Once upon a time, music publishing was a profoundly unsexy profession, the IRS of the industry. When a sample or interpolation needed clearing, some ink-stained wretch from one of the major publishers would amble out to furnish the papers and disappear back into the Xerox mines. Today, music publishers are the ones making headlines. Industry power brokers like L.A. Reid and Clive Davis have largely been supplanted by figures like Primary Wave CEO Larry Mestel or Merck Mercuriadis, president of the venture-capitalist upstart Hipgnosis Songs Fund. The jaw-dropping transactions—Bob Dylan to Universal’s publishing arm for somewhere north of $300 million; half of Neil Young’s catalog to Hipgnosis for $150 million; Stevie Nicks to Primary Wave for close to $100 million—come not from artist signings but catalog acquisitions.
In the current speculative boom, Primary Wave enjoys a 15-year head start. The founders—Mestel, along with Shukat and Adam Lowenberg—met at Arista Records in the late 1990s, when the industry was breaking all-time revenue records. In 2005, when the CD boom started to go bust amid widespread piracy, Mestel left Arista to found Primary Wave, inviting Shukat and Lowenberg to join him. In March of 2006, Primary Wave announced its first-ever acquisition: the catalog of Kurt Cobain, for which it shelled out $50 million.
Walk two kilometres east of the BBC office in Bangkok, and you pass more than 40 dispensaries, selling potent marijuana flower buds and all the paraphernalia needed to smoke them.
Travel in the opposite direction, to the famous backpacker hangout of Khao San Road, and there is an entire marijuana-themed shopping mall, Plantopia, its shops half-hidden behind the haze of smoke created by customers trying out the product. The website Weed in Thailand lists more than 4,000 businesses across the country selling cannabis and its derivatives.
And this is Thailand, where until last June you could be jailed for five years just for possessing marijuana, up to 15 years for producing it; where other drug offences get the death penalty. The pace of change has been breathtaking.
While marriage may be an endless, evolving equation of events and decisions that increase or decrease the original store of love, in the end, one hopes, there is still, indeed, love. Keane understands this. Her perceptive, generous observations and attention to her characters’ inner lives make for a book that is much, much more than the sum of its characters. She manages to find the extraordinary grace in our achingly ordinary world.
But what sets “Weyward” apart from other witchcraft-related fiction is Hart’s wise decision to also explore topics that require no belief in the dark arts: men’s fear of women and the violence it can generate, women’s affinity for their ancestors and the blessings bestowed by intimate contact with the natural world.
In her graduate-level writing class on plot and queer structure, Pittsburgh-raised writer and book editor Sarah Cypher poses the question: “In the dominant mode of storytelling, a protagonist knows what they want and overcomes obstacles to get it. But when we tell stories about bodies and desires that won’t conform to traditional structures, how can we work with a sense of risk and playfulness to reject normative, closed notions of how characters ‘should’ develop and how stories ‘should’ be structured?”
This openness to risk and playfulness — while rejecting conformity and literary traditions of character development and plot structure — is a grounding force in Ms. Cypher’s debut novel, “The Skin and Its Girl,” released this month by Ballantine Books.
Editor Jane Holloway has gathered together a rich assortment of writing — not just stories — from a wide selection of writers. All of the pieces revolve around book-related themes, many are set in book-lined worlds and most feature book-loving people. It's a bibliophile's delight.
Should I be having this much fun? This is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: You cannot applaud his debut novel, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” without getting blood on your hands. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them.
This is also why his book works. It is an act of protest, but it does not straightforwardly preach. Instead, it lures you in, as if to demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick. Even readers who acknowledge the brazen evil of the dystopian premise — these televised duels offer prisoners a path to freedom — might find themselves titillated by its depiction, which functions as both satire and straight-up sportswriting. The lulls between bouts give readers a beat to think about all the ways they’ve been conditioned to enjoy such a story, by any number of America’s perversions: its narcotic televised pastimes, its singular talent for mass incarceration, its steady innovation in violence technology, its racial caste system, its eternal appetite for retribution. But it’s fun, I promise.
The comment that sent Hadley Freeman spiraling into anorexia as a young girl was seemingly benign. A schoolmate who was skinny said she felt envious because she wished she was “normal like you,” an innocuous remark that pitched Freeman into a descent towards self-starvation. As she observes in “Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia,” there’s a difference between trigger and cause: anything could have had a similar effect because she was so vulnerable. For women and girls predisposed to the illness, she writes, “the anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger.”
A 2011 study at University College London found that when we behold a pleasing work of art, blood rushes to our head in a physiological reflex that’s akin to gazing at a loved one. What explains such an immediate and unconscious seduction? In his new book Affinities: On Art and Fascination, critic and essayist Brian Dillon takes this instinctive rapport as the starting point for a series of elegant and discursive meditations on art’s enchantments.
Harold Bloom once stated in an interview with The Paris Review that poetry slam is “the death of art.” I like that. The gravity of the statement feels like its own commendation. But I would like to offer here that poetry slam is more accurately described as the art of death—the art of dying to oneself. You can hear the resonances of this approach in some of the descriptive terms of the slam, nowhere more vividly than in the role of the sacrificial poet: the first writer to touch stage during a slam.
White's characters are masterfully drawn, and his use of language is brilliant. He does an amazing job having mother and son describe what it means to live with their gift: "It's like I exist all at once, but I can't keep up," Key says at one point, while Colly reflects, "I am misplaced, lost in moments I believe to be linear."
This demand — and spirit — for bolder storytelling that transcends borders and identities certainly can be found in Oza’s generous novel. The author opens things up for her readers. More life, more joy and more love amid a shifting and layered landscape of unspeakable loss. It’s all there — the complicated humanity and grief of Oza’s family of characters — for the reader to consider and behold.
About 1500 years ago, a series of natural disasters transformed the world. Over the course of two decades, volcanic eruptions in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and across the tropics threw a dust veil into the atmosphere that obscured the light and warmth of the sun.
Scientists seek records of these events in ice cores, rock strata, and radiocarbon isotopes, but in The Earth Transformed Peter Frankopan traces their bleak impacts in Tang dynasty annals, Puebloan archaeology from the Colorado Plateau, Jain texts from Madhya Pradesh, and material from sacrificial sites in modern-day Denmark.
Overcast morning, cool and grey.
The white cat bends low
to drink from the swimming pool.
A sense of community is the true appeal of the bookstore setting. Bookstores in mysteries promise warmth and calm. They offer companionship. When all seems dark and dreary, they are there, “spilling light onto the sidewalk.”
What such length provides is more—more of whatever a filmmaker has to offer, more self-revelation, for better or worse. Ordinary filmmakers make long movies mere slogs: those whose ambition exceeds their artistry reveal their public-facing strivings and pleadings for recognition; but, for the greats, such as Scorsese, it’s a canvas as big as the world.
Long before it entered the urban playgrounds of the 20th century, the swing was a ritual instrument of healing, punishment and transformation. Through repetitive, vertigo-inducing movements, the swing was used to celebrate gods and legendary beings, to ward off evil, alleviate suicidal impulses, heal mental illness, express sexual dominance or torment those accused of occult practices. But its deeper use has always been one of transformation: as it holds us in its oscillating spell, the swing calls into question the world we know, with its established hierarchies and rhythms. To swing is not only to play, but to open disorienting passages into transgressive spaces.
Sixty. It sounded so substantial, so respectably old, a milestone, and I wanted to mark the place. Get a tattoo popped into my head out of nowhere. Perfect. I would get my first tattoo. It would be a salamander, because I love the way they look, and how they feel like a little puddle of mercury in the palm of your hand, and plus they are magic.
CM Lucca is writing a biography or memoir of her wife, in order to address what she sees as egregious errors in a bestselling biography of the eponymous “X”. The book is a wonderful series of rabbit holes. “X” is a myriad; a novelist, artist, musician, provocateur, strip-club dancer film-maker, and X has also been Dorothy, Bee, Luella, Marley, Joan and Angel before she settles on X. X is the term in algebra from an unknown quantity, and she is determined to be unknowable; hence her wife’s objection to the expedient biography shortly after her death. But X is also an unknown unknown: it means very different things if I put an x on a birthday card or an x after an incorrect piece of arithmetic. It is also the sign used for hybridisation in botany, and collaborations in aesthetics. It also marks the spot, and the impeccable X will not be pinned down for good reasons.
Alie Benge’s first book, Ithaca, is one of those non-fiction books that shifts between several forms. It is sometimes memoir, sometimes personal essay, sometimes criticism, sometimes analysis, sometimes even outright comedy. The one constant throughout is Benge’s voice – sharp, witty, precise. Whenever I’ve read her writing on this very site, I’ve always imagined her chatting directly to me, perhaps mid-cigarette, the coolest person in the room.
I want to laugh at the autumn rains.
When I laugh, it’s July again.
Perhaps that’s the real secret of the supercentenarians—how much of their lifespan is really beyond our control. Even if more of us are blessed with good genes, healthy lifestyles, and excellent medical care, it doesn’t mean we should expect longevity records to come crashing down. Robine looks a lot younger than his 71 years, and he often gets asked what his secret is. “I know the secret because Jeanne Calment told me it,” he usually responds. But the truth is that Calment—unlike other supercentenarians—never shared her longevity tips with Robine. She had no secret at all.
“The steamboat was the first American invention of world-shaking importance,” wrote historian James Thomas Flexner in 1944. In fact, he added, it “was one of those crucial inventions that change the whole cultural climate of the human race.”
Defined broadly as any vessel powered by a steam engine, the term “steamboat” is more often used to describe paddle wheel-propelled crafts that roamed the rivers of the United States, particularly the Mississippi, in the 19th century. An early prototype set sail in 1787, but it was only in 1807 that the first commercially successful steamboat made its debut. High-stakes—and sometimes deadly—steamboat races followed soon after.
"Y'all Eat Yet?" is a simple question, a call to gather, and a gentle nudge toward self-care: "This is a reminder to everybody to just slow down," Lambert says. "Take a weekend and go sit in a lawn chair and eat some deviled eggs and just have quality time. That's what this book is about."
On the surface, it's a Black southern gothic novel about a young woman learning to navigate life alone. But it's also a creepy ghost story with a sense of humor, a narrative about survival, and a strange tale of loss and grief sprinkled with sex, abuse, empathy, and a deep look at what it means to be dealt a rough hand at life from the very beginning.
That said, there's something that's very easy to declare about this novel: It's an incredible debut that announces the arrival of a unique voice in contemporary fiction.
At a time when the British education system is becoming suffocatingly narrow, with arts and music being dropped by schools, and our universities falling behind America in encouraging multidisciplinary studies, Once Upon a Prime is a joyous reminder of the way so much human creativity comes from joining the dots between seemingly disparate fields.
Rather quickly, I realized that in practice, I was asking potentially the wrong question. If anything can be a prayer, then what are my prayers actually saying? Figuring out the answer to that question turned out to be a little tougher — and I wasn't expecting to find it in a box of cake mix.
Our Milky Way galaxy is speeding through the emptiness of space at 600 kilometers per second, headed toward something we cannot clearly see. The focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution. But we'll never reach our destination because, in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will tear the Universe apart.
It would be a shame if “Small Mercies” was indeed Lehane’s final novel, though the last several years have seen him turned into a much-in-demand TV writer and showrunner, including on 2022’s AppleTV+ hit “Black Bird.” If it really is, it’s a worthy coda to a literary career built on cramped streets filled with unreliable women and men, each trying to find balance in a world of cops and criminals and a town in which you can’t always tell them apart.
Food kept aside as an ultimate taboo feels foreign in our world, but the way Chana Porter interweaves this with all-too-familiar societal fatphobia and examinations of oppressive cultural structures, these elements lean the premise into the real and surreal simultaneously, and this on its own is a feat worth commending.
Mountains have long loomed over humanity, both physically and in our imaginations. The home of gods and demons, they are simultaneously sacred and — as any viewer of alpine climbing documentaries can attest — hostile. They’re ideal settings, in other words, for horror-tinged speculative thrillers, including Nicholas Binge’s “Ascension.”
“Stalking Shakespeare” could have been a dry tale about a niche subject. Fortunately, Durkee’s zeal proves infectious, and he keeps readers hooked with his dogged sleuth-work, his radical thoughts on authorship and his insightful potted histories of each portrait — some involving royal intrigue, unsolved murders and sinister coverups.
Dillon observes that he is interested above all in images that enact “blurring and becoming,” “becoming otherwise, in disguises and personae.” In this engaging and exhilarating Wunderkammer of a book, he offers us the world — in this case, the visual world — as he experiences it: his way of seeing, and of being, in a web of thrilling, sometimes unexpected, connection.
Truthfully, aliens might invade without us
noticing, in the corner of the eye, as someone
sits over a gin in a bar. They’d be in the woods
In 1991 an academic debate spilled out of ivory towers and into the popular imagination. That year, Serge Renaud, a celebrated and charismatic alcohol researcher at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research—who also hailed from a winemaking family in Bordeaux—made a fateful appearance on 60 Minutes. Asked why the French had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than Americans did, even though people in both countries consumed high-fat diets, Renaud replied, without missing a beat, “The consumption of alcohol.” Renaud suspected that the so-called French paradox could be explained by the red wine at French dinner tables.
The French paradox quickly found a receptive audience. The day after the episode aired, according to an account in the food magazine the Valley Table, all U.S. airlines ran out of red wine. For the next month, red wine sales in the U.S. spiked by 44 percent. When the show was re-aired in 1992, sales spiked again, by 49 percent, and stayed elevated for years. Wine companies quickly adorned their bottles with neck tags extolling the product’s health benefits, which were backed up by the research that Renaud had been relying on when he made his off-the-cuff claim, and the dozens of studies that followed.
“I’m going to die here, alone,” I think. In the past, I never had thoughts like this. I was all swagger: Back when I lived in Jerusalem, I ran on isolated trails in the forest almost every afternoon. But since filing for divorce in August, I’ve become fearful of being alone. And being in Alaska — with its vastness, the way it dangles, lonely, at the edge of the continent — has only magnified those feelings.
I try to catch up with the women, but I’m tapped out, No. 12 in a field of a dozen. I worry: What if everyone finishes and goes home? I don’t have my phone; there will be no way for me to call for help.
And then I ask myself: Why did I come all the way to Alaska on the advice of a total stranger, to chase something I’m not even sure I believe in — an astrological event called a solar return?
The subtlest of time capsules, “Happy Place” resonates with our shared losses from the past few years. The only Happy Place any of us can count on, Henry seems to argue, is one another. And if your other has a “smoky velvet voice” and a “cut-glass profile,” well, so much the better.
With her latest contemporary romantic comedy, Emily Henry wanted to ‘write a book that would be a warm and cozy escape’ for readers. ‘A miniature happy place’ in book form, that not only brings people joy but reminds them that they deserve it too. And this book really does all that and more. It’s a happy place made of paper and words; a story populated with so much friendship, love and wisdom that you finish it feeling like you’ve lived a whole life with the characters.
Killing Thatcher is a deftly constructed narrative punctuated by dramatic moments that often seem determined by the fickle hand of fate as much as by rigorous planning, intelligence gathering and dogged adherence to a cause. At its centre are three figures: the bomber, Patrick Magee; his target, the British prime minister; and, looming in the background, the ghostly figure of the republican icon , Bobby Sands. In 1981, it was Thatcher’s absolute intransigence on the issue of political status for IRA prisoners that had led Sands and nine others to start the hunger strikes that led to their deaths. And it was Thatcher’s apparent callousness in the face of their protracted ordeal that was a determining factor in the IRA’s decision to attempt what many pragmatists in the movement thought impossible – the assassination of her and several of her cabinet ministers.
My name means earth. Means first.
It is the smallest unit of matter, a building block,
held together by almost unbreakable forces.
He carried me into the kitchen to get a glass of water
He reached for a cup in the sink filled with dishwater
Haunting. Devastating. Profound. Those words cannot even begin to describe this book.
Readers will meet Tom Kettle. He’s a retired detective with the Garda, the police service in Ireland. He has been sitting in his wicker chair in the small place he rents, staring at the Irish Sea, eating sausages and killing time. Or is time killing him?
“Romantic Comedy” delivers on all fronts, with energetic prose, humanity and hilarity. Although readers may hesitate to relive our recent pandemic days, in Sittenfeld’s hands, the collective nightmare is a catalyst for showing us how to live, how to love and how to be sincere even when making jokes is easier.
Johanne Lykke Holm's transfixing novel "Strega," in Saskia Vogel's virtuosic English translation, is a thought-provoking fairy tale for our flawed patriarchal world, its freighted moral the haunting observation that "a woman's life could at any point be turned into a crime scene."
I’ve been called an “erotic” songwriter. I don’t disagree, but even though I had plenty of sex when I was younger, I was never promiscuous. The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with somebody intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately. I realized early in my adult life that talking—real, honest, substantive conversation—could be superhot, and it didn’t have to result in anybody taking their clothes off for it to be erotic in a lasting way. Very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking.
As I was growing up, I began to be attracted to a certain kind of man, and I would maintain that kind of attraction for the rest of my life. The way I’ve often described this kind of man is “a poet on a motorcycle.” These were men who could think very deeply and have very deep feelings, but who also had a kind of blue-collar, roughneck quality to them. For me, the epitome of this kind of man was the poet Frank Stanford.
Carson realized that if a hard-shell tostada were placed inside a tortilla it could provide interior scaffolding. Across the table from me, she put her iPhone on a sheet of paper and carefully folded the paper around it, to demonstrate. After she proposed the idea to her Taco Bell colleagues, in 1995, she went to the company gym to work out. “I explained it to this gal on the treadmill next to me,” she said. “She was in food operations, and she said there were all these technical reasons it wouldn’t work.” For one thing, Carson hadn’t cracked how to keep the folded hexagon from popping open. She went on to pitch the company’s executives repeatedly on her idea—which would eventually become the Crunchwrap Supreme, the fastest-selling item in Taco Bell history—but, noting the extra seconds required for a worker to make the folds, they initially dismissed the concept. “There’s all these parameters around your creativity,” Carson said. “You just have to wipe your mind of certain facts.”
Taco Bell’s food-innovation staff, which includes sixty developers, focusses on big questions: How do you make a Cheez-It snack cracker big enough to be a tostada? What are the ideal Cheez-It dimensions to guarantee that the tostada won’t crack inconveniently when bitten into? Or consider the Doritos Locos Taco: What safeguards can be implemented to prevent the orange Doritos dust from staining a consumer’s hands or clothing? Can fourteen Flamin’ Hot Fritos corn chips be added to the middle of a burrito and retain their crunch? Can a taco shell be made out of a waffle, or a folded slab of chicken Milanese? These are all problems of architecture and scalability; fast food is assembly, not cooking.
One of the ironies of reading “In the Orchard” was realizing how little I remembered from the first two weeks of my daughter’s life; the book awakened memories I didn’t know I had. To me, Minot’s central concern is the fleetingness of time, the need to pay attention and stay amazed, while also extending grace to ourselves.
Stuck Monkey, then, is ultimately more of a long withdrawing roar at the absurdities of the modern world, at length judged too perverse to be worth saving.
This year, the Folio turns 400. It was—and still is—one of the English language’s foundational texts. Without it, “we wouldn’t even be talking about Shakespeare,” says Emma Smith, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Oxford and the author of Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book.
Published in 1623, the 900-page tome cemented the Bard’s legacy and permanently muddled the boundaries between popular culture and high art. It also saved half of his plays: Of the 36 included in the collection, 18 had never been published.
Late last year, to celebrate the end of her two-continent book tour, Kratochvila invited several of the bakers featured in the book to meet her in the village of Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné, in the Loire Valley of France, and make bread at the bakery and farm of her mentor, Franck Perrault, 46. The idea was to exchange ideas and experiment with Perrault’s flours, with each of the nine bakers (including Kratochvila) showcasing at least one new loaf.
Imagine that the single most influential piece of modern American music — a tour de force that spans classical, opera, Indigenous, Latin, folk, jazz and blues — was not, as claimed, the work of a White man but stolen from a homeless Black woman with a mental disability. Such a theft, and the public deletion of its true creator, would be a powerful illustration of the exploitation of marginalized artists. That’s the premise of musician Brendan Slocumb’s absorbing new novel, “Symphony of Secrets.” Like his 2022 debut, “The Violin Conspiracy,” Slocumb’s latest is a fast-paced detective adventure. It features a contemporary classical music scholar who gradually discovers the long-hidden truth inside a cryptic archive; woven through is a subtle but important message about racial erasure in American music history.
Much contemporary crime fiction works on a small scale: a focus on interior lives, claustrophobic domestic settings, the evil that you didn’t know existed next door, in the next room, next to you in bed. This has never been Don Winslow’s style. His books deal typically in large intricate plots with multiple moving parts and sweeping geographical and contemporary historical vistas. His latest, City of Dreams, is no exception.
Children's writer and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka's second graphic memoir, Sunshine, tracks a single week at summer camp when he was 16 years old and working as a counselor for children living with serious illnesses, and their families. Best known for Lunch Lady — a cheeky, hilarious, and popular graphic novel series for kids, of Dogman ilk, about an undercover spy who also serves school lunch — Krosoczka first set out to tell his own story in Hey, Kiddo. A National Book Award finalist, this 2018 graphic memoir describes his childhood and teenage years in Worcester, Mass., where he was raised by his grandparents while his heroin-addicted mother mostly communicated via phone calls, letters, and drawings — as she was often in jail or halfway housing. His birth father stayed completely out of the picture.
“The Eden Test” is deliciously entertaining, but its portrait of a marriage in trouble is nuanced and serious, hopeful and melancholy. There are real impacts under its glitter.
Fortunately, there are many establishments that managed to adapt and stay afloat by keeping up with the times. Independent bookstores, though struggling to keep up, managed to get by, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnes & Noble has seen a resurgence by taking advantage of BookTook trends: When something blows up on BookTook, the bookstore chain stocks them in their stores and puts “As Seen on BookTok” tag on displays.
That’s just one way to be sustainable, but with all the challenges that the book industry currently faces, how will the future bookstore look like? Hybrid? Digital? Something else? I asked some bookish folks what they think.
John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color.
Such reconsiderations are timely and important. In the foreword to Audubon at Sea, a new anthology of Audubon’s works about aquatic birds that I coedited, the artist and activist Subhankar Banerjee describes the reconsideration of Audubon’s failings as “part of a vigorous and necessary debate about a shared, sustainable future.” Those continuing to argue that the National Audubon Society rebrand itself—the way local chapters and a regional association of naturalists have already announced they will—do so in the hope that such a gesture would spur greater diversity among nature enthusiasts. Given his seemingly no-holds-barred killings of birds, some would argue that Audubon has always been an awkward fit for a conservation society anyway. That said, the founders of the Audubon Society and its local chapters never sought to honor the man but the fragile beauty of the birds he depicted.
We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time? Current research methods may be able to take us only part of the way toward an answer, but it’s far enough to consider a radical possibility: if we became more like an octopus, could we free time, metaphorically speaking, from its constraints? Could we experience it as multidimensional, fluid and free?
I could regale you all day with stories about people I’ve met at dinner parties and clung to like a baby koala. Dinner parties bring people together. There’s just something about having dinner and drinks at a friend’s house that is 1,000x more memorable than going to a restaurant. So as a believer in the power of dinner parties, I spent my mid-twenties attending as many as humanly possible.
But then, as my friends and I got busy with careers, dating lives, families, and general garbage, the dinner parties got further and further apart. One day, I was sitting on the couch feeling unsettled, thinking about what had shifted, and it became really obvious. I knew what I needed. Enter Friendsday Wednesday.
“We turned our mattress to face Stephen King instead of Charles Manson,” Sridej said when I poked my head inside.
The New Earth isn't an easy book to write about — it's elusive by design. What is this novel, that talks to and about itself, that asks unanswerable questions? The closest answer might be: It's a modern epic that takes an unsparing look at family and national dynamics that nobody really wants to confront. It's ambitious and magnificent, the rare swing for the fences that actually connects.
It’s no secret among TV executives that the younger people who once stayed up past midnight to watch David Letterman drop objects off a five-story building are not tuning to this generation’s cadre of late-night hosts in the same way. Changing habits like those described above make decades-old late night shows such as “Tonight, “Late Show” or “Late Night” less easy to monetize — and, if executives aren’t careful, less alluring to keep putting on the air one evening after another.
What makes a good alien in a story? It’s that delicious double vision of strangeness and plausibility, the feeling that if you strain or squint, you can not only believe in them, but embrace their existence for a moment—like trying to understand a shape in four dimensions, like trying to understand what it’s like to be a bat. A good alien lives in a thoroughly imagined world, and helps us see our own world fresh. They help us understand ourselves more richly, but they’re also rich in their own right.
The reason I couldn’t come up with a good answer to “What’s your favorite alien,” I realized, was that my favorite imagining of an alien isn’t from a work of sci-fi, and doesn’t take place on a spaceship or another planet. My favorite aliens once lived on earth.
Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work. Last year, as resignation rates appeared to plateau, the cause célèbre shifted to “quiet quitting.” This theory holds that what truly distinguishes the present crisis is a more metaphorical sort of resignation: a withdrawal of effort, the sort of thing that is called “work-to-rule” when undertaken by a union. This supposed rebellion against extortion has served as fodder for familiar right-wing complaints about entitlement. The most optimistic commentators on the left, however, have assimilated these hypothetical phenomena into a vision of revitalized working-class self-activity. The AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler has boasted of “labor’s great resurgence.” Even the New York Times, in its own milquetoast fashion, has acknowledged the prospect that, “after decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S.”
I am exhausted by ramen hacks. Every time I open TikTok or look at Instagram, I am bombarded with different ways to upgrade a bowl of instant ramen. I’ve added peanut butter, I’ve added mayo and egg, I’ve added a slice of cheese. And while all those “hacks” are tasty, they don’t manage to eclipse the soul-satiating nature of a basic-ass bowl of instant ramen.
Live life on the edge of the menu. Take a flier on the oatmeal cream pie at a crab shack, the vegan risotto at a steakhouse, the quesadillas at an underground Champagne bar. Just because a restaurant is known for one thing doesn’t mean you can’t order something else. If it looks good to you, get it. Often you’ll be rewarded for your transgression.
I celebrated, as I do, by taking a day off from my work and walking deep into the desert. I’m partially immunized, living in solitude, but imagining a renewed social life. Tomorrow, I’ll get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Today, though, I walked miles into the desert, not looking for bighorn sheep or trying to scare up ravens or scanning for bear prints. I was after arches, the second largest concentration of sandstone arches outside of Utah’s Arches National Park — and few people at this time of year visit the lesser-known formations. Situated in wilderness in western Colorado, it’s quite a distance to travel in a day, but with good weather I made the round trip in about 10 hours. Later in the season, a dirt road is opened, a slice into the wilderness, and folks can drive their four-by-fours within an easy stroll. I prefer to travel on foot, close to dirt, vaulted by sky, my rhythm the rhythm of human evolution. We humans evolved to walk. So, I walked and dawdled and walked and dawdled and walked some more, the world in motion as I moved through it. There must be a mathematical equation for such double movement, earth spinning, human walking, both tiny blips in the cosmos. I doubt it can be expressed as a constant.
Study of a new language often begins with words presented as opposites: “heat” and “cold,” or “quiet” and “loud.” You know you’ve progressed in your comprehension of that new language when other words disrupt the neatness of these initial pairings, when the word “quiet” arrives with some mental noise, echoing against other possible choices, “inaudible” or “unsaid,” that might be more precise.
In “Greek Lessons,” Han Kang’s unnamed narrator finds the echo of words like this, in her mind, so overwhelming that she’s lost the ability to speak. She decides to take a course in ancient Greek to see what might be possible in a language other than her native Korean, in which she can “taste bile at the back of her throat” at the mere thought of “arranging a word or two.”
Kira McPherson’s debut novel, Higher Education, is an ode to many things. It examines queer longing, complicated friendships, and the pleasure and pain of growth in your early 20s.
Step from an airplane, and it’s now ritual to boast how cruelly you’ve suffered. Seats that won’t lean back or seat backs that intrude. Violent seatmates. Starvation from tiny bags of pretzels. Crying infants. Lost luggage. The indignities pile up. Yet we forget that for almost the entirety of human existence, simply to leave the safety of hut or castle was to risk not inconvenience but violent death. “Travel,” after all, comes from the word “travail,” and nowhere was that truer than when humans crossed oceans on wooden ships. It is almost impossible for the contemporary mind to fathom the conditions and the peril. Passages that took months — years, often — in leaking, wet, unheated vessels packed with unwashed people that sailed blindly into gales and hurricanes, with no privacy, no weather satellites or GPS, no fresh food, and no Gore-Tex, surviving on bug-infested dried meat and bread. And that’s if all went well.
When things went wrong, they often went very wrong, and David Grann’s “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” is a sea story in which everything goes wrong over and over — and over — again. Reading it is like living one of those anxiety nightmares in which you’re just trying to get to that job interview, but you’re lost and your teeth are falling out and, wait, when your car dies you realize you’re naked, and then you’re attacked by flesh-eating zombies.
As an avid book-lover, he found himself dissatisfied with the way many books were being presented and sold on Instagram, believing the platform’s full potential to showcase “the beauty, quirkiness and oddness of different books” was not being fully utilised.
And this was how I came across his Instagram page while idly scrolling one morning. On the site, Lloyd presents individual books for sale in a specific way: showing the front and back covers, as well as the contents page and the first page of the book. Books don’t come with a “if you liked X, then you will like Y” type of message, which is a sentiment that is gaining popularity as social media-driven algorithms begin to dictate tastes online, which often spills over into our day-to-day lives. Instead, bookrunnermelbourne encourages an element of surprise, simulating an experience not unlike bookstore browsing: often, when shoppers don’t know a book or an author but are attracted to the cover or title, they find themselves reading the blurb, and then flipping to the first page to see if the book continues to hold any interest.
Despite our decades of technology and centuries of civilization, we are children in the gaze of these beings. But there’s something reassuring about that; it’s the same as how I still want my mom when I’m sick. If we’re children, then our mistakes are just the messy path of learning; if we’re children, the grown-ups can still come and help. We don’t want this violent, greedy, suffering version of humanity to be our final form. Transcendent outsiders give us hope and, hopefully, guidance. But even just knowing they are out there—and that they are reaching toward us—could be enough to change the world.
As my hosts showed off one of their prized telescope mirrors — 20 feet of shiny, immaculately curved aluminum-coated glass — I couldn’t help noticing a small, suspicious smudge. It looked like the kind of smear you might find on your windshield in the morning, especially if you had parked under a tree.
“Birds,” one astronomer grumbled when asked what it was.
I personally don’t identify my cooking with the concept of “fusion” cuisine, but describe it as classic Somali cuisine “reimagined.” To me, reimagining is rooted in respecting and knowing the classic form of the cuisine, and then building on it. It is fluid in its adherence to classicism and its flirtation with creativity. But it also comes from a cuisine’s ability to expand depending on what new shore it meets: So what, then, of the impact of migration?
What would happen if we were to examine human history through the wiliness and will of bacteria and viruses instead of the brains and brawn of men? Could great conquests — the fall of the Roman Empire, the Revolutionary War, the rise of capitalism — have been wrought not from brilliant strategy and innovation but because of certain populations’ susceptibility or resistance to pathogens? What if germs have been humans’ puppeteers all along? That is the gripping premise of Jonathan Kennedy’s debut book, “Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues.” By tracing evolution and history from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens today, Kennedy re-excavates the past, one in which we are much less significant than we think.
Freud did not discover the unconscious – Goethe, Schopenhauer and the ancient Greeks had all written about it. He was certainly right to stress the importance of early childhood in our later psychological development and the role of sexual repression in turn-of-the-century Vienna, but his theories of psychosexual development and neurosis now seem absurd. Nevertheless, despite a century of progress in neuroscience since Freud, the relationship between what is conscious and unconscious in our brains remains deeply mysterious.
Cultural identity, Stuart Hall wrote, is “a matter of becoming.” Although derived from our many histories, both personal and collective, identity is not some inherent essence, rooted in the past. It is instead, according to Hall, in “constant transformation.” Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America,” examines this process, and in particular the forging of her identity as a Korean American woman in a country that still operates under a racial hierarchy.
Maybe Gutkind wasn’t naming a new kind of writing, though. Maybe he was giving a new name to an old kind of writing. Maybe he wanted people to understand that writing traditionally classified as nonfiction is, or can be, as “creative” as poems and stories. By “creative,” then, he didn’t mean “made up” or “imaginary.” He meant something like “fully human.” Where did that come from?
One answer is suggested by Samuel W. Franklin’s provocative new book, “The Cult of Creativity”. Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America—that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Before that, he says, the term barely existed. “Create” and “creation,” of course, are old words (not to mention, as Franklin, oddly, does not, “Creator” and “Creation”). But “creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon.
Yet to Mother Nature, the evolution of the eye isn't really a difficult feat at all, it turns out. Indeed, there are about 10 different types of eye design in the animal kingdom, and eyes have evolved independently across animal species approximately 50 times or more. Furthermore, genetic evidence reveals that eyes can evolve relatively quickly — in as short as just a few hundred thousand years. That may sound like a long time, but on geological timescales, it's a blink of an … well, you know.
Limón’s “The Hurting Kind” asks us to consider the minutest of experiences through observing and connecting with the natural world and everything within it, whether an insect in a garden, the swelling of oceans or the branches of trees. We observe a constantly moving world in which humanity co-exists and, too, partakes in the cyclical experiences of life - the joys and sorrows, the good and the bad, and love and grief. While we must also consider ourselves, including our empathy and compassion we place on friends, family and strangers.
Blue Hour tackles a number of weighty themes, including grief, police brutality, sex versus love, and the ways we choose to cope with events we aren’t yet able to process. But what is central to the novel, acting as connective tissue amongst the other themes mentioned, is parenthood.
Kang’s latest isn’t a page-turner, and reading it can feel like being suspended in time, or sitting through a very long class, despite the book’s slimness. But that’s the effect of writing into discomfort. It’s important for the reader to feel it in their own body, a reminder that language is connected to the corporeal. Halfway through the book, she writes that the loss of words makes the world “fragmented, each piece distinct and separate — like the colored paper inside the kaleidoscope, shifting silently, repeatedly and in concert to form new patterns.” A distorted or disrupted perspective is the only path to clarity for her characters. In “Greek Lessons” Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable.
Taken at its most obvious face value, “Greek Lessons” can be read as an allegory about two sensory-handicapped people who endure years of isolation and psychological trauma only to find understanding, acceptance and human connection in the unlikeliest of places.
But contrary to Kang’s insistence in the interview, the novel’s true power lies not in its plot, but in its prose. As she did in “The Vegetarian” and most notably “The White Book,” Kang riddles the text with evocative descriptions that simultaneously illuminate and reflect.
The Washington Post humor columnist takes us on a tour of centuries of US history, including a first-hand look at the Adamses struggling to confirm how many petticoats and long shirts have been removed at any point in a year-and-a-half-long correspondence, interrupted by concerns over the health of their cows and a particularly lascivious note from Benjamin Franklin.
Will AI technologies really kill creativity, as some critics suggest? Certainly not metacreativity, at least according to Eduardo Navas in his new book, The Rise of Metacreativity: AI Aesthetics After Remix (2022). This must-read text for all those interested in the emerging relationship between AI and art has the merit of not considering the development of these technologies as a phenomenon that has suddenly turned the tables but instead placing it within a historical and theoretical framework rooted in our cultural, political, and economic past. The aim of the book, the author states, is to demonstrate and reflect on “how an advanced state of creativity has emerged and is connected to human history.” It is precisely this advanced state that he calls metacreativity.
The science of invisibility remains largely theoretical and abstract. It is in the literature that the field comes alive, and Gbur may be the world’s leading expert on invisibility fiction. His book includes both a bibliography and an invisibibliography that despite running several dozen entries long is, as Gbur cheerfully admits, incomplete, “considering how many stories I found through a cursory browsing of old pulp fiction magazines.” Gbur’s interest in invisibility fiction is chiefly scientific in nature. He is more concerned with descriptions of fictional invisibility mechanisms than in the ways authors use the concept to examine themes of free will, desire and fear of the unknown. But it seems worth noting that the dominant tone of invisibility literature is abject terror.
Somehow, one forgives the madder moments for the sheer brio of the writing, the sting of the jokes and the razor-edge of the historical insights. When it is good, it is really that good.
“It was my mother and I didn’t want to betray her, so I had to try to find a really fine line with putting something that was truthful and that actually conveyed what happened to us. I had to protect her reputation. But I also wanted to have enough truth and authenticity in it. It was very difficult to straddle those two opposing things.”
But Barbara Johnson’s great gift to her daughter was this book, agreeing to be part of it, knowing the risks of travelling with a writer, inadvertently being the catalyst for this writing from the heart. In the book Johnson writes, “if I had known that those weeks and months were to be my mother’s final days, I would have kept holding her hand and never left her side once”.
By de-emphasizing the rigidity of the recipe and making the experience of cooking more subjective — more welcoming of the variation that can exist in any given fridge and the agency of every cook — these cookbooks are forced to teach, and in the process to take on that role of the frugal caretaker. They are guides to developing instinct, and with instinct comes the ability to see a use for even the most idiosyncratic ingredients. There is no point in wasting, because something good can come out of everything.
the world is ready for new deities
the ancient ones are struggling, stumbling
around at 3am, looking for the lavatory
humanity tangled in their feet
I’m a novelist who spends a lot of my time thinking about time. The success of my books is dependent, in part, on how deftly I can manage this most precious of commodities. In fiction, time is flexible, and if I manipulate it carefully, my story’s pacing is neither too fast nor too slow. So, how is it that I don’t have a better handle on where the last 18 years have gone?
The woman’s name was Jeanne Manford, and she was marching alongside her twenty-one-year-old gay son, Morty. Moved by the outpouring of emotion, the two of them discussed it all along the route. By the time they reached Central Park, they had also reached a decision: if so many people wished that someone like Jeanne could talk to their parents, why not make that possible? The organization they dreamed up that day, which started as a single support group in Manhattan, was initially called Parents of Gays; later, it was renamed Parents FLAG, for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; nowadays, it is known only as PFLAG. Just a handful of people attended its first meeting, held fifty years ago this spring. Today, it has four hundred chapters and well north of a quarter of a million members.
Like any global capital, Rome stays open late, as young (and young-at-heart) locals buzz about the city’s many restaurants and bars. At the same time, the city’s diligent baking workforce arrives at their bakeries early in the morning to prep the day’s offerings. It was only a matter of time until these two groups overlapped, creating a late-night market for early-morning treats.
All travel books are by their very nature dated. That’s their fault, that they’re old-fangled; and it’s their virtue, that they preserve something of the past that would otherwise be lost.
There’s a melancholy that underpins a lot of Thirst for Salt, a sense of loss, but also of missed opportunities and lives not lived. Lucas leaves her readers, quietly, in this moment of reflection, where the possibilities of past and future stretch endlessly across the horizon.
Null. All. What’s after death or before.
Where my old dog is now, my mother,
my father—not the ashes clumped
He started to make plans. He didn’t want to just see a bit of the world: if possible, he was going to see all of it. “Because the world is complex and vast, and because my general temperament is pretty timid and more towards the shy side, I wanted to be forced into adventure. The point of adventure is it’s uncomfortable and you have to grow in it.
“I had $1,000 in my bank account so I needed to find a cheap way to travel, and that led me to the guys who had walked around the world.” He read up about Steve Newman (an American who circumnavigated the globe on foot over four years in the late 1980s) and Karl Bushby (a British ex-paratrooper who set off in 1998 and is still walking today), and now he had his answer. “It seemed to solve everything I wanted out of life,” he says.
Thirst for Salt gestures toward the taboo of age difference, yes. But it is really about the larger taboo native to so many of our relationships: what we withhold, intentionally or otherwise, and what these things – whether because they cannot be shared, or because we are unable to recognise them as worth sharing – might say about us.
“This Isn’t Going to End Well” gives off the particular radiance of a life lived hard, whatever else: as such, a brand of American bildungsroman. There’s deep satisfaction to its arc, despite its inherent sadness — a wondrous glimpse of the melding, in human doings, of fate, character and serendipity.
In a series of deeply informed and carefully worked out examples, Ian Dunt takes us through the Westminster labyrinth to reveal an omnishambles. It is not – and he is clear here – because the people involved are corrupt or lazy. It is because the system is not fit for purpose.
She washed eleven leaves and thought of her sister.
In the nearly detailed day in the crook of the moon
I didn’t argue with my parents when I was younger, but recently, I’ve started to openly disagree with their big-bad-wolf narrative. It’s led to some heated arguments, but not so heated that I risk being written out of their will. Eventually, last fall I decided I could change their minds. My parents have softened over the years, and I’d managed to convince them that all my boyfriends with tattoos weren’t serial killers. Why couldn’t I do the same with wolves?
My plan involved exposure therapy. But in order to make it happen, I knew I needed to take them to Yellowstone.
In fairy tales, magic often has humorous, complicated or unforeseen consequences. Heroes and heroines are done and undone by the gap between a spell’s intent and its effects: Characters are mistakenly grown and shrunk, transformed from animal to human or vice versa. Spells can also be about bartering and sacrificing: The offer of legs comes at the cost of voice, or future firstborn children are gambled against current happiness. A wish fulfilled always threatens to reveal itself as a curse.
Read in these terms, Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Happily: A Personal History — With Fairy Tales” is perhaps best thought of as a 26-chapter spell book for the times. It is structured as a series of essays in which Mark conjures up reflections about the intersections of her life as a mother, third wife, stepmother and daughter in this enchanted and broken world of ours. In each case, she examines her own life through the lens of fairy tales, demonstrating how we can draw on their moralities and imageries to make sense of ourselves and our relationship to others.
Harvard Square veterans inevitably utter the same lament: “The Square is not what it used to be.” Author Catherine J. Turco demonstrates that it was ever the case — from the felling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s spreading chestnut tree to widen a road in the 1840s to the current domination of international chain stores on Brattle Street. Harvard Square: A Love Story combs through 19th- and 20th-century newspaper archives and the annals of various Harvard Square business associations to prove that Harvard Square has always been “not what it used to be.”
Domestic shopping is a singular experience, a private activity carried out in full view of the public. It is one of the few tasks often conducted alone in the presence of many other people who are also alone. The types of institutions where ordinary citizens do this, Ernaux writes, has a huge impact on the way a community or society is formed. To her, superstores like this one “cannot be reduced […] to the ‘chore’ of grocery shopping. They provoke thought, anchor sensation and emotion in memory.” Such a store is both alienating and inviting, oppressive and inspiring, but it is one of the most basic experiences of the average middle-class person’s everyday life. “Politicians, journalists, ‘experts,’ all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today,” Ernaux writes. The 2022 Nobel laureate collected her notes into a diary, Look at the Lights, My Love, originally published in 2014 and now released in its first-ever English edition this year, in a translation by Alison L. Strayer for Yale University Press
Gopnik, a longtime New Yorker critic, isn’t the first author to emerge victorious from the American tournament of achievement only to discern its spiritual emptiness. But his contribution to an antidote feels original, and mercifully within reach. We need to refamiliarize ourselves, he thinks, with the profound and enlarging experience of truly mastering things, or at least attempting to do so.
What started as a favor done on a business-trip whim has since become the great project of Hunter’s professional life. In its first few years of existence, Bookshop defied even its founder’s expectations and demonstrated how helpful its model could be for small businesses. Now, Hunter has a new plot twist in mind: He wants to show business owners how to scale up without selling out—without needing to kill the competition.
I usually have anonymous sources falling all over themselves to spill industry secrets, so you can imagine that when I was assigned to investigate the methodology behind Barack Obama’s annual lists of book recommendations, I set out to expose a secret apparatus of industry shenanigans. What I found was much more shocking.
This interweaving of experience—a way to feel connected to something larger even in the most isolating moments life has to offer—mitigates the enormous space tragedy carves into lives, making it at least more possible to understand what happens to one, now, because it is possible to see, if one is willing to look, what has happened before.
“Life and Other Love Songs” is a precisely observed, often beautiful book about family, love, loss and the hidden history that shapes lives. Shifts in time and narrator nod at a greater theme: To understand a family’s present, you have to trace its past in multiple directions. Gray’s structural and narrative choices amplify the mood of mystery and tragedy threaded throughout.
Hart’s argument is that mathematics, far from being in tension with the literary, is bound up with it and always has been. The evidence comes in two flavors: First, Hart finds mathematical influence in literature itself. She unfolds the permutational structure that governs poetic forms like sestinas (explaining along the way why you could have a poem that worked like a sestina with three rotating end words instead of six, but not with four). And she finds mathematical infrastructure underlying contemporary novels like Amor Towles’s “A Gentleman in Moscow” and Eleanor Catton’s “The Luminaries,” both of which, it turns out, are built on sequences of powers of two.
In 1698, the Duc de Berry had a nosebleed. This calamity was brought on by his “overheating” during a partridge hunt. Three hundred and nineteen years later, the writer Anaïs Vanel quit her editing job and went surfing. What links this unlikely couple? Well, both of them earn a mention in “A History of Fatigue” (Polity), a new book by Georges Vigarello, translated by Nancy Erber. The book sets out to examine, in frankly draining detail, the many ways in which humans, often against their will, end up thoroughly pooped.
It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.”
Apparently, even now, it’s rather nice to open a book and suddenly feel understood.
Within a long sentence—clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up—there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun.
For all the ominousness of the title, The Last Catastrophe, Allegra Hyde’s sophomore short story collection, is remarkably hopeful. Not hopeful as to the eventual collapse of ecosystems, or the extinction of species, or technology addiction, or pollution, or the state of American politics (though Hyde’s satire on this front is biting enough to be, if not hopeful, quite funny) but hopeful as to the human capacity to find joy in spite of it all. Sometimes, as a particle scientist explains in one of Hyde’s stories, pollution makes sunsets more intense, more beautiful. The paradox of finding something decent—or, at the very least, something essentially human—amidst all the terrors and general badness lying in wait for the inhabitants of our planet is at the heart of Hyde’s collection.
Rather than replicate Rankine’s move, de Lima’s collection creates an altar to the dead, with offerings of blood.
Birnam Wood, the third novel by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, picks up on the instability of trying to be good, a pursuit the book views quite bleakly. Loosely about the idealistic antics of a guerrilla gardening group, it has no hero but rather an ensemble of antiheroes whose foibles Catton uses to poke, quite hard, at the dreams and pieties of people who believe they can change the world. Such an impulse is a major shift from Catton’s Man Booker Prize–winning second novel, The Luminaries, an intricate, glowing love story set during New Zealand’s gold rush. Birnam Wood, in contrast, is dark in both its outlook and its omnipresent humor.
I could swear there’s a ghost
in the cloudless night because
Before I became a parent or moved in baby-saturated social circles, I equated “fussy” with a mild negative affect, picturing a sour-faced infant emitting occasional cries of displeasure. Surely a fussy baby existed in the same emotional octave as an adult who’s fussy about punctuation: a low simmer of complaint, not a rolling boil. But in conversations with pediatricians, postpartum care providers, and fellow parents, I heard the term applied to a huge swath of the affective spectrum. Sometimes it meant the fleeting irritation I’d imagined. Other times it meant incessant, tortured screaming—what I would have called “completely losing it,” or “having lost it so thoroughly that having had it at all is only a dim memory.”
“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that my best friend, Darci Brawner, and I dreamed about was getting out. “I want to see new people and new places,” I wrote in my journal when I was 12. I wanted to move to California but would take “any state besides Oklahoma or Mississippi.” We wanted careers, we wanted to be rich and famous, we wanted to be far away. Boys and sex would only stop us, catch us, or so my mother had warned.
For more than a thousand years, the spicy, pungent Korean cabbage dish known as kimchi was fermented in earthenware vessels called “onggi.” Now, a pair of mechanical engineers have unraveled why these ancient Tupperware, made of mud slapped and pressed by hand and spun on a pottery wheel, are exquisitely suited to fostering the growth of probiotic microbes that transform humble cabbage into a culinary superstar.
The Japanese title, “Ten to Sen” (literally, “Points and Lines”), is more accurate in terms of the action, or rather the meticulously planned lack of action, within its pages. Nor does “Tokyo Express” quite express the sheer magnitude of the story. I say lack of action, but that’s not to say the book is dull or slow-moving. Far from it. Often cited as Matsumoto’s masterpiece — quite a feat considering the 1958 book was his first published novel (and at the age of 40, too) — it’s a twisting tale of obsessively planned details and the logic, not to mention perseverance, it takes to unravel the truth.
Towards the end there are two similar chapters written from Iman’s point of view as she talks to a dying Bowie. They are two imaginings of the same moment that unfold very differently. These conversations are themselves ellipses, a blank page that we fill in with our own stories we pose as Bowie’s. No one saw those moments besides the two people inside them, and even they only saw one side. In Always Crashing in the Same Car, Olsen has created a poignant, stimulating meditation on definition by exploring the life of a man whose appeal is found in his ability to refuse conclusion.
A Land Imagined shows the allure of so-called development with mesmerizing shots of seemingly endless streams of sand cascading from gigantic machines into the sea, but also insists we look beneath the shiny surface to witness what Leow calls “the ruins that underpin Singapore’s glamourous prosperity” and the human cost of this perpetual growth. In a similar vein, Rachel Heng’s novel uses the dreams and aspirations of a kampong boy to track Singapore’s journey to “a bright, orderly, prosperous future,” whilst clearly delineating everything that the country thoughtlessly cast aside in the name of progress, revealing how paltry this progress turned out to be—and asks if it was all worth it
While Goo maintains an age-appropriate, lighthearted humor throughout the novel, “Throwback” takes powerful turns that highlight the author’s skill with emotional material, too. Especially poignant are scenes when Sam observes Priscilla’s painful experiences with racism, her own tension with her overworked, immigrant mother, and her premature shouldering of burdens like grief and work at the family dry cleaners.
The scatological and profane swim together in Cursed Bunny. Originally published in 2017, this is South Korean author Bora Chung’s first work to be translated into English. Chung takes aim at capitalism, misogyny and the social obsessions with youth and beauty through these stories, which fluidly cross genres from science fiction to traditional fable structures.
A little-known piece of history is resurfacing 100 years after the luxurious Peking Express train was attacked by bandits in the middle of the night and hundreds of passengers, including dozens of foreigners, were taken hostage and marched across the Chinese countryside.
James M. Zimmerman's “The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China” takes mountains of research and boils it down to a digestible telling of the 1923 train derailment that, despite having considerable political and personal consequences, had been largely forgotten. Aided by pictures and quotes — some directly from the bandits, hostages and other players involved in the so-called Lincheng Outrage — the lawyer takes on a surprisingly engaging voice as a historical author, cutting between people and scenes like a movie.
In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers … to leane over’. England’s introduction to the balcony came over a decade after the first performance of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. When it was staged in the summer of 1596, just before London’s playhouses were closed owing to a resurgence of plague, the exchange now universally known as the ‘balcony scene’ was probably transacted at a window opening onto the backstage ‘tiring house’ of the Shoreditch Theatre. The popular image of Juliet as a bright-eyed teenager in white muslin leaning over a balustrade only began to form a century and a half later, when a balcony first appeared as part of the stage set. By the late 1930s, the museum director Antonio Avena had improvised a ‘tarrasse’ from a marble sarcophagus and retrofitted it to the walls of Via Cappello 23 – putative home of the ‘historical’ Capulets in Verona. Visitors now pose on ‘Juliet’s balcony’ as part of an international pilgrimage that also includes visiting a bronze statue of Shakespeare’s heroine and rubbing her right breast for luck.
The nearest US base in Antarctica was some two hundred miles away. We had been dropped off by a ship two months ago, with all our gear and food, and would be picked up in three more. Our crew of five was the only human presence on this isolated promontory.
Our home was a one-room plywood hut that served as a living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom. We had no internet, no running water, limited electricity. We worked every single day, in all weather: snow, wind, rain, blizzards, gales, hail, sun. Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, weekends, full moon, new moon. We measured and counted, captured and released, tracked and took notes. My job, in essence, was to observe.
Enter British author Jim Crace. His novels, including Quarantine, Being Dead, and The Gift of Stones, imagine a vast range of milieus, eras, and states of consciousness with incredible vividness. Crace visited my MFA program during my second year to do manuscript consultations, and I submitted the first fifty pages of a novel in progress to him—a World War II-era story loosely inspired by my grandmother’s life. I was, of course, hoping for praise and validation. Instead, Crace looked at me and said something I’ve never forgotten: “It’s well written. But you don’t seem to be having much fun.”
It can be hard to recall a time when France hated Picasso, who now has museums dedicated to his art and life in Paris, Antibes, Vallauris, and elsewhere. The Paris institution is one of the many that’s now toasting him to mark the 50th anniversary of his death in 1973. And so it is with surprise that many American readers will now greet Annie Cohen-Solal’s Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973, which has at long last arrived stateside, via an English translation by Sam Taylor, two years after its release in France.
The book, along with a related 2021 exhibition based on Cohen-Solal’s research conducted in police archives and elsewhere, got a good amount of attention in France, and this sturdy, unconventional biography of Picasso ought to attract similar recognition here in the US, where we get too much literature about the artist every year, too little of it of any real substance. This book, however, is different. The research presented within is not new—word of Picasso’s surveillance by the French police first emerged 20 years ago—but Cohen-Solal’s take on it is fresh.
“Healthcare remains linked to the question of worthiness.” This stark statement echoes throughout “The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine,” Ricardo Nuila’s attempt to untangle the labyrinthine system of American hospitals and, more crucially, American medical insurance.
The dreams of a 19-year-old are not the dreams of a 53-year old (for which we are all grateful), and neither are the playlists. Yet, some dreams, and some songs, persist. Publishing a debut novel after fifty is inevitably a long story, but publicity windows are short. A truncated few weeks, before and after the pub date, give rise to “all the feels,” and then quietly recede into Life After Publication—otherwise known as the rest of your real life, whatever that looks like. I’m here for all of it. Having already lived the longer portion of my life—unless I manage to live to be 107—is a gift in this way; my perspective has deep roots.
It was a familiar sound in any decent Central European restaurant: the reassuring whack-whack-whack of a chef flattening the schnitzel I’d ordered from the waiter a minute earlier. The crisp white tablecloth in front of me shined bright white, and the banquette seating offered the same minimalist design as some of the region’s trendiest spots. But one aspect was different from my other recent fine-dining experiences: In the panoramic window facing my table, an Old World landscape was flying by at over 90 miles an hour.
I was in the dining car of a train, halfway from my home in Prague to an event in Budapest. Despite the great service and cool décor, the meal was wildly better than I had any right to expect: a crisp, improbably thin, fried chicken fillet, tender on the inside, accompanied by the Platonic ideal of potato croquettes and a craft beer that had been custom-brewed for the train. It was not just good. It was spectacular.
Susanna Moore is best known for her stylishly explicit 1995 novel “In the Cut,” in which a New York City teacher has an affair with a detective investigating murders in her neighborhood. Three novels and nearly three decades and later, Moore turns her eye again to a woman on the verge, but this time the setting is the Minnesota prairie of mid-19th-century America, and her protagonist is an abused wife who flees Rhode Island for a new life on the American frontier. Drawn in part from a true story, “The Lost Wife” explores one woman’s experience amid escalating violence against indigenous tribes as they are pushed from their ancestral land.
For seasoned runners and beginners alike, Linden’s book offers plenty of inspiration about the power of endurance in the face of obstacles. For all readers, it grants a peek at what goes into building that endurance.
when I spent most of my time surviving a city
The Stinging Fly has been something of a revelation in Irish literature. Founded in Dublin in 1997 by Declan Meade and Aoife Kavanagh as a receptacle for “all this great writing floating around,” as Meade said, it earned government support and has reached its 25th year as a launching pad for some of the country’s most promising, and in time, some of its best known, poets and novelists. As such, it has also become prime poaching ground for editors in other countries hungry for Irish talent.
Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer used randomness to simulate nuclear processes. Similar approaches have since been used in astrophysics, climate science and economics. In all these cases, plugging in random numbers at certain steps in the algorithm helps researchers account for uncertainty about the many ways that complex processes can play out.
But adding randomness into an algorithm can also help you calculate the correct answer to unambiguous true-or-false questions. “You just say ‘OK, let me give up, let me not try, let me just pick something at random,’” said Eric Blais, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo. “For way too many problems, that ends up being a successful approach.”
This Bird Has Flown is a love story, a sweet and tender romance, but not just one between Jane and Tom — it's Hoffs' valentine to music. (It's no surprise that she titled the book after a song by her beloved Beatles.) "I'd never yearned for the spotlight, only the music, only to strive to give others what music has unwaveringly given to me," Jane thinks at one point. "An outpouring of love, of expression, of connection." That's just what this novel is, and it's an absolutely beautiful outpouring.
There is a word commonly used to describe books like this: gritty. Fair enough. “House of Cotton” is unafraid to peer at the unsavory minutiae of getting by. But for this novel, I’d add a few other labels too: magnetic, singular and completely unforgettable.
The title of this bracing memoir — I Can't Save You — by former ear, nose and throat surgeon Anthony Chin-Quee seems to suggests an inability or unwillingness to save lives.
But upon further reading, its seeming surrender actually affirms the Hippocratic Oath when you consider that Chin-Quee, a Black man who struggles with racial barriers throughout, can't save others without first saving himself — and that, as the tale tells, the author has to let go of his personal demons to prosper in his medical calling.
Jeannie Marshall’s compact and elegantly voiced book, “All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel,” is a confession about a former life which begins with a childhood that was squalid in both material and spiritual circumstances, and proceeds into a young adulthood that (mostly by implication) left her emotionally deprived but then got turned around by repeated exposure to the Sistine Chapel, where she found herself reborn into the love of art, the love of the past and, indeed, into love itself.
It is in the telling that the true magic of spoken word, and Bennett’s intricate exploration of its origin stories, comes alive. “Spoken Word” is an engaging meditation on the history of a literary and cultural movement that would take hold in the realms of music, theater, film, television and, of course, poetry.
Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.
Gaynor is part of a sea change in book publishing that has seen women surge ahead of men in almost every part of the industry in recent years. Once upon a time, women authored less than 10 percent of the new books published in the US each year. They now publish more than 50 percent of them. Not only that, the average female author sells more books than the average male author. In all this, the book market is an outlier when compared to many other creative realms, which continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by men.
These findings and others come from a new study by Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. Waldfogel crunches the numbers on the book market's female revolution. And, in a recent interview, the economist helps us think through potential reasons why women trail men in many creative industries, but have had spectacular success in achieving — in fact, surpassing — parity with men in the US publishing business.
I’ve always felt like a plant-person, moss and lichen covered; the land a part of me and me of it. The Irish landscape I grew up in is riddled with stone walls and stories, seventy thousand placenames and countless fairy trees. Irish placenames are derived from hidden histories or trees that used to grow there, ghost forests. Dair means “Oak” and is found in many placenames around Ireland. Townlands contain Cill, Irish for “cell” or “church,” demonstrating how intimately entwined our very cells-selves are with the Catholic church! In the first experiment in colonization, our language was beaten out of us. We had to learn in secret “hedge schools.”
The cover of the cookbook shows a bamboo basket laden with bell peppers, asparagus, and broccoli. Surrounding it on the table are scallions, ginger, dried mushrooms, peapods, a red onion. A fish, an eggroll, some dumplings, a pair of chopsticks. In the background, a white ceramic soup tureen waits coquettishly to be opened. A long, seductive purple eggplant and buxom bunch of bok choy lean against a garden window, or maybe it’s a wall with flowery wallpaper. It’s such abundant imagery, you would never notice what’s missing: shellfish, for example, and pork.
None of the items on the book jacket are conspicuously kosher, nor does the design suggest so-called Asian fusion. Today, an equivalent cookbook might be titled Jew-ish Chinese and include dishes like Mission Chinese’s famous kung pao pastrami. The book is Millie Chan’s Kosher Chinese Cookbook, or Millie Chan, as it’s known in my family. It predates this trend, but encapsulates an older American culinary tradition: the Jewish embrace of Chinese food.
During the service, my parents’ priest spoke of the daily pain Dad had lived with and how, in the end, he’d allowed this suffering to bring him closer to God. Of course, he couldn’t know the day or the hour. But he knew he would soon meet our Lord, and he prepared for that meeting. This, he concluded, is why my father ultimately knew peace at his death: It did not find him unready.
If that was true, I thought, why hadn’t my mother and I known? Had my father truly spent the past weeks, maybe even months, preparing to die? If he’d known his death was imminent, why didn’t he warn us? I stared at him in his casket, and the sudden flare of anger I felt was so unlike sorrow that I let myself take momentary refuge in it. If you really knew and didn’t tell us, that was a real dick move, Dad.
The novel is a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one’s life, and how horror can lurk beneath the surface of even the most poreless skin. Huang asks: What — or who — are we willing to sacrifice in order to become beautiful, and what happens if it all gets stripped away? As the proverb goes: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting.” But where does it go?
This land is your land,
this land is Comanche land,
Mescalero Apache land,
Coahuiltecan land, my ancestors—
Flowers. Just a shit ton of flowers. Preferably exotic-looking ones like orchids, not pedestrian flowers like daisies—that would be confusing.
My parents didn’t understand my job. At least, not in its entirety. If asked, they might tell people that their daughter was a writer. They were both avid readers who read my first book and many of my stories; once, when I visited them, I found a newspaper article I’d written stuck to their refrigerator door. On visits, they would occasionally see me working—that is, staring at my computer screen, typing a bit, and staring some more, wrestling with a draft for hours or days. They might be interested in what I was writing, but sometimes it was difficult for them to see it as Work, and they would often mistake it for volunteer labor, a hobby, like the hundreds of stories they knew I’d written growing up. The editorial process, my entire career in publishing, seemed nebulous to them, mostly invisible labor—until I sent them something I’d written that had been published, something they could see and hold and read for themselves.
The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes — which must, according to theory, be spherically shaped in a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time.
But do the same restrictions apply if our universe has higher dimensions, as is sometimes postulated — dimensions we cannot see but whose effects are still palpable? In those settings, are other black hole shapes possible?
Every Easter, a brood of volunteers in Bessières, a small town in southern France, collects 15,000 eggs — not to dye them pastel colors or even hide them for children to find. Early on Easter Monday morning, they will crack open the prodigious pile, add two pounds of salt, a pound of pepper and a bucket of herbs, then whip it all up in massive pots. Another team, sporting tall chef’s hats, plops a dozen gallons of duck fat into a 13-foot-wide frying pan that weighs more than a ton and, wielding huge wooden paddles, stirs up a humongous omelet.
But the thing is, our friendship didn’t have much to do with writing books. This though both of us were writers, and taught in the same program. Most of the texts and emails I received from him—I’ve spent a great deal of time rereading this posthumous work—are clips of his favorite songs from YouTube, with a few sentences explaining why he was sending this song now—or not. “Bad Lip Reading from the NFL” was sent without comment. He sent Morgan James covers of anybody. Off-the-cuff truths: “Syllabus writing is a hateful operation.” It feels like every third email was a link to an obituary, as we were both fanatics about great obituaries, especially those written by Anne Wroe, of the Economist. “I admire her prose so much,” he wrote. “So clear, graceful, and smart.” Since he was not an avid sleeper, in the morning I’d wake up and find six, seven, eight emails from him, and as many texts, sent at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and half of them, again, music videos. I imagine other friends could say the same. The rest were jokes or plaintive cries in the night, the sort of lamentations suitable for the darkest hours. The last email he sent me was on Aug. 25, three days before he died. It came in at 3 a.m. and was a link to Gloria Estefan singing “Reach.” And he wrote, “I will sweep my heart off the floor and get on with it.” I never responded to that email, hoping that the sun would lighten things up. He never said what had happened to his heart.
It has a unified mission that is easy to sum up: This is a book of retellings, and Link isn’t shy about that. Following each of her story’s titles is a second, parenthetical title, alerting the reader to the traditional folktale she retells. But true to form, each story takes a different approach to retelling.
Now, she’s back with “Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope,” a history — and defense — of the grand humanist project, from the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance to today’s debates about technology, artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
That might sound big and, well, blobby. And even Bakewell acknowledges, in characteristically understated — and British — fashion, that the whole subject can be “gently foggy.”
Now, though celebrated as the city’s sentinel, it may yet stand as a monument to the inexorable nature of climate change and the futility of man’s efforts to stop it. MOSE’s walls, costing 5 billion euros, about $5.3 billion, took so long to come together that the pace of climate change is already outstripping the projections they were built to withstand.
After all of the effort to get the barriers up, the future challenge will be finding ways to keep them down. Venice is already using MOSE more than expected, and faces the prospect of needing it much more than it had ever imagined against rising seas, so often that it would threaten to seal the city from the waters that are its lifeblood.
You can buy little snacky hand pies around the world—pasties, dumplings, empanadas, samosas; the genre is a recurring theme of this newsletter—but while most are available in a frozen version, the one you’re usually thinking of comes from a little storefront, a roadside stand, or hot out of a simmering pot in grandma’s kitchen. They’re crafted with love and attention to detail. They tell a story of a place.
Pizza rolls come in a bag from Walmart.
Since my sense of smell returned, however, I'm definitely more cognizant of the ways in which it informs and enhances my appreciation of food, both as an eater and as a cook. If you speak with anyone whose livelihood depends, at least in part, on their abilities to smell and taste — sommeliers, spirits professionals, flavor developers, chefs — they'll all offer one piece of advice with regards to improving either sense: Practice.
Why are we here? What is our purpose? How can we appreciate the lives we live and their mix of good and evil? These questions are no better answered than through Holland’s exploration of the life of a vampire and her journey through the shadows of history.
Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.
Why Writing Matters plunges us into all aspects of the writing life, describing the many experiences Delbanco has had, the lessons learned, and the writers befriended in the course of a distinguished career. His oeuvre doesn’t include a memoir—not yet—but he says he is working on something now, and much of what you find in this book feels like a first test run of incidents and experiences that will surely appear in that other work.
“I’ve just completed a text called ‘On Turning Eighty.’ It’s not a full-fledged memoir or, as a friend of mine calls it, me-moir,” he said. “But at a certain stage of age (and particularly if you’ve not indulged in the first person earlier), the desire to look back upon a life well- or ill-lived is almost unavoidable. And so, I’ve used my own little life as a template here.”
More than 50 years ago, the name “Judy Blume” became an enduring pop culture staple for the bravery it took to write books about puberty and sex in a way that no one else was doing. And now, between “Margaret,” “Judy Blume Forever,” and at least three more film and TV projects to come, Judy is becoming something of a movie star.
As we eat lunch, Mitchell stops by to ask Judy if she might be free for breakfast in a couple of days, but she’ll be having her hair and makeup done for an event at the Miami Film Festival. “The glam — I love that,” she says. “I never knew anything about that! The glam is going to be happening,” she giggles before returning to her grilled cheese.
For much of my career, I was the type of journalist who only published a handful of magazine pieces a year. These required a great deal of time, much of which was spent on minor improvements to the reporting, structure, and sentences. I believed that long-form journalism, much like fiction or poetry, possessed a near-mystical rhythm that could be accessed through months of intensive labor. Once unlocked, some spirit would sing through the piece and touch the readers in a universal, truthful way.
Then, about two years ago, while working at the New York Times, I began writing and publishing thousands of words a week. My main motivation was health care: I had been a contract employee for years and had very little income stability. But also, from an authorial standpoint, I was curious to see what would happen if I just started churning. Would my sentences deteriorate? Would I lose my sense for what was good or bad?
But for me, an only child of divorce, it was the first half-step into the world of cooking for myself.
If lesbian bars are dead, then where did I spend $50 on a glass of orange wine and a hot dog?
If Xu’s work is powerful, it’s because of the ways she so eloquently articulates this problem of wanting to honor one’s past without being reduced to it, a problem she links to debates about poetic genre while gesturing beyond them to the higher-stakes issues of surveillance, citizenship, cultural memory, and diaspora. Xu thereby deftly navigates a particularly tricky double bind of representation that has been at the heart of recent critiques of both confessionalism and experimental verse—a larger dynamic of the public sphere wherein minoritized writers must either negate their differences or risk being negated by rhetorics of invalidation. In so doing, Xu refuses the either/or logic that culture imposes on her, realizing in The Past a book that looks to the future as much as to history.