But as far as we can tell, we can’t reverse the flow of time. All evidence indicates that travel into the past is forbidden in our Universe. Every time we try to concoct a time machine, some random rule of the Universe comes in and slaps our hand away from the temporal cookie jar.
And yet, we have no idea why. The reasons really seem random; there is nothing fundamental we can point to, no law or equation or concept that definitively explains why thou shalt not travel into the past. And that’s pretty frustrating. It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.
Weeks serve as powerful mnemonic anchors because they are fundamentally artificial. Unlike days, months and years, all of which track, approximate, mimic or at least allude to some natural process (with hours, minutes and seconds representing neat fractions of those larger units), the week finds its foundation entirely in history. To say ‘today is Tuesday’ is to make a claim about the past rather than about the stars or the tides or the weather. We are asserting that a certain number of days, reckoned by uninterrupted counts of seven, separate today from some earlier moment. And because those counts have no prospect of astronomical confirmation or alignment, weeks depend in some sense on meticulous historical recordkeeping. But practically speaking, weekly counts are reinforced by the habits and rituals of other people. When those habits and rituals were radically obscured or altered in 2020, the week itself seemed to unravel.
During the past few decades, the state of neuroscientific mind reading has advanced substantially. Cognitive psychologists armed with an fMRI machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects. In another lab, scientists have scanned the brains of people who are reading the J. D. Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” in which it is unclear until the end whether or not a character is having an affair. From brain scans alone, the researchers can tell which interpretation readers are leaning toward, and watch as they change their minds.
Words for obscure emotions remind us we have company in our most private moments, writes John Koenig in his prologue to “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” a compendium of words he invented (or reinvented, in some cases). Koenig is taken with the “aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life,” he writes. Take for example “zielschmerz,” the throb of dread that sometimes hits when you’re on the cusp of realizing a long-held dream. Or perhaps you’ve savored a moment of “nyctous,” which Koenig defines as “feeling quietly overjoyed to be the only one awake in the middle of the night.”
Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.”
As Davis points out in a preface, the book is more focused in its material than was her previous collection, “Essays One.” With “Two,” it helps to have a pre-existing interest in translation, or at least a general curiosity about language, whereas to enjoy the earlier collection you needed only a pre-existing interest in “stuff.” But whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising.
Temptation made me dream
you had left me, and instead of freedom
As world leaders gathered across the globe this month to discuss a climate crisis that is rapidly heating the Earth, Billy Barr, 71, paused outside his mountainside cabin to measure snow.
His tools were simple, the same he’d used since the 1970s. A wooden ruler plunged into white flakes accumulating on his snow board — an old freezer door affixed to legs of plastic piping and wood — showed two inches. A section of snow that he slid into a metal bucket and hung from a scale a few paces away told him it was about 10 percent water, which did not surprise him. For years, that number hovered around 6 percent, but snow here has gotten wetter.
Tucked away in a side street near an urban park named Seoul Forest is a tea shop that barely seats 10. Here, you can’t talk. Your phone must be on silent. No shoes allowed.
The rules have one aim. Relax. Just space out.
Beneath the Gothic extravagance of its plot, the book’s success rests on a foundation of seamlessly integrated research and convincing, empathetic characterizations. Newman’s Karloff is a vulnerable, thoroughly decent figure who will go through many changes and emerge more human than before.
Horror is sometimes about the fun of asking "What if?" In The Ghost Tracks, Hurtado asks that question in every chapter, and then offers answers that dance between "Of course this is all real!" and "There's no way any of this is even remotely real." That back-and-forth is great, and it's a great reminder that one of the best things about horror fiction is its ability to twist our guts like a rollercoaster ride and make us ask for more.
What happens when you learn that the place you’ve called home for many years carries inside it a threat that puts your health and the health of those you love at risk? The answers that emerge and the conflict that comes close to tearing a community apart are both heartbreaking and redemptive, emotions that Ash Davidson skillfully weaves throughout her debut novel, Damnation Spring.
The reader gets to understand this Darkness as Thompson identifies the difference between running toward something with confidence and running away out of fear or avoidance. This is an important distinction as readers follow Thompson to rock bottom and then through his subsequent ascendance.
The distinctive, not to say brain-aching, novelty of Cain’s Jawbone is that its 100 pages are numbered out of sequence. And it’s the reader’s job to discover what the real order is and thereby identify six murder victims and their killers. The number of possible combinations of pages is a figure that is 158 numbers long.
Scannell decided to try to find the right sequence by fulfilling a “lifelong dream”, as she put it, to turn her “entire bedroom wall into a murder board”. She cut all the pages out of her paperback copy and pasted them on her wall, rearranging them as she attempts to make progress in what is billed as “the world’s most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle”.
The card came out of an old SeaWorld tourist pack, the kind with glossy pictures of animals doing tricks, purchased for excited kids by worn-down parents then tossed in a drawer when vacation is over. Its front showed two orcas, one big, one juvenile, jumping gracefully from the confines of their chlorine-blue pool as sunburnt 1980s patrons in tank tops snapped photos and gawked.
The back carried a plea for help.
A couple decades ago France suffered a severe shock. A Spanish restaurant called El Bulli, on the Catalan coast north of Barcelona, led a culinary revolution so bold that French cuisine suddenly looked stilted, a self-satisfied tradition stuck in a cloying bed of butter and cream.
In an article the French have never forgotten, Arthur Lubow wrote in The New York Times Magazine that “Spain has become the new France.” Chefs opined that classic French cuisine had run out of gas. It was a country, one esteemed Spanish restaurant critic suggested, where chefs go “to learn what not to do.” How could a veal blanquette or an entrecôte with morels and cream hold a candle to white bean foam with sea urchins or spherical melon caviar?
Short stories carry a lot of baggage. The best of them are often deemed “novelesque,” a nod to their more substantial kin whose shadow always looms. And yet, a great short story is a marvel, achieving its goals in a fraction of the time and space of its loftier cousin. Two different skill sets, one might think, and utterly separate. If you read Portland writer Lily King’s debut story collection, however, you might think otherwise. The award-winning author of “Euphoria” and four other novels, speaks volumes in short form. Her new collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” is as compelling and accomplished as anything you’re likely to read in the genre.
Victoria Chang is interested in the space between things. Lacunae. The unsaid. The unspeakable. Secrets, omissions, and the unknown. She applies a poet’s sensibility and an artistic eye to the details of her personal history in her memoir, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. The book is an excavation of her family’s story, as well as an exploration of Chang’s relationship with her parents and her past. Chang’s mother, now gone, closely guarded details about her life before she moved to America. What little Chang knew of her mom’s story was drawn out reluctantly in one spare interview before her mother’s death. It was only when Chang found a box of family photographs and documents after her mother died that she began to wonder about the specific details of her parents’ lives and what motivated their decisions. Much of their history was lost to time after her mother’s death, and her father’s Alzheimer’s illness rendered his memories inaccessible.
In our 23 years on the AT, as it’s known, our lives were ever-changing, but the trail always offered us familiar peace from the outside world — a walking meditation through the quiet forest shared with each other and the countless hikers we met.
Ours was a journey only made possible by sobriety, as both Dad and I struggled with alcohol dependence for many years. Then there was his cancer.
I went from a bouncy teenager to a 41-year-old with a bad back. I converted to a new religion and got married. So much time has passed that I’m only seven years younger than Dad was on that rainy May morning in Virginia.
The Grieving Parents monument, which stands at a war cemetery near Vladslo in Belgium, is a memorial for the grief-stricken parents of the war dead. The statues of mother and father stand at the foot of a small stone path that runs along the grass by a line of tombstones. The woman, in the likeness of the artist, kneels on a stone pediment. Her head bows forward as if rocking in grief and pain; a sheet is wrapped about her body, interwoven by arms and hands that hold the blanket in place. Käthe Kollwitz, as both artist and mother, designed the statue in the 1930s for her son, who had died in the trenches during the First World War. In shifting the subject from soldier to parent, the sculpture displaces the dead with the living.
I thought of The Grieving Parents on a visit to the 9/11 Memorial in New York. Visitors took selfies and photographs with iPhones, images that most likely will be shared with friends online. A group of three young women placed their arms around each other as one held a selfie stick aloft in the air. A masked tourist took a selfie a few feet away. The backdrop was the reflecting pool, the stone indent flowing with water where the towers collapsed. Rather than the names of the dead on the bronze placards, the visitors focused on the photographic act: finding the right angle or lighting or filter to portray themselves or the space.
A diligent cultivator, Brent Leggett will spare no effort to ensure a bountiful harvest, but even he can’t control the dirt. In Nash County, North Carolina—where cotton and tobacco were once king, and where sweet potatoes now reign supreme—enterprise is indebted to the earth, a soft, sandy, and khaki-brown soil perfectly suited for tubers and industrial crops alike. At the cusp of the 19th century, enslaved workers tended to this county’s agricultural output. Today, the harvest periods for sweet potatoes and cotton still overlap, from the beginning of October into early November. As I sink my heels into the loamy ridges of Leggett’s plot, I ponder this tangled history of bondage and reinvention.
I read hundreds of submissions a year from emerging writers. They don’t feel constrained by old arguments about literary versus commercial, or the value of a newspaper versus Instagram review. Let’s meet that bold energy with a more level playing field and an expansive view of what’s possible.
The more we learn about the many paths our ancestors have taken, the more possible futures open up. “The Dawn of Everything” begins as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available. Knowing that there were other ways to live, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, allows us to rethink what we might yet become.
"A ghost story" is how Gary Goodman characterizes his memoir "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade," and there is a whiff of sepia among its pages. It is, after all, about a way of making a living that has changed dramatically in recent years, thanks to the internet, but it's also a swashbuckling tale of thieves and forgers, a man who would be king, celebrities and the never-ending search for gold — in this case, books, rare ones, and the lengths some will go to acquire them.
Throughout history, foods that were once a marker of precarity and a lack of resources — dishes eked from scraps; tough cuts of meat; seafood too abundant to be of value to those who treasure rarity; wild roots scraped out of the earth with hardened hands — have gradually been co-opted by the upper classes, sometimes to the point that they’re no longer accessible to the people who once relied on them. For deliciousness has never been a fixed quality, wholly measurable by sensors on the tongue; it’s an invocation and reflection of memory, history and prevailing hierarchies. To have taste, in the cultural sense of showing discernment and an awareness of higher aesthetics, is to defeat taste in the physical sense: the animal instinct to simply eat what pleases us.
Evidence is mounting that other animals are capable of pyrocognition, the behavioural and cognitive abilities required to harness the potential of fire. This means that examining the way nonhuman animals interact with and live alongside fire can help us shed light on how our long-extinct ancestors managed this dangerous phenomenon, and how it went on to shape the creatures we are today.
Our overwhelming emphasis upon the visual aspects of architectural design fails to acknowledge the fact that, to gain understanding and knowledge of buildings, we rely upon all of our senses, including sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, as well as bodily senses such as proprioception and kinaesthesia, which are associated with balance and movement.
Chouette, Claire Oshetsky’s first novel, is part feminist fairytale in the vein of Angela Carter, part suburban body horror. Its epigraph is a quote from the David Lynch film Eraserhead: “Mother, they are still not sure it is a baby!”
Part of what’s refreshing in reading Patchett’s nonfiction is having a window into her discipline as a writer and her deep understanding of herself. This knowledge has made it possible for her to create the kind of life that suits her: devoting her hours to writing books and putting other people’s stories into eager hands as the owner of Parnassus Books.
While bird people will enjoy the photographs and facts, travelers will gobble up the tales of distant parts, and photographers will absorb the technical details included.
The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
At a house full of deaths hiding under the stairs. I was barefoot at the
time because my friend said, I know it’s dark, but you have to take your
shoes off in this house. You have to tread on the darkness. She caressed
Authors did not include fantastic machines in their tales of tomorrow just for their novelty value. The machines demonstrated human control of the natural world, something writers did not hesitate to point out. “So many new inventions had been struck out,” wrote Webb of her future England, “so many wonderful discoveries made, and so many ingenious contrivances put into execution, that poor Nature seemed to be degraded from her throne, and usurping man to have stepped up to supply her place.” The fiction of the future was in general agreement that machines would transform dreams of growth and progress into reality.
Whenever I encounter the story of a purportedly genius (and inevitably male) artist, I am drawn principally to his (inevitably female) muse, in part because I aspire to her station (if only temporarily) and in part because I’m interested in the muse-artist relationship and all its thorniness. I get the allure of that sort of artist, and particularly one who gives himself so fully to his work that he cannot give himself to anyone else. But I wonder what it would really be like to live inside an arrangement marked by such stark power differentials.
But don’t for one second confuse the Smithsonian with your grandmother’s attic. Meticulously organised and surprisingly selective, the museum’s archives are an essential resource in its mission to explore and preserve the natural and cultural wonders of America and the world.
When we were all shipwrecked by a pandemic-induced quarantine, the headlines rightly covered the craven politics, the coronavirus mismanagement, the lies, the hate, and the death and despair that marked our lost year. But there was another side to the story: big acts of heroism and small acts of kindness, from hospital employees willing to live apart from their families to neighbors sharing supplies and checking in on one another. The daily headlines reminded us of the failings of our fellow Americans. But our daily interactions revealed a bottomless supply of caring and giving.
Recipes scribbled on a scrap of paper that has faded over time and held together with a prayer. A cookbook with notes in the margins for additions or changes that worked better. That intuitive sense that you’re getting closer to making Big Mama’s oyster dressing because the smells transport you back to being a child, peering in curiosity on your tippy toes as you were shooed away to go play with your cousins. This sense of connectedness settling in on your chest means you’ve invoked them in the room with you.
“Small Things Like These” is an ideal title for this exquisite novella in which Claire Keegan closely attends to the daily life of a modest County Wexford coal vendor. In very little space, Keegan distills the texture of village life during Ireland’s devastating 1980s recession. While the novella is a sharp critique of Catholic institutions, it’s also a bold examination of Christian charity.
Buta-ya was meant to be a retirement office, where Miyazaki could pursue personal projects. He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” (an extension of a popular manga franchise and part of a different strain of Japanese anime, focused on action and vengeance, with a video-game-like feel). “Spirited Away” won the 2002 Academy Award for best animated feature, the only film from outside the West to ever do so. In 2013, he said again that he was done with film, and that time, having directed 11 features in 34 years, he was taken seriously: Studio Ghibli shut down its production department.
Yet here he is now, making a new film. “Because I wanted to,” he says, and grins, like a grizzled thief come back for one last heist.
It’s this very vulnerability — her warmth, sincerity, and lack of pretension — that makes her a trustworthy guide. She’s a narrator who takes her readers by the hand, leading them through life’s ordinary events and spinning these events into something magical. Unlike many essayists today, Patchett does not fixate on polarization, the climate crisis, or global instability. Or, perhaps, she approaches these pressing issues from the other side. Through her eyes, the global pandemic offers a glimpse into our humanity. It is an opportunity for a new connection. It offers someone a new lease on life.
For years, fans have searched for clues about what happened to the comics and their author. Sometimes, they would be hot on the trail — finding Pictures for Sad Children living somewhere on the internet, under an assumed name. But that, too, would go offline. The network of fans worldwide would form something between a detective agency and a book club.
Now, seven years after she first vanished from the internet, the author is opening up about the experience and sharing some new art. And, given the particularly dark and absurd era, she’s just in time.
Friends of mine in China who lived through the Cultural Revolution describe a contagious zeal that drove them to act on beliefs they did not share. This process is brilliantly caricatured in Eugène Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros,” in which people who seem perfectly normal transform into violent beasts, more and more of them caving as the play goes on. A parallel process has taken place as an increasing number of Americans seem willing to abandon previously hallowed democratic norms, including freedom of expression. Krause has not banned the books on his list because he is not in a position to do so, but the chilling effect of such lists is incontrovertible.
It has been 25 years since the first Tamagotchi cracked out of its egg. That’s right, 25 years. If you’re a ’90s kid, you either owned one yourself or spent every recess looking over the shoulder of someone who did. But while the toy has pretty much disappeared from schoolyards these days—replaced by smartphones—many of its key features had a significant impact on the video game industry and live on in major games today.
I’m not promising too much by claiming that Sarah Winman’s “Still Life” is a tonic for wanderlust and a cure for loneliness. It’s that rare, affectionate novel that makes one feel grateful to have been carried along. Unfurling with no more hurry than a Saturday night among old friends, the story celebrates the myriad ways love is expressed and families are formed.
In a business that encourages writers to repeat themselves, to stay relentlessly on brand, it’s exciting to see artists take a chance, cast off the dictates of publicity and marketing, go rogue. The results are sometimes catastrophic but often lead to the creation of singular and surprising works. “Pilot Impostor,” James Hannaham’s follow-up to his acclaimed novels “God Says No” and “Delicious Foods,” is one of these singular works, a book impossible to categorize.
“Termination Shock” deals brilliantly and innovatively with our era’s most pressing existential matter — while delivering stratospheric gigatons of carefully engineered delight.
But at their best, they are a catalogue of all the unexpected ways love can look, if you're imaginative and brave enough to try it — even while knowing that love and grief are two sides of the same coin. "Death always thinks of us eventually," Patchett writes. "The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have."
For all his paranoid etymologizing, there was at least one word the roots of which Grainger never seemed to have worried about: the compound mother tongue itself. Some words, maybe, were too holy to suspect. (In 1926 Grainger commissioned the Tasmanian linguist Robert Atkinson to produce a massive counterhistory of English to be titled Our Mothertongue.) But what if mother tongue turned out to be French- or Latin-begotten—the mere translation of langue maternelle or lingua materna? Could Grainger’s English do without it? While the composer combed his brain for dark-eyed words deep within a small mansion in upstate New York, in Germany, in a circle of devoutly German-loving linguists, the German equivalent of exactly this problem was arising. What if the ancient German term of endearment for German—die Muttersprache (“mother tongue,” more or less)—was not originally German?
Of course, we don’t usually question why a language has words for some things and not others. We don’t really imagine we have much choice in the matter, because the words we use to build our lives were mostly handed to us in the crib or picked up on the playground. They function as a kind of psychological programming that helps shape our relationships, our memory, even our perception of reality. As Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
But therein lies a problem. Language is so fundamental to our perception, we’re unable to perceive the flaws built into language itself. It would be difficult to tell, for example, if our vocabulary had fallen badly out of date, and no longer described the world in which we live. We would feel only a strange hollowness in our conversations, never really sure if we’re being understood.
If you had to devise a single object to capture the twitchy fear and uncertainty that defined the early stage of the pandemic, you could do worse than the “no-touch door opener.” Available for delivery from Amazon for just a few bucks, this key-size piece of metal, curved into multiple prongs, looks like an artifact of some lost civilization. It purports to help you operate elevator buttons and open latches and poke your phone without touching any of them. This item was, at best, a silly response to what turned out to be an airborne virus. And yet at the same time it reflects something fundamental to the human experience: the urge to tinker and design and adapt in the face of crises large and small.
One recent afternoon in Morocco, a fifty-nine-year-old former Royal Marine Commando named Phil Asher walked me into a desolate valley in the Atlas Mountains, shook my hand, and abandoned me. Asher, whom I had met only the previous evening, has a gray beard, a piercing gaze, and a bone-dry sense of humor. He teaches survival skills to people who have never fast-roped from a helicopter or killed their dinner. That morning, he had spent several hours educating me on the rudiments of living in the wilderness, alone. Now I was in the wilderness, alone.
The travel firm that organized my trip, Black Tomato, calls this experience Get Lost—a playful misnomer, since the idea is to do the opposite. A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains.
Today only a few farmers plant kernels from those heirloom lines. But cornmeal — usually ground from another hard maize called dent corn — is one of a handful of main ingredients found on Thanksgiving tables across the continental United States, baked into loaves, muffins and sticks; crumbled into stuffings and dressings; and steamed with molasses and eggs in a custard that has been known as Indian pudding since the era when the colonists referred to ground corn as Indian meal.
In that corn — written, in a sense, into its genetic code — is the story of the people who lived in Plymouth and throughout the Western Hemisphere before Europeans arrived.
The publication of Harrow, Joy Williams’s first novel in 20 years, is a literary event. Her work glows with cruelty and humor; her sentences showcase the dread at the foundation of our lives. Not much happens in a Williams novel, but that doesn’t matter when you feel the trembling that her characters go through on every page.
There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in “Tinderbox,” James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond.
The creditors whom Kevin Birmingham relied on to write “The Sinner and the Saint” — a dexterous biblio-biography about how “Crime and Punishment” came to be born — include a formidable array of scholars as well as Dostoevsky himself. Yet the biographer betrays no sign of panic. The tale he tells is rich, complex and convoluted, and though he must have struggled in constructing it, Birmingham writes with the poise and precision his subject sometimes lacked. (Though it worked out all right for him.)
Public libraries have been remarkably resistant, though not immune, to the waves of privatization, even as other public things, including things that are arguably more essential and harder to privatize, have been auctioned off. Some might say that libraries should be the first thing to go: some clearly see them as nonessential, and it would not be hard to see charging a per-use or subscription fee to support them. In our climate of austerity it would make economic sense. It would fit perfectly with the strands in our culture that celebrate materialism and individualism. And yet the idea of introducing even a bit of privatization to public libraries often seems like a bridge too far.
Libraries resist privatization because they are not just about the books. We could easily replace the transactional part of libraries with corporations, but we’d be left with a place where you come in, get your books, pay, and leave. You’d lose the opportunity to get help with homework or trade quilt patterns or meet people who are eager to recommend their favorite reads. And that’s just the surface of what libraries do, especially in a time when most other social services have been slashed. Author Deborah Fallows, after crisscrossing the nation, decided that libraries have become “second responders.”
The 50th anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is almost upon us, and a critical reconsideration of Hunter S. Thompson’s comic novel is already under way. The Gonzo classic hinged on two drug-fueled weekends in Las Vegas and served as a freeform epitaph for the 1960s. But if the counterculture was faltering during the Nixon era, Thompson was hitting his stride. In November 1971, Rolling Stone ran the Las Vegas story in two long articles; Random House published the book version in 1972 and helped make Thompson a cultural icon. In 1996, Modern Library issued its own edition, and a film version appeared two years after that. Together, they put Thompson in exalted literary company and drew millions of new fans who didn’t read books.
Some of the recent critical conversation has revolved around Oscar Acosta, who accompanied Thompson on both trips to Las Vegas. The two men met in Aspen but lit out for Nevada from Los Angeles. Acosta had been involved in the Chicano Movement and was defending its local leaders in court. At the same time, he was an aspiring novelist who sought and received literary advice from Thompson. As the Las Vegas material shaped up, however, tensions surfaced between the two men. Specifically, Acosta was irked that Thompson converted his character into Dr. Gonzo, a 300-pound Samoan attorney.
I am a books person. I’ve been reading steadily since I first learned how, building from Sweet Valley High to Sally Rooney. I’m also a type-A person—a hand-raiser raised on gold stars and assorted forms of validation. I was taught not to be “a quitter” (though I now question why “quitting” has been branded as an identity and not merely an action). This set me up for a toxic, occasionally torturous mental exercise when it came to finishing—or not finishing—books. I tend to keep going—just 10 more pages?!—even as my mind wanders. If I set it down, I let it languish on my nightstand, then demote it to the floor under my nightstand and eventually re-shelf it. All the while, it remains for too long in the “currently reading” slot of my Goodreads profile so that I don’t formally have to admit defeat.
In “Anecdote of the Jar,” poet Wallace Stevens places a jar in Tennessee and “The wilderness rose up to it.” In Andrew Siegrist’s story collection, “We Imagined It Was Rain,” water is the defining “jar.” The driving rain, flooded rivers and murky lakes set the tone for these tales of love and loss that capture a wooded, watery Tennessee.
Roberto Bolaño said that all novels are at their core detective novels. Macrae Burnet expands upon this, suggesting that the reader and the psychoanalyst – such intimate bedfellows – are both detectives gathering clues in pursuit of a final judgment that lies always just out of sight.
At first, birthdays were
reserved for kings and saints.
But it’s rainbow sprinkles and
face painting for everybody
these days.
It’s getting harder and harder to run a stoplight here, because there are fewer and fewer of them around. Every year, at intersections throughout this thriving city, traffic lights and stop signs have disappeared, replaced with roundabouts.
Lots and lots of roundabouts.
It supposedly had some of the best paella in Mallorca, Spain’s largest island. And my wife and I were determined to try it on a recent trip.
But the tiny, rustic eatery clings to a wind-swept, rocky promontory jutting into the western Mediterranean, a site so remote that you can only reach it by sea or on foot.
I’m frying the crackers this year, an adaptation I learned about from my colleague Alexandra Raij. I met her when she was a line cook at Prune, just a couple of years out of culinary school. Now she is a chef with her own restaurants and her own kids. She may not have invented the technique of frying crackers, which is a tradition in the American South, but she might be the first person to bring it to New York City — nutty, salty crisp saltines that she stacks next to her ceviches. Now that I’ve had them fried, I’ll never go back to “raw.” It’s one exhilarating change to a tradition that makes a lot of sense.
In that sense, The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves. Le Tellier introduces a counter-factual context, but he does not seriously expect readers to accept a sci-fi answer to the problems he has posed. Rather, he wants to undercut our pride in human reason with a healthy dose of epistemological skepticism.
Sebald’s genius was to see the “fiction in facts,” Carole Angier writes in “Speak, Silence,” the first major biography of the author. Angier sets out to find the facts in the fiction. Interspersing chapters on Sebald’s life with essays that dissect his books, Angier canvasses virtually everything Sebald ever said and wrote about his childhood, his family, and his career, with the same kitchen-sink exhaustiveness that marked her biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. “I remind you of the truth,” Angier writes in her introduction. “It’s why writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me. But I would say to him, You’re wrong.” As the defensive tone suggests, Angier didn’t write the book without a fight.
The courier asked if I was back
but he knows I refuse to harvest.
I only collect, marred by yellow
Working on a book about the inexplicable ending of that showdown game between Cal and Stanford, I interviewed coaches and players, fans, journalists and officials. I learned a lot about football, but more about brotherhood, regret and hope.
Yet, until this fall, I had never met Niualiku, the individual who literally loomed largest in my memory of Nov. 20, 1982. I wanted to know what he remembered of our encounter, so many seasons ago, and what The Play meant to him.
Focusing such that your mind is occupied but not excessively challenged, James says, is incredibly helpful for people with depression, anxiety, and stress because it offers what she describes as “a little holiday from yourself.” For some people, this “gentle focus” takes the form of tending to a garden or tidying a room, while for others, puzzles fill this space.
The difference between traditional gentle focus and puzzles, though, is the satisfaction of an “elegant solution” at the end, according to James. In a world filled with ever-changing norms and expectations, the clear-cut rules and codes present in puzzles make the solver feel in control—the rules of the puzzle won’t change willy-nilly, so the only question is whether you can solve it.
Lily King isn’t afraid of big emotional subjects: desire and grief, longing and love, growth and self-acceptance. But she eschews high drama for the immersive quiet of the everyday. King’s latest book, her first story collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” explores some of the same territory as her beloved novel “Writers & Lovers.” Here we inhabit the worlds of authors and mothers, children and friends; we experience their lives in clear, graceful prose that swells with generous possibility. This is a book for writers and lovers, a book about storytelling itself, a book for all of us.
This book’s subtitle is exactly right, for Wells did change our world. And Tomalin’s account of his early years educates and entertains, despite the difficulty of delivering the large life and legacy of H. G. Wells in a single volume.
In the hour before dawn, I rise up
to give myself a little bit
before it all starts again.
“Rise up” is not really what I do;
Books and travel have always gone hand in hand, but the current pandemic, in which people from around the world experienced mass lockdowns, made the need for escape through the written word even more crucial.
In his new book Around the World in 80 Books, author and literary scholar David Damrosch takes his readers on a global journey using some of the most transportive books ever published, from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, set in high-society Paris, to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, capturing life in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. A recognizable force in the field of literature and a professor at Harvard, Damrosch weaves in anecdotes from his own life as a ravenous reader, starting from a very young age while browsing the dusty bookshop near his school bus stop, to his many years teaching. Together with excerpts pulled from each book, Damrosch builds an itinerary that circumnavigates the globe—and doesn’t require a passport to enjoy. His carefully curated compendium of must-read written works spans time periods and continents, and includes a diverse selection of voices.
David Tanis — one of the storied chefs in the history of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse who, more than any other, helped define that restaurant’s cooking style — has a giant reputation. In reality, he’s of short stature, incredibly reserved, with a humility that is always a surprise when you compare him to chefs of his age with far fewer accolades.
[...]
But as experienced a chef as he is, Tanis is still eager to learn. A student-like excitement comes through in how he talks with farmers market vendors, or when he asks questions about how other people cook a dish similar to one he’s cooked dozens of times. It’s in his nature to create a constant student-teacher dynamic in the way he cooks, by himself and with others. And it’s a rapport he hopes comes through with diners as he starts another chapter of his life at Lulu, his and Waters’ new restaurant at the Hammer Museum in Westwood — Waters’ first new restaurant since Chez Panisse opened in 1971.
Ultimately, what this novel is about is freedom and choice, causes and consequences, and it is written in sharp language that is both deeply funny and painful. Completely absent any navel-gazing or self-pity, it is a book that probes questions of family, feminism, ecology, and home, and refuses to settle on easy answers.
“O Beautiful” unsettles the reader from the very first page. In the opening scene, Elinor Hanson, a 40-something former model and aspiring journalist, is on a plane seated next to a man who won’t stop talking. He’s a familiar and annoying type, eager to hear himself lecture to a captive, female audience. Elinor rebuffs him and takes a sleeping pill. When she wakes though, it is to a pawing and insistent violence. Did the assault really happen, or was it a pill-induced nightmare? The question haunts the rest of this enthralling and thought-provoking novel.
“These Precious Days,” the new collection of essays by beloved and best-selling author Ann Patchett, is a cornucopia of treats. Witty and warm, the essays succeed because of Patchett’s inimitable, endearing voice. Sincere but never simplistic, generous without being cloying, and accessible rather than anodyne, “These Precious Days” feels at once bracing and comforting.
Jeffrey Cranor is in Saugerties, N.Y., Janina Matthewson in “southeast London, the best part of the city.” I’m in Virginia, and the three of us are speaking via videoconference with black microphones close by. My mic might be window dressing, but theirs are essential equipment. From their distant outposts, Cranor and Matthewson write, produce and perform “Within the Wires,” an unusual epistolary podcast that has just spawned their first standalone novel, “You Feel It Just Below the Ribs.” It’s a little like “The Handmaid’s Tale” on acid, but comic and metatextual, constantly destabilizing its own version of truth.
OK, wait. Stop and rewind.
Although there is something oblique about these conceits, Calle is associated, above all, with acts of bald exposure. Her celebrity, which now extends far beyond France, has long been attached to charges of voyeurisme and exhibitionnisme (which have sometimes resulted in legal trouble). Yet, as “The Hotel” vividly shows, what Calle is really looking for is more enigmatic and compelling than other people’s dirty laundry. Rather than erase the residue of human presence, as a “real” maid is expected to, Calle does the opposite, preserving every stain and scrap as a sign or symbol. But of what? This is the question at the heart of Calle’s work, and the answer may hardly be the point; what interests her most is the seduction and projection involved in knowing another person—how fantasy intervenes in every attempt to see and be seen.
When something breaks this high up in space, the shards don’t just sit around. Like the ISS, the cloud of space junk loops around Earth. And the space station, officials realized, intersected with the orbit of that junk every 90 minutes. Remember that scene in Gravity where space debris pummels Sandra Bullock and her fellow astronauts while they’re working on the Hubble Space Telescope? That was a worst-case representation of what can happen when the orbit of spacefarers and the orbit of space junk overlap.
Around the year 1603, Italian shoemaker and amateur alchemist Vincenzo Casciarolo tried smelting some especially dense stone he had found on the slopes of Mount Paderno, near Bologna. No gold, silver or other precious metals resulted as he had hoped. But after the stone had cooled, Casciarolo discovered something interesting: If he exposed the material to sunlight and then took it into a dark room, the stone would glow.
That “Bologna Stone” was the first artificially prepared, persistently luminescent substance. Many more were to follow — and today, persistent luminescent materials are used for decorations, emergency lighting, pavement markings and medical imaging.
Someday they might give us glowing cities that stay cooler and use less electricity.
In “Burntcoat,” a merciless virus has paralyzed the planet. Hall’s sixth novel, with its quarantines, variants and “domestic death behind closed curtains,” could only be more current if it were serialized on social media.
This, of course, won’t appeal to readers who’d rather think about anything but our own very real global health disaster. But those who give “Burntcoat” a try will find that Hall has crafted a harrowing and memorable vision of decay, collapse and recovery.
Garner’s autofiction provides all the guts, glamour and goodness of the fiction that made her name. Its publication proves that the value of writing is firstly, for oneself.
For the true bibliomaniac, libraries are temples, shrines, shuls, places of worship. They trace their lineage back to the great library of Alexandria begun by Alexander the Great’s lieutenant Ptolemy and his son. The library, variously estimated to contain somewhere between 200,000 and half a million scrolls, was said to have been accidentally destroyed in a fire set in a nearby harbor by Julius Caesar during his intervention on the side of Cleopatra in her war against her brother Ptolemy XIII. The great extant libraries are thought to include the Bodleian at Oxford, la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne, the British Museum, the Vatican Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Peabody Conservatory Library in Baltimore, and a few others.
Most of these began life as personal collections of books built up and added onto over the decades, in some instances over the centuries. The bibliomaniac can only fantasize owning or even superintending as chief librarian the many books stored in such institutions. Meanwhile non-bibliophiles, even some philistines among them, often wish to attach themselves to the prestige of great libraries. The library, among other things, is a symbol of learning. In Margin of Hope, his autobiography, Irving Howe recounts how Abram Sachar called together a number of wealthy Jewish philanthropists in the hope of acquiring funds for a library for the newly founded Brandeis University. He regaled them with the prominence of Widener Library at Harvard in the lives of students, noting: “when the students at Harvard go to the library, they don’t say, ‘Let’s go to the library,’ they say, ‘Let’s go to Widener.’” Howe could sense in the men Sachar had gathered the thought: “Someday maybe they’ll say, ‘Let’s go to Shapiro!” Without great difficulty, Sachar got the money for the Brandeis library.
In 2021, we worry about the world ending because of wildfires and freezes and murder hornets and plagues, but in Howard Carson’s reality, America/Usa was destroyed by air pollution and gravity issues (pollutantus literati and pollutantus gravitas). I highly doubt that sustainability was on my mind back in fifth grade, but now it feels like a gentle warning to the human race to not be so wasteful. The things that remain in Usa are what we recognize as McDonald’s signs and gas station logos, but which Carson and Harriet interpret as spiritual altars along Monument Row. It’s far-fetched, but that’s the point. Besides, it probably will be the fast food signs and Big Gulp cups that remain long after we’re gone.
Here endeth this little parable—and true story—of what pondering a subject can do for a poet. The case in question was admittedly extreme: such pondering doesn’t always abet elevation. But it often abets understanding. I said in the last section that in choosing a subject, a poet engages with life. I’ve tried to show in this section that in pondering a subject, a poet examines life. It was Socrates, Google tells me, who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Pondering a subject is a practicum in the examination of life.
Subsidized by the war chest of venture capital, these companies have in the past decade successfully gotten between restaurants and their hard-earned customers, aided by slick marketing that convinces us eaters we’re too busy to live without it and promises businesses they’ll grow sales while adapting to today’s uniquely fast-paced customer. There are many good reasons why getting carryout or delivery for dinner is a necessary expediency. But the idea that we have uniquely cultivated an existence that demands convenience to serve our mightily efficient lifestyles is more spin. We’ve always been busy. We’ve always craved convenience. No part of delivery is new, other than the predatory companies making it irresistibly easy—and using that ease to wedge themselves between restaurants and their customers.
The Four Humors, Mina Seçkin’s debut novel, is a deliciously bittersweet meditation on the elastic, shifting narratives we weave from the fragile threads of our daily existence, the people around us, and the places we call home.
“Love in the Big City,” already a best seller in Korea and Park’s first novel to be translated into English, is intoxicating. Across four parts that follow Young from college to postgraduate life in Seoul to burgeoning literary success, the narrator — hard-drinking, hard-feeling and hard-falling — recounts the loves that have defined his life thus far.
An anxiety over what language can — or cannot — contribute to one’s survival stalks these stories.
Throughout comics history, the work is pushed forward by what Dauber, in a discussion about the cartoonist Dave Sim, calls the “parodic sensibility.” It is these parodies that most enliven the works discussed in “American Comics.” There’s parody as homage. Parody as cutting, vicious criticism. Parody as cheap laughs; parody as genius. Dauber ably demonstrates that comics, as much as or more than any other art or literature, can handle the most serious of topics, including one of the most serious of all: our ability to laugh at ourselves.
This year, I turned 30, a development that came with a breathless sense of dread at time’s passing. It wakes me up in the early mornings: Nocturnal terror breaks through the surface of sleep like a whale breaching for air. My ambition and fear kick in together until I get up, pour myself some water and look out the window at the squid-ink sky and the string of lights along my neighbors’ houses. I lie down again after finding firmer mental ground, dry land.
So when a guy that my friend was seeing evangelized about “time slips” — a genre of urban legend in which people claim that, while walking in particular places, they accidentally traveled back, and sometimes forward, in time — I was a ripe target. Curious and increasingly existential, I Googled these supposed time slips. I found a global community of believers building an archive of temporal dislocations from the present. These congregants gathered in corners of the internet to testify about how, in the right conditions, the dusting of alienation that settles over the world as we age can crystallize into collective fiction.
The result is not so much a novel of ideas as a novel of concepts. That’s not a criticism — “Termination Shock” manages to pull off a rare trick, at once wildly imaginative and grounded, and readers who go in for this world-building will likely leave with a heightened concern for all the ways in which we are actively making the planet inhospitable. Like T. R. Schmidt’s sulfur gun, this novel is both a response to a deeply broken reality, and an attempt to alter it.
If you’ve ever tried counting sheep and found yourself, rather than dropping off, wondering if there might be some kind of design underpinning the leaps and bleats of your woolly friends, Tom McCarthy’s new book might be for you. “The Making of Incarnation,” the British writer’s fifth novel, is an investigation of pattern and connection set in the world of motion studies. And lest that sound dry, rest assured it also asks such big questions as how can you fake zero-gravity love-making onscreen? and what happens if you put a bobsled in a wind tunnel?
When she isn't writing best-selling novels that explore Native American life, Louise Erdrich runs a bookstore in Minneapolis that sells Native literature and art. Her latest book, "The Sentence," combines her interest in both a shaggy-dog ghost story that unfolds over a year in a city scarred by the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.
Tishani Doshi’s fourth volume of poetry, following 2018’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, marks a transition in her exploration of growing and aging as a woman. Where her earlier work focused on the internal and the bodily, A God at the Door reinvents the ancient equation of femininity and the natural world in order to address the intersections of female experience and a larger set of issues, including aging and mortality, war and poverty, environmental disasters like climate change and the pandemic, and legacies of racism and genocide.
I am your leader
and I can’t answer
I always find it hard to list the books that have influenced me the most. Memory is tricky, and a work can assert its influences over my thinking long after I’ve forgotten its particular details, or even its title. Moreover, people who set as their job the task of judging what others do, and why, are not always reliable when turning the lens upon themselves. And then there’s the fact that any list of books that I feel made me, as both a writer and a human, changes with the day and feeling. Still, on that changing list there are a few mainstays.
Take Tony Judt’s Postwar. I first encountered Tony in a swirl of legend and myth, an intellectual hero who, in the dark post-9/11 years, inveighed against the Israeli occupation and filleted the “useful idiots” who sanctified the War on Terror. Having, at that time, read very little of Tony, I was left with the impression of an intellectual monk who eschewed the dictates of party or crowd. I’ve always been skeptical of writers who are spoken of in this way, intellectuals praised for violating the dictums of both “the left and the right” as though the best answer somehow lay unerringly in between. Maybe that’s why I didn’t read a book by Tony until after he’d died. It was my mistake. It was my loss.
On Saturdays, I came in around 9 am, an hour before we opened the phone lines, to grab a grapefruit from the walk-in, put on a pot of coffee, spray down the phones with Lysol, and get a plate of whatever the overnight porters prepared for their version of family meal. Family meal was when the entire staff sat down and ate together before the start of service, and it usually flowed into the pre-service meeting where George gave everyone the scoop on who was coming in that night. The overnight porters broke for a meal in the early morning, right around the time I arrived.
Most importantly, I locked the front door. Prospective guests showed up before 10 am, and I wasn’t so sure some of them wouldn’t stab me if I couldn’t give them a reservation. Some drove in from the suburbs of New Jersey or Connecticut, hoping to make a reservation for whatever date we were releasing that morning. What kind of person would drive all the way into Manhattan on a weekend just to make a dinner reservation? A smart one. That was what you had to do to get a table. Some of the more zealous resorted to banging on the windows. Everyone assumed that our lack of open tables was a publicity stunt and that we were intent on shutting out the average person, which was ridiculous—the more bodies we pumped in and out every night, the more money the front of the house made.
A maestro of the dramatic opener, Neal Stephenson began his 2015 novel, Seveneves, with the line “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” That’s a hard act to follow, but he gives it the old college try in his latest, Termination Shock, heralded, when first announced, as the celebrated science-fiction author “finally” taking on the subject of global warning. Termination Shock begins with the queen of the Netherlands piloting a business jet in an emergency landing at the Waco airport, a maneuver that goes terribly wrong when her plane’s landing gear collides with a herd of feral hogs that, chased by an oversize alligator, swarm the airstrip.
The City of Good Death, winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, on the one hand engages in staple exoticisms related to India — gods, ghosts, religion, and death — but on the other hand displays an earnest attempt at vividly capturing the life of the characters and of Kashi through the author’s lush and evocative prose.
It may be laden with whimsical details and witticisms, but the opening chapter of Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces feels grounded given her penchant for disorienting fables. Any predictability vanishes, however, when narrator Otto, his partner Xavier and their pet mongoose Árpád Montague XXX arrive at a dozy Kent railway station and board a sleeper train named the Lucky Day. Instantly, they find themselves in “an upside-down sort of place”, figuratively and also literally: in one carriage, the seats and tables are fixed to the ceiling. Others contain a library, a greenhouse, an art gallery (all the canvases are white, revealing different images for each viewer). From here on in, this smart, inventive narrative moves with antic momentum, darting between past and present, and from storyline to storyline.
H. G. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. “I have done what I pleased,” he wrote. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”—that he pioneered its modern use, in his 1900 novel, “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” as a shorthand for the totality of the activity. Like most “first use” claims—the number of words that Shakespeare supposedly used first has decreased as Elizabethan data banks have enlarged—this is probably overstated, but Wells certainly made the word, well, sticky. A case can even be made—indeed, to make it you can draw on Claire Tomalin’s new biography, “The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World”—that his eroticism was in no small part feminist in its promotion of a woman’s right to choose her own sexual partners, unconstrained by the strictures of a father or a husband.
All fruits are not created equal.
In September the pear tree produces
an army of hard pellets tasting
of twine, of whining,
tasting of the word but.
Near midnight, AT the top of a lighthouse in Dakar, the westernmost point of the African continent, I sat before a grilled whole fish as long as my forearm and accompanied by a dome of rice. Thiof, a white grouper, is such common Senegalese restaurant fare that the Wolof word itself is slang — a handsome man is also a thiof, a “good catch.” I’d eaten beachside thiof south of Dakar in the vacation area of Saly, and cliffside thiof at breezy restaurants in Les Almadies, the Dakar neighborhood known for its nightlife. This thiof, though rubbed with spices like the others — I tasted ginger, garlic, cardamom, maybe turmeric — was served with a tiny cup of warm tamarind glaze. If there were vegetables on the plate, I have banished them from my memory; only the sauce, fish and rice were in conversation. The skin of the thiof was crisp and juicy, the sauce tangy and rich. The rice was not as long as basmati, nor as short as sticky rice, but a size in between, round through the middle with little adhesion and a firm but pliant texture. If food encapsulates pleasure, innovation and community all at once, then tasting the Platonic ideal of a simple dish can bring a place and its people into focus, even if you encounter that ideal in an unlikely setting — a lighthouse restaurant known for its brunch.
I asked to see the menu again, to verify that I had indeed ordered the same dish I’d eaten at so many restaurants in town. It was late June, and being this close to the ocean at such a late hour meant that the steady heat of the day had faded to a light chill. Nearby, along the coast, was Africa’s tallest statue, the African Renaissance Monument, hulking in the semidark: A cartoonishly muscular man gripped his woman by the waist with one arm and held his child with the other, all three of their colossal copper bodies leaning out over the water. My dinner date, a Senegalese nonprofit executive in town from Paris to co-host a fashion show, read the menu alongside me. “Ooh, riz de la vallée,” she said. “Interesting to see that mentioned.” “Rice of the valley” is a phrase used to refer to rice grown in the Senegal River Valley, one of the country’s main areas of cultivation. It was my first and only time seeing the phrase on a menu, but by then — my final evening in Senegal, which is among the largest consumers of rice in West Africa — I had come to understand that rice, for the Senegalese, is often the subject of interest, and sometimes the subject of debate.
You are invited to a party. And not just a party, but the greatest party of all time.
But there’s a catch: There is no chance that you’ll actually be going to this party, because it starts at noon on June 6, 2269.
Huma Qureshi has the perfect title for her short story collection. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love strikingly encapsulates a major theme of the book: the inability to communicate honestly with the most important people in your life. Qureshi’s stories keenly identify the everyday tragedies of feeling profoundly unknown or unheard, of holding secrets and misunderstandings.
Meyer paints a vivid picture of a former and less-established Egypt, acknowledging the pillaging of artifacts by Western countries like Britain and France. Written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle's original books, Meyer's take on the Sherlock Holmes adventures blends old with new, giving readers familiar stories with parallels to and hints of more modern takes.
through uptown manhattan
to a suicide center
I was once walking in Los Angeles, in Silver Lake, thinking I was part of a fine, long tradition exemplified by Benjamin, Baudelaire, Debord et al, that I was a flâneur and a psychogeographer, observing things and soaking up ambiances. I was also taking photographs. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I lost my footing on a perfectly innocent bit of sidewalk — having eyes in the back of my head would have been no help at all — and I made a rapid, involuntary forward dive in the direction of the ground. But it was the kind of descent that still gave me enough time to do a modicum of thinking. One of my hands was free, the other held my camera, which wasn’t especially valuable but also not disposable, and I was afraid it was going to smash as I hit the ground. So, I held the camera close and put out my other arm to break my fall. This worked, to a strictly limited extent. Yes, the arm broke my fall, but in the process, I broke the arm in three places.
Keen in both its humor and in its pathos, the novel captures the acuteness and anguish of childhood and adolescence. The people Ruby loves — her long-suffering and perplexed father, her rebellious and artistic older sister Rania, and, above all, the woman of whom she explains, "Something on the shelf of my mother's heart died when she came to England" — comprise just a few of the somebodies of the title, evoking Ruby's broken but radiant world, a place suffused with grim humor and sad, strange aching.
Michael Ignatieff’s “On Consolation” presents a series of thoughtful essays on some of the great works of consolation in the Western tradition, from essays and speeches to painting (El Greco) and music (Mahler), taking us chronologically from the Book of Job to Cicely Saunders, a British doctor who was a pioneer in palliative care.
On Sunday, Xiao Ming dreams of an embargoed island
to which no other nation sells food. Wasteful Singaporeans
have over-eaten at the bestial shrine of Hunger.
The Moon is only a foothold, a first step on the edge of a vast landscape. Humanity stands on the brink of a new era of exploration, in which brief, intermittent and tentative space jaunts could be replaced by a multitude of cosmic activities conducted by many competing interests. Within 20 or 30 years, crewed missions could make giant leaps toward Mars – 500 times further away than the Moon – to map out the terrain and even establish colonies. Asteroids and other distant destinations will be next. With this new age dawning, we face a collective responsibility to consider the moral challenges before us, and to avoid committing the grave mistakes of the past.
Weapon of war, language-game, act of restorative justice, conversation – erasure poetry can play all these parts and more. A branch of found poetry, erasure poetry starts from an existent document, obliterating parts of it to leave a new, slimmer text. While this type of verse is seeing a surge in popularity due to its “instagrammable” nature, cut-up and collage techniques have been around since the mid-20th century. And parody, the mockery of another poem by borrowing words and ideas and giving them a comic twist, must have existed long before poems were even written down.
“The Four Humors” is a novel about connecting the dots — between people, countries, and cultures. Sibel, the aspiring doctor, realizes she doesn’t just have a body, she is a body. And she doesn’t just have a feeling, she could be the feeling.
“The Four Humors” unites and transports the reader with a throat-tugging ending, demonstrating the power of stories to expand us all.
The book is a rare achievement – a scholarly reference work that invites reading for pleasure. Fox moves beyond colour as a study of materials with symbolic meanings, and his book, though no panegyric, places colour, and therefore art, at the heart of the human story.
For once we are together in the same room,
looking at each other in the blue kitchen light.
Our separate lives bookmarked and left
on read: paper sighing on the desk,
As an earnest young physician, I wanted to provide him with a different kind of experience. So I turned away from the computer screen, with its long list of routine questions, and asked, “What gives you purpose as you face your own mortality?”
It had never occurred to me to pose such a question to a patient before—I asked on a whim. In response, Jim reached into his sports-jacket pocket and pulled out a rectangular black leather calendar book. He was, he said, a poet. He handed me the book. Inside were some of his own poems, and copies of verses written by some of his favorite poets—Carl Sandburg, Walter de la Mare—typed out and carefully stapled or taped onto each calendar page. Writing poetry, he said, was one of the main sources of joy in his life. “I’ve always appreciated the verse,” he said, with Shakespearean flair. But it was only in the past few years that he had found himself writing all the time.
Death Valley is both the lowest land in America and the hottest place on Earth. Its ancient salty lake bed, when plundered for its valuable minerals a century ago, gave rise to fringe communities on the edge of the desert and on the edge of life. One of those towns is Death Valley Junction.
The settlement is like nowhere else in California. The old elevated Death Valley Railroad that once carried borax out of the valley to Los Angeles now splinters into the sand. Derelict cottages and sand-beaten mills bake in the sun, looking like they could blow away in a strong wind. The place is in disrepair, save for a lone icon of American eccentricity, the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, that is open for business today, if you can find the lobby.
In her latest publication, Comfort Me With Apples, Valente truly embraces mysteries—not just that of the story she’s telling, but also in the genre she’s playing in and what puzzle box she’s giving to her readers. While this may seem like a domestic mystery from the outside, once you start turning pages, more and more trappings fall away as the true shape of this tale is revealed.
The latest novel from Domenico Starnone wrangles its players into a knot of unease. “Trust” puts the focus on a Roman husband and wife, their work, their passions — and their nagging sense of doom, even as things seem ever more solid. The husband, our narrator, suffers the dread worst. A rising star of academics, his books doing well, nonetheless he feels like a sham.
Psychiatrists call this “impostor syndrome,” and Starnone renders the anxiety so vividly, he raises goose bumps.
It is easy to satirise our digital world of funny cat pictures, insistent acronyms and thundering banality. It is also easy to be uncomfortable and even outraged about the erosion of privacy, creeping surveillance and an easily stoked-up blame culture. It is even easy to be circumspect about tech-billionaires who want everyone to see how big or fast their rocket is. But easy is not good; and Dave Eggers manages to walk a tightrope across multiple incomprehensible things.
I missed them again this year.
I was immersed elsewhere
when the weather broke
and enough rain came.
It was the winter of manatees, Captain
Rhonda and her chartered pontoon boat
floating down the Crystal River. It was the winter
Classics endure for many reasons. Some serve as eloquent time capsules, portraying a world now gone. Some offer aesthetic beauty and universal themes that transcend eras and cultures. And then there are seminal works that demand our ongoing attention because the full scope of their resonance, urgency, and vision is only visible once the world has started catching up to what the author bravely and brazenly immortalized on the page. Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Argentinean masterpiece, does each of these things, but, above all, it does the latter. When I consider its impact on literature and culture within and beyond Latin America, and on readers, including myself, I recall something a lesbian journalist once told me during an interview: I can only read your book with the body I have.
She was right. There is a subjectivity to reading that runs deep in our bones and can contribute to the depths of our knowing. And so, in defiance of the conventions of pre-feminist literary criticism, I will tell you a secret about my own Uruguayan, lesbian, and genderqueer body: the first time I read Kiss of the Spider Woman, years ago, I wept so hard that I could not breathe. That had never happened to me with a book before, nor has it happened since. I’d had an experience that, at the time, I could not yet put into words.
We’re often told to keep our friends close and our enemies closer. Ball reminds us that sometimes we mistake one for the other, and that one of the most important parts of parenting is helping children discern the difference. In “The Pessimists,” a few subplots are left hanging, a few ideas undeveloped — but the novel’s bite and loose structure promise excellent social satire to come from its author.
But to some extent, colour also has a life beyond any individual perception. It exists as both the quality of a thing as well as an approach to that thing, or—as James Fox writes in his new book, The World According to Colour—“a dance between subjects and objects, mind and matter.”
In its beginning, earth was fractured, frail
with coveting, and could not wait for us—
so, flailing in the muscled clutch of grace,
we blessed this sullen place. As we were born
I’m not going to tell you what the hostess said to Emily Ratajkowski. Instead, I will tell you this: We are having lunch at a restaurant. We consult the restaurant’s menu, which boasts many items. Ratajkowski, a model who first became famous for appearing naked in a music video, orders something. I, who have never been in a music video but have been naked many times, also order something. We remark casually on the restaurant’s ambience, noting its proximity to various locations. I turn on my recorder. Each of us is wearing clothes.
We are here to talk about Ratajkowski’s new book, “My Body.” In it, she reflects on her fraught relationship with the huge number of photographs of her body that have come to define her life and career. The book’s marquee essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which describes how Ratajkowski ended up purchasing a print of her own Instagram post from the appropriation artist Richard Prince, was published to great notice in New York magazine last fall. Ratajkowski also wrote that the photographer Jonathan Leder sexually assaulted her in his home after a photo shoot when she was 20.
In March 2021 the American Historical Review included three video games in its review section, a first for the self-proclaimed “journal of record for the historical profession in the United States.” All three games selected for review are installments of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which takes as its central conceit a centuries-long struggle between two shadowy organizations: the Templars, who seek to control and manipulate humanity for their own ends, and the Assassins, who champion human freedom and creativity and are usually (though not always) cast as morally superior. Throughout the franchise players are tapped by one or both factions to hunt for powerful artifacts called Pieces of Eden, each of which was hidden or lost long ago. Finding these artifacts requires accessing the past by means of a fictional technology called the Animus, which generates lifelike, interactive virtual-reality worlds from ancient DNA samples taken from the remains of long-dead witnesses to the Pieces of Eden’s fates.
Despite the fantastic silliness of the in-game time-travel logistics, the promise of historical accuracy has been a major selling point of Assassin’s Creed since the eponymous first installment in 2007; since then Ubisoft, its publisher, reports having sold more than 155 million units of the franchise, which has grown to include a total of twelve main games (the most recent being 2020’s Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which takes place mostly in Viking-age England). “Assassin’s Creed is steeped in historical fact,” a video-game reviewer for IGN writes of the first game in the series, which is set primarily in the twelfth-century Holy Land. “Were it not for the ‘anomalies’ that flitter around characters”—part of the sci-fi wrapping—“you would have little reason to ever question that this is indeed what these cities and people looked like centuries ago.”
Though it receives less attention than the climate crisis, food security, energy consumption, demand for industrial commodities, biodiversity loss or ageing populations, urbanisation is implicated in all of these. It is among the exemplary phenomena of a wide-ranging crisis of intensification – the growing risk, you might say, that humanity will default on its carbon debt – whose scope we are just starting to appreciate. As we’ll see, perhaps more than any other component of the intensification crisis, urbanisation is tied to the question of what it means to lead a good life, not to say to the rubrics of value that govern our economic behaviour.
I gravitate toward crime fiction and domestic suspense novels because they’re embedded with instructions on how to navigate a life. I write about grief and trauma to gain insight into the psychology of people faced with what I fear most. Perhaps also in hopes I can learn how to protect my family and myself.
Set in a bookstore, narrated by a bookseller whose former life in prison was turned around when she discovered books and began to read “with murderous attention,” “The Sentence” testifies repeatedly to the power books possess to heal us and, yes, to change our lives. It may be that, as Tookie argues, “books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.” But that harsh judgment notwithstanding, there are books, like this one, that while they may not resolve the mysteries of the human heart, go a long way toward shedding light on our predicaments. In the case of “The Sentence,” that’s plenty.
The coronavirus pandemic is still raging away and God knows we’ll be reading novels about it for years, but Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence” may be the best one we ever get. Neither a grim rehashing of the lockdown nor an apocalyptic exaggeration of the virus, her book offers the kind of fresh reflection only time can facilitate, and yet it’s so current the ink feels wet.
The Sentence: It's such an unassuming title (and one that sounds like it belongs to a writing manual); but, Louise Erdrich's latest is a deceptively big novel, various in its storytelling styles; ambitious in its immediacy.
As in her novels, many of the stories in King’s first collection of short fiction, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” are preceded by loss and ignited by desire — the pursuit of which often hinges upon its articulation, the ability to find the “words for all that roiled inside you,” as the protagonist of the title story, a reticent used-book seller, puts it.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music is such a presence on the programs of local orchestras and Boston is such an old city that the thought of the great man walking through Back Bay is more plausible than not. Of course, in his fifty-six years, Beethoven never left Europe. But he could have – and that possibility forms the basis of Paul Griffiths’ touching, witty, and thought-provoking new novel, Mr. Beethoven.
In these depths, which often are close to deaths, any notion of happiness has ebbed or evaporated entirely; indeed, circumstances can be so desperate that there seems no way back to shore. What can help in such moments? Certainly not a texted smiley face. Mental-health professionals and their pills might also be inadequate. “They treat our suffering as an illness from which we need to recover,” Ignatieff writes. “Yet when suffering becomes understood as an illness with a cure, something is lost.” His book is an ambitious restoration project, a survey course of Eurocentric anguish from Job to the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
A year after publishing “Obit,” Chang is still writing about her grief. Now, however, she is speaking not only of loss but also to it: her new book, “Dear Memory”, is made up of letters—to the dead and the living, to family and friends, to teachers, and, ultimately, to the reader. She has given up the authority of the third person for the vulnerability of direct address. If “Obit” sought a container for loss, “Dear Memory” is a messier formal experiment, an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection.
A project that started out as a fairly straightforward travelogue has become something stranger and more interesting under the heightened pressure applied by the constraints of the pandemic.
Now that I too am
the terrible witness
to the ovum
But when I got an email a few weeks ago confirming I had qualified for an elite start I’d coveted in the New York City Marathon — with a time logged just before the pandemic — my excitement quickly turned to dread. This Sunday, I’ll probably run the slowest marathon of my life.
We can make good things happen over the course of 60 minutes. Or as the poet Mary Oliver might have more elegantly put it: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious hour?
One may read a sentence, write a sentence, be sentenced. The word’s meaning is informed by power: who wields it, who is subject to it. In Louise Erdrich’s dazzling sentence-soaked new novel "The Sentence", a woman named Tookie grapples with how the claims of the past – lineage, brutality, love – come to shape and illuminate the present.
Victoria Chang’s “Dear Memory” comprises words and illustrations that illuminate Chang’s path back into time. In a series of letters addressed to those who play a part in her memories, she explores with tenderness and compassion the ways that all of us construct our stories of what lies both in our family’s past and in our own lives.
K.M. Jackson's new How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days is a rollicking rom-com full of fun, complex characters, laugh-out-loud one-liners and the kind of delicious banter that keeps you smiling from page one to the very end.
Also, let's not forget that the main character is on a mission worthy of any Keanu Reeves fangirl or fanboy worldwide.
In his new book, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination, Philip Ball argues that “the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas.” These stories, which “everyone knows without having to go to that trouble” of reading them, have “seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood.” Modern myths — of which Ball identifies seven, starting with Robinson Crusoe and ending with Batman — are not, despite their origins in specific texts, so much singular narratives as “evolving web[s] of many stories — interweaving, interacting, contradicting each other” — but with one thing in common: “[A] rugged, elemental, irreducible kernel charged with the magical power of generating versions of the story.” This fecund capacity to produce new narratives is what allows these myths to do their “cultural work”: they “erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears and dreams.”
Maybe you are not
wake up yet. Today is another
As the name suggests, her pity parties allowed her to wallow in her feelings of sadness and frustration in peace with only her stuffed animals for company. “I would just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and just feel sad about things that happened and didn’t happen,” said Kelly. “Sometimes I would cry and then fall asleep, but then the next day was a new day.”
Those moments from her childhood in the 1980s stayed with Kelly and when it came time to write and illustrate her chapter book “Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey,” she knew she needed to include them in the story. A scene in which the young Marisol lets out her frustrations while alone in her room struck a chord with readers. “Whenever I give talks, there are always kids in the audience who are just nodding and saying ‘me too,’ ” she recalled.
To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses. Repetitions in particular rise instantly to the surface, and they give the translator particular pause when there is more than one way to translate a particular word. On the one hand, why not repeat a word the author has deliberately repeated? On the other hand, was the repetition deliberate? Regardless of the author’s intentions, the translator’s other ear, in the other language, opens the floodgates to other solutions.
I don’t remember getting married. It’s not that I was drunk or anything. I simply wasn’t there—I was sound asleep, 4,400 miles away. Thankfully, my groom’s sister was gracious enough to marry him for me.
In 2020, many couples discovered the charms of alternative ceremonies—the intimacy of a backyard wedding, the giddy conspiracy of elopement. It’s almost better with the excess and commercialism whittled away, they said on social media, the ceremony distilled down to its heart—two people in love, together. But what happens when the bride and the groom can’t be together for the wedding? Not even over Zoom?
What does hold everything together here, fittingly enough in a novel so much of which takes place in a bookstore, is the connection made through reading; and one of the great charms of "The Sentence" for an avid reader is the running commentary on books — recommendations, judgments, citations, even, at the end, a "Totally Biased List" of Tookie's favorites. As she tells us: "The door is open. Go!"
Travel writing seems to reward the young and agile. Have any of Paul Theroux’s recent books felt as ferociously urgent as his first? Later-life collections can find a once-intrepid (or at least tireless) scribe ready instead to ponder a bad knee or worse service at a restaurant, or generally to lament what once was or could have been.
Charles Hood, a Southern California writer now into his 60s, certainly has regrets. There’s his original decision to major in English long ago, a divorce of more recent vintage, choices he made as a father or teacher. But from these difficulties emerges the fascinating core insight of his new collection, “A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat”: that what appears to be ugly or awful can, with the right knowledge and context, be seen instead as unique, even gorgeous.
I am fascinated by the fact that reality is often so bizarre, so unlikely, or so ridiculous, that you can’t get away with portraying it in fiction. Because … it’s unrealistic! Nobody will believe it. The truth is—and I’ve had this conversation with other lawyers and recently, over drinks, with a psychiatrist I met at a party—the truth is that, when it comes to human behaviour, everything is realistic, everything’s been done or will be done. Apart from really convenient coincidences in the plot, nothing is unrealistic! And we know even those really happen. But I wouldn’t use them. Even though they’re real. But in the real world, nothing is so far-fetched, so over-the-top, that it has not happened or won’t happen—as we’ve learned from observing the political scene over the last, say, five years.
“Winter Recipes from the Collective,” Louise Glück’s first poetry collection since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2020, feels as much like an ending as it does a beginning. The poems are elegiac, brooding and death-obsessed, haunted by intimations of mortality, by ghosts facing backward with regret and forward with trepidation. It is an end-of-life book, where the life in question could be anyone’s: the poet’s, the reader’s, the planet’s.
Hannah Kent describes her new novel, Devotion, as “a gift to my younger, queer, closeted-as-hell self”. If only we all knew how to be so kind to our former selves, to salve old wounds with such grace and light. For Kent has written herself a love story: a death-defying, God-toppling love story.
The moments in Devotion that stick are simple and intimate: a cheek against a pale trunk; two girls side by side, “the entirety of the universe ending at the periphery of [their] curled limbs”. It is a love story, ardent and wholesome, and it drapes its reader in lush historical detail. Fans will find a lot to savour.
As the greatest-selling author of all time, in line behind only Shakespeare and the bible, Agatha Christie undoubtedly has a good deal to teach writers of mystery and suspense. But she never would have written a craft book—not about writing, which she considered a job, one at which she worked hard but put away gladly. Once drafts were turned in and contract obligations were met, Christie happily retreated from vocation, withdrawing to her beloved holiday home, Greenway, in an area known as the English Riviera.
Greenway is, in Christie’s words, a perfect house, a dream house. It is situated on more than 30 acres of lush, verdant land criss-crossed by paths down to a boathouse on the River Dart and back up to a hilltop from which one can see, on a clear day, the estuary all the way to Dartmouth and the English Channel. It must have been a glorious place to restore one’s nerves before going once more into the breach of another novel. A perfect retreat, a dream retreat.
Perhaps this sounds like an oxymoron. Science, after all, is about what is observable, quantifiable, testable, predictable, explicable — and dreams are none of these things. They happen inside someone else’s head, quite invisibly to observers, and can be accessed, at best, through blurry and fragmented bits of fast-fading memory. Their bizarre, arbitrary-seeming contents seem to defy all narrative logic (“I was in my grandmother’s dining room, except it looked like my middle school cafeteria, and then suddenly my old orthodontist and this character from a book I’m reading were there”). As Barrett worked her way through a Ph.D. in psychology, she learned that many experts in the field believed that dreams were fundamentally meaningless — that they had no evolutionary purpose of their own and were merely a side effect of random neural firings as the sleeping brain went about more important business. It was silly, the thinking went, to pay too much attention to the results of dozy neurons making odd little stories out of loose bits and pieces rattling about in our brains.
Barrett, however, never lost her conviction that dreams mattered. Her first book was an edited collection that took seriously the dreams of trauma survivors: “Dreams,” she wrote, “can give voice to the unspeakable and begin to restore the savaged.” A subsequent book, “The Committee of Sleep,” examined the role of dreams in creativity, noting that dreams were credited as the direct origin of, to name a few examples, Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” the character Stuart Little and the plot of “Frankenstein,” the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” the first ironclad battleship, the scientific breakthrough that earned researchers the 1936 Nobel Prize in Medicine and — though this one may be apocryphal — the structure of the periodic table. Stephen King, who struggled with the conclusion of “It” before dreaming the ending exactly as he published it, once explained that he uses dreams as a purposeful part of the creative process, “the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on.” Barrett was also drawn — like researchers who study the dreams that follow hurricanes and fires and wars — to large, collective events, things that lots of different people experienced and then dreamed about. One person’s dreams might seem idiosyncratic and incoherent, but when you looked at many people’s dreams, all affected by the same experience, you could find patterns. Within patterns, you might find meaning.
And yet the biggest source of tension here, I find, incredibly, isn’t race. It’s the tension between “here” and “there.” Most of the people who live here are uprooted beings: uprooted by old age, by their own health, by a nearby dictator’s overreach, by hunger, by climate change, by disaster, by heartbreak. I know all this, and still, I was surprised to realize, just a few months ago, while editing an anthology on Florida’s literature of uprootedness, that I, myself, am not home. Decades after landing here, I am still moved by what I left.
Long form or short, this is a writer who has mastered the art of conveying depths of human feeling in one beautiful sentence after another.
What makes “Sellout” so engrossing is that it profiles both the artists and the suits — the label heads and their A&R reps. Ozzi not only provides a rigorously researched look at how labels targeted bands and fought to sign them; he also amasses an impressive number of firsthand accounts of major-label talent scouts acting like major league sleazeballs.
It may seem like a self-help book, but it resonated with me because it felt like a conversation with a friend or older sibling. It wasn't prescriptive or formulaic — it's without any psychological frameworks or three-step plans — and instead felt vulnerable, accessible and personal.
Being called all manner of things
from the Dictionary of Shame —
not English, not words, not heard,
but worn, borne, carried, never spent —
King has, for better or worse, left an indelible mark on the culture, and continues to — even as it seems the culture has left him behind, or that he’s roamed even further from the horror genre he’s almost unilaterally celebrated for.
Even though I’ve been thinking about him and reading him for years, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, reading the 2003 foreword to The Drawing of the Three, the second book in his Dark Tower fantasy epic, that I think I finally got Stephen King.
Who among us hasn’t, in some sense, stolen a corpse and accidentally trafficked crack cocaine across state lines? That is a question you will ponder while reading Louise Erdrich’s “The Sentence,” a bewitching novel that begins with a crime that would seem to defy “relatability” but becomes a practical metaphor for whatever moral felonies lurk unresolved in your guilty heart.
How does a woman who has been viewed as an object her entire life reclaim herself as a subject? How can she finally “see” herself when she looks in the mirror, rather than the person the world thinks it knows her to be? Stephanie Gangi has some ideas in her second novel, “Carry the Dog.”
Throughout the collection, Wilson eschews clear motivations, leaving the actions of his characters open to broad interpretation. This ambiguous approach is another way Wilson infuses his work with a poetic sensibility. He has created a world that is unified by an aesthetic mood, as well as a few central themes, more than by shared geography or characters. The stories are rooted in the notion that the inevitability of death is the only thing we can be sure of, and that no matter how far we may go to outrun our mortality, there is no escaping the eventual end.
But if Damasio’s account of consciousness is not an unqualified success, that merely puts him in the company of all the other distinguished scientists and philosophers who have tried to crack this conundrum. And happily, “Feeling & Knowing” has supplementary virtues that make it well worth reading.
It was just luck: orange groves,
those two olive orchards, the way
The popularity of penny dreadfuls had another side: They helped to promote literacy, especially among younger readers, at a time when, for many children, formal education was nonexistent or, well, Dickensian. The proliferation of such cheap reading material created “an incentive to require literacy,” says professor Jonathan Rose, author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. People were invested in the stories of Jack Harkaway and Sweeney Todd, and there was only one good way to keep up—learn to read.
The muted colors, large glass windows, and overall boxy appearance of a modern McDonald’s are forgettable, and a far cry from the garish red-and-yellow buildings that many recall from their childhood. Slowly but surely, fast food restaurants are giving up their once brand-defining facades to follow in the path of “fast casual” eateries like Chipotle, which have become much more popular over the years.
While this standardization might make good business sense for a style of dining that is sometimes seen as out of fashion or simply outmoded, some in the industry wonder if the company has lost something in the process of turning its back on its McDonaldland origins. As enthusiasts like Max Krieger attest, characters such as Ronald McDonald and Grimace might seem dated now, but they at least provided an identity for the brand that was original and appealing — even if only to its target audience of children and parents.
Not long after 9/11, Don DeLillo wrote: “Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it.” To write now is to write in the wake of 2020, whether one engages it or not. Some readers may want to escape the present, but there are those of us who want to see a writer find the language for what is unfolding, to give us the slanted, intimate clarity that can’t be achieved in other ways. After months of epidemiology Twitter, after the reportage about the dying and the dead, I turned to writers: Zadie Smith’s lyrical writing about the moral implications of the privileged stay-at-home class, Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious piece about getting Covid, and Lorrie Moore’s unstinting story “Face Time,” in which the description of isolation from a father as he died made me feel less isolated in my own grief. Gary Shteyngart brings his version of the above to his reflective, earthy, humane new novel, “Our Country Friends,” which is rife with the problem of privilege, the profoundly leveling experience of the virus, and an ever-present sense of absurdity and humor.
Over the course of her 50-year career, Ms. Roden, 85, has helped revolutionize the way the British cook and eat. She taught them how to blend cucumbers with yogurt and garlic into a creamy salad, how to simmer lentils with cumin to make a warming soup, and how to fold phyllo stuffed with cheese and herbs into flaky bite-size pastries.
As if that wasn’t legacy enough, she also helped shift the way writing about cuisine, particularly by women, was perceived.
There is something better than reading alone, I’ve discovered, and it’s reading side by side with friends who don’t judge you for wanting to hit “pause” on socialization and disappear into a book. In ninth grade, I struck up a tenuous friendship with two of the other kids who’d also come in from different middle schools. One, a rangy athletic type with a host of popular older siblings, quickly found her place in the upper echelons of the high-school caste system and promptly forgot me; the other, a quiet comedy nerd and fellow bookworm named Jazmine, is still my best friend to this day. Our history is long and complex, made up of old SNL clips and hastily chugged, illicitly obtained Smirnoff Ices and endless subway rides from the Bronx to Manhattan, but I knew we had reached a point of no return, friendship-wise, when we began to read together.
About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few. The two scholars came to see, however, that to inquire after the “origins” of inequality was to defer to one of two myths—roughly, Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s—based on a deeply ingrained and deeply misleading fantasy of the human career. The product of their extended collaboration, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go.
“I don’t know much about whales. I have never seen a whale in my life,” says Michael Bronstein. The Israeli computer scientist, teaching at Imperial College London, England, might not seem the ideal candidate for a project involving the communication of sperm whales. But his skills as an expert in machine learning could be key to an ambitious endeavor that officially started in March 2020: an interdisciplinary group of scientists wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the language of these marine mammals. If Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) succeeds, it would be the first time that we actually understand what animals are chatting about—and maybe we could even have a conversation with them.
On the eve of the Day of the Dead, Maria Santiago stood in the back of a moving pickup truck with her hair whipping through the air, heading toward the agave fields that her father had owned in this small town outside Oaxaca City.
She meandered through the plantation with her mother and brother-in-law, avoiding the prickly plants, to collect small yellow flowers for their altar.
These stories have a series of common themes: immigration, resilience and a second chance at starting something new with family.
Oliver Wang, a professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach who studies the ways in which food culture plays into Asian American lives, uses the word “intersection” when he talks about the phenomenon. “You have these American-raised children of immigrants who recognize the new landscape for food as a profession, and [you] bridge this to a more traditional form of filial piety,” he said.
Ms. Tomalin’s goal here is not a monumental biography of record. Instead, she focuses on the first half of Wells’s life, and limits her scope to the books he produced between 1895 and 1911—which she maintains represent his best work. She is certainly not the first to argue that Wells’s later work—with the exception of his autobiography and the enormously popular “Outline of History” (1920) and “A Short History of the World” (1922)—was not up to the caliber of his early efforts.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World is one of the more important books about climate change to have been written. Much of the literature to date feeds the appetite of readers who are already interested in the issue, but this book by Katharine Hayhoe, an internationally renowned climate scientist, could result in a massive expansion of interest in the subject.
Late afternoon slants, illuminates
the worn, white husk of hive and gleams
like an incubator bulb on the oval of an egg.