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.