I used to dream of owning a home with a library like the one in Beauty and the Beast. A ladder that glides along the impossibly high shelves filled with more books than you could read in 10 lifetimes. That was before I understood that the idea that you would have one house that you were able to live in for many years (and god forbid, add shelving) would itself be a fairytale. Packing up these books, disassembling their low-grade flatpack bookcases, hauling them across the city and interstate, and trying to reestablish this budding library time and time again has made me thoroughly fall out of love with my old dream.
Well into the 19th century, picturing foodstuffs and household items was estimated to take a little skill but not much of a brain. Still today, painting a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers is an intro lesson of art class.
But I’m fascinated by still life. By its silences. By this one in particular, painted in 1635 by the specialist Willem Claesz Heda.
This past December, three months after the Sultanate of Oman lifted its Covid-19 travel restrictions, I flew from my home in Paris to the southern city of Salalah, intending to explore the entirety of Oman’s coastline from south to north.
For the next three weeks, I would be traveling solo across the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, clocking more than 2,600 miles, improvising campsites, off-roading with middling success, loading my rental car onto ferries to reach remote islands, passing military checkpoints and, finally, reaching the northern tip of Oman and the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most geopolitically contentious and carefully monitored waterways in the world.
Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender. To know that the world is here to both guide us and lead us astray. Toward the end of the long poem, Limón writes: "I will not stop this reporting of attachments. / There is evidence everywhere." So don't stop looking. Just be open to what you may find. And know that the world is watching you, too.
“This book came out of years spent learning to be a writer, a process that will never be complete,” Maggie Shipstead writes in the acknowledgments of her first story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A. It may sound over-earnest – indeed, the whole section does – but with Shipstead there’s always a sharp layer of self-awareness just beneath the surface. In this case, it works as a knowing wink to the reader, since the second story in the book, Acknowledgements, is narrated by a solipsistic young male writer as he considers how best to use his novel’s acknowledgments to air long-held grievances against former mentors and women who’ve turned him down.
Hana Videen is one of a rare and treasurable breed of enthusiasts who want to remedy such misconceptions. Since the fall of 2013, she has taken to Twitter every day, as @OEWordhord, to post a single example of an Old English word. More than eight years on, the fruit of this slow accumulation is her first book. I doubt that I’m alone in frowning at the proliferation of nonfiction that began life as burblings on social media, and there’s an undelightful subgenre of Twitterature consisting of volumes that merely pile up linguistic trivia. But Ms. Videen is both a passionate medievalist and a relaxed, lucid writer; the pleasure she takes in her subject is infectious.