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.