When the weighty Cambridge History of THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL (as the title reads on its gold cover) landed on my doorstep I wondered if I would find out. Its editor, David Carter, first among equals as scholar-critic of Australian literature, has assembled 39 essays by leaders in the field, himself included, to chart the journey of the Australian version of this shape-shifting form.
I have read a lot of Australian novels in my time, and written a few. I decided that if I sat down and read the history from cover to cover with open-minded curiosity, I might see what patterns emerged.
What would happen if I stopped searching for the story in every turn signal, every stranger passing on the street, every minute shiver of the trees? What if I stopped fabricating intention and metaphor where there is neither? What if a sign outside the local science museum was just a sign, promoting an event, without outsized metaphorical significance? What if I just walked away, as Orlean does at the end of The Orchid Thief, without the perfect ending?
On New Year’s Day, I got an email from an old writer friend announcing plans to end her life. Her life was already ending. This expedited ending-of-life had been approved by a medical professional. She was electing to die with dignity. Her death was scheduled for the following day. Like a hair appointment or a visit to the dentist.
It wasn’t an email directly to me. I subscribe to her newsletter.
Absolution is a masterclass in point of view and thorny characterisation. McDermott captures the convolutions of social dynamics and the mutability of memory with brilliant aplomb and attention to detail. It is a successful and absorbing portrayal of the complicated interior lives of white American women during the Vietnam war, and the reverberation of their time abroad for many years after.
When Herman Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades. The process of rediscovery was a slow march that began in earnest just after World War I. Remembered primarily as a travel writer when he was remembered at all, Melville was soon recast as a proto-modernist, anticipating the literary developments soon to be undertaken by writers like James Joyce. The shifting, collage-like nature of Moby-Dick, alternating tragic monologues with low-rent sailor ditties, realistic descriptions of whaling with semi-parodic disquisitions on cetology, spoke to the moment aesthetically while the book’s depiction of a doomed, hyperviolent enterprise reflected the world-historical one.
With The Honeys, Ryan La Sala demonstrated that he understands everything there is to know about young adult horror, from the tone to the content to the characters to the themes. Now, with his latest book Beholder, he doubles down on the intensity and pushes the reader to their limits in a way that’s both thrilling and terrifying.
Utopia is in the eye of the beholder. For Sir Thomas More, who coined the word for his 1516 book of the same name, it meant a fictional island society carved out in a satirical image of perfection. For various back-to-nature communities it has meant an embrace of agrarian life and a decision to leave industrial society behind. And for Francis Ford Coppola, the subject of Sam Wasson’s new book, ”The Path to Paradise,” utopia meant changing the rules of how movies are made: multitaskers, freed from the regimentation of studios, constantly reinventing with an eye toward the future.
And for a while, it actually worked.
Sachs’s book, targeted to music-loving general readers, is less an impassioned defense of an indisputably influential composer than an earnest attempt by an engaging writer and insightful music historian to explain Schoenberg’s significant achievements and understand the lingering resistance to his works. These scores still “fascinate many people in the profession,” Sachs asserts, but “continue to meet with apathy, and often downright antipathy, on the part of most listeners.”
We often associate the phrase “campus novel” with coming-of-age stories set in the constructed reality of a cloistered campus bubble (which is frequently a microcosm for the wider world). These narratives tend to have a built-in sense of urgency thanks to their semester-based timeline, and they often take the form of a love story, traditional or not. But for many of today’s students, the stakes are higher. And now, those stakes are starting to appear on the page.
Rarely do I buy a book because I was seduced by the summary on the back or inside flap. As a reader, I don’t find such text all that relevant. I’ll skim it if I’m browsing in a bookstore or on a retail page—just enough to get the general contours. But lately, what used to be passive avoidance has evolved into a deliberate stance: these days, I refuse to read the jacket copy in full unless I absolutely have to. Jacket copy offers neither an effective barometer for predicting what I love nor reliable protection from buying things I regret. It is reductive, misleading, and—I have decided—none of my business.
This is the chapter’s usual fate, to be considered dully expedient but embarrassingly common, the musty old furniture of the book. We cannot entirely forget chapters because we do not ever really have to learn about them. The conventionality of the chapter places it in the middle of a spectrum of form: too ordinary to be easily apparent as a particular aesthetic method or choice, too necessary to eliminate in the name of an antiformal freedom that claims to speak on behalf of pure “life.” That intermediate position is a place, we might say, where form’s deliberate artifice and life’s unruly vibrancy mix most intimately. The chapter has one foot in both restriction and freedom, diluting the force of both: a not very severe restriction, a somewhat circumscribed freedom.
I felt gray and empty. This must be the feeling, I realized, of life trying to leave you. Watching someone, it’s hard to predict when that exact moment might start. But doctors see it unfold: The patient loses consciousness, their heartbeat slows, and the march toward death begins. When this happens on my watch, I spring into action while muttering to myself, Fuck, no.
Now the diminished blood flow to my brain made it hard to think. Nothing to do but remain calm. I’m sure they know they need to hurry.
No one questions that Juárez is the birthplace of burritos, though there are competing origin stories. Some attribute their creation to Juan Mendez, who sold guisados wrapped in flour tortillas from a donkey-pulled buggy — a burrito — during the Mexican Revolution. Others say they were born of the workers who took these wraps on the go and then called them burritos because they resembled the rolled blankets that sat atop donkeys in the fields. Some say they were named after children who helped women carry their shopping — endearingly nicknamed burritos — and paid with these wraps.
Both cities strive to maintain and preserve a purist burrito tradition while defining a fine burrito experience. Yet it is hard to deny that there is a friendly but deep rivalry.
McBride effortlessly transports us to another time and place. A musician as well as a writer, he is clearly at home in this period and milieu – his father was African American, his mother a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Every member of his diverse cast earns their place in this epic tale. McBride’s plotting is intricate but deftly handled, his rich characterisation and attention to detail are impressive, his compassion exemplary.
Sims presents an interesting collection of psychologically unnerving stories with unreliable narrators galore. If you’re in the mood for a more heady read, this one will be right up your alley.
Photographer Diego Vourakis’s images brim with radiance and warmth – the radiance of love and the heat of the sun. De Cara Al Sol, which translates to ‘Facing the Sun’ in English, is a fitting title for his debut photo book, which features a collection of images taken in Cuba between February 2020 and April 2023. A deeply personal ode to the tenacity of the Cuban spirit, the book’s title derives from the final lines of the poem Yo quiero salir del mundo (‘I Wish to Leave the World’) by Cuban national hero José Martí: “¡Yo soy bueno, y como bueno / Moriré de cara al sol!” (“I am good, and like a good thing / I will die with my face to the sun!”)
After all, so much of sports news is indeed trivial, a genuine waste of time and space, and continually updated reckless speculation (most of it soon to be discarded). Of course, that’s a description of a lot of news, some of it wrongly reported. At least in sports, no one dies from rumors of a coming baseball trade that never happens.
And yet … the sports department was also something of a newspaper within a newspaper, with its own deadlines, stand-alone pages and version of standards. For instance, sports figures (like felons) weren’t referred to with the normal honorifics (Mr., Mrs. and Miss) as they were then in other sections of the paper, while a certain lack of rigor in the editing may actually have contributed to greater readability, individuality and humanity.
Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.
Writer and professor Rachel DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there. We are, simply, bodies with much out of our control.
Reading this novel is like getting a prime seat at an exhibition match. The range on display is exhilarating. And it makes you wonder: What would happen if he played for keeps?
In his book One Two Three Four, Craig Brown detailed the ways that the Beatles fleetingly touched and altered millions of lives. In that account, one figure occasionally steps out of the shadows: Mal Evans, bouncer at the Cavern Club, driver and bodyguard as the band travelled first down the newly tarmac-ed M6 and then way beyond. Evans was both a trusted insider to those helter-skelter years and, in some ways, the ultimate Beatles groupie. In this exhaustively detailed account of his truncated life – Evans died aged 40 in 1976 in a volley of gunfire from the LAPD after he had apparently waved a Winchester rifle in their direction seeking his own destruction – he finally assumes the place to which all walk-on actors privately aspire: centre stage.
I’ve been preparing this breakfast for days. Collecting acorns from the local park; rosehips from the graveyard; dandelion roots from the patch of weeds in the garden. It’s like the Mystery Box round of MasterChef, if the show was produced by squirrels. On the subject of squirrels, there will be more later.
Foraged food has been in fashion ever since eating began. It’s the diet we evolved on and, according to a newly published study, we should all be getting more of it. The study – organised by ethnobotanist and author Monica Wilde, in partnership with Zoe, the nutritional science company – challenged a group of 24 experienced foragers to spend up to three months dining like hunter-gatherers. The results? On almost every single measured health marker, the group showed dramatic improvements: the obese dropped kilos, blood pressures normalised, inflammation fell and gut biomes bloomed. But is it a diet any of us can hope to follow? I decided to try it for a day and see.
The truth of the matter is that donuts, in some form, have existed since antiquity. Donut eaters of old didn't always call them "donuts," but a cross-check comparison of past and present ingredients reveals some consistent findings. That is, people have always loved a good bread recipe that's fried in fat and covered in sweetness, whether it be honey or sugar, regardless of whether the treat comes from a modern cookbook or the unearthed frescoes of Pompeii. The sweet and sometimes savory goodness of these recipes has filled tummies both in the trenches of war and during the greatest celebrations society has ever known, and because of the donut's long history and unparalleled comfort food factor, it can't help being one of the most popular and long-lived foods on the planet.
That football is so important to so many is absurd, and certainly not in every respect benign. But from one angle, football’s exorbitant significance is wondrous, because it’s stylised proof of a broader truth: that we can make meaning together, that we can and do make things matter for ourselves – not only sport but literature, art, politics. That football matters so blatantly and irresistibly is enough to convince you of – is overpowering evidence for – the existence, and importance, of culture. If football matters, anything can.
What was the song? Mary couldn’t quite remember. It was one of Mr Pepper’s classics, certainly. A ballad. Possibly You Are My Sunshine? What did it matter; the point was the voice. Not Mr Pepper’s – she knew what he sounded like well enough, being one of Easterlea Rest Home’s regular afternoon entertainers. No, this voice was new, and belonged to a man who had sat down in the chair next to her and started to sing along. She was so stunned – by the way his voice seemed to pour out of him, by its fierce clarity and defiance of age – that she turned to stare.
The man winked at her. Cheeky bugger, thought Mary.
When I got an unexpected job ghostwriting romance novels earlier this year, I thought I’d found an easy way to earn some money and get some fun stories to tell at dinner parties. I hadn’t read a lot of romances, but the opportunity to write all day was too good to pass up.
I quickly realized that I enjoyed the challenge of churning out thousands of words a day. But the deeper into my job I got, the more obvious it became that my day job was sharply out of step with my real life.
All Tetris ultimately shows is that no matter how much you think you are in control, there are limits. And it’s only a matter of time before chaos rules again. All I want is a world where problems arrive slowly with time to slot them into tidy solutions.
But a big part of my appreciation for leftovers is simply due to the fact that, despite their sometimes stayed reputation, when one assesses the spectrum of food history, leftovers are a relatively new invention. And who doesn’t like a little novelty?
The Tokyo cafe's staff are elderly people dealing with dementia, which makes for a, shall we say, unique experience for diners. As the restaurant's website puts it, "all of our servers are people living with dementia. They may, or may not, get your order right." And indeed they don't, nearly 40% of the time.
But the restaurant says that diners can "rest assured that even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one of a kind." And that's surely part of why their customer satisfaction rating is at a solid 99%.
De Hamel could easily have written this book as another entry in the genre. Instead, he wrote a love story. The madhouse is a place of isolation, and his interest is with community: with the passion for art, for learning, for nerdy minutiae, for history still living and breathing on the page, that brings manuscript lovers together. If you can imagine shedding tears because a manuscript is so exquisite, then this is a book about your people.
Tugboat crews routinely encounter what few of us will ever see. They easily read a vessel’s size, shape, function, and features, while deciphering at a glance the mysterious numbers, letters, and symbols on a ship’s hull. To non-mariners, the markings look like hieroglyphs. For those in the know, they speak volumes about a particular ship and also about the shipping industry.
As our understanding of the universe expanded, so too did the range of what could be considered habitable.
The premise is elegant. The In-Between traces a love story through its pivotal moments: not the milestone decisions or cataclysmic quarrels, but the encounters that deepen intimacy. The moments of grace. As Tsiolkas skips from one scene to the next – jumping weeks and months ahead – readers are left to fill the narrative gaps, to imagine the “in-between” for themselves.
Though the novella’s title gestures towards the baptismal, cleansing nature of the story it tells, the metaphor remains implicit, and is never really drawn out in the course of the book. What Boyne offers instead of innovation is an almost note-perfect piece of first-person storytelling.
The simplest way I can frame my own reaction to City Authentic is that it isn’t a book that necessarily reveals brand new phenomenons or problems, nor does it show every step of how FIRE entities take over cities. This is a book that offers readers new, necessary language to apply toward the incredibly complex urban phenomenons and problems they’re quite familiar with, and it’s worth spending time unpacking just how deeply this text has lodged in my brain like a pop song.
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
We are discussing the pope, who has woken one morning, at the age of 86, with a sudden craving to meet artists. An event has been proposed: a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet the pope, you go,’ Jason tells me. ‘It will make a perfect ending.’ For what?
Repeatedly retrieving a single object, especially for another species, isn’t a regular occurrence in the wild. Domestic dogs (retrievers, especially) fetch because we bred them to do so; people expect the behavior in puppies, tossing balls with abandon and showering their pets with rewards. With cats, though, “that’s not a trait we’ve actively selected for,” says Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Which makes fetching a bit of a paradox—a behavior with deep wild roots that has been coaxed out by a playful relationship with us.
I don’t remember learning to read. There is a story in my family: I am still a small child, my mother carries me in her arms as she stands in line at the bank, the bank teller sees my long golden hair and says, “What a pretty little girl.” I say “I am a boy, Janice,” and Janice screams and faints.
This was in the seventies in Kentucky, the years of The Exorcist and The Omen, the era of demonic children on-screen. Janice, primed by horror movies to see the supernatural in everything, was unable to imagine a less exciting explanation. It was impossible that a child so small could have read her name tag.
I’ve been trying to write this essay for a very long time. Months, I think. Or maybe even longer, before I ever mentioned it to anyone, before I let anyone know that I was even capable of multiple sentences again. When all I could muster writing was a single sentence on a note card. My brain works differently now than it used to, and differently than I feel that it ought to. I told my speech therapist that I was frustrated that I haven’t been able to write fiction since experiencing a traumatic brain injury — which means that I am still, after nearly two years, unable to do my job.
He nodded with practiced care. “That must feel frustrating,” he said. “But maybe it’s important to focus on what you can do.”
We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.
And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.
But the stance also communicates something less savory to the viewer. Mark Bowden, expert in human behavior and body language, explains the pose lends an aura of arrogance (which might be right on the money for some chefs, but they should probably do their best to hide it). It also sends a signal to kitchen staff.
“I am a Texan,” said Wunzel Lewis, 71, a regular at Luby’s, which serves Thanksgiving fare year-round as part of its sprawling menu. “We like to eat anything any time of the year.” And here, she said, “the turkey breast is always moist.”
Walking into a Luby’s feels a bit like rewinding several decades, to when liver and onions was a menu staple and faux leather booths were standard restaurant décor. For the devoted following of this Texas chain, that’s exactly its appeal.
In this murky world of cowardly self-interest, we crave someone courageous and honest. We need Benjamin Shreve, the young narrator of Elizabeth Crook’s stirring new western, “The Madstone.” He is not too good to be true, just good enough for us to want him to be true. As one devoted character says, he is a man with “a powerful conscience but maybe a stronger heart.” Earlier this month, Crook received the Texas Writer Award at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, and I can see why. With “The Madstone,” she has written the perfect adventure to curl up with on some desolate winter night.
The bleak humour, if not the slapstick, persists through the book as Auster explores the darker material of Baumgartner’s decade-long relationship with loss and grief. Sy has an ultimately ridiculous relationship, complete with awkwardly botched marriage proposal, with a woman he imagines might be a replacement for Anna; he delves into Anna’s journals; he publishes and promotes her previously unpublished poetry and recalls incidents from his own childhood, life and family history, which, in a very Auster-ish way, imperfectly coincide with incidents in Auster’s own childhood, life and family history. But mostly Sy returns to that day on Cape Cod when Anna “encountered the fierce, monster wave that broke her back and killed her, and since that afternoon, since that afternoon – ”.
Baron sees his book as being about the path to futurism in journalism, about his and the paper’s rise to the great Bezosian game. But what becomes clear is that Bezos never brought the Post onto that court. For him, it was something else. He held a tender, sentimental space for it; he kept its deepest threats at bay. He spoke of it as a redemptive clearing in his life. “My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90,” Bezos says. This man who long ago delivered his whole soul to the gods of commerce seemed to recognize the Post as something outside his realm, and worked to keep it going at surprising cost. He allowed it to be everything except business. That’s why the paper was so good.
Recently, a group of scientists set about searching for evidence that we’ve entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. They dug up mud from the world’s deepest lakes and cut cores from remote glaciers, looking for tiny anthropogenic markers: soot from combustion processes, microplastic particles and artificial radionuclides – the deadly fallout from thousands of nuclear-weapons tests. Trapped between layers of sediment and ice, all this human-made dust represents a point in time when we began to significantly alter the planet in ways that will still be visible far into the future. Whether or not you agree that we’ve entered a new geological time period (perhaps you consider our impact on Earth a mere blip in its 4.5-billion-year history), there’s no denying that dust is a marker of our modern world, as Jay Owens reveals in her new book.
In “The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty,” (Astra), Gina Rushton portrays her own ambivalence toward becoming a mother—and the ambivalence among millennial and Gen Z women more generally—as the result of a complex and extremely familiar interplay of factors. These include not only climate anxiety but also financial constraints, the demands of work and career, health risks (and the gross racial disparities that go with them), sexism (and the racism that compounds it), and a persistent imbalance in the division of domestic and emotional labor in heterosexual partnerships. Rushton, a writer on reproductive health who is based in Australia, had resolved to remain child-free. Then, one day, she found herself in an emergency room, in the throes of excruciating abdominal pain, signing a consent form to allow a doctor to remove one of her ovaries. “I don’t want kids, you know I don’t want kids,” Rushton kept telling her boyfriend and her mother, and yet she was saddened and panicked by the prospect of her fertility being compromised. (In the end, the ovary was saved.) She felt free in her choice until, all at once, it no longer seemed hers to make.
We might enjoy a hard puzzle but abhor a puzzle with pieces missing. Today’s consciousness science has more pieces than it did 25 years ago. But there is reason to think that key pieces are still missing, turning an intellectual puzzle into an intractable problem. To see why, we have to revisit the assumptions that launched the field of consciousness research.
The problem is that everyone in Paris basically seemed to think more nature was good. But no one ever actually said what meant by “nature” in the first place. What they meant by this term was, I guess, what most people mean by it: green things, trees, parks, birds, open space, clean air. This was never actually said, though, and so I was left wondering. We’re all convinced that there’s something wrong with contemporary city life. We’re equally all convinced—I think—that much of what’s wrong has to do somehow with an absence of nature. And that absence seems to go in two directions. On the one hand, there’s not enough natural stuff in cities—too few trees, not enough otters. On the other hand, a kind of unnatural way of living has taken hold among city people—too much sitting in air-conditioned buildings, too much concrete, too much stress and speed. All of this, I think, is fairly uncontroversial.
The bricks are made of what is known as qu—which sounds like “choo,” but with a lovely softness—a sort of coral reef teeming with desiccated microorganisms, enzymes, moulds and yeasts that will spring into action in the presence of water, ready to unleash themselves on all kinds of foods, especially those that are starchy. The Japanese, who learned about qu from China, call it koji ; it’s sometimes translated into English as “ferment.” When awakened, all these microorganisms will magically transform cooked beans, rice and other cereals, unravelling their tight-knit starches into simple sugars, then fermenting the sugars into alcohol, meanwhile spinning off a whole aurora of intriguing flavors. It is qu that converts soybeans into soy sauce and jiang. Qu is the catalyst for fermenting alcoholic drinks from rice, millet and other cereals, as well as grain vinegars. It’s no exaggeration to say that qu is one of the keys to what makes Chinese food Chinese.
Obviously, this occurred long before our current world where every film ever made is at your fingertips with algorithmic suggestions that make actual DVDs seem like a quaint and dusty relic akin to a gramophone. And it was quaint and dusty. You used to put all of the films you wanted to see into a list that Netflix dubbed the “queue.” Even at the time the word was redolent of some Victorian past in which each film waited decorously in line to be seen — such a calm, orderly concept. Its Britishness called to mind a magical Mary Poppins who would keep everything neat and tidy.
But the queue quickly became much more — a kind of running commentary on the state of my life. Much like books, the number of films I wanted to see far outran the number of films I had time to watch. But the beauty of Netflix was that it could keep track of all of those films for me until the queue itself became a kind of biography of the various phases of my life.
I’m not saying I deserve a life of ease. But I worked hard to earn my retirement, dropping giant chunks of my salary into company and government pension plans throughout those forty years. It’s time for the famous social contract to hold up its end of the bargain and take care of me, the way it did my father before me, to deliver on the idea that retirement is my right after a life of work and the promise that I will have the time and means to enjoy it.
Except none of that happened. The year since my retirement party has not been a dreamy passage to a welcoming future but a nerve-shattering trip into the unknown. My debt is swelling like a broken ankle; my hard-won savings may or may not be sucked into the vortex of an international market collapse. Can I keep my house? Who knows? The macroeconomy is messing with my microeconomy. The future keeps shape-shifting. And none of the careful planning I put into my retirement is going to change that.
“This Is Salvaged” is a collection of short fiction united by a singular question: In a world defined by estrangement, where do we find communion?
Though she never had the opportunity to describe all her sadnesses to her grandmother, it was her grandmother’s model — her love of the written and spoken word, and her unremitting support — that brought Savage to the book in which she finally unburdens herself. “Writing was how she communicated with God,” she explains. “Like Granny, I feel closest to God when I am writing.”
Being a gamer is not a cost of entry into “Critical Hits,” which emerges as a fresh deviation from stale debates about ludology, or the status of games as art, or the status of writing about games as some trite negligibility. Here instead is an array of arguments for how games structure our behavior and perception of the world around us. Lennon and Machado have emboldened a discourse on how we are learning to live among games in thought and deed, at the very least, one player at a time.
Where do writers, editors, and for that matter critics go from here? How do we make art under these conditions? One’s answer to such questions is inextricable from one’s politics more broadly, from one’s view of what we owe each other, whether the rich deserve their spoils, and the extent to which workers should determine the course of their lives.
The novelty of that control was thrilling to those of us raised on vinyl. Suddenly, anyone with a cheap tape player could record music, sequence it, distribute it, and—perhaps most powerfully—erase it and replace it with something else. Largely viewed as a nostalgic totem these days, the cassette tape was revelatory and revolutionary in its time; its disruptive power anticipated the even greater tectonic shift that the digital age would bring to music.
Today, Nyangai is disappearing before his very eyes, swallowed up by the relentless sea. As recently as ten years ago, it still measured some 2,300 feet from end to end. What's left today is a patch of sand barely 300 feet long and 250 wide. The forests are gone, swamped by saltwater. The soccer field lies under water for 22 hours of the day. And the land on which Charlie's family home once stood, the home he was born in, has long since vanished beneath the waves. In as little as two years, Charlie fears, Nyangai may no longer exist at all.
"It's getting worse and worse," says Charlie, a father of six who has lived in a makeshift home of sticks and tarpaulin since his previous home was washed away. "There's nowhere to go to the toilet. There's nowhere to be free. Whenever the water's high the place floods all over. It never used to happen like this."
But braille has had a revival during the past decade. Technology such as refreshable braille displays has made the script more portable and adaptable, and increasingly braille is being integrated into the community beyond books. For braille advocates, there is no substitute for braille when it relates to the literacy and communication skills of the vision-impaired.
When I heard about plane yoga, I was skeptical. Not just because I thought it was silly (though I did), but because it didn’t seem possible. Forget lengthening and bending into a blissful warrior three pose—being on a plane means contorting your body just to exist.
Yet those tight quarters are exactly the reason why yoga (well, an abbreviated version of yoga) could be useful on flights. Sitting for long periods of time can make you tight and even carries risks of blood clots, and stretching helps blood to flow.
Kinderland is not just an extraordinary look at life in Europe’s edgelands (“our poor and unhappy country”) – it’s also a powerful novel, full of surprising imagery and beautiful writing.
What is characteristic of logic is not a special standard of certainty, but a special level of generality. Beyond its role in policing deductive arguments, logic discerns patterns in reality of the most abstract, structural kind. A trivial example is this: everything is self-identical. The various logical discoveries mentioned earlier reflect much deeper patterns. Contrary to what some philosophers claim, these patterns are not just linguistic conventions. We cannot make something not self-identical, however hard we try. We could mean something else by the word ‘identity’, but that would be like trying to defeat gravity by using the word ‘gravity’ to mean something else. Laws of logic are no more up to us than laws of physics.
More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free-love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.
“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”
Day (like Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along") is a sad story of middle-aged disillusionment. It's about losses that range from a "low howl" to the unbearable. It's about the belated end of blithely delayed maturity and the premature end of childhood. But it's also about taking stock and making changes before it's too late. It isn't without hope.
A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.
Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.
But at its best, My Name Is Barbra confides her insecurities and a ravening hunger for fame that can never atone for the neglect she suffered as a child. She even wonders if the voice that thrilled the world is the accidental product of a deviated septum and of the air passages in her kinked nose. Let the mystery remain unsolved. What matters is that she sang, and now she no longer does. It’s some compensation to read her silent but eloquent and vociferous writing.
But after a 12-month battle, the status quo ante was restored and an apostrophe has been added back in to the sign for St Mary’s Terrace, to the delight not only of villagers but to a growing number of enthusiasts battling against the loss of the punctuation mark across the UK.
The controversy in Twyford began last year when a new road sign for St Mary’s Terrace appeared minus the apostrophe. The former teacher Oliver Gray expressed his discontent.
We like to think we are masters of our bodies and minds and, for the most part, we possess total agency and comprehension of our thoughts and actions. This assumption is embedded so thoroughly in our society that it seems unnecessary to even observe it.
But that is exactly what the legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector does in her mind-bending, metaphysical novel of the psyche, The Apple in the Dark, first published in 1961. Released this fall as the “capstone” in a series by New Directions, Benjamin Moser’s translation challenges our most basic assumptions about human behavior and the way we make sense of the world. Impressively, Lispector does so through both the musings of her characters and the sentences themselves. By repudiating standard syntax, she urges readers to reexamine their own patterns of thought, thereby posing the central question of the book—are we truly responsible for our actions?
“Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” is a series of interlocked essays that identifies a creative sensibility. Art Monsters have an instinct toward provocation (in both their artwork and the conduct of their lives), a creative pull toward the unspeakable, a defiant aesthetic, a focus on the body. The book centers primarily on visual artists — Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas and Kara Walker are some of its main characters — but it is attentive to literary ogres, as well. Virginia Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Kathy Acker are equally consequential in the development of this theory.
There is an intellectual thread that runs through all of these advances: measurement and calculation. Geometric calculations led to breakthroughs in painting, astronomy, cartography, surveying, and physics. The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity.
What does seem clear is that, ever since the Big Bang, time has only moved in one direction. We experience time as flowing from the past to the present and into the future, never doubling back or changing course. This is completely unlike our experience of three-dimensional space, which we can move in freely.
Is our perception of time wrong?
Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.
But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that it is an outdated social construct, not really grounded in biology. Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.
While the idea of magma rising was no doubt scary for tourists visiting the nearby Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, which was closed as a precaution, Iceland’s residents have learned over centuries to live with their island’s overactive geology.
So, why is Iceland so volcanically active?
The answer has two parts: One has to do with what geologists unimaginatively call a hotspot, and the other involves giant tectonic plates that are pulling apart right beneath the island. As a geologist, I study both.
Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage.
“We don’t really know how many books it is,” says Michael Adams, a lexicographer and chair of the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly 2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700. “And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty good estimate.”
There is no reason and no way to keep politics out of art, or artists out of politics. But these are different realms, and the values of one can be inhospitable—even deadly—to the values of the other. Climb down from the ivory tower, traverse the frontier, approach the crossroads, but be aware that artists can perish there.
Why isn’t the universe boring? It could be. The number of subatomic particles in the universe is about 1080, a 1 with 80 zeros after it. Scatter those particles at random, and the universe would just be a monotonous desert of sameness, a thin vacuum without any structure much larger than an atom for billions of light-years in any direction. Instead, we have a universe filled with stars and planets, canyons and waterfalls, pine trees and people. There is an exuberant plenty to nature. But why is any of this stuff here?
I want to tell you where aliens come from — not which galaxy or dimension, but rather how humans, over the past few centuries, have come to conceive of extraterrestrial life. But before we start, we must briefly note that there are already a few very good reasons to be sceptical of recent reports of encounters with alien beings. This is not at all to say that such beings do not exist, but only that the presumptions behind reported encounters almost always reveal a strong terrestrial bias: an inability to imagine the real conditions, imposed by the universe itself, on any potential interstellar voyage.
But the birds’ attachment to us now seems to be transforming into a liability. With the birds facing more dangers in the natural world, their need for human-made homes has grown. At the same time, experts told me, fervor for building and maintaining martin birdhouses appears to be waning, especially as those most enthusiastic about the practice continue to age and die. The martins’ dependence on our structures is, at its heart, a dependence on our behavior. Their precarious housing situation is now many experts’ “No. 1 concern,” Grisham told me—and it threatens to hasten the species’ decline.
“Oh, you want to know how you can support disability justice? MAKE SOMEONE A POT OF SOUP!” my friend William Maria Rain, a true disability justice OG, yelled at the audience at a disability justice panel at the D Center at the University of Washington, circa 2014 or so. Someone had probably been wringing their hands during the Q&A and timidly asking, “Um, what’s a good way to help the disabled community?” William made the answer very plain: You help disabled people by making sure we’re not dying of starvation in our apartments.
The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America.
Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page.
Where should we look to find women in history: to their global movements, their local meetings, their lives, or their ideas? In her new book, Jenni Nuttall departs from these familiar approaches, instead mining women’s past through vocabulary about their sex. A nimble treatment of history that blends lexicographical analysis with personal reflections, Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words makes the case that “women’s words”—in their specificity, their peculiarity, and their ambiguity—reveal new dimensions of long-ago eras and shed useful light on our own time.
And because history is more or less over, Willis’ characters get to muck about in the past and have adventures. Historians at her future Oxford have access to time travel technology which allows them to visit the past, dressing up like “contemps” (short for “contemporary people”) blending in to see what their lives were really like. Academic historians are, in fact, the only people in Willis’ books who use time travel: historical observation is the only practical application of the technology, since changing the past or bringing objects back through time is considered to be impossible. The scientific consensus in Willis’ novels is that going back in time to kill Hitler, for example, wouldn’t work—the continuum would stop you, spitting you out halfway around the world at a different time. History protects itself.
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature. The Writer makes coffee and sits down at their special writing desk for their ritualized morning pages. They break for lunch—or perhaps a morning constitution—during which they have an aha! moment about a troublesome plot point. Such a lifestyle aesthetic is “something we’ve long wanted to believe,” said Paul Bogaards, the veteran book publicist who has worked with the likes of Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and Robert Caro. “For a very small subset of writers, this has been true. And it’s getting harder and harder to do.”
Ithaca is also inundated with nature, drowned in it. This I can’t quantify, but it seemed to us then that the surrounding gorges, forests, swamps, and bogs were especially thronged with plants and animals. The air seemed thick with the smells of pollen, new leaves, rotting leaves, skunk cabbage, pine forests, and stagnant ponds. It was certainly full of pollen, midges and gnats, bees, wasps, hornets, butterflies, moths, deerflies, black flies, and horseflies. The water my sister, my brother, and I swam in was also occupied by rafts of water striders, water boatmen (which bit us), leeches (which bit us and left uncoagulated streams of blood after we’d salted them off), and water beetles (which also bit, very hard, taking chunks of flesh and drawing lots of blood). The mud we waded in was gooey with smooth green algae, sometimes jellied with clusters of frogs’ eggs, and always potentially mined with snapping turtles.
Stories keep traditions alive – they're the reason Maryland fried chicken continues to find new fans. They're the reason why 111 years after the Titanic sank, the ill-fated ocean liner continues to capture our imaginations. They're the reason a water-logged piece of paper sold on Saturday for the price of a luxury car.
Players have defended the game by noting that its letter strings—from AA (a kind of Hawaiian lava) to ZZZ (an interjection for sleep)—could be found in a bunch of standard North American dictionaries, books that have been used through the years to compile and revise Scrabble’s tournament word list. But after an update last month introduced dozens of suspect words, riling up the community of competitive players, that’s becoming harder to do.
As in fairy tales, settings are generic, characters are unnamed, plots unfold according to dream logic, and the situation is a given, the way that the accident of one’s birth to a particular set of parents in a particular time and place is a given. What matters is not so much the unknown specifics of the character’s background or life, but rather what the character does in the strange situation they find themselves in.
What is perhaps most astonishing in reading the three stories together is that they don’t showcase Keegan’s maturation as a writer over more than two decades so much as remind you of how long she has simply been a master of the craft.
In what might be the most entertaining music memoir since Elton John’s Me, Boy George’s Karma weaves a meandering path through several decades’ of fame, success, crash and burn, before delivering him into a kind of autumnal meditative serenity, aged 62. That it is all wildly discursive, spectacularly catty and occasionally quite mad merely confirms its authenticity. This is George O’Dowd in all his exhausting glory.
There have been salmon in the Yukon, the fourth-longest river in North America, for as long as there have been people on its banks. The river’s abundance helped Alaska earn its reputation as one of the last refuges for wild salmon, a place where they once came every year by the millions to spawn in pristine rivers and lakes after migrating thousands of miles. But as temperatures in western Alaska and the Bering Sea creep higher, the Yukon’s salmon populations have plunged.
State and federal fishery managers have resorted to drastic measures to save them. In 2021, for the first time in Fitka’s life, regulators prohibited all fishing for the river’s two main salmon species — king and chum — even for subsistence. For the better part of three fishing seasons, thousands of Yup’ik and Athabascan fishers have been banned from catching the fish that once kept their families fed.
“We grew up with fishing, cutting fish, smoking fish all our lives,” Fitka said. “And to have it taken away just like that — without warning, without mentally preparing yourself — is traumatizing.”
Can a work of art be deeply flawed and still be great? One of the reasons that some once-revered works in the Western canon have been treated so shabbily in recent years is that, once a new lens is introduced that illuminates their flaws, critics have been exceptionally severe. But great things need a certain kind of patience and understanding to exhibit their greatness, especially as time passes and new critical standards come into play.
One of the biggest difficulties is the sheer complexity of the problem: even the simplest known bacteria have well over 100 genes and contain hundreds of kinds of molecules, all furiously interacting in a microscopic dance. The environment on the primordial Earth must also have been complicated: huge numbers of different chemicals, from metals and minerals to water and gases, all being blasted around by winds and volcanic eruptions.
“The experimental parameter space is almost infinite,” says Wilhelm Huck, a chemist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Now, a few researchers are trying a new approach: harnessing artificial intelligence to zero in on the winning conditions. Specifically, several groups have started using machine-learning tools that can identify patterns in data sets too huge and messy for the human brain to comprehend.
I expect the occasional aural pummeling at a trendy restaurant, especially in this post-gourmet era of fine food with dressed-down vibes. In fact, the clamor almost suits a certain raucous restaurant genre featuring extra martinis that taste like caprese salads and new American cookery that gut-punches us with flavor and decadence via mouth-watering citric acid, umami-rich MSG, meat on meat and cheese on cream — like fancy fare for high people. But that doesn’t necessarily make it enjoyable.
Claire Keegan's newly published short story collection, So Late in the Day, contains three tales that testify to the screwed up relations between women and men. To give you a hint about Keegan's views on who's to blame for that situation, be aware that when the title story was published in France earlier this year, it was called, "Misogynie."
The pandemic and climate change put us solidly in a new era of American urbanism, one that demands big plans to solve big problems. Whether in adapting to rising seas, reimagining downtowns, creating a green mass transportation network or addressing the housing shortage, visionary thinking is desperately needed in cities across the country. The story of San Francisco's Ferry Building serves as a valuable reminder that transformative urban change is not just possible but inevitable. The only question is what form it will take, and whether we will celebrate it or live to regret it.
The book shows how attitudes toward UFOs have changed over the years, not just by scientists and the government but also in popular culture. Those shifting attitudes have led to more openness about discussing sightings, and the national security implications of not knowing what they could be.
My own materialism, fervent though it may be, veers into a type of wooly, incarnational mysticism that I imagine would be anathema to my more sober Marxist friends, but for me the book very much is the thing. I’ve had a few opportunities to actually touch the crinkled, brown paper of a first folio, the fine threads of the rendered rags which compose the individual pages visible and slightly textured to the touch, the individual fraying of faded black letters indicative of the sorts wearing down printing after printing. I’ve been able to turn the page of a first folio to the frontispiece of MacBeth at Lehigh University’s special collections, and to slowly paw through Carnegie Mellon University’s first folio and linger over lines like “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” from The Tempest in its earliest printing. At the risk of sounding sentimental, there are many things that go through one’s mind, not least of which is a sense of reverence for the sterling craftsmanship of what was still a mass-produced object; startling to consider when most of our contemporary books will transform into an acidic pulpy mass before the end of the century. Skill is why the book survived, why people wanted to pass it down, why so many still remain, especially when compared to other books from the time period. I’ve worked in the archive with sixteenth-century books where there is only one remaining copy, far fewer than the first folio’s 233 extant copies. Monetarily, these are worth far less than a folio, and the librarians scarcely paid me any attention, even though I could have suddenly lost my mind and began ripping pages and eating them.. That’s because nobody cares about Thomas Crashaw, but Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Maybe initially the binding and pages and cover, the thread and paper and leather, can explain the endurance of the folio, but it’s fair to say that if we think of a folio as a material object, then it’s certainly a relic, too. By definition, all relics are physical, and if the relic is where matter finds its apotheosis, then it’s hard not to see the folio as a sacred object.
In 1940, Chaplin made his first talkie, a satire of Hitler and Mussolini called “The Great Dictator.” It was a huge hit. And then the sky fell. The country, or a very noisy part of it, turned against him, and eventually, after a decade of critical and political abuse, Chaplin left the United States, cashed out his American assets, bought a house in Switzerland, and did not return for twenty years.
While time travel is fundamental to Doctor Who, the show never tries to ground the Tardis' abilities in anything resembling real-world physics. It would be odd to complain about this: Doctor Who has a fairy-tale quality and doesn't aspire to be realistic science fiction.
But what about in the real world? Could we ever build a time machine and travel into the distant past, or forward to see our great-great-great-grandchildren? Answering this question requires understanding how time actually works – something physicists are far from certain about. So far, what we can say with confidence is that travelling into the future is achievable, but travelling into the past is either wildly difficult or absolutely impossible.
Word spread quickly in my neighborhood one morning a few weeks ago. Phones in a certain corner of Astoria, Queens, buzzed with frantic group-chat messages. Pictures were shared on Instagram. Facebook posts about the news elicited crying emoji responses. We couldn’t hide our gut-level shock. I felt blindsided by sadness—mostly, I thought, on behalf of my younger daughter.
Basra’s too smart to think she can explain to us “the immigration situation” in one novel. But she does want us to feel Happy’s plight, and to share her anger at the dehumanizing methods by which our capitalist systems exploit migrant labor. To a profit-driven boss, one worker is the same as another, and is easily replaced by the next one who dares to come. But Happy’s indelible voice won’t let us take that attitude, or let Happy be forgotten.
Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Day,” visits a family on April 5 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — before, during and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shadows the book although the words “Covid” and “pandemic” never appear.
Cassie Bongiovanni’s favorite way to show people just how little we know about the seafloor is to open the mapping software on her computer and strip the world map down to what we do know about the seafloor. “You can see why this whole mapping thing is important,” she said with a laugh as she showed me the process one day over Zoom. “Because there’s nothing here! This is why. This is the big picture. There is no big picture!” The effect was startling. In an instant, the map went from a rich three-dimensional tapestry of underwater mountains, trenches, and canyons to flat, white nothing. That was especially true in deep waters outside national jurisdiction.
One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeology revolves around the identity of Punt, an otherworldly “land of plenty” revered by the ancient Egyptians. Punt had it all—fragrant myrrh and frankincense, precious electrum (a mixed alloy of gold and silver) and malachite, and coveted leopard skins, among other exotic luxury goods.
Despite being a trading partner for over a millennium, the ancient Egyptians never disclosed Punt’s exact whereabouts except for vague descriptions of voyages along what’s now the Red Sea. That could mean anywhere from southern Sudan to Somalia and even Yemen.
Just off Australia’s largest container port lies a sickle-shaped neighborhood with a scent so distinctive that passing taxi drivers will sometimes roll down their windows for a whiff of the rich and unmistakably beery aroma.
That smell, officially recognized by the City of Melbourne last year for its “intangible cultural heritage,” emanates from a nondescript, brick factory on a corner lot in this industrial district, known as Port Melbourne. Every vessel of Vegemite, the spread beloved in Australia and not so much outside it, has for the past 80 years begun its journey here.
More so than many of the plot points that tend to get recycled from situational comedy to situational comedy, it shines a really direct light on the gap between the messy chaos that can be real life and the image of a “perfect” holiday sold to us year after year, as well as the hidden domestic labor that makes up the ample space in between. Typically, it’s also done in such a way that the message is — well, digestible in 30 minutes or less.
About halfway through Lydia Davis’s latest collection – that is, in the 74th of 144 stories sardined into just 368 pages – a woman shows her husband the story she’s been working on. He doesn’t like it, telling her “there was no beginning, no end, and no plot”. Let’s hope he doesn’t read the other 143.
Besides a glimpse into book-selling, this book is likely to spark a greater conversation on burnout and a hyper-competitive work culture, with snappy quotable bits that tap the zeitgeist of the overworked.
Reading while hungry is not a predicament known to Dwight Garner, because, as he tells us in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” his winning new book, he cannot read without also eating, and, as a book critic for the Times, he reads quite a bit. The association between these two sustaining pleasures began long ago, during his boyhood in West Virginia and Florida. Garner takes a good hard look in memory’s mirror and tells us what he sees: “a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint, ‘husky’ in the department-store lingo, a brown-eyed boy with chafing thighs.” Riding his bicycle home from school beneath the blazing Gulf Coast sun, “sizzled crisp and pink with sweat,” he sounds fairly edible himself.
The opening D-day sequence of “Saving Private Ryan” and the climactic mad dash of “1917” are rightly praised for their authentically rendered brutality. But the chaos is typically part of a larger narrative designed to provide reassurance that war delivers victory and a sense of order: The soldier is rescued, the battlefield directive is successfully fulfilled. In that light, those “gritty” and “authentic” war films may be more of a guilty pleasure than any MCU spectacle.
This paradox is Thomson’s central concern throughout the book, but that doesn’t mean “The Fatal Alliance” is a book-length guilt trip. Thomson deeply admires many entries in the genre — he notes he’s watched “Black Hawk Down” six times — and has a keen eye for moments that undermine its more propagandistic conventions. But he’s also persistently, thoughtfully questioning what filmmakers intend, what conversations they’re accidentally stepping into and how we as moviegoers are implicated as war-story consumers.
Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.
Time, technology and changing tastes have derailed a once profitable, unique business that at its peak sold thousands of vintage telephones to buyers from around the world and produced revenues of nearly $1 million a year.
Only now, Ron and Mary Knappen are trying to determine what to do with their vast Phoneco inventory, which draws little interest these days. It’s the same challenges faced by others who deal in antiques like roll-top desks, sets of china, oil lamps, armoires and salt and pepper shakers.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” writes Mark Twain, “because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” More than anything, Tate’s achievement is to mount a challenge to our own sense of reality, our sense of what is “normal” or expected from the world. “Some people go their whole lives / without ever writing a single poem,” Tate reminds us, but what happens in a poem is no stranger than anything else. After all, these are people “who don’t hesitate / to cut somebody’s heart or skull open,” who play golf, hunt foxes, shoplift, and invest their money, or simply “stroll into a church / as if that were a natural part of life.” “Truth is, you are // free,” writes Tate in “Consumed,” “and what might happen to you / today, nobody knows.”
A bucket of moldy jam stored in the walk-in storage closet of an L.A. cafe; famous men masturbating in front of young women; misappropriated campaign funds: Such real-life cancellation plots provide the unspoken backdrop to Lexi Freiman’s angular, careening latest, “The Book of Ayn,” which charts a writer’s undoing after she publishes an opioid crisis satire, written from a rent-free pied-à-terre with a view of the Empire State Building. This is a gamy picaresque for the age of the notes-app apology: a cutting novel of ego and its death, Freudian yearning, Randian Hollywood, scatological epiphany and the vileness of the pursuit of a career in letters.
A title like The Race to Be Myself suggests a journey of self-discovery, but Semenya never expresses doubts about her identity as a woman or an athlete. The real race she’s describing is a race against time – a race to outmanoeuvre the IAAF’s shifting criteria about whether or not, and under what terms, women with “differences of sexual development” could compete. In the case of her own career, Semenya opted to take a a potent dose of estrogen to bring her testosterone down to a level deemed acceptable by the IAAF for as long as she could. The medication had intense physical and psychological side effects, but that didn’t stop her from running – and winning, repeatedly. Other young elite athletes, subjected to gonadectomies, entirely vanished from the field.
In Japan, enthusiasts clamor for the rarer flavors, with some sold for just a few weeks or only in a specific region. In the United States, obsessives fawn over the collectibles, comparing reviews on Japanese snack blogs and shelling out for limited editions.
These particular Kit Kats would become the key players in an ultimately frustrating saga of shell email accounts, phantom truckers, supply-chain fraud and one seriously bewildered cargo freight broker.
For the greater part of two decades, Sally Snowman has lived and worked contentedly on Little Brewster Island, a craggy patch of bare rock, crabgrass, concrete, and dilapidated buildings in Boston’s outer harbor. Under the auspices of the Coast Guard, she serves as the keeper, and the historian, of Boston Light. The lighthouse, opened in September, 1716, was the first in the American colonies, and Snowman is the last official keeper in the United States.
Some of our best literary characters, such as Adrian Veidt in Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Jay Gatsby, fall from grace due to their idealism being overtaken by bitterness and calculating utilitarianism. Their perspective is lost and therefore so is the world they are striving to achieve. What made them so compelling at first was that their idealism was overly optimistic, but the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. This is the plight in Greg Jackson’s debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave. The book centers the profession of journalism through its main characters and the philosophy that the journalist’s only goal is to tell the truth. The cynic may mock—if only gently—the sincere approach to the realities of “truth-telling.” It cannot be denied that Jackson’s idealism is done with eyes wide open. The challenge to readers is if we can imagine a world formed by optimistic idealism, despite pragmatically flawed human beings.
Blackouts revels in the grotesque, impossible beauty of human rot. It is a novel of mercies and indignities; bruises and bones; the ever-tangled eroticism of life and death. “From a certain distance, the catastrophic must be indistinguishable from the sublime,” Torres writes. That is what he has managed in this glorious book – to hold us at precisely the right distance.
In “Again and Again,” Evison performs writing magic; despite its implausibility, I committed myself fully to Eugene’s 1,100-odd years of life, immersed in tales of adventure and passion that are almost too good to be true.
Laurence Leamer’s Hitchcock’s Blondes arrives then to address a question that remains unanswered—why did Hitchcock insist on torturing his lead women?—while also inviting the reader to see his films through the lens of these relationships.
Andrew Wylie, the world’s most renowned – and for a long time its most reviled – literary agent, is 76 years old. Over the past four decades, he has reshaped the business of publishing in profound and, some say, insalubrious ways. He has been a champion of highbrow books and unabashed commerce, making many great writers famous and many famous writers rich. In the process, he has helped to define the global literary canon. His critics argue that he has also hastened the demise of the literary culture he claims to defend. Wylie is largely untroubled by such criticisms. What preoccupies him, instead, are the deals to be made in China.
Part of the magic of major literary awards seems to lie in their ceremonial mystery, the way that authors are anointed like popes, with a puff of white smoke emerging from a literary conclave. We are quick to point out that this book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, or that that author is a Booker Prize winner, but the people who draft those shortlists and select those winners are forgotten long before the gold and silver medallions are even pasted to the covers.
We may never know exactly what happened in the room where literary history was being made. But, thanks to new data on American literary prizes, we now know exactly who was there.
Tablescapes have become a cultural focal point because they’re a visual representation of shifting ideas around how we think about home, entertaining, and pleasure. Arranging a table isn’t just about accessories — it’s about attitude. The way we approach both is changing.
An immigrant newcomer to the fictional megacity of Polis, Slide has marginal employment as an apprentice to two bullying barbers and a tiny room in an apartment with two oddball roommates. Slide’s attempts to improve his standing — find his own apartment, his own shop, maybe a girlfriend — drive this book, which stays entertaining, clever and mysterious throughout its 500 pages.
Imagine an artificial intelligence — perhaps in human form — equipped with a layer of photoreceptors to capture light, a membrane that tracks fluctuations in air pressure, sensors on the body to communicate physical contact, and even some sort of a spectrometer to identify smells and flavors. Assume, too, that the intelligence is capable enough of integrating all this information, and of moving about and behaving as humans do. Would you think it conscious? Is it conscious? Would it see the same blue of the sea that we do, hear the same crash of the waves? Would it respond to an ocean breeze with joy, wistfulness or hope? Or would all of these incoming sensations be “just” information to it, bits and bytes, frequencies and wavelengths?
Science journalist George Musser attempts to answer some of these questions in his book “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe.” He has assembled a vast array of ideas from developments in artificial intelligence, heterodox interpretations of modern physics, and philosophies of science and mind, and has interviewed many of the scientists and philosophers behind these theories. His conclusion? We cannot understand what consciousness is without understanding the fundamental laws of physics; or, depending on whom you ask, the other way around.
Why is it so popular? It’s possible that many of the novel’s younger fans simply haven’t read enough to recognize how tired Yarros’ language and motifs are. Cliché makes reading a speedier process for people uninterested in anything but plot. But romance fans in particular have become fairly sophisticated consumers of their genre, speaking like connoisseurs of their favorite variations on such venerable tropes as “fake relationship,” “forced proximity,” and “friends to lovers.” What makes Fourth Wing risible to someone who wants something fresh or surprising from a novel makes it a familiar comfort to someone in search of an immersive escape. As violent and merciless as Violet and Xaden’s world is, it is governed by narrative laws that are reassuringly consistent and unbreakable. The more perilous and unpredictable the real world seems to be, the more appealing such scenarios become. Sure, you’ve read it all before, many, many times. That’s how you know that everything will turn out all right in the end.
The first time I slept with my future husband was in a beach house an hour north of my childhood home. My boyfriend had been given the keys to it for the weekend by its owner, Camilla, a retiree he’d worked for in the New Zealand government. The house was a modest rectangular modernist box, raised off the lawn, wood paneled inside, except for floor-to-ceiling windows at the front with a wide view of the coastal sky. Neither the building nor its contents seemed to have been updated since the sixties, and the atmosphere inside was super cozy. A pair of recliners upholstered in nubby beige angled toward each other in the lounge, around a low table crying out for matching teacups and scones fresh from the oven. When my boyfriend mentioned that Camilla’s sister was often at the house with her, I instantly saw them sitting there, two old maids in cardigans and sensible shoes, tut-tutting over the papers and arguing over who’d pick up the cold cuts for their afternoon guests.
My boyfriend and I had only just started dating, but he was handsome, smart, and kind, and I was optimistic about our future together. I was also, technically, still a virgin and knew I was likely to rectify that within the next half hour. As I moved through Camilla’s house, I should have been consumed with excitement, capable of attending to nothing but our two young bodies and what we were about to do with them. Instead, a different thought was forming in my mind. It reached its climax as I laid my valise in the sunny bedroom, where my childhood would soon officially end. Omg—my chest thrummed—what if Julia and I bought this place when we retired and lived here together till we died?
“Every story worth telling is a love story,” the narrator writes. “But this is not that story.” She’s right, but only because The Vulnerables is not a story—not purely a story. It collects diverse objects and forges links out of happenstance, creating a structure that insists on the possibility of connection. The novel’s most valuable offering comes from its ability to gather elements and hold them together, as we wished to hold one another. In this respect, love pervades every page.
“The Future” is so pleasing and page-turning a read, so full of intrigue, emotional depth and a delicious conclusion that I didn’t want it to end. That Alderman — who was raised Orthodox Jewish — manages to mine the Book of Genesis in exciting ways, making accessible the parables of community, conflict and survival found in its pages, is an added and surprising bonus. It’s almost enough to make you believe, despite the evidence, that the bleakest of futures isn’t inevitable.
In The Conversion, Lohrey delves into the places we call home, exploring the intricate dance between our influence on them and their transformative impact on us.
Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are misplaced – at least according to the linguist Valerie Fridland.
Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude does an excellent job of vindicating words and ways of speaking we love to hate. Tracing your ‘verys’ and your singular ‘theys’ across centuries and continents, Fridland offers a history of linguistic pet peeves that are much older than we might assume and have more important functions in communication than most of us would like to give them credit for.
Perhaps, though, the act of explicitly reimagining a classic is not entirely distinct from what novelists do as a matter of course. "Novelists are quite parasitical in our approach to material, whether it's our own lives or turning people we've met into characters," says Biles. "There's always an element of harvesting material and producing something new with it."
"We underestimate how much a part of literature is rewriting existing literature," agrees Newman. "You want to write something that says what the last book you read didn't say. When you narrow it down to one book, the scales fall from your eyes, and you realise that that's what you've been doing all along."
To us humans, glass is ubiquitous and banal; to birds, it’s one of the world’s most confounding materials. A tanager or flicker flying toward a transparent window perceives only the space and objects beyond, not the invisible forcefield in its way. The reflective glass that coats many modern skyscrapers is just as dangerous, a shimmering mirror of clouds and trees. Some birds survive collisions, dazed but unharmed. Most don’t, done in by brain injuries and internal bleeding. Per one 2014 analysis, glass kills as many as a billion birds every year in the United States alone.
Chicago, among the largest and brightest cities within North America’s Midwestern flyway, is especially lethal—both during spring migration and again in fall, when the survivors fly south. The millions of artificial lights that glow across the Windy City present as a galaxy of false stars, confusing migrant birds that orient themselves by starlight and enticing them toward the glassy buildings below. In 2019, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ranked Chicago the country’s most perilous city for birds—a metropolis that doubles as an ecological trap.
Wherever he goes now, home will feel as close as the nearest Chinese restaurant, his lifelong classroom and proof of the resilience of his family and Asian immigrants everywhere.
“We’ve always, you know, had uphill battles,” he said. “The odds have always been stacked against us, but we just persevere. And it’s all you can do.”
“Causal determinism,” the philosopher’s unlovely term for that unsettling hypothesis, is the default assumption of most modern science. It matters a good deal if the idea implies that none of our actions are what we call “free.” If science tells us to be determinists, and determinism is incompatible with freedom, shouldn’t we give up on judging people for doing what they were destined to do?
That’s what the Stanford neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky urges. He thinks the time has come to accept the truth about determinism and acknowledge that “we have no free will at all.” What follows? Early in his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” (Penguin Press), Sapolsky lists, with the morbid relish of a man daring to think the unthinkable, the implications of his heresy: no one is ever blameworthy—or, equally, praiseworthy—for doing anything. No one, Sapolsky writes, “has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.” Ordinary human sentiments—resentment and gratitude, love and hate—are pretty much irrational in their normal forms: “It makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house.” One practical implication is that, since nobody’s to blame for anything, criminal justice shouldn’t be about retribution. Accordingly, he tries to view human beings without judgment. Free-will skeptics are, he suggests, “less punitive and more forgiving.”
Torres stitches together the parts of his novel to create a whole, but one in which the seams are rough and visible. It’s part of the brilliance of the writing, which in drawing attention to the writer’s craft demonstrates that all stories are spliced together to create meaning. By switching back and forth between the testimony gathered by Jan Gay, her own life, and the memories Juan and the narrator share with each other, Torres makes visible a novelist’s sleight of hand. The result is a mille-feuille, a novel of multiple layers with various flavors on the palate.
What kind of a novel is “Baumgartner,” then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate “Baumgartner” in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty. For starters, we’ve got a bookish and earnest male protagonist and author’s proxy (Auster is a family name in the novel). We’ve got narrative instabilities that have us reading closely from Baumgartner’s point of view and then from some offstage “Pigs in Space”-type narrator’s: “Perhaps this odd confabulation will help the reader understand our hero’s state of mind at that particular moment.” Auster also splices in poems and pieces written by Baumgartner and his dead wife, Anna; forays into their past; and extended metaphors that require some unpacking. So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work.
In the publishing world “The Vulnerables” is classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer’s block.
The narrator broods about the writing life even though she knows that “whenever I write something about writing or being a writer, I am annoying the hell out of some people.” Indeed, self-awareness is a great part of her charm. “For the writer,” she muses, “obsessive rumination is a must.”
Maurice Blanchot once quipped that exhaustion is the start, and not the conclusion, of mental toil. Nobody believes this excuse, but telling someone you’re just too tired to meet them at the restaurant that night is the unassailable banner under which a great deal of writing often gets done. Exhaustion or tiredness (fatigue, in French) is writing’s condition of possibility—something to which Darrieussecq’s book can attest. Insomnia is excruciating, but it is also, for this reason, remarkably productive. Forced vigilance forces you to start writing things down: unable to ever really drift off, you might double down on your mental fixations and put them on the page. All the better for us that the coils of Darrieussecq’s fixation wound so tightly around the subject of sleeplessness itself.
Bohannon’s feminist revision of evolutionary history feels like an important counterbalance to the male-dominated narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, where we came from and what our purpose is – but one of the advantages of being a big-brained, hard-to-birth being is that we needn’t let our past define us.
Whether we’re managing a demanding career, caring for children, or both, most of us have dreamt of not being bound to the metaphorical hourglass through which our day seems to slip. But what we actually want is more time, not the absence of time altogether. Being unaware of the passage of time felt like being trapped in a single chaotic moment that never ends. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been sick for, when my caretakers would bring me dinner, or how long my recovery might take. Without a sense of time, seconds stretched indefinitely into the future. When I asked my caretakers for food or coffee, they seemed to disappear for hours before they returned.
In addition to my difficulty perceiving short spans of time, my comprehension of longer periods of time was also affected. I referred to every past event in my life, whether it was my doctor’s appointment the day before or an audition I’d taken years ago, as having happened “yesterday.” I couldn’t remember what date, month or even year it was. I forgot what times of day were appropriate to call friends and family on the phone, and I didn’t understand what people meant when they said they were “busy.” Bedridden and unable to comprehend time, my illness seemed to drag on for eternity with no end in sight.
On November 15, 1966, five police officers entered the Psychedelic Shop, in San Francisco, and purchased a thin volume of poetry, “The Love Book,” for a dollar. This sequence of erotic poems celebrating a woman’s sexual pleasure was by the Beat poet Lenore Kandel. As soon as the money exchanged hands, the deputy arrested the clerk for selling obscene material. The officers then confiscated copies of the book, detained and frisked customers, and put out a warrant for the store owner, who was jailed the next day. Then they headed across town to City Lights Booksellers, which also sold “The Love Book.” A decade earlier, in 1957, the police had impounded Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at City Lights and arrested the bookseller for peddling pornography. Now history repeated itself as the cops seized Kandel’s poetry and took the clerk into custody. What followed was San Francisco’s last, and longest, obscenity trial over a literary work, and the only one featuring a female writer.
Smith’s characters were real people; plucked from their peaceful rest as she peered under the tombstones of obscurity and discovered the creepy crawlies hiding there.
Smith transforms words from dusty journals, long-forgotten novels and foxed magazines into a tale more sensational than anything written by Ainsworth or his contemporaries, Thackeray and Dickens.
Zhang constructs an unsettling, vertiginous world. Her ornate style reflects the opulence her characters guard so closely, her command of sensory language is impressive, and it’s hard not be mesmerised by prose that is as rich and as startling as the food her protagonist prepares. This ambitious novel frustrates and tantalises in equal measure.
It was 15:37 (GMT) on a Thursday afternoon when we officially ran out of ideas. The request from the editors had been bouncing around for a couple of weeks: We need to write about the clocks going back. We’d groaned and tried to ignore it, but it kept resurfacing. Like time itself, the need was eternal.
If you’re not in the digital publishing business you might not know this, but people absolutely love reading articles about the clocks changing. They are routinely among the biggest performing stories on the site, and perhaps the purest distillation of how web traffic works in 2023: Find something that people are Googling and write about it so that when they Google it, they’ll click on it.
The human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. So-called basic color terms, single color words used frequently by speakers of a given language, are often employed to gauge how languages differ in their handling of color. Languages spoken in industrialized nations such as the United States, for example, tend to have about a dozen basic color terms, while languages spoken by more isolated populations often have fewer.
However, the way that a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages, according to a new study from MIT.
It is a mystery how things come to belong to us and even more why from certain things it is impossible to part, but I see now, thinking back on that time, that the sofa provided, for me, a kind of liminal space, a place that marked, that autumn, where I was—in between things—between being the daughter of my father who despite our periods of estrangement had towered over my childhood, a man who was soon, so mysteriously, not to be; the sofa, with its plucked-out embroidery, like a bench in a train station waiting room, where I sat, turned to stone, waiting for a silence to reverberate.
If ever there was a book fit to be called American Pastoral, this is it. Daniel Mason chose instead for his title, the plain monosyllables, North Woods.
The novel takes place at a “yellow house in the north woods” and it is through these two phenomena, the habitation and the forest, that the story of modern America is told.
Hunter’s new book, “Hot Springs Drive,” tells the story of two women — Jackie Stinson and Theresa Linden — and the events that lead to Theresa’s being killed in the garage of her suburban home. Their story, although one not uncommon in the genre, is uniquely told through a combination of lovely prose, relentless character study, and a twisting combination of lust and tension.
London this early September, where I read and am writing about Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate (2023), is oddly verdant—obscene, almost, in its greenery. The summer was wet; where last year’s drought heralded an unprecedented false autumn, our abundant plane trees turning prematurely brown and brittle in the wake of our first-ever 40-degree day (104 Fahrenheit), the city today is “a rainbow of green” to quote Turner’s poem “A Bad Spring.” With its record rainfall, we’ve had what might once have blithely been called “a bad summer,” except that in 2023 no one really knows what that looks like, or means, anymore; only that nothing feels right. While I’m writing this, a last-gasp heat wave has descended on the city and our skins are warm again, but I can’t stop thinking about the four ill-omened lines that comprise Turner’s “Superstition”: “red sky whenever / whatever the weather / red sky at all times / will all the rhymes fail.” We are, as she writes in “Poem,” “in the teeth of the forces we made.”
In November 2021, linguists from around the world met in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the seventh edition of a conference focusing specifically on the “R” sound. The conference, called ‘R-Atics, included a presentation on the intrusive R used in the Falkland Islands, a reconstruction of what R sounded like in historical Armenian, and a discussion of the R sounds in Shiwiar, an indigenous Ecuadorian language spoken by well under 10,000 people, among other events and talks. Don’t be too surprised if, at a future ‘R-Atics conference, the “crispy R” joins the ranks of esoteric presentations from linguists obsessed with the weirdness and variation of this particular sound.
Of course, you can get up and pee during Killers of the Flower Moon, the same way you can nip out for popcorn or to check your email or just stay in your seat and let your mind wander. A movie can solicit your attention, but it can’t compel it. It’s true that Killers isn’t much longer than the average football game or an evening’s worth of Grey’s Anatomy episodes, but it requires a different level of, to use Scorsese’s word, commitment.
Kate Briggs’s début novel, “The Long Form,” is a portrait of that nearness, of “a community of at least two.” The plot is deceptively bare: Helen and her baby, Rose, live through a day together. They have, so far, lived through almost six weeks’ worth of days, spent in constant, profuse closeness. But the plaster understanding of what a “day” is has flaked off, and, with it, the glue of social agreement, revealing the gleam of raw hours previously concealed. This is, in part, because of sleep deprivation—at one point, Helen weeps at the sight of a river flowing, her tiredness deciding for her—and also because that’s what the presence of a very young baby does. It forces you to lift and look under minutes like they were big rocks, unwieldy chunks of continuity, with wet immensities of squiggling life trapped underneath. It’s also what novels can do, when done well.
E. J. Koh’s debut novel, “The Liberators,” opens with joy followed immediately by grief. Yohan, a man living in Daejeon, South Korea, in 1980, recalls the importance of writing in his childhood. He would use anything at hand to trace the shapes of letters and characters, spelling out words for the sheer pleasure of it. “At some point,” he narrates on the book’s opening page, “my mother set me down and didn’t pick me up again. On my mother’s grave, I wrote grave.”
This kind of transition — from the idea that every growing child will eventually stop being picked up by a parent to the understanding that tragedy has struck — is typical of the novel, which manages to convey sweeping changes and painful events in families and nations through condensed, often lyrical language. In just over 200 pages, “The Liberators” covers more than 30 years of a family’s life, not counting flashbacks, and explores how the past travels with us, and how we may find solace amid loss through relationships with others.
Professor Edward J Cowan, generally known as Ted, was one of Scotland’s most distinguished, learned and popular historians. He died in 2022 and it is a shame that he did not live to see the publication of this last and enthralling book, sub-titled The Arctic Scots. It is a splendid piece of compelling narrative history, at its heart the search for the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is however much more than a history of voyages, being a study of the development of the Canadian North and the relationships between Scottish scientific historians and the native peoples, the Inuit and First Nations.
If I had read War and Peace at my normal reading speed, I would have skimmed over these smaller moments. I would have missed how Tolstoy uses repetition to show the chaos of battle. I would have missed the dirt crumbling from a horse’s hoof. I would have missed the “smell of fading leaves and dogs.” I very well might have never finished the book, giving up along the way, feeling as though it might never end, not allowing myself the pleasure of how the small moments accrue to create the whole. I would never have learned that I preferred the battles to the balls.
The Reformatory is Due's attempt to piece together the story of a family member never spoken of, but it's also much more than that. This is a novel that isn't afraid to look at the past and expose the good and the bad, the heartwarming and the harrowing, the real and the lies that were told by those in power.
With a clear-eyed blend of family stresses and furtive schemes, the author produces a classic whodunit and embraces the strength that is often nurtured among multiple generations of women. Celebrate Simon’s success and her mother’s survival.
Strip Tees is perhaps the first book on the American Apparel era. An echt-early-2000s coming-of-age cautionary tale no doubt positioned for literary adaptation. You can practically hear the Netflix POV narration when Flannery describes AA’s trademark Lolitafied ads as “real and intimate, like a snapshot you'd take with your best girlfriends […] practicing the ropes of sexiness, just getting a feel for it […] eager, wanting to please.” Uffie’s probably already cashed her royalty checks.
I am grateful for the example of Seamus Heaney, both man and poet, fully engaged in his time and his art with its visions of timelessness. He was never distracted by trends and trivialities. If the world seemed, implausibly, a better place when he lived, at least we now have his living work, its humane erudition, vitality and growth. Heaney said that Robert Frost inhabited the world at body heat. He could have been talking of himself. The biographer R. F. Foster refers to Heaney’s “overpowering but benign authority,” and anyone who knew him remembers an affable presence. His was an earthly civility. A farmer’s son, he led the life of a privileged intellectual and writer, “always politic / And shy of condescension” (as he put it in a great poem, “Casualty”). He worked hard, and the result of the labor was not just his productivity, but also his ability to change.
‘As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is not hated so much as it is viewed with a mixture of uncertainty and indifference. As Kieran Setiya recently put it in the London Review of Books, academic philosophy in particular is ‘in a state of some confusion’. There are many reasons for philosophy’s stagnation, though the dual influences of specialisation and commercialisation, in particular, have turned philosophy into something that scarcely resembles the discipline as it was practised by the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche.
Number theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with whole numbers (as opposed to, say, shapes or continuous quantities). The prime numbers — those divisible only by 1 and themselves — are at its core, much as DNA is core to biology. Quadratic reciprocity has changed mathematicians’ conception of how much it’s possible to prove about them. If you think of prime numbers as a mountain range, reciprocity is like a narrow path that lets mathematicians climb to previously unreachable peaks and, from those peaks, see truths that had been hidden.
Although it’s an old theorem, it continues to have new applications. This summer, Rickards and his colleague Katherine Stange, together with two students, disproved a widely accepted conjecture about how small circles can be packed inside a bigger one. The result shocked mathematicians. Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University, spoke with Stange at a conference soon after her team posted their paper. “She told me she has a counterexample,” Sarnak recalled. “I immediately asked her, ‘Are you using reciprocity somewhere?’ And that was indeed what she was using.’”
Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997.
Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything.
It dawned on me that running had begun to change not only my body and mind, but the way I travelled. As well as choosing hotels close to green spaces, had become mindful of things like air quality and stray dogs. In Tbilisi, during an intense heatwave, I used a hotel gym treadmill, up on the 18th-floor, which had air-conditioning and wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows for city views. With my fitness so hard won, I found myself scared to lose it, even if it meant paying to jog on the spot.
In her 2020 memoir, “The Magical Language of Others,” poet and translator E.J. Koh learned how to forgive those around her. From her parents — who moved to Korea for her father’s job, leaving her when she was 15, in Davis, Calif., with her brother — to said brother, who, as a 19-year-old kid himself, couldn’t provide the stability or parental guidance she needed. The list of people toward whom her anger and resentment burned was long. Through the poignant story, in which Koh explores complicated familial relationships, she works through her experiences, empathizes with those who hurt her and lets go of the negative emotions that haunted her for years. If forgiving others is the first step toward peace, then the final, and often most difficult one, is forgiving yourself. This is the lesson, a core touchstone of her work, from poetry to prose, that Koh tackles head-on in her forthcoming debut novel, “The Liberators,” which hits shelves Nov. 7.
Here in this town on Australia's northern edge, laksa is the meal of choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner, weekday or weekend, a staple everywhere from food courts and cafes to snazzy restaurants.
The sour and spicy noodle broth, traditionally topped with meat or seafood, is the love child of Malaysian, Indonesian, Chinese and Singaporean cuisine, though each tries to claim it.
If you ask Darwin though, they'll say it's theirs now.
Some readers will rue the absence of reality-warping plot contrivances, unreliable narration and metafictional devices. But by dispensing with his postmodern pyrotechnics, Auster has produced a more grounded and consequently more believable work about a memorable life — and a life of memories. It may not be vintage Auster, but it is moving and compelling enough to qualify as a late-career triumph.
This is a novel of questions. How does the past ripple into the present? How do we live with our past actions? What is the nature of forgiveness? What is the nature of religious belief? How might we understand experiences of the spiritual?
I think, ultimately, it’s a story of memory and sacrifice. It asks what we do and don’t remember of our pasts. And it asks: what are we willing to give up in the name of our life’s purpose?
Can artificial intelligence preserve us from the loss of death? This is one of the many fascinating questions Amy Kurzweil raises in her second graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story. Built in part around the artist’s relationship with her father, futurist and AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil, Artificial is a big book full of big ideas about identity, heritage, and technology. In that sense, it couldn’t be more timely. Yet perhaps most essential is its attempt to reckon with what we mean to one another and the extent to which love can truly matter when we are all destined to disappear.
Black holes are real. They have been observed in a number of ways including direct images using the entire Earth as a telescope. But even though physicists have seen black holes and developed many remarkable and sophisticated ideas about them, the eventual fate of matter falling into one remains a stubborn scientific mystery.
That's where Rovelli and White Holes comes in. His answer to the question "What happens?" is that black holes eventually become white holes where everything that fell into event horizon emerges again.
Written in verse form, Thorne’s writing is perfectly complemented by Halloran’s vivid illustrations in explaining how that research has pierced a universe that is “varied and vast.”