Molecular detective work has identified red blood cells and collagen from 76-million-year-old therapods, the group that includes the largest predators to have stalked the Earth. It has revealed tell-tale chemical signatures that indicate triceratops and stegosaurs were, unusually for dinosaurs, cold-blooded – and that one spiky, heavily armoured herbivore, nodosaur, was ginger. Scientists have discovered that Spinosaurus – famous for the large 'sail' on its back – probably used its six-inch (15 cm) teeth and crocodile jaws to hunt in deep water, as well as evidence that iguanodons might have been surprisingly intelligent, and that pterosaurs (not technically dinosaurs, of course – they're actually winged reptiles) often walked to find their prey.
But research into exactly how dinosaurs mated – or in fact, anything at all about how they hooked up – has drawn a total blank. To this day, scientists can't even accurately distinguish males from females, let alone tell you how they courted or what kind of genitals they had. Without this fundamental knowledge, much of their biology and behaviour remains a total mystery. Only one thing is certain: they would have been doing it.
Marcy Dermansky specializes in female characters behaving badly. Her second novel, about a feckless nanny, is titled “Bad Marie.” From the sisters who get tattoos in her debut, “Twins,” to the on-the-road protagonist of “The Red Car” and the mother-daughter rivals in 2019’s “Very Nice,” Dermansky allows women to choose their own paths, even when those paths lead to dark and difficult places.
While the meanings of Auden’s poems can sometimes be elusive, nearly all of them contain lines and passages that take your breath away.
John Mauceri, founding director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, is a composer, arranger, writer, and educator who has conducted the world’s major opera companies and symphony orchestras. For 18 years, Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein on many of Bernstein’s premieres. He has championed the work of composers banned by Hitler, in particular those who found refuge in Hollywood, and has written about and performed music from opera, musical theater, and music composed for film. His new book, The War on Music: Reclaiming the 20th Century, is a critical survey — and rethinking — of 20th-century classical music. It is also, in its own way, a manifesto and a cri de coeur that proposes to make contemporary classical music more popular and alive by reimagining its repertoire.
Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.
You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.
This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.
The plate lunch of today is still built as pure fuel. It comes with your choice of protein, maybe hamburger steak drinking up gravy, teri (short for teriyaki) beef or guava chicken with its faint memory of Hawaiian Sun juice in a can. Equal weight goes to the carbs: two scoop rice — no “of,” if you please, and drop the “s” at the end of “scoops” while you’re at it — and one scoop mac salad, perfectly domed, like a helping of ice cream. (The traditional utensil for serving is, in fact, the ice-cream scoop.)
If you haven’t jumped over a barrel since “Donkey Kong,” you may be reluctant to read Gabrielle Zevin’s immersive new novel about video game designers. But don’t worry, you don’t have to wear a VR headset to experience “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” It’s not a novelization of “Tron” or a homage to “Ready Player One.” You’re welcome on this journey whether the Oregon Trail makes you think of Francis Parkman’s memoir or your brother’s Commodore 64.
I feel confident making such a promise because “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is actually a novel about friendship — particularly that rare, miraculous friend who may drift away for long stretches of time but always rises again with the vigor of Sonic the Hedgehog.
We are all going to die. Most of us don’t know when. But what if we did know? What if we were told the year, the month, even the day? How would that change our lives?
These questions drive Nikki Erlick’s debut novel, “The Measure,” which weighs Emerson’s claim that “it is not the length of life, but the depth of life” that matters.
I suspect that in a generation or two, to walk into a home with bookshelves filled with books will be akin to walking into a home with original art on the walls. Both will be rare occurrences — even if the art is not by an old master or even if the books are not first editions or even classics. Their material presence on the shelves will provide aura enough.•
Most metropolises are overrun with ghosts; from New York to London, Mumbai to Shanghai, a simple Google search throws up an encyclopaedia’s worth of results about urban legends based on things that go bump in the dark. Yet, when I speak of ghosts, I don’t just mean the horror-story variety. Our lives in cities are shaped by invisible hands, body-less voices and an eerie automation of infrastructure. As the French Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote, cities are in a constant state of decay and transformation, demolition and rebuilding, and it is this repeated change that makes cities fertile grounds for hauntings. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), he wrote that haunted places are the only places people can live in, as the human psyche is too entwined with memory and familiarity to let go of things past. The mind, he says, comes up with creative forms of resistance to cope with the pressures of modern life, and ghosts are one of them.
Framing motherhood as an affliction might, understandably, provoke outrage. But this is one of the disarming virtues of a fantasy novel: It can confront social norms without directly appearing to do so. In her brooding second novel, “Elsewhere,” Alexis Schaitkin delves into a subgenre that might be called Domestic Dystopia, well-mined by writers like Shirley Jackson and Margaret Atwood.
Sometimes it’s fun to read something that doesn’t fit in any particular category. “Elsewhere,” the new novel from Alexis Schaitkin, is best described as a dark fairy tale, with elements of the supernatural, but with something very real to say about a topic all readers can relate to in one way or another — motherhood.
While the concept of a book within a book is certainly not new, Gentill’s take on the concept brings a refreshing twist to the crime genre; allowing her to explore questions relating to what it’s like to be a writer in a post-pandemic world.
Camilla Grudova’s Children Of Paradise is a remarkable and memorable achievement. To combine the gothic, the carnivalesque, the ghastly and the sublime in a relatively slender novel shows considerable talent indeed.
True to life, there is no great moral. The book is neither tragic nor triumphant. Baht’s novel is a slice of life that will either ring eerily true, or be a highly educational experience in empathy.
I thought about taking a picture.
To capture what? I decided to live
through the present moment instead:
ephemeral glaze, sentimental risk
But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to 25 teachers spread across the district’s three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended, on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the “mass exodus” of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is “disintegrating” and “imploding.” Jill Haugo, a nine-year teacher at Central High School, said she has never seen anything like this. “Teachers are breaking their contracts in the middle of the year and just leaving.”
How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools. One such person is the president of the Rapid City school board, Kate Thomas.
Dear George Orwell,
Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».
Because I'm writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.
Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ».
“With a menu, you have a physical and digital record that you can compare over time,” explains William Cheung, a fisheries biologist at UBC and one of the study’s authors. Cheung has spent his career studying climate change and its effects on the world’s oceans. He has contributed to several of the landmark reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but along with John-Paul Ng, an undergraduate student at UBC, he wanted to find a different way to both study and communicate those changes.
“Many people, especially in Vancouver, go out to restaurants and enjoy seafood, so we wanted to see whether climate change has affected the seafood that the restaurants serve,” Cheung says.
To Fill a Yellow House explores the problem of “how to be” if you want to be truly yourself, if you are not prepared to divide yourself among what everyone else wants. As the novel follows Kwasi carving out his own freedom – finding communities delineated less by family and neighbourhood, united instead by permitting and “seeing” each other – it points a way to our untying ourselves from those with whom we share a history, to form more meaningful bonds with those whom we share a future.
The novel’s pockets of sentimentality are offset by streaks of viciousness, accurately reflecting how we tend to remember our pasts: happy times bathed in a distorting glow, miserable times diminished and disowned.
“Girls They Write Songs About” is a love story about two friends, but it’s also something thornier — a narrative about the cycles of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment that make up a life.
I recently got rid of my vintage Raleigh cruiser, a dusky brown survivor with numerous patches of rust that, to my mind, made the 1960s bicycle look more distinguished. The finicky gears weren’t the problem. Nor was it the handbrake cable that frequently jutted straight up like an antenna. What wore me down were the slim tires that routinely got banged up on New York City streets, turning the wheels into dead weights riding on thin scalps of rubber.
Thankfully, since upgrading to a used Fuji BMX, with a black frame and much thicker tires, I’ve been spared that recurring scenario. But memories of my Raleigh came rushing back as I read Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, which opens with colorful descriptions of bicycle ads from the turn of the 20th century: Art Nouveau posters that depict the faddish invention soaring through the air, riding through the clouds, and ascending into the reaches of outer space.
The pebbled path leads to an overgrown garden
where roses tumble over each other and daffodils
To the extent we take seriously the possibility that we live in a simulation, we should be cosmologically and theologically discomfited. We should be rocked with doubt. A simulated world is likely to be much less predictable and sensibly governed than a world grounded on a large, planetary rock or on the immutable word of a benevolent God.
In a 2011 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlant engaged in a spirited exchange about love. At the center was Hardt’s contention that we lack a “properly” political concept of love, in which both reason and passion are deployed to bond us in difference, rescue us from narcissism, and transform our relationships with the world. Love is always “a risk,” he argued, “in which we abandon some of our attachments to this world in the hope of creating another, better one” — why not imagine a kind of political love that could truly provide us the possibility for metamorphosis? Disagreeing with Hardt’s premise more than the proposal, Berlant countered that love has, in fact, long “been floated by so many as a solution — literally, a loosening or an unfastening, a dissolution — to the problem of social antagonism, or fractured community.” One only needs to look to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Melanie Klein, to see how love has been theorized in an array of political contexts for when things go drastically wrong.
Though she doesn’t care much for politics, this formula for love’s work is vigorously at play in Eugenie Brinkema’s recently published Life-Destroying Diagrams. It not only makes the logic between destruction and love structurally obvious — the first section is organized around horror; the second, love — but poses love as the solution to a crucial problem plaguing formalism. Lovers of formalism, she argues, have become too mollified by the arguments of its haters. Her archnemesis is Fredric Jameson, whose call “for a ‘literary or cultural criticism which seeks to avoid imprisonment in the windless closure of the formalisms’” has emboldened others to accuse formalists “of abandoning the world, its misfortunes, its tumults and things.” Formalists, Brinkema argues, have been cowed by requests to make formalism relevant to the world, and their responses have come at the expense of forgetting about form itself. As Maurice Denis argued in his famous 1890 symbolist manifesto, “Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” “it is well to remember that a picture — before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote — is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”
All the Lovers in the Night is one of those novels that hangs together so delicately that it’s difficult to discern its overall design; upon finishing it, all you are left with are questions. At heart, though, it is a love letter to finding self-worth and a turbid telling of what it means when our inner loner is finally brave enough to step into the light.
Instead, the surprising frail tenderness that punctuated Moshfegh’s earlier work is more battered than ever in “Lapvona.” With its determined anomie and its coldly beautiful sentences, this fable is in service to a stunning, hard, insistent worship of misanthropy.
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For decades publishing insiders have wrung their hands over the ways in which television, video games and the internet have eaten into their profits, while ignoring the ways in which their own business practices have limited the audience for their products. Survey after survey shows that the two groups of Americans most likely to read books are those who have a bachelor’s degree and those who earn more than $75,000 a year. For publishers, this should be Champagne-popping news. After all, the percentage of Americans over 25 who have earned bachelor’s degrees has more than doubled since 1970. But demographically these graduates look different than they did in the 1970s — they are more likely to be women and to be Black, Asian or Latino — and by neglecting to build an audience among them, publishers may have lost millions of customers. Publishers, Lucas pointed out, have nurtured audiences for items as strange as adult coloring books and young-adult vampire mysteries. “We built these audiences,” she said. “We invested. We worked. We took things that did work and we built something out of them.”
Some editors, like Lucas, are trying to figure out how to do the same for the vast swaths of America that big publishers have mostly ignored. It’s an effort that is complicated by a long history of neglect, which itself is bound up with publishers’ failure to take diversity in their own professional ranks seriously until recently. In interviews with more than 50 current and former book professionals and authors, I heard about the previous unsuccessful attempts to cultivate Black audiences and about an industry culture that still struggles to overcome the clubby, white elitism it was born in. As Lucas sees it, the future of book publishing will be determined not only by its recent hires but also by how it answers this question: Instead of fighting over slices of a shrinking pie, can publishers work to make the readership bigger for everyone?
There’s a huge appeal to putting infrastructure underground, says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer at University College Dublin and author of Subterranean London. "Human beings tend to like those things to be operating in the background." It gives the illusion of seamlessness, he says. "There's almost something magical about it."
Along with trains, powerlines, pipes, cables and sewers, there’s another piece of infrastructure some have long wished to bury – roads.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary new novel is the weirdest, most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever inhaled. Part history, part prophecy, all fever dream, “Thrust” offers a radical critique of the foundational ideals that conceal our persistent national crimes. As we march from Juneteenth to July 4, this is a story to scrub the patinated surface of our civic pride.
Publishing a book about beaches in the season of the “beach read” is a bold and meta move, like when Kramer made a coffee-table book about coffee tables on “Seinfeld.”
The conventional wisdom is that readers want something light and unchallenging for their summer vacations, something they don’t mind smudging with Coppertone and leaving behind at the rental house. Sarah Stodola’s “The Last Resort,” its title echoing Cleveland Amory’s classic about high-society playgrounds, is definitely not that kind of book. Indeed it aims, in well-intentioned, widely researched and somewhat scattershot fashion, to make you profoundly uneasy about the very act of visiting the beach.
Learned today that flamingos can live up to seventy years.
I gasped at the fact, thinking about a bird, pink and slender
I was the kind of notebook keeper Joan Didion so perfectly describes, in “On Keeping a Notebook,” one of those “children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” All the more unsettling, then, to lose the only record of what’s been narrowly saved. I contented myself to think that if anyone had intercepted my notebook, they wouldn’t get very far, by the same law that says no one can stand to listen to anyone else recount their dreams.
What I didn’t expect was a Facebook message. A stranger named T had discovered my bag, she said, on an Ohio-bound Greyhound, and was eager to get its contents back to me. “Girl, not to be a hippie, but when I found your stuff I felt like the universe put it there for me to find you.” I was overcome with gratitude. When the package arrived days later, I tore it open, relieved.
Then—confused.
So, while the question of why our fingers and toes began wrinkling in water in the first place remains open, our pruney digits are proving useful to doctors in other surprising ways.
Defining ourselves by our jobs is a core cultural trait that’s hard to shake, Gomez says. After all, the first question we often ask a new acquaintance is, “What do you do?” LinkedIn’s new posting culture signals a celebration of some of the most insidious aspects of working life: namely, an unyielding, cultish devotion to work, valorizing the hustle and the idea that our jobs are an extension of our personhood, all while frequently glossing over the more critical conversations we could be having. On LinkedIn, what we do has become who we are, and who we are is what we do.
The Novelist takes place over a single morning, following an unnamed writer as he faffs around on social media while his girlfriend sleeps in their apartment; he occasionally fiddles with novels in progress in Google Docs. That’s it. The first 16 pages describe the protagonist looking at Twitter in minute-by-minute detail, thinking inane thoughts like “my Twitter was horrible—Twitter in general was horrible.” A more annoying premise for a book is, frankly, hard to imagine. And yet, here I am, recommending it. What’s good about a novel with a plotline so insipid it borders on openly hostile? Well, for starters, it’s funny—a rare and cherishable quality in contemporary literature.
It also contains some of the most accurate—and accurately abject—depictions of the experience of using the internet ever captured in fiction.
Like many thousands of other people, I have relied throughout the course of COVID-19 on Yong's reporting at The Atlantic as he cracked open the fast-changing world of pandemic science. Now, with An Immense World, Yong brings into beautiful focus a host of other animal sensory worlds that co-exist with ours, and how we may protect them. He has synthesized and compellingly presented a spectacular amount of scientific information to do this, making it look easy along the way. But isn't easy at all. It's a magnificent achievement.
Bourgon puts herself in the poacher’s shoes, and the result is a refreshing and compassionate warning about the perils of well-intentioned but overzealous environmentalism.
How to describe Talk to My Back, a classic collection of graphic stories by alt-manga’s feminist star, Yamada Murasaki? These tales of thwarted-ness and domestic ennui were written in the 80s, but Japan being what it is – only last month it was reported that when abortion pills are finally made available to women in the country, partner consent will still be required – their atmosphere often feels much closer to that of the 50s or early 60s. At moments, it’s almost as if Murasaki has set out to fictionalise Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. If her stories are pensive to the point of dreaminess, they’re also full of frustration, a discontent that simmers like a hot pan. I’m so glad Drawn & Quarterly has seen fit to put them into an English edition for the first time.
The lights have given way to darkness in the rain-soaked Costa Rican villa where I read Meron Hadero’s debut collection, “A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times.” I don’t like reading short story collections in order, yet, as I crack open this one midway and begin “Sinkholes” about an Ethiopian boy in the midst of a standoff with his small-town Florida teacher over the use of the n-word, it occurs to me that I better start at the beginning. This remarkably tense story wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, Hadero’s collection is full of surprises. With stories set in Berlin and Iowa, Los Angeles and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Hadero establishes her willingness to be an insider for the outsiders.
We might learn more from Buddhism if, rather than carving out what we like in its history, we take seriously its limitations and failures, and ask how its genuinely illuminating philosophy can more readily overcome them. To do so, we need works like Davis’s that are helpful guides to the kind of peace and equanimity that can help end suffering. But we also need more introductions to Zen and other worldviews that run toward the pathways of entangled and unpleasant interdependence that constitutes the globalized world.
I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke. The image of my father at his desk. The sound of his diction and intonation as he brought each character to life and drove each plot twist home. In these things, I beheld the card catalog of the infinite library of his heart, the map of his soul, drawn with aching clarity in the topography of his books.
When my father unexpectedly died in 2016, I rushed home to North Carolina. The 6 hour-drive was exhausting, more emotionally than physically. Once there, I was unsettled, not just by the shock, but knowing my father died the day before on the couch I was now staring at and wouldn't dare sit on. A situation not unlike one anyone who has lost a parent has faced.
I opened the refrigerator, saw a bottle of local chardonnay, and smiled. It was a small gift from the universe.
The next day, upon arriving from London, my brother asked, "What's on the agenda?"
He meant wine.
Werner Herzog has portrayed the poetic excesses of human drama as the brilliant director, producer and screenwriter of more than 60 feature and documentary films, the author of more than 12 books and the director of more than a dozen operas.
His debut novel, “The Twilight World,” is a spare and lyric tale about Hiroo Onoda, a real Japanese lieutenant who terrorized the Philippine villagers of Lubang Island with guerrilla tactics for 29 years after World War II’s conclusion.
Since the remarkable success of her nonfiction debut, Three Women, Lisa Taddeo has specialised in writing with gloves-off candour about female desire, in particular the kind that modern feminists are not supposed to admit to. Ghost Lover, her first collection of stories, is peopled by outwardly successful, empowered women who are emotionally or sexually in thrall to men, often men who are not remotely worth the time spent obsessing over them. Sometimes the women themselves know it – “He has no idea he is not interesting” – but still they persist in their self-abasement: “She wanted him more than her whole life.”
Tracy Flick, the character created by Tom Perrotta in his 1998 novel, “Election,” and immortalized by Reese Witherspoon in the film version a year later, is back. Perrotta has set his darkly comic sequel, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win,” in a different New Jersey high school some 20 years after Tracy’s notorious bid to become student president.
In the 19th century, large numbers of people living in Southern and Central Appalachia supported themselves to varying degrees by harvesting herbs, roots and other medicinal botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands around them. These "sang diggers," as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance to the global botanical pharmaceutical trade are the focus of Luke Manget's "Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia."
A weird thing happened when I sat down to review Paul Madonna's latest book. You Know Exactly is Madonna's third and final collection of art and musings gathered from the All Over Coffee series he made for the San Francisco Chronicle between 2004 and 2015. And as I flicked through the beautifully rendered, hyper-detailed depictions of quiet corners of San Francisco, a house appeared that was immediately familiar. It took my brain a second to process.
There, staring back at me, were the front gates of a building I moved into in 2005 and didn't leave until 2013. It was a two-bedroom that, at any given time, had five to ten people staying there. The apartment had so many roommates, so many couch surfers and so many impromptu parties, it seemed entirely feasible to me that Madonna might have passed through at some point.
Bachelder’s short but indelible novel spills forth with kitchen-sink wisdom; it was exactly what I’d been missing as a young father, struggling to make sense of my irrevocably changed existence. For all the profundity that one experiences when becoming a parent—the primordial love; the humbling wonder—there’s also a lot of dullness and mundanity. Child-rearing is an immense task consisting of many mind-numbing moments. Among the reasons Abbott Awaits is remarkable is because it collects these moments and pulls them to center stage. It makes the everyday aspects of middle-class parenting objects of study, of tender observation.
It’s that tension that gives “Nuclear Family” its radioactive fuel: between traditional values in both Korea and Hawaii, between all traditional values and the mores of American capitalism. Early on, the author focuses on the generation gap among the Chos. But somewhere in the middle, Han’s writing becomes experimental — particularly in a section written by Grace full of “redactions” that invite the reader to play an existential variation on Mad Libs. If you can freely substitute words, why not people?
James Joyce fans around the world celebrate Bloomsday—June 16, the date on which his novel Ulysses takes place—any number of ways. There are marathon readings and brilliant stage performances. There are solemn rituals (eating a Gorgonzola sandwich), whimsical gestures (carrying a potato in your pocket), and more canonical Joycean exploits (late-night brothel hijinks). Given all the ways Joyce’s novel tends to seep into everyday life, on Bloomsday and year-round, it’s remarkable that Ulysses was illegal to publish, sell, import, or advertise in the United States for over a decade. The novel was banned as obscene until 1933, when Judge John Woolsey of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed it to roam free on U.S. soil.
As he grew into a toddler, my son decided to play instead of read books with his sister at night or at the kitchen table during breakfast. He preferred running wild until he passed out. He’s me as a small child—the energy and the desire to explore and push boundaries. He wants to climb up my back and jump on me.
Finally, I found another book that caught his attention: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I’d read the book to him before, but one evening, when he was two, he saw what I saw as a child.
When it came to agreeing on an idea for the show, the Brothers and I knew that most everybody loved bars, especially sports bars. The Brothers had grown up in Las Vegas, and one of our earliest ideas was to set the bar in Barstow, California, because we thought about its proximity to Las Vegas and how the guests on the show would stop over in Barstow en route to or from Vegas. The main action would take place in the hotel bar. The structure was similar to that of Fawlty Towers in that the stories would walk into the bar.
Once we settled on a sports bar, we ruled out New York City as a setting, not only because it had been overdone but, more important, because it had multiple teams for the same sport. We considered Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, where local fans really love their sports and everyone roots for the same team. We decided on Boston because there was an accent and because it was such a distinctive town—working-class and cosmopolitan at the same time.
Einstein’s theory of relativity shattered the master clock into many clocks – one for each person and object in motion. In Einstein’s picture of the universe, everyone carries their own clock with them.
One consequence of this is there is no guarantee the clocks will tick at the same rate. In fact, many clocks will tick at different rates.
Even worse, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower your clock will tick compared to theirs.
Arguments had previously been made for stretches of countryside in the Marche region and between Milan and Genoa. During a presentation in Vinci, near Florence, Mr Cotte contended that the artist was more plausibly depicting a part of his native Tuscany—one that keenly interested him at the time. According to this theory, da Vinci represented the area not as it was, but as, in an unrealised scheme, he intended it to be.
The streaming of music offers us a two-dimensional view of pop. Stars that peaked decades apart seem close to one another, like the constellations in the night sky. A young fan of guitar rock, coming across “My Generation” and “Pretty Vacant” for the first time on a playlist, might imagine they came from the same period. That could never have happened during the vinyl age, when one look at the haircuts on the record sleeve would immediately tell you that the Who and the Sex Pistols came from different eras of pop. With nothing but the capacious but disordered resource of the internet to help us make sense of the vast array of music at our fingertips, what we need is a comprehensive handbook, a text that provides contextual depth to 120 years of recorded sound.
The earliest indoor shopping malls, with their I-shaped, bowling-alley forms, had no centralized place where groups could gather, nor much need for one. But by the early 1970s, and the advent of more complexly laid-out malls in T-, X-, or O-shapes, patrons might wander forever, missing each other in the long, low-ceilinged identical halls. Hence the atrium, which has its own storied architectural history: Ancient Roman houses were centered on open-air or skylit spaces, which provided daylight and breezes to the rooms surrounding them.
These courts often had an impluvium, or fountain, to catch rainwater from the roof, as well as furnishings for outdoor entertaining. In the shopping mall, the atrium serves a similar function, opening up the middle of a building lined with windowless shops; letting in light, water, and plants; and furnished like a living room. The atrium was the center of the social life of the Roman domus and so, too, has it been the center of mall sociability.
The moment the pumpkin toadlet leaps into the air, anything seems possible. The tiny frog, which is about the size of a honeybee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem launching itself high off the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet begins to soar, something goes awry.
The frog’s body, limbs splayed like a starfish, starts to spin. And then it falls, tumbling gracelessly until it lands on its rear or its head and unintentionally cartwheels or backflips to a stop.
The unnamed narrator of Jordan Castro’s The Novelist is not Jordan Castro. Castro, the author, wants this to be clear. So clear, in fact, that there is a famous writer named Jordan Castro within the novel. The unnamed narrator admires Jordan Castro—he’s everything the narrator wants to be as a writer, and he envies Castro’s intellect, success, and fame. What results is an engaging reflection on the anxieties of writing autofiction, and of the genre as it exists today. This is where The Novelist shines—not only in its exploration of the conventions of the genre, but in his experimentation with it as well. This novel, if at times tedious in its granular approach, breathes air into a tired form.
The true center of gravity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of essays on translation and self-translation is an extended meditation on Antonio Gramsci. For this Marxist intellectual, linguist, and politician who died in 1937 at the age of forty-six after more than a decade in prison, Lahiri writes, “[t]ranslation was a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor.” Translation in its many facets and applications was a foundational pillar of Gramsci’s political thought and engagement as founder of the Italian Communist party. It was also an integral part of his emotional life and most intimate communications. In her sensitive and sustained reading of his Letters from Prison and his Prison Notebooks, Lahiri teases out the direct and indirect manifestations of translation in Gramsci’s life on these levels and more: linguistic, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and emotional. What becomes clear in her reflections on this “polyhedric” man, as well as in the nine personal essays in Translating Myself and Others, is that, in an echo of Gramsci’s experience, translation has become Lahiri’s primum mobile, the primary lens through which she views and understands the world on the page and off.
Death takes no holidays in his new collection of essays, “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Whether he’s writing about his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic or the slow decline of his fractious father, he’s whistling past the graveyard ― but still hilarious.
The singers have fallen asleep in their cars,
small camps smoldering. What they didn’t sing
ashes its leftover words in my mouth.
The mathematically optimal solution of buying four hot-dog packs (of ten hot dogs each) and five hot-dog-bun packs (of eight hot-dog buns each), to total forty hot dogs and forty buns, does not adequately solve the problem, as having forty hot dogs and forty hot-dog buns is undesirable for most households (or single people in need of hot dogs).
Throughout my life, magazines were something communal: passed around at a sleepover as a girl or shared in college when we were too broke to get our own subscriptions. Reading them was inextricably tied up with my friendships with other women. Whether it was fashion tips and dating advice or later, feminist essays and profiles of political candidates, the pages of magazines have always been something to be discussed and digested among like-minded women.
Magazines were an easy jumping-off point for making new friendships and maintaining old ones, because discussing articles about actors or books was really a way of asking people about their likes and dislikes, their hobbies, their passions, what they want and think about when they aren’t at school or work.
The facade of Paris’ most beloved bookstore is an invitation to step back in time. On passing the shops’ jade panelling and vintage signage, many begin to wonder if they’ve taken a wrong turn along the Rue de la Bûcherie and stepped into some forgotten quarter of Paris, somewhere the city of light still holds its honey glow. In fact, they have stumbled upon Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop with the kind of lineage that would make Louis XVI weep. Once the haunt of James Joyce and his contemporaries, the store has a hand in publishing some of the greatest and most adventurous novelists of the 20th century. In the 1950s, it was a hang-out spot for the beat generation, and today it endures as one of Paris’s most important cultural landmarks.
The “trash” in Shuggie’s name refers to waste from farmers and other food suppliers, which the owners repurpose in all sorts of ways: Bruised fruit gets blended into frosé slushies, fish bycatch crowns a salmon belly pizza, and buffalo-flavored chicken gizzards and hearts make the most of meat offcuts. With the exception of the pepperoni pizza, every item on the Shuggie’s menu has multiple ingredients that would otherwise go wasted. (Murphy does insist on canned Stanislaus 7/11 tomatoes and low-moisture mozzarella to maintain a consistent base of flavor for the pizzas.)
By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or a speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the woman's role in a male-dominated space, she actually joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation.
Alexandra Lange’s “Meet Me by the Fountain” is a well-researched introduction to the rise and fall and dicey future of an American institution. Perhaps the signature American institution; in a 1996 issue of The American Historical Review, Kenneth T. Jackson wrote that “the Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have a great wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.”
Jackson may have been stretching the case to make a (brutal) point, but it’s hard to argue against the mall as a ubiquitous feature of postwar America. Lange, a design critic, writes in the book’s introduction about her anxiety that malls were “potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study.” The fear diminished when she discovered how responsive people were when she mentioned the project. The response was nearly always an impassioned “Oh, let me tell you about my mall.”
More than anything, “Esmond and Ilia” is a reckoning with loss — personal and public. Wandering among ghosts, however, is a dangerous business, and the sensory memories this provokes, “fumes of rose water, pistachios and icing sugar from the Mouski, chlorine in the swimming pool at the Club,” weave a heady spell. “The dust from the desert gently powdering the surfaces all around,” Warner recalls. “Sugar melting in pans to make syrup. My mother’s dressing table glinting with glass.” Ilia and Esmond aren’t the only ones adrift in the mists of time: In the middle of it all, a little girl watches as her parents’ world goes up in flames.
In August 2021, Michael McTavish received an unexpected Facebook message: in some Toronto and Hamilton neighbourhoods, gardeners were reporting an unusual presence in the soil. McTavish is an expert in earthworms and conducts postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. Soon, he found himself standing in one of those gardeners’ yard with an unusually energetic worm in his hand and a sinking feeling in his heart.
Though McTavish had previously seen this specimen only in videos and pictures, it was immediately clear what it was: a jumping worm, so named because of their startling tendency to thrash around, as if electrocuted, when disturbed. “They are just kind of upsetting,” says McTavish.
And jumping worms aren’t only upsetting for this creepy behaviour. Since one species was first recorded in North America, in the 1930s—one theory posits that they were introduced via some cherry trees Japan donated to Washington, DC, and Bethesda, Maryland, in the 1910s—these creatures have wriggled their way across at least thirty-eight states and now appeared to have moved to Canada too. The Toronto reports were among the first confirmed sightings of jumping worms in the country; they’d previously been found only once before, close to the American border in Windsor. Not long after McTavish received his message, the worms were detected in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well.
Crayfish, also known as west coast rock lobster, support one of South Africa’s most valuable fisheries, especially on the country’s west coast. In recent decades, however, crayfish populations have crashed. In 2021, harvestable stocks were at just 1.5 percent of their pristine levels. Overharvesting and illegal fishing are largely to blame for the fishery’s collapse, but mass strandings like this one haven’t helped.
Known locally as crayfish walkouts, the strandings are driven by harmful algal blooms. These sudden proliferations of algae, sometimes referred to as red tides, are common along South Africa’s west coast, especially in late summer. When the algae die, they sink to the seafloor where they are decomposed by bacteria. The process uses up most of the oxygen in the water, causing crayfish and other marine life to flee toward the coast where breaking waves reoxygenate the water. The animals do not actually walk out of the ocean, but when the tide recedes, they get stuck on land. Trapped, the crayfish are vulnerable to sun exposure, desiccation, and trampling.
When David Howes thinks of his home city of Montreal, he thinks of the harmonious tones of carillon bells and the smell of bagels being cooked over wood fires. But when he stopped in at his local tourism office to ask where they recommend that visitors go to smell, taste, and listen to the city, he just received blank stares.
“They only know about things to see, not about the city’s other sensory attractions, its soundmarks and smellmarks,” says Howes, the author of the forthcoming book The Sensory Studies Manifesto and director of Concordia University’s Centre for Sensory Studies, a hub for the growing field often referred to as “sensory urbanism.”
There’s something encouraging, and perhaps telling, about Ottessa Moshfegh’s success. Her abject, pervy, excremental fictions carry a whiff of deviance and nihilism into a squeaky clean mainstream that comforts some while alienating others. Although it was set before the horrors of web 2.0, her hugely popular novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation seemed to reflect something of the medicated, desolate, anaesthetised now. While our era’s ruling cultural-literary tone decrees “It’s the end of the world – no laughing”, Moshfegh’s stuff is comically weird, amoral and antisocial.
Lapvona is not her first novel to eschew the contemporary world – her debut, was set aboard a 19th-century pirate ship – yet its blurred medieval setting, like a recounted dream of a half-forgotten past, feels like a bold swerve. As I began reading I kept asking myself: “What’s she up to? What skin has she got in this game?” Three hundred pages later, I still didn’t fully have my answers, though by then I’d realised that the (pseudo) historical setting wrenches us out of history and into a timeless, interior landscape of drives, impulses and cravings. A crowd of first name-only characters trace the play of instinct and appetite amid a cheerfully undignified, infantile realm wherein morality either operates in some alien manner or isn’t there at all. Lapvona’s grotesque, shameless world shows us not how it used to be, but how it’s always been.
One can’t help being impressed by how many narrative balls Pfeijffer keeps in the air. The novel combines a comedy of manners with travel journalism, political and cultural commentary, and reflections on European identity. Oh, plus an art-heist mystery (centering on the final days and paintings of Caravaggio). And that love story.
Building 46 is much more than a compelling ghost story. It’s a coming-of-age story whose revelation of prejudice weaves together two very different cultures.
The most common entries for ‘x’ in alphabet books nowadays are probably ‘x-ray’ and ‘xylophone’—based on anecdotal evidence only, someone do this research please—but of course, it wasn’t always so. The x-ray was invented in 1895, and, as the editors over at The Public Domain Review explain, xylophones, “although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of ‘xylophone’) until the early twentieth century.” So what demonstrated the letter ‘x’ in the alphabet books of yore?
Echolocation’s main weakness is its short range: Some bats can detect small moths from about six to nine yards away. But they can do so in darkness so total that vision simply doesn’t work. Even in pitch-blackness, bats can skirt around branches and pluck minuscule insects from the sky. Of course, bats are not the only animals that hunt nocturnally. In the Tetons, as I watch Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath. While I itch, an owl flies overhead, tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward its ears. These creatures have all evolved senses that allow them to thrive in the dark. But the dark is disappearing.
Cancer isn't one thing. It's over one hundred things, over one hundred variations on a theme of uncontrolled cell growth, all with their own particular expressions. There are four types of breast cancer, four types of melanoma. As Dr. Jonathan Chernoff, Chief Scientific Officer at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has explained, "It turns out cancer is a general term. There are lots of different kinds of cancer in different tissues that act in different ways. They're not all caused by the same mutations and they're not all going to respond to the same type of treatment."
Genetic variations in all of us make each cancer its own unique experience. Some treatments work well for some people, and other people not at all. I didn't have the right BRAF mutation for vemurafenib, a treatment that was approved by the FDA mere days before I was diagnosed at Stage 4. Is vemurafenib an effective treatment for a specific type of cancer? Yes. Would anybody call it "the cure" for cancer? Of course not.
Grief wracks us in many ways. Of course, much is made of the mental and emotional toll of grief, as well-wishers encourage those suffering to “take their time” and offer space and a sympathetic ear. But grief, and suffering at large, often manifests itself in physical means as well. Times like these can show that the heart and mind are also fleshy organs, not quite at the far remove we all too-often place them at. It’s this divide—or lack thereof—that Sally Oliver explores in her debut novel, Garden of Earthly Bodies. As Marianne struggles to come to terms with her younger sister’s death, small black hairs begin to appear along her spine. While the hairs seem benign enough, they unsettle Marianne, leading her on a journey of not only medical inquiry but self-inquiry as well, as she confronts the depths of her fears. Garden of Earthly Bodies ripples with visceral language that conceals an ominous underbelly, ever threatening to burst free, but the contrived plot and uneven pacing prevent it from truly reaching the primal core it yearns for.
“Here Lies” is a stunning and evocative work of speculative fiction by Mississippi author Olivia Clare Friedman about two young women brought together in the year 2042 by their mutual grief as they wade through the mire of climate-battered Louisiana. Exploring the potential physical ramifications of, and social reactions to, global warming, “Here Lies” is a tender examination of the enduring bonds of humanity amid a bleak and dystopian future.
Be it the humans who call Antarctica home in 2007’s “Encounters at the End of the World,” the morality of capital punishment in 2011’s “Into the Abyss,” or a sweet man with a dangerous affinity for bears in 2005’s “Grizzly Man,” the connective tissue of Herzog’s output reveals an enduring fascination with the nature of obsession, the people ensnared by it, and the strange places our infatuations can lead.
In his debut novel, “The Twilight World,” Herzog returns once more to this fertile well by immortalizing the surreal saga of real-life Imperial Army Lt. Hiroo Onoda.
Lange doesn’t have a false nostalgia for malls. “Meet Me by the Fountain” is frank about how they have usurped public space. But at a time when malls still serve the function of bringing us together, Lange’s book is a thoughtful guide to helping them do what the best of them already have — but better.
This is the world I’m tethered to:
clouds, lavender-tinged, and below them
russet-going-on-green hillsides.
The Russian River represents one possible future—perhaps the most likely one—for many other rivers on the west coast of North America: They will have hatchery salmon or no salmon at all. In this heavily developed watershed, climate change is already escalating droughts, fires, and floods, providing a preview of what may be in store for other regions. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that facilities like Warm Springs, often described as “conservation hatcheries,” can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. It’s a task that sometimes verges on the impossible. As Mariska Obedzinski, who has led California Sea Grant’s coho monitoring program in the Russian River for almost 18 years, puts it, “It can feel like one step forward and five steps back.”
Hatcheries hold up a mirror to the stubborn belief that salmon can exist without intact habitat. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in places where logged, dammed, and developed watersheds can no longer support abundant runs. But can salmon raised in captivity really replace wild ones? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for years, and, full disclosure, I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a consortium of salmon conservationists encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat, rather than build more hatcheries.
Today, trains just have a number. Or a departure time. But some railroads are trying to give named-trains a new chance.
There is, of course, “Eurostar,” the popular train between London and Paris via “the Chunnel.” There’s also “Thalys” from Paris to Brussels and Amsterdam, and “Lyria,” a super-fast service from Paris to Switzerland using French TGV’s.
Do novels, those great vehicles of democracy and generosity, really change the way people think? Is love, as Hannah Arendt believed, not just apolitical, but anti-political? What is to be done with desire that is prohibited? Should adult happiness always be sacrificed on the altar of children? (Lupton, unfashionable to the last, thinks not, and I’m inclined to agree with her.) Like Jane Austen, to whose novels she gives particular attention, she can be both kind and caustic. In the cause of fathoming how to live life to the full, she spares neither herself, nor anyone she has ever read, no matter how brilliant.
Rebecca Stott’s superb third novel, Dark Earth, dramatises the parallels between archaeology and historical fiction. Stott is a renowned historian, but in this excavation of London’s deep past she has created something radically new and beautiful, a book that retells a period of our national past that straddles the line between history and myth.
Part rom-com, part psychological profile, part redemption tale, Community Klepto is a swift read, but don't let its digestibility fool you. Ann's world is one you can chew on again and again without losing its flavor; if anything, repeat tastings – like a fine wine or one of Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstoppers – reveal brand-new flavors to savor. The cherry on top of it all? Ann's judgmental inner monologue is absolutely hilarious.
Robots have sparked a lot of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Just how smart do we want robots to become, some ask, and what are the implications? Similar questions are raised when it comes to the appearances of intelligent machines—just how human do we want robots to look?
In this way, Earth Room asks large questions in an understated voice — how to grieve and how to love, how to be a family and how to understand place. For answers, she turns to art, questioning the lines we draw between performance and life. Does the speaker give us definite answers? Certainly not — we must come to them ourselves, but she’s here alongside, encouraging, reminding us in the final poem that we are “very very very very / very very close.”
The memoir of a bookseller, poet, travel writer and essayist from Ontario who found his way to England by way of several jobs, A Factotum in the Book Trade is cranky, obscure, charming, occasionally antiquarian in its assessment of contemporary social and political life, and illuminating. It reads like a used bookstore smells. Perhaps Kociejowski would hate that simile but for many a book collector – or hoarder, accumulator, maven, avid reader, or whatever you please – it is high praise. Go open this book and see where it takes you.
As a science consultant for the forthcoming film Jurassic World Dominion, Brusatte has nothing against dinosaurs, and the shelves of his office are teeming with sketches, plastic models and even origami creations of the beasts.
The effusive American even began as a T rex expert before branching out into studying mammal fossils. But there’s a simple reason why he’s so passionate about the latter. As he says in his new book: “Dinosaurs are awesome, but they are not us.”
Using a character’s name has long been a tried-and-true way to come up with a book title; one need look no further than Anna Karenina (or Amelia Bedelia) for proof. And this more specific iteration—the Protagonist Does a Thing formula—been around at least since Mr. Smith went to Washington. You still see it in movies—Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris comes to theaters next month—as well as celebrity profiles and children’s books all the time. Lately, though, it has become the formula du jour for women’s fiction—so much so that some authors are even renaming their protagonists to fit in with the trend.
As you approach the gateway to the underworld, the driving gets hairy. The clifftop road skirts ruined towers and terraces carved by desperate farmers into the barren mountains, before dead-ending at the southern tip of the Mani, the wildest part of the Peloponnese. The roar of the cicadas dies away and, on the finger of land dividing the Aegean and Ionian seas, only thorns seem to grow. Known as Cape Matapan or Cape Tenaro, this beautiful, desolate headland hosts the entrance to the kingdom of Hades.
Or so classical authors such as Euripides implied; others put the gateway farther north in Greece, or near Naples, or on the Turkish coast. But for visitors who suspend disbelief on the path that winds from a derelict chapel to a quiet cove, this is it: the place where Heracles dragged Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog, snarling into the light, and where Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice to the darkness for ever.
Prizing the rare and beautiful over the unattractive and commonplace is hardly unique to culinary preferences. Engagement rings, after all, usually feature diamonds rather than concrete. But such narrow-minded food choices can have irrevocable consequences: the bluefin tuna and Chinook salmon may not survive human fondness for them. Better to stare into a sea-devil’s beady eyes, or get to grips with a geoduck, than to contribute to the permanent loss of a species.
Meredith has not left her home for 1,214 days. She writes in the first person, giving a day to day account of her life, interspersed with flashbacks to childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This is a suspense novel, but an unusual one. The question is whether she will ever venture forth again, and if so, why and when?
So much has been written about the beauty and mythology of this city that maybe it’s superfluous to add even a little more to the ledger. If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung beauty of the Sunset, the cafés tucked along narrow streets, then Golden Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to the beach. It’s so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough, brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. But it’s maddening because the beauty and the mythology—the preciousness, the self-regard—are part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early middle age, sometimes wish it weren’t so nice at all.
It may appear as a gimmick or pretense to create Golden State allure in a nation of dark booths and gloomy weather. But SOLA is Michelin-starred fine-dining, a top-rated destination in London’s bustling Soho district that’s made its name since pandemic-era restaurant rules eased last year and Britons returned to eating out in one of Europe’s biggest and most ethnically diverse cities.
In a country brimming with intoxicating cuisine — few things better than the local chicken rice, roti prata and crab beehoon — California’s fuss-free style of fine dining is having an unlikely culinary moment in a city where top dollar is usually reserved for the ambiance and decors of more stuffy European and Japanese restaurants.
In her new collection, Egypt-born poet Marwa Helal plays with language to challenge the way we approach our problems. The poet wants us to be more open and curious, so that we can better understand how we see the world and what connects us to one another.
It’s March 16, 2020, and Joseph Osmundson is stocking up on red onions. Yesterday, public schools were shut down. The day before that, an 82-year-old woman became New York City’s first Covid death. A professor of microbiology at N.Y.U., Osmundson sees clearly that the coming months will bring many more, but at the moment he’s thinking of the past: “I often find myself mourning the voices that I wish we still had to write us through a present crisis, even in line at the grocery store.” In this, his third book, Osmundson has tried to do just that. “Virology” is composed of 11 essays whose connective tissue — parts queer theory, molecular science and social criticism — consists mostly of what Audre Lorde calls the only answer to death: “the heat and confusion of living.” The subtitle, “Essays for the Living, the Dead and the Small Things in Between,” is significant; these are essays not about but for. These are love essays.
“The Facemaker”, a new book, looks at the other aspect of plastic surgery—that which focuses on reconstruction, in many cases after trauma. Lindsey Fitzharris, a medical historian, describes the pioneering work done by Harold Gillies in the early 20th century. The powerful weaponry used in the first world war, including shells, grenades, mortar bombs and automatic guns, killed millions of men. It maimed many others: as Ms Fitzharris notes, “before the war was over, 280,000 men from France, Germany and Britain alone would suffer some form of facial trauma.” Such injuries had rarely been seen before, and there was no established method for treating them. As one nurse at the time put it: the “science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying”.
This book is bad news for anyone who thinks we should use facts and evidence to change people’s minds. It is disappointing for lovers of debate. It reveals the psychological and evolutionary reasons why all humans are certain we are right, and why “certainty” is nothing but an illusion. But it’s an optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring read. Because while you can’t talk someone into changing their mind, you just might be able to listen them into it, and David McRaney thinks he can show you how.
The street hangs from the sky, held in suspension
by summer’s dark hair lazily in a braid,
exhausted power lines. Someone has thrown a pair
of sneakers, joined together by knots,
One of my toddler’s favorite books is Dr. Seuss’s ABC. I like the narcotic effect of the sing-song rhymes, she likes getting praised whenever she correctly screams a letter, and we both like the goofy little drawings. Every time I get to H, though—”Hungry Horse. Hen in hat. H…h…H”—I ask myself the same question. Not “What begins with H?” but: did Dr. Seuss go his entire life without seeing a horse? Or a photograph of a horse? Or an oil painting of a horse, standing next to Napoleon or Tony Soprano?
The real chicken mystery has nothing to do with whether the egg came first. Scientists would like to know when, where and how a bird of the jungle came together with human farmers to begin down the path that eventually led to the Popeyes chicken sandwich.
The more bioarchaeologists and evolutionary biologists delve into the deep past of the chicken, the more complex its history becomes, and the more difficult it is to imagine a time when they were not food. But recently, scientists have been reconstructing a past in which the birds, descendants of the red jungle fowl, were first viewed by humans as marvelous and exotic, then sometimes sacrificed to ancient gods and sometimes revered as status symbols.
City of Orange is less a panoramic view of a post-apocalyptic landscape, rendered via traditional techniques of worldbuilding, than it is an intimate portrait of one man’s mind. A funhouse reflection of how it feels to travel through the warped corridors and mazed processes of residual trauma, memory loss and re-formation. It’s exactly this meandering quality that allows Yoon to deviate from the usual suspenseful question, ‘will [main character] survive the apocalypse?’ in favor of asking something more troubling and potent.
If given the choice, he asks, would we want to survive our own forgetting?
Seemingly, what you see is what you get — a con artist story, a pop-feminist caper, a fashionable romp. Fun! Pass the popcorn. Except nothing in this novel is what it seems.
Make no mistake, “Counterfeit” is an entertaining, luxurious read — but beneath its glitz and flash, it is also a shrewd deconstruction of the American dream and the myth of the model minority.
Andrew Holleran’s fifth novel, “The Kingdom of Sand,” announces its theme early. “This story is about the things we accumulate during a lifetime but cannot bear to part with before we die,” its unnamed narrator explains. Which is to say that it continues the project Holleran began four decades ago: elegant, contemplative works obsessed with matters of intimacy and loss.
“Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World” teases out the stories behind the materials — exalting them as builders of civilizations, instruments of advancement and keepers of sacred tradition. Just as she did in “Color: A Natural History of the Palette,” Finlay provides an exhaustive exploration that spans the breadth of the globe over the course of centuries. It’s a tall order, to be sure — but she delivers, and does so with deft cultural consciousness. Additionally, she writes of these materials with such wonderment — such reverence — that one cannot help believing in the “hidden magic” she insists is spun into each fiber.
In God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, Arinze Ifeakandu’s beautiful debut collection out tomorrow from A Public Space Books, people often struggle to express their true emotions and feelings. Living in a world that may not accept who they are and whom they love, it is at times difficult for the book’s queer characters to speak what’s on their mind. Ifeakandu [...] often uses a description of the world to express their emotional state—at times he uses metaphor; at others, he simply describes the landscape. The way that he chooses to depict a character’s world, seen through their eyes, also reflects their emotional landscape. It is a subtle and beautiful way to portray these characters, to allow us to truly understand how they feel.
It is this thread of refusal to be pitied, to have what happened to his family reduced to "a tawdry bit of sentimental fluff for people to tut along to and say how sad," that makes Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? so rousing. That it is also deadly funny is an extra treat.
Badger gives a clear account of the shifts in documentary photography as an art form in Britain from 1945 to the present day, but it is the social, cultural and political climate of each decade that has been the biggest impetus for change, and it is these important contexts that Badger conveys so concisely and well, showing how they helped to shape new generations of documentary photographers, intent on recording life and death in a creative way.
Smith hunts for the most effective metaphor for the Internet, a concept that encompasses more than the vacuity of “content” and the addictiveness of the “attention economy.” Is it like a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or like a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or perhaps like a loom that weaves together souls? He doesn’t quite land on an answer, though he ends by recognizing that the interface of the Internet, and the keyboard that gives him access to it, is less an external device than an extension of his questing mind. To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities. In a sense, the Instagram egg has yet to fully hatch.
They were on clearance,
shelved alongside the first, unwelcome
Christmas baubles —
bulbs of a different nature.
If the film is unsettling, consider the novel it was based on, Carlo Collodi’s “Adventures of Pinocchio” (1883). The tale begins with a lethal weapon: under blows from an axe, the pine log that will become Pinocchio cries out, “Ouch! you’ve hurt me!” Soon afterward, the woodworker Geppetto starts fashioning the log into a puppet, which he calls Pinocchio: pino, in Italian, meaning pine, and occhio, meaning eye, one of the first parts of Pinocchio that Geppetto liberates from within the log. Next comes the nose, which, the moment Geppetto has finished it, starts to grow to an enormous length. Geppetto tries to prune it back, “but the more he cut and shortened it, the longer that impudent nose became.” This nose will become Pinocchio’s trademark feature, and the combined comedy and cruelty that attend its birth can be said to stand for Collodi’s novel as a whole: Geppetto got Pinocchio by cutting, and for most of the remainder of the tale Pinocchio cuts him—mocks him, runs away from him.
But, as with Horowitz’s earlier two Bond novels, this is popular fiction at its most accomplished, purring along with the sleek assurance of an Aston Martin. All the ingredients of a cracking spy story are present, from the smooth, dastardly villain, Colonel Boris – a dig at our prime minister? – who is said to be “the high priest of an evil religion” and practises mind control on his unfortunate victims, to the young Russian agent Katya Leonova, who has “something of the young Jean Seberg about her face... [and is] far too beautiful for the uniform she has chosen”. She might sneer of Bond that he is “extroverted, highly self-opinionated and borderline psychotic”, but such things are seldom a bar to a union in these tales, and so it proves here.
Since bursting on the scene with the runaway hit “A Time to Kill” in 1989, John Grisham has been one of the most reliable fiction writers alive, churning out a bestselling novel almost every year. But like the best pitchers in Grisham’s beloved sport of baseball, sometimes you just want to throw a change-up. Enter “Sparring Partners, a collection of three novellas with almost nothing in common. Yes, they’re all about some aspect of the law — the people who practice it or the people who run afoul of it. But that’s the only thing that groups them together.
As in the real world, when the landscape turns bizarre, Walter’s characters attempt to interpret, catalogue, control, and even eradicate it, to no avail. Slowly, like the walking group in ‘Conglomerate’, we realise that something terrible is going on in the natural world. But we are, of course, too late, and the land is done with us. ‘Do you see now?’ it demands. ‘Nothing is fine and there is nowhere that you can hide.’
Ann de Forest’s new anthology, Ways of Walking, takes a different path. It gives the reader a prismatic sense of this basic human activity by tapping into 26 distinct examples of humanity, each with their own concerns, physicality and gender, ties to landscape and sense of history, unique focus and powers of observation, levels of sensual participation, ecological and social perceptions, and level of literary aspiration. This is no soliloquy; it triumphs as a many-sided conversation. And deviating from the flâneur’s Great Cities — New York, Paris — many of these essays center on Philadelphia, that slightly invisible father of American cities, though the voices here also report from the Chilean jungle, the mountains of Appalachia, and the uneven stones of the Appian Way. The successive essays form a palimpsest of landscapes, histories, questions, and bodies, an exploration of the most basic means of human locomotion.
There’s something electrifying about encountering a long-dead author who somehow diagnoses your own predicament perfectly. It’s a feeling that the historian Aaron Sachs explores in his excellent new work, Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The book is a braided account of Melville and Mumford, aimed at exploring the strange resonance between their times and ours. It asks, with unusual directness: What’s the point of the past?
As the daughter of Broadway star Joel Grey, Jennifer Grey caught the acting bug early, at age 6. That’s when her father originated the role of the slick, menacing Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret” onstage, in 1966. As Jennifer Grey writes in her keenly observed memoir, “Out of the Corner,” her Saturday treat was to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself with false eyelashes, lip pencil and Dippity-do gel.
“Every one of his features was reinvented from scratch,” she writes. “This self-drawn mask blotted out any trace of my dad as I knew him.”
Those admiring words haunt the rest of her story, because Grey’s own arc of celebrity has been famously complicated by the reinvention, so to speak, of her own features.
Like many great works of art, James Joyce’s Ulysses has an existence beyond the printed page, an artistic half-life that has endured now for 100 years. It is a novel to learn from and obsess about, and you can spend a lifetime immersed in its pages. Nevertheless, many uninitiated readers view Joyce’s epic with paralyzing fear, something the author didn’t exactly allay with this admission in the mid-1920s: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” The stance is flippant, though in many ways, Joyce intended for the novel to be intimidating. Ulysses is not fast food. It discomfits conventional wisdom, challenges ossified beliefs, attacks commonplaces, jogs perceptual patterns. Many of the emotions and actions plumbed in the novel are unsettling. But if the fictional world of Joyce’s making is contradictory and multilayered, so too is human existence, with its jumble of joys and frustrations.
At 77, and releasing his first novel in over 15 years, Holleran feels as though he has reached “the end of the arc,” he said in a recent interview. So it’s appropriate that in “The Kingdom of Sand” — out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus & Giroux — death is the subject.
“But isn’t everyone obsessed with death?” Holleran, whose real name is Eric Garber, asked during a video call from his home near Gainesville, Fla. “We all think about the transitory nature of life.”
When Caroline Knutson began walking laps at the Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon, in 1982, she felt like she was onto something. She had signed up for TOPS — Take Off Pounds Sensibly, a nationwide nonprofit wellness group — and it provided new friends as well as a new routine. She chatted, shopped and exercised, on dark winter mornings as well as light summer ones. Back then she drove herself to the mall and walked without assistance. By 2013, when the The Statesman Journal caught up with her, she was vision impaired and using a rolling walker. Her daughter had to drop her off, but she still showed up most weekday mornings at the mall. Now she made one half-mile loop of the mall rather than six to eight.
“Asked how she navigates the mall with such poor vision, she chuckles through her response: ‘I’ve walked there since 1982. I know that mall,’” reads the Journal profile. After heart surgery in 2003, a doctor suggested she get on a treadmill. “I’m a mall walker!” Knutson’s daughter remembers her mother proclaiming.
The dominance of blue in such lists doesn't surprise Lauren Labrecque, an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies the effect of colour in marketing. Like a Pantone-sponsored party trick, she'll often ask students in her classes to name their favourite colour. After they respond, she clicks on her presentation. "I have a slide already made up saying '80% of you said blue'," Labrecque tells them. She is usually right. "Because once we get to be adults, we all like blue. It seems to be cross cultural, and there's no big difference – people just like blue." (Interestingly, Japan is one of the few countries where people rank white in their top three colours).
When Alan Turing first proposed his eponymous Turing test in 1950, he tried to reframe the question “Can computers think?” into a more unambiguous counterpart: “Can computers imitate human thinking?” He argued that imitation, rather than the nature of thought itself, could be more easily measured, which would in turn lead to a more scientific understanding of the nature of artificial intelligence. Yet, as the films above demonstrate, this question about whether computers can think — and, if so, how they might act on these thoughts — has been at the heart of many science-fictional imaginings of the future. As a result, many of these narratives rest on the central antagonism between human beings and nonhuman machines. The harder it becomes to tell machines apart from humans, the more threatening their imbrication in our lives becomes.
In her new novel, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn stages a decidedly different dynamic. Although the characters in her novel are split along a human/computer divide, the “robot uprising” that Ravn depicts does not categorically target the human world. Unlike HAL’s attempted sabotage of the American space travel enterprise, and unlike the Terminator’s mission to effectively exterminate humanity, the humanoids in The Employees seek to overthrow the reign of work, rather than the reign of humans.
Place, like class, is often understood by Americans to be a temporary state of affairs on the way to something — or somewhere — better. This rootlessness, this faith in mobility, has found its way into many contemporary books, wherein the settings are more like painted backdrops, inert and somewhat arbitrary. But there’s an older, perennial instinct in American literature to claim a place as one’s own, to study it minutely and evoke its ultimate mystery. It’s this instinct that’s on full display in Adam White’s vividly rendered debut novel, “The Midcoast.”
The novel is a whodunit of sorts. But it is also a thought-provoking drama which routinely strikes a number of serious notes about man's inhumanity and the traumatic effects of conflict. As Edward reminds us, "War poisons everything that it does not destroy."
Sedaris presents himself as a damaged specimen, scarred by a cantankerous father and an alcoholic mother, hen-pecked by four domineering sisters, additionally suffering from a lisp, a nervous tic and the usual addictions. All the same, this feisty fellow has undertaken to set the world to rights through comedy. His recent volume of diaries, A Carnival of Snackery, surveys a panorama of “war and calamity – natural disaster, mass migration, racial strife” and asks whether humour can make these afflictions endurable. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of autobiographical sketches, he broods about the cosmic injustice of Covid-19: noting that a million Americans died in the pandemic, he fumes that he didn’t get to choose a single one of them.
We know, we know: We live in the era of “eat the rich.” Conspicuous consumption is supposed to turn our collectively enlightened stomachs.
But who does the Financial Times think it is fooling by rebranding How to Spend It? That’s the tasty glossy magazine that comes tucked inside the weekend edition of the pink-paged British broadsheet. It is the most trusted Baedeker of bankers, oligarchs, and what Evelyn Waugh called “the sound old snobbery of pound sterling and strawberry leaves.” After Muammar Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound was stormed by Libyan rebels, one journalist reported finding a “well-thumbed” copy of How to Spend It on the dictator’s coffee table. Last weekend’s issue featured an actual statue of Bacchus once owned by Hubert de Givenchy and currently priced at over €1 million. In terms of opulence, How to Spend It makes the New York Times’ T Magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ. — and even Luxx, which is put out by the Times of London — seem if not populist then at least relatively approachable. How to Spend It once claimed that one in five of its readers has, or would consider using, a private jet. Maybe consider is the key word here. Part of the fun of the magazine is to imagine yourself having to weigh the pros and cons of private jettery. (And I know exactly where in my apartment I would put that Bacchus.)
While visiting a friend of a friend in Key West many winters ago, I was smitten by the bookshelves in his living room. The built-in shelves wrapped around a window and ran to the ceiling, obviously the work of an expert craftsman. But from across the room it was the books themselves that dazzled my eye—their spines, meticulously arranged by size and color, made the wall look like a gigantic pointillist painting. When I complimented my host on his bookshelves and asked what he liked to read, he looked at me as if I was one very dim bulb. “I bought those books by the yard,” he said. “Then I arranged them in a way that’s pleasing to my eye. I haven’t actually read them.”
In 1920, 12 women held pilot’s licenses in the United States. Ten years later, that number had risen to more than 300. As female aviators took to the skies, performing daredevil stunts and smashing speed records, journalist Harry Goldberg heralded the start of a “feminine invasion” in aviation. “A new world of endeavor beckons to womankind,” he wrote in an article syndicated in various newspapers on August 21, 1927. But when Edith Eva Keating answered its call, she wasn’t piloting a plane; she was steering a camera.
From the start, it is clear this is not only a novel of natural disaster, destruction, and dystopia, but also one that shows desire does not end just because the world does.
Set in a too plausible future in which American control of Canada is even more explicit and far reaching than it is today and a patriarchal counter revolution reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is rapidly gaining ground, Autonomy is an implausible love story. The romance links Slaton, a Canadian student counsellor who works for the deliciously named Department of Brand Management at the fictional D’Aillaire University, with Julian, a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence who has been developed to conduct interrogations for the government.
David Gergen worked for four American presidents — Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — and he witnessed their struggles with leadership up close. In his remarkable new book, “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made,” he rejects universal models for leadership. His heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and include John F. Kennedy, George H.W. Bush, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.
A.
Lately, when I imagine, I remember. Then I shift into a peaceful kind of forgetfulness. And I start to imagine again, remembering. Like a circle that’s no longer vicious because it erases its own trail, little by little, always re-sketching its outline for the first time.
Despite the no-beach requirement, beach reads often announce themselves with a woman wearing sunglasses on the cover. This is not the case with “The Foundling,” which sports the moody image of bare branches and a hulking Victorian building in shades of deep blue. It also has an introduction by the author explaining the historical threads that inspired her novel: the early 20th-century incarceration of “feebleminded” women and the disturbingly widespread support for the eugenics movement. Sounds serious, right?
Well, it is, but it’s also insanely fun, with fascinating characters, jaw-dropping plot twists and a hair-raising caper finale that recalls the nail-biting climaxes of “Ocean’s Eleven” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”
In his new book, “Raising Raffi: The First Five Years,” the n+1 magazine co-founder, novelist (“All the Sad Young Literary Men”) and New Yorker contributor describes the surprising, joyful and often enervating experience of raising Raphael, his son with novelist Emily Gould. As a toddler, Raffi, who turns 7 today, was bright and fun-loving if occasionally aggression-prone. (“You don’t know anything about yourself until the day your adorable little boy looks you in the eye, notices that your face is right up close to him, and punches you in the nose,” Gessen writes.) But it’s also a book about how books can only do so much to make us better parents — or to address the isolation and confusion that often accompanies parenthood.
Edwards has a key role: he writes detective stories, he is a tireless champion of crime fiction, he has a hand in those British Library reprints (you know, the ones with the great 30s covers that make good gifts) – and he is also creating a body of serious research into the genre.
The Life of Crime is his new contribution, and it is awe-inspiring: 600 pages followed by a 40-page list of all the books featured. It describes the entire history of crime fiction from the 1790s to right now, and is aimed squarely at those of us with a deep interest in the genre and its more obscure corners.
When the inaugural issue of the prestigious literary magazine Criterion hit shelves in October 1922, it included a 434-line-long poem by a little-known American author who spent his days as a banker at Lloyd’s. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its cacophony and bleakness, encapsulated in verse the spirit of modernism, much like Stravinsky had in music with Rite of Spring in 1913.
The Waste Land includes drowned sailors, soothsayers and tarot-card readers, and quarreling lovers. There are mythological figures, such as Tiresias, Tristan, and Isolde, and lines from poems, operas, and works of literature that span genres and cultures. Undergirding the action is one of the most well-known, yet enigmatic myths in Western tradition, namely the legend of the Fisher King, which contains elements of your standard heroic quest, the restoration of the land, and cyclical fertility rites.
“Merry christmas from the Family”, a country song by Robert Earl Keen released in 1994, tells the tale of a sprawling festive get-together, replete with champagne punch, carol-singing and turkey. Many listeners will recognise the chaos the narrator describes; even more than that, they may identify with his struggle to recall how he is related to the various guests. “Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen,” Mr Keen croons. “Can’t remember how I’m kin to them.”
That may have something to do with the English language. It is often joked that anyone around your age is a “cousin”, regardless of actual relation, and anyone older is an “uncle” or “aunt”. English is rather bare in its terms for family members. Other languages pay far more attention to the details.
Sleepwalk is a literary picaresque full of dark wit and quirky observations set in an alternate America. Mixed in with the purely imagined are characters, technologies, and events that are real, and taken together, demonstrate just how close we are to things getting really weird.
“It doesn’t matter how lucky you are”, says the protagonist of Leila Mottley’s debut novel, “because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks.” “Nightcrawling” tells the compelling story of a young black woman who, despite her best efforts, finds herself “stuck between street and gutter”. Set in the author’s native Oakland, California, and inspired by a true crime which made headlines in 2015, the book is both a searing depiction of sexual exploitation and a gripping account of a struggle for survival.
When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded: “By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress or confine it … Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.” At a time when structural imbalances of capital, health, gender and race deepen divides, the young American Leila Mottley’s debut novel is a searing testament to the liberated spirit and explosive ingenuity of such storytelling.
Although Pavone fans may find “Two Nights in Lisbon” quite a stretch, this smart, calculating author remains many notches above others in his field. He is worldly and inviting when it comes to the book’s mostly European settings. His book captures a vacation’s escapism even as its heroine feels walls closing in. And his smaller scenes, like those set in Ariel’s bookstore, feel much less forced than his high-stakes ones. It’s a nice touch to say that the bookstore, with its coffee and greeting cards, does “a brisk business in banal.” Ariel can be accused of many things, but banality isn’t one.
A closed current
as small as a necklace
this water. Looking down at the pebble beach
If you, transported to the turn of the twentieth century, were to visit Call in her private office on Arlington Street in Boston with similar complaints of nervous strain, the advice she would offer might strike you as rather contemporary. Call told the overtaxed young woman to perform her job “the lazy way,” by tensing only the muscles directly engaged in the task at hand and relaxing those that weren’t. As an illustration, Call asks the reader to imagine the feeling of holding a pen “with much more force than is needful, tightening your throat and tongue at the same time.” By adopting a looser mode of gripping, she argues, “ten pages can be finished with the effort it formerly took to write one.” Anyone, she seems to suggest, can manage long hours of demoralizing labor if only they can learn to relax. She prescribed breathing exercises, mindfulness, and cognitive reframing for all sorts of ills. After weeks of following Call’s regimen, her patient still faced the same predicament but now met it “with a smiling face, better color, and a new and more quiet life in her eyes.”
When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses.
If we are what we do, then to-do-lists are itemized descriptions of our true selves. Although I like to think of myself as a tropical bird, impulsive and free, my daily lists describe a much more boring and prosaic woman. Fold socks. Call dentist. Buy cat food. My soul wants to dance on rainbows, but life demands that I pay the gas bill on time.
Occasionally the lists offer an intriguing mystery, thanks to my chicken-scratch writing. Kitten garage? Knitting grasp? I’ll move that to tomorrow.
Wealthy, dysfunctional families are so common in novels that it’s easy to dismiss books centered around them. Don’t make that mistake with “The Latecomer,” which introduces readers to the Oppenheimers, a New York family with triplets born via IVF who were “in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish.”