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.”