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.