Five books about the expedition have now been published; one more comes out in November. I hope a bookshop will display them all together — one story told six different ways.
That leaves my own version, which remains theoretical, at least for now. I’m still turning over my thoughts on my maverick great-great-uncle. I believe there are still parts of his story left to crack.
The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are rather small, and a vanishingly small portion of them have been studied at all, much less by cognition researchers. But the profile of one group of diminutive animals is rapidly rising as scientists discover surprisingly sophisticated behaviors among them.
“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”
It's a book that's filled with seemingly small moments that are actually anything but — Wu understands the human heart keenly, and her novel is a subtle but powerful triumph.
Author Alison Stine maintains eerie calm and quiet here, with just enough blanks left unfilled to leave readers feeling the cringey kind of unease that happens when you’re anticipating something bad and oops, it’s tomorrow. The story isn’t really even dystopian; it’s more futuristic, set in a possible someday time when society is almost entirely feral and the gulf between has and has nothing is as wide as an ocean full of plastic garbage.
Start it, and you can smell the tale from your reading spot.
In Louise Nealon's debut novel, "Snowflake," we are introduced to the world of life on a small Irish dairy farm by Debbie White, our 18-year-old narrator, who milks cows each day and prepares to enter university. While this may sound sweet and wholesome, what lies beneath the surface is anything but.
I sneeze and therefore I am
not of this kindling landscape,
Still, a few stalwart souls continue to practice this old art. Today, by most industry estimates, 20 shops in the United States specialize in headstone carving. Among those shaping the future of this anachronistic sector are millennial and Gen Z carvers, some continuing family traditions and others starting new firms.
Sam Pink makes it look easy and it isn’t. Over some dozen books of poetry, stories, and prose, he’s refined a spare but precise style that reads like truth. He gives alley dwellers, dishwashers, and city wanderers the dignity and gravitas that other writers normally reserve for the upper echelon. Pink continues to write about these kinds of people with care in his recently released novel, Ketchup, one of his best books so far.
In her debut memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford narrates her family’s peculiar brand of unhappiness (much to her mother’s chagrin; “Why can’t you ever write about the happy times we had? We had happy times too,” she complains to her daughter upon reading her work). Ford’s father is sent to prison when she is still a toddler. She grows up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her mother; younger brother, RC; and grandmother. Along the way, two half-siblings her mother has with an on-again, off-again stepfather join the family. Ford executes her task with both unstinting honesty and rare tenderness toward the deeply flawed, but steadfast, circle of adults who raised her. The resulting portraits, of her mother and grandmother, in particular, are remarkably vivid and humane, haunting the reader long after one has closed the book’s pages.
Though its subject may sound familiar, journalist and talk-show host Tamron Hall's debut novel As the Wicked Watch is a singular thriller that brings the vulnerability and systemic neglect of Black girls as victims of violent crime into vivid relief.
That's an ambitious agenda, and fiction is a distinctly different mode of storytelling from news reporting, even if taking big issues and making them personal is second nature for the Emmy Award-winner. But the novel's storyline proves perfectly tailored to Hall's experience and skill set.
Although its social, economic, and political consequences have had a major impact on the modern world, the theory and practice of meritocracy has lacked a good history—until now. The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge fills that gap. The author is an editor and columnist at The Economist, the influential London-based weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper, and the co-author of a number of well-regarded books, most recently Capitalism in America, written with the former chairman of the American Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan. Wooldridge’s wide-ranging, informative, and often provocative book depicts the traditional world in which personal background and connections counted for everything, the traces and harbingers of the meritocratic idea that appeared before the French Revolution, and its progress thereafter.
Go ahead, take it, the observable universe.
Take its buying, sighing, and dying rituals:
around here, we let the dead bury the dead.
In 2000, a failed surgery originally intended to restore functionality did his right hand in for good. Soon after, doctors found a tumor in his left. They removed it, along with any remaining hope of his fingers gliding over his beloved keyboard ever again.
So that's how João Carlos Martins finally lost his ability to play the piano. This is the story of how he got it back.
There is A peculiar moment at the beginning of every good novel. It has nothing to do with the story. You read page one, perhaps page two, and then you stop reading. You put the book down and slide it some distance away. This is good, you think. But already your schedule is crowded. Perhaps there is dinner to be made, children to bathe, some task to perform. It doesn’t matter. You know you only have 30 minutes or an hour to spare, and yet you know, after just one or two pages, that this will not be enough. This is one for open time. Not because it’s difficult or obtuse. Simply because it’s good. You already have that feeling of being in the flow and you don’t want the necessity of stopping to become a frustration.
Such is the feeling I had after just two pages of Tom Noyes’s new book, The Substance of Things Hoped For. This is an extraordinary novel, erudite and learned and also wonderfully compelling. I began, then stopped, then began again a day later when I had open hours. Every moment has been a joy.
Though his earlier books found an audience — and won big poetry awards — this selection makes the best way to get into Rosal, because it’s the first volume to show his range. To read these poems one after another is to experience a kind of double or triple vision: an American bedroom, an Ilocan coastal village, a Metuchen street. That vision leads, in turn, to felt connections, to loyalty as solid as Rosal’s firmest, longest lines.
Claire risks more than other sad-mom protagonists, pulling off a jailbreak that they only dream about. But her inner monologue, while seductively specific, isn’t always tortured. She experiences the pain of being away from her daughter, but she seems less anguished by how others—the white men in her head, perhaps—might interpret her. It’s as if Watkins is closing the door on the other novels’ agonizingly open questions, about whether a woman is “allowed” to pursue her art, or whether she’s a bad person for begrudging the black hole of time and selfhood that is a baby.
Paul Auster and Stephen Crane were both born in Newark. Other than that, you wouldn’t think they had a lot in common. Crane is among the least cerebral of writers. He’s interested not in ideas but in experience and sensation, which he describes in language that’s vivid, direct and often metaphorical. Auster, on the other hand, is the dean of American postmodernists, one of those writers whose books are always chasing their own narrative tails. His sentences are long, allusive and sometimes deliberately flat. But, for all their differences, Auster loves Crane and cares so much about his reputation that in this enormous, impassioned book he has taken it upon himself to restore him to his rightful place in the American canon.
Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.
Eventually, inevitably, the anti-aging industry and the athletic performance industry intertwined, with weird results. Now, HGH and testosterone are no longer solely the tools of bodybuilders, MLB sluggers and NFL linemen, but also of CEOs, bankers and life hackers. Now, science and salesmanship can be hard to separate; outcomes are murky—enhancing performance doesn’t necessarily mean extending longevity—and those people with time, money and privilege have a huge head start on the rest.
Now, we live in an era of possibility. Even if many of us don’t yet know it.
Earlier this year, I taught Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to groups of second-year English students. I was inspired by the conversations born from the text, covering such diverse areas as the family, the nonhuman, and ideas of care. But across all the groups I taught, we also talked a lot about work. We discussed how, in the immediate aftermath of his awakening to discover his body altered, Gregor Samsa finds himself still tired, and tries to go back to sleep. When he has difficulty getting comfortable in his bug body, he begins to decry a plethora of mundane stresses from his job as a traveling salesman. These did not seem to be the thoughts of a person who has undergone some mysterious supernatural change, but rather those that many of us have when our alarm goes off first thing in the morning and we must head off to our jobs. Tired, stressed, bored.
“The land here eats everything,” thinks the narrator of The Lady with the Big Head Chronicle, the first story of Glorious Frazzled Beings, longlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. “There are after all so many intact spirits roaming, and they are hungry for knowing.”
The characters in Angelique Lalonde’s debut collection, the only story collection on this year’s Giller Prize shortlist, are hungry for knowing, too: they want to understand their mothers, their grocery lists, their guilt over killing flies, the disappearing enchanted town they discovered in the woods. They are struggling, lonely, yearning, and frazzled— that scattered, delirious, deeply maternal state of mind, which Lalonde excavates in inventive, rhapsodic prose.
But if you were the kind of band that earned its cred giving the finger to corporate suits, how were you supposed to navigate shaking their hand for your shot at rock stardom?
That's the question at the center of the new book Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994 - 2007 from music writer Dan Ozzi. The book uses the major label debuts of 11 bands to examine a music industry in flux, fans feeling betrayed, and bands just trying to navigate the machine. "I wanted to know, what happens to the real people," says Ozzi. "Is it worth it?"
Inside its dry and musty hull, the smell of old books contains great distances. You sense time travel, of course, but also the soaring aeronautics of ideas. Sometimes a great book sticks the landing, very often they don’t. And sometimes books fail to jump high enough.
In smelling old books, you can smell actual geographic distances, too. Imagine all the cardboard boxes necessary to crate up a roomful of books, the slow trundle of cargo to a new destination, the books aging along with their owner from move to move. Readers who find this smell intoxicating are ruefully aware of how insane, how flatly contradictory of convenience, loving this smell can be.
Holy adjectives, Edward. But in fact, Bulwer-Lytton didn’t invent the phrase—he only made it what it is today: a textbook example of melodramatic, overwritten prose. (And you can see why.) According to English professor Scott Rice (more on him below), “the line had been around for donkey’s years before Lytton decided to have fun with it.”
When we first started talking in September, she claimed to be prepared for whatever was to come. She told me that she had recently ordered a wine-mom T-shirt that reads I’M NOT FOR EVERYONE. It’s an interesting daily affirmation for Couric, whose career was based on being appealing to, well, pretty much everyone. She acknowledged how deeply it was ingrained in her that her job was to be “likable,” which she said often translates into being “as inoffensive as possible, palatable for mass consumption.” She chose to write this book, she said, because “now I’m liberated to be who I am, warts and all, and I don’t have to worry about somebody saying, ‘I don’t like her; I’m not going to watch her.’”
I asked her if it’s going to be hard to be cast as unlikable. “Is it hard? I think it’s life. It’s life if you’re living it honestly.”
When Wes Craven’s Scream appeared on the scene in 1996, horror was stuck in a rut. The fun, philosophical innovations that characterized the genre in the ’80s had been reduced to derivative, repetitive slasher flicks: stab, wipe, repeat. The cultural ascendence of 1991’s Silence of the Lambs kicked off an era in which stylish cat-and-mouse thrillers with horror elements had dominated mainstream cinema, while more traditional teen slasher fare languished.
That all changed when Scream debuted five days before Christmas in 1996. In one single, terrifying opening scene, and with one now-immortal line — “Do you like scary movies?” — Scream completely transformed ’90s horror and paved the way for generations of smart, genre-savvy filmmaking to come.
Every time I find myself in a new city, I go on a ghost tour. Why not? It’s the perfect way to see the sights—just at an interesting slant. When you think about it, ghost tours can really encompass all aspects of a place in a way that other tours can’t. They bring the past into the present. They explain odd local superstitions and traditions. They get into architecture and structural ruin. They have this magical ability to cover swaths of the nation’s history through the lens of a few unfortunate souls. (And I can’t stress this point enough: I have to leave the room during horror movie trailers, but ghost tours are not scary and always a goddamn delight! Think of them less like hauntings and more like personal, living stories.) When I was visiting a friend in Philadelphia (a thoroughly spooky place), our guide put it best when she said, “History classes just teach the most boring part of it. People have always been weird and fascinating.”
In “Trashlands,” Stine builds a world in which dark times have descended. And yet, she insists, the things that make us human persist. This is her ballad to love in a time of darkness — future and present.
Claire Vaye Watkins has written a novel about the most frightening creature in America: a bad mother. “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” is an audaciously candid story about the crush of conflicted feelings that a baby inspires — particularly for a woman who regards the nursery as a place where ambition, freedom and sex die.
Kansas, a landlocked American state more than 1,700 km from the sea, is not the most obvious place to find a font of knowledge on sushi, Japan's most iconic food. But Eric Rath teaches Japanese cultural history at the University of Kansas and his new book "Oishii: The History of Sushi" (oishii is Japanese for "delicious") is an enticing title for one of the first substantial books written in English on the history of sushi.
When author Patti Callahan began delving into the life of C.S. Lewis, it was by way of his often mentioned but seldom explored wife, Joy Davidman. Three years after publishing her first historical novel, “Becoming Mrs. Lewis,” Callahan returns to that fertile ground with “Once Upon a Wardrobe,” revisiting the year Lewis spent in Oxford, working on his most famous book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
I saw a dark carp moving beneath the water like a bruise
Moving indigo across a woman’s cheek
In the annals of archaeology, it ranks as the most bizarre excavation team. Led by a handsome British aristocrat, its members included a Swiss psychic, a Finnish poet, an English cricket champion and a mustachioed Swede who once piloted a steamboat on the Congo River. None had any training in the field.
Nor was the object of their search ordinary. This motley assemblage arrived in Jerusalem in 1909, when the Holy City was still under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul. They sought nothing less than the famed Ark of the Covenant, along with treasures gathered by King Solomon 3,000 years ago that, according to legend, were later hidden.
Long before Raiders of the Lost Ark was a box-office smash, this band of unlikely explorers launched a secret dig that blew up into an international scandal that shook the Middle East, with consequences still felt today.
It’s easy enough to find banana and fudge or banana caramel ice cream at your local deli these days, but the flavor I miss from my childhood, and which is far harder to track down, is just plain banana. No chocolate, no nuts. It tasted only of cream, bananas and sugar, and was much more luscious and profound than the sum of its parts. At Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Forest Hills, Queens, it is just as I remember it, as if seasoned with a dash of nostalgia.
A depressed protagonist poses a particular challenge for the writer: How do you get your story moving forward when the person at its center has a hard time getting out of bed? In his briskly entertaining debut novel, “The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven,” Nathaniel Ian Miller solves this problem by focusing on the transforming possibilities of friendship. Sven Ormson, the eponymous hero, is introduced as a gloomy, bookish and somewhat pretentious young man who fantasizes about swapping the dismal daily grind of early-20th-century Stockholm for the unpeopled expanses of the Arctic, yet lacks the energy and wherewithal to make a change. His melancholic tendencies are apparent from the beginning, but as the novel unfolds Miller helpfully supplies Sven with a series of companions who are able, whenever needs must, to prod him into action and bring out the better, more cheerful aspects of his character.
Glück’s new book, Winter Recipes From The Collective, comes seven years later and a year after she won the Nobel Prize. It is quite brief, only 15 poems, and gives an impression of exhaustion, as though language and material have been nearly depleted. Glück has often drawn on mythology, a way of supplementing one’s life material; you may need just a touch of your own pain or memory to breathe life into the old, familiar myth. Here, as in her last book, the poems often feel like fables or strange little fictions, positing characters with unclear relation to the poet — there is fictive distance, but how much distance? “The Denial of Death” is an almost novelistic poem in which the speaker recalls how her life changed after she misplaced her passport; her companion goes on with the journey as planned, while she is stuck in place and therefore time. The concierge of the hotel tells her, “You have begun your own journey, / not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself.” “Everything returns,” he goes on, “but what returns is not / what went away.”
She cooks to Ella’s soaring, playful voice.
The bright, three-minute songs have changed and lifted
her mood. The speakers rattle the kitchen cabinets.
Getting the SETI field moving again required more than a specific new technology; it required a new way of thinking about technology as a whole. ‘I was never a big fan of what might be called “beacon SETI”,’ the astrophysicist Adam Frank from the University of Rochester tells me. ‘The idea is that you’re waiting for somebody to send you a message with radio, but I thought, maybe nobody wants to do that.’ Frank is one of the leading researchers embracing a different approach, one that focuses on the hunt for ‘technosignatures’: evidence of any kind of alien technology that modifies its environment in detectable ways.
The shift from SETI to technosignature is an intellectual sea change in thinking about what extraterrestrials could be, and about how they might reveal themselves to us. The emerging science of technosignatures has also reopened a high-stakes, long-dormant debate. To make contact, do we need to stop just listening and start talking as well? Or is announcing our existence to the Universe an invitation to destruction?
To write a poignant sentence or a precise description is a joy, but the pleasure of writing is not content-dependent. Making marks is the thing. I have distinctive penmanship—small letters, precisely assembled, compact but not cramped, legible. But sloppier, dashed-off notes come with their own satisfaction, a race between head and hand, stretching out letterforms from small blocks of ink to interconnected shapes that approach the undulating waves of my mother’s cursive.
At first glance, Kwon Yeo-sun’s “Lemon” appears to be your typical whodunit; much of its first chapter is dedicated to an interview between detective and suspect. But then Kwon directs the reader’s attention elsewhere. Yes, by the end, the reader will know who the killer is, but that knowledge takes a back seat in this poignant tale.
On the surface, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears is a crime novel about channeling grief to exact revenge. However, right underneath there is much more. For starters, it’s a timely narrative about coming to terms with Otherness, accepting difference, recognizing that love is love, and the devastating effects not doing those things can have on families. Also, it’s a story that takes the Black experience in the South and places it in a rural context, which is something most contemporary crime fiction has failed to do. Cosby, a Black man born and raised in a family of limited means in southeastern Virginia, knows exactly how to bring authenticity to the page. While these elements are enough to make this novel an outstanding read, Razorblade Tears is more than the sum of its parts. This is crime fiction packed with everything fans have come to expect of the genre, but the way Cosby writes about emotion is more aligned with literary fiction. Razorblade Tears expands into social commentary that’s not preachy.
In The Lincoln Highway, Towles gives us what all great road novels give us: the panoramic sweep of the prairies and hills, adventures that seem to spring from the landscape itself, the propulsive rhythm of the road. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and each is as engaging and fully realised as the next.
What Wharton put out is a bewitching, and frequently terrifying, collection of tales which more often than not fulfill her criterion for a successful ghost story: “If it sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well.” In her preface, Wharton frets about the public’s ability to appreciate a good ghost story, an instinct she sees “being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.” Modern life in 1937 was too noisy, too diffuse and distracted, for a ghost to make much headway. “Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity,” she wrote. “For where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours, when at last the wireless has ceased to jazz.”
Despite being nominated for an Oscar in 1996, playing out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival that May, and being, at the time, the first true Mickey Mouse theatrical short to play for theatrical audiences in more than 40 years has been all but erased from existence. The short is not locked in the Disney Vault, it’s seemingly buried underneath it in a lead-lined box.
How “Runaway Brain” came to be, and why it’s been deemed a forbidden object in the years since, is one of the weirder stories in modern Disney history.
Before the days of Apple Genius Bar appointments booked online, when your MacBook finked out in New York City you schlepped it down to Tekserve on West 23rd Street, where you pushed a lever for a numbered ticket, as if you were at Zabar's smoked fish counter. Then, surrounded by other Mac users distressed by coffee spills and un-backed-up data, you settled into a fold-down wooden theater seat until your number flashed on the screen of a re-purposed Macintosh. Sometimes it was a very long wait.
I never thought I'd look back on those lost, scruffy days with nostalgia — until Tamara Shopsin's unusual and oddly moving debut novel, LaserWriter II, brought it all back to me.
“What do I / to say. I cannot say it,” writes Robert Creeley in the title poem of For Love (1962), far and away one of the most influential books of American poetry to emerge during the postwar era. In a characteristic move, Creeley develops the poem around what the poem cannot say; gestures of refusal and uncertainty abound, with the poet seized by something that “despairs of its own / statement, wants to / turn away, endlessly / to turn away.” The poet is trying to write a love poem for his wife, but the attempt produces a general skepticism about his own authenticity, a worry that he has not “earned” the right to demonstrate his love in literature rather than in life. This in turn leads to the worry that the idea of “earning” love might itself be too transactional, mechanical.
Tiphanie Yanique's Monster in the Middle is an ambitious novel. It's a story about love that sets out to capture both minds and hearts. Like an earnest suitor, it declares its intentions from the start: in the epigraph that laments the challenge of being taken seriously when writing about love and in a prologue that explores the complex nature of romantic love. To varying degrees, it succeeds on both counts.
Guatelombian poet, screenwriter, and multi-medium artist Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s debut novel, Dreaming of You, is a beautiful confluence of verse and prose. In it, a Latina poet, also named Melissa, brings Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life through a séance. This uncanny version of Selena confronts the protagonist with the figment of her personal and cultural obsessions: from the beauty of Selena she’s tried to emulate with her friends, to the idea of how she should act around a boyfriend, and the fear of violence against women’s bodies that later withdraws her from intimacy. Organized into a four-act play, Dreaming of You pushes the limits of its verse-prose hybrid narrative form to explore the complexity of modern, generational immigrant identity of Latina women.
This is a creepy, meticulously-crafted tragedy and frankly, one of the most beautifully written haunted stories I've ever read. As in the best ghost stories, the house is full of ghosts, but it's the people who are the houses.
In its barbed appraisal of New York’s hypercompetitive social scene, Marlowe Granados’s debut novel, Happy Hour, plumbs this tension between the occasional thrill of the party and the tiresome morass of navigating its cartographies.
On the April day that gives Donald Antrim’s book its title, the novelist had to be coaxed off a fire escape. “I was there to die,” he writes in a vivid memoir whose existence — and subtitle, “A Story of Suicide and Survival” — prove that his goal was thankfully thwarted. Antrim, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner whose books include “Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World” and “The Hundred Brothers,” checked himself into a hospital in 2006 and found enough composure to write this bracing memoir about his experience.
Lauren Elkin’s latest book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is a bus diary, but it is also a sort of manifesto to the bus, and to urban existence. She writes about Paris, not London, where there are fewer buses overall but no parallel loss in ridership (pandemic notwithstanding). Elkin set herself the project of recording her experiences riding to and from her work teaching university students English on the eponymous 91 and 92 bus lines, and she kept to this assignment, more or less, for the full academic year of 2014-15. There are a few entries written from the metro or the back of a taxi, but mostly, the reader falls in with Elkin’s routine of catching the 8:12 in the morning (or just missing it) and beating rush hour in the afternoon. She took these notes on the Notes app on her phone, though she also criticizes her fellow passengers for getting so into their phones that “they forget where they are.” According to her introduction, the text has only been lightly edited for spelling and punctuation, making them true records of the day they were written.
The Mojave is a long horizon flush with broken roads and open for access at all points. As you drive it, you see your destination glittering miles up ahead along the ribbon of vanishing pavement. All landmarks are easy to identify, the grand sweep of the Mojave easy to take in. Time to reflect and see: the creosote, a stocky knotty shrub, waving in the wind; the desert trumpets, stems springing from inflated bulbs below; and plates of earth that lift the desert to an upward slant, causing vertigo. The affiliation of meditation with the desert perhaps is that the arid sightlines shrink the world despite their sprawling scope. In something like the Basin and Range area, a stretch of valleys and peaks with little vegetation, the reason for going on, for taking the next step, is not to unravel the mystery of where that next footstep leads; between points A and B there is no interruption.
For as long as our species can remember, even before Plato and Confucius, we were deploying two pairs of conceptual distinctions to carve up the world and make it understandable: the distinction between parts and wholes, and the distinction between particulars and universals.
A Honda engine is a part that — along with other parts, like the steering wheel, the gears, and the fan belt — composes the “whole” known as a Honda car. That very same engine, meanwhile, is also — along with Toyota engines, General Motors engines, and Ford engines — a particular that embodies or “instantiates” the universal idea of engine-ness.
These three women are at the heart of a story of tangled and repressed emotions, complex and shifting relationships, misunderstandings and enforced change. Its beauty is that it mirrors normal life and normal people (a term here used broadly) in all their messiness, casual unkindness, generosity and friendship.
Seen through the lens of our moment, Stephen Crane can appear wildly presumptuous, a writer chronically inclined toward cultural appropriation. His first novel, 1893’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” was an effort to get into the head of a young woman in the dirt-poor Bowery, written by a well-bred New Jerseyite not long out of his teens. His most famous work, 1895’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” was a Civil War novel produced decades after the fighting ended by a writer who’d never done military service. He conjured up a Wild West he’d only passed through, imagined a Black experience he hardly knew, wrote poetry unbeholden to any tradition. Incapable of staying in his lane, he weaved into all of them.
But one person’s presumptuousness is another’s winning audacity, and Crane’s overreach is among the many traits that fascinate Paul Auster, who himself has had a rich career as a novelist, poet, screenwriter and memoirist.
Eric S. Hintz’s new book, American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D, offers a persuasive counternarrative. His goal, achieved via case studies based on a wide array of historical sources, is straightforward: to show that independent inventors did not vanish. This is an important claim. The United States has long touted a certain pragmatic and inventive quality as endemic to its national character. So, who is actually doing this inventing? Is it individuals (white men only, or also women and people of color), or is it corporations? This matters for questions of identity, and obviously also for questions of economics. A historian at Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation (part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History), Hintz explains that the road independent creative people traveled was neither smooth nor easily navigated, but it offered a pathway to fortune, if not always fame. Moreover, the community of individual inventors, long depicted as composed only of tenacious, practical, and resourceful white men, was much more diverse in terms of race and gender than is commonly understood.
I believed there must be some compensation for watching a man die. Part of me even wondered if a cartoon angel might lift out of his still-warm body. Okay, not that, but . . . something. The loaded book that falls from the shelf. The providential bird that lands on the sill. There was nothing. He had his run. He breathed his last. The dumb oxygen tank beeped and respired until, ten minutes later, someone thought to turn it off. The peace and quiet were outrageous.
In her new memoir Gentrifier, Eisner Award-winning culture critic Anne Elizabeth Moore revisits Woolf's premise, refracting it through the lens of her experience of being awarded a "free" house in Detroit in which to live and write. Write A House, the now-defunct arts organization that gave Moore a bungalow in 2016, cast their mission as revising the concept of writer's residencies by "giving the writer the residence, forever."
In 1936, a man born Eric Blair, who had rechristened himself George Orwell, planted roses in the garden of a very small, rented country cottage in Wallington, an English village in Hertfordshire.
This declarative sentence is simple, yet it has the potential to evoke a series of questions, rabbit holes an inquisitive person might follow down into a warren of intersecting tunnels. For example: What was 1936 like politically, socially, and economically in England? Where was Orwell in his career then? Or: What did his given name signify and what history did it carry? What significance lay in his chosen nom de plume that over time was used by friends and family as well? And even: What does it mean to plant roses? What role do roses play in our art and culture and history, and, in present day, what does it mean that we can walk into many grocery stores and florists in the United States and find ready-made bouquets of them? Rebecca Solnit — famously interested in context and the interconnectedness of language, cultural ideas, history, and social justice — explores these questions and many more in her new book, Orwell's Roses.
The octopus avoided his fate long enough.
Reluctant to rise from the glass tank.
A milky heart spilling out of grasp.
I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
“You can keep the oysters and the snails,” says Rob on All-Stars, as he eats his daily allotment out of a broken coconut shell. He laughs. “This is what Survivor is all about. Rice, baby, rice.” Most of the time, tribes are given enough rice at the beginning of the game for each person to eat a half cup per day. People lose a lot of weight on Survivor. The hunger is made more peculiar by the fact that elaborate crew tents with plenty of food are nearby. (During season 16, players supposedly broke into the crew quarters and stole food. Security is tighter now.)
Such hunger is a new experience for most people playing the game. On Tocantins, when a few people start eating termites, one of the women says, “I’ll eat one at a challenge if I have to, but not in real life.” After two weeks, a player on season 24 shouts, “I haven’t had soda in, like, forever!” On season 35, when his tribe is completely out of food, Devon says, “This is a lot more real than I thought.”
I imagine Elizabeth Strout scrawling out her novels longhand in some serene room in coastal Maine, a party of white pines standing tall outside her window. There is a quietude to her prose — even with scowly, persnickety characters like Olive Kitteridge — that exudes calm devotion. Even in her novels’ darkest moments, there’s a soft, periwinkle feeling.
Books about a sibling’s mental illness proliferate in many genres — there are novels, such as Mira T. Lee’s family drama “Everything Here Is Beautiful,” and nonfiction books, including Robert Kolker’s medical mystery “Hidden Valley Road.” One of the latest is the moving and discursive experimental novel from Lucy Corin, “The Swank Hotel,” about a young woman named Em whose dull, stable life cannot withstand her anxiety about her sister Ad’s schizophrenia-induced peregrinations.
In Her Stories, as in her other work, Levine does not shy away from the high stakes of her history, forging an argument that proponents of prestige television are rarely compelled (or able) to make: that soap operas are the history of television, and television is the history of America, so, by extension, soap operas index the conflicts and character of American culture from mid-century to the present day. As Levine herself writes, “For soap opera, the past always matters, bearing upon the present and shaping the future.” And who better than soap opera’s biggest fans to safeguard the past, relish in the present, and place — angry — calls regarding the future?
But in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit [...] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know.
I’ve been working for almost 50 years now including an eight-year stint when I worked every day from dawn to dusk on a two-acre home farm in the high mountain desert of Arizona to grow enough food to feed our household and write about how I managed to do it. And write a few poems about the desert and the importance of taking care of the land when I had a little time. Apricot trees, aloe plants, tomatillos, salmon-colored calendula flowers with their peppery petals, everything thrived in the hard-fought-for bounty as I spent days crawling up and down the hills in the wadis installing sprinklers to save water and trying to outwit one wily desert creature after another. My partner, a woman ten years older than me, told me one day she was acting about actually loving me and left me high and dry without any warning. “I am an actress, you know,” she said with a flourish of a kind after she gave me the news about her intention to leave me. She had studied acting in New York but it made no difference to me. I lost it all.
The younger of the two men said, “you don’t look like an artist.”
For the next few weeks this comment rattled around in my head. What did an artist look like? What did I look like? The more I thought about it, the more I came to understand how I had always avoided identifying as an artist by hiding behind the figure of the architect, a complicated two-sided image I had constructed from experience and fiction — from professors and friends and characters in novels and films. I did not want to be an architect, but I felt comfortable in the archetype. It was an image that had currency in the art world at the time when I entered it, and I had used that to my advantage.
Elizabeth Strout’s batting average now qualifies as dazzling — with reason. Each new title seems only to refine and distill the Pulitzer winner’s already gorgeous skills. You know you’re in expert hands when a novel’s first lines chop a clean stroke straight to its own heart: “Grief is such a — oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think.”
Pouring over the family scrapbook brings back fond memories for most of us, and the scrapbooking hobby continues to be popular. In the clever “These Toxic Things,” Rachel Howzell Hall explores how future generations may prefer their memories to be preserved digitally.
In The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams (Gail Hudson is an additional author), discuss the park as an example of how our injured Earth can be restored and healed. At one point the park was "a monstrous five-hundred-acre scar where almost nothing grew" because a cement company created a quarry that ravaged the land. The company's CEO decided to repair the damage and slowly, year by year, with horticultural tending and introduction of wild animals, the area was transformed.
I start with this story in honor of Goodall's forceful argument that hope for our ailing planet is galvanized through storytelling: It's crucial, she says, that people — especially young people — know how positive action can still turn around the frightening trajectories of climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the ongoing global pandemic. "It's mostly because people are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our folly that they feel helpless," Goodall states. They need to hear stories of "the people who succeed because they won't give up."
“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him,” Virginia Woolf admonishes in her 1926 essay “How Should One Read a Book?” While Woolf’s use of the male pronoun would likely rankle progressive readers today, her sentiment — that we should strive, when reading, to adopt the author’s perspective on the world — is perhaps even more provocative to prevailing literary sensibilities. In a 2019 essay for The New York Times, Brian Morton finds himself differing with a young reader who can’t bear another page of Edith Wharton due to her manifest antisemitism. Thinking along similar lines as Woolf, Morton sees readers of old books as “journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around,” whereas others might imagine writers of the past, with their outdated views, invading ours.
When University of Oxford professor and literary critic Merve Emre began work on a new, annotated edition of Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, she decided to retype the entire text herself, which she describes in the introduction as a “monkish” practice. For Emre, following Woolf’s advice doesn’t mean inhibiting her critical faculties, and indeed, we find her vigorously wrestling with the author’s entrenched racism whenever it rears its head in the novel. But part of what Emre achieves in this scholarly yet accessible work is to reanimate for us the world in which the novel was written.
Paul Auster’s “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (Holt) is a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account of the brief life of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Blue Hotel,” augmented by readings of his work, and a compendium of contemporary reactions to it, it seems motivated purely by a devotion to Crane’s writing. Usually, when a well-established writer turns to an earlier, overlooked exemplar, there is an element of self-approval through implied genealogy: “Meet the parents!” is what the writer is really saying. And so we get John Updike on William Dean Howells, extolling the virtues of charm and middle-range realism, or Gore Vidal on H. L. Mencken, praising an inheritance of bile alleviated by humor. Indeed, Crane got this kind of homage in a brief critical life from the poet John Berryman in the nineteen-fifties, a heavily Freudian interpretation in which Berryman was obviously identifying a precedent for his own cryptic American poetic vernacular in Crane’s verse collections “The Black Riders” and “War Is Kind.”
But Auster, voluminous in output and long-breathed in his sentences, would seem to have little in common with the terse, hard-bitten Crane. A postmodern luxuriance of reference and a plurality of literary manners is central to Auster’s own writing; in this book, the opening pages alone offer a list of some seventy-five inventions of Crane’s time. The quotations from Crane’s harsh, haiku-like poems spit out from Auster’s gently loquacious pages in unmissable disjunction. No, Auster plainly loves Crane—and wants the reader to—for Crane’s own far-from-sweet sake.
One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight.
It could so easily become cloying over 250 pages, but Parkinson deploys her droll cynicism to good effect. Where there is positivity, mordant wit and pathos are never far behind (we learn of the author’s struggles with mental illness, which adds an extra dimension to the exercise).
It is no River Jordan that flows here
between the railroad tracks and the back porch.
It’s a canal. Not unlike my mother:
Recently I was asked to write the foreword to a book of poetry written by female pilots. The editor, American Airlines captain Linda Pauwels, knew of my work as a journalist writing about aviation. I hadn’t read much beyond the first pages before I realized Pauwels’s book included one jaw-dropping contributor: Among the poems written across a century of flight are several previously unpublished pieces by the most famous aviatrix of them all, Amelia Earhart.
Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written about Earhart, arguably the patron saint of women fliers. But I was not alone in my ignorance of Earhart’s secret desire to have her poems published. Despite her many accomplishments, she disappeared in 1937 not having achieved that goal.
The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view. No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do. But in today’s market, if I pitched a studio executive a comedy in which a white lady has to translate the speech of black people; in which an eight-year-old girl says, “I like my coffee black, like my men”; or an airline pilot makes sexual suggestions to a little boy (“Billy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”), I’d be told, in Studioese, “That’s just fantastically great! We’ll call you.”
[...]
Today, we’re faced with social and political pressures that are tearing our country and our families apart. Not that I couldn’t do without some family members anyway, but the point is, we live in the most outrageous period in our recent history, when the need for humor is greatest, and yet we seem to be losing our ability to laugh at ourselves and our world.
Most of us paper-based people accumulated our fair share of these cabinets, which held, as such things do, a carefully organized history of one’s past: artwork, by grade; camp letters, by year; cards, birthday; cards, Valentine’s Day; cards, other; insurance forms; house deeds; medical records. Birth certificates, tax receipts, diplomas, fading photocopies of Social Security cards. Who knew when one scrap or another might prove useful?
Fan Fiction begins with a pig penis. It ends with a killing. And in between it touches on murder, obsession, Frank Sinatra, quaaludes, Hollywood, series television, fandom and the early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It isn't great literature, but it is weird (which counts for a lot) and fun (which also counts for a lot), might be an elaborate prank being played by the author, and it is absolutely a book that could've only been written by Brent Spiner — Lt. Commander Data of TNG fame, working here on the page for the very first time (with help from co-author/ghostwriter Jeanne Darst).
Reading Destroyer of Light is a disorienting experience. As with so much of the best science fiction, the details of its worldbuilding sound crazy and arbitrary if you just summarize them flatly — as I will be compelled to do at least to a certain extent in this review. And yet these details coalesce into compelling and disturbing patterns as you read the novel as a whole and reflect upon the implications not just of its plot, but also of the overall environment that it renders.
The orchards of past times that have survived — in physical form or at least recorded in written documents — are those that belonged to kings and queens, the noble class, and religious orders. But while these estates were impressive, they did not represent the typical orchards that provided most people with fruit. As far back as the Middle Ages, networks of orchards surrounded many of central Europe’s villages and towns. In many cases, they were part of or located near vegetable or kitchen gardens. Crops such as potatoes, turnips, corn, or grasses grew in the shade of the trees and both crops and fruit were harvested by hand in the fall.
In the past, boundaries between the orchards planted near settlements and surrounding forests were often fluid. People went out into the forest to gather fruits and nuts, but they also used the forest as a source for rootstocks that they could then use to graft on scions from cultivated trees that were more productive than those growing wild. Information on the region around Paris in the eighteenth century provides examples. Wild cherry trees were collected as rootstocks for cultivated cherries. Hazelnut bushes and wild apple and pear trees were useful as rootstocks, too. And the currant bushes growing in the forest could simply be transplanted — no grafting required. As forests were often much drier than cultivated orchards and gardens, it often took some time for forest rootstocks (or sometimes transplanted bushes) to acclimate to their new surroundings.
Fried chicken, crispy chicken, chicken schnitzel: Is there another dish so ubiquitous and yet, so particular? Everyone has one, yes, but everyone has their own. An “Around the World in 80 Dishes” cookbook could easily be filled with nothing but fried chicken recipes: Austrian schnitzel, Korean fried chicken, Italian pollo fritto, Japanese tonkatsu, chicken Milanese, Chinese gong bao, Senagalese chicken yassa, Southern fried chicken and so on. Fried chicken is beloved globally.
I left the novel feeling as I often did after watching a great scary movie as a kid—totally convinced that whatever evil, implausible thing I had just witnessed on the screen awaited me in the next room. Not that this novel offers horror in the conventional sense. Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.
This Thing Between Us is a superb debut from an author who understands that horror fails in the absence of empathy. More than just scare us, Moreno wants to hurt readers with this book, and I strongly suggest you let him — even if you end up turning off your smart speaker forever.
Like any good mystery, Anthony Horowitz's "A Line to Kill" has a gripping story, quirky characters who might be devious or might be innocent, a twisty plot, an enigmatic detective and a memorable setting.
But it also has something else: sly humor, most of it at the expense of the author.
Like the work of the writers he most admires—Heraclitus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the physicist and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Balzac, among others—“The Notes” is about seemingly everything. But Hohl’s central preoccupation, and the subject of his first section, is what he calls “work”: earnest, determined, and courageous creative activity undertaken with the full consciousness that life is short. “The idea of death,” he tells us, “must be the beginning of all thought.”
But horror doesn’t just reflect our fears and anxieties back at us. It also helps us process them. Horror is a fun house mirror everybody can use. It exaggerates, distorts and distills whatever it is we’re trying to work through, then delivers it back to us as entertainment.
Horror can offer comfort, can offer solace. Not because it’s an accurate representation or dramatization of our turmoil — who’s that intentional with their media consumption? — but because horror comes packaged for us in 400-page novels, in two-hour movies, in stories that end. Whether those books or films end happily or not, they end. For all of us who sense no end to our own daily horror stories, that’s what’s important.
Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014, and many scientists think the code could be a key component of how the brain handles other abstract forms of information.
Yet lab animals in a box with a flat floor only need to navigate through two dimensions, and researchers are now finding that extending the lessons of that situation to the real world is full of challenges and pitfalls.
I want to estimate the force that would be required for MJ to hang on to Spidey during one of these swings using only her own arms. It's going to require some estimations based on video analysis of the trailer and understanding some basic physics concepts. Let's get started.
Joy Sorman’s “Life Sciences” takes an overtly political premise — the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women — and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?
Say then that I am overflowing
& nobody’s fool & did not give up
As a child of the ’90s, it is now my turn to watch teenagers and younger adults run wild with the fashions of my youth. The school two blocks from my house is full of skaters in baggy cargo pants, kids with tiny backpacks and crop tops, and, god help me, low-cut jeans. On TikTok, they’re just posting footage of high schools in the ’90s as “vibes.” It’s fine, such is the way of aging. But the dream of the ’90s is not just alive in clothing; It’s back with a vengeance in food, too.
What if the Spanish conquest happened in reverse? This is the premise of Laurent Binet’s newest novel Civilizations, out last month in English translation by Sam Taylor, a centuries-spanning epic that posits a world in which the Incan Empire colonizes Spain. Getting there requires fewer counterfactuals than you might imagine: in Binet’s telling, all it takes is a small band of Vikings from Leif Eriksen’s Newfoundland colony wandering south after a murderous dispute.
The Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel His Bloody Project employed a range of narrative techniques to prod at the truth surrounding a murder in a 19th-century Scottish crofting community. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s concern was not so much with who committed the crime – we know that from the outset – but with the moral ambiguity inherent in assigning blame. His new novel, Case Study, is different in tone, though an interest in exploring complex psychological dramas through intricate narrative structures takes centre stage once again.
People eat animals. I sometimes do. I eat sardines that are packed side by side. I forget about their swimming when I do this.
This summer I re-read H is for Hawk, the 2016 book by British naturalist and historian Helen Macdonald. It’s a resplendent, sad, and genre-bending book about training a goshawk, about another writer who wrote a doomed book about training a goshawk, about grief and love. But mostly, it’s about wonder. Macdonald’s prose is burnished, as though written in scrolls. I see colors in her words, hidden and layered; in gray there is slate, raincloud, smoke, pepper, flint, chalk, pewter, ash, colors within colors, refracting cathedrals of gray. She writes about light in a house, how it’s solid as glass. She writes about a goshawk’s startled eyes, “the colour of sun on white paper,” how they stare “because the whole world had fallen into them at once.” I needed this book again to help me write my own.
We know next to nothing about the other 6 billion or so Earth-like planets in the galaxy. With the imminent launch of the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built, Laura Kreidberg is optimistic this will soon change.
I bought a stainless-steel kitchen prep table in 2016 because I once read that you could throw hot pots and pans directly on it. This tall, sturdy table has since become a center of gravity for me. I do everything on it, from reading the paper with my coffee in the morning to developing recipes for work during the day. At night, I clear it for dinner. It’s where I chop onions, whisk vinaigrettes and knead dough for fresh-baked milk bread on the weekend. I have only two stools, one for each side of the table, and I like it that way. It’s where my partner and I sit for our meals.
In an era when the failures and misdeeds of intelligence services around the world can shock and alarm, reading Philip’s remarks feels like a clarion call that slices straight to the bone, and hurts. John le Carré did not just leave the world an engaging novel, he also left us with a warning.
A groundbreaking collage of epistles, mementos, poetry, and literary criticism, Victoria Chang's Dear Memory asks a profound question: "Can memory be / unhoused, or is it / the form in which / everything is held?"
The animal kingdom may be as corralled as we are, but it’s also “alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious.” Orlean acknowledges the mystery but doesn’t explore it. Instead, she relies on her powers of observation, conveyed with unflappable curiosity. Her rich storytelling is almost soothing, even when it’s about something as disturbing as South African hunting facilities sedating animals so they can be more easily shot. Sometimes I wished for more countenance with that unknowability — and perhaps our reluctance to think of ourselves as two-legged animals — but philosophical rumination is not included on this tour. Orlean is committed to investigating the dizzying multiplicity of roles animals serve — employee, best friend, harbinger of climate change — and the places where those functions intersect.
To allow myself this pace, I discover a tension between freedom and impatience, that is, in the slow, I find a fresh inventiveness and sovereignty from the relentless influence of our economic system. Though within this, I must temper and unlearn my own fixed haste at generating creative work at a rapid measure.
A good park bench leaves me in a state perched somewhere between nostalgia and eager anticipation. Where once I was excited by the profanities engraved on wood, I now find, as a 40-year-old, that I’m more appreciative of each bench’s quiet stoicism, the way they’re willing to wait out their turn in every weather, remaining available to all-comers. Like a good book or piece of music, a park bench allows for a sense of solitude and community at the same time, a simultaneity that’s crucial to life in a great city.
“LaserWriter II” is a screenshot of a less gentrified East Village in the 20th century’s final decade, with punk rockers squatting in an Avenue B apartment, a broke intern reselling CDs to Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks Place and well-honed observations about Tekserve and its people. It’s a crisp redraw of a time when Apple Computer was the rebellious choice, poor rebels could afford to live in the Big Apple and — in more ways than one — people found themselves offline.
At the end of “One Friday in April,” Donald Antrim frames a domestic scene: his wife, Marija, plays the piano while he sits “on the living room sofa, writing to you.” It’s a small moment, intimate yet generous in the way it seeks to include us. It also seems to represent a point of closure — or as near as Antrim’s brief and devastating memoir gets to one.
In a letter addressed to the reader in her book “Dear Memory,” the poet Victoria Chang explains why she chose the epistolary format: These letters were a way for her to “speak to the dead, the not-yet-dead.” They would steer her toward her parents, her history and, ultimately, “toward silence. Toward death.”
Three reasons you should read Susan Orlean’s “On Animals” even if, like me, you are a faithful subscriber to The New Yorker and eagerly consumed nearly all of the essays when they first appeared during the more than 25 years this collection spans: (1) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (2) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (3) Every essay in the book is magnificent.
The book is all about boiling life down to what really matters, and its simplicity is part of its bountiful charm. It’s remarkable, really, that Doughty could come up with this many happy-making things. The book is not short and the font is not large, yet page after page, he continues to remind us how many reasons we have to smile.
Simple scientific laws are preferred, then, because, if they fit or fully explain the data, they’re more likely to be the source of it. With more knobs to tweak, arbitrarily complex models such as Ptolemy’s astronomical system could be made to fit any dataset. As the mathematician John von Neumann once quipped: ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk’.
Had he retired 40 years ago, after his Karla trilogy (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People”) was completed in 1979, he would have been regarded as one of our greatest spy novelists. After “A Perfect Spy” (1986), he was often considered one of the finest novelists, period, since World War II. It’s not that he “transcended the genre,” as the tired saying goes; it’s that he elevated the level of play. The great Graham Greene didn’t quite take his own spy novels seriously, labeling them “entertainments,” but le Carré revamped the genre to fit his considerable ambitions. “Out of the secret world I once knew,” he wrote, “I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit.”
In The Magician, Colm Tóibín reimagines what it cost Thomas Mann to sustain his writing life after fleeing Germany in the early 1930s. Mann shuttled for a time between France and Switzerland, then escaped the continent altogether for Princeton before resettling in Pacific Palisades, where he built the house that still bears his name.
Friedrich Schiller called Joy the spark of divinity
but she visits me on a regular basis,
I first came across the work of the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah when I was studying for field exams in post-colonial literature, in 2009, and what I remember most is the way his writing short-circuited my scathing analytical response, which had grown to monstrous proportions. At that point in my graduate career, I couldn’t get through a page of fiction without scrawling a mess of question marks and exclamation points and inane comments in the margins. But I sank into “Paradise,” Gurnah’s historical novel of colonial East Africa, published in 1994, like a person who still knew how to read for pleasure. My clearest memories of the book have to do with its sensory richness, its flashes of eroticism, and the protagonist’s dreamy interiority—though the novel’s evocation of a web of multilingual communities that are threatened by an encroaching colonial monoculture insured that I had lots to note down once I picked up my pen again.
The indie-pop duo, who've been a couple as long as they've been a band, travelled to Ipswich and made a movie about breaking up.
"We went from a day full of joy to an abandoned house full of cockroaches," says singer-songwriter Anthony West.
"And we spent the next week arguing on film," adds his musical and romantic partner, Josephine (Josie) Vander Gucht.
The story only gets weirder from there.
There is no denying that in his Tokyo Trilogy Peace has built an intricate labyrinth. But it gets better, easier to navigate with each rereading. Rewarding the reader generously in ways other, easier, books cannot.
That's the thing about a Gothic novel: It has to walk the line between horror and romance and not flinch away from either. The Death of Jane Lawrence is up to this task, even as it descends into a sort of frenzied madness as Jane's grasp on reality weakens and the haunting of Lindridge Hall threatens to consume her whole. By the time the book reached that point of no return, I was so invested that I would have followed Jane into the very depths of hell.
Michael Nava has set his eighth Henry Rios mystery novel in 1986, a year that seems both distant and familiar. The pandemic raging then was AIDS — a virus deadlier than COVID-19, if somewhat harder to catch. What should have been a simple public health emergency became a battlefield in the culture wars, because AIDS initially was seen as a “homosexual disease.”
At age 60, “edging toward the mid-to-late autumn” of his years, Tucci finds that food — specifically, the way food connects him to the people he loves — means more to him than show business. A handful of celebrity co-stars make cameos in “Taste,” but only because they happened to be sitting across from him at a memorable meal. This book focuses on Tucci’s more intimate food experiences: the eggplant parm hoagies his mother packed in his childhood lunchboxes, the coq au vin he ate on his first date with his first wife, Kate (who died of breast cancer in 2009), magnificent breakfasts on German film sets (“Someone please employ me there again”) and how he is passing family culinary traditions onto his children, one salami sandwich at a time.
Sutton Foster understands the power of time-consuming hobbies, especially those that yield tactile results. In her charming memoir, the two-time Tony Award winner and star of TV’s “Bunheads” and “Younger,” shows how projects involving colored pencils, epoxy glue and — chiefly — yarn have helped her cope with heartbreak and stress, including backstage spitefulness, tabloid voyeurism and a painful relationship with her agoraphobic mother.
An architect draws a watercolor
depicting two people about to enter
a meeting room, while someone
on the stairway gazes through windows
Many people who have survived major earthquakes notice the lack of concern among those who have not. Honn Kao, who now works for the Geological Survey of Canada, returned home to Taiwan, in 1999, two days after a massive magnitude-7.7 earthquake had ravaged the island. The quake killed 2,000 and left another 100,000 homeless. Taiwan’s power stations also were heavily damaged, and its nuclear reactors shut down automatically. For many, that led to the loss of water and electricity. Honn and his family had to walk down nine flights of stairs to collect two pails of water—and carry them back up—at least three times each day. “The impact goes far beyond just the number of fatalities and injuries. It’s all the lives of millions of people who all of a sudden have a change that they do not expect,” he says. “These are the kinds of things that you will not be able to imagine unless you actually live through it.”
That may explain why some of the best-prepared people have direct experience with disasters. Both Anne Mullens and Claire Kelly lived through big earthquakes in Japan before returning to Canada, though the earthquakes were more than forty years apart. Mullens was ten years old and staying with her family in Tokyo when the city shook in 1968. She remembers hearing a grinding noise like she’d never heard before, followed by a sudden, violent shaking. A goldfish bowl on top of the television jumped into the air “in a cartoon-like fashion” and smashed on the floor.
No one can pinpoint the exact date that he disappeared.
The 58-year-old always knew how to stand out from the crowd: bright red hair, a painted face, long shoes. In 2004, a small sample of children found him to be more recognisable than Founding Father George Washington and Jesus Christ, the son of God himself. But no one raised the alarm when he stopped appearing on British TV screens. No one wept when his cardboard cut-outs were shoved into the stockroom next to the spuds. When was the last time you sat on a bench with his cold plastic arm stretched stiff behind your back, a rictus grin frozen on his face? Ronald McDonald has been missing for seven years.
If the “Internet novel” or “Instagram novel” are ascendant genres in today’s literary marketplace, Tolstoy Together is an impressive nonfiction cousin. It sits merrily on the fence between a type of collective criticism and a commonplace book filled to bursting with clever ruminations and quotations. It also deftly strikes a balance between specificity and universality that Tolstoy, that preternatural truth-teller, would have approved of.
Crocodiles look like they belong to another time, an era when reptiles ruled. But appearances can be deceiving. Today’s crocodiles are not holdovers that have gone unchanged since the Jurassic, but are one expression of a great, varied family that’s been around for over 235 million years. More than that, crocodiles are still evolving—and faster than they have at other times in their family’s scaly history.
Recording the soundtrack of Wilder’s film directly from the TV, Coe would lie awake, listening on his Walkman until “the rhythm to his dialogue […] seeped into my subconscious.” His early attraction to this flawed film, which moved Coe “more deeply and directly than any other film,” led to 50 years of research into Wilder’s life and cinematic art. Coe’s outstanding new novel, Mr Wilder and Me, is the result of this obsession. In it, Coe succeeds in bringing life to the complex, charismatic Wilder. He surrounds Wilder with perfectly achieved portraits of the phlegmatic I. A. L. Diamond, his writing partner for 30 years, and their wives, Audrey and Barbara, resigned to how their husbands’ main relationship is with each other.
The essays in this slim volume are drawn from the Massey Lectures she will give on CBC Radio in November. Addressing race and representation, memory and belonging, Edugyan — whose novels “Half-Blood Blues” and “Washington Black” both won Canada’s Giller Prize and were shortlisted for the Man Booker — explores with empathy what it means to be seen, and who remains unseen, in our current identity-conscious, visibility-obsessed culture that seems to be limping toward a new aesthetic order and politics of power.
A low-tax libertarian paradise whose government mandates where citizens can live so as to avoid the creation of racial ghettoes. An anti-communist stronghold during the Cold War, now cultivating close links with China. A country that holds free and fair elections, which the ruling party never loses.
Welcome to Singapore, the subject of Jeevan Vasagar’s new book Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia. Cited abroad as either an exemplar or a cautionary tale, depending on one’s political views, the city-state’s remarkable transformation from colonial backwater to one of the richest countries in the world has had an outsized impact on the world’s imagination.
The weather of course and the afternoon light
that might as well be bad milk when
I recorded her, as if data would take the longing out
or, blander than that: a mind-made sense-
In one sense Sebald’s use and depiction of repetition are historically specific, a German gentile’s reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust. It is far from his only concern, but it’s never far from any of his concerns. It is the tragedy he can neither responsibly “remember” (both because he wasn’t there and because artifice risks simplifying, supplanting the reality it supposedly depicts) nor forget. Angier’s title—in addition to constituting another Nabokov allusion—refers first and foremost to Sebald’s commitment to breaking what he called “the conspiracy of silence” surrounding the Nazi past in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. He never forgets, but he never pretends to have arrived at a form of remembering equal to a horror that exceeds representation; his melancholic repetitions become a way of addressing, and acknowledging the complexity of addressing, the genocide of the European Jewry.
But Sebald’s obsessive repetitions can also threaten to undermine historical specificity. This ambiguity is built into repetition as method: it concretizes and abstracts, heightens and flattens, focuses attention and disperses it, marks an event as significant at the cost of its singularity. Even the lightest of Sebald’s motifs, Nabokov, “the man with the butterfly net” who appears impossibly across The Emigrants, necessarily works against the individuality of each life that is being elegized. (This is the point, or part of it; the figures serve to declare artifice, to acknowledge fictionality.) The repetition that is doubling also blurs as much as it differentiates: Paul Bereyter, the teacher, is based on a teacher of Sebald’s, but he’s also clearly based on Wittgenstein.
By late afternoon, the newsroom had reopened, and the presses were rolling. Burlingtonians had their papers by 8 p.m., just three hours behind schedule, complete with a full-size photo of the fireball and aerial images from the scene. The blast had injured some workers, but miraculously no one died. It had shattered hundreds of windows downtown and sank a nearby barge.
Even now, veteran Hawk Eye staffers will tell you that the grain-elevator explosion was a career highlight. It gave them the kind of thrill that all reporters crave. But there was also a real sense of ownership to the story: This was Burlington’s disaster—an event with an immediate impact. There was no question that The Hawk Eye would cover it from every possible angle.
My formative understanding of world events had two acts: the ancient history conveyed in the Bible and the modern arc approximated at Disneyland, which opened in Southern California in 1955, four and a half decades before my first visit.
In Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, there are moments of pure clarity. In its explorations of corporate America, of familial loss and grief, and of 2008 recession-era life, the novel shines. But in its interstitial space, darting from one narrator to another in the tangled web of love, relationships, and confusion, the novel puzzles. This is not a book to read in an afternoon, but one to chew and digest over time. And when given this space, we still may not understand.
We all secretly want to believe that fame is awful and famous people are miserable. But Dave Grohl, superstar rock drummer, cheerful avatar of suburban averageness and puppy in human form, is here to tell you it’s actually pretty great. “Believe me,” he writes in his amiable, conversational new memoir, “The Storyteller,” life as a rock star “is all that it’s cracked up to be and more.”
It’s hardly original to point out that forms of copying are foundational to creativity. Even pointing out that this is not original is not original. And making the same point using exclusively the language of others, edited slightly for consistency, also wouldn’t be original. Still, it bears repeating. The recirculation of this notion should surprise no one—it should be accepted as the truly unoriginal, inescapable idea that it is—but because it isn’t a naturalized idea, it often feels counterintuitive, contrary, knowing, tricksy. Why is it so awkward to integrate this notion, of repetition and derivation as the basis for new literary works, into our actual habits of thinking, reading and writing?
Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?
But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”
As fan cultures have deepened, these cookbooks have evolved, too. Less prevalent are the ones that simply name recipes after characters. Today’s pop-culture cookbooks are heavily researched tomes about their fictional worlds. They consider climates and character motivations. They fill in gaps in the narrative. Authors pore over every element — down to the props in recipe photos — so fans can feel fully immersed.
Initially, it’s hard to take the novel’s spiritual concerns seriously. Given his reputation for piercing characters on the mandibles of his superior intellect, a praying Franzen doesn’t feel much more sanctified than a praying mantis. But “Crossroads” quickly demonstrates that it isn’t — or isn’t just — a satire of suburban church culture or the hypocrisies of religious faith. It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne.
It is hard to describe what this book is about, but its refusal to fit into familiar categories is a large part of its pleasure. Peterson writes this story with the flat affect of a fairy tale: her characters are archetypes, her language tends toward the abstract, and she creates a world that is at once bizarre and recognizable.
“The Lincoln Highway” is a long and winding road, but one Towles’s motley crew navigates with brains, heart and courage. The novel embraces the contradictions of our character with a skillful hand, guiding the reader forward with “a sensation of floating – like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.”
When done properly, covering science trains a writer to bring clarity to complexity, to embrace nuance, to understand that everything new is built upon old foundations, and to probe the unknown while delimiting the bounds of their own ignorance. The best science writers learn that science is not a procession of facts and breakthroughs, but an erratic stumble toward gradually diminished uncertainty; that peer-reviewed publications are not gospel and even prestigious journals are polluted by nonsense; and that the scientific endeavor is plagued by all-too-human failings such as hubris. All of these qualities should have been invaluable in the midst of a global calamity, where clear explanations were needed, misinformation was rife, and answers were in high demand but short supply.
But the pandemic hasn’t just been a science story. It is an omnicrisis that has warped and upended every aspect of our lives.
Sure, this little story is about software, but it’s also about how we accept and overlook the ways technology is remaking us. Eggers’ arm’s-length relationship with technological novelty gives him a level of insight most of us might not have.
Atticus Lish’s second novel, “The War for Gloria,” is a book about men. To say that about a book in 2021 implies certain things. That perhaps it’s a lyrical critique of machismo or a meditation on the sensitive inner lives beneath tough-guy exteriors.
Nope. “Meditation” isn’t in Lish’s vocabulary — his prose is too rooted in clear physical detail and plain speech for that. And though he’s interested in what makes men men, he approaches his story bluntly, fistwise. “Gloria” is a deeply immersive novel, steeped in tragedies — the chief one being characters who try to muscle their way through problems for lack of other ideas.
This surreal odyssey, propelled by maternal rage, may at times be alienating even to female readers, but it is unequivocally triumphant to witness Watkins writing for herself.
Search History by Eugene Lim charts the swerves that persist across our systems and ideologies. This novel, like Dear Cyborgs, addresses questions around living and thinking in relation to one another, mediated through the internet. And one of the practical results of these questions is a cascade of framing devices.
What sets Sedaris’s diaries apart from his essay collections is not that they’re more intimate (more wouldn’t be possible) or that they show a different aspect of the author or his life, but that the collections themselves are longer. Time passes. Sedaris ages 17 years, from 47 to 64. He watches his literary agent descend into dementia and his aged father discover Fox News. His younger sister Tiffany dies of suicide, and David and his family cope, over time, with layers of grief. Hugh’s hair turns silver.
For the longest part of our history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers who neither experienced economic growth nor worried about its absence. Instead of working many hours each day in order to acquire as much as possible, our nature—insofar as we have one—has been to do the minimum amount of work necessary to underwrite a good life.
This is the central claim of the South African anthropologist James Suzman’s new book, Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, in which he asks whether we might learn to live like our ancestors did—that is, to value free time over money. Answering that question takes him on a 300-millennium journey through humanity’s existence.
To read The Mirror and the Palette is to be reminded why art history is such a compelling subject. At its best, the field understands art’s place in the world by blending explorations of political and cultural history, religion and mythology, geography and language. Then there is the examination of the art itself, which offers opportunities for one-on-one communion with great works. In lively prose, author Jennifer Higgie touches on all of these bases, taking us through a varied terrain while advancing her illuminating thesis: women have always created self-portraits — regardless of whether the academies and exhibitions that validated the “real” stuff (aka men’s art) — barred the doors.
When she returns, we mostly sit in separate rooms, faces down
into our screens. I hear her leaving him
messages on WeChat. She won’t get out of bed, sleeps with her glasses on.
There is no gentle enough way to wake someone
Whether or not readers agree that City of Glass achieves this feat, the book ultimately taught me how to read. I’d studied New Criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, but none of these made as much sense to me as the end of Auster’s book. Prior to my senior year of high school, when I’d first encountered Faulkner, I’d read purely for pleasure — “to be amused,” as Auster puts it — devouring detective novels, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy. In college, I learned that there was something shameful about this reading, even as it had served as my gateway to taking books seriously, as my professors insisted we do. In Auster, I found the entertainment I’d sought in those previous reading experiences, but in a story that was as serious as any that I’d read for class. Quinn wasn’t Milkman Dead or Joe Christmas, but he and his acquaintances’ emphases on language, identity, and storytelling showed me more about myself and pointed the way toward a more mature approach to reading.
Oscar Wilde was in the dock when he observed himself becoming two people. It was a Saturday in May, 1895, the final day of his trial for “gross indecency,” and the solicitor general, Frank Lockwood, was in the midst of a closing address for the prosecution. His catalogue of accusations, shot through with moral disgust, struck Wilde as an “appalling denunciation”—“like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante,” as he wrote two years later. He was “sickened with horror” at what he heard. But the sensation was short-lived: “Suddenly it occurred to me, How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself. I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.” At the critical moment, he was able to transform the drama in his imagination by taking both roles, substituting the real Lockwood with an alternative Wilde, one who could control the courtroom and its narrative.
Fiction in the Age of Amazon is the symbolic provision of more—above all, of more various and interesting “life experience” than can be had by any mortal being, let alone one constrained by the demands of work and family. It is a commodification of this experience, shaped to the reader’s limitations and recurring therapeutic needs.
The Bohemian literary colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., gained notoriety in the early 20th century not only for its drunken bonfire parties, embrace of free love, and hosting of left-leaning poets and writers such as Robinson Jeffers, Sinclair Lewis and Jack London. It also became infamous in those decades for a tragic love triangle that resulted in three suicides.
In “The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America,” Catherine Prendergast, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, exposes the myth behind the colony’s creation and the desperate powerlessness and exploitation of two women involved in that circle.
We don’t expect consistency from diarists, nor explication, and we don’t get it, as people appear without introduction or footnote: in Sedaris’s books, other people exist mainly to provide amusement. Best, then, not to read this book cover to cover, like a novel, but to use it as suggested by the title (which is taken from an Indian restaurant menu): to keep the appetite for delight and absurdity satisfied until the next Sedaris book comes along.
Right before Shirley Jackson began working on her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, a postcard depicting a California mansion started bothering her. “It was an ugly house,” she wrote. “[A]ll angles and all wrong. It was sick, diseased.” She wrote to her mother, who still lived near San Francisco where Jackson grew up, and asked if she knew anything about it. Her mother replied that her “great-grandfather had built it. She remembered when the people of the town got together one night and burned it down.” Soon, Jackson was at work on the best haunted house novel I’ve read.
Hers was the first number I memorized when I learned to use a telephone. She would answer, a little curious and with a Brooklyn air of “Who the hell is this?”, which gingered up as soon as she heard me say “Hi, Grandma.”
I’d call every day when I got home from my North Hollywood elementary school. Whenever I felt a sharp pain in my ribs, or just generally off, I went into our butter-yellow kitchen and dialed. “It’s gas,” she usually said, in a raspy pack-and-a-half timbre. After moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Syd had enrolled in a program that trained low-income women to become nurses. She practiced until her early sixties, mostly in convalescent homes where she called her patients “my babies.” After she retired, she became the family’s Florence Nightingale. I was her most demanding patient.
Mike Bacchus remembers the man only as “the Texan.” A few years back, the Texan, well into his seventies, was a guest at New Zealand’s Lakestone Lodge, which Bacchus and his family own. The man had made his way from Texas to the Mackenzie region of New Zealand’s South Island for the landscapes, to see vivid swathes of violet lupins set against blue glacial lakes and snowy peaks rising beyond golden tussocked hills. He hadn’t realized one of the most glorious sights in Mackenzie is revealed after sunset. In a region with some of the darkest night skies in the world, the vast sweep of the Milky Way dwarfs even the towering summit of nearby Aoraki, or Mount Cook.
One evening, Bacchus invited his guest to step outside. The Texan’s first instinct was to raise his hand. The stars were so vivid it seemed as if he could reach out and clasp them. Standing beneath the great bowl of the heavens, the man bathed in starlight and emotion. He told Bacchus he was seeing the stars clearly for the first time since he was 10 years old.
The Last House on Needless Street is complex and multilayered, but more like a multiverse than an onion. Time is iffy and everyone is erratic. There is a truth we begin to see relatively early on, but when you're standing on shaky ground and the narrative keeps throwing curveballs your way, believing you know what's happening is almost impossible.
Birth may be one of the few experiences shared by every person on the planet, but the material culture of human reproduction has often been overlooked. Michelle Millar Fisher, a curator of contemporary decorative arts at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Amber Winick, a writer, design historian, and mother of three, offer a corrective with this collection of essays, photo-essays, and interviews. Like the Instagram account the authors have used to share their research over the last few years, it’s highly visual, filled with many striking full-bleed images, but this is no coffee table book — it’s a tome thick with footnotes, dealing with matters of life and death, fascinating and unsettling in equal measure.
Behind all of this floated something more personal, a deeper set of unresolved questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I belong?
That’s what compelled me to start writing this book.
The author of the lauded novel "A Tale for the Time Being," Ozeki teaches at Smith College in Massachusetts. She's also a Zen Buddhist priest. This book ponders the very nature of things. Does the soul exist? Is it immortal? Do inanimate items possess a life force? How do we distinguish acute sensitivity from mental illness? These questions fuel a searching novel, one that combines a coming-of-age tale with an ode to the printed page.
Writing about dreams can be a dangerous business. Unless the shimmering ambiguities and surreal tone of the dream world are handled with exquisite care and precision, the dream can turn to mush and smoke on the page. Pepper manages the fraught dream material well, and by the second page this reader was hooked.
When police questioned him, the man seemed dazed. He was unable to supply his name, his address, or an explanation for why he was in Jackson. He was arrested for vagrancy. After a few days, he was placed in the custody of Dr. C. D. Mitchell, superintendent of the Mississippi State Hospital. Upon his arrival at the facility, the man, who was estimated to be about sixty, was entered into the patient ledger as “Mr. X.”
Who was he? Where had he come from? How did he wind up alone on a street in the Deep South, at the beginning of the Great Depression, without his memory? Months passed, then years. Mr. X remained at the hospital, and the mystery of his identity lingered. For reasons no one could discern, his past was beyond his reach.
This past year and a half, many of us were relegated to mostly virtual lives, scrolling through our phones and living vicariously through screens. Such was quarantine life during a global pandemic. A few weeks later, the baking frenzy was in full swing. Baking powder and yeast flew off store shelves as quickly as toilet paper and hand sanitizer did a month earlier. I was bombarded with images and videos of people who formerly subsisted on takeout burgers and sushi, now proudly boasting their homemade garden-vegetable focaccia breads, scones, and cupcakes. Self-reliance at its finest, starting in the kitchen.
I also became inspired to try my hand at baking cakes and biscuits. The biscuits turned out hard as rocks and surreptitiously fed to neighboring pigeons, but I wasn’t deterred. In fact, I became even more dedicated and industrious. I decided that I wanted to bake a cake and attempt to decorate it like a professional pastry artist. Amateurs may deal with frosting and measly sprinkles, but I wanted to make something that would be a luxurious feather in my cap: handmade candied lemon and lime slices.
To list everything in play in this novel, including societal drift, ideological cleavage, the nature of truth and fiction, the alienation of families, the ravages of capitalism visited even on those who feel they have some agency in the system, might make “A Calling for Charlie Barnes” sound cluttered. It’s not. Ferris is in shrewd command of his thematic and syntactic trajectories. This novel is a passionate, well-constructed, often hilarious and, at times, profound plunge into grief, both civic and intimate, as well as a culmination (so far) of the literary explorations Ferris has been undertaking since he arrived.
In 2010 the playwright Sarah Ruhl lost her smile. It “walked off my face, and wandered out into the world,” she writes in the opening lines of her new book. Three years earlier, the same thing had happened to me.
This had nothing to do with our dispositions. We were struck with Bell’s palsy, a type of facial paralysis that occurs when the nerves controlling the muscles on one side of the face are damaged or even destroyed. Why? The science is not conclusive — it could be triggered by a virus, hormones or myriad other factors. The result, though, is devastating. Suddenly you’re unable to convey happiness, sadness and other emotions. There are words you can’t pronounce. Ruhl struggled mightily to say her own daughter’s name — Hope — an irony not lost on her. In her thoughtful and moving memoir “Smile,” Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human.