Raymond Antrobus was born deaf. When he came to poetry, much of his work was built on the history and foundations of poetry slams and spoken word performances.
"I really felt a lineage of poets in music, poets in voice, poets in performance," Antrobus says.
Humans have spent centuries wondering if we are alone in the universe, or if there are alien beings somewhere in the vast reaches of space. Given that Earth remains the only planet that we know supports life—and we are not even sure how it arose here—it remains challenging to assess the odds that extraterrestrial life exists based on this lonely sample size of one.
These limitations in our knowledge prompted the theoretical physicist Brandon Carter to propose decades ago that the presence of life on Earth does not indicate that the mysterious process of abiogenesis, in which living organisms arise from inanimate matter, is more or less likely to occur on other planets. Now, a mathematician has revisited this idea and come to a very different conclusion with a more optimistic view about the existence of alien life.
Some of this rush toward dining is a consequence of the pandemic, which gave Americans a renewed appreciation for spending a night out and stressed the restaurant industry to its breaking point. It’s also the consequence of a whole ecosystem of restaurant-centric media and technology that has sprouted around these very trendy diners, guiding them into hard-won seats at new spots and classics, both at home and around the world. But most of all, dining out has become a fundamentally more powerful status symbol for a larger number of people than ever before. In an American consumer culture full of sameness and convenience, scarce restaurant availability is itself becoming unique. Now, if only you could get a table.
Pull off an interstate before dawn in the American South and, outside city centres, you enter a shuttered, ghostly world: darkened businesses, petrol stations devoid of cars, traffic lights flashing red and yellow over empty junctions. But if you are lucky, you may spot a beacon: “WAFFLE HOUSE” spelled out on giant yellow tiles that tower above the restaurant of that name. It will be warmly lit and, more important, open.
Li’s novel is fired by her vivid imagination, and her singular perspective as a US-based Chinese author writing in English about a French woman who is narrating the story of her youth in English. Everything is conveyed through layers of translation, subjectivity and invention. The impact is profound.
What does the word “utopia” mean to the battle-scarred denizens of the twenty-first century? A shockingly unscientific survey of the nine or ten people I buttonholed last week suggests that the key connotations of the word are: ideal, perfect, imaginary, unrealistic, and unattainable. I’ve arranged these terms purposefully in that order, so that they imply not a static and fixed definition but rather a narrative arc, a falling away from hope into disappointment: all of the people I spoke to (students and colleagues at the large Southern state-flagship university where I teach, so a fair cross-section of ages, races, ethnicities, and genders) firmly believed that the word “utopia” denotes an unrealistic or quixotic goal. It’s not my thesis here that disappointment is the necessary fate of any utopian project, but it might be a provisional thesis that most people living in Western cultures today think that it is.
As a Victorian literature scholar, I’m a little surprised at how pejoratively the word “utopian” is used today. Because I immerse myself in another historical period for my research and teaching, I am forced to move back and forth, somewhat vertiginously, between the Olden Times I study and the present moment; just like H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller, I sometimes find it takes a few moments to blink away the “veil of confusion” occasioned by my most recent trip home from the nineteenth century. For the Victorians the word “utopian” did not carry the negative connotations of impossibility, naïveté, and dunderheadedness that it does for us now—the writers and thinkers who used that word were for the most part engaged in actual utopian projects, whether literal or literary (or both).
Translator of Japanese literature Sam Bett once said that translating is the slowest form of reading. When translating, you need to consider the impact each word has on the whole text and, no matter how fast of a reader you are, there’s really no way around the time you’ll need to do such meticulous work. (Unless you’re translating at the most superficial level, in which case, Google Translate is coming for your job.) As translators, we have to slow down our reading and feed the text into the sausage machine of our target language generator—a machine that science doesn’t quite seem to understand yet—and hope the sausage arrives before our publishers’ deadline.
Sam’s observation came to mind when I happened upon yet another round of translator Twitter discourse around a particular topic that keeps coming back: Do translators actually read their books before they translate them? You might think it’s obvious that we do, but there are always translators in the replies—in wording that makes it seem they’re revealing a great, shameful secret—saying that they don’t. The reality is a little more complicated than that.
Does reading leave a residue? Whenever I’ve accumulated a stash of glossy magazines, I like to make strips from the perfume samples embedded in their pages. These I will turn into bookmarks, which will turn me into a voracious consumer of words. That, at least, is the promise contained in voluptuous notes of sunny daffodil and jasmine, or velvety sandalwood and iris. Also, violet, which, as it turns out, is a kind of aphrodisiac: when you get a whiff, volatile molecules momentarily stun your nose and leave you craving more violets — and, in my case, words.
To be honest, I still have a picture of my boyfriend taking a picture of the pizza on his phone. It was slightly caramelized along the tips of the bacon bits, as well as along the seams where the cheese met the crust. The cherry tomatoes had burst, the seeds glistening like little jewels. And then there was the pineapple — just a few taut, golden-yellow rings scattered across the top of the pie. They were sweet, a little acidic and a perfect complement to the inherent heaviness of deep dish.
"This is what pineapple pizza should taste like," I texted her. "I want to eat all the fruit on pizza now."
There was ease to our meals. Everything was more or less served at room temperature, so there was no rush to the table. We ate with immense relish and pleasure, but all of the elements seemed part of a larger ensemble. It was in bed at the close of our three days together that I noted the sheer amount of baking that had been done. Yet it was almost impossible to remember when any of the measuring and mixing had actually happened.
You could toss off a description of the book as “the portrait of the artist as a young woman,” but life is short and that’s awfully reductive. Martin’s book is too complicated, too messy, too specifically entangled with the sheer impossibility of art for art’s sake under capitalism, for that kind of catalog copy to apply.
Catching in the very rhythm of narration the pressures of 2020, letting us listen as Lucy tries to make sense of relationships in lockdown and political tensions deepening across the country, Strout has written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for.
In their brief introduction to this handsome and enthralling volume, the editors, David Dawson, for many years Freud’s personal assistant, and Martin Gayford, a friend of the artist, begin by insisting that what they have produced is neither a memoir nor a biography, but a collection of letters. This is disingenuous, and does both men an injustice. Love Lucian is unique, a sort of biographical tapestry woven around a set of missives reproduced in facsimile that are at once skimpy, slapdash, funny and, in many cases, idiosyncratically but beautifully illustrated – works of pictorial art.
It fell about contest time
and a good time it was then,
when all who flail in meter’s lair
gathered with their kin.
There was a time, not so long ago, when things were perfect for the children up at the bright-faced house, at the edge of London. Heaps of toys in the nursery, an enchanted garden that rolled on for ages, and there were always buns for tea. Mother forever merry, forever there. But then Father died, or was imprisoned for treason, or his business partner absconded to Spain with their money, and the family had to abandon all the best old things and perhaps even the beloved house altogether, being reduced to a dank, crumbling cottage. Mother, too, was soon indisposed—dead or shut up in a room writing stories for pay—which left the children to a crotchety aunt or a kindly old gentleman friend. Mostly it left them to their own devices, unsupervised and largely unschooled, to seek their lost fortune together, with the aid of a time-travelling mole, say, or a sand-fairy who granted wishes. A form of reclamation awaited at story’s end: the return of the family’s comfort and prospects, perhaps even the return of Father.
These are the furnishings of the English writer E. Nesbit’s stories for young readers, and, book after book, she rearranged them with enough invention and emotional intelligence to become one of the most celebrated children’s authors of the Edwardian decade. H. G. Wells wrote to Nesbit, regarding her book “The Phoenix and the Carpet,” “I knock my forehead on the ground at your feet in the vigour of my admiration of your easy artistry.” In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C. S. Lewis wrote that Nesbit provided the older members of her audience with “more realistic reading about children than they could find in most books addressed to adults”; he also plucked his famous wardrobe from Nesbit’s story “The Aunt and Amabel.”
You might know that some sets of numbers are infinitely large, but did you know that some infinities are bigger than others? And that we’re not sure if there are other infinities sandwiched between the two we know best? Mathematicians have been pondering this second question for at least a century, and some recent work has changed the way people think about the issue.
If you have ever called the Windy City home, you no doubt have strong feelings about which pizzas do (and don't) deserve to be anointed bona fide Chicago-style. I'm not here to offer hot takes; I simply want to declare that the Chicago-born pie I hold dearest is tavern-style — a.k.a party cut, a.k.a the circular pizza with cracker-thin crust that's inexplicably cut into small squares.
The way in which we present ourselves to the world is not always the way in which we see ourselves. That gap widens when it meets the constant memory of violence.
In her second poetry collection Intimacies, Received Taneum Bambrick comes to terms with that gap in her life — understanding how she has protected herself from the burden of a traumatic past by simply daring to remember it.
At its best, Internet for the People strikes a happy middle ground between technical history and polemic. Tarnoff addresses the Internet as a technology in the Heideggerian sense, as a product and mediator of social relations: “that setting upon that sets upon man.” Readers will likely walk away from this book with a heightened familiarity with an entire realm of relevant literature. And while Tarnoff’s presentation of the Internet’s origins may seem bleak at times, he is ultimately optimistic about the direction of its possible evolution in the years to come.
Madame Bovary is a food novel: food echoes itself across the narrative, and Flaubert uses food to highlight the characters bourgeois angst. However, Flaubert’s use of food is almost antithetical to the way food is used in contemporary literature and writing. Modern food writing is all about recreating the meal, the experience of eating. On the other hand, while there is so much food in Madame Bovary–nobody seems to eat! Well, except for Charles. Poor, hungry Charles. The only time we, as readers, see Emma eat, to truly exist in the moment of consumption, is when purges, or when she commits suicide by ingesting poison.
Almost a millennium before the Rosetta Stone was even discovered, Arabic scholars had begun to grapple with the hieroglyphs they found on Egyptian monuments and tomb paintings. The highly pictorial method of writing was first developed about 3250 BC and known in Egyptian as "divine words" and in Greek as "sacred carving" or "hieroglyph". Although it had ceased to be used by the 5th Century AD, these medieval scholars believed that the script could still be deciphered, and the secrets of the inscriptions revealed.
Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.
The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.
However perverse it may sound, that death party — as my sister and I came to call those five days — remains one of the most profound experiences of my life. For a brief moment, at my grandfather’s party, I got to slow down the inevitable, to be with the people I grew up with, in the place we held sacred and dear. Amid that joyful reverie, I had time to sober up and confront the simple reality that my grandfather wanted to die and that everything would change. I saw that the man who had commanded movie sets and TV crews now rarely left his house. That his sweaters hung loose on his stooped shoulders, and that his rosebushes withered with neglect. That things were already changing, whether I was ready for it or not.
Despite the fact that she is our first-person narrator, Agnès, too, knows that her inner dreamworld is hidden, and chooses to keep much of it that way. This is what makes The Book of Goose demand a careful, incisive reading. The pleasure lies in seeing, obliquely and incompletely, glimpses not of the stories she tells, but of the secrets that she keeps.
During the year I lived in France, I read Annie Ernaux insatiably. For months, I returned to the library to get her books, one copy after another. Faced with the loneliness of living abroad, I threw myself into reading. Into Ernaux. I liked the way she juxtaposed a detached style with intimate stories. Those stripped-down sentences gave me an easy way to practice French. At the same time, her autobiographical books offered me the space to see my own life anew. When I finally got to Se Perdre (the French title of Getting Lost, translated by Alison L. Strayer), I recognized my own aimless obsession for Ernaux’s books in her insatiable desire for her lover. With both of us turned inward, I recognized this driving force behind her writing: obsession. To understand the past, to keep it close in order to make sense of the present.
“Have you ever walked between two great big airplane hangars and it made you feel very small and very strange?” the art dealer Richard Bellamy is said to have asked. “Well, that’s minimalism.”
There are no airplane hangars in the Zambian American writer Namwali Serpell’s second novel, “The Furrows,” and the tone isn’t spare. But the book is so laden with odd convergences and there are so many brushes with demons that it does leave you feeling tiny and weird.
At heart, though, it’s a big, rewarding puzzle that casts a jaundiced eye at one of London’s historic heydays while slipping the reader a flask full of Jazz-Age thrills under the table.
The best-selling Korean writer Kim Hye-jin’s first novel to be translated into English, “Concerning My Daughter,” begins with an awkward question. Eating udon noodles with her mother, a 30-year-old daughter asks if she and her girlfriend, Lane, can move into the mother’s house. The daughter (who is only ever referred to by Lane’s nickname for her, “Green”) can’t afford a flat of her own because of her unpredictable work as an “itinerant” university lecturer. The mother — our narrator, also unnamed — agrees reluctantly, needing extra income to supplement what she earns caring for dementia patients. She also recognizes that her only daughter needs help, even if that means helping Lane too, whom the mother despises on principle because she is not a man. The mother wrestles with her disapproval of her daughter’s life choices both in private and with her patient Jen, a successful and well-traveled woman who never had children, and now has no family to care for her.
Where the sequel surpasses the original is in how the author keeps faith with the reader’s emotional intelligence on abstract notions of memory and culpability. In Election, the characters are too self-aware, too insightful when it comes to their own ethical shortcomings; they call themselves out so we don’t have (or get) to. Tracy Flick Can’t Win offers no such moral clarity. Here, the novel’s multiple points of view underscore just why closure remains out of reach.
Holabird — like a lot of children — loved to dance as a kid. She grew up in Chicago with three sisters, and they spent hours dressing up and dancing around the house in ballet costumes, made by her set-designer father. Later, when she was a freelance writer living in London, she had two young daughters who also loved to dance.
"It just seemed to me this was a wonderful story about little girls and how empowering dance and music can be," says Holabird.
Youth itself is novelty, and everyone loves when something is new. In this ecosystem where all the instruments are tuned toward whatever is new, youth will always make the loudest noise. The young take up the most space online, by cultural volume if not necessarily by actual numbers. Everyone else online is old–I know this, because we all talk to each other about it all day long–and yet it is always possible to feel like the only person over 30 left on the internet.
My favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.
For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the nature of reality and the truth quotient of fact, memory and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – so much more “fatal”, as Agnès puts it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight. There’s room, too, for a spiky, often droll critique of what it takes out of an author to be published and compelled to engage with the outside world.
This book’s title might suggest a history of the London Underground map of 1933 (which is technically a diagram), the one created by Harry Beck and resembling electric circuitry. But it’s really a history of London Underground maps plural, albeit with Beck as the star of the show. After all, there were underground maps before him, and there have been others since, because his original game-changer has been much messed with. Caroline Roope’s lucid and thoroughly researched study can also be read as a history of London Underground per se. In other words, she sets Harry Beck in the fullest possible context – a well-merited honour.
You’re standing in the doorway in my red bathrobe,
one arm stretched out into the sun, a cigarette burning at the tip.
You’re leaning on the jamb, talking
about ghosts or contrails, the loneliness of Tony Soprano,
Brian Lewis grew up on a tough council estate after arriving in Britain as part of the Windrush generation. At the age of eight he developed an interest in chess and joined a team made up of council estate kids to take part in championships, generally against children from more privileged backgrounds. At 12 he took on – and beat – an international grandmaster.
You have probably never heard of Lewis and yet he is one of thousands of ordinary people joining a rapidly growing trend to preserve their life stories for posterity with a ghostwritten autobiography. And there has been a sharp rise in demand for these services after the pandemic.
Translators face the creative balancing act of remaining faithful to the source text while also ensuring that the translation is a smooth, informative read. One intriguing task for translators of Austen has been how to describe the 19th-century British food featured in the many convivial sequences that shed light on characters through their social interaction.
Since the Middle Ages, botanical explorers inspired by ancient accounts of this remarkable plant have sought it on three continents, and always in vain. Many historians view the disappearance of silphion as the first recorded extinction of any species, plant or animal, and a cautionary tale in how thoroughly human appetite can erase a species from the wild.
But is silphion truly extinct? Thanks to a lucky encounter almost 40 years ago, and decades of subsequent research, a professor at Istanbul University suspects he has re-discovered the last holdouts of the ancient plant more than a thousand years after it disappeared from history books, and nearly a thousand miles from where it once grew.
Writing is an isolating job – “a life of homework”, according to my next-door neighbour. One surprising thing to emerge from this biography is just how much Pratchett valued and acknowledged the help of a circle of family, friends and fans. Wilkins is pre-eminent here but there’s a roster of advisers, illustrators, toymakers, cartographers and fellow writers – notably Neil Gaiman – who are accorded places of honour in the Venerable Order of the Honeybee. The Pratchett who emerges from this book is good at many things – beekeeping, mead making, gardening, negotiating, pissing people off – but most of all, he seems to have been good at love. Gaiman said: “This is the loophole writers get – as long as you read us, we’re not dead.” Keep on reading him.
To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity: the grocery store “that took about six songs to get to”; the zine that allowed him to rearrange “photocopied images, short essays and bits of cut-up paper into a version of myself that felt real and true.” This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life.
In her 2016 essay for the New Yorker on Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, Laura Miller argues that while French presents readers with an extraordinary “portrait of contemporary Ireland wobbling in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse,” in which the locations of the murders and investigations are vivid and salient, “the kernel of her work’s appeal” is not its exploration of Irish society but its exploration of self: “In most crime fiction, the central mystery is: Who is the murderer? In French’s novels, it’s: Who is the detective?” Since late summer, I’ve been reading the novels for the first time (Miller is correct when she says that “anybody who’s read one will very shortly have read them all”; the Brooklyn Public Library cannot get the novels to me fast enough), and what fascinates me is the relationship between self and place—specifically self and home—in them.
We already spend all day on our computers or our phones, feeling those repeated blasts of rage and despair and envy. And then we retire to the bathroom and dive right back into the same mess?
Look, I do it too: keying while peeing, scrolling while unrolling. But I wish I didn’t! Because that’s not what the bathroom is for. The bathroom ought to be a respite from the loud, angry world, a place to purge our bodies of waste and clear our minds for the time ahead.
Our forefathers, and foremothers, had a solution for this problem: the bathroom book.
Did The Jetsons inspire generation of innovators to realize both the many artifacts and the essence of its vision? Or did the writers understand the core human needs for comfort and convenience, and by extrapolating from the emerging technologies of the time, brilliantly imagined a future that was effectively predestined in any market-driven society? Both explanations are likely true to some extent, but whatever the reason, we have pursued—and partially achieved—the future The Jetsons depicted. And we continue to pursue it, applying a bursting pipeline of new technologies in the service of greater convenience.
The writers of The Jetsons gently mocked this culture of convenience. The scripts are peppered with ironic comments about working too hard, in relation to housework, for example, which consisted of pushing the requisite buttons. George needs to relax at the end of his “hard day” at work, which consisted of sitting back in a chair with his hands clasped behind his head, peering at a wall of controls and occasionally pressing a button or fiddling with a knob. And Jane needs to take an exercise class, where she works out her fingers, to make them stronger for all the button pushing she needs to do.
Think of karashi mentaiko, or sacs of salted cod roe that have been marinated in powdered chiles and spices, as caviar’s Japanese cousin. Spicy and mildly fishy, it has lurked flirtatiously on restaurant menus and in international snack aisles for the last decade. But now, thanks to a combination of factors, including the recent proliferation of wafu restaurants around the country, mentaiko is now more recognizable than ever in America’s collective consciousness. Its name translates to “children of the cod” in English, which brings a certain Stephen King novel to mind. In this case, be very scared of how much you’re going to love mentaiko, because it’s about to be everywhere.
Perhaps my memory of browsing the mall is shot through with the faintest sepia tint. I’m sure I was bored some of the time. Lunch behind me, I was typically after a specific novel or CD or comic book, which used up my spending money almost immediately and set me adrift for the remainder of the trip until the agreed-upon meet-up time. Anyway, wasn’t the mall a site of vapid capitalist consumption? Shouldn’t I have been wandering an art gallery or nudging a soccer ball outdoors? By the parenting standards of today, my family’s Saturdays would not be judged especially nourishing.
But, at least, the mall back then was modest—low ceilinged, less brilliantly lit, and compact. The scale was human and the stores affordable. They served the needs of the browser, not of the brand.
In the acknowledgements to #! (pronounced “shebang”), Nick Montfort writes: “The poems in this book consist of computer programs followed by output from running these programs. Some of them use randomness…In these cases, running the program yourself will very likely produce different results.” Montfort goes on to specify that the computer programming languages used to create the outputs for this 2014 book of poetry include Python, Ruby, and Perl. #! is an example of what we might call “code poetics” or “database aesthetics,” which explores the politics of the appropriation of open-source code by putting code to use in new and unimagined contexts. Montfort recognizes as much: “You may type the programs in and run them if you like, or do whatever you want with them; all of them should be considered free software (offered entirely without any warranty of any sort).” Montfort’s poems thus have an indeterminate quality; they are intended to be appropriated and recontextualized, yielding new outputs—new poems—each time.
“Shrines” doesn’t surprise in the thrilling sui generis way of “Behind the Scenes” or “Life After Life”; no thunderclap revelations à la “Case Histories” arrive in the flurry of postscripts and ever-afters that make up its final pages. It lands instead as light refreshment; a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured.
For around 100 years, naturists – formerly known as nudists – have been arguing that public disrobing is physically and morally improving. They first promoted their ideas in illustrated books and magazines in the 1920s and ’30s, and soon extended their claims to the pleasures and practices of viewing nude bodies in photographs. They did this, in Britain, in the face of an incredulous public and a hostile legal system with strict ideas about decency and obscenity.
Can looking at nudes be good for you? The lively debates raised by historical nudists about the pleasures and powers of showing the nude body are fascinating. They provide surprising perspectives on questions about physical beauty, nature, and the sexualised body.
“Love is finding someone with whom you don’t have to translate yourself,” says Warrell, 51 — a line she credited to a friend, the poet Charles Coe. “Love, to me, means creating a safe place for vulnerability to happen.”
She had an outlet for those ruminations because one thing she never gave up on, after decades of persisting and surviving rejection, was writing. It’s been a steady presence in her life since she learned to string words together. She wrote her first book in elementary school, her first novel in her 20s, and she hasn’t stopped since.
Perhaps the days of the blockbuster podcast are gone. Podcasting wouldn’t be unique in this loss — after all, we do live in a post-monoculture era of too much everything. Maybe it’s not so bad to settle for art house: a smaller domain within the industry for fresh ideas, new talent, and actual podcasts as podcasts. There will be plenty to fill your ears. Just don’t expect to hear it at a listening party.
The definition of “dystopia” in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: “An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible.”
Literature is full of examples. In “The Time Machine,” the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. “The Handmaid’s Tale” deals with state-sanctioned rape. The firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” incinerate books instead of saving them. In “1984”’s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. In “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable — and hence, more upsetting.
The week after our family friend is not shot
that Saturday morning in synagogue,
she invites us over for dinner. I’ve known
her and her husband long enough
Hsu, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is an inveterate collector — of books, yes, but also of music and movies, relics and memories. His new book, Stay True, is a memoir with a tragedy at its center: the killing of his best friend, Ken, during a robbery in the late 1990s, when they were students at UC Berkeley. But it is also a coming-of-age story that proposes an identity can be created through the careful curation of the galaxy of cultural artifacts swirling around the average American teenager. For the adolescent Hsu, this curatorial instinct found its purest expression in the zine, those xeroxed, stapled-together DIY magazines that long ago went extinct. “Making my zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being,” he writes.
That may sound like standard fare for a young Gen-Xer (Hsu was born in 1977), but I’m not sure there’s ever been a book quite like Stay True. It is decidedly not an overt attempt to explain the Asian American condition, a genre popularized in recent years by Wesley Yang, Jay Caspian Kang, and Cathy Park Hong. Nor is it part of a rich tradition of immersing readers — and by this I mostly mean white readers — in an immigrant milieu like Anthony Veasna So. Its significance is so subtle that it might be lost on people who didn’t hang out with a lot of Asian kids when they were young, which, given how few Asian Americans there are in this country (we make up only 6 percent of the population), is nearly everyone. But if your friends parted their very straight black hair down the middle and shaved it around the sides, and wore baggy jeans and high-tops and listened to a lot of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, then you will read this book and think, perhaps for the first time in your life, I know these guys.
Queen Elizabeth II's long reign meant that she saw many changes in the world around her, from rationing and pea-soupers to social media and a global pandemic. As Britain's longest-serving monarch, she also became a global symbol of steadfast principles and stability. Yet, after 70 years on the throne, the Queen left behind a unique and precious legacy that did change with the times: her voice, captured by decades of recording.
Her Majesty's distinctive accent, delivered through public speeches, radio broadcasts, television, and then the Internet, provides a unique insight into how the world changed during her long reign – and how she changed within it. It also adds to growing evidence that our speech patterns remain more flexible throughout the human lifespan than previously thought, absorbing and reflecting our experiences and memories – even far into old age.
Even though streaming is what transformed Studio Ghibli films into objects of daily wonder for me, it now forces me to consider again the precarity of media when they depend on the whims of their distributor to exist.
When Saeed Jones was working on his new book of poems during the pandemic's lockdown phase, he learned something about grief — it doesn't end, it just changes with time.
Olfaction has always been our underdog sense. It’s both primitive and complex, which makes it hard to study and harder still to transfer to our increasingly digital existence. Our scientific understanding of how smell works lags so far behind our grasp of hearing and (especially) vision, and smells cannot at this point be recorded or emailed or Instagrammed. In one 2011 survey, more than half of young adults admitted that they would rather forfeit their ability to smell than their smartphones.
But just when it seemed that the nose could not recover from its nose dive, along came the coronavirus. Afflicted people robbed of their sense of smell realized that they couldn’t register the smoke of fires actively burning down their houses, or the scent of their spouses (torpedoing marriages, by some accounts), or even the savor of a candy bar—since many of what we think of as tastes, like the flavor of chocolate, are actually smells. That stank. “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” Keller says.
I wrote my own name 2,000 times on Tuesday afternoon. An odd experience, to be sure. I got through two and a half brand new Sharpies. This was at a book distribution centre in an enormous warehouse near Didcot in Oxfordshire. I can’t bear writers who use columns to plug their books but mine’s called The Good Drinker and it’ll be available in all good bookshops, blah, blah, very soon.
For Cassandra Williams, the haunted young woman at the center of Serpell’s dynamic second novel, “The Furrows,” life moves forward, of course, but with a turbulence that upsets the past. “Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore,” she laments. “It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles.”
Portable Magic, the latest book by Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith, is more than just a book about books. Or rather, it’s not exactly what you would expect from a book about books. Instead of being a cultural history of books, reading and publishing, it’s a thematic account of books as physical objects.
not only my favorite food
but a combination of all
required groups
But the beauty of reading a body of work as extensive and rich as Li’s is that you are able to see how the best novels defy summary. Like all Li’s books, “Goose” does not, as Li describes it, “linger,” because “lingering is for the reader”; it moves unapologetically through time, attuned to the inner workings of its characters while never dwelling on the many violences and losses they experience.
Is there a more universal littoral pursuit than skipping rocks? Russians call it baking pancakes. Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they’re tossing sandwiches. Competitors of Japanese mizu kiri, which translates as “cutting water,” are judged not just by a throw’s distance or the number of skips but by its aesthetic beauty.
Ancient Greeks held stone-skipping contests, and Tudor Britons later took it up, calling the pastime “ducks and drakes.” Eighteenth-century priest and scientist Lazzaro Spallanzini determined how stones can push down on the surface of water to generate lift, knowledge humans later employed to kill each other more effectively—first with skipping cannonballs, then with the bouncing bombs invented by British engineer Barnes Wallis to bombard Nazi dams.
But perhaps the greatest power cosmic strings possess is their capacity to confound physicists. According to our best understanding of the early Universe, our cosmos should be riddled with cosmic strings. And yet not a single search has found any evidence for them. Figuring out where the cosmic strings are hiding, or why they shouldn’t exist after all, will help push our understanding of cosmology and fundamental physics to new heights.
Early on, Arthur is told by his former lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet, a kind of secret for success, both as a writer and as a person: “Pay attention. ... That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.” The punch line there is that the world is so full of distractions that Arthur misses the opportunity to do that, or finds himself paying attention to the wrong things. That leads to the moments of misdirection that are the lifeblood of funny novels. But trying to pay attention is touching too: Like writing a novel or finding a happy place to call home, it’s hard, worthy work.
Lucy By the Sea is a chronicle of a plague year — the first year of this ongoing pandemic. It captures its disruptions, uncertainties, and anxieties better than any novel I've read to date on the subject. But because it is also a chronicle of Lucy's growing insights into herself, her family, and their changing relationships during this period of enforced togetherness and separation, it is heartwarming as well as somber.
On a large screen TV my uterus
is projected in a darkened room.
My uterus a shadowy field
In 1996, upon my arrival in the United States, I attended a university orientation for international students, which began with the organizer asking us to stand and face what she said was the east. Orientation, she explained, came from the word orient. To be able to tell east from west, north from south, was the first step to finding one’s way in a new country.
This memory returned while I was reading Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, The Hero of This Book, when the narrator, an American writer visiting London, is momentarily lost on a Sunday morning, until she hears the bells of St. Paul’s. “I came around the corner and there was the cathedral, as startling as an elk in the road.” I wonder if this is the first time that St. Paul’s has been compared to an elk. Some writers describe human habitats eloquently; others write about nature with wisdom. McCracken sees the elk in the middle of London, an image that perfectly encapsulates the essence of her fiction: seemingly nonsensical and yet making perfect sense. The world, strange in the first place, is often made stranger by our minds. McCracken captures the twilight zone between consciousness and subconsciousness, where intuitions are not yet filed away, impulses not yet stifled.
On this day, the day that Mom canned the peaches, things were more or less normal. No one was fighting yet, no rain, and boots had been taken off at the back door. So far. I waited, practicing patience, because Mom said we must do one thing at a time. I sat on the kitchen floor. Soon, she would scrub it again. The tiles were like a tessellation and many of these spear-like shapes had come undone. We kept all the loose tiles in a wicker basket beneath the bar counter in the kitchen. In a nook, between two stools where the wicker basket was, I picked out the tiles and, matching each shape, put them back in the spots where they fit best. Mom said if I was going to do that then I should Superglue them, because Dad would never get around to really fixing them with the grout and everything they’d need to stay secure. My dexterity, though decent, we knew wasn’t good enough that I could handle Superglue without every limb being stuck together until I formed my own shell, so I knew she must have been being passive-aggressive and just wanted to complain about him. I didn’t have those exact words for it at the time, but I knew what it meant when adults said stuff like that. I knew she wouldn’t give me the Superglue though I looked at her excitedly when she said it.
I was eating French fries at the Odeon when I noticed that a server had begun to repeatedly check in. “Oh,” I realized, “she needs the table back.” It was 6:22 p.m. The restaurant was full. Once, 11:40 p.m. had been “a little too early for Odeon,” according to “Bright Lights, Big City,” Jay McInerney’s 1984 chronicle of druggy downtown Manhattan, which featured the spot’s red neon marquee on its original paperback cover. “We sometimes didn’t get busy until, like, 8:30,” says Roya Shanks, the restaurant’s longtime maitre d’. But lately, she reports, there are “waves of people making 5 o’clock reservations” — unheard of just a few years ago. Farther uptown, at Danny Meyer’s Ci Siamo and Gramercy Tavern, “People sit down at 6:30, and our restaurant is full,” says Megan Sullivan, the director of operations for Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. “Eight o’clock is what was hot for New Yorkers,” adds Roni Mazumdar, a co-owner of Dhamaka, a difficult-to-reserve Indian restaurant on the Lower East Side. “Now, people email, ‘Can I come in for that 6:00 reservation?’”
Interpolation is central to storing and communicating electronic data, constructing cryptographic schemes, and more. It’s why you can scratch a CD and still hear music, or get a QR code dirty and still scan it. It’s why space missions like the Voyager program could send clear digital images back to Earth. It’s why a cluster of computers can perform a complex computation even if one of those computers malfunctions.
These applications all rely on a strikingly beautiful and conceptually straightforward use of interpolation: so-called Reed-Solomon codes, and the codes that build on them.
We just sat there listening as we took slow drags from cigarettes and really tasted the liquor in our glasses. One of the girls lit a candle and danced so she could watch her own shadow on the wall, and even though it was irksome and pretentious, it clarified what we were learning, which is that jazz was a way to drill down to some emotional marrow, some shimmer in our senses we didn’t know we had in us.
This book is a paean to the Bay Area in the 1990s, and to the uncertainties of anyone who is just trying to fit in. It’s also, in its own quiet way, an act of kindness.
“It looks like a surviving fragment of an actual letter, right?” says Erika Dowell, Lilly Library’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, as she examines the paper. In an 1893 short story called “The Final Problem,” John Watson quotes from the letter and explains how he found it on a narrow mountain ledge in the Alps outside Meiringen, Switzerland. It was there, he concluded, that Holmes tumbled to his death in the rushing waters of Reichenbach Falls.
Dowell knows, of course, that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle. She knows, too, that this is Doyle’s bold and precise penmanship; the Lilly Library owns numerous letters written in his hand. And although the full provenance of the letter fragment, which has been in the collection for decades, is unclear, she knows that it did not pass through Watson’s hands. He’s not real, either—unless, that is, you are “Playing the Game.”
One day a few years ago, an Englishman walked into a tourist shop on the ground floor of a Neapolitan palazzo and told a woman he encountered there that he was searching for the soul of Naples. The building, named Palazzo del Panormita, for an obscure fifteenth-century author of erotic Latin epigrams, stands near a small piazza named for the River Nile, recalling the Egyptian traders who once lived in a mini-quarter within the city center’s ancient Greek grid. (There was a Greek settlement there before the Parthenon was built.) Today, that grid runs into a thoroughfare cut by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, when the Kingdom of Naples was under their imperial control. Named Via Toledo by the Spanish, the street became Via Roma three centuries later, when Naples, at last free of a series of foreign overlords, joined a unified Italy. And yet for many Neapolitans the idea of being governed from Rome was apparently as abhorrent as Spanish dominion: the name Via Roma aroused so much resentment that, in the nineteen-eighties, the city brought the old Spanish name back into official use. Even now, Neapolitans differ sharply on what their central commercial street should be called.
The soul, then, of which Naples? Who could think of locating so elusive an aspect of a place built on such deep yet never fully buried layers of history, myth, culture, memory? What sort of dreamer enters a shop selling Pompeian-themed mouse pads to announce this quixotic goal? The circumstances would be ridiculous, except for the fact that the seasoned Neapolitan woman replied, as though she were a Sibyl in a cave and had been awaiting her questioner for centuries, “I am the soul of Naples,” and went on to prove her statement at least partly true.
Oreskes acknowledges the importance Popper placed on the role of attempting to refute a theory, but also emphasises the social and consensual element of scientific practice.
For Oreskes, we have reason to trust science because, or to the extent that, there is a consensus among the (relevant) scientific community that a particular claim is true – wherein that same scientific community has done their best to disprove it, and failed.
In the end, I’m not quite sure how we pulled it off. Did everything go our way because of good luck? Or did we channel Ferris’s buoyant optimism? I’d like to believe part of the magic came from impersonating Hughes’s hero. Chicagoans and visitors instantly recognized us and wanted to help us create the perfect day off. It might sound ridiculous, but “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” stirs both nostalgia and a certain civic pride for Chicagoans. After all, the film was Hughes’s love letter to the city.
I watched the leaves grow back on the trees on the street below my window. I craned my neck to see them from the top story of my New York City dorm overlooking the city. I could only spot four of them. And even so, they appeared microscopic. I moved here in January of 2021 when the air was too cold to enjoy the outdoors and when the masses were trapped indoors. Peering out the black industrial-looking windowpane, I saw my reflection appear, blurring into the city lights, like some sort of modern-day Kandinsky. I am taken back to my childhood, looking out the car windows smudged from my old dog’s nose. He used to pry his head out into the fresh air while dripping slobber all over. I am taken back to my side porch with screens instead of windows that allow indoor and fresh air to meet somewhere in the middle. I am taken back to when I could feel the outdoors take over my body whenever I pleased. But suddenly, the world existed in the confine of our own spaces. The locks on our doors tightened, leaving us isolated from the world around us.
At the heart of Svensson’s tumultuous epic lies a perennial query: Are our lives simply random intersections of space and time, or are they part of a grand master plan of the universe, where we are all but cosmic marionettes and nothing is coincidence? In the end, this vexing jigsaw puzzle of a novel issues a covert wink as it answers. In the words of the colorfully kooky Elif, the former child star now palling around Easter Island with Clara and a ragtag group waiting for the world to end: “Life’s just one big mess.”
Maybe it is a product of Fisher’s long Zen practice, but for all the finger-wagging in this wide-ranging text, his authorial voice is clear and gentle. Brimming with common sense and wisdom, a salmagundi of history, science, and informed opinion, The Urge should ignite the urge for invigorated conversation and debate about our current understanding and treatment of the malady you can catch from the corner dealer — or a lab-coated doctor.
Some important backstory: I regard butter, and all dairy, really, with an almost scholarly enthusiasm. It's what inspired me to get my first cheese mongering certification (I'm now studying for my second!) and the reason why I've polled experts for their own tips on how to buy better butter and the best way to store it. For that reason, I tend to get served up recommended advertisements that pertain to my searches, such as a pair of earrings that look like dangling hunks of roquefort and so many butter dishes.
A few weeks back, I saw an online ad for a butter warmer, a tiny enamel pot that would be perfect for melting down a few knobs of butter.
Hope, when held past the point of reason, is liable to transform into a certain kind of absurdity. Over the course of The Healing Circle — the latest novel from writer, artist, and curator Coco Picard — a woman and her loved ones walk the narrow line between hope and delusion as she battles cancer.
Near the end of the book, Milch exhorts us to keep going. "Let me say from my heart: Don't give up on mass culture. Contribute to it. Break your heart in trying to make it better. Our species is in the fight for its life and nobody says the decision is going to go in one way or another. Put your bodies and your spirits up."
That's the big game David Milch was after in his writing: finding the universal in the specific, the imaginative in the fanciful and the writer at the farthest reaches. And, as in his life, Milch often failed in his writing. But in that failure, David Milch is, in many ways, at his most beautiful.
Another day of heat-
strangers continue to wobble
It’s very late-stage capitalism, of course, to sit there or lie there in your envelope of sound, your private entertainment capsule, technologically sealed and cerebrally catered to, fiddling with the volume. But being read to is ancient. I love a podcast—the chitchat, the colloquy—but this is deeper: the reading voice, the singular storytelling voice, thrums in the memory tunnels of the species. When I’m listening to an audiobook, I’m being entertained like a tired ploughman. I’m being lulled, bardically lulled, like a drunken baron at a long feast table, pork grease shining on my chin. I’m being quieted like a child. I’m being spellbound like a face caught in firelight.
I regret having to ask Joyce Carol Oates — five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the 1970 National Book Award, whose books number more than 70, whose own longtime editor could not tell me how many novels he’d worked on with her and had to run some quick numbers in his head, who published four books last year alone at age 83 — about her Twitter presence. But I do, because, fairly or not, that is what a lot of people know her for these days.
It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.
Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.
Designing the perfect queue is no easy task—and the mass of people snaking through London is no ordinary queue. But help is at hand—from the behavioral science of queue theory to tricks of the trade more commonly used at theme parks, it’s possible to keep hundreds of thousands of people in order. Especially when most of them are Brits—a people famed for their ability to stand obediently in line.
“The perfect queue is one that doesn’t take longer than 10 minutes,” says Eric Kant, founder of Phase01 Crowd Management, a Dutch company that manages events—including long lines. (A 2017 study from University College London suggests that Brits get antsy when they wait longer than 5 minutes 45 seconds.) “From this perspective, it is not a perfect queue,” says Kant. But it is a well-prepared one, with meticulous planning, pinpoint precision, and wild logistics. In short, it’s a queue fit for a queen.
The Book of Goose is a taut landscape built of all literature’s attachments, manipulations, displacements, anxieties, and escapes. It is the labored breadth of an economy that is resplendently libidinal and compelling—the mark of an experienced writer’s rigorous later work.
Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company.
It’s supposed to be solemn and settled
And in celebration of the individual human life,
Whatever it is. It’s each of us of course,
And yet the view we have of it is so oblique
This August marked the centennial birthday of Mavis Gallant (1922–2014), who is known primarily for her short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker and later turned into acclaimed collections, and two novels and nonfiction essays. Somehow, I’d never read Mavis Gallant when I was very young, even though we were both born in Montreal, and I am fond of writing from my home city. Of course, I’d heard her name, but that was about it. Her work was never assigned in any of my English literature classes at McGill. I even took a year-long course on Canadian women writers, but her stories were not touched upon. I do believe, though, we find writers when we need them most. I was in my mid-twenties when I heard her voice on a car radio. She was talking about how all she had ever wanted to do in life was write. She went off to Paris so she could do only that. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. I went to the library and checked out a pile of her collections and never looked back.
Memory is slippery. With each recall it is altered. The context you remember from colours it. The narratives you’ve told to make sense of it colour it, like a drop of food dye in a cup of water. The identity you imagine for yourself colours it. This memory is persistent. I can feel the heat on my face. I can hear the stranger describing his utopian building plans, touring us around the construction site, pointing at a wooden frame that, with drywall, would become a bedroom, and the holes where windows would be. I watch myself watching as the stranger cries. In the memory I don’t have the language or tools to understand what is happening, but now I understand that this was grief.
Ecological grief can be triggered by the loss of a species, an animal, part of a forest, a cherished place, a river, a home, future ecologies, past ecologies. The grief can be acute, anticipatory, vicarious, cumulative. It is connected to a cluster of a newly defined set of emotions: eco-anxiety, eco-panic, eco-trauma, all resulting from our personal relationship to the natural world. I think of this memory as a demarcation, a transition between a time before I understood the idea of ecological grief to a time after.
Off the California seaboard, ocean and sky create a phenomenon that has long defined life along the coast.
It rushes through the Golden Gate, shaping a city with its bracing chill and haunting charm.
Now, some scientists fear that a timeless companion is fading away as the world warms.
For someone who thinks of herself as a writer, I’m writing very little these days. It’s been months since I’ve liked anything I’ve made, or since I’ve felt much pleasure in making it. From where I sit, likely culprits include Twitter, television, and a growing sense of self-consciousness, but I’ve come to writing this here, and now, in part because I can’t quite tell why I’ve ground to such a halt. The exact reasons are murky, even if the timeline of my realizing what is happening is not. It started with a dog.
This line of inquiry might not have been productive just a few years ago. But several advances have made the search for technosignatures feasible. The first, thanks to new telescopes and astronomical techniques, is the identification of planets orbiting distant stars. As of August, NASA’s confirmed tally of such exoplanets was 5,084, and the number tends to grow by several hundred a year. “Pretty much every star you see in the night sky has a planet around it, if not a family of planets,” Frank says; he notes that this realization has only taken hold in the past decade or so. Because there are probably at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the potential candidates for life — as well as for civilizations that possess technology — may involve numbers almost too large to imagine. Perhaps more important, our tools keep getting better. This summer, the first pictures from the new James Webb Space Telescope were released. But several other powerful ground- and space-based instruments are being developed that will allow us to view exceedingly distant objects for the first time or view previously identified objects in novel ways. “With things like J.W.S.T. and some of the other telescopes, we’re beginning to be able to probe atmospheres looking for much smaller signals,” Michael New, a NASA research official who attended the 2018 Houston conference, told me. “And this is something we just couldn’t have done before.”
As Frank puts it, more bluntly: “The point is, after 2,500 years of people yelling at each other over life in the universe, in the next 10, 20 and 30 years we will actually get data.”
Dark energy can’t be ignored because to keep the expansion of the universe speeding up, it has to account for at least 68 percent of all of the matter and energy in the universe.
“The community is puzzled by the results. We can either claim the techniques could be further refined to get closer values for the Hubble constant, or we could improve the models we use to calibrate the observations,” García adds. “There is a third possibility that could be considered — a variable Hubble rate at different epochs of the universe, implying that the contribution of dark energy is not a constant, but it varies over time.”
And one way of looking back in time is by studying gravitational waves launched by distant events.
In a video clip posted to Instagram, a jelly shimmies. With fluted curves like a Bundt cake, it suggests a ball gown skirt gone rogue, the dancer within turned ghost or banished from the scene. Elsewhere online lurk ornate jellies, from 18th-century British molds, with high, gooey spires that dip wildly from side to side, to cheesecakes, ostensibly solid yet vibrating, as if in thrall to some erratic internal pulse. (These are Japanese cotton cheesecakes, so called because of their confounding lightness, achieved by folding in egg whites whipped into peaks and then baking the cakes in a hot-water bath.) Sometimes the oscillations are slowed down to a tidal ripple. Sometimes a human hand enters the frame, spanking a cheesecake to make it bounce or, in a curious trend that started in 2019, wielding a spoon to smack the bottom of a little gelatinous pig or bunny — reminding us that the food in question cannot move of its own power; that it is not, in fact, alive.
It is 9 a.m. on a Saturday, and I am sitting in a little wooden boat with my son. He is fidgety, restless with excitement, practically bouncing against the large metal bar on our laps. A bell rings, and we begin moving in a circle, slowly at first, following the swells and dips of the waves. Then we speed up. My son grabs the helm in front of us and turns it several times, swinging our boat around. We are moving backwards fast, and my stomach is turning. I take the wheel and right our boat, but now the light goes out. Before I know it, my son has spun us around again.
He is laughing. It is his first amusement park ride, and he’s keen to squeeze every last drop of thrill out of it. I have spent my life avoiding thrills. My son is ten and tall enough for roller coasters. I am forty-one, and I have only ever been on one. I always find a reason to stay away. Someone needs to take care of the smaller kids, I say. Or: I’m not interested. It’s not my idea of fun. Who knows what could go wrong? Do I really trust the technical know-how and safety expertise of seasonal carnival workers and distracted teenagers? Didn’t I read once about riders getting stuck midtrack and being left to hang upside down?
It’s silly, yes, but for me it feels like summer is a limited resource, one I want to optimize. I hold onto the season tightly: every single day feels precious. Soon, my time will not be my own. Soon, the sun will set earlier and the days will be cold. Soon, this all will end. I do this largely because I want to remember my summers vividly, and with no regret. I want every summer to be the best summer of my life: the most productive, the most full, the most relaxing, the most memorable. In some ways, I’m chasing the summers of my girlhood—the ones that felt wide open and endless, full of perfect days.
But nothing is just one thing in Ma's writing: Satire swirls into savagery; a gimmicky premise into poignancy. What does this story mean? Maybe something about the truth of most of us living with memories of people — old lovers and others — populating our headspace, except here the memories and the space are made literal. But beware: Another story, called "Peking Duck" explicitly warns against asking of any story, "What's the lesson here supposed to be?"
Ma’s new short story collection, “Bliss Montage,” shares some of the themes she explored in her debut, including identity and the immigrant experience, but most of these stories are uncanny and haunting.
In Ling Ma’s story collection Bliss Montage, Chinese American women hope for a similar Happy Interlude, if not a happy ending. Instead, much like in Ma’s celebrated debut novel Severance, life happens to them, and surreal events force them to face who they really are.
This idea — that solipsism is a lie, that we must remember that we are as humans all interconnected — undergirds all of Milch's transformative television, from the groundbreaking police procedurals Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, to the Shakespeare-meets-the-profane Western Deadwood, to the odd and awe-inspiring surfing drama John from Cincinnati, to the ill-fated horse racing series Luck. And it's something Milch urgently wants to get across in his memoir Life's Work. "We are organs of a larger organism which knows us although we do not know it," he writes, prefacing his commentary on Hickok's funeral.
Edward Enninful’s memoir gives the impression of someone in perpetual motion. He has, after all, made the journey from refugee to the hallowed offices of Condé Nast, becoming the editor-in-chief who brought true diversity to the pages of British Vogue. Make it past the preface, notable for the number of names dropped in one particularly glitzy passage, and you’ll find a text more intimate in tone and easier to relate to, emotionally at least.
You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them?
This was the late eighties in Los Angeles. You binged on these books, pulling tattered sun-bleached copies from your bookshelf: four, five, six in the course of a single afternoon. All over the country, all over the world, other kids were pulling these books from their bookshelves, too. The series has sold more than two hundred and seventy million copies since its launch, in 1979. It’s the fourth-best-selling children’s-book series of all time. Its popularity peaked in the eighties, but the franchise still sells about a million books a year.
As a teenager growing up in Communist China, the expatriate novelist Yiyun Li discovered her gift for writing propaganda. She would channel language through the rhetorical modes of the great patriotic writers she had studied in school, spooling out long, moving passages embroidered with beautiful clichés about boats returning to the motherland. “There were moments in life when I would be performing those public speeches, knowing that I did not trust anything I said,” she told me as we sat in the cool shadow of a library at Princeton University, where Li teaches creative writing. She remembers gazing out at her audience after giving a patriotic speech and witnessing, with some horror, the tears on their faces: She couldn’t believe how deeply they believed her.
“I think that was the end of my relationship with Chinese,” she said, her voice quiet and steady amid the sound of landscaping equipment buzzing in the summer heat. “I know Chinese is beautiful. I love its poetry. But the moment I speak, I always think of that day I moved people to tears.” Now 49, the author of 10 books and the recipient of countless honors — from a Whiting Award to Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships — Li is repulsed by dogma. “I would never say: ‘I know this. I’m certain that this is the case.’ I will never say that in English,” she told me. “I feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty.”
My creative life began in the dilapidated art building of a Midwestern, Big Ten college with a busted up Coke machine in the lobby and the smell of plywood and burning metal in the air. I didn’t often have to write about my art, but I was occasionally forced to find the words to defend my artistic choices in harrowing classroom critiques. The language I used in those critiques was carefully defined by the current art school trends. Words like “process” and “derivative” and “lexicon” were acceptable in the early 1990s, words like “I like” or “I feel” were not.
But once an artist leaves art school the language we apply to our artwork focuses on trying to convince gallery owners and curators of group shows that our work is sellable, that we are of the zeitgeist, that our paintings aren’t actually terrible, they are merely ahead of their time. This marketing speak focuses on movements, materiality, structuralism, fragments of meaning, material invention. It is often, quite honestly, a lot of blah, blah, blah.
In Ian McEwan's expansive new novel, a man assesses his life's trajectory from childhood to old age, focusing especially on what he considers his wrong turns and disappointments. Set against the backdrop of 70 years of major global events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Covid pandemic, Lessons displays both breadth and depth. It ranks among McEwan's best work, including Atonement.
“The Unfolding,” a sharp new satire by A.M. Homes, opens just after that national disaster that reshaped America in the early 21st century. The survivors are stunned, disbelieving, still surveying the damage while muttering, “This can’t happen here.”
That may sound like the shocked response to 9/11, but these are White Republicans in a Phoenix hotel reacting to the election of Barack Obama.
“I looked around and said: ‘wow, this is just everybody, this is humanity,’” Wolin, now 69, says. “There were people there on their way up, people on their way down, young and old, gay and straight, Black and white, people from all different walks. I’d always wondered, even as a young girl growing up in Cheyenne — there was a row, on the main street, of these residential hotels — who lives in these hotels, how do people exist there?”
Wolin’s “Guest Register,” out Wednesday from Crazy Woman Creek Press, offers some answers. The oversized art book includes 34 of the black and white portraits, along with snippets of text, that Wolin made while living at the St. Francis. The book is fashioned like a weathered, leather-bound hotel sign-in register and includes essays Wolin wrote both in 1975 and last year, looking back. The front and back cover interiors include reproductions of the hotel’s actual guest registers, complete with hand-scribbled names and arrival dates.
Some memoirs are deeply introspective; others amount to victory laps sandwiched between covers. Jann Wenner’s “Like a Rolling Stone” falls firmly in the second category. The co-founder and former owner and publisher of Rolling Stone — and still its public face even after a noisy parting of ways —takes stock of his magazine’s place in history and drops a lot of names that are admittedly worth dropping (Bruce! Bob! Bono!).
back then, at customs,
a window opened—
how are you two related?
Asked to name the two most important things about Pinocchio, most Americans would answer: First, his nose grows when he lies, and second, he is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. At this, Carlo Collodi would most likely shake his head. The 19th-century Italian author, who wrote the book that inspired the Disney movie and countless other adaptations (including the live-action reboot released last week and another version from the director Guillermo del Toro coming out later this year), saw his character very differently.
A radical political commentator who turned to children’s literature late in life, Collodi wrote a complex, unsettling novel—miles away from the morality tale that Pinocchio’s story has become. Collodi’s is a multilayered work of fiction that, although primarily aimed at young readers, is imbued with social criticism and pessimistic humor, and can be read, among other things, as an irreverent attack on established authority.
I’m at the Venice film festival, in a hyper-real city square, surrounded by lapping blue water and tourists who move in mysterious ways. There is a ginger cat here called Dorian who walks on his hind legs and speaks with a French accent. Dorian is showing us how to walk and turn and jump and crouch. He’s concerned by the tourist who can’t get herself off the ground. Dorian explains that if we ever get lost we should press the “respawn” button which will put us right back where we began. He sighs heavily and says: “Sooner or later everybody gets lost.”
It is the fear of getting lost – this terror of the unknown – that scares many punters away from Venice Immersive, which sits behind the big Mussolini-era casino that hosts the film festival proper. That and the boat ride, the headsets, the schedule, the stress. The movies on the main programme: they’re largely a known quantity. Whereas the “extended reality” exhibits out on VI island are almost too much to process; we lack even the grammar and the language to frame them. To misquote Bob Dylan, something is happening here – but no one, it seems, can definitively say what it is.
But these relatively portable, double electric breast pumps that make it possible to routinely, remotely provide breast milk have been around for only about 30 years.
Before they arrived in the 1990s—hidden away in discrete, business-professional cases—contraptions for expressing breast milk already had a long and fascinating story, one that stretches back thousands of years. This history reveals a checkered evolution of perplexing innovation, dubious medicine and shifting ideas of parenthood. Today, amidst infant formula shortages, new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines to support breastfeeding for two years, the repeated failure of efforts like the proposed PUMP Act to safeguard pumping rights for workers and a spate of new laws severely limiting abortion access after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, pumping is poised to suck for more people than ever.
Over the last few decades, nearly every kind of fast food chain — local, regional and national — has set up in Ming’s epicenter. I’ve driven up and down that miracle mile of mass-marketed goodies dozens of times, watching lines of cars form in drive-thru lanes that appeared unique. Even so, I had a tough time identifying what was really happening.
A little more research uncovered that in recent years, Bakersfield — and Ming Avenue specifically — has become the proving ground for some of your newest fast food faves and (more often) near misses. And I’d been absent for all of them.
As I look at this quilt with its intricate details and workmanship, I see the framework that mirrors her life, a collection of scraps turned into a final entity of beauty. No shortcuts, just determination, and a double dose of hard work. For Ms. Ruth, failure was never an option, even though the road to success may have been the road less traveled, especially for a woman. She encountered many bumps, detours, and even some obstacles that required going back and starting over. Yet, she stayed focused and goal-oriented.
Fantasy has always been the province of the bored housewife. Over the monotonous passing of hours and days, she crafts escapist visions that wise readers know will never be realized. The dreaming, of course, is the point. In a life devoid of meaningful agency, these momentary detachments from reality offer a necessary pleasure. The question posed by Ling Ma’s speculative story collection, Bliss Montage, is: How long can fantasy really sustain you?
The header “NO” halts your progress, followed by “Wait, before they got to the hotel …” and the story rewinds like an old film strip. Then there’s another “NO.” And another. “Wait, go back behind the trailer,” you read, as the narrative is respooled, reconsidered and put back on course toward a revelation that takes your breath away.
It’s the sort of literary effect — technique intersecting theme to create epiphany — that writers tell their grandchildren about (or at least their grad students), and it’s a good example of why Means is considered a modern master of the art.
Telling the untold story is the heart of Natural History, and indeed all of the related collections and novels Barrett has written. In Ship Fever, the opening story, “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” creates space for invention around the lives and discoveries of scientists such as Gregor Mendel, comprehensively setting the tone for the collection, and features stories told successfully or unsuccessfully, told in a bid to connect or to be withheld. Natural History revolves around Henrietta Atkins, whose story, the book suggests, is one that needs to be told.
Not fruit but the moment before fruit. Not thought but the moment before thought.
The entire body poured into almost thinking it. What
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It can convince us of a candy-coated vision of “the good old days,” making us myopic to the wider schema of structural inequities, resistant to progress’s pull. And yet. We seldom speak of the grief about our nostalgia for vanishing public spaces; but it smarts all the same. For many among us, our distress is one of stolen inheritance. We pictured ourselves handing down certain experiences to younger generations, moving for a time in the same, warm psychic spaces. Connecting, despite our differences.
I’m already barreling through time, thinking about a future version of my daughter, grown desperate for her own version of teenage independence. Where will she spend her formative years, if not at the mall?
On Washington's San Juan Island, a national historical park harks back to a notorious 1859 border dispute when the British and Americans almost went to war over a pig.
Like all of Strout’s novels, “Lucy by the Sea” has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It is meant to feel like life—random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning—but it is art. The Shaker plainness of Strout’s prose stretches to accommodate Lucy’s bewilderment as she goes about her life’s great project: attempting to understand the people around her. Despite powerful moments of intuition—that her son-in-law’s father has contracted the coronavirus, that her daughter is contemplating an affair—Lucy, who’s in her sixties, keeps telling herself that she knows nothing. It becomes an unspoken article of faith for her, and a humble spur to her curiosity.
The maze, the monster, the fire, the water: Serpell reminds us on every page that nothing is less reliable than language—that every story is necessarily a betrayal. I don’t want to tell you what happened. The result is a novel that reclaims and refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos. Furrows are the tracks we make and the tracks we cover up, and the shifting ground of Serpell’s novel denies every certainty save that the furrows are where we all live.
Count me among those who rely on NPR reporter Nina Totenberg's crystalline explanations for all things legal, especially Supreme Court arcana — no one is clearer and more incisive.
Now comes Totenberg with Dinners with Ruth, a memoir ostensibly about her long friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“Life’s Work” is one of the best books about television I’ve read. It’s funny, discursive, literate, druggy, self-absorbed, fidgety, replete with intense perceptions. It does not read, as too many El Lay books do, as if it were filmed with a Steadicam at golden hour.
The founder of Rolling Stone magazine always had a baby face, but he was never timid. His own mother told him he was the most difficult child she’d ever encountered. He edited stories with a red pen. He gave out roach clips with subscriptions. He turned a darkroom into an in-house drug-dealing operation called the Capri Lounge, as a perk for staffers.
“More than anyone I know, he’s always just done what he wanted,” said his friend Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.”
There is a Spanish word for venting one’s feelings, desahogar, which when translated literally means “to un-drown.” To pour one’s heart out. To cry until there is no need to cry anymore.
In Angie Cruz’s fourth novel, “How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water,” an interviewer with an employment assistance program in New York asks protagonist Cara Romero to say something about herself. What follows feels, at first, like an un-drowning.
Jamie Ford’s new novel is part historical fiction, part feminist fiction, part science fiction and totally captivating.
“The Many Daughters of Afong Moy” grabs the reader’s attention from the beginning and holds it through generations of a mythical family that jumps to life on these pages.
The Royal Academy of Art has never hosted a solo exhibition by a woman in their main space. The National Gallery was founded in 1824 and held its first major solo exhibition by a female artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, in 2020. The first edition of EH Gombrich’s supposedly definitive The Story of Art featured no female artists in its first edition in 1950 – and one woman in its 16th edition. In 2015, the curator and art historian Katy Hessel “walked into an art fair and realised that, out of the thousands of artworks before me, not a single one was by a woman”.
And so she created this positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women. Starting in 1500 and shooting through to artists born in the 1990s, The Story of Art Without Men brings centuries-old figures to life while giving form and gravitas to emergent voices and covering every substantial movement from dadaism to civil-rights-era antiracist art along the way.
Magpies fly from branch to branch. In the slow
tide of the afternoon, you sleep in my arms;
we drift to shore, as sea turtles beach;
Five hours into a long drive through New England last week, I needed coffee. I pulled up to a Dunkin’ in Gorham, New Hampshire, parked, and got out of the car. Mistake. In the donut-scented interior, I learned that this Dunkin’ wasn’t taking orders in the store—only at the drive-thru and via the app. Reluctantly, I downloaded Dunkin’, selected a large cold brew, tapped in my credit card number, and watched in silence as two workers prepared and placed the coffee on the largely obsolete counter.
Seven days later, I got an email—“Are Your Cravings Calling?”—that left me unsure if I’d signed up for DD or AA. I was part of the Dunkin’ digital universe now, which is right where the company, owned by Atlanta-based Inspire Brands, wants me. Certainly more than in the actual store. Last August, Dunkin’ opened its first “digital” location on Beacon Street in Boston. There are no cashiers, replaced by touchscreens and mobile ordering, and no seats or tables.
Could gravitational waves be used someday to probe distant matter in the universe? Through a theoretical physics calculation, researchers from Case Western Reserve University suggest that they could. Their work demonstrates that signals scattered by large astronomical objects could reveal what is inside them.
The early days of my relationship with the dirty martini were complex. I craved the easy sophistication that a martini conjured, but my postcollege self wasn’t ready for its stone-cold booziness. Few in their early twenties have dealt with enough adult life to appreciate the marti- ni’s ability to make you forget that you now have to deal with adult life. A dirty martini, however? That wisp of olive brine alongside gin and vermouth made the drink downright quaffable and fun, even though it still looked like the thing that grown-ups who had a mortgage and a dinner jacket drank. It became a go-to when I felt the need to flex some faux refinement.
On the cover of “Bliss Montage,” clear plastic clings to the nubbled curves of oranges, suffocating all that sunshine-y zing. The title and Ma’s name are ruffled too, as if the author herself were shrink-wrapping delicious pleasure into a denatured product.
The stories of “Bliss Montage” keep the cover’s cheeky promise. They take place in little pockets removed from “real” life, whatever that means: inside a parallel world hidden behind a wardrobe; at a cultish festival in a fictional country; on a protracted vacation in a “de-Americanized” world; in an MFA workshop. The air has been sucked out of all these claustrophobic nowheres.
Why do we remember the past and not the future? Theories of time in physics abound, but one such idea goes like this: time is like film from a movie—everything that will happen has already happened or perhaps it would be more apt to say that everything is always happening. In such a world, it is mere happenstance that human beings remember the past and not the future.
Such mental gymnastics abound in Elisa Gabbert’s new poetry collection, Normal Distance. “Why do I have to make this future that already exists?” she asks in “I Don’t Want To Hear Any Good News or Bad News,” and “Today, there’s more past that yesterday. But is there any / less future?” in “Historians of the Future.”
The dream – three really
of being with Roni.
Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. “I got totally obsessed with Russia invading Ukraine,” he says, an unfamiliar note of pain in his voice. “From February onwards, it filled my thoughts. Massacres in small villages northeast of Kyiv, like curling black-and-white photographs. Suddenly it’s here again—unbelievable, merciless brutality; old ladies shot in their kitchens.” He rubs his eyes (hay fever). A barbaric assault on European complacency, the invasion has reminded him how close we are, all of us, to annihilation.
A word should not, in a perfect world, mean the opposite of itself; if galaxies comprise stars, surely stars cannot comprise galaxies. But in fact there are lots of words that are their own opposites, so many that they have not just one but several names: contronyms, auto-antonyms or, most poetically, “Janus words”, named for the two-faced Roman god who looks in opposite directions (and so gave his name to January, which faces back into the old year and forward to the new).
Though the press called her outfit “indecent,” Lenglen went on to win the tournament, becoming the first non–English speaker to do so. It marked the beginning of a bracing new era for Wimbledon, which had been on a four-year hiatus during World War I, and for women’s tennis in general. Lenglen would dominate the international tennis scene until her withdrawal from amateur tennis in 1926, winning five Wimbledon championships as well as two French titles and three Olympic medals. Her winning streak made tennis history, while also altering the course of fashion history.
At a time when female players typically wore the same ankle-length skirts and high-necked, long-sleeved blouses on and off the court, Lenglen’s attire was as revolutionary as her overhand serve and penchant for chugging cognac between sets; never before in Western history had women’s legs been on display.
What should we make of this realization? For me, it offers a feeling of kinship with all living things. We living things are the only mechanism by which the universe can observe itself. We living things, a few grains of sand on the desert, are that special arrangement of atoms and molecules that can attempt to fathom and record this dazzling spectacle of existence. In a limited but real sense, we living things help give the universe meaning. Without us, the cosmos would merely be.
As more people pour into metropolises—urban populations are projected to double in the next three decades, according to the World Bank—scientists like Bousselot are investigating how designers and planners can ruralize cities, greening roofs, and empty lots. The concept is known as “rurbanization,” and it could have all kinds of knock-on benefits for ballooning populations, from beautifying blocks to producing food more locally. It dispenses with the “city versus country” binary and instead blends the two in deliberate, meaningful ways. “You don’t have to set this up as a dichotomy between urban and rural, really,” says Bousselot. “What we should probably focus on is resilience overall.”
The best job I ever had was in the waning days of 35mm film projection at a cheap, six-screen mall movie theatre, the kind done up in garish family-friendly murals and rainbow colors, floors always a bit too sticky, seats in desperate need of replacing. The distinct odor of popcorn was so deeply infused in the carpet-covered walls that one might forgive patrons for skipping the concession stand out of olfactory disgust alone, if not the absurd prices—that nacho combo could really set you back!
I worked every meaningful position at that theater. Everyone started behind the concession stand, serving guests with a smile while sustaining regular abuse, a trial by fire. If you couldn’t hack it slinging popcorn, what good would you be in the business of film exhibition? Going home late each night after wearing out my elbow scrubbing down the popper, the unmistakable smell of sweat and stale popcorn wafted off my uniform as I tossed it over a chair in the bedroom, knowing I’d put it back on, unwashed, to do it all again tomorrow. For minimum wage and the sake of cinema.
Mr McEwan’s latest novel returns to more traditional fictional territory. This is not to say that “Lessons” is devoid of big ideas and artistic risks. Indeed, in some respects it may be the author’s most ambitious work to date. Well over 400 pages long, and tracking the course of a single life, it is a dense yet deeply absorbing book.
Nixon was wrong — on both counts. Buchwald was funny and serious. In the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain, he concealed deep wisdom in the seemingly silly and farcical. As for Nixon’s potshot, Buchwald was not the least perturbed. “As a humor columnist, I need Nixon,” he said. “He’s been great for me. I’m going to run him for a third term.”
Over the decades, Buchwald was equally grateful for many other presidents, including Jimmy Carter (“I worship the very quicksand he walks on”) and Bill Clinton (for obvious reasons). Only George H.W. Bush let him down. “Nothing to write about, everything was dull,” Buchwald is quoted as saying in Michael Hill’s brisk and engaging biography, “Funny Business: The Legendary Life and Political Satire of Art Buchwald.” Meticulously researched and delivered in a taut, almost staccato style, “Funny Business” glides along the surface of Buchwald’s remarkable life, venturing wide but not especially deep.
In the end, though, why the “queen of crime” was so self-effacing is never quite clear. Much about this “elusive genius” appears destined to remain secret. She seems to have preferred it that way.
I’m not arguing against critical reviews. I’m all for critical reviews, both the ones that point out misogyny or racism or homophobia in books, and the ones that simply express an opinion about something that didn’t work — plot, character, prose, etc. Reviews are subjective. If someone doesn’t like a book, and they can explain why without using the words “I wanted,” that information can help other readers decide whether or not they want to read it. But if that review is just sentence after sentence trolling the book because it wasn’t the book that reviewer wanted to read — that’s not helpful, and it’s not even a real critical review.
Sometime this year, or maybe the next, Bruce Willis’ final movie will be released, almost certainly to minimal press attention and even less audience interest. To someone who grew up in the 1990s, this seems impossible. Tinseltown is usually very good at paying tribute to its bygone stars. But it seems entirely likely that Willis will miss the entire Hollywood lionization machine in the final years or decades of his life: no career achievement awards, no late-life Oscar nomination for a surprising indie, no wave from the balcony at the Kennedy Center. From 1988 to the end of the millennium, no one made bigger hits, flopped bigger flops, and grinned more shit-eating grins. He used to be one of the coolest movie stars around. It feels painfully unfair to watch his work end with this kind of whimper.
But behind him he leaves a fascinating cinematic record. To look back at Bruce Willis’ career is to see a man who became a megastar in an instant and spent the following decades torn: searching for ways to complicate his persona, retreating to what was familiar. There’s nothing to see in a movie like Wire Room, no hint of the Willis who commanded $20 million per movie and, ever so briefly, deserved every penny. But you don’t need to watch Wire Room when you can watch so many other movies.
For veteran members of Club Purr, the reasons are clear. A purr is warm tea, a roaring fire, and fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies, all rolled into a fleece-lined hug; it is the auditory salve of a babbling brook; it is coffee brewing at dawn. It is emotional gratification incarnate—a sign that “we’ve made our pets happy,” which just feels darn good, says Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at the San Francisco SPCA.
But purrs—one of the most recognizable sounds in the animal kingdom—are also one of the most mysterious. “No one, still, knows how purring is actually done,” says Robert Eklund, a phonetician and linguist at Linköping University, in Sweden. Nor can experts say, exactly, what purring means. Cats purr when they’re happy—but also sometimes when they’re anxious or afraid, when they’re in labor, even when they’re about to die. Cats are perhaps the most inscrutable creatures humans welcome into our homes, and purring might be the most inscrutable sound they make.
Cruz’s quick-reading character study is only simple on the surface; Ms. Romero is a complicated woman. Shouldering (and shrugging off) middle age, frayed community, fractious friends and family and the hard squeeze of economics, she has a keen social prowess that often misses its target. But Cruz never misses. Her new novel aims for the heart, and fires.
senseless here’s the man with the crystal contractions
with the rumor of sand with a doll’s past tense
at the hollow step in a bed of distress
nevertheless present at the passage of spring
Book publishing has long had a reputation as a low-paying industry, but one that offers its professionals enviable perks—not the least of which is helping to influence the national discourse. Over the past few months, though, questions about whether that sort of trade-off is still working have been circulating on social media and roiling different factions of the industry. In March, a former assistant editor at Tor named Molly McGhee shared her resignation letter on Twitter. In it, she explained how she was finding success in a job she loved but was nonetheless overwhelmed by an insurmountable stream of work and frustrated by the murky path toward promotion. The post drew hundreds of responses (and more than 700 retweets). In May, the Bookseller released a report stating that 68% of publishing staffers in the U.K. felt burned-out in the last year.
Kids get older, and fads come and go. But some toys persist, almost stubbornly—artifacts passing from one generation to the next. In the toy business, these products are considered “classics.” It’s an amorphous category filled with all sorts of games and toys that have just a few things in common: namely, they are survivors in an industry where trends rule all. The Rubik’s Cube is, in many ways, the perfect example of a classic toy. More than 450 million are estimated to have been sold since 1978, with up to tens of millions of units still moving in a year. Etch A Sketch (180 million sold since 1960), Lego, Potato Head, Barbie, and, of course, Play-Doh are classics too. These toys are instantly recognizable but rarely advertised. They’re often low tech or analog. In fact, in a world full of screens, their tactility is increasingly part of the draw. Often, classic toys encourage what academics say is high-quality play, like problem solving or imaginative thinking. And, as some experts have found, such toys are highly nostalgic—conjuring warm, fuzzy memories in the parents who do the buying. This is how toys turn into tradition.
Wolfgang Tillmans credits as his first significant photograph a hard-to-read shot of a young male body—his own. He was 18, a high school student on a monthlong coming-of-age train trip away from his hometown of Remscheid, Germany. On a beach in southwestern France, holding a range finder camera borrowed from his mother and wearing his favorite shorts and T-shirt, he experimented and wound up with a semi-abstract composition in the manner of a Milton Avery painting: a curving patch of pink cotton, the clothing label in white on black trunks, a tan leg stippled with sand, and a mottled brown beach that takes up half the frame.
Stephen King’s “Fairy Tale” is an epic quest novel with a golden-haired hero and his beloved pooch who save a cursed people from an even more cursed villain. Surprisingly unscary, the book offers a journey through an enchanted world. Charlie Reade, the main character, warns the reader right off the bat: “I’m sure I can tell this story. I’m also sure no one will believe it.”
Like many people during the pandemic, King sought ways to occupy himself. He asked himself “What could you write that would make you happy?” This book was the answer.
The best book titles feel wholly different to the reader by the time the book is finished. And the best books teach you their own logic, offering specific and surprising definitions of previously canned words and ideas. It is very much to Jonathan Escoffery’s credit that, after finishing his debut story collection, “If I Survive You,” I realized how differently I thought of the title phrase. What does it mean to survive? What are the conditions under which this might be possible? Who is the “you” in each of our lives? Who is the “them”?
Marx, a writer with a particular interest in cultural trends, quickly arrives at his thesis: We cannot unravel the mystery of “how culture changes over time,” he states, without understanding status. In an attempt to “synthesize all the significant theories and case studies to explain how culture works as a system and why culture changes over time,” the book poses several questions: Is culture a mere byproduct of status? Is class anxiety the ultimate fertilizer for artistic production? Are we all just mindlessly adopting “certain techniques to ensure semiotic success?” Do we “make our aesthetic choices within the context of status?”
across from me at the sushi place this mad woman talking to nothing so loud all customers avert
their eyes to the shrimp passing and reject this one that one that one and then for some reason
One doesn’t have to look far, even within the received canon of English literature, to find impatient dissent from the idea of the natural superiority of democratic government. Shakespeare found nothing good to be said for democracy or egalitarian impulses, trusting entirely to order and compassion to lubricate the joints of the state, even though he is the author, in “King Lear,” of the greatest of lines on the social perils of privilege: “Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Dr. Johnson thought that democracy was obviously silly, and Dr. Johnson, let us remember, was a prescient, 1619 kind of guy, seeing the impending American Revolution as a slaveholders’-protection enterprise. (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) It is not only possible to be an anti-liberal and not be reactionary but easily done.
These days, liberal, representative democracy—moribund in Russia, failing in Eastern Europe, sickened in Western Europe, and having come one marginally resolute Indiana politician away from failing here—seems in the gravest danger. Previously fringe views certainly find new forums, with monarchists speaking loudly, if a touch theatrically, but that is mostly strut and noise. What would a plausible alternative actually look like? “We’d all love to see the plan,” John Lennon sang sensibly about revolution.
Pupetta, who died last December at 86, may be the star but she is hardly the only engaging figure in this crisply written, dutifully researched book exploring the role of women in a sector of Italian society not noted for its embrace of a #MeToo ethos. Criminal groups — be it the Camorra, the Sicily-based Mafia, the Calabria-rooted ’Ndrangheta or newcomers like the Rome-focused Mafia Capitale and assorted Nigerian arrivals — hardly feel bound by Title IX imperatives. Still, Nadeau observes, women in an organization like the Camorra “are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers.”
Although she is not universally known to Americans, Marguerite Steinheil is a household name in France, the subject of books, plays and television specials — and with some reason. As Sarah Horowitz, a professor of history and the head of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Washington and Lee University, recounts, Steinheil’s salon was adorned by the great eminences of the Third Republic, and among her lovers was the French president, Félix Faure.
My Instagram feed is currently riddled with mushroom advertisements. A mushroom beverage exceeds coffee for focus and health benefits! Mushroom face serums provide youthful, plump-celled, and small-pored complexions! Another mushroom supplement rivals Xanax! To say nothing of the anti-dementia mushrooms, cancer-fighting mushrooms, gut health mushrooms, and luxury magic mushroom retreats! In 2022, The New York Times named mushrooms the “ingredient of the year” and the U.S. food broker Presence hailed “mushroom everything” alongside carbonated sodas, relaxation supplements, and sleep supplements.
But how did mushrooms—a largely marginalized category of beings—develop such prominence in popular imagination?
It is tempting to finish the review with reference to a beautiful essay about the love between herself and her father and the oomph in the last line in this last essay but it might be better to whet the appetite with the wonderful, wobbling incongruities in the opening line of the title essay which make it hard not to read on: “Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the Gulf Coast of Texas.”
If that is an opener that leaves you with an un-scratchable itch to find out where the hell that essay goes then this one’s for you.
Lessons covers eight decades in the life of Roland, a twice-married tearoom pianist at “a second-rank London hotel”. From his postwar military childhood in Libya (not the only detail he shares with his author) through the Thatcher years, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Blair, 9/11, Brexit and, yes, Covid; from schoolboy masturbation to arthritic widowhood; from the hard yards of childcare to the pang of the empty nest, the everyday milestones of Roland’s life tick by to the inescapable rhythm of the headlines: “How could he complain... when his son [Lawrence] was not at risk from smallpox or polio, or from snipers hidden in the hills above Sarajevo?”
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 may have ended the war with Japan, but it was the firebombing of Tokyo, five months earlier, that likely won it.
Neither decision came lightly, obviously. It was President Truman, four months into his presidency, who made the call to unleash “the force from which the sun draws its power.”
But the decision to firebomb Tokyo — the most destructive air attack in history — was made by a lower-tier general named Curtis LeMay, stationed on Guam.
The hope expressed in Driving with Strangers is that the continuing presence of young hitchhikers – long before middle age when most of us, including Purkis himself, appear to give it up – and others who share their general outlook means an alternative future remains possible. Though the capacity-building and political re-imagining that Purkis would like to see emerge seems almost unrealisable in these conflictual and alienating times, we should not forget the mutuality and generosity that were brought to the forefront of everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic. If that could be harnessed in a political movement, we might even find ourselves hitchhiking again.
Clark, whose New York Times column is called "A Good Appetite," has written dozens of cookbooks. In her latest — Dinner in One — Clark offers 100 recipes that can be made in a single container, be it pot, bowl, skillet or slow cooker.
"Imagine like writing a haiku," Clark says. "You want to express the biggest thought with the fewest amount of words. ... The end goal was when I'm finished cooking, there's like three things in the sink."
We’re in our forties now. Maybe it’s no surprise that we’ve grown up to have grim obsessions: Debbie spent her high school years studying serial killers — John Joubert, a.k.a. the Nebraska Boy Snatcher, was a favorite because of his close proximity to us — and now works as a clinical psychologist. I’ve written a book about the violence and fear afflicting women and mothers. Reenacted true-crime stories, like the ones airing on Dateline and 20/20 and especially those about somebody murdering a member of their own family, fascinate us. Perhaps we find comfort in the clear delineation of evil and the safe distance from which to witness aberrant behavior in a relationship that is not ours.
For anybody who got through the pandemic’s early days, it doesn’t matter how much logic and sense there was to our lives. What mattered is that we lived to tell the tale. And it’s a funny story — sometimes.
In the early 17th century, there was a room in a house in Copenhagen bursting with hundreds of objects: bones and shells and taxidermised birds, not to mention weapons and rocks and a stuffed polar bear cub hanging from the ceiling. This was the Museum Wormianum, collected and curated by the Danish physician and philosopher Olaus Wormius, or Ole Worm to most. Four hundred years later, this quintessential cabinet of curiosities still inspires philosophy professor Perry Zurn and bioengineering professor Dani S Bassett, identical twins. What provoked Worm to collect? Which electrical signals were firing in his brain? How would the Enlightenment eccentric have behaved given access to Wikipedia?
These are questions asked in Zurn and Bassett’s latest work, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, in which they investigate the neurological, historical, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of curiosity. What exactly is curiosity? Where does it come from and how does it work? In a manuscript peppered with questions, the academics explore everything from Plutarch to Google algorithms, to argue that curiosity is networked. “It works by linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together,” they write in the book, “Yet it also works within human grids of friendship, society and culture.”
Porter Fox, a journalist who’s written a great deal about snow, skiing and the ski industry, has in his latest book adventured more completely into the world of ice and snow to consider its future. “The Last Winter” is a beautifully written and intriguing combination of travel adventure, history, scientific reportage and personal response to the climate changes that are affecting the cryosphere — the frozen water part of the Earth system.
Think of the word "contain." Consider how it means two things: to hold, as well as to hold back. This is what we're talking about when we talk about great personal essays, how they express the inexpressible, how they take us inside the writer's life and, in usually fewer than 20 pages, return us to a piece of ourselves. This is what Jami Attenberg does in her 2022 memoir-in-essays, "I Came All This Way To Meet You: Writing Myself Home." Here, the best-selling novelist cracks open the image of a successful writer to reveal what it requires and what's happened along her way.
because I faithfully reply to every email from the absurd
gods of urgency who punish my good deeds by leaving me
empty when I empty my inbox … because I praise hating
Jill Bialosky’s latest novel The Deceptions follows an unnamed narrator in New York City who finds solace in the antiquity exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While viewing the sculptures inspired by Greek, Roman, and Egyptian myth, the narrator uses the objects and the corresponding stories that inspired their creation to consider the fractured state of her marriage, meditate on her complicated experience with motherhood, make sense of her dissatisfaction with the state and success of her career, and reflect on the intense but troubled friendship with the Visiting Poet, a writer who taught at the same private school the previous school year. With the narrator’s insightful contemplations, the novel poses big questions: Why does women’s art receive lesser acclaim? How does a marriage move forward without desire? Why are we drawn to myth and fiction to make meaning of our own messy lives? A poet as well as a novelist, Bialosky deftly balances these vast universal questions with tight descriptions of personal, arresting images. The result is a pressing, mesmerizing novel that explores the intense emotional journey of a writer, teacher, and mother grappling with the shifts in these identities in the aftermath of betrayal.
Fairy Tale is vintage, timeless King, a transporting, terrifying treat born from multiple lockdowns which, in true King style, puts its finger right on that tender point which is the threshold between childhood and growing up.
For most of its length, though, “Birds of Maine” is a nicely calibrated blend of the enigmatic and the ridiculous — a blend that DeForge should, by now, be well known for.
“Bit Flip” understands the righteous anger directed at Silicon Valley. As Sam says, the Valley has crafted deliberately addictive products and “compromise(d) our privacy.” His ex-employer is breaking the law. What will he do about it? That’s the question that fuels Trigg’s admirable novel.
There’s a lot of funny inside “The Mamas,” but a lot is left to think about here, too. If you’re a mother (to be) or if you’ve been studying or living with racism, this book belongs on your shelf.
Will I find there nothing
nothing rakes the summer woods
no light, no rain, no rain spell mustering
I turned 39 not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. So I looked at the bookshelf of works I’d published: four cartoon collections, two critical studies, a series of scholarly articles, some translations, and a handful of stories and essays. There was enough there, I figured, to get her through a few weeks of reading. But then what? What would she read next?
The more I thought about this question, the more I felt compelled to write new material, which led me to reflect on the links between storytelling and death. I remembered reading Joan Didion as a graduate student, especially her classic opener, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It sounded right when I was younger, but from where I sat today, I wasn’t so sure it was the only reason. Perhaps we told ourselves stories in order to live. But it seemed to me that we told others stories in order to die.
The playful language excited the 5-year-old at Dr. Varner’s family gathering – the kittens, the mittens, the bowl full of mush! The person over 90 recalled, too, how the black-and-white prints interspersed in a book about a “great green room” were actually meant to keep costs down. Color prints could make a picture book prohibitively expensive back then.
“But that, actually, that’s one of the most memorable features of the book,” says Dr. Varner. It creates an aesthetic rhythm, melding perspectives of time, blinking back and forth between modern color and familiar black and white – even as time is grounded in subtle visual details, like the clocks, which move forward 10 minutes through the frames, and the moon, which rises bit by bit behind the window.
When she feels as if she is running on shards of glass, when her legs feel like they are about to split open, when she thinks she can’t possibly run one more mile, Courtney Dauwalter starts visualizing the pain cave. It’s a place she constructs in her mind with elaborate detail. She conjures every crevice of the cave’s architecture: a large space with different tunnels inside. The cavernous paths in her mind can be wide or narrow, depending on the length and duration of the race. But with Courtney, they’re usually impossibly long.
Dauwalter, 37, is considered the world’s best female ultramarathon runner. She might just be the greatest ultrarunner of all time, period. She races astonishing distances of 100- and 200-plus miles, even once attempting a 486-mile course. She is often on her feet for a mind-bending 24 or 48 straight hours, in the harshest environments imaginable, from steep terrain and high elevation to extreme weather.
Whether you sprinkle it on mango slices, the rim of your favorite beverage, or chicken wings, Tajín Clásico is becoming a go-to seasoning for imparting spicy, salty tang to people’s favorite foods. Long appreciated in Latin communities, in recent years Tajín has gained a following — one that could go toe-to-toe with those for regional spices like Maryland’s fixation on Old Bay and the far-reaching love of Louisiana’s Tony Chachere’s Creole seasonings.
In Houston, though — the U.S. headquarters for Empresas Tajín’s manufacturing plant — there’s a particular penchant for this secret formula of chile peppers, sea salt, and lime. Houston Mexican restaurant Picos incorporates it in marinades. Heights bar Eight Row Flint uses it in several of its cocktails. Popsicle and paleta shops like Popston use it in their frozen treats. La Lucha and Dish Society pair it with fruity salads, and even grocery chain H-E-B incorporates Tajín in its sushi offerings.
For one, I love reading romance books while snuggled up, and my phone happens to be the perfect size for such reading. It’s also a bonus that I have my own apartment now, so my mother can’t stop me from reading late into the night. Do I drop my phone on my face from time to time? Yes.
How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’), and there’s nothing new about quoting. Lines from Virgil figure among the graffiti at Pompeii and phrases from Euripides have been found at Herculaneum. These were inscribed less in the spirit of surreal anarchism that makes people write ‘Kilroy was here’ on lavatory walls than out of respect for either the authors or the authority of what they had written. The earliest writings on the art of rhetoric were also in a way books of quotations, since they gathered together passages ascribed to master rhetoricians such as Cicero, which they used to illustrate particular figures of speech. ‘Quotations’ have therefore served both a stylistic and ethically normative function throughout literate history.
For his part, Joyce has an uncannily well-tuned ear for the speech of working-class Dubliners, and Ulysses, which is awash with pub talk, gossip, political polemic and satirical invective, is one of the first novels in English to portray what we might now call mass culture. It includes tabloid journalism, scientific jargon, a pastiche of women’s romantic fiction, a mini-Expressionist jargon, the language of the unconscious and a good deal more. There is really no answer to the question “What is Joyce’s style?” even though he could spend days on end sculpting a sentence.
The novelist Cai Emmons, who has intimately explored the rough contours traced by rage, grief and happiness onto ordinary lives for 20 years, has two novels out in September, “Unleashed” and “Livid.” The reason for the near-simultaneous release — and the extraordinary productivity and urgency behind it — was the shattering news she received on Feb. 4, 2021.
“It’s like: ‘How many nice meals have you prepared?’ You know, for your family or friends. You take some time to make a nice meal, but you don’t necessarily remember. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I’m totally immersed in the work I’m doing today. Every time I write, it’s like the first time,” she says.
The approach has yielded so many books that the epithet routinely attached to Oates is “prolific”. Unfortunately, this suggests that the salient feature of her output is its quantity. Does she mind? “I guess it’s just true. It’s just a fact,” she says. “I never thought that I would even publish one book. If you publish your first when you’re quite young, you feel: wow, maybe there will never be another one. And it was sort of one book at a time. Or one project at a time. ‘If I can just get this finished …’ I guess I just kept on with that.”
“I walked six miles this morning” messaged BordersCrone a couple of weeks before our proposed hike, “and am absolutely knackered”. “My foot doctor said I should keep off it for five weeks,” replied BucksCrone, “but it’ll be OK in a boot.” DevonCrone’s hip hurts (that’s me) but she decided not to say anything. After all, the die was cast with the three Old Crones committed to walk the 97-mile St Oswald’s Way in Northumberland.
As a group of friends – two octogenarians plus one youngster of 78 – we keep each other motivated for our weekly Saturday parkruns, but this would be much more challenging. We hadn’t meant to get so old before tackling it: 2019 was the plan but then came lockdown. We enlisted the help of Mickledore Holidays to produce for us a not-too-strenuous itinerary and sort the accommodation. The longest day was supposed to be 11 miles, which we reckoned we’d manage. Just.
But then we come to Miss Marple, Christie’s other enduring character. This lady has inspired several theatrical incarnations, from the hearty Margaret Rutherford to the perfectly understated Joan Hickson. And now she has claimed the attention of a group of best-selling authors, each trying her hand at a Miss Marple story in an anthology simply called “Marple”. The illustrious group includes Kate Mosse, Val McDermid, Elly Griffith, Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware. Each author captures Christie — and Marple — perfectly, while also displaying just a bit of her own unique touch. Feminist author Naomi Alderman, for instance, describes one pompous male character as having a voice that “boomed from the bottom of his beard.” Later he’s found face down in his plate of roast venison, dead of an overdose.
So, what does Marple have that Poirot hasn’t? First, she is relatable. One would like to entertain Miss Marple to tea. She is maybe one of Christie’s few real and fleshed-out characters: the consummate English spinster, living in the typical English village, with its gossip and intrigues. Marple actually represents a whole generation of women whose hopes of marriage were dashed by the loss of over a million young men on the battlefields of World War I. As a young woman of good family at that time, she was raised to make a good match, and not equipped for much else. She clearly has an excellent brain. In other times she might have gone on to university and had a lucrative profession. Instead, she has to content herself with her garden and good works around the parish. It’s no wonder that she turns that excellent brain and sharp powers of observation to solving crimes.
So “Fairy Tale” is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it’s also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action.