The life of the editor Bob Gottlieb, at a spry 91 years old, is nowadays largely limited to a single room on the second floor of his East 48th Street townhouse — by choice, not necessity. He can bound up Second Avenue just fine to the diner that he considers an extension of his home, where the waitress knows he takes his chocolate milkshakes extra thick. But everything he needs, his library and his pencils, is right here, so why go farther? To receive guests like this one, he didn’t even have to put on shoes or tame the gull’s-wing sweep of his silver hair. Burbling away in a leather club chair in his book-lined office (they are arranged according to a system, he says with a point to his head, that’s “up here”), with piles of more books on the floor and in the corners, beneath giant MGM publicity posters of Marion Davies, Clark Gable, and Norma Shearer from the early 1930s, he is a man in his element. “I don’t want to go anywhere because there’s nowhere I want to go,” he says in his fluty register. “My life is very calm, just the way I like.”
One of these miracles is the mountain guide who has been following our footsteps to the summit. He makes an emergency call as soon as he realises the tracks have abruptly disappeared close to the cliff’s edge. I spend at least five hours unconscious in the deep snow amassed by the wind at the bottom of the cliff before a rescue helicopter flies me to a hospital in the city of Sion, 40 miles away.
I come close to freezing to death, but the doctors are amazed by how little damage my body suffers from the fall. No vital organ has been injured. My legs are unbroken, my skull intact. The diagnosis is a broken wrist, a broken vertebra and several broken ribs. Erhard is dead. The helicopter also transported the body of the man I loved. He was found lying in the snow next to me, still tied to my waist. I never realised that he had been right there, within touching distance.
It is not the last time I will fall.
Almost everything was as usual at the Sbarro in Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan on Saturday night — the rumble of the 1 train could be heard and the aroma of greasy pizza was thick in the air. But something out of the ordinary was taking place at the pizzeria, part of a chain typically disdained by New Yorkers: a night of erotic readings.
“To be clear, this is not at all ironic,” said Matt Starr, one of the event’s organizers. “We wanted to take something that people typically do or read in private and bring it into a public, shared setting.”
From the demon who appears as a fearsome figure hurling stones, gouging out valleys and heaping up hills, or as a sinister black-clad huntsman with his fiery-eyed hounds howling across Bodmin Moor, to ideas about how a woman’s wit is better than a man’s when it comes to besting the lord of darkness, Harte takes his reader on a devilishly entertaining tour of England and its richly storied landscape.
At a time when humanity is destroying natural abundance and failing to understand its own diversity, a book like Imbler’s is a valuable gift. Their creativity and candour bridge the empathy gap by demanding imaginative participation. We are invited into unseen worlds where the survivors of 4bn years of evolution and all the messiness of life “glitter, together, in the dark”.
For White Rock historian Derek Hayes (Iron Road West) the impressive, laudable result was Incredible Crossings. A wealth of absorbing photographs alongside an enthused chronicle about an integral part of the province’s “critical infrastructure” that millions have passed over everyday but might not give much thought to, Hayes’ handsome book offers innumerable reasons to pay closer attention to bridges — not to mention, tunnels and inland ferries — in all their assorted shapes, colours and sizes.