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.