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.