The emotional part of my brain still tells me to look forward to the next stage of Momofuku. The journalist part of my brain tells me I’ll of course cover any new spots. That’s my job. But the critic in me says there are a lot of other restaurants out there that aren’t taking a pause. And they need reviewing.
I’m looking at two bowls of lasagna. These ready-to-eat meals with a 25-year shelf life come from two US-based survival food companies. Preparation is simple: Just add hot water. One can be eaten after about 12 minutes, the other after just six.
Neither looks particularly appetizing. It probably doesn’t help that I’m a picky eater, but they prove hard to swallow. There is no relation to actual lasagna in taste or texture. One is exceptionally salty, with a particularly unpleasant smell. The other has the aftertaste of a protein shake and a disconcerting mouthfeel. However, I’m not starving or fighting to survive in the middle of the apocalypse. Under such circumstances, I assume these would make an acceptable meal—perhaps even an enjoyable one.
It is not modish in polite society today to introduce somebody by their nationality, even worse to affix a definite article in front. One impeaches oneself as provincial when subscribing too rigidly to the importance of borders. So J. M. Coetzee, the South African writer who now lives in Australia, has chosen a crotchety title for his most recent novella: The Pole. Under this banner he suggests to the world again a general atmosphere of existential homelessness for his characters, a sense of time out of joint.
Though thin of plot, the book does have an arc, and its ending will leave readers breathless. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente writes in the book’s afterword: “the novel, with that formidable twist at its end, would have made a great Alfred Hitchcock movie.”
Henry Winkler's memoir begins on a Tuesday morning in October 1973, at his first audition for “Happy Days.” He was almost 28 — quite a bit old for a high schooler — and struggling with something he didn’t know had a name.
“Being Henry: The Fonz... and Beyond,” released Tuesday by Celadon Books, is a breezy, inspirational story of one of Hollywood’s most beloved figures who became an unlikely TV screen icon and later a champion for those with dyslexia.
But there are no raucous rounds of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass the time on this road trip, no macramé-ing of friendship bracelets. And archery, horseback riding and kickball are not on the agenda this weekend.
The main event? Books.
We’re on a readers retreat. This is not to be confused with a writers retreat, where aspiring authors attend instructive workshops and spend chunks of time, alone, working on their manuscripts. Nor is it an authors retreat for published writers to attend panels and network with other authors and publishers.
Not only have men robbed women of their own narratives; they have also appropriated and retold them to benefit their own interests. Essential in reconsidering a foundational Judeo-Christian story, The Book of Eve is doing the fundamental work of reimagining the internal life of a woman who has scarcely been afforded one.
What makes this spy thriller so compelling is its central character. Heather is complex and always interesting — she’s haunted by memories, in particular of her father whom she adored, and of Flavia, the only real friend she ever had.
But what saves this horror-fest from being shoved back onto the bookshelf in despair at the depravity of its two perpetrators of crime is the complexity and humanity of private investigator, Holly Gibney.
You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.
By the turn of the millennium, Miramax was spending big on middlebrow fare like “The Cider House Rules” and “Kate & Leopold,” the kind of stuff the studios made. As Soderbergh laments to Biskind, “The independent film movement, as we knew it, just doesn’t exist anymore.”
Like many Hollywood sagas, Biskind’s turns out to be a trilogy. His latest book, “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV” (William Morrow), explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. Biskind’s turn to television is telling: the movies, he sighs, are stuck in “superhero monoculture.” Soderbergh, who directed the Cinemax series “The Knick,” reappears to complain, “The audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television.” Not network television, mind you—Biskind dismisses it, somewhat ungenerously, as “a measureless tract of hard, cracked soil, inhospitable to intelligent life”—but the other kind, starting with HBO.
Late Night Horror is best known today, if it is known at all, by its mysterious (if slightly apocryphal) reputation: a broadcast so terrifying, that so scarred viewers, that it was not just taken off the air, but swiftly destroyed. It’s a compelling story, but one that overshadows Late Night Horror’s distinction as a forward-thinking piece of entertainment, both technically and socially. Moreover, its destruction not only reveals England’s odd history of missing TV, it also illuminates something about how media consumption has changed, about cultural memory, maybe even about the ephemeral nature of art itself. Like a ghost, Late Night Horror had to disappear to make an impression.
The endpoint of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.
We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, a record of our pleasure. We must put spices back on their racks, the halved butter stick back in the fridge before it pools on the counter. We must transfer braised greens and ladlefuls of curry into containers that will keep them from spoiling. We must hem and haw over whether cake goes in the fridge or stays on the table, to stare at us for breakfast. We must collect all the surfaces and vessels we have dirtied and turn them clean again. This is a result not of the cooking process, but of the final leg of it.
Who was the first rocker to explore Eastern spirituality and broker what would come to be called world music? George Harrison. Who spurred the Beatles to quit live performance and expand their sonic palette in the studio? George Harrison. Who awoke rock’s social conscience and invented the all-star charity event with the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971? You’re catching on.
This is part of the impetus behind Philip Norman’s new biography, “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle” — to give due and overdue attention to the self-styled “dark horse” of the 20th century’s most important pop act. The other part seems to be completism: Norman authored the first serious book about the Fab Four, “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation,” which was published in 1981, and has since written biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not to mention Elton John, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.One imagines a list of names on Norman’s refrigerator, two-thirds of them checked off, and poor, sad-eyed Ringo Starr down at the bottom.
As he sang in “Things Have Changed,” don’t get up, he’s only passing through. That’s the most fascinating mystery about Dylan and his music — the stubbornly mischievous refusal to fade into the past. In a way, the book enshrines a history that Dylan has already slipped away from, a history where he’s determined not to get trapped. It’s a road map of places he has left behind. But then, that’s how Bob Dylan stories usually go. While everybody kneels to pray, the drifter escapes.
When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.
Dickens said nothing in his letter to explain how he could discern from words on a page that the person who wrote them was a woman. Maybe it was because, a few years earlier, he had made himself “mentally…like a woman” in Bleak House, which is interspersed with chapters from the first-person point of view of a young woman named Esther Summerson. Dickens told an American journalist the effort had “cost him no little labor and anxiety. ‘Is it quite natural,’ he asked, ‘quite girlish?’” Charlotte Brontë, for one, thought it wasn’t: “It seems to me too often weak and twaddling; an amiable nature caricatured, not faithfully rendered.” But Dickens felt he had succeeded, writing another friend that he had done “a pretty womanly thing as the sex will like.”
To students new to the study of nineteenth-century American literature, it may seem that the field has been so thoroughly studied and catalogued that there can be very little left to discover about it. This could hardly be further from the truth. The bodies of work of the most well-studied of American authors from the period—much less writers who are only just beginning to receive their critical due—are almost all incomplete. Indeed, it is probably a rare thing to study a writer who does not have works, either known or suspected, missing from their corpuses. This seems to be especially true of authors of the nineteenth century, for a few reasons.
When searching for a tea emoji on most text messaging apps, a range of options appear. One shows what looks like green liquid in a white bowl. Another features a saucer and a cup filled with a darker liquid that doubles as coffee.
These emoji’s designs allude to the long history of tea, tracing how this centerpiece of a cherished Asian tradition grew into a global beverage. For most of recorded history, the word “tea” referred to green tea from China and later Japan—illustrated by the emoji officially called “teacup without handle.”
More than her human protagonists, her furry characters exude distinct, memorable, impossible-to-ignore personalities. From one tale to the next, tissues might get soggy and eyes puffy, but the hope that there will be more stories will surely lift readers’ hearts.
Many academics are clinical prose stylists, but Sinykin writes with verve and narrative flair as he documents the consolidation of the major publishing houses — and, along the way, overturns the myth of “the romantic author,” that lone genius unfettered by social circumstances or material constraints. Far from working in isolation, he argues, writers inhabit a “hidden world” of “subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats.” In “Big Fiction,” these shadowy figures, so central yet so uncelebrated, slink out of the wings and onto the stage. The result is a fascinating and informative account of the convulsions roiling the American publishing industry for the past half-century — and a devastating reckoning with the ways in which conglomeration has altered American fiction.
Why did Gilbert take this seriously? When she says she does “not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced … grievous and extreme harm,” her sympathy is well-placed but muddled and indulgent. She stops short of an apology to avoid the appearance of scandal, and she doesn’t call for peace to show she had never supported anything else. In other words, she says as little as possible, passing on the easy opportunity to defend her right to free expression and anyone’s right to read or not read whatever they want, both of which are currently and repeatedly threatened in Russia, Ukraine and the United States.
How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?
Thai Food Near Me is a small but powerful symbol of Google’s far-reaching impact on businesses over the past two decades and the lengths their owners will go to try to optimize their operations for the company’s platforms. The name is both notable and obvious — if you’ve spent any amount of time searching for things online, you will understand the reference immediately. The turn is that 25 years after Google Search first arrived, the name says the quiet part out loud.
“When you have a million restaurants close by, you will be in the bottom [of rankings] if it’s a random name,” Jirapraphanan says. “But [when] we used Thai Food Near Me, people started knowing us.” Customers, like Jirapraphanan, were searching for the exact phrase and stumbling upon the restaurant, they told him.
Ever since I was a kid, watching re-runs of ancient cartoons at my Grandma Marge’s house in Hubbard, Nebraska, I’ve been a fan of Casper the Friendly Ghost, especially the original episodes from the late 1940s. The first installment opened with baritone radio announcer Frank Gallop intoning: “There are some people who believe in ghosts, and there are some people who don’t. If you’re the believe-in-ghosts kind, then this story is about one. And if you’re the don’t-believe-in-ghosts-kind, well, just for fun, this story is about one anyway.”
I believed, I wanted to tell Frank Gallop; I was in the former category, even though I’d never yet been lucky enough to see one.
This is a novel with enough frame narratives to make the ghost of Joseph Conrad come and listen; the story told by Adanson is itself surrounded by other people, other considerations. Diop takes a risk in devoting the long first section to Adanson’s daughter Aglaé, her complicated middle life, and her feelings about a father more interested in compiling his Famille des plantes than in his own young family. Though this is deeply appealing biographical terrain, it’s not clear where the central path of the novel will open up. By the end we can return with pleasure to this beginning, meeting Aglaé in her greenhouse, understanding how far this is a book about inheritances that come late or in roundabout ways and are sometimes not wanted at all. The inheritors have their own lives to be getting on with. That fact provides a nice counterweight to the grandeur of emotion with which Adanson tells his tale.
This is the difficulty. Is child-rearing on some level not arduous, boring, numbing, and then suddenly revelatory? By the end of the novel, Rose has her first smile, and Helen and Rose briefly fall asleep to a Winnicott lecture. Moments like this may make everything feel worth it to some. Others may still wonder what the fuss is about, like they don’t even know what a human is anyway.
One of the first things I discovered was that there were two ways of thinking about creativity: ‘little-c’ and ‘Big-C’. Little-c was everyday creativity, the type of activities that the average person could do, such as building a bookcase or learning to play popular songs on the guitar. Big-C was reserved for geniuses. The dichotomy – which was first articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – made sense to me. But it would not have been especially helpful for my situation. I wasn’t a genius, so as far as creative writing was concerned, that meant I was lumped in with everyone else – those engaged in little-c. If I wouldn’t be able to reach a level of consistently publishing my creative work, then it seemed to me that I had definitely made the right choice to give up my creative ambitions.
I didn’t know it then, but I had been susceptible to a ‘genius bias’ – that is, I assumed that the only creativity of note was that of brilliant creators. I didn’t value my own creativity enough. My writing was clearly not at the Big-C level, but I would come to find that the category of little-c was too vast to sufficiently describe what the majority of people engage in. I would eventually tackle this problem as a researcher of creativity, emerging with a more nuanced (and continually developing) view of what creativity can be. I will explain that view further – but first, it’s worth examining some other common misconceptions about creativity that any of us can fall victim to, and how these incorrect beliefs can unconsciously shape and narrow our perspective on creativity.
In a novel based around a film buff, actual films naturally play a part in structuring the narrative. Like novels, films mean different things to different people, provoke contrasting responses. My wish was to describe the many movies mentioned in Brian in a form which reflected the emotions of my central character, whilst also communicating accurately something of the films’ original essence, and at the same time not undermining cinemagoers’ individual memories of the work. To achieve this I needed my text to have a certain openness and freedom from rigidity. Although the chronology is accurate and all the films titled and attributed correctly, the narrative style allows for focus often on lesser-known aspects and for the insertion of mild inventions. Told entirely from close to the closed point of view of Brian, the isolated buff, the book’s views on life in general and film in particular are his.
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.
Her newest collection of fiction writing, Our Strangers, reflects this new consciousness in subtle ways. The pieces here—143 pieces in total—have a lot in common with her earlier work: Most are just a page or two in length, with a handful of very sparse prose pieces with line breaks. There are series that run through the collection—scrupulous descriptions of somebody’s distant relations to famous people, vignettes of moments of annoyance in a marriage—as well as pieces that are revisions, or alternate tellings, of previous ones. But if she continues to pay heed to the smallest, unturned details of the problems of domestic life, she affords them with less importance than before. With insistence, she returns to themes of plant and animal life, community, and old age.
This story is a fictional account of the life of Ernest Hemmingway’s third son, born Gregory Hemmingway, who struggled with gender dysphoria, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. The story is of a person straining deeply to understand themselves. From childhood through to struggles as a doctor and eventually the loss of medical license due to alcoholism, four divorces, and a constant internal conflict. There are feelings here of a person on the brink of breaking apart.
And yet one doesn’t need to know any of that to enjoy this book. It is beautifully well done. It’s rare to find a fictional account of real life that moves with grace and passion and yet tells us something profound about the mind, perhaps even gives a glimpse — moments — of what it feels like to be human. Russell Franklin uses his talent to tell that fractured story with the empathy normally reserved for our family, creating a convincing work of fiction.
A Forest Journey is a classic because it has stood the test of time. It’s a paean to forests and a reminder to us all that civilizations have crumbled when the land reached its limit. After all the destructive storms, floods, and fires of the past decade, we shouldn’t need reminding that we exploit the Earth at our peril. Forests are a gift.
It is difficult to explain what makes Svetlana Alexievich’s work so moving. Hardly any of the words in the books that bear her name are her own. Hardly ever does she allow her authorial voice to make itself heard. Rather, in the literary equivalent of collage, Alexievich writes by arranging others’ words. At times, she seems to nudge her interlocutors, provoking them, asking them questions or contradicting them. But we only become aware of this behind the scenes maneuvering in her interviewees’ rare outbursts, which she faithfully records alongside their tics and mannerisms. Similarly, if we sometimes come to suspect that she must dictate the flow of the conversation, asking productively open-ended questions, her texts are silent about how or when she might do this, recording only the answers that are spoken back to her. Those whose lives she documents seem to come out of nowhere and to speak into the void.
Even among those literary fiction writers who publish successfully with the Big Five, few make a living solely from their books. Many get a significant share of income from events, so their workplace may often be made up of (repetitive, impassioned, and/or draining) conversations with bookstore audiences and students and festival attendees and organizers bringing them here and there. Many of us work in the academy, of course (as discussed in Mark McGurl’s influential 2009 book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing), though adjunctification, austerity, and the hierarchical bad vibes of higher ed are undercutting that profession. Increasingly, many literary writers are turning to screenwriting. And many simply work other jobs, stealing time for writing on the side. So, books exist in the terms that publishing shapes, yes, but writing’s origins and activities are more diverse, diffuse, mysterious—both more constrained (since most of society supports literary work less than the publishing industry does, and that includes the academy) and more possible than publishing’s limits suggest, both freer and more precarious. It’s good to consider how fiction reflects its immediate economic conditions, but those conditions are about more than conglomeration in literary media.
Young envisioned a book that would top out at around two hundred pages and take two years to complete. When she delivered the manuscript to Scribner eighteen years later, the stack of papers was almost half as tall as she was. In the meantime, Young had acquired a new residence (the Greenwich Village apartment where she was to spend much of her life), a new editor (Burroughs Mitchell), a new series of honors (Guggenheim, Newberry Library, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships), and a new title for her now epically proportioned novel: “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Young, too, had reconstructed the Harmonist labyrinth—out of paper and ink instead of shrubbery and wood. In her version, though, there was no shrine waiting to be found in the center.
Not wanting to cause ecological problems by planting the trees across the Pacific Northwest, Stielstra would eventually contact one of the foremost experts on the coast redwood, a botanist and forest ecologist named Stephen Sillett, at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ask if moving redwoods north was safe. Sillett thought planting redwoods around Seattle was a fantastic idea. (“It’s not like it’s going to escape and become a nuisance species,” Sillett told me, before adding, “it just has so many benefits.”) Another factor encouraged Stielstra too: Millions of years ago, redwoods — or their close relatives — grew across the Pacific Northwest. By moving them, Stielstra reasoned, he was helping the magnificent trees regain lost territory.
A day at a nudist resort? The notion tingles, deliciously shocking. Then anger flares. Why should nudity shock me, or anybody else? We are born naked. Had God intended us to wear clothes, we would have popped out in tweed.
When I reveal my plan, my friends’ eyes widen. They envision, I can tell, either debauchery or a throwback hippie commune, faded as old Kodachrome. Yet France, Germany, Spain, Croatia, the Netherlands, Brazil—many parts of the world remain calm when someone undresses. “Most Munich residents do not find public nudity in the park to be anything special,” notes a travel piece. “Getting naked is a way for people to allow themselves to be who they are and to get away from the stress of urban Munich, which is why designated naked zones are put up legally.”
You don’t have to be religious, or artistic, or creative, or a scientist, to understand that the world and what it contains is more than a 3D experience. To understand that truth, all we have to do is log on. Increasingly, our days are spent staring at screens, communicating with people we shall never meet. Young people who have grown up online consider that arena to be more significant to them than life in the “real” world. In China, there is a growing group who call themselves two-dimensionals, because work life, social life, love life, shopping, information, happen at a remove from physical interaction with others. This will become more apparent and more bizarre when metaverses offer an alternative reality.
Let me ask you this. If you enjoyed a friendship with someone you have never met, would you know if they were dead? What if communication continued seamlessly? What if you went on meeting in the metaverse, just as always?
A large part of the work of writing is inarticulable. Writers who can explain what they’re doing while they are doing it, the ideological aspirations that govern their work in progress—these writers are alien to me. The process more familiar to me is witchier, an optimistic ignorance sustained on occasional gifts from the void.
In Late, Michael Fitzgerald has achieved a novel in which time seems to clench. The reader is held within the frame of Zelda’s gaze, and given some insights into her mind. Densely intertextual in its scope, populated with literary and cultural references, Late is both witty and melancholic.
Pity the freelancer tasked with reviewing for The New York Times the intimate and joyful new memoir by the esteemed Times book critic Dwight Garner. Unqualified praise in these pages for “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” will never be entirely trusted. Fortunately, after my third reading of Garner’s eccentric bricolage of literary anecdote and autobiography, I did come up with a few qualifications.
“Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Outside the world of the cartoon, it’s less than half a year before Bill Watterson, thirty-seven at the time, will retire from producing his wildly beloved work. “Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. The second panel of the July 17th strip is wide, with detailed trees in the foreground, the wagon airborne, and Calvin concluding his thought: “But I’m still going to gripe about it.”
Many people, not only in Britain but around the world, were eagerly awaiting the appearance of the first part of the Dictionary, and Murray particularly wanted Ellis’s opinion on the draft Introduction, which he knew he had to get just right. It all read perfectly to Ellis except for one section. “The Dictionary aims at being exhaustive,” Murray had written. “Not everyone who consults it will require all the information supplied; everyone, it is hoped, will find what he actually wants.”
Is it really exhaustive? Ellis wondered. What about slang and coarse words? He scribbled to Murray in the margin (and the page with the scribble still survives today in the archives), “You omit slang & perhaps obscenities, thus are by no means exhaustive. Though disagreeable, obscene words are part of the life of a language.” Feeling satisfied with his contribution to Murray’s landmark first part of the Dictionary, and admiring of the project as a whole, Ellis placed the corrected draft into an envelope and placed it by his front door, ready for the morning post.
In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.
And here, any writer should find their breath caught in their throat. Any writer would have to pause and marvel.
One limitation of this modern-day resistance spread across a globalized system is that its wins can feel like pacifications. The effects of automation are managed piecemeal, and continuing harms pushed out of sight or displaced to somewhere else. Merchant holds the weapon just out of our view—suggesting that workers “might just reach, once again, for the hammers”—but leaving us in suspense. Which raises an age-old question: Can you be a Luddite without smashing anything?
As soon as the last word of my story’s punchline left my lips, David Sedaris erupted in a fit of laughter. Eyelids clenched, mouth agape, he cackled at the ceiling of the posh lobby abutting the colossal hall where he had just performed a near-sold-out show.
A surge of satisfaction washed over me. I had just put Sedaris, a master humorist, on the other side of the laughs after he had held a couple thousand people rapt in their seats. But my joy turned to panic when Sedaris pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down everything I had just told him, repeating it back to me—as if talking to himself, looking right through me—to get the tone and wording right.
One remarkable tool in Washington’s repertoire is his use of space and time; both are fundamentally important in this novel, though rooted in his finesse with characterization and voice.
“Opposable Thumbs,” a lively accounting of the men and the various versions of their show, makes the author’s admiration for his subjects clear. But the book isn’t just a fan’s note. Incorporating thorough reporting and research, including hundreds of hours watching clips on YouTube, Singer gets at what made their partnership unique and far ahead of its time.
Still, “Opposable Thumbs” is a welcome reminder of an era when film criticism actually mattered, from the theoretical debates between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris to pioneering print-to-TV critics like Judith Crist. But it was Siskel and Ebert who, in Singer’s words, “democratized criticism, turned it into mass entertainment.”
The triumph of this book is that it’s quite rare in the self-help canon – or what publishers now term personal development – to not make a cynic such as myself roll their eyes, and this one doesn’t. It’s a shame that whoever was responsible for the jacket blurbs takes a shoving-a-finger-in-your chest approach that isn’t replicated by the variable tone inside, which is sometimes dogmatic but often reflects the genuine kindness and enthusiasm of its author. Be Useful, it turns out, is very helpful.
It sounds like fiction from “The Lord of the Rings.” An enemy begins attacking a tree. The tree fends it off and sends out a warning message. Nearby trees set up their own defenses. The forest is saved.
But you don’t need a magical Ent from J.R.R. Tolkien’s world to conjure this scene. Real trees on our Earth can communicate and warn each other of danger — and a new study explains how.
“Many people now want less preserved food. They want natural food, which is seen as healthier and better for us,” says Jakobsen. The downside is an increased risk of microbial contamination. But natural “barriers” can curb bacteria from proliferating without using unhealthy chemicals. For example, the team found that when raw fish slices are placed atop vinegar rice—the type of rice normally served with sushi—the bacteria grow more slowly, because they don’t like the acidic environment. And of course, the longer a packed sushi lunch sits on the shelf, the more time these bacteria have to grow.
Ingenious storylines, intriguing suspects, insular British settings and isolated manors recall Christie’s trademarks and display Hannah’s fidelity to her revered predecessor. But allegiance without innovation would qualify as nothing more than facile derivation, and Hannah is too talented, too intelligent and too creative to settle for easy achievement.
“Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night” exemplifies Hannah’s power. Revel in her work, test your own little grey CQ cells and bless the joy to the world that she delivers to devotees of detective whodunits.
Now we are moving beyond Einstein’s equations on cosmology and physics into a new unknown. We must be certain about uncertainty and explore the new. I would give this book to anyone, young and old, interested in thinking, science and literature. His reflections on how Shakespeare and Dante considered first and last things are a joy. His book is a work of literature itself.
And it is striking how much of Nisbet’s bill of accusations against the humanities, delivered in 1982, still applies very precisely, over four decades later: the domineering status of political ideology, obsession with questions of race and sexuality and identity, the steady preoccupation with oppression and marginalization and historical grievance, the celebration of the transgressive, the tyranny of overspecialization.All of this was firmly in place in the faculties of our “best” institutions during the Eighties.
I’ll return to Nisbet later in my remarks. But for now, let’s consider his plaintive question: “what the hell are the humanities?”
I did not grow up with dolls, which is odd given how much the women in my family—my grandmother, my mother, my many aunts—cherished girliness. Let me be clear: they did not value girls (“you feed girls only to give them away”); they valued girliness. Everything I knew about femininity—its modesty, its delicacy, its compliance, its dollishness—came from the real women in my life. The only doll I knew from childhood stood inside a tall glass case in the music room on the second floor of my grandmother’s house in Tainan. Her still face was made of porcelain, her body encased in a tiered, European gown of black and red lace, and I knew not to touch her. I simply did not have off-the-shelf toys the way my children in the United States did. (Was it the times? Were we that poor? Were my parents just strict?) My favorite plaything before the sartorial splendor that my father sent me was a thick stack of tear-away subscription postcards that I diligently collected from my mother’s women’s magazines. They were fabulous: they could be money when I played bank, or mail when I played post office, or secret papers when I played spy.
Two months after a storm that dropped a year’s rainfall in a single day, flooding roads, destroying trails and closing down the park, the national park’s Oct. 15 reopening revealed a strange place made stranger.
The appeal of cosmopolitanism lies in its assertion of some independence from race and other markers of identity, which, no matter how overbearing, can never wholly define you. And while it would be irresponsible for anyone to forget their ancestors, I doubt that these forebears would have wanted their hardships to weigh so heavily on their sons and daughters. Cole started his career as a high-flier, and not even the most jealous ghost of the past would deny that the sky is where he belongs.
Palmer’s reach transcends his channel. Delve into chat forums—conversation hubs with names like BackcountryPilot.org, SuperCub.org, and, on Facebook, Big Tire Pilots – STOL Pilots – Backcountry Pilots – Mountain Pilots—and you’ll inevitably encounter mentions of Palmer and occasional references to “the Trent Palmer Effect,” which refers to his ability to bring new participants into the recreational bush-flying game, whose presence gooses both demand for planes and their prices.
One of Palmer’s closest friends refers to him as the “Convincer in Chief.” Partly because of Palmer’s charms, the plane he purchased for $39,000 in 2015 is now worth five times that, and people hoping to buy one like it face more than a three-year backlog for a factory-built plane and two years for a DIY kit. “I’m basically flying a plane I can’t afford,” Palmer told me.
Try to imagine baking something you love — a cupcake or a babka, maybe — without butter, dairy, or eggs. It probably presents as an unsolvable logic puzzle. It’s not just that those ingredients have defined what we think of as patisserie in the French sense, which is the foundation on which Western pastry is built. It’s that they’ve done so because they provide not only structure for most of our desserts and baked goods, but also what we identify as the flavor or texture. For instance, we describe things as “buttery” or “creamy” or “custardy.”
So how could you possibly have a croissant without butter? A panna cotta without milk? A custard tart without eggs? And if you could, would they still count as themselves?
Newman hasn’t proved herself a worthy successor to Orwell; she’s outclassed him, both in knowledge of human nature and in character development. “Julia” should be the new required text on those high-school curricula, a stunning look into what happens when a person of strength faces the worst in humanity, as well as a perfect specimen of derivative art that, in standing on another’s shoulders, can reach a higher plane.
Louisa Hall’s novel Reproduction centers on a writing professor who struggles to conceive, give birth to, and then parent a young daughter all while attempting to write a “biographical novel” about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Hall’s unnamed protagonist, who is also the novel’s narrator, is teaching a course on science fiction and re-reading Frankenstein, and soon, the course and the book begin to seep into her everyday life, which takes on an otherworldly strangeness. When she suffers a miscarriage, she feels as if she is “floating in the coldness of space”; her hospital visit for a D&C, performed by masked doctors in a cold, bare room—like “a capsule sent into space”—is surreal and disorienting.
If there’s one thing that Alexandra Christo – author of the Hundred Kingdoms and Into the Crooked Place books – writes really well, it’s a loveable motley group of characters thrown together for a common cause. And that’s certainly true for her latest immersive romantasy, The Night Hunt, which pits vengeful Gods against an unlikely team-up of monsters and humans. In this novel, the endearing quartet of reluctant heroes consists of a lonely monster, a disgruntled messenger to the Gods, a shunned half-banshee and a curious scholar, who must band together to break a curse and bring down the Gods bent on killing them.
In writing of love, psychology, philosophy — even mathematics — Chung sprinkles in such observations, both highly personal and surprisingly universal. What a treat to spend an afternoon immersed in her world, to better understand her loneliness, to laugh as she indicts "one swipe and you're out" dating culture and feel the pangs of nostalgia for lost time as it rushes forward. Or does time actually rush forward? Matthew McConaughey and Nietszshe would have some thoughts.
Today, groundwater in Michoacán is disappearing, and its bodies of water are drying up. Lake Zirahuén is polluted by agricultural runoff. Nearly 85 percent of the country was experiencing a drought in 2021, and experts project that the state’s Lake Cuitzeo, the second largest in all of Mexico, could disappear within a decade. In part because of the conversion from pine to avocado trees, the rainy season has shrunk from around six months to three. So profound is the drain on the region’s aquifers that small earthquakes have newly become commonplace. The one-hundred-mile avocado corridor has, in effect, become the only live theater of what is often referred to as “California’s water wars.”
It’s unclear whether the avocado can survive this changing climate. But in Michoacán, the more pressing question is whether its residents can survive the avocado.
The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put it in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘time wol nat abide/Fro day to night it changeth as the tide.’ When he wrote those words, a mechanical clock was being built at the abbey in St Albans: it showed the time, the position of the stars and the state of the tides at London Bridge. Time was movement and flux, and the sea revealed its regular rhythm; if the tides ceased, time was out of joint. ‘What is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities’. Fifteen centuries of waiting for the end made time an existential problem: how to describe it, how to measure it, how to use it? The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century devotional treatise, put the matter starkly: ‘All time is goven to thee, and it schal be askid of thee how thou hast dispended it.’
Almost four years before Galileo’s launch, in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded shortly after lift-off, taking seven lives with it. NASA cancelled its plans to dispatch Galileo on a speedy path to Jupiter using a liquid-fuelled rocket aboard another space shuttle. Instead, the probe was released more gently from an orbiting shuttle, with mission engineers slingshotting it around Venus and Earth so it could gain the gravitational boosts that would catapult it all the way to Jupiter.
On 8 December 1990, Galileo was due to skim past Earth, just 960 kilometres above the surface. The tickling became an itch that Sagan had to scratch. He talked NASA into pointing the spacecraft’s instruments at our planet. The resulting paper was titled ‘A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft’.
I think one reason I love the notion of a single-ingredient focus — which I've tried to do in some of my own food writing — is that it accentuates the point that there is much to investigate and enjoy about one ingredient. You may love cauliflower, but if you only cook it one way and rarely ever veer away form that variation, then are you really enjoying cauliflower to the fullest?
There's much to untangle and savor in this exquisite novel, including the symbolism of the titular doors and the significance of Reynaldo Hahn's musical composition based on Paul Verlaine's poem "L'heure exquise" ("The Exquisite Hour").
But for me, especially upon re-reading Maugham's The Casuarina Tree, I was struck by Tan's audaciousness in manipulating Maugham's stories in the interests of literature in much the same way that Maugham himself had fed his fiction by manipulating the stories people told him during his travels.
Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.
I’m reading a book about New York in the late 1970s and it begins with a perennial observation that you can live many lifetimes in the city due to the unsentimental way it demolishes the past. I have a spooky feeling, peering over the shoulder of the writer, Paul Goldberger, forty-five years later. Most of the thrilling new items he describes – buses, which are all painted white, phone booths one cannot molest—are now in 2023 things in the past. Some of it reads like a prophecy: about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mercedes Benz showroom at 430 Park Ave. Goldberger asks: “why Wright did this is a mystery… the idea of having sleek European cars appear to the purchaser to be gliding toward him off a curving ramp is an appealing one, but it doesn’t stand a chance of working in such a low cramped space.” And now that that show room is gone.
Working as an editor, especially within literary journals, can sometimes feel like a similar experience in hyperactive obsolescence. Not that writers’ manuscripts are gliding toward us in a low cramped space—but rather every week brings a new foreclosure. This month it’s The White Review and The Gettysburg Review. Next month it will be others. This is the way of literary magazine publishing. For every Virginia Quarterly Review or Paris Review, there are dozens if not hundreds of other small journals that open with fanfare, continue for a few issues and then close quietly in the night before the chill has gone off the wine for their launch parties. I’ve lived in New York City almost thirty years and my memory is cluttered with issue parties for little magazines like Open City or Astra, or Black Clock, beautiful journals which are no longer in circulation.
In Samuel Johnson’s club women seem to have been present only to bring in food and clear away the dirty plates, but Daisy Hay’s new book, Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, draws attention to another equally influential yet informal eighteenth century dining society that met for over thirty years at the home of the publisher Joseph Johnson. ‘All those who dined were connected by a web that spun outwards from Johnson’s house through the medium of paper,’ Hay writes, ‘as conversations begun within the privacy of the dining toom stretched out – often in public view – across the country and over the decades.’ Johnson’s many guests did not come because of the food ‑ usually it was the same ‘citizen’s dinner’ of boiled cod, roast veal and rice pudding – but for the conversation. From the start, women writers contributed to those stimulating discussions and were treated as equals.
Eight months after her husband, Chad, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, Stacie Vanags planted 1,100 flower seeds in her Ventura backyard.
“Something called me to do it,” Stacie said of her tiny flower farm. “I needed a sanctuary.”
Now, Ward has moved further back in time to focus on the United States’ original sin, the peculiar institution that managed to reify every circle of Dante’s “Inferno.” Here, in “Let Us Descend” are enslaved Black women close enough to the birth of America to have heard directly about the horrors of the Middle Passage and even the nature of life on the African continent.
And yet, for all its boundless suffering, this is a novel of triumph.
Ours is a time of what environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb describes as an “infrastructure tsunami.” The automobile reigns supreme and civilization’s appetite for new roads appears insatiable. There are about 40 million miles of roadways in the world, Goldfarb writes, and our collective future will bring many more cars and the need for even more roads. But the environmental and social costs of this tsunami are almost unimaginable.
Felix Kaaya, a member of the Meru people of Tanzania, spent decades searching for his grandfather’s bones. Mangi (“Chief”) Lobulu was among the 19 Indigenous leaders hanged from a single tree on March 2, 1900, during Germany’s brutal suppression of the Meru’s resistance to colonization of East Africa. After that, his body disappeared.
Kaaya, who is now in his early 70s, suspected that Lobulu was one of the many dead African individuals whose remains were shipped to German universities and museums for study and experimentation. Konradin Kunze, a German performer and director, met Kaaya while preparing an exhibition advocating for the return of these remains. Kunze promised to help Kaaya find Lobulu. His research in German archives revealed that Lobulu’s skeleton had indeed been sent to the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan and that Lobulu’s bones were among the 200 skeletons and 5,000 skulls the American Museum of Natural History purchased from von Luschan’s widow in 1924. Lobulu’s remains have spent a century on the Upper West Side.
On the Velvet Underground official bootleg “Live at Max’s Kansas City,” recorded on August 23, 1970, you can, at one point, hear the author and downtown face Jim Carroll, in the audience, asking someone to go fetch him a “double Pernod,” and then interacting with a passing drug dealer. “You got a down?” he says. “What is it? A Tuinal? Gimme it immediately.” That night, the band’s set list included songs called “New Age” and “Beginning to See the Light,” but no one could have mistaken their etiolated din for the sweet harmonies and sweeter optimism of the nineteen-sixties. In this grimy oubliette, sex, drugs, and rock and roll do not herald the dawn of some airy utopia; the mood is new, and dark. Breakdown. Atomization. Serious narcotics. “Live at Max’s” was recorded by Brigid Berlin, a onetime receptionist for Andy Warhol whose father was the president of the Hearst Corporation. Her Warhol family name was Brigid Polk, granted for her habit of randomly poking people with an amphetamine-filled syringe.
That mingling of high and low society, penthouse and pavement, was a distinguishing mark of the surrounding scene, where there was a self-conscious glorying in things sleazy. “Scum” and “punk” were terms of approbation. Values upended, à la Genet: what straight society considers irredeemably low, raised on high. People disporting themselves like minor French nobility in the Versailles of Louis XVI, against a backdrop of shooting galleries and cruising strips. In the summer of 1970, the ambisexual look and sybaritic morals of this particular underground were set to go mainstream, to be hailed as something called glam rock. And Lou Reed was its ambiguous sovereign.
“It all began with writing,” goes the first line of Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel, in which a young socialite named Celine is slandered in pornographic, anonymously authored pamphlets circulating in prerevolutionary Paris. Four pages later, Thirlwell clears his throat — actually, Celine’s publicity troubles go back to the Big Bang: “The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of existence that tend toward a form, in which it might be possible to discern a design — and one of these was this story of Celine and her friends.” This could have gone without saying, but Thirlwell can’t help himself. In “The Future Future,” the English writer compulsively gestures to the biggest picture and decides it’s the gesture that’s profound.
Christine Coulson, who spent 25 years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a short, clever novel that tells the story of a woman over the course of her life in a series of museum wall labels. In doing so, she acknowledges a sad but undeniable truth — that for much of the 20th century and perhaps even today, a certain kind of wealthy, white socialite in America was nothing more than an object to be critiqued, described, evaluated and displayed.
It’s hard to write about food, for more than a page or two, without folding in comparisons and allusions to another form of carnal knowledge. Food and sex: their techniques and variety borrow from the same stock of language. What we eat is as revealing as what we do in bed, and as we grow older, food is sexual compensation.
Dunlop’s descriptions explore this intertwining. The dark leaves on a stalk of Chinese broccoli are as “sleek and languid as a mermaid’s hair.” Chefs in Shanxi are adept at “thumbing, extruding, pinching, dripping, tearing, pulling, rubbing” their noodles. Menus aimed at Western customers, with their too-obvious dishes, resemble “a row of cabaret girls showing off their legs.” Textural descriptions in Chinese cookbooks remind Dunlop of scenes from “Fanny Hill,” the classic erotic novel. A simple breakfast stew is “pimped with chile and pickles.” If I had a nickel for every time Dunlop used the words “smitten” or “besotted,” I would absolutely be able to buy 40 minutes of small-town parking.
If you had met the poet Michael Field walking in London in the late 1880s, you might have been surprised to learn that the new literary celebrity dazzling critics with his “Elizabethan Method” was not a brilliant young man, but two women: aunt and niece. Before Robert Browning let the secret slip, you might have strolled past Michael Field and never known. But the women might have noticed you and returned home to write about you in Michael Field’s diary.
In Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2022), scholar Carolyn Dever pulls that diary out of a century of obscurity and unfurls 30 years and almost 10,000 pages to reveal a genre-defying, protomodernist document.
Perhaps among the bees, peaceful and well-organized social creatures that they are, American confessional poet Sylvia Plath found a solid sense of community, support, and connection that she was missing on the home front. Add to that the affective element of hereditary nostalgia—Plath’s late father, Otto Plath, was a respected biologist who published a book in 1934 on the habits of bumblebees—and what was produced was a series of poems that are notably more grounded and less volatile than anything she ever wrote about her father’s early death from diabetes or the abysmal health care she received for her lifelong mental illness.
Sylvia Plath’s healthy relationship with bees and their impact on her work in times of debilitating writer’s block could even be described as that of a genius and their muse. She was a beekeeper herself and likely composed poems in her head while interacting with her bees and absorbing their conflict-free productivity. Pun fully intended, they gave her a much-needed buzz.
The Milky Way is twisted, and astronomers may finally know why. They're laying the blame on a football-shaped, tilted halo of dark matter that envelopes our galaxy.
Philip Notman, the history professor protagonist of Rupert Thomson’s 14th novel, “Dartmouth Park,” is, by his own estimation, an essentially anonymous man, disguised by his education, Christianity, whiteness, heterosexuality and middle age. Long stuck in his ways, he isn’t expecting to have his life upended while returning to London from an academic conference in Norway, even after spending an unexpectedly memorable few days roving about with an enthralling younger sociologist from Cádiz named Inés Vaquero de Ayala. But an upending is exactly what happens to Philip when, on the way home, he experiences what he later calls his “Damascene moment” — a woman near him taps a travel card to get on the airport tram, and the mundane beep the card reader makes sends him into a brief but visceral fugue, wherein “his head began to float sideways and backward,” and he feels a sensation akin to a hand wrapping around his brain and squeezing, leaving him momentarily unable to think or react.
Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).
At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found?
Readers may find the lack of neurosis and anguish surprising for the genre, but McAllister’s account of his life as a ballet dancer and director is frank and entertaining, a kind of behind-the-scenes guide to ballet for people who are curious.
For more than 50 years, “Orpheus and Apollo,” the constellation of gleaming metal bars conceived by the sculptor Richard Lippold, graced the grand lobby of Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall like two friendly gods floating in space. It hung on steel wires from the ceiling until 2014, when it was taken down for safety concerns. This midcentury masterpiece has now, against all odds, been reassembled at another New York landmark — La Guardia Airport.
“Lippold said if this is ever taken down, they won’t be able to build it again,” said Alberto Quartaroli, director of the Richard Lippold Foundation. But Humpty Dumpty could be put together again, after all.
Aging brings its share of aches, pains and memory glitches, and the death of people you have known a long time. But, as Downie writes in his journal, selections of which are printed below, life is still very sweet: “I’m defiantly not ready to retire or to fear the future.”
The thing is, I’m a classic extrovert. I thrive in lively settings and gain energy from being around other people. But on a trip to Lake Como in 2021, I had a realization: Much like our day-to-day lives, everyone needs their alone time when traveling. After all, during life outside the alternate reality when traveling, I’m never with any one person 24/7. Why should vacation be so vastly different?
Dear Jean Pierre carries a profound weight, not simply because of the tremendous amount of days accounted for within it. It is an intimate record of a love and lifetime that had faded into the background of history, now present and alive for us once more.
Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. As the physiologist J. Scott Turner writes in “The Extended Organism”: “Animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as kidneys, heart, lungs or livers.” This is true for termites, for example, who form a single organism in symbiosis with their nests. The extended body of the organism is created by the extended mind of the colony.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” McBride’s triumphant novel that follows the widely acclaimed “Deacon King Kong,” serves up a riot of life crammed into a cacophonous corner of 1920s America – the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. McBride works well in tight spaces. As he proved with the streets of south Brooklyn in “Deacon King Kong” and the life of James Brown in his 2016 biography “Kill ’Em and Leave,” constraint breeds depth. There’s a world of work, hurt, absurdity, and hope in Chicken Hill, offering McBride ample ways to ponder the appeal and elusiveness of the American dream.
Exaggerated rumors about the death of the novel have been spreading for at least a century, but I’m not concerned about its imminent demise. As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, “Tremor.”
In The Lives of Animals (1999), a pair of lectures delivered in fictional form, Elizabeth Curren has become the ageing novelist Elizabeth Costello, who is much concerned with the “enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing” of animals, which to her “rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of”. The abuse of non-human animals is a constantly recurring theme in Coetzee’s work, one that obviously causes him as much anguish and outrage as it does his fictional avatar.
In the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee effectively killed her off and sent her to a Kafkaesque afterworld. Over the years since then he has resurrected her in a series of enigmatic short stories. Those stories are collected in The Pole, preceded by the eponymous 150-page novella.
Now Sarah Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers — the “word nerds” — who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time.
The germ of Ogilvie’s book lies in a discovery she made when about to leave her job working on the dictionary itself: Murray’s address book, lying unexamined in the basement archive of the Oxford University Press. “The Dictionary People,” then, is the result of following up these leads, digging into the lives of Murray’s volunteer army.
The goal is to make Dominica, a country facing some of the most severe harms from global warming, into a climate-resilient nation.
That’s where cassava comes in. Dominica has a footprint of 300 square miles and the majority of that land is too mountainous for many types of industrial agriculture. But cassava actually thrives in Dominica’s hilly terrain. As an underground tuber, it can withstand intense storms that would otherwise wipe out grains growing above. It can survive in the soil untouched for years, if need be.
Why are we predestined to love certain writers? What is the personal algorithm of affinity? How do we keep our creativity and curiosity alive in the face of loss and hardship?
In the end, “My Death” is not about death at all, but about life after catastrophe: how art revives us, and how writers live on in their readers.
This book is destined to be a Christmas present that will cheer anyone up. Well, perhaps not quite anyone. It might, I suppose, struggle to draw a smile, let alone a laugh, from that that other great Scots Comic’s creation, the Rev IM Jolly. But there might be a flicker even from his doleful lips.
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
Simply stated, the Curry-Howard correspondence posits that two concepts from computer science (types and programs) are equivalent, respectively, to propositions and proofs — concepts from logic.
One ramification of this correspondence is that programming — often seen as a personal craft — is elevated to the idealized level of mathematics. Writing a program is not just “coding,” it becomes an act of proving a theorem. This formalizes the act of programming and provides ways to reason mathematically about the correctness of programs.
No matter how technologically advanced our society becomes, humans will always be captivated by fire. The fear and fascination it instills in us is primal, a sobering reminder of human fragility. Perhaps the lasting appeal of a flambé lies in our ability to manipulate fire to create something sweet and luxurious, one of the few moments in life where we feel the tiniest degree of control over Mother Nature.
A quartet’s name represents the life of a performing entity, subsuming the individual in four musicians’ quest for musical identity and communication. Simmenauer writes from the inside with depth, musical insight and understanding of idiosyncrasy, human foible, and immersion in artistic endeavour.
Faint light from the streetlamp outside threaded the curtains, casting my bedroom ceiling the color of a bruise. For hours, I had lain in bed, staring at the dark pooling around me. Soon enough, the day would break, and I would need to pick up the shards of the night to do all my various jobs: packing lunches, finding lost socks, getting my kids to school, and then, eventually, hopefully, making any progress on the book I’d been paid to write. But I knew by this point, having had many such nights in recent weeks, that this insomnia would cast my day in a haze, would turn my brain into something resembling the oatmeal I needed to get up and make.
What had started these weeks of sleeplessness was, in fact, good news: while working on my book, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and An American Inheritance, I won the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a prestigious award that meant I now had sufficient funds to complete my project and do it well. I feared it also meant that people might actually read the book when it was published.
For those who don't want the bread component of a breakfast sandwich but also don't have the leisure to sit and enjoy a bowl or cereal or oatmeal, the egg bite might be the perfect compromise. That's one of the reasons I opted to start eating them. As a New Jersey native, I am truly a fiend for bagels of every shape and size. Trying to minimize my bagel count (which could truly be an unconscionable amount per week) became a much easier taste once egg bites came into my life.
Maureen Ryan is as mad as hell about what’s been happening in Hollywood. And the Vanity Fair contributing editor has written Burn It Down to tell readers why. “What should be assessed is not just the creative product, its financial cost, and its efficiency (or lack thereof),” she writes, “It’s also how productive and nurturing an environment it is.” Something that she goes to great lengths to explain isn’t happening now and never has been.
Her book, which deals mainly but not exclusively with the world of television, was written before the recent strikes by the American Writers and Screen Actors Guilds and doesn’t deal directly with the specific issues that have provoked them. But it does point to a range of resentments that have been simmering away for years, to do with how workplaces that ought to service the needs of employees have frequently become hellholes.
If there is a single takeaway, it is that Tolhurst views goth as interdisciplinary — an ideology that spans different art forms, mediums and generations, one that shape-shifts with whoever finds interest in it.
The book is most compelling when Schwarzenegger writes from his own perspective, a voice that valorizes both intellectual curiosity and the thrill of getting absolutely shredded. The charm offensive even (or especially) works when he’s tiptoeing the line of self-parody, such as comparing himself taking on “Kindergarten Cop” post-“The Terminator” to Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel after sculpting “David.” Somehow, I found myself assenting. Sure. I buy it.
In the first few years of the 1980s, it became difficult to publish aesthetically ambitious writers, or to publish and market them well. Independent publishers were in tough shape: Grove had imploded, and New Directions was treading water. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux was a notable exception.) Nonprofit publishers such as Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, and Graywolf didn’t yet exist or weren’t publishing fiction. And the conglomerates, hemmed in by the major bookstore chains, shareholder value, rising interest rates, and the recessions of 1980 and 1981–82, were investing in blockbusters and formulaic series to the exclusion of what now needed the name “literary fiction.” By labeling a title as such, one put it in an emergent category, a new genre, a beacon by which artistically minded publishers, booksellers, and consumers could find one another.
In 1984, an ambitious young editor, Gary Fisketjon, told Publishers Weekly that “it’s hard to publish literary fiction well.” He often couldn’t, and when he did, it “sold so poorly in hardcover” that it “never even went into paperback.” Part of this was the fault of the bookstore chains. Waldenbooks, for example, typically bought books with a print run of at least 20,000 copies, far more than most noncommercial novels could meet.
It’s nearly impossible to spend time in London without seeing a number of traditional ‘ye olde’ English pubs: “Ye Olde Mitre,” “Ye Olde Watling” and the curiously named “Ye Olde Cock Tavern” are just a few. It may seem that these places are real relics, or at least their names themselves are written in an ancient language—but they are not. “Ye olde” is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said “ye olde” except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.
But that’s not to say it has no roots in the past.
All of us living things have to find out where we are and where we are going. Earth’s first cell had only a dim chemical feel for its immediate liquid surroundings. But it multiplied fruitfully, and the animals that flowed from its lineages are able to navigate whole seas and continents. Birds have developed an inner sense of the Earth that allows them to traverse entire hemispheres. By animal standards, these are impressive feats of orientation, but they are crude compared with those that human beings have achieved. Our most sublime such effort is a global collaboration to build, over the course of decades, a network of more than 30 radio observatories that work together to situate our planet within a mind-bending volume of space.
The British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin held that there are two categories of writers: “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” “There are writers who can only function ‘at home,’ with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopedias, and now perhaps the word processor,” he observed. “And there are those, like myself, who are paralyzed by ‘home,’ for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer’s block, and who believe naïvely that all would be well if only they were somewhere else.” I like this notion. It seems to have an air of true insight about it. When I read Chatwin, for instance, I detect the shuffle of his restless feet traversing ancient causeways, just as, when I read Melville, I smell salt air.
One might think that we better know the writers who “dig in” than those who “move.” That is to say, we can picture them at their desks, in their studies, working. Proust’s cork-lined room and the bed in which he composed his masterpiece affords one an imaginative notion of the writer’s interior world, if not the creative effort itself. Place matters to the imagination. I have frequently, while traveling, attempted to enhance my reading imagination by linking favorite writers to place. Once, for instance, while in London traipsing around Bloomsbury, I sought out Virginia Woolf’s home. The expected brass plate bolted to the building corner confirmed the find. But the house is not open to the public, and is now converted office space. I was reduced to peering in through a barred street window. There were computers and furniture, a woman in a beige sweater pounding away on a keyboard and the flurry of activity one associates with commerce. I tried to imagine Woolf there but failed—a “dug in” writer who slipped through my fingers. The failure was particularly poignant in light of her famous observation, “A woman is to have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
On January 5, 1975, when Guinevere Turner was seven, the world was supposed to end. She grabbed her favorite toy and donned a fancy dress, but the spaceship to take Turner to Venus never arrived. Turner’s new memoir, When the World Didn’t End, follows her life as she grows up with the Lyman Family, an apocalyptic cult spearheaded by Melvin Lyman, a self-proclaimed prophet. She lives in close quarters with around 60 other children and 100 adults on a compound in Kansas where she roams free in sorghum fields nibbling mulberries. Everything about Turner’s childhood seems idyllic. And in many ways, it is. The urban hippie commune offers a cozy youth—a beautiful setting with goats and blooming jasmine. Belonging. Structure. And hope, despite the converted school bus being painted with the words “Venus or Bust.” Cults often excel by providing what is missing from prospective members’ lives. Some young individuals, like Turner’s mom, who joined when she was 19 and pregnant with Turner, are attracted to what they think will be carefree, free-thinking living. People don’t join cults—they join communities.
“She had worms in her brain,” a character in Alison Rumfitt’s “Brainwyrms” decides when faced with his mother’s increasingly transphobic zeal. “It was easier to think of it in those terms than to admit that his mother genuinely hated him.”
Given the book’s title, it will not be a spoiler to reveal that this character’s mother is, in fact, host to a parasitic virus that is eating her brain. Is that better or worse than more familiar forms of virulent transphobia? Same difference, the novel suggests.
While this book is not for the casually interested reader — Hirsch is a college professor likely writing for his industry-obsessed colleagues after all — it promises to entertain and educate movie lovers wanting to know more about the evolution of the film industry.
Never before has the idea of human extinction been as widely discussed, debated and fretted over as it is right now. This peculiarity is underlined by the fact that only about two centuries ago, nearly everyone in the Western world would have agreed that human extinction is impossible. It isn’t how our story ends—because it isn’t how our story could end. There is simply no possibility of our species dying out the way the dodo and dinosaurs did, of disappearing entirely from the universe. Humanity is fundamentally indestructible, these people would have said, a pervasive assumption that dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers.
So, what changed from then to now? How did this idea evolve from being virtually unthinkable two centuries ago to a topic that people can’t stop talking about today? The answer is: through a series of earth-shattering epiphanies that unfolded in abrupt shifts beginning in the mid-19th century. With each shift came a completely new understanding of our existential precarity in the universe — a novel conception of our vulnerability to annihilation — and in every case these shifts were deeply startling and troubling. A close reading of Western history reveals four major ruptures in our thinking about extinction, three of which happened over the past 80 years. Together, they tell a harrowing story of profound psycho-cultural trauma, in which the once-ubiquitous assumption of our collective indestructibility has been undermined and replaced by the now-widespread belief that we stand inches from the precipice.
Until this summer I hadn’t been to the movies in more than 23 years.
What I mean is, even though I had seen more movies in that time than just about anyone I know, it had always been for work, part of my job as a film critic for The Times. Even when I just bought a ticket to go out with family or friends, I never felt as if I were off-duty. I saw movies in the company of my fellow critical clock-punchers, sometimes in specially taped-off rows of regular movie theaters during sneak previews, sometimes at festivals, usually in screening rooms tucked into Manhattan office buildings.
And then one day, like a weary gunslinger who has seen too much, I decided it was time to ride off into the sunset. In March of this year I published my last movie review and walked away. After spending 21 weeks reading books, studying the weather and trying to learn a new musical instrument, I felt sufficiently purged of my old habits to return to the movies like a normal person. In a curious coincidence, this happened to be the very summer that all the other normal people were returning too. We all went to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
Truth, Russ seems to be telling us, isn’t always enlightenment. Sometimes it’s just an opportunity to identify all the ways the world has taught us to hate ourselves — and to try, always vainly, to drown them out with wild dreams of worlds we’ll never see.
These essays and poems present incarcerated men and women as nothing more or less than our fellow humans. Given the opportunity to embrace that humble yet radical assertion, most readers are likely to reject much of what characterizes incarceration in this country, and perhaps incarceration itself. Prisons are built to separate the incarcerated from the rest of the community, to silence their voices. Jails are an essential part of a system built to make them disappear. Works like That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It expose the cruelty and absurdity of that intention.
Some may see the sheer volume of texts featured for analysis in Diverse Futures as Sanchez-Taylor biting off more than she can chew, and indeed a few texts are left wanting more critical attention. But Sanchez-Taylor is less interested in producing an exhaustive close reading of her featured narratives, many of which have enjoyed their place in the literary spotlight, at least in SF circles. You will find no distanced, sterile elucidation within these pages. Rather, Diverse Futures is a passionate call to democratize the system of categorization at the heart of literary study. And more than that, it’s a call to shake up the norm.
“I remember where I sat.”
These words, this introduction to a memory, launch Foster Hirsch’s sweeping, winningly eccentric new film history book, “Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties,” a study that manages to be both personal and comprehensive. Hirsch, a longtime film professor at Brooklyn College whose previous book subjects include film noir and Woody Allen, is recalling the day — April 30, 1953 — when he joined a packed house at the Warner-Hollywood Theater, “an imposing Spanish-style movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard,” to soak in a new widescreen exhibition format called Cinerama.
Margo Steines knows something about pain. At seventeen, while growing up in New York City, she became a dominatrix, her first-ever job. She was a sex worker for a decade, later running her own S/M dungeon—kicking, punching, and otherwise assaulting consenting, paying adult males for a living. She developed a romantic—albeit increasingly tumultuous and aggressive—long-term relationship with one of her clients, a man who led her into the worlds of farming and metal work, worlds that taught Steines their own kinds of violence. In her debut book, Brutalities: A Love Story, Steines weaves essays examining her past with essays set in present-tense as she nears the end of her pregnancy, which is happening in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Brutalities is a then-and-now study of what Steines has been through and what she’s going through to get to where she is now—among other things, a mother; a partner in a stable, healthy, loving relationship; an MFA graduate; a faculty member at the University of Arizona, where she currently teaches creative writing.
In science fiction, what counts as plausible or as serious? What comes across as silly—and what is just outlandish enough to be believable? Your views on these questions depend on your ideas about the future. We live in an era of prestige sci-fi, in which many writers aim for seriousness, and yet seriousness can be a kind of constraint, since the world is so often absurd. “This Month in History” is from an earlier, looser, raunchier, zanier sci-fi era. The genre’s longest-running joke, it raises an unsettling possibility: What if pulpy absurdity is a good way to predict the future?
Francis Spufford’s fabulous third novel is a piece of pulp fiction disguised as speculative history, or possibly vice versa: the tale plays both sides and switches lanes in a blur. It is set in an alternative 1920s America that is recognisable at the edges and unfamiliar at its core, centred on a First Nations people who have avoided the worst effects of manifest destiny to maintain a toehold of power in the febrile midwest. Where Golden Hill, Spufford’s riotous 2016 bestseller, took its lead from the writings of Henry and Sarah Fielding to paint a portrait of nascent 18th-century New York, Cahokia Jazz nods to the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It rattles through the urban jungle in the manner of a fast-paced dimestore thriller.
Can you return to the person you once were? Can any of us ever truly go home again? The Motherthing author Ainslie Hogarth’s second novel, “Normal Women,” roots around this trope of going back — to your old town and your old self — and how geography, psychology and maternity can alter your very identity.
Something strange happened the first time I encountered an article online that I wrote for a print magazine. The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish. The layered process by which such texts were produced meant that I had read through my article with close attention over a dozen times before it was published, by which point I could recite long passages of my prose by heart.
Yet the sentences and paragraphs that I saw swimming before me on the screen clearly weren’t mine. Rather, they read like a raw, unfinished version of my actual article—an undergraduate parody of something that took me months to write. I was gesticulating wildly where I should have been quiet, drawing attention to myself at weird junctures, and making weird faces at the camera. Points I had made in a sensible, even-toned fashion had been washed out or faded into the background, making it hard to follow my argument. I was living the dream of going into an important meeting with no pants on, except I wasn’t dreaming. Hundreds of thousands of people would soon be seeing this unwonted version of my prose self, stammering and half naked.
I am one of the luckiest girls in the whole world. This is what they told me when I walked into the lobby. It was a white room with a white desk and behind the desk is where they sat. They had beautiful long yellow hair and pretty blue eyes and they were on their computers clack clack clacking away. It was amazing to behold. To see them at work. I wondered what it was that they were typing on there. I bet they were looking at websites, blinking at them. Making deals. Perhaps they had accessed the part of the internet where you can buy a boyfriend or a child servant or some strappy high-heeled shoes.
They asked me how my flight went. They asked me if I got their gift beforehand and I said yes it was so cool, and thanks to your amazing gift what happened was I washed it down with the complimentary glass of ginger ale in a little red cup and then I fell asleep. They said that sounds so nice and they all smiled at me.
The dream of road ecology is the dream of connectivity, of reconnecting these islands of habitats with overpasses, underpasses, culverts and other green paths. It is the work of literal and metaphoric bridge-building.
If the dream is hopeful, so is the “species empathy” — the ability to see beyond ourselves, to imagine our way into lives beyond the human — that the work requires and embodies. It is a tall task, but if we fail to do this, or at least fail to try to do this, we end up on an island of our own, isolated and cold, forever apart from all the other beings that share our planet.
It’s not always an easy feat to walk the line between food poisoning and bankruptcy when choosing a new go-to takeaway place, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. And so, the humble California roll lives on in my heart. Not as something I seek to consume, but as a dependable and trustworthy guide. A roll that will take my tender hand and lead me to my next meal. A roll that steers me clear of foodborne illness and financial ruin. A roll that will usher me to the comforting pleasure of a reliable meal.
Neither I nor any of my seven siblings can recall how we came to be Pop-Tart critics, and my parents aren’t alive to tell us. But I have a theory: My mother was resourceful and, with eight children to feed, she probably saw an appeal for tasters somewhere and thought: “Oh, boy. Free dessert.”
For more than four decades, four words in fast food have captured the appetite and imagination of millions around the world who have craved a guilty pleasure for a limited time only: The McRib is back.
While the barbecue-flavored pork sandwich did not find immediate success for McDonald’s, and seemed destined for doom, something unusual happened that signaled that the McRib would not be easy to kill off: There weren’t enough chickens to keep up with the wild success of the Chicken McNuggets. McDonald’s needed another hot item for its locations to promote, and René Arend, the executive chef for McDonald’s, knew it was time to push the McRib as a viable alternative in 1981.
Loss, departures, reunions, ghosts — “Family Meal” is a novel about what it means to leave, and how even when it seems we’ve moved on, there are some things that can never be left behind.
“Mourning and melancholia are rituals of settler possession,” Evelyn Araulen wrote recently. Edenglassie, glinting with love, force and narrative glee, lays out a masterclass in the alternative. This novel, fiercely invested in a collective future, challenges any version of history that, to quote Nita, “looks in the other direction at what’s easy to see”. And issues that painful, bemusing reminder: it didn’t have to be like this.
In the opening scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a pack of male hominids gather, screech and chase one another around Stanley Kubrick’s set. Then one picks up an animal bone and starts dominating. Humanity has dawned. Ta-da!
If this tableau is newly familiar, it may be because Greta Gerwig restaged it in “Barbie,” imagining the moment with a doll instead of a weapon. But when Cat Bohannon, a narrative theorist and poet, rewrites the same scene, she has grander ambitions. She wants to change how we understand all of human evolution — to tear our eyes away from “the clever ape — always male” — and force us to consider the female of the species. How did our needs, and our anatomy, spark pivotal breakthroughs? What about the Dawn of Woman?
But what Dent really wants to write about, it seems to me, is nostalgia. This is a book shot through with a certain kind of recollection of northern, working-class family life in all its funny and poignant detail. As Dent puts it herself: “There’s nothing about life in late 20th-century north-west England that isn’t faintly hilarious in print, and I would not swap a single, solitary second.”
About a decade ago — after an adult sleepover — I had my first bites of okonomiyaki, in a man’s walk-up apartment not far from Osaka’s Namba train station. I’d only just gotten used to the city’s drowsy mornings. My chef, an older guy with even sleepier eyes than mine, had seemingly every ingredient but the one he was looking for, grumbling as he chopped, stirred, ladled and fried our batter. But everything he did have went into the pancakes. And every bite tasted like something else — unexpected.
In her letter to early readers, Zhang notes that this novel was composed after her first post-lockdown restaurant meal, the experience made holy in its long absence. This reverence is clear in Land of Milk and Honey, and wholly relatable. The novel is, at its best, both a love letter to food and a prescient warning of capitalist catastrophe to come, and the juxtaposition ultimately succeeds.
It’s a truth not often-enough acknowledged that Mavis Gallant is a wonder of the literary world, even if many of that world’s biggest names have declared her just that. John Updike, for instance, said her “talent is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic.”
If you’ve not read her yet, it won’t hurt to start with her nonfiction. And what luck: “Paris Notebooks,” a superb collection of her essays, reviews and journal entries has just been reissued.
I got the feeling, over those 430 pages, not of interrupting my life by reading it but understanding what it means to interrupt a book with a life. And in this sense the book comes to life in a way none other has for me — not a thing to be consumed but a force exerting its own energy on me.
“I am very much a person who likes to get high,” I read. “I have always been a person who likes to get high.” I try to feel the words, not just recite them, try to convincingly perform this rueful confession of the author, documenting her struggles with addiction and her mixed feelings about intoxication. The book is fragmented, potty-mouthed, decidedly inconclusive, laced with literary references and sociological research and vomiting scenes. It’s kind of hard to read.
Also, it’s mine. It’s my book. I wrote this thing. It’s me.
The absence of quotation marks helps the text lean, uninterrupted, into the jagged stream of consciousness of a disaffected teenager trying to maintain an ironic distance even from her most difficult emotions. It’s a successful union of form and content, where everything is given the same undifferentiated weight because everything feels equally heavy.
The choice can be somewhat disorienting, and it can take readers a little longer to get into the book’s flow. But it’s a choice that’s increasingly common in modern fiction. Some of the best and buzziest contemporary writers—Sally Rooney, Ian Williams, Bryan Washington, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma—render their dialogue free of quotation marks. The reasons vary, but more writers are dropping speech marks to explore distances between readers and narrators and even to eliminate hierarchies.
For those of us not personally affected by a violent crime, the why can become the stuff of legend, as intriguing as the how. We want to know the motive, to judge for ourselves whether or not the reason is good enough. We want to weigh in, to somehow make the event about ourselves. But Penance underscores what seems most important to those who are irrevocably connected to both victims and perpetrators: it happened, and there is no taking it back. After everything, far from granting relief, unrelenting attempts by spectators to answer the question why are likely to inflame.
That's the thing about Davis' work: Even when life isn't so fascinating, she finds its very lack of excitement fascinating.
A ruddy blush of modesty colors “Making It So,” Patrick Stewart’s engaging self-portrait of life on the British stage and the starship U.S.S. Enterprise. Humility is not, of course, the trait that first comes to mind with big-name actors, for whom a strapping ego would seem to be a job requirement.
And with his booming voice and clenched-fist persona, Stewart has usually registered as a take-charge, cross-me-at-your-peril kind of guy. He became internationally famous portraying the autocratic space captain Jean-Luc Picard on the long-running sci-fi series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a man given to terse dictums like the one from which this book takes its title: “Make it so.”
If you are a connoisseur of fancy coffee and fancy coffee shops (or even just fancy-ish), you’ve probably noticed that the price of your favorite drink is higher than it used to be. Nowadays, the base price for a regular latte is something like $6, then maybe you add in vanilla syrup, which costs you an extra dollar, and ask for oat milk, which is a dollar more. You’re now staring at an $8 drink, plus taxes and, assuming you’re doing the right thing here, at least a $1 tip.
What, you might be asking yourself, is going on here? You are not alone. Why is my latte so expensive? is indeed a perennial question. And to that question, at least the 2023 version, I’ve got answers.
Once a month for the past 28 years, filmmaker Gerry Fialka has convened a book group to read James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” a book that is famously difficult to understand.
This Tuesday, Oct. 3, Fialka’s Venice-Wake group, which he launched at the Venice branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1995 and has continued on Zoom since the pandemic, will reach the book’s final page. Has this experience been something he could have ever foreseen?
It is a truism of creative writing classes that hunger of one kind or another is a prerequisite for the protagonist in any drama. AK Blakemore’s second novel, the follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut, The Manningtree Witches, examines this idea of hunger in its most literal and extreme manifestation. As with her previous novel, it is inspired by a historical figure – in this case, the Great Tarare, a French peasant who lived at the end of the 18th century and became a freakshow attraction on account of his prodigious appetite (he is said to have eaten improbable quantities of food as well as household objects, live animals and a toddler).
On the evidence of his new “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” it may be that he’s found Brooklyn frustrating and confounding to write about in full. Despite a couple of bestsellers about the place, he’s perhaps concluded that no fictional narrative or historical essay can quite do it justice. So this time around he’s tried to blend the two, writing a kind of Brooklyn metanarrative. “Crime Novel” doesn’t have a clear protagonist or rising action; plot-wise it’s a series of scenes, jumbled in time from the 70s to the present day, mainly but not always about a group of boys living on or near the same street. Interwoven with those scenes are commentaries about history, music, writing, homeownership and more.
Stone Yard Devotional is a beautiful and masterful book especially for its ability to dwell within the confusion and complexity of all that it is questioning, and for all of its quiet force.
But it turns out that fantasy, as an enduring publishing genre, is hardly older than I am. All sorts of things had to go right—and wrong—to make it happen. Book publishing and retailing were revolutionized in the 1970s. Lester del Rey took advantage of that revolution, realizing that readers were hungry for derivates of Tolkien. Piers Anthony, a prolific sci-fi writer, volunteered to write one to order. In 1994, I thought I was reading Anthony’s Xanth novels to access an ancient tradition of enchantment. To the publishing industry, I was reading them because I was precisely the modern consumer they expected and needed me to be: an upper-middle-class suburban kid in a shopping-mall Barnes & Noble. This is the story of how del Rey did it.
Without writing, I don’t know what would have become of me. I take up what’s around me, but I often write about myself and the people I know here. That personal writing can be cathartic but also tricky. How do I render my subject in relation to the issue that he’s trying to overcome and the crime that brought him to prison? Is his crime relevant? What about mine? If I don’t divulge, will the reader trust me? Editors help me see the idea of a piece, frame the narratives; they push and pull the best writing out of me. In successive drafts, I leave much behind: ugly phrases, clunky sentences, rationalizing sentiments. What if I were left to live with those thoughts and never challenged to develop them? Becoming a better writer has helped me become a better human being.
I realize that artistic growth doesn’t always parallel moral growth, but my entry point was convict, murderer. For me, becoming a writer was a way to overcome being a killer, even as I know I’ll never overcome it completely. With the personal parts of my writing, I feel like there’s always more desired, owed. It’s the journalism part — communing and connecting with my subjects, analyzing their actions — that helps me better understand the pain in their lives and in mine, as if we were a damaged team. It’s this kind of writing that helps me develop more of the thing that it seems I’ve always lacked: empathy.
Extreme weather has melted the distinction between fact and fiction. As El Akkad described it, global warming doesn’t feel slow and steady; it feels more like falling down the stairs, with big drops that shake your expectations. One moment, you’re taking a nap in your house; the next, you’re running for your life from a wildfire. This year, a naturally hotter weather pattern called El Niño started setting in, adding extra heat on top of the climate change we’ve become accustomed to. July was the planet’s hottest month on record, clocking in at 1.5 degrees C (2.4 F) warmer than the preindustrial average. The disasters this summer serve as a preview of what the world could see during a typical year in the early 2030s. We no longer need authors or scientists to imagine it; real-world experience does the trick for anyone who’s paying close attention.
What is it about bread and butter that hits the spot like nothing else in the world? Why is that specific combination just so damn good? To the western palate, few things are so ordinary and yet so evocative.
Before “a writer living in Brooklyn” became a tiresome stereotype, there was Jonathan Lethem, who — like Bernard Malamud and Betty Smith before him — was actually born and raised in Brooklyn, giving his portrayals of the place, or a swath of it anyway, a dingy verisimilitude. He knows deep in his bones that a coffee shop is not a Starbucks but a diner, and what it means to take that coffee regular (milk and two sugars), like gas in a car.
It’s surely no coincidence, given Lethem’s deep reservoir of feeling about the borough, that his most heralded novels, “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999) and “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003), were set there. Now, after somewhat quieter forays to California, Maine and parts as exotic as Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he has returned, to kick the crushed can even further down the potholed street. The new book is titled “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” with a Gen X shrug, but has a memoirish aspect. The narrator seems to be peering at events from a distance behind the stiff collar of an upturned trench coat.
“Death Valley” is a triumph, a ribald prayer for sensuality and grace in the face of profound loss, a hilarious revolt against the aggressive godlessness, dehumanization and fear plaguing our time. All 10 of Melissa Broder’s finger lamps are blazing. Why not be totally changed into fire?
“One of the paradoxes of sleep science (and, perhaps, most other sciences),” Miller writes, “is that it often violates the precepts of Occam’s razor — the principle that between two competing theories, the simpler explanation is to be preferred." We’ve long known that there is nothing simple about sleep; Miller introduces us to its farthest reaches. Our growing understanding of this stubborn, beautiful enigma will inform our waking consciousness, too.
The desolation of loneliness, like the connected problems of substance abuse and depression, comes from the feeling that the experience—when one is in it—will never end. That is why, sometimes, people choose to end it for themselves. If we are to keep going, push through, or slip around it, I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it. I have been trying to do this my whole life.
To write as a marginalized writer is to face, sooner or later, questions of authenticity and imagination. Reviewers from outside your community might approach your work the way an ethnologist would, focusing so much on cultural detail that they miss (or worse, dismiss) its literary value. Those from inside your community, meanwhile, might treat your fiction as a vessel of representation, combing through the text in hope of having it reflect their entire lived experience. But is authenticity all that important in fiction? What role does that leave to beauty, playfulness or mystery? These are concerns that the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr explores in his brainy and beautiful novel “The Most Secret Memory of Men.”
In half a century of writing horror novels, Stephen King has created some remarkable villains. Who can forget the sing-song voice of Pennywise the clown, the devil incarnate Randall Flagg, or the drooling jaws of Cujo? The big bads in King’s latest novel, “Holly,” aren’t quite so memorable, but that’s part of what makes them terrifying.
“People Collide,” by Isle McElroy, is a delightfully gimmicky novel about how gender is a gimmick. It starts off with a tried-and-true fictional premise, the semi-dysfunctional marriage, but then turns that marriage inside out, just about literally. The result is a story that finds queerness at the core of heterosexual marriage and, conversely, a heterosexual romance arc inside a gender transition novel.
This is a rich novel of ideas, insisting on moral complexity in the end times. It’s also a startling prose hymn to food and sex, love and violence, power and resistance. It is not, in the end, devoid of the optimism without which we have no agency for change.
“The Times,” the latest book about the paper’s history, begins in 1976 and covers two publishers, seven executive editors, a financial meltdown, a reinvented business model and a revolutionary transformation in how journalism itself is done, ending with the 2016 presidential election. Written by Adam Nagourney, a veteran Times reporter, it is something of a white-knuckle ride with — spoiler alert — a broadly happy ending.
It is not necessarily a book for those who have a favorite restaurant but would rather not know what goes on in the kitchen. Nagourney describes his journalistic colleagues as “by their nature self-reliant, secretive, insecure, competitive, sensitive and suspicious. They have sprawling egos and high self-regard.”
Baron’s “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” is less a traditional memoir than a closely observed, gripping chronicle of politics and journalism during a decade of turmoil. (Baron joined The Post in 2013 and retired in 2021.) Against a backdrop of electoral upheaval, the #MeToo movement, a contested Supreme Court nomination, two impeachment trials and an insurrection, his monumental book tells three distinct but overlapping stories.
It goes doorbell
(two beats)
then knocking
(three or more beats)