It is impossible to talk about Salman Rushdie’s work without acknowledging that he is that Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie who went into hiding because of the 1989 fatwa over his book “The Satanic Verses,” eventually reentered public life, big-time, and was brutally attacked onstage last August. Rushdie is a novelist whose writing is prolific, exuberant, extravagant, magical, expansive, mythological, brilliant — and he is also the man who has lived under decades of threats that are all too real.
As he releases a new novel, “Victory City,” Rushdie has returned to seclusion, declining media requests. He has not made a public appearance since the attack that left him gravely injured. Rushdie’s absence speaks volumes. How can we tell the dancer from the dance? The writing and the writer are one.
Rushdie knows a lot—too much—about backlashes and their horrors. It would be easy to read the antics of his post-fatwa novels as pure defiance: If he stops playing the jester, the terrorists win. There’s some truth to that, and in the face of a deadly threat that curtailed his freedom of movement for more than three decades, his staunch drollery has been remarkable. But he was a clown from the beginning. His verbal excess, his vamping, his characters’ exaggerated traits—his general shenanigans—are parts of a whole, a commedia dell’arte performance drawing on his personal suffering, yes, but also on the great dramas of our time, in which he played a role only because he was forced to. Chief among these dramas, for Rushdie, are the struggle between authoritarianism and noisy, messy democracy, and the efforts of the humorless and hierarchical to quash irreverence and equality. No matter what else is happening, in the theater of this author’s mind, the masks go on and are taken off. He stands in the wings, ready with the next one. He mugs for the audience. Points are made, but lightly, lightly. When you think about it, Rushdie’s novels are a miracle. May the goddess grant him strength to write another one.
As the years went by and the magazine grew fatter and glossier, there was only one little problem: the typeface on my essays became smaller and smaller and increasingly hard to find between the Jimmy Choo ads. When I would ask a good friend who had been a New Yorker editor for decades and then the editor of the Times Book Review to read a piece I was particularly pleased with, he would come back to me and say that he had looked through the magazine and couldn’t find it. “Too many ads,” he declared. On the one occasion he took the time to actually read through the whole magazine he was impressed and wondered why he hadn’t known how good the writing was before.
Of course it’s not just ads that have changed magazines forever. The larger problem for women’s magazines, and magazines in general, is that money has moved from print to online in a way that has changed reading habits dramatically.
So until someone digs up an earlier example, the best working theory of why designers and layout editors have been filling pages with a garbled version of a 1st century BCE treatise that says, in so many words, “No pain, no gain,” for 60-odd years is that some marketing exec at Letraset tasked with generating placeholder text for an ad heroically declined to hit the pub with her colleagues and reached instead for her 1914 Loeb facing translation of De Finibus, then settled down to the hard, thankless task of absolutely butchering it.
Mourning is important to every human life that gets as far as adulthood. That is because every such life is framed and inflected by the unpreventable and irretrievable loss of everything that contributes to its flourishing: love, health, meaning, happiness, accomplishment, wealth, beauty, and eventually itself. Pascal writes that the last act is bloody no matter how fine the rest of the play, and that the end is always the same: the grave. The situation is made worse by the fact that the grave opens not only for you but also for everyone and everything you have ever loved. Christians, and some others, have the consolation of hope. But the losses are nevertheless unavoidable, and mourning is one of the few things we can do in the face of them—perhaps the only thing we can do that does face them.
But what, exactly, is mourning, and how does doing it well contribute to a fully human life? These are good questions, addressed too rarely.
The challenge of pizza is to cook each element to peak deliciousness at once. When ice and shipping are added to the equation, that becomes even more complicated. Fresh mozzarella becomes clumpy, tomatoes dry out, crusts become soggy.
New freezing technology and affordable access to express shipping have made it possible for more options to slide into freezers. But they’re not coming out of frozen-food factories owned by industry giants like Nestlé or Rich’s. These new pies are wood- or coal-fired, hand-pulled and made with organic and Italian ingredients.
Now, in a political period not dissimilar to the chaos of the 1960s, the opportunity to change the tone of political comedy is upon us. And the activist-comedy of that era can be our new blueprint. We no longer need it to spread information or "make fun of" news cycles that are already absurd. Political comedians on the left have the opportunity to "motivate us to be part of the resistance." Rather than acting as journalists, sharing information in a palatable way, they push conversation forward. Stewart himself has made this shift a bit, with his activism for 9/11 first responders. But now the new voices of liberal comedy can pave the way.
A Country of Eternal Light functions as a window into its protagonist’s life, spanning many years, multiple countries, two children, several grandchildren, heartbreak, holidays and a fatal diagnosis. First-person present-tense is the perfect space from which to recall the past with clarity, without neglecting hindsight. The chronologically fragmented retrospective structure makes this journey all the more intense for the reader, who is able to witness the protagonist’s life from outside an embodied perspective.
Yet that’s the problem in a nutshell. When I read, I don’t want less but rather more. I want to immerse, whether in a piece of reporting about Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell or a novel or a book of poems. I want to engage with the world by, paradoxically, removing myself from it, for however long it takes.
I don’t read, in other words, as a client, or even a consumer, but rather as a partner. As every dedicated reader understands, ours is an active art. “The unread story,” Ursula K. Le Guin once observed, “is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.”
Only a reader, she is saying, can make a piece of writing come to life.
Dizz Tate’s debut novel, Brutes, opens with a disappearance: Sammy Liu-Lou, daughter of a famous televangelist and an enigmatic rebel with shaved hair. When her mother discovers her empty bed, one question echoes around this fictitious Florida town, “tickling” the surface of the lake that lies ominously undisturbed at its centre: “Where is she?”
Somewhat infuriatingly, Sammy is to remain a mystery, since this novel is not about her, but the gang of eighth-grade girls hunched behind binoculars at their bedroom windows, ogling her – and all other residents’ – every move. These are Tate’s “brutes”, who together make up the book’s sardonic yet vulnerably naive first-person plural narrator. Sammy’s vanishing is just one diversion in what reads like a literary house of mirrors, deliberately only scratching the surface of the dubious (and occasionally supernatural) carryings-on in this swampy, theme park-adjacent landscape.
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism.
This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today’s China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period – violent nightmare or socialist utopia? – still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.
Lucy, when I die,
I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes
of Virginia Beach.
This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?
Play kitchens are no longer the brightly-colored, rounded-edge plastic toys of yesterday; they are now, thanks to companies like Ikea and undeniably chic miniatures of decidedly adult kitchens, complete with faux-subway tile and little fake gas burners.
What do love letters look like today? Has everyone’s access to the spurious democratic forms of self-presentation and confession on social media rendered the truly personal and private redundant – weird even? A young friend of mine tells me that no one she knows really writes love letters like what I’m talking about but that “even if it’s a text or a DM or whatever, it’s still a love letter, I guess, and you know it when you see it”.
These shifting aesthetics can tell us a lot about our culture's changing relationship with domestic performance — and the increasing pressure to have a "trophy kitchen," even if only a plastic one.
This unusual and relentlessly self-reflexive approach allows Van Booy to tell not only the story of the doomed Little, but also to tell the bigger story of how stories are told — their inherently incomplete yet collaborative nature. As Little explains, “Through the act of reading this novel, it’s actually you telling the story” because “when you see words, what’s imagined comes from your experience of life, not mine.”
“I wrote this book because I wanted to dream up a more hopeful world,” says Newitz in their acknowledgments. They have indeed gifted us a vibrant, quirky vision of endless potential earned by heroism, love and wit.
Street food sellers, hawkers, costermongers – familiar in the capital well into the 20th Century, affectionately caricatured in the popular prints and ballads known as the Cries of London, yet just as often marginalised as a desperate and sometimes dangerous underclass.
By contrast, Charlie Taverner’s engaging Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London puts street sellers at the centre of his narrative, convincingly arguing for their position at the “core of the city’s food system” over some three centuries.
The recent chaos at Twitter has left many communities on the platform wondering—what happens if we wake up tomorrow and the lights are off for good? One such community is “Book Twitter,” made up of writers, editors, agents, booksellers, publishers, literary organizations, and everyone in between. Recently, notable authors like John Green and Sarah MacLean have joined other prominent voices in either deleting or indefinitely locking their accounts, leaving many fearful that a slow bleed of influential players will eventually lead to the community’s demise—if Twitter’s code doesn’t blow up first.
The thought of Book Twitter going up in a puff of smoke because of one entitled man is upsetting to many people, myself included. In the words of author and writing coach Paulette Perhach, “It feels like the castle we made is being swept off the table by a billionaire's tantrum.” To get to the heart of what’s at stake, let’s look at the role Book Twitter plays in shaping the publishing process.
After 50 years of work on a theory of everything, we’re left with approximate theories that seem so tantalizingly close to explaining all of physics… and yet always out of reach. Work continues on finding the underlying dualities that link the different versions of string theory, trying to suss out the mysterious M-theory that might underlie them all. Improvements to perturbation theory and approximation schemes provide some hope for making a breakthrough to link the dimensional structure of the extra dimensions to predictable physics. Routes around the damage caused by the LHC’s lack of evidence for supersymmetry continue to be laid.
In response to our inability to choose which Calabi-Yau manifold corresponds to our Universe—and more importantly, why our Universe has that manifold rather than any of the other ones—some string theorists appeal to what you might call the landscape. They argue that all possible configurations of compact dimensions are realized, each one with its own unique universe and set of physical laws, and we happen to live in this one because life would be impossible in most or all of the others. That’s not the strongest argument to come out of physics, but I’ll save a dissection of the idea for another day.
Writing down one's observations inevitably causes the observer to pay closer attention to the circumstances being observed, and often from this scrutiny comes a change in consciousness. Such is the simple yet powerful premise of Alba de Céspedes' novel "Forbidden Notebook," in which protagonist Valeria Cossati, a lower-middle-class housewife living in Rome after World War II, begins to do precisely that in a nondescript black diary she purchases illegally one Sunday morning at the tobacconist's.
“The Faraway World” is a collection about the Latin American diaspora, but it’s also one that proves how Engel, like one of her characters, is capable of noticing that between any two people “a look reveals more than a fingerprint.”
This approach, in which short chapters incorporate memories from childhood, adolescence and adulthood alongside one another to suggest resonances across a span of years and kilometres, reflects a conception of time that is key to Thunig’s memoir. “As Indigenous peoples we are raised to understand time as circular,” they write. “Within a circular understanding of life: time, energy and generations coexist.”
As Blaisdell confesses in his conclusion to Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: “I have found myself in the midst of writing this biography sometimes reading Chekhov’s publication record like an accountant.” But this almost stolid intrepid reading of Chekhov’s daily productions is what makes this book so pleasurable. It’s the sort of book that dedicated readers rarely find, one that doesn’t presume to teach us about Chekhov so much as simply enjoy him. It is like reading along with a fellow lover of Chekhov, attentive to the nuances of the life behind the work and yet never absorbed by anything but Chekhov’s inexhaustible affection for the odd, brave, ridiculous, grotesque, noble, brutal, and always marvelously understandable people he knows so well.
It’s difficult to talk with Martin Riker and not feel hopeful. Not so much about the world; both of us are likely too old to presume to know what might come of society, the planet, human beings. But talking with him, and reading his new book, “The Guest Lecture,” lit me up in thrilling ways about all the possibilities still alive — at least for books.
Then again, books and life, ideas and the concrete, the imaginative and the practical, are not opposites for Riker or for his protagonist, Abby. “There’s a William Carlos Williams quote,” says Riker, speaking from his home in St. Louis, where he teaches writing at Washington University. “Something to the effect of, ‘Only the imagination can save us’. … As a young man, I wanted to tattoo it on my arm. But I decided that it needs to mean something practical. It can’t mean something just idealistic.”
The Literary Supplement of The Times came into being on January 17, 1902, a few days before the first anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria. It was conceived as a convenience, a bearer of excess baggage from the overloaded Times—“a makeshift.” The idea was to find a place for the increasing numbers of book reviews, with their accompanying column-length advertisements, now clogging up the pages of the newspaper. With a busy parliamentary session in prospect, the management wished to keep space free for debates about the conduct of the war in South Africa and related matters, such as the construction of the original concentration camps—an innovation of which The Times disapproved. Casting back in 1930, the TLS’s editor Bruce Richmond found it “almost a shock to look at the first number with its hesitating announcement that ‘During the ensuing session of Parliament’ a supplement dealing with books will be published”—during that session but not beyond. It is easy to assume now that continuation was certain from the start but, in fact, the Lit Supp, child of 1902, hadn’t a licence to survive into 1903.
When the parliamentary session closed, it was expected that the makeshift would close with it. Thanks to the manager of The Times, Charles Moberly Bell, however, the Supplement was discreetly steered into a second year. In his letter of 1930 to Mrs. Moberly Bell, Richmond remembered how it staggered past the final week of Parliament, “when your husband . . . immersed in graver troubles, seemed to have forgotten to stop it.
There are other luthiers with expertise in instruments from the Italian craftsman’s golden period, from 1700 to 1725, but master violin restorers are rare — around 20 worldwide now — and Becker is widely regarded as the best. At 64, he has worked on more than 120 Stradivarius violins — likely more, he says, than any other living person. David Fulton, a Seattle-based former software engineer and entrepreneur who once possessed the world’s largest collection of historic Cremonese instruments (named for the city where Stradivari and other renowned Italian luthiers worked) with 28, including eight Strads, entrusted Becker to care for them. (Fulton has since started selling off the bulk of them.) “He’s probably as fine a woodworker as lives on the planet today,” says Fulton. “Without men like him, these things would have decayed into splinters long ago.”
People travel from all over the globe to hand-deliver their instruments to Becker’s office, across the street from Grant Park. (When it comes to multimillion-dollar instruments, FedEx doesn’t cut it.) Once, says Becker, Nigel Kennedy, one of the most famous solo violinists of the 1980s, flew in from England for a day just so Becker could make him a new sound post, the small dowel that sits inside the violin and transfers vibrations from front to back. “He’s like a great surgeon,” says Bell. “His work is so meticulous. It’s like constructing a sailboat inside a bottle. There’s a reason I fly here to bring him my fiddle. He’s the master.”
Yet the joys of eating alone have been documented since ancient times, and I’m happy that it’s never occurred to me to think of solo dining as anything other than an ordinary act. The history of solo dining, particularly for women, hasn’t always been welcoming, and even now there are some best practices I’ve developed to help me do it well. But for me, eating alone in a restaurant is almost meditative, even if I’m just wolfing down a plate of pasta between meetings.
A history of Italian pasta can only start here, with the legendary fettuccine Alfredo. A very simple dish, with just three ingredients, that has been wildly successful: it turns up in over 800 American cookbooks published from 1933 to the present. So why will your Italian friends tell you they’ve never heard of the stuff?
What begins as a statement of absence transforms into a positive construction of an alternate world: one that questions our inherited sense of reality and shows how much we take for granted in our everyday lives.
It is worth spending time with this book for the introduction alone. The editor, Kaveh Akbar, is an Iranian in his early 30s. He is also a recovering alcoholic whose addiction came close to claiming his life. “When I was getting sober, I found no easy prayers, no poems to sing me well,” he says. Nonetheless, he read a great deal of poetry in that time because poetry was a safe place in which he was not going to do himself injury. It was a kind of gift. Poetry freed him from the burden of selfhood. He explains this beautifully.
Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel is immense. Not because it is inordinately long – it isn’t – but because it contains almost as much as its title promises: journeys that take years, and lives that span continents; falling empires and storied cities; so many wars they blur and merge in the characters’ memories; indelible loves, unbearable losses; dreams and songs and megalomaniac delusions; witty allusions, rude jokes. By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I’ll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year.
In Ascension, Scottish writer Martin MacInnes’s ambitious third novel – his first, Infinite Ground, won the Somerset Maugham Award – is religious in just this sense. Sci-fi in the grand, world-scaling tradition, it’s concerned with first things, last things and everything in between; the messy pith of existence.
“City Under One Roof” dramatizes both the comforts and the risks of living in an insular community. By story’s end, most readers will probably agree that Point Mettier was a good place to visit, but few of us would ever want to live there.
Euclid had what we now call horror
of the infinite, that something—
anything—could simply go on &
on. The years I lived in bars were
Those “long hours” of reading and research that Callil describes dominate my working life. I’m clinically incapable of passing a second-hand bookshop—or a charity shop with a single shelf of sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks—without diving in for a quick scan of the spines. “How do you know what you’re looking for?” someone asked me recently. Certain, now-long-defunct imprints, those I’ve come to associate with a particular quality of writing, or an editor whose taste was second to none. An author’s name that doesn’t ring a bell. Or one that does. Elizabeth Mavor, for example, whose enchanting, eccentric fourth novel, A Green Equinox—the story of an antiquarian book dealer named Hero Kinoull, who first falls in love with her married lover’s wife, and then his mother—was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1973 but had been long out of print by the time I gleefully found a copy. I’d been looking for a while, especially as the handful for sale online were priced at three figures. (Incidentally, if your interest is piqued but your pockets aren’t deep, don’t despair. McNally Editions is re-issuing it later this year.)
Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting titbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.
All of which makes me lucky, in one respect. Far too often, women who present with hard-to-diagnose illnesses are told that the symptoms are no big deal, that the problem is in their head. They spend years going from doctor to doctor, in a desperate search for someone, anyone, who’s willing to help. This has not been my experience. From the first, doctors took my condition seriously, sometimes more seriously than I did. They pushed me along to the nation’s greatest experts, at the finest medical institutions. My insurance paid large sums for tests and treatments; my family and friends were patient and supportive. All the while, I was able to keep doing what needed to be done: write a book, raise a child, teach my classes.
But none of this gets around a single, stubborn fact. “You are the only person known to have this exact mutation,” Ombrello explains. “I haven’t seen any reports in reference populations of this mutation, and I don’t have anyone that I’ve had referred to me or that I’ve seen in my patient cohort that has this mutation.” In other words, I am one of a kind, and therefore a medical curiosity. Doctors often blurt out that my situation is “fascinating” before catching themselves; they’re aware that nobody really wants to be fascinating in quite this way. Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing, though, researchers are increasingly able to identify one-offs like me.
When I was growing up, my family would occasionally buy canned or boxed chicken broth, and my mom would always say, “but it’s not as good as the real thing.” The real thing being, of course, homemade: that golden, translucent, endlessly versatile nectar with tiny circles of fat shimmering on its surface.
I was raised to love this liquid, the best versions of which ensure that chicken soup tastes nuanced and complex rather than just salty. I still, as often as possible, make giant batches of homemade stock in the biggest pot I have, then freeze it for future meals. I even wrote about the virtues of homemade chicken stock in my upcoming cookbook, The Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook. But when I set about trying to explain, in the recipe’s headnote, why homemade stock was better than store-bought, I realized that I didn’t actually know. I wondered, How can two things that are supposed to be the same, taste and feel so wildly different?
Writing on the literary representation of women in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf mused that "What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact [...] but not losing sight of fiction either — that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually."
After Sappho, a brilliant debut work from Selby Wynn Schwartz, takes Woolf at her instructive word. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, the book is partly a love letter to Woolf and the female poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a work of speculative biography. It's innovatively narrated from a perspective that might be called the first person choral, levitating among multiple consciousnesses of women writers, painters and actors who channeled the spirit of Sappho in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Already a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as a co-host of The Poet Salon podcast, it’s hard to believe that Judas Goat is Gabrielle Bates’s debut collection. The two-score poems within display a sensitive and assured voice and a candid exploration of human relationships and the self via mythologies, philosophies, and vulnerable narratives. The title suggests the stakes of such an excavation: the ostensibly domesticated Judas goat guides other animals to their end yet remains free and safe—or relatively free and safe, with a reality that is far more complex. The metaphor asks a pressing question: at what price do we fit into a society that may value us only as a tool to achieve a desperate, dreadful outcome? How are we haunted by our past experiences, and how do they impact our actions, and sometimes painful inactions?
Most of us worry—maybe even obsess, if we’re being honest—about our future as we emerge from a global pandemic and continue to grapple with the threat of climate change. In Anchor, her third poetry collection, Rebecca Aronson explores these issues on both the personal and the universal level as she writes about the death of her parents; her own mortality; and, ultimately, expands her grief to include our dying planet.
While Taken touches on sensitive social fault lines, it is primarily a visceral evocation of just how hard it can be for women with ambition to succeed in a career in which they are destined to fail because of their gender. Still.
Pamela Paul and I met twice, in the same Times conference room, and on both occasions she wore a black biker jacket. She paired it with soft skirts in floral print or pink stripes: a look to suit a provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation. “A kind of writing that I don’t like to do myself is deliberately contrarian writing—like, people who are just pushing buttons and testing waters,” she told me. “That’s not my way. To my mind, the role and responsibility of a columnist is to always write what you think.”
Yet, since stepping down as editor of the Times Book Review to become an opinion columnist, early last year, Paul has produced a body of work—deliberately contrarian or not—that reliably results in buttons being pushed. Her inaugural column, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’ ” took up the question of who has “the right” to address culturally specific subject matter. For example: “Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” Paul wrote. “Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture—docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.” One representative response, by the press critic Dan Froomkin, read, “Wow. New @nytopinion columnist comes out of the gates with a straw-man panic attack on wokeism. Just what the place didn’t need.”
On our very first date, my now wife, Debbie, told me that when she turned 60, she was traveling to Antarctica to see a total eclipse of the sun. My first thought was that this was a very Caucasian ambition. Then I thought it was strange she was planning a trip 20 years in advance. I wished her well on her future adventure because I surely was not going to Antarctica, under any circumstances. Later that evening, she revealed that she was 57.
I demanded proof, and she proffered her driver’s license, which indicated that she was, indeed, telling the truth. Her unique birthday celebration was closer than I assumed, but it was still not my concern, however lovely our date was. Three years later, in June 2021, Debbie and I eloped. Because of the pandemic, the big wedding we had been planning would not be possible for the foreseeable future. Instead, our wedding was an impromptu but romantic affair in an office building in Encino, California. Five months later, near midnight on November 27, we were on a flight to Santiago, Chile, to begin a very long journey to the bottom of the world.
I made my way down there on a clear winter day. Without a soul in sight, the place felt a world away from the highway that ferries thousands between Los Angeles and Las Vegas every day.
The most striking sight at Zzyzx is Lake Tuendae, a body of water the size of a football field. Beyond, through the palm trees, the vast, ancient, crusty white lakebed reaches to the Devils Playground mountains.
Any story about identity is really a story about more than one identity—and more than one time. For example: a time before and a time after. I have written about my adoption, and the moment I realized I wasn’t white, and my marriage, and parenthood. Not long after my wife died, I wrote about carrying another time with me, the time in which she is still alive, even as I live in a time in which she is dead. I dream again and again that she is dying, instead, that we still have time left, and when I wake, it is with the sense that the only way for me to exist is if there are two of me.
No one in my family can agree on the exact moment Kraft infiltrated our Balkan home. My mother insists she never bought it, and Baba suspects my uncle was at fault somehow. Despite this unremarkable entrance, I started asking for it––even begging for it. Traditional Balkan food takes a lot of time and care to get right. Pita (a dish of phyllo dough, spinach, and feta all baked together) must be gently layered. The phyllo is handled like thousand-year-old lace in order to avoid ripping it apart. Baklava (a dessert of phyllo dough and walnut filling) involves hand-grinding walnuts, layering phyllo once again, and then soaking it all overnight in a vat of sugar syrup. Unlike these Slavic dishes, Kraft Mac and Cheese takes nine minutes, tops. While my family ran around trying to keep up multiple jobs and dealing with trauma upon trauma, the short cooking time became all the more alluring. My mother was especially gifted in the kitchen, but the task of daily feedings usually fell to my grandmother, who was often in charge of taking care of me and keeping me full.
Thinking of our pets as family occludes the deep tensions that are present throughout our lives with them. Reflecting on Pixel’s passing brought these to the fore. It made it clearer than ever that, although we can have incredibly strong bonds with animals, they are not our friends. We can value their lives intensely but when their number is up, no matter how hard it hits us, I don’t think it is the awful event the death of a fellow human is. Thinking about my relationship with Pixel shed light on our relationship to nature more widely, as well as the difficulty of seeing it for what it is, in all its splendour and cruelty.
If I start by calling Laurent Mauvignier’s “The Birthday Party” a psychological thriller, understand that this means what you probably think it means, but also something else. It means a nail-biter plot, but also a focus on characters’ interior worlds so detailed that at times I forgot there was a plot at all. It is psychological, on the one hand, and a thriller, on the other, as if the book were two books at once.
You need optimism to become an immigrant in America. Frankly, you need a lot of other things too: money, luck, employment, maybe a family connection. The protagonist in Kathryn Ma’s latest novel, “The Chinese Groove,” however, has only a few of these essentials when he leaves China and lands at his distant cousin Ted’s doorstep in San Francisco at just 18. Zheng Xue Li, or Shelley as he becomes known in the United States, has no plan, no cash and no place to stay after his two weeks at his cousin’s are up. But you’ve got to give him this: He believes in his own American dream, that anyone can get lucky if they just work hard enough.
Janet Malcolm famously despised biography. While she found journalism, with its mandate “to notice small things”, deliciously congenial, she thought biographical research led only to an “insufferable familiarity”, the fat volumes resulting from it being little more than processing plants in which “experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables”. As for autobiography, that great literary craze of the late 20th century, it is misnamed. As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What does this or that story prove? The answer is: almost nothing, in the end. The gold is “dross”.
That thing you just said: I was editing it in my head as you spoke. And that email you sent me earlier today: I edited that, too. Sorry, I don’t think less of you. It’s because I’m a copyeditor. My mind just sort of does it automatically. PowerPoint slides, interstate billboards, restaurant menus, church bulletins: We live in a world of typos, and it’s my job to see them. The measure of a book’s quality, they say, lies in what’s left on the cutting-room floor. Copyeditors are the ones employed to do the cutting.
“I thought, I’m afraid of a stupid needle,” she said. “And these animals have to deal with this all the time.” She reflected on how her newfound freedom, and quite possibly her health, came at the expense of animals suffering or dying to develop the vaccines.
Merely being grateful for those animals seemed insufficient; Ms. Strohacker wanted to give something tangible in return. A little online research returned the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s sanctuary fund, which supports the care of retired lab animals. She made a small donation. “To give thanks was the very least I could do,” Ms. Strohacker said.
This is local cuisine: a cultural object that is the result of the societal conditions and history on the ground in a particular place, not the construct of a top-down, international food conglomerate. Nothing bums me out quite like seeing a Sysco truck pulling up to a restaurant, knowing that the same shitty foodstuffs available in cafeterias and airports the world over will soon be sold here, too. The mini hot dogs of Troy, New York, are not healthy or trendy or even the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten, but they do represent a little act of rebellion against a domineering monoculture, against disordered diet trends, against painstakingly styled TikTok food. Plus, they’re just really cute.
My preparations for each Lunar New Year begin in the bathroom. On Lunar New Year’s Eve, I turn on the hot water and let the air fill with steam. With my bare toes curled against the chilly floor, I scissor off a lock of hair, clip my nails, and discard these symbolic crumbs of bad luck into the trash. Then I get in the shower, where I suds and scour and scrub down every inch of skin.
“You have to wash off all of the bad luck from the year before.” This was my mother’s imperative, as if bad fortune could accumulate into a grungy layer over the course of the year. As if I had one chance—a crucial opening on a February night—in which it would be possible to get rid of it.
The larger social context that Winslow explores is what moves this story beyond one crime into a reflection on the myriad unacknowledged crimes committed across decades. “Decent People” — a title that becomes increasingly ironic — is really about a community eating itself. “It seems there’s a lot more going in this small town than I’d expected,” Josephine says. “Everyone’s got a secret.”
Not for long.
In “The Guest Lecture,” Keynes is a prop for a novel that’s barely a novel. (The other characters are sketched, as if they were James Thurber drawings, in a gentle line or two.) Riker pulls it off because he’s observant, and he has a grainy, semi-comic feel for what angst and failure really feel like. His antinovel resembles books that split commentary on a writer with more personal material — books like Julian Barnes’s novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” and Geoff Dyer’s quasi-biography of D.H. Lawrence, “Out of Sheer Rage.”
Who was the monkiest monk of them all? One candidate is Simeon Stylites, who lived alone atop a pillar near Aleppo for at least thirty-five years. Another is Macarius of Alexandria, who pursued his spiritual disciplines for twenty days straight without sleeping. He was perhaps outdone by Caluppa, who never stopped praying, even when snakes filled his cave, slithering under his feet and falling from the ceiling. And then there’s Pachomius, who not only managed to maintain his focus on God while living with other monks but also ignored the demons that paraded about his room like soldiers, rattled his walls like an earthquake, and then, in a last-ditch effort to distract him, turned into scantily clad women. Not that women were only distractions. They, too, could have formidable attention spans—like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without ever looking at it.
These all-stars of attention are just a few of the monks who populate Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction”. More specifically, they are the exceptions: most of their brethren, like most of us, were terrible at paying attention. All kinds of statistics depict our powers of concentration as depressingly withered, but, as Kreiner shows, medieval monasteries were filled with people who wanted to focus on God but couldn’t. Long before televisions or TikTok, smartphones or streaming services, paying attention was already devilishly difficult—literally so, in the case of these monks, since they associated distraction with the Devil.
The idea that reading may confer healing benefits is not new, but continues to intrigue readers and researchers.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to reading about how to put up the tent, or tidy our piles of household stuff. When we talk about books that might offer a balm for the soul, we mean fiction, poetry and narrative non-fiction (including memoir).
The idea of emotional catharsis through reading is intuitively appealing. But does it work that way? Or do we read for interest, pleasure, escapism – or love of words?
Twice during a recent interview, he artfully, playfully, steadfastly dodged requests at providing a quick pitch for the novel. “I think of my writing as interrogative,” Harding, 55, said. “You just go in there, and you just listen and look and describe. The mode can never be explanatory. There’s no thesis. There’s no argument. It’s purely descriptive, just always asking, ‘What is it like, what is it like, what is it like?’”
Part of the fun of dancing on stairs is giving up control: Are you riding the stairs or are they riding you? No matter how harrowing it feels, part of you has to relax to find balance, to reap the benefits.
In California, if you’re going to spend over $100 for two on a night out — maybe more like $200 these days — the experience must meet certain expectations. The produce should be fresh and seasonal, sourced from your city’s flagship farmers market. The flavors of a dish should come from light sauces, unexpected herbs or chiles, the smoke of a grill, and most importantly, the key ingredients themselves. The presentation should be unfussy and stylish, matching the rumpled linens, rare sneakers, and vintage jeans you and everyone else in the restaurant are wearing for the occasion.
It feels wrong to call this cooking all the same type of cuisine. The restaurants that practice it could call themselves Italian, French, Mediterranean, Turkish, Mexican, Vietnamese, or American. But there’s a term that encompasses this approach, even if it’s old-fashioned and outmoded, weighed down by goat cheese and sundried tomatoes and Napa cabs: California cuisine.
You know the kind of mystery where the explanation comes pouring out at the end in great detail and you, the reader, gnash your teeth because there was no way on Earth you could have solved it because you didn't have all of the facts? Well, Benjamin Stevenson's narrator, Ernest Cunningham, promises he will not do that to you. And he doesn't.
As he tells the story of a string of deaths that take place before and during a family trip to a ski resort, he lays out all the clues. He highlights clues. He reminds us of previous clues. And yet .... good luck solving this. It's incredibly convoluted.
The mystery of where Leigh will end up is so enticing that it’s a shame when the last substantive section of the book returns us to Earth and family life, with a thud of crammed backstory and a few future shocks. But an uncertain finish doesn’t damage what went before. Indeed, it’s an apt approach for a book that reminds us to value above all the journey we are on, and the world we live in.
“The Chinese Groove” by Kathryn Ma is a funny and insightful novel, a satisfying immigration story told by an 18-year-old narrator, Zheng Xue Li, from Yunnan province, China. We can’t help but love the determined and steadfast young man even as we laugh and wince and worry about him.
Russell Banks’ ambitious new novel, “The Magic Kingdom,” uses an early 1900s Florida Shaker community to present profound, if often implausible, arguments about the ardor of adolescent innocence, the transience of purported paradise and the path to the American Dream.
Simon Garfield’s All the Knowledge in the World is a valentine to the monumental significance of encyclopaedias, reminding us how, until the arrival of computers, “they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world”.
While most Westerners are familiar with the 12 astrological signs of the zodiac that correspond with constellations and when a person is born in a given year, the Chinese zodiac is different, cycling through one sign per year, over a cycle of 12 years. The animal signs follow the same order every dozen years: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat (also translated as Ram and Sheep), Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig.
But if there's a Rat and a Dog, where's the Cat in all of this? Well, if one goes by the Chinese zodiac, there isn't one. But the Vietnamese people, despite being inspired by the Chinese lunar calendar, actually have a Cat in place of the Rabbit. That's right; this year is also the Year of the Cat.
Just as I will never eat a crab sandwich as good as the one I devoured at a pub in Seahouses in Northumberland after a long walk in filthy weather, no grilled chicken with rice and tomatoes will ever live up to those that were served to a dripping wet me (I’d been swimming) on an old boat in the middle of a lake in Turkey a whole lifetime ago. I eat knafeh, oozing sugar syrup and soft white cheese, whenever I see it. But I’ve never tasted any so delicious as the slice I hungrily forked up beneath the fluorescent strip lights of a Ramallah sweet shop in 2005, my reward for days of hard work.
But it is human nature to want to try and replicate perfection, though we know full well this will lead inevitably only to disappointment.
That devilishly clever murder mystery author Anthony Horowitz has finally got his comeuppance — he’s the prime suspect in the brutal murder of a vile theatre critic, and the police have the goods to put him away for life.
Yes, I worry about the future. And Japan's future will have lessons for the rest of us. In the age of artificial intelligence, fewer workers could drive innovation; Japan's aged farmers may be replaced by intelligent robots. Large parts of the country could return to the wild.
Will Japan gradually fade into irrelevance, or re-invent itself? My head tells me that to prosper anew Japan must embrace change. But my heart aches at the thought of it losing the things that make it so special.
As a kid, Josh Ku often went to Taiwanese restaurants in Flushing, Queens. A highlight of these family trips was zhajiangmian — a bowl of thick, chewy fresh wheat noodles covered in a savory-sweet pork-studded gravy and showered with chilled cucumber shards. Tossed together, the noodles were not soupy but not dry, hot yet cool, texturally all over the place, and impossible to stop slurping.
Years later, when Ku opened Win Son, a Taiwanese American restaurant in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, he put lamb zhajiangmian on the menu. Consisting of thick noodles, gamey lamb, and a sauce accented with spices like cumin and mint, it was nothing anyone had ever seen before, but that was perhaps the point. Ku and Trigg Brown, Win Son’s co-owner and chef, ran the dish through an American lens, reinventing the classic for a new audience in a new place.
So many books, so little time. If that’s true, all the more reason to implement a “Life Is Too Short” list. It is not a failure to acknowledge what we will not do. (Barring shocking reversals of fortune, I’m never going to Sesame Place and I see no reason I’ll ever find myself in outer space.) Far from scary, there is comfort in knowing that, as long as we live, and as much as we read, we will never, ever run out. No hoarding required.
Batuman’s decision to set The Idiot in the era of the nascent internet illustrates what it has done to how we communicate. It has trained us to be hyperselective in our word choices—to look for the perfect keyword that will bring up the response we desire: to make the troll go away, to get the commenter who is clearly wrong to shut up. To fit our bon mots under the 280-character limit. To win someone over, or to feel like we have won.
Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel “Lungfish” dramatically transports the reader to an isolated island, the wind whipping and the waves crashing as life rages. Tuck, the novel’s female protagonist, becomes symbolic of the sacrifices many women make to protect the people they love most. With grit, determination, and perpetual hope, it’s a story that hits hard and requires readers to ask themselves how much they’d give to make themselves whole.
Brookshire unpacks our complex relationships with some of the world’s most irksome and irritating creatures: Those that usually do not directly harm us, but that invade our space and “harm our stuff,” as she puts it. Inspired by encounters with Kevin and other animals — from aggressive turkeys to Froot Loop-loving lab mice — “Pests” is Brookshire’s attempt to “find out why we call some animals pests, and some not.”
Today I stole from Kroger. Didn’t mean to.
The checkout robot said, repeatedly,
“Place the item in the bag.” The bag
grew full and overflowed with groceries,
Much of astrobiology research involves searching for chemical “biosignatures”—molecules or combinations of molecules that could indicate the presence of life. But because scientists can’t reliably say that ET life should look, chemically, like Earth life, seeking those signatures could mean we miss beings that might be staring us in the face. “How do we move beyond that?” Johnson asks. “How do we contend with the truly alien?” Scientific methods, she thought, should be more open to varieties of life based on varied biochemistry: life as we don’t know it. Or, in a new term coined here, “LAWDKI.”
It’s easy to become desensitized to the news of yet another restaurant closing — especially if you have no personal relationship with that restaurant. But closing one is never easy for the people who run it. A closure is the end of a chapter, and sometimes represents the death of a dream. Not just another COVID-19 casualty, the death of Miri’s was the result of the endless grind of owning a restaurant while digging out after a world-changing event.
“The hardest thing about closing is thinking about the dream that was but isn’t anymore. And how to reconcile and honor both feelings as true,” Plowman said. “And maybe missing that juicy new creative space. Dismantling it is way less juicy.”
On the surface, The Shards is a relatively simple story about an obsessive young man learning to navigate the interstitial space between being a teenager and adulthood. However, it's also much more; this is a novel about obsession, the masks everyone wears as they go through life, and how isolation exacerbates paranoia — and one that could only have come from Bret Easton Ellis.
“The Half Known Life” is a masterful merging of Iyer’s past and current concerns, a book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors, of hopeful optimism for a world rooted in the paradise of being home.
But in the dream I can’t find the slot with my name on it. And then I slowly become aware of all the unfamiliar staff members who are looking at me and trying to figure out who I am. That’s when the truth seeps in: it’s not the eighties anymore, and I haven’t been a daily inhabitant of this office—a salaried staff writer for Texas Monthly—for a very long time.
Why do I keep having this dream? Though I’m a long-serving writer for this magazine, appearing in its pages more or less consistently for fifty years, I was an office denizen for only about a decade. But those were crucible years, and I think that dream has such a claim on me because it represents a time when, after years of serving a solitary apprenticeship as a writer, I was at last part of a surging group experiment.
“Writing?” I replied. I was surprised. In the dream—this was a dream, although of course I didn’t know that until later—it was clear to me that no one “wrote” anymore, that “writing” was a thing of the past. Everyone knew this. Too polite to embarrass the questioner by mentioning such an obvious fact, I said merely, “Oh, I’m not writing!”
I woke with an almost blissful sense of release. At the time of that dream, I had been a working writer for 34 years. I had published 13 novels—two mysteries, two literary novels, and nine Regency Romances written under a penname—and had been a freelance journalist for the New York Times for more than a decade. Now, for the first time ever, I wondered if, in fact, I could stop writing.
It was four days before Christmas. The holiday village stood roped off, but the mall no longer hired a Santa Claus. Soon, Gantert would upload his visit for a corner of the internet spellbound by an uncanny phenomenon of the modern era: the so-called dead mall.
To be clear, University Mall is alive. More than 80 tenants still operate here near the University of South Florida. But in the world of online mall fandom — documenting everything from malls’ sparkling heyday to trespassing excursions in abandoned malls — the term “dead mall” simply means a once-great destination in decline. Think sparse customers, dwindling occupancy and signs of decay, like stained carpets under the benches near a hollowed-out anchor store. University Mall fits the bill.
I couldn’t let it drown. I ripped off a piece
of my sandwich bag, lifted it to safety.
Today, my first novel is being published. It’s the culmination of seven years of work and, uh, a large number of years of dreaming of writing a novel. Publication day for a debut novel can be a little overwhelming, I’m told—you’ve got all those TV news producers begging you for interviews. (They haven’t called me yet, but I assume they will soon.) Overall, though, pub day ought to be a time of joy, if slightly nervous joy: A thing you made, and care deeply about, is finally making its way into the world!
But for me, and for a lot of other authors this winter, publication day is feeling a little bittersweet. That’s because we’re being published by HarperCollins.
Driving home one day in the early ’90s, Conan O’Brien found himself in a familiar situation: alone in his car, laughing. He had spotted a billboard that he’d never seen before. He doesn’t remember the exact details of it, but one word stuck out: “It just said, ‘monorail.’ I don’t even know why.”
This giant advertisement was completely inexplicable, yet O’Brien also saw it as a perfect joke on itself. “Monorails were always funny to me because they’re a phony promise of the future,” he says. “It really is just a trolley, right?”
Here’s something that happens every time I go to Singapore. The first morning I wake up in my grandmother’s flat, I take a short and sweaty walk to my neighborhood kopitiam and buy myself the same breakfast: two orders of roti pratha with goat curry and an iced Milo.
Milo is, as Patricia Kelly Yeo puts it, “Southeast Asian Nesquik — if Nesquik tasted good.” It is a chocolate malt powder sold in bottle-green plastic cans, usually emblazoned with a photograph of an athlete kicking a soccer ball. In Singaporean and Malaysian supermarkets, there is of course Milo for sale in powder form, but on the shelves there is also Milo whole grain cereal, Milo snack bars, canned Milo, boxed Milo, and bottled dairy-free Milo. The simplest and most common form of the powder, however, is mixed into water or milk and served as a hot or cold beverage.
“The past was elsewhere,” Hemon writes, “the present was always this — the masses of refugees moving around the city looking for food and a place, for some way not to die.” That’s been the plight of untold millions for generations. The real miracle of “The World and All That It Holds” is that despite holding so much, we come to know the fragile joys of this one melancholy man so well that he feels written into our own past.
If we start working with a more philosophically grounded understanding of free will, we realize that only a small subset of our everyday actions is important enough to worry about. We want to feel in control of those decisions, the ones whose outcomes make a difference in our life and whose responsibility we feel on our shoulders. It is in this context—decisions that matter—that the question of free will most naturally applies.
The Shards is a bold attempt to understand how the analog and digital interact. This accounts for the novel’s countless, obsessive descriptions of outmoded forms of analogue tech: the cassette, the Betamax, and, most tellingly, the typewriter. It also explains Ellis’s bravura manipulation of genre (the age of the digital, as we know, is one where once-stable systems of classification tend to collapse).
With his latest, Ellis is, in essence, attempting to refashion and – to crib from the Trawler – remake the (analog) novel in our contemporary (digital) age. I think he succeeds. Others may disagree. Either way, The Shards is a timely reminder this is a writer willing to take risks.
“Please Report Your Bug Here” is not the first — and nowhere near the best — sci-fi thriller to contend with Silicon Valley’s immense power. But it’s a smart and brisk novel that, despite some occasionally leaden prose, speaks the language of a distinct cohort — 20- and 30-somethings who, as one of Riedel’s characters says, were “practically raised” by the internet but have since found it increasingly alienating.
And even if its abundant pathos comes at the somewhat high price of overweening narrative omniscience, this macabre twist on the marriage-portrait novel ultimately invites prudence and humility on the thorny question of how much we can ever know about those closest to us. Hardly a new insight, for sure, but rarely can it have been demonstrated quite so explosively.
Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.
A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.
We don’t need to learn the biological mechanics of dying in order to die. But it may help to know them in facing death. If the philosophers haven’t figured out how to do that — at least not to everyone’s satisfaction — might a physician have more luck? Henry Marsh is an author and retired doctor, in whom, said The Economist, “neuroscience has found its Boswell.” In his most recent book, the physician becomes a patient, confronting a diagnosis that will probably end his life.
The source of le Carré’s popularity might be that he understood keenly the yearning to do work that is good, in every sense, and our collective sadness that so few options exist for it. Many of his characters are quiet, ordinary people longing for honorable work and finding, as we do, all paths riddled with complicity and compromise. Sometimes it feels like there’s no way out except to disappear into fantasy—but le Carré wrote fiction that refused to lie to us. Deceit was his old job.
It was after reading “Happy All the Time” that I started writing fiction again, after decades away. My only goal, at first, was to write scenes that made me feel the way “Happy All the Time” made me feel as I read it. It was the only way I could keep myself going, honestly, writing while navigating family life and a job and the very typical problems of a sandwich-generation dad. And so when I found myself edging toward darkness, I steered toward the light instead. Writing at 10:45 at night, after I’d put the kids to bed, I just didn’t have it in me to put my own characters, or myself, through truly terrible things.
But all these cartoons did exist. In fact, they were very popular. They are a problematic, essential part of the fabric of American life, and of the world that came before the one in which we’re now trying to raise our children. More than nearly any other cultural product, Looney Tunes makes it possible for children to have a sophisticated conversation with the past, because its entertainment value is undimmed by its continuity with the parts of that past that are disposable, unprofitable, or embarrassing. These films must not simply vanish in an ecstasy of corporate bean counting. They belong to history, and they belong to us.
Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.
Over the past three decades, Stephen Amidon has produced a series of novels as compulsively readable as they are hard-edge about such uncomfortable facts of American life as race, class and money. His latest, “Locust Lane,” adheres to this bracing tradition with the story of a young woman killed in the affluent Boston suburb of Emerson and the ugly truths about several of its elite denizens that come to light in the murder’s wake.
“Rough Sleepers” follows Dr. Jim O’Connell, a Camus-quoting, onetime philosophy graduate student turned Harvard-trained physician who, since 1985, has been treating Boston’s most vulnerable unhoused population: the city’s “rough sleepers” (a 19th-century Britishism and Dr. Jim’s preferred term), men and women who dwell mostly out of doors, on the margins of the margins — in parks, in subway tunnels, on sidewalks. In an increasingly expensive, gentrifying Boston, these people inhabit a uniquely hellish landscape. Bedding down outside, they die at 10 times the rate as housed Bostonians. They die of overdoses, of being set on fire, of being beaten to death, of suicide, of falling asleep in the snow and never waking up. “The best feeling in my life, the best feeling, was going to sleep,” says one, Tony Columbo (a pseudonym; Kidder has changed the names of many of Dr. Jim’s patients), after he overdoses on fentanyl. “The worst feeling was waking back up. To realize, first of all, that tomorrow there’s no such thing as religion or God. … It’s just that I want to disappear.”
Malcolm’s unusual form offers up the idea that all we really have of the past is a box of Old Not Good Photos that we must work very hard to understand. She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us. She asks, “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud? Doesn’t the lock on the bedroom door permanently protect them from our curiosity, keep us forever in the corridor of doubt?”
This particular quest – in search of the idea of paradise in the midst of political complication – is something of a summation of that roving life.
I wake up and eat a banana.
Stand naked in my kitchen.
Shave and listen to Billie Holiday.
A flash of red and grey feathers. The pungent smell of durian fruit. I crane my neck, raising myself up onto my tiptoes to see what everyone’s crowding around. There’s a blue bird cage mounted on a wheeled walking frame, sunflower seeds scattering at our feet. A woman, perhaps in her early seventies, is taking her pet parrot shopping.
I’ve come to Bedok — one of Singapore’s oldest residential neighbourhoods, in the east of the city — to meet three generations of the Soh family, who have called this area home for almost eight decades. They’ve brought me to 58 Bedok Market, a low-rise, red-and-white-tiled building stocking everything from fish balls to toilet bleach. We’re here to pick up seafood and spices for lunch at their home and cooking school, One Kind House. The matriarch — a petite woman with pink lipstick, pencilled eyebrows and long, midnight-blue nails, who introduces herself simply as ‘Mamma Soh’ — soon tires of looking at the parrot and sets off towards the fish counters. Mamma Soh will be celebrating her 80th birthday next year, but I struggle to keep up as she makes a beeline past the piles of squid and cuttlefish the size of my forearm, towards the golden pomfrets: plump, silver fish with sunflower-yellow fins.
DuBois' writing has only gained depth over the years. The language is simple but elegant, and the worlds described are full of pain and wonder, love and loss. DuBois' work is a perfect starter book for any reluctant reader of poetry, and it's sure to convert them into lifelong lovers of the craft, just as Quinn's English teacher Ms. Koval encourages Quinn's transformation into a budding poet.
The novel unfolds against the backdrop of plague, revolt and the rise of the Lollards. This is a spare, uncluttered book, free of the Wikipedia bric-a-brac that often clogs up historical fiction, but you feel in every sentence the weight of history pressing down on and confining these women.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining why Redzepi has said that the fine dining model at Noma is “unsustainable.” If that system is on the cusp of change, and if the Noma announcement nudges that change forward, that’s all for the better. As far back as 2014, in fact, Redzepi has been talking about trying to change himself and find a remedy for the toxicity of kitchen culture. “The future is not any more of that screaming,” he told chef Danny Bowien in Mexico that year as I traveled along with them. “I used to be so angry in the kitchen. Insanely angry. A monster. I made a decision: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” As we’ve seen in episodes of The Bear, long hours and low pay and cramped quarters and menial tasks and fraying tempers do not foster esprit de corps. Even when there happens to be a sauna on the property.
At Kunyah Cafe, weighing scales can speak, light switches are paired with dimmers, and its chefs are more afraid of prejudice than sharp knives.
And the signature sandwiches — filled with crispy breaded chicken thigh, tempeh, otah or shrimp cake — were creations of two visually impaired chefs.
Although Kois now lives in Northern Virginia, his recollections of 1990s Manhattan tell us that he was too. “Vintage Contemporaries” is crammed a bit too full of plot, not unlike the cramped city it documents. Fortunately, it’s also overstuffed with bittersweet beauty, not unlike the vintage contemporaries of Laurie Colwin.
In “Masters of the Lost Land,” Heriberto Araujo set out to document this ongoing conflict in one bloody corner of Brazil’s wild north. A Spanish journalist who relocated to Brazil from China in 2013, Araujo was quickly swept up in the region’s biggest story: the destruction of the rainforest and the role it plays in accelerating global warming. Intrigued by the human drama behind the catastrophe, he decided, he writes, “to capture, in a single narrative, the factors that have made the largest rainforest on Earth the world’s most dangerous place for environmental and land activists.” The result is an often gripping, sometimes unwieldy narrative that spans five decades and follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from labor leaders to low-level hit men, from criminal bosses to the government officials who abet them.
While Miller’s critical reputation rose and fell throughout his lifetime, Lahr’s perceptive book makes a strong case for the enduring relevance of the playwright as well.
Do NOT stick your broccoli
all up in my cheese sauce.
If you are going to push
my buttons, have the decency
Every sensitive reader has pet peeves. One of mine is attributing the power of sight to things that don’t have eyes, as in this sentence from the Wall Street Journal: “Restaurant sales are expected to see a warming trend this spring as menu prices rise and consumers spend more.” “To see,” in the Journal sentence, is a lazy solution to a mildly challenging word-order problem, which the writer created and then gave up on. (For that matter, how about using “warming trend” only for weather, if even for that?) One of many possible rewrites: “Economists expect restaurant prices and revenues to rise.”
Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. At a health club many years ago, the man on the stair climber next to mine, who knew I was a writer, told me that he despised split infinitives. If I had an opinion about split infinitives at that moment, it was probably that I despised them, too. The man annoyed me, though, so I said, “Oh, I love split infinitives. I use them all the time.” In an article I wrote not long after that, I made sure to use one or two, in case he was checking.
Having herself navigated some unsteady personal terrain, Heisey is making a career out of guiding characters through the kinds of crises we can laugh at and sympathize with all at once, while upending enough rom-com tropes to keep things interesting. All of which is to say that you’re going to get to know Monica Heisey a lot better, in one medium or another, and you’re likely to come out of the experience knowing yourself a little better too.
Broadly speaking, the researchers found two ways to avoid the trade-off between density and green space. Take Singapore, one of the densest countries in the world. There, plants are installed on roofs and facades, turning the familiar gray landscape of skyscrapers and overpasses into a living matrix. By law, developers must replace any natural area that they develop with green space somewhere on the building. Meanwhile, in Curitiba, the largest city in southern Brazil, which has tripled in population since 1970, dense housing is built around dedicated bus lanes and interwoven with large public parks and conservation areas. Curitiba also uses planted areas to help direct and soak up stormwater, buffering residential areas from floods. In Singapore, nature shares space with the built environment, while Curitiba packs people in tightly and then spares land for other species inside the boundaries of the city.
For you souls out there that have always appreciated this king of burgers, well, all you have to do is read and enjoy and we can agree that we are kindred spirits separated on the plane of time and space (depending where and when you happen to read this), and we know what a good thing is when we taste one, and the Big Mac is indeed a good thing. In fact, it’s great.
Many people enjoy movies. But people are often surprised that I do, too, because I am legally blind. I don’t watch a film the way a sighted person does, but the experience opens up a whole world for me.
Poetry today is filled with grand yet remarkably cautious writing, big poems that present themselves as hurricanes, but whose courses you know in advance, and whose winds dissipate only moments after being summoned. In the face of this, how remarkable to produce writing with the intransigent sturdiness of a pebble, a stone you might put in your pocket for comfort or for no reason at all. You should do so; I recommend it to you.
An oral history of Cambodian music, as told by those who survived the Khmer Rouge regime—90% of musicians may have perished—it is also an affecting memoir and travelogue.
I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms
Months before Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City came out, I met her in Hong Kong after years of circling each other’s orbits of mutual friends. When the subject of her book came up, she said, almost right away, “You don’t have to read the first twenty pages. I’m telling everyone not to.” Months later, I was faced with two choices: respect her agency as an author, never read the first twenty pages, and exist in the world as she wants it to be; or read the first twenty pages and text everyone I know to read this book but to skip the first twenty pages, which are not for us.
It’s fine, but it’s not for us: this is what we often conclude in group chats where we send each other links to the latest books and coverage about our hometown, usually published in widely respected foreign outlets by foreign correspondents or anglophone journalists who, by the nature of our work and social spheres, are also our friends or professional acquaintances in the region. We roll our eyes at trite symbolism, tired references, tone-deaf histrionics, or dramatic geopolitical spin, and then, having exhausted our private complaints, we retweet the article or order the book in question for our friends scattered around the world anyway. I can’t name the last memoir written in English by someone my age from Hong Kong that was published by a major English-language publisher; I don’t share the dewy sentimentality that emanates from Cheung’s personal writing, but I sent my friends her book because I know how a homesick person feels when they are reaching for lifelines that might bind them to a concrete place where, once upon a time, life happened.
It’s been three decades since a slim volume of 11 interconnected stories, cobbled together for a few thousand dollars to keep the IRS at bay, changed the landscape of American literature. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is one of those books you read in a single sitting, again and again. It’s a repeat offender, in the best sense of the term. A professor at Brooklyn College handed me my first copy in the late 1990’s—he said only this: “Read this. I’ll say no more.” I read it often, and I’ve been handing it to students, friends, and family members ever since. As we reach its pearl anniversary, I can’t help but connect this book with Matthew 7:6 and not “casting your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn again and rend you.” Such is the wisdom of this small, epiphanic book about a drifter, druggie, drunk, and ne’er do well as he slowly finds himself working out of drug addiction and acedia and toward a hard-earned, sober redemption and reengagement with the world.
The fish truck stayed gone, but in the Philly neighborhoods, the fresh fish came back. An outfit called Fishadelphia buys fish from the New Jersey docks, then drives it to a high school in North Philly where it’s packed into coolers, which people take home to their own porches, where neighbors pick up their assigned fish. Fishadelphia’s founder and executive director is Talia Young, whose PhD is in ecology, who’s a visiting assistant professor in environmental studies at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and whose goal in life has never been to sell fish.
“I’m sort of a scientist,” she says. “I’m not doing science but I can. I’m an academic by default, I’m a teacher for sure, I’m sort of an activist, and technically I’m a business person but I know nothing about it.”
So why is she selling fish? “I’ve spent my professional life figuring out how to occupy a space that includes the environment, science, and social justice,” Young says. Scientists don’t usually combine science with activism, worrying that the combination would undermine a reputation for unbiased research. Young, however, has only ever cared about finding the nexus between her three interests and, she says, “Fishadelphia is the closest I’ve come.”
My mother rarely made Southern food when I was growing up even though she is from the South. She said it was because her mother never taught her. That always seemed likely: My grandmother was a sweet but anxious woman from the small town of Pickens, South Carolina, so poor that her family could not “set a table”—that is, with matching cutlery. A 1940s housewife who felt trapped in her home, curious about the world but left to a life of domestic drudgery. One can understand her wanting to conceal the secrets of her one magic power: cooking.
Tales of terror, by their very nature, take the things we cherish and turn them against us: a beloved pet wants to kill us (“Cujo”), our home is cursed (“The Haunting of Hill House”), the baby we’re expecting turns demonic (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Yet, of all the horror tropes, is there any that’s scarier than dolls and puppets that come to life?
Grady Hendrix creates a whole new kind of toybox hell in “How to Sell a Haunted House.” This ingenious novel is a twisted story of malevolent puppets and dolls that have a problem with real estate deals. (Yes, there’s comic relief.)
Secretly, I know
my name is Moon Whisperer.
Tonight, I lie awake,
Researchers like Hughes have been raising concerns for nearly 50 years about the glaciers that flow into Pine Island Bay and the surrounding Amundsen Sea embayment. Yet coordinated international research of the region only took off in 2018, with the formation of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Today, the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier is among the largest environmental threats to global civilization—and we’ve barely begun to understand it. What took us so long?
As it turns out, Pine Island Bay is one of the hardest places in the world to reach. The story of how we know what we know about Thwaites is also a story of the challenges—and triumphs—of science at the bottom of the world.
For whatever reason, cottage cheese has an especially maligned reputation among dairy products. It frequently pops up on scientifically dubious surveys gauging people’s most hated foods, listed among other polarizing edibles like anchovies and liver. But that designation feels especially outdated in 2022, when cottage cheese is better than it has been since people were making it in their actual cottages, and pretty much everyone should be eating more of it.
I’ve always wanted this, I realize now: a small corner of the world that I don’t have to leave, where I am occasionally visited by the people whose company I enjoy the most (or whose company I can dread in an entertaining way), and a job that casts only a vague shadow across a personal life of hijinks and witty repartee. I don’t need to travel. I don’t need adventure. I’d trade every vacation I’ve ever taken for a life of short drop-ins with friends and family and a refrigerator that magically replenishes itself.
Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation – part memoir, part essay – offers a reflection on the role that the gun has played in history, society and the novelist’s own life. We learn of his gradual, uneventful introduction to guns, from childhood toys to the rifle he tries out at summer camp and a double-barrelled shotgun at his friend’s farm; when he joins the merchant navy he meets people from the south and marvels at their reckless relationship to firearms. We also discover that while there were no guns in the Auster home, there was a significant, if rarely mentioned, gun death in the family’s history: his grandmother shot his estranged grandfather in front of his uncle.
How places and choices have shaped people is the book’s main theme and the stories share similar undercurrents—dislocation, family separation, uncertainty, ambition, backbreaking labour. But “Have You Eaten Yet?” also explores how Chinese immigrants have shaped their adopted countries. Places like Noisy Jim’s New Outlook Cafe are “an institution in towns across the Canadian prairies: a community centre, a place where families grow up together”. Soupe chinoise is “an adopted national dish” in Madagascar. Across the Caribbean, “in every village and town, there’s always a ‘Chinese shop’”—a small general store. Enrichment is a two-way street.
Any architecture lover has certainly pondered what is possible when it comes to buildings in seemingly unbuildable locations—and Agata Toromanoff’s new book, Living on the Edge: Houses on Cliffs, explores more than 40 gravity-defying houses.
What is the matter of history through which Dionne Brand offers a guide? This history that arrives in the room with us is not the captor’s history, even as it is a history of captivity. It is not history as the project and handmaiden of Europe, or the plots and stories that create the fatal divide, the caesura between the West and the rest of us, or the self-aggrandizing romance of a nation, or even a narrative with fixed coordinates and a certain arc, no once-upon-a-time, no myths of origin or claims of autochthony. A Map to the Door of No Return is a philosophical meditation on the world created by the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and of the Portuguese on the West African coast in the fifteenth century, inaugurating one of the largest forced migrations in history, described euphemistically as “the trade in slaves.” The book is a hybrid of poetry, memoir, theory, and history, and its recursive and nonlinear structure formally enacts the open question of the door and its duration: “nothing is ever over.” As Brand writes, there is no way in, no return, “no ancestry except the black water and the Door of no Return.” The door is less a place than a threshold of the brutal history of capitalist modernity. The door is the end of traceable beginnings and provides a figure for describing the psychic and affective dimensions of black existence in the diaspora.
A few years ago, in my 50s, I began to wonder what happened to my sense of style, and then the coronavirus shutdown brought the issue to the foreground. Working from home, formerly stylish people happily adapted to sweat-pants couture. Some people may never fully return to their once-dapper attire, but some, like me, left fashion behind long before the pandemic. Or perhaps fashion left me behind.
Ultimately, The Shards is a fraught and emotional head trip of a book that will scare the shit out of you—but also a novel filled with loss and love and the wreckage caused by growing up too fast. In it, the author Bret Easton Ellis hopes to bring some redemption to his character, the author Bret Easton Ellis. As he acknowledges, he hopes that readers will discover that “the man who wrote American Psycho was actually, some people were surprised to find out, just an amiable mess, maybe even likable…”•
Saunders admires Russian literature—he recently published a book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, that analyzes stories by the classic Russian authors—and this story feels akin to Chekhov; it is quietly great. Here is a topic that’s new to Saunders and worthy of his prodigious imagination: the subtle winds that shift the psyche, the mysteries of human interaction. The characters of this story are fragile and complex. They are fickle and burning up with bitterness. There are no saints here.
A mesmerizing collection of essays that vividly recalls sojourns to mostly contentious yet fabled realms, Pico Iyer's The Half Known Life upends the conventional travel genre by offering a paradoxical investigation of paradise.
Iyer's deeply reflective explorations at once affirm and challenge the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's statement that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
“I was getting to stay in one place much longer than I normally would,” Iyer explains over Zoom from his “deepest home” outside Kyoto, Japan, as the sun rises on a clear winter morning. “So it was almost a perfect time to think about 40 years of travel, 48 years of talking to the Dalai Lama, 31 years of spending time with Benedictine monks. How does it all come together?”
His new book, “The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise,” is a retrospective look at his travels, readings and encounters through the prism of the idea of “paradise”: What is it and where is it (on the map or in the mind)? Why are so many chimerical Shangri-Las fraught with conflict? And whose version of paradise are we talking about anyway?
Regan’s new book, “Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir,” is held together by mycelial architecture. Mushrooms connect her to her forebears. Great-grandmother Busia from a village in northern Poland used boletus to give czarnina, duck blood soup, the flavor of the forest. Regan spent countless childhood hours searching for wild mushrooms among the oak, pine and hemlock of rural Indiana with her father. She watched keenly as her mother cleaned and sliced the day’s find on the counter island in their farmhouse kitchen. Wild mushrooms even made an appearance in the hospital room not long after her birth. Today, she collects them on her land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and serves them to guests at the Milkweed Inn, which she owns and runs with her wife, Anna.
Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft, Moehringer aims, ultimately, to disappear. Ghostwriters channel someone else’s voice — often, someone else’s very recognizable voice — and construct with it a book that has shape and texture, narrative arc and memorable characters, all without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill and an ego that is, at a minimum, flexible.
“If I’m a great collaborative writer, I am a vessel,” said Michelle Burford, who has written books with broadcaster Robin Roberts, actress Cicely Tyson and musician Alicia Keys. “The lion’s share of my job is about getting out of the way, vanishing so the voice of my client can come through as clearly as possible.” The way she explains it to her clients, she said, is that they provide the raw materials to build a house, and she puts it together, brick by brick.
For those who see food as an integral part of healing, this is a monumental step forward. But prescribing food is not as straightforward as it sounds.
Food is more complex than any pill. This makes it difficult for doctors and patients to know which medically tailored foods are the best medicine and which suppliers can best deliver these edible therapies.
Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation, “The Diaries of Franz Kafka” (Schocken), is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness. Martin Greenberg and Joseph Kresh’s previous rendering, published in 1948 and 1949, did no such thing: the manuscript on which it is based had been heavily doctored by Brod, likely in an effort to protect both Kafka’s reputation and his own. In the vandalized diaries, entries have been shuffled into a linear chronology, lewd and lightly homoerotic content has been excised, solecisms have been corrected, dialect has been rigidified into strenuously proper High German, punctuation has been inserted, drafts and revisions of stories have been removed so as to impose an artificial distinction between fiction and fact, and passages unflattering to Brod have been cut. The result is prim and polished, less like a diary and more like a monument. The unadulterated Kafka, in the new version, is less stilted and more alive. Kafka neglects to finish sentences and sometimes even breaks off mid-word. Many of his entries are undated, and occasionally long periods pass between one jotting and the next.
Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence.
But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction. As Jamie Kreiner puts it in her new book, “The Wandering Mind,” the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. The goal was “clearsighted calm above the chaos,” Kreiner writes. John of Dalyatha, an eighth-century monk who lived in what is now northern Iraq, lamented in a letter to his brother, “All I do is eat, sleep, drink and be negligent.”
This book offers that comfort, that togetherness, thanks to Philpott’s gift of unpretentious self-revelation. Her first-person voice is never overly confessional or self-indulgent; instead, her prose invites us in. These essays are like familiar rooms where we feel at ease and find we understand ourselves more clearly.
As the poet has it, we are born strangers and afraid in a world we never made and, he might have added, spend a large part of our lives negotiating that original aloneness. Most of us make some headway with the struggle, but some of us get nowhere with it; we remain people who are at home nowhere, with no one, feeling like strangers to ourselves and others all our lives. For such unfortunates, the aloneness is more than a penalty, it is a humiliation; humiliation is degrading; degradation induces fear and rage; fear and rage are doubly isolating. Such a destiny was the one meted out to the richly febrile writer Jean Rhys, whose gift for language and form made her stories and novels a compelling embodiment of the permanently forlorn.
Until the late 19th century, most Londoners bought milk and cheaper sorts of fish and fruit in season from street sellers. In 1618, a Venetian visitor wrote that they did not eat fruit at dinner, but “between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats”.
After a lunch of mulligatawny soup and roast mutton on a wintry New Year’s Day in 1900, Miss Frank E. Buttolph struck upon a novel idea. “I stopped in the Columbia Restaurant for lunch and thought it might be interesting to file a bill of fare at the library,” Buttolph wrote in a letter dated February 14, noting the restaurant that was located in Manhattan’s Union Square. “A week later the thought occurred, why not preserve others?” Buttolph — whose given name was Frances but who preferred to be addressed as Frank — was already an avid collector of postcards with pictures of lighthouses. Preserving menus suited her penchant for collecting unique and colorful ephemera.
Soon after, the idiosyncratic Buttolph petitioned the New York Public Library’s director, John Shaw Billings, to enlist the library’s help with preserving menus from around the world that she would collect on its behalf. Despite Buttolph’s notoriously prickly disposition (her tirades against whistling and untidy desks were legendary), the library agreed to award her a voluntary position as menu archivist.
Ah, the Lower East Side of Manhattan – alphabet-lettered streets, mangy storefronts, dilapidated tenements with bathtubs in kitchens, apartment doors secured by iron rods in floor traps… probably clocking these days in at three grand a month’s rent? (Just checked Craigslist; that’s lowballing it!) But let’s backtrack a bit, time travel with the always amusing Sam Lipsyte and his wry comic latest, No One Left to Come Looking For You. Perhaps the title is clunky, but this novel is generally nimble – a capable intrigue so enhanced by atmosphere and pop detail that they command as much attention as the storyline.
Jünger’s book had obvious significance in 1939, at a time when the globe was about to be engulfed in wars that pitted fascism against democracy. For decades, many believed that the age of despotism was long past. But the current rise of populist demagogues and autocrats, promising a better world — if we only abandon notions of rights, individual liberties, and respect for minorities — proves otherwise. History appears to be surreal: maintaining liberty in the face of totalitarian fantasy calls for vigilance. Jünger’s cautionary tale may be more resonant now than when it was first published.
For Crawford, a Scottish journalist and broadcaster, a border is almost always a bad idea. “The Edge of the Plain” pulls history, travelogue and reportage into an ambitious investigation of “this vast network of lines … running all over the earth.” Crawford visits the stone remnants of the Antonine Wall, which marked the Roman Empire’s northern frontier. He hikes the shifting Alpine watershed that separates Italy from Austria. He writes about the borderless homelands of the Samí, the Indigenous people of the Scandinavian peninsula. But time and again the book returns to scenes of cruelty and brutality — to damaged landscapes and shattered lives on the militarized borders of today’s world. Crawford quotes an environmental activist: “Wherever there are borders … that’s where you are going to find the most concentrated injustice.”
With its modest title, “Pests” might be mistakenly shelved with mouse-proofing guides. But Bethany Brookshire’s new book is something far more ambitious. A lively and fascinating work of science writing, “Pests” explores, as its subtitle promises, “how humans create animal villains” — including, naturally, mice.
Soon after my son Benjamin was born, the chief neonatologist had to swear all the physicians and nurses in the intensive care unit to secrecy as they were about to commit a crime. I was forcing them to break the law and risk their professional credentials alongside my own unfathomable risk as we prepared for my son to become the first baby in the world to receive an experimental, illegal treatment that was not yet approved by the FDA. This was the moment that I had dreaded, but it was also the moment that filled me with hope for my son’s life.
New York City boasts a number of signature sandwiches, from the Katz’s Deli pastrami to the bacon, egg and cheese offerings across the five boroughs. Another bodega staple that’s in the spotlight right now? The chopped cheese.
For the uninitiated, a chopped cheese or “chop cheese” is a sandwich consisting of ground beef, melted cheese, onions, lettuce, tomato and condiments on a hero roll. It’s often compared (somewhat controversially) to a cheeseburger, sloppy Joe or cheesesteak.
Calvino’s love for fantastical literature gets its own section, and the reviews of science books that make up the final part are unfailingly stimulating. These elements are aspects of Calvino’s curiosity about ways of seeing things. In the title essay, he reflects on his unease in the “real” world outside books, and asks himself, “Why do you want to venture into this vast world that you are unable to master?” The answer, of course, was to put it on the page, to aid the rest of us helpless readers in seeing it and understanding it too.
Making a living as a writer has always been an elusive pursuit. The competition is fierce. The measures of success are subjective. Even many people at the top of the profession can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Darryl Pinckney recalls in his evocative new memoir, “told us that there were really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge. She told us that if we couldn’t take rejection, if we couldn’t be told no, then we could not be writers.”
In spite of these red flags, countless people set out on this path. One lifeline, if you’re lucky enough to find it, is mentorship. Literary mentors offer the conventional benefits: perspective, direction, connections. But the partnerships that result are less transactional and more messy and serendipitous than those that tend to exist in other industries. While many people might think of such arrangements as altruistic or at least utilitarian, Pinckney’s book, which chronicles his tutelage under Hardwick, shows that artistic mentorships, especially literary ones, are far more fraught. Together, he and Hardwick weathered two intersecting careers, each with fallow periods and moments of success. This can be a challenge for creative, fragile egos—leading to a fair amount of projection, blame, and tension. And yet, the mentorships that endure allow for unpredictability and evolution.
The failures of this book are what give it its weight. “Memory does not narrate or render character,” she writes. “Memory has no regard for the reader.” It is sadly and ultimately true. Readers looking for the cutting and flinty Malcolm of earlier books will not find her here. There is something else, more subtle but perhaps more important, about our inability to capture our own “still pictures” of our lives, even with the chronicling tools of photography or writing. They cling to us in a way that makes them impossible to render accurately.
Suddenly, my mother
couldn’t call up the noun reverend
this forgetful moment unlike the time
I wracked my brain for the adjective decadent—
When my grandmother (also a November baby) told me I would receive her diaries when she passed, I was haunted by the idea of holding her former selves and secrets. Now, as I find myself in that vast stretch between youthful optimism and seniority, I’ve started to recognize that my grandmother’s “sharing” is an intimate act that goes beyond its recent digital connotation: posting. However, for me, the two terms have become interchangeable.
In what may be a major archaeological breakthrough, an independent researcher has suggested that the earliest writing in human history has been hiding in plain sight in prehistoric cave paintings in Europe, a discovery that would push the timeline of written language back by tens of thousands of years, reports a new study.
Hundreds of European caves are decorated with mesmerizing paintings of animals and other figures that were made by our species between roughly 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the Palaeolithic Age when humans were still hunter-gatherers. These cave paintings often include non-figurative markings, such as dots and lines, that have evaded explanation for decades.
This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t like it, but I do on occasion. I recently used it to describe the noise of my horrible doorbell (‘BZZZT!’) to convey the sensation of panic that occurs when I hear it. I also love it when the speech bubble above a cartoon character’s head contains nothing but an exclamation mark: pure surprise. My favourite example is in Snoopy’s case, for often his ears also stand up like exclamation marks themselves.
But we have not always known how to use it. According to Florence Hazrat, the author of An Admirable Point, it took us a while to get a handle on it – as if it knew what it was about all along and we were just slow to catch up with it.
This charming self-help book is broken down into 12 seasonally appropriate themes. January is for future-facing resolutions. March is for spring cleaning – mental as well as physical. September is about re-engaging with work, perhaps seeing it differently it after a break. The guiding principle is that clinical psychology isn’t just for fixing dysfunctional situations; you can also use it to improve functional ones. If you feel a bit off-kilter but not quite bad enough to spend hundreds of pounds on therapy, Maddox’s tips and tricks from the consulting room could be for you. Not only do the book’s modest claims make it likable, but the fact that it isn’t trying to sell you some pumped-up, perfect version of yourself has the effect of making it seem trustworthy too.
All his life, Joseph Roth preferred to write in public. He was a familiar sight in cafes and hotel lobbies across most of continental Europe, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Marseilles. “Aside from being unable to bear loneliness, being surrounded by life stimulated him,” writes Keiron Pim in his absorbing new biography of Roth, “Endless Flight.” Whether dashing off his latest journalistic dispatch or drinking himself to within a nanometer of liver collapse, Roth, one suspects, was only ever happy when surrounded by waiters, bartenders, porters, maids and concierges. A self-declared Hotelpatriot, he was constitutionally averse to domesticity. “I hate houses,” he once wrote to a friend.
I–. I can’t. I shot my eyes down. I really, literally can’t, I muttered, I mean I only have a debit card and I don’t have that much money on there right now.
K. tossed her hair around her face. I’ll pay for it now, she said. You’ll pay me back.
It’s your wedding dress, she said. We found your wedding dress. It’s so perfect!
In the middle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a park ranger carefully placed a wooden nightstand on the ground. She attached a sign she made:
“Take a poem, leave a poem.”
Since the nightstand’s debut there last month, amateur poets have filled it with more than 100 handwritten poems.
In 2012, researchers at England’s The Open University tested the strength of a 2x2-stud Lego brick using a hydraulic press. The brick held up a staggering 950 pounds of force before failing. That strength, in theory, could support about 375,000 other bricks, or a tower just over two miles high. They’re also adept at resisting shear (sliding) forces; the stud-and-tube design locks the pieces in place to keep them from sliding side to side. But tensional (pulling) force is the block’s structural weakness: Under tension, they begin to separate, and the structure collapses.
If you think about it, it's a little strange that a single country in the heart of the Mediterranean developed a culture with hundreds of pasta dishes, up and down the peninsula, that characterize its cuisine more than anything else. In the end, pasta is just one way of eating a dough of water and flour: bake it, and it's a pie, flatbread or pizza; dip it in boiling oil, and it's a fritter (plain or filled), but boil it in water, and you've entered the vast world of pasta.
Definitions are not set in stone, however, and that is why, for the first few centuries of its existence, pasta was not considered a culinary category unto itself. The circumstances of its birth are also rather hazy, and although we know that Sicily was a center of production for dried pasta as early as the twelfth century, the thread of its origins gets lost somewhere back in Classical Greece and the Near East.
The desire for spices such as pepper drove European expeditions eastwards, to cut out the middlemen who brought them overland. Ultimately, the desire to own and amass riches from these spices and similar goods drove colonialism. The unknown “east” became known and ownable. In a sense, those first pepper-filled ships marked a turning point, a period when the western world shifted, after which there was no going back.
The tension between the immediate and the imagined or remembered is what makes this novel work, with Berne striking a satisfying balance between what happens, what it might mean, and what’s needed to go on. The past may be past, but its significance has yet to be determined. The possibilities are endless.
This is a book about cats: famous cats, religious cats, cats in mythology, the cats of artists and authors, and, naturally, Cosslett’s own cat Mackerel, adopted as a kitten in the spring of 2020. It is also a book about lockdown – the pain, grief, terror and occasional unexpected joy of those pandemic months. It is about Cosslett herself: her childhood in Wales caring for her autistic brother, her time in Paris, and the traumas that she acknowledges have shaped her life. And it is a book about motherhood, or rather, the complex, knotted, contradictory concept of motherhood as seen through the eyes of a woman in her early thirties desperately trying to work out what she wants.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession” contains one inconsequential detail that fully captured my attention: Luxurious mid-century gyms were famous for their plush carpets. Can you imagine the accumulation of sweat? The disgusting way the soaked fibers aged?
The primary concern of “Fit Nation” is the way that exercise culture has matured as badly as a carpeted gym floor. Petrzela’s cultural history combines an academic approach with an activist’s urgency, aiming to “strengthen us to fight for a better path forward, at the gym and in the world.” Her book is structured chronologically, with reminders of long-faded exercise fads (the ThighMaster) and the origins of exercise mainstays (running). All the while, it promises to work through the contradictions in America’s current relationship to fitness. Key among them: Why has fitness culture become so influential when, as the book reports, just 20 percent of people in America work out regularly?
In bygone centuries aristocratic love was not merely a thing of passion but a complex and courtly game, played with knights and bishops, in which the most dazzling figure might be the queen—but the most important was the king. Anne Boleyn forfeited her head not merely because she failed to produce a male heir but also, argues Sarah Gristwood in “The Tudors in Love”, because she had lost at the game of courtly love. For it, like chess, was played until one side or the other was routed.
I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed
at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.
We open every book with the assumption that the writer wishes it to be read. Readers occupy a default position of generosity, bestowing the gift of our attention on the page before us. At most, we might concede that a novel or a poem was written for inward pleasures only, without the need or anticipation of an audience. It is very rare to open a book and to feel—to know—that the writer did not want us to read it at all, and, in fact, tried to prevent our reading it, and that, in reading the book, we are resurrecting a self that the writer wished, without hesitation or mercy, to kill.
This is the case with Rosemary Tonks’s “The Bloater,” published originally in 1968 and reissued in 2022 by New Directions, eight years after the author’s death in 2014. Without this intervention, Tonks might have succeeded in wiping “The Bloater” out, along with five other novels and two books of strange and special poetry, scorching her own literary earth. Before New Directions’ reissue and Bloodaxe Books’ posthumous collection of her poetry, getting hold of any of her work was prohibitively expensive; one novel could cost thousands of dollars.
How we got here is one of the great stories of science and synergy. The emergence of this new large-scale lab-based astrophysics was an unanticipated side effect of a much broader, more fraught, and now quite in-the-news scientific journey: the quest for nuclear fusion. As humanity has worked to capture the energy of the stars, we’ve also found a way to bring the stars down to Earth.
Still, despite all that, readers seemed to enjoy it, and for just the reasons I had hoped: the story lingered in people’s minds from one Friday to the next, and they wondered what turn it would take. As it spun out across the span of a year I got letters (well, emails) from people regularly suggesting possible plot twists or bemoaning the demise of favorite characters. I didn’t consciously adjust the story to fit their requests (and I’d written much of it in advance) but I did take note of what people were responding to.
But even then, I wanted to be more than funny. As is the way with youth, I began experimenting, testing other voices, longer forms. At twenty-one, I drafted an elegiac novel, Kaaterskill Falls. Ted Solotaroff, who edited Total Immersion, my first collection of stories, rejected my manuscript, asking, dismayed, “What happened to the sparkling Allegra Goodman I used to know?”
What happened? I was growing up, graduating, getting married, studying, traveling, having a baby. I published new stories, revised Kaaterskill Falls. and saw that book succeed. I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.
Tom Crewe’s intricate and finely crafted debut novel makes fiction of real history: In London, in the 1890s, two men, John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, collaborated on a study supporting freedom for “sexual inverts,” or what we would now call gay rights. Their efforts predate popular conceptions of the fight for equal rights, and it’s their lives and work that take the spotlight in Crewe’s reimagining.
In her latest novel, “Sam,” Allegra Goodman delivers a portrait of a girl at risk that shimmers with an unusual intimacy and depth. Her title character is 7 at the start of the book, living in Beverly, Mass., with her mother, Courtney, a hairdresser, and her brother, Noah, who is 2. To get away from Noah, who thinks his name may really be “No,” Sam climbs the walls — or actually the doorjambs — inch by tenuous inch.
In her latest book, the amazing Eva Brann addresses one of humanity’s most universal concerns: the pursuit of happiness. Drawn from the first line of the American Declaration of Independence, her familiar reference suggests that she is a pursuer. Renowned as one of the founding architects of the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College in Annapolis (and at its cousin college in Santa Fe), she has never stopped serving — she is 93 and has taught at the school for 65 years — as a classicist, tutor, dean, prolific writer, and intrepid explorer of the ideals of American democracy. She describes herself, however, not as a philosopher but as “one of a company of curators of a community of learning.” She has published — written, translated, edited — 39 books. She won the National Humanities Medal in 2005. She is the longest-serving tutor at her college. She is a maestro.
We only talk about short stature in a positive light once every four years, when Simone Biles dazzles us in a leotard. That has left the many advantages enjoyed by short people underappreciated. On average, short people live longer and have fewer incidences of cancer. One theory suggests this is the case because with fewer cells there is less likelihood that one goes wrong. I’d take that over dunking a basketball any day.
The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion. Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).
Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, oceans from pole to pole were covered with a blanket of ice a kilometer or so thick. Scientists call this “snowball Earth.”
Some early animals managed to endure this frigid era from roughly 720 million to 580 million years ago, but they had their work cut out for them. Despite their valiant successes, the repeated expansion and contraction of giant ice sheets pulverized the hardy extremophiles’ remains, leaving almost no trace of them in the fossil record and scientists with little to no idea of how they managed to survive.
Human civilization had a good understanding of how sex and reproduction worked long before the microscope was invented. But it wasn't until the 17th century that anyone knew what sperm actually were, or were aware of their strange appearance. And when sperm finally were formally discovered, by Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, he was so uncomfortable he wished he could unsee what he'd just observed.
This past spring, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein taught his final two classes at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he had been a professor since 1989. One was a course on American pragmatism, the tradition to which his own work belongs. The other was a seminar on Hannah Arendt, who, late in her life, was Bernstein’s friend.
Years ago, when I got my Ph.D., I was Bernstein’s student. I still am, in a way. And so I asked him if I could audit the class on Arendt and write about it. He said that he didn’t like passive auditors—I would have to participate fully. That requirement struck me as a good description of what Bernstein had done all his life.
This is one reason why I recently became interested in learning how to cry on command. The ability to produce tears on demand is a critical part of the professional actor’s playbook. When the script calls for crying, you need to be able to do it, even if you might not feel particularly sad at that moment. I aspired to this level of control over my own mind and body. I wanted to see my tears as a choice, rather than just an involuntary emotional reaction—and I wondered whether, by gaining mastery over my tear ducts, I might also learn how to shut them off at will.
The anonymous setting of Mohsin Hamid’s 2022 novel The Last White Man brings with it a certain comfort. The British Pakistani author’s lack of specificity is purposeful: dropped into a nameless town in an unknown country, the reader has no cultural touchstones to grab onto, no societal baggage to carry. The blank slate leaves just one aspect to focus on, which Hamid homes in on with his first line: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” This succinct statement of fact — a rarity in the novel — establishes the binary law of the land: you’re either white or dark, no in-between.
Spotswood allows his heroines to shine. Lillian, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, is shown in moments of strength and weakness. Will, her “leg-woman” and “occasional browbeater,” proves a force to be reckoned with. The dialogue crackles, the mysteries intrigue and there is an abundance of wit and grit. This is a rollicking ride with a class double-act.
“Love and Rockets” is about many things, but taken altogether, it’s about time — about its passage and the ways it whittles us into who we are in the present. The brothers’ singular achievement is that four decades out, their narratives continue to beguile. The comics may retain echoes of the past, but their stories — full of yearning and ache — remain utterly, absorbingly timeless.
Going out to dinner with Juan Tamariz in Madrid is a little like accompanying a cartoon character on a journey to the real world. As I walked with the 80-year-old magician on side streets off the city center’s main drag, the Calle Gran Vía, heads turned left and right. Tamariz has been a professional magician for 52 years, and in that time, he has managed the singular feat of becoming both a household name in his home country and a living legend in magic everywhere. He is referred to by magicians all over the world, and waiters all over Madrid, as Maestro. David Blaine has called him “the greatest and most influential card magician alive.” But in Spain, Tamariz is an icon, less like Blaine or David Copperfield and more like Kermit the Frog.
A cluster of young men smoking a joint, heads bowed and pupils dilated, whispered, “Tamariz?” uncertain if they could believe their eyes. (Imagine getting good and baked in public and seeing Kermit strolling by.) One passing woman did a Buster Keaton-grade double take, culminating in an expression of such uninhibited delight that witnessing it seemed to amount to a violation of her privacy. Tamariz is used to this. He will pause midsentence to say hello, or pose for a picture, before returning seamlessly to whatever conversation he was engaged in the previous moment. A preternatural night owl — he often goes to bed when he sees the sun coming out — Tamariz is the last to leave any restaurant he dines in, permitting just about every other customer to approach him on their way out. “They always make the same joke,” he whispered to me, after a man asked him to make his wife disappear. But Tamariz reacted as though it were the first time anyone had come up with the notion.
Earth records provide us with this information: Ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites in caves, growth rings in corals, tusks, and mollusks. These archives accrete memories on time periods varying from months to millions of years, allowing us to see a spectrum of Earth changes on various temporal and spatial scales—how biology, ocean, and ice respond to climate change in signature patterns, and the points at which those systems are pushed past thresholds.
This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks. How resilience folds into catastrophic failure. They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinction; the long timescales it takes for ice sheets to grow—accumulating million-year memories—and how fast they can melt, puddling history into storm surges that erode the banks of our futures.
But the leap second has always represented a deeper discrepancy. Our idea of a day is based on how fast the Earth spins; yet we define the second—the actual base unit of time as far as scientists, computers, and the like are concerned—with the help of atoms. It’s a definitive gap that puts astronomy and atomic physics at odds with each other.
“Now Is Not the Time to Panic,” the sixth novel from New York Times bestselling writer Kevin Wilson (“Nothing to See Here”) delves into the capacity of teenagers to create — but not also control — transformative art, and into the conjoined questions of culpability when that artwork takes on a momentum and meaning all its own among its consumers.
In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my moral happiness’. He wanted to master the German language and meet the thinkers and writers who lived in Jena, a small university town, southwest of Berlin. On Thomas Poole’s advice, his motto had been: ‘Speak nothing but German. Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
After a few days in Hamburg, Coleridge realised he didn’t have enough money to travel the 300 miles south to Jena and Weimar, and instead he spent almost five months in nearby Ratzeburg, then studied for several months in Göttingen. He soon spoke German. Though he deemed his pronunciation ‘hideous’, his knowledge of the language was so good that he would later translate Friedrich Schiller’s drama Wallenstein (1800) and Goethe’s Faust (1808). Those 10 months in Germany marked a turning point in Coleridge’s life. He had left England as a poet but returned with the mind of a philosopher – and a trunk full of philosophical books. ‘No man was ever yet a great poet,’ Coleridge later wrote, ‘without being at the same time a profound philosopher.’ Though Coleridge never made it to Jena, the ideas that came out of this small town were vitally important for his thinking – from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of the self to Friedrich Schelling’s ideas on the unity of mind and nature. ‘There is no doubt,’ one of his friends later said, ‘that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English.’
On a breezy winter day in Hawai‘i, a team of researchers from Whale Trust Maui watched as a group of humpback whales cavorted around their boat. The wind-rippled ocean surface distorted the view through the ocean–air interface, but one whale repeatedly swished its fins at the surface to produce a vortex that flattened the chop, creating a smooth spot where it placed its eye to look up at the scientists. Photographer and researcher Flip Nicklin, having never seen vortices used in this way, dubbed them “whale windows.” At the end of the encounter, the whale used a different method to construct the window—it blew a perfect air ring from its blowhole, much like a smoker puffs a smoke ring, which again smoothed the surface. Then, as before, the whale turned its head and looked up, meeting the researcher’s eye. Was the whale using a bubble as a tool?
Growing up as a Haitian American, January 1 has always been more than just the start of the new year for me. As a child, waking up on New Year’s Day, I practically floated through the air to the aromas of soup joumou, or Haitian pumpkin soup, resting in one of the decorative bowls my mother reserved for the annual tradition.
Every New Year’s Day, Haitians around the world consume soup joumou as a way to commemorate Haitian Independence Day. On January 1, 1804, Haitians declared independence from French colonial rule following the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791. Soup joumou is a savory, orange-tinted soup that typically consists of calabaza squash—a pumpkin-like squash native to the Caribbean—that’s cooked and blended as the soup’s base. To that base, cooks add beef, carrots, cabbage, noodles, potatoes and other fresh vegetables, herbs and spices.
“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday”: the famously deadpan opening of L’Étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. Love Me Tender starts in a similarly affectless mode, with an even more shocking declaration: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other.” A son can lose interest in his mother, but for a mother to sever relations with her son is sacrilege.
The word “terrorist,” or some variation thereof, shows up six times on the opening page of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s “Brotherless Night.” To be bludgeoned this way by such a poisoned piece of political taxonomy is to be reminded that for those fortunate enough to wield it, “terrorist” is a word that cleanses nuance: It suggests that there are good and bad people, and the bad ones are irredeemable enough to warrant a fixed label.
But the author’s sophomore novel — after “Love Marriage” in 2008 — isn’t really about terrorism or terrorists. It’s about all the ugly little human complexities those words are designed to obliterate, about what it means to have a much less straightforward relationship with violence and the people responsible for it.
On Jan. 7, 1978, Silvia Morella de Palma gave birth to her son Emilio. The event is noteworthy because it took place at Argentina’s Esperanza station in Antarctica. It was a gesture to remind the world that Argentina still considers the area hers. In response, Chile sent three pregnant women to bases they ran.
This is just one of the fascinating things you will learn about our largest continent in these pages. The authors had planned a physical exhibition on Antarctica, but COVID changed that to this book. Many of the 100 items highlighted are scientific instruments or tales of early explorers like Ernest Shackleton. It’s the others that intrigued me most.
The book’s subtitle is The Making of a Modern Conductor, and at least half of its almost 300 pages are given over to explaining how the shy but gifted girl who always thought she was too nervous to appear in public made it to the podium. It was a strikingly traditional route that many 20th- and even 19th-century conductors would recognise: singing in choirs, learning the organ, getting a job as church organist, which led to conducting the choir; acting as a rehearsal pianist for opera companies, which led to the offer of actually conducting a performance.