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.