On August 17, 1960, five young Britons were approaching the stage of a small night club in Hamburg, about to play music in that city for the first time. To reach the stage, they had come an almost unimaginable distance. From their home, in Liverpool, they had driven in a cream-and-green minibus to the port of Harwich. The bus, teetering under the weight of amplifiers and instruments, had been lifted onto a ferry by a crane. At first, the stevedores had refused to handle such a precarious load; a photograph captured the moment just after they changed their minds, with the sixties hanging in the balance.
The musicians slept on benches as the ferry churned across the North Sea toward the Hook of Holland. From there, they drove to the West German border, where they told officials that they were students, bringing their guitars for “sing-songs” with friends. They were young enough to encourage the ruse—during the long ride, their manager had recited “The Wind in the Willows” to entertain them. Four of the five were teen-agers: John Lennon, nineteen; Paul McCartney and Pete Best, eighteen; George Harrison, seventeen. The fifth, Stuart Sutcliffe, was twenty, barely.
France’s Palace of Versailles was designed to make jaws drop. It wasn’t just its colossal size, tons of marble, and painted frescoes that stunned 17th-century visitors (and continue to impress eight million annual visitors today). The gardens were also a symbol of Louis XIV’s power, showing off the ordered wizardry and wonder that made designer André Le Nôtre’s jardin à la française, or French formal garden, widely copied in Europe.
But fewer than 700 feet from the palace, the discreet Queen’s Grove stood in complete contrast with Le Nôtre’s geometric precision. Here, Marie-Antoinette enlisted the finest botanists, architects, and horticulturists to create a secret refuge from the prying eyes and rigid rules of the 18th-century royal court.
Often ignored in the pandemic’s up-and-down, zig-and-zag, here-and-gone restaurant policies is a higher mandate that applies to 4 million people nationwide. They are tasked by God with a directive that is both centuries-old and recognized by pandemic CDC tweets: Ramadan, the ninth month of Islam’s lunar calendar, which marks the revelation of the Koran to the prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel with broad, month-long, dawn-to-sunset fasts that end with a three-day festival called Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast.
The Long Now Foundation is “about much more than the clock,” I was told. Indeed, Long Now’s headquarters at San Francisco’s Fort Mason — a converted military site turned arts and culture center — hosts a seminar series on long-term thinking, a steampunk bar called the Interval, two projects to preserve linguistic diversity, a platform for placing bets on future events and a research program examining dozens of long-lived organizations across the world.
“Since moving to Texas, the clock has become a lightning rod for criticism and scorn.
I love a novel that provokes me. That pokes at and upends my emotions. Novels whose craft buffets me drunkenly down impassioned pages. Sentences that make me squirm or yearn, bristle or seethe, or sink deeper into the chair where, after checking to make sure no one’s watching, I greedily read on. I’m not talking about escapism or manipulation for its own sake, clickbait from lazy writers who play on emotions instead of having something to say or the ability to say it artfully. I simply mean those authors who can compel me to endure, consider, and maybe appreciate that which, outside their fiction, I might never endure, consider, or appreciate. Sometimes my collusion is easy to win; other times I respond almost in spite of myself.
The luxuriously disquieting and lexically dynamic fiction of Argentine author Ariana Harwicz offers many examples of such coerced complicity. Delectable images that would prompt stunned silence, disapproving frowns, illicit twinges if presented out of context or crafted by a less engaging author. And she never tells you how to react: you’re left chained to the crag, exposed to the elements.
Boy Parts is about how images appropriate and deceive—from security camera footage to art exhibitions, the visuals in this novel conceal as much as they reveal. But the novel is also about how language can do the same, and more. As rhetoricians have known since antiquity, language creates its own mental images that persuade not the eye but the heart. This moving power of words is responsible for fiction’s most intense pleasures, but it can also be used manipulatively. Irina’s words steer other characters, as well as draw the reader in. Clark never lets language out of her sight, making her novel a brilliant reflection on how fiction works as well as its delights and its dangers.
“Let’s Not Do That Again” is a political comedy of manners that reads like the love child of Page Six and a long episode of “Veep.” I mean this in the best possible way. If you like your humor dark and take guilty pleasure in imagining the messy lives of others, you will enjoy Grant Ginder’s fifth novel.
“The Candy House,” which passes the microphone to a number of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is similar in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it might be better to describe it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your friends and friends of friends on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist. It is a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes.
The 50s, or to be more exact the period from 1946 to 1963, marked what Norman Mailer dubbed at the time the “years of conformity and depression”.
Except it didn’t, or at least not for everyone. As James Gaines shows in this revelatory study, beneath the Pleasantville surface of postwar America there churned all manner of resentment and refusal. Everywhere he looks, Gaines finds individuals who insisted on marching to their own drum, even when that brought them into direct and even dangerous conflict with the newly oppressive status quo. In the process, he sheds light on a whole range of underground movements tackling everything from race relations to working-class feminism by way of non-binary sexuality.