“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.