There is the dream of the writer’s life, and there is the reality. We may always want to escape from the world as writers, but the truth is, the work of writing is often embedded into our everyday lives—and inextricable from it, both in process and in theme. If we can create in and amongst mess and chaos, then we’re doing something right.
If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.
The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it.
Most of us would kill for the chance to have one last goodbye with a lost loved one. What if you had that chance? Could even spend a whole road trip with them, revisiting all the ways your lives had intersected?
In Lorrie Moore’s first novel since 2009’s A Gate at the Stairs, the author explores—and blurs—the fine lines between the dead and the living. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home asks questions about grief and depression with death as the platform.
In his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, William Faulkner said, “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” The title of David Gessner’s new book, “A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water,” suggests a 21st-century update of Faulkner’s dictum: Man will prevail but might not endure.
A veteran writer on the environment, Gessner evokes the havoc resulting from human-caused climate change by taking us to a host of melting, blazing, flooded or desiccated places, including the Mississippi River Delta; his hurricane-prone hometown of Wilmington, N.C.; the Colorado River, in the throes of becoming Colorado Creek; Miami, New York and other coastal cities vulnerable to what geology professor Hal Wanless predicts will be “an eight- to ten-foot sea level rise by the end of the century. Maybe eleven to thirteen.”
It’s no secret that humans use their hands, as well as their voices, to communicate. But while countless volumes have been written about the world’s spoken and written languages, gestures appear to have been given short shrift. And so Susan Goldin-Meadow’s new book, “Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts,” comes as a welcome attempt to close the gap.