But Fox says that as he grappled with these recent losses and medical setbacks, he felt a “similar emptiness” to that dark time when doctors first delivered the Parkinson’s news. “I have aides around me quite a bit of the time in case I fall, and that lack of privacy is hard to deal with,” he says. “I lost family members, I lost my dog, I lost freedom, I lost health. I hesitate to use the term ‘depression,’ because I’m not qualified to diagnose myself, but all the signs were there.”
So how, I ask, was he able to shake it off? “My family,” he says. “My family pulled me out.”
There is no hard definition for what makes food authentic or traditional. Instead, food goes through a process of authentication. A dish once considered novel or adaptive can form a strong identity over time, eventually becoming traditional in its own right.
Chinese food is a perfect example of this. It has always been produced in ways that blur both national boundaries and the borders between ethnic cuisines.
The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.
“A friend to me has no race, no class and belongs to no minority,” said Frank Sinatra. “My friendships are formed out of affection, mutual respect and a feeling of having something in common. These are eternal values that cannot be classified.” These words ran through my head as I read “Last Call at Coogan’s,” Jon Michaud’s book about the life and times of a venerated Washington Heights pub that shuttered in 2020. It might have been the motto of Coogan’s — a spot that may have resembled an Irish tavern of the sort found from Mumbai to Manhattan, but was a unique place, ecumenical in outlook and bighearted in practice.
It is commonly supposed that the more one knows about a major writer the better, and that therefore his every written word must be gathered, published, and read by those who would truly appreciate his work. I am not sure that this is so. Great letter-writer though Dickens was, I do not think it necessary to wade through the ten gargantuan volumes of his correspondence in order to enjoy at their true value Mr. Micawber’s or Mrs. Gummidge’s wonderful utterances.
Kafka is especially interesting to many of us, perhaps, because he is, par excellence, the writer of neurosis—and to be neurotic these days is to be in a state of grace, for persons who are not neurotic must be complacent and therefore insensitive to the world’s woes. Of course, Kafka was born in 1883 in a harlequin empire with no ideological justification beyond dynastic continuity, and he belonged to a recently and uncertainly liberated minority, the Jews. As the succeeding century was to demonstrate, there were ample grounds for anxiety (Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust), but the world into which he was born was also that of the halcyon days of Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. Setting aside his chronic ill health and the condition of Central Europe in the days before the First World War, one suspects that Kafka would have been highly neurotic in any circumstances, a prophet and exemplar of a psychological tendency, so powerfully stimulated by Freud, to make mountains out of molehills. Do events such as the Great War cause neurosis, or does neurosis cause events? Was the Great War the result of the spiritual sickness that preceded it, Kafka having suffered from it very acutely?
If Doomsday Book and Passage and To Say Nothing of the Dog loom over Willis’s other fare, they’re nonetheless built on the same joys and exasperations that elevate nearly all her stories. This consistency might be the most important way in which Willis resembles her old Hollywood favorites. Not every Fred Astaire picture can match Top Hat, but the line of his glide remains the same.
“I’m petrified of growing old with a disability,” she says. If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support. She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home. She’s worked in long-term care facilities and never wants to live in one. Applying for disability support programs, such as home care, can be cumbersome. There’s no one-stop shop for disability services; they’re spread across government agencies and ministries. Wait lists are long. Paperwork can be complicated. Carlson doesn’t think she’ll be able to understand how to navigate social assistance programs without her husband to explain them to her. But if she dies first, she reckons, she won’t have to.
If time travel was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking techniques they pioneered while building Notre Dame Cathedral more than 800 years ago are being used again today to rebuild the world-famous monument's fire-ravaged roof.
Certainly the reverse is true for the modern-day carpenters using medieval-era skills.
That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that. Deb seems to set his sights on other issues, too: When artificial intelligence can make our speech, text, appearance and existence better than it really is, then who are we? Meanwhile, the planet we have poisoned turns on us. Whatever the author’s intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.
Dark, eerie and unsettling, Jacqueline Ross’ debut novel Blackwater taps into the horror of Tasmania’s colonial past. Blackwater explores the legacy of so-called ‘female factories’ – the workhouses to which female convicts were sent during the early 19th century – putting a contemporary spin on this uncomfortable chapter in Australia’s history.
Written through a female lens of empowerment, at its heart House of Longing is about accepting who you are and finding ways to live while working to support the changes you can make.
Usually, we know what to do when we go to a museum. Beautiful, finely crafted objects are available to be looked at, and otherwise left alone. We admire the subject matter and the artist’s unique way of representing it. The works afford experiences of visual and intellectual enjoyment. We may return to the same works again and again, finding new elements to enjoy even as the work’s features remain largely unchanged. But this experience prepares us poorly for ‘conceptual’ art, so-called based on the proposition that it features ideas as much as physical stuff.
Taking care of your lawn is a kind of entry-level way into this manner of interacting with the world. There is a right way to do it, and while it may not take immense skill, it takes attention to detail and orderly thinking. You mow the lawn; it smells nice and looks sharp. Then you clear the garden beds of weeds and stray grass, then trim the edges between the grass and the gardens and the sidewalk. When you’re finished, you’ve spent some time interacting with the physical world, a relatively rare state of consciousness for some of us. A small problem has been resolved. You have maintained the place where you live.
A master of the macabre, challenging and subversive, Rachel Ingalls' novellas have a way of drawing you into her alternative universe that is both unsettling and thrilling.
How Not to Kill Yourself is a riveting and inspiring read for anyone who has had to keep company with the chthonic feeling that the breath of life is a curse. Martin is one of the few members of the Socratic guild who is also a masterful writer of fiction. His knack for descriptions enables him to bring abstract concepts down to earth. Turning the final page, I had to smile at the last chords of this self-study since they seemed to encapsulate the pat-on-the-back spirit of a good book.
“Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?
Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not.
For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Those arguments also ignored our common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences, which unite us, regardless of where we live. I wanted to show that the places of American fiction can’t be divided into blue or red states.
She needed a distraction, so she turned, as she often does, to video games. But when she tried to play the adventure game Gold Rush, she discovered that the version she had played obsessively as a kid no longer existed. It felt like a chapter of her childhood had been erased. “This part of my life was gone,” she said.
The feeling of loss yielded a kernel of an idea, which Zevin jotted in a notebook: “Story of two game designers. The games they make are their lives."
At the book’s unlikely heart is a 1,000-pound manatee living in a once-famous South Florida aquarium housed in an old Danish warship. Jones’ fast-paced narrative presents an endearingly looney cast of characters: a vicious Florida retiree, a group of pot-smoking older ladies, a desperate (and desperately loving) mother, a mysteriously dead grandmother and a rebellious tech-savvy teen.
When you come to the end of Abraham Verghese's new novel, "The Covenant of Water," you will feel as if you have lived among its Indian and Anglo-Indian characters for almost a century. It's that long.
But it's also that immersive — appropriately enough for a book so steeped in the medium and metaphor of water, as the title suggests.
There’s so much to know about any one creature in our world, and even more to know about how creatures interact with their environment and one another. Bring into that mix the apex human animal, with all our history, science, politics and behaviors, and the story gets more fascinating yet.
Writer and photographer Tom Walker, with his lifetime of close observation of the natural world and the lives of animals, has written a remarkable new book that tracks a single wolf as it wandered through northern Alaska for 3,000 miles, driven by its need to eat, escape danger, and find a mate. That Walker didn’t literally climb mountains and ford rivers to do this makes the story no less interesting.
Rain comes back to the East River,
never the same river
The hero of a kids’ book doesn’t usually die. In Choose Your Own Adventure books, a children’s series that has sold more than 270m copies and been translated into 40 languages since its launch in 1979, the hero dies multiple times, in unpleasant, unexpected and often grotesque ways. And that hero happens to be You.
You, the reader, addressed in the second person, make choices every few pages, to find out who killed Harlowe Thrombey, to seek the lost jewels of Nabooti, uncover the secret of the pyramids, or escape being a prisoner of the Ant People. And while some endings can be deemed happy, in most scenarios you end up dead. You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters. You fall down mineshafts, off cliffs, into wormholes, and perish in every conceivable natural catastrophe.
My husband reads to me every night before we go to sleep. We deliberately choose books that are familiar – oft-read children's classics make frequent appearances – so I do not worry about missing something important when I drift off. I have noticed that after some time – it can be as little as a few minutes if I am especially tired – the meanings of the words are gradually eclipsed by the sounds. I begin to hear sounds and rhythms instead of words and story. The waxing and waning of the accents and stress patterns become a calming, lulling, treasured experience that soothes and resets me after a long day.
Scientists have discovered new evidence that the universe was briefly governed by different physical laws than it is today, producing a violation to which we owe our very existence, reports a new study.
The results open a window into the mysterious epoch of inflation, an ultrashort period when the universe expanded exponentially fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
“Hell hath no fury like the citizens of a country who hold a ‘bird of the year’ contest,” quipped Auckland scientist Catherine Qualtrough – and the country does have an internationally unusual focus and dedication to its winged creatures. That love has shaped its national identity and conservation agenda and launched an enormous country-wide campaign to wipe out animals that threaten the avian population.
“You know what you know,” says Andrew Digby, a science adviser at the Department of Conservation – and what New Zealand knows is birds. The country is one of only a handful of places around the world that have no native terrestrial mammals.
But Gout’s novel is about much more than a confrontation between the obviously good and the obviously evil; it is a story concerned with historical trauma and the systemic violence that it spawns. It also encourages us to ask uncomfortable questions. How much are we willing to sympathize with those who have been victimized but are now victimizing others? Is it possible to take moral revenge against systemic violence? Piñata may fundamentally be a mythic horror story about a group of people trying to stop vengeful spirits from destroying the world, but the horror is more often brutally real than fantastical. In fact, Piñata begins with the end of a world—all the more tragic because it actually happened.
Samantha Irby dedicates her new book to Zoloft. It’s a fitting tribute. In “Quietly Hostile,” the author-comedian delivers 17 essays that explore — with lacerating humor — some sensitive subjects, including her depression.
Outside, the swarm. The dog found it first,
ran crying, and now we’re both wearing balaclavas
in July. You in mittens, two sweatshirts, some Oakleys
from God knows where, hands up against the sliding glass.
I am still moved by the quiet miracle of that boyhood afternoon. But my relationship with art has changed. I look for trouble now. No longer is a Vermeer painting simply “foreign and alluring.” It is an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness — the world when the painting was made and the world now. Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them. On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal, divulging all kinds of other things I need to know.
The relationship between physics and mathematics goes back to the beginning of both subjects; as the fields have advanced, this relationship has gotten more and more tangled, a complicated tapestry. There is seemingly no end to the places where a well-placed set of tools for making calculations could help physicists, or where a probing question from physics could inspire mathematicians to create entirely new mathematical objects or theories.
The joke that people love to hate — or hate to love — American cheese is outdated. We’re at the point where we can all admit it’s good. You ever top a burger with fresh mozzarella and watch as it sits there and does everything but melt? Ever try putting a slice of cheddar on ramen only to witness the puddles of fat sweat out from the clumpy solids? In these cases and so many others, it must be American cheese, our collective shorthand for a perfectly creamy melt.
By the end of the first, four-page-long sentence of “Mild Vertigo,” I found myself strongly identifying with Natsumi, the Tokyo housewife at the center of the Japanese author Mieko Kanai’s latest novel to be translated into English. Never mind that my life and Natsumi’s are nothing alike. Like her, I too began to fret about the cleanliness of my kitchen walls. My thoughts began to mimic the buzzy, galumphing rhythms of Natsumi’s interior world. I began to wonder whether I had always thought this way, whether this book was making me aware of the true nature of my mind for the first time. Such is the mesmerizing wonder of Kanai’s prose, as translated by Polly Barton.
In its themes of misinformation, potential microbiological Trojan horses and conspiracy, Conquest can also be read in total as a joyously fantastical and elaborate Covid-19 allegory; if so, it is surely the best book yet to emerge from the pandemic.
The Choice is a satisfyingly solid novel. It is splendidly old-fashioned. Its theme is clear. There is a good story. The characters are all well-rounded and credible. It is concerned with morality and questions of morality, and this is pleasing partly because it is rare today to read something which is concerned with the fundamental question of right and wrong rather than merely with today’s fashionable prejudices. Arditti is also that unusual thing, a serious Christian novelist, an English counterpart of the American Marillyn Robinson, and in the same class as her.
“When did we begin to be as selfish as we are today?” asks historian Andrea Wulf in her new book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. “At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? . . . When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?”
Wulf locates the historical moment in the small German university town of Jena, in the years between the onset of the French Revolution and the town’s devastation by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. During the research for her 2015 biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Wulf found herself fascinated by the “Jena Set” with whom Humboldt socialized and collaborated during extended visits to the town during the 1790s. Between 1789, when Friedrich Schiller arrived in Jena to lecture on history and aesthetics at the university, and 1807, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a latecomer, finally left the nearly ruined town, a remarkable group of thinkers and authors lived there: as well as Schiller and Hegel, there were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Alexander von Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm; the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm; Friedrich Hölderlin; Novalis (pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg); Ludwig Tieck; Friedrich Schelling. And then there was Caroline Michaelis Böhmer, whom Wulf sees as the heart of the group, an intellectual widow who had given birth to a child out of wedlock and then married first August Wilhelm Schlegel and then, after divorcing him, Schelling. All these people worked side by side, collaborated, competed, fought. By the turn of the nineteenth century, they had mostly fallen out with one another, but their proximity during the key Revolutionary years had a great deal to do, as Wulf demonstrates, with the birth of Romanticism and what it was eventually to become.
The story of the Guerrero is little known but among the most dramatic of the transatlantic slave trade. Captained by the infamous pirate José Gomez, the ship was carrying 561 enslaved Africans to Cuba when HMS Nimble, a British anti-slaver patrolling the Keys, opened fire. During the ensuing gunfight and chase, the Guerrero slammed into a reef, shearing in two and plunging forty-one terrified Africans to their watery deaths (and leaving the survivors to an uncertain fate). As Brenda Altmeier, the maritime heritage coordinator for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, puts it, “It’s not just a wreck site; it’s a graveyard.”
But thanks to DWP and its ragtag team of citizen scientists and marine archaeologists, the Guerrero’s story is no longer resigned to the past. After nearly two centuries lost at sea, the remains of the ship, and whatever is left of the Africans who died inside it, are lost no more. “Look, I’ll say it,” Corey Malcom, a marine archaeologist in Key West who has been working with DWP, tells me, “we found the Guerrero. I’m convinced of it.”
How, the book proposes, do we disinfect the more toxic kinds of masculinity? How do we recognise the work, sacrifice and grief of women? These are large questions for a relatively slim book, but my, it raises them.
What is actually revealed by the book, and especially by the decision to organise it chronologically, is the process by which Sontag approached, assimilated, dominated and expelled disquieting material.
Where the Wild Things Are turns 60 this November. Yet, with its unforgettable colour palette of pinks, blues and greens and its depiction of perennial childhood joys like tree swinging and piggyback rides, it looks as fresh as the day it was born. The story of a loveable rascal called Max whose mother sends him to his room for causing mayhem, it takes a more mysterious turn when, left alone, Max conjures a vivid world of towering trees and vines and sails off to become king of an island of party-loving monsters, before getting lonely and returning home.
I fell into this story. It was like pulling on the thread of a fraying jacket and not being able to stop myself even as the fabric started to come undone. In my memory, the morning everything started it was snowing and I was about to log onto a Zoom class when my husband came home and told me about the teepee. He’d run into the woman who tended it and asked her why it had been destroyed. I got it into my head that I had to figure out who kept knocking down the teepee and why.
Then everything started unraveling on its own.
The Adonis may be my nightcap, but is more often than not someone else’s night-starter; a glass of Champagne before bed, meanwhile, signals a sort of rewiring of perspective. A good night’s rest is not a begrudgingly logical endpoint of a day, but a beginning. It is an opening toast to the after-party of the subconscious; a toast to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.
As terrifying as the novel becomes, it’s also, at its core, a lot of fun. Its characters are kids hurling themselves at the world, escaping their past as much as finding themselves. They are reckless and headstrong but relatable. Each is essentially powerless when the story opens: traumatized, poor, displaced, angry, yet freed by the force of the music they mainline together. “Gone to the Wolves” is an anti-establishment treatise, bildungsroman and extreme love letter to the flame of youth.
This may seem like a minor change to most readers — or perhaps a long overdue one — but the use of courtesy titles has divided newsrooms and journalism schools for decades.
In our age of planetary unravelling, mourning has become a crucial disposition. It is one that allows us to acknowledge and grieve loss, but also to create or revive connections with more-than-human others. In that way, mourning becomes a form of resistance that pushes against human exceptionalism. It reminds us that we share the world with many other kinds of beings, and that these beings also have their own ways of grieving. But the space shared with other species is complicated. We are not just together in the same world, we are tangled up in each other’s lives. Other species live on and in us, they change us, and we change them, too: we breed them, farm them, mutate their genomes, eat them, research them, love them, and kill them. Increasingly, human action is leading to their extinction. Should we not mourn them, too? Acknowledging the relations that sustain or undermine life and death in multispecies worlds means also learning to practise ‘multispecies mourning’.
Maybe if I’d stuck with slow eating, I would have lost some gassiness, choking risk, or weight—but also, I think, some joy. There’s something to speed-eating that can be plain old fun, akin to the rush of zooming down an empty highway in a red sports car. If I have just an hour-ish (or, knowing me, less) of eating each day, I’d prefer to relish every brisk, indecorous bite.
I’ve been a writer all my life. But these days, my role as an innkeeper occupies me almost as much as fiction. I never intended this, but introducing travelers from all over the world — particularly those from the United States, the country of my birth, whose State Department website has posted warnings about travel to Guatemala for years — has become a central concern of my life.
In the end, the novel concludes, we will make all the same mistakes, vote for all the wrong people or ignore the opportunities at hand even when we vote for the right ones. History muscles its way back, an unthinking, unfeeling set of forces that proves more difficult to repair — let alone reverse — than death itself.
“The Late Americans” is a worthy addition to the genre, not because anything much happens but rather because Taylor is indeed a beautiful writer. His tautly constructed sentences are as concrete and vivid as the poems that the hapless Seamus adores.
Pochoda writes with insight and empathy about women pushing back on the violence perpetrated against them — and also, conversely, their shame at their inability to act. She’s also a keen observer of life among the city’s undomiciled citizens (to use Pochoda’s preferred term), whether through the eyes of Lobos, looking for her ex, or Florida, who finds refuge and wisdom among them while on the run from the law and the relentless Diosmary.
It all starts with Jack, the guy who goes gunnin’ for the man who stole his water and somehow avoids execution because the executioner has better things to do with his time. As Alex Pappademas writes in his wry, playful but deeply incisive new book, “Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan,” “Jack is both the first Steely Dan protagonist and the archetypal one. He’s a loser strapped to the karmic wheel, forever slipping out of one trap set by his own dumb desires and into another one, rescuing doom from the jaws of salvation.”
This might be news to the casual listener of “Do It Again” (1972), who perhaps just likes the easygoing groove and that wandering sitar solo. But “Quantum Criminals” wasn’t written for that listener. This is a book for Dan obsessives like me, who treat every track like a cryptic, jazzy short story, a Raymond Carver joint with crazy chord changes. We pore over the songs and the albums through infinite listens, enraptured by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s music and perhaps more puzzled by their words than we’d care to admit. Who are Chino and Daddy G. (“My Old School”)? What is that Hoops McCann guy up to (“Glamour Profession”)? And, is there gas in the car (“Kid Charlemagne”)? OK, that one actually gets answered. Yes, there’s gas in the car.
Long before climate change threatened the very existence of the Colorado River, two women botanists set off with a group of amateur boatmen to record the plants that lived along what was then the most dangerous river in the world.
In “Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon,” science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny draws on the diaries of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter to trace their 43-day sojourn in the summer of 1938.
I didn’t realize it at first. I began to learn what happened when, out of the depths of nowhere, a voice asked if I knew where I was. I struggled to produce my monosyllabic answer: “No.”
The voice responded: “You’re in the ICU. You had a heart attack during your hockey game last night. A player on the other team saved your life.”
I didn’t remember going to a game last night. The last thing I remembered … I couldn’t remember the last thing I remembered. I didn’t even know what a heart attack felt like.
“Getting Lost” is both weapon and record. It is artillery in Ernaux’s battle against forgetfulness and even against ennui. There have been other men, other passions. With S, she accepts a bounded love and rejoices within the perimeters she accepts. She even thinks about weeping with anticipation: “Maybe I will tonight.” Tears have an orchestrated quality, as if part of the symphony of love. His indifference and her obsession are the twin tracks of the book’s story.
Kevin Powers’s third novel, “A Line in the Sand,” is set primarily in the Tidewater region of Virginia, but its heart is located 6,000 miles away, in war-torn Iraq. Nearly every character is a veteran of the conflict that decimated that nation in the years following the United States’ 2003 invasion. They may have physically left the combat zones of Mosul and Fallujah, but that doesn’t mean their war is over.
With a title like The Girls of Summer, you might find yourself picking up Katie Bishop’s debut novel with expectations of a typical sun-drenched summer read. But whilst this book partly takes place on a secluded, sun-trapped Greek island, where the days are lazy, the nights long, the drinks flow endlessly, and the rest of the world feels a million miles away, there’s a darker side to the story that casts a sharp spotlight on the complicated nature of power, consent and recollection.
A book about proceeding in brokenness, On The Inconvenience of Other People is simultaneously an experiment, if not a map, on how to do theory in a damaged world. Throughout it, Berlant writes in what they term ‘a parenthetical voice’. Like the modes of the episodic and the elliptical, this voice proceeds uncertainly, while ‘limiting the sneaky ways em dashes, notes, and other modes of insertion’ to avoid a hierarchical organisation of thought and of reading. Preferring spontaneity and the immediacy of the visceral, the voice gives rise to a collection of ‘assays’ that are open-ended, inviting re-writing, continuation and improvement. Destined to be Berlant’s last book, On The Inconvenience of Other People is not their final contribution then. They have left us how the book begins – in the middle of life, asking that we pick it up and change what the object is and can do.
The column is a miscellany: three or four items, irreverent and journalistic in tone. It’s a small treat for readers who make it to the end.
From 1997 to 2020, its golden age, the column was signed J.C. This correspondent has officially been outed as James Campbell, a biographer of James Baldwin and a longtime editor at the magazine. He was a good steward of the column, and his best material has been collected now in “NB by J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement.”
Science is under attack. Ironically, the weapons are products of science itself: the propagation of misleading information, the torturing of data to ‘prove’ claims about anything, the mining of data untroubled by any hypothesis about what you might find. As Gary Smith writes in Distrust, “Disinformation is spread by the Internet that scientists created. Data torturing is driven by scientists’ insistence on empirical evidence. Data mining is fuelled by the big data and powerful computers that scientists created.”
The original collection, “A Handbook of Integer Sequences,” appeared in 1973 and contained 2,372 entries. In 1995, it became an “encyclopedia,” with 5,487 sequences and an additional author, Simon Plouffe, a mathematician in Quebec. A year later, the collection had doubled in size again, so Dr. Sloane put it on the internet.
“In a sense, every sequence is a puzzle,” Dr. Sloane said in a recent interview. He added that the puzzle aspect is incidental to the database’s main purpose: to organize all mathematical knowledge.
Taylor has written a bleak book with flashes of beauty, circling a hothouse of young people on the brink of transplantation into the harsh outside world. His ear for dialogue is exquisitely sensitive. Even if he calls it a novel, I hope he’s working on a play.
Powerful and affecting, “The Trackers” also suggests a sharp comparison between the disparities of its time and the dissonance of our own, and it raises the question of whether the past augurs recovery — or a siren in the night.
If you live in California — or anywhere in the West, for that matter — fires are a constant threat, and they’re getting worse by the year. In 2021 alone, two of them, the Caldor and Dixie fires, burned more than 1.18 million acres. Tens of thousands of people were displaced from their homes. But what would it feel like to run toward these infernos instead of away from them?
In her extraordinary debut memoir, “Burnt,” Clare Frank answers this question in a fascinating, boots-on-the-ground account of her storied career as a firefighter. From her first push-up at Sandy Point Training Center southeast of Pescadero in 1982 all the way up to her job as California’s state chief of fire protection in 2013 — the first and only woman to serve in that position — she takes readers behind the scenes in a play-by-play that is as riveting as it is informative.
Roger Ebert, the beloved film critic who died in 2013 having done more than anyone else in history to turn arguing about movies into a mainstream American sport, once observed that “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.”
Big Swiss is a fluffy sex comedy with a dark underbelly. In fact, its dark underbelly has a darker underbelly, which is then startlingly fluffy. There are multiple trauma plotlines: Greta is emotionally stunted by her mother’s suicide when she was 13; Flavia is still coping with aftershocks from the assault that almost killed her; even Greta’s landlady, Sabine, has a dark secret and a recovery arc. Meanwhile, Flavia’s attacker has been released from prison and may be stalking her. It’s an abuse-themed love story with a dash of psychological thriller where everything is played for laughs. Somewhat miraculously, this mixture works. The voice is sharp, the plot is compelling, the jokes are funny and sometimes startling, as the very best comedy is; it’s easy to forgive the odd moments when two elements clash.
Female novelists seem to be getting a bit of a bashing these days. Some literature courses offer trigger warnings for anyone frightened by the “toxicity” of Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey. Tom Rachman’s The Imposters doesn’t let them off too lightly either. His first novel, The Imperfectionists, focused on journalists. Here he offers a convoluted study of a different sort of writer, the ageing novelist Dora, in a treatment that is not unfeeling, though needlessly contorted.
“I Felt the End Before It Came” is Cox’s way of putting his chaotic life experiences into words. In so doing, he has offered up a language for others who might still be searching for the right thing to say.
“We choose our objects and our places of memory,” Annie Ernaux writes near the start of “Look at the Lights, My Love,” “or rather the spirit of the times decides what is worth remembering.” It’s a statement that could apply to her whole career. Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, has long been a writer who occupies the middle ground between experience and recollection, between the life that is lived and the one that is recalled.
Some of artificial dyes’ biggest dangers, then, may not even be entirely inherent to the chemicals themselves. Foods that need a color boost tend to be the ones that experts already want us to avoid: candies, sodas, and packaged, processed snacks, especially those marketed to children, points out Lindsay Moyer, a CSPI nutritionist. Colors so exaggerated, so surprising, so unnatural inevitably tempt kids “to reach out of the grocery cart,” Moyer told me. Dyes, once cooked up by us to mimic and juxtapose with the natural world, have long since altered us—manipulating our base instincts, warping our appetites—and transformed into a luxury that the world now seems entirely unable to quit.
The unification of time and space radically changed the trajectory of physics in the 20th century. It opened new possibilities for how we think about reality. What could the unification of time and matter do in our century? What happens when time is an object?
At old-school slice shops like John’s that are still open today, the secret to longevity is a combination of tradition and reinvention. Regardless of how they made it this far, the future of these businesses hangs in the balance. Their fate lies not just in the skillful navigation of a changing industry, but in the willingness of the next generation to carry the torch, or, in this case, the Bakers Pride deck ovens. Every time a family calls it quits, the city loses more than a great slice of pizza: It cedes a living piece of its history to the vast, unknowable past.
It is not surprising then that Ten Planets is a peculiarly uncomfortable short story collection. These 20 bizarre tales by Mexican-born writer and political scientist Yuri Herrera, first collected in the original Spanish as Diez Planetas in 2019 and now newly translated into English by Lisa Dillman, are rarely longer than a handful of pages. Their characters have ambitions, anxieties, and misgivings about their lives, but we barely get to know them before we reach the end of their story. And yet the stories are formulaic too: this is very much fantastic fiction, although narrowing the genre further would be somewhat tricky. The collection employs many of the fantastic tropes that have become part of our shared culture—aliens and monsters, rebellious technology, spaceships leaving a condemned, decaying earth—except even these tropes are confused, short-circuited. Ten Planets’ tapestry of situations and characters feels familiar—until Herrera, time and again, pulls the rug out from under our feet
The word “haunting” is often used to describe our interaction with the past. To write about the past of your own family – the people who in so many ways define us – is to be haunted in a very personal way. Why did our ancestors do what they did and how does knowledge of that affect our relationship with them, with their memory? Anam – André Dao’s debut novel that won a Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript – is a vivid, complex book that never shies away from the spectres that haunt.
The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame;
then the air burst into reds, silver-edged
and filled with mouths like snapping scissors.
Silence. Complete, unnerving silence. Despite decades of searches for any form of life, intelligent or otherwise, out there in the cosmos, the Universe has but one message for us: No one is answering.
But that solitude is not a curse. The great expanse of the empty heavens above us does not carry with it an impossible burden of loneliness. It begets a freedom—a freedom to explore, to be curious, to wonder, to expand.
Conventionally, the rise of oxygen is seen as life triumphantly terraforming a passive planet. But we’re learning now that Earth was an active participant, and it took two more big lifts of oxygen over the succeeding 2 billion years before it reached breathable levels. So which was more responsible for oxygen’s rise on Earth: the evolution of life or the evolution of the planet? Nature or nurture? And does the same answer apply to all of the rises of oxygen in Earth’s past?
It’s a question beyond curiosity about our past, as it also affects how we might interpret signs of life on exoplanets.
Financial faith relies on the notion that everything works out for the best, irrespective of individual desires. “Trust” gives the reader opportunities to feel that same tension in narrative itself, to question the apparently smooth operations of fiction while still becoming invested in its drama. Through these indirections, Diaz leads the reader on a journey from abstractions—all that literature is capable of representing, including the markets and moneymen that rule the world—down to something small, private, and experiential. Perhaps “Trust,” in the end, makes a surprisingly un-postmodern case for what the novel can do. It can deliver discrete, luminous sensations. It can make one subjectivity clear at a time. And it can help you appreciate experience—your hand in front of your face—before it disappears.
The dedication page of MariNaomi’s new visual memoir, “I Thought You Loved Me,” reads, in meticulously rendered, chalk-colored cursive script: “For Chris Smith.” It’s a perplexing tribute, given that soon into the book readers learn that the author has trouble remembering just who this person was or what part he played in the story being told.
Claire Kilroy’s first novel in 10 years is a whole-body experience: reading it was, for me, like being elbowed through a rip in the space-time continuum back into the chaotic, exhausting, lovesick fog of the baby and toddler years. Anyone who has endured “the blurred days and the blurred nights” of early motherhood – or indeed anyone contemplating the possibility of embarking on them – be warned. You’re looking at a book-length panic attack.
You learn the alphabet from an eight-foot-tall yellow anthropomorphic bird that irrevocably imprints on you. Big Bird may as well be your dad.
You move on to bigger birds (i.e., dinosaurs) and take an intense interest in pterodactyls. This will become the basis for your atheism.
Your mom reads you the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” Your dad reads you the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” Your first-grade teacher reads you—not the entire class, just you—the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” You begin to read between the lines.
Audiobooks have become such a driving economic force in the publishing industry that they have spawned their own dedicated networks of promotion, circulation, and consecration. Audiobook rights are now a staple of book contracts, changing the terms of negotiation. Their sales are counted and listed by The New York Times. They even have their own literary prizes, the Audies and the Golden Voice Awards.
The audiobook boom is also changing how writers work. In 2021, novelist Jess Walter and narrator Edoardo Ballerini released The Angel of Rome, a jointly written, two-hour “Audible Original,” born of the pair’s previous work together. Walter is writing lines with Ballerini’s voice in mind, and Ballerini is so familiar with Walter’s work that he is able to add some lines himself; the idea of this collaboration is thus woven into the born-audio novella from the start.
I sleep with my very own glacier that night. Try it sometime if you want to know just how insignificant you can be. Melting throughout day, the ice releases what sounds like barks, then pistol shots. It groans, a sound like no other, and shoots out thick streams of snowmelt that arc high above, luminous in the half-light of a dim reeling sun, before plunging down, down into the dark lake.
The next day I climb the rock pile for two hours but make it barely halfway up. The sweat soaking my shirt comes as much from fear as exertion. The vast field of boulders bows alarmingly in the center, perilously close to giving way. Crossing that stretch seems much riskier than waiting for the helicopter, but even that option now seems like a long shot.
Michael Farris Smith forcefully illustrates what a stylist he is, delving deep into a suspense-laden, emotional story about people and a landscape on the edge in “Salvage This World.”
A main theme within The Albatross – as evidenced by the title – is the unlikelihood of succeeding in something the second time around. The rarest of miracle manoeuvres is described by golf aficionado Josh as being ‘very deliberate, very thoughtful, one superb shot followed by another’. The same could be said of this book.
At dusk, orphans flock to the abandoned chapel,
an assembly formed by starvation, from scabs & stuttering ribs,
memories of parents slamming doors to ruined flats
There’s a moment late in Emma Straub’s novel This Time Tomorrow that I hesitate to even allude to, because reading it, and realizing what she’s been doing, is one of those experiences that suddenly casts the world into slightly sharper focus. The book offers a revelation about a defining emotion of modern life, and it surprised even Straub herself. “What’s so funny about being a novelist is how stupid one is, really,” she told me last month over Zoom. She knew that the novel was about grief and about pre-grief, the strange purgatory of knowing that someone you love is going to die, when life feels indefinitely suspended. What she didn’t know was what the completed work would ultimately expose: that being human is largely about loss. That we lose pieces of ourselves—treasured possessions, beloved places, entire stages of our loved ones’ lives—with such regularity that we scarcely think to grieve them at all.
Say you’re a writer (everybody says so nowadays), and you aspire to sign a Mephistophelean contract with a major literary agent, because you hanker after a lucrative Big Five contract and assorted fornication partners.
If your pitch passes the marketability muster, you will be assigned to a Stylist, whose job is to comb through your “property” (the major agent doesn’t bother) and compel you to remove anything that might be offensive. All your previous publications must also be scrutinized, and, if anything is found to be potentially hurtful toward members of marginalized communities, you can kiss off representation. (And here you thought style referred to the effective arrangement, rather than the socialization, of words.)
Pirkko Saisio’s novel The Red Book of Farewells opens on perhaps the most harrowing loss of all for an author: the complete disappearance of an already finished work. While hiking across an island, the protagonist, also named Pirkko Saisio, receives a phone call from her agent inquiring about the state of a manuscript Pirkko’s supposed to be turning in. “It’s gone,” she says while looking at a dead seal that lies among the rocks before her, its innards exposed, mouthful of yellow teeth open to the air. (For clarity, I will refer to the writer as Saisio and her character as Pirkko.) Her companion vomits. “The whole book?” asks the agent. “It’s all gone, the whole book,” Pirkko confirms. From the start, then, the reader understands that the version of The Red Book of Farewells they’re holding is something reconstructed, rewritten—a reference to an original gone forever.
Whether she is writing about a couple that reads prophecies on the shells of red-winged blackbirds or an Italian grandma who believes a garlic necklace is a cure-all, McIlwain brings to life a luminous world of plants and animals that even the extraction industries, sleazy bettors and smooth-talking city hunters “with slick cars and six-figure salaries” cannot destroy.
In her fourth collection of essays, Quietly Hostile, the bestselling author and television writer renews her love/hate vows with the human race — as well as her relationship with her own flaws and failings. By her own admission, she's lousy with money, she sounds like an idiot on podcasts, and she is more apt to down a six-pack of Diet Coke on any given day before she touches a glass of water. Luckily for the reader, she never wallows in loathing, self- or otherwise. Instead, she lets us all in on the joke. And what a joke it is.
My mom helped me cultivate a drive to preserve and help expand the voices of communities to make the world feel more connected and tender. Little did she know, the mysteries tucked within her own family history would inspire me to embark on this journey to create a cookbook to preserve our family’s recipes handed down by the last two generations.
The result, “The Postcard,” recreates in stunning detail the lives of Berest’s lost family members and weaves them into a detective story, loosely centered on the postcard. Part Holocaust drama, part family mystery, the novel led Berest to relive some of the grimmest hours of France’s recent history and to examine her own experience of being Jewish.
Book shops are where I find comfort and community at home in New York City, so it’s no surprise that I also seek them out when I’m traveling. Sure, the books themselves are the main draw, but it certainly doesn’t hurt that booksellers are often the coolest people you can find in any given neighborhood.
But more than that, the welcoming atmosphere and creative energy I’ve found in nearly every bookshop I’ve ever visited is what pulls me in like a magnet every time.
But these "secret" rivers are imprinted on London's geography. Marylebone started life as St Mary by the bourne (an old name for a watercourse, in this case the Tyburn); while Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Westbourne and Holborn are all named by waterways that ran through them. Deptford was the site of a deep ford over the Ravensbourne, while Wandsworth is named after the River Wandle. East Ham and West Ham get their names from an old word for an area between rivers (hamm) – in their case, the Lea and the Roding. And while Britain's leading newspapers have left Fleet Street, the River Fleet still runs beneath.
"London should really be one massive wetland – a salt marsh on an estuary," said Will Oliver, a development manager at Thames21, a charity helping guide 40-plus river restorations. Thanks to the organisation's efforts alongside other groups, buried rivers have returned to the light, while others are being rewilded in ways that will improve the lives and environment of millions of people, as well as provide a key boost for nature.
The precision of the writing and the carefully told story, which concentrates on its humble protagonists, not the bigger arc of history, make this a sweet and gentle novel, and an absorbing and satisfying read.
As a quiet misfit in a foreign place, Daphne hungers for human connection even as she physically deteriorates. A look inside her mind reveals the force of danger thinly veiled behind the romantic glow of youth.
Though the voice is decidedly Irish, the message of Michael Magee’s dead-on debut novel is universal. At its core, “Close to Home” is about finding a way to transcend the pain, the people and the place you’re born into.
Perhaps Miles even enjoyed himself a little too much: The stories of romance, intrigue, gambling, and heavy drinking are so many that his nearly 400-page history can feel a little repetitive at times. Yet Once Upon a Time World is much more than a book-sized gossip column. Miles’s whirlwind of characters coalesces into a narrative of booms and busts throughout the decades: the highs of the Belle Époque, the Roaring ’20s, and the 1950s—when Hollywood stars took the area’s glamor to a new level—but also the lows of both World Wars and the Great Depression.
“If you hate brunch, you probably just don’t want to get up in the morning,” says Jason Lock, the general manager at Coastal Kitchen on Capitol Hill, which has served brunch for nearly 30 years.
I’ll take it a step further and say that if you hate brunch, you’re probably just looking for something to complain about. And hey, I’m not against complaining — here I am complaining about the people who hate brunch! — I’m just saying you’re misguided.
This is an unsettling thriller which will not allow you to relax. Jo Spain keeps gleefully shifting the goalposts, leaving us on tenterhooks. Her approach is surprisingly stealthy. Very little is as it seems in this exceptionally skillful and deceptive novel.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Anne O’Hare McCormick. I hadn’t, and as the director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, which holds peerless collections documenting pioneers in print journalism, I could have, and definitely should have. Brooke Kroeger’s compendious and lively “Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism” introduced me to her.
More significantly, Jonathan Strassfeld has given us a first-rate history of American philosophy that reminds us that the “best” ideas don’t simply win out on their merits. Rather, they often come to be labeled as such after their influence is established through the vagaries of institutional contingency. At a time when the line dividing the continental and analytic traditions appears to be wearing thin, we would do well to heed this injunction for historical reflection.
It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime. It debuted in Paris in 1859 and quickly became a worldwide hit, especially in the U.S., where it was chosen to inaugurate the newly founded Metropolitan Opera in 1883. But in time, Faust’s blockbuster status made it a byword for middlebrow entertainment, a bit like The Phantom of the Opera today. When Edith Wharton set the first chapter of The Age of Innocence at a performance of Faust, it was a way of critiquing the provincialism of 1870s New York from the vantage point of 1920. For instance, Wharton pokes fun at the fact that the opera, originally written in French, is sung in Italian, the language Americans were used to hearing in the opera house at the time.
Blurb, then, is a twentieth-century euphemism for a particular kind of advertisement, one that uses evaluation as a figleaf for a sales pitch. In the twenty-first century book world, the blurbs are inescapable. Burgess had in his sights the vacuous forms of recommendation used by publishers to move units but he hardly made them slow down. Indeed the act of blurbing is now business as usual in the book trade. In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will be conscripted to marketing duties, obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide glowing snippets to hype their friends and colleagues too. Writers who negotiate complex narrative positions and personas find themselves turned into spruikers when they write blurbs. Anything less than euphoric approbation breaks with the etiquette of blurb culture.
Yet for all the blurbs that are written, be they earnest recommendations, ironic appraisals or acts of shameless nepotism, for all the exhortations to buy this amazing book right now, few Australian books sell sufficient copies to bring their authors a decent income.
A basement apartment in Brooklyn. A cat named Jack. A crew of cartoonists who share a studio known as Pizza Island. These are among the people, things and places inhabiting Julia Wertz’s latest graphic memoir, “Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story.” But it is, more generally, a story about the self-deprecating and sometimes curmudgeonly Wertz’s alcoholism and rocky road to recovery as she grapples with depression and an overactive sense of guilt.
It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.
The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”
Afterward, I went back to my dorm room and typed “Connie” into the campus Facebook. I found the girl from the sandwich line — and I also found many, many more. In my freshman class alone, there was a Connie Zheng, a Connie Guo, a Connie Xu, a few Connie Chengs, and multiple Connie Wangs. No wonder the university email address I’d wanted had been taken.
All this time, I’d thought the story of my name was special; little did I know it was the story of a generation.
It's hard to imagine a darker start to a novel, and Lone Women is indeed infused with creeping dread and chilling horror. But there's more to this book than just that — it's an excellent novel that blurs genres and looks at early-20th-century America from a perspective that's been ignored for far too long.
Charlie, Love and Clichés may just be my favourite Ella Maise novel yet, and not least because it seems to be following in the footsteps of The American Roommate Experiment to give romance readers everything they’re looking for in one, easily readable novel. With her fifth book, Maise gives herself over to the romance genre entirely, delivering a hopeless romantic heroine who is searching for the cheesiest, most clichéd love story possible and a hero who’s more than happy to play his own part. What follows is a swoony, slow burn story that’s packed full of romantic tension and happily delivers on the promise of its title and then some.
Still, Search History is a pacy, compulsive read that illustrates the double-edged sword of living in an information-rich world. By the end of it, I felt exhausted and embarrassed thinking back on my past behaviour but also somewhat comforted knowing that maybe this is just how it is for us now. I made a mental note to log off more often – but I know I won’t.
“Harold” is a strange and wonderful book, written by the strange and wonderful comedian Steven Wright, whose dry delivery and brand of absurdist one-liners made him a household name beginning in the mid-1980s. The book is set on a single school day in December of 1965, in Ms. Yuka’s third-grade classroom at Wildwood Elementary School. The action takes place almost entirely in Harold’s mind as he meditates on, among many other things: time, love, piñatas, silence, sanity, God and the sartorial choices of the astronomer Carl Sagan.
The problem is that some literature of suicide suffers from being rather convincing. Suicidal speech has a contagious quality, pulling you into its orbit, spreading negativity and exacerbating forms of destructive enjoyment. The literature is less dangerous to those who are not actively suicidal, but that doesn’t mean those who are should avoid reading about the experiences of others. To the contrary, it is important to read accounts of similar hardships so one doesn’t feel isolated and fail to reach out for help. The trouble is that doing so can also provide the wrong kinds of comfort, persuading when it should reassure.
Never have I read a book so aware of this dilemma as to be practically swimming in it as Clancy Martin’s “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.”Martin is a professor of philosophy and an acclaimed novelist and essayist. This book is the story of his many suicide attempts, his descent into alcoholism and attempt to sober up, his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as the disintegration of several marriages and his relationships with his children.
Sometimes
I write a poem
in the moment
and I wonder
whether it’s any good
It’s late November, and I’m in Cerro Pelón, a mountain range straddling the border of the Estado de México and its neighboring state, Michoacán. Just two and a half hours west of Mexico City, the most populous city in North America, is the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a protected region of 217 square miles. In the rugged, subtropical coniferous forest of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt at an elevation of 11,500 feet, I am witness to one of the most incredible natural phenomena on Earth: the monarch butterfly migration.
Gazing at the clouds of monarchs, it’s easy to imagine them as infinite. But as Monika Maeckle, founder of the Texas Butterfly Ranch, described solemnly, “From the perspective of someone who’s witnessed this for 20 years now, it used to be these dramatic pulses of monarchs…[but now] we’re seeing more of a dribbling constant.” A knot forms in my throat as I realize that what I’m seeing, though incredible, is a mere fraction of what once was. Obtaining an accurate count on the butterflies is a moving target. It is difficult to get good numbers on how many are left and how fast we are losing them. In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated that the eastern population of monarchs had declined around 84% since the 1990s, when their numbers were upwards of one billion. Though the butterflies’ numbers fluctuate yearly, they’ve been trending downward. In July 2022, monarch butterflies officially joined the endangered species list.
First and foremost, “A Line in the Sand” is a stunning novel. Kevin Powers provides what any discerning reader desires the most — complex and flawed characters, precise use of language, succinct description and believable dialogue.
The House of Doors is Tan’s first novel since 2012’s Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists and shares many of its themes. It’s a book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy that sideslips through the decades and passes the narrative baton between Lesley and Maugham. While Tan – born in Penang of Straits Chinese descent – is deliberately writing in the voice of the oppressor, he generally does so with care, conscious of the limits of his characters’ language and worldview. If colonial Malaysia is a pastiche of middle-class England, his drama is its costumed morality play.
You have undoubtedly heard of “road rage” — the kind of impetuous fury that erupts when motorists are stuck in traffic or on the move. But even when the driving ends, parking is no picnic either.
Henry Grabar opens “Paved Paradise,” his wry and revelatory new book about parking (a combination of words I never thought I would write), with a scrum that started when two cars vied for a scarce curbside spot in Queens and ended when a white Audi crashed through a bakery’s plate-glass window. Disputes over parking can turn violent; a few dozen times a year, they turn deadly.
In an era of internet saturation, The Age of Guilt offers a salutary good, a critical look at contemporary culture with an eye toward changing it for the better. Edmundson dares readers to imagine themselves at their best because, as he concludes, “[w]here super-ego was, there human ideals may be. There, in a thriving democracy, they may be.”
Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.
Family after family hid their past. Some would not discuss their suffering even with the husbands or wives who had witnessed it. Others told brothers and sisters to forget the events that had scarred their childhood. Sometimes, scared by psychotic episodes or anxious at strange obsessions, adult sons and daughters brought their parents directly to psychiatrists.
More often, patients came for physical ailments that had found no relief. They had seen that speech had unimaginable consequences and that a surface harmony, however tenuous, should not be broken. Silence was safety, however dearly bought. The misery stretched back fifty years and ran onwards; you could not see its end. The trauma would not die with its victims: it had already replicated itself in their children, and their children’s children. Like cancer cells, it could not mature, only reproduce itself, mutating in grotesque immortality.
I wondered what truths and demons glimmered in the polar night, and what that night might reveal to a visitor. When the pilot announces that we’ll be landing shortly, the full moon appears suddenly in the middle of a window across the aisle, but the horizon has disappeared. I imagine the sea and sky as different shades of dark to orient myself, to correct the sensation that I’m falling.
In 2019, the gentle rhythm of a normal summer’s day was shattered by Iris’s death in an accident on the family farm in Somerset. Goldsmith’s world was thrown into disarray. He recounts those final, awful hours in quiet, careful prose that nevertheless lays bare their gut-wrenching agony.
The resulting shock and grief fuel a relentless pursuit to understand why. He seeks out other grieving parents. Their conversations are moving and enlightening and show the repercussions of loss over decades. He explores different religious beliefs about death and the afterlife, even engaging with a psychic medium. Finally, he experiences an intense ayahuasca ritual, the visions furnishing him with the intriguing title of the book.
At the outset, I do what ghostwriters do. I listen. And eventually, after the callers talk themselves out, I ask a few gentle questions. The first (aside from “How did you get this number?”) is always: How bad do you want it? Because things can go sideways in a hurry. An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow, and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter.
I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology, and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of “Spare” describing Harry as “off his royal tits” and me as going “all Sartre or Faulkner,” so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules? Maybe the alchemy of each ghost-author pairing is unique.
To some, Eggers’ approach to publishing might feel archaic. Quixotic. Arcane. And, well, it might be.
But when you hold that hefty, impractical wood-bound book in your hand, with its gilded edges and gold foil–stamped spine, you can’t help but feel that he was right all along.
In today’s more promising climate, a ‘fighting spirit’ appeals to many people with cancer. For some cancer patients I’ve known, it’s been important to say – and for those around them to hear – that they’re trying to summon their emotional and physical powers, to do whatever they can to live longer. Some deploy combative phrases to give themselves pep talks (‘You can beat this’) as encouragement before and while receiving cancer treatment, even though they know full well that the outcome is beyond their control.
Yet hawkish words – talk of ‘battling’, as opposed to, say, ‘coping with’ cancer – have fallen out of favour among physicians, psychologists and patient advocates. As a practising oncologist I avoided that sort of language. War metaphors seemed inapt for describing research or cancer care. And I recognised this risk: if a treatment doesn’t work, if a tumour progresses, patients who have been led to believe that they’re supposed to put up a fight against cancer may blame themselves, mistakenly thinking that they lacked sufficient strength or will, when it’s the treatment that failed.
But despite birth’s recurring presence in the written record, and despite rumors of some long-lost matriarchal age and society that privileged a feminine divine and saw birth as the primary axis of imaginative, political, and social power, there is little evidence that birth was ever the foundational experience that any culture organized itself around. Just as women have been seen, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrasing, as “the second sex,” birth has a sense of secondariness about it; it has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor. Death has been humanity’s central defining experience, its deepest existential theme, more authoritative somehow than birth, and certainly more final. It is a given that humans are mortal creatures who must wrestle with their mortality, that death is the horizon no one can avoid, despite constant attempts at evasion and postponement and despite the recurring fantasy of immortality. Birth, meanwhile, is what recedes into a hazy background, slipping back past the limits of memory, existing in that forgotten realm where uteruses, blood, sex, pain, pleasure, and infancy constellate.
Published in the run-up to summer, Emma Cline’s second novel is probably what people mean when they talk about a “beach read”. Whereas her 2016 debut, arrived on a tsunami of hype and hazy lyricism, The Guest is the more controlled work of a fine talent maturing on its own terms. Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.
There are questions threaded through every intimate relationship, woven deeply into the fabric of a shared history. They take different forms and use different words, but they boil down to a stark inquiry: How far would I go to save this relationship? When things in the relationship are going well, these questions never come to the surface.
When things are off track, though …
But I found people with weighty stories were still willing to talk in China. The problem was they themselves had yet to sort through and make sense of China's turbulent past, and they struggled to articulate it in full to an outsider.
These conundrums — the slipperiness of memory and the intractability of talking about trauma — are at the heart of what makes Tania Branigan's book Red Memory: Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution so compelling.
When my friends and I left the homeland, my second departure from Kuwait, there were five of us and ten suitcases. I knew exactly what was in each bag, just as I knew the pain and angst of the five travelers heading toward the unknown. The suitcases were packed with clothes, kitchenware, Indian spices, and various items we didn’t think we’d be able to find abroad.
I could only bring four books with me from my vast library back home: Al-Mutannabi, in two parts; the collected works of Mahmoud Darwish; and just one of the volumes of The Unique Necklace. These would constitute the entire library I would survive on, for however long I ended up living in estrangement. Once we’d settled into our accommodation in a small house on Norris Drive in Ottawa, I arranged the books on the sleek wooden flooring, the place being still unfurnished. Then I sat back and simply gazed at them.
Project A119, as it was known, was a top-secret proposal to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. Hydrogen bombs were vastly more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the latest in nuclear weapon design at the time. Asked to "fast track" the project by senior officers in the Air Force, Reiffel produced many reports between May 1958 and January 1959 on the feasibility of the plan.
DJ turned novelist Annie Macmanus described her bestselling debut, Mother Mother, as a love letter to Belfast. Her second book, The Mess We’re In, channels an evocative rush of feeling for another capital central to the Irish experience, London. How to go about finding your place within such a city is a question that drives this immersive, music-infused coming-of-age story.
Before she was famous in her own right, Lucinda Williams won a Grammy for “Passionate Kisses,” a song of hers that became a hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter. “My reaction was mixed,” Williams writes in her new memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You.” Her newfound fame both humbled and terrified her. “My mind-set was still that of the girl working in the record store or taco stand or selling sausages in the supermarket.” She ended up not attending the awards ceremony. “I froze in fear,” she explains. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life.”
Reconstructing Le Prince’s life and the rivalries that shape today’s film industry, Paul Fischer reveals how his subject succeeded “like a conjurer, in willing light, time, and silver to combine into a force that could capture life itself”.
One of the joys of 52 Ways to Walk is discovering that there’s a scientific basis for much of what we’d call common sense or folk wisdom – and so much of it is rooted in leaving the house and going for a walk: getting the sun on your skin can help your immune system, and there’s nothing harmful in getting covered in mud. In fact, it can help your gut health.
At the spa, it wasn't just the fact that I was being seen that shifted my comfort level with my body. It was the fact that I was seeing the bodies of my friends and of strangers in such unfiltered glory, like I was visiting a cold plunge pool for my brain. Rewiring my assumption of what my friends' bodies looked like under their clothes, I came to understand that the comparisons I made in my head — elevating their skinniness while chastising my curves — were not just cruel, but unscientific. I could never be as skinny as my friend. Her frame is smaller and straighter than mine, genetics I can't achieve through a crash diet. Similarly, without makeup and hair products, I also could see the realities of people's wrinkles and pores, of how grooming makes smoke and mirrors of our DNA.
When I left the spa, I had super smooth skin and a full body glow. I also had a renewed understanding of what I could realistically expect my body to achieve.
There is a vivid moment in Farah Karim-Cooper’s new book where she reflects on the image of the nation’s pre-eminent playwright – how unfathomable he has seemed to artists and how his face has been conjured from a historical blur. She compares portraits and discerns a marked shift in the 18th century when he seems to become “more beautiful, symmetrical, and whiter in complexion”.
If visual art has hitherto seemed like a peripheral detail in the appraisal of his work, Karim-Cooper, a professor of Shakespeare studies, connects this paled image to a metaphorical whitewashing: the man we celebrate today is not the one who lived and worked in Elizabethan England but a reconstructed fantasy, built to serve as an emblem of white excellence and imperial Englishness.
The philosopher Nikhil Krishnan arrived in Oxford from India as a Rhodes scholar in 2007. His education there transformed him, and this book is an expression of gratitude to a movement in Oxford philosophy that had reached its peak of development 50 years earlier, but of whose intellectual legacy he found himself the beneficiary: the “ordinary language” movement, which held that linguistic analysis was the key to resolving philosophical problems.
For decades, this store was an anchor for the Bay Area's Asian American community. Now, Harvey and his wife Beatrice, the store's co-owner, have decided to close the shop. They're both in their 70s and have aging parents to care for – and last weekend, they shut the doors for the final time.
While they're used to seeing this place packed with literature, Eastwind was never just about the books.
I have never been to Hiroshima, but for a long time I have felt a strong desire to connect physically with this part of my family’s history. I have been searching for things that survived — an heirloom, a letter, a bracelet.
Unexpectedly, the objects that have offered me the most meaningful connection to Hiroshima are not objects at all but living, breathing things: trees.
But, once you get used to the style and surrender to it, “Honeybees” is a lovely book to get lost in because it forces you to be in the moment with the story. Something clicks — you hit a stride and suddenly realize pages have passed since you said “I’ll stop at the end of this paragraph.”
David Edmonds’s new book, “Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality,” is about both the intelligence and the strangeness of its subject. It works through his life, spent largely at Oxford, and his ideas, which all relate to people (or “persons”) and ethics, the study of what people ought to do. In Edmonds’s estimation, at least, Parfit saw himself as among the first philosophers to really and seriously undertake this study without religious assumptions. Concerned above all with suffering, Parfit himself had abandoned religion in his youth, unable to understand how a just and loving God could be responsible for so much pain. And his ethical philosophy remained focused on suffering, a good fit for British utilitarian consequentialism, an intellectual tradition in which promoting pleasure and reducing pain are seen as the primary mandates of ethics.
Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and a definitive edition did not appear until 1952.
From the beginning, then, El Señor Presidente has been star-crossed. But it also ranks as one of the most important and influential works of modern Latin American literature, a kind of urtext for the celebrated generation of novelists that followed Asturias and gained global recognition in the 1960s and 1970s as members of “El Boom”: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, and several others.
Usually, there are clear answers in mathematics—especially if the tasks are not too complicated. But when it comes to the Sleeping Beauty problem, which became popular in 2000, there is still no universal consensus. Experts in philosophy and mathematics split into two camps and ceaselessly cite—often quite convincingly—arguments for their respective side. More than 100 technical publications exist on this puzzle, and almost every person who hears about the Sleeping Beauty thought experiment develops their own strong opinion.
Link’s short stories may be infused with elements of multiple genres and literary influences, but her originality and idiosyncratic imagination defy classification or comparison. She places herself simply in “the long tradition of the weird,” an amorphous category broadly defined by the presence of “something in this story that you don’t expect.”
Anchoring their work in elemental life routines, the four artists explore the sensuous materiality of existential vacillation and survival. Caught between the fixity of endless reiteration or seriality, and the movements of art and life, their intimate explorations focus on small and ordinary yet radical—that is, fundamental, principial—gestures that betray existential vulnerability and display artistic experimentation in transformative, indeed political, ways. It is the starkness of their uncompromising oeuvre that stings or pricks me, the lusciousness of their rigor, which relentlessly reasserts the shared paradoxical condition of women: that of being simultaneously free and alienated.
what makes a house
a home is difficult
to define, as not just
any walls of plaster or stucco
or brick can hold
Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script. Despite our advanced natural sciences, we are neither prepared nor trained to really look at things, being rather at loggerheads with nature. Other eras, indeed, perhaps all other eras, all earlier periods before the earth fell to technology and industry, were attuned to nature’s symbolic sorcery, reading its signs with greater simplicity, greater innocence than is our wont. This was by no means sentimental; the sentimental relationship people have with the natural world is a more recent development that may well arise from our troubled conscience with regard to that world.
A few miles west of San Diego is a stretch of ocean that’s rather unremarkable from the surface. The water is cold and blue. There’s some green seaweed peeking out.
Sink below the waves, however, and a whole other realm appears. Under the sea here, near Point Loma, is a forest as beautiful as any other. It’s made not of trees but of strands of giant kelp, a species of algae that can grow taller than a 10-story building.
For Angelenos of a certain era, Kawafuku was the place where they first tried sushi — at a small, L-shaped bar installed by its flamboyant owner, Tokijiro Nakashima. He’d done so at the urging of Noritoshi Kanai, the food importer who’d gotten the idea in the mid-1960s to push sushi in L.A. from his associate Harry Wolff Jr.
Kanai and Wolff believed that if Japanese restaurants were persuaded to serve sushi, a lucrative supply chain could be built to support the cuisine — eel, wasabi and all. And Kanai set his sights on Kawafuku, which until then had mostly been known for dishes that were friendly to Western palates. When Nakashima agreed — it took six months to convince him, Kanai said in a 2015 interview with The Times — sushi began its norm-busting journey from culinary curiosity to mainstream Los Angeles offering.
Or, to put it another way, what begins as the romance of comedy eventually melts away into the romance of romance. But maybe that’s okay. After all, many a feminist reworking of the rom-com lies precisely in this gray zone—one in which reclaiming the genre is hard to disentangle from simply taking its fantasies seriously to begin with.
By figuring language as a kind of “unbodied apparition,” Han seems intent on reconsidering how humans conceive of their relationship to it. Writers have long lamented the insufficiency of words in the face of the rapture and terror of our emotions; as Flaubert wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.” Yet here, Han asks us to consider another possibility. What if it is not human experience that exceeds the limits of language, but language that extends beyond human limitations, and is capable of expressing concepts and feelings that we might be too afraid to acknowledge or explore?
What does it take to lead what’s called a “flourishing life”? Pleasure? Satisfied desires? Friendships? Opportunities? Fulfilling labor? Paul Woodruff’s new study Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of Socrates (2022), confirmed and illustrated by his experiences as an officer during the Vietnam War, suggests an item that seldom makes it onto contemporary lists: a reasonably clear conscience. We all know—some of us via testimony, others by bitter personal experience—that guilt and remorse over terrible deeds can rip a soul into shreds, putting inner harmony, and thus happiness, beyond reach. Here is a book that takes conscience seriously and offers a path to peace of mind.
The oldest written story of a border dates back to 2,400 BC, carved in cuneiform into a half-meter-tall pillar of crystalline limestone. It tells of an argument between two cities over a stretch of Mesopotamian barley fields called the “edge of the plain”—now part of the deserts of Iraq. For a century and a half, these fields changed hands, most often violently. The pillar, which was placed on the border between the cities, gave only one side of the dispute. Among other details, it explained the origin of the line it demarcated: that it was drawn by the father of all the gods, at the very beginning of time. Territory, it said, was eternal.
I began to learn beekeeping in 2020, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly everyone who works for Two Hives Honey, the Austin company that now employs me, had some previous career. I had been a bookseller at Malvern Books, an independent Austin store specializing in experimental literature, and I had sent my first novel out on submission two weeks before Austin temporarily shut down nonessential businesses. In the months that followed, the bookstore drastically cut its hours and lost much of its staff, including me. My novel waited in limbo.
In virtually every circumstance that comes to mind, a steaming pile of rice is stellar on its own. But to top those grains with ingredients simmered in dashi and soy sauce, before they’re set into a bowl and sprinkled with scallions and shichimi, culminating in delicious donburi, is another plane of pleasure entirely. As straightforward as these Japanese rice bowls may seem — (perfect) rice! Covered with (perfectly) poached ingredients! Served in a (perfect) bowl! — their understatedness belie their exquisiteness.
It is a bright summer’s day on the Eurasian plains, sometime in the neighborhood of 4000 B.C. As children shout at each other in a Proto-Indo-European language and pursue each other through the tall grasses, you milk the hoofed animal standing in front of you, a horse. Her young foal is tied to her rear leg to trick her into thinking that its mouth, not your hands, is tugging at her teats. The milk splashes into a textured earthen pot and you smile as you see that the liquid has already started to curdle, the sign of a healthy food brewed by nature and enjoyed by you and your kinfolk.
For Anne Mendelson, a culinary historian, this is the paradise we have lost. In “Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood,” she chronicles how modern society fell away from this symbiotic relationship with dairy and how, in what she calls “one of the great flukes of food history,” liquid cow’s milk cheated its way into becoming a darling of the medical community. She demonstrates that physicians and public health officials, some of them charlatans, most of them well-meaning, all of them under-informed, waged a public relations crusade in which they touted liquid milk’s supposed nutritional benefits, such that by the 20th century, the public came to accept it as an essential item on the grocery list.
The beauty of Baddiel’s paradoxical book is that, after admitting his attraction to a God that offers deliverance from death, he confesses he loves his ancestral religion for its unceasing struggle for life in this world. “If I am moved by Jewish survival,” he writes “I am moved by Judaism. There’s no getting around it.” He has no need to regret the absence of a death-denying God. The story of survival is enough. But if there is inconsistency here, it is more than forgivable. Baddiel’s contradictions are like his jokes – pointers to truths that bring us back to earth.
Who she was as a writer bore only one very specific relationship to who she was as a woman: They inhabited the same body. It was to this body that she was confined, actually and artistically — to its social and economic destiny, to its gendered limitations, to its geographical and temporal location. What had happened to and in this body, what it in turn had made happen in the years from its birth to the present moment, was the limit and extent of her material.
That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but it’s a pattern we see again and again. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a “smutmobile” filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist?
For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.
At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years.
Will that last thought be a profound pearl of wisdom? An expletive?
Some part of me thought, Stop. Let them rest, dead in their own way. Let us not create Frankenstein’s monsters out of the corpses of feminist intellectuals. Another part of me thought, This novel is almost like a spiritualist document, an effortful séance that grows increasingly heartbreaking and garbled. Perhaps all biography is built from that kind of earnest ventriloquism, that kind of clouded remembering. Ghosts appear in our mouths, confused and out of time. The widows stand vigil: writing, writing, writing.
Even if you didn’t spend your adolescence puking on your shoes in parking lots, flirting with calamity as distorted riffs thunder out of blown-out speakers or shutting your eyes while driving down the highway as you crank up to “Fade to Black,” “Gone to the Wolves” captures the feeling of loving something so intensely it just might kill you.
Hertog is no passive player in this story, having been a student and collaborator of Hawking. He is, instead, an active participant. Intriguingly, as Hertog explains, we are all active participants in Hawking’s final theory, shaping the universe by observing it.
In this new book, Hertog tells us that Hawking’s final theory tries to address one of the deep mysteries of the universe, something known as the problem of cosmological fine-tuning.
Look at the Lights doesn’t lay out a quasi-legal case against Auchan, nor is it a snarkily supercilious theoretical takedown of mall culture. Rather, Ernaux faces the harder emotional truth: you can hate everything the superstore stands for, and you can feel somewhere on the dull spectrum of bored to mildly uncomfortable when you enter, but ultimately, the superstore offers a real opportunity to feel the edges of your own anonymity, one you don’t get anywhere else. There is a certain vulnerability in admitting that you want to lose yourself and that you might find yourself among a collection of objects you didn’t realize you needed. There is an illicit pleasure in aimless browsing on this scale: like running, or swimming, or lying dead in corpse pose, there’s a relentless surrender to bodily experience. Caught in a list of endless stuff, you don’t have to choose, or think; you can just be.
It takes guts and a sense of humor to kick off your debut memoir with an insult from Andy Warhol. “Seeing Alexandra was sad — a big rug-rat hanging off Viva — she’ll probably turn out a mess.” But Alexandra Auder uses it as the epigraph for her impossible-to-put-down memoir, “Don’t Call Me Home,” a must-read for children of narcissistic parents.
What I didn’t realize then is that by refusing to speak Tagalog I was enacting my first attempts at translation, making sense of the dislocation I felt as an immigrant daughter translating my parents’ words into a language that symbolized belonging to me, even though I rarely felt like I belonged.
While caves in the upper Lozoya Valley, about an hour's drive north of Madrid, had been known about since the 19th Century, the Des-Cubierta site was only found in 2009 during investigation of other cavities on the hillside. As researchers slowly uncovered the layers inside, a startling picture of the cave began to emerge. The skulls, they argued, pointed to something beyond the simple detritus of hunting and gathering. Instead, they saw the skulls as symbolic – perhaps even a shrine containing trophies of the chase.
If correct, it would raise a tantalising prospect – Neanderthals were capable of the kind of complex symbolic concepts and behaviours that characterise our own species.
Sparrow is a wonderful novel, but it’s also a visceral and brutal one. The coming of Christianity has brought shame and censure to the lives of the wolves, even though, as Jacob says, “the entire empire is a mosaic of rape and murder and bastardy and forced labour”. Like the very best of novelists engaging with the classical past – Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Mary Renault – Hynes has found a way of making the events of almost 2,000 years ago feel as if they are happening right now, in front of our faces. That’s maybe because, in the sordid, sensual and secretive world he’s writing about, less has changed than we might think.
After the Spanish were overthrown in 1898, Filipinos, who were preparing for independence, found that their nation had been sold to the United States for $20 million. Hard on the heels of this new colonial occupation, a transport ship carrying 600 teachers arrived, to disseminate English as a “civilizing” medium. A 1935 constitution established English, alongside Spanish, as an official language. During World War II, the Philippines was occupied by the Japanese, leaving yet another linguistic deposit.
Amid such a polyglot swirl, what tongue should a Filipino literature speak? The answer given by Gina Apostol in her sprawling, ambitious new novel, “La Tercera,” is — all of them. The book’s substance is a story about a New York writer who is forced to come to terms with her difficult family history, but its most profound preoccupations are linguistic.
Beautiful feelings produce bad literature. If we were to take this idea from Dazai’s unnamed narrator as truth and not glib maxim, then perhaps Dazai has proven its inverse: the ugliest feelings in the depths of ourselves can be mined to produce literature that persists beyond the flesh.
The Hands of Time will appeal to anyone interested in the complexities of making things, and how societies pursue, manage, and implement innovation and how science — in this instance timekeeping — can bolster democracy.