In that respect, he was like at least 10,000 Jews who hid in Holland and managed to live by pretending not to exist. At least 104,000 others — many of whom also sought refuge, but were found — ended up being sent to their deaths.
But Bloch’s experience was different because, in addition to sustenance and care, his helpers brought him pens, glue, newspapers and other printed materials that he used to produce a startling publication: his own weekly, satirical poetry magazine.
As a woman who lives in a big city, comes from a small town, and whose name could reasonably be shortened to “Merry,” Hallmark virtually promises that I should be meeting cute throughout the month of December. In reality, there’s arguably no less sexy time of year. I don’t know how you celebrate the holidays (or don’t), but my main event is a week of shopping for things no one needs, eating enormous quantities of everything, and sitting around the house with my parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. I see an exhausting number of people, but I am related to nearly all of them. Still, the prevailing genre of holiday film isn’t “family,” it’s resolutely “kissing.” What’s going on?
I have a theory.
You might think that having a positive attitude about the nothing-pill is what transforms it into a something-pill. Perhaps OLPs are a sort of meta-placebo, a testament to how much we believe in our power of belief. But the real driving impulse for many patients who enroll in clinical trials isn’t positive expectation. It seems to be a more uncertain emotion: hope.
Since the mid-2010s, cookbook author Ali Slagle has published some 360 recipes for “The New York Times’” Cooking section, many of which have topped annual reader favorite lists for their simplicity and indubitable craveability. One of her most beloved recipes, for Thai-inspired chicken meatball soup, drew over 13,500 ratings (averaging five stars) and almost 700 comments. Amid all the praise, criticism, helpful notations and humorous color, Slagle’s voice is notably absent. Indeed, she almost never responds to comments on her recipes — and not just to avoid trolls.
There is a lot that is terrible about Alzheimer's, no doubt. But for three weeks that Christmas, I got to see the joy on mom's face as she beheld a Christmas tree for the first time over and over again, and it never once lost its power to astonish.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is the kind of debut novel for which the word “audacious” was created. A story about work, and the absurdity of work, it is told by an unexpected narrator, and told in such a way that you know the end on the first page but you still have no idea what’s coming. People like to describe novels like this as a critiques of capitalism, and this is true, but it’s also too vague. This kind of novel is about what work will ask of you, and what you will give it, and whether it is possible to succeed at work without selling your soul and selling out the people around you.
“North Woods,” the fifth novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, has become one of the fall’s most acclaimed books on the strength of its innovation as a sweeping and stealthy historical saga. But it is also another tree-stuck story: Set in a patch of a Massachusetts forest, it follows the fate of multiple residents of a house across nearly three centuries. Some familiar themes of the genre apply: The tragedy of environmental devastation, the beauty of the natural landscape, nature’s stubborn capacity to endure well past human folly. But because Mason’s novel operates in such a robust variety of styles and voices, it is — perhaps more than its arboreal literary brethren — an unusually spectacular showcase of the various powerful responses that nature provokes in us, from wonderment to utter derangement.
Stevenson has carefully crafted another excellent locked-room mystery that not only follows all the rules of Golden Age mysteries, but, with narrator Ernest at the helm, also contrasts the genre with the messiness of reality.
This is largely a story about Reed, who was a restless artist, a canny songwriter and — quite often — a surly jerk. But some of the book’s most compelling passages describe Reed’s difficult and all-too-brief partnership with the equally intense Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales.