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