You could say that Dickens lived like one of his own characters—always on, the Energizer Bunny of empathy and enjoyment. Good enough was never good enough. Wherever he was or whatever he was doing, life was histrionic, either a birthday party or a funeral. And, when you read the recollections of his contemporaries and the responses to his books from nineteenth-century readers, you can’t doubt his charisma or the impact his writing had. The twenty-four-year-old Henry James met Dickens in 1867, during Dickens’s second trip to America, and he remembered “how tremendously it had been laid upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles of our shoes.”
But even the Bunny sooner or later runs out of room, hits a wall, or tumbles off the edge of the table, and Dickens had his crisis. It was in the cards.
You can copyright a character, if it’s yours; you cannot copyright the love of a character, and why should you want to?
“Anyway, a proper pandemic might be quite good for the environment,” says a character in Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth. “Depopulation from the plague did wonders for medieval fauna and flora.” More than a decade later, The Fell—which was published in the UK in 2021—explores that “proper pandemic” scenario through the lives of five characters in central England’s Peak District during a COVID-19 lockdown.
These two works bookend the author’s oeuvre, embracing themes that resurface throughout both fiction and non-fiction: death and survival, fractured and functioning systems, homes and stopping-places, community and isolation, and history and narrative. These themes’ consistent appearance in her work magnifies the tangible links across and between narratives.
Amy Liptrot’s first book, The Outrun, chronicled her retreat from London and alcoholism to the islands around Orkney, where she had grown up on a cliffside farm. The book became a prizewinning bestseller, and her new essayistic memoir, The Instant, picks up where it left off, finding Liptrot in her mid-30s, sober, strong and single.
Intentionally or not, “I Was Better Last Night” is very quilt-like. Fierstein shares his life less in conventional chapters than in colorful patches: 59 of them, stitched together with photos and a plush index. The sum of this is warm and enveloping and indeed two-sided: One is a raw, cobwebby tale of anger, hurt, indignation and pain; flip it over and you get billowing ribbons of humor, gossip and fabulous, hot-pink success.
The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept.
On Jan. 26, 2020, Amy Bloom and her husband, Brian Ameche, boarded a flight from New York to Zurich. They hadn’t called on their usual driver to transport them from their home in Connecticut to John F. Kennedy Airport; they didn’t want to make small talk about their itinerary. Usually they flew coach, but this time they were in business class.
“In our Swissair pods, Brian and I toast each other, and we say, ‘Here’s to you,’ a little hesitantly, instead of what we usually say, ‘Cent’anni’ (‘May we have a hundred years,’ a very Italian toast),” Bloom writes in her 10th book and first memoir, “In Love,” which Random House will publish on March 8. “There is no ‘Cent’anni’ for us; we won’t make it to our 13th wedding anniversary.”
Dr. Parry, the author of “Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual,” traced the tradition back to at least the 18th century, when it was largely practiced by marginalized populations in Europe, he said, “such as traveling communities like the British Romani, rural Welsh communities, Irish individuals and various other people who lived on the margins of the British Isles.”
As Europeans who had jumped over brooms at their weddings came to the United States, so too did the ritual. It was soon adopted by another marginalized population: enslaved people in the American South. “While broomsticks were used in some West African ceremonies,” Dr. Parry said the earliest documented examples of people of African descent jumping over a broom in the U.S. are from the 1800s.
Some of the most enduring images from the Los Angeles riots are the photos of armed Korean shopkeepers patrolling the rooftops of liquor stores and laundromats to deter rioters.
In some Korean Americans those images inspire pride, and in others, shame. The actor John Cho, he told me, felt mostly panic and fear. Then 19 years old and a student at UC Berkeley, he could see how the images were being interpreted and worried that they would spark more hostility toward Koreans.
In his new young adult novel that he wrote with Sara Suk, “Troublemaker,” his goal was to start with those photos, and zoom out.
“Burning Questions” is a canny title for Margaret Atwood’s new book of essays and occasional pieces. It reflects both the urgency of the issues dear to her — literature, feminism, the environment, human rights — and their combustibility, the risk that in writing about them she might get burned. Though she wryly self-defines as a “supposedly revered elderly icon or scary witchy granny figure,” Atwood, now in the seventh decade of her colossally successful literary career, can still rile and inspire.
My grandmother died in October 2019, the day after her 97th birthday. She must have been born within a few months of Howard Jacobson’s mother, who, as the moving preface to his memoir Mother’s Boy explains, died in May 2020 at the same age. Jacobson’s mother was an autodidact with a passion for poetry and a burning drive to write that her circumstances – living in Manchester as a working-class woman, wife and mother – ultimately thwarted.
My grandmother was able to live out her commitments in her younger days, inspired by the socialist ideals of the Jewish youth movement to travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine, via a stint in a British prison camp in Cyprus, to help found and establish a kibbutz. She returned to England when my father was a toddler, however, living in Southport, just down the road from Jacobson’s family. She worked as a dinner lady, her sharpness of mind and love of words finding an outlet only via the endless games of Scrabble that we played. I thought often of her and her life as I read Mother’s Boy and its insights into the frustrations, possibilities and intensities of human lives and of the lives of British Jews in particular.
Daniel Levy’s sprawling new history of 19th-century New York, Manhattan Phoenix, is subtitled “The Great Fire of 1835 and the Emergence of Modern New York”. The author argues, a little implausibly, that it was that conflagration that gave birth to the modern city. But he is thorough enough to include a detailed description of a much more important water project, the Croton Aqueduct, and passing references to the equally crucial Erie Canal, which determined New York’s status as the premier American metropolis.
One thing Pankaj Mishra seems certain of is that humans are uncertain creatures, but uncertain in a notably coherent way. “Human identity,” Mishra wrote in the prologue to Age of Anger (2017), is “manifold and self-conflicted”. He thus feels “unqualified regard for a figure like Montaigne”, for he recognised “the acute self-divisions of individual selves”. Mishra is hardly alone in emphasising human ambivalence, but his is a rather spruce, even schematic vision of perplexity: we are less awash in inarticulate doubt or disarrayed by our unconscious than intelligibly sundered between our “inner and public selves”.
As a writer, Mishra’s public self has had the upper hand for most of his career. He is best known as an intellectual and essayist, and among the essays that have appeared in prestigious Anglo-American journals over the past 25 years, he is more associated with his forceful political, sometimes polemical, writings than with his mellower literary criticism. But as an aspiring twenty-something writer in the early 1990s, living in verdant seclusion in a Himalayan village in north India, when he imagined himself writing it was “always as a novelist”. Being a writer, however, demanded a kind of cerebral worldliness: “to engage rationally with, rather than retreat from, the world; it was to concern oneself particularly with the fate of the individual in society”.
Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds — hands (wings?) down.
The Indian subcontinent had been the home of muslin, a cotton fabric of plain weave, for centuries. Indian muslin was as treasured in Rome as in China, and in the 16th and 17th centuries it was all the rage in Europe. Yet, if we seldom speak of muslins today, or come across fine Indian muslins only in the pages of Jane Austen, there is a reason. British colonialism, which wedded aggressive protectionism at home to violent free trade abroad, forced local artisans to give up their craft and switch to cotton cultivation instead, bringing a long and beautiful tradition to a swift and precipitous decline. Indian muslin became a rare, sought-after commodity in Europe, while English muslin — cheap, industrial, protected by the state — became the norm. As Mr. Tilney observes, “Muslin always turns to some account or other.”
Sofi Thanhauser’s “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing” is a compilation of many such “accounts” of fabric, from which we learn that, if we were a bit more curious about our clothes, they would offer us rich, interesting and often surprising insights into human history. It is a deep and sustained inquiry into the origins of what we wear, and what we have worn for the past 500 years, as well as into the material conditions and social consequences of their production.
In her wide-ranging and intricately argued book, “Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Laura F. Edwards, a prizewinning legal historian at Princeton, explains how ordinary people participated in the American economy and the legal system before the Civil War despite the fact that most of them lacked formal rights to do so. What made it possible? Textiles.
The illness narrative, ending in financial ruin and decreased quality of life, has become one of the classic 21st-century American stories. In her debut essay collection, Emily Maloney documents the complex intersections of money, illness and medicine. For Maloney, the primary experience of receiving health care is not merely a bodily or spiritual event but always, also, a financial one. She understands on a granular level the relationship of money to being ill, to developing a drug, to housing and caring for patients and, of course, to managing an unfathomable amount of debt. Her broad perspective is hard won; at different times she has been a multiply diagnosed chronically ill patient, an E.M.T., an emergency room medical technician, a drug rep, a data analyst, a medical writer, a medical debtor and an American citizen who has — so far — survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit medical care.
Margaret Atwood has earned her place as a literary seer, a prophet, a sage elder — or, as she recently described herself, “elderly icon or scary witchy granny.” She’s frequently asked to speak about women’s issues, because of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the looming climate catastrophe, because of the MaddAddam trilogy. Audiences want to hear from the 82-year-old author whose fiction foresees the rise of a patriarchal fascist state and cataclysmic environmental collapse.
“People are deeply worried about the future right now,” Atwood told me during a phone call from her home in Canada. “Things are in turmoil — partly because of climate change; partly because democratic norms and procedures that we took for granted and believed represented the true, the good and the beautiful, have been tossed out the window.”
Picture a romance novel. Are there heaving bosoms and swaggering poses? Is the word “trashy” one of the first to pop into your mind? If so, your stereotypes are decades out of date. Recent years have seen a marked shift away from shirtless ab shots and “clinch covers” that feature a passionate embrace toward bright, flirty graphics. Modern romance covers are opting for graphic illustration in a bid to outrun the sexist stigma that has dogged the genre since its inception and repackage the books for new audiences. This evolution reflects changes within the genre and broader attitudes toward it as well.
We are naturally inclined to stay away from things we find unpleasant, and there's a chance pandemic literature strikes some readers as precisely that. However, the narratives we've seen so far have shown that the pandemic can be a starting point for any story — and that writing about it can be a way of processing trauma, an exercise in trying to understand its impact on our psyche. This literature can add to a growing map of work that helps us navigate not only recent history but also our present and immediate future.
Weaving seemingly disjointed aspects of human history into a coherent exploration of the mechanics of race and racism is no small task. Yet in her new essay collection, Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan does it with apparent ease. In a class beyond the now popular “race 101” genre, Out of the Sun is concerned with coming to terms with the fictions we create about ourselves, and asking why we do so. It explores race, identity and Blackness in their ever-shifting contexts, asking uncomfortable questions about our framing of the past and our desires for the future.
Ockham and his outsize, vital influence on the sciences are the subject of University of Surrey genetics professor Johnjoe McFadden’s new book, Life Is Simple. In it, McFadden follows the full developmental arc of science in the western world and highlights the way Occam’s courage and principles led to almost every major discovery that came after.
My heart is a knot
that you are tied up in—
If I have been asked one question more often in my writing life than any other, it’s this: Why write such sad stories?
The short answer is this: I believe that they matter more. They mean more to us. They are the protein of prose, not necessarily the most appealing confection on the plate but with the power to teach us the big lessons, when we write them and when we read them. Writing them is not easy, but it feels necessary to me. As every good writing professor will tell you to do, I write the stories I want to read.
Why write about prison? Every story needs hope.
In our stories, we may have started out the murderers, rapists, thieves, and addicts, the monsters, the bad guys, the adversaries, the villains, the defendants, but prison does not have to be the end of our tale. If we don’t write our own endings, we hand our pens over to the legislators, owners of privatized prisons, and propagators of the lies behind mass incarceration.
It’s part of a growing wave of tasting menus that are shifting the traditional format to something more casual and distinctly Los Angeles. The Eurocentric foods and dinner bills that could easily cover a month’s rent are being replaced by folding tables, ‘90s rap music and cuisines that span the globe.
These are tasting menus born in the early days of quarantine, the need for a creative outlet, staffing constraints and a city’s constant appetite for something new.
At a time when many of us are staying closer to home, it is exhilarating to join the author on a pilgrimage to some of the last strongholds of traditional food culture. The book is an immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page.
The book is also inevitably a eulogy for a vanishing world.
Imagine tasting a full English breakfast whenever you heard the words “Tottenham Court Road”. Or the flavour of pineapple chunks at the tinkling of a piano. For James, who is a synaesthete and one of the extraordinary people described in Guy Leschziner’s new book, words, music and life itself are saturated with striking taste sensations. Leschziner, a professor of neurology at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, has brought together a collection of exceptionally unusual and interesting stories in his second book, dedicated to the wonder of our senses.
In a tenement shared with a dozen others,
I sleep in a closet just long enough to stretch out.
Sometimes I bring guys there.
Wordplay is an embellisher. It prettifies poetry’s architecture. If rhyme and meter are its beams and joists, wordplay is the artfully chiseled balustrade, the pillowed window seat, the foliated mantel frieze, the coordinated hues adorning the interior walls. Choice of paint is a crucial decision—potentially elevating a room from the merely functional to the inviting and comely. But it won’t keep your walls and ceiling from coming down.
Still, poetry is a tricky enterprise, routinely upending generalizations that would contain or confine it. It turns out there are moments when wordplay, taking on a structural element, does hold things together. These occur mostly within light verse.
When I reveal that I wrote a book about demonology, I’m invariably asked if I believe that demons are actually real. “Of course, I don’t think that demons are actually real,” is the expected response and the one that I give. “I’m a modern, secular, educated, liberal, agnostic man. I don’t believe in demons and devils, goblins and ghouls, imps, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or poltergeists either.” Yet whenever giving the doxology of all of that which we’re not to have faith in, I’m mentally keeping my fingers crossed, because so much of that question depends on the definitions of the words “believe,” “demons,” “actually,” and “real.”
“This is Bill Richmond,” the retired teacher says, reaching down to pick up an early 19th-century etching of a Black man. Born into slavery on Staten Island before the Revolutionary War, he was, according to local legend, “accosted by three Redcoats—and proceeded to beat all three of them.” A British commander was so impressed, Meaders continues, that he convinced Richmond’s owner to free him and brought him back to England, where he became a boxing legend known for his bobbing-and-weaving style almost two centuries before Muhammad Ali. Richmond later set up a boxing academy and served as an usher at George IV’s 1821 coronation. “He was America’s first sports superstar—and nobody knows anything about him,” says Meaders. “This is an example of the need for this collection, because it’s loaded with untold stories.”
Crayons at restaurants have a long history, and are largely favored by parents (and owners) hoping to keep young kids occupied during mealtime. But why should kids have all the fun? If you feel too old, or too cool, to draw with restaurant crayons, let me assure you that you’re not. If restaurants are meant to be a respite from our homes, then crayons are the perfect ways to blow off steam, perhaps with a glass of wine in the other fist.
By early January, Germán Silva had run halfway across Mexico: 30 miles a day through the Sierra Madre, past befuddled cartel gunmen and bemused road crews, across vast stretches of ranch land where the cows, too, seemed to look at him askance.
There were moments when even Silva, one of the best long-distance runners in Mexico’s history, thought he might be nuts. Days when he couldn’t tell whether the greater threat to his four-month, 3,134-mile run was the terrain or his own, failing body.
Fashion has, for centuries, adapted to a changing world, and major trends often correspond with significant historical events. But, in the instance of the bra, it feels like we’ve reached a turning point: one that isn’t just about style but instead asks us to reconsider the purpose of our undergarments altogether. “There’s been this unwritten rule that our breasts need to be strapped up and held up and we have to pretend we don’t have nipples,” Chloé Julian, a former designer at Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty, told the New York Times last year. “We’re starting to question that.”
Rereading my old copy, translated in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers, brought back how it reflected my childhood fears—of losing my mother in a crowd, of my parents dying, of the general indifference and cruelty of the big world outside the bedroom where I read. The novel painted the world as a beautiful and dangerous place, whose beauties were easy to see and whose dangers were implied without being named (why couldn’t I be dropped off at the movies?). I would have learned about the Holocaust around the same time I read Bambi, but of course I didn’t connect the two myself. The translation reflected the anxiety of being a child, not the anxiety of being a Jew.
Jennifer Haigh’s surprisingly restrained new novel, “Mercy Street,” explores the precarious status of safe, legal abortion in a country where disapproval comes in a thick mixture of class snobbery, theological absolutism and misogynist fanaticism. Coincidentally, “Mercy Street” is likely to be the last abortion-focused novel that appears before our newly reconstituted Supreme Court reasserts the state’s control of women’s bodies. And yet it’s not so much a clarion call as a melancholy appraisal of the stalemate that has long held sway in the United States.
Above all, amidst this terrible current wave of book banning and idea policing, Jonas's debut raises the question — as Lolita itself always has — of how we determine the "value" of literature. We can seek to suppress that which upsets our sense of morality or we can engage with what is disturbing, offensive, deeply wrong. And, when reading the artful Vladímír, we can also have a damn good time doing it, too.
The narrative’s lush scope — from Pira’s deep dream life to the sight of the mighty volcano whose ancient creation stories he’s memorized to assorted crises including a scorpion’s near-fatal sting — reveals the boy’s gentle, undefended awakening to his own and others’ flawed, earnest love. An exquisite meditation upon language, meaning, human longing and consciousness itself, “Stone World” will fill readers with wonder.
Arriving in the dark days of February, Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment nevertheless feels like the most entertaining sort of summer thriller, a fast-paced, twisty bit of escapism that mixes compelling, messy characters, deft narrative red herrings, shifting perspectives, and a few genuine surprises to create a story that’ll keep you up reading well into the night.
Rob Hart's The Paradox Hotel is a strange novel that smashes together some of the best elements of science fiction and crime to deliver a story in which time is broken — and some crucial events that have a huge impact on the present haven't happened yet. And they may not happen at all.
The joy of browsing isn't so much in the satisfaction of reaching your desired destination but in the cultural detours you discover along the way.
Roughly 99 percent of the people living in the United States and Europe see only a dim approximation of stars in the night sky, nothing close to the bright firmament that our ancestors witnessed before humans harnessed electricity. The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, the study that reported the findings, also found that 83 percent of the world’s population cannot see a naturally dark sky because of the light emanating from cities.
Armed with those statistics, I found myself again looking skyward last October, this time lying face up on a long stone slab at Arches National Park in Utah. Surrounded by strangers, I was trying to locate the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, and our nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda. My first trip in two years since the pandemic required a destination that felt new and otherworldly. As it turns out that is Utah with its biblical terrain and preternatural cobalt sky, a sky that also happens to be ablaze with stars at night.
Eleven years ago, when Heather Mair, a sociologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, began a survey of female curlers in the Northwest Territories of Canada, she found something she had not expected: Many of them said curling had helped with their mental health.
It pushed them to go out during the darkest months of the year, when the sun barely crosses the horizon and people withdraw into their houses. For women who curled, withdrawing was not an option, because the team depended on them.
At its most intriguing, Flight Risk is a novel that explores internal and external conflicts: a brown girl in a white and black world. A girl from an impoverished background now clad in cashmere and jewels. The story slowly reveals itself, in snapshots and asides, and Castro respects the reader’s ability to make connections and inferences. We read on, eager to know who is that child in the photograph, why Isabel’s mother was incarcerated, and what so utterly severed her relationship to her hometown and kin that she kept most of her past hidden from her husband. Even with the dazzling view from a penthouse in Chicago, her damage and trauma can’t withstand the pull of her secret past in the hollers of West Virginia. We read on, riveted, to the end.
Admittedly, there is something thin about “Life Without Children,” a certain degree of repetitive emotions and scenarios — almost a quality of having been written at great speed before time runs out on all of us. But that very thinness seems suited in some way to the unimaginable period of isolation and confinement Doyle is writing about, a period to which he imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection that make it less surreal and more a part of the daily vicissitudes through which we must make our way, or perish.
Famous philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre may have massively shifted our discourse on the meaning of morality, but they are certainly not known for having succinct or approachable writing styles. Creating an overview of their massively influential yet arguably quite boring works that is an easy, enjoyable read is no simple task. Despite these odds, writer and producer Michael Schur somehow manages to craft a beginner’s guide to moral philosophy that is equal parts humorous, relevant, and educational with his debut book “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question.”
Nicolson, a polymathic author and historian, has written books on subjects from seabirds to the King James Bible. In his latest, he operates in a tradition pioneered by Annie Dillard and upheld by the likes of David Haskell — closely observing a discrete patch of earth (or sea) and taking it as his muse. “No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: Go to the rocks and the living will say hello,” Nicolson writes.
According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”
Tawada’s latest novel, “Scattered All Over the Earth” (New Directions), imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Her odyssey becomes a fairy-tale test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.” Tawada has been described as the world’s leading practitioner of “exophonic literature,” or writing in a foreign language, a description that her unique practice has made applicable to nearly all her work. “I have to let my German go when I work with Japanese,” she has said. “I don’t want to get familiar with one language.” The constant shuttling has more to do with existential displacement than with cross-cultural exchange: Tawada, as the new novel’s English translator, Margaret Mitsutani, has observed, is “not nearly as interested in crossing borders as she is in the borders themselves.”
Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day. Then there’s the awkward narrative problem of how to turn what some have termed the “boring apocalypse” — a period of stasis that, for the most fortunate, has been defined by staying home and doing nothing — into a gripping story.
Philip Olterman was born and brought up in West Germany, coming to the UK in his mid-teenage years. He studied English and German Literature at Oxford before going into journalism and is now Berlin Bureau Chief for a UK newspaper. All of this experience is brought to this short book which is an outstanding creative work. I say “creative”, because although this is a work of non-fiction, it is non-fiction of the most creative kind.
With her piercing, lovely verse, Boyce-Taylor almost takes on the role of Lorde, a mentor who lifts other women with word weapons, unapologetic in delineating true experience. Once again Boyce-Taylor has written a set of affecting poems, her language packed with the complex emotions of being that aren’t always easy to sift through.
Sheilas: Badass women of Australian History is an acerbic exploration of civil disobedience, competitive swimming, and the revolutionary setting of personal boundaries. From bushrangers to mermaids, this beautifully illustrated girls-only gathering redefines what it means to be a good Australian woman.
The development of online “wallets” might seem particularly bloodless — what, those things you use sometimes to buy stuff on the internet and often forget the password to? — and yet “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley,” by Jimmy Soni, is an intensely magnetic chronicle in which ambitions and emotions run as red-hot as they did in the Facebook movie written by Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.” It helps that PayPal’s origin story, though essentially an ensemble piece, features two of the more complicated antiheroes of our time: Peter Thiel, who has become a significant player in right-wing politics, and Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, who makes aggressive forays into the cosmos.
I want those championing freedom
the patriots of peace
the ones who march into our schools
handcuff our history
hold our imaginations hostage
the so-called American dreamers
Whether we read to engage or to escape reality, we continue to read fiction because it provides us with an experience that cannot be satisfied by other means. Additionally, as a cultural practice, reading fiction has taken on a quasi-spiritual aura; it has become a secular ritual, not unlike mindfulness meditation, that is robustly encouraged by its proponents. One recalls the Orwellian “READ” posters that have been published by the American Library Association since 1985, the most recent a rendering of Channing Tatum, holding a copy of Peter Pan, standing in front of a glittering star field. Evoking the imperious command of alien billboards in John Carpenter’s They Live — obey, marry, reproduce, consume — these posters celebrate reading as an activity of unquestionable social value and say nothing about what is real. Why not read fiction to escape the real?
Whether it's through fire-breathing dragons, time travel, psychic powers, or spaceships that sail effortlessly between distant stars, there's never been a shortage of tropes in fantasy or science fiction stories that challenge our belief of what's possible. Yet while fantasy and science fiction authors are great at imagining new forms of magic and technology, authors aren't so good at imagining different political systems. Indeed, for the most part, they fall back on the same old political or economic systems: for fantasy, we have our usual monarchies and empires, kings and queens, nobles and commoners. For sci-fi, the future is often bleak, dominated by hyper-capitalist corporate galactic warfare or techno-bureaucratic empires clinging to power on their newly-annexed planets.
Still, that openness brought a responsibility. It forged a fierce bond with her readers, who write to her and seek her out at readings. “They want to tell me about the parallels between their life and mine,” she says. “The most amazing thing is the people who are trying to get sober, or who are newly sober, who’ve said the book’s helped them. Or people who have addicts in their life who say that the book’s helped them to understand and have compassion for those people. That has been incredible for me and the greatest gift of my life, I would say.”
This sense of connection galvanised her writing. “The fact that people will come on board with me, to keep on following down the things that I felt were interesting or worthwhile rather than what other people are writing about,” she says. “It gave me that confidence to follow my own instinct.”
Of course, buses break down. Of course, they’re late. But it’s the gap between their purpose and their product, their design and their delivery, that tells the story, in miniature, of the U.S.’ efforts to fulfill its obligations to us all.
Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound implications for our understanding of planetary evolution. The concept posits that life acts as a potent force shaping how the planet changes over time, on par with other geological systems like the atmosphere, hydrosphere (water), cryosphere (ice), and lithosphere (land). Essentially, life has the capacity to hijack Earth’s evolution and, perhaps, steer its fate. The biosphere tells us that once life appears in a world, that world can take on a life of its own.
This idea first came as a shock to many researchers. Over the years, however, it has become central to Earth science, deeply influencing how we see life interacting with our planet, and our ideas about what life might do to other planets in the universe. As our understanding of the biosphere’s influence has deepened, it has also pointed to a provocative question—one much less explored. If a planet with life has a life of its own, can it also have a mind of its own?
How do you grow up and make your own life when you’re tethered to others? Even harder if the people you’re tethered to are both needy and slightly bonkers.
In her debut novel, “The Sisters Sweet,” Minneapolis writer Elizabeth Weiss has spun a fascinating coming-of-age novel around this question, even imagining a literal tether. The result is a highly original, engrossing story about family secrets, hypocrisy and betrayal.
But what happens when a press does more than increase its roster of writers of colour? What happens when diversity is built into its very structure? Mémoire d’encrier suggests that the results can be transformative.
Maud Casey’s fourth novel, “City of Incurable Women,” is a haunted and haunting book, short, but densely packed with metaphor and meaning. Ghostly black-and-white photographs of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and women treated for hysteria there in the 19th century, accompanied by case study notes and “photographic service” cards recording the subjects’ symptoms, convey the impression that we are reading messages from the dead past. This is an illusion created by Casey’s skillful blend of fact and fiction. The case histories and service card texts are partly based on rough translations of primary sources, partly invented. Casey gives voices to women previously seen only through their doctors’ eyes by imagining their accounts of who they were “in the before” and what they became under medical supervision.
Western civilization loves its embattled mothers. It takes a special relish in idealizing motherhood, only to see the women capsize in their attempts to live up to impossible expectations. Is this a universal claim?
"Woman Running in the Mountains," a novel by Yūko Tsushima, suggests not. Certain forms of criticism that mothers seem automatically to accept in Western literature glide off this work like Teflon. Which is not to say that the novel paints a rosy portrait of motherhood. There is a surface placidity to the prose that belies its heavy themes of domestic violence, alcoholism, and economic and social precarity.
There is a minimalism to Julie Otsuka's work. The sentences in her slim books dive right into the details. About once a decade, readers are treated to a novel of Otsuka's well-honed words: "The Buddha in the Attic" in 2011 and "When the Emperor Was Divine" in 2002. So, I am thrilled that her latest book, "The Swimmers," is another artfully refined story, even when it delves into the most painful parts of life.
What is art criticism? Does anyone really care? Criticism is about creating discussion and fostering community; at least that’s what critics and those invested in criticism like to tell themselves. But after around ten years of working as an art critic, Carla Lonzi started to feel the opposite: that the role of the critic involved a ‘codified alienation towards the artistic fact’, that criticism was an accomplice to a class system, corralling art into a rarefied sphere in which creativity and life are seen as separate things. Self-Portrait – originally published in 1969 and translated here for the first time – is the Italian writer’s extended dissection of and farewell to criticism. Her only subsequent writing about art occurred in her diary; energy was instead poured into activism and feminist writings, and cofounding the influential collective Rivolta Femminile.
Home chefs, whether of Great British Bake Off caliber or not, can turn to an abundance of cookbooks to guide their kitchen projects. But the recipe manuals of today are not those of the past. In A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries, the historian Henry Notaker traces how recipe collections have evolved. In 15th- and 16th-century Western Europe, cookbooks were demonstrations of luxury, targeting an upper-class audience with access to rare and expensive goods. But over the centuries, as printing became easier, literacy rates increased, and food became more abundant, the genre democratized, becoming available to all sorts of people. By the 20th century, popular writers were primarily developing recipes for the European and American middle classes.
But what separates a food writer from someone who just happens to write about food? As with any compartmentalizing of genre, there is something in the title that implies a diminishment, as if today, as in ancient Greece, the act of eating were too frivolous to be worthy of serious meditation. Matro aimed for comedy in the excesses of his dinner-party verse, but the tone of Archestratos’ work isn’t so clear, and he was disdained by later scholars for daring to imagine that, in compiling an index of culinary pleasures, he was “laying the foundation of some science likely to improve human existence.” Still, when contemporary food writers (and, I suppose, I am one) stray from celebrating flavors to probe the larger issues surrounding the parade of dishes to our tables — exploitation of labor, abuse of animals, climate change, the homogenizing of cuisines and cultures under globalization, systemic injustices that allow millions of people to go hungry each year — some readers complain. Food should not be political, they insist. Food is universal; food unites us. Let us have our cake in peace.
If you approach these tales with the proper frame of mind, the ridiculous aspects become sources of delight—no different from the outrageous elements in a play by Ionesco or Beckett. Perhaps we should simply classify the locked room mystery as a branch of absurdist literature, and leave it at that. The entrance of the orangutan is exactly what such a story needs and deserves.
You want spoilers? Let me give you some.
Like all great plagues, tuberculosis inspired great art, operatic tragedies and literature, including Bram Stroker’s Dracula. Panicked by a mysterious illness ravaging their village, residents of Exeter, Rhode Island, turned to a folk remedy popular at the time: if the heart of a corpse contained blood, it was believed that it showed it was living off the blood and tissue of living family members—that the corpse was preying on the living. As a result, the village exhumed 19-year-old Mercy Brown on January 17, 1892. She would go on to inspire the character of Lucy Westenra in Stroker’s gothic novel.
To experience “Recitatif” for the first time is to remember that books, at their best, teach us how to read them. The story is so simple yet at the same time so ingenious. We wonder: Is she really doing what I think she is? Then you realize: Yes, she is. In the spirit of that fresh approach, I won’t be more specific about the experiment. In fact, I might suggest you read Morrison’s story first and Smith’s introduction afterward. The pieces are very much in conversation with each other. Equally important, both seek to be in conversation with us.
Amanda Pellegrino's debut novel "Smile and Look Pretty" deftly explores the world of assistants dealing with all manner of mistreatment in the name of working their way up.
Chuluun, a young Tibetan Buddhist monk in present-day Mongolia and the protagonist of “When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East,” has two weeks to find the reincarnation of a tulku, an enlightened teacher. He’s asked to do this not because he’s uniquely qualified to identify the child who is destined to help carry on his faith, but because he has “indomitable patience.”
From ancient Egypt to Silicon Valley, Duncan is an ideal tour guide: witty, engaging, knowledgeable and a fount of diverting anecdotes. The book skews toward the literary, but anyone interested in the 2,200-year journey to quickly find what one needs in a book will be enlightened, and will never again take an index for granted. The well-designed book also includes nearly 40 illustrations. As might be expected, the index — created not by the author but by Paula Clarke Bain — is magnificent.
What I’m saying is that it’s possible things have already fallen apart, and that I’ve spent my whole life watching it. And I think the only reasonable response to this is to write about love. Our government collects our taxes and watches us die and laughs when we beg for help. We’ve seen over a year and a half of communities rising up in mutual aid because, while the people we elect to protect us don’t give a fuck if we die, it turns out that we, all of us, very much do. So I write about love, because it’s the only thing I think really matters.
The challenge for any novelist, of course, is not merely to use twins as an off-the-peg plot device, but to capture the existential experience of growing up in exact parallel to a sibling, or, in the case of identical twins, being the genetic double of another human being. As a twin myself, I’d say Renée Branum’s riddling debut, Defenestrate, gets very close to a true depiction, as Marta and Nick attempt to individuate from each other – first in Prague, and then in a midwest hospital after Nick falls from a fifth-storey window.
We’re a divided nation, but pretty much everyone acknowledges the morbid symptoms. There is less agreement on what sort of ideological paradigm will be born next, or how. Gestational metaphors are only so useful. We know where babies come from. We’re less clear on what changes the world.
In his wide-ranging, subtly ambitious new book, “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” Gal Beckerman submits that the answer, or one of them, is “a group of people talking.” The people he has in mind are not party grandees in smoke-filled rooms. They’re vanguardists, visionaries, fanatics, riot grrrls—some of them political dissidents, some of them revolutionaries in the realms of art or thought. In particular, Beckerman is concerned with how these people talk—through public manifestos, through onionskin samizdat, through telegrams, through Telegram—and how the medium affects the efficacy of the message.
But Lindemann argues quite convincingly that despite people’s knee-jerk mockery of reality TV or reflexive embarrassment at being “caught” as a viewer, studying the genre gives us a better understanding of our world and ourselves. The book takes a deep dive into reality TV through a sociological lens, looking at how the genre reveals American thinking on gender, race, sex, families and more, repeatedly reinforcing Lindemann’s point with evidence from social scientists, anthropologists, philosophers and media psychologists.
like the phantom of the opera
or the kingdom of god
the golden state killer
is there inside your mind
Chekhov is easier to know and read than the other Russian giants. He doesn’t look big or talk big. He’s funny on purpose. He shows us how to read him; he quietly attunes us to place and situation. We observe more than judge his characters’ actions; we detect their mental and emotional states through their physical symptoms. Chekhov began his professional career as a writer while in medical school. Even as he imagined the agitations and disruptions and occasional explosions of his characters, he was always also a doctor. He describes what it feels like to fall in love, to be pregnant and to miscarry, to bully one’s children, to flutter about helplessly while seeking someone to love, to have typhus, to cringe with embarrassment over a bespattering sneeze, to blather like a professor, to be struck dumb by love, to beg for sympathy, to grieve, to menace the innocent, to be conscious of but prey to one’s weaknesses, to be overworked to the point of hallucinating, to be ruthless.
He himself didn’t do most of that; his fiction was where he streamed into other consciousnesses and cut loose, fell apart, ambled like a shepherd, or strode like a wife on her way to or from an assignation. His imagination and professional knowledge allowed him to depict passions he did not act upon. “So many hereditary negatives were turned into positives,” Michael C. Finke writes in his new biography.
At heart, crappy things promise more than they deliver. They are inherently dishonest in the ways they are made and promoted. I chose this word out of dozens of potential others—junk, trash, stuff, kitsch, tchotchkes—because “crap” alone both suggests the full scope of this kind of stuff and also succinctly captures the cynical, degraded, and often degrading aspects of these things—as well as the false sentiments inherent to them.
Now, post-cancer diagnosis, I am awash in a sea of medical-related crap. Case in point: I find myself in yet another exceptionally unremarkable exam room, spoken to by yet another unfamiliar nurse about my treatment. Like so many others, she, too, comes bearing the glossy literature of industrialized medicine, a genre which has become all-too familiar to me. This is late capitalism’s medicalized equivalent of the smooth and persuasive tongue of Lou Bookman, a skilled sidewalk pitchman portrayed in an early episode of The Twilight Zone whom we meet in Crap’s Introduction. Bookman’s ability to rhapsodize about everything from ordinary sewing thread to artificial silk neckties enables him to enchant even Mr. Death, who has come for our affable protagonist but is too distracted by the pitch to successfully carry out his duties.
I don’t remember when I first saw that particular photograph of Alice Liddell but it changed something about my relationship with Wonderland, seeing this real girl who was the real inspiration for such an extraordinary story captured on film. I wonder often about that girl who became a piece of modern myth, about that boat trip and those sisters who requested a story, for what a tale they received.
Such comprehensive cover design initiatives tap into the same power as branded objects. It might seem dismal to compare an author to a brand. The writer—the literary purveyor, if you will—is indispensable, and each book they produce is a unique object. To group them together in a branded package like bottles on a drug store shelf can seem reductive, dystopian even, at its face. But this is essentially what publishers do when they commission several books by one author to be designed in a similar fashion. It’s a way for the publisher to associate a particular writer with a visual identity. And ultimately, despite any venal ambitions on behalf of publishers, the designs they require can be demanding and gratifying artistic projects for book designers.
In Paul Tran’s stunning debut poetry collection, the word “trauma” is never written. Instead, a violent encounter permeates the speaker’s environment, informing their descriptions of visual art, the natural world, and family history, specifically contextualized by the United States’ brutal intervention in Vietnam’s civil war. Survival in the face of bodily harm is everywhere. Here, Tran’s expansiveness is a major strength: the collection refuses to be a linear roadmap, providing the reader instead with a vast exploration of the aftermath of trauma.
To manage this telling, a cross-pollination of a parable, an allegory and a novel, Heti breaks God into a trinity. No, not that kind, though as a writer of the Jewish tradition, she invokes God as a creative, censorious and punishing He.
Nina Mingya Powles’s Small Bodies of Water, a memoir made up of interconnected essays, is one of those books I read ravenously, consuming the vast majority of it on a plane to Cyprus, tired, ears thick with altitude. I am glad I read it in this suspended state, between countries, held in the air. At first, this felt like an encumbrance on the experience. There are lots of places and things in Small Bodies of Water — a city in southern China called Guilin, a wild swimming spot called Slippery Stones in the Peak District, the mountain ranges of Kota Kinabalu, the poem-like texts of artist Talia Smith, pungent Rafflesia flowers — that I had the urge to Google. I wanted images and Wikipedia pages and definitions.
There wasn’t yet a sun.
The sky was still empty.
In the beginning was the rhythm. The rhythm was a row of buckets in the shapes of sounds. These sounds were syllables of different dimensions in weight or length: unstressed and stressed, or short, short, long. You tossed words into the rhythm from across the playing field. The playing field measured exactly the distance between your mouth and someone else’s ear.
It was a game. You might say, “I’m working on this,” or refer to a work-in-progress, or a book of poems as a “project,” or call a poet’s books “works” — but deep down, you knew this was different from waiting tables or preparing a PowerPoint for the quarterly meeting. That was work, and if you could get time off from it, you would play this game.
Yet adapting Agatha Christie as mass 21st-Century entertainment is not without its complications: they are products of the time they were written in, the mid-20th Century, and arguably reflect some unsavoury attitudes not least when it comes to racism, xenophobia and colonialism. The question is therefore: how do you translate and update Agatha Christie – or not – for the modern age?
But I am also delighted, in a different way, by authors whose books come out years and years apart. I’ve started to notice that having to wait six or ten years between books makes me think about those books in a different way. It’s not that I think a book that takes ten years to write is somehow more worthy than a book someone writes in two months (ugh). It’s simply that I have a different relationship with them, even before I pick them up.
Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.
I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.
Having a movie you love, I realized, isn’t only about you. Wayne’s World first bonded me to my best friend, made me realize how important she was to me, how we could play different roles but be in the same play. Years later, it made me fall in love with my father-in-law. It allowed me to appreciate his best qualities — his humor and attention and interest.
Sure, they sometimes get together for good (see: Jim and Pam on The Office), and sure, these relationships can eventually get a little exhausting as they go through their millionth iteration of the drama (uh, see: Ross and Rachel again). But the will-they, won’t-they is a TV staple for a reason. We love to see people fall in love, and TV loves a story that goes on and on and on (and on).
For me, however, TV has never topped the original will-they, won’t-they couple — Sam Malone and Diane Chambers from Cheers, the NBC sitcom that aired from 1982 to 1993.
If this book is a continued examination of Heti’s long-held obsessions — how to be and also how to make things; how to capture the texture of living without destroying your actual life — it is also a more mature take on those questions, more settled and retrospective. There’s more grief and earnestness, less sex. It feels both as thrillingly inventive as she’s ever been and also defiantly and satisfyingly middle-aged.
In Nigerian, “wahala” means trouble — an apt title for Nikki May’s highly entertaining debut that manages to be an insightful look at racism, classism, female friendship, heritage and jealousy, while straddling a fine line between a light mystery and a hard-edged novel.
Passionate, well written, and accessible, its story of the vigor, struggle, and fleeting success of seven immigrant women offers a counternarrative to conventional understandings of success and failure in the food world. One hopes that the book will stimulate further awareness of the deeply entrenched xenophobic prejudices that disadvantage immigrants in America.
As erected by Duncan, this set of thoughtful rhetorical signposts ushers the reader smoothly, even soothingly, along a fascinating, immensely pleasurable journey through previously uncharted terrain.
I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain
shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps
soundlessly in her bed. Her áo dài of the whitest silk.
Fitting a small stone into a sling made of yak wool, Tsering Stobdan whipped his wrist and let the object fly, sending it soaring across the arid landscape. This, he told me, was how he protects his flock from predators and convinces straggling goats to return — just one of the countless skills he has learned in the last 60 years that allow him to rear his animals in such an unforgiving landscape.
Meanwhile, some 15,000 feet above sea level, I was simply trying to breathe. Here on the Changthang plateau, in a remote region of the Indian Himalayas, the altitude had left me lightheaded and gasping for air.
The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 10th book — in a genre-bending career that has included novels, stories, collaborative anthologies, children’s books and a stage play — is part bonkers cosmology and part contemporary parable. In a creation myth viewed through the keyhole-size aperture of a single life, a young would-be critic named Mira spends these pages grappling with the loss of her fiercely adoring father and her unrequited affection for a woman named Annie. A “birdlike” person, Mira finds it difficult to return her bearish father’s enveloping love in kind, or to communicate her feelings to the mysterious and fishlike Annie — whose own particular strain of remoteness is symmetrical to Mira’s but incompatible. These different modalities of love, and all the inexact, invigorating and frustrating ways in which they combine, drive the pathos of the book as well as its most phenomenal moments of exultation, moments where meaning crackles and flares.
There are many easy-to-enjoy novels that I pass on to friends in our Alaska neighborhood, recommend to my well-read grandmother or wrap as birthday gifts to my father. This isn’t one of those books. A reader must enter the Dark Star trilogy of her own volition, with eyes wide open. But the Moon Witch lit my path and showed me how a woman might navigate this dangerous, remarkable world.
Allende’s work is a curious mix of high romanticism and social realism, conventional storytelling against a realistic socio-historical background. Her great strength is to give priority to the matriarchs, the world of women which is so often overlooked by male writers.
A year before my birth, Mother, you wished for a son to grow inside you. You’d call him banyan tree, strangler fig, boy strong as my father. When I came, you knew
Activists will remind you that Lolita is already living on borrowed time. Well into her 50s, she’s eclipsed the normal lifespan of an orca in the wild—and long since surpassed the life expectancy of one captured.
As they await her fate, a band of whale fanatics in Washington—scientists, capture converts, and spiritual relatives—have advanced an ambitious plan to bring her back to the Salish Sea.
They could have come together much sooner.
Groundwater—held in caves, pores, and cracks—is actually the world’s largest unfrozen freshwater habitat, containing more water than all lakes and rivers combined. And where there is water, there is life. Often blind, pale, and adapted to live in near starvation, these groundwater-dwelling animals—known as stygofauna—are poorly understood and difficult to study.
But lately scientists from France to India and Australia are using genetic and chemical techniques to better understand stygofauna—and warning that many of these strange creatures may soon face extinction, including Texas’ salamanders. Many people rely on groundwater for drinking and domestic use, and in the past it has often been treated like an infinite resource. But groundwater is already running out in many areas. And the world is going to get even thirstier in the coming century: According to the World Meteorological Organization, by 2050, 5 billion people may lack adequate access to water.
Visibility and attention, and even a lively cultural conversation, are one thing. Actually mustering the power to fundamentally rearrange society or politics — that is something else. And though activists are good at achieving the former, they often seem stuck when it comes to the latter.
Very Cold People is not a novel one reads for plot, but I hesitate to say too much about how the stories of Ruth's friends, aunt, cousins, and mother deftly dovetail in this sobering portrait of the damage wrought by predatory adults on young girls' lives. The glimmer of hope in this understated variant of what has come to be called the trauma plot is in the narrator's escape and gradual understanding of the terrible circumstances that warped her mother.
In November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to ‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37, Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race. Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the trap.’
Why heap so much praise on a sitcom dad? It's easy to disregard TV as mere mindless entertainment. But entertainment media can both reflect and reshape culture – including how fathers interact with their children. They can influence how viewers think about fathers, regardless of the accuracy of those portrayals.
As someone who studies stereotypes of fathers, I view Danny as an avatar of the changing expectations of fatherhood that began in the late 1970s.
It’s about a lot of other things, too: the pandemic, and being a Native person in America, and the carceral state, and perhaps especially books. But what strikes me the most about The Sentence, here as we prepare to enter the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, surrounded by loss, is how much time it devotes to the question of what we owe the dead, and whether we have failed to deliver.
Journalist Dan Saladino unveils the work of Harlan and other visionaries in “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them,” his impressively researched book about the variety of crops, animals and foods that have been tossed aside in favor of the monocultures that have come to dominate our food supply. Though they were meant to improve efficiency and yield by “feeding the world,” these crops and breeds are having unintended consequences. Many of today’s “improved” crops, which lack diversity because they come from patented seeds, have no defenses against fungi, viruses and insects — all of which are becoming more of a threat with climate change. The breeds of animals we rely on for food have also been narrowed on a global scale, making them more susceptible to diseases that could wipe them out.
Before you know it, God is having coffee in an organic
Delaware restaurant. He starts to stare.
Imaginary numbers are not imaginary at all. The truth is, they have had far more impact on our lives than anything truly imaginary ever could. Without imaginary numbers, and the vital role they played in putting electricity into homes, factories, and internet server-farms, the modern world would not exist. Students who might complain to their math teacher that there’s no point in anyone learning how to use imaginary numbers would have to put down their phone, turn off their music, and pull the wires out of their broadband router. But perhaps we should start with an explanation of what an imaginary number is.
The Grass Hotel leaves us with a persuasive articulation of familial power dynamics, their emotional turbulence, and the psychical cling – like ash in water – of our parents. “We slip into our children’s minds and they don’t know if it’s actual or figment,” says the novel’s mother to her son, the author to himself. “Carried in them onward and they slip into their children the same.”
Schulz finds a series of deeply touching ways to honor and celebrate both the conjunction and continuity that her entwined experiences of losing and finding love have shown her. Life, she realizes, is clearest in the forward-moving union that “and” promises: that moment when we’re alive with both grief and joy, both the knowledge that we are nothing and the awareness that the world is waiting for us. This gorgeous memoir is heartbreaking and restorative all at once.
It is an ambitious mission to rail against the plethora of standards expected of women over the centuries while also focusing on understanding the contemporary Australian experience. Kaz Cooke delivers an expansive inventory of guilt-invoking, shaming, and frequently dangerous instructions directed at women, setting a largely unattainable and objectionable (also objectifying) bar. It could be a morose tale of edicts, often seeded in patriarchal dominance, that have weighed upon women’s lives. Instead, it is a witty and fun read despite the often-harmful repercussions of bad advice.
Toward the end of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Death on the Nile, detective Hercule Poirot likens his investigation to an archaeological excavation, declaring, “You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone. … That is what I have been seeking to do—clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth.”
Poirot’s comparison is an apt one that reflects his creator’s oft-overlooked interest in archaeology. As the wife of Max Mallowan, a British archaeologist who led digs in Syria and Iraq, Christie often accompanied her husband on his trips to the Middle East, all while she was at the peak of her powers as a best-selling author. She spent her mornings writing and her afternoons in the field, photographing excavations and conserving and cataloging finds. The methodical nature of the work greatly appealed to the mystery novelist, who “was of course fascinated by puzzles, by the little archaeological fragments,” as Charlotte Trümpler, who co-curated an early 2000s exhibition on Christie and archaeology, told CNN in 2011. “[S]he had a gift for piecing them together very patiently.”
She’s weary of journalists asking her what is the one most important thing for people to do to rescue the planet. “There isn’t one single thing that’s most important,” she says. “There’s one single thing that’s important to you. We’re so lucky to have all the different people with their concerns about saving animals and the environment, and so on. People take on different aspects because then they can work with passion about what they care about, knowing that other people are working on the other aspects.”
That approach is necessary because the threat to nature is “a pattern where you pull out the threads, like biodiversity, and animal and plant species become extinct,” Goodall says. That tapestry unravels and ecosystems then collapse.
In the diner, no one is eating. Three customers lean on their tall stools, none of them speaking. And behind the counter, a soda jerk bends to retrieve something we can’t see. Like a bartender, his job is to serve lonely people late at night, to pour them drinks, because that’s all they want in front of them: sturdy cups of coffee, cooling and forgotten.
A mother and daughter meet in Japan for vacation. They take walks, ride trains, visit art galleries, eat in restaurants, and shop for gifts. This is just about all the surface action in “Cold Enough for Snow,” the slim and sly second novel by the Australian author Jessica Au. The daughter narrates in calm prose that evokes the sound of a rake carefully tracing a pattern in sand. Along the way, she shares a few memories: of a creepy patron at the Chinese restaurant where she worked as a waitress; of the otherworldly allure of a beloved college professor’s house; of her first visit to the home where her husband grew up. We never find out where either character is travelling from, or much about the lives that await them upon return.
Lan Samantha Chang’s third novel begins by bringing history to the table: “For thirty-five years, everyone supported Leo Chao’s restaurant.” The Wisconsin eatery is a family affair. Everyone assumes it will eventually be peacefully handed down to one of Leo’s three sons – but they overlook just how fraught and bloody inheritance can be. “In dark times,” Chang writes, with a characteristically cunning sense of slow-boiled foreboding, “there is really nothing like a good, steaming soup, and dumplings made from scratch.”
That gift — of feeling at home as a foreigner, foreign when you’re at home — is a duality perhaps especially helpful to writers, to whom it lends the kind of stereoscopic perspective that makes Mead’s writing so clear and profound. Even for those who stay put, which is to say most of us for the last two years, “Home/Land” is a remarkable exploration of how being mindful of the past can enrich and imbue with urgency our everyday lives. Our past, Mead reveals, is the home we take with us.
As with a casual tryst, the best part of this book is the anonymity; the promise of no strings attached. No names or expectations, just give and take what you want. While no single experience or story guarantees the pleasure you seek, the thrill is in taking a chance on the unknown.
Common things—filing my toe nails, the misshapen little piggie.
Nasty tasks–cleaning out the compost bucket, slime of rind and reason,
corkscrews which resemble crucifixes, talc, drink. Paperclips
that teenagers link into six-foot chains because they had nothing to do.
The whole phenomenon is of particular interest to me for two reasons. The first is that I adore the Classics, and my extensive reading is a major part of my personal identity, so I always have to restrain myself from weighing in.
And the second is that I never did the reading in high school. The last book I remember opening for high school English was Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade, and it was so dull that I threw it across the room and finished my essay using CliffsNotes. For most of college, and even grad school, I didn’t read any of the required texts.
Sour’s a bizarro cue, a signal reliable neither for toxicity nor for nutrition. Really, it’s just a rough proxy for low pH, the presence of acid—the citric in lemons, the acetic in vinegar, and the like. “We don’t need sour to live,” Ann-Marie Torregrossa, a taste researcher at the University at Buffalo, told me. “It’s a weird sense to need.” It has been so scientifically neglected that Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, considers it something of a “missing taste,” the gustatory litter’s forgotten runt. No one really knows for sure, Dunn told me, “what it’s all about.”
What I’d felt was the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us. “E.T.” led me into a love affair with being made to cry among strangers in the dark. I almost typed “being reduced to tears,” except where is the reduction? Crying for art is an honor, an exaltation, a salute. It’s applause with mucus and salt. I’m not the only person who lost it at “E.T.” It was the No. 1 movie of 1982. And what I presume we all experienced was a willingness to give ourselves over to the ridiculous beauty of a story about feeling everything.
You could argue that “Very Cold People” is a version of what Parul Sehgal, writing in this magazine, called the trauma plot. Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node, or victim, in the net, moving suspensefully inward. But “Very Cold People” adds nuance by investigating how substitution and silence can be misguided acts of love, not just symptoms of damage.
Hofmann presents love—that whirlpool, whirlwind, and wandering emotion that makes life worth living and also ensures future anguish—in its many shades from Eros to Agape. His explorations—like the mythologies—aren’t cherubic, instead embracing both darkness and light. These poems are earthy and multisensory: “Every desire I had I wanted enacted— / on the beaches, in bathrooms, in train stations.”
This book is, on one level, a history of information science, but it’s also a history of reading and writing and everything those actions entail — communication, learning and imagination, as well as competition, anxiety and no small amount of mischief.
The Conservatives’ birthday gift to the BBC, which is 100 this year, turns out to be culture secretary Nadine Dorries’s promise to abolish the licence fee, the funding mechanism that has allowed it to flourish as an independent institution beloved, trusted and envied across the world. Reading David Hendy’s The BBC: A People’s History in light of this latest attack on the corporation is a sobering experience. The author himself clearly feels the clouds gathering, and at times cannot banish an elegiac tone from his prose.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the law is an ass, look no further than Guilty Pigs. This detailed book explores a wide range of ways in which the law and animals intersect, from the ancient Irish Bechbretha (or ‘bee law’), to medieval murder trials for pigs and wolves, to 16th Century French winegrowers seeking punishment for green weevils, to legal wranglings about the use of police dogs in evidence and searches, to recent court case discussions about animals’ right to the copyright of their images.
“I think, as a writer, it’s a good idea to challenge yourself and do what you haven’t done before,” she said. “I could have followed the same template and had a career writing detective novels over and over again, but that’s not what I want to do with my life. I’d always avoided writing about sex because it’s really hard to write about well. We have such a lack of good words in commonly spoken, everyday colloquial English to talk about sex.”
There are few transformations in cooking as miraculous as turning an egg into a meringue.
With only some sugar, air and a small amount of effort, a bowl of modest egg whites can become extravagantly glossy and puffed, ready to dress up all manner of swoopy, fancy confections — festooned on cakes, piped into pavlovas and kisses, or swirled onto pies.
Sheila Heti’s new novel, “Pure Colour,” is about a young woman who turns into a leaf. “Unrequited love’s a bore,” Billie Holiday sang. So, it turns out, is photosynthesis.
“Wildcat” was a book I couldn’t set down for long. What was all this tension leading to? That something wasn’t divorce, an affair, tortured regret over giving up your life for a tiny, demanding demon. That something was the realization that you’re content with your life and your choices, even if every day isn’t easy, and that it’s time to excise the people who can’t be happy for you too — and maybe make them suffer, just a little.
I don’t like how the second you don’t die
you’re a survivor—there should be some between
period where you don’t have to be that quite
yet, like how when wild garlic gets torn out
This, I think, is our real problem with audio books, and it is also Esposito’s and Birkerts’s and Bloom’s. When these critics demand “active listening,” when they insist that the internal cognitive analytic effort they valorize must have an external manifestation (that only the motion of the eyes can render a person “open to wisdom”), they are saying that audio books are middlebrow. They don’t care whether you listen to Tracy Morgan’s I Am the New Black or Keith Richards’s Life; that stuff is already beneath their concern. What they don’t like is when you try to listen to Père Goriot. Reading is only reading, by this account, when it requires the constant assertion of will. Reading is that heroic and dignified effort of the raccoon resisting the shiny objects and paying sustained attention to the page. Novels that do not require effort, once-highbrow books suddenly made accessible even to raccoons and the dyslexic and people without the willpower to finish or even begin them in hardback, are art for strivers. They’re simply too easy to swallow.
Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He then proceeded to tell me more about the pharaoh Tutankhamun than most of the other students could tell me about their own grandfathers.
It makes sense that a boy king would have an enduring hold over boys, but it is less clear why so many of the rest of us are still enthralled by Tutankhamun more than three thousand years after he ruled over the New Kingdom and a hundred years after the excavation of his tomb, in the Valley of the Kings. Tutankhamun represents an extremely narrow slice of Egyptian history; imagine if, in the year 4850, the world understood the United States largely through the Presidency of Millard Fillmore. Yet the anniversary of the excavation has occasioned everything from new histories and documentaries to travelling exhibitions and children’s books, each of which contains its own implicit argument about Tutankhamun’s appeal.
The 2017 novel by Korean American author Min Jin Lee tells the story of a Korean family over 80 years and four generations. Sunja, the novel’s protagonist and the family’s matriarch, is born in the 1910s in Japanese-colonized Busan, Korea, and migrates to Osaka, Japan. The family are Zainichi, Koreans living in Japan, who are subject to discrimination and bullying. Pachinko, which gets its name from the arcade-style gambling game (Sunja’s family ultimately ends up operating pachinko parlors in Osaka), was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times. It was a finalist for a National Book Award. Hugh was aware of the buzz, and even though she is a Korean American herself, something held her back from reading it.
“I think a part of you is afraid to crack open the book because it would be sort of having to reckon with that pain, the generational trauma, and the family’s experiences of the past hundred years,” she says. But on a flight from London to New York, she decided to give it a shot.
The simplest theory of human nature is that we work as hard as we can to avoid such experiences. We pursue pleasure and comfort; we hope to make it through life unscathed. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The tidying guru Marie Kondo became famous by telling people to throw away possessions that don’t “spark joy,” and many would see such purging as excellent life advice in general.
But this theory is incomplete. Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for.
Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a plot. Such a bump is the unmistakable signature of “resonance,” one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in nature.
Resonance underlies aspects of the world as diverse as music, nuclear fusion in dying stars, and even the very existence of subatomic particles. Here’s how the same effect manifests in such varied settings, from everyday life down to the smallest scales.
My curiosity about my leukocytes started before the pandemic. I was motivated by the oldest and most basic grief we experience: the loss of love. But the lessons from my heartache and the emerging neurogenomics of loneliness have much to offer our strange moment in time.
Steve was always ready to grab a shield off the wall and hunker down. He was never dishonest about it. “Not my thing,” he wrote from time to time about some artist I’d covered that didn’t connect for him. “But I admire the passion.”
Please consider for just a moment how much more elegant that response is than the contemporary cultural default of clearly defined positive and negative spaces. We live in binary times with the things we like and hate. Steve saw what happened to the light when it shot through the prism. He had preferences — as we all do. But a guy who helped airplanes converge through narrowing passages to a common point always saw something more like the sky in art — boundless possibilities.
When you're an established author, people see your articles and books come out, they hear about your awards and see you on TV, but what they didn't see — literally, because the audiences were that small — is you earning your stripes first in the world of unpaid and underpaid art events. Creative writing students know that grind. It goes with submitting your work again and again after thousands of rejections from journals with tiny audiences, reading pages of feedback from people who don't get your work and sticking it out at wild mixers.
Now that I've published a few books and hundreds of articles, I'd like to celebrate by sharing some readings from hell. This is my toast to the MFA students out there, especially those coming out of virtual classrooms to engage with the public for the first time. Keep submitting your work. Keep doing the readings. You'll keep getting better. And I promise you, it will pay off.
Want to finish reading an article? You can, but only if you subscribe for just $1 for 3 months, which becomes $11.99 a month thereafter, and into perpetuity, until your credit card expires. Even if it's after you do.
I have a strong, even personal interest in paying journalists fairly. But the cost most people have to pay these days if they want to try to stay informed and enrich their minds with a range of opinions is pretty steep.
So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain that when more dramatic plot turns arrive — suicides, teen pregnancies — they almost seem superfluous, visitations from an after-school special. The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.
Eating keeps us alive, of course, but one theme of Saladino’s deeply humanist book is how many of the things we consume can’t survive without us. Heirloom vegetables and grains, like the O-Higu soybean that once grew across Okinawa, will be unknown if we stop planting them. Livestock breeds like the Middle White pig, also known as the London Porker in the days when it was “ pig of choice,” will die out if we stop raising them. The Georgian wines fermented by wild yeasts in clay pots called qvevri that were around before wine barrels will dry up if we stop drinking them.
one of these days, and if it is I’ll swim,
bobbing up and down over probably,
it will be summer and my god I’ll say hello
to people who don’t live in my house,
The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.
In Sarah Manguso’s debut novel, “Very Cold People,” a woman named Ruthie reflects on growing up in the aptly named fictional small town of Waitsfield, Mass. “I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me. … My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.” In looking back at that time, she can give herself a more definitive shape. (One can’t help but think of the title of Eimear McBride’s novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.”) It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it. After all, her pithy and profound nonfiction (including “300 Arguments” and “Ongoingness”) deals with time and mortality, among other topics, and she grew up in the same state. But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma.
It might be hard to think of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) as a forest creature. Most of us picture honey bees in the context of hives in wooden boxes, managed by beekeepers in heavy white jumpsuits. We don’t think of them living in trees. We don’t think of colonies thriving without human intervention. But forest-dwelling honey bee colonies do exist in the wild.
This is the most basic truth you’ll come to understand when reading Ingo Arndt and Jürgen Tautz’s “Wild Honey Bees,” a fascinating work on forest bees in Central Europe. Yet, it’s not the only thing you’ll learn. Arndt and Tautz have produced a book that will change the way you think about bees forever.
"Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return" chronicles the author's relocation from her adopted home of New York to her birth city of London. After becoming increasingly disenchanted with the American political situation, Mead, a staff writer at the New Yorker, decided to leave the country with her husband and adolescent son.
It was a big step: She had lived in America for 30 years and become an American citizen; London had drastically transformed itself over that time and she harbored mixed feelings about her "chilly, moated island nation." But in the summer of 2018 she and her family finally took the plunge and made the move.
Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting views of political ideologies: for example, he expressed sympathies for socialism (“anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty,” he wrote, can understand why fighting “against the inequality of wealth” was necessary) only to reject it elsewhere as antithetical to human nature. He similarly supported Zionism (even serving on the founding board of the Hebrew University) while simultaneously criticizing it as “baseless fanaticism.” Few works embodied this ambivalence better than Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud’s most all-encompassing reflection on social matters. Discussing everything from religion to technology to bodily odors, he provocatively concluded that life in society is destined to be tragic: Whatever people gain from their social web, from safety to a sense of belonging, always comes at the price of unhappiness. Even his hair-raising escape from the Nazis, who in 1938 occupied Freud’s home country of Austria, invoked mixed feelings. “The triumphant feeling of liberation,” he wrote in a letter from exile, “is mingled too strongly with mourning for one had loved the prison from which one has been released.”
“I never thought I would write a novel,” she told me. “Yet I’ve been able to articulate something about this culture that I hadn’t been able to. I’ve learned a few things about what fiction can do that nonfiction can’t. It was incredibly freeing. This is a real turning point for me as a writer. My books were getting shorter and shorter. I initially began the book as a memoir, but there wasn’t enough story there. I ran out of material!”
In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted two versions of the Tower of Babel, one in Antwerp and the other in Brussels, after he had married and moved there to distance himself from his mistress. The move, Michael Pye suggests in Europe’s Babylon, his exuberant history of sixteenth-century Antwerp, changed the artist’s viewpoint. The first painting is a scene of construction, with sheds and cranes, ladders and chutes. Nimrod, the mighty hunter and God-defying tyrant, stands before a recognizable panorama of Antwerp’s wharves, spires, walls, and windmills: “Furious, muddled energy is building a heap which will have the look of a city.” In the second version, Nimrod has vanished. The ziggurat tower-city is finished but ominously quiet. The life has gone out of it—a prophecy in paint.
It is midnight. We are walking up a road that winds itself round a mountain outside of Bergen, Norway. The walk has been lasting for what seems like an eternity already. Icy wind lunges at us now and again, scratching at our faces. My nose is red and sore from me constantly wiping it with tissues. My eyes are watering and I lower my head so that it’s parallel to the ground. Occasional lampposts bathe the asphalt in warm light, and it glimmers with hoar frost as if powdered with fairy dust. It’s too bright here, though; there’s too much light pollution. We swerve off the road and onto a footpath, looking for a sweet open spot. Our feet move tentatively along a stony trail, tree branches lashing at our faces. It is so quiet. Someone in our group turns on a flashlight and the rest of us snarl back, as we’ve just got our natural night vision going. The flashlight goes out. When it’s finally pitch dark and there’s not a tree to cover our view, we know we have arrived. There is a distant silhouette of a hill rising on the other side of the fjord, with just a scattering of houses around it. The sky is dark and rich with tiny stars. The place is perfect. The sky is perfect — perfect for watching the Northern Lights.
The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions – like the lines of a screen painting the narrator admires: “Some were strong and definite, while others bled and faded, giving the impression of vapour. And yet, when you looked, you saw something: mountains, dissolution, form and colour running forever downwards.” Aesthetic, opaque, endlessly uncoiling.
We’re living through rough times. Pandemics, climate change, volcanic eruptions—each sweeping horror seems worse than the last. In Kim Fu’s new collection of stories, Lesser Known Monsters Of The 21st Century, the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity.
Jonas’s narrator is a work of art in herself, with at least one foot on the wrong side of #MeToo. You wouldn’t want to let that stop you.
Structurally the book is like countless other introductions to ethics. Chapters focus on major theories, such as utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics of duty, Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Sartre’s existentialism. But that’s where the resemblance to a conventional textbook ends. The narrative voice is not that of a gentle professor but of a slightly manic bar-room joker who is actually funny and genuinely excited to share his passion with anyone who will listen—and anyone who won’t.
You might expect a book on this morbid theme to be forbidding or sombre. This one is neither. Instead Mr Doig, a biochemist at the University of Manchester, tells an empowering story of human ingenuity.
Pixelated, on a clear day, a shovel may resemble
a rifle. A woman is always a civilian, by definition,
I cannot start any document — a novel, a letter, an invoice — without first clicking on the drop-down menu labeled “Font” and considering my options. There are the obvious choices: Times New Roman, reliable if bland; Arial, crisp and austere; Proxima Nova, clean and versatile. But what about those occasions that require the fine china of typography?
And yet making sense of dreams, it occurs to me lately, is not wholly dissimilar from making sense of “reality,” whatever that is. Yes, we all live in the same world. We can compare notes on what is happening, and draw inferences, in a way impossible with dreams.
And yet your experience of the world is unique to you. So is your interpretation of it, which depends on your prior beliefs, yearnings and aversions, and on what matters to you. No wonder we often disagree vehemently, violently, on what has happened and what it means.
In “The Christie Affair,” an ingenious new psychological suspense novel that concocts an elaborate backstory behind Christie’s disappearance, Nina de Gramont reminds readers of “the other woman” in the story and suggests that it also would be a mistake to underestimate her. This Nancy Neele — here called “Nan O’Dea” — is powered by rage and grief and matches wits with the Queen of Crime herself, not only to possess Archie, but to achieve a greater end that few readers will anticipate. And, here’s the neatest narrative trick of all: As Christie characteristically did, de Gramont hides the solution to the mystery of “The Christie Affair” in plain sight.
The Family Chao is a riveting character-driven novel that delves beautifully into human psychology; Dostoevsky himself would surely approve.
For all its run-on sentences and muddled emotions, “Men in My Situation” is possessed of an austerity and bleakness that is satisfyingly unforgiving (and that is tempting for an American reviewer to attach to cold, northern weather conditions — but I shall resist). The hapless, deeply flawed Arvid can make no sense of the string of senseless events that make a life. And his puzzlement offers comfort, transcending middle-aged male disaffection to speak to the universal condition of adulthood.
Even as she set towering records and moved mountains with her voice, she was judged at every turn by those who could never step into in her shoes.
Although the love never left, the mockery grew louder in her later years as she fell victim to drug abuse before dying in 2012 at age 48.
“Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” a new book by Gerrick Kennedy, seeks to recontextualize Houston‘s life, looking with compassion rather than scorn.
The concept at New York’s latest fine dining restaurant could not be further from that of the building’s past incarnations — or of pretty much any other upscale restaurant in New York, for that matter, but Justice and Lindsley share Chang’s desire to turn the concept of fine dining on its head. “We would have been so sad to just open another [restaurant],” Justice says. “But at the end of the day, we’re opening a little boutique, fine dining restaurant in Manhattan.” So what is HAGS, if not just another costly culinary experience in a cramped dining room? It is a space, as Lindsley and Justice see it (and hope you will, too) where queerness comes first, and all else comes second.
But nothing should overshadow Tokarczuk’s literary presence in the United States now. “The Books of Jacob” is finally available here in a wondrous English translation by Jennifer Croft, and it’s just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed when they praised Tokarczuk for showing “the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding.” In terms of its scope and ambition, “The Books of Jacob” is beyond anything else I’ve ever read. Even its voluminous subtitle is a witty expression of Tokarczuk’s irrepressible, omnivorous reach. Deep breath: “A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing From a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.”
When I opened Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, “The Violin Conspiracy,” I was immediately transported to a place I’d never been, surrounded by characters I’d never met. In the crowded world of fiction, that’s no small accomplishment. Taking inspiration from his day job as a music teacher, Slocumb has orchestrated an engaging and suspenseful story about an aspiring musician and his great-great-grandfather’s violin.
But this is a deceptively expansive novel, filled with idiosyncratic characters and a distinctive flavor of the times. Beyond the confines of Phyllis's suburban house and Nicky's one-room flat, Hadley gives us sweeping descriptions of London in the Swinging '60s, where old fashioned elegance, is giving way to crushed velvets and "Indian silver" jewelry. A domestic novel of manners, erotic abandon and cultural change, Free Love is as eclectic and alive as the times it captures.
Darnielle’s creative direction is a scholarly and practical one: all of his protagonists have to have jobs, because he doesn’t believe in writing characters that aren’t working, that aren’t like most of the adult world; he made an album of songs all derived from Bible verses; one section of Devil House is written entirely in Arthurian language, or, as he calls it, a “dimestore version of Middle English, but still a discursive, generous style of thought”; he conjures a comparison of true crime writers’ absorptions of real-life gore to the contemporary plights of Facebook content moderators.
But Darnielle’s work joins the likes of entertainers attempting to achieve crossover appeal, though he’s not entirely interested in having his music and novel-writing successes intersect. “My ideal situation is somebody who can’t stand my band but reads my book and says, ‘He’s a good writer, but I don’t care for his music,’” he told me over the phone, chuckling.
This sense of relinquishment — of setting aside reason to take up freedom — is what drives Phyllis and also works on her author in the middle of her late career: the freedom from having to polemicize and explain. “The great privilege of the novelist actually — which I believe quite strongly — is that at their best, [one] doesn’t actually need to take sides,” she says.
But in a business where the reinvention of classic dishes is commonplace, where does inspiration by another chef's work end and plagiarism begin?
Stuart Roosa, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, took a small canvas bag of tree seeds with him on the journey. While his fellow astronauts walked on the lunar surface, Roosa and the seeds flew round and round the moon until the crew was ready to come back. A few years after the astronauts returned home, some of the seeds—sycamores, redwoods, pines, firs, and sweetgums—were planted across the United States, to see how they would grow, or simply to keep a piece of moon history close by.
When cocooned in the darkness for months on end, many on Antarctic expeditions have lost their minds. This is no surprise, especially for those experiencing it for the first time. It is not only dark, cold and claustrophobic, but being marooned on a mysterious land thousands of miles away from civilization can be difficult to get your head around. These pressures would take their toll on even the most hardened of individuals. Indeed, on the Belgica expedition, the crew succumbed to a mix of scurvy and “cabin fever.”
Even those on the Discovery who kept their sanity found the conditions difficult. As temperatures outside dropped to as low as minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit, most decided to stay on board, but even then, ice still formed on the cabin walls. In these uncomfortable conditions, many of the men grew homesick, while being trapped in the same place and seeing the same people, for months on end, quickly began to grate. Any natural tendency to irritation, depression, pessimism or worry was magnified and, in the absence of loved ones, the natural, indeed the safest, outlets for pent-up feelings were diaries and letters home. That’s human nature, and even more so on an expedition where sensibilities can become extreme.
Today, the waterway is more reminiscent of an oversize storm drain than a river, with just a slow trickle of water flowing down the center of the concrete-lined channel. The images it conjures for most people are the settings featured in famous movie scenes, like “Grease” or “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
But tucked in a little corner of Los Angeles, underneath the intersection of two highways, lies a neighborhood known as Frogtown — along with a small and lush section of the Los Angeles River.
More than 25 years later, Koi Palace Daly City is the restaurant group’s oldest property, a place where servers can split a whole fish among a table of eight with just one hand and wok cooks have committed hundreds of off-menu dishes to memory. But as the years have gone by, both the restaurant’s loyal customers and employees have grown older. Willy Ng worries that younger customers might feel uncomfortable in Koi Palace if they’re unfamiliar with Cantonese cuisine and the Chinese language. “You will feel like you are a stranger … think, ‘Maybe [Koi Palace] isn’t my place,’” he says.
So Willy Ng now faces a new challenge: making Cantonese cuisine that’s accessible to new generations of clientele, and reproducible without a classically trained kitchen staff. His solution? Sleek restaurants serving multicolored dumplings and a behind-the-scenes commissary kitchen powered by machinery and a staff of 60.
The Greyhound was escape and pursuit all in one — the old life in the rearview mirror, another brighter one ahead. This was especially true immediately after leaving the bus stations, which were unfailingly peopled with distressed, red-eyed women, and bristly jawed, ruined-looking men. To a person, they looked as though they clutched a switchblade inside their jacket pocket. Their eyes dared you to ask them the time.
The truth is, the glory days of the Greyhound were over long before they folded. The only thing I can ever remember the bus delivering to our little prairie town was my Granny once a year. By the time she arrived in Manitoba from Vancouver, even a seasoned Greyhounder like her looked as haggard and unshaven as the rest of the passengers.
“Vladimir” contains far too many uncomfortable truths to be merely fun, but — especially for those of us with feet in the worlds of academia and literature — it remains, by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining.
“In this country there are always calamities, and it’s not hard to connect them to some life event,” the 100-year-old Violeta writes to a shadowy figure in Isabel Allende’s new novel. Violeta could as easily be describing the epistolary epic that frames her own life, which is also rife with calamity: the dissolution of a family fortune, a tempestuous marriage interspersed with love affairs, the machinations of family and friends over a century, all set against political upheaval in her homeland, an unnamed Latin American country.
One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her. She saw the yellow of his nicotine-stained fingers and the shine of his black, Brylcreemed hair. They stared at each other, happy to be together again. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone and the sunlit lawn was empty.
Her father had been dead for more than 20 years and the sighting of him through the glass door was simply one of the many visual hallucinations that ambush Mitchell: the escalator turns into a waterfall; a marble floor is a swimming pool; a patterned carpet writhes with creatures; a person dressed in black becomes a disembodied head floating on air. Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.
From cave paintings to Toy Story, via expeditions to Egypt, Russian gulags and a hundred other directions that manage to be both weirdly relevant and usually fascinating, this is the physics and family history of everything that goes into images on screens.