Here's a simple note to tell you that I'm now taking a sabbatical from updating this little website.
Will this website return? I have two answers.
I want to say I will return. Updating this little website before bedtime gave me solace from the grind of day-to-day stuff. Things come, things go. It's nice, for me, to do something simple, to do something I know how to do.
But, I don't know if I will change my mind. Things come, things go. Except that there are some really big things coming at me right now.
So, for now, I'll say that this website will return on Sunday, Oct 1st, 2023. It's not a promise. I can't promise. But if I change my mind, I'll update this little message.
So, it's goodbye for now, have a good new iPhone day, enjoy the new operating systems, and I hope to see you soon.
The two-up, two-down terraced house on a cobbled Hebden Bridge street does not look like the headquarters of a multi award-winning publishing house.
There is no gleaming edifice, no sign and certainly no reception desk. The green front door leads straight into Kevin Duffy’s living room, the nerve centre of Bluemoose books, his independent literary hit factory.
It is at a cluttered table in the corner that Duffy has built a business with a success rate that billion-pound publishers regard with envy.
The sordid details of literary marriages have always found a fascinated audience; one would indeed be hard pressed to find better examples of the tension between the larger-than-life aspirations of genius and the quotidian banalities of everyday existence. Kingsley Amis certainly expected his first and second wives to make his life easier and make companionable domesticity available when literary success was proving elusive or otherwise unsatisfying. Lives of the Wives provides examples of literary unions that test this precept. Take for instance the de facto “marriage” between the writer Radclyffe Hall (born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall) and her lesbian partner Lady Una Troubridge. Hall was biologically female but dressed and lived as a man (having described herself as suffering from “inversion,” where she was a man trapped in a woman’s body). It was not only the manners, clothing, and affect that Hall took on. At twenty-seven, Hall fell in love with Mabel Batten, who was fifty-one. This relationship endured until she met Una Troubridge, wife of a high-ranking naval officer and proceeded to fall in love with her. It was Troubridge who was the “wife” in the relationship, abandoning whatever interests she may have had to decipher Hall’s poor handwriting, lack of punctuation, stylistic excesses, and then type it all up (with new titles) to submit to a publisher. The devotion endured even when Hall proceeded to become completely infatuated with her Russian nurse. Even after Hall died, Troubridge surrounded herself with editions of Hall’s books and laid fresh flowers before her picture every single day.
In a country where nearly every iota of our psyches and our physical spaces has been captured for the purpose of generating a profit, the ongoing existence of public libraries feels not just radical, but astonishing. What few public goods and systems we have are perpetually embattled. Public restrooms are disappearing. Public benches are being ripped out, casualties of the nation’s “war on sitting.” Public parks are disproportionately available to those who can pay. And yet, in spite of the many and concerted efforts to diminish, starve, and control them, public libraries live on. Here is a place where the unruly endeavor of sharing—and even co-owning—a space is met, not with the carceral impulse to discipline, but rather the impulse to support and to hear out. A place where everyone’s right to a bathroom, a place to sit, clean water, quiet—is clear, and assumed as a matter of course. A place where your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay. Such an experience is so rare in the 21st century that it’s no wonder that people really, really love libraries.
In Emily Habeck’s beguiling first novel, Lewis and Wren have been married for only a few weeks when Lewis is diagnosed with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. That explains his nose turning to nothing but cartilage, his intense thirst and appetite, and all those loose molars. By the end of the year, Lewis will transform into a great white shark. When he tells Wren the bad news, she quips, “They say the first year of marriage is the hardest.” The joke has a hard kernel of grief at its center — because, of course, “there would not be another year to measure against this first one.”
This isn’t only a whimsical concept, though it’s that too. “Shark Heart” succeeds because it doesn’t function solely on the level of metaphor. In the world of the book, human-to-animal mutations are a lamentable but very real fate, like metastatic cancer or mental illness. The process is described with such specificity and physicality that the fantastical becomes, if not mundane, then at least believable. An acquaintance at the gym swimming pool is pregnant with peregrine falcons; another woman’s brother is becoming a zebra. Wren herself is no stranger to the brutality and loss of such mutations; they’re a defining fact of her upbringing, though Habeck withholds this past from the reader for as long as possible.
“Disobedient” was everything I’d hoped for and so much more. Fremantle has immense talent and tells the story of an amazing and inspiring woman with wit and certainty.
As in every Schaffhausen novel, the suspenseful plot is combined with a thoughtful treatment of family tensions and the toll police work takes on a dedicated officer. The characters, including the many stalking suspects, are well drawn, and the prose is tight and vivid.
What Frederick Soddy, the English radiochemist whose lectures would inspire H. G. Wells to predict the atomic bomb, described as the “ultra-potentialities” of radioactive elements seemed limitless. Throughout the nineteen-aughts and -tens, scientists and snake-oil salesmen alike would ascribe to radium—and radiation in general—vitalizing, even life-giving powers. By the 1920s, then, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin and the English biologist J. B. S. Haldane could independently propose that radiation, acting upon our planet’s inorganic compounds billions of years ago, had produced a primordial “soup” from which emerged life.
Science fiction, too, emerged during the genre’s 1900–1935 Radium Age from out of a hot dilute soup of sorts, this one composed of outré genres of literature—from occult mysteries and paranormal thrillers to Yukon adventures and Symbolist poetry—acted upon by the energy of new scientific and technological theories and breakthroughs.
Pedersen hoped to become perhaps the first person to visit all 195 countries without flying. He figured he would return home to Copenhagen in four years as a record holder.
But Pedersen recently walked off a boat in Denmark, having completed his objective six years later than anticipated and feeling fortunate to be alive. Pedersen said he ventured about 260,000 miles via cars, trains, buses, taxis, boats, shipping containers and his own feet.
The book shows how witch-hunting was a source of income for many local people — innkeepers, carpenters, gaolers, and others — and of how whole communities became involved in one way or another.
Its strengths include Meyer’s fine prose, and its vivid evocation of life in a 17th-century English village, how such a place looked and smelled, its social relations, and the language spoken by its inhabitants.
Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered to any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.
But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.
Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is a charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages via the friends and families that mobilize to protect Dodo, a child endangered by the structures he was born into and injured by. With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved people of Chicken Hill. He has reached back into our shared past when, by migration and violence, segregation and collision, America was still becoming America. And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.
In this potpourri of a book on the Paris Métro, British author Andrew Martin is not so much writing an ode to the Métropolitain as providing rail fanatics with a literary handbook. You don’t need to be familiar with “third-rail electrification” and “the MP73s, third-generation tyred trains” to enjoy the eclectic information and funny anecdotes of this charming book – but it would sometimes help. Perhaps better assembled as a dictionary of the Métro, in the style of the Dictionnaire amoureux series published since 2000 in France by Plon, Martin’s short book will nonetheless give Paris and Métro lovers what they are looking for: the infectious enthusiasm of a passionate fan with a clear eye for details.
The body remembers; the road remembers—everything reminds us of everything. Two Open Doors in a Field (2023), Sophie Klahr’s captivating second collection of poems, serves as a travelogue of the heart and mind, with each poem offering a postcard or snapshot of memories evoked by absence, presence, and emptiness.
For all of the words McKinnon uses to celebrate vegetables, the one you won’t find in her book — outside of a few descriptions of both herself and certain pantry ingredients — is “vegetarian.” Instead, as Tenderheart’s subtitle says, this is a “cookbook about vegetables.” That description, which serves as both a declaration and a clarification, is one that has become increasingly common in the cookbook landscape. Vegetarian and nonvegetarian cookbooks alike employ similar wording: In these pages you’ll find vegetables, they say — not vegetarian recipes, necessarily, but vegetables.
Party Lines is about the politics of dancing. It treats dance as resistance, as ritual, an unruly energy. A way to affirm life and to stick two fingers up to the world. Gillett is less interested in summer of love nostalgia or having-it-large anecdotes from superstar DJs than he is on the cycles of social panic generated by Notting Hill carnival-goers, free party travellers, even drill fans in the present day.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” confirms the abiding strength of McBride’s vernacular narrative. With his eccentric, larger-than-life characters and outrageous scenes of spliced tragedy and comedy, “Dickensian” is not too grand a description for his novels, but the term is ultimately too condescending and too Anglican. The melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own, steeped in our country’s complex racial tensions and alliances. Surely, the time is not too far distant when we’ll refer to other writers’ hypnotically entertaining stories as McBridean.
"The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store" is unflinching in its portrayal of America's treatment of Black and Jewish citizens. But it also shows how two dynamic communities band together to make their own justice, provide their own social safety net, and even furnish their own utilities by tapping into pipes when the city fails to provide running water. It is full of colorful stories of speakeasy proprietors, snooty bigwigs, hapless rabbis, stone-cold gangsters and intimidating cobblers. In the end, McBride braids all these stories together in a way that is cohesive, satisfying and hopeful.
In 1916, when W.B. Laughead, an advertising manager for Minnesota’s Red River Timber Company, published a pamphlet to promote the logging industry, a minor figure in Midwestern folklore underwent a major growth spurt, expanding dramatically in physique and reputation.
“Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend,” by the cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, puts the spotlight on Laughead, who also wrote and illustrated the pamphlet.
How to measure up to my mother’s kitchen? That wood-paneled heart of the house, where the fridge overflowed with vegetables and juices and nourishments of all sorts, and when she heard me open it she’d tell me not to spoil my appetite.
Dinner was as close as we got to religion. Less the meal than the idea of it: sitting down around a table to eat together, to commune. We didn’t say grace, we perfunctory Jews, but it sometimes felt like we did, and the looks that friends assumed when I mentioned I had to make it home for dinner were the same looks I expect one receives after mentioning their membership in certain questionable sects. We didn’t even eat the same things, so different were our diets, but my mother cooked for all of us, often three dinners a night — a meaty entrée for my father and brother, a meatless one for me, and an equally meatless non-entrée for herself, like an undressed salad, or cottage cheese with half an avocado and a few squirts of Sriracha — all after coming home from her own all-consuming job, a feat of selflessness that I now apprehend in its properly herculean proportions.
Every novel should teach you at least one thing. If you’re looking for a meticulously detailed breakdown of surf culture, look no further than Melanie Benjamin’s new novel “California Golden,” about a broken family of surfers and a national cult of beach life that flourished after World War II in Southern California.
Is this a romance? Yes and no. Is it a womance? Yes and no. Is it a classic enemies-to-lovers story? Yep. The ingredients are there for a heroine’s journey and the result is a delicious Christmas pudding — crunchy, sweet, rich and a little bit hot once you set it on fire.
The body as deserted burning witness
as ghost
as primeval leper
Bob Comet is, at first glance, a lonely man. A retired librarian in Portland, Oregon, he has no friends or family to speak of. Instead, he engages with the world mainly by reading about it. This changes one day when he comes across a woman in a pink sweatsuit staring blankly into a 7-Eleven fridge. He identifies her as a denizen of the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and in an effort to find meaning in his golden years, he decides to volunteer at the old folks’ home. His way of giving back is by reading to them.
Hanging around Gambell-Reed’s eccentric inhabitants, Bob begins to reflect on his own quiet existence. The Librarianist, the fifth novel from Patrick deWitt, flashes back and forth in time to piece together Bob’s supposedly unremarkable life. In doing so, deWitt cobbles together a complicated but heartfelt treatise on introversion and the value of a life lived through books.
Humans lived there for thousands of years, until the community was reduced to unsustainable levels by poverty, neglect and loss.
The last remaining 36 St Kildans were evacuated to live in mainland Scotland in 1930.
The Lost Lights of St Kilda is a powerful evocation of this story and a well-turned novel that explores potent themes of change, endurance and resistance through a dual narrative from the perspectives of two individuals: Chrissie and Fred.
Group biographies are ambitious undertakings. To weave together divergent narratives, even about the most widely known figures, is a challenging feat; to make it coalesce, the writer has to find the right balance of substance and texture.
A classmate in an undergrad writing workshop once said to me, “Did you know that the word wine shows up in every one of your stories?” He was absolutely right, but I’d had no idea until he told me. To me, the phrase “a glass of wine” is one of the beauties of the English language, and though I didn’t drink much wine in undergrad, I realized I was mentioning it simply for my own pleasure—I wanted to place an object in my story that was beautiful and desirable, to me and to my characters. Our brains take certain pleasure at the mere sight of certain words on the page: for me, the words wine and cream set off little starbursts in my head, so much so that I will recall even an unremarkable scene involving those words for years, even decades.
Writers know that every book has its own unique challenges. Sometimes a book has point of view issues. Or the timeline is tangled. Or the character’s motivation evaporates and you’re locked in a psychotic staring contest with your own delusion. When I sat down to write my latest thriller featuring an atmospheric physicist, the challenge was obvious: I didn’t know anything about physics.
Sometimes a reader resists a narrative the way a patient resists psychoanalysis. This resistance isn’t an impediment to understanding; it’s integral to the process. The very refusal yields insight. Reading “Time’s Mouth” brought this productive tension to mind as I grappled with, but never quite reconciled myself to, the time travel at the novel’s spooky core.
“Ariane” is a slim novel. That Anet devotes so much of it to these retreads implies that they are fundamentally irresolvable. There’s no way to be “in love,” Anet seems to be saying, without descending into stale tropes or some degree of silliness. And yet, we do it anyway.