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”.