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.