In the milieu of American diners, who readily latched onto Jiro, this search for the perfect and pure was an indicator of the “authenticity” of Jiro’s work, particularly in comparison to the mass-market sushi that was more readily available in the United States. Though “Instagram food” as we now know it hadn’t quite taken hold at the time of Jiro’s release, food trends were skewing in the stunt direction: sushi pizza and the “sushi burrito,” for example. For some American diners, the kind of Edo-style sushi that Ono created appeared as a corrective. The word “authenticity” would be bandied around by both diners and the food media establishment as a value judgment; pursuit of the “authentic” subtly marked a restaurant as superior for its ability to resist trends and concessions and to provide diners with the “real deal” of a cuisine, untouched by globalization and gimmick.
Originally titled Planet Sushi, Gelb has said that Jiro’s aesthetic was largely influenced by nature documentaries like the BBC’s Planet Earth. There’s no famous narrator in Jiro, but Planet Earth’s particular style of storytelling emerges in Jiro’s evocative Philip Glass soundtrack, and in its attention to the good, the bad, and the ugly in its subject matter: the life cycle of a sushi dinner, from the chaos of the Tsukiji Fish Market to the final glistening pieces of nigiri. Its expansive cinematography emphasizes long, almost sensual shots that linger as chefs slice ruby-red ahi tuna and massage octopus until it is perfectly tender, making human actions feel as organic or instinctive as a whale gracefully gliding through the ocean. “We try to use all the tools of cinema, from sound, music, cinematography, all these things to draw the audience into the character in the way that any film would,” Gelb told Deadline of his perspective in 2019. The expansive, sweeping shots feel like a deliberate attempt to draw parallels to the beauty of the natural world, inspiring introspection — or even awe.
Of course, austere temples to sushi existed in the U.S. pre-Jiro; the “Japanese turn,” as defined by historian Samuel Yamashita, had infused American fine dining with Japanese influence since the 1980s. But after Jiro Dreams of Sushi debuted, the game changed. In the past decade, counter after counter of Edomae-style omakase — a sushi style with origins in Tokyo, served with no menu but rather face-to-face at the discretion of the chef — has opened across the country. There is precise, pure sushi served by a master in a serene, sparse setting, with diners finagling for reservations. But most of all there is exclusivity, created by both venue size and cost. For better or worse, in the decade since Jiro Dreams of Sushi was streamed into our homes, there are more places than ever to enjoy a similar experience. And fewer people who can actually afford it.
It's lunch and we're short-staffed. An American woman stops me. Indignant that her filet de bœuf is not à point as requested, but most definitely saignant. The sliced-open, offending piece of meat's rose centre stares up at me like an old wound. What she has is what French chefs would consider 'medium', I say politely, and perhaps she should try it first. Using terms more suited to the Pass, the lady thrusts the plate into my hand and tells me to get out of her sight. As a waiter, you quickly get used to the fact that people believe they can talk to you like a lower species. With no plateau to hand I pray to God I'm not caught by a manager. Carrying dirty plates on one's hand is fine, but never something with food on. And when you do carry dirty plates you must carry as many as possible. It must look impressive. It's part of the show.
As wildly varying photos of “tomato sandwiches” flooded my timeline, I asked myself: what is a sandwich? Of course, the fun is in the fact that any new rule I might make about the definition of a sandwich will provoke the creation of other rules by other people. Arguably, a sandwich is a site for the pure play of rules, where the only basis for rule-making anyone need observe is: do I like it? Even if there is a long embedded rule about how to make a sandwich, it is inevitable that each person who enacts this tradition will intervene with their own revised understanding, their own palate, shaped by their own situation in life.
The locals of Los Alamos have a nickname for their little California town: Lost, almost.
Not just because it’s teeny-tiny—the town’s main drag, Bell Street, is only seven blocks long—but because, for a long time, it was the kind of place that people intentionally didn’t talk about. “The rich and famous came here to the Santa Ynez Valley to escape the limelight,” explains Daisy Ryan. “They came here to be left alone.”
You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure. O’Farrell and Lucrezia, with her “crystalline, righteous anger,” will always be one step ahead of you.
Fairy Tale is both sweeping and self-contained, comic and scary, touching and bleak.
But not all lineages are familial, and not all ancestors are related by blood or marriage. Sometimes, we find or go searching for figures from the past because we're seeking to recognize some part of ourselves that we don't see mirrored in our families or communities.
For Casey Parks, a journalist for the Washington Post, Roy Hudgins was that person. And her first book, Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery, follows her attempts to uncover his story while rediscovering her own along the way.
If Agatha Christie remains elusive, it’s not for the want of those trying to find her. Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction.
A newly minted university graduate heads home after a long absence, to the delight and trepidation of his widowed father, who waits for hours at the station. At last, the son arrives, handsome and grown-up. The father is thrilled. But the son has brought with him a friend, a tall, brusque, fierce-looking young man. This friend is clearly the senior one in the relationship, and the two have returned from the university with all sorts of notions. They are “nihilists,” they tell the father. Their creed is to subject everything to withering scrutiny and critique. Things soon grow tense at the father’s house. At dinner and tea, where they are joined by the father’s well-dressed, old-fashioned brother, heated arguments break out. To make matters worse, the father’s estate is not flourishing. The peasants don’t like his new progressive management system. He was hoping his son would take an interest. Now he is not sure that he will.
This is the setup of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” or, more literally but less accurately, “Fathers and Children,” in a new translation by the husband-and-wife team of Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. The book was first published in 1862, in Russian, and the action takes place a few years earlier, in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs and amid furious debates over the future of Russia.
Pick a memory. It could be as recent as breakfast or as distant as your first day of kindergarten. What matters is that you can really visualize it. Hold the image in your mind.
Now consider: Do you see the scene through your own eyes, as you did at the time? Or do you see yourself in it, as if you’re watching a character in a movie? Do you see it, in other words, from a first-person or a third-person perspective? Usually, we associate this kind of distinction with storytelling and fiction-writing. But like a story, every visual memory has its own implicit vantage point. All seeing is seeing from somewhere. And sometimes, in memories, that somewhere is not where you actually were at the time.
But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.
But downing that pickle martini made me ponder this sublime ingredient, this turmeric and dill-spiked perfection, neon and glowing in all its glory. And I’ve come to the conclusion that pickle brine may just be the most glorious liquid the human race has ever engineered.
The Arctic defies categorisation. It is a staggeringly miscellaneous collection, as deep, inexhaustible and boundless as Mary Poppins’s carpetbag – although minus the magically reassuring properties – a troubling book out of which varied marvels come. Some of Don Paterson’s subjects, in this 10th collection, are vast and ungraspable – the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the possibility of nuclear extinction. In Easter 2020, he recalls the alienating cruelty of the pandemic as a ballad, the form an innocent foil to a canny fury against government (or lack of it) – it is an ICU, not a nursery rhyme.
In October, the Swedish Academy will have the opportunity both to chip away at its record of overlooking many of the most profound writers in its field of vision and to help correct its woeful hesitation in standing up for the values it ought to champion. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Salman Rushdie’s masterpieces, “Midnight’s Children” and “Shame,” had been translated into Persian and were admired in Iran as expressions of anti-imperialism. Everything changed on February 14, 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned as blasphemous “The Satanic Verses,” a novel that he hadn’t bothered to read, and issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death. Khomeini’s edict helped inspire book burnings and vicious demonstrations against Rushdie from Karachi to London.
Rushdie, who could never have anticipated such a reaction to his work, spent much of the next decade in hiding and under heavy guard. The literary world was hardly unanimous in his defense. Roald Dahl, John Berger, and John le Carré were some of the writers who judged Rushdie to have been insufficiently attentive to clerical sensitivities in Tehran. Among the more cowardly acts of the time was the Swedish Academy’s refusal to issue a statement in support of Rushdie. The Academy waited twenty-seven years—a period during which booksellers in the United States and in Europe were firebombed and Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered––before it roused itself to condemn the fatwa as a “serious violation of free speech.” Stern stuff.
In June, I had a long talk with Marilyn Horne, the great mezzo-soprano. In the course of our talk, I said, “Aren’t you glad you lived and worked in the age of recordings?” Pre-Caruso, no singers were recorded: not Maria Malibran, not Jenny Lind, not any of them. Horne, born in 1934, worked in the second half of the twentieth century. The opera roles she performed, the songs she sang—a great deal of that is captured on recordings. Her career, her art, is well documented.
Yes, she said, she was glad. But she added something I hadn’t thought of: singers today have many fewer opportunities to record than their predecessors did—fewer opportunities than their teachers, and their teachers’ teachers, did. The recording industry is transformed. Who will pay for an album of, say, Schubert songs? A person can go to YouTube and hear Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fritz Wunderlich, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . . . Marilyn Horne.
There is a popular saying in Cheongju, South Korea, that “anyone who does not know Jikji is a foreign spy.” The word appears on every street sign, and has been appended to the names of cafes, bookstores, and delis. For a few years, the local soccer team rebranded as Jikji FC. “It’s literally everywhere. I’m not kidding,” says Angelica Noh, who recently moved to the city from Seoul. Noh learned the word in elementary school, “like everyone in Korea,” she says. Jikji is the name of a book, a collection of Confucian teachings, that was printed by a group of monks in a temple in Cheongju in 1377. And though few outside of Korea know it, that date is significant: Jikji is the world’s oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, predating the earliest Gutenberg Bible by 78 years.
NASA can land a probe on Saturn's largest moon, 764 million miles from Earth—yet no one has been able to mathematically demonstrate the exact positions of the Earth, sun, and our own moon at a given point in the future. Scientists can make estimates, but these all rely on simplifications.
Two-body problems, like mapping the movement of one planet around one star, are solvable. These binary orbits are easy to predict. But a serious complication arises if a third body is introduced. Our moon, which has the gravitational forces of both the sun and the Earth acting upon it simultaneously, is part of an infamous three-body problem.
“Technically, a spring roll is a dumpling,” chef Shirley Chung says during a recent visit to her Ms. Chi restaurant in Culver City. Seated next to her at a table are food writer Andy Wang and culinary consultant and event producer Caryl Chinn. I sought counsel from these three because they are known for their dumpling expertise — after all, they refer to themselves as the Dumpling Mafia. “The definition is [it] has a wrapper and has a filling. ‘Dumpling’ is a big umbrella.”
Also on her list of dumplings: cabbage rolls, empanadas, even calzones, which she refers to as “giant dumplings.”
Oklahoma tries to make everyone happy with an official state meal that includes eleven separate dishes, while Louisiana stands out as the only part of the union bold enough to name an overall state cuisine, which is gumbo.
It’s a fascinating list, one you could spend hours studying, alongside the inventory of state beverages, of which there are 22 (most are milk). As you get into the more esoteric items, a few obvious questions arise, over and over. For starters: Who picked this hodgepodge of foods? And was there ever any debate about some of these seemingly random selections?
Still, there’s a difference between hope and grace. Literature abounds with characters who jury-rig salvation out of scraps. But Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education. If I survive you, the book qualifies, and its prose comes alive in that gasping and clawing—what Trelawny calls an “exquisite, wracking compulsion.” These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style.
Better than the minivan you slept a winter in, American Legion
Michael Bishop’S The City and the Cygnets is an alternate history of the city of Atlanta. Bishop’s Atlanta does not grow to become the American South’s largest sprawling metropolitan area. Instead, the city encases itself within a giant dome big enough to contain the entire population of the state of Georgia, and the city’s residents remain trapped inside their dome for almost a century. Bishop’s novel is an impressive achievement of speculative world-building: his domed Atlanta is a technological marvel straight out of Buckminster Fuller’s wildest geodesic dreams; his descriptions of abandoned Georgia highways and suburbs choked in kudzu are haunting and unforgettable; and his cat-eating space aliens, “the Cygnets,” are truly eerie. Yet as memorable as these fantastic sights are, The City and the Cygnets succeeds mostly because its author never loses sight of what all cities, domed and otherwise, are really made of: the people who live in them.
When I was thinking about this review there were two words in my mind – tense and mood – and although the novel is both suspenseful and atmospheric, I was using the words in a strictly grammatical sense. On reflection perhaps “syntax” would have been even better. Nobody can manipulate and modulate time in the way Maggie O’Farrell does, and this has been a consistently overlooked feature of her oeuvre.
“The Witches of Moonshyne Manor” is a remarkable read about a family overcoming daunting obstacles to reconnect and reestablish their love for each other. It weaves in relative plot lines facing a modern reader: an older generation struggling with adapting to an increasingly tech-savvy society, desperate expressions of love toward an unreciprocating individual, and the acceptance of a new, younger adept who will continue the family legacy. This wonderful novel will grab the reader’s attention until the very end to see how this family perseveres and heals to regain their love and compassion toward each other.
“Hurray then for funerals!” exclaims Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus’s 1956 novel The Fall. Camus himself was a fan of funerals, according to Olivier Todd in his 1996 biography of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist. As Todd details, Camus became obsessed with American funeral customs on his trip to the United States in 1946. Hayley Campbell, also a funeral fan, reports on what we make of our dead in her new book, All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work. She dives far deeper than just a survey of funeral ceremonies, choosing to interview professionals in the death industry in the United States and the United Kingdom, including a doctor who handles cadavers at the Mayo Clinic, a death-mask sculptor, a Black executioner in Virginia, and workers at the largest cryonics center in the world, among others.
In late spring 1928 librarians in the rare book collections at the Huntington Library in Southern California noticed that something was feasting on the volumes in their care. Rail and utilities titan Henry E. Huntington had established the library in 1920, spending a small fortune to gobble up a number of the largest and finest rare book collections in a relatively short time, and creating a truly priceless set of artifacts. Though Huntington died in 1927, he intended his collection to live on long after him, but as the librarians discovered, the volumes were literally too full of life. The problem with assembling a massive collection of books is that you necessarily collect the very organisms that feed on books.
At the heart of history’s most successful eradication campaign is a mystery. The smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
It is something else entirely: a unique poxvirus whose origins have been lost, or perhaps never known at all. Scientists call it vaccinia, and it is pretty much found only in the vaccines. No one knows where vaccinia came from in nature. No one has ever found its animal reservoir. No one knows quite what vaccinia is—even as it has been used to inoculate billions of people and saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is a ghost of a virus that has survived by being turned into a vaccine.
I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended. Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I remember—from 1983, the year the book was published—it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks—not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephron’s divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man.
"The House of Fortune," Jessie Burton's fourth novel for adults, is that rare, double-headed beast. It is a sequel to the author's first book, "The Miniaturist" (2014), an acclaimed work of historical fiction which enchanted legions of readers. But it is also a standalone novel that can be enjoyed by those who have not yet immersed themselves in the unique world of that exquisite debut. Burton returns to her main setting and brings back several characters, but the most welcome recurring feature is her skilled storytelling.
The first and last stories extend the book's concerns beyond the Chinese diaspora. The first story (also the title story) takes place entirely within China and offers no evidence that the characters have ever left. In it, a young Shanghai-based doctor looks forward to finishing an unwelcome assignment with small-town officials, with whom he thinks he has nothing in common. In the collection's final story, "The Nanny," Chai experiments with science fiction and imagines an older woman creating a new sense of family in a Chinese colony on Mars.
These two stories bookend this moving, well crafted collection perfectly, as they explore ways in which the human capacities for resilience and imagination, so obviously on display in immigrants' lives, shape our lives more broadly — and how essential they will be in determining forms of life in the future.
Line 10 of the Paris Métro terminates almost five miles west of the center of the city at Boulogne-Pont de Saint-Cloud. The station is a polished hub in one of the wealthiest regions of Paris, not to mention all of France. Boulogne-Billancourt is the birthplace of France’s aviation industry and the site of the historic Chateau Rothschild. It is also home to the Musée Albert-Kahn, an archive of the planet.
It is a madcap, romantic thing to try to document the entire Earth, an undertaking so ambitious and so hopeful it must be delusional. And yet, faced with the crisis of a rapidly changing world at the start of the 20th century, that is precisely what Albert Kahn sought to do. Between 1909 and 1931, he dispatched a team to distant lands to record the world in photography and film exactly as it was: its people, landforms and ways of life. For Kahn, it was primarily an effort to understand and produce images of human complexity as a means of promoting international solidarity and peace. He was forced to stop only after the Great Depression decimated his fortune.
Over the past two years, though, her knack for attention gathering, and her determination to create the kind of off-kilter, exclusive, cooler-than-everything-else scene that has defined earlier moments in Manhattan — but this time with herself at its center — has eclipsed everything else.
As Mr. McNamara put it, she models “a very particular kind of New York glamour: the girl from Montana who comes here and somehow is wearing a $3,000 dress and all she has to her name is this roll of quarters.”
“We all want that New York,” he said.
Parker’s larger point is to show how older ways of experiencing the seasons continue to run steadily through our lives, even if we don’t quite register the tug. This lovely book acts as a portal back to an older time, using the poetry of medieval England to unlock a world where the seasons, and the changing weather, are a subject of deep pleasure and renewing wonder.
As Keith Fisher shows in “A Pipeline Runs Through It”, a sprawling, painstakingly researched history of oil from the Palaeolithic era to the first world war, black gold has been as much a curse as a blessing for the people on whose land it has been found. Oil has always been a dirty business, both literally and metaphorically.
If I’ve learned anything from being in community with Zhu and reading their work in the past year, it’s that a whole lot of people don’t know how to love in healthy ways, and most of those people are eager to do better. What makes Zhu’s work so special is that they learned to stop fearing love, not by following constructs and norms, but by destroying them. In a culture filled with so many tragic depictions of queerness, this is one of the few books that illustrates how the answer to broken systems lies in queer communities of color who understand love better than anyone — if only because we’ve overcome the unconditional hate of others.
Is there a German word for being surrounded by stacks of once-feted, now forgotten novels piled in a deeply haunted basement wondering, “What if this is where my book ends up?”
Three years of German in high school didn’t offer an ample enough vocabulary. Thankfully, English has a word for this: sadness.
Literature’s history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. It’s the shadow narrative of expression—how we fail because of sloppiness, or ignorance, or simple tiredness. Blessed are the copyeditors, for theirs is a war of eternal attrition. Nothing done by humans is untouched by such fallenness, for to err is the universal lot of all of us. Authors make mistakes, as do editors, publishers, printers (and readers).
There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.
Toward the end of the novel the protagonist acknowledges that she is “apart from this world and vulnerable to it.” It’s a deceptively simple statement that neatly summarizes the overarching theme: that existential loneliness exists alongside the deeply porous experience of being a human in a social world. It’s the tension of that seeming contradiction, as well as the sure hand of the book’s guiding intelligence, that makes “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” such a pleasure to read.
Just before our ’68 Camaro hit the guardrail, I thought, “I’ve spent four years crying every day over something I can’t have, and now I’m going to die.” Unharmed and stunned, my husband and I stood on the shoulder listening to the ambulances’ screams. “I’m done ruining my life trying to have a kid,” I said. I got pregnant that night. Nine months later, during my emergency Caesarean, both the baby and I almost died.
Fast-forward 33 years. Same place: San Francisco. Same problem: A woman desperately wants a baby, and it’s not working out. “At twenty-seven,” Michelle Tea writes in “Knocking Myself Up,” the latest of her 16 novels, memoirs and how-to-live-an-artsy-life books, “I read Ariel Gore’s book The Hip Mama Survival Guide and suddenly pregnancy seemed sort of cool, like some sort of wild art project. Ariel’s book was the first thing I had ever read that gave me—poor, queer, weird—permission to bring a kid into the world.”
I was not prepared, then, for the wonder that is the fruit sandwich. I did not even know that such a thing existed until I saw it a few years ago on the menu of a tiny Japanese cafe on the Lower East Side, then run by Yudai Kanayama, a native of Hokkaido. It came to the table on wax paper, not a dainty tea sandwich that I could hold with just the tips of my fingers but two triangles as thick as cake and tilted upward to show off their insides: fat strawberries, a golden orb of canned peach and green kiwi with black ellipses of seeds.
Though painful, this beautifully crushing experiment in empathy and brokenness is worth experiencing. Watkins and Tiny Reparations Books have made a bold statement with “Perish” and will both be worth watching for what comes next.
I proudly call myself a fan of Old Hollywood, but until this year I had never seen a Rita Hayworth movie. I’d seen her famous pinup image for LIFE magazine, known vaguely of her as a 1940s “love goddess,” and watched clips of her in Gilda, but I’d never actually viewed any of her onscreen performances until I was reading Jerome Charyn’s new novel Big Red. As it turns out, as magnetic as her performances on screen are, her films aren’t even close to the most interesting part of her story. Written with love and affection for its subject, Big Red is an entrancing work of historical fiction that serves as a glimpse into Rita Hayworth’s life far beyond her stardom.
Donal Ryan’s latest novel is a book of opposing forces. It begins with an ending – the abrupt loss of a character we have only just met – yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind. Between those events lies a coming-of-age story that explores the challenges of growing up in a tight rural community in 1980s Ireland, and the broader landscape of prejudice, misogyny and family conflict.
In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: “the slavish one who complies” to a recipe and “gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority”, and the “original one” who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity.
Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that “in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe”. A recipe, she argues, “demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only”. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact “the paradox of a constraint that liberates”.
Why will Quentin Tarantino only make 10 films? Because he’s thinking of his “oeuvre,” of course. That’s the “hard-to-pronounce French word for ‘body of work,’ ” writes Evan Puschak. The 20th-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats thought that way too, apparently.
It’s not common for those names to crop up in the same conversation, but the eccentric film director behind “Kill Bill” and “Pulp Fiction,” and the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the past share a fundamental approach that involves considering one’s legacy while in the midst of creating it.
I still live in northern New Jersey, and I still find a strange peace in that late-summer melancholy. The awareness that something good is going to end helps me appreciate that it is happening now.
If you appreciate this feeling, as I do, there is no better work of fiction than “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 story, which teems with the languid sadness of summer’s final act. The shift between the promise of freedom and an awareness of the coming cold happens so smoothly, so quickly in the story that I am somehow astounded each time I read it.
In 1968, the British literary quarterly Ambit, under the editorial auspices of J. G. Ballard, Edwin Brock, and Martin Bax, ran an infamous competition for the best work written under the influence of drugs. Years later, in an interview for The Paris Review, Ballard recalled that, in terms of literary quality, “cannabis was the best stimulant, though some good pieces came out of LSD.” But “the best writing of all,” he went on, “was done by Ann Quin, under the influence of the contraceptive pill.” This winning story, “Tripticks”—the opening of Quin’s final novel, which she had started earlier that year—won publication in the magazine and a prize of £40 for its author. “Don’t laugh,” Quin wrote to her publisher, Marion Boyars, “but I’ve won a Drugs competition.” It’s a funny little anecdote, but it seems to me that this comic subversion of Ambit’s contest is also a preview of the more serious subversive work that Quin was doing in her book. For, just as Quin’s homage to her birth-control pills—Orthonovin 2, to be specific—deflates the romantic narrative of nineteen-sixties drug culture, “Tripticks,” Quin’s most pointedly satirical work, is a feminist anti-romance, anti-road novel of a distinctly disruptive sort.
One morning in September 2003, Jim E. Tynsky was working on the tip of a ridge above a canyon in southwestern Wyoming. That point of land had become known as “Tom’s Folly” because of a previous fossil hunter’s inability to find anything in the quarry there. Tynsky wasn’t doing much better. With the season racing to its snowy end, he had little to show for a summer of hard work but the commonest sort of fish fossils. Heaps of discarded stone slabs lay around like broken pottery.
Other quarries on this ridge were known for producing extraordinarily detailed and complete fossils, all from the bottom of an ancient lake. Tynsky, the third generation of his family to eke out a living from finding fossils there, knelt down beside a slab still embedded in the ground. He chose a spot along an exposed edge and started to work at it with his chisel and his geological hammer. A fragment of stone broke away above the split. He was expecting to find fossilized fish underneath. Maybe some good ones. What caught his eye instead was a foot.
The oldest continuously operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana, where 47-year-old Jerry Tam, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, presides over the Pekin Noodle Parlor. Standing on South Main Street outside the weathered two-story brick building, with its display window of antique Chinese cooking equipment, Tam describes the Pekin as a “walk back in time”—one that illuminates the often-overlooked history of the Chinese population in Montana.
You see where I am living now. This morning, out walking on the cliffs behind the Château de Dieppe, I gazed at the archway that leads to those cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a moat. Through that same archway, Madame de Longueville escaped from Queen Anne of Austria. Stealing away on a ship that set sail from Le Havre, she landed in Rotterdam and rendezvoused in Stenay with Marshal de Turenne. The great captain’s laurels had by then been sullied, and the exiled tease treated him none too well.
When I’m trapped in a metal tube, trying my best to keep my limbs from inconveniencing anyone else around me, I find myself clinging to any small pleasure I can find, even if it’s just a cup of muddy coffee. Up here, the illusion of luxury might as well be actual luxury. Airplanes are a place of needle-thin margins, where an ounce of comfort for yourself can come at a steep cost to someone else. Only one true retreat remains: watching free movies.
Chai does this again and again, elegantly yet forcefully subverting our preconceived notions as readers with each successive read. “Tomorrow in Shanghai” harnesses our attention, splitting it to show the shades of hope, fear, love and loss we’ve already brought to the page.
For his third novel, out this week, Hannaham combines both modes — wicked satire and selected allusions to “The Odyssey” and its progeny — to create a scathing, heartbreaking takedown of the carceral system, “Didn’t Nobody Give a S— What Happened to Carlotta.”
Punch Me Up to the Gods is a letter to so many people, a letter that so many of us need to read and write in our own way, a letter to future generations, a letter to help mend those of us who are broken, a letter to help us prevent breaking those that come after us, so that no one needs to be punched up to see their gods.
So here I’ve been consuming contemporary verse
along with long essays about contemporary verse,
a nearly paralyzing experience that has taught me
that I know nothing about poetry, despite the fact
that I’ve been scribbling poems for all my long life.
A good romance feels like putting two puzzle pieces together. One piece might be gruff and grumpy while the other is sweet and affectionate. Two pieces might be very alike, but detest each other: similar-shaped curves that just won't line up. One proud piece, one prejudiced. The dramatic core of the romance novel is the moment when the two pieces finally click! into place, but for that click to satisfy, readers need to know those puzzle pieces in detail. Their shapes, their histories, their hard and soft edges, the curves and scope of all the different parts that make two people work. It means that every romance novel is at its heart a character study, an examination of those details that make someone who they are.
Unsurprising then, that in romance literature as everywhere else, race matters. The choice to write a character as a particular race is never a coincidence. Though whiteness is often permitted to pass uncommented, Sally Rooney's novels are as much about what it is like when two white people fall in love as Tia Williams' are an ode to the romantic experience of two Black people. Our racial identities and experiences form a core part of our personhood. In a character study, they're significant.
As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, café napkin, or theater ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn't shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.
I am not charging into battle but being shuffled along. Earlier, my husband led me to the car, to the 405 freeway, up La Cienega Boulevard and down Beverly. At the cancer center, we were treated to valet parking and I could almost pretend we were headed to a fancy restaurant.
People tell me to fight. They call me a warrior. They tell me how their friend fought or their cousin fought or they themselves fought, how they won, which is obvious, so obvious because they’re standing here or sitting here, alive, claiming victory. It’s not a fight, I’m thinking, it’s submission, it’s leaning back, full of Xanax, and offering up a body, a vein.
The three mathematicians relied on a strategy — called proof by contradiction — that had been previously employed in related work. The argument goes roughly like this: First, the researchers assume the opposite of what they’re trying to prove, namely that the solution does not exist forever — that there is, instead, a maximum time after which the Kerr solution breaks down. They then use some “mathematical trickery,” said Giorgi — an analysis of partial differential equations, which lie at the heart of general relativity — to extend the solution beyond the purported maximum time. In other words, they show that no matter what value is chosen for the maximum time, it can always be extended. Their initial assumption is thus contradicted, implying that the conjecture itself must be true.
Tourists came and took portraits of themselves against the view. De Mahieu noticed that, as soon as someone stepped in front of the camera, they would shed their layers in defiance of the cold to convey the image of a blissful summer. In front of the camera: T-shirts, floaty dresses. Behind it: swathes of padded jackets. It was Instagram versus reality.
De Mahieu’s photo series, which she calls Theatre of Authenticity, explores the link between tourism and spectacle, and how we perform when we travel, particularly when we think no one is watching. The photos make up the graduation project for her masters degree in documentary photography, and bring together the three issues that most preoccupy her: tourism, social media and climate change.
Catherine Ryan Howard structures the novel like a Chinese box. Each story opens out to reveal a parallel one inside. Strung through the narratives is a lead character who is a clone of those in the other versions. For all these heroines, for they are all young women, it is definitely time to run.
Time is running out and death is near. It is similar to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life in which Ursula dies over and over again. Does each death render the reader insensate to the following one? Or is it, like in a horror film, a way of building tension for the next shock? Or maybe like a bad dream in which you are ready to run, but you are, somehow, paralysed. It may, indeed, be Run Time, but how to run and where to?
When your body becomes a cathedral
for holy communion, your tongue will grow
into a souvenir of songs lost in the throat
When the author Alexander Chee agreed to select “American fiction” for a subscription service called Boxwalla, starting with two works arriving in mailboxes this month, he understood an essential perk of receiving curated items.
Chee is the author of acclaimed novels such as “The Queen of the Night” and the essay collection “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.” He is also a fan of gift boxes. “I like the idea that being surprised is part of it,” said Chee, speaking from Tennessee, where he was teaching at the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. “I get the New York Review of Books subscription, as well as a mystery box of comics and graphic novels each month, and you never know what you might receive — and discover.”
Getting your book as fast as possible has never been easier. With ereaders, you can download the book you want as fast as your internet connection allows. Many places allow preorder so the book will appear in your ereader library at midnight in your time zone on publication day. If you’re more of a physical book fan, there are a million ways to get the book as quickly as possible, including express shipping and apps with gig workers to go get things for you. The history of the midnight release party starts right before the rise of ereaders.
I came to a stark realization: I don’t have any hobbies—and nobody else I knew seemed to either. It had been nearly a decade since I played the piano. Aside from the dodgeball league I joined impromptu at the height of unemployment one year, I never fostered the time and commitment toward a joyful activity when I wasn’t on the clock.
Fitzgerald’s debut memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, is about stories he inherited and sometimes invented, stories he dodged or clung to or performed, often in self-destructive ways, until he began to confront himself. This negotiation between received “truths” and capital-T Truth is the work of every memoir, one could argue, but Fitzgerald’s project of openhearted self-interrogation still feels refreshing in a culture where men are socialized to bury their pain, or worse, turn it back on the world as misplaced resentment.
In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 movie Arrival the US army asks an expert in linguistics to decipher the complex language of the seven-limbed aliens (“heptapods”) who have landed on Earth. It’s a memorable and indeed moving attempt to portray the immense challenges involved in bridging the gulf of mutual incomprehension between two completely different species.
I thought of Arrival while reading Paco Calvo’s remarkable book, the result of “two decades of passionate exploration into a rich and alternate world that exists alongside our own” – the world of plants. The subject of his exploration is startlingly radical: the question of whether plants can be regarded as possessing intelligence.
All this is familiar, and there can be no new ground to explore. Goring does, however, enrich the picture by full descriptions of the places that feature in the story, as they were then and are now. She fixes Mary in the Scotland of her time, and of ours.
Shakespeare and Company’s green-and-yellow facade and weather-beaten sidewalk book bins telegraphed old-world charm. Inside, thousands of books both new and used lined the shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. More books were heaped on tables crammed into corners. I’d never seen so many books packed into a space. Tara had told us on the way over that this English-language bookstore, founded in 1951, had long been the center of expat literary life and that many famous writers had visited and even slept there over the years. Looking around the store, an extraordinary tribute to reading and writing as surely as the Musée d’Orsay was to art, I could see why.
“The Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have the 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.” wrote Kenneth T. Jackson in his 1996 article “The World’s a Mall.” Jackson, an eminent historian of New York City, turned his gaze to the suburban phenomenon of the American mall and found it to be a striking synecdoche for a particular epoch in American history. And he wouldn’t be wrong. The mall––in its sameness, and abundance, its hidden seediness and advertised cleanliness––captures the ethos of capitalist post-war America and the rise of neoliberalism. But as time churned on and neoliberalism became the defining structural tenet of American life, even the mall’s half-hearted attempt at creating public space was cannibalized by a system orchestrated under one flag: profit maximization.
I knew going in that Crane’s own marriage ended after 15 years. I also knew that despite the best (and worst) efforts of all the self-help columns, books, call-in shows and podcasts in the “can this marriage be saved” industry, the most revealing accounts often come in the form of an autopsy.
And that, Crane’s book, “This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After,” most definitely is. Categorized as a memoir, it deals almost exclusively with the author’s marriage to artist and woodworker Ben Brandt, which ended in a way that seemed, to her, sudden and baffling. He left her for another woman, a client for whom he had been installing windows. (To be fair, they appear to have been very fancy windows that required a lot of design and, well, collaboration.)
All nations beguile themselves with stories, and Ireland has long been susceptible to the warm tingle of mythology. Some cherished beliefs, though, are not only comforting but at least partly true. For instance, during the collapse of the Roman empire, Irish scholars really did salvage much of Europe’s literary heritage. Mind you, this had as much to do with their remoteness and obscurity as their zeal for learning.
Emma Donoghue’s latest novel takes a disenchanted view of these events. Set in the seventh century, it strips away the misty hagiography shrouding this period, dispensing with saints and scholars in favour of striving and imperfect humans. Though it retains some of the starkness and figurative grandeur of mythology, this is a tale that entertains no illusions.
There are lessons in these essays about creating new types of narratives for the era of climate crisis that loosely link them to the others in the collection; but what lasts are these little brutal gems of images, the Wilk whose involuntary trauma-response to stress is to fall suddenly asleep, the Wilk who receives a consensual slap by a stranger at a Nordic LARP-ing quest. In these essays, it is the lucidly observed idiosyncrasies of everyday life, so profoundly strange, that expand our sense of the beautiful and the possible, no landrus required.
I’ve mentioned the title of this memoir to some people who have dismissed it out of hand, remarking that being glad one’s parent is dead is crude and a sentiment that should be kept to oneself. But those people haven’t read the book. McCurdy takes her time to remember difficult and complex moments of her life, staying true to her younger self while ultimately trying to come to terms with who she is as an independent adult. It’s a triumph of the confessional genre.
today i went to the grocery store
and bought several organic fruits
And while the presence of pimply-faced teens wearing Topstone masks was enough to scare me at that tender age, I wish I’d realized that what I was actually seeing was one of the last manifestations, at least around these parts, of the ghost show, or spook show.
The real ghost shows, dating back to the early days of the 20th century and usually held in hard-top, or indoor, theaters, were much more elaborate than just kids recruited to wear rubber masks at this drive-in.
Wilding, who is writing a biography of Galileo, has uncovered forged Galileo works before: he previously found evidence that a copy of Galileo’s 1610 treatise “Sidereus Nuncius” (“Starry Messenger”), with several watercolors, was a fake. He became suspicious of the Michigan manuscript in May while examining an online image of it. Some of the letter forms and word choices seemed strange to him, and even though the top and bottom were supposedly written months apart, the ink seemed remarkably similar.
“It just kind of jumps out as weird,” Wilding said. “This is supposedly two different documents that happen to be on one sheet of paper. Why is it all exactly the same color brown?”
If any dish were a poem, oyakodon would come pretty darned close. Preparation begins by slowly warming up dashi and sending sliced onions for a tumble into a savory broth. Eggs are lightly beaten and poured gingerly over chicken thighs and mellowed-out onions. You can’t rush oyakodon — patience rewards the cook with pillowy eggs, juicy chicken and a fistful of onions soft to the bite. All the while, the sweet aroma of dashi envelops the kitchen like a cozy, weighted blanket.
In 1953, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began writing about the idea of “good-enough” parenting—a term he coined, and one he’s still famous for today. According to Winnicott, after infancy, babies do not need tirelessly responsive or self-sacrificing parents. In fact, he wrote, it is developmentally key for parents to lessen their “active adaptation” to their children’s needs over time. In doing so, they teach their kids to “account for failure” and “tolerate the results of frustration”—both necessary skills at a very young age, as anyone who’s watched a baby learn to crawl knows.
In his recent book The Good-Enough Life, the scholar and writing lecturer Avram Alpert radically broadens Winnicott’s idea of good-enoughness, transforming it into a sweeping ideology. Alpert sees good-enoughness as a necessary alternative to “greatness thinking,” or the twin beliefs that everybody has the right to embark on “personal quests for greatness” and that the great few can uplift the mediocre many. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capital is an example of greatness thinking; so is its latter-day analogue, trickle-down economics. So are many forms of ambition: wanting to win the National Book Award, to start a revolution that turns your divided and unequal country into a Marxist utopia, or to make a sex tape that catapults you to global fame.
“Animal Joy” is at once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s first nonfiction book advocates the liberating power of spontaneity, curiosity, humor. The book practices what it preaches. The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis. Collectively these parts amount to an inspiring endorsement of shredding the filters of propriety wherever they are applied — personally, socially, creatively. Encouraging readers to play, the text’s discrete segments become a game of connect the dots. The completed picture shows how humor, like any instinctual act, is fundamentally subversive. If ever we needed a reminder of laughter’s transformational ability to upend expectations and disappoint the status quo, now is the time.
Why was Freud so convinced that he didn’t need to worry? Partly because he had spent a lifetime claiming that he didn’t do politics, apparently unaware that politics might still insist on doing something to him. The sturm and drang of Bolshevism and nazism and everything in between struck him merely as a noisy sideshow, the outward manifestation of various individuals’ ragged inner lives. Sort out the oedipal complex, the death drive and other bits and pieces, and international common sense would return. So the old man clung on in Vienna, the city where he had lived for all but the first three years of his life, convinced that things would come right in the end.
They didn’t, of course, and this thrilling book, as edge-of-your-seat gripping as any heist movie, tells the story of how a “rescue squad” was marshalled to get Freud out of danger before it was too late.
We know that the people loved beautiful things.
From their earliest kind they were fools for shine
and order: necklaces strung with tiny seashells,
amulets of amethyst and chalcedony. The people
loved tall buildings with many gleaming windows;
from these they would survey the land below them,
Literary festivals could “risk waning interest” and some may no longer remain viable if they remain inwardly focused and don’t attract audiences from marginalised communities, especially in the wake of the cost of living crisis, organisers have said.
Do you understand how lucky you are to be learning this kind of vital information directly from me, an actual galaxy? You’d probably be just as nonplussed if it were that almost-dwarf Larry writing this, though I guarantee you wouldn’t find Larry’s explanations nearly as entertaining. My telling you this story—my story—is a gift. It’s like if you learned about…oh, what’s something you humans admire? It’s like Beyoncé taking time out of her “busy” schedule to personally give you singing lessons. Even that falls short, though—she’s not supervising a hundred billion stars.
What if all the work of improving a romantic partner could be outsourced? Female readers, many of whom may feel that they carry the emotional burden in their relationships with men, will find that Lauren Forsythe’s debut novel, “The Fixer Upper” hits pretty close to home. Billed as a “sassy feminist rom-com,” the book is a lot of fun, full of cheeky one-liners and a cast of characters both sharp and heartwarming.
In Serpell’s new novel The Furrows, time mimics grief – it slurs, skips, loops and folds in on itself.
Remember the “why” game? Most children discover it during their intensive questioning phase. They ask “why is something as it is?” You answer only to be instantly asked “why?” again. That’s basically it. After a few rounds it has veered into an existential nightmare for you, while the child has long-since stopped listening and is there only to ride the sadistic thrill at your facial rictus as you plumb the void for meaning.
To maximise your chances of survival, come armed with something such as The Shortest History of the World by David Baker, a book that is essentially one massive causal chain that starts with the entire universe compressed into a fraction of an atom and ends 10ˆ40 years (10 duodecillion years) from today with futures ranging from the possible to the preposterous.
When Nuar Alsadir went to clown school, she wasn't there for a career in clowning. The poet and psychoanalyst was researching laughter for a new book –- going out to comedy clubs and improv shows to really listen to the audience and hear when they laughed.
What she learned at clown school surprised her.
The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how. What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.
But with a dearth of evidence for any of these ideas, a dark horse theory has emerged. In those first seconds of the Universe, there might have been another ingredient in the primordial soup: black holes. These black holes from the very beginning of time, known as primordial black holes (PBHs), could still be lurking around today – and some scientists believe they could solve the problem of dark matter.
Fitting with geology, thousands of years passed and little happened. Snow that started as flakes was transformed to dense glacial ice as it moved quickly, about four miles per year, toward the west coast of Greenland. Ice weakens as it nears the coast, because every day, particularly in the summer, enormous walls of ice flake off the glacier and fall into the ocean.
This is how ocean icebergs form. But it was one particular iceberg that fell in the summer of 1909 that would drift toward infamy. Around too briefly to have a name, this iceberg was more than two miles wide and one hundred feet tall at its birth, big enough to dwarf the Colosseum in Rome and all the pyramids put together, at least before it started melting. It would tower over the largest steamship ever conceived, which was also formed in that summer of 1909.
Let’s imagine that a corporation transforms into a person. Pretend that it inhabits a human body with a beating heart and a back that aches when it sleeps on the wrong side of the bed. Who is that person? What are they like? Do you see them as a co-worker or even a friend? Would you want to join them for drinks after work? Would they get an invite to your wedding? These questions aren’t as outlandish as they appear, especially if you’re familiar with the legal concept of corporate personhood. Corporations can hold property, enter contracts, and sue like any human being — and, controversially, they maintain First Amendment rights to spend money on elections and object to federal birth control mandates on religious grounds, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now comes Emma Donoghue, another popular and critically acclaimed novelist, with “Haven,” a monastic story of her own. But Donoghue has ratcheted up the stakes by taking on a trifecta of bestseller killers: First, she moves the clock back even further, to around 600 A.D. Second, she portrays a culture inhabited only by men. And third, her characters live and move and have their being in an atmosphere fully imbued with their primitive Christian faith.
In short, very few readers have been praying for a novel like this. But “Haven” creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.
Skellig Michael, a jagged outcrop off the coast of County Kerry, was used as the location of Luke Skywalker’s hideaway in two Star Wars films, but tradition holds that human habitation on the island dates from AD600, when ascetic Irish monks began retreating to ever-more remote spots. Emma Donoghue’s brooding, dreamlike new novel, Haven, imagines who those first souls might have been and how they might have survived. Suffice to say, the refuge they imagine – somewhere far from temptation and worldly chatter – soon becomes a very different kind of place as their faith in God and one another is tested to extremes.
After my father’s death, I didn’t write for two years. Even reading fiction no longer interested me. But when a friend mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, a romance novel published in 1928, I was curious. The novel had been disparaged and overlooked by critics; maybe that’s why I was attracted to it. Did Du Bois, the renowned social scientist and activist—whose seminal book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, remains one of the most influential works of African American literature—really write a romance? I had never been a reader of the genre, but death had recalibrated so much of my relationship to the world that it was hard for me to be definitive about anything, even my own tastes.
In every poem, there is a ghost. The page’s emptiness between words. White space where what’s said falls short of what, at the most essential level, needed be said.
For every image, a negative. A lit room gone dark. Against it, the outline of a face, its vague features.
In the moments before entering every supercell thunderstorm, there’s a moment of pause that washes over me. It usually comes as daylight vanishes, a few seconds after I turn on my headlights; just before the first raindrops, and just after the wind has gone still. I silence the radio, tighten my seatbelt, and lower my armrest. Here we go again, I think. There’s no turning back now.
Then it hits, in this case like a car wash. The strongest storms often have the sharpest precipitation gradients. There’s no gradual arrival of the heavy rain. You’re either in or out. And I was in it.
Seeking greatness as individuals makes us restless, discontented, and ruthless to our children, while social and economic rewards for the great immiserate the many. Greatness’s trickle-down effects never arrive. Alpert’s observations may seem a little too familiar. Few of us can be unaware of the late turn to a bespoke minimalism in private life, whether our resources stretch to purchasing meditation apps or to hiring one of Marie Kondo’s KonMari Master Consultants to declutter our houses. And as for trickle-down economics, hasn’t the bloom been off that rose for a good while? “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because while he was up there we were signing people up,” said Christian Smalls, organizer of the first Amazon union in the United States, the ALU. Seldom has anyone so efficiently skewered the notion that the greatness of a few visionary innovators benefits us all.
Shifting back and forth between the late 1970s and early 1990s, “A Map for the Missing” is a vivid portrait of this period of rapid change in Chinese society, showing both the benefits of opening to the world as well as more personal losses that cannot be recouped.
For generations, they have laboured in obscurity, combing through works of history, biography, botany and cookery for names that need mentioning and subjects that should be grouped together so that readers can look them up. The world scarcely knows they exist. Some readers assume authors themselves do the indexing (most farm it out to pros). Others think a machine is in charge. Indexers are accustomed to being asked: Doesn’t a computer do that?
Lately, though, indexers have been getting a few well-deserved minutes in the sun. A new book with a clever title – Index, A History of the – explores how this useful occupation came to be and why it still has value. Its author, Dennis Duncan, a lecturer at University College London, calls his book “a wreath laid at the tomb of these unknown readers.”
Flipping through an old photo album, I came across a picture of myself as a little girl posing in front of my television set. Standing in my red, white, and blue party dress, attempting to curtsy, I was the subject of a snapshot that curiously depicted TV not as a mass-entertainment medium, but as a backdrop for a social performance in an intimate family scene. Struck by the snapshot, I wondered if there were others like it. Searching at thrift stores and online sites, I’ve collected roughly 5,000 snapshots of people posing with TV sets in the 1950s through the 1970s. The snapshots depict a broad range of families across racial, class, and ethnic backgrounds. Like today’s selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people pictured themselves in an increasingly mediatized culture.
Rather than watch TV, in TV snapshots, people use TV as a prop and backdrop for the presentation of self and family. Snapshots turn the home into a theater of everyday life where people use TV to showcase themselves as celebrities of their own making. In snapshots, the empty space around the television set essentially becomes a posing place in which people play roles and engage in acts of everyday pretend.
For this pyramid, sheer size is not the real superlative; Vegas, after all, has its own, even larger tetrahedral hotel. What sets it apart is the fact that its cavernous interior has been converted into an outlet of Bass Pro Shops, the world’s largest hunting-and-fishing retailer, and the hotel rooms—set in the ring-shaped interior balconies that make up the pyramid’s two upper levels—overlook the store’s floor space. On the exterior of the pyramid, a 78-foot-tall re-creation of the company’s logo, featuring the eponymous fish in mid-leap, glows green above the Mississippi River at night.
The stature of this landmark is suggested by the fact that it’s a rare retail store—the only one, so far as I can tell—to appear on a U.S. driver’s license. When Tennessee officials designed a collage of iconic architecture to use as the background of state I.D. cards, they thought: What could represent Memphis better than this inexplicable shrine?
Shibata-san, the only woman in her office group, is tired of cleaning up after the men. One day, when her section head asks her why dirty coffee cups are still lying around hours after a meeting, she improvises an astonishing lie. "I'm pregnant. The smell of coffee ... triggers my morning sickness."
So begins Emi Yagi's debut novel, "Diary of a Void," a bleak, acerbic, melancholy story of a woman who fakes a pregnancy to fight back against a workplace culture that expects women to tidy up and do all the menial chores around the office.
Books throw us into the world as much as they provide respite from it. Now that summer is here, I am reminded of the particular pleasure of lying reading on the grass. It’s a memory of adolescence, filled with sensuality: toes curled on to green softness; the sun, pulsing hot on bare legs; the book – Jane Eyre, or The God of Small Things perhaps – held aloft to keep glare off the face. But it also has an ethical charge. I was reading, as so many young women have read, to find out how to be a strong woman in an oppressive world, how to channel anger and let it take me outwards, away from the pettiness of family squabbles; how to allow the body’s needs and wants to play out without shame.
There are dozens of reasons, many good, not to go for a ride in a hot air balloon. These might range from contingent factors like poor weather or lack of access, to more essential but also essentially subjective factors such as the fear of heights or plain lack of interest. None of these objections are wrong, and neither is the moderate view that it might, after all, be nice, but not nicer than anything else that’s nice, so that in the end you wouldn’t do it. But down on the ground are also some of what might be called accidental non-balloonists, who want to fly, who wouldn’t balk at the rental, but who despite that, even in fine weather, regard it all as too much trouble. Perhaps they’re perfectionists, distractible, or weak-willed, feeling undeserving—there’s no need for fine taxonomies here, except to say that it is to this latter group that I belong, the group of flightless birds with wings that work. In theory, I want to, I can, I even ought to, but up to now, I haven’t.
I could begin by making a list of all the things I’ve lost: a green blouse with a lizard brooch, during a train ride. A fancy, travel-size tube of mint-flavored toothpaste, after an intercontinental flight. A boyfriend, in 1982. A sock. An aspirin tablet. Contact lenses. My house keys—but they were inside a tote bag, something I only discovered after changing all the locks.
DeForest, a practicing neurologist and palliative care physician, at times seems to waver between the goals of imaginative fiction and bearing witness. “A History of Present Illness” offers us the perspective of a doctor who feels everything. Her writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story. The answer, tucked in the book’s last pages, is a revelation.
Even now, having sent my novel out into the world, I find that a reporter’s fact-abiding mind-set can be hard to shake. A friend came to dinner recently. She had just read the novel and was eager to discuss the plot, the characters, their motivations, their psychological makeup. I began to feel uneasy, accountable for her investment in people who didn’t exist. I had a sudden urge to apologize to her, to confess that I had, like Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair and other reporters who violated the public’s trust with their fabricated stories, invented those people and everything about them.
I sized up the couple who were ambitious enough to order such a monument of food. She, a yoga lady about the size of my thumb. He, a thin man who seemed more eager for a cigarette than a massive meal. They snapped pictures of the gratuitous dribbles of cheese and delighted in the rainbow shimmer of grease revealed by their phone flashes, then quickly lost interest. There was barely a dent visible in that unconquerable mountain of food.
I picked at my inadequate salad and tried to redirect my romantic attention toward my date, but I was helpless against the allure of the simmering pile of golden-battered food next to him. It was obvious that the uninterested couple wouldn’t finish it. And though I wanted it more than anything, food theft isn’t socially appropriate on a first date, nor in a pandemic, nor ever. I knew from experience that the waitstaff probably threw out five or ten of these platters every night. No one could possibly eat it all.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras calls her new book, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” “a memoir of the ghostly.” It tells the story of her grandfather Rafael Contreras Alfonso, or Nono, a Colombian curandero, or healer, who had magical gifts that he passed down to Rojas Contreras and her mother. Nono could speak to the dead and heal the sick. Rojas Contreras’s mother, Sojaila, can see into the future and be in two places at once. Using symbols, family stories and national history, Rojas Contreras threads other characters in and out of a narrative that focuses primarily on the separate bouts of amnesia that led her and her mother to acquire Nono’s spiritual gifts, and their journey, years later, to exhume his body and properly lay him to rest.
“The father, the son. This is the question, isn’t it?” So says Rafik to his child, Fahad, at the outset of Taymour Soomro’s debut novel. The relationship between father and son is one of the dominant themes of “Other Names for Love”. The fraught dynamic between Rafik and Fahad is also one of the key sources of tension in the book—an accomplished work which spans years and explores desire, inheritance and the power of memory.
For writers of nonfiction, there are subjects, and then there are stories. McCullough always told stories. In 2003, in an electrifying speech titled “The Course of Human Events,” which he gave for the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, McCullough famously said that “no harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” History, he believed, was for everyone. It affected us all, so it belonged to us all. It could begin or prevent wars; expand or distort human understanding; connect us to other cultures, other times, other species. It was important, but that did not mean that we had to grit our teeth and set out on a forced march through the past. On the contrary, we should be sucked in from the first page.
One of the stranger sights on the University College London campus is the clothed skeleton of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Stranger still is that a waxwork head sits on its shoulders, where Bentham’s own head should be, as per his will. Meanwhile, his preserved head is elsewhere – his friends thought it looked too grotesque for display, and commissioned the waxwork one instead. Legend has it that Bentham’s real head was stolen by some students from King’s College London as a prank against their University College rivals, and a ransom demanded for returning it. Apparently, this was eventually paid up, and the head was returned.
Apocryphal or not, such tales of mischief are amusing, and apt to elicit in us a certain kind of sympathy. But there is something curious about this. Mischief is essentially a form of misbehaviour, and its practitioners are generally met with punishment and reproach rather than praise, at least when they are caught. Why is it, then, that tales of mischief so often elicit in us such a positive response? Could it be that there is something virtuous about mischief, and something noble about mischievous people, considered as a type?
I have my suspicions about nudist colonies. Nothing to do with hanky-panky, mind you. I’m just guessing that some residents have a secret reason for going au natural: namely, to avoid deciding what to wear.
It’s the question we face anew every morning, a reminder that to live is to choose — perhaps the last thing we want to do before we’re fully awake. Granted, this choice weighs more heavily on some of us than on others. There are those who seem to copy the Eudora Welty character who dressed like she just opened her closet and said, “I’m going to town. Who wants to come along?” Then there are the more discerning dressers who would amend a famous Nietzsche quote: “To live is to suffer” — especially if you’re wearing the wrong outfit.
If I were desperately wanting a punch in the gob this August, I might well saunter over to Don Paterson and tell him how much I admired his new collection of poetry, and how surprised I was that he had mellowed. I would richly deserve said gubbing, as there is a seam of righteous indignation throughout this new book; but, in my defence, I am also partially in the right.
Keith Corbin is many things at once: a James Beard Award-nominated chef, a formerly drug-addicted convict, a devoted grandson, a gifted storyteller. His weaving of the earliest aspects of his extreme upbringing, sitting on his mother’s or uncle’s hip as they sold drugs, should have defined a life of another Black man falling through the cracks of an American society that has no desire to catch him. Instead it makes his success all the more gripping.
The result is a buffet selection of a book, offering a delectable selection of bite-sized mouthfuls of pub lore. It’s almost charming at times, and yes, it’s quite a page-turner, and a bit like a buffet, you often end up consuming far more than you planned to at a sitting.
Forests are foundational resources for humans. Fallen and felled wood is burned for heat and energy; trees are logged for construction material; sap or pitch is harvested for waterproofing boats; bark is stripped for use in clothing production; softwood is pulped to make paper--the list goes on. In games like Age of Empires, which recapitulate the history of humanity, the first thing the player does is turn forests of trees into wood. Before gold, before oil, there’s the accumulation of wood. It takes a bit more effort, and the consequences are greater outside, on the real planet earth. But, in the face of climate change, carbon sequestration and storage acquires new market value, and wood finds itself in competition with trees. Whether a given tree is worth more standing or chopped down, as a tree or as wood, depends on who’s doing the measuring, and how. What, then, is a tree worth?
Sometime around 1860, a man named Jacob Sharp stood at the intersection of Chambers Street and Broadway in Manhattan and counted the omnibuses. By his count, there was one every 15 seconds, or more than 6,000 in a 13-hour stretch. Each omnibus — a horse-drawn coach that could carry about a dozen people — was fast, uncomfortable, and profitable. But Sharp knew he could do better. By counting the traffic he could make his case to the New York City Council that they should let him lay rails in the middle of the road. By replacing wooden wheels on cobblestone with steel wheels on steel rails the same horses could pull many more passengers in a train. That meant a more orderly street with less horse poop, more regular routes, and a smoother ride. He was right: The rails were laid, and eventually the horses were replaced by steam engines, and then electricity.
But even as the meteoric rise of streetcars continued into the early 20th century, there also came the automobile. It could not make its case on social efficiency and improved public safety — it brought on ruthless carnage that left thousands of people, mostly children, dead in the street as new motorists struggled to understand this new power that Henry Ford had given them. Nonetheless, it would surpass streetcars and become the dominant transportation technology, reshaping the built environment into a testament to its own seeming inevitability.
There have always been monuments to commemorate the loss of life from calamitous events, such as the thousands of memorials dedicated to world wars, the Sept. 11 attacks, the Holocaust.
But the Covid-19 pandemic, now in its third year, has presented a unique challenge for grieving families. It is not a singular event, in one location. As the death toll of more than six million worldwide continues to rise, communities and families are trying to keep up, building memorials at the same time that the tragedy is unfolding, its end not yet written.
Move over chimpanzees, dolphins, and even bonobos. Apes and cetaceans doing clever things is so mid-2000s. The new geniuses are birds, especially parrots and corvids, members of the crow family. An African Grey Parrot named Alex learned about 150 words, not merely repeating them but seeming to know what they meant, and could categorize objects by color and size. When he died at the age of 31, his obituary appeared in the New York Times. Even pigeons, which don’t seem especially thoughtful, can memorize more than 700 different patterns, and can classify objects as either “human-made” or “natural.”
In case that seems too studious, consider Snowball, the dancing Sulphur-crested Cockatoo. This bird rocketed to YouTube fame with his ability to move along to the beat of pop songs. Standing on the back of an armchair, Snowball produced 14 distinct dance moves. The authors of a paper examining his behavior note that these were spontaneously generated by the bird, rather than copied from his owner, “who does not make a wide range of movements when dancing with Snowball and tends only to engage in head bobbing and hand waving” (which is an accurate description of a lot of people’s dance moves, in my experience).
The worst part of having a Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdown, according to Selin’s best friend, Svetlana, in Elif Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, is not being able to tell people about it, lest you appear self-important. We glean the second-worst part for ourselves: the sense of existential dread that turns even the most seemingly simple decisions into philosophical ones. Throughout this novel, the sequel to 2018’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Idiot, Selin – our narrator – is bewildered by the mundane and fixated on the profound. Strings of passing questions are imbued with Batuman’s wit and flair – “What good was a novelty candle?” “What good was the actual Hippocrates?” “What was a Swedish twin fetish?”. One, though, is present throughout: are some lives more real than others?
I feel a rising resentment of the restaurant’s approach to gastronomy. Yet, I increasingly admire the waiters. The pride in what they do. Their no-non- sense work ethic. The Sisyphean nature of the job: redemption through repetition. The camaraderie. The competition. Their relationship with money and the ephemeral. The way they feel part of a great lineage, of something distinctly French. That they, unlike the rest of the citizens of the city, know something special. A secret order of magicians, perhaps. Just a lot less glamorous.
Because, if a waiter is doing his job correctly, he will be manipulating your perception of reality. He is, to all intents and purposes, an illusionist and his job is to deceive you. He wants you to believe that all is calm and luxurious, because on the other side of the wall, beyond that door, is hell. He is, in effect, the living example of the façade.
Doctors said the young man’s future was bleak: Save for his eyes, he would never be able to move again. Lopes would have to live with locked-in syndrome, a rare condition characterized by near-total paralysis of the body and a totally lucid mind. LIS is predominantly caused by strokes in specific brain regions; it can also be caused by traumatic brain injury, tumors, and progressive diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
Yet almost 30 years later, Lopes now lives in a small Paris apartment near the Seine. He goes to the theater, watches movies at the cinema, and roams the local park in his wheelchair, accompanied by a caregiver. A small piece of black, red, and green fabric with the word “Portugal” dangles from his wheelchair. On a warm afternoon this past June, his birth country was slated to play against Spain in a soccer match, and he was excited.
Since 1947, the Japanese government has distributed a booklet to expectant mothers, encouraging them to record their journeys through pregnancy, delivery, and matrescence. Prepartum, women can jot down their diet and exercise regimes, and the details of their doctors’ visits; after giving birth, they can note vaccination dates and developmental milestones. In Japanese, the handbook is known as boshi techō, where techo means “planning journal” and boshi means “mother and child.” Emi Yagi has titled her début novel, translated into a rinsed, clear English by David Boyd and Lucy North, kūshin techō—a log not for mother and child but for “an empty core.” American readers will encounter the book as “Diary of a Void.”
This sprawling upstate network has kept up with the city’s demands for more than a century. This week it’s at about 80 percent of capacity — not bad but below normal. A writer could begin a buzzard-black apocalyptic novel with a scientist noticing levels are falling.
Lucy Sante’s new book, “Nineteen Reservoirs,” is about the construction of this system from 1907 to 1967, an Egyptian task, and about the villages and farms and schools and churches that were demolished and submerged to make way for it.
Salesses’s foremost concern is the way that the behavioral and artistic norms of writing workshops suppress or distort the voices of writers of color, but his deeper purpose is to suggest that the question “What makes a story ‘good writing’?” can’t be answered until you know who the story is for.
But where our species has been provided with genetic instructions and incentives galore to reward itself for procreation — such that the feeding-cleaning-rearing burdens placed on mothers are ones we tend to tacitly approve, romanticize and even enjoy — there is no oxytocin rush or cultural capital coming down the pike for adult children caring for aged parents.
One of my most enduring school memories is of an austere English teacher urging us—a class of two dozen 13-year-old girls with all the raging hormones of a Harry Styles arena tour—not to succumb to the books of Jackie Collins. “If you read trash, girls,” she articulated, with icy precision, “you will write trash.” Thinking back on this, all I can summon is: I wish. Collins sold half a billion novels during her life, made more than $100 million, and had a Beverly Hills mansion and a gold Jaguar XKR with the license plate LUCKY77. We should all be so blessed as to write like she did.
Still, for me, the message stuck—not a moralistic warning about the dangers of sexually explicit popular fiction, but an aesthetic one. The idea that “bad” novels could poison someone’s thinking, could plant roots in the recesses of her brain only to send out shoots of florid prose years later, was an alarming one. I read all of Jackie Collins anyway, while feeling slightly embarrassed about it, my initiation into a world where virtually everything that’s pleasurable for women is shaded with guilt. Her characters—bold, beautiful women striding through Hollywood in leopard-print jodhpurs and suede Alaïa boots—embodied a combination of desirability and ambition that was totally intoxicating to a British teenager with a school uniform and a clarinet. And her writing did settle into my subconscious, I can see now, but not at all in the ways my teacher feared it would.
Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.
Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?
There's a reason Sagamihara, Japan, isn't in travel guides. It's a sprawling commuter city for nearby Yokohama and Tokyo; a mix of main roads, light industrial estates and quiet towns people go through rather than stop.
However, a 30-minute bus ride from Sagami-Ono station and tucked behind a main road lies Tatsuhiro Saito's used tire shop, an unexpected and remarkable destination for those looking for a taste of Japan's recent past -- dispensed from around 70 restored and working food vending machines from the Showa era (1926--1989).
We usually think of hospitals as somewhere safe, where patients get better or move on. The quote from Dante’s The Divine Comedy prefacing Austin Duffy’s latest novel implies an extreme version of this liminal space. This is underlined when his protagonist suggests his workplace resembles “one of those medieval paintings of hell, swarming with devils and the wretched”. The demons are the medical staff “directing the show”, the wretched are their helpless patients.
The woman who helped me, who I later found out was named Luci Zahray, but who everyone calls The Poison Lady, has been advising mystery writers for decades, and I wanted to know more. “A walking talking, poison Wiktionary,” is how Susan Wittig Albert, the NYT bestselling author of more than fifty books, describes her.
Luci is a retired pharmacist with a master’s degree in toxicology from Texas A&M. She has two great passions in life: poisons and mysteries, though she’s never poisoned anyone or tried to write a mystery.
In the Japanese author Emi Yagi’s prizewinning debut, “Diary of a Void,” a single woman in her mid-30s, frustrated by her stupefying job at a company that manufactures cardboard cores for paper products, spontaneously decides to feign pregnancy in order to get out of menial tasks like making coffee and cleaning up after meetings — the stench of unappreciated labor aggravates her morning sickness. Over the course of the novel, she carries the lie to term.
The Year of Miracles is Risbridger’s account of how she cooked her way through the ensuing grief. And because it is, ominously, set in 2020, she is grieving not just the loss of her partner, but also the loss of a whole way of pre-pandemic life.
“This is supposed to be the year when the world, my world, starts again;” Risbridger writes as she first hears news of the pandemic. “This is not the year the world is supposed to end, because my world has already ended.”
From 2002 to 2009 author Mary Emerick worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Sitka as a wilderness ranger, charged with monitoring and managing use on Baranof and Chichagof islands. She initiated a kayak ranger program in which she, with other Forest Service employees or volunteers, traveled the island coastlines by kayak to check on campsites, archaeological sites, trespass cabins, invasive plants, trails and the people who used the public lands for hunting and recreating. In “The Last Layer of the Ocean” she describes that life, when rain was a near-constant companion and storms threatened but also when rare sun-kissed days illuminated hidden bays, sparkling waters, and every shade of green.
The author, Kathy Kleiman, now a law professor at American University, was a computer programmer in high school. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she discovered two photos with women standing in front of the ENIAC, the 80ft-tall and 80ft-long behemoth invented for the army by J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. From that moment on, Kleiman became obsessed with learning the identities of all the earliest women programers.
The result of that magnificent obsession was a documentary in 2014 and this book, which melds social history with the major events of the second world war and the biographies of these six remarkable pioneers to produce an irresistible narrative.
“Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.” He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts—including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described as Victorian”—have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds. Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their place. “I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery,” he writes. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.”
The voice of the marginalized. The lady of the Navigli. The mad poet. Alda Merini didn’t like these labels, but as one of Italy’s most celebrated literary figures, she couldn’t escape them. Countless admirers have been intrigued by her life, from her upbringing along the system of canals in Milan called the Navigli, to her struggles with mental illness as an adult.
“Seeing the real sky, the old-fashioned way, is still important,” said Hummel. “There should be places left … that we can preserve where people can go and experience the night.”
They just called it elevator music back in the day. Everybody understood what the name meant—it was a dismissive term used to describe bland, inoffensive music intended to stay in the background.
But my informal research indicates that elevator music has almost disappeared. I can’t say I’m shedding tears, but part of me laments the loss of a cultural signifier from a simpler time. Like a quixotic crusader for a hopeless cause, I would prefer we keep elevator music, just make it better.
Before COVID-19 and before her second husband fell off a ladder and died in August 2020, she was known for hosting spontaneous dinner parties in her Florida community for a dozen couples. “Hey, if you have enough booze and play Steely Dan, no one cares about the food,” Veronica would say. But her vast network of couple friends withered as the pandemic spread: Older folks isolated, people who lost a partner moved closer to their adult kids. Being a widow, she told me once, was a social liability: “They don’t know what to do with you at dinner parties.” In the span of about six months, her circle of about 20 friends and acquaintances had shrunk to two widowed women. One of them was battling cancer and didn’t feel comfortable socializing during the pandemic.
As the name suggests, the book – published by Phaidon and compiled by American documentary filmmaker Immy Humes – explores the phenomenon of the ‘only woman’ in photography. Humes has made a habit of trawling through photography archives around the world, and her work demonstrates that this kind of imagery has existed since the inception of the camera.
In “A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse,” Victoria Shepherd takes us back hundreds of years to investigate extraordinary and well-documented cases of delusion. In doing so, she invites us to understand the logic behind the madness.
Let’s start with a full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Broadway — one of those theater fans who will see five different productions of the same show, who genuflect before cast albums from the ’50s, who inhale theater gossip as if it really mattered. I’m also a sucker for books about Broadway, books as different from one another as Moss Hart’s “Act One,” William Goldman’s “The Season” and Jack Viertel’s “The Secret Life of the American Musical.” But I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s “Shy.” Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.
My grandfather spoke Latin at the breakfast table
over his All-Bran and two stewed prunes, read
Paris Match in the loo, referred to his many
grandchildren as little cannon fodder. What else
Imagine being arrested for killing someone. Imagine that there are witnesses to the crime, that there is evidence, a trail and trial. The extensive details are presented before a jury of your peers and you are found guilty without a shadow of a doubt. And now imagine that you cannot remember any of it. Not the murder, not what led to it, not even who the victim was. Imagine being put in prison for years, decades, waiting to be executed, and you sit there day in and day out, alone, scared, confused, trying to figure out what exactly you did and why. You feel like you were framed. It’s a slow torture. You beat your head against the wall trying to remember, trying to put the pieces together. But it’s like it happened to a different person. It’s not you. You know you’re being punished but you want to scream you’re innocent even though you’re not. You miss your friends, your family, your old life. You feel your sanity slowly slipping away. Death awaits.
Is this justice? Undoubtedly. A crime was committed and the family of the deceased deserves to see such repercussions—this is one of the goals of prison, along with being a deterrent and to provide rehabilitation. But how do you rehabilitate a person who believes they did nothing wrong? And what purpose does execution serve when the murderer doesn’t even remember doing it?
Take quantum computers. A basic part of performing any computation is executing certain tasks at certain times. External classical control systems keep time for today’s quantum computers, but a control system that could operate entirely within the quantum realm would open up new possibilities. Giving our imaginations free rein, we might envision tiny quantum drones that can tinker with or deliver molecules. Such autonomous machines would have to carry their own clocks and those clocks would have to be quantum too to prevent the machines from losing their quantum character. For instance, quantum technologies benefit from entanglement, strong correlations that sync quantum particles. The more a quantum drone interacted with ordinary devices, the more its entanglement could dissipate.
The question is, can we build such a quantum clock that would do the job?
Glass bottles have historically been the perfect containers for wine. They are inert and handily sealed, so wine can age and evolve for years free of influence. They are easy to transport and store. A 750-milliliter bottle is the perfect size for two people.
Yet glass bottles have never been more of a problem than they are today, at a time of global trade disruptions and climate crisis.
Alejandro Zambra’s “Bonsai” (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) begins with an ending: “In the end she dies and he is alone, although really he had been alone for some years before her death.” What follows is a truly sublime novella as we watch Julio (the aforementioned “he”) and Emilia (the aforementioned “her”) encounter each other, fall in love, then fall out of touch, until Julio discovers in the novella’s last, beautiful pages that Emilia is dead.
“Mount Chicago” is one of those sweeping, polyphonic, absurdist epic novels like they used to make — think, for example, of “A Confederacy of Dunces” or “The Bonfire of the Vanities” — though to me Levin most closely resembles his fellow Chicagoan Stanley Elkin. Like Elkin, he has a boisterous yet mournful sensibility, nihilism backed with vaudeville shtick; like Elkin, he has a gift for the riff and the digression, the labyrinthine shaggy-dog joke that roves and ranges until you’ve almost forgotten the setup.
Confronting what might one day be left on a ruined, “offline” Earth is a powerful way to refocus the lens on the world we are presently creating, and the politics informing what we build – whether it’s from bricks or code.
But in the same way a great piece of music leads you to a place you didn’t know you needed to go, this novel arrives at its destination with empathy and verve.
In the past century, astrophysicists have coalesced around the notion that our universe resulted from a big bang, when our prenatal universe was so small, hot and compressed that matter and time effectively did not exist. The evidence of this has mostly come from calculating several known quantities of universal expansion, chiefly its speed and contents, and running the tape in reverse to arrive at the universe’s first minuscule fraction of a second.
In her book, “Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond,” quantum cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton focuses on the prequel to this galactic episode, pondering what happened beforehand that put our universe in the position to be banged open. There is no physical evidence for this era, so it’s a little like investigating a murder before the murder’s taken place. But this quandary is still possible to explore, at least in the field of theoretical physics.
We’d go after dark. That way, maybe if someone looked out, they’d see the car but not who was inside it. Sometimes, we’d bring a portable tape recorder, hide it in the pocket of our jeans, so after we left, we could play back the tape to prove to ourselves that it had really happened. That we weren’t just making it up.
Back then, we all were novelists in a sense. Storytellers anyway. We had to be—too much was left to the imagination; too many questions we couldn’t answer.
Sūnya, nulla, ṣifr, zevero, zip and zilch are among the many names of the mathematical concept of nothingness. Historians, journalists and others have variously identified the symbol’s birthplace as the Andes mountains of South America, the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the surface of a calculating board in the Tang dynasty of China, a cast iron column and temple inscriptions in India, and most recently, a stone epigraphic inscription found in Cambodia.
The tracing of zero’s heritage has been elusive. For a country to be able to claim the number’s origin would provide a sense of ownership and determine a source of great nationalistic pride.
Susan Coll knows books. Not only did she write the novels “The Stager,” “Acceptance” and “Beach Week,” but she also has spent years working in an independent bookstore. (For Washington, D.C., readers, it’s Politics and Prose.) Her new novel, “Bookish People,” makes witty use of her experience. Set almost entirely inside an unnamed bookstore, the novel offers an insightful and entertaining look behind the shelves and into the lives of the people who stock them.
Like many readers, I first came across Sloane Crosley through her hilarious and incisive debut collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008), and have since thought of her as a nonfiction humor writer. Yet she has just come out with her second novel, Cult Classic (her first being 2015’s The Clasp), and as expected, it’s overflowing with razor-sharp social critique and laugh-out-loud one-liners, causing me to leave many exclamation marks in the book’s margins.
At the tender age of 25, while her contemporaries were Instagramming latte foam and downloading dating apps, the British author Ella Risbridger lost her longtime boyfriend to cancer. She had a contract to write a “cheerful dinner-party cookbook” but instead handed her forbearing editors “The Year of Miracles,” a luminous memoir about grieving, renewal and the twin consolations of friendship and cooking.
Hone set out to write a book that stresses what isn't yet known about dinosaurs as much as what is known. (Regarding the title, how fast T. rex ran is one of the unknowns.) He achieves this balance beautifully. The volume is jam-packed with gripping descriptions of advances in dinosaur science, while also serving as a handbook for anyone wishing to identify central gaps in our knowledge.
The vagaries of caregiving can be shocking to those who haven’t done much of it — though many have. With parents living longer and children coming later, an entire generation has become well acquainted with the double duty of caring for children as well as elderly parents. There’s even a name for this group: the sandwich generation.
“Mothercare” is revelatory not only for its honest discussion of this thankless task, but also for Tillman’s candor about having her life drip away in service to someone she cares for more than she cares about.
God bless the lightning
bolt in my little
brother’s hair.
God bless our neighborhood
barber, the patience it takes
to make a man
you’ve just met
beautiful. God bless
For faithful readers, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga came to an end more than a quarter century ago. It happened in 1996, when DC Comics published The Sandman #75, the final issue of a critically acclaimed run that didn’t just establish Gaiman as a force, but helped legitimize comics as a medium. (Norman Mailer once famously described it as “a comic strip for intellectuals.”) After seven years, 75 issues (plus one special edition) and a storyline that spanned millennia, The Sandman was over—a rarity in mainstream comics, where characters often outlive their creators.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t over at all.
Everyone knows bookstores are the greatest places on earth. Having a terrible day? Go to a bookstore. Need something to do to end a lovely day, go to a bookstore? I love the smell and the sounds the way it feels to walk around and I love all the knick-knacks and if there’s a café? Heaven. But if you want to ruin bookstores for yourself, become a writer.
Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt makes the most of its fraught and carefully bound setting: in the aftermath of World War II, Leigh Welles returns from Edinburgh to her remote Scottish island home in the wake of her father’s death. Leigh arrives broke and alienated from her successful brother Sam, an army veteran; without other recourse, Leigh is forced to try to live a life on an island seemingly caught in time. The folk traditions that had been, in her childhood, perhaps quaint and suffused with only enough danger to be cautionary and exciting, seem increasingly desperate. The crows that arrive each October—called the sluagh—have become terrifying; islanders board up their windows and write warning signs in blood to keep them away. One man is missing an eye from an attack, and even animals as large as sheep have been found torn apart by the flock. The sluagh form one of the central mysteries of the novel: are they simply crows acting at the apex of their natural intelligence and stirred to aggression by biological and environmental factors, or are they, as some say, the unquiet and now malevolent souls of the dead unable to pass properly into the afterlife? Rather than answering that question early and directly, Seckel wields multiple strategies of constraint to expand the novel’s speculative possibilities and, most importantly, establish a thoroughly compelling set of character relationships that infuse the supernatural stakes with organic urgency.
Before I’d read any psychoanalytic texts, or attempted therapy myself, I was drawn to the practice for its facility with plot. This intrigue began in high school, when my mom went into training to become a clinical psychologist. Occasionally, she would arrange for a classmate to try the inkblot test on me. As a result of these sessions and of being exposed to the new terminology floating around our household, I began to sense that a problem, stared at over time, changed form—it generated its own alternatives. Strangers met up in the same room for years to talk each other into new realities. It was all very exciting, enough so that this method I barely grasped inspired me to begin writing fictional stories of comically exaggerated circumstance. One was about a woman who shows up to every session dressed as a different historical figure who shares her name. (She has no wardrobe budget for this fantasy.) In another, which was written as a play, two characters—Freud and his unconscious—are each other’s friends, family, lovers, and enemies.
This is the sort of enthusiasm for the drama of psychoanalysis that animates Judith Rossner’s novel “August,” from 1983. Reading it for the first time, last year, was like returning to the home of an old family friend after a long absence, somewhere filled with the comforting noise of loved ones rattling off associations. Before coming across “August,” I’d read some novels in which characters go to therapy, others that take the form of a patient’s confession from the couch, and plenty with characters trying to overcome their pasts. But this was something different: heaps of melodramatic stories, recounted in sessions between a therapist and one of her patients, interspersed with scenes from the therapist’s personal life, and written by a master of middlebrow genre romps that were themselves informed by Freudianism and developmental psychology.
The opening sentence of “The Last White Man,” the latest novel by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, may sound overfamiliar — “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown” — but who wouldn’t read on? A protagonist as erudite as his creator might have been grateful not to turn into a giant bug; Anders, who works in a gym and seems as aliterate as he is inarticulate, feels only rage at losing his whiteness: “He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before.” But the self-divided Anders — could he have a more Nordic name? — calms down when he learns there’s a pandemic of changelings; the formerly white come to include his yoga-teacher girlfriend, Oona; Oona’s racist mother; and, eventually, everybody who was born white. (All except Anders’s dying father, a secondary character who gives the book its catchy, if misleading, title.) By the end, a pulp-magazine premise has metamorphosed into a vision of humanity unvexed by racial animosities.
In her new memoir, “Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility,” the nurturing impulse already manifest in Tea’s work is made literal. A “dare to the universe” turns into a dream, peopled with friends and a devoted partner. What does it mean to “conjure a life, and in the process, deeply unsettle my own?” Tea asks. Tea interrogates each element of pregnancy — how to inseminate, with whom to inseminate, how to name a child, how and with whom to parent a child — with studious commitment. These questions underlie the values that have shaped Tea’s life and work for decades: They are the building blocks of a community in which inherited forms, particularly those of romance and kinship, are never taken for granted.
But it did make me wonder: What makes a good vacation read? Is it a novel set in the city you’re in that provides a frisson of recognition every time you stumble upon a street corner or plaza where some plot point occurs? Is it a nonfiction book about that place that helps you understand its history, culture or architecture? Is it a biography of someone closely associated with that city?
Or is it something else entirely: an unrelated palate cleanser chosen to help reset the mind after a frenzied day of sightseeing? A vacation is supposed to be an escape. Would your escape benefit from escapist literature?
At the dawn of the pandemic, Gabino Iglesias had already been living paycheck to paycheck in Texas for more than a decade. Then the public high school where he was teaching had devastating news: He was being let go.
Iglesias, a Puerto Rican novelist, found himself without a salary or health insurance. Unable to find other work in the bleak 2020 job market, he gambled on finishing the book he had started writing on his lunch breaks.
Many of the items seem mysterious without context or origins, and for more than nine years no one ever reached out to claim one, McKellar said.
That changed last month, when Jamee Longacre was looking through some of the collection and a green sticky note caught her eye.
Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and—a physicist might add—the values of the fundamental constants. These are quantities, such as the speed of light or the mass of the electron, which physicists have determined do not change over time throughout the universe.
Or do they?
The Mediterranean’s apocalyptic scenes are some of the clearest examples of how the climate crisis is already upending life around the world and is a harbinger for what could await others. It is also part of a stark global pattern: In the United Kingdom, record-breaking heat has melted roads and forced the government to declare a national emergency. The American West has been baking under an acute heat wave and drought, coastal communities on the east coast of Australia are at risk of washing away, and extreme flooding in China has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Fourteen volunteers, six climate researchers and a mobile biometeorological cart named “Smarty” prepared to set off for a “heat walk” in the Southeast Asian city-state’s downtown area. The volunteers had strapped on devices to measure their heart rates and the temperature of their skin. Winston Chow, the lead researcher, watched the scene as a sliver of sweat formed on his forehead.
Mr. Chow and his team are part of Cooling Singapore, a multi-institutional project that was launched in 2017 with funding from the Singapore government. The project’s current goal is to build a computer model, or “digital urban climate twin,” of Singapore, which would allow policymakers to analyze the effectiveness of various heat mitigation measures before spending money on solutions that might not work.
For three years in the 1980s, my father, who was a partner at a class-action securities firm that bore his name, had an ongoing legal case in Oregon. As a child, I had no idea what this meant, only that he often returned to New York from his long business trips with two things: a stupid dad joke, and a tiny spoon, purchased in the gift shop of an airport. An afterthought, sure, but it was something. We were almost always apart, my father and I, from the time I was 1, when my parents separated, to the time he died, when I was 30.
Their purpose seems obvious — to quench thirst, duh — but stage actors get dry mouths, and no Hamlet puts down his sword to pick up an Evian.
The water bottle is the prop that clues us in that a comic — not a character — is at work.
Growing up, thriller author Megan Miranda spent time at her grandparent's house in the Poconos. There wasn't any cell service — it was just her and her family out there in the woods, cut off from society. "During the day, it would be this grand adventure," recalls Miranda. "But at night I would just stare out into the darkness thinking, 'what is out there?' "
So began Miranda's long obsession with the duality of nature — at once, a beautiful serene place, and also, with just a slight change of perspective, a terrifying one.
As we ponder world-historical events on a ten-, 20- or 50-year timeline – the long-term effects of Brexit; the resettling of the status quo in European security; even the climate crisis – it’s somehow easy to miss changes that are potentially even more lasting and fundamental. This apparently inconsequential story strikes me as an epiphenomenon of one of them. That is: gradually and without all that much fanfare, a whole generation of digital natives have come to adulthood in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it.
The story goes like this: before Sir Grant, my great-grandfather, was a thrice-knighted imperial officer, he was a young rugby student studying Classics at Oxford. It would have been around 1890 that him and Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, better known as Oscar Wilde’s lover, became friendly. When Bosie became the new editor of an Oxford literary magazine, he began publishing a roster of exclusively gay writers, who were also his friends and lovers: people like Wilde, John Addington Symonds, and Robbie Ross.
Scandalized, my great-grandfather published an article against Bosie’s editorship. The takedown was mostly a slam against Wilde, whom he dubbed “Ossian Savage” saying his “greatest misfortune was his face.” (A rather camp criticism in my estimation.) Bosie took great offense, he and Grant argued, but within a few months they were back to being friends.
Today, the book is Rupert Everett’s “To the End of the World,” the actor’s characteristically waspish diary of the making of his directorial debut, “The Happy Prince,” a film in which he also cast himself in the lead role of Oscar Wilde. It is not yet 9 a.m., and I find myself alone in the rear carriage with “something sensational to read in the train.” I am not merely glad to be alive; I am jubilant.
For obvious reasons, over the last couple of years there hasn’t been much opportunity to do my favorite thing in the world. Today I am doing it en route to London, where I am going to do my second favorite thing in the world: sit in a darkened room all day with strangers — and a few friends — watching old films and television programs.
For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions aren’t simply natural upwellings from our psyche—they’re constructions we inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier researchers who sought to identify a small set of “hard-wired” emotions, which were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once accepted that, as she writes, “people’s emotional lives are different, but emotions themselves are the same.” Her research initially looked for the differences elsewhere: in the language of emotion, in the forms and the intensity of its expression, in its social meaning.
Josh, when living
your best life you are a floodgate,
the last restraint between
us open mouths and feelings
we had never had or have had since.