her life gray. Gray soul, gray sky, gray earth of March, grayish whitish abbey.”
“Harrow” unfolds on a ruined continent where environmental devastation has changed everything but also nothing; the zoos may “have been washed away” and the coasts flooded, yet “[p]retty much everything is up and running again. The amusement industry has heroically reestablished itself. Disney World has rebooted and is going strong.” Williams’ tone is caustic and discomfiting; it brings to mind the moment in which we are living, when matters of science and public health are regularly ridiculed or redirected in favor of political or economic platitudes.
“The Oracle of Night” makes a resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams. Ribeiro marshals prodigious evidence to bolster his case that a dream is not simply “fragments of memory assembled at random” (as he summarizes Francis Crick’s dismissive position), but instead is a “privileged moment for prospecting the unconscious” — a phenomenon that, in Carl Jung’s words, “prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.”
“On Freedom” isn’t a book about morality but about abolition in the abstract sense: defunding the cop in your mind. Nelson wants her reader to move past seeing individuals, or even humanity itself, as “good” or “bad.” “On Freedom” asks us, in the face of anxiety and uncertainty and in defiance of a mass culture of blame-seeking, to move past our lust for punishment into a place of acceptance.
Reading, of course, brings me a lot of joy. But bookish rituals keep me grounded. When I started looking for them, and then deliberately cultivating them, it became obvious what an important role they play in my life.
How could our insignificant little lives – our day jobs and dinner parties, unanswered emails and bad first dates, minuscule insecurities and anxieties – possibly matter in the face of looming economic, social and environmental collapse? What is the value of sex and friendship, and literature about sex and friendship, when the world is quite literally burning?
In Sally Rooney’s fiction, they still matter very much.
I found the novel’s defensiveness about the moral dubiousness of its aesthetic project kind of charming, but also frustrating. Yet, for all that, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is Rooney’s best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.
Setting a feminist story in the 12th century is no easy feat. There's always the possibility of coming on too strong and imposing modern ideologies onto a period where they may not be as believable as the author hopes.
But Lauren Groff's Matrix is an inspiring novel that truly demonstrates the power women wield, regardless of the era. It has sisterhood, love, war, sex — and many graphic deaths, all entangled in a once-forgotten abbey in the English countryside.
There's not a story in Hao that's anything less than gorgeous. Ye, who's also a literary translator, has an uncanny ability to explore the vocabularies that we build around ourselves, the ways that we communicate, and what happens when those break down. It's a beautiful collection that looks at people who have nothing but their words — until they don't.
An index is an arsy-versy tool: it enables us to sneak into a book from the rear end, saving the time it would take to advance through the text from the beginning. Jonathan Swift, quoted by Dennis Duncan in his witty and wide-ranging study of the subject, compares readers who use such short cuts to travellers entering a palace through the privy.
One of the most famous images by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya is an etching that depicts a man slumped over his desk asleep, papers underneath him and his head buried in his arms. From the shadows behind him, strange and sinister creatures emerge: owls and bats with their wings spread wide, a cat with a stony gaze, other beasts impossible to identify. “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos,” a caption on the side of the desk warns: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
The picture is often taken as Goya’s assertion of faith in Enlightenment values, in the ability of logical thought and empirical observation to sweep away the darkness of superstition. But there is a catch: sueño, the Spanish word for “sleep,” can also be translated as “dream.” What if the monsters are present not because reason isn’t awake to fend them off but because reason, in its slumber, actively generates them? If monsters can exist not despite reason but as a consequence of it, then perhaps we’re not as safe in the rational world—the land of logic and science—as we thought.
There are few things more glamorous than the belief that we are living through the end of an era — and there are even fewer times in recent history when we haven’t believed it. It’s a conviction that allows us to ennoble ourselves with pathos, with rueful maturity, with wisdom won too late. To be certain that we’re at the beginning of something can mean feeling optimistic and openhearted about the future in a way that, especially these days, risks courting contempt. And to know that we’re in the middle of an era is — well, it’s not even a phrase, is it? It’s nothing much at all, simply a kind of semipermanent Wednesday of the soul, a spirit-flattening acceptance of stasis and complacency. But nearing the end? In that, you have a lifetime’s worth of wistfulness, and perhaps some bitterness and grief, not to mention prescience about what might come next. In short, life at the end of an era is — to use a term that might be coming to the end of its own era — lit. And it almost doesn’t matter if the lighting is seductive and flattering or as harsh and glaring as if the music has just been turned off and the club is about to close. Drama is drama.
Nutritionism and essentialism provide comfortingly clear perspectives about what makes food healthful. But an open-minded look at the evidence suggests that many of the most hotly debated questions about nutrition are impossible to answer with the information we have, maybe with the information we will ever have in the foreseeable future. If we isolate nutrients and eat them in different forms than they naturally come in, how will they affect us? Can processed foods be made in ways to approach or even surpass the healthfulness of natural whole foods?
Subtitled “Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” the book consists of a series of linked essays examining different conceptions of freedom in the realms of art, sex, drugs and climate change. Nelson says she decided to group her thoughts under the rubric of freedom in part because of her “long-standing frustration with [the word’s] capture by the right wing” – think “freedom fries,” the Freedom Caucus and the pro-military saying, “Freedom’s never free.”
What a treat it is to write about a translation of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837) — like getting invited to rhapsodize about oxygen (“Great stuff!”). He’s our everything, as Russians say, and indeed his DNA is everywhere in Russian literature. Even if you spend most of your time with more recent writers, he’s so important to every subsequent poet writing in Russian that every door back to him stands open. Even that brilliant idol-smashing Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wanted to toss all his poetic predecessors off “the steamship of modernity,” eventually wrote a thoughtful and intimate poem addressed to Alexander Sergeyevich. Pushkin deeply shaped Russian as it is written, so even his moments of archaism still feel elegant and effective. Who he was is unusually important too, since his African heritage (and what he wrote about it) put openness to the wider world into Russian culture from this formative moment onward — no matter what Dostoyevsky made of Pushkin’s specifically Russian greatness in his famous 1880 speech, when they dedicated the black metal statue in Moscow. Finally, and most vitally, reading Pushkin offers tremendous pleasure: right after shaking one’s head at what a little prick he was, a typical Gemini, one is touched or amused by the next amazing line. We require our students to memorize a poem of his in first-year Russian language class, as precious cultural capital plus good phonetic practice.
The result is a touching, introspective story about identity, belonging and the effects of long-term transience on both the heart and soul.
Though a few stories read more like fragmentary situations, “How to Wrestle a Girl” shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge our presumptions and dissect the beauty, danger and wonder of girlhood.
You asked me for a love poem
and I gave you a text message and a handful of
imaginary paprika crisps. You told me this was
Doesn’t all our greatest art address the subject of death—its cruelty, its inevitability? The shadow it casts on our all too brief lives? “What does it all mean?” we ask ourselves.
Allow me to tell you: death means that the dinner reservation you made for a party of seven needs to be upped to ten, then lowered to nine, and then upped again, this time to fourteen. Eighteen will ultimately show up, so you will have to sit with people you just vaguely remember at a four-top on the other side of the room, listening as the fun table, the one with your sparkling sister at it, laughs and laughs. Or perhaps you’re all together but not getting your main courses because the chef, who should be in the kitchen, cooking, is getting dressed down by your brother-in-law, who did not care for the soup. Or maybe your party has been split into six groups of three, or three groups of six. While the specifics blur together, there will remain one constant, which is you, having to hear things like “Well, I know that your father did his best.”
Several years ago, when I was quivering at the top of a rock-climbing wall, the instructor called up to me: “You just have to let go and the auto-belay will catch you. Just let yourself fall.” I peered down at the empty space below. Absolutely not, I thought.
I climbed all the way back down, grazing the tips of my fingers on the rough hand holds. The instructor shook his head and grinned. I stomped off, embarrassed. I was never good at falling. What I was good at was holding on. Keeping it together, at any cost. The ease of the fall terrified me. Absolutely not.
It’s rare that I finish a book and find myself at a loss as to how to review it, but here we are with Angela Mi Young Hur’s sophomore novel Folklorn. Ostensibly, it is a novel about the daughter of immigrants trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, but it is so much more than that. So, so, so much more. Genre-defying and emotionally unsettling, it is a book that refuses to stay in whatever category the reader wants to put it.
Your mother enters the poem
with her sadness intact.
When your mother enters
the poem, should she be
No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you. My first language, Cantonese, is the only one I share with my parents, and, as it slips from my memory, I also lose my ability to communicate with them. When I tell people this, their eyes tend to grow wide with disbelief, as if it’s so absurd that I must be joking. “They can’t speak English?” they ask. “So how do you talk to your parents?” I never have a good answer. The truth is, I rely on translation apps and online dictionaries for most of our conversations.
Sure, Marvel’s newest superhero flick, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, impresses with its high-flying martial arts fight scenes, the usual show-stopping, Disney-caliber visual effects, and a groundbreaking Asian superhero taking center stage.
But for advocates in San Francisco’s Chinese community, the movie’s trailer perked up eyebrows for a totally different reason.
That San Francisco Muni bus—now that was a show-stopper.
The unanimous consensus, and most obvious answer, is movies feel too long now because they have to set up potential sequels. Movies can no longer “just end” and leave some loose threads up to the viewer. Everything has to be resolved in order to set up the next story. “Movies now complete the ending so much that they actually start the next thing,” says one prominent screenwriter. “So many movies now end with the beginning of the sequel.”
Such an odd thing, packing a rucksack. It’s an act of austerity that liberates even as it frustrates. For every item to earn its place on my puny shoulders, it must be life-preserving in some way. I limit myself to 26.5 pounds, casting out the frivolous, the inessential. I check weather forecasts, tear spines from books, put things in—paints, camera lenses, walnuts—then throw them out. Every time I toss away an item, I feel a swift stab of anxiety followed by a ripple of lightness. So that even as I shunt the pack onto my back, I experience a sense of weightlessness. I have become disencumbered. Free. My life whittled down to the bone.
What a treat it is to have this baker's dozen of stories in one volume. The collection is bookended on one end by the title tale, which was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966, and on the other by a powerful new story, written in 2020, which checks in on a pair of Wolitzer's longtime recurring characters just as the novel coronavirus pandemic hits New York.
Regarding our rapidly accelerating world overrun by a pandemic, climate change and inequality, a question that our generation faces is whether good will endure. In response to this question, Saklikar spins a cautionary tale called Bramah & The Beggar Boy – a three hundred page epic told in verse and the first book of a fantasy series.
When the first public sundial arrived in Rome, a trophy of war expropriated from Sicily in the third century BCE and mounted in the Forum for all to see, some Romans cursed it. “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits,” wrote Plautus. “You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest.” People have been complaining about clocks ever since.
Plautus, a comedy writer, may have been half-kidding, but David Rooney is not. “It changed everything,” he tells us. “Romans were forced to live their lives by the clock. And this new temporal order was sweeping civilizations across the world.” In his insightful, globe-spanning new book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, he sets out to show that this ancient device is neither simple nor innocent, that clocks are designed with hidden agendas and ulterior motives, and that their influence on human societies and the human psyche has been more profound than we usually imagine.
In his new book, Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition, Lockwood returns to the dilemma of art and life from a different point of view, offering a briskly paced tour of the history of Beethoven biography, starting in 1827, the year of the composer’s death, and continuing almost to the present. It would be impossible for such a survey to be totally comprehensive and up to date, since the flood of Beethoven books is ongoing—last year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, brought a new crop. But Beethoven’s Lives shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.
it is the thing about clouds that they look
like other things.
when I see a cloud I think of other
Becoming the raspberry stain on the pink of your cheek,
a tongue’s soft landing spot. Becoming the empty ritual,
what can’t be said. Becoming intercession, my language
becoming yours, the blessing of tongues. Becoming the river
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
When author María Amparo Escandón moved to New York from Los Angeles in 2014, she’d often hear New Yorkers claim L.A. has no weather.
“What do you mean there’s no weather in L.A.?!” she’d exclaim, before countering with the Santa Ana winds, fires, drought and — yes — rain. “It’s not always 72 and sunny.”
I seek out gay bars in every city I visit. In Denver I find myself lighting one cigarette after another at a bright lounge with the writers Vi Khi Nao and Steven Dunn. Vi and I are in town for a reading, the last stop on my book tour. After the event, we pile into Steven’s car and drive towards the highway. The bar’s parking lot is flooded with muddy yellow light. The tarmac empty save a few SUVs with stickers that say “I’d rather be Climbing” and “Who Rescued Who?”
Inside we stand in line at a wide wooden bar flanking a deserted dance floor. Clots of men in khakis and fleece vests lean against mirrored walls and abandoned Plexiglas cages where dancers once writhed under the blue and white lights. I stare up at the motionless disco ball and try to picture the bar as it might’ve looked during its heyday: a fog machine pumping white clouds obscuring a smorgasbord of bodies, bottles, powders sniffed and swallowed on the floor. In this scene, I root through the night with my mouth, awash in blue lights. Every pore an orifice.
First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist essay was the notion that the accumulation of capital equaled liberation and that intellectual freedom was bound with the material. The nuance of this claim about materiality however should not be missed. Indeed, as Woolf concedes, writing itself is material—an embodied practice that is produced in protest of a material lack. Money then not only makes writing possible but also, in turn, makes available a rendering of our world that would otherwise be hidden from us. It is in this seemingly paradoxical space wherein money produces the freedom to write, which in turn makes visible our world, that Jo Hamya situates her troubling debut novel, Three Rooms.
In the end we love the line love cannot cross.
In the end we fall for what we fail.
The preeminent Hong Kong actor of his generation and one of international cinema’s greatest stars, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, now 59, moves with the smoldering, understated charm of an old-world matinee idol. His performances often make his films feel like their own genre, whether they’re kung fu sagas, police dramas, or film noir love stories. And over the past four decades, he’s been a muse to some of Asia’s greatest directors, among them Ang Lee, John Woo, Andy Lau, and his friend and frequent collaborator Wong Kar Wai. Wong’s films, in particular, set the tone for Leung’s career; the pencil mustache and debonair personality he cultivated for a role in the filmmaker’s surreal epic 2046 earned him a nickname that tried to translate his charm for Western audiences: Asia’s Clark Gable.
Leung had always wanted to make a Hollywood movie—he dreamed of working with Martin Scorsese, or starring in an adaptation of a Lawrence Block crime novel. But he’d never been presented with the right opportunity. American film has traditionally had little to offer any Asian leading man, and Leung didn’t think there would ever be a role in a big-budget American movie for a Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese actor of his stature.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure of this novel is also its most subtle. Groff is a gifted writer capable of deft pyrotechnics and well up to the challenges she sets herself, including that of rendering feverish apparitions of the Virgin as recorded by a seminal poet of the Western canon. One senses she doesn’t so much struggle to create her vision but is borne aloft on it, which is the page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.
To be free and to contribute meaningfully to society, it has long been held, we must sometimes be truly alone and know ourselves to be alone, as only then can we truly be ourselves. As societies, we have embarked on a strange experiment — one that sometimes seems self-obsessed, but, in another sense promotes self-annihilation, the cultivation of the public self over the private one. Boghosian’s work is a clear call to re-embrace our privacy and value its place both in our lives as individuals and in a free society.
Here, true to form, he tells us to abandon the impossible – “the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be”. Four Thousand Weeks is a time-unmanagement book, a pushback against what the American writer Marilynne Robinson calls the “joyless urgency” of our age.
I wanted to speak to the Ferryman.
I called directory inquiry, information,
on my smartphone. I was given a number,
a revelation. I swore to Hermes,