Sigh. Will I ever get to these books, and dozens of others, as well as all that tempting fiction? Who knows? Still, I suspect any reader could share an equally idiosyncratic “secret” list. What’s on yours?
The banquets are what I most remember about Hong Fu. Many of the customs of banquet meals in Taiwan were also present at Hong Fu, despite the fact that it served both Sichuan and Taiwanese cuisines and was in Cupertino, California. Upon our arrival, waitstaff would present a variety of set menus in ascending order of cost per table to whoever had made the reservation. The number and order of dishes on a banquet menu are purposefully set, and the waitstaff brings out the food just as thoughtfully. Eight dishes are lucky because eight (“ba”) sounds like “fa,” a word that conjures prosperity. Four, which sounds like the word for death, ought to be avoided at all costs. A few select dishes come out at a time so that diners may enjoy a variety of flavors and textures at any moment; soup and cold appetizers arrive at the beginning, and fried rice and/or noodles come toward the end.
Hannah Gadsby understands the value of context. In Nanette, her startling stand-up comedy show that was made into a Netflix special in 2018, she memorably provides additional context for Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. She recounts how she was once confronted by an audience member who, in the course of criticizing antidepressants, argued that if Van Gogh had taken medication for his depression, he would not have painted his flowery masterpieces. In response, Gadsby drew on her education in art history and “tore that man a college debt-sized new arsehole,” explaining that Van Gogh was in fact not only medicating, but that one of the medications he was taking had a side effect of increasing the intensity of the color yellow.
Besides providing a sharp counterpoint to some unwanted feedback, this context also gives us more information about how Van Gogh’s work connected with his life. In Gadsby’s new book, Ten Steps to Nanette, she offers us a similar gift, amplifying the significance of her performance by building frames of reference for its groundbreaking content.
In Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television, Annie Berke explores this first Golden Age of television through the contributions of women writers, whom she convincingly argues have been grossly overlooked. Of particular interest to Berke is how women writers negotiated and demonstrated their value, both onscreen and off, in “an industry that sought to capitalize on female viewership while keeping executive power largely in men’s hands.”
I tell the oracles that no one has touched
me, that plenty have looked, drunk their fill
on my ( ). Their predictions break down every
“It’s just what I know, so there’s no point in changing,” says Dean Coombs, the man running the machine. Coombs, 70, is publisher and editor of the Saguache Crescent, the weekly for Saguache, Colorado, a hamlet of around 500 souls high in the Rocky Mountains. The Crescent goes to press every Tuesday. It costs 35 cents at the local gas station and town thrift store, and you can snag a copy for free at the 4th Street Diner and Bakery. An annual subscription can go for as little as $16. There are 360 subscribers. Each week, Coombs produces 400 or more copies using a Mergenthaler Model 14, which his family purchased new in 1920. It’s the last linotype-produced newspaper in the United States—and perhaps the world.
Kakuni translates to “square simmered” in Japanese. It’s pork belly cooked in a trinity that’s largely synonymous with the country’s cuisine: sugar, sake and soy sauce. The most expensive ingredient is time. But cooking kakuni is wildly simple: After frying your pork lightly for color, you simmer the meat until it’s soft to the touch, rendering most of the fat. This allows the base ensemble to imbue your meal with silky, molten flavor. For all of its simplicity, the dish is wildly consoling. You’re just as likely to find it chalked across the menu board of a bar as in the weeknight rotation of somebody’s home.
Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You’ve entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan’s new one, “The Candy House,” is one of these novels. It makes you feel a bit high, drugged, and fitted with V.R. goggles, almost from the start.
In pop culture, female androids and artificial intelligences tend to be sexualized and treated as potential partners (“Ex Machina,” “Westworld,” “Her”). Male androids, in contrast, are super strong and hypercompetent (The Terminator series, Ultron, “Bladerunner.”) The title story of Kate Folk’s new collection “Out There” gleefully rewires those gendered tropes. The story is about blots — male AIs designed to look like handsome heartthrobs, ingratiate themselves and steal women’s data. The perfect artificial man is not a muscled savior. He’s a friendly exterior concealing a nefarious plot to seduce you and rob you of your self.
Focused almost wholly on the first half of Wells’s life, Tomalin’s brisk new study, The Young H.G. Wells, reintroduces this would-be titan of reason, the mustached precursor of Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tomalin shows Wells’s difficult path through illness to security, his consistent attention to left-wing politics alongside science, and his appetite for pleasure, once security came. It might not disrupt the picture earlier critics give of Wells the tireless rationalist, who wanted everything (even sex) to make sense. And yet—set beside Wells’s own fiction—it might. Wells became famous not just because he showed a prodigious faculty for reason, an energy for explaining, a passion for science, though he would not have risen without those qualities. His work and his life—especially the first half—also spring from the power in imagination, from the wish (which his characters share) to escape from this life, to discover something more.
“I have loved my father and I have feared him, and I have lain awake in the dark late at night worrying what it means to have half his genome inside me, but I have never understood him. Sometimes I have felt that if I could just reach down far enough into myself, I would find the answers: what he wants, what he fears, what he loves.”
With these words, Maud Newton sets the course for her debut memoir, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation. With these words, she enters the prism of family. Before she is done, she will have examined many ideas — about ancestry across cultures and across time, on genes and individuality, and from the philosophical world that underpins how we think about ourselves. She will have built a perspective on today’s internet-inspired genealogy and what it can mean in our lives.
where M is the mass of my brother’s body
falling after he pulled the trigger.
And here we are, bound to Earth’s pull
downward. His knees hit the floor first.
In these spaces of questionable morality, the femme fatale’s sex appeal gives her the upper hand. She’s always a target in rooms filled with men who want to leer at her. She knows this, and turns it to her advantage. While the erotic thrills are obviously meant to be found in her self-revelation, what seems more thrilling to me is how she works this trap. She’s a magician who can misdirect her audience with a quip and the raise of a perfectly sculpted brow. A femme fatale always knows how to use the erotics of the erotic thriller. When Catherine Tramell intimidates her male interrogators with candid discussion of her sex life and famously uncrosses her legs to reveal she’s not wearing underwear, the moment is so self-conscious in its studied sexiness that it becomes bizarre. Who would ever do such a thing in real life? But the men onscreen are so enthralled by her that she can do whatever she wants. It’s a fantasy of weaponized femininity in a misogynist world, and by the time Jeanne Tripplehorn exclaims of Stone’s character: “She’s evil! She’s brilliant!” I can’t help but wish that I too could be evil and brilliant, working my way into spaces where I shouldn’t be and surprising everyone with that stylish mix of sexiness and cunning that only exists in movies.
The news does not matter. It has little, if any real impact on your life besides what you allow it to have. Like a vampire, The news- whether mainstream, alternative, printed or screen-based- is a parasitic force that will drain you of your energy, happiness and rationality if you welcome it over your threshold and in to your life. The key is to simply never invite it in.
Now, I’m sure this controversial opening paragraph has already got some readers citing objections and caveats, reaching for counter-examples and exceptions, or simply getting ready to wave me off as an uninformed fool who doesn’t know what he is talking about. And perhaps there is something to that, given that my online avatar is a pixelated rendering of Stanczyk the Court Jester. But jesters are kept around because they say what needs to be said. And they express these unpopular messages with enough wit and entertainment that the kings let them keep their heads and indeed value their council. Which is the service that I am hoping to perform for you today.
Comedy has always been the author’s way into deeper issues. “You know, you laugh and you laugh and you laugh until you cry,” he says. “With this book in particular, I was writing at a time when our American democracy was being threatened by a president who told Orwellian lies constantly. I was editing the book during a pandemic and the strains a global health crisis put on our government. Those things led me to the question of: How far would a person go to protect something they see as sacred?”
In this new book by Kári Gíslason, the medieval tale of The Saga of Gisli is reimagined, providing flesh, bones and heart to a woman long relegated to the sidelines of Icelandic history.
Hannah Gadsby repeatedly points out that she’s zigging when a ghostwriter would’ve zagged in “Ten Steps to Nanette,” the enthralling and occasionally vexing book she bills as “A Memoir Situation.” Case in point: The Emmy-winning stand-up comic opens with an epilogue, concludes with the prologue and drops in an intermission to encourage mid-reading decompression.
Should we have expected anything less? The Australian rocketed to global prominence in 2018 with the Netflix release of “Nanette,” which challenged notions of what a comedy special could be through its unapologetic interrogation of sexual violence, homophobia and patriarchal structures. She remained in a form-breaking mood with her charming 2020 follow-up, “Douglas,” a lighter but more methodically crafted exercise in comedy deconstruction. Although “Ten Steps to Nanette” has the trappings of a memoir, as Gadsby embeds her memories with wit, reflection and self-deprecation, she eschews convention by meticulously framing her life through her defining work.
Early in his new book, Robert Whiting refers to the “Yamate Line,” and most readers who have been to Tokyo in the past half-century will suspect a misprint. Few visitors to the Japanese capital could avoid the subway train in question, which runs in a loop through such well-known districts as Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Ginza. But they’ll know it as the Yamanote Line, a romanization of its Japanese name (literally “mountain’s hand,” equivalent to the English “foothill”) first adopted in 1971. But by then, the Californian Whiting had already logged almost a decade in Japan, having been sent there by the United States Air Force in 1962. “Tokyo is the best city in the world,” he remembers a master sergeant saying when informing him of his posting: “You’ll be over there with all those geisha girls, riding around in rickshaws. Ten million people. More neon signs than you can imagine.”
The neon comes up quite often throughout Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys … and Baseball, as one of the city’s few constants during a period of ceaseless change. Whiting closes his memoir with his 77th birthday lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Nihonbashi: “It occurred to me over our gelato that there is very little left in Tokyo that is older than I am, given how this city keeps on renewing itself.” He arrived nearly 60 years ago to “the biggest construction site in the world,” a transformation motivated by preparation for the 1964 Summer Olympics. Still, there were plenty of attractions amid all the dust: there were “deluxe movie theaters with 70mm screens, and pachinko pinball parlors jangling noisily all day long,” beside “noodle stands, yakitori shops with their smoky grills, food marts, and discount shops,” beside “ancient temples with serene gardens of gravel and rocks and inner courtyards.”
Taking readers on an expansive journey across continents, cultures, centuries and even species, Gross reveals a stunning disparity in Western medicine and academia: While huge amounts of money and dedication are poured into the understanding of penises, the female body is disregarded. Like lore, this misinformation and shame are still being passed down to girls today.
It is a challenge to capture the essence of a protean life while the subject is still writing the script, but Mr. Markoff, a longtime tech journalist for the New York Times, has done it beautifully. “Telling the story of Stewart Brand”—now a vital 83—“poses a puzzle, for he isn’t someone who can be neatly categorized,” Mr. Markoff reflects. “Perhaps it is so difficult to put him in a box because he has such an uncanny knack for seeing the world from outside the box.”
It may be true
that I’m limerent
for you another victim
of love I’ve got all
the relevant symptoms
That a movie’s length could be a meaningful measure of anything beyond how literally long it takes to watch it is nonsense, like judging a painting by how many square inches it takes up. Smarter people than me have already stated this more eloquently than I can: “Bad movies are always too long, but good movies are either too short, or just right,” Roger Ebert wrote in 1992, and it’s as true now as it was then.
Fight me on this: The absolute best place to hang out on vacation is in an independent bookstore. Staff recommendations let you peek into the mind of a city’s literary trendsetters. Local displays highlight authors and stories you won’t stumble across anywhere else. And, best of all, you are surrounded by kindred book-loving spirits who call the place you’re visiting home.
At the beginning of Andrew Miller’s ninth novel, a letter arrives. The narrator, a 51-year-old recovering alcoholic named Stephen Rose, is being summoned to Belfast from his home in Somerset by a body known as the Commission. The letter assures Stephen that this is not about bringing anyone to trial, but giving those involved in an incident that took place 30 years ago an opportunity to tell their side of the story. In short, the past is being dragged into the light. We know something terrible happened during Stephen’s service with the British army in Northern Ireland as a young man; the promise of learning the grisly details is what entices us through this sombre examination of shame, guilt and the long aftershocks of trauma.
Joyce Carol Oates’s multitudinous collections are repeatedly subtitled “tales of suspense” or “stories of mystery”. You tend to know what you’re getting with an Oatesian short – a disquieting snapshot of American life on the verge of individual or ideological collapse – and these nine additions to her oeuvre don’t disappoint.
Horizons shows the immense potential of global histories of science, but it also shows the continued need for other approaches. We need histories of science in Europe, because we need to know what happened inside the black hole. We need epistemic histories of science, because the value of science depends on its ability to understand the natural world. We also need relativist histories of science, because science is not the only way to be rational, and not always the best way. And we need national and regional histories, because cultural separation is as much a part of modern history as cultural exchange.
As a leading adviser on disaster recovery, Lucy Easthope has often witnessed the effects of “nuclear incidents, chemical attacks, pandemics, food shortages, fuel shortages, trains and plane crashes, volcanoes and tsunamis”. Yet when she arrives at another scene of carnage, she tells us, she is “always struck by how fine the line between catastrophe and the rest of the world can be”. Her enthralling new book draws back the curtain on the crucial but largely hidden work of planning for emergencies, intervening when the worst happens – and then trying to bring communities back from the brink.
To the one who begged for no more guests and carved a kitchen chair for me anyway:
Fifteen minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, into a tranquil gated community, up a red-brick driveway, past the palm trees that touch the Mojave Desert sky, through the veil that separates the astral plane, and here he is: the man they say gained and lost a $150 million fortune; who owned castles in Europe and the most haunted house in America and the Shah of Iran's Lamborghini and two albino king cobras and a rare two-headed snake; who had to return his prized dinosaur skull upon learning it was stolen from Mongolia; who went on an epic quest for the actual Holy Grail; and who—when his singular, fantastical life eventually comes to an end—will be laid to eternal rest in a colossal white pyramid tomb in New Orleans.
Nicolas Cage greets me at his door, wearing a kung fu suit.
Cold Enough for Snow is constructed as a mystery, but the puzzle is its two central characters: a mother and a daughter, who arrive separately from an unnamed country to spend a short autumn holiday together in Tokyo. The novel is Melbourne-based Jessica Au’s UK debut, elliptical and ghostly, gleaming with beautiful imagery as bright as a shoal of tiny tetra fish. It is typhoon season, and the pair’s every action – sharing meals, walking, visiting art galleries, talking obliquely about the past and the present but never the future – appears veiled, as if through a delicate, persistent mist.
The reader is left with many questions at the end, but that feels like one of the points of the book. Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious.
This is not the book that Sarah Hughes intended it to be. Aged just 46, the journalist learned that her recently treated breast cancer had not only returned and spread, it had become incurable. She went on to defy statistics and live with it for more than two years (the median is just 11 months) but it wasn’t long enough to complete the work she had originally outlined. And yet, while they’re clearly as nothing compared with some of her life’s other incomplete endeavours – most poignantly, the raising of her two children – missing chapters such as Financial Advice from an Unrepentant Gambler and The Secret Lives of Catholic Saints are also fully eclipsed by what she did manage to achieve.
Maybe McGonigal remains so buoyant because she sees play everywhere. She writes about leading a quick game of “When does the future start?” That, to me, sounds like a question — an exercise at best. But maybe that’s her point: A game can be anything you approach with a sense of fun. McGonigal seems like one of the few interested in gaming’s potential to foster collective well-being, rather than filling corporate coffers. Play for play’s sake — but also for the sake of solving world problems — is an uncommon self-help angle. In “Imaginable,” there’s no tangible reward save the feeling of readiness itself. Which, right now, is certainly appealing.
I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone’s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body—and, it turns out, it skims everyone’s body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times—in 2001, 2009, and 2018—though not by me.
Over the past few decades, bartenders have derided the Long Island Iced Tea as little more than a punchline. The slapdash consortium of spirits that make up the cocktail—usually neighbors in the slum of a bartender’s well—make strange bedfellows. But as the outside world descends into chaos, the chaotic cocktail appears to be having a moment. “On paper, the cocktail’s a mess,” says Nick Bennett, the beverage director of Porchlight Bar in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “But if you look at the recipe, it’s really just a simple sour served as a highball.”
Egon Schiele’s images of women are challenging and varied. Some are elusive, quaint or decorative, but many are sexual, powerful, provocative. They raise unsettling questions of voyeurism and exploitation. Who were these women and what role did they play in Schiele’s life and his art? These are questions Sophie Haydock sets out to answer in her ambitious and intriguing debut novel.
In Canada, just about every urban centre holds its share of (often stunning) disappeared structures, as Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic and illustrator Raymond Biesinger reveal in 305 Lost Buildings of Canada, their delightful if slightly melancholic guide to architecture-no-longer-with-us.
For Newton the big question becomes what exactly our relationship with our ancestors is. To this end, she looks at the ways inheritance has been conceived in earlier times and by diverse cultures. Eventually, she attempts to deal with the crimes of her ancestors and, much to this reader's consternation, plunges whole-hog into mystical waters, communing with a couple of her "well" predecessors who, in turn, become agents for "repairing" the "unwell" ones.
American English, like America, seemed inherently excessive to me. You didn’t just sleep, you passed out. Until the age of about 20, it seemed, you weren’t merely young but a kid. A favorite adjective amongst the students at my high school was belligerent. You didn’t simply get drunk or annoyed or tired, you got belligerently so.
British English, by contrast, is designed to minimize. When I was growing up, “quite nice” was considered a high compliment. Forget being called hot or beautiful, if a boy described you as “a bit of alright,” you were on cloud nine.
No, what looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.
There used to be a time when unannounced gastronomic pop-ups were a thing. There was neither a spread of promotional materials nor an infectious pre-event hype on social media—they just went viral along their own cosy street.
These flash bazaars simply showed up and, literally, brightened up the neighbourhood.
One of the triumphs of “The Cartographers” is the exploration of what it means to make a map. Does the act of surveying, measuring, drafting and drawing the map affect the landscape it represents? Is it possible to map something without altering it in the process? How accurate can any map be, given that it only represents a snapshot of that landscape at one point in time, and to what extent does this matter?
“The Cartographers” explores these questions with deep, vivid intensity; it will make you think twice about the power of paper maps, especially in a world where they’ve been supplanted by electronic devices.
Reading The Exhibitionist is like eating a rich, delicious and wildly elaborate cream cake. You know you’ll regret devouring the whole thing at once, but it’s very hard to stop.
American parochialism can become American ignorance, a condition that has long frustrated geography teachers in the U.S. and delighted late-night talk show hosts. (Take a cringe-filled stroll through YouTube’s vast catalog of segments such as Jimmy Kimmel’s “Can You Name a Country?” in which several random passersby in Los Angeles fail to identify a single country on a world map.) But this lack of familiarity with the world beyond U.S. borders has also had dangerous consequences, for both the U.S. and the world. Ignorant of local condiations, American policymakers have made disastrous assumptions—the conflation of Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein comes to mind—and leapt into war.
How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
For her mostly revelatory new memoir, “Ancestor Trouble,” blogger, critic and essayist Maud Newton has spent the last several years reckoning with the personal and historical legacy of her ancestors, starting with her fractured immediate family and working backward in time, through and beyond her great-grandparents.
Stephen Galloway’s dual biography, Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and The Romance of The Century is a worthy addition to film history libraries, using insight gained over decades not to judge or excoriate its subjects, but to view their accomplishments and struggles through a new lens, encouraging readers to look at how much they were able to accomplish despite insurmountable personal issues and extremes of emotion.
In 1966, Stewart Brand was an impresario of Bay Area counterculture. As the host of an extravaganza of music and psychedelic simulation called the Trips Festival, he was, according to John Markoff’s “Whole Earth,” “shirtless, with a large Indian pendant around his neck … and wearing a black top hat capped with a prominent feather.” Four decades later, Brand had become a business consultant. At a meeting with the Nuclear Energy Institute, he promoted the virtues and inevitability of nuclear power. He also wrote a book endorsing genetically modified organisms, geoengineering and urban density.
Tracing the relationship between these two Stewart Brands, and what the distance they cover might say about the American environmental movement, is Markoff’s challenging task. A former New York Times technology writer who has explored the intersection of the counterculture and computing in previous work, Markoff now focuses on Brand’s unpredictable path as a “quixotic intellectual troubadour,” a “provocateur” and, in Brand’s own words, an “eco-pragmatist.”
Today, the town's historical district is protected by Japanese law. It is an extensive area encompassing 323 houses and other hongawara-buki (traditional buildings) recognised for their immense cultural value. Many of them still have their traditional lattice windows and curved tile roofs, architectural features that were symbols to passers-by of the owners' prosperity. They include five soy sauce shops and six Kinzanji miso makers that are still active. Visiting them tells the remarkable story of the intertwined fortunes of Kinzanji miso and soy sauce.
But Evison complicates and enriches the narrative by providing not only a backstory for each of his passengers, but a historical explanation for why each of them are here. In many ways, his characters represent archetypical stories, but they are infused with humanity in his capable hands. While one set of stories are all taking place on the train in 2019, the others all occur in mid-19th-century America.
Combining mystery with a soupçon of fantasy, the supernatural and literary fiction, Shepherd delivers an insightful story about obsession — the things that give us comfort, yet can agitate us, how an obsession can guide a person, or destroy you. “The Cartographers” also is a tale of families, the unshakeable bonds of parents and children, of true friendships that withstand any adversary, of unconditional love and a valentine to libraries. Even when “The Cartographers” dips into “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” territory, Shepherd keeps the tenets of mysteries paramount.
With each book, her scope seems to widen, and Pure Colour ushers the reader further from roman à clef or autobiography and closer to a kind of speculative philosophy or myth.
Jeffers engages with a richness of Black life and history far beyond her characters’ proximity to whiteness alone. By tracing the African American experience back to its roots, she has created a canon-worthy work that exposes the complexity of color and the deep wounds passing superficially attempts to address.
“Disorientation” does what great comedies and satires are supposed to do: make you laugh while forcing you to ponder the uncomfortable implications of every punchline.
In On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, the distinguished Canadian historian and political theorist Michael Ignatieff reflects on the consequences of the enduring disruption in the metaphysical supply chain that had connected countless generations to hope. The book could hardly arrive at a more critical moment. Though conceived in 2017, it was shaped and shaded by the explosion of the novel coronavirus into our lives a few years later.
Since the 13th century, when the Suffolk coastline by Dunwich began to be seriously gnawed by the waves, thousands of settlements have disappeared from our maps. It is the untold story of these lost communities – “Britain’s shadow topography” – that has become Green’s obsession. He disinters their rich history and reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets, revealing “tales of human perseverance, obsession, resistance and reconciliation”. By doing so, he makes tangible the tragedy of their loss and the threat we all face from the climate crisis on these storm-tossed islands.
In 1932, Samuel Beckett paid a visit to the Paris apartment of Walter Lowenfels, an American poet and member of the Communist Party. Sunk in a corner of the living room, looking like “a forest ranger in a Western,” Beckett listened forbearingly as Lowenfels lurched into passionate speech about the need for anonymity in the arts and the terrible material conditions of society. Increasingly frustrated by the silence of his guest, Lowenfels suddenly exclaimed: “You sit there saying nothing while the world is going to pieces. What do you want? What do you want to do?” To which Beckett offered the languid response: “Walter, all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”
Beckett’s remark is flippant and was clearly intended to be. (Flippancy in the face of humorless self-importance being always funny). But it is seriously flippant, by which I mean that it contains an implied challenge to the question posed, as if to say: What of it? What exactly is wrong with wanting to read Dante even as the world is falling to pieces?
When food writing is not done in exclusion, it lives outside the genres of glistening recipes written with over-compensating zeal. It is a solemn, celebratory narrative, a web of scene and place. If the food media can let go of their penchant for either disdain or exoticism, we may be able to create an industry that gets at the heart of what matters about cuisine and culture.
To arrive at language is to amalgamate our various exposures. From the sounds of home, to the hum of our surroundings, the cacophony of our pasts, what we read, who we meet, how we live. Our position in relation to dominant power structures (and the inherent eurocentrism, misogyny and racism of etymology) will likely influence our stance on grammar, what we subscribe to and what we rage against, steering our ear toward style, the vibrations of rhythm, syntactical flourish, structural choice. This is the magic that makes us.
Whenever I see someone in an old movie say “Swell!” or the like, I always wonder what other kinds of things they said when we weren’t listening. There’s no reason to think they weren’t as linguistically fun as we are now.
The heist or caper stories I love best, though, have a germ of justice at their hearts. Usually, the heist team is going up against a nearly invulnerable enemy, a person who can’t be touched. They’ve committed crimes themselves, or at least injustices, and faced zero consequences. If the heist succeeds, the gang will take away something they value. It isn’t societal justice, but it’s sure as hell satisfying.
What Disorientation shows us is that there is power in the page-turner, that literary merit and a unique, propelling story are not mutually exclusive. Of course, those of us who love reading know this already, but books like this show us that it never hurts to be reminded.
Even in this place where "we'd turned against the earth that now turned against us," where the struggle for survival has caused the country to turn its back on what made it a civilization, there is some beauty and mercy left.
Bulawayo doesn’t hold back in speaking truth to power. She writes urgently and courageously, holding up a mirror both to contemporary Zimbabwe and the world at large. Her fearless and innovative chronicling of politically repressive times calls to mind other great storytellers such as Herta Müller, Elif Shafak and Zimbabwean compatriot Yvonne Vera. Glory, with a flicker of hope at its end, is allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch.
The naughty pleasure of this novel is bound up in our fascination with fakes, especially when executed in the cavalier mode of Robin Hood. Perhaps Buenos Aires is more forgiving, but I doubt it.
We’re standing in the shadows of the 450-square-foot apartment that Egan and her boyfriend (now husband), David Herskovits, rented for $900 a month back in the ’90s, when she was still working as a “private secretary” to a novelist-countess (among other less glamorous money jobs) and he was starting out as a theater director, staging shows at nearby venues like La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Nada. The pair decamped more than two decades ago—first to an apartment near Penn Station and then to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where they raised two sons, but Egan never stopped thinking about that first apartment. It was where they used to host cast parties that “were so packed you could barely move,” and where she wrote her first book. She used it as a setting in A Visit From the Goon Squad, an audacious, polyphonic novel that circled around the music industry and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. In her recasting, the third-floor walk-up was home to Bix, a nerdy Black graduate student who predicted the rise of the internet. He is back in her mind-bending follow-up, The Candy House, now as a tech god whose memory-collection invention has sent the free world off its axis. Bix is a one-name master of the universe, but he dreams of returning to the place where he was a nobody and had the best conversations of his life.
Nestled in an old commercial-building structure on Los Angeles’s Jefferson Boulevard, alongside a panadería and a preschool, is a little library. Unlike the city library up the street, this one is solely focused on circulating books that explore radical political ideas, such as abolition and anarchism. There’s poetry, too, and even some zines.
The Radical Hood Library opened its doors in September, but can only do so one day a week due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. The library, founded by poet and musician Fatimah Warner, whose stage name is Noname, is the headquarters for the Noname Book Club. Although the book club bears Noname’s moniker, the efforts are not hers alone — and she would probably be the first to tell you so.
Might it be possible to write a perfect short story? Not just good, but perfect. It must be: the only thing the great stories have in common is how close they come to perfection. Which might be an overstatement, though it’s true that short stories are judged by simple criteria; there are hundreds of different ways a novel might succeed or fail, a story simply has to be brilliant. Which, for its writers, is liberating, daunting and relentlessly intriguing.
Scrabble players talk about rare and esoteric words constantly. The strange combinations and bizarre juxtapositions of letters, the aesthetic beauty and beguiling diversity of English. It’s one of the joys of the game. But they almost never get to play those words, because probability. To discuss and learn one of them, and the very next morning have it appear like a signal from a distant galaxy? And then to receive and process the signal? Utterly, mathematically, existentially nuts.
There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of “French Braid” offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace.
Fisher’s writing about his stream of patients is what gives this memoir its immediacy, its pulse. “The beauty of emergency medicine,” he writes, “is the way an entire team can enter a flow state — perfect immersion and focus with no gap between thought and action.”
His book derives its depth and tone from his arguments about the inequities of American health care. Fisher is moved, and infuriated, that so many African Americans die young because they lack access to decent insurance and treatment.
“Those who can, do science,” the economist Paul Samuelson once remarked. “Those who can’t, prattle on about methodology.” Until fairly recently this seemed to be the dominant attitude among mainstream economists, but a sea change came when the global financial system began to unravel in 2007. In the decade and a half since—painful years of sluggish recovery, stagnating real wages, yawning inequality, and populist upheaval—reflexive talk has exploded. Why was the crash not widely predicted? Was the “efficient market hypothesis” to blame? Have lessons from the Great Depression been forgotten? And why are core questions about finance, power, inequality, and capitalism still largely missing from Economics 101?
Far more than macroeconomic theory, it is microeconomic principles that define and unite the modern economic profession.
“Letter to a Stranger” is an endearing reminder of the humanity that surrounds us; messy, awkward, compassionate, vulnerable. Its bite-sized pieces allow you to jump in and out and skip around — though the smooth flow of categories is worth passing through once from beginning to end. Kinder's organization puts the essays in a pattern that could be read cyclically, inviting the reader to come back and start over.
The star-nosed mole can barely see, yet this hamster-size mammal is the fastest-hunting predator in the animal kingdom. Employing a snout equipped with 22 fleshy Cthulhu-like tentacles, it can identify and kill prey in less than the blink of an eye. As Jackie Higgins explains in her brilliant new book, “Sentient,” these heightened tactile abilities make this little-known creature the perfect specimen to help scientists explore the sense of touch in other animals, including humans.
Less often remarked upon, however, is the fact that Sebald’s books are virtually impossible to remember precisely, which is only an apparent paradox given that the main theme in his work is memory. Reading Sebald is a profoundly disorienting experience: the reader feels that she is lost — sometimes enjoyably so, and others distressingly so — somewhere in a random point of a hypertext that may not have an end. Sebald has a unique ability to blur the transition from one narrative block to the next, which makes reading his books a dreamlike experience: you read them and have the impression of entering and exiting a dream, or perhaps many interconnected dreams, similar to Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Like in dreams, when you wake up (but do you really wake up?), all you remember are vivid images torn out of context, fragments, and the impression of coming back from the underworld.
Each generation, in short, is defined partly—maybe even largely—by the apocalypses, the world-remaking catastrophes, it experienced somewhere in the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. The Boomers got duck-and-cover, Vietnam, and the convulsions of the 60s; Gen X had the Challenger explosion, the sputtering wind-down of the Cold War, Desert Storm on CNN. My generation, the Millennials, got 9/11 and the subsequent catastrophes of the Bush years. Gen Z is getting Covid-19, the global decline of democracy, the unmistakable signs of climate change, and… well, maybe the actual end of the world?
On Sunday mornings at the bagel shop though, being alone never felt so bad. I had my Sundays down to a science. Grabbing my latest book, I drove eight minutes to the bagel store by the water, one of the few routes I had memorized. There, I waited in line while watching for a booth to empty.
A bagel store on a Sunday morning is like an exhibit of dioramas, perfect human moments displayed in miniature all around you. The college kids in sweatpants, clutching chocolate milk in their fists like hangover talismans. Parents wiping schmear from their children's cheeks as the little ones babbled and squawked. Each person who approached the counter seemed deserving of attention, of appreciation. (Except for the blueberry bagel types. You know the ones.)
“Vagabonds!” abounds in spirits, but it defines the living city of Lagos and its very real rules. And though these rules can at first be hard for a reader to understand, and the voice dictating them can at times fall jarringy out of range, they become the powerful texture of the novel — or rather the game board on which complex characters are forced to play. And their teller, Osunde, becomes a bold new voice for bold new generations.
The Rack is not an easy read, particularly now, but it is a vital one, a novel of big ideas with a febrile, twisted sentimentality at its heart. It asks us to consider what makes life worth living, and what, in the end, we would be prepared to die for.
At 18, I began my unsingle life.
After I announced my June marriage, the dean at Wellesley told me I couldn’t return to college for my second year. I would lose that privilege along with my virginity. In 1956, even a prestigious school like Wellesley saw a woman as her body, and a woman’s body as her possible role in life. I impressed my housemother, Mrs. Tower, with my diamond engagement ring.
Defying crime fiction convention, nobody dies in Donna Leon’s latest mystery, Give unto Others. In fact, the bloodiest encounter in this, the author’s 31st novel featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, occurs between two dogs — and by the time we are aware of it, a vet is already on the scene (both animals survive). Humans are injured in the course of Brunetti’s latest case, one seriously. But the true victim of the crime at the center of this book is trust — in those we love and in ourselves as well.
But it’s not only the intelligent and riveting storyline or the carefully conceived and fully developed characters that elevate this book far above mundane thrillers. Foley’s precise prose rings with echoes of her British background and the elegance of her French setting.
And for those who cherish Paris, the author offers scores of scenes and sites that evoke memories. But do not expect passages that reflect only the City of Light’s charm and beauty; others depict the inevitable dark underbelly found in any metropolis.
The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition — to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit.
Muddy Matterhorn is a swan song in which McHugh recalls old friends and nods at death as well as worries about its approach. She remembers her youth and the nuns who taught her in school. She thinks about her parents and their arguments, reminisces about her former husband and his mother, and celebrates a love found late in life.
Humans can move through time in only one way: forward, second by second, even when we set the clocks ahead an hour. But literature isn’t bound by the same rules. When narratives take place in the past or future, transporting the reader to the scene of events that already occurred or are expected to happen, that’s a kind of time travel exclusive to storytelling. For example, a Nomi Stone poem about cleaning mussels begins in the present, as the speaker prepares a meal. Then it vividly considers her wife’s childhood, even though the speaker wasn’t present then. It ends with a lament: “Isn’t it beautiful and terrible to exist inside / time: to already be not there but here then here—”
In poetry and in prose, time can warp, twist, and buckle. Authors conjure up the past in the present tense, or they make it relevant to contemporary life.
The visual monotony of the crisis has put art departments at news organizations in a pinch. How do you keep covering one of the most important stories of our time when the story keeps revolving around the same virus?
When my grandma Mary passed away at age 98, I was 34, eight months pregnant, and unable to fly to Michigan for her funeral. She was my Lebanese-American grandmother on my mother's side; we called her Sita. After the funeral, my mother collected a few of Sita's things for me: her Fiestaware dish set, bread peel, and two aprons.
When I wear Sita's aprons in my kitchen, I feel like a more confident cook. Over the years, wearing those aprons, I've made perfectly seared scallops, replicated my English husband's favorite stew with Yorkshire pudding, and baked a strawberry layer cake for my daughter's birthday. When I finally tackled sourdough in the summer of 2020, I was struck by how natural it felt to mix, knead, and shape the dough, as if my hands were possessed of some unspoken knowledge. It made me think of Sita making pita.
As Ingrid follows the clues to the mystery at the center of the novel, it’s this looming deadline for Ingrid’s expulsion into the real world that elevates the pressure on Ingrid and moves the story forward. Ingrid’s identity as a graduate student is central to the novel, and Chou captures this experience expertly—the spirit of department politics, the competition between grad students, the deep sense of insecurity in your research, your future, yourself. Her identity is layered with her identity as a Taiwanese American woman; Ingrid’s experience with her research subject is complicated by her largely white department and her own experience growing up in a white town. It’s this complexity and Ingrid’s personal journey over the course of the academic year that makes Disorientation not only an outrageously enjoyable academic mystery, but also a moving portrayal of self-discovery.
Friendship, love, jealousy, obsession. They seem distinct enough, but what happens when these experiences begin to blend together?
Caitlin Barasch’s debut meta-novel, “A Novel Obsession,” is a chaotic exploration of these relationships and the way art blurs the line between them.
This is clear-eyed, often beautifully written prose informed both by personal trauma and by the dark complexity to be found within the human heart and the boundaries of Epping Forest, the rough woodland near London that lies at the centre of this book.
Despite its author’s depth of years, “533 Days” doesn’t style itself as a repository of seasoned wisdom. Mr. Nooteboom’s real subject is the one that’s defined his career—mainly, the persistent strangeness of existence and its refusal to be fully resolved by religion, philosophy or science.
In her new book, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence,” Stanford professor and intelligence expert Amy B. Zegart provides not just a sweeping history of the U.S. intelligence community but also nuggets that help place events in a new context.
“Godine at Fifty” amounts to an autobiography of sorts, the story of a book-making life, and also an elegy for a kind of publishing — beginning back when books were signed up by companies that were not part of huge conglomerates, still printed with hot metal and sold almost exclusively in brick-and-mortar stores — that is no longer possible.
“Did I emphasize the look of the books too much?” Godine said last month while spreading some books out on his dining room table. “Maybe. The text is what really matters — I know that. And that means the author matters. But so do binders and paper makers and typesetters and designers — all those unsung talents that go into making a book.”
At the heart of every black hole sits a problem. As they sizzle away into nothingness over the eons, they take with them a small piece of the Universe. Which, quite frankly, just isn't in the rule book.
It's a paradox the late Stephen Hawking left us with as a part of his revolutionary work on these monstrous objects, inspiring researchers to tinker with potential solutions for the better part of half a century.
Before I arrived in Japan, I was intoxicated by its tradition of wandering poets. They weren’t roaming around lakes and hills like Wordsworth, but proceeding along a rough, pointed path, in the way of Matsuo Basho. His most famous work—Narrow Road to the Interior—could suggest both the remote areas of northern Japan through which he was walking, and the inner terrain that the act of walking would awaken. Monks in the Zen tradition are called unsui—“drifting like clouds, flowing like water”—to enforce the sense that they follow Buddha on his daily path, sometimes quite literally as they walk around each morning with begging bowls, collecting food.
Wait — have I reasoned myself into a corner? Does this mean we can’t eat anything at all, or at least not without guilt? So much of morality is about legislating pleasure, either because it distracts you from what really matters or because it harms others. The harm in the case of the lavish meal is still unclear. When we decry the price of the golden steak, are we trying to shame diners into atoning by giving an equivalent sum to the poor? (At the opposite end of the debate, there are those who criticize people on public assistance for occasionally using food stamps to buy crab legs or birthday cakes, as if only the rich deserved such delights.) Is outrage a genuine weapon, an attempt to disrupt and correct the system, or is the best we can hope for a little more consciousness of the world’s ills and gratitude for one’s own privilege and dumb luck, as when parents exhort children to clean their plates because people elsewhere in the world are starving? Is it all performative?
I’ve arrived on my own lazy gardening philosophy: Try your best to reciprocate the contempt and indifference that nature has for you. When your bougainvilleas refuse to offer up their blooms despite your halfhearted efforts, regard them with the same mild, healthy disdain that you reserve for things that disappoint you, but are not really your problem.
Segura effectively balances the realities of Carmen's personal and professional challenges with the joy of creativity and friendship in a novel that manages to be thought-provoking and fun. The last ace in this deck is the consistent pacing and intensity of the plot; it's full of twists but free of red herrings. Secret Identity is a satisfying choice for lovers of comics, twentieth century historical fiction and mysteries that make you think.
“The story of one is the story of us all,” say the mushrooms. When I Sing, Mountains Dance, the second novel by Catalan writer and artist Irene Solà, is nothing if not inclusive: men, women, children, ghosts, witches, dogs, deer, mountains, clouds, even mushrooms, all get a chance to tell their tales.
Given the global influence of the rap, breakdancing, graffiti, and DJ culture that flowered in the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, one might guess that a work of scholarship about that place and time would focus on hip-hop. Bronx-born Peter L’Official, a literature professor at Bard, acknowledges that “hip-hop was, and is, the Bronx’s social novel for the ages”—and that Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Jeff Chang, and others have already covered that ground. In his recent book, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, he deliberately and skillfully reads the borough instead through novels, movies, art, journalism, and municipal records, looking to both unpack and undo its mythology. The result is a vibrant cultural history that gestures beyond the tropes of the boogie down and the burning metropolis, those pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect that have dogged the area for half a century.
For 16 months in the mid-1970s, America’s clocks sprang forward and never fell back.
Every other weekend between 1988 and 1998, I became, as my fourth-grade teacher christened me, Miss Pan Am, jetting between Boston’s Logan Airport and LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal. I was born in New York City, and that’s where my father remained when my mother relocated to the north, where she grew up; Newburyport, Massachusetts, would become my adopted hometown.
A life like that sees a lot of repetition. For me, much of that trip played out on a strip of U.S. Route 1, all neon signs and strange attractions, when I sat as a passenger on the 48-minute drive between the airport and my mom’s home. But what’s still the most fascinating in my childhood memory is a gargantuan, totem-festooned restaurant called Kowloon, located on Route 1 just 10 miles north of the airport in a town called Saugus.
In “The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.,” Kravetz uses narratives told by other women to create the latest incarnation of Plath, who, like Virginia Woolf before her, has become, beyond the author of her poetry and prose, a character in her own right.
This novel is a portrait of the artist as a monster, and for readers undeterred by the grand tradition of middle-class domestic realism, it’s a fine and haunting book.
Today, like other days of my conscious
existence, my tongue is at war with a new language —
I wake to the sound of my neighbors upstairs as if they are bowling.
And maybe they are, all pins and love fallen over.
I lie against my floor, if only to feel that kind of affection.
Unlike the many orphans, infants, and laborers who in his novels perish unloved and unwanted, Dickens lived on into middle age. And the events of 1851—the halfway point of the century, and of Dickens’s career—pressed him toward an artistic evolution. In that year he began writing Bleak House, in which he sought to capture, through formal and stylistic experimentation, the density and complexity of 19th-century London. The story unearths hidden connections among far-flung people (dancing teachers, detectives, street sweepers). A novel of networks, Bleak House offered its readers a powerful model for thinking about urban life: a new kind of literature for a new kind of world.
Egan’s new novel, The Candy House, is a sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad. In a 2017 New Yorker profile, Egan described the work-in-progress as a book that “uses the same structural ideas as Goon Squad, and some of the same characters, but has nothing in common with it.” In fact, the new work has turned out to be a straightforward continuation of the old, with the minor characters of Goon Squad getting the kind of focus that the major characters got in the previous work: generally, each central figure has her own chapter, or story, then appears and disappears throughout the text. The Candy House is also partitioned according to a musical metaphor, this time in four sections (Build, Break, Drop, Build) that correspond to . . . the structure of electronic dance music, which I look forward to hearing Egan discuss in interviews. Time has moved forward a bit; the latest sections of The Candy House take place in the 2030s, and the technology of Egan’s alternative present allows us to look back to the 1960s. The children we glimpsed in Goon Squad are now adults, approaching their parents with a more critical eye, and looking nervously over their shoulders for signs of their own fates. As in Goon Squad, Egan employs first, second, third, and technologically mediated narration, and the chronology is shuffled; we see characters from their own perspective and from other perspectives, the events of their lives expanding and contracting depending on where we are in time and consciousness. If you struggle to follow what one reviewer of Goon Squad called “a wild relay race” of viewpoints, Egan’s fondness for names straddling the border of the unusual—Sasha (the redheaded kleptomaniac), Bennie (the A&R guy), Lulu, Dolly, Mindy, Rolph, and so on—will offer some stability.
Up until now, author Alex Segura's writing has come primarily in two forms: Mystery novels like Miami Midnight, and comics like The Archies. With his new book, Secret Identity, the writer decided to combine those two interests. The result is a hardboiled noir, set in decaying '70s New York City, about working in the comics industry.
In theory, movement is the opposite of being stuck. But in America, surveillance can be the punishment for seeking freedom, and to be allowed movement across the country's borders is to be indoctrinated into a set of rules. In her highly anticipated second collection Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines the language of these rules and considers how we can truly get to the other side.
Straight’s characters are the backbones of agriculture, health care and hospitality — those people of color who pick, wipe and disinfect for long hours on low wages. Through the tinted windows of a speeding Mercedes, their communities may look as plain as the desert, but under Straight’s capacious vision, they appear in all their vibrant humanity.
Translation—the conveyance of ideas, sentences, a story, a feeling, from one language to another—is inherently contradictory: be as exact as possible, or risk failing at the act. But since the transference of meaning is something so subjective, so tied to cultural and social cues, one could argue “exact” is impossible. Translation becomes its own art form then, one that can only be deeply personal, its product as unique as the heart and brain behind the translation. Such is the case for Polly Barton, a British translator of Japanese work like Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job: for Barton, the act of translation is tied up in the act of becoming herself. Fifty Sounds is a memoir and meditation of what is lost and gained of oneself when one enters this space of communion between a foreign culture, its language, and those of your own.
It’s hard to believe, but the humble index—expediter of searches, organizer of concepts— prompted outcries as it became more widespread: If one has an index, why would anyone read a book? Alarms “were being sounded,” Dennis Duncan writes in his lively Index, A History of the, “that indexes were taking the place of books.” Jonathan Swift worried that people would “pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index, as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he has seen nothing but the Privy.”
The most honest rejection letter I ever received for a piece of writing was from Oregon Coast Magazine, to which I had sent a piece that was half bucolic travelogue and half blistering attack on the tendencies of hamlets along the coast to seek the ugliest and most lurid neon signage for their bumper-car emporia, myrtlewood lawn-ornament shops, used-car lots, auto-wrecking concerns, terra-cotta nightmares, and sad moist flyblown restaurants.
“Thanks for your submission,” came the handwritten reply from the managing editor. “But if we published it we would be sued by half our advertisers.”
This was a straightforward remark and I admire it, partly for its honesty, a rare shout in a world of whispers, and partly because I have, in thirty years as a writer and editor, become a close student of the rejection note. The shape, the color, the prose, the tone, the subtext, the speed or lack thereof with which it arrives, even the typeface or scrawl used to stomp gently on the writer’s heart—of these things I sing.
Two big questions arise for users and compilers of these books: should they be arranged topically or by source? If you want quotations about the subject of research, would you rather have them all in one place under R, or spread throughout the book under the names of the people who uttered the statements? My own preference has always been for the former: show me all the research quotations together. Or honesty. Or marriage. Or wit.
But the most authoritative quotation books have always been the other way: author by author, not topic by topic. That’s how John Bartlett did it in 1855 when he first assembled what, in later versions, became Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The idea is to have, tucked in the back matter, elaborate indexes that allow users to find whatever topic they’re looking for — by flipping pages back and forth. Perhaps hyperlinked electronic versions will soon make things easier.
“I know I’m in serious trouble when Sammo calls me by my real name: It’s like, ‘Choo Kheng! Choo Kheng!”’ she recalls. “And I looked up and there was Ann Hui. She was right next to the boxes. And she was looking at me with tears just rolling down her face.” Yeoh worked to calm herself, concentrating on the fact that she could still feel her hands, as members of the crew placed the mattress (with her still on it) in a van, and drove her straight to the hospital, where she was placed in a body cast and treated for several cracked ribs.
The accident illustrated the special risks involved in moving between different modes of filmmaking, from the slapdash and high-energy environment of Hong Kong action movies — often shot without a script and choreographed on set — to more staid, introspective films that prioritize psychological depth. Yeoh was being asked to consolidate all that she knew about falling into a character who knew much less — and bridging the difference required a new sort of agility.
Set in 1975 during a particularly low point in the comics industry, Alex Segura’s “Secret Identity” is the genre-defying story of Carmen Valdez, a 20-something comic book fan from Miami who comes into her power, both on and off the page, through the Legendary Lynx, the superhero comic she creates at a New York City comic book company.
Budding authors are often advised to write the book only they can write. It’s one of those truisms that is so much easier said than done, but in Segura’s case, at this point in his singular career, it is most certainly true.
The Swimmers is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it's a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds; and — who knows? — it could also be read as a grand parable about the crack in the world wrought by this pandemic.
In an apocalypse where a virus turns anyone with enough testosterone into a feral, cannibalistic beast, who survives?
In Gretchen Felker-Martin's electric debut novel Manhunt, the book's nightmare world is populated with everyone left — mostly cisgender women, but there are also plenty of non-binary people, transgender men, and transgender women. Oh, plus a faction of authoritarian trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) slowly taking over the Eastern seaboard, killing trans people just as quickly as the infected beasts will. Told from a trans perspective, Manhunt is a fresh, stomach-turning take on gendered apocalypse.
In Emily Berry’s third collection, Unexhausted Time, nothing is off limits and limits themselves are consciously defied: the membrane between waking and dreaming is semi-permeable, the boundary between past and present is blurred: “How is it the things that happen to us seem to have happened already,” she asks in one unsettled and untitled poem (titles are rarities here). In another, she blends with the weather as if her body were unconfinable: “Prolonged heat made me feel smudged./It was not a bad feeling…/to be a smear on a windowpane…” Her metaphors are prone to melting too or, at least, not allowed a final say.
A dozen pages into reading “The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior,” which was first published in German in 2017 and now appears in a translation by Krishna Winston, I had the not unexciting realization that, if nothing else, for the next 300 pages I was in for an experience of unadulterated literature: that is, a work that would pay not the slightest heed to genre conventions, commercial imperatives or even — this I was less enthusiastic about — the reader’s timid expectation that he might be shown a good time. I was also reminded that I was dealing here with a very slippery fish.
“True Biz” is moving, fast-paced and spirited — we have vivid access to all of the main characters’ points of view — but also skillfully educational: The lessons Charlie learns about A.S.L. and deaf culture are interspersed in the text and illustrated by Brittany Castle. Novic, who is deaf and spent time at deaf schools researching the novel, makes an urgent and heartfelt case for the schools’ importance in providing language access, and in nurturing community and a sense of self. Great stories create empathy and awareness more effectively than facts do, and this important novel should — true biz — change minds and transform the conversation.
As a teenager these novels moved me; they move me now. At their best, these novels awaken in me each time I read them a sense, and then a conviction — that my hunger for beauty and my longing for transcendence are linked, that there is a moral and ontological reality that lies beyond the everyday world in which I lived, and that the breathless sense of enchantment that the realm of the aesthetic offered can help me see it better. And yet, as an adult, reading these novels against the background of an even more secular world — no less pessimistic, no less disenchanted, but no less, perhaps, hungry for something new and rich and transcendent — these novels simultaneously attract and disturb me.
Looking back, this is the part where I can’t quite understand my actions. Why didn’t I just call Chris and ask him what was going on? Here’s my best attempt at a defense. The night before, I’d been up several times, tending to my nine-week-old son, and never finding my way back to true sleep. I started on coffee sometime around dawn. When these e-mails came, I was a quivering zombie, incapable of real thought, looking only to move forward, dealing with whatever came up until the next time my son slept, when I could try sleeping, too. I was in no condition to think, only to do.
Not long after I sent the Word manuscript to the .co address, my phone rang. It was Chris. He’d been offline for a few hours, he said, so he was just now seeing that I’d sent him my manuscript twice that morning. Why, he asked, sounding more than a little bit stressed, had I done that, when he hadn’t asked me to?
I’m in the ballroom of a Boston hotel, trying to play it like I deserve to be there, when someone decides that we will go around the room and introduce ourselves. Thud, the dread hits first in my chest. I am a stutterer, and this is my worst-case scenario. I’m the lone PR rep among a hundred New York investment bankers dressed in slick suits competing to take my superhot tech client public. They begin, their effortless, pedigreed voices piping up one at a time. My throat tightens as each person speaks: first name, last name, firm name. Am I seeing stars or is it the jarring yellow of this room? Gold carpet, gold walls, gold words, gold everything except for the white tablecloth underneath my hands. The introductions creep closer, an unstoppable wave. I have no plan, only a desperate hope that my lips will allow the words to pass. When my turn comes, the entire room looks at me, my boss to my left, my client CEO next to her. I open my mouth: nothing comes out. I am twenty-nine years old.
British folk tales have undergone a renaissance in recent years – witness the success of communities such as #FolkloreThursday on Twitter, the presence of folkloric tropes in the work of writers such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss, and the rediscovery of classic novels by Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and Robert Holdstock. In Mischief Acts, Gilbert has created a novel that is part of this movement and entirely sui generis. Weaving together prose and poetry, myth and history, the past, present and future, it’s a work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised.
Claire Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate. Lydia struggles to accept the demon inside her and yearns to love, live and eat like a human. Her father, a successful Japanese artist, died before she was born. Lydia has committed her mother, a Malaysian-English vampire in declining health, to a home in Margate and accepted an internship with a contemporary London gallery known as the Otter.
Although the essays in what is arguably her latest act of service to that questionable project — Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative — are all personal narratives themselves (as opposed to straight-up craft essays with clear dos and don'ts for the aspiring or practicing writer), they also provide practical and philosophical arguments for the expansiveness that such narratives allow and for their power in the world.
Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s new book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity, argues that we are leaving all of this behind. “Today,” they write, “people are increasingly speaking, dressing, and acting as if a video of them might, at any moment, be uploaded for dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions to view.” Contemporary identity is concerned less with roles and masks; it takes as its archetype the “profile,” that public representation of ourselves that is searchable online, time-consuming to craft, and addressed differently to different audiences. Not only social media profiles, but also dating profiles and résumés are “carefully curated to appeal to the general peer.” The authors call this new identity regime “profilicity,” which, in contrast to sincerity and authenticity, takes the existence of “mass narcissism” and “concern with one’s self-image and profile” as a reflection of “the social proliferation of second-order observation.” The phrase “second-order observation” refers to our instinct to filter what we observe through the eyes of others. It comes from systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, who claimed second-order observation to be a distinguishing feature of the modern world. It seems that we can hardly avoid sustaining this double vision. “Nothing is posted without a concern for how one is seen as being seen,” the authors write. Second-order observation has become second nature.
Synonyms for the verb “to walk” are plentiful – promenade, hike and trudge, amble and ramble. Where My Feet Fall, a new collection of essays both sprightly and ruminative, illustrates all these ambulatory attitudes and more, exploring the delights – and challenges – of that most essential of human activities, the placing of one foot in front of the other.
Footfall in the long hallways above us,
painted stars on the ceiling, real stars from the balcony.
So this is my resolution as I trudge from this dark place: to speak out more. Not to engage in callouts, or scolding, or eye rolls, which are not my style, but to express my own deep ambivalence, my own point of view on subjects that matter to me. Not because anyone asked for it, but because this is the career I’ve chosen, and if I’m not doing that, then what are we doing here? I suspect I will lose followers (I don’t have that many), but perhaps I will gain self-respect, which I’ve been sorely lacking lately. That might be why I’ve so desperately sought the validation of people on Twitter I’ve never even met. I still wanted it both ways: the respect and admiration of strangers without the hard work of earning that respect. I wanted people to love me without really knowing me, which isn’t love. It’s projection.
Bilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city's oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. They are the product of a program from the 1960s aimed at making navigating the neighborhood easier for those Chinese New Yorkers who might not read English.
These signs represented a formal recognition of the growing influence of a neighborhood that for more than a century had largely been relegated to the margins of the city’s attention. But as the prominence of Manhattan’s Chinatown as the singular Chinese cultural center of the city has waned in the 21st century, this unique piece of infrastructure has begun to slowly disappear.
The question of which of these people and events, if any, are historical has captivated scholars for centuries, and though there’s little conclusive evidence that any scene happened as Homer described it, he invested his characters with such vitality and complexity that it can be hard to remember that much of the story is likely made up. His epic, based on centuries of oral tradition, plays out among the ships in the harbor, inside the walls of Troy, and on the plain in between—perhaps a stone’s throw from where I now stood in the parking lot. It was there, according to the legend, that the Greeks, led by “god-like” Achilles, confronted Priam’s son Hector and his Trojan force. With its stirring descriptions of martial pageantry, its dramatic accounts of close combat, its heroic but flawed characters, its sacrifices, betrayals, grieving lovers and parents, and its powerful descriptions of loss and human suffering, the Iliad shaped Western literature through millennia. “Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lose a part of ourselves,” the British actor and scholar Stephen Fry wrote in his recent best seller Troy.
With Fry’s words ringing in my ears, I entered the site, which is administered by the Turkish government, through a gate reserved for researchers, skirted the giant Trojan horse, and followed a path to a barnlike building crammed with boxes of animal bones, broken fax machines and other detritus. This was the headquarters of Rüstem Aslan, the current head of excavations at Hisarlik, the modern Turkish name for the area, and the first Turkish citizen to serve as chief archaeologist since formal digging began, in 1870.
It is also inevitable that over time, many of our memories of these difficult years will fade. As a neuroscientist who studies memory and memory disorders like Alzheimer’s, I find this fact — perhaps counterintuitively — comforting. I have come to understand, through new research, that there is a danger in remembering too much and that forgetting is not only normal but in fact necessary for our mental health.
“The Love of My Life” is a classic example of the “I married a stranger” domestic suspense plot — with a twist. Usually, the partner with a secret triggers suspicion in us canny readers early on. (That Maxim de Winter guy is too aloof, too insistent on having his own way to be without a tangled past.) But, Emma Merry Bigelow, the enigmatic heroine of Rosie Walsh’s “The Love of My Life,” seems so funny, warm, compassionate and kind that we readers root for her — even though we learn fairly quickly that she’s living under an assumed name and harbors a host of other secrets, something her adoring husband, Leo, doesn’t know about. Walsh just may have written the first domestic suspense novel in which the deceitful spouse is also a genuinely nice person. Maybe.
It’s a modern mystery why Charlotte Mendelson, one of the funniest writers in Britain, isn’t a bestseller (though she has just been longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction). Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond was reading the Bible one day, and she got to a part about the Temple of Solomon that made her pause.
There were some drapes in the temple that were blue.
"And I was wondering why that was significant," says Brew-Hammond. So she started researching, and learned an interesting tidbit about a species of snail.
Philbrick presents an excellent story replete with details about Washington’s travels, and he compares those with the details of today’s traveler. The prose entertains and compels the reader to forge on just as Washington did aboard his favorite steed, Prescott.
For publishers of books by women and targeted at women, the prerogative now is not to fall into the 2010s trap of 'books for women'. Less than five years ago, publishing books in powdery shades of pink was an intentional reclamation of sexist stereotypes, even spawning books with titles like Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies). Yet the shade rapidly went from subversive to cliché. Ami Smithson, a design manager at Macmillan and the woman behind the bold green cover of Chollet’s In Defence Of Witches tells R29: "I wanted to avoid anything too light, clichéd, or anything considered too soft or feminine." She says that pink was among her initial drafts but green was a really conscious choice. "I wanted a modern green, a fresh green that was zappy." This particular shade did just that, while also making the black and white text more visible.
Yet while Christie is usually heralded as one of the 20th century’s cleverest writers, Heyer, despite being a wildly popular romance author, has somehow managed to fly just under the mainstream radar without the same level of popular and critical recognition. That speaks, perhaps, to how often she’s been lumped together with more tawdry writers simply because of her chosen genre. Heyer satisfied the many eager writers and readers who wanted a bit more emphasis on the heated passions that Austen tastefully avoided, and that left her open to critical dismissal.
Although my family left its banks in the 1970s, the river keeps luring me back. Each time I’m in Bangkok, I hop a ferry to the old amulet market at Maharaj Pier and slurp lod chong Singapore (bubble noodles in sweet coconut milk) in Ratchawong, where my family lived.
These days the riverside neighborhoods are a little timeworn, but my old stomping grounds are now being rediscovered and revived by artists and entrepreneurs. And, the Chao Phraya, always central to my story, is once again the center of Bangkok.
One of America’s most accomplished memoirists, Febos, now 41, decided to build on the pep talks she gave to her students in an essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” which became the first chapter of her new book, “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.”
This original, lyrical collection weaves memory and teaching — about craft, about trauma and healing, about social justice — into an ode to personal writing that couldn’t come at a more critical time: amid a nationwide assault on precisely these types of stories.
In Defense of Witches celebrates women, offers a plethora of reasons to accept a variety of viewpoints, and shows how women are still expected to act certain ways or be ostracized. Despite all that, the element that overpowers all others is the celebration of feminist minds and their work, our modern witches. Yes, this book will make you angry at the staying power of misogyny, but it will also make you scream "Long live witches!" — and that makes it a must-read.
Krasnostein’s generous and compassionate book, “The Believer: Encounters With the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle,” recounts her experiences with followers of eccentric or, let’s say, science fiction beliefs as well as many Christians, all of whom are treated with respect. Her tour of humanity, spanning unlighted country roads in Australia to crumbling apartments in the South Bronx, shows that many human beings benefit from finding an ideology that encompasses not just their beliefs but their ways of living. I don’t know if Krasnostein is entertained, credulous or just tolerant of the ghost types, and that is one of her gifts.
This is the situation that science writer Florence Williams found herself thrust into as she tried to cope with the emotional and physical wreckage following her divorce from a man she had met and fallen in love with during their freshman year at Yale. They had married, parented two children and loved until she was at the cusp of 50, when he “decided to live on his own after three decades of togetherness,” leaving her feeling as if she’d “been axed in the heart.” “Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey” is a raw and exhaustively reported exploration of her suffering, the kind of reportage engaged in by Michael Pollan as he looked at his diet and his brain, or Ross Douthat when coping with his chronic Lyme disease; the kind when a journalist lands on a rich subject because he or she happens to be living it.
For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to be done, and to what ends, and within what exact parameters—this is where the trouble begins. But that there should be present fiction’s mysterious friend verisimilitude is, it seems, a matter of relatively little disagreement. There are myriad ways, of course, that this might be accomplished, but one of the more under-appreciated tactics is the reflecting of a subject matter in the very form a work takes. To infuse in the readerly experience some measure of the sensations and emotions navigated by the protagonist; to mirror life and art, so to speak, is an approach as tricky as it is effective. In her debut novella, Love, Maayan Eitan realizes this goal rather ably, painting a portrait of a young sex worker that itself contains the fluidity, disquiet, and uncertainty of its subject’s life.
Dennis Duncan’s breathless description of his encounter with a 15th-century volume in an Oxford library offers an indication of his enthusiasm for the subject of his new book. He writes of his “disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my desk. … It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pages. … I feel like I am on the verge of tears.”
The source of this excitement? Duncan has in his hands the text of a sermon, printed in 1470, on whose opening page appears the numeral 1. In another context the digit would be unremarkable, but this particular book boasts the first printed page number in history. And page numbers, together with a much earlier innovation, alphabetical order, form the basis of the index, the topic of Duncan’s entertaining and erudite “Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.”
Throughout her journey, Williams manages to retain her sense of humor, and her writing is honest, even when ruminating in detail about her divorce. At times her self-awareness borders on self-absorption, but her storytelling opens up when she interacts with researchers and therapists, and when describing her experiences in nature and with therapeutic groups and organizations designed for trauma survivors.
Created by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer in 1930, Betty—envisioned not as a cartoon version of any single performer, but rather as an archetype of Jazz Age culture—appeared in animated shorts throughout the Great Depression. She was an instant success. Publications compared her to such stars as Greta Garbo, calling her an “overnight hit” and “the most popular personage on the screen today.”
At a time when cartoons were largely opening acts before a featured movie, Betty’s stardom was an outlier. “She’s a big hit,” says Katia Perea, a cartoon scholar at City University New York, “and she’s a big hit in the same way that Felix the Cat is a big hit, where she was drawing audiences to the movie. … They would come for the Betty Boop cartoon.”
Then, after a bit of banter about the sounds of snacking, the actors nimbly slipped into character, adapting the mien of the four troubled Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning classic, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
With just a few performances left of their intimate, searing revival at the Minetta Lane Theater, a small Off Broadway house in Greenwich Village, they were now a half mile east, at the Cutting Room Studios, futzing with headsets and repositioning microphones as they recorded the production for the company that had underwritten the it: Audible.
Booth is at its most affecting, though, when it’s at its most imaginative. The novel’s climax tells not only the familiar story of John Wilkes’ shooting of Lincoln but the unfamiliar—and, it seems clear, often invented by Fowler—stories of how all his family members receive the news. One by one, Fowler’s narrator settles in each of these minds, watching them as they absorb the fact that the drama of their lives has been turned into the tragedy of a nation. We land, finally, upon Rosalie, miserable Rosalie, whom we know has had every reason to bemoan all that has come before. But now she can’t remember any of that. “How happy, how rich her life once was!” Rosalie thinks. “John has murdered them all.”
The Man Who Tasted Words is a deep dive into the world of our senses — one that explores the way they shape our reality and what happens when something malfunctions or functions differently.
Despite the complicated science permeating the narrative and the plethora of medical explanations, the book is also part memoir. And because of the way the author, Dr. Guy Leschziner, treats his patients — and how he presents the ways their conditions affect their lives and those of the people around them — it is also a very humane, heartfelt book.
Not everyone will agree with Brian's decision, or with Bloom's agreement to support his wishes. Bloom understands that euthanasia is a controversial subject, and she addresses it with the gravitas it deserves. At various points, she worries "that a better wife, certainly a different wife, would have said no, would have insisted on keeping her husband in this world until his body gave out." In Brian's sharper moments, she worries that they're acting too soon. She also, rightly, rails at a system that allows animals to be put out of their misery, but not human beings.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Maybe?
That’s the general sentiment evoked by “Woman: The American History of an Idea,” by Lillian Faderman, an ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. “Woman” is exhaustively researched and finely written, with more than 100 pages of endnotes.
Of course you don’t really understand any given Really Long Book. You don’t – because no one truly can. These are not finished things, these are not self-contained things. There is no one single, clear and obvious thing that they are telling us. If nothing else, these things take so long for you to read them, that they worm their way completely into your life as you do so; you will be different every time that you approach them. If you ever think you’ve finished a Really Long Book, you have not understood it. If it contains any sense at all, then this sense is something that you will keep on returning to – revising, over and over again, throughout your life. At their best, these texts are every bit as opaque as the self. A true Really Long Book is something that you’re never done with.
They spice up dull hotel bars and live in corporate lobbies. They’re insta-gravitas props on movie sets and upgraded Zoom backgrounds for the pandemic era. Often they are sold to interior designers by the linear foot (about 10 to 12 books per foot typically), or to under-booked new homeowners, or chain store decorators and myriad others.
Want 10 feet of purple-spined, 10-inch-tall books that have never been opened? How about 100 feet of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet books to make your shelves look like a rainbow flag? It’s doable — and it’s been done.
I first held a violin in my late forties. Placing it under my chin, I let go an impious expletive, astonished by the instrument’s connection to mammalian evolution. In my ignorance, I had not realized that violinists not only tuck instruments against their necks, but they also gently press them against their lower jawbones. Twenty‑five years of teaching biology primed me, or perhaps produced a strange bias in me, to experience holding the instrument as a zoological wonder. Under the jaw, only skin covers the bone. The fleshiness of our cheeks and the chewing muscle of the jaw start higher, leaving the bottom edge open. Sound flows through air, of course, but waves also stream from the violin’s body, through the chin rest, directly to the jawbone and thence into our skull and inner ears.
Music from an instrument pressed into our jaw: These sounds take us directly back to the dawn of mammalian hearing and beyond. Violinists and violists transport their bodies—and listeners along with them—into the deep past of our identity as mammals, an atavistic recapitulation of evolution.
It makes no sense … until you imagine something else. Don’t imagine a snowy slope; it’s too passive. Imagine, instead, someone sitting at a desk. First, they boot up their computer. This is the quantum-foam stage, the computer existing in a state of suspended anticipation. Then, our desk person mouses over to a file called, oh I don’t know, KnownUniverse.mov, and double-clicks. This is the emergence of the inflaton. It’s the tiny zzzt that launches the program.
In other words, yes, and with sincere apologies to Tonelli and most of his fellow physicists, who hate it when anybody suggests this: The only explanation for life, the universe, and everything that makes any sense, in light of quantum mechanics, in light of observation, in light of light and something faster than light, is that we’re living inside a supercomputer. Is that we’re living, all of us, and always, in a simulation.
The trigger for this quantum of doubt was a new paper. There’s nothing particularly special about it; it’s just a proposal for an experiment that might tell us something more about how the universe works. But, to me, it felt like the final straw. It has opened my eyes to the possibility that, without radical change, quantum physics may forever let me down.
Essentially, I just want to know what I am made of. One hundred years ago this year, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr received the Nobel prize “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms.” But I’m still waiting for a straight answer as to what the structure of the atoms that make up my body is. Quantum theory seems to promise an answer that it can’t deliver, at least not in any way that I can comprehend. As Bohr once put it, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
“I was obsessed with the notion of a poem as a kind of social grenade,” declares a major figure in Allegra Hyde’s “Eleutheria.” She and her creator both, I’d say. Hyde plants all sorts of IEDs in her first novel, shattering her protagonist’s heart, the streets of a decidedly un-United States and, especially, our fragile planetary ecosystem. This is cli-fi even when it turns intimate, with the first kiss between lovers or the failures of addict parents. Individual tensions generate unexpected crackle, but everyone’s caught in the same toxic knots, their environment collapsing around them. The upshot is a first novel way outside the norms: a work of imagination rather than autobiography.
Chen suggests that the repurposing of religion in this way is historically new, but in fact, America’s corporate titans have harnessed religion to motivate and control their workers since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. What strikes me as genuinely new in the world Chen depicts are the combinations of labor style and religion in play. Silicon Valley’s large working class — unstudied here — may still go to church on Sundays, but for the elite, work really is the source of meaning and mission. In the industrial era, it was brawn that made the hammers swing and energy that kept the furnaces firing.
As with all great books about dying, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss” does not terrorize with grim statistics and forewarnings but rather destigmatizes euthanasia and enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude. It renews those joys of being “In Love” with the people around us — despite the numbing effects of routine and familiarity which so often cause happiness to lapse in middle age.
When I was about thirteen, and even more insecure about my literary tastes than I am now, I got into a conversation with someone who referred to Jane Austen as “light.” I was horrified. Austen was romantic, of course, but her novels were important. They had depth! They absolutely could not be light, or the self-satisfaction I got from reading them, patting myself on the back for enjoying serious literature, would be completely ruined.
I still remember my mom’s response when I blurted these half-formed anxieties to her. “Just because something is light,” she said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t good.”
It’s a bright fall day in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The air is chilly and crisp, and sunlight shines through leaves tinted in the deep reds, oranges and golds of late afternoon. And there, just to the right of a winding footpath, lies a cadaver, a nude male mottled in the purples and blues of a bruise.
Lying on his back, nestled among the leaves, he looks almost as if he’s fallen asleep—but he’s actually working. His job is to decompose so that scientists can study his body’s biological undoing and answer morbid questions about how mummified tissue breaks down. These answers might one day assist in murder investigations and could possibly reveal new ways to identify John and Jane Does. Compared to some of his peers nearby, this body is new at the job. In fact, he’s just getting started.
“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest.” It’s a particularly apt citation for Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel, “Booth,” about the family of Junius Brutus Booth, one of the most famous Shakespearean actors of his time – and the father of John Wilkes Booth, the incensed anti-abolitionist who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865.
Of course, the line is also an apt motto for a writer who is well aware that the best historical fiction helps us recognize connections between the past and present, and see both afresh. The pre-Civil War political landscape evoked by Fowler in “Booth” abounds in implicit parallels with today’s polarized society, including the breakdown of civility in Congress and beyond, and attempts to block voters’ rights. Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob ring loud and clear in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021.
Every family shares a stage, but some are more crowded than others. In her exquisite new historical novel, “Booth,” acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler raises the curtain on a cast of ego-driven, grief-haunted siblings and parents jostling for a spotlight even as they carelessly shove into the shadows the more timid among them.
In “Ocean State,” O’Nan is subverting the thriller, borrowing its momentum to propel this bracing, chilling novel. Whereas thrillers tend to use murders as a prurient jumping-off point, the entryway to the reader’s pleasure — that chance to play Columbo or Kinsey Millhone in our heads — O’Nan takes his time, humanizing this story to make the hole where the victim was suitably substantial.
The word “salon,” for a starry convocation of creative types, intelligentsia, and patrons, has never firmly penetrated English. It retains a pair of transatlantic wet feet from the phenomenon’s storied annals, chiefly in France, since the eighteenth century. So it was that the all-time most glamorous and consequential American instance, thriving in New York between 1915 and 1920, centered on Europeans in temporary flight from the miseries of the First World War. Their hosts were Walter Arensberg, a Pittsburgh steel heir, and his wife, Louise Stevens, an even wealthier Massachusetts textile-industry legatee. The couple had been thunderstruck by the 1913 Armory Show of international contemporary art, which exposed Americans to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp. Made the previous year, his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” a cunning mashup of Cubism and Futurism, with its title hand-lettered along the bottom, was the event’s prime sensation: at once insinuating indecency and making it hard to perceive, what with the image’s scalloped planes, which a Times critic jovially likened to “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Today, the view from, and out of, nowhere is common fare among philosophers when they seek to develop knockout, universal arguments. Curiously, though, they do not probe into the origins of the view from nowhere. As a result, they fail to see that its claims to objectivity are rooted in unexamined biases. This view began in modern Europe in a world dominated by colonial and imperial practices, where European philosophers thought that they alone could take up a standpoint that was removed from events unfolding on the ground. They alone could pursue philosophy as a science, and not a way of life.
This begets a wilful ignorance of world philosophies that is built into the model of what it means to practise academic philosophy
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel, “Glory,” a nation riven by decades of autocratic rule finds itself dividing once again. Seeking “to forget the screaming in their heads,” the citizens of Jidada flock to the Internet. Safe inside this “Other Country,” they rage against their government in ways that would be unthinkable in the physical “Country Country,” where cancellation is truly final.
The gulf between the world as it is and the world as it could be is as wide in Bulawayo’s novel as it is outside it. The actions depicted in the book are so familiar, the events so recognizable, the pain so acute, it’s easy to see how “Glory” began as a work of nonfiction. That the characters are animals — furred, feathered, scaled and all — is almost incidental.
A futuristic crime novel tells us just what we don't want to hear: that human nature in its rawest form doesn't change. Greed, lust for sex and material wealth, and the unending pursuit of power all live large four decades from now in this new installment of the Eve Dallas detective series set in 2063.
A love story, a ghost story, a thriller: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant first novel embraces elements of multiple genres, binding them through incantatory language steeped in the rhythms, fables and spirituality of her Trinidadian homeland.
Deep time is, to me, one of the most awe-inspiring concepts to come out of the earth sciences. Getting to grips with the incomprehensibly vast stretches of time over which geological processes play out is not easy. We are, in the words of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, naturally chronophobic. In Notes from Deep Time, author Helen Gordon presents a diverse and fascinating collection of essay-length chapters that give 16 different answers to the question: “What do we talk about when we talk about deep time?” This is one of those books whose title is very appropriate.
It’s tempting for readers to interpret the book as just memories of a more innocent, less instant age. But Klosterman does a good job putting everything in its place. “Times change, because that’s what times do,” he writes.
“The Organization Man” made Whyte famous but, as Mr. Rein’s title suggests, he spent most of his career analyzing how cities work. Over the four decades between when he left Fortune and his death in 1999, Whyte thought about how to preserve open countryside and historic buildings while encouraging lively urban spaces. Under the patronage of Laurance Rockefeller, he probed the assumptions behind city plans, often arguing for the opposite conclusion. Too much open space could be as great a problem as too little. “Open space, like development, needs the discipline of function,” he wrote. Public places didn’t get overcrowded if they offered places to sit. They were underused if they didn’t. People, wrote Whyte, “determine the level of crowding, and they do it very well.”
Think back to the last time you walked into the living room and forgot what you came for, or tugged on the car door handle only to realize your keys were on the kitchen counter. Each week, patients in my memory clinic recount similar stories and ask me: Is this normal?
Our hands have always been able to talk. Even without the highly developed nuance of sign languages, the right gesture can invite a lover, repel an enemy and express confusion or excitement. Aside from many universally understood gestures like the middle finger, we also use our hands in vaguer ways to express more complicated concepts while speaking. But how do these gestures affect our speech and communication in general?
Amelia Aurelia, the 28-year-old protagonist of Ella Baxter’s debut novel “New Animal,” knows she cannot outrun death. She spends her days working as a cosmetic mortician at her family’s funeral home in the Northern Rivers region of Australia, making the dead appear alive to comfort mourners. Amelia finds the bodies she works on “beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikeable is gone. Like a shopping center in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.” She understands that we will all lose that chaos and clatter sooner or later. “Life rests like a layer of chiffon over a body: one puff of wind and you’re dead,” or so Amelia explains to her neighbors at the local pub.
This sense of equanimity reveals itself to be as flimsy a cover as that chiffon, Amelia’s morbid wisdom an illusion of control over life’s impermanence. What follows is by turns a comedy of errors and a profound meditation on how to find mooring in the world when you have lost your anchor.
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of our best living science fiction writers, has compared science fiction to a pair of old-fashioned 3-D glasses; through one lens we see predictions about the future, through the other we recognize metaphors for our own time, and with the two together we get to feel ourselves participating in history. “How High We Go in the Dark,” the debut novel by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a young Japanese-American, presents exactly this kind of complex vision.
Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious, which makes the book, despite its depressing subject matter, a pleasure to read. Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life.
A hawk perches on the snow-covered roof.
Two smaller birds circle,
come in too close.
You tried to be good, in your own small way, and the world smacked you across the face. You’re also angry. You had good intentions, and at least you put in the effort — shouldn’t that count for something?! And you’re discouraged. You can’t afford to do much more than what you did, because you’re not a billionaire who can start some giant charitable foundation, and given everything else we have to deal with in our everyday lives, who has the time and money and energy to think about ethics?
In short: being good is impossible, and it was pointless to even try, and we should all just eat hormone-filled cheeseburgers, toss the trash directly into the Pacific Ocean, and give up.
That was a fun experiment. What now?
The idea of concealing a vegetable in a meal has, of course, been around since the first toddler learned to wail at a plate of limp broccoli. And there have been attempts to coax adults to join in along the way, such as Jessica Seinfeld’s 2010 cookbook “Double Delicious!” geared toward home cooks seeking guidance for slipping blitzed produce into family meals. (“Jerry’s Cinnamon Buns” call for a half-cup of carrot puree in the dough and a quarter-cup of cauliflower puree in the icing.)
A fantasy book can have all the dazzling magic, intricate plotting, and gorgeous prose in the world, but it won't amount to much if there's not a solid main character in there driving things forward. Lucky for us, V.E. Schwab's "Gallant" has one of the best young-adult protagonists I've read in some time, and she's the one leading us through a deliciously creepy world filled with mysterious journals, haunted houses, and gothic magic.
What we have, then, is an interesting historical novel about a family in 19th-century America, whose story begins in theatrical celebrity and ends in notoriety, broken by the Civil War and the irreconcilable convictions it exposed and the bloody passions they unleashed.
“The Second Half” profiles a curated group of interesting women who have hit their stride and used earlier experiences as “compost for what’s growing in the second half,” as one of the book’s subjects, Luisah Teish, a shaman and spiritual anthropologist, aptly describes it. Many of the women have been scarred by wars, coups, poverty, racism and other forms of oppression. While some experienced lives of privilege, all had their share of difficulty. How the women dealt with their challenges is instructive. All look to the future with a sense of equanimity.
This lighthearted book is for anyone who is trying to make sense of their decision making and inner biases while taking a ride through history in a linear narrative with short digestible chapters. It contains meaningful insight on human behavior and people’s less-than rational tendencies.
Our dirtbags, our dirtbags
were medicine men.
The idea of a spontaneous order emerging from chaos may sound implausible. But in nature it is ubiquitous, from the self-organization of snowflakes and flocks of birds to the hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and later the economist Friedrich Hayek, pointed to spontaneous order in human affairs by stressing that markets produce an orderly system of prices and production from the chaos of the marketplace.
Perhaps it is also the case that the order of language arises not from a hard-wired instinct within the genes and mind of each individual but from the cumulative result of social interactions among individuals. To see such a process in action, consider the remarkable phenomenon of “grammaticalization”: the curious process through which words with concrete, specific meanings transmute into components of grammar, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, verb endings and more.
Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies.
It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.
As a writing exercise, walking becomes whatever you require—an outing with a specific creative goal in mind or simply an opportunity to take in the unexpected details of your environment. No matter the approach you find yourself heading out the door with, there are the undeniable benefits, as walking challenges how we observe, record, and experience the everyday. To write while we walk, or walk while we write, is to find something new in our most unassuming actions. It’s the perfect way to launch into a creative project you already have in mind or to gather fascinating odds and ends for later, when you’re ready to sit down again and fill the page.
If a ghost story isn’t scary, is it really a ghost story? I asked myself this question as I read through Edith Wharton’s Ghosts, newly reissued by NYRB Classics. The collection, which was initially published in 1937, consists of a preface and 11 stories that Wharton selected and arranged herself shortly before her death that year. The publishers describe it as “an elegantly hair-raising collection,” a description which, if you ask me, is slightly exaggerated. The stories in Ghosts are not particularly spooky.
But they are conventional. While ghost lore has existed in some form or another for centuries, it coalesced into the mode we’re familiar with sometime around the early 19th century, with the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s ghost stories, which drew together formal and thematic elements from an assortment of emergent genres, especially the Gothic. Wharton’s work is clearly indebted to Scott, as well as to American practitioners of the form such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving (one gossipy character in her 1910 story “The Eyes” even tells us that a distant aunt knew Irving). In the preface, Wharton writes that she was inspired to begin writing ghost stories after reading the tales of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), saying that she finds James’s now widely popular story incomparable in its “imaginative handling of the supernatural.”
Alice starts the book as one of a cast of swimmers. By the end, we have been plunged into the recesses of her life, submerged into the reality of dementia. It is frequently painful to read, for it is unflinching in its depiction of decline and human frailties – but it is also exquisite and very, very moving. A work of great depth.
In The Wonders, two women, living and working in Madrid generations apart, are always the caretaker, never the ones cared for. Their search for any little money and independence leads to solitude and sometimes self-destructive behavior. In her debut novel, out now in English, Spanish poet Elena Medel captures the plight of working women who are limited by class and gender dynamics.
In that juxtaposition of a traditional sport and a startlingly new perspective, the author exposes overlooked places and history in a world where, against all odds, there is always something new under the desert sun.
When I was growing up, Mortimer J. Adler championed “The Great Books of the Western World,” Clifton Fadiman promoted “The Lifetime Reading Plan” and every thrift store worth its salt carried a broken set of the Harvard Classics. All these enterprises were energized by one basic assumption: Civilization was on the ropes because fewer and fewer people engaged with the literature and intellectual achievements of the past. Instead, Americans — especially young Americans — were wallowing in ephemeral, popular amusements, which in the mid-20th century largely meant movies and television. Wouldn’t we all be better off devoting our evenings to Aristotle and Emily Dickinson?
Probably. Yet these well-intentioned literacy campaigns usually made reading sound like schoolwork. Far better, I now think, to emphasize that acquiring familiarity with humankind’s greatest cultural achievements, besides increasing one’s store of knowledge, lends an additional pleasure to life. After all, we read because it’s exciting. Metaphorically speaking, books are always taking us to the big city, opening our eyes to the world’s plenitude and diversity. By contrast, those who ban or censor them want to keep us down on the farm, restricting our experience to some safe or approved orthodoxy.
An elegant way to understand Poincaré’s conclusion, and bring some order to chaos, came some 70 years later. Shortly after the brilliant young topologist (and future Fields medalist) Stephen Smale wrote his first article on dynamical systems, he received a letter that led him to discover a relatively simple and ubiquitous function that explains the chaos Poincaré observed in the three-body problem. Smale called it the horseshoe.
Loosely summarized, “Checkout 19” is about a writer’s fervid encounters with writing, her own and others’. If you have grown weary of similar summaries on the covers of new books — that is, if you’ve had your fill of autofiction, thanks — don’t lose interest just yet. If much of the genre can be fairly criticized for its narrowness, “Checkout 19” suggests it perhaps hasn’t yet been fully explored.
One morning in the fall of 2017, Frank Bruni woke up unable to see out of his right eye. During the night, the journalist, then 52, had suffered a rare kind of stroke that ravaged one of his optic nerves and left him with a thick fog across the right side of his vision. A few days later, a neuro-ophthalmologist warned him, “You know that this could happen in your other eye.” Bruni asked what that risk might be. “About a forty percent chance,” came the frightening answer.
A flood unzips a graveyard.
Cadavers sluice down Main St.
It’s my job to find the dead,
chauffeur them back to their plots.
There is something a little absurd about watching the weather on TV while it is happening just beyond our windows. Most of what we see is so obvious: Snow comes down, wind picks up, plows roll through. We watch anyway. Toward the end of the segment filmed on Long Island, the newscaster reminds us that it is still very early on, that it is going to be a very long day, that there is still much more to come. We have to stay tuned.
I love the famous story of Julia Child’s dropping a hunk of meat on the kitchen floor, scooping it up and carrying on. It doesn’t matter to me that it never happened — Julia told me that it didn’t when I asked her about it years ago — it’s still fun to imagine the scene. Her timing would be perfect and her movements grand. As she would thump the food back onto the counter, she would smile, and it would have the complicity of a wink, drawing us in. Then, in her breathy voice with her quirky cadence, she would say the lines that are quoted so often: “Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”
Not many people are able to live this way; not many women or working-class characters get written this way. For the rooted among us, reading Checkout 19 can be utterly jarring. It is a portrait, like Pond; it's also a call to come at least a little undone. Yes, really. It really is.
Traditionally a memoirist’s task is to gather the flukes of her life and marshal them into something resembling a story. But Davis has a different project in mind. She has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal quality of the episodes that give meaning to life. “Aurelia, Aurélia” doesn’t care for the constraints of melody, but is nonetheless an entrancing song.
The known facts of Crane’s life have largely been established by previous scholars. In his new biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, the novelist Paul Auster records the main events and traits, but his emphasis falls on the work. Like the poet John Berryman, whose 1950 Critical Biography renewed a precedent, established during Crane’s lifetime, for appreciation by fellow writers, Auster writes as his subject’s champion. (Whatever the merits of such defenses as a genre, when an author continues to prompt them, it is generally a good sign—of something disturbing, unassimilable, undeniable.) Yet where Berryman wrote against the irresolution of critics, Auster faces the more difficult problem of what he perceives to be neglect among readers. To defend Crane, he must reintroduce him. This he does assiduously and at length, showing that Red Badge, Crane’s “masterpiece,” represents only a sliver of a vast and varied body of writing that includes “close to three dozen stories of unimpeachable brilliance” and “more than two hundred pieces of journalism, many of them so good that they stand on equal footing with his literary work.”
Much of the book chronicles the period after “Torch Song Trilogy,” Fierstein’s groundbreaking gay play, transformed him into a Tony-winning writer and star. He delivers plenty of dish, some of which leaves a bitter aftertaste. But his writing is most alive in the early years, before he becomes a Broadway institution.
When I (ill-advisedly) joined Twitter in 2016, I often scrolled through an account dedicated to images of nonliving things that appeared to have a face. A smiling banana slice, for instance. Or a frowning toaster. Or a surprised-looking cottage. None of these things were intentionally designed to look like a face, but once a viewer like me registered a pair of eyes and a mouth, the face was impossible to unsee.
I perused these images to amuse myself, but actual scientists have studied this face-perceiving phenomenon. Called face pareidolia, it is a product of evolution. We see faces where faces are none because our brains constantly scan for people—specifically for the presence of friends or foes. To search for people—then plumb their expressions for meaning—is an inherently human impulse.
The crab pots are piled high at the fishing docks in Newport, Oregon. Stacks of tire-sized cages fill the parking lot, festooned with colorful buoys and grimy ropes. By this time in July, most commercial fishers have called it a year for Dungeness crab. But not Dave Bailey, the skipper of the 14-meter Morningstar II. The season won’t end for another month, and “demand for fresh, live crab never stops,” Bailey says with a squinting smile and fading Midwestern accent.
It’s a clear morning, and he leads me aboard a white-and-blue crab boat, built in 1967 and owned by Bailey since 1992. He skirts a giant metal tank that he hopes will soon hold a mob of leggy crustaceans and ducks his tall frame into a cluttered cabin, where an age-worn steering wheel gleams beneath the front windows and a fisherman’s prayer hangs on the wall: “Dear God, be good to me. Your sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
To Bennett’s great credit, “Checkout 19” doesn’t dramatize the life-saving role of books. Reading here is not embraced as mere escape, nor glorified as edification. Bennett is not selling anything or arguing a point. In the telling of a life lived through books, and in her own sometimes floridly erudite sentences, the deep magic of writing is revealed.
Whether the digital takeover of our lives is a blessing or a fatal curse might be up for debate, but it is definitely a boon to crime writers. In “The Verifiers,” Jane Pek’s debut, the world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another.
In Dreadful Sorry: Essays on American Nostalgia, Jennifer Niesslein explores personal and cultural nostalgia, the way it is used and abused, and the way memory shapes our lives. In a series of deceptively sly essays about seemingly slight topics — a family road trip, a favorite movie, a class reunion — Niesslein probes what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.
There’s a terrific mix of youthfulness and gravitas to Karen Cheung’s poignant debut, “The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir.” Yes, this is a love letter to Hong Kong, but it’s one free of romanticized illusion. Cheung is acutely aware of the city’s abysmal failings: its hyper-capitalism, bureaucracy, corruption and limited voting rights.
My great-grandma Tessie used to say that if you walked into a room and saw everyone else’s troubles hanging on the walls, you would take one look and head straight for your own.
I thought of this often while reading “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss,” Amy Bloom’s searing account of her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. I had a similar experience with my mother, whose condition, over the course of 12 years, deteriorated steadily until she died. Bloom’s husband, Brian Ameche, makes an unwavering decision just days after his diagnosis: He wants to end his life. Now.
The title of Ferrara’s book, “The Greatest Invention,” might sound bombastic, but the book isn’t. One reason is Ferrara’s conversational style, rendered into lively English by Todd Portnowitz. Ferrara says she wrote the book the way she talks to friends over dinner, and that’s exactly how it reads. Instead of telling a chronological history of writing, she moves freely from script to script, island to island. It can be a bit dizzying but also great fun, and she is constantly by our side, prodding us with questions, offering speculations, reporting on exciting discoveries (and on annoying colleagues: Please don’t email her with your theories about ancient scripts).