Rocks, cliff faces, quarries gouged in earth. Not much for most of us to look at, but for paleontologist Andrew Knoll, they are radiant with meaning, telling a story he says is far grander and stuffed with more plot twists than any Hollywood blockbuster.
That tale is Earth's history -- how the planet went from a rock covered in magma oceans buffeted by comets and meteors to a green and blue orb teeming with life. Between those inhospitable beginnings and now, continents formed and were torn apart, mountain ranges appeared and disappeared, ice caps spread and receded. These are the lost worlds that Knoll has explored and shed light on.
This is that other kind of beach read — not for casual consumption while stretched out on the warm sand, but to read and contemplate while you’re inside on a chilly day, remembering the beauties of the coast and the pull of the tides.
That the narrator and author of this Florida-set debut share a name is no coincidence. This is raw, semi-autobiographical fiction at its most painfully honest, which could only have been written from actual experience of a teenage descent into addiction, criminality and young offender institutions.
The conclusion seems inescapable: We may not be able to prove that we are in a simulation, but at the very least, it will be a possibility that we can’t rule out. But it could be more than that. Chalmers argues that if we’re in a simulation, there’d be no reason to think it’s the only simulation; in the same way that lots of different computers today are running Microsoft Excel, lots of different machines might be running an instance of the simulation. If that was the case, simulated worlds would vastly outnumber non-sim worlds — meaning that, just as a matter of statistics, it would be not just possible that our world is one of the many simulations but likely. As Chalmers puts it, “We are probably sims.”
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to reconsider cake. For most of my life, I’d thought of it exclusively as a celebratory confection: to be eaten—for dessert, usually—on the occasion of a birthday, an anniversary, or a wedding. Then, one summer in college, I spent a month in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, where I was enrolled in a conservation-biology course on the tiny, rural campus of an institute for ecological research. A staff of local women prepared and provided not only breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also two coffee breaks, midmorning and midafternoon. The indisputable star of the latter, café da tarde, was cake, cut into neat squares: bolo de fubá, made with cornmeal, coconut, condensed milk, on one day; dense chocolate frosted in buttercream another; vanilla sponge layered with strawberry jam and vanilla cream the next.
For weeks, I had a piece every afternoon. What at first felt unreasonably indulgent came to seem necessary: I was working up a fierce appetite tromping through the steamy forest and its interstitial patches of farmland, testing the pH levels of soil, running from cows, scanning treetops for monkeys and sloths. This cake was not dessert; this cake was sustenance. More important, it was a daily pleasure formally sanctioned, with no whiff of the guilt that I would have felt eating cake so regularly in my normal life.
If Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel, “Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?,” was to become a TV sitcom, it could run episode after episode, season after season, without losing steam on story material. Cheeky and entertaining, the novel, which spans just six months in the chaotic life of its British-Nigerian protagonist Yinka, packs in a whole lot of cross-cultural drama and social commentary with an easygoing, conversational style.
On their second date, he told her that, should they continue seeing each other, "[she] could still date and sleep with other people, even fall in love again. I don't want to restrict my partners' experiences."
This thrilled her, although knowing that he would also forgo monogamy eventually did not. Still, she was fascinated by and powerfully drawn to him, so she decided to give it a shot. Her first book, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy, documents what happened next, using extensive research, interviews with experts, and her own meticulous record-keeping to flesh out and interpret her personal experiences.
This book is thrilling: it leaves the reader scrambling for ground: Is every possible interpretation or nuance about archipelagoes contained here? The possibility enthrals. Within the compendium individual writers reveal their own sources so the effect is like a Russian doll of mysteries within mysteries. The editors are to be praised for uniting these threads into a rare and colourful garment.
Reid, who was born in Canada, has been the first lady of Iceland since 2016. She is 45 years old, married and has four young children. She would, and often does, say that she is privileged, and she shows that she understands this by structuring her book around interviews with other women, mostly in Iceland, who have set out to do what they wanted to do and have succeeded. Many of these “sprakkar” (an ancient Icelandic word meaning extraordinary or outstanding women), she explains, “fly under the radar, but their lived experiences nevertheless help portray a society that values the ambition of gender equality.”
Three toes fall over the line, severed at just the right place so the
foot does not bleed. The foot walks away and the toes become
Sometimes, our pain calls for something other than straightforward prose. Poems can offer new ways to understand our experiences—especially those that are confusing, distressing, or just hard to put our finger on. For poets like Natasha Trethewey, poetry is an “act of remembering”; she used it to process memories of her mother’s death and her stepfather’s abuse. For Carolyn Forché, it’s a means of witness, a way to mark injustice and convey its urgency to the world. And for Tracy K. Smith, poetry is a way to grapple with the long history of violence against Black Americans—it can even resurrect those erased from the record, if only on the page.
I see humor and beauty in many things, especially people. I’m a natural people person. I often say that I try to make extraordinary pictures out of ordinary, everyday people. I practice on my friends and associates almost all the time. Luckily for me I have access to plenty of people who don’t mind being photographed. Without them I wouldn’t be as happy as I am.
Writing, Schalansky theorizes, is not resurrection, “but it can enable everything to be experienced.” The best essays in Extinct manage this, bringing the ashtray and the tragedy of arsenic wallpaper and the strange floodlights of streets lit by moon towers not quite to life but into the realm of our imagined experience.
Jane Ridley, a professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham and the author of “George V: Never a Dull Moment,” a richly detailed and diverting new assessment of his life and reign, thinks that the “boring” label is unfair. She concedes that the king’s stiffness and cultivated sang-froid create barriers to understanding him. “The biographer,” she admits, “searches George’s writings in vain for an inner life.” But, Ridley continues, there was more going on beneath the gruff Saxe-Coburg exterior than met at first glance. Indeed, she calls him “one of the most successful monarchs in British history.”
Straight couples in denim and white Nikes
drink enough beer and then forget their keys.
Tan and Jordan conceived and edited “Anonymous Sex” while they were 9,000 miles apart — quarantined in New York City and Singapore, respectively. Tan explained that their approach was, in part, a way of prompting (or skirting) the modern question of cultural appropriation. “At a time when the literary and artistic world is debating who has the right to write which story, it was interesting to tell our authors, ‘You can write anything you want,’” Tan said. “So readers won’t experience each story through the narrow lens of ‘This was written by a female, trans, gay or cis male writer in India or Nebraska.’”
And then there were the practicalities. “I have zero worries about being seen as someone who writes about sex, but some of our authors shared that they were able to write more freely because their names were attached to the book, but not to their own stories,” Tan said.
Exposure. It makes me ill every time. Even if it is just a little newsletter that sixty people read. I thought it would get better as I grew older and published more things, but it has not. Walking naked into bookstores; walking naked into social media posts. Practicing some extreme yoga of radical vulnerability on the page.
But I have found my mentors over the years.
An unsettling truth that’s emerged over the course of our present pandemic is that while we are, in a sense, all in this together, so too are we each having our own and often wildly different experiences of the ongoing tragedy. Nagamatsu captures this weird balance of human collectivity and individuality.
On the broadcaster’s centenary, David Hendy’s lively new history is a reminder that the BBC’s present struggles—government rows, culture wars, foreign rivals and more—are modern manifestations of old problems. His account of the corporation also makes for an incisive history of Britain’s 20th century. Asa Briggs, who wrote the definitive, 4,000-page record of the BBC’s first 50 years, said that “to write the history of broadcasting…is in a sense to write the history of everything else”. The glowing screen of the BBC casts a revealing light on its audience.
When voice actor Heath Miller sits down in his boatshed-turned-home studio in Maine to record a new audiobook narration, he has already read the text through carefully at least once. To deliver his best performance, he takes notes on each character and any hints of how they should sound. Over the past two years, audiobook roles, like narrating popular fantasy series He Who Fights With Monsters, have become Miller’s main source of work. But in December he briefly turned online detective after he saw a tweet from UK sci-fi author Jon Richter disclosing that his latest audiobook had no need for the kind of artistry Miller offers: It was narrated by a synthetic voice.
I met Death in my early twenties. I had already lost loved ones before this time. A friend at school was taken by leukemia in a breathtaking six weeks one strange, hot summer. My grandfather, Eric, and my uncle, Tim, both died before their time.
But none of us truly meets Death until we are ready to understand what it means. My first meeting came while sitting in a recording studio with a Holocaust survivor called Hannah.1 Hannah had endured the death march from her home in Hungary when she was fifteen years old. In 1944, she and her family were transported by cattle truck to Auschwitz. Out of dozens of family members, only she and her brother came through the war alive.
To some, an origin story of humanity that’s rooted deeply in carnivory seems to point toward some long-lost masculine ideal that humans owe their very existence to their lust for blood and meat. In reality, the emerging evidence is a little more complex than that. Meat-eating may have evolved alongside a host of other behaviors that unleashed the power of our larger brains and set us down the path to complex language and societies. “Maybe meat made us human not just because we were eating it, but because of the social stuff we were doing around it,” says Merritt. “Rather than asking ‘did meat make us human?’ I would like to know how meat made us human.”
Should I go? Last summer I’d agreed to deliver the toast to Sherlock Holmes at the annual banquet of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York. But as Friday, Jan. 4, approached, the omicron variant was, as they say, raging. Still, I’d been boosted and everyone attending was required to present proof of vaccination. How, then, could I let the team down?
Happily, I didn’t get sick and tested negative after returning home. Perhaps it wasn’t happenstance that the Westin Hotel on East 42nd Street, where most Irregulars were staying, is directly across from the Pfizer World Headquarters. Signs on its building proclaimed, “Science Will Win.”
John Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House, is a fascinating hybrid of gothic horror, the true crime format, and something stranger. It’s keenly attuned to how people change, how we bring our pasts with us, how the spaces we enter shape us, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes violently. The novel is intensely (if circuitously) invested in the condition of narration—who is speaking, why are they speaking, what are they getting out of it? It’s a picture of someone refusing to tell a story they’re already committed to tell, that they’re complicit in and profiting from. While I expected bloody twists and turns, the kinds of twists and turns this novel threw at me were intoxicating.
Some readers familiar with the mystery genre will likely guess quite a few of the twists as they're signaled pretty early on, but the journey there is nevertheless fun—and, occasionally, squelchy and gruesome, in just the right amount for a gothic love story.
From depictions of casual misogyny to distressing scenes of public shaming, mistreatment and torture, the novel shows the terrifying social forces that strip vulnerable people of dignity and render them animal-like. It's a searing meditation on the meaning of dignity in a dehumanizing world.
A good book, play, or film can be absorbing, enabling our imaginations to engage and take flight, but rarely does it envelop us; there is still space for reflection and contemplation. By privileging immediacy and affect, immersion requires us to submit to our senses. But culture is not just a matter of feeling. It is also a way of knowing and understanding the world. The immersive precludes the discursive by collapsing the distance needed for critique.
Massimo Stiavelli heads the JWST Mission Office at the institute that allocates research time on the telescope. According to Stiavelli, “every area of science is covered” in the proposals his group has approved, from the search for potentially habitable exoplanets to studies of the earliest stars. Yet he is particularly hopeful that JWST could help settle one of the biggest controversies in modern astronomy: the dispute about the expansion rate of the universe.
“If you try to measure the current expansion rate, well, there’s a variety of techniques that people use, and they tend to get a certain number,” says Tommaso Treu, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And it turns out that those numbers don’t match.”
Still known colloquially as “the most beautiful suicide,” McHale makes a cameo appearance in Renée Branum’s stylish, shimmering debut, “Defenestrate,” along with Buster Keaton; the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal; and Juliane Koepcke, the teenager who survived a nearly two-mile plunge when her plane disintegrated over the Amazon rainforest in 1971. Branum breaks up her novel into fragments, some only a paragraph long, and each with its own subhead. There’s a diaphanous flow to her storytelling, full of light and air, with darker notes that play off our hard-wired terror of falling, or basophobia.
Gary Shteyngart’s contribution to the burgeoning genre of the lockdown novel is very, very Russian – in the best possible way. The premise is that a group of old friends are to spend a month in the country (well, several months) riding out New York’s pandemic in a little ad hoc colony in the Hudson valley. The cast is a collection of privileged, mournful “lishnii cheloveks” (as the “superfluous men” of 19th-century Russian literature were known) in late middle age, pottering and squabbling in rural exile, wondering what the world is coming to and regretting the past.
Oliver Roeder, a student of games and game theory, is deeply aware of the tension between what games are and what people project onto them; he even quotes that line from “Shibumi” to start the chapter on Go in his new book, “Seven Games.” His “group biography” of seven classic games — checkers, chess, Go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble and bridge — is in many ways an interrogation of these questions: Are games more than their rules and playing pieces? Are they metaphors for deeper truths of the human experience? Is chess “life in miniature,” as the former world champion Garry Kasparov once said? Or is it just a board game — Risk with more rules and a boring map?
Without an Arabic text to work from, contemporary translators often resist including these popular tales in their work. Seale and Horta take a different approach. For some time now, it’s been known that the French stories have an Arabic source, a man that Galland met in 1709. At the time, Galland had come out with seven volumes of his “Nights” translation, which were based largely on the Syrian manuscript. (A friend gave him the document in 1701.) The books sold terrifically well, and Galland’s publisher pestered him for more—but he had reached the end of his manuscript, and was at a loss for material. That spring, at a friend’s apartment, Galland was introduced to Hanna Diyab, a traveller from Aleppo who knew some “beautiful Arabic tales,” as Galland wrote in his diary. In the course of a month, Diyab told his stories and Galland scribbled them down. (Galland’s notes survive.) Diyab never indicated that these stories were part of the “Nights.” He never explained whether he’d heard them somewhere or whether he’d made them up.
A few weeks ago, my second book (and first novel) was released. Since my publisher is a small press and its publicity budget even smaller, most of the marketing work has been up to me.
I’m trying to get myself into self-glorification gear. But my cognitive clutch is stiff. As I compose emails to events coordinators at local bookstores politely but urgently exhorting them to sponsor a reading, I stall out. After all, there are dozens — make that hundreds — of novels that I know to be better than mine, books that will have a profound impact on readers’ understanding of the world, or at least of themselves.
I could see, of course, that the writing was brilliant, the mood evocative, but there was a coolness to Didion’s writing that was different to what I had imagined. The author of the sentence I had years ago latched onto was an ally, a friend. She understood the existential fear that nothing makes sense, but applauded the utopianism inherent in the effort to try to make sense of it anyway. The author of ‘The White Album’ was more circumspect in offering any intimations of hope. The sentence does something different, read alone, to what it does in the larger text of which it was originally a part.
I am not the only one for whom that sentence has particular meaning. It is one of Didion’s best known sentences, so much so that the 2006 complete volume of her collected essays was named after it.
Following the run-off to the lake is approaching place as dynamic. An alpine lake drains in a trickle to a creek. Follow the water uphill, and you find its source. Following a dashed line on a screen to a blue oval on that same screen and believing you’ll arrive at water is approaching place as static, a series of unchanging coordinates, imagining that place imitates map.
The most compelling reason for learning about infinite series (or so I tell my students) is that they’re stunning connectors. They reveal ties between different areas of mathematics, unexpected links between everything that came before. It’s only when you get to this part of calculus that the true structure of math — all of math — finally starts to emerge.
To play the game well you needn’t learn the definitions, of course, and success in the competitive game of Scrabble has nothing to do with one’s everyday working vocabulary. Its best players tend not to be poets or English professors but, rather, computer programmers, mathematicians, musicians, and the otherwise technically inclined. These are the sort of people who can easily retain coded information and quickly turn it into ordered meaning. A number of the world’s best English-language players come from Thailand and barely speak English. And recall that the world’s best English-language player won the French-language championship without speaking French.
A couple of chapters in, I had to admit I’d been wrong—at least about Darnielle. I still don’t care about the Mountain Goats (or indie rock bands in general, really). But reading Devil House, a strange, enthralling novel, precipitated a binge through Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester, books with an idiosyncratic flavor most unlike the usual run of literary fiction, even if they share some of its concerns. These novels are like fingers straining to keep hold of an object relentlessly slipping away. At times the anticipated loss is of something as universal as youth, or the relationship between parents and their children who are approaching adulthood and leaving home. In other, smaller, more concrete instances, Darnielle commemorates aspects of our pre-internet culture, a time when information was elusive and mystery was everywhere.
It’s an ingenious premise: Onyebuchi suburbanizes outer space and makes battered, almost uninhabitable provincial America the frontier. “Best thing that coulda happened to the planet was all the white folks left it,” thinks one of the men left behind. Except now the white folks are coming back.
“The Books of Jacob” is an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel. It’s sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. It treats everything it bumps into at both face value and ad absurdum. It’s Chaucerian in its brio.
“Notes on an Execution” is nuanced, ambitious and compelling. Perversely, some of the novel’s propulsive power comes from the very conventions it fails to abandon. The seduction of the serial killer narrative is difficult to shake, for reader and author alike. We keep watching, and we keep turning the pages. In our fascination, we’re all implicated.
What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence. And yet his book is also a form of dark tourism, with doom hovering over each edible miracle. That Saladino is able to simultaneously channel the euphoria of sipping pear cider that smells of “damp autumnal forest” or tasting an inky qizha cake in the West Bank while underscoring the precariousness of these foods makes for a book that is both disturbing and enchanting.
On February 15, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone, just for a laugh. I’d had a new phone for a few months, and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape, or hairstyle, I was, specifically and exclusively, interested in the gender-swap function. I fed in a mug-shot-style selfie and in return got something that didn’t displease me: a picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that had lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I had seldom allowed myself such a graphic self-depiction; over the years I had occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman but had always immediately destroyed the results. And yet I didn’t delete that cyber-image. Instead, over the next week or so I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12: snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see, laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl, from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman, I could now see, was a coherent phenomenon, consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.
There are moments in history that are so monumental that they cause the world to freeze on its axis, demanding the attention of all humankind and forever changing who we are.
July 16, 1969: Man walks on the moon, birthing conspiracy theorists who insist that man has definitely not walked on the moon. November 2, 2016: The Chicago Cubs win the World Series, alerting us all to the fact that the end is nigh. March 25, 2019: The internet is introduced to the "St. Louis Bagel," and within minutes the population of Twitter begins to violently collapse in on itself like a dying star.
Edmund White’s new metafictional novel, “A Previous Life,” takes place mostly in 2050, and his future is very much like our present. Covid seems to have passed. People continue to connect on Facebook. Museums and theaters still exist, at least in the form of a London revival of Matthew Lopez’s 2018 play “The Inheritance.” Academics — yes, there is still academia — research and write intellectual works, among them, it turns out, a biography of White himself, even if “scholars have worked more on Sedaris.”
If ever there was a moment to brush up on your knowledge of the immune system, this is that moment. (Okay, March-April 2020 may have been preferable, but you can still catch up.) And Immune is the perfect vehicle to help you do that. This book is phenomenal. It is engaging, it is informative, it is extremely clear and well-organized, it is helpful and illuminating and relevant and eye-opening and incredibly timely. And it is beautiful. Go get it and read it.
Corseting, girdling, foot-binding, liposuctioning, circumcising, Botoxing, bleaching, douching, vajazzling, plugging with jade eggs, burning at the stake, stoning in the square, sterilizing without consent — what doesn’t culture do with female bodies?
The subject could fill an encyclopedia; in Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies, historian Catherine McCormack narrows it down to women in art history and visual culture, from Old Masters to female artists, influencers, and celebrities. Identifying four historical tropes that have defined and constrained women in art and beyond (Venus, mothers, maidens and dead damsels, and monsters,) she brings insight and expertise to the subject. She writes,
Human judgments are eccentric. Many factors influence them and vary across individuals, times, situations. Some judgments are biased towards or against certain phenomena, showing predictable systematic deviation from desirable human behaviour, while some are unpredictable; they are noisy. In Noise, the authors highlight such crucial flaws of human judgment which they define as random/chaotic deviations from targeted behaviour that invite no causal explanation.
My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.
Years later, I suddenly think of you
scuttling through the walls of my cabin
in Flagstaff, where I’d come to escape.
In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, “The Source of Self-Regard,” was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain—page by page, line by line—that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With “Recitatif” she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”
Narratives of emotional attachment are central to our myths about our consumption of animal products, just as they are to our myths about marriage and the home. Feel-good stories told to children, and clung to by countless adults, imply that animals painlessly and instinctually bestow meat, milk, and eggs on farmers in return for care and protection, conjuring a semblance of a fair exchange. While there are no doubt farmers who care for and even love their animals, love is not an apolitical feeling, particularly when the one who is loved is a commodity. As political theorist Claire Jean Kim has poignantly observed, “With respect to animals, it is far too easy for us to confuse what feels good to us emotionally” — or, we might add, what benefits us economically — with honoring or acting in accordance with their “needs, desires, and interests.”
We have jetpacks and we do not care. An Australian named David Mayman has invented a functioning jetpack and has flown it all over the world – once in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty – yet few people know his name. His jetpacks can be bought but no one is clamouring for one. For decades, humans have said they want jetpacks, and for thousands of years we have said we want to fly, but do we really? Look up. The sky is empty.
But the tender heart of the book is literature — namely its capacity to save us, its utility even for the meanest meth head. One passage might double as an especially erudite BuzzFeed list for junkies: “Read Dante, read ‘Moby Dick’ while you’re high, get lost in the chapters that luxuriate on the different kinds of rope and how to tie knots. Read ‘Notes From Underground,’ Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ if you are withdrawing. ‘The Waves’ or Faulkner if you haven’t slept in a few days. Mostly, don’t go north of 1950. Stay away from the Beatniks — they don’t know what the f— they’re talking about. And memoirs are whiny.”
Books, Sanchez argues, are as powerful as any controlled substance — just time-released jolts of information — and in their own way are just as radically simple: “There’s two parts: the white part and the black part. Read the black part.”
“Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?” is more than a book about a woman looking for a man. It addresses themes such as female friendships, Black beauty standards and religion. This is not a romance novel, unless the journey to self-love qualifies.
Blame the comic book. Cheap and transportable, a trove of infantile fantasy and psychosexual Pop Art, often spiced with egregious stereotypes and nativist aggression, this humble medium was for a time the United States’ most ubiquitous cultural ambassador. Such is the thesis of Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, an engaging account of the ways in which comics variously served or confounded official interests.
A few years back, when I was teaching a class on art criticism in Salzburg, one of the participants said something that’s stayed with me: that art critics, as they get older, tend to use the first person more. On the one hand, I think that’s true – see this very column, or any of the earlier ones – and is something to do with confusing having your sketchy opinions published for years with them mattering much. For a useful corrective, a critic might pay attention to where they’re placed at the gallery dinner; enjoy getting to know the technicians. On the other hand, grizzled art writers starting every other sentence with ‘I’ are no longer the exception. If anything’s changed in art criticism within living memory, aside from the latter-day ‘crisis’ it seems continually able to stagger through, it’s that the first-person exhibition review has mainstreamed.
If you question the merchants of Chinatown, which amounts to about 24 blocks, many old-timers say an era has ended. Some blame the pandemic and cite rising xenophobia. Some blame Amazon for undermining their bricks-and-mortar livelihoods. Some blame the rising tourist appetite for experiences and Instagram fodder instead of conventional merchandise.
These problems have hobbled Chinatowns across North America, including Los Angeles and New York, and they take on a special resonance in San Francisco, home to this continent’s oldest Chinatown.
Bold and italics are the oils that grace my palette. Cut and paste the strings upon my lyre. Fonts, bullets, columns, indentations—these stubborn materials are no match for the alchemy with which I extract meaning and impose order. For I am proficient in Microsoft Word.
Joudah has an impeccable ear, and the poem is a song that rides on its internal rhymes and half-rhymes, assonance and consonance. He has a scientist’s mind, landing on the unusual coupling of “unified” with “nucleotides.” His ability to see the body for what it is — water, blood, food for worms, a mass of nucleotides, adding up to our fully functioning biosphere and microbiome, both clarifies and mystifies.
By exploring the spectrum of commitment — from doubts about one's career and cultural identity, as depicted in Wang's debut novel Chemistry, to a deep passion for one's calling that seems tantamount to faith in Joan is Okay — Weike Wang has shown us myriad ways to build a sense of home, myriad ways to feel okay in our skin.
But it just came bagged from an isle of maggots squirming
in beehives. As love, reckless, as some wind loves sound
The products speak words of magic. But who are they speaking to? Once, vibe, mood, and energy were watchwords of the counterculture. Among hippies, dropouts, and other assorted voyagers in psychedelia, they were part of a private shorthand for sensations strongly felt but not so easily explained. Today, this vocabulary has diffused beyond any niche group. Yuppies profess to feeling certain energies; New York Times writers divine vibes; venture capitalists do a booming business in moods, pouring money into astrology apps. The occult is for everyone, and so for no one in particular.
Gas stations were important. Gas companies issued their own credit cards, good only for that brand, so if we didn’t find a Standard Oil station, we had to spend our precious cash for gas. The companies issued free road maps showing the locations of their gas stations. They also provided restrooms, but cleanliness varied, so Mom carried paper seat liners and paper towels. Bruce was fairly cooperative about using the bathroom when we stopped, but he was only 3, and occasionally we had to pull over near rural undergrowth while Mom rushed him behind a tree, muttering about the idiot (Dad) who gave children canteens.
Drinking fountains were scarcer than restrooms and there was no bottled water, so Dad filled his own canteen and had bought small ones for Bruce and me. For those not pretending they were pioneers on the way west (Mom and Tom), Mom carried a collapsible folding cup.
Free Love is both a complex tale of personal awakening and a snapshot of a moment in time when the survivors of war were suddenly painted as relics by a new generation determined not to live under their dour and hesitant shadow.
If true crime is an addiction, “Devil House” is a novelist’s cure. It’s a multilayered, fictional story of some horrific murders, their victims and perpetrators, and the man who sets out to tell their tales.
To be a member of the human race is to undergo loss, anguish, bereavement, betrayal, failure, aloneness, and the fear of death, and Michael Ignatieff’s remarkable and moving new book, On Consolation, written out of the dark times of a world pandemic, tells some dramatic stories of the worst that can happen to human beings and the worst they can do to one another. But to be human is also to look for meaning, joy, and consolation.
A new biography of Lamb—the first comprehensive one in more than a century—charts a life that was colored by full-scale tragedy and suffused with routine torments. Yet “Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb” is no catalog of doom and gloom. Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, offsets the dark with more than enough light and shows that while misfortune affected Lamb’s character, the quality of his often remarkable creative output shone through.
it’s been raining all night
and I can’t sleep
half-remembering a poem
The surprise television hit Ted Lasso, about an American college football coach hired to manage a struggling Premier League football club, continues to earn critical accolades and inspire an ever-growing viewership. Even those with little interest in sports seem to be won over by the show’s themes of progressiveness and kindness, and perhaps the pandemic’s timing has facilitated a certain degree of its popularity. Yet there’s an underappreciated but fundamental quality that propels the show: a keen attention to the power of words. From the first time we see our eponymous hero, as he exits a plane’s toilet to return to his seat and a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, to the text-only dating app Bantr featured in Season 2, Ted Lasso pushes our understanding of what words are and what effects they have in our culture. The show is, in a word, literary.
When approaching a piece of literature, I frequently urge my students to do something rather intimate: “Try it on.” I then remind them that they’d never purchase clothes or shoes without first trying them on, and they then remind me that online shopping has turned my exhortation into something quaint and nostalgic. OK. But visualize those angled mirrors that still exist in clothing stores, whereby you see yourself not only in the front but also from the side and even in the back. You see your butt. (The mirror is indispensable: you can’t do this without it.) Books of literature are mirrors of this sort. They see “inside” their characters (we can’t), but they also see their characters in the round (also off-limits to our vision of ourselves and others).
And they often see into the “beyond,” a place where the individual can be lost or eclipsed. This can range from delivering an entire city rife with change, even alienation (as Baudelaire does for Paris and as Joyce does, in countless different modes, for Dublin in Ulysses), to imagined, fantasized voyages (such as the masochistic speculations of sexual betrayal generated by Proust’s jealous narrator or the Faulknerian one made, in Absalom, Absalom!, by two Harvard students in 1910 into a Confederate camp in 1864). Or the fictional voyages can be literal, such as the one on a raft on the Mississippi undertaken by a runaway white boy and an escaped black slave. Sometimes literature reprises actual historical documents, such as Melville’s narrative of the real sea captain Amasa Delano who encountered things on a Spanish slave ship that exploded his worldview entirely, while challenging ours.
Understanding emerging photographic possibilities is crucial to better inform the practices that will profoundly influence this evolving sense of self.
We will continue to cherish this expanded suite of image types in our physically, digitally, or cerebrally stored family albums.
The thing about creating an elaborate trap is knowing when to make it snap. The premise is easy enough, but how the author can bring it to closure another thing entirely. Although I like the puns and references and artfulness of it all, I wondered the whole way through about how it might achieve closure. It does, but to give away the elegance of the solution would be unforgiveable. The plot is resolved in a “never saw that coming but should have” way, but it is aesthetically beautiful and riddlesome in its finale.
Depending on how you measure it, the roots of John Darnielle’s third novel, “Devil House,” date back to 2004, the ’80s era of Satanic panic or the late 14th century.
Real validation wouldn’t come until around 2:30 that morning, after the first day of the tournament had come to an end and Davies had made the 15-minute drive from the Rio to his home, outside Las Vegas. There, in an office just in from the garage, he opened a computer program called PioSOLVER, one of a handful of artificial-intelligence-based tools that have, over the last several years, radically remade the way poker is played, especially at the highest levels of the game. Davies input all the details of the hand and then set the program to run. In moments, the solver generated an optimal strategy. Mostly, the program said, Davies had gotten it right. His bet on the turn, when the deuce of diamonds was dealt, should have been 80 percent of the pot instead of 50 percent, but the 1.7 million chip bluff on the river was the right play.
“That feels really good,” Davies said. “Even more than winning a huge pot. The real satisfying part is when you nail one like that.” Davies went to sleep that night knowing for certain that he played the hand within a few degrees of perfection.
Red fish are in demand as the new year looms; they’re the color of luck. Local TV anchors report ahi prices as breaking news. Restaurants and hotels typically get first pick, so Uncle Glenn orders his onaga a month ahead through a friend who owns a sushi bar. (An unexpected blessing of the 2020 pandemic lockdown was that home cooks suddenly had access to the islands’ best fish, with boats offering drive-through specials at the pier.) This is how it goes in Hawaii, little favors and shares, a jar of guava jam left at the front door, a sack of mangoes hanging on the knob.
In the hall of mirrors that is literary culture, Andrew Lipstein has now published “Last Resort,” a novel about a bad art friend. No one is accusing Lipstein of plagiarizing Kolker’s article — his novel was finished long before the Times piece appeared — but “Last Resort” offers an uncanny dramatization of the issues Kolker explored. Clearly, we live in an age sweaty with anxiety about authenticity.
Cowardly, avaricious, annoying, territorial, deceitful, opportunistic: There aren’t enough shady adjectives in the dictionary to describe the narrator of Andrew Lipstein’s “Last Resort.” What fun! One great thing about the well-drawn weasels of fiction is that you can always locate a bit of yourself in them.
“Every time the question of language surfaces,” the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “in one way or another a series of other problems are coming to the fore,” like “the enlargement of the governing class,” the “relationships between the governing groups and the national–popular mass” and the fight over “cultural hegemony.” Vindicating Gramsci, Rosemary Salomone’s “The Rise of English” explores the language wars being fought all over the world, revealing the political, economic and cultural stakes behind these wars, and showing that so far English is winning. It is a panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening book, with an arresting fact on nearly every page.
I’m writing this so I can tell you that what you’re thinking
about me is exactly what I’m thinking
about you.
I love books. Some might even say I’m obsessed with them. I have a modest collection of my own, but mostly I borrow from the library and collect ebook review copies. I run a book blog with about a dozen other reviewers, and I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I was a bookseller for ten years, then an English teacher and aspiring school librarian, and now an editor for a bookish website. I procrastinate by scrolling BookTok and any given conversation will lead back to the literary. My life is built on a foundation of books. But reading? Mm…I could take it or leave it.
The relatively recent creation of this bone suggests that counting is a late-blooming skill, not an inevitable result of intelligence. The brain inside your head is largely the same as the one inside the skull of the first Homo sapiens, and it seems that for most of our species’ history, this wise man did not bother with numbers at all.
Once we did get to grips with numbers, however, the advantage was clear. This is why you probably don’t even remember learning to count. Counting is such a valued skill in most human cultures that you would have started before you began to lay down permanent memories.
Some places are offering regional flavors, or creative takes on heritage dishes; others feature a tasting menu or an extensive wine list. They are meeting the tastes of a suburban population that, in part because of the pandemic, is not only growing but also diversifying. The stereotype of the suburbs as homogeneous, white-picket-fence communities is long outdated, and as people move there from cities, they are bringing their appetite for more sophisticated, varied menus.
As Vancouver officials scrambled to decide the fate of the nearly 200-foot, brick-red barge in the days and weeks that followed, passers-by gravitated to the surreal sight. Clusters of people stopped and marveled. They took selfies and went live on Facebook. Like many art installations, the barge in Canada’s third largest city piqued curiosity, sparked questions and drew comparisons.
Here is a character who is vulnerable but not entirely sympathetic, or trustworthy; a woman desperate for transformation, but also one who fears if she looks too hard at herself, she would be like “a bay stripped bare by the tides, all the scum and rocks…on hideous display.” It’s a mesmerizing portrayal, inviting understanding while flashing warnings not to get too close.
Isolated and fatigued by the pandemic over the last two years, existential questions have consumed many of our minds. What is the meaning of our lives? How should we be spending our time?
Poets are great at ruminating on these questions, and Bianca Stone is one of them.
Many of the poems in Air Raid perform acts of poetic reanimation, lending the letters of famine victims and forgotten authors the kind of verve and lushness that are Barskova’s signature. These poems cast a canny and often self-ironizing eye on her own endeavor: “Dead poets love me back,” she quips in “Mutabor.” And yet, their playfulness is undergirded with a sense of mission: to amplify the voices of those whom history has reduced to statistics. The feelings occasioned by this historical position are not simple, and Barskova’s writing does not avoid, but indeed revels in, their messiness.
Clementine Ford is a force to be reckoned with: a feminist provocateuse whose humour is almost as powerful as her integrity. Her third book, How We Love, is a collection of personal essays showing how a girl became a woman, and demonstrating the self-compassion we all need to show our younger selves.
I visit sites of historic knowledge. Trees layer
their ecological light onto my human form.
Unlike many other Disney classics, from “Cinderella” to “Frozen,” this fright fest is not based on a fairy tale. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten. The book rendered Salten famous; the movie, which altered and overshadowed its source material, rendered him virtually unknown. And it rendered the original “Bambi” obscure, too, even though it had previously been both widely acclaimed and passionately reviled. The English-language version, as translated in 1928 by the soon to be Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, was enormously popular, earning rave reviews and selling six hundred and fifty thousand copies in the dozen-plus years before the film came out. The original version, meanwhile, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, where it was regarded as a parable about the treatment of Jews in Europe.
Kelly Korreck is still thinking about the time her spacecraft flew into the sun, how one moment, the probe was rushing through a stormy current of fast-moving particles, and the next, it was plunging somewhere quieter, where the plasma rolled like ocean waves. No machine had ever crossed that mysterious boundary before. But Korreck and her team had dispatched a mission for that exact purpose, and their plan worked. For the first time in history, a spacecraft had entered the sun’s atmosphere.
“This is a totally cool place to go—well, I guess, hot place to go,” Korreck, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told me. “We’ve touched plasma and gas that actually belongs to the sun.”
We had been driving for four hours and had yet to see another soul. No people. No cars. Just eerie, lunar nothingness stretching south to the horizon. To the left, desert; to the right, ocean. A packed salt road sewed a tight seam between the two. Under an overcast sky, the three surfaces faded into a single indistinguishable gray-brown smear.
We were traveling along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, a region often referred to as the end of the Earth.
Ruth Miner, a young woman living in a brutal 17th-century New England, can’t seem to catch a break. She flees her hometown after allegations of witchcraft and becomes a stowaway on a ship with her childhood friend Owen Townsend as the first mate, but danger abounds amidst the other lecherous crew members. And this is one of her safer adventures in Leah Angstman’s debut novel, When Ruth disembarks in a new town and Owen can’t—or won’t—stay with her, she buys land, befriends a Pequot Indian, and learns to speak French—all punishable offenses for women in 1689 New England. When Owen returns for a visit and tells her he won’t return again for at least another year, Ruth, for her own safety and wellbeing, accepts a marriage proposal from another man—which becomes the catalyst for the rest of the dangerous situations she encounters throughout the novel.
The title of Rosemary Sullivan’s important new book, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” resounds far beyond its primary meaning. Sullivan is chronicling the investigation of a cold case, the unsolved mystery of who alerted authorities in the summer of 1944 to the hiding place of Frank, her family and four other Jewish people, above a pectin and spice warehouse in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, resulting in their arrest and deportation to concentration camps. Two official investigations, begun in 1947 and 1963, failed to reveal the identity of the informant; the matter has preoccupied multiple biographers since. Sullivan writes with absolute dedication and precision, bringing a previously obscure suspect to the fore.
You don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy this charming, fun memoir. But it will get you thinking about great meals and the people you share them with.
Oesch answered that he looks at such distant smudges every day. Sure, they’re part of the universe, he said. But consider the abstraction (thought I). A few exhausted photons of light from GNz-11 dropped on a photoelectric detector aboard a satellite orbiting Earth, produced a tiny electrical current that was translated into 0s and 1s, which were beamed to Earth in a radio wave. That information was then processed in data centers in New Mexico and Maryland and eventually landed on Professor Oesch’s computer screen in Geneva. These days, professional astronomers rarely look at the sky through the lens of a telescope. They sit at computer screens.
But not only astronomers. Many of us invest hours each day staring at the screens of our televisions and computers and smartphones. Seldom do we go outside on a clear night, away from the lights of the city, and gaze at the dark starry sky, or take walks in the woods unaccompanied by our digital devices. Most of the minutes and hours of each day we spend in temperature-controlled structures of wood, concrete, and steel. With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature. We live mediated lives. We have created a natureless world.
Relying on new geochemical techniques for analyzing ice core sediment to determine the dates of ancient volcanic activity down to the year or even season, the paper, published in Nature in 2015, showed that major eruptions worldwide caused precipitous, up-to-a-decade-long drops in global temperatures. Later research pegged those drops at as much as 13 degrees F.
What stunned Manning, an Egyptologist, was that the paper recalibrated earlier chronologies by seven to eight years, so that dates of the eruptions neatly coincided with the timing of well-documented political, social, and military upheavals over three centuries of ancient Egyptian history. The paper also correlated volcanic eruptions with major 6th century A.D. pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic turmoil in Europe, Asia, and Central America. The inescapable conclusion, the paper argued, was that volcanic soot—which cools the earth by shielding its surface from sunlight, adversely affecting growing seasons and causing crop failures — helped drive those crises.
Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public’s trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century.
"The Speckled Beauty" is a very Southern story — the devotion to mother, the wild dogs, the biscuits, the snakes, the red dirt and the ornery mules — but in a broader way it is universal, a story of loyalty, love and redemption.
There’s something undeniably gratifying about an elegantly crafted morality tale — and the business reporter Christopher Leonard has written a good one, even if you suspect that the full shape of it isn’t quite as smooth as he makes it out to be. “The Lords of Easy Money” is a fascinating and propulsive story about the Federal Reserve — yes, you read that right. Leonard, in the tradition of Michael Lewis, has taken an arcane subject, rife with the risk of incomprehensibility (or boredom), and built a riveting narrative in which the stakes couldn’t be any clearer.
For many months it’s been predicted, its arrival declared inevitable. The experts have been consulted, and the think pieces have urged us to prepare ourselves. You can sneer or avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but it won’t go away. No amount of cynicism will deter its spread. In March 2020, the New York Times told us it was only a matter of time, and now the wait is over: the first wave of pandemic fiction is upon us.
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” then-president Donald Trump tweeted just days into the first work-from-home mandates. It was a statement outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and the talking heads went wild. Saying the unsayable is not the job of political leaders; it is, however, the province of great fiction. There is a reason world-historical ruptures, like the one collectively experienced in the spring of 2020, tend to produce big, ambitious books. Already the pandemic has crept into some novels (Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends), but as a fact of the world rather than a moral and intellectual crisis to be reckoned with. The task of the great pandemic novel, if such a thing were to exist, might be to start metabolizing the unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 response: the ideas internalized, vocabularies assimilated, risks assumed, sacrifices made. That is the feat Hanya Yanagihara has attempted with To Paradise—a quick turnaround for a 720-page book, which is perhaps why it only decides to be the first great pandemic novel halfway through.
As newspapers were lamenting the labour frittered away on crossword puzzles, they also had cross words to say about another form of cryptic writing and time-consuming interpretation: modernist literature. With Nottingham Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the Aberdeen Press and Journal remarked, in a review published on November 8, 1926 about Gertrude Stein’s “The Fifteenth of November”: “Cross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff”.Stein’s story, glossed as “a portrait of T. S. Eliot”, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword’s clues: “In this case a description. Forward and back weekly. In this case absolutely a question in question. Furnished as meaning supplied.” Another humorous critic writing for the Daily Mirror on “Rhymes to Cure the Cold”, that is, on literature as medicine — Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs — disagrees with the toffee analogy: “Much more modern [medically] and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.”
The Riemann hypothesis and the subconvexity problem are important because prime numbers are the most fundamental — and most fundamentally mysterious — objects in mathematics. When you plot them on the number line, there appears to be no pattern to how they’re distributed. But in 1859 Riemann devised an object called the Riemann zeta function — a kind of infinite sum — which fueled a revolutionary approach that, if proved to work, would unlock the primes’ hidden structure.
“It proves a result that a few years ago would have been regarded as science fiction,” said Valentin Blomer of the University of Bonn.
At the start of Gunnhild Øyehaug's Present Tense Machine, a mother misreads the word trädgård — Norwegian for garden — as tärdgård, a nonsensical word, as her young daughter plays nearby. The mistake triggers the expulsion of the child from her life.
Thus the allegory of The Fall becomes a linguistic accident, rather than a hubristic quest for knowledge. From this irrevocable error, the mother's world is spliced into two parallel universes — rendering her invisible and forgotten to her daughter and vice-versa.
In Concrete, the recent novel by French Oulipian Anne Garréta, is an absurdist psychosexual satire about how a father’s dangerous mania for mixing concrete in the name of nonstop “muddernizing” — i.e., building, tinkering, fixing — embroils and threatens his wife and two daughters. Garréta’s novel is a charming tour de force of childhood adventure, positing fanciful tomboy spunk and punning humor as an antidote to deadening fixity and daddy fixations. Deftly balancing the literal and the imaginative, Emma Ramadan’s splendid translation from the French is funny, beguiling, and mysterious from first to last.
This is a book that doesn’t afford easy succor or any particular comfort at all. In Nakamura’s universe we are all damned, not by our sins so much (although those, as well) as by our ignorance. Who are we? What are we doing here? The answers to those questions are unavailable to us, but it doesn’t matter anyway. “Turn this page, and you may give up your life,” indeed.
“I don’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity,” says Meg in Snakebite, one of 10 short stories in 25-year-old British author Saba Sams’s exceptional debut collection. Sams joins the ranks of writers such as Megan Nolan and Frances Leviston with these acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future.
If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? My own impression is that much of what today passes for politically aroused art fails to transcend journalistic agitation. It does not linger in the mind and heart. It does not furnish the ballast associated with great literature and music, paintings and sculpture. That equation is traditional. It may also be indispensable.
On a Monday evening in the early fall, I arrived in Portland, Oregon, aboard the Coast Starlight, a notoriously late Amtrak train that operates between Los Angeles and Seattle. Sure enough, we were pulling into Portland’s Union Station four hours behind schedule, thanks to a faulty railroad track somewhere around Klamath Falls. This meant that what was supposed to be a 17-or-so-hour journey from Emeryville, California, just across the bay from my home in San Francisco, had turned into 21 hours in coach class. I’ve been traveling by train for the better part of 20 years, and I’ve become used to its flaws and have even grown to appreciate them.
Or maybe I’ll get lucky and butt my way into a fiery debate over whether or not it’s acceptable to skip your cousin’s kid’s third wedding. To quote the late, great Olympia Dukakis in her portrayal of Clairee Belcher in the seminal 1989 film Steel Magnolias: “You know what they say: if you don’t have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.”
“A Thousand Steps,” its title taken from one of the city’s famous beaches, is as powerful as a riptide in summer. And like those deceptively strong currents, Parker crafts this mystery slowly at first, until the cultural forces he’s laid bare threaten to inundate a family trying to stay afloat. In the process, “A Thousand Steps” reopens for our reconsideration the consequences of clashes between authority and freedom, order and chaos, that persist to this day — and the innocents that will always get caught in the tumult.
Free Love examines what happened when the late 1960s sexual revolution going on amongst the young artists and writers of London migrated to the suburbs. In particular, it uses the explosion of one family’s domestic setup to draw a fascinating portrait of a world of politics, manners, morals and the decline of empire in a period of rapid societal change.
In “Women in the Picture: What Culture Does With Female Bodies,” British art historian Catherine McCormack invites us to walk with her through some of the rooms where art reflects and shapes our deepest beliefs. Moving past familiar works, mainly European paintings at the National Gallery and the Tate Modern in London, she aims a feminist, intersectional gaze at women as subjects and makers.
From rocky soil it came
from next to nothing
stretched on the rack of its genome
How to explain this novel’s success? The critic Parul Sehgal recently suggested A Little Life as a prominent example of the “trauma plot” — fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative. Indeed, it’s easy to see Jude as a “vivified DSM entry” perfectly crafted to appeal to “a world infatuated with victimhood.” But Jude hates words like abuse and disabled and refuses to see a therapist for most of the novel, while Yanagihara has skeptically compared talk therapy to “scooping out your brain and placing it into someone else’s cupped palms to prod at.” (Jude’s sickest torturer turns out to be a psychiatrist.) More compelling about A Little Life — and vexing and disturbing — is the author’s omnipresence in the novel, not just as the “perverse intelligence” behind Jude’s trauma, in the words of another critic, but as the possessive presence keeping him, against all odds, alive. A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers.
Reading reviews of the book, I realized I wasn’t alone in my seemingly masochistic enjoyment of the book’s trauma. But there are also those who share my husband’s opinion, hating the book for what it put them through emotionally. I struggled to find an explanation for why I had loved this aspect of the novel, felt I understood it even, when so many others hadn’t felt the same. Then, one day, I found myself saying, “It’s like reading fanfiction! It’s supposed to be over the top!” Suddenly, the book and my dedication to it began to make sense.
It would be a mistake, however, to try neatly to divide the works of anyone into those that speak only to their time and those with a universal resonance. If we look carefully enough, what seems to concern only one parochial period of humanity’s story often says something more general about the human condition.
What does it mean to be free? Throughout her profound debut novel, “None but the Righteous,” Chantal James demonstrates how hard it is to shake myths compounded by a legacy of injustice. In this deceptively slim book, she considers the layers of spirituality and history tangled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of one young man whose life reverberates with the beauty and horror of the city he calls home.
SEVEN
Cramped room
with my sound-
asleep brothers,
I fantasize
filth—rivers
a convocation of desert eagles rises from your spleen,
each one carrying a stone—this one to mark the blood
leaving your body, your face now a milk white grotto,
& one from the basilica in your heart destroyed, in part,
So anyway, now that the question’s out there, what is the status of translation as poetic activity? Certainly it’s a form of “making,” and therefore poiesis if you want to go that route. Translation is poiesis of the target-language replica, and there is a poetics to it shared by court interpretation, medical, technical, and diplomatic translation, and literary translation considered as a fine art. And anything done wonderfully well can be called “poetry.”
“Mouth to Mouth” has overtones of a murder mystery, though it is more of a caper crossed with a moral parable told by an unreliable narrator. Whether it is about a murder is, well, up in the air. Perspective is everything, as Wilson demonstrates during a Zoom call from his home office in Brentwood, when he turns off his blurred background and reveals himself surrounded by mounds of tinsel and torn giftwrap — the detritus of holiday season.
There are two optimal strategic approaches to Wordle, depending on what’s more important to you: trying to get the answer within the allotted six guesses but not really trying to win any quicker than that, or trying to win with as few guesses as possible, which almost necessarily means a higher risk of sometimes losing completely. (If you take the third strategic approach—“just have a good time for three minutes, and maybe question your impulse to optimize everything in life”—you have our sincere congratulations.)
Not long after the end of World War I, American Sylvia Beach opened an English-language bookstore and lending library in Paris. “The Paris Bookseller,” Kerri Maher’s historical novel based on Beach’s remarkable life, imagines her impromptu speech to the war-weary crowd at the 1919 opening of Shakespeare and Company. “Here, a place of exchange between English and French thinking, we get to enjoy the spoils of peace: literature, friendship, conversation, debate,” Sylvia declares. “Long may we enjoy them and may they – instead of guns and grenades – become the weapons of new rebellions.”
But Lost & Found is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of Schulz's personal grief and love stories. It is that philosophical turning over of loss and discovery that makes this memoir extraordinary, for it unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life.
This is a book about fatigue (“and she wipes weary from her eyes/ still glued to the no-good/ glued to the high-definition glare/ of low-definition life”), about holding indefinitely at the limits of anxiety, acknowledging that the people you know best often drive you to your wits’ end, followed by the catharsis of seeing and hearing them anew, relearning to see and hear yourself through them.
Chan’s ideas are livid, but her prose is cool in temperature, and the effect is of an extended-release drug that doesn’t peak until long after you’ve swallowed it. One test of speculative fiction is whether or not it gives you nightmares, and when mine came — I knew they would — it was a full week after I’d finished this time bomb of a book. “This is a safe space, ladies,” a faceless captor was telling me in my sleep. Terrifying.
We used to understand this, I think. (“Who’s we?” the careful reader should always ask, following a sentence like that. But like most questions, it is one you could always ask yourself, quietly, while looking for answers elsewhere in the text. Reading!) But social media has tilted things so that books by contemporary authors—let alone essays—are no longer portable worlds that awaken when a reader enters and slumber when one leaves. Today, the author is not dead until the author is actually dead. In the meantime, every published piece of writing is treated as the beginning of a conversation—or worse, a workshop piece—by some readers, each of whom feels entitled to a bespoke response. What did you mean by that? Is this supposed to be funny? Did you even consider X? Why didn’t you do this thing the way I would have done it, instead? I’m writing an essay on your book for my high school class—do you have fifteen minutes for an interview about the key themes?
The 32-year-old graphic novelist imagined a world where the Aztec Empire still stands and a group of misfit comrades come to the rescue of the last dragon prince.
In Helm Greycastle, Barajas wanted to depict characters he never really saw in the The Lord of the Rings or the game Dungeons and Dragons, some of his favorites growing up.
On first viewing, it’s easy to perceive these interactions as a form of genuine companionship—an impression encouraged by lingering close-ups and swelling music. The apparent emotional connection between Foster and the octopus is precisely the aspect of the film that provoked such a strong response from audiences and critics. Upon further reflection, however, the true nature of their relationship becomes more ambiguous. Only one member of the pair speaks directly to the camera. Any conclusions about the octopus’s subjective experience are based entirely on interpretations of her often-enigmatic behavior. Maybe what looks to us like tenderness is mere curiosity or bemusement. Perhaps an ostensible embrace is actually a deflection. No doubt some people are extremely fond of octopuses, but can an octopus really be friends with a human?
I will never forgot when I first saw that iconic moment of American cinema: the Bennet sisters, et al., in a ballroom, pulling aside their skirts to yank swords from their garters in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I am not exaggerating to say that my heart fluttered, I leant forward in my seat, and the popcorn paused at my lips. For once, shit was about to get stabby and the ladies were leading the charge. I wish I could say I was twelve when I experienced this magnificent moment but I was in fact thirty and at the very start of what I hope my future literary biographer will refer to as my own stabby period.
In Bergen, Norway, lives Anna, a novelist who struggles with her latest project while parenting her teenage children and contemplating the origins of language. (The author bio on her books, all written under a pseudonym, reads only: “Hedda Solhaug is a text machine.”) Across town, her daughter Laura is expecting a child with her musician boyfriend. Laura worries about their hazardous, noisy flat, about her boyfriend’s fidelity, about her own faithfulness, given her attraction to an incarcerated student in the online literature class she’s teaching. She experiences “the disconcerting feeling that everything is double.”
No wonder, because Laura has been living in a parallel universe since being accidentally transported there by her mother’s misreading of a poem. Anna and Laura no longer remember each other because when Laura was a toddler, Anna misread the Swedish word trädgård (garden) as the nonsense word tärdgård. Her daughter was suddenly no longer riding her tricycle in Anna’s garden, but was transported, motherless, to a tärdgård in another world.
Yanagihara is back with a daunting new book titled “To Paradise.” The emotional impact of this novel is less visceral than “A Little Life,” but only because the author’s scope is now so vast and her dexterity so dazzling. Presented as a triptych of related novellas, “To Paradise” demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations.
“Small World” is ambitious, showing our interconnectedness across time, place and cultures. What happens on the day of potential tragedy is revealed slowly throughout the book. I wanted to know the conclusion to every character’s story line so much that I wasn’t too concerned with how Walter’s train went awry. The final pages, earnest and direct, chance the sentimental, which might be the riskiest move of all.
What happens when a bright, successful, well-adjusted adult loses her loving father to a peaceful death? Or, in the same period of time, falls in love with a similarly brilliant and well-adjusted partner? So much, Schulz insists. Enough to fill a book. Grief and love — and the profound transformations they put into motion — don’t belong only to the traumatized, tragic, marginalized or maligned. They are universal, indiscriminate in their ability to alter perspective, introduce awe or wonder. And so, they are of universal interest.
Attempts to bridge the two philosophies are liable to devolve into mere intellectual exercises, or else to peter out in the banal advice that therapy sessions ought to begin with a period of concentrating on the breath. (For anyone who’s ever paid out of pocket for a therapeutic “hour,” the idea of using valuable minutes that way may evoke strong feelings.) But in “The Zen of Therapy,” a warm, profound and cleareyed memoir of a year in his consulting room prior to the pandemic, the psychiatrist and author — and practicing Buddhist — Mark Epstein aims at something meatier. He seeks to uncover the fundamental wisdom both worldviews share, and to show, as a practical matter, how it might help us wriggle free from the places we get stuck on the road to fulfillment.
I’m writing this so I can tell you that what you’re thinking
about me is exactly what I’m thinking
about you.
Yanagihara is also a novelist with a large readership. Her 2015 book, “A Little Life,” begins as the story of the friendships among four recent college graduates, then cascades into an operatic, often appalling, chronicle of the abuse suffered by one of the protagonists. Like her magazine, the novel is proudly baroque. The critical reception to the book was very divided: it was called a “great gay novel” by one critic, and a “ghastly litany” by another. But it has sold more than a million and a half copies in English alone. It’s still easy to find readers talking online, with odd pleasure, about the emotional devastation that reading “A Little Life” brought upon them. TikTokers post videos of themselves crying after finishing the book.
Yanagihara is more confident talking about her magazine editing than about her novelistic abilities. She writes at night, for long stretches when the words are flowing. She completed her new novel, “To Paradise”—which stages three radically different narratives, set in three centuries, at the same town house in Washington Square—during the pandemic. Like “A Little Life,” it exceeds seven hundred pages. After she has hit on a plot and a structure she sticks to them, as if revising risks collapse. As she put it, “Once I’ve poured the concrete, I don’t rebuild the foundation.” Despite the extraordinary success of her fiction career, she regards it as a “slightly shameful” sideline. Indeed, she knows almost no other novelists, because she isn’t comfortable among them. She said, “I find that, whether from a sort of evil-eye avoidance superstition, or from not feeling that I quite have the right to call myself a writer—I don’t know what this is about, really, but I feel that writer is not something that I am, it is something that I do. And it’s something that I do in private.”
It had sunk in a matter of minutes. Wager did not consider the battle a victory but a devastating failure. As the flagship, the San José carried far more silver, gold, emeralds, and pearls than any of the merchant vessels. Wager’s prize had slipped his grasp, and its treasure now gilded the seabed at unknowable depths, along with the bodies of Casa Alegre and almost 600 of his men.
In the three centuries since, the San José has become a myth. Its legend is built upon gold, which does not oxidize. A gold coin will shine as brightly after 500 years on the ocean floor as the day it was minted. So too in the imagination.
"Here was a pattern of sleep unknown to the modern world," said Ekirch, a university distinguished professor in the department of history at Virginia Tech. Ekirch's subsequent book, "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past," unearthed more than 500 references to what's since been termed biphasic sleep. Ekirch has now found more than 2,000 references in a dozen languages and going back in time as far as ancient Greece. His 2004 book will be republished in April.
Is this trend simply a result of chance? Are contestants getting better at prepping — have they learned to game the game? Is this a case of improvement over time, much in the same way that top runners and swimmers are able to best the records set by their predecessors? Could the clues possibly be getting easier?
Liberation is at the heart of “Olga Dies Dreaming.” The story’s driving tension derives from questions of how to break free: from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from the traumatic burden of abandonment, from colonial oppression, from corrosive greed.
In Nigerian culture, "Wahala" means trouble. In Nikki May's sharply observed debut novel Wahala, trouble's name is Isobel, the new girl who shakes up the equilibrium in a tight group of Anglo-Nigerian friends.
The advice in the original, however, around open and non-judgemental communication about sex and sexual needs feels relevant to everyone. And Comfort acknowledges there are groups of people for whom other books are needed. Although his language around these issues is awkward under today's gaze, there is a broad acceptance of same-gender attractions (without citing any evidence Comfort happily claims everyone is bisexual) and aspects of gender fluidity.
Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book “Exercises in Style” famously demonstrated 99 different ways to tell the same story. One that did not make it in was the concept of recounting someone’s life through the pets that have loomed large in it — but Jennifer Finney Boylan’s “Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs” makes a resonant case that this approach might just work. It’s certainly effective here, with Boylan writing movingly about the dogs that she’s lived with from childhood through middle age.
“No one was a Nazi,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote about the end of World War II in Europe, mordantly recalling how all the Germans she met insisted they had hidden a Communist or were secretly half-Jewish. The photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White heard the phrase “We didn’t know!” with such “monotonous frequency” that it sounded “like a kind of national chant for Germany.”
In “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” the Berlin-based journalist Harald Jähner is similarly skeptical, describing how the majority of surviving Germans were so preoccupied with their own suffering that the dominant mood was one of self-pity. “They saw themselves as the victims,” he writes, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”
There is no page in this book, from the preface by Mary Heffernan of the OPW to the personal record of archivist Lucy Whiteside which does not offer entertainment, pleasure or, at the very least, information. And that includes the index.
His legacy as an intellectual is mixed, as is to be expected. Rosenberg provided a necessary counterbalance to both Communism and formalism but his contribution is not always easy to define. This biography does a good job at summarising Rosenberg the man and author and bringing to life his pivotal role in the American post-war intellectual scene.
Ultimately, her memoir is about what it is like not to have, nor even much to want, all the things that are supposed to make a woman complete. If it is wonderful to be free – to be the kind of unicorn that judges yourself, not according to the putrid benchmarks of a sexist society, but by your own standards – this doesn’t mean that it isn’t also, sometimes, painful.
Bibliotherapy is premised on the idea that books can be healing tools. It can occur in individual or group settings, though the main distinction is between clinical bibliotherapy, where texts, including fiction and nonfiction, are recommended by a clinical therapist, and nonclinical bibliotherapy, as practised by a facilitator such as a librarian. Though not a stand-alone clinical practice in Canada, clinical bibliotherapy is a method used by professionals who already have certification in counselling, therapy, and clinical therapy and want to help patients seeking an additional outlet. Nonclinical bibliotherapy can’t replace professional help for patients with mental illnesses; instead, it is often used in conjunction with other forms of clinical therapy.
Cheu, based in Sudbury, Ontario, first learned of bibliotherapy during his undergraduate degree, when he came across English professor Joseph Gold’s Read For Your Life, which outlines the benefits of bibliotherapy. In fact, the British-born Gold is widely credited with bringing bibliotherapy to Canada. Cheu began working under Gold during his master’s at the University of Waterloo and later wrote his PhD thesis on James Joyce and the art of Zen, applying principles of Buddhism to his analysis of the Irish writer’s works. He eventually became Gold’s assistant, joining him in sessions with clients in his private practice. Books, Cheu says, provide a safely cocooned space inside which people can unearth painful and sometimes repressed feelings.
The James Webb Space Telescope, also known as the JWST, finally launched on December 25 for its journey 930,000 miles from Earth. This is the next generation that will replace the famous Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has been capturing awesome photos for over 30 years, but it's time for something better. The JWST will be tasked with using its infrared sensors to explore some of the most distant and hard-to-see parts of the sky, helping with the search for exoplanets and with exploring the earliest days of the universe. So this seems like a good time to go over the most important scientific concepts that relate to space telescopes.
Settling in to review Phil Rosenzweig’s absorbing new book about a screenwriter and his movie, Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men, the first thing I did was download the film, long a favorite of mine, on Apple TV, for an umpteenth rewatch. Watching it this way had an ahistorical appropriateness, in part because Rose was first and always a television writer, and the movie was first produced in that medium in 1954 on the anthology series Studio One, but mainly because several aspects of its cinematic punch might just come off better on the small screen: the forcefulness, for instance, of director Sidney Lumet’s plentiful, crafty close-ups, and the dramatic claustrophobia of the jury room in which the whole movie, in effect, takes place.
But something else, entirely unpredictable, added irony and, in the long run, meaning to my having a fresh look: I happened to do so on the day of Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, at once deservedly infamous, at least in my bubble. If ever there were a movie to jolt you, assuming real-life events haven’t already done so, into a critical engagement with the pros and cons of our justice system, particularly as pertains to juries, it’s this movie, released to acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, albeit to disappointingly small audiences, in 1957.
Herons are bigger than egrets, though they have the same long legs.
My father said one with an eight-foot wingspan flew over his boat.
I would like to be shadowed by something that big. It would seem
Throughout history, philosophers, scientists, and theologians — Plato, Einstein, and St. Augustine, for instance — have written about the nature of time with insight and perception that far transcends any ability of mine to judge. What I do know is what my eyes and reason show me, that change happens constantly and that what was is, at some point, no more. The evidence of that process is, paradoxically, the utter stillness of a cemetery where change itself comes to die, people whose lives are now only moving images on a piece of film, or the reality of a moist green leaf that withers into a dried parchment-like object crackling beneath the feet of busy passers-by.
An arc of piping-hot tea streamed high above my head as the waiter poured the frothy concoction from one tin cup to another, increasing the distance with each pass. In an act that seemingly defied physics, he angled the stream further over my table and channelled the miniature waterfall flawlessly into my glass.
Looking up from the tableside spectacle across the smoky room, I noticed the other diners around me: a young Indian family returning from the temple across the street; a meeting of sleek-looking bankers hunched over spreadsheets; Muslim students wearing traditional songkok hats; and a few uniformed street cleaners taking a break from their morning work. It was as if a microcosm of Malaysia was summoned here, drawn by the allure of this bubbly drink.
As a Black girl, I was told that I had to be realistic, both in my plans for my life and the things that I created. Overwhelmed by such limitations, I allowed rationality to take over even my fantasies and dreams. I let my imagination be throttled not only by questions of how mermaids breathe and survive and transform, but, more importantly: why don’t they just sink all of the ships and flood the world that would put people in chains?
Natasha Bowen takes on these questions fearlessly in the captivating fantasy adventure novel Skin of the Sea, which brings together mermaids, African folklore, and the transatlantic slave trade.
LaserWriter II will likely be adored by readers of a certain age, the ones who enjoyed a visceral relationship to the buzzes and whirs that once emanated from their prehistoric home computing systems — reminders that laser printers and disk drives and modems were cyber cool, yes, but also still mechanical, actual machines with moving parts (unlike an iPhone). Eventually, such things pass beyond repair and just become junk, or curios for retro computing nerds and media archaeologists. But in the deep algorithms of the web, a kind of alchemy is possible. Google “laserwriter ii” now, and the first page of listings you’ll see is for the novel rather than the device. The vocation become object has become something else again: the old hardware, now useless landfill, has been reanimated as literature. The printer has become a text.
“The School for Good Mothers” has drawn comparisons to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but where Gilead’s extremely rigid social structure might seem horrifyingly unrecognizable, Chan’s setting is far too close for comfort. Parents accused by CPS of abuse or neglect already face uphill battles to get their children back, and poor parents and Black parents are disproportionately targeted for investigations. It’s easy to judge — and readers may be understandably disturbed by the behavior of some housed at the facility — but Chan’s debut shines a light on its mothers’ humanity, mistakes and all.
Hanya Yanagihara’s critically-acclaimed “A Little Life” was an intimate, close-up portrait of four men and their love, shame, and existential loneliness. Her new book, “To Paradise,” is a sprawling, yet similarly intimate epic that is also focused on love, shame, and existential loneliness. Other than these shared themes (and heft), the two books have little in common besides Yanagihara’s masterful, transfixing writing, and her ability to plumb the depths of her characters at their most despicable and at their most tender.
This ambitious novel tackles major American questions and answers them in an original, engrossing way. It has a major feel. But it is finally in such minor moments that Yanagihara shows greatness.
One True Loves is a fantastic tale full of shenanigans, escapades, and lighthearted banter, while also delving into deeper issues of race and the perception of the successful futures of young people of color.
Falling in love and losing a loved one are two of the most common human experiences. Though the two seem diametrically opposed, the arc of our humanity reveals ways in which we can find solace and gravity in both occurrences. Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker magazine staff writer Kathryn Schulz’s new book, “Lost & Found,” is a memoir framed simply around two remarkable life events: the death of her father and meeting the love of her life 18 months earlier.
After a year of hearing about the unstoppable rise of food delivery, I expected a truly wild and alien vision of the future to be presented at the Food On Demand conference in Las Vegas, a convergence of various food-service delivery, production, and mobile ordering companies — delivery robots bumping into my legs, self-driving vans filled with pizza freshly baked en route, maybe that noodle vendor from the Fifth Element hovering outside my hotel window. These conversations, after all, were happening within the halls of exxxcess: past the glass Chihuly blossoms hanging in the lobby of the Bellagio, past the extravagant autumnal display of mushroom and dragonfly sculptures towering overhead in the hotel’s conservatory and botanical gardens, past the all-Christmas store and the chocolate fountain in the bakery, away from the caviar bar and the casino and the wedding chapel and the tourists with foot-long daiquiris and the famous dancing fountain and the life.
In the windowless beige back rooms, a hundred men (it was vastly men) championed their data collection and organization apps. They asked seemingly easy questions: Why shouldn’t you be able to order not just food, but flowers, toiletries, and shoes? Why should geography determine what restaurants you can order from? Why should you ever have to leave the house? Andy Rebhun, SVP digital and marketing officer for El Pollo Loco, noted during the drone demo that “I really don’t feel like customers should have to travel to pick up their food.” And I sat, watching the drone video and dudes exchanging business cards while making small talk, thinking, oh fuck and is that it?
Perhaps it is raining, the river in winter roar, breaking from the spine of its straightened banks and stretching flood arms out across our paddocks. The river has been farmed for only a hundred years. I am almost a teenager. Inside our Wairarapa farmhouse my father shows me his copy of the Tao Te Ching from the 1970s. “Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. / Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better.” Outside the river rips up fence posts and wires. The next day my mother, at her most anarchic, will have us three kids out there rafting on tractor tire inner tubes. We rise and soar with the wild waters, which resemble nothing we could ever own.
It was a sign that she loved me that she baked something especially for me, but it was a misunderstanding: I didn’t like poppy seeds. I always wanted my brother’s cookies, but he never shared them, and I was too nice a kid to set my grandmother straight. Instead, I would try scraping the seeds off with my fingers, only to come up against grandma’s egg glaze — it cemented those seeds in place.
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it.
One of the editors who worked on my first book asked me to make it “more universal”—which, she quickly clarified, meant “hetero.” It was a book for the mainstream after all, a work about technology and how it changes our lives. There was no need, went the argument, to gay things up. Queer elements would ostracize straight readers, or worse, make them uncomfortable. This was 2013, and the discomfort of the majority was still seen as a death knell for mainstream authors.
We know them only from black-and-white photographs, taken at the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh at the very end of their lives. Blindfolds removed, they stare, squint, smirk, glance away from the camera’s glare, moments before they were ferried away to the killing fields outside the city. A small boy perched in a chair, mouth gaping in terror. An adolescent girl, prim and composed, eyebrows arched. A young mother clasping her infant, a tear visible along her cheek, eyes glistening with the foreknowledge of her fate, and her son’s.
They are among the ghosts that haunt Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, his gut-wrenching, beautifully crafted collection of linked stories about survivors of Pol Pot’s Rouge’s four-year genocide, which claimed nearly two million (and likely many more) men, women, and children deemed enemies of the Khmer Rouge.
Devotees of cozy mysteries, rejoice: Nita Prose's debut, The Maid, satisfies on every level — from place to plot to protagonist.
In a fancy urban hotel, a guest lies dead, and the main suspect is Molly Gray, a member of the cleaning staff whose devotion to her work is matched only by her love for her deceased grandmother.
Let the locked-room hijinks begin!
Each page of Sara Freeman’s debut novel holds a slim paragraph, two at most. And if there are two paragraphs on one page, then these are divided by the symbol of a crescent moon, so that at no point is any section of text close to touching another. At all moments, the writing in Tides has to contend with an expanse of vacant space. The experience of reading such a novel is like travelling through a series of expertly designed studio flats. You marvel at every interior you come to: a whole unto itself, not a foot wrong in the design. But then you turn the page and enter yet another four walls, the last beginning to fade from your mind. Only at the end are you able to conceive of all these paragraphs at once, imagine a whole tower block of crafted text.
John Richardson, who died in 2019, set the standard for modern artists’ biographies (and we are living through a golden age of the genre) with the first three volumes of his Pablo Picasso biography. The first volume was published in 1991.
The fourth and final volume, covering the 10 years after Adolf Hitler came to power and ceasing, unfortunately, three full decades before Picasso’s death in 1973, is a worthy follow-up to its predecessors. Completed in difficult circumstances — Richardson was in his 90s and going blind — it is only about half their length. But it is just as rich, just as astounding.
We started talking about the multiverse
before the twentieth century, a different way
of making sense, acknowledging
the changeability and indifference.
The very act of travel appears to throw up thorny questions about the suitability of the genre. Any long-haul flight, Atkins remarks, “can plausibly be described as an act of violence” due to the carbon implications. His contributors, unlike Buford’s (whose magazine cover featured a glamorous woman and a pilot with suitcases disembarking a plane), were “discouraged from flying” and the issue’s title — Should We Have Stayed At Home? — does not beat about the bush. The answer hanging in the air of “yes” might seem to “cancel” the whole literary genre.
Gonzo journalism was an attitude, an experiment, and a withering critique of hypocrisy and mendacity. It began as an accident, peaked with several works of startling power and originality, and eventually consumed its creator. By that time, however, Gonzo was shorthand for Hunter S. Thompson’s work, signature style, and the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the 20th century. Now, five decades after Rolling Stone published “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Gonzo journalism is due for a fresh review.
For months, Gonzalez had been brainstorming a plot engine that would drive her novel’s protagonist. “I’d written all these weird stories where she’s in different circumstances, but I didn’t have a larger vehicle for her,” she said in a Zoom interview.
She hopped off the train, walked into a Starbucks to ask for a pen and napkin, and scribbled a synopsis: “Robin Hood wedding planner robs from her clients, sends money to mother (revolutionary?) to fix house in Puerto Rico.”
I asked my girlfriend to marry me on Ash Wednesday. It was an accident—not the asking, the timing. The asking had been on my mind for the better part of two years. From almost the beginning of my relationship with C., I had known that I would someday propose to her, and, for almost as long, both of us had talked about the future in terms that made it perfectly clear we planned to share it. But unless your partner has spent years dropping hints about a Caribbean beach at sunset or you are in sudden need of a shotgun wedding, there’s no obvious moment to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with you, a fact that had become clear to me long before that particular Lent rolled around.
So many of us are thrown into friendships through sheer circumstance when we're children — proximity at school, parental friendships, a shared difference or minority identity — but as we grow older and begin to make our own choices about where we'll live, what we'll do with our time and who we'll spend it with, we lose touch. We drift, or we stop liking each other, or we get busy and forgetful.
The friendships that do survive feel precious, unlikely. One such is at the tender, beating heart of Jean Chen Ho's debut work of fiction, Fiona and Jane.
Through “Fiona and Jane,” Ho honors the hours put into a relationship, while also acknowledging the ways in which our lives are irreversibly changed by short-term engagements. The collection explores the dichotomy between deep and lengthy bonds, like Jane and Fiona’s, and fleeting encounters with lovers, fair-weather friends, colleagues, even parents.
Cities are, by their very nature, haunted places, Edinburgh perhaps more than most. A million lives, a million stories crisscross these streets, invisible psychogeographies built up in layers of memory and history ripe for excavation. In her new novel, “Luckenbooth,” Jenni Fagan traces the lives of nine “ootlins,” or outsiders: artists and dreamers, queers and mystics and vagabonds, criminals and cutups, winding upstairs and down in the doomed tenement block of the title. The result is a cabinet of curiosities that is both a love letter to the Scottish capital, and a knife to its throat.
The strength of this novel is not only as a puzzle to be unravelled by the astute reader but is a journey of discovery into some of the less pleasant aspects of those who are prepared to bend the law.
The sky was still dark that morning in October, 1961, when a Frenchwoman named Simone “Simca” Beck and her American friend Julia Child headed over to the NBC studio sets in Midtown Manhattan, ready to make their television debut. They were to conduct a cooking demonstration for the Today show to promote Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), the 732-page tome both women had co-authored with the writer Louisette Bertholle. It had been released a few days before in America by the publishing house Knopf to rapturous reviews. Sales, though, could’ve been better. Appearing on Today, which pulled in around four million viewers a day back then, certainly couldn’t hurt.
Though the book had three authors, Bertholle’s involvement became minimal as the book neared publication, which is to say it was really a two-hander between Beck and Child. And it was Beck, in particular, who contributed the majority of the recipes to early versions of the book, many of them family heirlooms from her upbringing in Normandy. Child, meanwhile, gave the text its American soul, making the recipes legible to readers in the United States.
This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood — novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America.
The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the prize — Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin.
“Fiona and Jane” is a refreshingly honest treatment of long-term friendships — particularly their inexorable ebb and flow. Story by story, the book captures the way friendships negotiate their own boundaries, at times dissolving unexpectedly and at others flourishing into something more, even if just fleetingly.
While Ho admits her adult friendships flavor the book, she is hesitant to draw any direct parallels. She did say she felt compelled to write about friendship between Asian American women, partly as the result of her own upbringing in a predominantly Asian L.A. suburb — the kind of place that complicates simplistic media definitions of diversity as “an element of difference to the white majority.”
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. Space will expand ever outwards until even that dim light becomes too spread out to interact. Activity will cease.
Or will it? Strangely enough, some cosmologists believe a previous, cold dark empty universe like the one which lies in our far future could have been the source of our very own Big Bang.
I’d say Mr. Matsuki knows too much about the fish, but it’s not actually possible to know too much about a fish when your job is to prepare it for sushi. On a wee cushion of rice, shaped as it tumbled gently through his hands, seasoned with a dark, grain-staining vinegar, the fish is sweet and sumptuous, unreasonably delicate, verging on fragile, a marvel of a bite.
Recent meals at Ginza Onodera, and at so many other counters across the city, affirmed that despite the continuing effects of the pandemic, Los Angeles remains this country’s glorious sushi capital. It has one of the most robust sushi scenes outside of Japan, with a thrilling diversity of styles for every taste, budget and neighborhood.
You might dismiss the World’s Best Rice as a marketing stunt; Toyo Rice only produces a few hundred boxes a year. But the concept that a person’s palate can be trusted to rate and rank batches of plain white rice, like single-origin coffee or grower Champagne, has a mainstream following in Japan. National newspapers, lifestyle magazines, food websites, radio shows, daytime TV programs—there’s no shortage of printed pages and broadcast airtime filled with in-depth commentary from “rice sommeliers” about what types are better for a light breakfast of fermented soybeans and seaweed or as fried rice for dinner. In addition, shopkeepers certified as “five-star rice meisters” demonstrate their expertise with their special in-house blends and taste charts.
How do we bring children up in today’s increasingly dangerous and divided world? Will they rise? Or will they fall? With the recent rash of articles about the fragility of adolescent mental health and America’s uptick in teenage suicide rates, these questions are urgent. In his sixth novel, “Anthem,” Noah Hawley taps into our existential anxiety — and transforms it into a hefty page-turner that’s equal parts horrific, catastrophic and, at times, strangely entertaining.
Coming a century after the Swedish actress' film debut, Robert Gottlieb's biography of Greta Garbo is a classic movie lover's dream. Enriching his insightful reconsideration of Garbo's life and career are wonderful photos, a selection of essays from the past, and anecdotes from those who encountered the enigmatic star.
A book is inherently something that is viewed; a memoir is one more way of being stared at. It is not unusual when reading a memoir or autobiography to feel like a voyeur, and this is perhaps particularly true when the subject is part of a marginalized group in which the reader is not included. I struggled reading a book like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, because of the private intimacy of certain moments, such as Strayed consuming her mother’s ashes — but I felt guilty reading Lehrer’s and Grue’s memoirs, as if I was somehow perpetrating yet more crimes against their privacy, even though I had been invited to do so by the authors. Maybe that is part of the point, of course: to force the reader into inhabiting the gaze. However, at the end of each book, I felt buoyed by the writers’ ability to demand that disabled people be viewed as individuals, each in the particular way they chose to be portrayed.
Math is often described this way, as a language or a tool that humans created to describe the world around them, with precision.
But there's another school of thought which suggests math is actually what the world is made of; that nature follows the same simple rules, time and time again, because mathematics underpins the fundamental laws of the physical world.
It’s perhaps asking too much for social scientists to invalidate half a century’s worth of demographic assessment of the baby boomers. But what about “Generation Z,” a term that’s so far struggled to establish any meaningful difference between millennials and zoomers? Are we really, simply stuck with these terms? What do we lose in rejecting “zoomer”? We stand to gain a far more accurate and sensible comprehension of our culture, and ourselves.
Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives. One takes place in a dystopian near-future Melbourne, where Lyle, an immigrant father of two, is employed by the state to write sinister-sounding “evaluations” nominating fellow migrants for arrest and repatriation; the other half of the book is set in 1981 and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian working as a teaching assistant in France, prior to postgraduate literary study in Oxford. It’s typical of De Kretser’s sophistication that she leaves the link between these narratives entirely up to you – even the order in which they are to be read is left to the individual reader, given the book’s reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design.
In Drunk, a witty and erudite homage to alcohol, Slingerland offers a novel explanation to an old evolutionary puzzle: Why do we keep drinking? “Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk,” he writes. “The rarity of this behavior is not surprising, given its costs.” The downsides of alcohol have always been obvious: impaired motor skills, wretched decision-making, excruciating headaches, and assorted long-term damage to body and soul. Logically, a society of teetotalers ought to be so much more productive that it would long ago have conquered its drunken neighbors and eventually the rest of the planet. Yet from the ancient world until today, from the wine sipped at Greek philosophers’ symposia to the champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, the richest and most dynamic societies have given alcohol a central role in their cultures.
It is clear that his lifetime of proximity to works by great masters has made him a well informed afficionado, and one gets a sense of what he likes and doesn’t like. One also gets the sense it is his love of art that has driven him to write this work that makes modern art understandable and accessible to the rest of us. This easily readable, engaging book is a good way to get familiar with the foundations of modern art.
You just can’t expect kids to sit down and open a volume of the encyclopedia like we did back in the day. Many have probably never even seen one.
“Media and information comes so quickly on the internet, and they are texting all the time,” Steinberg said. “They are used to getting things in compact, quick ways.”
Tech-addled adults are not immune to the curse of the shortened attention span. Unless I am deeply engaged in a subject, I no longer have the patience for those overly long New Yorker stories. That teetering pile of unread books on my nightstand could kill me in an earthquake. How did it get so tall? Because I used to read novels until I got sleepy. Now I snuggle with my iPhone.
In a national park a four-hour drive north of Sydney in Australia, a fire is smoldering out of control – and it's been doing so for at least 6,000 years.
Known as 'Burning Mountain', the mysterious underground blaze is the oldest known fire on the planet. And some scientists estimate it may be far more ancient than we currently think.
As readers of Ernest Hemingway know, war can be a powerful aphrodisiac. In her book Love in a Time of War: My Years With Robert Fisk, the French American foreign correspondent Lara Marlowe tells the autobiographical story of two reporters and their intense and stormy love affair against the rough and dangerous background of war.
Their love story spans decades, skipping across the Middle East and Balkans while the two report, argue, and love—in short, live life to the fullest. They drink, write, and interview war lords against a backdrop of front-line battles—when they aren’t taking a break in Paris or Dublin. The couple were part of a journalistic tribe then called “firemen,” reporters sent at a moment’s notice by their media organizations to cover a hot spot. In a sense, the book is two things in one: a memoir of Marlowe’s journalistic career and a poignant tribute to a man she loved and revered.
I am not enjoying the pandemic, but I did enjoy Finch's articulate take on life in the midst of it. Missing his friends and mourning the world as he knew it, Finch's account has a unifying effect in the same way that good literature affirms humanity by capturing a moment in time. As Finch chronicles his routines honestly and without benefit of hindsight, we recall our own. Events of the past year and a half were stupefying and horrific — but we suffered them together.
Gavin Francis has written excellent books on the specifics of the human body – Adventures In Human Being, for example – and recently on the pandemic with Intensive Care. This new book could not be more timely, as it deals with the other side of illness. It is brief, useful and written with his customary blend of case study and literary precedent. As he states at the outset, “The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need”.
Like Samuel Johnson (good for 110 quotes here), who chose only the “best writers” to provide his dictionary’s usage examples, such were the foundations of these long-established tomes. You were on predictable, solid (but also stolid) ground with each. The workhorses did their job, growing ever-more tattered, ever less contemporary, but no matter. They gave and you were happy to receive.
Before prising keel worms off the backs of mussels,
we have to tap them with a knife, when good sense, fear,
In 1967, a woman was admitted to Baltimore City Hospital, complaining about shortness of breath, chest pains, nausea, and dizziness. She was 22-years-old. She hadn't had health problems until just over a month earlier. Now she was extremely anxious, hyperventilating, sweating and nearly fainting.
After two weeks, she finally confided to the doctor what she believed was wrong with her. By then, she only had a few days to solve it. As it happened, the woman had been born on Friday the 13th in Florida's Okefenokee Swamp. The midwife who'd delivered her had also delivered two other children that day. She told the girls' parents that all three children had been hexed. The first girl would die before her sixteenth birthday. The second would die before her twenty-first. The third—the woman in this hospital—would die before she turned twenty-three.
The problem science journalists face is that this process is fundamentally at odds with how news coverage works, and that this can be confusing to readers. In most areas—politics, international relations, business, sports—the newest thing journalists report is almost always the most definitive. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Mississippi’s challenge to Roe v. Wade; pitcher Max Scherzer signed a three-year, $130-million contract with the Mets; Facebook rebranded its parent company as “Meta.” All of these are indisputably true. And when the court issues its ruling next year, or if Scherzer is injured and can’t play; or if Facebook re-rebrands itself, that won’t make these stories incorrect; they’ll just be out-of-date.
But in scientific research, the newest thing is often the least definitive—we have seen this over and over with COVID—with science reported, then revised, as more information comes in.
When was the last time you swore? Like, really let go. Released a flock of choice words out into the ether and into the ears of passers-by who were busy minding their own business, cycling to the shops to get a newspaper and a packet of rich tea biscuits, until they found themselves lying discombobulated in a privet hedge having been submitted to your filthy, potty-mouthed ranting?
Well, never mind them, that’s their look out. You, on the other hand, can rejoice. Because there is now enough evidence to prove, beyond all f***ing doubt, that swearing is good for you.
“The Latinist” is ingenious in its sinister simplicity. In the opening pages of Mark Prins’s novel, Tessa Templeton, a Ph.D. candidate in classics at Oxford, discovers that her mentor has written a recommendation letter that damns her with faint praise, torpedoing her chances of securing an academic job. His motive? Obsession. Professor Christopher Eccles wants to keep Tessa close to him, toiling as an adjunct. He’s the ultimate “Professor of Desire.”