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