We woke early. We had become synchronised. We shared our dreams. We had dreamed of hydras. We had dreamed of a pantomime horse. On Tuesdays it was often drizzling. It was our day off, and so we shook ourselves awake and walked together, by the river. The pink early-budding tulips in the sunshine of our mornings seemed darts thrown from heaven. Then we crawled back into the bed still hot with us. Half-drowsing we picked the first book we reached for on the shelf. We read, aloud, Eros, you burn us, dawn comes out wearing a purple garment, not letting on that in actual fact we knew nothing about the book we had spoken of so knowledgeably at the bookstore, not letting on that we understood nothing of these words, even if we had often read them.
The National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley’s sophomore story collection, “Witness,” opens with an epigraph from James Baldwin, describing how thin the line is between a witness and an actor: “Nevertheless,” Baldwin concludes, “the line is real.” But is it? Over the course of 10 splendidly thought-provoking stories — set in Brooklyn and featuring animal rescue volunteers, florists, ghosts, UPS workers and a host of other characters — Brinkley shatters Baldwin’s thesis, masterfully demonstrating that witness and actor are one and the same.
Who are we without our memories? How do we stay connected to each other? These questions are at the center of Esmerelda Santiago’s new novel, “Las Madres.” Here Santiago has accomplished what seems to be an impossible feat, centering a character with amnesia due to a traumatic brain injury. And though I initially wondered if Santiago could pull it off, by the end I was sorry to have doubted her. “Las Madres” is a magnificent novel.
Once I started thinking about it like that, I realized I’d been cooking from The Vegetarian Epicure for years, before I even heard of the book, even when I thought a vegetarian diet was all about molded seitan and Tofurkey and other poor imitations of meat. When I made that asparagus galette with ricotta cheese, when I learned how to roast broccoli with salt and olive oil, when I first made a garlic scape pesto and was dumbfounded by how good it tasted, that was all because of The Vegetarian Epicure. Not because those recipes came from the book, but because of the principles behind them did: vegetables should taste like themselves, and vegetables are delicious. That’s the mark of a true classic, that it’s seeped so far into the culture, we can’t even identify where it came from.
“My joke,” the mystery writer Joseph Hansen remarked in an interview, “was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual.”
It was more than a joke. Hansen was a serious writer, a poet published in the New Yorker, a journalist and an author of novels and stories beyond crime fiction. But he is most celebrated for elegant, literary mystery novels. In 1970, when Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen were still knitting their fanciful plots, Hansen entered the field with “Fadeout.” It introduced a 40ish investigator named Dave Brandstetter, who was smart, observant, compassionate and gay.
If there’s a moral to this tale, beyond never naming a fictional character after a person you know, it’s that people love to put themselves at the centre of any story. For me, the most illuminating part was coming into contact with people who felt insulted because they weren’t in the novel. “Why am I not in it?” one neighbour complained. “I feel like I make myself a little bit known around here.”
One thing’s for certain: As we get to know these characters, they do not, as Joe claims invariably happens, “shed one layer of mystery after another, the dismal burlesque towards their inevitable ordinariness.” With revelation upon revelation, their ordinariness seems all the more mysterious, and this first-time novelist all the more masterly at writing in such an original voice.
“Exile did not work out exactly as our parents had planned,” novelist Ana Menéndez once explained in the foreword of a Cuban cookbook. “For their American children, Cuba is little more than a fairy-tale land of perfect fruit and blue hills. Every year the island and whatever promise it once held for us slips farther out of reach.” In her new novel, The Apartment, characters grapple with the pain of that elusive dream, which scholar Isabel Alvarez Borland and others have thoroughly charted as part of the Cuban American literary tradition of political exile, nostalgic longing, and survival—or despair. “Suicide is our one great national pastime. Our Cuban curse,” one character in The Apartment declares.
In marine biology, a whale fall is the body of a dead whale that has slowly descended to the bottom of the ocean. Scavengers strip its flesh, crustaceans and other creatures colonize its skeleton and its decaying bones help sustain countless organisms for years to come, part of the delicate balance of the undersea ecosystem.
It’s lovely, and in keeping with the majesty of the species, that in death a whale bestows life. Daniel Kraus’s thrilling new novel, “Whalefall,” spins the concept into a crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea. That much of the action takes place in an absurdly improbable setting — inside the various stomachs of a 60-ton sperm whale, where a scuba diver has been trapped after being inadvertently swallowed for lunch — well, that only adds to the book’s brash allure.
“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser. It’s highly conscious of Emily Gibbs’s speech about human failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “straining away all the time to make something of itself,” and of the ravages to that earth. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.
The black-market melodrama’s doubled lives, Szalay argues, illustrate the contradictions of the narratives and myths the white middle-class US family has developed about itself, that it has told and retold to itself over and over (often, though of course not solely, through popular media). Throughout Second Lives, Szalay plumbs the depths of these stories, considering, across its five chapters, the genre’s origin in melodrama, gangster films, and mourning plays; reproductive labor and housework; gendered and racialized anxieties; emotional labor and affective self-management; and the stasis and repetition of seriality. In discussing these concerns, Szalay demonstrates how deindustrialization and the loss of the “family wage” have produced the black-market melodrama’s “most essential discovery […] that distinctions between home and work cannot in fact be maintained.” Prestige television—or “TV’s quality renaissance,” as Szalay calls it (and which he traces to the emergence of the black-market melodrama)—works in part to represent, mediate, and negotiate this discovery, even as it also represents, mediates, and negotiates the conditions under which this revelation has become the case.
This is not going to be one of those laments about how nobody reads the great old books anymore. Not many people read them when they first appeared, either. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully.
That’s what I mean about the gap between the book and its title. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise. Just try to say those five words without yawning. But look inside and you will be jolted awake.
In January 2023, while waiting to board a plane in Stockholm, I saw how swiftly grief can take hold of a person. In a quiet corner of Arlanda Airport, it unfolded before me like a scene from a movie: an older woman answered her cell phone, listened for a few moments to the voice on the other end, then burst into tears. Her anguish was so immediate, and so visceral, that it could only have been the worst kind of news—the end of a marriage, a dream, or a life. Not just any life, though: one so precious to her that its end was immediately comprehensible.
It was this immediacy that struck me as cinematic, because in real life, or at least in my life, death is many other things before it is something I can cry about. Last year, when my uncle Bill died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven, months passed before I could even conceive of his absence. He meant more to me than any other man, including my father, and yet his death was not at once fathomable to me. It landed with no impact I could make sense of; robbed of the clarifying weight of tragedy, I experienced his death first as an inconvenience. An obstacle. A disturbance that immediately complicated my life, or at least my career, which is what I had instead of a life. The instincts that had helped lift me out of poverty had also made it hard to slow down, and so I lived as if on the run. Next stop: Tokyo, where I planned to cement my relationship with a big American magazine by writing the definitive profile of a major Japanese novelist.
Why do people lose their minds, and where do they go when they’re no longer themselves? Is mental illness curable? To the extent that a work of fiction can contend with the enormity of these questions, Commitment, the seventh novel by Mona Simpson, does a masterful job of it. The story sets a family in motion over 400 pages, painting a portrait of a mother, her children, and their friends, in an attempt to get at the heart of what it’s like to have someone in your inner circle completely lose themselves to a mental breakdown.
This little book is beautifully done. One has sympathy for Savonarola – he is heroic and his end is appalling. But one would no more care to live in his Florence than in Calvin’s Geneva or Mau’s China. Still this is a remarkable, moving and thought-provoking book.
What was new about two women having a baby? Why did Logan’s story need to be told? These are questions the writer herself grapples with throughout the book. By the end I was convinced not only that hers was an important story, but that her obvious struggle to tell it was really the point.
I published my first picture book for children two years ago, when I was 62 — a bit late to the reading circle, I admit. But William Steig didn’t publish his first picture book until he was 61, and Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when “Little House in the Big Woods” came out in 1932, so as a late bloomer I’m in good company. The funny thing is, writing for kids had long been an ambition of mine, but until recently I didn’t know it had long been an ambition. While that might sound contradictory, remember that there is an entire industry — talk therapy — built on the idea that one’s own back story can be terra incognita.
There’s something uncanny about the chain. The very combination of words “The Cheesecake Factory” evokes the idea of a humble, blue-collar dessert diner, yet every Cheesecake Factory looks like what would happen if a time-traveling Italian artisan drew ancient Egypt from memory. Somewhere between the chicken samosas, the Skinnylicious section, and the Americana Cheeseburger Glamburger®, between the towering columns, overstuffed booths, and the free refills on soda, the veil between sense and nonsense, lucidity and lunacy, and good and bad dissolves.
This, I’m told, is what makes the Cheesecake Factory a special place — a brave, unapologetic lack of self-awareness or pretense. The rules that govern regular restaurants have no power over the Cheesecake Factory. If there is one rule at the Cheesecake Factory, it’s that the conventional wisdom of the restaurant industry — keeping costs low, concepts simple, and menus under 200 items — is meant to be ignored.
The hotel lobby is a category of place I had once written off as the epitome of dull corporate life. Splendid decor aside, this one was as inoffensive in atmosphere, menu, and company as you could expect from a giant chain in the downtown of a midsize Midwestern city. That suited me just fine. It was bright enough to read in, quiet enough to talk on the phone, empty enough to find the perfect chair—but lively enough to keep the hotel room blues away.
This is the anodyne essence of the hotel lobby, whatever its architectural flourishes. It’s a place required to play so many roles at once—concierge and reception, conference on-ramp, family playpen, meeting place, café-bar, deal zone—that it can never stray too far in any one direction. Most public life is commercialized, and most commercial spaces are circumscribed by waitlists, high prices, esoteric specialization, and behavioral codes. But the hotel lobby is free ground. Have a seat, why don’t you?
In September of 2020, I started working more regularly at my local library, and not exactly on purpose. It was a tumultuous time: the world was reeling from COVID-related chaos, illness, and death, and our country was beginning to reckon, finally, with racially motivated murders by police. In the midst of this, I had my own private, puny sorrow—one that hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things, but wrecked me all the same: I’d written a second novel that no one wanted to publish.
Bart’s Books’ status as a travel destination feels fitting — a story coming full circle — given that the bookstore was inspired by its founder’s travels far from home.
Seth Taranoff, the young Jewish narrator of Ben Purkert’s witty debut novel, “The Men Can’t Be Saved,” is what in Yiddish is called a schlemiel — a congenital bungler, a screw-up, a klutz. It’s not that he’s constantly breaking things, though a borrowed Range Rover does get pretty roughed up under his watch. He’s a bumbler because he’s so determined to make things simple and frictionless for himself that he’soblivious to reality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he works in advertising.
“The Last Ranger” can get convoluted in juggling all this, but it thrives as an old-fashioned duality-of-man drama. Ren may be more dirtied up by his troubled past than he wants to admit to himself; Les may have kinder, more understandable reasons for his actions than we know; both may have more in common than they think. It’s a durable trope that’s worked from Jekyll and Hyde to Kirk and Khan, but Heller is less invested in identifying winners and losers. Here, everybody has a “cross-grained stubbornness and iconoclast’s temper.”
“I look forward to a rebellion,” said Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. It was 1958, and Jackson Pollock was two years gone. Barr wanted something, anything, to replace Abstract Expressionism. Pop, minimalism, hard-edge painting — the next big thing hadn’t grown big enough to assert itself.
In “The Slip,” Prudence Peiffer’s tenderly researched group biography, six visual artists in different seasons of life and seeking different aesthetic ideals met Barr’s challenge with an unlikely spirit of concert.
After all, during shutdowns it felt like many of us were stuck in time loops, repeating the same day over and over. In addition, "It felt like during the pandemic the timeline split, like we're in an alternate timeline we're not supposed to be in," says writer and avid time travel fan Rebecca Johns-Trissler. "It's like something is off. Something feels deeply messed up. If we could have seen what was coming at the end of 2019, what would we change?"
“Like the dope fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm, I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter,” W Somerset Maugham wrote in his 1932 short story “The Book Bag”. I entirely agree: if you want to feel at home in a new city, simply bring a book as you saunter the streets.
In buying books, I’m feeding the delusion that I will get to them all. Because, from my cockeyed perspective, it’s the noble thing to do. And perhaps it takes me back to better times. Yes, book sales are down. But I’m once again doing my part to right the ship.
At night we’re just animals, I was reminded. The clients, yes, seeking release they couldn’t admit during daylight hours, but also the workers who manned the various portions of the strip mall after dark. The way we cared for each other, sometimes more in silent gestures than anything else, felt connected to our deepest instincts as pack animals. No matter how much I wanted to go home, there was some comfort in the simplicity of that connection.
On the rapidly expanding shelf of dystopian novels, “My Name Is Iris” offers a sharp vision of how racism gets imbibed by its victims like a sweet poison. In Skyhorse’s telling, America’s melting-pot myth is a narcotic that promises inclusion but induces self-harm.
When the association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meets to decide how the states of Southeast Asia will navigate the tricky passage between China and the United States, they do it in English. Other languages fall victim to practicality (Bahasa or Tagalog aren’t widely learned outside their homelands) or politics (Japanese runs the risk of recalling wartime hegemony, and Chinese might suggest acquiescence to a contemporary one). There is irony in the fact that the world’s most economically dynamic region, and potentially its most turbulent one, operates in a language whose spread is a product of imperial history.
It’s this irony that lies at the heart of Nile Green’s fascinating and engaging book, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (2022). There is no doubt, as Green shows, that the geographical concept of Asia has become distinct and meaningful. But there was nothing natural about it. Of course, in a certain sense, all geographical terms are constructs. But rhetoric in recent years about an “Asian century,” or the importance of Asian markets or Asian values, belies the reality that the commonality in the region is often patchy and frequently a product of its experience being mediated through its encounters with Europe. The development of the European Union, flawed and partial an account of the continent though it is, has given shape to some sense of common purpose, although not a common language. Like ASEAN, the EU uses English more than any other language, Brexit or not. Asian collective identity does not have quite as obvious a political coalition, but a more amorphous one does exist and can be analyzed.
Will readers like us therefore need to become the literary equivalents of the Amish, living peacefully and slightly outside the technological world? Can reading and writing literature become our version of riding in horse-drawn buggies cantering peacefully down a car-jammed highway? Or do we simply need to accept new forms of art, whatever they might be, as when Bibles were first printed by the Gutenberg Press back in 1455, and a new bright vision arose from reading?
The four-color theorem is now widely accepted as a fact, but still a yearning lingers over it. A computer program that systematically analyzes reams of configurations doesn’t explain exactly why every map can be filled with four colors. Although mathematicians now welcome computers as partners in discovery, they still search today for a more illuminating proof of this colorful puzzle.
It was a little after 5:30 a.m., a cold dawn in June, and I was sitting on a meditation cushion in a big red barn in the Hudson Valley. A dozen other people sat with me in deep silence. Hundreds of birds began to sing in the meadows and trees. In the distance, we could hear livestock and machinery, the sounds of a working farm waking up.
I had not looked at an email, chat, headline, news alert or tweet for several days. What a strange situation for an editor who leads a breaking news team at The New York Times.
If the death of Boethius marked the end of an era, was Theoderic a benighted barbarian who kick-started the Middle Ages?
Or was he the last great custodian of antiquity? After all, the king had governed so adeptly for most of his three decades in power that many modern historians came to see his reign as a “golden age” — a time of prosperity made possible by a leader who apparently respected Roman culture more than many earlier Roman emperors did.
When Paddington Bear set out for London in 1958, equipped with only a small brown suitcase and a tag around his neck imploring strangers to “Please look after this bear,” he claimed his homeland as “darkest Africa.” Of course, Africa is filled with all sorts of magnificent beasts, but bears, unfortunately, are not one of them.
Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington, was blithely unaware of this fact when he sent his manuscript to literary agent Harvey Unna, who swiftly responded enthusiastically, but with an important correction.
Lately, I have been interested in completism. I have been moved to embrace fannish obsession, to consider a writer’s bibliography deeply, to try and read every book in a single author’s oeuvre (even the bad ones). I’m curious about them all: the books that may have been written out of desperation and for money, the ones that came easily, the volumes that still don’t quite click.
The early ones, too—the books in which you can see the writer still half-formed, still moldable, not yet hardened into whatever self, whatever public pose or affectation, they will later self-consciously sink into. The young writer, scratching out the words and themes they’ll return to over the arc of their career.
My brother and I would always order a large half regular, half pepperoni. A simple pie, sweet-sauced and oily, which we’d take home. When I think of pizza, I think of those afternoons with my brother: Pardon the Interruption; green bean bags; the space-age boot-up sound of our Sega Dreamcast.
Strange, but often remarked upon, is that food is the pathway to memory. Stranger, I’ve learned, is that when memory is distorted by loss, the food distorts too. Pizza, which I’ve always loved for its humbleness, has become redolent of grief.
The miracle of “The Brothers Karamazov” is that somehow it all fits. This cacophonous novel, made up of wildly divergent arguments written by an author who refuses to let any point of view go by without cross-examination, coheres. Its elements are all made, by Dostoyevsky, to belong. Every digression becomes key to the case, every forgotten character is called to the stand. United by guilt, they all own up to the parts they played. Like good siblings, they learn to share.
True, Barker’s poetic sensibility can feel willed; this is the sort of book that sees fit to describe Glasgow as “this most marcasite city”. But more often the diction hits the bullseye: playful as well as serious, mashing near homophones to layer meaning (“the messh of existence”, say, which more or less sums up the book’s theme), and a slyly sexual undertow that hints at the range of the narrator’s unvoiced feeling. In this novel – a fleeting requiem – the problem of finding the right words ultimately leads to none at all: “what’s to be said? / When your blood’s full thrumming / but all you have is A-Z.”
When Millhauser is on, he hands you a periscope of his own unique design, and he allows you to really look and feel. You can bring your own allegory.
After reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, “The Country of the Blind,” you will look at the English language differently. You will even look at the word “look” differently. (And, at intervals: “reading.”)
Leland is a prolific podcaster and longtime editor at the literary magazine The Believer, whose troubles in recent years had some wags calling it The Beleaguered. He is also beleaguered by — or, his book suggests, maybe blessed with — a rare genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa that is gradually causing him to lose his vision. While posing considerable challenges, this has given him what most authors of nonfiction crave: a definitive Big Topic.
Though this is a book often driven by exasperation, a labour of love written with scholarly precision, Gillett’s passion for the transcendental, communitarian experience of dancing shines through throughout.
It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. She taught me the piano by holding her hands over mine, bending my fingers into arches above the keys. When I was just a boy, she died in a car accident. Afterward, I was both boundlessly angry and attached to the piano. I played it with extreme force, sometimes bleeding onto the keys. I still feel her hands when I play. I feel them even more when I’m learning a new instrument.
As I write this, on a laptop in my kitchen, I can see at least a hundred instruments around me. There’s a Baroque guitar; some Colombian gaita flutes; a French musical saw; a shourangiz (a Persian instrument resembling a traditional poet’s lute); an Array mbira (a giant chromatic thumb piano, made in San Diego); a Turkish clarinet; and a Chinese guqin. A reproduction of an ancient Celtic harp sits near some giant penny whistles, a tar frame drum, a Roman sistrum, a long-neck banjo, and some duduks from Armenia. (Duduks are the haunting reed instruments used in movie soundtracks to convey xeno-profundity.) There are many more instruments in other rooms of the house, and I’ve learned to play them all. I’ve become a compulsive explorer of new instruments and the ways they make me feel.
Palumbi was diving in one of the most radioactive places on Earth: the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Archipelago. Nearly seven decades earlier, this ring-shaped band of islands – formerly an archetypal tropical paradise – had been used to test the atomic bomb. Over 12 years in the 1940s and 50s, the US blasted its tranquil waters and those of a neighbouring atoll with 67 nuclear weapons equivalent to 210 megatonnes of TNT – more than 7,000 times the force used at Hiroshima. Palumbi's navigation system was off because certain islands, still recorded on older maps, had been entirely vaporised by the explosions.
This dark past has left a devastating legacy for the Bikini islanders, who have been unable to return to their home ever since. But it has also created an accidental sanctuary: a place where wildlife is protected by the area's very toxicity. For almost 70 years, there has been no fishing.
With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels. I’m not the novelist for the age. You want horror, you can get horror. You want dystopia, you can get dystopia. You want disaffected ennui and depression, you got that covered.”
Her retort to those who complain that her fiction is “naive” or even Pollyanna-ish is: “How many serial killers do you know?” She likes to write about the people around her. “If you are writing about mobsters and murderers and psychopaths, then people say: ‘Oh, you’re telling the real story.’ And I think: ‘No, you’re not. Because you don’t know those people.’”
In Russo’s hands these intentions — and the expectations and forgiveness of others — are fine brushes and a palette. He paints a shining fresco of a working-class community, warts and all, a 30-year project come to fruition in this last, best book.
This is a strikingly assured and accomplished debut. Sara Ochs clearly has a fine understanding of the conventions and possibilities of the psychological thriller. She has devised an intricate and satisfying puzzle here. In the manner of a more seasoned crime writer, she shows an awareness of when it is best to be evasive, elusive, coy. She has an instinct for the timing of her crucial revelations. This sense of timing is impeccable and highly dramatic.
A few times a day, a strange, pulsating sound fills the Boston headquarters of the National Braille Press. Thun-thun. Thun-thun. This is what employees of the nonprofit braille publisher call the office’s “braille heartbeat,” generated by an assortment of printing presses—50-year-old Heidelbergs and modern big-roll embossers alike—pumping away in the basement, producing books and other reading materials for blind readers.
NBP has been at the forefront of braille publishing since 1927, when it was founded by the blind Italian immigrant Francis Ierardi—a classmate of Helen Keller’s at the Perkins School—as a weekly newspaper serving Boston’s blind community. Demand was so great that it went national after just three months. Since then the organization has expanded far beyond a single publication. Today, NBP produces and distributes braille books, reading materials, and technologies for the nation, with clients ranging from individual blind readers to the Library of Congress.
Literary life rarely offers such splendid spectacles today. Open book-review pages, and you are more likely to see writers describing each other and their work with such words as “lyrical”, “brilliant” and “insightful” rather than, as they once did, “tiresome“, “an idiot” and a “dunghill”. On literary pages there is now what one writer called “endemic” grade inflation. An editor for BuzzFeed, a news site, even announced that its books section would not do negative book reviews at all. This was wonderful news for writers (and their mums) everywhere. It was much less good news for readers. The literary world may no longer need to mourn spurned poets; it does need to mourn the death of the hatchet job.
One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.
This happy, if slightly astringent, dose of realism is what makes Athill’s lone novel something special, in our time, but hers as well. She was not a fool — and in her book there’s no higher compliment.
But while the book is, as the subtitle says, a story of crime, it’s also, on a quieter level, an exploration of archiving and ownership. At the height of his infamy, Breitwieser viewed himself as an “art liberator.” He believed he could protect and appreciate historical treasures in ways that museums couldn’t. Breitwieser was delusional, obviously, and reckless. He crowded his plunder in a couple of secret attic rooms at his mother’s house, and much of it was later damaged or destroyed. But while he might not ask this explicitly, Finkel, through meticulous research and extensive investigation of trial and interview transcripts, does nudge us to consider: What is the best way to preserve the past? And how should we make it accessible?
One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”
In 2018, after Harold Bloom read a piece on Cormac McCarthy in my collection of critical essays, he emailed me a note that contained these lines: “I hope Cormac, whom I find personally benign, reads you on not being influenced by him. He might enjoy it.” That he might enjoy it was enough to let me know that Harold, usually made happy by my work, was not at all happy now. The phone call that followed was another lecture for me by a man I called Teacher and Mentor. This lecture consisted of the ways in which my own novel, called Hold the Dark—a book that couldn’t be reviewed without the name “Cormac McCarthy” rearing its divine head every other paragraph—assimilated Melville, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor by way of McCarthy.
You see, I had forgotten the by way of part in my essay. Harold didn’t like to see any forgetting of this sloppy sort. He also didn’t approve of my contention that my novel owed more to Heart of Darkness directly than to any book by McCarthy indirectly. “Dear,” he said, “just whom do you think you’re reading when you read McCarthy? Conrad is there next to Melville.” And when I blundered into saying that the female character in my novel was another Medea, I had to find a chair and listen to all the ways I was wrong about Euripides.
On restaurant menus across New England, green crabs are showing up in everything from bouillabaisse and bisques to croquettes and crudo. The umami-packed crabs are harvested locally — often a big selling point for diners. What patrons may not realize, however, is that by indulging in green crab for dinner, they're also working to combat the growth of an invasive species.
“How to Love Your Daughter” is Hila Blum’s second novel and her U.S. debut, in a lively, vivid translation from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir, and it is a stone-cold masterwork of psychological tension. Often its sentences are deceptively clear, as transparent and menacing as a swarm of jellyfish. Elsewhere, the tone swerves into humor, even goofiness. What links the two disparate registers, and all those in between, is an unerring authenticity: Every observation, gesture and piece of dialogue rings true.
Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was feeling listless, isolated and bored. Confined in a Brooklyn apartment with my roommate, I spent my time working at my computer and taking the occasional walk around our neighborhood. But one day, I received an unusual message. The environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams had heard my podcast, Constellation Prize, and she was inspired to do a project together.
Terry suggested that we go on nightwalks together from the new moon and the full moon, write each other a letter after each walk and record these letters in audio.
Debut: The word connotes virginal daughters of the elite, gowned and gleaming, stepping lightly in heels through a ballroom and into high society.
This summer brings my debut. I’m sixty-five. I wear orthotics, not heels, and step lightly through the Trader Joe’s parking lot. And rather than a high-society ritual, my debut is a novel—not the first I’ve completed, but the first to make it into print.
Last month, I took the 9:30 AM from JFK to Seattle, where my mother met me at SeaTac with a car full of camping gear. We drove over the mountains and into the wide, dry part of the state, dipping down to cross the Columbia River—the much-dammed snake that flows down from Canada and through central Washington until shifting west to the Pacific to make a rippling border with Oregon—and then up again in a road cut through black basalt cliffs. The sky here is big, like Montana, and even in June the grass is yellow and dry; the land is a maze of cliffs and canyons, cut during the last ice age when a dam burst on a vast lake covering much of Montana and northern Idaho, and drained to the Pacific in two days flat, carving out the land like worms cut through cheese. We were here, in this dramatic canyon country, to see Joni Mitchell sing.
The series, however, offers no blueprint for how to arrive at that utopia, unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s techno-bureaucratic cli-fi or the bloody oral histories imagined in Everything for Everyone’s postrevolutionary New York commune. Chambers simply tells us that “[t]his had been the way of things since the Transition,” after all machines spontaneously and mysteriously came to consciousness—and fled. Left to their own devices and in need of a reset, “the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature”—evocative of Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s “half-earth socialism.” Chambers starts her story on Panga centuries after this Transition: human society has already been built for radical sustainability (out of “translucent casein and mycelium masonry”) and democratic governance (with leaderless village “councils”), and nature has been left to heal itself. Out of that rewilded nature comes Mosscap, the solar-powered robot elected to reestablish human contact with one small question: “What do humans need?”
You left in a whoosh
Without a goodbye to us
Grief left in your place
Yesterday’s hike was rough, but the 15 miles today were raw pain. The mosquitoes were so vicious that by mile two even our local guides had asked to borrow our 100 percent deet. Bugs here suck down lesser repellent like an aperitif. Nothing provides complete protection.
Our destination is La Danta, one of the largest pyramids on earth. It’s located in the ruins of El Mirador, a centerpiece of Maya civilization from 800 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. that was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago. There are no restrooms, no gift shops. In fact, the site is still being excavated.
This is where Angela and Suley want to get married. So, accompanied by a pair of guides, a half-dozen pack donkeys, and their ten toughest (or least informed) friends, the brides are determined to march us 60 miles over five days through Parque Nacional El Mirador in northern Guatemala to La Danta to say “I do.” It’s our second night on the trail.
A messenger arrives with bad news. (The messenger is wearing a double-breasted suit jacket and wields a thin cigar.) “Painting,” he says, “is dead.” The artist panics, throws his hog-hair brushes into the fire and starts fiddling with devices, heavy metals, ideas. He’s heard rumors before but now painting is really dead, it’s terminal, the situation is so dire that someone is saying they’ve painted the “last paintings” anyone can paint. The artist looks out over the vast and blighted landscape of culture and sees painting everywhere surrounded by the carnage of itself, squirming and dying on screens, more confused and ugly than ever, the word “beauty” a distant memory.
When Linn became blind when he was 11 years old, he soon realized he took more pleasure from restaurants than he did from his other passions. He lost his vision in the early 1980s, between the release of the second and third Star Wars films, and he was struck by how disappointing the cinematic experience was as a blind person: “Ewoks just aren’t that cool when you’re blind,” he says. But a good restaurant was still a revelation. “Eating a fantastic manchego, or pancetta,” he says, “you put it in your mouth and it explodes.” On a recent trip to Crete, he and his wife went on a dining tour. “I’ve never liked honey that much, but this was real honey,” he says, his voice caramelizing with the memory. “It was almost a liquid.”
The biggest problem for a blind diner has very little to do with any mechanical or logistical difficulty of blindness, and instead centers on the condescending, exclusionary, or simply ignorant attitudes and behaviors of sighted people.
Since June, Rauwerda, of New York’s Brooklyn borough, has been making a “perpetual stew” in her apartment and documenting it online. She’s also invited others to join in, hosting free “stew tastings” attended by as many as 200 Brooklyn residents, who sign up in advance on Rauwerda’s website and agree to bring an ingredient of their choice. If their name is Stew or Stu, they’ll be anointed a guest of honor.
A perpetual stew gets topped up with new broth and ingredients when it runs low rather than being dumped down the drain. The dish’s dubious origins are often traced to medieval European cuisine, though the concept better resembles certain Asian broth recipes. Regardless, intrepid cooks have put their own spins on the perpetual stew. Rauwerda’s is vegan and made in a Crock-Pot, she said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. That even back when I still held out hope, my features were meanwhile settling, treacherous, into a mediocrity which surprised, humiliated, crushed me. In other words, I was not going to be any great beauty. I was only going to be what I was: attractive occasionally, like most people, relative to whoever happened to stand nearby. I was horrified; I couldn’t get over it. Being average-looking is, by definition, completely normal. Why hadn’t anyone prepared me for it?
I could not have discovered I was plain without discovering K was pretty. She is my friend of many years. Back then, it obsesses me: how we make each other exist. We attend elementary school together, then high school. She enrolls at a nearby college. Her tall grants me my short; my plump her skinny; her leonine features my pedestrian ones. I resent her as much as I exult in her company. In between us, and without words for it, the female universe dilates, a continuum whose comparative alchemy seems designed to confront me, make me suffer, lift her up. Her protagonism diminishes me, or does it? I confuse myself for a long time thinking I am the planet, and K is the sun. It takes me a long time to forgive her.
In 1907, an unrelenting rainstorm hit the fictional town of Hosh Hanna, triggering a massive flood that swept through its streets. The flood took everything with it: houses collapsed, livestock died, and all but two people, who desperately clung to a walnut tree, drowned. The story of the flood that swallows this small Syrian town outside Aleppo opens Khaled Khalifa’s latest novel, No One Prayed Over Their Graves, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. But the flood is just one of many currents that wash through the area, and the others—the twilight days of a decaying empire, budding nationalisms, liberalism, and the grip of religious fervor, to name a few—claim just as many lives over the course of the novel.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process. It plays out in a dystopian US just a shuffle-step from the norm, where predominantly Black prisoners fight not just for the entertainment of a primetime TV audience but, indirectly, for the reader’s benefit too. The narrative explodes in all directions. The tale at the centre is sometimes obscured. The book is unruly and knowingly compromised but it comes fuelled by a sense of thrilling, righteous rage.
What at first feels like another “2001: A Space Odyssey” turns out to be so much more. Kitasei has a few tricks up her sleeve, as well as an amazing talent for description — reading “The Deep Sky” is like watching a 4D movie, all senses engaged.
“The Deep Sky” is a smart, emotionally mature, quick-paced climate fiction space whodunit that I already wanted to read again before I even finished it.
In the hospital coffee shop the glass
doors open and close on the past,
open and close on the future and all
one wonders about in a hospital.
I have no idea if Charles Causley’s poetry is known to American readers but I suspect it isn’t, or only to scholars and other poets; to become internationally celebrated for poetry requires the kind of ambition he signally lacked. He was without question one of the most important British poets of the last century—utterly original, his working-class voice untainted by university and the dead weight of literary tradition it passes on, and abidingly popular without being populist.
Little Poems, a new anthology edited by Michael Hennessy, provides a history of short poems since antiquity, from Sappho to Ocean Vuong, a lovely pocket-size volume with several hundred brief, chronological examples of what poetry can do. I read it cover to cover, speeding through the centuries, though approaching an anthology this way, for anyone other than a critic, is perverse. The pleasure of anthologies is scope, scope and openness. As with Wikipedia or the O.E.D., you can enter anywhere and stop any time. They encourage random flipping and riffling, seeing what hooks the eye — a form of bibliomancy, this mode of intentional happenstance. Dipping into “Little Poems” like so, you might find, in rapid succession, a fifth-century epigram by Julian the Egyptian (“I kept singing this, and I will call it out from the grave:/‘Drink, before you put on these clothes of dust’”) and “This Living Hand,” by John Keats, another poem that projects itself into a time after death, ever startling in its moment that sounds like someone talking right now, right next to you: “So in my veins red life might stream again,/And thou be conscious-calmed — see here it is —/I hold it towards you.” You might find a handful of snail poems, or anonymous poems, which, when they appear back to back, as do “Western Wind” (“Westron wind, when will thou blow?/The small rain down can rain”) and “Hey Nonny No” (“Is’t not fine to dance and sing/When the bells of death do ring? … When the winds do blow,/And the seas do flow?/Hey nonny no!”), you can pretend were written by the same famous, nameless poet.
Moreno-Garcia spends a bit too much time explaining how Ewers’s movie magic functions, but the myriad film references and odes to analog tech make this the equivalent of a lovingly nostalgic double-bill “Chiller Theater” for 21st century horror nerds. Best of all is Moreno-Garcia’s depiction of the poignant, lifelong friendship between Montserrat and Tristán, with its simmering romantic undercurrent, shared childhood language and adult resentments. Like its namesake, “Silver Nitrate” catches fire and doesn’t stop burning until the end.
In this summer’s treat, “Silver Nitrate,” Moreno-Garcia again deploys horror as a touchstone for a textured ghost story with surprising historical undertones while paying homage to a lesser-known progenitor of the form. True to her own method, she succeeds here by knowing when to follow the rules of genre storytelling and when to turn them upside down.
Lindsay Lynch’s debut novel “Do Tell” goes far beyond that fateful night in 1939 and the court case that follows — which is loosely based on the real case brought by Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen against actor Errol Flynn — and creates a noir-like tale of Hollywood’s underbelly.
At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.
Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.
The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux. As Rainer Maria Rilke expressed this thought in poetic terms, “Everything/is not itself.”
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
Writing a “Raymond Chandler” novel without it being pastiche is a remarkable stunt. The fact Denise Mina has now produced a “Philip Marlowe” mystery that is clearly still a Denise Mina novel is quite an achievement.
“How many borders had fallen in her lifetime?” Irina thinks. “The Berlin Wall, the far-flung boundaries of the U.S.S.R., the shifting puzzle of the former Soviet bloc.” Over the course of the novel, we see the corrosion of familial borders, too; as Ivanito reminds his cousins with a phrase now commonly used, “the political and the personal are inseparable.” As the youngest generation prepares to reunite in Berlin, the underlying question remains: When a map vanishes, what is left in its wake? Or, more important, was there ever a map to begin with?
Those summers I was never home, especially on the weekends, but sometimes I’d stop by to change clothes or grab a quick bite, and she would be there in the garden with her hair pulled high, her ponytail hanging out of the top of an old skate-brand visor I had stopped wearing years before. I see her now in the pink tee she often wore and a pair of denim shorts. Sunglasses and a smile. I moved away at 19, but on the rare occasions when I’d return home, I’d find her out back as if nothing had changed. Her hair would slowly grey. New cats would accumulate, similarly.
So it brought me great joy to read Camille Dungy’s memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, filled as it is with moments in which Dungy and her daughter, Callie, share time together in their backyard, cultivating a space all their own. They started their garden after they moved from Oakland, California, to Fort Collins, Colorado. They were acclimating to a new place, but also learning about the native plants and wildlife. In the process they were discovering what it was like to participate in the surrounding ecology. They named their garden the Prairie Project, and it’s the focus of Soil.
According to David-Antoine Williams, in his 2020 book The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry, we live in an “age of language science.” And this war chest and treasury of corpus linguistics, live thesauri, and machine translations, this lapidary or dilapidated Babel of searchable online texts and libraries, this climacteric of alleged “world history,” has pushed and helped contemporary poets to engage with etymology, or the roots and histories of words, to an astonishing extent, especially in English—though their engagement is part of a long tradition.
Though the term “beach read” wasn’t popularized until the 1990s, the concept has existed for so long that it can seem like easy breezy pleasure reading while on summer holiday has simply always been. In fact, it has a distinct history that can be traced back to the early 1800s.
When the mathematician Dr Kit Yates sees a weather forecast predicting a 25% chance of rain, he packs an umbrella. When he meets someone who shares his birthday in a crowded room, he is not in the least surprised. And if he comes across an unfamiliar phrase, such as “the Baader-Meinhof effect”, he knows he is likely to encounter it again, very soon.
“One of the biggest things I learned from writing my book was that surprisingly unlikely things can and do happen, given enough opportunities,” Yates says, referring to his new book, How to Expect the Unexpected.
My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village—a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.
Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the past few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.
In love, in art, in crime, what is done intentionally and what is done unintentionally? This is the question at the core of Stephanie Bishop’s fourth novel, “The Anniversary.”
For a novelist to engage in literary experimentation requires initial boldness and enduring resolve.
Rachel Cantor succeeds with energy and empathy in “Half-Life of a Stolen Sister,” in which familial eccentricity abounds, sorrow pervades and time wobbles.
We are accustomed to thinking of the car as an inevitable fit for America and Americans when it appeared around 1900. A spread-out people, already accustomed to personal travel by horse, with an often-noted aversion to crowds, made the conversion to mechanical automobility easy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the region of Southern California. In 1900, Los Angeles was a new city, free from the density and labyrinthine streets of the old walking towns of Europe or even New England; it had attracted settlers (and developers) expecting personal space but also the easy access to work and shopping the car alone could provide. The city had weather that accommodated early roofless and unheated vehicles that in New York might have needed to be stored during winter. Even the early L.A. trolly system paved the way for the car by fostering dispersal and the subsequent need to fill in the gaps between the web of trolly lines with cars and roads. But, as Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s recently released book Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930 claims, Los Angeles as the United States’ quintessential car town cannot be reduced to such abstractions. People, even individualistic people, made it happen.
In order to live comfortably as myself in a culture that drools over milk glands and coerces women to repurpose and repackage them in order to maximize the drool we can collect as capital, this is what I have to do. Fortunately, between movies, TV, Instagram, billboards, sidewalks, beaches, pools, and every other space on planet Earth, the world is crawling with opportunities to practice. And then maybe one day soon, I’ll be able to attend the world premiere of some movie Mike stars in with Jennifer, Anne, and Bonnie without exploding into mist.
Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.
Decades after leaving her hometown in the wake of a tragedy, a woman returns to find that the mysteries of the past are determined to reassert themselves in the present. We’ve heard this tale before, but Polly Stewart buoys The Good Ones with finely drawn characters who harbor a pleasing passel of secrets.
This is a memoir that unfolds partly as retrospective, partly as journal entries kept in real time and partly as poetry — literal poems that break up the meditative narrative into language that is even more heightened and lyrical. But there is hardly any reason for such distinctions. It is impossible to do justice to the beauty of “Returning Light.” The whole book is a poem.
John McPhee, who turned 92 in March, would like to keep at it for a while — the writing, and the breathing. In his lively new collection, “Tabula Rasa,” the very longtime, very long-form journalist writes of “old-people projects,” the kinds of things we feel compelled to do when the end is a lot closer than the beginning. His favorite example is Mark Twain’s autobiography, which the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” author dictated when he was in his 70s. Such projects, McPhee writes, give us purpose. “Old-people projects keep old people old,” he writes. “You’re no longer old when you’re dead. If Mark Twain had stayed with it, he would be alive today.”
In short order, Jackson became the de facto manager of about fifteen volunteers, offering a shoulder to cry on, keeping protective watch over the offerings to the dead, and, four days after the mysterious artist began work on the site, organizing a candlelight vigil for which the 24-foot-long, 7.5-foot-tall public mural he’d worked on was the centerpiece. “Every day was a day of pain and love,” Jackson says.
Who was that black-hatted man, anyway? His name is Roberto Marquez, and he’s a self-taught immigrant artist who lives in South Dallas. Over the past few years, countless people who have visited ad hoc memorial sites in the raw, brutal days after major tragedies in Texas have likely met him. He was there after a gunman killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde in May 2022, after 53 migrants baked to death in the back of a container truck in San Antonio in June 2022, and after two planes collided at an air show in Dallas last November. He also has ventured outside the state’s borders, traveling to Ciudad Juárez this March after a fire at a migrant center left forty dead and dozens injured; to Surfside, Florida, after the 2021 condo collapse; to Turkey, in the aftermath of the recent earthquake; and to Ukraine, in the early days of the war.
There’s also a great deal of academic literature on Disney World. This is true even if you’re someone, like me, who feels that there is a great deal of academic literature on almost everything. Type “Disney World” into JSTOR and you will unearth many pages about how the theme park is not a Rabelaisian carnival (glad that’s been cleared up), or about how it is a monument to death, or about how it is somehow in dialogue with synthetic Cubism or Mecca or Hegel’s end of history. Plus much discussion of simulacra and fascism, naturally.
What was the point in adding to this surplus? No point. Except, after I’d settled in to our time-share and signed up for the Disney Experience app and started visiting the parks, several puzzles for which there had been no solutions in Greil Marcus or in “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Center” et cetera did present themselves.
Smart, self-aware, fun, creepy, and strange, The Beast You Are is even better than the outstanding Growing Things — and it further cements Tremblay as one of the finest voices in modern horror fiction as well as dazzling innovator of the short form regardless of genre. This collection shows an author at the peaks of his powers doing everything he can to push the boundaries of the short story.
After a chance meeting with a recruiter at a dive bar in the winter of 2005, Kate Flannery walked into American Apparel’s Los Angeles headquarters wearing tight surf shorts and her mother’s floppy felt hat. That day — as Flannery writes in her first book, “Strip Tees,” a racy, thoughtful memoir of her tenure during the rise and fall of the controversial company — she watched garment workers produce “quivering piles of kelly-green men’s underwear”; posed for Polaroids in a leg-baring velour romper; and encountered the company’s brash, charismatic founder, Dov Charney, “a flip phone pressed to one ear while another waited in a holster on his belt loop.”
The reason I eat a sandwich is because I want to eat a little bit of a lot of good things — meat, cheese, veggies, spread, really good bread — all at once. As sandwiches swell larger and larger, that calculus gets thrown off. I end up with a bite that’s all meat, another that’s just veggies, and that uncanny situation where the center of the sandwich protrudes out too far compared to the rest of it, only exacerbating the unbalanced bite problem.
I understand why these hulking, overstuffed sandwiches have taken over: They look great on Instagram, where it’s all about that sweet cross-section shot, but this has come at the expense of the eating experience. The best sandwiches I’ve had recently have looked modest in pictures, but they’ve resulted in perfect bite after perfect bite since I can squish the whole thing down and actually eat every element at the same time.
All writers have false starts. We once stuffed them in manila folders and pushed them deep inside our desks; now we store them in a different kind of folder. But we still rarely give up on them, harboring a shameful hope that someday we’ll perform freelancer’s CPR, breathing new, sellable life into them.
If you’re John McPhee, longtime New Yorker staff writer, author of 31 books and nonagenarian statesman of what’s often called longform journalism, you can collect these abandoned projects into a book. “Tabula Rasa: Volume 1” is a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn’t make it, ideas that never got fully baked, research never written up, either because the subject died or because McPhee, who was born in 1931, lost interest along the way.
The narrative arc is about "relentless human progression and our resulting departure from nature," the evolution from animal to human being to machine and the violence of imposed order, the violence necessary for dominance. This theme manifests throughout, in language and narrative and numbers and manners and hierarchy and markets.
Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto” is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — “Crook Manifesto” gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.
John Milas’s honest, sad and disturbing first novel, “The Militia House,” might be called gothic fiction or horror, but at heart it’s the story of one man’s struggle to maintain his grip on reality amid incessant conflict. Our narrator, Corporal Loyette, has joined the Marines primarily because his brother was killed by an I.E.D. while serving in Iraq. He doesn’t speak of revenge, but does have a sense that it is his duty to go, to see the elephant, to show his face on a battlefield of his own time.
What is it like to read as a child? Is there something in it – the headlong, hungry, immersive quality of it – that we can get back to? When I was young I read with a rage to understand. Adult memories of how we once read are often de-spiked by nostalgia, but my need for books as a child was sharp and urgent and furious if thwarted. My family was large, and reading offered privacy from the raucous, mildly unhinged panopticon that is living with three siblings: I could be sitting alongside them in the car, but, in fact, it was the only time when nobody in the world knew where I was. Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.
For most readers, acquiring a newly released book means heading to your local bookstore, hitting the library, or logging on to Amazon. For others, however, it involves opening up a thoughtfully designed box that includes a copy of the book, alongside gifted items like a custom tote bag, a scented candle, beauty products, and maybe even a box of tea. If you’re a book influencer, the latter is often the case.
Doing nothing in a world where everybody seemed busy doing something – anything – struck Cioran as the only lifestyle worth pursuing and defending. A life devoid of action and practical ambitions, of distractions and busyness, is a life in which room has been made for meaning: ‘Anything good comes from indolence, from our incapacity of taking action, executing our projects and plans,’ Cioran wrote. And he behaved accordingly. When a journalist once asked him about his writerly routines, his answer was candour itself: ‘Most of the time I don’t do anything. I am the idlest man in Paris … the only one who does less than I do is a whore without clients.’
Like many folks who had been cooped up at home at the start of the pandemic, I got in the habit of talking long walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. I told myself it was enough exercise to justify all the comfort eating, as well as an opportunity to support local businesses and cure my cabin fever.
Over time, I started paying attention to—really noticing—the space I was using: the sidewalk. And the more I paid attention to the sidewalk, the more I saw.
At the entrance of The Good Place, you stopped to fill up your tubs from a drinking fountain with two spouts – a cold one and a warm one. What is it good for? I asked a Gypsy man with a face pummeled with hardship. What do I know, he chuckled. Everything, they say, so I fill up and hope.
The luxurious water embraced your insides. The summer was late, life was caught in a sticky web. Something emanated from the mountain. It felt like predestination. Destiny, destination, destino. Destino, purpose, goal.
“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, In a series of chapters focused on everything from the origins of the universe to the speculative scene of first contact, Green writes about imaginary microbes and massive extraterrestrial engineering experiments and tentacled squid people and radio signals from distant, unknown origins. But her main characters are sci-fi writers and scientists whose lives are and have been dedicated to dreaming of and seeking out life beyond our home planet. We are, for better and worse, stuck within the worlds we have imagined and built here, unable to see beyond ourselves in ways both petty and profound. The Possibility of Life is not a book about aliens; it’s about human beings and the possibilities of our lives, together and alone.
My son says you’re listening so you might tell us
what we want. If so, I want to know
what is lost under my fingertips
besides home? And whether you understand
“There’s a point in the movie where the Kens are riding invisible horses from their beach battle to the Mojo Dojo Casa Houses,” Gerwig told me — a Mojo Dojo Casa House is like a Barbie Dreamhouse, but for Kens — “and I think to myself, every time: Why did they let us do this?” It was late May, less than two months until the movie’s theatrical release, and Gerwig was putting in long hours on finishing touches, shuttling between postproduction facilities in Manhattan. Still, the very fact of the movie’s existence continued to puzzle and delight her. Why did they let her do this?
The answer seems so obvious now. Mattel, Warner Brothers and the producers let Greta Gerwig make “Barbie” so that exactly what is currently happening would happen. So that the fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break though the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist. So that Mattel, in particular, could rocket-launch its grand ambitions to become a proto-Disney and announce the activation of its entire intellectual-property back catalog with a fuchsia splash. So that Barbie stans and Barbie agnostics alike would find themselves bombarded by paparazzi snaps of Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, dressed in matching, radioactively vivid Rollerblading outfits — plus “Barbie” trailers, #Barbiecore TikToks and wall-to-wall Barbie tie-ins. They wanted Gerwig, with her indie bona fides, feminist credentials and multiple Oscar nominations, to use her credibility to make this multibillion-dollar platinum-blond I.P. newly relevant, delivering a very, very, very pink summer blockbuster that acknowledges Barbie’s baggage, unpacks that baggage and, also, sells that baggage. (The designer-luggage company Béis now offers a Barbie collection.) They wanted Gerwig to burnish Barbie. But why, exactly, did Gerwig want to do that?
It is through the ritual of cooking and eventually writing—the two are very closely related for Johnson—that she begins to see the recipe as a text every bit as worthy of serious attention as other forms of academic study. Drawing on the work of feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici, Johnson proposes that “in writing about the recipe, I am writing about a form of knowledge that is often denied the status of knowledge,” work that, like much women’s work in the home, has often gone unacknowledged. Keenly aware of the assumptions that have informed so much writing about food, Johnson seeks to restore cooking to its rightful place as a form of knowledge—one through which pleasure, desire, and resistance can be expressed.
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Naturally, Johnson begins to draw parallels between the many ways of translating an epic poem and the making and unmaking of a recipe. In other words, she sees recipe writing as a mode of translation: from the act of cooking—the carrettieri making their tomato sauce, for example—into the pages of a cookbook, which tells its own kind of story. Then the recipe enters a second act: from the cookbook into another kitchen where it has “infinite potential translators.” The recipe is neither the origin nor the final form of the dish. It allows for endless interpretations, which if you’re cooking the same thing over and over can be liberating.
For decades, scientists, engineers, and dreamers have worked to develop technologies that can radically expand our presence outside the Solar System. But they all face one enormous challenge: the brain-breaking enormity of the cosmos. Sustained interstellar travel is simply beyond the means of our technology, and any reasonable projection of anything we’ll develop over the next few generations.
Thankfully, that doesn’t mean our space dreams are dead. We’ll have to learn to love the one we’re with and stop looking beyond to impossible frontiers and instead turn our curious eyes and minds to the wonders and mysteries of our own Solar System.
Earth, in most renderings, is a smooth sphere with a glossy complexion—a blue marble, as pictures snapped from space have shown us. Earth scientists know that’s not exactly true. Earth, in fact, is an ellipsoid, a little bit squashed at the poles and fat around the equator, not to mention speckled with mountain ranges. And then you have the geoid people—the ones who think of Earth less as an imperfect sphere and more as a lumpy potato.
There are twenty-five words typed on the card on the wall, five rows of five, all nouns: “Ball,” “Tree,” “Dog,” etc. I read the words out loud one by one, first unaccompanied, then along with a metronome at 80 beats per minute, then again at 100. I read the first and the last word of each line at 80, then the second and the second-to-last. Now I hold an identical card and read all twenty-five words, alternating between the card in my hand and the card on the wall. At 80. At 100. I read the first word of each line on the card in my hand and the last on the card on the wall. At 100. Again, backward. I read the words on the card on the wall along with the metronome standing on a mat that throws my feet off balance. Now I focus my vision on the word in the center of the card on the wall: “Dog.” I shake my head back and forth along with the metronome, at 80 beats per minute. Dog. Dog. Dog. The tempo increases to 100 again. The word comes in and out of focus. Dog. Dog. Dog. Thirty seconds. Finally, I stop. I sit down and close my eyes.
Ideal summer reading, “Goodbye Earl” is the kind of story you want to tell all your friends about because the content is heavy enough to need to vent it out, but the narration is light enough to merit gossip. Cross-Smith’s incredible, easy voice will make your skin crawl one moment and give you goose bumps the next, then smooth out your frazzled emotions with a contented, sunshiny vibe two pages later.
What do you do when your writing career lasts seven decades but you haven’t said everything you once thought about saying? If you’re John McPhee, you crack open your notebooks and give fans a taste of the stories you never wrote.
I’d Rather Not is a slim volume of autobiographical essays in which Skinner sets out in episodic fashion, some of the trials and (mis)adventures of his life, but this is no misery memoir that wallows in self-pity, with a rousing morale at the end that champions resilience atop a scrap heap. Mercifully free of existential angst, he’s amiable and charming, able to make you both commiserate with and laugh at his misfortunes and missteps.
The scariest thing about the heat-infused future, Goodell notes, is that we don’t treat it with the respect and concern that it deserves. When the heat rises, plants, animals and people die. But the coronavirus pandemic has showed just how much death and destruction a society can accept. Suffering and death “will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century,” he writes. “Something we accept.”
A bowl of gyūdon, for years a symbol of Japan’s deflationary spiral, is the lunch of choice for time-poor office workers on a budget, even after the chain – which has about 1,200 outlets across the country – raised the dish’s price in 2021 for the first time in seven years.
But the enthusiasm with which they demolish bowl after bowl of the salty, satisfying dish masks an unsettling trend for its staple ingredient: the Japanese are eating less rice than at any time in their history.
This book reminds you, more often, of why readers cared about her in the first place. She’s a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy. (One character mistakes Burt Bacharach, on television, for Jeffrey Epstein.) She is a fine appraiser of socioeconomic detail. (The nouveau riche and their pineapple doorknockers!) She takes notes on her species, as if she were a naturalist observing robins. She pries at the mystery of life. There’s a strong feeling of convergence in her best stories.
Wittgenstein wrote that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” which is to say: It’s not about what you say, but how you say it. Manazir Siddiqi seems to have taken this to heart with “The Centre,” a novel that knows that whether you’re trying to place an errant foreign word or unlock a dark secret behind a pedagogical miracle, context is key. This is a book whose many delights and horrors are unlikely to be lost in translation.
Lipsky’s book is a project of maximum ambition. He retells the entire climate story, from the dawn of electricity to the dire straits of our present day. It’s well-trod ground, but Lipsky, a newcomer to the climate field (he is best known for “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” a memoir set on a road trip with David Foster Wallace), makes it page turning and appropriately infuriating. He says it up front: He wants this to be like a Netflix series, bingeable.
Storytelling is a powerful thing, and I have been lucky to be part of the audiobook industry for the last 20 years. I know there are listeners who, through listening to the books I perform, are able to explore their own desires, heal from past trauma, enjoy the pure fantasy of it all or connect with their bodies. This should be applauded.
Narrating erotica literally gave me the words in my own relationships to express the needs and desires I have. It started me on a journey to understand and embrace my body. I found confidence in myself and my sexuality. Eventually I found a partner and relationship that is fulfilling in every way, mostly because we are able to talk about what we want individually and who we want to be as a couple inside the bedroom and out. We both love that we can say the words with confidence.
A tour de force that reminds us why we read fiction and how it can touch our hearts, engage our minds and enrich our lives, Bauermeister’s latest novel melds her imagination, acumen and humanity. And as she embraces the circle of life, she evokes tears, awe and gratitude.
Not since Jonathan Safran Foer’ s “Eating Animals” has a Brooklyn writer made so plain a case for greater sensitivity to the natural world. And “The Vegan,” a pig in a blanket of irony, subversion and humor, is much easier to swallow.
If this all sounds a little heavy, well, it is. And yet Frank never loses his sense of humor, and Richard Ford has not lost his gift for finding the poetry in the tragic, the mundane and even the absurd. Frank isn't interested in persuading himself or anyone else that everything turns out OK for everyone — that happiness can be attained and should be expected or even desired. But his persistent alertness to both the sublime and the ridiculous in everything he encounters suggests that he still finds the trip worth taking. "It's completely pointless and ridiculous, and it's great," Paul says. He's speaking of Mount Rushmore, but he might as well be talking about life.
This is not art historical scholarship of the academic kind – there are no footnotes or references to sources beyond her own feelings and intuition. It is an emotionally informed approach to art, always paying attention to the fact that each person’s vision is different (one of her daughters goes colour-blind as she is writing this book, having stared too long at the sun). Cumming cannot in truth show us new definitive facts about Carel Fabritius, but she brings him out of the shadows, making us see why he is so much more than the missing link in someone else’s story.
In 2011, I ordered an I.D. cane, used less for tapping around than to signal to the world that its bearer might not see well. It folded up, and mostly I hid it in my bag. But, after running into fire hydrants and hip-checking a toddler in a café, I began using it full time. Reading became difficult: the white of the page took on a wince-inducing glare, and the words frosted over, like the lowermost lines on the optometrist’s eye chart. It was only once I’d reached this stage that my diagnosis started to feel real. I frantically wondered whether I should use my last years to, say, visit Japan, or plow through the Criterion Collection, instead of spending my evenings watching “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” with Lily. One night, I lay awake in bed. I knew that, if Lily were awake, she’d be able to see the blankets, the window, the door, but, when I scanned the room, I saw nothing, just the flashers and floaters that oscillated in my eyes. Is this what it will be like? I wondered, casting my gaze around like a dead flashlight. I felt like I’d been buried alive.
In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind, and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people. The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.” That fall, I signed up.
Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.”
All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear.
The delicate balance of making a living and making art—living, in other words, within physical constraints while trying, meanwhile, to make room for the spontaneity needed for true expression—is the subject of Levy’s recent work, which includes a trilogy of memoirs—Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018), and Real Estate (2021)—detailing her coming of age as a writer, her life as a mother, her divorce, and her attempt to fund a room of her own. These books are the latest in her decades-long exploration of form, beginning with playwriting and fiction and detouring into poetry. She’s traveled widely, and her current style and themes feel like the result of accretion, with flourishes picked up here and there. In August Blue, the characters have the gauzy abstractness of a poem speaker while the scenes themselves have the schematic tautness of a play.
Etter expertly diverts the novel from neat or didactic tropes. While Cassie does resist the powers that be in small ways — attending a rent protest, refusing to wear company swag — she mainly continues to live with her two selves, until an unforgettable ending. The upheaval of the book is largely internal, but no less moving. Through Cassie’s personal history and relationships — with her parents, with the chef, with her pseudo-friends in San Francisco — Etter accomplishes what we seek in fiction: a deeply human connection.
This is a story of a young woman and the pocket of stale air that separates her from the world and from herself, the static between authenticity and performance, fantasy and reality. Some might find the plot’s relentless dissociation a decelerator, but I found it brave and effective: Flattery remains so loyal to the physics of her character’s struggles, to the struggle of storytelling itself, that she is willing to risk allowing the less committed reader to wander off.
This book is a tour of how the science of processing has allowed companies to produce goods that are no longer even faint echoes of the real food of which they are copies, and of what the evidence shows about the biology and psychology of eating in today’s world. Van Tulleken is at his best when using his own scientific expertise to help readers through otherwise unnavigable science, data and history, explaining with precision what we are actually eating.
One anecdote in Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You captures the essence of Lucinda Williams, the acclaimed American singer-songwriter. In 1993, Williams won a Grammy award for her song “Passionate Kisses,” but although she appreciated the recognition and was gratified that her music had reached a wider audience, the prospect of attending the award ceremony in New York City filled her with such anxiety and terror that she didn’t go.
“The truth is,” Williams writes, with the candor found throughout her memoir, “that I was not just self-conscious but also scared. I feared that I didn’t belong.” Williams was 41 years old at the time. Now in her early seventies, recognized as an icon of rock, folk, and country music, this fear doesn’t arise as regularly as it once did.
In this respect, “All-Night Pharmacy” is somewhat autobiographical. The protagonist, her sister and her mother are all wrestling with the knowledge that their forebears endured unimaginable suffering so that they could prosper in the United States. This incalculable debt starts to feel like a chokehold when the sisters fail to make the most of their opportunities.
“I was interested in the ways that historical traumas affect people who are several generations removed,” Madievsky says, “and might not even know that they’re reacting in some way to those traumas.”
I rattled with the truck as my family and I drove a short way to the corral to get the sheep. It had been donated to us to help feed the many who were scheduled to show up later in the day in celebration and reverence for a relative who was reaching a pinnacle in her/their life: the Kinaałda, or what has been loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony. An intense and refreshing four days of family, song, and food. The ceremony is a moment when beauty of the beyond and beauty of the world come together as we sit around a fire and grind corn, tell stories, and prepare food.
As we rolled up to the corral, my mom was worrying because there was no one to do the butchering. Butchering for ceremony takes a tremendous amount of labor and often requires several people. She had called everyone in our family, even distant family, and I had posted on social media asking for anyone who might happen to be free. But no one responded. There is no blame here. Times change, pressures build. We are often pulled in so many directions. I told my mom we had to do it ourselves. Uncertain, she agreed, and I would do it.
The Midnight News borrows tropes from a number of genres aside from mystery, with elements of espionage, romance. psychological thriller and even literary fiction evident on the page. The result is a nuanced discussion of women’s autonomy in England in the 1940s, particularly as it relates to their own bodies and sexual freedoms.
“Was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy?” Such unstable compounds fill everyone in Kairos, the magnificent new novel from German author Jenny Erpenbeck. The text keeps coming back to the question of identity; the passage above follows up by changing the analogy, unsettlingly: “Did you have any control over what you saw in the mirror?” The metaphors are vivid yet volatile—one moment a test tube, the next a mirror image, each expressed in active terms. In just two sentences, they assert a rhetoric of rare intelligence and imagination, along with the ability to turn on a dime.
Is it possible to change the contours of your personality late in life, with, as the woman with the prophetic space heater puts it, “the knowledge of a long dusk coming on”? The final scene in The Librarianist features an answer as modest as it is revolutionary, but deWitt has spent the preceding pages making the oxymoron of a modest revolution utterly believable. The answer is: maybe a little bit. Maybe enough.
“Evidence of Things Not Seen” offers a road map for moving the true crime genre past its pulpy roots and toward something more compassionate — and interesting. Weinman calls this a shift from “providing answers to asking more questions.” The questions this book raises are critical and timely, and I look forward to seeing what these writers ask next.
Ican list a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.
Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.
That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)
At the time, The New York Times credited Lewis with “advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports.” In three years, he released arguably the two biggest sports books of the 21st century. He hasn’t written another one since.
Why not? The simple answer is that Lewis hasn’t discovered a sports story worthy of another book. The more complicated answer is that sports media has changed drastically in the last two decades, draining such books of their significance.
In re-classing the Bennets, Chau both uncovers new layers in the original and reveals some of what Austen left out. “Where we come from is as important as where we want to go,” a chastened Darcy admits to LB. That isn’t really the message of “Pride and Prejudice.” But it’s Chau’s good fortune, and ours, to see in this adaptation not just Jade’s foolishness, but also her courage and love.
Who gets to be a monster? Is the term reserved for enemies or can it be applied to heroes too? Lauren Elkin’s work of radical feminist criticism asks us to meet her art monsters, who are all women, and to see their monstrosity as central to their being and their art.
Beneath all this he has a powerful question, more so because, while he has strong suspicions, he is not completely sure of the answer. He wonders if knowledge is becoming a thing of the past. His concern is based on the observation that nobody needs to know anything anymore. If you visit a doctor, they are likely to check your symptoms on their computer. The same applies to any kind of professional.
So, what happens to us as a species if all our knowing is outsourced to machines. Is it possible to be wise, without personal knowledge. Winchester doubts it. But it is possible to be foolish or even nasty.
In her new book, Jennifer Ackerman, bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, takes us on a journey of discovery into the world of owls, exploring both their mystery and the new science that is revealing their complexity. Along the way, she introduces us to numerous species, from the tiny northern saw-whet owl, which lives in forests across North America and is as small as a robin, to the giant Blakiston’s fish owl, native to Japan and Russia.
A worldwide push is currently underway to have the seas’ cold dark depths fully mapped, with the work to be completed by the end of this decade, no less. Laura Trethewey, a Canadian writer long captivated by matters maritime, has written “The Deepest Map,” a gripping and all-too-timely account of what in more ways than one is turning out to be a very costly and questionably necessary race to the bottom.
When the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov was writing the novel “Time Shelter,” in 2019, he agonized over a scene he thought might be over the top, even for a work of absurdist fiction.
In the novel, a wave of nostalgia leads several European countries to organize large-scale re-enactments of past events, and Gospodinov was unsure about a section in which a country recreates World War II and invades its neighbor, causing widespread devastation.
“I thought maybe I should have skipped it, it’s too much,” he recently recalled in an interview in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. “But then it happened in February of last year,” when Russia invaded Ukraine.
In a field of brickellbush, hundreds of monarch butterflies move with the grace of a Disney fairy waving a wand. They circle back and forth in figure eights all around us, flashing black and orange wings dotted with white, as they fly from stem to stem undisturbed. My guide, Jim, and I take off our hats while my wife, Vanessa, takes out her camera. We stand there, spellbound.
It’s only later that I realize the scene was likely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But maybe our whole trip was. We were there last October to find a place called the Narrows. This limestone gorge on the Blanco River has hidden, almost tropical pools where honeycombed rock walls, skirted with maidenhair fern, shimmer with the water’s reflection—a Texas oasis like no other. After hearing about the Narrows several years ago and finding pictures online, I dreamt about seeing it for real. But there was another reason for my interest. I had just learned about Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinaabekwe First Nation woman who had popularized the concept of a “water walk.” Undertaken in Canada 20 years ago, hers was an act of defiance against those polluting her community’s water. I felt compelled to commemorate the anniversary of her noble effort.
Traced is a fast-paced Australian noir thriller, taking place across two timelines – one in 2014, when Jeanette plans to help her daughter, Courtney, escape domestic violence, and the other in 2020, in between lockdowns in NSW, where Jane and her daughter Tara are still on edge and trying to stay safe. Going back and forth in time builds the tension well because of the slow revelation about who the characters really are. The dual timeline also allows information to be delivered when it needs to be, ensuring a slow build-up to the climax and an intensity that keeps the pages turning.
The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one.
Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.
Scheherazade has earned her rest, but she remains booked and busy, obsessively renamed and reclaimed. She is dusted off and wheeled out wherever the “magic of storytelling” is conjured, irresistible to any writer trafficking in “wonder” or “enchantment.” Her ghost floats through the work of Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Salman Rushdie in strenuous if harmless homage. But she has also been claimed by new constituencies and put to unsavory new uses. The narrator of “The Arabian Nights” must find herself bewildered at being name-checked in Karl Rove’s “Scheherazade Strategy,” as well as in articles about brand management, serialized content, mastering the attention economy—the unwitting inspiration, and occasional face, of the shifty and shifting tangle of alibis that goes by “storytelling.”
Do we dare define it? “Storytelling”—as presently, promiscuously deployed—comprises fiction (but also nonfiction). It is the realm of playful fantasy (but also the very mortar of identity and community); it traps (and liberates); it defines (and obscures). Perhaps the most reliable marker is that little halo it has taken to holding above its own head, its insistent aura of piety. Storytelling is what will save the kingdom; we are all Scheherazade now.
Patrick deWitt, a droll satirist with a pointed taste for the bizarre, made his name with novels full of clever literary hijinks, including “Undermajordomo Minor” and “The Sisters Brothers.” His last book, “French Exit” (2018), was a loopy mother-son “tragedy of manners” that channeled both Noël Coward and Wes Anderson.
In his new novel, “The Librarianist,” a quirky, affectionate portrait of an introverted loner who makes some surprising connections late in life, DeWitt tames the outlandishness without sacrificing his offbeat humor. His bemused sense of compassion for his characters recalls Anne Tyler, with whom he shares a soft spot for misfits, along with a firm conviction that even supposedly ordinary people lead extraordinary lives.
The journalist in wartime enjoys an enviable image: a hard-bitten idealist filing pages from the front lines, interpreting the chaos of battle for the audience at home. During the Second World War, expectations of thrill and reward attracted ambitious Western journalists to the Soviet Union. From the first shots, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 was clearly going to be a historical turning point. The reporters who ended up with a posting to Moscow would surely enjoy a privileged view of the clash.
Alan Philps’s “The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War” documents the lives of those British, American and Australian journalists. In his telling, the principal risks they faced were not bullets but boredom. Far from accompanying the Red Army during its battles against the fascist invaders, the correspondents instead spent almost all of their time confined to Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, a czarist-era hot spot for playboys’ galas and trysts that became a wartime gilded cage. By filing censored stories while playing the role of adventurous journalist, they contributed to a propaganda operation in which Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union sought to manage Western public opinion.
Writing a book about James Garfield is no easy task. The 20th president who served the second shortest amount of time in the White House is popularly known more for his assassination than what he did in office.
But in “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier,” C.W. Goodyear admirably remedies that with a book that demonstrates the long shadow Garfield's life and legacy has left our country.
They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time.
“It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.
There are obvious benefits to moving away from in-person shopping. For one thing, sizes often not offered in stores are much more accessible. And scrolling through an online catalog helps me envision the potential of an outfit. But I can’t help but feel that a major way we’ve come to relate to style and fashion is being lost. I’m trying to hold on, but sometimes I think I’m totally alone in having actually positive memories of these spaces.
A tour de force that reminds us why we read fiction and how it can touch our hearts, engage our minds and enrich our lives, Bauermeister’s latest novel melds her imagination, acumen and humanity. And as she embraces the circle of life, she evokes tears, awe and gratitude.
For McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and all the under-30s among the 73 million Americans who tuned into CBS that night, that moment was Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It’s a moment that’s been recalled countless times, but here we see it from a new, candid angle, thanks to McCartney’s lens: a shot of Ringo Starr setting up his “precariously perched drum kit” for a rehearsal of the show.
"Identify it. Own it. Fix it."
Clare Frank received this advice when she was a rookie firefighter in the 1980s. Offered to her by a captain who became an important mentor, she took the words to heart as she climbed the career ladder to become one of the highest-ranking female officers in California’s history. “Burnt, A Memoir of Fighting Fire” is her story.
This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood — the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children — as much as it is about the pandemic. It’s a book about a “life inside” — not just inside the home, but inside the mind. Zambreno’s writing is sharpest, most emotionally alive, when it drills into that interior landscape.
In Orwell: The New Life, the critic and biographer D.J. Taylor painstakingly notes the myriad occasions that the writer rubbished his own work. When he submitted his first novel Burmese Days to his literary agent, he pronounced himself “very dissatisfied” with it; even up until the end of his life, he was informing friends that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “an awful book really.” “I am not pleased with it,” he remarked, “but I think it is a good idea.” Little wonder that a reader’s report of Burmese Days for the publisher observed “I know nothing of Orwell, but it is perfectly clear that he has been through hell, and that he is probably still there.”
For over a decade, the diarist Anaïs Nin led a double life, married to two different men on separate coasts of the United States. One husband was a wealthy filmmaker and banker in New York City, who provided Nin with a cosmopolitan lifestyle full of friends and luxuries. The other husband was a handsome forest ranger 20 years Nin’s junior, with whom she had passionate trysts in a mountainside cabin in Sierra Madre, California. Neither man knew about the other. Nin divided her time between them, flying back and forth for six-week stints. She called this balancing act her trapeze.
Everyone I’ve told this story to has either laughed or said something like “Good for her.” After all, who hasn’t wondered about the path not taken, the home in another city or the arms of a new partner? And here Anaïs (pronounced “anna-ees”) Nin seemed to have found a way to live two experiences at once: a sophisticated urban life on the East Coast and a romantic pastoral one on the West. It’s even more unusual because she was a woman. At a time when polyamory and open relationships were unheard of, and when women were funneled into narrow channels leading to marriage and motherhood, Nin seemed to be living on her own terms.
Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop. He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. “I’m takin’ five,” he told me. “I have to. I just don’t want my lead to dwindle.” He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.
It was midnight for civilians, but at Dawn to Dusk to Dawn—a grueling 24-hour ultramarathon in Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania—hour 17 meant more to the runners. Gagz, 47, wasn’t the only one who’d started to creak. Harvey, the race leader who had already run more than four back-to-back marathons that day (107.87 miles), needed to change his fluorescent-yellow shoes. As he sat for the first time in the race, his two crew members facilitated the camping-chair pit stop: Anti-chafe salve was handed off, new socks were stuffed in the cupholders, fresh shoes were lined up. Micah, 40, had been leading the women and was second overall. Her team in the tent next door had been tracking that while she had run 23 of her 414 laps in more than three minutes, eight of her 17 laps this hour took longer. Jeff, 75, had been the definition of consistency all day, alternating between running and walking in pursuit of multiple American records for his age group. Five minutes before Gagz laid down, Jeff had stumbled to the field inside the track and started vomiting.
“Good Night, Irene,” the latest novel from Luis Alberto Urrea, finally gives us strong women braving the heart of the battle and showing the importance of their strength and tenacity.
“Completely Mad” tells the story of these two men — one a flamboyant, attention-seeking playboy, the other a quiet and determined paratrooper — and their race to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic. The term “race” isn’t quite accurate, since only one man was actually racing. During his ordeal, Fairfax had no idea someone else was rowing across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, thousands of miles to the north. McClean, on the other hand, was acutely aware of his rival and brooded about him the whole way.
Their timing, however, was bad: Their triumphs were overshadowed by nonstop coverage of the moon landing. While celebrated in nautical circles, neither man became well known, nor have their stories been told together in a single book, until now.
There was a time when library shelves fairly sagged with strange reference works. Readers could peruse “The Best,” a 1974 hit that cataloged all things superlative, including bedsheets, sunscreens and life insurance policies. They could plunge into the RAND Corporation’s “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates,” something of a bible among data scientists. Or they could cozy up with “The Dictionary of Imaginary Places,” containing entries on El Dorado and Jurassic Park.
The rise of the search engine, reference text ad infinitum, spelled doom for many books such as these. So it’s a pleasure to encounter Dan Schreiber’s “The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird,” a willfully miscellaneous survey of the bizarre beliefs that people have held over the centuries: the kind of random, strange-for-the-sake-of-strange compendium that’s seldom published anymore.
Portis hadn’t published a novel in nearly twenty years, but he turned up finely turned out, only to bolt for home before the ceremony began. By the time the organizers tracked him down he had changed out of his evening wear into khaki pants and a beige windbreaker. He was coaxed back to the gala but didn’t want to change again, so it was in this garb that he took the stage and accepted a golden statue of a rooster from then-editor Marc Smirnoff.
It’s a perfectly Portisean moment, in which an almost pathologically unassuming figure is coerced by circumstance into wagering a personal reserve of dignity against the overweening silliness of the world. The masterful touch—the one Portis would have invented if it hadn’t been invented for him—is of course the golden rooster statue, which was based on the magazine’s colophon but could not help alluding to True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn as well as Joann, “The College Educated Chicken,” from his debut novel, Norwood (1966). As far as I can tell, this was the last public appearance he ever made.
Every professional writer, that is, every person who makes publishable composition his trade, whether he be paid for it or not, experiences at times a supreme disgust with his profession and himself. Now many of these writers would no more make a confession of such weakness than they would admit that they were not just as good as any of their contemporary writers, if readers would only judge the merits of writing honestly. But if there is any professional writer who asserts on all occasions, especially in the occasional moments of candor that even authors may have, that he is not oftentimes bored to death by his trade, and furious at himself for being an author, then that professional writer is only an amateur, and if not that, a prevaricator.
This is something Voevodsky has learned through personal experience. In 1999 he discovered an error in a paper he had written seven years earlier. Voevodsky eventually found a way to salvage the result, but in an article last summer in the IAS newsletter, he wrote that the experience scared him. He began to worry that unless he formalized his work on the computer, he wouldn’t have complete confidence that it was correct.
But taking that step required him to rethink the very basics of mathematics. The accepted foundation of mathematics is set theory. Like any foundational system, set theory provides a collection of basic concepts and rules, which can be used to construct the rest of mathematics. Set theory has sufficed as a foundation for more than a century, but it can’t readily be translated into a form that computers can use to check proofs. So with his decision to start formalizing mathematics on the computer, Voevodsky set in motion a process of discovery that ultimately led to something far more ambitious: a recasting of the underpinnings of mathematics.
In our days of Insta-everything, where cool is watered down by likes and dislikes and anyone can become an influencer, this novel reminds us that cool used to be hard to attain — and that L.A. cool is different from New York cool, which is different from Cannes cool. “The Sunset Crowd” is cool sans hangover, which makes it a perfect addition to your summer luggage.
In the midst of France’s année terrible, there’s a panther loose in Paris. It’s “black as a hole and [moves] like liquid”, and those who see it take it as a bad harbinger. Who can blame them for suspecting the supernatural, when their city’s been turned upside down? Although there’s a more mundane explanation – the panther has escaped from the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes – it’s emblematic of an extraordinary and terrible year. Stef Penney’s fourth novel opens in May 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. It chronicles the siege of Paris – four months of shellfire and starvation – and even then is only halfway done. After the French defeat in January 1871, Paris is far from peaceful: revolution follows, and the radical Paris Commune takes control of the city until its violent defeat in May 1871. To cram all these events into one novel is ambitious, but the result is electrifying.
“Since the identity of the United States as a nation remains unusually fluid and elusive, we Americans have had to look back repeatedly to the Revolution and the Founding (as we call it) in order to know who we are.” The eminent historian Gordon S. Wood wrote those words in “The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States” (2011). Now, with the country locked in an endless, vicious battle over American values — and as we celebrate its 247th birthday — it’s a suitable time to return to the founding documents and the events that led to their creation. British writer Peter Moore’s new book, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” examines the prehistory of the Declaration of Independence and the transatlantic currents that bore it to the shore of legend on July 4, 1776. Is there anything we can apply to our present tribulations?