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.