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-