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.