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.”