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.