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.