Without the ability to feel pain, life is more dangerous. To avoid injury, pain tells us to use a hammer more gently, wait for the soup to cool or put on gloves in a snowball fight. Those with rare inherited disorders that leave them without the ability to feel pain are unable to protect themselves from environmental threats, leading to broken bones, damaged skin, infections, and ultimately a shorter life span.
In these contexts, pain is much more than a sensation: It is a protective call to action. But pain that is too intense or long-lasting can be debilitating. So how does modern medicine soften the call?
“Fellowship Point” is a novel rich with social and psychological insights, both earnest and sly, big ideas grounded in individual emotions, a portrait of a tightly knit community made up of artfully drawn, individual souls. In the end, as Agnes sums it up, “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”
In other words, fellowship is the point. Only connect.
How do you grow up and make your own life when you're tethered to others? Even harder if the people you're tethered to are both needy and slightly bonkers.
In her debut novel, "The Sisters Sweet," Minneapolis writer Elizabeth Weiss has spun a fascinating coming-of-age novel around this question, even imagining a literal tether. The result is a highly original, engrossing story about family secrets, hypocrisy and betrayal.
“The Mermaid of Black Conch” is told from three distinct narrative voices: the retrospective diary entries of David, the kindhearted fisherman who rescues Aycayia; a roving, omniscient narrator who allows us entry into the minds of characters both major and minor; and Aycayia’s own voice in verse. For a book with this much story, the changes of perspective allow for a nimbleness that does much with a relatively small space.
In 1993, Princess Diana asked her friend George Michael to help organize a benefit concert for World AIDS Day. He came through magnificently, lining up the other acts and delivering a strong and heartfelt headlining set of his own. Then when it came time for the show to air as a TV special, the English singer insisted on seeing the footage, altering the sequence of performers and recutting the shots of himself onstage because he thought his butt looked big. According to a former BBC producer, “‘Never work with children, animals or George Michael’ became an industry mantra after that.”
Stories like this show up over and over in James Gavin’s engrossing, depressing biography “George Michael: A Life” — acts of generosity followed by displays of petulance, creative aspiration soured into half-assed compromise. Michael emerges as a gifted, tragic and infuriating figure, whose tortured relationship to his sexuality steered him into artistic confusion and self-sabotage.
Technically, the poet and translator Boris Dralyuk (the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books) falls into the category of a first-generation immigrant, but he was brought to the United States from Odessa in the ’90s by his mother at the tender age of eight. So, culturally and linguistically, Dralyuk’s life and educational experience are arguably closer to a “second-generation” profile. In either case, the poems in his first collection meditate on evanescent California immigrant dreams.
C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency As Art is about games, and about why nobody should be ashamed of them — playing them, designing them, or discussing them with other adults. I read the book, and I stopped being ashamed. Unfortunately, I don’t know what a game is anymore. This is a review about that.