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.