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.