But in between The Shining and The Stand King published a book that complicated that image and, perhaps more than any of those others, foreshadowed the extraordinary career that was to come: Night Shift, a collection of those works from the pages of publications like Ubris and Cavalier, written back when he was a hungry comer. The tales in Night Shift are well-crafted and preternaturally fluid works of storytelling, with a master’s sense of structure and suspense. They also are the earliest evidence of King’s greatest gift: his twisted and seemingly inexhaustible imagination.
Yet, Scream did not tell me about anything called “film studies”—at least not right away. Instead, the film champions a celebration of pop-culture authority outside the university. The fanboy’s objects of expertise, mode of delivery, and “insider” audience are positioned as a rebellious, resentful resistance to the oppressive posture of the intellectual. Scream was written by Kevin Williamson, who used his exhaustive familiarity with the horror films of the 1980s to write a new one. Williamson might have been aware of film studies as a discipline (he had transitioned to screenwriting while studying at UCLA) but Scream is notably silent on its existence. This ostensibly democratic politics was noted by the late, great film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote that the film “is self-deconstructing”; he explains that deconstruction “is an academic word. It means saying what everybody knows about the movies in words nobody can understand.” Ebert was being derisive, but he had delivered an item of importance to me: the “academic word.” Reading and rereading his review over a dial-up connection, I slowly understood that the study of films was not only for fanboys in the movies—maybe it was already happening.
A cover is all about disclosure. A cover may encase a book but its purpose is to encourage readers to pry open its pages. A cover is as much an invitation as it is a revelation. This I’ve long understood in the abstract, but it wasn’t until the design proofs for my own came in that I realized just how literal that would feel. With its warm orange-yellow hue staring back at me, The Male Gazed cover was an arresting reminder that I’d written an entire book about desire and masculinity (there was a male torso on full display asking you to lust after it) filtered through my own experience (there was that “taught me” line in the magenta-colored subtitle right atop my own bolded name). All of this gave me pause: if every cover is a promise, I realized that what I’d be asking of my readers was precisely the kind of welcome ogling my prose dissected through its many chapters. On a more frivolous note, that image of a shirtless man wearing only a chain around his neck made me uneasy for a wholly different reason: I knew close friends would inquire whether, narcissist that I can sometimes be, I had posed for my own cover.
A quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, in the borderless realm of the midwater, two blue-green orbs illuminate the inky black. They glow for a few seconds then disappear. When they return, it’s for the same duration. The same disappearance. It’s a signal, a message, the morse code of an ancient language of light.
Wait … healthy doughnuts? Surely not. Everyone knows that doughnuts are deeply unhealthy. That’s the whole point. Take away the sugary glaze and oily smoosh of dough and what are you left with? Nothing. You’ll have to prize our sugared rings from our caramel-coated fingers. Some things are too sacred to give up.
Or maybe we don’t have to. A shake-up of food rules in the United Kingdom has sparked a new kind of doughy disruption: the quest for healthy confectionery. Or, if not healthy exactly, then at least much healthier than the fried goods currently on offer. The winds of change are blowing, and they smell a lot like delicious steam-baked dough.
So: a well-told novel of crime and detection. There are plenty of them on the market. What sets this one apart, what gives it both grit and texture, is its unerring depiction of small-town rural life and the uneasy (and sometimes violent) interactions between Charon’s white and Black citizens. Sheriff Crown finds himself in that gray area between, with a foot in both worlds. The novel gets mighty down-home Southern gothic in places — gay men passing for straight, the illegitimate child of an interracial relationship, backwoods snake-handling Jesus-shouters — but Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal. He stays firmly focused on Titus, and on the town of Charon itself. For me, the reality of the locale and the people who live there lifted this story up and made it sing.
If the #EscapeTheCorset protesters are engaged in “a general strike against aesthetic labor,” as Hu so wisely writes, what exactly are their demands? Most striking laborers do not aim to abolish the workplace but to reform it. How can beauty be rewritten so that it frees rather than fetters? What will women ask for when at last they have a chance to negotiate for better terms?
By removing the human perspective from the narration, “Open Throat” proposes a deceptively simple equation that exposes us for who we are: vulnerable, reckless beings who worship “green paper,” talk into wires and have rendered the natural world unlivable. More important, the novel introduces a tender, unforgettable protagonist. Though many readers will label “Open Throat” unconventional, this act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception. At its best, fiction can make the familiar strange in order to bring readers and our world into scintillating focus. “Open Throat” is what fiction should be.
Maybe it's because so many of us were separated from one another during the height of the pandemic, or that during that time we grew accustomed to socializing less, working from home and staying in — but it seems people are craving connection now more than ever. Rowley's “The Celebrants” is not only a reminder of that, but a salve. Treat yourself, read this book, and call an old friend.
Notes on Her Color is not only a debut novel by Jennifer Neal, but also a musical composition. Each word is a note carefully considered before being etched onto the page with the hope of bringing art to life and feelings to the surface.
A memoir that celebrates as much as it grieves, rages and broods, Jane Wong’s “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” charts its author’s progress from the casinos of New Jersey to the college dorms of Upstate New York, to Hong Kong and Iowa and finally Bellingham, Wash., where she now teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. Composed of 12 linked essays separated by shorter, lyrical interludes on topics ranging from cyberfeminist search engines to dragon fruit to “guts,” the book catalogues the highs and lows of the literary life, turning over, at length, the joys of acceptance, the ache of rejection, the ecstasy of professional recognition and the sting of casual racism in the field. It reminds readers to treasure the fruits of their labor, as well as the support systems that make success possible.
Historians are in the business of digging stories out of the archives. But in “My Hijacking,” published June 6 by Harper, Hodes also goes digging through her own recollections. The book is the story of a dramatic and politically charged event, but also an exploration of trauma and memory, the relationship between our older and younger selves and the connection between personal experience and capital-H history.