My first conversation with Michael Silverblatt lasted only four hours. It was late on my side of the phone, but we could have easily talked until daybreak on the East Coast. We spanned a vast range of topics that December night. I offered my inevitable spiel about how big a fan I am, which included all the usual platitudes and (botched) attempts at preening. We talked about books, of course, and writers we love; about Silverblatt’s luminous university days in Buffalo; about his hero and mentor John Barth; about soirées with the likes of Michel Foucault and Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag; and about his list of “secret books” (all of which I knew I had to purchase and read immediately). In a moment I’d like at the top of my résumé, I cited a book with which Silverblatt was not familiar (I know!). He immediately began hunting down a copy, but it was out of print. Going against deeply rooted personal book ethics, I mailed him my beloved edition, asking him to please ignore the juvenile marginalia scrawled throughout. Like the conversations on his legendary KCRW talk show Bookworm, this phone call was an education unto itself
On March 30, 1943, a middle-aged man named Lynn Riggs sat in a Broadway theater, watching the final rehearsal for Oklahoma! before its premiere the following night. The first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the show was about to change musical theater forever. Before, the form centered around jaunty song-and-dance numbers, without much else connecting them. But in Oklahoma!, the music was woven into the plot in a sophisticated new way. Characters had important conversations in song and expressed a wide range of emotions. As New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson later put it, after Oklahoma!, “the banalities of the old musical stage became intolerable.”
It’s hard to imagine what Riggs was thinking that night as he watched the show through his dark-rimmed glasses. He was a playwright, and Oklahoma! was based on his 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs. As Hammerstein told the press, “Mr. Riggs’ play is a wellspring of almost all that is good in Oklahoma! I kept many of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them at all for the simple reason that they could not be improved on—at any rate, not by me.”
There have been surprisingly few experimental efforts to explore the possible avenues by which Hawai‘i’s snails might have crossed oceans to arrive in their new home. In fact, to date there has been precisely one study on this topic of which I am aware. In 2006, Brenden Holland, a researcher in the biology department at Hawai‘i Pacific University, placed a piece of tree bark with 12 live snails of the species Succinea caduca into a saltwater aquarium. This is one of Hawai‘i’s nonendangered snail species; in fact, it is one of the few species that is found on multiple islands and seems to be doing okay. It is a coastal species, and the individuals enrolled into the study were from populations living as little as 10 meters from the beach. Brenden explained to me: “After heavy rain, they are commonly seen in gullies by the coast so there’s no question that they are going to get washed down pretty frequently.”
John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson were unlikely allies in the war to preserve Yosemite. Muir, son of a Scripture-quoting Scottish immigrant father, was raised poor on a Wisconsin farm, but he wrote and spoke with the fervor of a prophet, and his craggy visage, tough constitution and unshakable devotion to the natural world drew admirers like a magnet. The urbane and cultured Johnson was an insider with a vast network of contacts in publishing and politics. The editor of one of the country’s preeminent magazines, Johnson hosted New York literary salons, mingled with America’s elite and eventually became the U.S. ambassador to Italy.
Nicole Chung is a chronicler of loss. In her debut memoir, “All You Can Ever Know,” she wrote about what has become known as disenfranchised grief — sorrow that is not publicly acknowledged or socially supported — as she explored the circumstances of her adoption. Now, in her second memoir, “A Living Remedy,” Chung’s anguish is focused on the glaringly visible: the broken U.S. health care system; the brutality of capitalism; the hurt of everyday racism; and the devastating shock of losing her adoptive parents and the family narrative that, for so long, was all she knew.
The first home I remember is the one we lost. It is startling and vivid in my memory, the way that childhood sensations are. The rounded corners on each step of the wooden staircase, on which I bruised my shins. The pink enamel bathtub in my parents’ bathroom, where my father once submerged me in scathing purple water to calm a massive outbreak of hives after being bitten by an ant. The rough terracotta tiles of the roof I’d climbed out onto from my bedroom window one evening, to the alarm of the family across the street who spotted me sitting out there calmly in the twilight.
We lost this home when I was nine. In hindsight, the signs were clear. For years, our family holidays had been to destinations that featured casinos: cruise ships, Genting Highlands, Las Vegas. In my earliest memories I see my father standing before the dark television screen glowing with red and green numbers, stock market indices ticking up and down, up and down, as promising as Christmas itself. Another time, he gave me Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar to read, a story about a gambler who, through intense meditation, masters the ability to see through playing cards and predict the future, then uses his powers to make a massive fortune in casinos. My father believed he was a kind of Henry Sugar, gifted with the power of a sixth sense. Before school exams, he would run through elaborate mantras and visualization exercises with me. Our minds, he explained, could bend reality, if we only tried hard enough.
And yet, to stand there, beside her grave, was to feel afresh the presence of a life that had somehow fused itself with mine. When it comes to writers, it is often their work that moves us: words we wish we could have written ourselves if we had the patience or talent to do so. At other times, it is their lives, the heroism as captured in biographies or biopics for the particularly famous, and that dogged intent to put text to the hazy stuff of life. Or we might relate to the circumstances in which they grew up, finding their tribulations very similar to our own. Like many others, I have long admired the work of Sylvia Plath and have found in it a deep affinity; in The Bell Jar (1963), the first of her works that I read, I found the neurotic ambition of my girlhood entirely justified and felt much less alone for it—as have countless other high-achieving young women, I’d later learn. A few years after reading the novel, I reveled in the unapologetic honesty of Plath’s journals, which spurred me to record my own life with a similar candor and attention.
](https://slate.com/business/2023/03/wordle-hint-clue-guides-why-why-why.html), by Luke Winkie, Slate
Sam Hill, an editor at the technology website Digital Trends, has penned 647 articles about Wordle. Each of them follows the same basic format: Hill offers a series of clues pointing toward the solution to the New York Times’ daily puzzle, targeting the Google queries of readers who find themselves stumped over their morning coffee. Wordle is a robust, left-brained deduction game; it does not lend itself to creative hint construction, or smug, crossword-ish puns. But Hill always finds a way. In a post this week, Hill writes that the answer begins with the letter H, and that, contextually speaking, the mystery word is related to nouns like “speed” or “urgency.” Scroll down, and Hill gives the answer outright. (It’s “HURRY.” One of those vexing double-consonant solutions.) This is not the most invigorating part of Hill’s job. Nobody in the media aspires to write hundreds of bespoke Wordle guides, day after day after day. But Hill approaches his duty with monk-like discipline, because the traffic is just that good.
For a city supposedly frozen in time, all this adds up to some undeniably dramatic changes, of which bicycles are only the most visible. A car-choked capital is transforming before our eyes, the dream of urbanites around the world who are eager to reassess the automobile’s dominant role in the city. The question posed by these changes transcends the daily debate over bicycles and cars. It is nothing less than this: Who is the city for?
The Füde Dinner Experience is hosted by the artist and model Charlie Ann Max. For $88, and after Ms. Max has approved the applications, guests come together to enjoy, according to the website: “a liberating space that celebrates our most pure selves, through plant-based cooking, art, nudity, & self-love.”
Put another way: It’s a naked vegan dinner party with a bunch of strangers.
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it's liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option.
Once, before fairies were neutered into tiny winged princesses by sentimental Victorians and the Disney corporation, they came in many forms, a few of them ugly and frightening. Some folklorists believe that these traditional fairies—who liked to whisk people away to other, often subterranean worlds—were in fact representations of the dead. The stories in White Cat, Black Dog are tales about this kind of fairy, the ghosts of our past and of our future—a reminder, like the billionaire’s sons, of the limits on our time in the sun. Their melancholy is potent, but that only makes them more beautiful.
The specific homage to Bradbury’s atmosphere is remarkable enough, but this is more than a pastiche: memorable plot and characters, flashes of weird horror that aren’t there so much to scare you as to gesture at a larger and wilder universe, and repeatedly grounded with moments of gritty reality.
Matthew Zapruder’s new memoir “Story of a Poem” isn’t just about a poem. It’s also the story of a writer, a father, a husband, a son — and this story has a plot twist: The author’s young son is diagnosed with autism.
Writing about himself in third person, Zapruder poses the question that lives at the heart of this book: “What is the relation between making poems and learning to be the father of this atypical child?”
There is a beauty to this, even if it doesn’t quite answer the question of how to rein in all the godlike powers we have already unleashed — not infrequently in our attempts to make the world more hospitable to our desires and amplify “the richness of actual life,” at least as it is enjoyed by humans. But perhaps it comes down to recognizing what we share with other creatures. Blandly optimistic statements about human potential sound less inspiring than an unflinching recognition of our limits. “One is responsible to life,” James Baldwin wrote. “It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
Cockroaches Are Changing Up Their Sex Lives, and It’s All Our Fault. Faced With Sweet Poisoned Bait, Roaches First Ended Up With a Mutation That Made Them Hate Sweets, Hindering Their Mating Strategies. Now, More Roach Mutations Are Emerging, Showing You Can’t Keep a Good Pest Down.
in the Vietnamese Culture, if Someone Doesn’t Receive a Proper Burial in Their Hometown, “Their Souls Are Cursed to Wander the Earth Aimlessly, as Ghosts.” This Is According to an American Soldier, Explaining the Macabre Tactic of Playing Tapes of Loud Voices During the Vietnam War to Terrify the Enemy.
in “Wandering Souls,” Cecile Pin’s Subtle and Gripping Debut Novel, Such Americans Are Bit Players, as Are the Ghosts of Those Who Die Fleeing the Country. The Wanderers in Question Are Anh, Minh and Thanh, Three Young Orphans Who Travel Overseas, From One Refugee Camp to Another, Before Finally Beginning to Piece Together a Life.
Feeling Put Off by All This Experimental Genre-Bending? Don't Be. For as Much as Lacey Has Written a Postmodern Miasma of a Novel About Deception and the Relationship of the Artist to Their Work, She's Also Structured That Novel in an Old-Fashioned Way: Via a Scheherazade-Like Sequence of Stories. Most of These Stories Are About the Charismatic X's Life and Fabrications; All of Them Are Arresting in Their Originality; And, the Final Story That CM Is Led to, Housed in a Storage Facility, Is Devastating in Its Calculated Brutality.
Daniel Knowles Hates Cars, and He Wants You to Hate Them Too. Or, to Put a Finer Point on It, Knowles — the Midwest U.S. Correspondent for the Economist Magazine — Hates What Cars Have Done to the World, and Especially to Our Cities. His New Book, “Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It,” Shows How They Pollute the Air, Inefficiently Consume Enormous Amounts of Natural Resources, Take Up Too Much Space, and Kill and Injure Too Many People. They Make Cities Into Worse Places: Less Pleasant, Less Walkable and Bikeable, Harder to Enjoy, Dirtier, and Louder. They Stress Us Out and Make Our Lives More Sedentary. We Need, Knowles Argues, to Get as Many of Them Off the Road as We Can, as Quickly as Possible.
Like Doubling Back, Writing Landscape consists of a series of essays inspired by direct experience of the natural world; however, whereas the earlier book was almost always on the move ("I enjoy the sense of walking a storyline" Cracknell writes at one point), this time we frequently find her focusing all her attention on a single location.
The central relationship in Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is the lifelong creative partnership between Sam and Sadie, childhood friends who go on to start a video game company. The novel depicts the exhilarating highs and enraging lows of collaboration, including fights over recognition — that is, how Sam and Sadie see each other’s contributions to their work compared with how the world sees them.
One of the games they develop together, “Solution,” is now caught up in a real-life debate about artistry and credit.
Among psychologists, such intuitive psychology — the ability to attribute to other people mental states different from our own — is called theory of mind, and its absence or impairment has been linked to autism, schizophrenia and other developmental disorders. Theory of mind helps us communicate with and understand one another; it allows us to enjoy literature and movies, play games and make sense of our social surroundings. In many ways, the capacity is an essential part of being human.
What if a machine could read minds, too?
That’s just what the world’s leading pastry chefs are doing with croissant dough: coiling it into pinwheels and squiggles, tying it in knots and stacking it into cubes. They are turning it into breakfast cereal, tie-dyeing it and, in Mr. Ly’s case, wrapping it around baguettes.
We all know that a holiday means liberation from your habits as much as from your home; even in a place not far from where you live, you have the chance to be someone different from the self you know too well. And to see the world you thought you knew afresh. No tickets to buy, no itineraries to fret over. No visas, no injections, no fancy clothes, no people to impress. I’d been living near Osaka for 34 years, but now, for the first time ever, I was getting to see a small part of it from within.
When I left Singapore to come to the US for college, much of my single suitcase was dedicated to food (“supplies” as I thought of it): pineapple tarts, ba kwa, sauce packets to make curry and chicken rice, and of course, a tin of Milo. I found out when I got here that Milo could be found in the occasional Asian supermarket, but it tasted different. Sweeter somehow, or less malty, or something. I resolved to always bring it from home.
This is an epic novel, but not for its 464-page length, nor for the impressive amount of history it covers. It is an epic for the reasons life itself is epic. “The Great Reclamation” asks the reader to confront the big things, like love and identity and loss, but it allows us to revel in the little things, too, from the buttery taste of steamed fish to the smooth surface of a rubber seed.
When you're confronted with the whole world at once — when you can fathom even the things you cannot see and are not prepared for — it becomes impossible to hide from the truth. Clint Smith's new poems in Above Ground wash over like waves asking us to discern all the times we've trusted the world, even when it has not offered us a steady current.
In Shaughnessy’s hands, this refusal to relinquish the people she loves can’t be brushed off as mere denial. It suggests something greater, more devoted and complicated, which I am still trying to learn from her work, and for which I am grateful.
To say that the stories in “White Cat, Black Dog” are influenced by fairy tales isn’t to say very much; they’re influenced by a vast pool of intertextual allusion that includes superhero movies and Icelandic legends, academic discourse, and the work of Shirley Jackson, Lucy Clifford, and William Shakespeare. Few stories in the new collection can truly be said to reinterpret existing tales. One that does is “The White Cat’s Divorce,” which transposes a French tale called “The White Cat” to Colorado, where weed is legal, and replaces a tyrannical king with a Jeff Bezos-esque billionaire, but otherwise stays in the vicinity of the original. Most of the stories, though, are more loosely wrapped around the tales that supposedly inspired them. Were it not for the label “(Hansel and Gretel)” beneath the title “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” few readers would connect that tale with Link’s story of spaceships, robots, and vampires. More than anything, the aim of producing “reinvented fairy tales,” in the publisher’s formulation, seems like such an obvious account of what the stories are doing that those familiar with the author’s work will be put on guard. To read Link is to place oneself in the hands of an expert illusionist, entering a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Spiritually abandoned and lost, readers begin to understand what lies behind the narrator’s obsession—a desire to be unique, to love and be loved in return, to be seen wholly, and to belong to something greater. Direct in its criticism of fan-culture entitlement and philosophical in its exploration of private personas, Y/N also sheds light on a real and shared human experience. The narrator’s methods may be invasive and unethical at times, but readers can empathize with the idea that we’re all searching for a place to land—a source of stability and community. In Y/N’s own words, “What I wanted was something or someone to follow.”
Officially, there is no hall of fame for unhappy families. But even the staunchest Russian novelist might be hard pressed to match the particular gift for dysfunction that the Wilcoxes, subjects of Jess Row’s sprawling metafiction “The New Earth,” display with such impressive esprit de corps across nearly 600 dense and often wildly discursive pages. Death and divorce are a given; immigration, climate change and crises of faith crowd the margins, clambering to compete with a thousand-year conflict in the Middle East. Incest eventually enters the chat, an assiduous but uninvited guest, and race hovers over it all, a quivering question mark. (The impetus for everything, naturally, is a wedding.)
Me? Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone
I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes
I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.
Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.
Or at least that is what one of the world’s leading brain scientists believes.
For TV writers, getting canceled is just another part of the gig. HBO Max isn’t the first streaming service to cancel shows. Disney+, Hulu, Paramount +, Peacock, and other major platforms have all responded to ongoing inflation and a dwindling subscriber base by slashing series after their first seasons and canceling underperforming projects. But when entertainment conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Discovery + and HBO Max, needed a way to increase cash flow and cut down on debts, shows weren’t just canceled — full projects were erased and treated as tax write-offs.
There are as many ways to write a novel as there are authors, and the tropes and traditions are simply waiting to be rethought, rearranged, and made our own.
With “Earth’s the Right Place for Love,” Elizabeth Berg has written a story that is sweet without being trite, heartwarming without being sentimental. Case in point: The title is a line from a Robert Frost poem, and Frost is anything but saccharine. The novel picks up the backstory of Arthur Moses, a character introduced in Berg’s 2018 novel, “The Story of Arthur Truluv.” In that book, Arthur was an old man who befriended a young, sad girl and a lonely neighbor. This novel takes the reader back to Arthur’s teen years in post-war, small-town Missouri.
LaValle’s “Lone Women” deftly weaves history, horror, suspense and the perspectives of those rarely recorded in the West. It opens with a quote from Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon”: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the [expletive] that weighs you down.” There’s a muscular poetics in the line: the “wanna” and the “weigh,” the “got” and the “give,” and the profane punctuation. The language is in service to the notion that surrender is freedom. Letting go of the past, of shame, allows one to become someone new. It’s an apt invocation in a novel centered on marginalized women in the American West who are finding ways to do more than just survive.
Some titles are blunt instruments, and “How Not to Kill Yourself” is the bluntest I’ve encountered yet in this job. The book it describes, by Clancy Martin, is a doozy: messy, confessional but ultimately beneficent. Casting a harsh high beam on a growing societal problem, swaddled in mental-health resources and caveats, it doesn’t so much illuminate as irradiate.
However, the fact is that readers expecting a series of whodunits had come to the wrong place, because I am a proponent of the notion that a mystery does not have to include a crime—indeed, I’ve always viewed it as the archetypal journey through chaos to resolution. But that doesn’t help the PR pros to pitch a novel or indeed booksellers and librarians to shelve it—and it plays havoc with reviewers. Does this go to the Crime critic? The Historical Novel expert? Or the … well, fill in the gap. Within the literary form that we tag “mystery” you will read some of the finest fiction on the subject of the environment, the machinations of government, immigration, treatment of refugees, poverty, international conflict—and so many more subjects from writers who have done stellar homework or who are already experts in their field but have chosen fiction to touch upon universal truths rather than be restricted by hard-wired facts. Perhaps noted historian Simon Schama was onto something when he said in his series, The History of Now, “It’s not always politicians, but artists, musicians and writers who rouse us from indifference and become the true agents of change.” That works as long as we also remember that as novelists of whatever stripe, we are in the entertainment industry.
From Circe to Medusa via Persephone, Electra and the women of Troy, it seems there are few characters from Greek mythology left who haven’t been the subject of a feminist retelling in recent years. This year, the world of such reimaginings is expanding beyond the Greeks – although there is a clutch of those retellings, too – with the publication of books about Julia from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood), Rosaline from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons) and Morgan le Fay from Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Looking at the number of books still to come – from Bea Fitzgerald’s Girl, Goddess, Queen to Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta – and those that have been released in the last couple of years, it seems there’s no end to these retellings. But are we close to reaching saturation point? And if a story is simply being retold, is there any creativity involved?
Ceramic cookie jars — those flamboyant crockeries topped with ornate finials — first brought art into the heart of American homes decades ago. Becoming a prominent kitchenware item by the 1950s, around the introduction of premade cookie dough, cookie jars remained popular well into the 1990s. But even after being sidelined as seasonal holiday decor, broad adoration for ceramic cookie jars has never fully disappeared. “The idea of a cookie jar is familiar and it feels nostalgic,” says Mae. “But also, it’s new and fresh and contemporary.”
The narrative pleasures of “Flux” lie less in the big reveals than in watching Chong knit together genre tropes from sci-fi movies, speculative fiction and thrillers to tell a story about how what we remember can imprison us — and why freedom may lie within.
When the American war machine withdrew from Vietnam, it left a lot behind. It left a military debacle so mismanaged it became a common metaphor for disaster. It left years of fighting that saw tens of thousands of servicemen killed, and millions more Vietnamese citizens. The new novel "Dust Child" shifts the focus away from the battlefield, looking instead at what was lost on a much more intimate scale.
If still life is a background of lustrous dark space against which shines life, Doty uses this composition to show how memory illuminates certain people and objects while allowing others to recede.
Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, never-ending, speed-written fantasy books, it’s huge. By Sanderson’s estimation, he’s the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign—$42 million of that $55 million—I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?
Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.
Picture this: You are on a flight when you learn that the pilots have fallen ill and can no longer fly the plane. A voice comes over the public address system, asking for a volunteer to help land the aircraft. You have no experience, but you have seen “Airplane!” and “Snakes on a Plane.” Maybe you’ve frittered away hours on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. You throw off your seat belt and march toward the cockpit, your cape rustling behind you.
Hold on, hero. You might want to return to your seat for this reality check.
As an Italian living abroad, hearing a food expert say that our national cuisine, with its reputation for tradition and authenticity, is in fact based on lies feels like being let in on an unspeakable family secret that I’d always suspected. I’d always hated the hype around Italian food, whether it came from disturbingly keen foreign friends (like the New Yorker well-versed in niche regional Italian pasta recipes) or embarrassingly pedantic compatriots (such as my Neapolitan friend who refuses even to touch fresh tomatoes in the UK). I was amused, if perplexed, during the panic buying phase of the first Covid-19 lockdowns, to hear of Italian supermarket shelves being emptied of everything bar smooth penne, considered by Italians to be lower quality.
“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.
For the most part, dinosaurs were atrocious swimmers. But it took decades for paleontologists to figure this out as they waited for the right fossil tracks, analyses of dinosaur bone structure, and computer methods capable of estimating the buoyancy of dinosaurs. During much of the 20th century, when experts insulted living reptiles and dinosaurs alike by characterizing the extinct saurians as dimwitted slowpokes, some paleontologists thought long-necked sauropods like Brachiosaurus could only support their weight in water. They also posited that the “duck-billed” dinosaurs, or hadrosaurids, plunged into lakes when tyrannosaurs stalked too near—the only defense herbivores that weren’t covered in armor or horns could have, apparently. Starting in the 1970s, paleontologists realized that fossilized tracks and other clues about the sauropods and duck-bills indicated they lived in terrestrial environments and weren’t adept in water. Not only that, but the relatively few trace fossils made by swimming dinosaurs—scrapes in the sediment from when they kicked their feet—were created by carnivorous dinosaurs, undercutting the idea that water was a refuge for plant eaters.
Though evidently captivated by the power of language to conjure up past experience, Williams’ love of literature ultimately seems to stem from a fascination with the nature of stories, both fictional and historical, and knotty questions about what stories get told, who gets to tell them, and what gets left out.
In psychology, the term “resistance” refers to a patient’s hesitance or incapacity to engage with therapy, of being unable to meaningfully engage in the nuances – the “shadows overlaying shadows” – of one’s own narrative. Throughout this artfully rendered novel, Halloran interrogates the other stories we may struggle at times to contend with, or even understand. It’s a compelling insight into the human condition and on the indelible marks that can be impressed upon us by those closest.
All straight women of a certain age were sold a trio of lies by romantic comedies — that love conquers differences, that we can have it all (whatever “all” is) and that perfect men fall from the sky just as our emotional acidity starts to become permanent.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel, “Romantic Comedy,” is a love letter to the prototypical rom-com.
Making out inside a Richard Serra
Strikes me as the right way to take in art
Like embracing an echo
Here’s a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness in our response to art.
I realize this is not a popular take, especially on the weekends, which were invented for laziness and self-indulgence. The thing is, I really like eating breakfast — and, more gobsmackingly, three square meals a day. But brunch doesn't stop at screwing up the poor, Type A person's eating schedule; it is really only satisfied when it has hijacked the entire day.
Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book (2023) is a novel focused on the living, breathing world, entirely devoid of people and, as Comitta’s preface declares, “contains no words of my own.” Instead, it consists of natural descriptions from over 300 novels, composed methodically and meticulously via subtraction and collage into a meditative, lush narrative on the relationship between time and nature. With us gone, the stage is set for “animals, landforms, and weather patterns that have buttressed human drama since the beginning of the novel form,” as an earlier version of the book described it
“I recall that I am extremely forgetful,” announces the narrator of Percival Everett’s Dr No in the novel’s opening lines. “I believe I am. I think I know that I am forgetful. Though I remember having forgotten, I cannot recall what it was that I forgot or what forgetting feels like.” No sooner has the reader crossed the threshold of the narrative than it begins to reveal itself as a labyrinth of mirrors, an elaborate and joyously rickety construction of philosophical gags and structural paradoxes.
According to Denis Diderot, perhaps the most famous encyclopedist of the 18th century, the goal of an encyclopedia is “to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” More than 270 years later, the size of that task grows still, as new knowledge continues to be created. In “All the Knowledge in the World,” Simon Garfield offers a delightful curated sampling of what seekers before and after Diderot have tried to actualize.
In 2000, my parents and I moved to Austin, traversing the southern states in our black Toyota Camry and a half-full moving truck. It was a strange but welcome reprieve from the bucolic quietude of Oxford—in place of magnolia trees, giant rocky cliffs that had been cloven in two to make way for the snaking highway. We lived in the Lost Creek neighborhood, finally shedding the graduate school housing of my parents’ earlier years with a real house. By the time I was in high school, my mother was commuting to San Antonio every day for work via Interstate 35. Even in 2004, the drive was odious. Austin was growing at an unprecedented rate, certainly beyond the limits of what its hippie college town infrastructure could sustain. The corridor between Austin and San Antonio was and remains one of the most clogged roadways in the state, with more than 100,000 vehicles passing through on average per day.
For my mother, though, the drive was negligible compared to the relief it gave our family. My father had been unemployed for years by this point—a casualty of working in tech startups during the dot-com bubble. Faced with our mortgage, my impending college tuition, and the unknown future, my mother accepted the commute without question. Making money, even if it was all the way in San Antonio, was worth everything.
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down. And so, in January, I booked a package vacation to Morocco through a company whose stated aim — beyond offering package vacations — is to help people in their 30s and 40s make new friends.
Old God's Time is a powerful, painful novel, another excellent offering from Barry, who is clearly one of the best Irish writers working today. It's also a book suffused with a deep moral anger that refuses to let go of the crimes that destroyed the lives of so many.
Regan Penaluna’s book is a combination of memoir and analysis, as she looks at the careers of earlier female philosophers; in particular, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Cockburn. I would hazard that only one of the four names is familiar to the average reader. They are united by concerns. How to be independent? What is obligation? Is self-sufficiency possible, necessary or desirable? Penaluna makes an excellent job of counterpointing these women’s own lives, in all their ambiguities, to their work.
You remember this, don’t you?
We said, later, we’d remember,
and now it’s later. Do you?
Where the wild things are is a shifting concept influenced by culture, upbringing, environs, what we watch on our screens, and, for me, the tussle between my education as a wildlife biologist and my experiences in the field. Taking to heart a core tenet of conservation science—that wild animals, certainly large carnivores, belong in the wilderness—I began my career in the 1990s by visiting nature reserves in India to study Asiatic lions and clouded leopards. When in the new millennium I stumbled on leopards living in and around villages, I was shocked. “They shouldn't be here!” my training shouted. But there they were, leaping over the metaphysical walls scholars had constructed between nature and humankind as nonchalantly as they strolled past the physical boundaries of protected areas.
Take the first leopard I collared with a GPS tag: a large male that had fallen into a well near Junnar, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in the summer of 2009. He took refuge on a ledge just above the water, and forest department personnel rescued him by lowering a ladder with a trap cage at the top into the well. It had been a hot day, and the leopard was clearly old and very tired, but even after climbing up into the cage, he remained unruffled. My team—veterinarian Karabi Deka, a local farmer named Ashok Ghule who served as a translator and guide, me (a doctoral student at the time) and some others—made sure he was secure, and Deka shot a tranquilizer dart into him through the cage bars. He didn't even growl. His calm, gentle and elderly demeanor induced us to call him Ajoba, which means “grandfather” in Marathi, the area's local language.
As present debates about what constitutes history continue to evoke images of a monolithic, unchanging understanding of the past, constructed out of blocks of neutral facts excavated from the archives, it is time, perhaps, that we pay new attention to fragments and lost voices, historical cul-de-sacs and missed turns, to the history that was not recorded, and the history that did not happen.
Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people? Although there is a large literature on the costs and benefits – psychological and economic – of traditional religion, there is a dearth of comparable research on religion’s near-universal handmaiden, the soul. As with Justice Potter Stewart’s non-definition of pornography – ‘I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it’ – the soul is slippery and, even though it cannot be seen (or smelled, touched, heard or tasted), soul-certain people seem to agree that they know it when they imagine it. And they imagine it in everyone.
I’ve had a manuscript locked in a drawer for three and a half years now. It’s a coming-of-age novel about a boy who believes a supernatural force has seized the minds of the adults in his life. He and his best friend confront and defeat the supernatural force, but victory comes at the cost of their innocence—the classic trade-off. I don’t know if it’s my best work, but it’s my favorite. Perhaps inevitably, I’m terrified of ever trying to sell it to someone.
It looked as if a war was coming. It was. One Sunday last month, in a northern Italian town called Ivrea, the facades of historic buildings were covered with plastic sheeting and nets. Storefront windows had been fortified with plywood and tarps. And in several different piazzas, hundreds of wooden crates had appeared, walls of them stacked eight feet high and even farther across. The crates looked like barricades but were actually arms depots. Inside them were oranges. Oranges, the fruit.
The climax of the book, what Lucca discovers, is not to be shared in this review. But it is the recognizable nightmare of anyone who has loved an art monster. More terrifying and tantalizing is the message such parallel worlds send to art monsters themselves. Lacey asks, what happens when we don’t choose love?
Beware, argue the authors of a new book. Besuited jetsetters, armed with prestigious degrees and powerpoint slides, have infiltrated governments and corporations around the world. They claim to offer valuable expertise and fresh ideas. But don't be fooled! The consulting industry, the authors argue, is selling snake oil that is poisoning governments and distorting economies.
Morning’s sun holds me:
summer farewell,
fall welcome,
What Joyce and his countrymen did do was to remake English, molding the language of the ruling élite into something beguilingly subversive, an unstable compound of familiar and foreign. If you want to understand Irish literature’s extraordinary richness, Foster suggested, the special magic of everyday Irish speech is a good place to start.
Few contemporary writers have done more with the natural resource of Irish English, or with the buried tensions at the heart of Irish identity, than Sebastian Barry, who made his name as a playwright before emerging as one of Europe’s leading novelists. To open one of Barry’s books is to be hit by a great gale of talk. In “Days Without End” (2017), the talker is Thomas McNulty, who has fled the Great Famine of the eighteen-forties and come to live in the United States. For want of other work, McNulty joins the Army, where many of his compatriots have also wound up. “You know a Irishman because he has it writ all over him,” he says in his vividly skewed English, which he has acquired only since arriving in America. “He speaks some other way and he is not a great man for hair cutting generally and there’s something about a Irish when he is drinking that just ain’t like any other human being. Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity.” If you’re Irish, of course, so-called civilized humanity may be more a term of abuse than of approbation.
“What am I supposed to tell this lady?” she asked him. “I can’t keep doing this. Every minute it’s something.”
Joe reached for her hand. “It’ll get better. Stick with me,” he said, but now they could hear the woman tossing some of her belongings onto the floor.
“The king needs his ransom!” she shouted.
“I’m sorry, but it’s time to go,” Debbie told her.
“You thieves. You devils,” the woman said.
“Please,” Debbie said. “This is our business. We’re just trying to get through lunch.”
Tell Her Everything is a layered recital of intricately woven hauntings, decisions, and confessions. It is a story of a man who loves his daughter and wants to provide her with the upbringing he never had; it is a story of a man who is more than complicit in a horrible system of punishment; and it is also a story of how the desire to be a good provider can push one to unspeakable limits—how the shame of transgressing those limits can destroy the very relationships you sacrificed for, in addition to one’s sense of self.
This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.
On a chilly morning in January 1952, Alan Baldridge witnessed a murder. Sailing off the coast of California in pursuit of a pod of migrating whales, he heard screams in the distance. The pod abruptly vanished. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a large gray whale “spy-hopping,” swimming vertically and raising its head above the surface. Baldridge, a marine biologist at Stanford, decided to investigate; drawing closer, he saw seven orcas singing hunting cries, circling a small gray whale calf. As its mother watched nearby, the orcas began devouring the lips, tongue and throat of the dead baby.
Baldridge’s story inspired a controversial research agenda. Soon after his encounter, the Navy began using orca sounds in an attempt to control cetaceans. Their hypothesis: Whales could decode information from sound, a contrarian claim in an era when most researchers believed that animal noise was devoid of meaning. One of the Navy’s first experiments involved sailing a catamaran off the coast of San Diego, playing recorded orca screams to gray whales swimming south on their annual migration. The results were “spectacular”: The whales whirled around and fled north or hid deep in nearby kelp beds, slowly popping their heads above the surface to search for predators. When they finally resumed swimming south, the whales were in stealth mode: sneaking past, with little of their bodies showing above the surface, their breathing scarcely audible.
Some people are drawn to beautiful birds. Others are enamoured with orchids. There are those who are mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic swish and sway of tropical fish. But mention you’re interested in fungi, and you’re likely to be met with a raised eyebrow, a sideways glance, or perhaps even a choked-back guffaw. You may even watch faces warp from expressions of interest to ones of disgust. Fortunately, however, things are changing, and fungi are finally being looked at anew by homo sapiens.
A slasher sequel has the unenviable task of one-upping the original: more blood, more bodies, more terror, more killers (or more of the same killer vanquished in the original). This is the challenge confronted—and overcome—by Stephen Graham Jones in Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023), the second novel in his planned Indian Lake trilogy. If the first novel of the trilogy, My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021), thrives on navigating the ins and outs of slasher films, then Reaper doubles down on the genre, leaning into the tenets of the sequels: monsters come back, body counts double, and the “final girl” returns home.
What emerges is something special — a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don’t own. At times, it’s unclear exactly where Pin is going — for instance, there’s a superfluous thread about American soldiers serving in Vietnam — but we follow because Pin’s novel is less about the story and more about how the story is made. Reading it is like watching a writer at work as she tries to give loss a plot and make meaning out of details. This proves to be more fascinating than the story of three siblings acclimating to their new home.
There’s a great deal of love in this book — often complicated, always genuinely depicted, never with a hint of sentimentality. Readers will come away with full and aching hearts, the best thing that can be said about any novel. The “lookout” of the title may refer to the fire lookouts that appear periodically through the text, but the larger meaning returns to Cody’s lesson about paying attention and, perhaps, caring for beloved places and the people who belong to them.
In 1932, a sideshow magician known only as Mr. Electrico disappeared into the American heartland.
The only evidence of the performer’s existence was a memory shared by the acclaimed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who credited a strange, seemingly mystical encounter with Mr. Electrico with changing his life.
If you are lucky enough to have come of age in a time when seeking treatment for anxiety is akin to, say, visiting a dermatologist for acne, you might have some trouble getting your bearings in “Commitment,” Mona Simpson’s generously proportioned, gently powerful seventh novel.
But if you grew up among people who whispered certain words — remember Mare Winningham’s mother in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” lowering her voice to say “cancer”? — then this story of three siblings fending for themselves in the 1970s after their mother enters a psychiatric hospital will demonstrate how far we’ve come in our conversations about mental health. (Though still not far enough.)
“The Nursery” concerns itself with something every new mother goes through: the discovery that she’s gone from being a (relatively) free entity roaming the earth to a bleeding, exhausted body that exists mostly to nurture her baby. Molnar pushes this transformation into the stuff of quiet horror. In doing so, she’s written an essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood.
In his new book, “The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science,” Alan Lightman describes watching the lives of a family of ospreys one summer near his house on a small island in Maine. From his second-floor deck, he observed the chicks in the nest beginning to flap their wings, growing bigger and stronger. “All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them,” Lightman writes. Then, one afternoon, they took their maiden flight. “They did a wide half-mile loop out over the ocean and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed.” Lightman was concerned; a juvenile osprey, though smaller than an adult, still has powerful, sharp talons. “My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since the birds could have ripped my face off,” he recalls. “But something held me to my ground.” At the last moment, when the birds were within 15 or 20 feet of him, they veered away and soared upward. “But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact.” After the young ospreys disappeared, Lightman was shaking and in tears. “To this day,” he observes, “I don’t understand what happened in that half second. But it was a profound connection to nature. And a feeling of being part of something much larger than myself.”
In an interview last week the actor Seth Rogen, reflecting on his brushes with bad reviews, said: “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things.” The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw came to the defence of “bad notices”: “Of what value are the good reviews… without the bedrock assumption that the reviewers were free to say the opposite?” The exchange dredges up an old question: who is criticism for?
One day about 10 years ago, a German beachcomber picked up a small orange rock and pocketed it without much thought. Minutes later, he looked down to see that his left leg was on fire. The rock, it turned out, was not a rock at all but a glob of phosphorus — a remnant of the deadly firebombs that pummeled the country during World War II. After decades of slumber, the modest heat of the man’s body had rekindled its wrath, leaving him badly injured.
That harrowing incident makes a fitting opener for Dan Egan’s new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.” In the tradition of environmental clarion calls like “Silent Spring” and “The Sixth Extinction,” which drew attention to the problems of pesticide overuse and disappearing species, respectively, “The Devil’s Element” urges readers to confront another quietly unfolding disaster. This one revolves around phosphorus — which is essential for life but has, at the hands of humans, become a menace in ways that go far beyond incendiary pebbles.
The Wilderness Act, passed in 1964, established the National Wilderness Preservation System to safeguard federally owned land, beginning with 9.1 million acres, called “wilderness areas,” to be “designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition.” Wilderness was defined as a place essentially untouched by humankind, one where a person is “a visitor who does not remain.” The desire for places where we are not is a deep and multifaceted one. Because of the climate crisis, this desire is increasingly urgent; into this charged atmosphere comes “The Nature Book,” an experimental novel by Tom Comitta. “The Nature Book” is entirely made up of descriptions of the natural world that Comitta has copied from canonical novels and spliced together in oddly mesmerizing combinations. As the afterword explains, no words have been added to the phrases, sentences, and longer passages that the book borrows; some words, however, have been erased. What’s omitted are the human stories. In doing so, “The Nature Book” attempts to create a novel that is itself a wilderness.
She lets them grow slack in their purple suits.
She keeps them
In the 40 years since Heartburn was published, there have been two distinct ways to read it. Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel is narrated by a food writer, Rachel Samstat, who discovers that her esteemed journalist husband is having an affair with Thelma Rice, “a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.” Taken at face value, the book is a triumphant satire—of love; of Washington, D.C.; of therapy; of pompous columnists; of the kind of men who consider themselves exemplary partners but who leave their wives, seven months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, to navigate an airport while they idly buy magazines. (Putting aside infidelity for a moment, that was the part where I personally believed that Rachel’s marriage was past saving.)
Unfortunately, the people being satirized had some objections, which leads us to the second way to read Heartburn: as historical fact distorted through a vengeful lens, all the more salient for its smudges. Ephron, like Rachel, had indeed been married to a high-profile Washington journalist, the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bernstein, like Rachel’s husband—whom Ephron named Mark Feldman in what many guessed was an allusion to the real identity of Deep Throat—had indeed had an affair with a tall person (and a future Labour peer), Margaret Jay. Ephron, like Rachel, was heavily pregnant when she discovered the affair. And yet, in writing about what had happened to her, Ephron was cast as the villain by a media ecosystem outraged that someone dared to spill the secrets of its own, even as it dug up everyone else’s.
Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.
Each of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to an urgent technological problem of the era: making automobiles more efficient, producing a safer refrigerant. But each turned out to have deadly secondary effects on a global scale. Indeed, there may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best of intentions as an inventor.
It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge?
That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we can confidently trace cosmic history back to one second after the Big Bang, what happened before is harder to gauge. Our accelerators simply can’t produce enough energy to replicate the extreme conditions that prevailed in the first nanosecond.
But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we’ve never seen before.
It’s a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?
If every time we saw the words “authentic food” and replaced it with the word “traditional,” the sentence itself would probably be much less controversial. But even thinking of “traditional food” doesn’t maintain the intended meaning. I can guarantee that every time a recipe has been passed down to the next generation, changes were made.
Authenticity is simply a buzzword that some people have adopted as a way to declare that they are the real food-lovers and are somehow better than you based on what they perceive to be “real.”
It's crucial that we savor the small wins in this grueling, life-long marathon we call home cooking. Say, for instance, you've fried up a couple of perfectly serviceable eggs with greens and garlic for lunch. If you take another minute (and one more small pan) to melt a few pats of butter till foamy with a sprinkling of kashmiri chili powder and lemon zest, then drizzle that over everything, lunch suddenly catapults into the realm of extraordinary.
I couldn't help but brag about this recent, small feat of dish bedazzling to my Instagram town square, whereupon Yoshi Yamada, chef and owner of the fun-loving Indian restaurant Superkhana International in Chicago, replied: "Achar butter will give it a run for its money."
After you died
I planted peonies
in the front garden
“What came out of those Zoom meetings was a sense of frustration that books are increasingly viewed as props or as interior decor—especially with the way they are set-dressed for social media,” he says. “Any assessment of how they are designed has become so paper-thin as to be largely meaningless.”
Beyond niche design sites and click baity trend pieces, there’s not much in the way of book cover discourse. So Pearson decided to do something about it. He hammered out the idea with designer Jon Gray as Jack Smyth rallied the project along. The result: The Book Cover Review, a veritable New Yorker of the topic.
Cabbage is a special friend. It doesn’t spring to mind as often as others do. It’s challenging in many ways. It doesn’t necessarily get along with my other friends. I still haven’t managed to get my children to love it, apart from a lemony slaw I once made for them that was so creamy and sour you couldn’t taste much else.
If I look at other food writers and cooks, I am definitely not the only one with a complex attitude toward cabbage. There aren’t many who would pour their hearts out in an unmitigated love serenade to the forebear of all brassicas. The only one I can think of is Nora Ephron, with her piece “The Lost Strudel” — admittedly less of a love song and more of an elegy.
We live at a time when many environmentalists feel helpless next to mega-rich forces who seem able to despoil the planet as they wish and to avoid any governmental attempts to check them. In Birnam Wood, we see the consequences of this gap in power, and the results are not pretty.
Lovers of classical ballet who don’t want to see the sausage being made might do well to avoid “Don’t Think, Dear.” But I found myself feeling something like gratitude: For maybe the first time ever, I was glad I had missed out on all ballet had to offer me.
Wagner specializes in caterpillars, or, it might be more accurate to say, is consumed by them. (They are, he suggested to me, the reason he is no longer married.) Probably he knows more about the caterpillars of the U.S. than anyone else in the country, and possibly he knows more about caterpillars in general than anyone else on the planet. When he travels, it’s not uncommon for him to return home with a suitcase full of specimens. Most of these he has injected with alcohol; some, though, may remain alive, nestled in little vials of their favorite plants.
Wagner’s “Caterpillars of Eastern North America,” published in 2005, runs to nearly five hundred pages. It relates the life histories of roughly that many species and is considered the definitive field guide on the subject. Wagner is now thirteen years into an even more ambitious project, “Caterpillars of Western North America,” which he plans to publish in four volumes.
That she had ventured into music at all was remarkably gutsy. It was impossible to look at her and not see her father’s smoldering sensuality and sultry gaze, along with hints of his curled lip. Her mother Priscilla’s porcelain beauty was also apparent. As she well knew, the comparisons to her dad were inevitable. Singer-songwriter Samantha Harlow beheld the expectations for herself when she opened for Presley at a show at Nashville’s Exit/In club in 2012. Stepping onstage for her set, Harlow observed a house packed with women older than her, pressed against the stage, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the daughter of the King. “She had so much weight on her shoulders,” Harlow says. “I can’t imagine what it would have been to carry the responsibility of her father’s legacy.”
But Presley — or Lisa Marie, as Elvis fans always called her — had a charisma of her own. “There’s a genuine swagger to a star,” says producer and songwriter Linda Perry, who also worked with Presley. “Keith Richards has it, Courtney Love and Harry Styles have it. They just walk a little different than other stars, and Lisa Marie was so interesting too — there was something dark about her, a mystery around her.” The mere fact that she soldiered on was inspiring. Everybody yearns to carve out a life for themselves apart from their parents, and here was someone trying to do that against absurdly overwhelming odds. If she could do it, so, maybe, could you.
The human-dog bond is ancient: we have co-evolved together since before writing even existed. Our long cohabitation with dogs has granted both species a unique insight into the other's feelings: dogs, for instance, know when you are looking into their eyes, unlike wolves and other animals. And, dogs can understand human language to some extent: one "Guiness"-worthy dog knows over 1,000 nouns.
Yet for all our mutual insights, we can't truly see inside the mind of a dog — nor can we know for sure what they're thinking, or what they do when we're not looking. And while cameras that watch our pets can reveal what they are doing, it's harder to know what they're thinking in private. What can dog owners know for sure?
The satisfaction was there, in the dish: It was simple to make and a perfect work-from-home lunch with a piece of buttered bread and some pickles on the side. But there was another reward, the one I’m always chasing when I peer into the fridge and wonder what’s for dinner. It was in finding a beginning in what had appeared, at first, to be the end.
It was Pliny the Elder who told us, “Home is where the heart is.” Perhaps he never had to know what it feels like when home is where your heart got broken, or where the people you left behind are now the people who scare you.
In her elegiac and unsettling new novel, “Take What You Need,” Idra Novey explores the anxious ambivalence provoked by such visits home from two perspectives: Leah and her stepmother, Jean.
So much of a successful life depends on chance — being in the right place at the right time, or, conversely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s all about luck, happenstance, the roll of the dice … at least, that’s what we tell ourselves. Underneath all that chance is a fundamental truth: Some people have more access to the “right” places, and more resources and support to get out of the “wrong” ones. In her debut novel, “Our Best Intentions,” Vibhuti Jain uses a crime in an affluent Westchester suburb to reveal how views of right and wrong are shaded by privilege, status, color and, of course, money. Whose intentions are best, and for whom, exactly?
The main pleasure of “Y/N” is not so much its somewhat skeletal plot, which floats in and out of surreality like an adult “Phantom Tollbooth,” as its corkscrew turns of language (also Tollboothian). I loved how Yi animates objects and reduces humans to collections of cells. The celestial group refers to its fans as “livers” — maybe because it sounds like “lovers,” but more because “we kept them alive,” the narrator notes, “like critical organs.”
A paean to the regenerative power of storytelling and to Los Angeles itself, “Künstlers in Paradise” is also an invitation to leave the familiar behind. In any century, seeing the world through someone else’s windows just might change everything.
Odell’s writing is strongest when she is articulating a slow and detailed awareness of her surroundings – observing the quality of light at a particular time of day, the leaves appearing on trees, or the moss spores that emerged in her kitchen and “set about dividing, differentiating, grabbing hold of the potting soil with hair-like rhizoids and growing tiny green leaves”. Such descriptions evince a careful, studied attention, hinting at a different and more expansive conception of time – time that has been better spent.
Danmei fiction draws women into romantic stories that don’t have to confront the realities of being a young woman in China, says Megan Walsh, the author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters. There is no risk of pregnancy, no pressure to marry, and sexual desires can be felt and acted upon without judgment.
Few things in life excite me more than doing research for a new novel. For me, it is the phase of the book-writing-process where new ideas manifest themselves, where rabbit holes are explored, and new discoveries are made. It is a phase full of wonder and limitless aspirations for what your book could be, but also a Herculean double edge sword when you realize that the research rabbit hole you’ve climbed down is none other than your brain’s careful attempt to camouflage what you are really doing: Procrastinating.
These fascinating, perplexing and frustrating stories have an elusive quality. This is an extraordinary collection, but also undeniably a difficult one. Clarity is not Atwood’s goal, she is invariably drawn to ambiguity and irony. The stories are unconventional and eccentric, mostly surprising, sometimes mystifying. Atwood likes tangents and asides and is extremely frugal when it comes to disclosing sought-after information. The reader is expected to work hard, to pay very close attention, to make connections, to extrapolate and intuit.
This is what Hensher lays bare here. He’s upfront about the various literary devices he uses, and titles the book’s four parts accordingly: “The Iterative Mood” sets the scene, “Free Indirect Style” sees those all-important “chains of causality” click into action, and “Entrelacement” ties everything together.
This is more than just stylistic showmanship, though. To Battersea Park is a different kind of state-of-the-nation novel; an exercise in imagination and empathy born out of a moment of collective crisis during which we all needed those things more than ever before.
Eleanor Catton’s third novel, “Birnam Wood,” is a big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wreching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humor. The result is thrilling. “Birnam Wood” nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles, like hair drawn through a pocket comb.
In showing the ways that many of us perform public selves not at all reflective of our personal natures, Holland challenges the ways that we tell stories about ourselves.
Humans think they understand the natural world, Moss argues, and so they imagine they can control it. That fantasy of control starts with little things, such as mythological ravens or feathered hats; it ends in mass extinction and climate catastrophe. Moss isn’t optimistic about our future, but he asks readers not to despair. The next chapter in our history with birds has yet to be written; we still have time to change our ways. We may not understand birds but we can try to live with them. As this delicate, stylish book explains, we need each other more than we can know.
Unable to narrate himself into the story of Mozambique on that day, Couto has been writing about the country ever since, as if to atone for that original sin. His life has been woven into the history of the nation, and he has become the foremost chronicler of Mozambique’s antiheroes: its women, its peasants, even its dead.
As his characters grapple with violence, isolation and modernity in far-flung corners of the country, the lines of reality can blur, often through magical and otherworldly explanations drawn from folklore, witchcraft and religion.
This growing investment in special interest publications shows how much the commercial strategy of the magazine industry has changed.
“It is completely the opposite of the business model of the 20th century for magazines,” Husni said. “We used to have the magazine almost for free, selling the customers to the advertisers, giving the content to the customers. Now we are in the business of selling the content to the customers.”
The test of banked knowledge and problem-solving ability can boost your ego, or deflate it. But either way, you’re clearing out the cobwebs, right? It’s the “use it or lose it” theory in action, and as I get older, I’d like to believe these mental exercises can help keep my mind sharp and maybe even ward off memory loss, even if my wife usually beats me at all these games.
But is there any science behind that, or is it wishful thinking?
I Have Some Questions for You seems at first glance like a retreat for Makkai, whose previous novel, The Great Believers, was a brilliant and ambitious chronicle of the AIDS epidemic. Following a group of gay men in Chicago in the 1980s and deftly interweaving plots from different time periods, Makkai captured the scourge’s devastating long-term repercussions in a city given far less attention than either Los Angeles or New York. Yet look again, and I Have Some Questions for You, too, tackles big social convulsions that raise questions about memory, and about how we assign blame. But this time, training a wary eye on our true-crime obsession and on #MeToo revelations, Makkai conveys less confidence that we have useful means of excavating and telling the stories that haunt us. The novel’s dizzying tour of tweets and headlines and podcast sound bites leaves us unmoored even as it has us hooked—and that’s precisely the point.
That old proverb your mother taught you — “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” — applies to marine archaeology just as it does to other aspects of life. That’s the lesson of a new work of nonfiction from Mensun Bound, one of the world’s foremost shipwreck hunters, who failed in 2019 to find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance” on the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, but succeeded three years later.
On the cover of the American edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a photograph by the late Peter Hujar. It shows a handsome young man who, with his eyes screwed shut and his head resting on his hand, looks utterly overcome with despair. Look at the small print and you see that the picture is called Orgasmic Man, one of a series Hujar made in 1969. The man isn’t crying. He’s coming.
It’s a remarkably apt image for a book which has hit the commercial motherlode by wallowing in abject misery. Since it was published in 2015, A Little Life has sold more than 1m copies and is now a bona fide cult classic. There are multiple Reddit threads devoted to it; on Pinterest, people show off their A Little Life-inspired tattoos; and the style magazine i-D recently quoted a woman called Kristin Curtis saying that her friends would send each other selfies while sobbing when they reached the novel’s conclusion. On TikTok, the search terms “A Little Life” and “A Little Life book” have 200m page views between them, although not all of the content is positive. “I would not recommend this book to my worst enemy,” declares declares BookTokker @sivanreads, disapprovingly brandishing her copy, and representing the many readers who were appalled – rather than moved – by this famously divisive text.
I wasn’t the first to make the connection, but once I noticed it, it was everywhere. You walk past a poster for a new movie and think, Why is every action hero named Jack, John, James, or, occasionally, Jason?
I turned to my friends and colleagues, asking desperately if they had also noticed this trend, as I made my case by listing off well-known characters: John Wick, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, John McClane, James Bond, Jack Bauer, and double hitter John James Rambo.
I worried I might have fallen victim to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Now that I had become aware of it, was each glimpse of a John Wick ad reaffirming my unsubstantiated theory?
Camilla Rathsach walked along the lichen-covered sand, heading out from the lone village on Denmark’s remote Anholt island—a spot of land just a few kilometers wide in the middle of the Kattegat Strait, which separates the Danish mainland from Sweden. As Anholt Town’s 45 streetlights receded into the distance, moonlit shadows reached out to embrace the dunes. Rathsach looked up, admiring the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Thousands of stars shone down. “It’s just amazing,” she says. “Your senses heighten and you hear the water and feel the fresh air.”
This dark-sky moment was one of many Rathsach experienced while visiting the island in 2020 for work on her master’s thesis on balancing the need for outdoor lighting and darkness. Having grown up in urban areas, Rathsach wasn’t used to how bright moonlit nights could be. And after speaking with the island’s residents, who value the dark sky deeply and navigate with little outdoor light, she realized that artificial lighting could be turned down at night depending on the moon’s phase.
Plating food matters. I wish I knew this as a kid, but at least I get to consider it when feeding my own.
You probably already know how you’re going to feel about Margaret Atwood‘s newest collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood. That Atwood is a legend of the literary enterprise is of no debate, and this collection is a strong continuance of the daring, prickly, and deeply humane voice that has marked her work for decades.
Sasha Kutabah Sarago has been a model, a magazine editor, a documentary maker and a writer: now, she describes herself as an abolisher of paradigms.
The Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Jirrbal and African-American woman wants us to reject the idea of beauty perpetuated by corporations and across pop culture, and in her just released memoir, Gigorou, she details her mission for change.
Heartbreaking, gorgeously written even if its darkest passages, and truly epic in terms of breadth and scope, The God of Endings chronicles almost two centuries of one woman's journey while also exploring the beauty of brevity, the power of love, and the importance of art.
“Monstrilio,” a debut novel by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, is aptly titled — an unearthly hybrid that’s part horror, part literary meditation on grief, part wildly entertaining tale of an impossible being forced to live in the shadow of the dead boy he replaced. At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture.
In Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, the New Yorker writer Michael Schulman provides just what we need as the same old love-hate drama plays out yet again for Oscar fans and shunners alike: a rich array of unflattering but spellbinding stories about the feuds and failures of judgment that the Academy has thus far managed to weather. Schulman explores nine decades of Oscar-related turf battles, examining the institution’s constant missteps and often bumbling self-reinvention as it strives to sustain its influence. “If there’s a common thread running through the decades of Oscar wars,” he writes, “it’s power: who has it, who’s straining to keep it, who’s invading the golden citadel to snatch it.” As everyone in the movie business knows, that particular story line appeals to brows high and low.
Gregory Day wants us to listen. Not to the bells of civilisation – the colonial pealing that keeps our trousers up, shielding us from our true beastly selves – but to the cacophonous medley of the land itself. The novelist, poet and essayist, whose accolades include the Patrick White Literary award and a Miles Franklin shortlisting, has a long history writing about the symbiotic relationships between place, nature and language. The Bell of the World is the crescendo of these preoccupations.
To (politely) sum up the current consensus: Gloves reduce your sense of touch, increasing the likelihood that you might accidentally tear a page, smear pigments, dislodge loose fragments — or worse, drop the book.
And whatever their associations with cleanliness, cotton gloves attract dirt. They also tend to make hands sweat, generating moisture that can damage a page. Rubber gloves, while moisture-proof and generally better fitted to the hand, are too grabby.
As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwarzenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981, when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’ ” Wachter recalled. “He said, ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’ ”
Schwarzenegger isn’t afraid of death. “I’m just pissed off about it.
Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday? I told them the same story my adoptive parents had told me: My birth parents were unable to take care of a fragile, premature baby. They believed that another family would provide me with a better life. And so I was adopted and became my parents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When your family is formed by divine will, who are you to question it? To wonder about the family you never knew?
The truth is that I’m often bored and certainly don’t have enough to do. There are places I could go to wallow in oldness with other people suffering the same predicament, but I can’t face that. Instead, there is a perpetual inner argument between what I like to think of as my superego and the voice of my defeated younger self. The first tells me in a firm voice, and rather witheringly, that I must not only swim forty lengths a day but the lengths must be swum according to a routine, alternately crawl and backstroke, and the backstroke evenly divided between the use of both arms moving simultaneously and then separately. The other, weaker, voice tells me that by far the more grown-up and sensible course of action would be to swim fewer lengths and not every day and/or to lie to myself about how many I’ve done. It also mutters that I could swim all the lengths on my back, which is much easier, and that I could even indulge my lurking wish to spend longer in bed in the morning reading the Guardian and listening to the Today programme than I already do.
Alex North's The Angel Maker is one of those tense, gripping narratives that walk a fine line between horror, mystery, a detective story, and something dark and enigmatic that lives in the shadows between those genres.
“IN A LIFE I never had I was a brave cosmonaut and I navigated the stars I’d always watched curiously.” From the opening pages of her 2019 memoir Voyager: Constellations of Memory, Nona Fernández spurns the conventions of the form, opting instead for a wider, more visionary lens. As Fernández accompanies her mother to the doctor after a string of mysterious fainting spells, the scan of her mother’s brain illuminated on the hospital monitor prompts a starscape to spring to life in Fernández’s mind, initiating the book’s voyage through space, memory, and imagination.
Wilson challenges notions about nature in cities, noting in his introduction that New York contains more species than Yosemite National Park. Rethinking the relationship between cities and nature requires taking a closer look at the cracks in sidewalks, vacant lots and backyard gardens.
I surrender to stop signs,
storms, that loose screw
in the window casing, grime
defiling the grout. I acknowledge
When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.
They recognised in each other a sense of frustration that chasing career progression had not led to personal fulfilment. “Over a drink in the pub one evening, we started to sketch out what our ideal lifestyle might look like,” they said. “We knew we wanted to own a business in Shaftesbury that would allow us simple pleasures such as walking to work and feeling properly rooted in our town.”
Inspired by an old photograph at the pub, they decided to set up an independent bookshop together. Today, they are part of a growing number of female friendship duos who have similarly decided to follow their dreams of running bookshops that cater to local communities, women and under-represented minorities.
Bibimbar’s owner, Ina Jungin Lee, took over the restaurant in 2012 and, in the years since, she’s built a mini-empire of restaurants, bars, and other Korean food businesses in San Francisco. A Korean immigrant, she came to San Francisco for graphic design in the early aughts with no particular sense of purpose. But over the years she’s become laser-focused on her goal of spreading Korean culture through food and drink — and she’s brought her entire family from South Korea to join the cause. Now, whether at her Valencia Street snack spot BoBop or her Excelsior hideout for house music and soju Korner Store, she’s firmly pursuing that mission.
In essence, the novel is about individuals, how they feel and think and change and in doing so shape the world they live in, even if they only do so in small ways. But Catton’s characters resemble the figures in Greek tragedy, people enmeshed in systems whose attempts to commandeer their own fates inevitably end in tears and blood. It may upset readers who were certain they knew what kind of resolution was coming, but that is surely Catton’s point. Hubris will always get you in the end.
Underneath the spangly surfaces of country music, there’s a lot of messiness and injustice. In some ways, the genre has been more upfront about that in recent years, especially for women artists; in some ways they have not. The range of acceptable personas for a country singer may have expanded, but personas still dominate, and as Stephanie Clifford shows in her thought-provoking and entertaining new novel “The Farewell Tour,” life for a female country singer can still be, to put it mildly, constricting.
Heartburn the book is a comedic and gently sad account of the dissolution of a marriage, and in turn the dissolution of a life. It’s bittersweet enough that only a romantic could have written it, and vicious enough that the romantic must have been both extremely mean and extremely funny. Also, the food is great.
It is in the gap between present and future, where outcomes are not yet determined, that Jenny Odell enters with her paradigm-destroying new book, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.” This grand, eclectic, wide-ranging work is about the various problems that swirl out from dominant conceptions of “time,” which sometimes means history, sometimes means an individual lifetime and sometimes means the future.
Taking a numerical approach to the natural world – as in Simon Barnes’s History of the World in 100 Plants, for example – is a handy way to carve off a manageable slice from a potential plethora of examples. There are, for instance, nearly 10,000 bird species worldwide. In his new book, naturalist Stephen Moss wisely chooses just 10, but in doing so tells the story of the long relationship between birds and humanity – and it has mostly been a disastrous one.
Pennsylvania Station, in west midtown, is the busiest railroad station in the Western Hemisphere. It is also a shabby, haunted labyrinth. I was there recently with Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect and city planner who has been involved for decades in efforts, most of them futile, to improve the station. We entered from Seventh Avenue, going down a narrow escalator with so little headroom that I flinched and ducked. On our left, a man was wrestling a baby carriage up a staircase, bumping step by step toward the street.
“It’s the architecture that tells you where to go in a train station,” Chakrabarti said. In Penn, the architecture generally tells you to go away. The area where we had entered resembles a dingy subterranean shopping mall, dominated by fast-food joints—Dunkin’ Donuts, Jamba Juice, Krispy Kreme. Three railroads and six busy subway lines converge in Penn Station, but from where we were it was hard to find your way to any of them. “Down here, the signage has always been a huge issue,” Chakrabarti said. His tone was equal parts earnest concern and professorial detachment; he was a professor at Columbia for seven years, worked as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s director of city planning for Manhattan, runs a global architecture studio, and lives with his family about a mile from Penn Station, through which they are often obliged to travel. Chakrabarti is fifty-six, tall, with a well-trimmed white chin-strap beard.
I have, on numerous occasions, experienced the superstore as a great human meeting place, a spectacle; the first time, I felt this acutely and with a certain sense of shame. In order to write, I had isolated myself off-season in a village in the Nièvre, but I was unable to write. Going to Leclerc, five kilometres away, brought relief: by being among strangers, I was “back in the world.” Back in the necessary presence of people. And thus discovering that I was the same as everyone else who drops by the shopping center for entertainment or an escape from loneliness. Very spontaneously, I began to describe the things I saw in these supercenters. I saw an opportunity to provide an account of the real practice of their routine use, far removed from the conventional discourses, which are often tinged with an aversion that these so-called non-places arouse and which in no way correspond to my experience of them.
One of those zombie tropes is that Los Angeles isn’t a walking city. Actually, Los Angeles is a fantastic walking city. Exploring it on foot is how I started to make sense of things. Of course, L.A. isn’t concentrated like Manhattan, or pedestrian-friendly like Tokyo. It’s not aesthetically breathtaking like Rome. The built environment is often rough and grainy, almost deliberately antipretty, with gantlets of warehouses, parking lots and industrial parks unprotected from the sun. Crosswalks are infrequent, and drivers often ignore them; the city only recently stopped ticketing residents for jaywalking. Probably most of Greater L.A. is awful to experience on foot. Yet there’s so much of it, radiating from multiple cores, that the amount worth walking is colossal.
When my son was born, I became obsessed with making. It was as if his coming into the world flipped a switch somewhere inside of myself that compelled me to create things with my hands. This desire to make was not necessarily anything new—I come from a long line of makers on both sides of my family—but I had until then always been lackadaisical about my projects, only taking them on from time to time, usually with a lot of space in between. There was something about the arrival of my son that suddenly made this business of handwork feel extremely, viscerally important to my everyday life.
“Your Driver Is Waiting” roars to life when Damani becomes more of an active participator making her feelings known and her singular voice heard. She is a fascinating creation: a woman with attitude and an agenda, who displays her vulnerability but also shows her tough side and is unafraid of using the titanium baseball bat in her trunk and the switchblade in her pocket. “When I go fast, I am invincible,” she tells us. Strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.
Katherine Mansfield died a hundred years ago this winter at age 34. Although she was so young, she has a special place in the literary canon as someone who changed the course of the short story in the 20th century. As a young writer I remember reading some of her stories many times, trying to pin down how she could take the most ordinary of events — for example, moving house in “Prelude” — and create a story so vivid that I can still tell you about those children and their parents and aunt and grandmother in great detail. In those days I knew that Mansfield, New Zealand’s great treasure, was a magician with words, that she was considered a “modernist,” that her best work shimmered with an unusual tenderness, and that her characters could creep into your heart, leading to comparisons with Woolf and Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalist Percival Everett won another prestigious award this month, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, for his newest book, Dr. No. Taking a sharp turn with his first novel since the triumphant success of The Trees, Everett's Dr. No is a delightfully escapist romp as well as an incisive sendup of espionage fiction.
King’s style in this book regularly recalls those of the great cartographers of similar imaginary spaces, like Mervyn Peake and Gene Wolfe, though his aims are different. His prose is not as wonderfully ornate as theirs, but it has its own smooth lyricism and evocative imagery, helping the book’s pages turn quickly. King loves extravagant lists full of quirky details: of the city’s strange landmarks, of a room’s various odors, of the housekeeping habits of professors, of one character’s many seedy associates, of another’s erotic fantasies.
When I first met them, my own father was dying from cancer: Harold’s story was my way of dealing with my lacerating grief—of bringing shape to something that felt to have no shape at all. It makes complete sense to me now that I chose to write about a man trying to keep a person alive, when I myself was losing my father. Harold and I made our way through his journey, against the odds. I listened to him, and to his days of wonder and days of doubt, and found a reflection of what I was feeling.
In fact Harold became so real to me, and to my family, that there were times we would drive past an elderly man on a road and my children would actually wind down their car windows and wave. A few years later, I even saw him (or at least the image of Harold Fry that was on the Thai cover) as the logo on a van advertising a stair lift company. I came home and said to my husband, “You’ll never believe this, but Harold has his own private enterprise now.”
The author Alice Winn was procrastinating, digging through the archives of the English boarding school she had attended, when she came across a historical treasure trove: copies of school’s newspaper from the early 20th century.
The paper, digitized and posted online, tracked the progression of World War I through the lives of alumni and students at the school, Marlborough College. At first, the students were eager to join the fight; they cheered on their classmates and wrote letters home from the front, romanticizing the valor and bravery of war. And then they started dying.
It is, in part, a serious look at a cohort of accomplished women artists whose work has been largely lost or overlooked by the art establishment; it’s also a charming and poetic stroll through esoterica and the spirit world.
In “Saving Time,” with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch. She wrote this book to save her life, she explains, as she struggled to understand why the world came to be organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving. She charts how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells, then by the nineteenth-century railroads; the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force; and the ways that time has been progressively commodified and disciplined, from the factories of the early twentieth century to the floors of contemporary Amazon warehouses. A capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time, she argues, as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time. Modernity has pulled us out of synch with nature and the needs of our bodies; it has depleted our inner and outer worlds.
This must be the room of last resort,
this half-lit passage under the dripping bridge
where, on the only route to the Underground,
To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the lawn, with its hair in long, curving crimps and a deerstalker hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find you, its face lights up, there is something in this world for you to do.
A sandy bluff towers above the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. Every year, Alaska Native resident Ken Shade watches as a little more of his land falls over the edge, into the sea.
Dillingham is just one example of a small Alaskan town with a big erosion problem. Around the state, dozens of coastal communities are watching their coastlines crumble, losing at least 3 feet of land per year. Critical infrastructure such as airport runways, fuel tanks, and schools are in danger. Many Alaska Natives have been hard hit: Now, with climate change altering weather patterns, melting permafrost, and reducing sea ice, the land these communities are built on is falling into the sea.
In one sense, these new discoveries have injected drama, even anxiety, into a field that was quite stable. “It’s incredible how the universe is just so much weirder than we thought it was,” Erica Nelson, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me. But in another sense, it’s just fun. When I asked Kirkpatrick whether she feels stressed about the uncertainty her profession is navigating, she cackled with glee. “It’s the beginning of the universe!” she said. “It’s not going to affect my life, so it’s really fun to think about this kind of stuff.”
Decades before journaling became a verb, Alba de Céspedes explored in Forbidden Notebook the insidious, inflammatory, radically self-affirming potential of women’s life writing. Like her grandfather ending slavery on his plantation before taking up arms against Spain, she knew that true revolution begins at home.
There’s a point when you realize that the fairy tales you read as a child were eerily prescient. Their familiar plots surface everywhere as the cumulative absurdity of everyday life warps your consciousness. “Fairy tales themselves are well-trodden paths,” writes Sabrina Orah Mark in “Happily,” her new essay collection. “I connect pieces of fairy tales to walk me through motherhood, and marriage, and America, and weather, and loneliness, and failure, and inheritance, and love.” When history and truth are subject to excruciating debate, returning to the ur-texts of one’s childhood seems completely sensible.
“Saving Time” is an unusual book, a mix of history, philosophy and personal narrative. And while it takes on a topic that is central to work-life balance and conversations about well-being, it is not self-help. Odell isn’t trying to tell anyone what to do. She doesn’t see herself as “fixing anything,” she said, but as mapping out a societal problem.
“She’s a good teacher,” said Joshua Batson, a good friend of hers. “She wants you to have an experience, not to listen to her.”
One of the most popular songs in the world right now presents a musical riddle: Are you supposed to dance or nap? PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” featuring the rapper Ice Spice, sounds both fast and sluggish, new and old. It’s undeniably catchy and yet feels as fleeting as a mild dream. Another vexing fact: Liar is pronounced, in the chorus, “lee-yah.”
Really, the No. 3 song on the Billboard Hot 100 is the culmination of a few trends, technologically driven and taste-bound. In many enclaves, music is getting faster and more fidgety. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s getting more energetic or extroverted. Welcome to the age of lo-fi beats to take stimulants to.
The Iditarod is Alaska’s best-known sporting event. Sled dogs and their mushers travel the roughly thousand-mile trail from Anchorage to Nome each year in March to commemorate the 1925 serum run, when a relay of 20 dogsled teams delivered life-saving medication to Nome to halt a diphtheria outbreak. The route is only passable in winter, when the rivers and lakes have frozen over. But the trail has become trickier in the past two decades as the region has warmed, making trail conditions less reliable. The 51st annual running of the Iditarod starts on March 4, but this year there are fewer teams than usual. In the past, there were sometimes as many as 85 teams, but now there are only 33—the lowest participation in the race’s history.
“The Farewell Tour” is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description.
One of the challenges many crime-fiction writers face is how to present the grim findings of their research while still providing entertainment. Novelist Kwei Quartey navigates this predicament deftly in “Last Seen in Lapaz,” which takes the author’s Ghanaian private investigator into the unsettling world of sex trafficking.
Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well as excess fat. For these reasons alone, any sensible person should beware of blurbs.
My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.
I looked at the objects in the house
the titles of the books
strange incandescence from the windows
The kebaya became a word used for both men and women's robes or blouses, but from the 19th Century onwards, it became synonymous in Southeast Asia with a women's blouse paired with a batik sarong. This style became popular with Dutch women during the times of the Dutch East Indies (in what is now Indonesia), and was also adopted by women in Southeast Asia who followed Islam and wanted to dress more modestly.
Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award and also garnered a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 selection, that place was the Alaska wilderness across thirteen stories that intersected with survival, with the toughness an unpredictable environment requires, and with the vulnerability of surrendering to a landscape. Moustakis delves even deeper into the Alaskan terrain in her debut novel, Homestead, exploring the tension between taming and untaming, between human willpower and the will of a terrain, and between characters who seek both togetherness and solitude in a new-to-them place. The result is a luminous and fierce portrait of early marriage as a territory moves toward statehood.
Who on earth ever loved Margaret Atwood for her cautious restraint? She swings at all pitches, and sometimes she misses. (Her 2015 novel “The Heart Goes Last” lost me at the Elvis sex bots, but good God, it was fun.)
I’d be more tempted to dwell on the puzzle of that grab bag of middle stories being sandwiched between realistic, virtuosic, elegiac linked stories if the reasoning didn’t so simply present itself: This is Atwood. This is our four-faced Janus, who’s got one face turned to the past, one to the present, one to the future and the fourth inside a spaceship, telling stories about eating horses. Long may she reign.
Frameworks like crip time and Afrofuturism suggest two things: that linear time as we experience it in the West is a colonial construction, and that each person’s experience of temporality is—or, at least, once was, and could be again—informed by their identity, geography, and lived experience.
Both of these ideas are at the heart of Jenny Odell’s new book, Saving Time. A writer and artist from California, Odell became a near-household name in 2019 with her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. That book argued that doing nothing in a society that constantly demands our productivity and attention is a difficult but crucial task, and that “solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.” Her newest book falls along similar thematic lines, but rather than arguing for the importance of “wasting time,” she is exploring the nature of temporality itself.
I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about sentences. I have been sentenced to this fate, you might say, which is both a bad pun and also the truth; between writing, teaching, and reading, I can’t escape sentences.
The sentence contains the entirety of literature in miniature. Individual words hold their power through context and placement; phrases carry their meaning through juxtaposition. Paragraphs are often too thick to memorize: a mindful, more than the mouth can manage. Sentences linger on the tongue and echo in the room. You can still hear, years and yearnings later, the sharpest sentences of our life.
The idea that life in the past was better is, of course, not new, extending at least as far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage. But the 20th-century version of the primitivist thesis can be traced back to ‘The Original Affluent Society’, an essay by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. It is one of the most famous, and controversial, essays in all of anthropology, assigned in virtually every class in the discipline. It is the essay that redefined how we think about hunter-gatherers – and ourselves.
When it comes to teenagers, Ginni and her friends are pretty typical. They love watching boys, they’re embarrassed by their parents, and they think it’d be cool to start a band (though truthfully, none of them really have any interest in music or practice). Ginni’s crush is an albatross named James. She likes him for his extremely impressive wingspan, and you can often find her sitting in a nearby tree with her friends Ramil and Ivy watching James gracefully fly over the water. At night, Ginni likes to leave James small food offerings near his nest from her family’s share of the universal worm, occasionally making hyperbolic declarations of love to him out of earshot. “I want him to peck out my eyes. He’s so handsome,” she swoons.
That’s just what life is like for teenage birds living on the moon. Or at least, that’s what life is like for the teenage birds living on the moon in Michael DeForge’s latest comic, Birds of Maine (2022). The book, which is a collection of DeForge’s webcomic of the same name, might at first seem like a simplistic—albeit humorous—imagining of bird life, but it quickly turns into something much deeper. DeForge’s birds are not your typical avian brethren but rather a complex and sophisticated ornithological unit that have taken up residence on the moon after fleeing the Earth and its population of corrupt humans. DeForge renders them and their world in a style that feels like Charley Harper’s geometric birds have been dropped into a Wassily Kandinsky landscape, and the narrative reads like a futuristic tale reminiscent of Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2020) or Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In short, these birds are on another level. Still, there is something remarkably familiar about them.
Over all of these days and months, I’ve been reading the new poetry collection by John Freeman, Wind, Trees (2022), likewise a lesson in the elements, including fire and ice, fear and trembling, with turns, too, on emigrant plants, difficult breathing, the love of a good dog, and a “four o’clock dark beginning like a rumor.” In winter, it gets dark early where I am too.
As a rule, I try not to read this way, toward identification. But it’s happened in this case; there’s no point denying that. After all, I see myself and my own comfortable life and my own comfortable habits in Wind, Trees: the possibility of calm domesticity during quarantine, dog walks through nature, daily toast with preserves. Reflected in these poems is the wherewithal and interest to look back on a life from middle age—to say, Freeman writes, of love lost, “the body inside my body turns over, / the one that remembers not being yours,” or to recall taking up boxing in “the waning days / of those years in London”—when some of what’s there to look back on is adulthood already behind us, when life has been long enough for us to have called other places home. (For me, this was New York City.
In August sun I blister in the promise
that married us last year on this island
of mice who claim the dark corners
“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
“Wisconsin Death Trip” is 50 years old this year, and it’s an anniversary worth heeding. Lesy’s unclassifiable book earns its portentous title, and its tone has influenced many disparate works of art. It is a haunting backdoor into history and a raw experiment in feeling. It has never been, as the fissures in American life deepen, more relevant.
In 1999, MIT made the shocking admission that the university had discriminated against its women scientists … and promised to do better. The 16 women who had challenged the status quo, most notably Nancy Hopkins, the reluctant de facto leader, were thrilled but eager to return to their roles as elite scientists.
They largely moved on. So did the Boston Globe reporter who broke the story, Kate Zernike, trading her higher education beat for a national correspondent role at the New York Times. But nearly two decades later, the #MeToo movement compelled her to revisit the moment for a new book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.”
I don’t care to remember what you call,
inaccurately, the fine old days.