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.