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.