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.