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.