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.