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