On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longevity, was harder to pin down. Perhaps due to this very indefiniteness, it provided raw material for his aesthetic imagination.
The first rule of wellness food is: it shouldn’t look like food. You might recognize some elements of the food as food, but there should be plausible deniability—they could just as easily be not-food. Those zucchini ribbons could be part of a floral arrangement. The raw cacao might be mulch; the kelp appears freshly plucked from a reef. It’s key to avoid any association with consumption. These dishes can and should be savored, as one might savor the feeling of a spring breeze across the skin.
The taquito! It’s a tiny dream in a tortilla — simplicity incarnate, endlessly amenable. Hardly as ubiquitous as its sibling the taco, and slightly less elaborate than the sauced enchilada, it can come smothered in queso fresco and lettuce, if that’s how you’d prefer it, or unadorned in a paper wrap, or spread atop smoking pastel plates.
Robert Selby’s The Kentish Rebellion is a rare feat of poetry: a book-length sequence of forgotten history, conveyed in a mosaic of events and personages, cinematic in its high-definition detail, and daringly anachronistic in ways that make pertinent the past. As a playwright as well as a poet, I find myself contemplating the dramaturgical elements at play in a collection that invokes the three-act structure of stage and screen: a “Prelude” of nine poems, setting the scene and lighting the fuse; an “Interlude” that does not serve as an interval in the theatrical sense but as an escalatory immersion in the mind of a murderous fanatic; and a third-act eruption of the Royalist rebellion in the county of Kent in England in 1648. This dramatic structure constitutes the book’s compelling, propulsive engine.
In her new memoir, “George,” Frieda Hughes rarely mentions her famous parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But their absence — in life and art — underscores this poignant and often funny story about, of all things, her relationship with a magpie.
Yes, a magpie. That loud, often destructive animal many consider a pest — and a close relation to the crow, a bird that, perhaps coincidentally, was the subject of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes (“When Crow cried his mother’s ear/ Scorched to a stump”).