Blume, now 85, says that she is probably done writing, that the novel she published in 2015 was her last big book. She doesn’t get many handwritten letters anymore, though she still interacts with readers in the nonprofit bookstore that she and her husband, George Cooper, founded in Key West in 2016. Some fans, women who grew up reading Blume, cry when they meet her. “Judy, hi!” one middle-aged visitor exclaimed when I was there, as if she were greeting an old friend. She was from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where Blume raised her two children in the ’60s and ’70s, though she admitted that the author would have no reason to know her personally. “Well hello, and welcome!” Blume said.
Blume loves meeting kids in the store too. Usually, though, she avoids making recommendations in the young-adult section—not because of the kids so much as their hovering parents. “The parents are so judgmental ” about their kids’ book choices, she told me. “They’re always, you know, ‘What is this? Let me see this.’ You want to say, ‘Leave them alone.’ ” (Key West is a tourist town, and not everyone knows they’re walking into Judy Blume’s bookstore.)
I know that this isn’t exactly how it happened. There were no celestial matriarchs whispering me away from the brink of creative perdition. But they’re part of me, those women, and I’m part of them. Every day of that magical season their essence was on the pages that I handed to Anne Marie, and when she smiled at me and told me that it was good, that it was true and right, their voices joined with hers, and I knew that I was saved.
They say that print is dead and local news is dying. But in the small patch of Lower Manhattan that is Greenwich Village, there are four local newspapers vying for supremacy. Here, print is very much alive.
And local news is vicious.
When I’m born in May my parents think I look perfect. And I do, at first. But when they look closer into those newborn baby eyes, they see the black and purple specks floating around the white iris of my right eye—a phenomenon not inherited from my new family.
Comparing a brand-new novel against an established piece of media is often tempting, but can be far from accurate without casting a broader lens. Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns has been described endlessly as a gender-bent Taxi Driver. And while there are similarities between the debut novel and the Robert DeNiro movie, the comparison is somewhat misleading. This doesn’t detract from the quality of Your Driver is Waiting, far from it, but distracts from the true highlights of the book. Rather than a propulsive plot, this novel shines for its sharp writing and attention to detail. A closer comparison would be other recent works of literature, such as Sarah Thankam Mathews’s All This Could Be Different or Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl. These comparisons shed light on the adept characterization and social commentary of the novel, while retaining its innate sense of excitement.
Homestead is a beautiful novel, quiet as a snowfall, warm as a glowing wood stove. It's also a profound look at how we navigate one another, and what it means to reveal ourselves to the ones we care about — or as Marie thinks, "How much to be taken, and given, how much to be known, before calling this love, and will it be as sudden as a quiet hour?"
Zernike’s book is a inspiring but often infuriating account of the ways that MIT had discriminated against some of the brightest scientists in their fields. It’s also a cautionary tale of how easily workplace discrimination can take root, even among academics who consider themselves well-intentioned.
In his poignant memoir, “Life On Delay,” John Hendrickson invites the reader to understand his own relationship with words — the ones he says and the ones he doesn’t. A lifelong stutterer, Hendrickson uses “Life On Delay” to communicate the immense impact of spoken word.
Jennifer Wright opens her painfully timely biography of Madame Restell, the notorious “abortionist of Fifth Avenue,” with her final arrest, in 1878, at the hands of the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. For Comstock, a Victorian zealot who smeared his sexual obsessions all over American life well into the 20th century, this was the climax of an epic struggle between Satan’s handmaiden and his flaming sword of righteousness. To Restell, a grandmother in her late 60s, it was merely the latest in a long line of tedious interruptions to her business.
“It’s the novel Jane Austen would have written,” said the author Chris Bohjalian, “if Jane Austen lived in Brooklyn Heights in the 21st century.”
But Jane Austen didn’t hold a high-profile position in publishing, as well: Jackson, the author with a splashy debut on her hands, is also a vice-president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Bohjalian is one of her authors.
Jackson’s foray into writing came as a surprise to most who know her, not least those who have known her as editor, and raised questions: How will Jackson deploy her skills in her new circumstances? And what does it feel like to be on the other side of the author-publisher relationship?
“I want to write against this mythology of Alaska as the last frontier,” she says. “Alaska Natives have been there for thousands of years, and people have always lived there. There’s this idea that it’s an untouched, pristine wilderness, and that’s not true. There’s a price to be paid in trying to forge a life in a place that’s beautiful, but also tough to live in. I just want to be true to the Alaska that I’ve experienced and that I know my family has experienced.”
Astronomers began asking whether the profusion of early big things defies the current understanding of the cosmos. Some researchers and media outlets claimed that the telescope’s observations were breaking the standard model of cosmology — a well-tested set of equations called the lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM, model — thrillingly pointing to new cosmic ingredients or governing laws. It has since become clear, however, that the ΛCDM model is resilient. Instead of forcing researchers to rewrite the rules of cosmology, the JWST findings have astronomers rethinking how galaxies are made, especially in the cosmic beginning. The telescope has not yet broken cosmology, but that doesn’t mean the case of the too-early galaxies will turn out to be anything but epochal.
It feels terrible as a writer to admit, but I’ve been struggling to read for pleasure. I didn’t know it was an ability that could desert me until March 2020. It was during the Covid pandemic that I resolved to try and stop doom-scrolling on my phone, and found my eyes couldn’t settle on a page instead. It is a loss that has plagued me on-and-off ever since.
I didn’t worry at first. I looked it up (on my phone) and found that it was a common response to feeling unsafe. For every person for whom life in lockdown offered space for the comfort and escapism of reading, there was another who shared my sense of being stuck seeing only the surface of things; a kind of hypervigilant monitoring of our immediate fields of vision that sealed off deeper worlds of imagination. I accepted that because my body felt itself to be in danger, it was not willing to let me drift off somewhere else, even if that place – in a book – is where I have always felt most completely myself.
If language — lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary — and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, “The Queen of Dirt Island” is not your next read. Ryan’s book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both.
Ultimately, Old God’s Time is an at times woozy rendering of unstable memories and the difficulty in telling your story as it disappears “into old God’s time”, as well as a tribute to enduring love and its ability to light up the dark.
Once regarded as a masterpiece, the high-water mark of collective erudition, the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) is now best known for the egregiousness of its articles on race and ethnicity. Meanwhile, its entry for “woman” was trimmed down after the editor realized the 29-volume set was shaping up to be too large for its specially built bookcase. This was still a dramatic improvement on the first edition, which devoted a withering four words to the topic: “the female of man.”
One of the salutary lessons of Simon Garfield’s lively and informative history of the encyclopedia, “All the Knowledge in the World,” is to watch out for the prejudices and the constraints — material and commercial — that lurk in the background wherever we see the promise of universal knowledge. The word “encyclopedia” — not classical Greek, but a 16th-century coining — implies “learning in the round,” but what this might mean will be forever in flux.
"It's really difficult to operate here. It's one of the probably toughest places to get stuff done creatively," says DJ Chew.
"But if you can, something beautiful and powerful comes out of it, like a flower pushing up from a crack in the concrete."
“VenCo” is an incredible novel of social rejection and acceptance, of finding a community to belong to and flourishing in that supportive environment. Dimaline’s plot proves that no one is chained or ensorcelled by their past actions, and that it is always possible to venture forth to new beginnings or more fruitful experiences. The most important part of this transition, however, lies in finding new family and friends who can support, care and love the person during the process.
“The Librarian of Burned Books” is not a young adult novel, but it should be read by young adults. In fact, it is a novel that should be read by anyone and everyone who cares about books in a day and age where books and their subject matter are once again being challenged by school boards and parents throughout the country.
“A philosopher”, according to an old joke retold in this book, “is someone of whom you ask a question and, after he’s talked for a bit, you don’t understand your question”.
Whether or not true words are spoken in that jest is what’s examined in this excellent and often witty primer on the art, or aspiration, of thinking clearly and logically and ethically.
Peter Freuchen spent the winter of 1907 alone in the dark. A junior member of a Danish scientific expedition to northern Greenland, he was, in his own words, “just past 20, full of a lust for novel adventures,” and so, “like a fool,” he volunteered to spend the season manning a remote weather station. As wolves slaughtered his dogs and the icy condensation of his breath caused his cabin’s frozen walls to creep inward, his thoughts turned “sterile and unattractive” and he began having extended conversations with his cutlery. But the ordeal did not break him, for Freuchen had fallen in love with the Arctic.
Freuchen is the subject of Reid Mitenbuler’s “Wanderlust,” an attempt to reconcile the contradictions of, as Mitenbuler writes, “a highly sociable person who, somewhat inexplicably, was drawn to some of the most isolated places on Earth.” Mitenbuler paints Freuchen as the rare explorer who saw the world’s remote corners not as territory to be conquered but as a place to call home. Although narratively clumsy, it is a charming portrait of a man who traveled the world with an open mind, whose natural warmth never faltered in the cold.
There is fine writing here – fine writing , one may even say, of the sort which one sometimes rightly distrusts in novels; it can so easily become self-indulgent and ornamental, a peacock display, distracting from the matter, the how it is done seeming to matters more than what is being done. A writer of Barry’s gifts walks this tightrope. He keeps his balance beautifully, though. He is sometimes leisurely and may seem at risk of being self-indulgent. There’s a longish scene early on in which Tom goes to the local store, suddenly determined to give his shabby little flat a thorough cleaning. It’s amusing, lightly written, may even have you wondering why it’s there, yet you come to see it’s necessary. You have to listen for the tune echoing beyond his words. There is always music in the background of his writing.
Once again, Jane Harper triumphs with an intelligent, beautifully crafted crime novel, one that is more of a slow-burn mystery than a high-octane thriller, and all the better for it.
The result is an empathetic, vividly realised novel about motherhood and mental illness which pays thoughtful attention to the kinds of small details that can ground us when the larger stuff of life becomes fraught.
By the time revolutionaries took over the infamous French prison four years later, François, better known as the Marquis de Sade, was imprisoned at a nearby mental hospital, but the pages he’d filled — stretching 40 feet when the paper was stitched together — remained behind. A citizen from Provence found the writing, a violently pornographic novel titled “120 Days of Sodom,” hidden at the Bastille and removed it, sparking an overlapping sequence of some of the most notable controversies and scandals in literary history.
“The Curse of the Marquis de Sade,” Joel Warner’s book on the surrounding dramas, is equal parts biography, history and true crime. It tracks not just the story of the novel and its notorious writer but the role it played in a massive French Ponzi scheme.
She knew precisely who she was and how best to express that self. This was her purpose. Readers adored her because she appeared impervious to insecurity and doubt. Ephron owned her story, then and now. Life gives you a car wreck of a breakup. Here, enjoy my novel. The three potato recipes are gratis.
What is software if not the most consequential form of creation of our time? In fact, it's possible that we cannot come to a full understanding of our time without certain pieces of software. (Can you explain the early 20th century without Tin Lizzie?) I recoil at this phrase, but software—like it or not—has been eating the world. And large language models are coming to eat your lunch.
Hence a critical understanding of software products—ones you spend more time every day on than calling your parents every week—is vital.
You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.
Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?
In 1982, San Francisco resident Jane Cryan was looking for a home for herself and her grand piano when she stumbled upon a tiny cottage along 24th Avenue, in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood. “There was a refrigerator in the front yard,” says Cryan, “and a feral cat living there with umpteen kittens.” The paint on the cottage’s barn red with white trim exterior was peeling. “It was a disaster,” she says, “and everything I had ever wanted.” Cryan signed the lease that same day. It wasn’t until a month later that Cryan found out she was living in three cobbled-together refugee shacks, the same ones originally built to house displaced San Franciscans after the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake and fire.
How to Be Remembered is an ambitious first novel from the journalist and podcaster Michael Thompson. Its big-hearted conceit is constructed around Tommy, a boy whose entire existence is wiped from the memory of everyone who knows him each year on the fifth of January. Tommy – who is placed into a foster home on the morning of his first birthday when his parents wake to discover a child they don’t remember having crying in their lounge room – is raised (in a way) by Miss Michelle, who runs Milkwood House, colloquially known as the Dairy. Every year Tommy wakes in the Dairy, to an empty room, and descends the stairs rehearsing the script that will ingratiate him back into the lives of his former friends and carer. Surprisingly, that works.
“Users” is not only a book for today or a warning about tomorrow, but a timeless and moving story about fatherhood and one man’s yearning for a more meaningful life.
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.
I’m pretty sure we weren’t buying £2 candles a few years ago. What happened? The manager at Selfridges was right: it’s something to do with well-being. Lighting a scented candle now forms part of a suite of ritualistic wellness behaviours that include home care and mindfulness. Alongside other fragrance devices, it has its own consumer category: “air care”. Our homes have become shrines to ourselves and candles adorn the altar. As the cost of living rises, they also offer an achievable form of indulgence. But still, why candles?
So why dilute the original Rainforest Cafe’s wackiest, most beloved elements? The restaurant chain itself may be in decline, but on a cultural level, it hasn’t gone anywhere. We are, writ large, still obsessed with the Rainforest Cafe. A veritable jungle of animatronic animals, sage talking trees, and volcanoes erupting from between hefty slabs of brownie, it’s come to represent Y2K nostalgia itself — not unlike the decaying suburban malls where the chain made its home, themselves an endangered species. These days, malls are turning to experiential attractions to bring shoppers in, but maybe they’re already working with more than they think. Maybe nostalgia itself is the ultimate experience.
Perhaps we should start with the dumplings themselves, which are, of course, delicious. Worth the trip. Worth planning the trip around. Particularly the soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, which are — you could argue, and I would — the platonic ideal of the form: silky, broth-filled little clouds that explode inside your mouth upon impact. An all-timer of a dumping.
And that, more or less, is the most you will hear about the food made at the wildly popular Taiwanese dumpling chain Din Tai Fung: It’s great, it’s a draw, it’s the reason for everything that follows.
The remainder of our story begins and ends and pretty much exclusively takes place in Glendale, California — a city of close to 200,000 that sits just 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
For a very long time, New York City’s LaGuardia Airport felt like the intricately dressed set of an apocalypse film. Spread across its terminals were abandoned check-in stands gone feral, floors damp with discharged moistures, low ceilings looming over dark corridors. Now, near the end of a nine-year, $8 billion rebuild of its main terminals and roadways, LaGuardia has become an unexpected hero for American infrastructural renewal. It is an incredible airport.
That kid had been replaced by someone I no longer recognized—a stranger with vacant eyes and sores hidden beneath thick makeup, thin as a coatrack. Addicted to heroin and fentanyl. At 25.
I still couldn’t believe it. Shea used to be terrified of needles. She used to be a lot of things—a soccer player, a prankster, someone who sang in the shower. Now I didn’t know where she was or who she was with. I expected a pair of stone-faced cops to knock on our door any day. I couldn’t think where we would bury her.
The only thing of Shea’s that I could reach out and touch was her 3-year-old dog, Hank, a 30-pound mutt who was now living with us. I started running with him at the nearby Middlesex Fells Reservation a few times a week after a particularly low point in Shea’s journey.
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove,
pouring the herbs into the pot,
“As the age of handwriting comes to an end,” Joel Warner asks in his new book, “what is the value of the original texts left behind?” As it turns out, quite a bit. Warner’s The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History tells the story not of the narrative to be found in Sade’s book The 120 Days of Sodom, but of the manuscript itself. This 40-foot scroll, made up of sheets of paper pasted end to end, which Sade wrote while imprisoned in the Bastille, subsequently embarked on a strange and fantastical journey involving a level of criminality that rivaled the life of Sade himself.
At its best, paleontology opens windows into trillions of other lifetimes spent swimming, scuttling, stomping and soaring across this planet. Scientists, the press and the public alike tend to tell and retell these success stories, lionizing intrepid researchers. The most impressive specimens are enshrined in museums. But possibly just as important is when scientists get something wrong, badly, and somebody sets the record straight.
At first, it may seem difficult to explain how the distance between our Milky Way and CEERS-93316 has grown to 35 billion lightyears, given the Universe has only been expanding for 13.8 billion years.
How can it be that the size of the Universe is bigger than its age?
“I Have Some Questions for You” asks us to examine many things: high school, the ’90s, privilege, justice, sexual harassment, what we owe the dead. Like the true-crime podcasts it’s modeled on, it’s addictive, well told and a little bit unsettling.
In English the versatile suffix “ish” captures the somewhatness of something, as when we call a cloud “whitish” or say “Life is normal. Ish.” In Dorothy Tse’s whimsical satire about a version of contemporary Hong Kong going through hellish transformations, Owlish – “something like an owl but also not like an owl” – is a wise and elusive character who quotes from the Bible, speaks in a coded language, and appears and disappears randomly. Regardless of who or what Owlish is, they must find a way “to survive” as “who knows what will happen next? Everything is changing.”
No one could stand it the métro was so slow later halted a man started
Strumming a guitar making patter I couldn’t hear how could
There be room for a guitar I should be like him tell you things I’m
Underlying this rich literary tradition are fundamental questions of universal interest about the fate of the dead, the porousness of the boundary separating their world from ours, and the social obligations that the living had to provide for the deceased in their need. This attention to the memory of the dead and the responsibility of the living for their care was not unique to ancient polytheism or medieval Christianity. In fact, Western ghost stories shine most brightly as tools for teaching when they are read in tandem with tales of the returning dead from other religious cultures. In Buddhist and Taoist traditions, for example, the neglect of ancestors or misdeeds in life could give rise to “hungry ghosts.” These fearful spirits abided in the underworld, but they walked the earth during the seventh month of the Chinese calendar. In anticipation of their arrival, communities celebrated the Hungry Ghost Festival to provide symbolic sustenance not only to honor their own ghostly ancestors but also to ward off the ill will of the unknown phantoms in their midst. Like their Western analogues, the practice of the care of the hungry ghosts in Chinese culture is grounded on the hope that when we die, we, too, can rely on the living for help as we face the consequences of our mortal actions in the world to come.
I didn’t merely want to write about Hanging Out. I wanted to enact it—to meet the challenge Liming offers her readers. Take risks, she writes. Create opportunities to spend unproductive, unstructured time doing nothing with other people. That’s why I asked Liming, a complete stranger, if I could fly up to Vermont and hang out for a day. Because she is down to hang, she said sure. So, after dinner, when her husband, Dave Haeselin, asked if I wanted to come over to their house and continue the hang, I said, “Yeah, I can stay out a little later.”
How paleontologists define what species are, or are not, megafauna depends on what sort of creatures we’re talking about, and sometimes which expert we’re talking to. Herbivores are generally considered megafauna when they reach more than 2,200 pounds, and carnivores when they’re over 220 pounds. (So, the beavers, with their plant-based diet, don’t quite qualify, but they were impressively large all the same.) And up until relatively recently, there were many more such species. It wasn’t just that there were saber-toothed cats larger than Amur tigers prowling the Pleistocene grasslands, but also that Earth’s ecosystems would often host two or three species of large saber-toothed cat in one place, along with several giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, giant camels, and more. Then, most of them vanished. Of about 50 megaherbivore species present toward the end of the ice age, 41 went extinct. Experts are still debating why, but the emerging picture is that shifts in climate and in hunting by humans combined to make it impossible for the giant, ancient plant-munchers to survive. Big carnivores didn’t fare much better. Out of 15 megafauna carnivores, only about 6 survived—beasts, like black bears and jaguars, that persist in pockets of their former ranges.
If you eat a midday meal, do you call it lunch? What about luncheon, nuncheon, noonshine, or nunch? Perhaps you pause for refreshment toward the end of the morning and call this light repast elevenses (from eleven, as in eleven o’clock a.m.). If you skipped breakfast, your meal might be brunch (a portmanteau, or blended, word made from breakfast and lunch). Or maybe you call a midday meal dinner (and an evening meal supper, from Old French super, “to sup, take liquids by sipping”).
Chances are, you don’t say noonshine unless you’re a big Jane Austen fan. Noonshine, meaning “noon light,” has been around since the seventeenth century, but Austen appears to have been the first to apply it to a midday meal. Her particular use of noonshine, however, didn’t catch on with the general public. But Austen, like others in the early nineteenth century, also called a midday meal nuncheon (from Middle English noon and shenche, “a cupful, a drink”). Nuncheon and its shortened form nunch, meaning “light refreshment” or “drink,” had been around for centuries before Austen used it, and nuncheon lives on in regional varieties of English in the United States and the United Kingdom.
I watch the closing credits of every movie I see. I learned from my parents, who would always sit in the dark theater watching the names scroll down the screen while the ushers trickled in and the rest of the audience collected their belongings. Their ritual confused me as a kid: “Muppet Treasure Island” was over; Kermit and his friends were reunited; and the villain had his comeuppance. But my parents were still in their seats, eyes on the screen. What more were they expecting?
As the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman writes in his new book, “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” the Academy Awards can be described as a “game,” a “fashion show,” a “horse race” and even “an orgy of self-congratulation by rich and famous people who think too highly of themselves.” But, Schulman contends, the real key to understanding the awards comes down to power: “who has it, who’s straining to keep it, who’s invading the golden citadel to snatch it.” More than a mere journey through Academy Awards history, his book is a trip through Hollywood’s power struggles.
What Lloyd wants us to recognise is just how individualised mourning is and to understand that the grieving process never really ends – it just morphs. “You don’t get over it… There’s a peace but there’s not an ending.” Wise words and much like the book as a whole, a reminder that death touches every family, and we’re better off dealing with it together than alone.
The latest crop of Christie homages is a testament to the writer’s enduring appeal, but also to the flexibility of the format she perfected. The whodunit has its tropes—the eccentric investigator, the isolated country estate—while acting as a vehicle for whatever social commentary, colorful characters, or cultural references its current steward wants to infuse it with. “With the whodunit, I’m always looking for the genre to place inside that genre to actually make the car go,” Glass Onion director Rian Johnson told The Ringer in a conversation last month. “And the whodunit element is almost laid on top of it as an extra layer.” The whodunit can accommodate anything from a takedown of tech billionaires to a theatrical farce to an allegory of romance gone wrong, all while its most classic example remains beloved enough to inspire a box office hit. And while the genre has never gone out of style, the whodunit’s latest peak is an opportunity to appreciate both the form and its undisputed master.
She boiled a batch on the stove in her Northern California kitchen, ladled it into clean jars, and then put the jars in her pressure canner, a device with a locking lid similar to an Instant Pot. While they were processing (it takes about 75 minutes), she made a second batch to can. Eventually, she had eight pint jars of soup ready to eat, at a cost of only about $3 a jar — less than the price of a Big Mac.
Gomes, 39, is a longtime canning expert who teaches food preservation classes and co-hosts a podcast called Perfectly Preserved. But her strategy for getting dinner on the table (and tomorrow’s dinner in the cupboard) is becoming an increasingly common one. A growing number of Americans have taken up home canning in recent years, in what’s become a trend, a hobby, a political movement, and a response to the various bleak and bewildering conditions of life in the early 21st century.
Fried cheese was the last thing I thought I'd see going into a traditional West African dish, but especially into an okra stew. It was just one of several ingredients that surprised me as a Louisiana-born Cajun who cut his teeth on gumbo, a pillar of southern Louisiana cuisine that's made up of seafood or meat cooked in a roux – but never with cheese.
The origins of Louisiana gumbo can be traced to West Africa, during a time when enslaved Africans brought okra (or gombo as it is known in regional tongues) with them to the Caribbean and the US South, including where I'm from, the port city of New Orleans.
Makkai, as a fiction writer, draws on a long tradition of open-endedness. For her, suspending judgment is a creative act, inviting the novel’s last and most important thrall, in which imagination fills the gaps left by knowledge. By the final page, all options remain alive. “You” hold the knife. It’s the perfect crime.
The highest highs and the lowest lows of life often lead us down the path of memory. The destination? The single decision that set us on the road to our current reality. Sometimes, we are baffled by our own good fortune at forming incredible friendships, dwelling in a town or city where we thrive, or having a career that completely fulfills us. Other times, as in Tomihiko Morimi’s novel The Tatami Galaxy, we stew over the inexplicable bad luck that seems to drag us down endlessly like quicksand, and try to identify the moment when life took such an irredeemable turn. While those around us might offer up extreme optimism in the face of adversity as the answer, Morimi’s novel proposes a far more reasonable middle ground between that and drowning in self-pity.
Even when it does not literally rhyme, great poetry rhymes. The best poems are both of their own epoch and transferable to others, their themes and thoughts, emotions and meanings signifying whatever the poet initially meant and whatever future readers (all readers are temporally in the future) may need the poem to mean.
If you are a book lover, you have benefited from literary magazines. It doesn’t matter whether or not you curl up with them of an evening. British titles have nurtured many of our finest writers – from Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, down to younger authors such as Claire-Louise Bennett and Julia Armfield – and supplemented the meagre advances they may have received for their early books.
Yet such magazines are in danger. Last week, Ambit, the quarterly renowned since 1959 as a showcase for avant-garde writing (J G Ballard was once its fiction editor) was put on hiatus by its board. The current edition of the Irish literary quarterly The Moth will, after 13 years, be its last. In America, the mainstream book-review magazine Bookforum (founded in 1994) became defunct at the end of 2022, as did the fledgling fiction and poetry magazine Astra – in that case, after barely a year.
In September 1980, during the final weeks of his life, Lennon confronted this issue, admitting his frustration to journalist David Sheff. "Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist, or even as part of the Beatles," he remarked, "has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything." Incredibly, not even Ono's unfathomable trauma at having witnessed her husband's senseless murder would quell the naysayers and detractors who disparage her name.
As we celebrate Ono's ascent into the ranks of the nonagenarians, we can perhaps more profitably honor her aesthetic contributions by ignoring her detractors and highlighting her artistry. By the time that she met Lennon in 1966, Ono had successfully established herself amongst the Dadaesque group of artists known as Fluxus (from the Latin word "to flow").
Why did a one-star review persuade me that I should read a book? Because of the power of polarization.
Tom Crewe’s impressive first novel set in London in the 1890s explores the possibility of unconventional relationships between men and women, based on sexual freedom. This is the ‘New Life’ of the title, a dangerous prospect, when sodomy was still a crime punishable by penal servitude.
Popular perceptions of Sylvia Plath tend to dwell on a deeply troubled version of the young poet due to her well-documented difficulties with depression and the morbid imagery found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may come as a surprise.
This despairing Plath is a far cry from the poet I have come to know and admire – a poet who writes about the simple beauty of meadows and the tenacity of fungi as well as the splendours of rugged wilderness.
Of course, it’s one thing to say that Frake-Waterfield is acting within his rights. It’s another to say that what he’s doing has value. To see why it does, you first have to understand the various anti-democratic and anti-creative forces that are arrayed against his project and others like it.
But the construction of this stone salute to the Revolutionary War hero and “father of our country” was far from straightforward. It took nearly four decades to build the enormous monument in the mid-19th century, during which time it was occupied by a political fringe group, beset by controversy, and stalled by a lack of funds.
In November 1880, just three years before his death, Karl Marx wrote a letter to his friend Friedrich Adolph Sorge, a German émigré and labor organizer who had recently helped found the first socialist political party in the United States. After commenting at length on various developments in Russia, France and Germany, Marx added a postscript: “I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California, of course at my expense. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”
The aging Marx’s interest in California was certainly not incidental. As readers will discover in the opening chapters of Malcolm Harris’ newly published Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World—which includes Marx’s letter as an epigraph—the region was a crucible of modern capitalism long before it became synonymous with the likes of semiconductors, microchips or artificial intelligence. In the popular imagination, Silicon Valley today is known as the global center of technological innovation—a feverish, futuristic El Dorado in which grit, intellect and risk commingle to produce disruptive new inventions and bountiful wealth along with them. It’s an alluring mythos and, by extension, a blinding one, too: The region’s foundational narrative of boundless progress and Promethean genius often more closely resembles fable than actual history.
Just as the rise of the Kindle afforded contemporary readers a new, more private way to engage with erotic content (the best-selling Kindle e-book of all time remains Fifty Shades of Grey, after all), the distribution model of early romance paperbacks of the 1940s and ’50s allowed readers access to a genre, and a hobby, previously unavailable to them.
Within these new retail spaces, mass-market paperbacks were displayed in revolving wire racks with the cover facing outward, rather than the spine (as in a conventional book shop). This made them more akin to a display of candy bars than to a display of encyclopedias. As such, the cover became the de facto advertisement for a book: It had to quickly and efficiently communicate the content and tone of the novel to the consumer, and it had to be loud and eye-catching enough to compete with the books directly adjacent to it.
In early May 2009, 12 men arrived in La Rochelle on the west coast of France, carrying a few pairs of Speedos in their luggage. They had not come to swim but, as they liked to put it, to “fly”. Their sport, which involves diving from cliffs, buildings or bridges, always comes with an atmosphere of nervous excitement, but this time the stakes were higher than ever before. Cliff diving had long been at the obscure end of extreme sports, a pursuit for thrill-seekers with day jobs. Now, the energy drink company Red Bull was launching what it called a “cliff diving world series”, with eight events scheduled across the summer that would attract hundreds of thousands of spectators. Here was a chance at fame and, if not fortune, for the very best of the divers, a modest living.
I think altering your face is more acceptable if you’re honest with everyone but your significant other (they don’t need to know how the sauce is made). Lying about your age is old news. I recommend stating your age, then politely waiting for the chorus of, “Oh, you don’t look 38!” It’s far more humble, especially when followed by a hand wave while saying “Botox,” as if you’re talking about “this old thing?” At least, that’s how it works in my head.
The mid-1990s seems like a pretty good era in retrospect. America was in the middle of the longest period of economic growth in history. Global pandemics were the stuff of science fiction, the Great Depression was a history lesson, the threat of global nuclear war seemingly had collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, and the numbers 9/11 were still just for calling in an emergency.
On the other hand, the mid-1990s weren’t so great for some people. Monica Lewinsky, for instance, probably has had better decades. Likewise, Isabel, the protagonist and narrator of Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel, My Last Innocent Year, might not have had such a great decade. Since then, societal attitudes toward consent and sexual assault have improved, but Florin’s novel questions how far we’ve really come.
Reading has a reputation as the quintessential quiet activity. Picture reading and you might think of hushed libraries and shushing librarians or a cozy afternoon whiled away in silence on the couch with a good novel and perhaps a purring cat on your lap. There are even silent reading parties where guests BYOB (bring your own book) and sit in companionable quiet. A bookish introvert’s dream! Yet, despite reading’s association with quiet individual immersion, it has a loud, communal history. In fact, for millennia, reading was something only done out loud. Here’s a quick primer on how reading went silent.
Most nights I don’t sleep well, so to relax, I often listen to audiobooks or the radio. Other people’s words keep me from sliding into the canyon of doom, where all around shouts of “you’re screwed” reverberate. For many months I put on murder mysteries, but in an effort to embrace a more soothing sort of rest, I have started listening to compilations of the Shipping Forecast, a BBC Radio 4 production that is no fancier than its name suggests: It is, simply, a program featuring weather reports that narrate the gales and tides around the British Isles. If some people doze off to the sound of rain, I fall asleep to broadcasters announcing the rain that is to come.
This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.
A book about staring down the barrel of a stage four cancer diagnosis could have made for grim reading. But beloved actor, Richard E. Grant brings his likeable nature and positive personality to the unsurprisingly-named, A Pocketful of Happiness. This memoir is a love letter to his darling wife, Joan Washington, and a reminder of the things that truly matter in life.
This crisp book is full of wonderful details and fresh information about half-known, half-remembered names. Some should stay like that. But Nevil Shute was spot on: skilled writing can make anything interesting.
high tide of light rises up upon the sky
we are awash all day in glory
After Patrick Bringley lost his older brother in 2008, he decided to take the most straightforward job he could think of in the most beautiful place he knew. He left his job at the New Yorker’s events department and spent the next 10 years as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bringley’s new memoir, All the Beauty in the World, tells the story of his time at the Met. It’s full of satisfyingly inside-baseball facts: the secret routines of the guards, the basement galleries where the Met’s earliest collections linger, the backstories of stolen art. It’s also a story of art appreciation. Bringley makes a strong case that nothing teaches you to understand a work of art better than standing in a room with it for eight hours at a time, with little to occupy you but the art and your own responses to it.
Perhaps most importantly, though, All the Beauty in the World is a story about grief and about beauty, and about how inextricably the two are linked.
The template is a classic: Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl. But the delivery — a series of intimate, offbeat, often hilarious musings on a relationship, from first blush to post-breakup drinks — is a highly entertaining surprise. At first glance, the text looks like prose poetry: well-spaced, economical paragraphs of two or three lines. But the format belies the potency of the writing. This is not an airy ode; the hard truths of love and loss are boiled down here. If the novel were a sauce, it would be a reduction.
The thirty-three contributors to Wanting risk sharing their desires on the page in empowering personal essays that demonstrate astonishing courage, but also craft, making it an anthology that reveals the relationship between wanting and body, mind, and heart, yes, but also between wanting and voice. “Our desires,” write the editors“—and speaking them aloud—make us powerful.”
My first impression was not awe or majesty or surrender or consumerist bliss. It was confusion. For a surprisingly long time after I arrived, I could not tell whether or not I had arrived. There was no security checkpoint, no ticket booths, no ambient Ghibli soundtrack, no mountainous Cat Bus statue. Instead, I found myself stepping out of a very ordinary train station into what seemed to be a large municipal park. A sea of pavement. Sports fields. Vending machines. It looked like the kind of place you might go on a lazy weekend to see a pretty good softball tournament.
There were some buildings around, but it was hard to tell which of them might or might not be Ghibli-related. In the distance, the arc of a Ferris wheel broke the horizon — but this, I would discover, had nothing to do with Ghibli Park. I wandered into and out of a convenience store. I saw some children wearing Totoro hats and started to follow them. It felt like some kind of bizarre treasure hunt — a theme park where the theme was searching for the theme park. Which was, in a way, perfectly Studio Ghibli: no pleasure without a little challenge. And so I headed down the hill, trying to find my way in.
Her family worried about the move. They asked whether it was a good idea to make a radical life change involving great financial risk. High admits she had her moments of doubt. The GoFundMe she launched was trudging along with the help of friends and family. And last summer, Eso Won Books, a prominent Black-owned bookstore in South Los Angeles, announced it would close its store. High, who frequented Eso Won, wondered what the closure might mean for a new bookstore with a similar focus.
“There was that initial fear,” High said during an interview at her bookstore — which still sat empty in late January, save for a few tantalizing books by the window. “And then it was like, OK, but we have to keep showing up, and we have to bet on our community of readers and people with curious minds. I’m confident that those people are here in this area and beyond.”
Alternate histories have long been a staple of my comfort reading diet. When the going gets rough—the future looks uncertain, the present unstable—I have always been happy to decamp to a hypothetical world. But I’m tricking myself when I think it will be a great escape. These books’ imaginary times always bring me firmly back to reality. They change how I see real life, help me articulate what I haven’t been able to name. They remind me that history may seem inevitable in hindsight, but the future is still undefined.
We, as audiences, are told that this makes these characters more dynamic. It’s a sort of postmodern reinterpretation of what a hero or a villain is, in an effort to create more complex stories. But what if we’re losing, in the process, coherent characters and storytelling with real stakes? If no one in your story plays by the rules, can you even claim to have any in the first place?
More troubling, seeing as how so many genre entertainment properties right now are owned by large monopolies and distributed via a never-ending string of in-universe spinoffs and sequels, at what point do we have to admit that perhaps there are more cynical financial reasons at play for never defining your characters? A traditional hero’s journey or your classic villain’s downfall requires some kind of ending to remain believable. But antiheroes, it seems, can stream forever.
Iridescent rainbow orbs bursting into tangerine spun sugar. Pearly spheres of goo. Sorbet corn dogs leaning into one another with matching bouffants. Bright yellow blackberries. A bunch of Mr. Blobby’s babies. Golden goblets overflowing with effervescent honeycomb. Opalescent spherules in crinkled sweet wrappers. Amaretti flecked with flakes of soap. Honestly, go and check it out if you don’t believe me.
These intricate structures—netted, patterned, striated, globed—were, I learned, the fruiting bodies of myxomycetes, the scientific name for slime molds. Slime mold is a common name which is an attempt to describe organisms that defy simple categorization. For a while, it was thought they were fungi, so they were once classed as such (hence, myceto-, meaning fungus). But they are not fungi at all, and they live much of their lives like an animal.
Forget archaeologists and their lost civilizations, or paleontologists with their fossils—astrophysicist Heloise Stevance studies the past on an entirely different scale. When astronomers catch a glimpse of an unusual signal in the sky, perhaps the light from a star exploding, Stevance takes that signal and rewinds the clock on it by billions of years. Working at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, she traces the past lives of dead and dying stars, a process she calls stellar genealogy. “There’s a lot of drama in the lives of stars,” she says.
On August 17, 2017, astrophysicists witnessed two dead stars’ remnant cores, known as neutron stars, colliding into each other in a distant galaxy. Known as a neutron star merger, they detected this event via ripples in spacetime—known as gravitational waves—and light produced by the resulting explosion. This marked the first and only time scientists had seen such an event using gravitational waves. From those signals, they deduced that the neutron stars were 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun. They also figured out that such collisions create some of the heavier natural elements found in the Universe, such as gold and platinum. But overall, the signals presented more puzzles than answers.
For fans of Siri Hustvedt and Claire Messud, Charmaine Craig’s third novel, “My Nemesis,” is the spiky little feminist page-turner you’ve been waiting for. Spiky little feminist page-turner? When’s the last time you saw those four words in a row? I can explain. But first, some sense of the plot.
To say “The Laughter” is just a campus novel is to vastly undersell it; it’s also the story of America’s changing cultural landscape and the major political and philosophical shifts needed to uplift and protect the marginalized. This is a smart and hilarious book not just for anyone who wants to laugh at the absurdity of academia, but for anyone who wants to become a better person by doing it.
Ultimately, the narrative force in “The Applicant” comes not primarily from Leyla’s precarious status under the Fiktionsbescheinigung, or even her impending choice between the inconstant life of an artist and the stability offered by her lover. It comes from a quieter uncertainty. “What do I want?” Leyla asks herself, over and over. “What do I want that I can get and won’t turn me into a Thérèse Chevalier, a Jeanne Dielman, my mother?” Leyla may not know the answer. But by the end of “The Applicant,” we can rest assured that she means to find out.
Forty years ago , Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete.
It isn’t just that everyone now has a story; it’s that everyone is a story. Who you are is the narrative you recount about yourself. Whether the life history of someone forced into sex work reflects their true self, or whether self-narration might also be self-deception, are questions that seemingly don’t trouble this line of argument.
Has sex become too readily available? Banal, even? A boring chore? If so, what better way to make it fascinating again than to prohibit all mention of it? Don’t read about sex! Don’t think about sex! See no sex, hear no sex, speak no sex! Suddenly, the kids want to explore! “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17). If that’s the school board’s game, well played! Virginia may even get more babies out of it.
How dare I question the school board’s motives? I do dare. After all, it has questioned mine.
Tarantino’s books about the films and filmmaking of the past function less as museum exhibits than guides to keeping the form potent, relevant, and maybe still able to inspire another nine-year-old budding cineaste whose mind gets blown by a movie he never should have been allowed to see.
How are we supposed to wrap our heads around that? How can we possibly come to grips with a theory that doesn’t explain how anything works? People have struggled with these questions ever since quantum mechanics was developed, and they’ve come up with a number of ways to make sense of the processes involved in quantum behavior. Let’s explore three of these interpretations of quantum mechanics to see if any of them satisfy our cravings for a "why" behind all this odd phenomenology.
Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows — shadows doing impossible things — that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.
As I looked at the rolling, empty sand dunes sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the quiet town of Guadalupe, California, it was hard to imagine that for a few short weeks in 1923 this area was teeming with thousands of actors, crew members and animals participating in one of the silent film era's most epic productions. That said, it was neither the movie's filming, nor even the film itself that brought this town of just 1.3 sq miles in Santa Barbara County its notoriety. That has more to do with what has remained just below the surface here for the last 100 years.
What often elevates a writer is compassion, and O’Connor has it in spades – paying tribute to the courage of those who resist tyranny. Beautifully crafted, his razor-sharp dialogue is to be savoured, and he employs dark humour to great effect. The plot twists keep on coming until the novel’s coda, where a final joyful conceit is revealed.
What is there left of wonder in the world? Little perhaps for us postmoderns: a dying planet, a godless universe, the lingering angst of political strife and pandemics. The closest science has come to connecting us with the cosmos is the materialist reassurance of Carl Sagan’s adage, “We are made of star-stuff.” Yet our dismal globe is a thing of recent discovery. For a long time, other cultures looked through quite different lenses at the earth and skies above.
In Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book that Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (2023), Travis Zadeh takes us on a tour through one such lost world — a medieval Muslim cosmos in which the earth and all its parts had their place in a benign divine order. It is a cosmography contained within the pages of a single book that, for the best part of 700 years, was read from India to Egypt — the ʿAjaʾib al-Makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾ ib al-mawjūdāt (“The Wonders of Things Created and Rarities of Matters Existent,” in Zadeh’s rendering) by Abū Yaḥyā al-Qazwīnī, who was born around 1203 in what is today Western Iran. Nowadays, its many extant manuscript versions are mostly known for their fabulous illustrations, at once geometric and fantastic. The past decade has seen several exhibitions based on copies held in European and American libraries. But Zadeh is primarily concerned with al-Qazwīnī’s words, acting as a commentator in the classical sense of someone seeking to reveal the layers of reference and meaning in a text from another time. In taking this approach, Zadeh presents his book in the guise of the Persian literary commentary known as a javāb, or “answer,” to an author from centuries earlier. In this way, he gives us vicarious entry to a centuries-long conversation, not only with al-Qazwīnī himself but also with his many other commentators. Thus, Zadeh has not so much written a study of al-Qazwīnī as a biography of his book and its interpretation and circulation over the course of seven centuries.
Priscilla Gilman’s new memoir, “The Critic’s Daughter,” is about her tangled relationship with her father, the critic Richard Gilman. By the end of the book, there’s a lot of blood on the floor, but it doesn’t belong to the author or her ostensible subject.
How often driving down those roads
we hoped we wouldn’t hit something,
Hailing from a small, rural town in North Carolina, I have a strong understanding of small-town living. Time seems slower down here, peace and quiet echo throughout your neighborhood, and your neighbors are fairly familiar with the people in their community, which means they are knowledgeable of your comings and goings.
Anyone else who has lived in a small town knows that gossip travels fast. De’Shawn Winslow knows this well and expertly demonstrates it in his new book Decent People.
Marriage. What to do about it? We marry, then instantly yearn for freedom. Scholars concur that marriage is a tricky business. Too often our unions are a “betrayal of our inner richness and complexity,” Phyllis Rose declared in her iconic book, “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” (1983). But wait, don’t file for divorce! Rose suggests that learning about other people’s relationships can help us save our own, offering us new possibilities about how to remain married and fulfilled.
Enter Carmela Ciuraru. Her new book, “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages,” is a tour de force that extends and deepens Rose’s pioneering work. Ciuraru studies five literary couples, focusing on “how women have defined themselves through or in opposition to men.” She delves into these colorful relationships as a way to show how not to be married, highlighting the dangers of unbalanced relationships. “The problem with being a wife,” Ciuraru writes, “is being a wife.” Her book explores the negotiations and compromises that occurred inside these marriages, demonstrating how subservience and disparity undermine relationships, even love.
In his introduction to “A Black Woman’s West — The Life of Rose B. Gordon,” (2022), author Michael K. Johnson noted that African American women have been nearly invisible in the recorded history of the American west. He hoped to make that history more visible with his biography of Rose Gordon.
The result is a portrait of an intelligent and generous woman whose choices in life were guided by her loyalty to her family and community. It is also a portrait of that community, the town of White Sulphur Springs, where Gordon spent nearly her entire life of 85 years. Finally, it is an exploration of how Gordon steered through a social milieu in which the color of her skin set her apart from nearly everyone else in her surroundings. For the most part, it is a story of harmony across racial lines.
Through these gripping, intertwined stories we see determination and a sponsor’s cash rescue Jules Schulback; witness the birth of Superman, midwifed by a girlie magazine publisher; and watch the abandoned foster child Norma Jeane Mortenson become the biggest star in the world.
What’s more American than all that?
A paradox defines writing: The public sees writers mainly in their victories but their lives are spent mostly in defeat. I suppose that’s why, in the rare moments of triumph, writers always look a little out of place — posing in magazine profiles in their half-considered outfits with their last-minute hair; desperately re-upping their most positive reviews on Instagram; or, at the ceremonies for writing prizes — the Oscars for lumpy people — grinning like recently released prisoners readjusting to society.
Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone.
The reason? We eat so many chickens. So, so many. In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion of them, up from 8 billion in 1965. On Sunday alone, Americans will likely eat a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings as they watch the Eagles take on the Chiefs at Super Bowl LVII. And that makes it all the more astonishing that, according to chicken industry lore, the system that makes it possible for us to eat so much chicken in the first place originated with a minor clerical error.
With the Super Bowl at hand, behold the cheerful untruth that has been perpetrated upon (and generally with the blessing of) the chicken-consuming citizens of the United States on menus across the land: a “boneless wing” that isn’t a wing at all.
Odds are you already knew that — though spot checks over the past year at a smattering of wing joints (see what we did there?) suggest that a healthy amount of Americans don’t. But those little white-meat nuggets, tasty as they may be, offer a glimpse into how things are marketed, how people believe them — and whether it matters to anyone but the chicken.
The 11 autobiographical essays (six old, five new) collected in Haruki Murakami’s splendid second memoir of sorts, Novelist as a Vocation, are not meant to comprise a general guidebook on how to write novels but, rather, a key that illuminates his individual process. It is neither a self-help book nor a manual on fiction writing. As he states in the foreword, it is a “comprehensive look (at the present time) of [his] views on writing novels.” The book, published in Japan in 2015 and now available in an English translation by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, began as a series of “undelivered speeches” and became a record of his “thoughts and feelings.” Yet, despite significant changes in personal and societal circumstances (including the pandemic), his “fundamental stance and way of thinking have hardly changed at all.”
Forty-seven years later, Spielberg is a Hollywood elder statesman at the forefront of the Academy Awards race. His late-career bildungsroman, The Fabelmans, is nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. By now, it’s a commonplace assumption that Spielberg is the master of Oscar bait—that he makes the kinds of movies the Academy loves, and is rewarded accordingly. But as much as Spielberg seems like a perennial shoo-in, his Oscar history is surprisingly spotty.
On a rainy summer day, I took a train to the Swiss city of Saint-Maurice and trekked through the squelching mud to a medieval fortress perched high atop a cliff. After descending into a dark cavern and twisting through its dimly lit corridors, I finally arrived at the main viewpoint of the Grotte aux Fées (Cave of the Fairies): a plunging 77m waterfall that shoots from an underground limestone ledge into a translucent pool. As the splatter echoed through the cavern and drenched my jacket, I closed my eyes and took out my phone to record the rush of dreamy reality before me.
I had come in search of a sound, not a sight.
Last December, with some hesitation, I posted a personal essay I’d written for Racquet Magazine on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The piece examined why Serena’s retirement from professional tennis, in order to have another child, had prompted an existential crisis for me. Serena and I are both 41, and her sadness around the word “retirement” echoed my own sadness around the word “motherhood.” While I came to no firm conclusions, I ended the essay suggesting that my husband and I would likely not have children, given my age and our ambivalence, despite family and social pressures to reproduce.
One week after posting the article, I found out I was pregnant.
Well, fair enough. But it seems a little one-sided. After all, there must be plenty of things that books might dislike about readers, and turnabout is fair play. So who will speak for the books? That’s right, it’s Literary Hub. (Who else?) Just for fun, we asked some of our favorite books what their pet peeves are, and here’s what they told us:
The sweet spot in the title of Amy Poeppel’s fourth novel refers to a grungy Greenwich Village bar, a beloved neighborhood fixture with battered wood floors, rickety tables and a pungent smell of beer. Its handsome owner is Dan, “a laid-back, decent, extremely chill” single dad who helpfully steers customers clear of the house wine. It’s a good name for a bar but an even better name for a warm and charming comedy of manners that hits every note just right.
Knowing Lowry’s versatility, I shouldn’t have been surprised that in her latest book she succeeds in doing three things at once. “The Windeby Puzzle” is structurally strange and beautifully crafted, zigzagging, as its subtitle announces, between history and story.
Proust died at fifty-one, in Paris, of pneumonia, on November 18th, and last year was the centenary of his death. Since I first read “In Search of Lost Time,” his immense and unique autobiographical novel, a long passage about what writing is—from “Time Regained,” the seventh and last volume—has stayed with me. It takes place at the mansion of the Princess Guermantes, where the narrator has been invited to a musical reception. On his way to the Guermantes’s, he encounters by chance M. de Charlus, a member of the Guermantes family. Ancient and ruined by a stroke, Charlus is like a ghost of a possible future for the narrator himself. At this point in the novel, the narrator is nearly middle-aged, bored, over-sophisticated, and aware that, for lack of talent, he is not the writer he had dreamed of becoming. Everything in the first six volumes is behind him—Swann, Gilberte, Vinteuil, Albertine—although unwritten as yet.
Dreams, in fact, are a primary irritation for a number of readers. Such reverie might have worked for Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” or Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but no more, thank you very much. “I absolutely hate dream sequences,” writes Michael Ream. “They are always SO LITERAL,” Jennifer Gaffney adds, “usually an example of lazy writing.”
Laziness may be the underlying cause of several other major irritants.
Every time I return to Berlin—and this is now 17 years’ worth of returning—I also return to speaking German. I’m always flooded with thoughts and observations about this return. Speaking German elicits big, inarticulate feelings: It’s good, it’s familiar, it’s awful, it’s tumultuous, it’s suddenly great again. But why?
Robert E. McGinnis was a prolific illustrator behind the movie poster for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, magazine illustrations, and over 1,000 book covers. In 1980, McGinnis created the cover for Johanna Lindsey’s Fires of Winter, the first romance novel cover to feature a fully naked man. The cover depicts a couple on a fur rug, the hero sitting on his knees, reclining, with the heroine in his lap. His bare thighs frame her hips and she is leaning back against his bare chest. McGinnis originally had the heroine naked as well, but added clothing at the publishing house’s request. The cover radiates sensuality.
In 1985, McGinnis created the cover for another book of Lindsey’s, Tender is the Storm. The hero is stark naked and turned to the side, his entire body visible from head and shoulder down to muscular thigh. He’s clutching the heroine to his body, his arms strategically covering her breasts, and her breasts and body are strategically covering his groin. The overtly sexy nature of the cover caused concern among booksellers who were worried about the reaction from the public, and a large gold sticker was added to help conceal the hero’s butt and groin and the heroine’s breasts.
In the 1970s, the artist Salvador Dalí was commissioned to create a tarot deck for the James Bond film “Live and Let Die.” The deal fell through, but Dalí continued to work on the cards, casting himself as the Magician and his wife, Gala, as the Empress. Inspired by the raw, dreamlike language of Delacroix, Duchamp and Surrealism, Dalí married the hallucinatory with the concrete, the esoteric with the commonplace and the disturbing with the beautiful to create images that feel both ethereal and visceral.
This is the vibe of Mariana Enriquez’s startlingly brilliant new novel, “Our Share of Night.” Epic in scope — it is 600 pages long — the narrative explores the founding families of the Cult of the Shadow, also known as the Order, an international secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death. The hunt for immortality leads them to do the unthinkable.
The memory thing started before I retired.
But it really worsened several years ago,
All this has left the documentary world suffering an identity crisis. What even is a documentary anymore? There is more money than ever, but it has come with expectations that didn’t exist when the industry was closer in ethics and taste to public broadcasting than to Hollywood. The people agreeing to tell their stories are now asking for control, or cash, leaving documentarians navigating a sense of responsibility (or fealty) toward their subjects; the demands of the algorithm; and their desire to make great work. For the audience, it has become almost impossible to sort works of art or journalism from glorified reality TV or public-relations exercises: An HBO Max subscriber can scroll through the documentaries tab and find two movies about Lizzo that she herself executive-produced, 41 films and series described as true crime, an Oscar-nominated movie about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and Wahl Street, “a glimpse into global star Mark Wahlberg’s life as he juggles the demands of his personal and professional worlds and hustles to grow his expanding business empire.” Hollywood is now showing signs of retrenching. With budgets shrinking, filmmakers worry the problems of the doc boom could be exacerbated by a doc bust, and that the old-fashioned idea that documentaries could be trusted to tell honest, complicated stories may go down with it.
There are skyscrapers, and then there are supertalls, often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk. First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. Now they’re all over the place. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000; there are now a couple hundred worldwide, including Dubai’s 163-story Burj Khalifa (a hypodermic needle aimed at space), Tianjin’s 97-floor CTF Finance Centre (reminiscent of a drill bit boring the clouds), and, encroaching on my sky, Manhattan’s 84-floor Steinway Tower (a luxury condominium resembling the love child of a dustbuster and a Mach3 razor).
At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. She isn’t playing. Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.” It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot.
For readers of contemporary literature, the 21st century has been a period besotted with memoir and its close if slightly more esoteric cousins, autotheory and autofiction. In her latest novel, “My Nemesis,” the American author Charmaine Craig explores the murky terrain of memoir by chronicling the fictional relationship between two women writers. Tessa, the narrator, is a New York-based memoirist whose books address divorce, motherhood and “the absurdities of middle age”; while Wah is a university lecturer in Los Angeles who has published a nonfiction book about her adopted daughter’s experience as a victim of child trafficking overseas. They meet when Wah’s husband, Charlie, “a decently published philosophy professor,” contacts Tessa about one of her books. A quasi-flirtatious correspondence ensues and soon Tessa and her husband, Milton, begin a series of sometimes-cordial bicoastal visits with Charlie and Wah.
It became a time when song no longer soared
but climbed, hand over hand up a taut rope.
One cracked voice was all it took. Cathedrals
bombed and gone, carcasses opened to the sun,
At first, the paper kept getting rejected. “Weirdly, we didn’t get impostor feelings about that,” Clance told me, when I visited her at her home, in Atlanta. “We believed in what we were trying to say.” It was eventually published in 1978, in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice. The paper spread like an underground zine. People kept writing to Clance to ask for copies, and she sent out so many that the person working the copy machine in her department asked, “What are you doing with all these?” For decades, Clance and Imes saw their concept steadily gaining traction—in 1985, Clance published a book, “The Impostor Phenomenon,” and also released an official “I.P. scale” for researchers to license for use in their own studies—but it wasn’t until the rise of social media that the idea, by now rebranded as “impostor syndrome,” truly exploded.
Almost fifty years after its formulation, the concept has achieved a level of cultural saturation that Clance and Imes never imagined. Clance maintains a list of studies and articles that have referenced their original idea; it is now more than two hundred pages long. The concept has inspired a micro-industry of self-help books, ranging in tone from #girlboss self-empowered sass (“The Middle Finger Project: Trash Your Imposter Syndrome and Live the Unf*ckwithable Life You Deserve”) to unapologetic earnestness (“Yes! You Are Good Enough: End Imposter Syndrome, Overthinking and Perfectionism and Do What YOU Want”). “The Imposter Syndrome Workbook” invites readers to draw their impostor voice as a creature or a monster of their choosing, to cross-examine their negative self-talk, and to fill a “Self-Love Mason Jar” with written affirmations and accomplishments.
It’s July in northwest Montana. I prop my foot against the side of my car, Henry, so I can lace my hiking boots. My shitty green Toyota Corolla has been the only constant in my life since leaving New Hampshire after college. An hour ago, I finished working the breakfast/lunch shift at a restaurant on the edge of Glacier National Park. There are seven hours of daylight left—it won’t be dark until nearly 10 p.m. There is enough time for a seventeen-mile hike.
I am fastest when I am alone. And I am usually alone.
Maggie Millner’s “Couplets” (out with FSG
the week before Valentine’s Day 2023,
so booksellers and gifters can rest assured
they’ll have it in hand for paramours)
is an astounding debut. Ugh: astound?
A word too easily tossed around,
like “lyric,” “stunning,” “heartbreaking, “gripping” —
but, here, all are true. Millner’s clever couplets strip
Adolescence, that alchemical torment, is a time few of us wish to return to. We remember too well that maturity comes at a cost. And yet, stories of baptisms by fire are common and commonly loved. These coming-of-age tales have the narrative neatness of a hero’s journey — departure, risk, trial, disillusioned growth, humbled return. And who doesn’t savor a bittersweet mouthful of wisdom, hard-earned?
But what of coming of age after coming out? Becoming queer is a passage rarely aligned with the timetables of development. “The second adolescence — like the second first love,” writes poet Maggie Millner, “is a time we have few legends of.” What kind of self-knowledge is wrought from this rarely memorialized transformation? And at what cost?
“Your Driver Is Waiting” is an ambitious project, taking on performative ally-ship, racial discrimination and the class system all at once. It would be challenging for a veteran author to weave together theory and story, moving seamlessly between the two, while maintaining a cast of fully realized characters. Guns’s inaugural endeavor may sacrifice some nuance for message — but it will no doubt resonate with readers, particularly those who see their own struggles in Damani’s.
As near as I can tell, Bruce Schneier has never been photographed in a black hoodie, despite his hacker’s pedigree. And this is fitting: His new book, “A Hacker’s Mind,” intends to broaden the public’s sense of who hackers are and what defines a hack. A fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Schneier has made a career of explaining cybersecurity to a lay audience. In 2014, after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on N.S.A. surveillance, Schneier briefed six members of Congress on the import of the revelations.
“A Hacker’s Mind” reads like just such a briefing — fused with a manifesto about power and compliance. Hacking, Schneier argues, need not involve computers or even technology; a hack is merely “an activity allowed by the system that subverts the goal or intent of the system.” Any system, from a slot machine to the U.S. tax code, can be hacked. Hairsplitting, workarounds, weaselly little shortcuts: These are all hacks, and if you’ve ever found yourself uttering phrases like “technically legal” or “gray area,” you might be a hacker. The odds increase with your net worth. While “we conventionally think of hacking as something countercultural,” Schneier writes, “it’s more common for the wealthy to hack systems to their own advantage,” occupying “a middle ground between cheating and innovation.” To steal a car by smashing its window and hot-wiring it would be merely criminal; a true hacker would coax the car’s computer into unlocking itself.
In his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled. On that day, a neurologist briskly explained to him that his recent MRI scan had revealed the existence of lesions on his spine and brain that were almost certainly the result of MS, and in that moment – whoosh! – down he plummeted. “There was,” he writes, “a creak of wood, the sharp click of a sliding bolt, and then nothing but the sensation of rushing air.” His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful. But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable.
Still, he wasn’t about to give up: then, or now. In his lovely, book-lined room in Magdalen College, Oxford – open a window, and you may hear the sound of a deer coughing in the mist – Douglas-Fairhurst, a fiftysomething professor of English whose studies of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens have won literary prizes, and who has acted as the historical consultant on, among other productions, the TV series Dickensian and the Enola Holmes films, gamely waves an ankle at me. “Feel my knee!” he instructs. “Go on! Feel it.”
On Earth, there is a place called Point Nemo where one can be so far away from other humans that the closest person to encounter is 250 miles above, orbiting in the International Space Station. In the Pacific Ocean, Point Nemo is equidistant from all points of land: 1,670 miles from the Pitcairn Islands to the north; Easter Islands, to the northeast; and Maher Island, to the south. It’s so far from human habitation that it has become a convenient graveyard — artificial satellites past their purpose are de-orbited there, safe from crashing into any populated areas. As someone living in the arid and scrubby hills of the Great Basin high desert, it is hard to imagine a place more alien than that. Water in all directions, the nearest point of land far beyond the horizon. No correct direction to head toward to find shore, only any direction. I want to reconstitute the fundamentalist Evangelical Christian faith I was raised in to be like Point Nemo. Allow me to explain.
Hostility, chaos, murder and bearish gloom have been key elements of Russian prison literature. So has psychosis, in various forms. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the opening pages of “The Gulag Archipelago,” wrote that being arrested in Russia is such a “breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you” that the shock causes some to slip sideways into insanity.
Here are the crossroads where old women come
Under the quarter moon to cast their spells,
In the coastal, rainy city of Kanazawa, Japan, landscape architect and researcher Juan Pastor-Ivars discovered something surprising: gardens in the center of this city of 460,000 contain species of animals, plants, and insects that no longer live in the surrounding mountains and protected wildlife areas outside the city. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, scientists discovered that an astounding 2 percent of the world’s species can be found within the borders of Mexico City, a metropolis of nearly 9 million people.
These recent findings emphasize that humans don’t always need to be destructive forces on the environment—in fact, they can be positive influences on biodiversity and life. And one particularly counterintuitive implication is that a rich, biodiverse ecosystem doesn’t have to be at odds with dense city-building.
They had climbed 3,000 feet up a steep trail covered in snow and ice. Less-seasoned hikers probably would not have stopped. But Bartell and Mitchell have been scaling mountains for decades; they’ve each summited this one more than 400 times. They knew what could go wrong.
Getting to the top one more time might be easy, they figured; getting down might not.
Set in contemporary Nigeria, Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, “A Spell of Good Things,” is a pointed warning about the dangers of choosing to look away from the deep economic fissures that run through a community. Whatever we might do to distance ourselves from the destitute — taking refuge in tidy suburbs, expunging the poor from our scenic trails — in any society lives can and do intersect. These intersections expose the flimsiness of the illusions the privileged cling to, that they can both preside over and hide from the impoverished, and that there is no cost to doing so.
When Sherriff’s novel was first published, it alerted England to its complacency before the storm of total war with fascist Germany. Sherriff also seems to have recognized that war would usher in the end of the British Empire, already in its long twilight. For readers today, many elements in the novel will call to mind our own recent experiences with the coronavirus pandemic, ultranationalist politics, widespread religious fanaticism, the global climate crisis and senseless, brutal wars of attrition around the world. In short, “The Hopkins Manuscript” doesn’t simply — or simplistically — envision what some have called a “cozy catastrophe.” It remains a relevant cautionary tale.
In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.
The New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe used that tragedy as the embarkation point for his landmark “deep dive” into the criminal underworld that brought – and brings – vast numbers of Chinese people to the US.
I often start my MFA courses with a discussion of fairy tales. It seems an obvious place to start, since fairy tales are some of humanity’s oldest stories and likely the first stories that my students remember reading as children. But I also love starting with fairy tales because they violate more or less every single rule of fiction writing that is drilled into us in creative writing classes.
Instead of “show don’t tell,” fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding “round characters,” fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical “worldbuilding,” fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting “in media res,” they start “once upon a time.” Instead of “telling the story only you can tell,” fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.
I was fifteen when I first saw that image, working my way through the fiction section of my home-town library in suburban Wisconsin. I was searching for books that felt older than I was. Nicholson Baker’s 1986 novel “The Mezzanine” looked like no other book I’d ever seen, and it read like no other book I’d ever read. I wrestled with the novel’s deceptively slow pace—it takes place on a single ride up an office escalator, but really it’s set inside the human mind, as it asks questions, produces hypotheses, and makes connections with neuronic quickness.
On the last page of the paperback was a list of other books, most of which I had never heard of. Floating at the top of the list was an unusual logo, a hovering 3-D orb casting a shadow over a parallelogram. Underneath the logo were two words in perfectly justified type: “Vintage Contemporaries.”
Biochemist Martin Gruebele regularly dons a pair of headphones in his lab at the University of Illinois. But instead of music, he listens to a cacophony of clinking, jarring noises — as if a group of robots were having a loud argument.
The payoff for this pain? These sounds help Gruebele understand how proteins in our body interact with water.
Pozole's own, somewhat grisly, origins purportedly date back to the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico. According to the Mazlatlán Post, it originated as a sacred offering to the Aztec god Xipe Totec in the hopes of a good harvest. Aztec warriors would kill and dismember a rival captive then toss him into the stewpot with salt and dried corn to prepare a ceremonial soup to be eaten by the Aztec priests, the king, and the warriors who — ahem — procured the meat. When the Spanish colonizers came along, they introduced pork, which the Aztecs started using instead.
The aromatic makeup of this simple pork soup changes depending on where you are in Mexico. On the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and in the lush mountains, pozole is often green — seasoned with a salsa of roasted poblanos, spinach, cilantro and tomatillo. The dish tends toward red in the more arid, red pepper-yielding areas of Jalisco and in the northern Chihuahuan desert.
I know I’m not alone. A lot of people are grossed out by the foods on their plate touching. And for years, I would ladle portions of braised greens or buttered corn into separate bowls to keep their juices off my mashed potatoes, a system that is both impractical at my tiny dining table and annoying when it’s time to do dishes. But now, when I’m worried about my brothy beans touching my roast chicken, I simply turn to my stash of divided plates.
That we orientate ourselves with and within stories – and that these stories need to be constantly examined and questioned, as he argued, even within Islam – is undeniable. The claim that stories are what nation, family, religion and community absolutely and completely are, though, is patently not true, an assertion that’s both overweening and inadequate, an absurdity – even if it is what allows Rushdie to write in the distinctive way he does.
What do an experiment in free love, a renowned newspaper editor with a penchant for the occult, and a dour — then murdered — president have in common?
That’s the question that the prolific historian Susan Wels poses in “An Assassin in Utopia,” which explores the interwoven fates of the radical preacher John Humphrey Noyes, the media impresario Horace Greeley and the doomed James A. Garfield, who was shot four months into his tenure as president of the United States and died of infection two months later.
The crown jewel of our National Wildlife Refuge System, the Bosque del Apache, has been my annual pilgrimage site for a decade. The largest single population of sandhill cranes migrates to the Bosque late in the fall to overwinter along the Rio Grande. I have seen these cranes with crimson crowns in Southern California and at the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in British Columbia but they descend on the Bosque in staggering numbers. In the evenings, you stare at cranes with serpentine necks flying in over skies streaked rosy pink and clementine. New Mexico’s skies can be striations of color approximating infinity but these numberless flocks of cranes and geese outdo the theatrics of the sky. When the cranes begin their fairylike descent onto milky-blue sheets of water, you find yourself in a place where humans are far outnumbered by birds. You let the primal orchestra of cranes and geese remind you of the place your ancestors came from.
The refuge is ninety miles south of Albuquerque, near the quaint town of San Antonio, New Mexico. Cradled between the Chupadera and Little San Pascual mountains, the core of the 57,000-acre refuge, some 13,000 acres, sits beside the Rio Grande, at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. One winter as I explored the arroyos, cornfields, and ponds in the refuge’s North and South Loops, the cranes stood slate gray in the pale, rose-colored dusk. Their curved necks moved insistently against the grass as they foraged. There was ample food that year and they honked contentedly—a rich, rounded, baritone sound.
John Curtis’s enemies – and for a man who runs a mid-sized botanical garden on the Isle of Wight, he has surprisingly many – have a tendency to refer to him as “the American Businessman”, a phrase that, for many islanders, carries overtones of rapaciousness and cultural barbarism. He would rather not have quite so many adversaries, but neither does it seem especially to disturb him to be the object of simmering ill will on the island. He is not in the business of deliberately goading his detractors, but he tends, in his discussion of the increasingly public argument unfolding around his stewardship of the garden, toward a certain easygoing, sprightly provocation. “I’m a lightning rod,” as he put it to me in our first conversation, and on several occasions thereafter.
Every hiker is called to the trail for a different reason: to process grief, to conquer a physical challenge, to curtail corporate burnout, to connect with nature, to mitigate a midlife crisis, etc. Everyone I bumped into had a unique story, and usually they weren’t shy to share it. I met recovering addicts, depressed divorcées, college dropouts, Amish defectors, newlyweds, retired dentists, veterans, and even a day trader who spent dusk at camp hunting for cell signal to check their portfolio’s performance. Thru-hikers comprise a wide array of hopefuls, but we all share a common goal: We all want to finish.
On a recent Saturday morning at Eastern Market in Detroit, busking musicians filled the air with jazz as vendors finished setting up for the day’s traffic. Shoppers streamed in, sizing up winter produce, relishes and chutneys, fresh cuts of beef and more.
Though farmers’ markets are usually associated with warm months and lush fruits and vegetables, Eastern Market and others like it across the country are becoming cold-weather travel destinations as they add artisanal goods, entertainment and indoor experiences like the cooking classes the Detroit market has sometimes offered during the cold months.
In “Decent People,” his second novel, author De’Shawn Charles Winslow has a lot to say about a lot of things. In fewer than 300 pages, Winslow takes on love, racism, Black masculinity, morality, hypocrisy and justice in a small Southern town in the mid-1970s.
But Winslow’s deeper theme is the power of secrets: how they drive behavior, inhibit progress and become more toxic the longer they stay hidden. And while times may have changed, the past isn’t far behind.
As Looser suggests, the Porters’ greatest contribution to 19th-century letters might be their own correspondence. Looser quotes extensively from these letters, and their effect builds as the biography proceeds to a poignant conclusion and a rather surreal epilogue. Sister Novelists shows not only how difficult it was for Romantic-era women to make a living in the arts but also the remarkable privilege and entitlement of the men around those women. It’s one thing for someone living today to argue that this was the case; it’s another to have the sexist realities of 19th-century literary culture recorded by women whose reputations have been obscured for so long because of it.
If the tendency of rhyme, like that of desire, is to pull distant things together and force their boundaries to blur, then the countervailing force in this book, the one that makes it go, is the impulse toward narrative, toward making sense of the passage of time.
But still, there is value in reading death memoirs, if we can take them on their own terms. When Breath Becomes Air cannot prepare us to face our own mortality or bring us closer to comprehending the purpose of life or what it means to die. It can, though, allow us inside one man’s personal and philosophical end-of-life reckoning, which may in turn spur our own reflections. Similarly,Your Hearts, Your Scars cannot be an instruction manual for “living each day as a gift,” as the back cover claims that Talve-Goodman did. It can be a slim volume of words about coming-of-age that a young writer never got to polish to her satisfaction, shared as part of her legacy.
If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction’. This concern reappeared again and again over the next millennia. By the 12th century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi saw himself living in a new age of distraction thanks to the technology of print: ‘The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts.’ And in 14th-century Italy, the scholar and poet Petrarch made even stronger claims about the effects of accumulating books.
But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives, outdoor dining is “ absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.
If there were a point to life, the point would be pleasure. I knew a man, an Italian communist, who liked to say, raising a glass of champagne and nibbling a blini with caviar, “Nothing’s too good for the working class.” Kafka’s Hunger Artist explains to the overseer at the end of the story he’s not a saint, nor is he devoted to art or sacrifice. He’s just a picky eater. “I have to fast. I can’t help it … I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”
The diaries, with all their passions and reversals, reveal Highsmith’s determination to carve herself like a sculpture using words as her material. Her abiding conviction is in her worth as an artist and an individual, which she rarely doubts. Only the cost of this conviction—the amalgamation of skill, cruelty, and self-sacrifice that it will demand—eludes her, much as she strives to appraise it. When I think of Highsmith at the end of her life, a refrain from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Querelle” plays in my head: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” The line comes from Oscar Wilde—whose grave a devoted Highsmith visited on a trip to Paris in 1962—and in the film is sung by the French actress Jeanne Moreau, one of the few people Highsmith hit it off with in her later years. “I like the way she talks,” Highsmith said, of Moreau. “I like the way she smokes.”
If the sky is such a cliché
Why is it falling?
Staring up through the barrel of his steel cocoon, all David Smith Jr. sees is a small circle of cornflower-blue sky. The angle of the 35-foot cannon is such that he is almost standing, every muscle in his body pulled taut. As the electrifying opening riff of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” kicks in, the announcer starts the countdown: “Five…four…three…”
For a split second, everything is eerily still. Then, with a loud boom and a burst of fiery sparks, David Jr. hurtles from the cannon, soaring 80 feet in the air. Like a missile, he goes from zero to 74 miles an hour in less than half a second. But he maintains pinpoint focus. At this height, there’s no room for mistakes. He hears the crowd take a collective breath. He notices a little girl sitting on her dad’s shoulders. And he sees the red landing net hovering in the distance. But to reach it, he must first fly through a hoop that is 90-feet high, about the height of a 10-story building. Oh, and the hoop is on fire.
“Why raise children on the promise of magic?” Alex wonders. “Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied — for revelation, for transformation — and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?” The beauty of “Hell Bent” is that for all the bleakness, the sense of wonder somehow still remains.
“One is always failing at writing,” V acknowledges, in a sentiment any writer understands. And indeed “Reckoning” is, if not a failure, kind of a bloody mess, but defiantly, provocatively, maybe intentionally so. It exhorts readers to confront the worst and ugliest, pleads for progress and peace, and provokes admiration for its resilient, activist author. V shall overcome, someday.