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.