Branding is in the eye of the beholder and to be an author in 2023 is to live and die by the internet. That's just the reality of the industry. With publishers putting more pressure on authors to move copies and connect with their audience – to build a platform – there is only going to be continued pressure on authors to not only produce good work but to be able to market it on an almost expert level. So for a seasoned author like Gilbert, with literary stature and prominence in the field, pulling a book is not going to hold the same consequences as it does for other authors that might not have built the kind of brand power yet as Gilbert.
My book "A Flat Place" is about the flat landscapes of Britain and Pakistan, and my intense, fascinated love for them. Flat landscapes aren't a popular thing to love. The bare expanses of prairies, fenlands, wheatfields and marshes can seem boring, bleak, even frightening. Their horizons have no landmarks to hang on to: nothing to orientate yourself toward. That's why we hate them or fear them, mostly, in Western culture. It's hard to find the point of them, in a very literal sense.
But I love them in the same way that I love stones and bones. They are hard, inert, inscrutable. Busy being themselves, in a way I can't stop watching. Because they have no landmarks, I can't grab onto them — can't orientate successfully toward them — and so I could look at them forever.
With little said beyond glances and nods, we took up our perch on the curved corner of the long, white marble bar, next to a woman wearing her swimsuit and a towel. "Sorry I didn't have time to change!" she told her companion before ordering a margarita. (Somehow the unspoken rules of dining room attire don't carry the same weight in the bar.) My friends and I spent the next few hours taking the "All Day" part of the restaurant's name a little too literally: sipping low-octane cocktails and slowly noshing on crispy tempura eggplant and slabs of sourdough with butter and house-cured ham. The conversation meandered in the relaxed sort of way it only does on vacation.
One Saturday out of the blue my father announced that it was time for me to ride my bike downtown on my own. My mother was against it. My father spoke on behalf of children worldwide when he said, “Vicki, this is how they learn.”
He was in the front yard wearing tan pants, so he must have been on his way to work. I had my bike on the grass.
“This sidewalk will take you downtown,” he said, pointing at the thin strip of concrete in the grass.
Williams has crafted a layered narrative celebrating a heroine who embodies verve, pluck and courage. Ultimately “The Beach at Summerly” is an ode to a season and a feeling. If our summers past represent a paradise lost, as selves that once were, or might have been, then in Williams’s pages we may briefly recapture the delicious freedom we used to feel when the days became longer and warmer, and we were young and in love.
The era of New York City as a municipal ruin — a period stretching from the late 1960s to the early 1980s — has remained a source of fascination in American culture for so long that it seems to be fulfilling a mythic need. For one thing, New York run amok is the template for the current hysteria, a kind of wish in some quarters, that posits America’s cities as unspeakable hellholes. But to think of it only politically is to deprive this wish of its full power as a metaphor — 1970s New York as a kind of dark id rising to the surface, throwing off sparks like punk rock and hip-hop, hastening civilization’s collapse. Of course, the very idea of a repressed wish is a Freudian concept, and this primal fear of and fascination with fallen New York can seem an extension of a fear of and fascination with all the shrinks (and Jews) running around within it.
It is this gritty, out-of-control (and cheap!) New York that is the principal setting for Alexander Stille’s wonderful and troubling new book, “The Sullivanians,” about a renegade psychoanalytic institute that evolved into a kind of urban commune and then into a frighteningly insular and sadistic cult that held its members in its grip for two generations.