I’d gotten into the habit of locking my door before going to sleep. Stories of murders were dominating the local news at the time; two girls about my age whose bodies and bones had turned up by a lake not far from where I lived. It wasn’t clear or logical, even to me, what protection locks were supposed to afford: both victims had been killed while out jogging during the daytime, not snatched out of their beds, and the attacks had taken place along a nature trail and not in a quiet suburb. Still, the steady drip of stranger danger messaging I’d absorbed over the last decade or so meant that any new threat could be absorbed by osmosis and incorporated into the faceless, ever-present figure of the Kidnapper. In this context, my door-locking was less practical than ritual, one that brought me some inchoate sense of safety and wellbeing, like a psychic sugar pill.
I passed the better part of the afternoon jabbing and scraping a straightened paper clip into the hole in my doorknob, waiting for whatever happened inside locks to happen. At one point, nearing defeat, I asked my stepmother if we could go to the hardware store to buy a lockpicking kit. There’s no such thing, she said firmly. I frowned; I was sure I’d heard the phrase before, but it was true that the more I turned the words over in my head the more implausible they sounded. A box full of tools purpose-built for break-ins? That you could just buy like it was a candy bar? Surely that couldn’t be right. But then I heard a click, and I felt the door give way, and suddenly the question was moot, and I allowed it to submerge itself in the lower depths of my subconscious for another decade or so.
I wake early each morning, before the kids, to write and see the real city—my private Brooklyn curving in on itself, the prose poem of citywide snow removal and garbage pick-ups, geese migrating over Kings County rooftops in V-formation. The humor, the horror, the wonder. How to chronicle it all? I don’t feel like it’s actual writing unless I burn out my computer, smoke puffing from its mechanical gills, in the same liminal state of system overdrive I find myself in daily. So I sit behind my smoking MacBook Air, a woman with a story to tell.
We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent and more faithful reading.
There are many poems found in the Bible. We know this, vaguely and without giving it too much thought, but shouldn’t we be rather astonished by the role of poetry in a collection of books with such a pressing and salutary Word to express? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves if the presence of this writing—so much more self-conscious and desirous than is prose of a form it can make vibrate—affects the biblical “message” and changes its nature?
There is probably no such thing as a place for everyone. But the diner has been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness since its earliest days as a horse-drawn food cart selling sandwiches and coffee. At the prototypical American diner, the story goes, workers and students and the unemployed could all rub shoulders with one another, as long as they had a few cents for a meal. Diners have become synonymous with these other images — the working class, the small-town community center, a place for “real” Americans free of frills and ostentation, and most of all, a place for “everyone.” For politicians and celebrities, or anyone looking to (as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tweeted last year) “meet the most interesting people” over eggs and iced tea, this is what is being evoked. Such that it doesn’t matter whether diners, in their current state, are actually those things.
Restaurant owners — like Redding of Thai Diner, Samuel Yoo of NYC’s Chinatown-influenced Golden Diner, and Sofia Baltopoulos of the Tasty vegan diner in Philadelphia — are beginning to expand the definition of what a diner can be. But the survival of diners has long depended on their association with this down-home, ordinary imagery, where folks from different walks of life can put aside their differences and find common ground over sandwich platters. Can there ever really be a place where “everyone” is welcome? How much of the diner is a myth?
On a surface level, I suppose I was just hoping for anything other than corporate monotony. But on a deeper level, I think I wanted to find a place of independent character and ideally someplace old, where people had been eating for decades. I wanted a restaurant that had survived a changing world and somehow wore its years gracefully but honestly. I hoped for patrons with weathered faces, and a server who’d committed a crime two states over, or maybe dated Bob Dylan in the ’60s, or fought in a war that no one remembers. The toast would come with margarine and the soda with chipped ice in a 32-ounce plastic cup, but the coffee would come in a 6-ounce mug with endless refills of varying temperatures. I wanted a steak that begged to be smothered in A-1 Sauce, maybe served as an open-face sandwich that really just means “on top of a slice of sourdough toast.” I’d order the soup of the day, no matter what is in it. I knew that I would rather fast for the next 4½ hours than eat a Deluxe McCrispy.
Open The Library of Broken Worlds to just about any page and you will find rich storytelling that ranges from the practical (every food detail is a delight) to the explosive, from the intimate details of Freida’s life to the story of how her world came to be. Johnson layers myths on histories on gods on planets, and it feels as if there’s enough world—or worlds—here to sustain countless more tales. But this one alone is a feast, artful, imaginative, and unmatched.
There’s a well-known bit of literary advice, often misattributed to Vladimir Nabokov, that goes like this: The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then, once he’s up there, throw rocks at him. This maxim is sound, so far as it goes. But it doesn’t say what should happen if the character dies and comes back to life as a tree — or at least a treelike variety of zombie.
This is what happens in Lorrie Moore’s fluky, fitfully funny and folk-horror-adjacent new novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home.”
Her latest novel is of course about dead people and therefore has a plot, and yet Moore manages to pack in a civil war-era legend, a brother’s final moments in a hospice, and a road novel in less than 200 pages. I Am Homeless is a triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.
But at its heart, “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women” is much more than a story about a pioneering doctor. It’s a tale of enduring friendship and the effect it can have both in the moment and centuries afterward.