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.