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?