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