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.