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.