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.