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.