A red lever-arch folder, well-loved and battered, sits near me in my office. Throughout my adult life, it has teetered on shelves in various homes, my university dissertation about the women in TS Eliot’s best-known poem, The Waste Land, lying inside – women whose voices felt urgent to me then and still do today.
First published 100 years ago this month in literary journal the Criterion, Eliot’s 434-line poem was instantly notorious. It mixed fragments of languages, religions, references from ancient poems, books, plays, opera and music hall, passages of eloquent speech and scraps of everyday conversations. It translated the restless energy of art movements such as cubism and futurism into vivid words and sounds, uprooting the possibilities of what poetry could be.
The simplest questions in the philosophy of mathematics point to profound issues: why is 1+1 = 2? Why does the statement “1+1 = 2” feel so very different from a statement like “it rained yesterday”? For that matter, what do we even mean by “1”, “2”, …? Does “1” exist? If so, how, and where? These questions have been available to philosophers for as long as mathematics has been practiced. They are, as so many of the questions of philosophy, very general and very difficult to answer – to make real sense of statements like “1+1 = 2”, it seems one needs a lot of philosophical machinery, as was the case with pre-modern forays into the philosophy of mathematics. From Plato, to Leibniz, to Kant, the answers to the questions above led to and formed part of a greater system: the philosophy of mathematics.
But could we actually build an arcology? The size of such a structure would require massive foundations in order to support its weight. "You can build almost anything within reason," says structural engineer Monika Anszperger of BSP Consulting. "The loadings would be massive, but nothing is unachievable. It will just cost more to build the foundations for it."
I'm really into horror, whether it's books or films. At age 12 my girlfriends were living by Judy Blume, but I was reading Stephen King thrillers for the second time.
The first time I got detention in high school was for reading Clive Barker's The Damnation Game instead of the assigned book. I thought I was slick too, sliding my newest horror book into my looseleaf notebook. I was so engrossed that I gasped in the middle of class, much to the dismay of my classmates and teacher. It was sort of hilarious. He took my book and handed me detention. I learned that he was a horror fan, and we chatted about our favorite authors. He ended up reading my book during detention and thanked me for turning him on to someone new.
But who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend?
For those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, “Foster,” is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year.
Kath Kenny is an essayist, arts reviewer and researcher whose book, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram, provides a detailed exploration of the cultural revolution of the 1970s. By focusing on theatre as a thinking medium, Kenny explores the ways in which women’s liberation changed the setting of the world’s stage.
In dozens of early letters, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe raved about walking in extreme wind. “I love it,” she wrote, again and again. A few other walkers have enthused about mud, snow, rain, darkness and cold. And yet, as the days draw in and the temperature falls, most of us hang up our walking boots.
Big mistake!
Stalls heave with huge sides of bluefin tuna, expertly transformed into more manageable portions by knife-wielding workers, while early-morning shoppers pause to inspect boxes of squid, flounder and sea pineapples landed only hours earlier.
Despite the bounty on display in this small port town, a growing body of scientific evidence – backed up by anecdotes from fishermen – points to a bleak future for Japanese cuisine as a result of the climate emergency.
Like a great many famous people who go by just one name, Bono isn’t really known for subtlety. As the lead singer and public face of U2, the biggest rock band on the planet during much of their existence, he fills stages and records with a largeness of self. He’s never been shy about wanting to change the world (not that there’s anything wrong with that). He has so much juice that he convinced Apple to flood every iTunes user with the 2014 U2 album “Songs of Innocence.” He’s kind of a big deal.
So it’s a pleasant surprise to discover that his first book, the musical memoir “Surrender: 40 songs, One Story,” is defined largely by humility. This is an introspective story written by a man whose spirit is never far removed from the sadness and grief of his childhood; the hunger, literal and figurative, of a teen wannabe rocker; and the gratitude of one who worked his butt off and made it to the top. Some have speculated that a ghostwriter is responsible for these pages. His publishers say no, and I believe them. The tone feels too honest and direct, the details and memories too sharp. And he apologizes for that whole iTunes thing.
But like U2, “Surrender” soars whenever the spotlight comes on. Bono is never more powerful, on the page or the stage, than when he strives for the transcendence that only music can offer. “I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd,” he says, “finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.”
David Letterman, 20 years later, still thinks about the interview. “It was the only time in my talk show history that I did anything like that,” he says. “I’ve never sat down and talked to anybody on television where we both understood they were about to die.”
For half a century Arecibo was the mightiest telescope on the planet. One thousand feet wide, it listened to radio signals from the stars — as well from pulsars, planets, asteroids and more — for any hints of intelligent life, potentially Earth-killing objects and insights into the mysteries of gravity and space-time.
The demise of Arecibo also punched a hole in the pride and the economy of Puerto Rico, which has repeatedly been hit by hurricanes, earthquakes and widespread electrical outages. Since 1963, when the telescope was founded, generations of schoolchildren in the territory have trooped through the hills to a sci-fi setting: a gigantic, concave antenna, set like a mixing bowl in a mountain valley, with 900 tons of radio receivers suspended above it. There, young students could rub elbows with renowned scientists at work and be inspired by science, particularly astronomy. Many grew up to be astronomers themselves.
A humble virus, the Dead Sea, oil pipelines, Wonder Woman, a voodoo doll, Escherichia coli, the concept of freedom, monsoons, ‘extinct’ languages, and tectonic plates. All are real. All are active. And, in their own way, these and myriad other nonhuman entities are actors, enrolled in the production of our world. We’re still in the opening paragraph, but this is where Bruno Latour might have stopped us to make a slight correction: the production of worlds.
Back in the ’90s, when it was still socially appropriate to scare the pants off your kids and their friends on Halloween, many of us remember attending a party or two with a “Dead Man’s Body” buffet: In the popular party game, we were encouraged by adults to stick our hands into bowls of increasingly gross-feeling stuff for a spooky sensory experience. There were the peeled grapes meant to feel like eyeballs, the dried apricots passed off as dismembered ears, and most terrifying, the bowls of cold, limp spaghetti tinted with food coloring to look like bloody guts.
And perhaps it’s that root, the squick imprinted on our brains as we touch that clammy pasta, that makes spaghetti the scariest food. Or at least the scariest-looking food. Sure, one could say that other dishes, like those dead birds on a plate that were trending at fancy restaurants in 2019, have more intrinsic appeal for terror, but none have the same universality as spaghetti. We’ve all eaten it, we’ve all felt it, and because of that familiarity, noodles are often used in horror movies to make the audience feel a range of emotions, from nausea to outright fear.
But how did we get to this point where ghosts-as-sheets were accepted as the classic way we both picture ghosts and dress as them? Here's a closer look at the history behind the bedsheet ghost, including its early depictions, rise to popularity and significance today.
I got talking to a woman called Charity who held the world record for the longest river journey by pumpkin boat. I’d never heard of anyone paddling in a pumpkin before, but once the idea was in my head, I had to try it. Within a few weeks, Charity’s 15.09-mile record was beaten by a man in Minnesota who completed a 25.5-mile voyage. If there’s one thing I’ve never lacked, it’s optimism, and I decided that with the right pumpkin, I could do better.
Many fiction writers lament the solitary nature of their work, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. “The Lemon” marks the arrival of S.E. Boyd, a pseudonym cooked up by its three authors, the journalists Kevin Alexander and Joe Keohane, and the editor Alessandra Lusardi. Drawing on Alexander’s background reporting on the hospitality industry, and tapping into a fascination with chefs’ lives that has only been stoked by the TV drama “The Bear,” this poised and playful debut novel is a sly satire on foodie culture and the modern hype machine.
About halfway through “Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin,” Peter Orner invokes Terrance Hayes’ “To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight.” By this point we know enough about what we’ve been reading to recognize the parallels between Orner’s project and Hayes’ work of biography-as-criticism-as-autobiography. Like its predecessor collection “Am I Alone Here?,” a 2016 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, “Still No Word From You” is a book of conversations: Orner in dialogue with other books, Orner in dialogue with himself.
If your first reaction to the subject matter of Nick Hornby’s new book is a perplexed “Huh?”, you might take comfort in knowing its author had similar feelings. In superficial terms, his yoking together of two cultural giants – the novelist Charles Dickens and musician Prince Rogers Nelson – seems unusual given they operated not just in different media but different centuries. While both found fame early and died in their 50s, the bare bones of their biographies are otherwise wildly different. Before beginning his research, it seemed to Hornby that the biggest thing they had in common was him. “They are,” he writes, “two of what I shall have to describe … as My People – the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my work.”
A corpse serves as a surfboard on a lake full of dumped bodies. An Elvis Presley cassette is pivotal to the exposure of potential war crimes. Violent death has a silver lining: freedom from the forever traffic of Colombo. Shehan Karunatilaka’s new novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, audaciously reimagines modern Sri Lankan experience for Anglophone readers otherwise accustomed to the lyric gravitas and cosmopolitan textures of fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Michelle de Kretser, Romesh Gunesekera and, more recently, Anuk Arudpragasam. By striking contrast, and even if the title promises book-club exotica, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is preternaturally irreverent about the manifold brutalities in Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil war.
It’s a beautifully painted portrait of a single relationship, yes, but it also feels like a wake up call, a reminder of how easily and insidiously evil can grow and take root.
The book ends up an homage to a time when vernacular forms like folk, country and blues were the rock-solid foundations of music, rather than the beats, production tricks and techniques, and soundscapes of the last few decades. The Philosophy of Modern Song literally closes the book on the way songs were written, played, recorded and sung for a long period of time. He leaves the future, and the pleasure of the now, to those who will eventually write their own versions of this book.
“Ricky” would rocket all the way to No. 63 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and no further — but the fact that it had charted at all still felt like a sign.
“I think that very day I gave my notice,” Yankovic says. “I said, ‘Well, maybe I should be full-time Weird Al, see how this thing pans out.’”
When asked when being full-time Weird Al started to feel like a viable career, Yankovic, who just turned 63, says, “I think about three months ago.”
With a book in one hand and a crayon in the other, I have played with words and pictures for as long as I can remember. Advertising and design was a natural fit, and I enjoyed a career as a creative director with respected national clients. An opportunity for our family eventually prompted a move, and I left agency life for freelance work and more time with my kids. I also began to write and illustrate picture books, and in early 2011, I became a bookseller in a storied independent bookshop in Neptune Beach, Florida. One rainy Sunday afternoon, in a lull that followed an especially strong rush of customers and friends, a colleague and I surveyed the resultant disarray. Small stacks seemed to cover every square inch of the shop. Books waited to be gift wrapped, to be mailed, to be returned to the shelves, to be reordered, or to be sorted for returns. Advance copies from publishers balanced on boxes, pending a spot on the cart. Everywhere, genres mingled together: science fiction mixed with business, histories with mysteries, and so on—and we laughed as we read titles in their random arrangements.
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Between life and not life? Between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you?
I’ve been a Toronto-based food writer for more than a decade, and there’s one project I’ve always wanted to do but never got around to (so far). I’ve wanted to map out this city of almost six million people through dumplings. My map would show the different enclaves and communities based on where all the pierogi places are versus the locations of the wonton soup restaurants or all the manti spots.
Toronto is the perfect city to create such a map: a metropolis that has evolved to be one of the most diverse culinary destinations in the world, thanks to waves of migration resulting in cuisines from disparate parts of the world commingling with each other. This place is a mix of cooks practicing centuries-old techniques learned from previous generations, innovators sharing new creations in the age of TikTok, and cooks embracing their third-culture cooking—combining what they learned from their parents with the new flavors and methods that come from living in a city where a roti spot, a sushi restaurant, and a souvlaki joint can all be found in a single plaza.
Urban dwelling comes with an unspoken pact that sensory intrusions will inevitably punctuate your life. Car alarms and the screeching, rumbling “L” pierce the air at all hours; neon signs rudely blink into apartment windows; rows of dumpsters assault passersby in the thick August heat, while sudden changes in the wind’s direction may bring friendlier wafts from the Blommer Chocolate Co. building.
If you’ve ever lived above a restaurant, these encroachments may even take on rhythms by which to set your days and nights.
Some of you are thinking, Ewww, no way. But open your hearts to the truth: spiders are among the most fascinating creatures on earth, and great neighbors to boot (goodbye, mosquitos!). With climate change putting them in danger, they could use a few new friends.
So instead of writing what I wanted to write, I turned to crosswords. My fascination had morphed into a curious admiration: I didn’t just want to solve them; I wanted to untangle how they were created. I had to understand how it was possible that someone could ever make something so brilliant, and so I started trying to make my own.
Perhaps the most painful moment following the death of a loved one is the split second after you reflexively pick up your phone to give them a call, or the instant after you tuck away an anecdote to share the next time you see them. These are the moments when the finality of death—previously ephemeral, almost unbelievable—finally registers.
For most people, anyway. Some, though, find themselves suspended between here and there, between the unthinking action and the devastating realization that follows. You might even spend years of your life treading back and forth between these two poles. This is the emotional realm in which The Furrows, Namwali Serpell’s knotty, prismatic sophomore novel, resides. The book traverses many genres and points of view, but it is primarily concerned with exploring one of the most enduring human impulses: the inability to accept death as the last word on a loved one’s life; the desire to hold on, to imagine, to desperately dream that the end is not the end.
“The Song of the Cell” is part history lesson, part biology lesson and part reminder of how science itself actually proceeds—the valleys of silence, as he calls them, where all is busy work with no strong theory to knit everything together, punctuated by moments of insight about what the connecting principles are.
But, as is frequently the case, our parents deserve more credit than we give them. “I’ve probably known since you were 5 years old,” she told him. “I’ve just been waiting for you to come out for years.”
After that, their relationship changed. “She’s much more chill and open to the decisions I make,” Gaw says. “Moments like that, after I came out, really helped me push forward. I think I was scared to share because I was afraid of people judging me.”
Gaw needed that confidence to pursue the huge leap he took in October 2020, when he quit a lucrative career as a UX designer to follow his passion: writing a very personal cookbook about growing up Taiwanese American, straddling two cultures, losing his dad, being gay. And of course, food is the through-line he follows, his grandmas’ recipes for Taiwanese home cooking tempered with the Cracker Barrels and Chipotles of his suburban upbringing.
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine you know two languages. For any noun you can think of—object, feeling, place—two words exist where a monolingual brain comes up with only one. When speaking, reading, or writing, your brain must decide which of those words to use—an added task on top of the language processing you’re already doing.
Scientists suspect that sorting through those extra words—and switching between them—gives bilingual people more practice with cognitive control. But whether bilingual brains are neurologically different from monolingual ones is still unknown.
The Passenger flirts with not being a traditional novel and succeeds. Stella Maris doesn't care about not being a novel, and it shines because of it. The former is dark and mysterious like a night out on the bayou. The latter — a spiritual sister presented as a coda to be published a month later — is wild, profoundly sinister, and more a philosophical exploration and celebration of math-mysticism and the possibilities — and perhaps unknowability? — of quantum mechanics than a novel. Taken together, these two novels are a floating signifier that refuses to be pinned down. They are also great additions to McCarthy's already outstanding oeuvre and proof that the mind of one of our greatest living writers is as sharp as it has ever been.
“The Singularities,” Banville’s exhilarating new novel, offers itself quite overtly as a rumination on, or rummage around, ideas about representation. Like much of his best work, it aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things.
It’s hard to imagine a future in which the myth of the American West isn’t dominated by white men. It’s harder yet to imagine a moment when dismantling it is more important than it is today, as a kind of manifest destiny drives everything from pipeline permits to SpaceX moon flights. Even revisionist westerns that puncture the romance of settler colonialism (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Power of the Dog”) sideline Mexicans (the first cowboys), African Americans (who also rode West on wagon trains) and, most confoundingly, Native Americans.
Katie Hickman’s riveting new history, “Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West,” works to correct this imbalance by foregrounding the historical experiences of Western women — Black, white, Mexican, indigenous, mixed race and Chinese. It covers the period from 1836, when Presbyterian missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding, the first “westering” women, set out with their husbands for Oregon country, to 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau pronounced the frontier closed.
Every writer I know has memories they return to in their work over and over again. There is rarely much logic to the choices, nor do such memories tend to align with the sorts of significant events that traditionally make up the time line of one’s life. My point of fixation, one that’s appeared a few times in my writing, occurred during a solo cross-country road trip I took at the age of nineteen. I was driving to Seattle, where I knew nobody, and was planning to stop for the night in Billings, Montana. It was already late, and I had been keeping myself awake with a non-stop chain of cigarettes and vending-machine coffee I’d dutifully bought at every rest stop along the way. I had a pile of books on tape on the passenger’s seat. About an hour outside of Billings, I put in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which, coincidentally, starts out on a road trip to Montana. The first line—“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning”—had a hypnotic effect on me. I blew through Billings that night, and for the next six hours I listened to Robert M. Pirsig’s barely fictional meditation on fatherhood, Chautauquas, Zen, tools, and the idea that quality—the main conceptual preoccupation of Pirsig’s life—lay in the repetition of right actions.
I am not particularly self-aware, nor do I have much memory for the person I was at the time. So I can’t really explain to you why “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” had such a hold on me. Even back then, I knew that the book was considered a bit gauche—a manual for the type of seekers who plumb out all the parts of Eastern religions that justify their own selfish behavior, who spend their days walking the earth in a fog of patchouli oil and immense self-regard. But I was also captivated by the idea that dharma demanded a sense of conscientious and careful action, whether maintaining a 1966 Honda Super Hawk, shooting free throws, or writing. I was, and I suppose still am, deeply suspicious of the life of the mind, and wanted to believe that enlightenment existed elsewhere.
The Siglio origin story famously begins with founder Lisa Pearson in Prague in the days before with Velvet Revolution being slipped a samizdat copy of exiled novelist Milan Kundera’s incendiary novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Which is to say, in commission of a crime. Because anyone found in possession of the manuscript could be arrested. The novel, a re-typed typewritten translation of a contraband English edition has been mimeographed on cheap paper, so it appears, as Pearson recalls, “as subversive as a thick stack of Communist-era restaurant menus.”
The moment Pearson passed Kundera’s novel-in-disguise to the next person at great risk to her and the next reader, she became a publisher. It’s not surprising that she’d find her calling publishing books whose deeper meaning is revealed in the marriage of the book’s physical form and literary content. Hybrids of art and text that don’t respect boundaries but deal in the frisson created when collage cross-pollinates with fiction, poetry speaks through photographs, graphics accesses emotion the memoir can’t, and paintings remember what history forgets. This unique form of reader engagement is what Siglio books trade in, and it’s what turns readers like me into brazen proselytizers pushing Siglio books into the hands of friends and strangers like a love-drunk publicist.
But when I flipped over my “action” card, I confronted a tableau of despair. My card—the Ten of Swords—depicted a dying man in an arid desert canyon. Swords pierced his side. A muscular black dog growled at his feet. Storm clouds roiled.
“This doesn’t look good,” I said.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean death,” Laura assured me, a little too eagerly. “This card just represents an ending. Like, you’ve tried, you’ve failed. It’s over. Time to give up and move on.” Laura smiled and threw up her hands. “So maybe you’re done with that novel.”
If the growling of my stomach wakes me up at 3 a.m., I go to the 24-hour Japanese diner with my sister, slurping noodles alongside men sobering up after a night of drinking. Or I take a long walk through my bungalow-lined neighborhood with my husband, spotting rabbits in the dew-laden grass. If my strange grief — of leaving home only to come home — starts to feel too big to hold, I sit in the front room of my childhood Chicago home with my father and drink black coffee, watching the sun stretch its fingers through the sycamore trees.
As the birth of our first child approached, my wife asked me to pick a stroller. It took a while: there were so many to choose from, and the decision felt loaded. I wanted our son to be safe. I wanted him to be comfortable. I’d been increasingly preoccupied by the horrors of American car culture, and I wanted to keep walking as much as possible. We lived on the second floor of a walkup, so I wanted something light and easily collapsible—but not fundamentally flimsy. I didn’t want to get duped into spending too much, and I didn’t want to be a stubborn cheapskate. I wanted to identify, from the hundreds of strollers the market was offering us, the right one, proving that, as we became a family, I knew how to identify and satisfy our needs. Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Babylist: I kept opening new browser tabs, hoping they would add up to one incontrovertible answer.
Over time, I’ve mostly forgotten the details of this search; without looking, I couldn’t tell you the exact model that I picked, even though I use it almost every day. Reading Amanda Parrish Morgan’s “Stroller,” a slim work of memoiristic cultural criticism, sent me back to how stroller shopping felt: my embarrassed sense that I was pinning too much on a damn stroller, and also my inability to stop. For Morgan, strollers aren’t just tools we use, or products we buy; they’re dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. They tell us things: about what we want, what we can’t have, what we fear. Some have cup holders, and some of those cup holders work, while some guarantee spillage. You can spend twenty dollars, or three thousand dollars, or anything in between.
Anyone writing a memoir wonders just what they’re up to, pulling together the scattered materials of experience and library work, but few express that struggle with the poetry of Sofia Samatar. She doesn’t merely admit to trouble with structure; she frets that the text is in “magpie condition,” all bits and pieces. Yet “The White Mosque,” out this week, sustains a sturdy and accessible outline. Its present action is a bus tour through Central Asia in 2016, following a pilgrimage most people would consider half-crazy. In the 1880s a wagon train of Dutch-German Mennonites, burning with millenarian fever, set out to meet Jesus on far side of the Caucasus.
To access Rachel Cusk’s apartment in Paris, on the top floor of a narrow residential building in the Marais, you must first climb five flights of winding stairs. Once inside her place, you are confronted with yet another staircase, at the top of which runs a sleek corridor of rooms and a highly Instagrammable reading nook. From that level, there remains a final, minimal set of steps leading up to a loftlike living space, which gives way to a lovely terrace with unobstructed views that more than justify the effort needed to get there.
It is not every day that a writer you believe to be one of the greatest living novelists up and expatriates to a few minutes from your doorstep. In essay after essay, novel after novel, Cusk has demonstrated what the author Heidi Julavits aptly termed—in her review of Outline, the first in Cusk’s trilogy of innovative autofictional novels—“lethally intelligent” prose. Cusk’s is a literature of immaculately crafted observations, as aesthetically exhilarating as it is philosophically devastating. And I have a suspicion that this move to Paris—a city full of the sort of bourgeois social situations she captures with such punishing honesty—will yield something spectacular.
After a long drive, the only thing that makes our stomachs churn faster than a windshield smeared with bug guts is a windshield bearing no evidence of insect life whatsoever. It feels like a fundamental pillar of the planet’s ecology has snapped.
You’ve probably noticed it, too. On long summer road trips, tiny corpses once formed a crust so thick that the reduced visibility posed a legitimate safety risk. Now, many folks we spoke with can’t remember the last time they had to scour the bug gore from their RAV4.
Christopher de Hamel is a bookworm – or, to be more precise, a manuscript weevil for whom “mere printed books” are modish novelties – who has the rare capacity to turn a scholarly specialism into a humane and humorous adventure. In The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club, silent sessions in libraries are enlivened by De Hamel’s imaginary conversations with long-dead collectors and, at the end of a history that extends across a thousand years, he invites medieval monks, Renaissance princes, Florentine merchants and American industrialists to a notional dinner at which they all unstoppably talk about their shared obsession.
Francis Bacon famously said that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He’ll get no argument from me, but the great philosopher and essayist did leave out a fourth category: Some books we simply gobble up, unable to stop reading.
Normally, these are novels — particularly fast-moving fiction, thrillers and mysteries — but not always. Witness “Come Back in September,” by Darryl Pinckney, subtitled “A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan.” That address belonged to the brilliant Elizabeth Hardwick — she is pictured on the book’s cover — who, back in the 1970s, guided the 20-something Pinckney through the upper echelons of Manhattan literary and intellectual life. This memoir of that apprenticeship — by one of our most distinguished writers on African American culture, literature and history — provides a “you are there” account of those thrilling years.
It’s been almost 50 years since Stephen King published “Carrie” and upended mainstream publishing. Never before had a “horror writer” achieved the kind of mammoth sales King has enjoyed, nor attained the wide-spread popularity enjoyed by the prolific author.
Just after King’s 75 birthday, long-time King scholar, friend and collaborator Bev Vincent has taken the opportunity to update his “Stephen King Companion” with “Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences.” The subtitle promises a lot, and King’s loyal “Constant Readers” will be delighted with the results.
Many photographers have captured the dwindling ice of the Arctic, and this is critical. Few, however, have given much thought to dwindling human cultures lost with that ice. Axelsson has spent over 50 years depicting those cultures, and his contribution here presents a piece of the climate change tapestry that is too often overlooked. A warming Arctic is not only an ecological loss. It’s a human loss. And like the damage to the natural world, the cost of that loss cannot be calculated in dollars.
It headed out from Oz and colorized the sepia along
the unmarked Kansas county roads, then headed
“Anything strange or startling?” That’s how my da, Bob, opens our conversations. We’d meet in our “local” pub in Dalkey, Dublin. Finnegan’s is its own country with its own laws and customs. Time is said to change shape on crossing its door. I have experienced that. It’s a constitutional monarchy with Dan Finnegan the head of state, his sons effectively running the government with his eldest, Donal, the prime minister. Donal is 6ft 4in but, depending on the hour and the state of the state, can appear 6ft 7in. I would not want to mess with Donal Finnegan.
Dan Finnegan loved my da. They shared a love of opera and stage musicals, and Dan recognised when another prince was present, one who could actually sing. On the occasion when my father silenced the place by singing The Way We Were followed by The Black Hills of Dakota, Dan looked over at me with something like pity, and I imagined him speaking under his breath, “Think how far you’d have come if only you had your father’s voice.”
EastEnders debuted in a crowded field of British soaps: Coronation Street was already 26 years old, while Emmerdale and Brookside were popular too. But in just one year, EastEnders had beaten Coronation Street's all-time most-viewed episode by 10m viewers. Why was it so popular? "On Coronation Street, the scenes in Rover's Return had become sedate: nobody passed the camera, there was no background noise, no one was fighting to be heard," Cashman says. "But in EastEnders there was life. It shook things up and brought Coronation Street back to life too."
The rivalry between these two soaps endures today, with Coronation Street back on top – for now. But the reality is that Britain is no longer as engaged with the soap genre as it was. Last Christmas, just 2.9 million tuned in for the Christmas Day Eastenders episode, making it only the 10th most-watched programme on Christmas Day overall, where it used to regularly top the ratings. And it's not just EastEnders: "While TV viewing as a whole fell by 9% between 2017 and 2019, Coronation Street's audience fell by 19%, while Emmerdale's went down by 22%,” noted Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian earlier this year.
John Banville's novels come and go but not all of his characters depart with them. Some remain in limbo and then return with a new lease on life in a sequel or next installment in a series. In his latest novel, "The Singularities," the Booker winner tries something more ambitious by bringing back diverse characters from disparate books and letting them intermingle. As they do so, they find themselves navigating a warped reality made up of various possibilities and blasts from the past.
“The Confessions of Matthew Strong” has been categorized as a thriller, and fans of the genre will delight in Power-Greene’s studied interpretation: His deft choreography inspires genuine suspense. But despite the generic twists and turns, the novel is most compelling when it slips into the more modest trappings of psychological drama.
Isobel’s synesthesia is a gift as a seamstress, but as Albanese ramps up the tension in a harrowing plot, it becomes evident that her belief in her gift has skewed her sense of others. A world built on visual difference offers us back only our distorted reflections. In order for Isobel to survive, she will have to learn to apprehend what lies beneath the cloth she stitches for others.
The book unpacks these layers of history like those of the sandwich itself – Cuban bread filled with seasoned pork, sweet ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard – to understand where it came from and how it has evolved. It weaves together research and profiles of artisans who are making the sandwich in different parts of the world today.
All this adds immense urgency to perhaps the biggest mystery of food allergies: Why are they on the rise? Why are more babies and kids reacting badly to cookies, ice cream, cake, and milk? Why are more adults discovering that they can’t eat a lobster roll anymore?
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It turns out that some of the trappings of the modern world may have had some unintended consequences, and some well-intentioned guidance on how we should eat may have been completely wrong.
The settings and subjects haven’t changed much in his new collection, “Liberation Day,” but Saunders’s career-long strategies have acquired a deeper intensity, focus and bite. He’s always been a moralist, concerned with our obligations to one another; now, an ongoing and intense debate over democracy and its threats has further exposed that.
Psychologists have a fancy name for this capacity to bounce around in time inside our heads: They call it “mental time travel.”
But here’s the thing: Most animals can’t do it (at least, not to the degree that we humans do it). Neither can babies and infants, and neither can people with certain cognitive impairments, like advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for example. But there’s evidence that most members of our lineage, at least since the time of Homo erectus, have been able to mentally journey through time. And according to a new book by cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley, mental time travel made all the difference. In “The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight,” Suddendorf and his co-authors argue that the ability to envision future events while recalling past ones was a key development in the evolution of our species.
Before you went, you sipped smooth dark honey,
pleasure we nearly forget. With all of eternity
I grew up watching ghosts rise in swirling gusts of autumn leaves. In the pitch dark of the bathroom, I dared to summon the local legendary specter Black Aggie in the mirror. I consorted with midnight skeletons of light that danced on the walls. I probed the cosmic mysteries with charts I gleaned from astrology books and consulted my Magic 8-Ball with the seriousness of a soothsayer. Everything, it seemed, could be read, if one let her sight adjust to the darkness.
A few years ago, I discovered a more sophisticated Magic 8 Ball: oracle cards. A friend I was visiting had just presented me with a cup of tea and a box of cards with a dove hovering in sunbeams on the front and the words Gaia Oracle.
The renaming of Brontosaurus was scientific but also narrative, born of a mission to revise the story of the prehistoric world. Like palaeontologists, authors of fiction routinely revise their narratives. They expand them by inventing new stories, some placed in the current moment, others inserted between past events. Some of those insertions reinterpret parts of the past, altering some previous stories. Other revisions start the whole world over, altering all previous stories.
Metaphors of combat seem hyperbolic — unless you’re a victim. In both books, Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies. In “Is Mother Dead,” Hjorth abandons a single, lethal sentence on a full page of white space: “If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever have children.” Childhood, the source of our earliest wounds, leaves enduring rivalries and rifts — the stuff of precise and affecting novels.
And as much as I wish he hadn’t had to write it, I am glad he did. Because such deaths do happen. And they largely happen in private. The reality of medical care, especially social and palliative care, is often shrouded in silence. Those engulfed in it, from workers to “clients”, are often too tired, physically and emotionally, to shine a light on its strengths or its fault lines (although Delaney, an American, is full of praise and wonder at the very existence of the NHS). Those who don’t need it don’t like to hear about it. Indeed, the more severe the pain, the more desperate the need of others to avoid it – they don’t want to intrude or don’t know how to help, scared of confronting their own and their children’s mortality. And those suffering stay in their cottages in the woods. So as much as Delaney is writing to offer succour and companionship to people who have experienced something similar, he is also rallying those who haven’t to understand and listen, and to chisel away at the stigma of pain. That he is able to do so with such guiltless, funny and disarming honesty is testament to the profound effect of Henry’s short but meaningful life.
There was once hardly any part of London that didn’t boast its very own department store, as a glamourous landmark on the high street offering everything from mundane household goods to clothing for a night out. Now mostly a fond memory told by the older generation, a compact but richly illustrated book tells the story of the heyday of London’s department stores.
“The Ruin of All Witches” provides a deft example of how a historian can avoid “presentism,” the practice of examining the past through a contemporary perspective, and inhabit a reality different from ours by “suspending hindsight.” As for his story’s relevance, Gaskill never mentions Donald Trump and his cries of “Witch hunt!” or his QAnon fantasies. He doesn’t have to. Whatever hallucinations are arising from our current state, like smoke from a fire, it’s obvious they’re not much different from what was going up the chimney in the 1600s.
IN THE FOREWORD to the 2004 Vintage edition of “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison writes that it was her body that started the book — that the first lines, like so much of the best music, were born of a physical expression of frustration. She’d already picked a time period and mapped out a plot, “read issues of every ‘Colored’ newspaper I could for the year 1926” and knew each character as well as an old tattoo, but she couldn’t “locate the voice, or position the eye.” How could the narrator elude her when the story was so clear? “I know this woman!” she kept thinking. “Angered by my inability to summon suitable language,” she writes, “I threw my pencil on the floor, sucked my teeth in disgust.” Sth.
“So that’s what I wrote” she says, and it became the novel’s first line.
When William Wong took over his in-laws’ Chinese restaurant in 1958, his vision for the place was boundless. He imagined an escapist fantasy in Saugus, on a colossal scale, unlike anything the Boston area had ever seen.
Inspired by his Hawaiian honeymoon, and eager to capitalize on America’s postwar fascination with the South Seas, William would over the next few decades transform the humble eatery into a Technicolor Polynesian paradise, big enough to seat 1,200 guests. He outfitted it with faux palm trees, gurgling fountains, and ceiling lights that mimicked the night sky. He installed a mural of a dazzling volcanic lagoon in one of the dining rooms; in another, he lodged a replica of a ship.
He renamed the restaurant Kowloon, in homage to the Hong Kong peninsula where he began his safe passage to the United States from China in 1939, amid the Second Sino-Japanese War.
On a recent Sunday morning, Sonoko Sakai, the Los Angeles-based cooking teacher, gathered up her 12 students in the front room of her home and dropped a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of dough onto the floor. She slipped off her shoes — she had gotten a pedicure for the occasion — and started to stomp on the bag. Sakai is an expert on Japanese noodle-making; “everyone” in Japan steps on their dough to knead it, she explained. Her specialty is soba-making, which she called “a restorative art,” but today the class focused on ramen, which would form the base of a cold noodle dish called hiyashi chuka. “Ramen is fun,” Sakai said.
After the demonstration, the students kicked off their own shoes, revealing at least one pair of dinosaur socks, and began their own more tentative stomping. Working noodle dough with your feet is a unique textural experience the bag is a little slippery, and the dough is soft but also unyielding. Giddiness welled in the room, along with a feeling of catharsis. “This would have been really great a few weeks into the pandemic,” one student observed. “If I could have gotten flour,” another replied. But clearly a large part of the fun was the one thing no one would have done during the early pandemic — gathering in a room to stomp on the dough together.
That's because bacalhau – or salt cod – which sits at the heart of all these dishes, runs deep through Portugal's culinary identity, with the country consuming 20% of the world's supply. In fact, so central to Portuguese hearts (and stomachs) is this ingredient, that the saying goes "there are 365 ways to prepare salted cod, one for each day of the year".
But for a fish that is found only in the icy depths of the North Atlantic Ocean – far from Portugal's shores – the country's love affair with salt cod is a puzzling one. How exactly did it end up on Portuguese plates? The answer is wrapped up in more than 500 years of intriguing history.
Your monstera is boring. The pothos hanging from your bookshelf? Yawn. That windowsill cactus collection is, at best, a solid meh. Anyone can grow houseplants that absorb nutrients from the soil, energy from the sun, etc. But if your plants don’t consume insect flesh in a gut-sucking display of evolutionary brutality, let’s face it: Your collection is basic. To turn your mild-leafed menagerie into the ultimate selfie background, what you need is a Nepenthes.
Haunted houses are liminal spaces by design, the boundary between life and afterlife blurred and the line between truth and imagination called into question within. But the most effective haunted houses in literature blur even more lines—between past and present, and memory and reality. Throughout Lucy Wood’s debut novel, Weathering, even the boundaries between physical spaces are challenged as the distinction between the house Ada inherits from her dead mother, Pearl, and the river outside it becomes less concrete. This blurring frames the lives of the book’s three main characters: as Ada and her six-year-old daughter, Pepper, spend more time in the house and around the river, their experiences not only overlap with and repeat Pearl’s life, but also intersect with Pearl’s ghost.
The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way.
The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” — alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year — kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence. There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. He teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer.
A slow burn needs a compelling character to hold the reader’s interest, and White has created an especially unnerving and memorable one in Aoileann.
The most revolutionary and influential poem of the last 100 years was written by an American banker in the City of London. When TS Eliot published “The Waste Land”, his forbiddingly difficult work in five parts — full of parody, pastiche and allusion — in 1922, Time magazine wondered whether it was a hoax. One London reviewer said of its bewildering modernist techniques: “A grunt would serve equally well.” By contrast, New York’s Dial magazine declared: “The poem is — in spite of its lack of structural unity — simply one triumph after another.” It would be reviled by some but also become one of the most admired and imitated works of literature ever written.
Two books celebrating the centenary of “The Waste Land” bring new biographical research to interpretation of Eliot’s achievements and reveal how troubled relationships with women are woven into his enigmatic poetry. Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem revives the enduring fascination of Eliot’s masterpiece. The second volume of Robert Crawford’s biography, Eliot After The Waste Land, completes the story he began in Young Eliot (2016) and is the first book to draw extensively upon a dramatic cache of letters to Emily Hale that was unsealed in 2020.
the more you listen to it—emerges. Blue
The status of dance in American culture is deeply paradoxical. Concert dance is one of the most elite art forms imaginable. The demands placed on professional dancers are so punishing that those of us who live outside this spartan vocation may struggle to understand the labor involved. Dancers are, in the words of the choreographer William Forsythe, “Olympic-level athletes” whose aim is a perfect synthesis of athletics and artistry. This takes years of training and enormous sacrifice—and for what? An audience composed of a sliver of the urban intelligentsia; a career butterfly-like in its brevity, inevitably cut short by age or injury.
And yet: Dance is also spontaneous, elemental, universal. Cave paintings show that humans have been dancing since at least the Stone Age. Some scientists, having observed that chimpanzees occasionally sway and clap while listening to piano music, believe that the desire to dance predates humanity. Psychologists have argued that group dance supports social bonding. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have found expressive or ecstatic movement at the core of many religious rituals: healing rites, initiation ceremonies, funerals, weddings, preparations for war. Dance returns us to the earliest mysteries of human creation. It is one of our fundamental arts.
When the waffle maker arrived, I experimented with various recipes, always making far too many for two people to eat. Clearly, we needed more mouths to feed—and owning this ridiculous thing provided a great excuse for having people over—so we decided to open our home on Saturdays to anyone who shared our desire to bask in the good vibes of others. We circulated a sign-up spreadsheet to close friends, friends of friends, coworkers, former students at the college where I taught, far-flung pals who might be passing through New York, fond acquaintances. We promised to provide waffles and eggs and to introduce them to delightful strangers.
I recently came into possession of a good spork. It doesn’t matter how this happened, only that now in my cutlery drawer there is a spork many times heftier than those wrapped in plastic to accompany lunch at day camp. And I am finding that at many meals, I don’t want to eat with anything else.
In her superb new story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, Toni Ann Johnson follows the Arrington family, starting in the not-so-distant world of 1962. From there, via parents Phil and Velma and daughter Maddie, we travel through the ’70s, ’80s, and up to 2005, along the way visiting the Bronx, West Africa, and New Jersey, but always firmly anchored in uptight Monroe, in Upstate New York. Each story is an emotional journey through the complexity of an upper-middle-class Black family attempting to live their lives in a virtually all-white community. The stories create an emotional resonance that continues to thrum long after the reader has finished the book.
American writer Jennifer Egan’s fascination with human reactions to technology sits at the heart of her novel “The Candy House.”
Told in a dizzying array of narratives and styles, “The Candy House” is an exploration of our interconnectedness, but also our desire for real connection.
Fatima Ali was a rising star. A celebrity chef featured on the reality contests Chopped and Top Chef, Ali aspired to open the eyes and mouths of American diners to Pakistani flavors. But in 2017, at the age of twenty-nine, she was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, and soon after passed away in 2019. She wanted a legacy connecting cultures through her food. Facing death, she chose to spend her time working with Tarajia Morrell on a final memoir, Savor: A Chef’s Hunger For More.
Brooks is a nimble and elegant writer, letting his argument unfold, showing us how fiction can do two seemingly incommensurate things at once: It allows us to get “caught up” in the world that it creates, while it also stimulates our capacities for “understanding and reflection.” He ends with a chapter on the decidedly nonfictional realm of the law, where stories are often viewed as “suspiciously emotional” — too likely to be irrelevant or prejudicial — when in fact the law relies more on storytelling than even its most august arbiters would like to admit.
“Seduced by Story” turns out not to be the condemnation of narrative that I thought would follow from Brooks’s complaints in its early pages, but rather a potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications. Literary criticism, here to save the day! This may be a sneakily self-serving story on his (and my) part, but that shouldn’t make it any less true.
Progress in economic thought comes in three stages; first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they ask you to write a quirky book explaining your ideas to a mass audience. Ha-Joon Chang has been working hard at providing an alternative to neoliberalism for two decades now, ever since his book Kicking Away the Ladder pointed out that low taxes, free trade and deregulation simply wasn’t the way that most rich countries had developed. Now he’s reached the summit of the profession; a fun little book of essays (some of them extended and expanded versions of columns for FT Magazine), restating the case against the Washington consensus through the medium of recipes.
On its brittle vine, my grandfather’s voice
ripened with stories he thought forgotten.
In the 1930s, three decades before Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon, Buck Rogers had his own Western-like space adventures—in comic books and on the silver screen. When NASA got off the ground in the 1960s, the first generation of astronauts looked just like him: all white men, just without ray guns.
A half-century later, sci-fi has shot past real-world space programs. There are still Buck Rogerses in the 21st century, but there are also Star Trek: Discovery’s Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Andor’s Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), characters that show the breadth of diversity in the world in the way early sci-fi, and early NASA, never really did. Shows like those, as well as series like The Expanse and Foundation, have remained strides ahead of the US space agency, which is just now preparing to send the first woman and the first person of color to walk on the moon in 2026.
There’s been good news recently for bibliophiles in Boston; a wave of independent bookstores are opening new storefronts around the city.
Shop owners, managers, and industry leaders are cheering the development, which comes on the heels of a pandemic that caused the shuttering of many local businesses.
Of all the people in Jonathan Saha's life worth dedicating his book to, none of them could match the impact, or lack thereof, of Toast the cat.
Saha's cat "was no help at all," reads the dedication page in Colonizing Animals which recently went viral on Twitter, collecting more than 266,000 likes.
Skeptical lottery officials ushered him into a back office and checked his tickets carefully. Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers—7-8-0-0—drawn on June 18. The odds of winning were just 1 in 416—not terribly long by lottery standards—but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. There were other red flags. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning. It took staff six hours to cut 500 checks for $5,000 each. Then Gjonaj (his name is pronounced Joe-nye) tucked them inside the pocket of his sports jacket and roared away in his Lincoln Navigator, richer by $2.5 million.
Over the next nine months, the 40-year-old real-estate broker would return many times, exchanging thousands of winning tickets for nearly $30 million, making him one of the biggest winners in the history of the Michigan Lottery. His luck appeared to defy the laws of statistics and probability, and sent the lottery commission into a spin. Had Gjonaj found a way to rig the machines? Or had he somehow developed a system to predict the winning combinations again and again and again?
Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, sixteen days before Voyager 1. The little brother went first. But Voyager 1 went faster. It overtook Voyager 2 a few months later. In the 1980s it overtook Pioneer 11. On February 17, 1998, it overtook Pioneer 10. From that day forward, it’s been the most distant human-made object from Earth, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. The two Voyagers were only able to reach escape velocity with the help of multiple gravity assists made possible by an alignment of planets that only happens every 176 years. Even the New Horizons probe, launched almost four decades later in 2006, will never overtake them. They will always be the farthest away.
Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit in or have a good reason not to.
Unnaturalness is a problem.
The poster child for unnatural is gravity. It has never played well with others; it’s absurdly weak compared with the other movers and shakers of the cosmos—electromagnetism and nuclear forces. A tiny magnet can lift a large metal spoon off the ground against the pull of gravity of the entire Earth. No one knows why. (Gravity even speaks a different language—generally smooth geometry—as opposed to the buzzing quantum probability-speak native to other forces.)
The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes a decade after his rollicking debut Chinaman, which combined the love of cricket with the horror of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Set at the tail end of the 80s, his second novel again plumbs national violence and atrocity, teasing out its roots in colonial history. It’s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person.
It’s one of the first things we learn about Auschwitz, and one of the hardest to forget: that the Nazis tricked their victims before gassing them. When transports of Jews arrived for extermination — some 1 million people between 1942 and 1944 — the SS reassured their victims with promises of food and a warm shower while marching them off to the gas chamber. The perverse theater of death included a military van marked with a red cross, in which an SS “medic” ferried canisters of Zyklon B.
The Nazis weren’t playing a cruel joke or even covering their tracks. There was a logic behind this program of deception. Walter Rosenberg, an 18-year-old Slovak Jew enlisted in the commando charged with unloading the trains, figured it out. The prisoners’ obedience kept the machinery of death running smoothly, which the SS required: because the transports arrived in such quick succession, but also because the victims far outnumbered the guards. “If the Jews knew what was coming,” Jonathan Freedland writes in “The Escape Artist,” his riveting chronicle of Rosenberg’s escape from Auschwitz and subsequent effort to rally the world to action, “what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” Even a small amount of resistance could be enough.
Melissa Newman once told her father — Paul Newman, that Paul Newman — that she imagined him standing in front of a giant billboard featuring a photo of his famous, gorgeous face. But in her imagining, she said, the movie star himself stands beneath the photo: “Just a little person with a little sign saying, ‘It’s me. I’m here.’”
That desire to be seen as his true self is at the heart of his posthumous memoir, “Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man.” Filled with inner turmoil and self-doubt, much of it fueled by family dysfunction, the unusual release comes on the heels of the HBO docuseries “The Last Movie Stars,” which used a wider lens to explore the lives and loves of Newman and wife Joanne Woodward. Both draw on the same remarkable cache of interviews — material that a conflicted Newman created and then abandoned.
Good writing, I think, ultimately exists between the twin goal posts of as-few-words-as-you-need and as-many-words-as-you-want. I, a natural natterer, lean toward the latterer.
But one must draw the line somewhere. I recommend striking out “actually” at every opportunity, unless it’s in a discussion of the movie “Love Actually,” in which case we might want to focus on the title’s confounding commalessness. Similarly, though I would never fault the supreme lyricist Johnny Mercer for the gorgeous “You’re much too much / And just too very very,” I am on constant alert for “very,” always looking for the chance to dispose of it. I’d encourage you to do the same.
Every morning for three months of the year, Lola wakes at 8 and goes hunting. She races past oak trees, running at full speed through a 50-hectare field set in the southern end of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The daily challenge — to find her elusive prey — never fails to excite Lola. She darts from place to place until faltering at last: 40 minutes into her day, she gets distracted or simply gives in to exhaustion.
Lola is a Brittany spaniel, and beneath her orange-spotted white coat is the agile body of a hunter. But her most important tool is her sense of smell. “Through training, dogs learn to recognize substances in their long-term memory — in this case, the smell of truffles,” says dog trainer Germán Escobar.
My whole life, the smoky, vinegar-laced scent of pickled jalapeños — and their little-known origin story — has been lingering under my nose. I grew up with immigrant parents in California, and at any gathering chiles en escabeche were as commonplace as bottles of tequila and Squirt to make palomas.
But it wasn’t until this summer, when I revisited my family in Xalapa, in Veracruz state, that I realized that my parents’ hometown has played a major role in the history of the pickled jalapeño.
Eschewing body counts for philosophical debate, the legacy of McCarthy’s new offerings is, much as the author would surely wish, both magnificent and cruelly impossible to define.
Alan Rickman’s voice was a purr, but it masked sharp claws. This was evident in the memorable baddies he played and now you can hear it in the feline prose of these selected diaries. “John Major said, ‘You have given us so much enjoyment.’ ‘I wish I could say the same of you,’ was the unstoppable reply. He had the grace to laugh.” You suspect not everyone did. Rickman didn’t suffer fools and his intelligence keeps chafing against his fellow professionals – their self-absorption, their vanity, their unresponsiveness. He snipes and then regrets it. After a barney with his latest director he writes: “How can I curb this ability to distance and intimidate?”
Okay, I get it. We are all busy people. Who’s got time to lie on the couch eating bonbons for hours and lapping up delicious 1,000-page stories about made-up people in made-up situations while our bosses are Slacking us and the television is beckoning and the real world is falling apart?
But, really, someone needs to speak up for long novels — for the hours of escape they promise, their fuller characters and the worlds they build. For making us more empathetic and forcing us to engage with the ideas of others. For the exercise of our underutilized imaginations and our declining attention spans.
The popular conception of Sherlock Holmes varies depending on who you talk to. The most basic image is that he’s the guy who smokes a pipe and wields both a magnifying glass and his intellect to solve mysteries. He’s a mercurial brainiac, someone so smart that he coldly dismisses anyone who isn’t his mental equal. If you crack open what's arguably the most important Sherlock Holmes book of all time, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, all of those impressions appear in some form or another. But what these generalizations leave out is that Holmes has all sorts of other moods—including total hilarity. In “The Red-Headed League,” after he and Watson burst into laughter over some absurd details of a mystery, Holmes says to a client, “There is if you will excuse me saying so, something just a little funny about it.” Most Holmes short story titles are each preceded by the phrase “The Adventure of…,” and when you re-read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, it makes sense. These are bonkers adventures first and complex mysteries second. 130 years later, it’s easy to see why this book is still so thrilling.
What might be the world’s oldest tree — a bristlecone pine named Methusaleh that is thousands of years old — is hidden in plain sight somewhere along the 4.5-mile Methuselah Trail in the Inyo National Forest in California. Even photos of it are rare — the internet is littered with pictures of old and gnarled bristlecone pines mislabeled as Methuselah.
“We do not give out the exact location or give photos out of the Methuselah tree, to keep it protected,” said Becky Hutto, a visitor center supervisor in the Inyo National Forest.
“Shrines of Gaiety” could be called an exercise in staginess; Atkinson threads a flagrant number of coincidences, near-misses, and winking foreshadowings (more than one character unwittingly predicts the manner of his own death) into the text. At the novel’s end, she doles out the future fates of her characters, with one gleeful exception; this brief nod to her metanarrative concerns gives the book a piquant finish. “Shrines of Gaiety” fulfills the guidelines of the genres it adopts: the missing girls are found, the historical setting richly elaborated, the romantic confusion conveniently sorted out, if not fully resolved. Yet, despite these technical satisfactions, Atkinson is never content to let her readers steep in the enjoyment of a plot tidily concluded. In this case, she hints at the idea that undergirds all of her historical fiction: no matter how closely we examine or imagine the past, the idea that we might fully understand it is always an illusion.
Though the mystery remains at the heart of the novel, Hamdy’s work becomes quite philosophical, asking and attempting to answer huge questions about the nature of life, death and time.
Her previous work skips genres and times with similar fluidity. Now, Moreno-Garcia's enthralling new novel, "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau," deftly blends 19th-century science fiction with a 21st-century sensibility.
Pink seafoam leaves odd gifts for me to find:
a puffed-up man-o-war, a mermaid’s purse,
I remember the story being genuinely scary. I remember lying awake at night, not wanting my hands or feet to extrude from under the covers for fear that a ghost might lick them. But most vividly I remember the strange, beguiling image of a ghost’s tongue: the idea of a dead girl licking a living girl’s hand felt obscene, something we weren’t supposed to have imagined at all. It would be nearly two decades before my own queerness became completely apparent to me, but I knew, even then, that the appeal of the murdered-dog ghost story was not entirely straightforward, that the narrative was transgressive in more ways than one.
Around the same time, I began fervently reading ghost stories. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps, when you sense something shadowy about yourself, you start looking in the shadows for understanding, or at least meaning of some kind. What I did see clearly was that my interest in ghosts endured, long after my friends had moved on. We no longer swapped scary stories in the cafeteria, stroking each other’s palms. Instead, we talked about ourselves, and one another, and spent an extravagant amount of time trying to determine what was and wasn’t cool. I did my best to keep up. We bought magazines called things like Sugar and Shout, which came with free friendship bracelets. We went to a club night for under-eighteens at the Park End Club called the Fly-by-Night, and then, as soon as we could get away with it, began sneaking into regular bars. I recall writing a reminder to myself on a scrap of paper that simply read, “Notice boys!” Instead, I would go home alone and read about ghosts.
“Ulitsa Sezam” bounded onto TV screens across the former Soviet Union in October 1996, nearly five years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It was a complicated era, simultaneously fraught with instability and rife with the hope that a new generation of children would grow up in a freer society than the one that had preceded it. Helmed by the Children’s Television Workshop, the American organization behind “Sesame Street,” “Ulitsa Sezam” sought to teach young viewers the skills they would need to thrive in a nascent market economy, with Muppets serving as fluffy mascots of democratic values.
Cork was first used by the Egyptians and Persians for fishing floats, then by the Ancient Greeks and the Romans who also made sandals and used it to seal amphorae jars. It wasn't until the late 1700s before glass bottles became the wine vessel of choice and their intimate relationship with the humble cork stopper began. Today there are 2.2m hectares (8,494sq miles) of cork forests growing around the world, producing around 13 billion cork stoppers every year, which are used in about two thirds of the roughly 20 billion bottles of wine sold annually.
In recent decades, the material has faced increasing competition from screw tops and synthetic stoppers, but the cork industry has been mounting a concerted comeback in the past few years. Cork oaks grow for an average of 25 years before their first bark can be removed and then it takes a further two harvests – 18 years in total – before it can produce cork of good enough quality to be used as a stopper.
Little Village comic contributor Lauren Haldeman’s fourth book, Team Photograph is a poignant exploration of how we’re shaped by the places where we grow up. This graphic novel combines Haldeman’s iconic wolf-headed style with erasure poetry to rehash her youth on soccer fields 800 feet away from the battlefields of Bull Run in Virginia.
Hemingway’s Widow is a fair-minded and comprehensive biography of a complex, flawed and heroic figure. Along the way, it provides fascinating glimpses of the publishing industry, psychiatry, alcoholism and marriage in the 20th century.
There is something like an implicit, magical relationship between pavements, cafes and writing. It is as if there exists a tension between the very ideas of them – the act of writing, of dwelling inside an establishment while also being out in the world. They create a situation in which humans might be observed in that most impossible of places: the wild. While the urban environment can never be truly wild – there are many interventions that subtly affect how we interact, there is something mystical about the pavement cafe.
The Japanese writer Taeko Kōno is a maestro of transgressive desire whose stories often—and deliciously—use food as a metaphor for sexual appetite. Kōno, who died in 2015, is considered one of Japan’s foremost feminist writers and one of its foremost writers of any kind. She won many of the country’s top literary prizes, including the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri. The single selection of her work in English, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, first published by New Directions in 1996 and translated by Lucy North and Lucy Lower, contains ten dark, deceptively simple stories about women who find the gender roles in Japanese society unbearable, and are warped by them.
Suddenly, there seemed every reason to visit New York.
Semiconductors are the cornerstone of the modern economy. Everything from emails to guided missiles relies on them. Yet parts of the supply chain, particularly for cutting-edge chips, depend on choke-points dominated by a small number of firms. For decades few people worried much about this—until covid-19 and rising tensions between China and America highlighted the sector’s fragility. In “Chip War”, his elegant new book, Chris Miller of Tufts University shows how economic, geopolitical and technological forces shaped this essential industry.
Somehow, there was “only” one Black writer praised in 1963; at least, so argued novelist John A. Williams. This solitary writer was James Baldwin, who had replaced Richard Wright, who had, in turn, replaced Langston Hughes. That succession, according to Williams, was because Black writers are only compared to each other. And this narrowness, warned Williams, “confine[s] them to a literary ghetto from which only one Negro name at a time may emerge.”
Scientists have been intrigued by animals that lack senescence for a long time. The experimental zoologist Abraham Trembley first studied the hydra nearly 300 years ago, cutting one in half in an effort to figure out whether it was an animal or a plant. He incorrectly hypothesized that if it survived and regenerated itself, it had to be a plant. Not only did it live, both halves grew into fully functioning hydras.
Pretty much since humans were first able to conceive of the limits to their time alive, they’ve searched for the secrets of immortality. The quest to live longer has animated many scientific endeavors and field research, some more sensible than others, and today continues to preoccupy many in the tech world who seek the vast profits that potentially await. Many look to the natural world for inspiration or models that humans might emulate in order to avoid the usual consequences of the progression of time. Though humans do now live longer on average than ever before (mostly as a result of improved standards of living, inoculation against disease and better sanitation practices), no breakthroughs in the quest to defeat aging have yet been made.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Restaurants don’t invest in their pastry program because not enough people are ordering dessert. So they put what New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells calls “numbingly predictable” low-labor desserts on the menu. Then customers—who have palate fatigue from experiencing the same few dishes over and over—decide to skip dessert and just get the check. And restaurants go on operating without pastry chefs, thinking they aren’t needed.
As Tampa bakery owner Villacorta sees it, “We’re becoming extinct.”
Reading Dane Bahr’s The Houseboat — a gothic noir set in 1960s Iowa — I was reminded of an observation that Jonathan Lethem once made about James Brown. The genius of Brown, Lethem argued, lay in his ability to develop an entire oeuvre out of the interstitial, transitional sounds of R&B songs. Brown turned “the barked or howled vocal asides, […] the brief single-chord jamming on the outros,” and “the drum breaks and guitar vamps” into the core theater of his unique music. Essentially, he moved background into foreground.
Bahr — a debut novelist from Minnesota, the same region where his story takes place — does something similar in The Houseboat. He turns those elements of style, theme, and motif that typically litter the periphery of traditional detective novels — the dark, bleak, foreboding imagery; clever similes; sexual perversion; alcoholism; haunted pasts and metaphorical ghosts — into the central focus. He moves background into foreground. Everything else sloughs away.
“Liberation Day” is a spiky, at times difficult collection, seldom providing the reader with much in the way of catharsis. But these are stories worth reading, the best of them as thought-provoking and resonant as a fan of Saunders might expect. Eschewing the speculatively richer, more dramatic question of what happens after the system comes crashing down, Saunders focuses instead on the queasy, knotty consequences of our present dilemma: What if it doesn’t?
In addition to a horror novel and a work of historical fiction about the 20th-century American South, “The Hollow Kind” is also an environmental allegory, a creepy variation on Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax.” As with that children’s book, for Nellie, the only path toward survival is to accept that there are certain boundaries humankind wasn’t meant to cross.
For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself.
On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes.
On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
I loved Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, “The Hero of This Book,” and hate to deprive people of the chance to dive unknowingly into something wonderful. So feel free to stop here and pretend I am pressing the slim hardcover into your hands, saying, “Don’t look at the jacket copy; just read.”
If you’re the sort who needs more information to commit, I will warn you that the book is hard to categorize. It doesn’t have a splashy hook, and it purposefully defies genre. Page by page, it’s the quiet story of an adult child mourning a parent. As a whole, it’s a map of how to love someone.
The narrator’s iron-willed discipline over her teenage diet and her adult drive to be annihilated by drinking or sex are the same. They are the hope of losing yourself in something bigger, and thereby exercising temporary command over what we cannot control and will inevitably destroy us. Being a woman who loves unsuitable men is simply a conduit. On one of her dispiriting childhood visits to the nursing home, the narrator recalls, she saw a garden rose “so powerfully pink, with drops of dew clinging…that tears came to my eyes and all I could feel for one brief moment was the pure potential of life.” But then, she tells us, “I remembered where I was and who I had just seen, and knew again that the image I so longed to perceive meant nothing, was nothing.”
Lev AC Rosen channels the old-fashioned private eye novel and the locked-room mystery while delivering a tense character-driven story about gay life in 1952 San Francisco in “Lavender House.” While the search for a killer lays the foundation of “Lavender House,” Rosen delves into homophobia, the need for connection and the secrets that motivate believable characters in this historical mystery.
Every now and then, somebody somewhere will publish an Everest book. I don’t mean a book about Mount Everest, although there’s not exactly a shortage of those. I’m talking about books for which the brief is so impossibly ambitious that the reasons for even making the attempt are not altogether clear. Just as Mallory, when asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb the world’s highest mountain, replied “because it’s there,” so I imagine the creators of these books must take on the challenge out of a combination of sheer bloody-mindedness and some deep-seated desire to attempt the apparently impossible.
Such must surely be the case with Ocean: Exploring the Marine World, a huge, 2.5kg tome published by art book specialists Phaidon. The book, says the blurb, aims to take readers on “a journey across continents and cultures to discover the endless ways artists and image-makers throughout history – extending over 3,000 years from ancient Greece to today – have been inspired by the world’s oceans." Yup, you read that right: a survey of the entire visual culture of human civilisation as it pertains to oceans. Like I say, bit of a tall order.
Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars. He was a flashpoint in the battle between highbrow and lowbrow, with devotees revering his plain-spoken honesty and Dick Cavett mockingly calling him “the most understood poet in America.” Every year on his birthday, he sold out Carnegie Hall.
But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name. His chiseled face stared out at me from abandoned hardcovers, torn paperbacks, and dusty record albums, all adorned with the most ’70s fonts you ever saw. He wore a turtleneck and luxurious blond hair on the cover of Come to Me in Silence. He reclined on a sandy beach on the front of Seasons in the Sun. On one paperback he stared out to sea and the title of the book told me just how he felt: Alone…
We often conceive of domestication as a process involving humans taming, penning or manipulating animals and plants. Domestication turned wild sheep species into livestock, wolves into pets, and weeds into cereal crops. It also transformed whole landscapes, as people learned to domesticate forests, grasslands, jungles and coastlines. But this is not a process that belongs to the distant past. Newer forms of domestication are still emerging as rural landscapes are turned into fields of solar panels, coastlines into concrete seawalls, and former deserts into forests. Each transformation is designed to serve human needs: to increase biomass, reduce food insecurity or sequester carbon. And, in each, domination appears to flow in one direction. Humans domesticate. But can domestication flow the other way?
In the months since my daughter started at her Montessori school, I'd become somewhat fixated on her lunchbox. When we enrolled, along with information about schedules and what to do in case of illness, the school sent us studiously healthy guidelines about what to pack for lunch: vegetables, fruit, whole grains, protein, and absolutely no packaged snack foods or sweets — in other words what many parents aspire to feed their kids, and what few toddlers actually like to eat. Reading through the list, I couldn't help but think of Alice Waters' descriptions from "The Art of Simple Food" of the elegant school lunches she made for her daughter: "Instead of sweets, I would send along fresh fruit, ripe and irresistible." This was our California cultural inheritance.
I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
Set on an old Georgia turpentine farm in 1989, Andy Davidson’s third horror novel, “The Hollow Kind,” presents a shape-shifting beast only to ask if the threat to these characters actually comes from within. Nellie Gardner has just moved back to her ancestral hometown in rural Baxter County with her 11-year-old son, Max, and not much else — they left everything behind in South Carolina to flee her abusive husband. She’s come to claim her inheritance: a house and a thousand acres of pine forest called Redfern Hill, which has been left to her by her grandfather August Redfern. The land became his 70 years earlier, through a dowry from his father-in-law, George Baxter, a carpetbagger who bought it for 10 cents an acre during Reconstruction. For all its past profitability, now the trees have “gory black cavities up and down their trunks where, too many times, the bark was hacked and rehacked to extract the resin and the pines, over too many years, were tricked and tricked again into healing themselves.” From the beginning of this powerful gothic ghost story, it’s clear the real legacy Nellie is inheriting is one of intergenerational greed, and danger.
At first glance, Kemper Donovan’s backyard bungalow appears perfectly normal for this Santa Monica neighborhood, but a few clues suggest otherwise.
A map of the English county of Devon. A copy of “The Poisoner’s Handbook.” A professional-looking microphone perched on a wooden desk. And then there’s the enormous portrait of Agatha Christie hanging next to the guest bed.
The first line of George Saunders’ acutely relevant collection of new stories: “It is third day of Interim.” Immediately, we ask: Interim? Why capitalized? Could Interim refer to our lives during COVID (maybe not over)? To the Trump years (maybe not over)? To our time on this planet (also not over, at least not yet)?
This is one of Saunders’ tricks, to write directly to the world of the story while writing to us out here in our chairs, our streets, our workplaces, and to our politics and public discourse. He provides a mirror, albeit a wonderfully distorted one.
The top line descriptor of the book is that it is a systems novel, the death of which has been much exaggerated of late, one that takes on the beastly word of academia. Erin Adamo is a Ph.D. candidate at one of those prestigious Manhattanite universities that lend themselves so well to novels, possessed of a fine literary mind, an imploding marriage, taxing parents, and an apartment for which she has no key. Through this stressed out graduate, Ives refracts a novel of multitudinous brilliance and luminosity, hammering away at convention and the well-trod path with the confidence and skill of an accomplished, fearless writer. It is a credit to both her vision and her publisher’s constitution that Life Is Everywhere, as wide-ranging and risk-taking a novel to be found this side of Infinite Jest, never once feels restrained or neutered.
Moore retired from comics a few years back, a huge loss to his admirers and the profession. Even his loopiest work — the last few volumes of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” for example — had something searing to say about matters mundane and sacred, and his feverish creativity was worth every bizarre digression and self-indulgent turn.
Fortunately, Moore hasn’t retired from storytelling. He is now an estimable writer of fiction with three books, including his latest, the story collection “Illuminations,” and while none of these volumes have the gamma-ray punch of his comics, all of them burn with Moore’s soaring intelligence and riotous humanity.
Global warming is arguably the most important topic in the news right now. Unless we act quickly and decisively, the lives of future generations are sure to be very grim. For this reason, at the very least, Tiziana Andina’s new book, translated by Antonella Emmi, deserves attention. Her blessedly brief and relentlessly lucid account offers a philosophical perspective on our situation. A Philosophy for Future Generations has four parts: an explanation of why the future matters; a survey of the relevant philosophical literature; a constructive analysis of philosophical responses; and, finally, three applications of her analysis.
I am standing in this field
Holding my glove in the air
Should I whistle?
I can’t whistle
On the evening of April 20, 1972, Craig and Janice Eckhart loaded several bags of luggage into a Buick in Wichita, Kansas, and put their two daughters—four-year-old Lori and year-old Cindy—in the back seat. Craig was going to see about a job in Iowa, where he and Janice had relatives. They planned to drive through the night and arrive in Northwood, just south of the Minnesota border, by morning.
About three hours into the trip, they stopped at a gas station outside Kansas City. After Craig filled the tank, a young man, wrapped in a sleeping bag and dripping wet, politely asked for a ride to Iowa City. Craig considered himself a Good Samaritan and had picked up hitchhikers in the past, though never when Janice and the kids were in the car. Still, the young man seemed friendly, and a cold rain was falling, so Craig asked Janice if it would be all right. She reluctantly said yes.
Food falling from the sky! It's every kid's fantasy — and since its publication in 1978, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs has sold millions of copies. Sony Pictures Animation even turned the children's book into a movie in 2009.
"I don't know what made me think of it other than the fact that I'm very involved with food," Barrett says.
In August 1894, at the end of a month-long stay to research his embryonic novel, Bram Stoker wrote in the visitors’ book at the Kilmarnock Arms on the Aberdeenshire coast that he had been “delighted with everything and everybody” and hoped to return soon.
According to new research, though, the feeling was not entirely mutual. Stoker, a genial Irishman usually known for his cheeriness, was experimenting with what would become known as “method acting” to get under the skin of his new character, one Count Dracula. Local historian Mike Shepherd, who has spent seven years researching Stoker, says the author’s links with the London theatre inspired Stoker to try inhabiting his character in a different way.
The threat of climate change loomed large above Vermont's 2022 Cheese Summit. I was invited to the event to taste and learn about local cheeses, made by the state's eclectic roster of producers — and I did so, gladly. But as the weekend wore on, it became increasingly clear that, despite the event's hyper-local focus, Vermont's cheese producers are tackling a far bigger question: What will cheesemaking look like in a warming world? According to them, dairy just might be the thing that saves us all.
Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. No other work of literature of the past century, or perhaps any century, feels quite so much a vivid breathing thing – ironically, since it is so consumed with death. Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis.
Friendships are like marriage: they require give and take and hard work. This book shows how glorious the benefits are when we give of ourselves to others, expecting only friendship in return.
Yes, two progressive publishing houses are a small thing indeed on this increasingly unnerving planet of ours. Still, think of this as the modern capitalist version of burning books, though as with those fossil fuel companies, it is, in reality, more like burning the future. Think of us as increasingly damaged goods on an increasingly damaged planet.
In another world, these might be considered truly terrible acts. In ours, they simply happen, it seems, without much comment or commentary even though silence is ultimately the opposite of what any decent book or book publisher stands for.
Our Missing Hearts is saddled by grief. But it is also propelled by hope, less a grim prognosis of the future than an impassioned call for a full reckoning with the past.
In this sense, Ng's narrative does borrow one important element from dystopian fiction — the idea of memory erasure, imposed by a repressive regime and borne by individuals cut off from their cultural legacy.
If you’ve ever taken a psych class, you may have seen an instructor hold a blank piece of paper up in front of the room, then wad it into a ball, the whole flat 8.5-by-11 sheet made compact inside a fist. The point of this demonstration is to show why human brain tissue is crumpled rather than smooth. It allows greater surface area to fit in a small space: more brain in the skull. You might also note how the opposite corners of the page can now touch. More folds mean more connections, more speed, more power — a good metaphor for poems. Verse (from the Latin for “turn,” as in turn of the plow) creates more folds. Lines call attention to the surface area of language, the words that brush against one another as they file into their pews, not just the words next to them but above and below them too. Lines accordion more meaning into narrow margins. “This spiral staircase/made of words,” Jorie Graham writes self-referentially in the poem “Root End” — a helical shape being the most efficient use of space when you need to climb a story.
Elizabeth McCracken’s novel The Hero of This Book marks a moment in time, summer 2019, “the summer before the world stopped.” The book is occasioned by a solo trip its narrator takes to London from her home in the United States, ten months after the death of her mother, Natalie Jacobson McCracken. We learn the mother’s name—which resembles the author’s—in a footnote near the end of the book, which jettisons conventions of genre and humorously combines the cadences of memoir with claims of fictionality. Though purportedly a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and the author of numerous publications in that genre, McCracken’s narrator resists being called a “novelist” now writing a “memoir.” The stories we tell while grieving tend to be too complicated and contradictory to classify anyway. It is enough, McCracken’s book argues, just to be a person with memories.
For an increasing number of people, reading means listening to streamed audio files through a smartphone. The audiobook has a long history, of course, but what is new is its commercial impact: For the first time, audiobooks can no longer be seen as a niche market. Now, the audio medium competes with print books and ebooks for the attention of book readers in a large and diverse range of national book markets. Most people in the book trade believe that the audiobook share will continue to grow in the coming years. According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), 8.1 percent of the revenues of the total US book trade in 2021 came from audiobooks. This figure can be compared to ebooks (11.6 percent), but also to change over time: in fact, it is audiobooks—in contrast to all other book formats—that have shown a rapid and steady increase over the past ten years.
No plant-based milk has been hotter than oat milk. Driven in large part by the success of Oatly, a Swedish company that invented oat milk in the early 1990s, the fervor for oat milk has been so intense that the brand has faced shortages throughout 2021, as more and more milk drinkers converted to the product. But now, following Oatly’s first major recall and a turning of the tide of popular opinion, the oat milk backlash has arrived.
Once he turned to songwriting, Cohen set fiction aside. Perhaps it was a purely strategic decision, or maybe he ultimately understood that it was not his form. If the pieces gathered in “A Ballet of Lepers” testify to this, they nonetheless offer nascent glimmers of his inimitable artistic vision: intimate yet aloof, trembling with weakness even as it aches toward wisdom.
Near the beginning of “Deliverance”, a horror film of 1972 about four men from Atlanta who go canoeing in the backwoods of north Georgia, one of the city types takes a guitar from his car and trades melodies with a dead-eyed boy on a porch, who strums a banjo. The locals and visitors smile and dance, but things soon turn sour. What follows helped convince a generation of urbanites to holiday at the beach. It also solidified the banjo’s image as a totem of white rural culture.
Kristina Gaddy’s beguiling new book aims to subvert that reputation by excavating the banjo’s history. Her thesis is simple and well-supported. The banjo was created in America by enslaved Africans, and for much of its history was integral to African-American culture, celebration, spirituality and resistance.
Nothing of that old house was square.
Shut doors were framed with triangles of air.
As soon as I picked up the parcel, my heart sank. The sheer weight of it gave the game away. Already I could unhappily picture myself struggling to hold it in one hand without straining a wrist while standing on the Piccadilly Line.
I’d ordered it after coming across a couple of positive references to it in quick succession: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Written in the 1980s, set in the 1870s, it’s a cowboy story that won a Pulitzer in its day and still has its enthusiasts. I just hadn’t thought to check its length.
Because light-induced illusions can be created in controlled environments, they might help researchers to discover the origin of hallucinations. The fact that flickering lights on closed eyes causes visions of colours, shapes and movement is "one of the oldest findings in neuroscience", says Anil Seth, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and the lead scientist on the immersive art-and-science project Dreamachine.
Created as a tool to capture the diversity of the public's inner minds by using strobing lights to induce hallucinations, the Dreamachine has been touring the UK during 2022. It is based on a little-known invention from 1959 by the same name. With the promise of being able to experience psychedelic hallucinations without drugs, I ventured in.
“What’s in her bag?” It’s a standard question posed in women’s magazines and on YouTube. The answers are meant to give readers an intimate glimpse into a chic individual’s world: what lip gloss she uses, what novel she’s reading. In her brilliantly berserk third novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” Lucy Ives utilizes this conceit to unique effect. If we imagine, that is, that the bag in question belonged to an obsessive, freshly jilted graduate student, “nearly insane with doubt,” awash in stoner wonderment and frustrated literary ambition.
Like any encounter with a fortuneteller, it's best to put your trust in Kalyna's hands and let her build a story around the two of you. Parts of it will speak to your own specific fears and desires; other aspects will be entertaining fictions, until you discover the devastating shard of truth within. And even if you know from the start that Kalyna is a swindler, she'll still surprise you (and even herself) by seeing something that no one else can.
Since his death in 1965, Winston Churchill has become a figure of such veneration, in Conservative circles, that it is sometimes difficult to see beyond this overwhelming aspect of his legacy. Adored by Margaret Thatcher, and still a regular point of reference for those nostalgic for Britain’s great days of Empire and of victory in Europe, his legacy increasingly attracts criticism and even hostility from those who reject that world view; and as Andrew Liddle points out in his fast-paced and fascinating new book about Churchill in Scotland, the growing polarisation of views about Churchill – not least around the debate on Scottish independence – tends to obscure and even misrepresent the memorable complexity and shifting allegiances of his early political life.
Another year of rain and terrible air, then I see the street again —
After the first lockdown in March 2020, I went looking for book sales data. I’m a data scientist and a literary scholar, and I wanted to know what books people were turning to in the early days of the pandemic for comfort, distraction, hope, guidance. How many copies of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven were being sold in COVID-19 times compared to when the novel debuted in 2014? And what about Giovanni Boccaccio’s much older—14th-century—plague stories, The Decameron? Were people clinging to or fleeing from pandemic tales during peak coronavirus panic? You might think, as I naively did, that a researcher would be able to find out exactly how many copies of a book were sold in certain months or years. But you, like me, would be wrong.
I went looking for book sales data, only to find that most of it is proprietary and purposefully locked away. What I learned was that the single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry. And I learned that this is a big problem.
Who would have thought about God as an apt topic for an essay about mathematics? Don’t worry, the following discussion is still solidly grounded within an intelligible scientific framework. But the question of whether God can be proved mathematically is intriguing. In fact, over the centuries, several mathematicians have repeatedly tried to prove the existence of a divine being. They range from Blaise Pascal and René Descartes (in the 17th century) to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in the 18th century) to Kurt Gödel (in the 20th century), whose writings on the subject were published as recently as 1987. And probably the most amazing thing: in a preprint study first posted in 2013 an algorithmic proof wizard checked Gödel’s logical chain of reasoning—and found it to be undoubtedly correct. Has mathematics now finally disproved the claims of all atheists?
If the title of Kevin Lambert’s Querelle of Roberval rings any bells, it should. It’s a direct homage to Jean Genet and his 1947 novel, Querelle of Brest – a work perhaps best known in the non-Francophone world for a 1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder film adaptation starring Brad Davis.
The Montreal writer takes the tribute further, too: Shifting the scene from a port city in Brittany to a logging town in northern Quebec, reimagining the original’s vision but respecting his essence, he shows himself a worthy heir to Genet’s project of giving the public morality of the day a thoroughly subversive seeing-to.
For 70 summers, children have boated to an island in the Adirondack wilderness to seek out a cluster of tiny wooden houses and leave messages for the fairies who are said to live there. Sometimes the fairies write back — on slips of birch bark, tucked into the crevice of a log for children to find and exult over. The adult go-betweens behind the letters can’t resist feeding the children’s faith that the natural world reciprocates their interest.
Of course, they don’t believe in fairies themselves. In “Looking for the Hidden Folk,” the cultural historian Nancy Marie Brown asks: Why not? “Why should disbelief be our default? Why should we deride our sense of wonder? Why do we allow our world to be disenchanted?”
Ninety per cent of the artists Mir initially approached told her to get lost, suspicious of how their savagings might be used and unwilling to revisit pieces that had hurt them. “Half the YBAs were weirdly humourless about it,” she says. Yet as the project progressed, more and more artists decided to share their terrible notices. They included such good sports as Robert Longo, who contributed a 1989 review by Roberta Smith of the New York Times which he said “single-handedly derailed my life”. The piece is headlined: “Once a Wunderkind, Now Robert ‘Long Ago’?”
Think about it, a piece of plain string,
any length, a piece of hemp, a strand of
Three years later I published my second book, a novel. My original beloved editor came back to the publishing house to run a new imprint. I was sent on a small book tour of Cape Cod, where my novel took place. This was the first time I met them, the book dealers, men who showed up with bags of books for a writer to sign, the dust jackets folded into mylar covers. I’m a former public librarian; I have always loved a mylar cover, nearly to the level of kink. The dealers brought with them my new book, The Giant’s House, but they also had copies of Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry. Hardcover; the book hadn’t made it into paperback, wouldn’t for some years.
“It’s a first edition,” the book dealers told me proudly, and I had to break it to them: “They’re all first editions.”
For all their ferocious gravitational abilities and their unholy exotic natures, black holes are surprisingly simple. If I give you two black holes with the exact same mass, charge, and spin, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. If I swapped their places without you looking, you wouldn’t know that I did it.
This also means that when you see a fully formed black hole, you have no idea what made it. Any combination of mass squeezed into a sufficiently small volume could have done the job. It could have been the ultra-dense core of a dying star. It could have been an extremely dense litter of adorable kittens squashed into oblivion.
As long as the mass, charge, and spin are the same, the history is irrelevant. No information about the original material that created the black hole survives. Or does it?
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster. Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell. Lobster is tasty, but I ate too much of it as a kid. My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls. Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”
When I think of Maine cuisine, I think of red hot dogs in spongy Nissen rolls, slow-baked beans (with a big chunk of pork fat thrown in), steamed fresh peas with bacon, whoopie pies, plus macaroni and cheese (often with lobster bits, if there were some left over). I think of creamed salt cod on mashed potatoes—a favorite of my toothless grandfather—and haddock baked in milk, which was the only fish my brother would eat. I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.
At the entrance to the Planet Word museum in Washington, D.C., stands a remarkable sculpture designed to resemble a weeping willow. However, instead of leaves, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s tree has tiny speakers drooping from each branch that play 360 different spoken languages, creating a deliberate Tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices that immerses visitors in our shared human need for expression.
When you finish Celeste Ng’s stunning new dystopian novel, “Our Missing Hearts,” you’ll understand why this sculpture comes to mind. The simplest way to put it without spoiling anything is to say that at the core of Ng’s narrative — a 12-year-old boy’s epic quest to find his missing mother — is the all-important question of how we communicate.
Parents of youth hockey players sometimes joke that, thanks to the sport’s intense early-morning weekend schedule, we belong to the International Church of Hockey. And in “The Winners,” the third installment in the hockey-centric Beartown trilogy, Fredrik Backman takes competition, friendship, politics and town rivalry to appropriately biblical proportions.
“Through much of history, there was no clear distinction between philosophical ethics and ‘self-help,’” writes Kieran Setiya early in “Life Is Hard.” Ancient philosophers were interested in what makes a good life and a just society, and in the virtues it takes to pursue both — but these central questions of human thriving now occupy the margins of the modern academic discipline. A professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Setiya is neither stranger nor enemy to arcane scholarly investigations. But in this book, he searches for “a philosophy that can speak more intimately to life,” one that will address the struggles just about all people face.
In this newly egalitarian cultural field, one might expect a critical reappraisal of Donna Tartt: a Donnaissance, if you will. After all, her novels — though marked by lapidary language and sprawling narrative scope — all contend with genre in significant ways. The Secret History reconfigures the conventions of the classic whodunit, turning it, famously, into a whydunit. The Little Friend (2002) draws heavily from “girl detective” fiction like the Nancy Drew series and Harriet the Spy. The Goldfinch is indebted to popular film, with one character described as “some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven, a lazy, sated gangster with not much to lose.” In other words, she writes literary takes on popular genres, purportedly the essence of the genre turn, and yet, somehow, she is omitted from this new canon as well. Tartt is not grouped with Whitehead and Egan any more than she is with Roth and DeLillo. Again, a look at the MLA Bibliography is illustrative: Whitehead returns over 500 peer-reviewed results, Egan almost 3,000. Tartt — though her career is longer — returns, again, a mere 80. Where authoritative old-school critics like Prose and James Wood regard Tartt with open hostility, her reception from the avant-garde genre-forward crowd might be summed up as awkward silence. Clearly, then, there are two ways to do the genre turn: the “right” way, and Tartt’s way.
In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.
“The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” says Nunn. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.”
“Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice,” McCracken warns in the first chapter. But the irony is, her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down. Is this book a novel or is it a memoir? It matters not at all. With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.
So The Hero of This Book is a hall of mirrors, a lightly fictionalized memoir that interrogates genre and the act of writing even as it strives to conjure up McCracken's beloved mother in all her splendid idiosyncrasy in order to prevent her from "evanescing." It features the snappy prose we've come to love in inventive novels like The Giant's House and Bowlaway, and in McCracken's most recent collection of profoundly hilarious stories, The Souvenir Museum.
Have you noticed lately that everything is shit? Things were very shitty the year before last, they became even shittier last year, and now everything is just indescribably shit. As a species, we’ve been stuck with this aspect of the human condition for around 300,000 years. But the question of how to respond to it intellectually and emotionally arises with fresh urgency in each new generation. And in the face of each fresh piece of shit.
Traditionally, one role of philosophy has been to aid us in this task. Friar Lawrence advises Romeo, banished from his city and the arms of his girl, to sip “Adversity’s sweet milke, Philosophie.” However, over the past couple of centuries, with the transformation of philosophy into an academic discipline, its connection with self-help has largely been severed. The aim of Kieran Setiya’s new book Life Is Hard is to recapture philosophy’s ancient mission of “helping us find our way” in the face of life’s afflictions.
When Constance Wu muses in “Making a Scene” that “true self-awareness requires context,” the 40-year-old actress is essentially posing the thesis of her illuminating new memoir. A gifted performer hounded by a diva reputation, Wu isn’t afraid to portray herself as volatile, cruel or conceited in enthralling essays that range from wistful recollections to uncomfortable confessions.
Go to New York.
Stay with your friends.
Meet with your friends.
Drink with your friends.
Marijuana and cocaine with your friends.
Nobu with your friends and farm-to-table Chinese with your
friends.
In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small, red-hulled sailboat tossed and rolled, at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest. The boat’s mast was sheared away, its yellow sails sunk deep in the sea. Amid the wreckage of the cabin, Susie Goodall sloshed through water seeping in from the deck, which had cracked when a great wave somersaulted the boat end over end. She was freezing, having been lashed by ocean, rain, and wind. Her hands were raw and bloody. Except for the boat, her companion and home for the 15,000 miles she’d sailed over the past five months, Goodall was alone.
The 29-year-old British woman had spent three years readying for this voyage. It demanded more from her than she could have imagined. She loved the planning of it, rigging her boat for a journey that might mean not stepping on land for nearly a year. But she was unprepared for the attention it drew—for the fact that everyone wanted a piece of her story.
The French, by and large, do not eat standing up, though there are a few exceptions to this largely unspoken rule: the quignon of a warm baguette, torn off and consumed as the loaf is transported home. Petit gris snails, which, in Occitanie, are grilled over vinewood, flambéed with lard, skewered on metal picks, and shuttled straight into the mouth, chased with cold rosé. And then there's socca, the three-ingredient chickpea flatbread of Nice, destined to be consumed hot and fresh as you wend your way through a local market.
Unlike wheat-and-egg-based crêpes or buckwheat galettes, which hail from northwestern Brittany, socca begins with a base of chickpea flour, water, and olive oil. Ladled onto an olive oil-greased copper pan as wide as the socca-maker's wingspan will allow, it's baked in a wood-fired oven, emerging crisp on the bottom and as tender as a good Yorkshire pudding within. And according to Niçois culinary historian Alex Benvenuto, it's a specialty best eaten "seasoned heavily with pepper and very hot, and, of course, with the fingers."
Run and Hide almost feels intentionally unpleasant to read, as if its author is anxious about the ease with which ideas travel through space in the Internet age and wants to remind us that deep engagement with the problems of the world should feel like a bit of a slog. Conversely, he mocks self-described progressives who short circuit if they have to read (or write) anything longer than 180 characters. In a hilarious scene near the end of the novel, Mishra invites us into a London party that Alia and Arun attend. Milling among the invitees, Arun meets an academic who “periodically announces a long and necessary break from Twitter to work on his book, only to sign back in a few days later, in order to, he claims, alert his followers to a new and important atrocity, usually of a racial nature: the latest one is the persecution of Meghan Markle by the British press.”
The novel inhabits an emotionally rich terrain, where past failures shine light on future possibilities, where strength comes from vulnerability and where chance challenges choices.
I don’t know what made me look you up, this many years later.
We weren’t friends—at best I may have merely noticed you;
at worst I may have laughed when the others said you were weird
and that you ate paste.
If you are a member of the Asian diaspora in America, the push-pull around foodstuffs may be a tension you recognize. On the one hand, there is the desire to maintain a connection to the ancestral land. On the other, a sense that too much weight is placed on food as a source of meaning and identity. There’s an impulse to share and celebrate all the culinary wonders of an inheritance and to bristle when some wellness influencer mispronounces turmeric or khichdi.
“The English Understand Wool” is a perfect introduction to the anarchic pleasures of DeWitt’s fiction. Once again, using the obtuse ratiocination of her characters, DeWitt aims at nothing less than expanding readerly consciousness, gesturing toward a world of untapped possibility freed from convention. Why go to school if you’re not going to learn anything? If the law is stupid, flout it! Don’t let the bastards get you down!
In a Cohen song, we would tolerate and perhaps even enjoy this, because there would be a killer tune, and the voice delivering the beating would sound like that of a world expert on compassion. Stripped of the troubadour’s glamour, it appears – as Cohen clearly intended – far more ugly than the hapless Cagely. But it’s the taint of bitterness that is most offputting. In order to become the truly heroic man I saw in 2008, Cohen had first of all to win the love of those countless audiences, and then overcome his need for it. Here are his first, fascinating struggles to repulse and to endear.
"Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren't," Elizabeth McCracken writes in her funny, perceptive novel "The Hero of This Book."
McCracken chronicles a trip the unnamed narrator took to London in 2019, the year after her mother died. The narrator, who has much in common with McCracken, visits tourist attractions and walks around the city. The narrator is frequently joined by a second narrative presence, who McCracken calls "the author," who comments on the story. Both reminisce about her remarkable mother, who loved London, from its wheelchair-accessible black cabs to its abundant theater offerings.
What do a beetle’s backside, a lotus leaf and a giraffe’s leg have in common? As science journalist Kristy Hamilton explains in her delightful first book, all three have inspired human engineers to solve complex problems.