We stood by the ruffled water on the breezy Greek shore, in an uncertain light of evening. It was early spring, Sunday, a feast day, and we were told there were celebrations earlier, of which this was the aftermath — this silence in the village and beside the water, beside the shuttered houses and the empty little pier, where the sea grasses bent this way and that in the wind and the sky was as though absorbed in a private process of transformation, a movement out of winter that had not yet been accomplished. This was not our country: We had only just arrived, and the celebrations had not included us. We didn’t mind, having paid the price of inclusion earlier in our lives. In fact our feelings had become more or less irrelevant, without our entirely noticing. So that the old terror, of exclusion — or abandonment perhaps — didn’t trouble us, any more than the thistledown troubled us whirling softly off the vegetation by the water. We stood and waited for the boat.
What I remember is our numbness, a numbness that used to be a closeness until we became confined in one another and in our troubles and had gone white and dead, like a foot in a tight shoe. Our bodies were stiff and disoriented, standing by the water and the pier, waiting for the boat to come. The sky and the empty bay seemed enormous, because they represented the fact that our confinement had ended and the world had cracked or split open, and we were released. The freedom of outside was incomprehensible. It made our imprisonment and our stiffness seem like choices we had made, a way we had decided to live. Around the bay in the coming dusk lay the bluish mounded shapes of islands grouped one behind another, so that their mystery and anonymity became almost intolerable from the perspective of the pier, became the object of mingled sorrow and desire, the desire to know or be that farthest island half-glimpsed behind those unknown others and hence even more mysterious than they.
Unfortunately, we don’t know whether secure cryptography truly exists. Over millennia, people have created ciphers that seemed unbreakable right until they were broken. Today, our internet transactions and state secrets are guarded by encryption methods that seem secure but could conceivably fail at any moment.
The Thanksgiving stuffing of my childhood never involved bread. Instead, my mom would render pancetta, cook aromatics in the gleaming fat, spike it with Madeira wine, and toss those richly flavored ingredients with almonds, green grapes, and dark slivers of wild rice. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried — the recipe came from Martha Stewart, after all, as published in the November 1999 issue of her famous Martha Stewart Living.
No micronation has ever succeeded in becoming a country – but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily fail. Success depends on what a micronation set out to achieve.
Every now and again, a first novel appears in a flurry of hype and big-name TV deals, and before the end of the first chapter you do a little air-punch because for once it’s all completely justified. Lessons in Chemistry, by former copywriter Bonnie Garmus, is that rare beast; a polished, funny, thought-provoking story, wearing its research lightly but confidently, and with sentences so stylishly turned it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.
Winslow says he didn’t read Greek and Roman classics until adulthood, when he discovered parallels to the real-life mob stories of his youth. “I saw every theme that we treat in modern crime fiction,” he says in a letter to readers, “power, murder, vengeance, corruption, justice and redemption.”
“City on Fire” explores these enduring themes in the story of two Providence mobs in the mid-1980s.
For years, if you wanted to see “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth at the Museum of Modern Art, you had to track it down in a corridor near the escalators. It was Wyeth’s most famous painting, but it didn’t fit into the modernist paradigm of art history. You got the feeling that the curators would have buried it in the racks if it weren’t so popular. Sharing “Christina’s” exile was a painting from a different tradition by the Russian American artist Pavel Tchelitchew (pronounced cha-LEE-cheff), “Cache-cache (Hide and Seek),” another work of art on the wrong side of history that pleased people who didn’t know any better.
Tchelitchew and his art have escaped from their quarantine, and both figure prominently in Patrick Mauriès’s “Theatres of Melancholy,” an alternative history of modern art that makes the case for the importance of a loosely aligned group of painters termed the Neo-Romantics. In Mauriès’s view, some are as important as the abstract artists who came of age during the period between the world wars.
The most enduring pain is in the impossibility of understanding why. Trujillo’s mother had bouts of depression throughout her life. Is this knowledge enough to alleviate her daughter’s agony of self-blame? With suicide, Trujillo writes, “only one person ‘gets’ an ending; the rest of us are left with a story abandoned midsentence.” Fearlessly, Trujillo attempts to complete the sentence. For many who have been touched by suicide, her hard-earned story will be a helpful companion.