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