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.