Let’s imagine for a second that Judy Rodgers had a perfectly ordinary senior year at Ladue High School, just outside of St. Louis, eating supermarket vegetables and pizza covered in processed cheese. Afterward, she would have gone to Stanford to study art history and then to law school and a distinguished career in the foreign service, because Rodgers, in addition to being a planner, was smart and thoughtful about details.
Maybe she would have had one special dinner at Chez Panisse during college and dropped in at other Michelin-starred restaurants during her various postings around the world. But she never would have tasted her own roast chicken at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe, and she never would have written down the recipe in 4 1/2 meticulously detailed pages. And innumerable home cooks across the English-speaking world, myself included, never would have learned to make their own perfectly roasted chickens, and the world, in this one small but important way, would be a sadder place.
In 1979, in a fascinating paper, physicist and feminist Evelyn Fox Keller somewhat snidely lauded the “ingenuity” of physicists in developing the Many Worlds Hypothesis: “this hypothesis demonstrates remarkable ingenuity in that it manages to retain both the confidence in the object reality of the system, and its literal correspondence with theory. Of course, a price has been paid – namely the price of seriousness.”
Maybe in the better branch of the wave function I’m heading to there won’t be so many haters.
With all these data, astronomers are making the first exact maps of the Milky Way: locations of stars in three dimensions, plus a record of their motions made by repeatedly imaging them over time. The result is a deep, high-resolution movie of a few billion swirling stars that helps to reveal not only the galaxy's structure but also its surprisingly tumultuous history, along with the histories of its stars and the galaxy's means of making more stars. It's “the single largest increase in astronomical knowledge in, like, forever,” says Charlie Conroy of Harvard University. “It's been shocking.”
If you require a neat, linear plot, beware. “Held” manipulates history and narrative with the same promiscuous verve that Lidia Yuknavitch demonstrated in her spectacular 2022 novel, “Thrust.” But even as these various storylines grow more elliptical, they become more evocative, the cumulative effect of Michaels turning profound issues over in her hands.
Alphabetical Diaries is a book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in “our brain” – a telling phrase for a work that burrows so deeply into a single psyche that it transcends the personal, as if emerging from one collective, neurotic consciousness. Then again, this book is “about” nothing – like life, it is not “about”, but just is. In many ways, it is a gimmick, a game. But its playfulness is profound.
“Get the Picture” is one of the funniest books I’ve read about New York’s contemporary art scene, even if I disagreed with some of its conclusions about how best to approach and appreciate art.
“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.” The line comes from an essay, first published in her 2019 collection Sleeveless, titled “To Be Fucked,” and here in miniature are the thematic and stylistic signatures of Stagg’s writing. The title suggests at once a discourse on sex and an anatomy of despair, a punk aggression and a passive subject. If the internet is impossible to think about, what are we doing when we write and read about it—and on it? You try to think but are left with only a feeling: a mixture of desire and hopelessness, a sense of excitement and power that is also an emptiness and inertia. Something you thought that you were doing, that was under your control (your crush, your browsing) becomes something that is being done to you (you’re crushed). Everything is at once manifest and obscure, right there on the surface for the world to see and somehow enigmatic, unresolved and unresolvable: a link, only, to something else. This internet affect is, despite its novelty, now probably as universal a feeling as that of romantic desire, but like the latter, it is also private and hard to pin down. To catch this mood one can’t try too hard.
The service starts with a large wooden bowl and two wooden mixing pallets. Wood seems absolutely crucial to be successful in making a proper Caesar salad, though the reason for this isn’t entirely clear.
First, a rich anchovy paste is scooped in. This is followed by large dabs of Dijon mustard, minced garlic, a squeeze of lime juice, crushed black pepper and shaved Parmesan cheese. The mixture begins taking shape as the server elegantly adds an egg yolk. He holds the egg between two spoons and gives it a surgical crack to let out the white with another spoon. Here he stirs.
Engaging and wildly entertaining, Martyr! will undoubtedly be considered one of the best debut novels of the year because it focuses on very specific stories while discussing universal feelings. It celebrates language while delving deep into human darkness. It entertains while jumping around in time and space and between the real and the surreal like a fever dream. It brilliantly explores addiction, grief, guilt, sexuality, racism, martyrdom, biculturalism, the compulsion to create something that matters, and our endless quest for purpose in a world that can often be cruel and uncaring. Akbar was already known as a great poet, but now he must also be called a great, fearless novelist.
Despite that gossipy setup, Reid creates a story with real weight. Her ear for dialogue — honed, no doubt, by the dozens of actual interviews she conducted with college students for this book — is finely tuned. It feels like you’re reading great gossip, but the characters come across as genuine, with real problems.
Copiously clad with humor and astute observations, each turn is like a tiny gift you get to unwrap. Every triumph is an indulgence to savor and every unfavorable outcome a bitter but welcome vibe-check. Though part of me wanted this book to go on indefinitely, there’s an undeniable appeal and beauty to the story being only one day.
We know life is finite.Why should we believe death lasts forever?
Zhang’s novel is ostensibly a work of speculative fiction, but scenarios like these, of course, are no longer strictly speculative—the slow-moving catastrophe of climate change has brought into sharp relief how close we are to the brink. The conditions that underlie Land of Milk and Honey are uncomfortably close to our own, not so much located somewhere in the future as in a parallel present, one or two lateral moves away from where we are now. In this way, Zhang builds a dystopian world so similar to ours that it does not transport so much as it unnerves, disconcerts.
Two years into recovery from a bad romance with booze and other drugs, an Iranian American poet makes a half-hearted attempt to redeem his misspent youth. He decides to write a book about people whose deaths retroactively imbued their lives with meaning: Joan of Arc, the early Muslim leader Hussain, the Irish Republican Army militant Bobby Sands, and, though he’s still alive, himself. Such is the premise of Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, an existential comedy about the difficulty of finding beauty in banality and sense in suffering.
His exploration of the world of sound/noise is a catalogue of curiosities that ranges across the sounds of space, of the northern lights, volcanoes and thunder, birdsong, insects, plants (yes, roots make noises as they push through the soil, though you’ll need some technology to hear them), musical instruments, song, bells and much more.
Rather than following a beginning-to-end approach, A Book of Noises is very much a collection for dipping into, starting wherever takes your fancy. Many of the sounds will be familiar: the aforementioned birds, bees, whales and humans, for example. Many others are beyond the realm of direct human experience, such as the sounds of deep space.
On a wintry Monday evening in January 1934, big-time businessman Sidney Cohen and his friend Morris Sussman gathered a group of nine Black journalists from New York and from out of town. Cohen and Sussman, both white, wanted the writers’ input on what the Harlem “community needed,” because four days later, the pair would make a historic business move.
Although they didn’t know it yet, their new venture, which promised a “revolutionary step in the presentation of stage shows,” would transform the world of entertainment for decades to come. On Friday, January 26, 1934, they would open the doors to one of the first vaudeville halls in New York City to spotlight Black performers and welcome Black audiences — the Apollo Theater.
Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.
It is not an upbeat view of higher education, but despite the fact that the story is fictional, the way it looks at more mundane parts of day-to-day life at the kind of school so many people actually attend but rarely read about makes it feel true — true in a way a thousand reported stories about inviting and uninviting campus speakers to the same tiny handful of places strangely can't.
That is the enduring thrill of creative nonfiction — tiptoeing along the border between art and fact. It requires turning a critical eye on your own ambition, your care for others, the literal truth of what happened and the style with which you might express how it felt, as well as the question of whose story is being told and who has the right to tell it.
A definitive biography of this woman who lived until 96 and spoke in epigrams, undulations and billowing fabric might be impossible to contain between one set of covers, but “Errand Into the Maze” is a distinguished biography: its description rich, its author’s rigor unquestionable.
The story was charming: a short article about soups, continually replenished for decades, secreted in jars across oceans. The soups, according to one source, were “older than Taylor Swift.” I devoured the article, published in December 2022 on Atlas Obscura, an online publication billed as “best-in-class journalism about hidden places, incredible history, scientific marvels, and gastronomical wonders,” and texted it to a few soup-obsessed friends. Then I forgot about it for months until the weather turned chilly and I pulled up the link again, only to notice the article had changed. An italicized editor’s note had been added to the top, which began: “This article has been retracted as it does not meet Atlas Obscura’s editorial standards.” The note went on to state that multiple details and interviews had been fabricated.
But how, exactly, permafrost thaw is turning these rivers orange has been a mystery. Solving it is crucial for understanding what the sweeping ecological impact could be and to help communities adapt, such as the eight Alaska Native villages that depend on rivers in the western Brooks Range for fish and drinking water. Some researchers think acid from minerals is leaching iron out of bedrock that has been exposed to water for the first time in millennia. Others think bacteria are mobilizing iron from the soil in thawing wetlands.
As exoplanet scientists fine-tune their ideas about where to look for alien life, they are now considering the origin of a star and its neighborhood, said Jesper Nielsen, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen. New simulations, along with observations from satellites that hunt for planets and monitor millions of stars, are painting a picture of how different galactic neighborhoods — and maybe even different galaxies — form planets differently.
“That, in turn, can help us better understand where to point our telescopes,” Nielsen said.
In a dining room as serene as a Zen meditation hall, I relish a dozen distinct salmon delicacies presented like jewels on a lacquered tray. Pickled salmon milt. Crunchy, flash-fried skin. A pâté-like treat made from liver. The parade of briny bites is a symphony of flavours and textures, and every part of the fish, from the coveted o-toro (luxurious belly fat) to the organs, finds delicious expression. Even the bones and teeth are rendered into an umami-laden gel to be eaten atop rice. The meal – an edible ode to silky, orange fish flesh – beautifully expresses the Japanese ideal of mottainai, finding creative ways to eliminate waste.
While many Americans may automatically think of Korean barbecue when the notion of Korean food comes up, or other staples like bulgogi, Korean fried chicken or tteokbokki, Park's deep focus and exploration on banchan and Hansik at large — both throughout the book and also in his restaurants — shines a light on other areas of Korean food that may not be as well known.
For the nervous reader who has little familiarity with theoretical physics, the unvarnished prose and hypnotic intensity with how this narrative unfurls shifting points of view and embracing varying worlds makes for an enthralling primer for novel writing itself.
Using the raw edge of authentic history, a compelling cast of exquisitely drawn characters that includes some of the period’s real names and faces, and harnessing the anger, fear and emotional turmoil that gripped the city, Clements brings us a breathtaking, suspense-filled whodunit which thrills and chills from first page to last.
I ran my hands over it to flatten its creases. It showed an area totaling just 20 square kilometers, a tiny place. The map was divided into 400 individual grid squares, outlined in light blue — a single square kilometer each. I could comfortably walk the perimeter of any square in about an hour.
Each week, I decided, I would explore one of those squares in detail, doing my best to see everything there, to walk or cycle every footpath and street, and to learn as much as I could along the way. I wanted it to be serendipitous, not governed by my preferences. I hoped to see things I would not ordinarily come across. I decided to treat everything as interesting. The late Terry Pratchett once gave a lecture on “the importance of being amazed about absolutely everything,” which felt like a fitting mission statement.
What do you call a galaxy without stars?
Earlier this month, radio astronomers announced that they had discovered the darkest galaxy ever not quite seen, a cloud of hydrogen gas resembling our own Milky Way galaxy in many respects, such as its mass and rotation, but with no stars that anyone can discern.
The day of the title is a composite of three days: a morning in 2019, a locked-down afternoon in 2020, and an evening in 2021, when it is possible to travel and gather again. On 5 April in each of these years, Michael Cunningham takes his samplings, or specimen hours, minutely observing the lives of the people he finds in a Brooklyn apartment. A quarter century after The Hours, with its three Mrs Dalloways in different times and cities, Cunningham returns to a solidly tripartite structure across which contrasts and connections build. And he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people on a single day.
Ultimately, Karam’s book illustrates in vivid detail—in just 200 pages, intricate yet in accessible prose—the vivid trapped existence of refugees, of how they begin to live outside time and space, of how the world seems not to see or acknowledge their past or their presence, while denying them a future.
The psychological underpinnings elevate “No One Can Know.” Marshall shows myriad sides of each character while adding plausible misdirections, keeping the reader off-kilter.
In his new book, Filterworld, Kyle Chayka demystifies how these all-powerful social-media algorithms have replaced human tastemakers to become the primary lever (and dictator) of global uniform culture. He calls these interconnected, expansive networks of algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok “Filterworld,” which prescribes what we watch, read, listen to, where we eat and even travel to.
The air conditioner was malfunctioning. When I bought the car used in January, the owner said she had just fixed it, but here I was on a steamy August day on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, with the vents pouring hot air into the already hot car. So, it was my imminent dehydration talking when I skidded to a stop in front of a roadside fruit seller’s table. I was once told by a grandmother, who lives in my seaside village but grew up in the northern dry regions where the Senegal River winds across a crispy and prickly savanna not far from the great desert, about a watermelon varietal called beref, which is cultivated mostly for its seeds but also serves as a kind of water reserve.
“There’s water that you can drink from it like a coconut,” she said.
Broadway’s digital turn will have effects beyond the sensory experiences of individual theatergoers. It is not just that the tap of a thumb on a smartphone has replaced the grasp of printed cardstock within the theatrical sensorium. As the platforms evolve that manage our ingress to those playhouses in the vicinity of Times Square (home of another media empire, subject to its own sea changes), so does information about theatrical culture.
Night Watch is tough reading, even excruciating at times, but far from unrelentingly bleak; small notes of grace appear throughout the novel, especially, albeit briefly, at the end. If at one juncture ConaLee remarks grimly “I’d not seen the war except in what it ruined”, she and some of those around her at the asylum are also offered a glimpse of what might, with time and care, be restored. “Much of [the civil war] is encrusted in myth or still unexplored,” the late Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, wrote in 2010. With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light.
It is difficult to talk about guns in America without talking about denial. With every new tragedy, we look the other way in a naive attempt to escape responsibility for our role in sustaining the cycle of gun violence.
Alexander Sammartino shows a keen sensitivity to this dynamic in his raucous, irreverent debut novel, Last Acts. Guns occupy center stage in Sammartino’s sly and darkly humorous take on modern masculinity, appropriately set among the unforgiving sun and tacky strip malls of the American southwest. Sammartino uses the father-son relationship at the heart of the book to poke fun at 21st-century American machismo, though his readers will be forgiven for wondering if Sammartino is always in on the joke.
You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics. Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt.
In July, 2021, just after lockdowns in Spain ended, Flamini thought about coming down from the mountains. But her real desire was to go somewhere more remote: the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia. Only one European had ever crossed it alone on foot, she’d learned. She moved to northern Spain and began training for the Gobi expedition by hiking steep mountain trails while carrying a backpack weighed down by bottles filled with water. She soon decided that she was prepared physically—she could carry twice her weight at six thousand feet—but not mentally. The longest stretch she’d ever spent alone was ninety-five days, in the Cantabrian Mountains. (A passing shepherd had told her to go home.)
Flamini thought about test runs that might prepare her for the extended solitude of the Mongolian desert. Spending time in a cave, she decided, could provide useful lessons in endurance and focus. She’d gone spelunking numerous times since El Reguerillo, and in the late nineties she’d spent longer stints with groups of cave explorers, serving as their photographer. She’d never had a bad time in a cave.
The first question you ask before digging into Laurie Frankel’s new novel, “Family Family”: What does that mean? The answer is as bewildering and eye-opening as the story itself: a family of families. Or: It’s what Frankel’s protagonist, India Allwood, has created by giving up two biological children for adoption and later adopting twin siblings. This family affair turns into a family romance and a family love story — and in true Frankel fashion, it juggles so many questions about what makes a family that readers will feel tossed about and rearranged.
Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity — through metaphor and with humor that lands. He invites the reader to embrace the kind of queer sense-making that finds no answers yet rests, as Cyrus says, with, “All I know is I’m fascinated.”
German physicist Albert Einstein died in 1955, and yet he is much alive — as one of the most-famous scientists of all time, the personification of genius and the subject of a whole industry of scholarship. In The Einsteinian Revolution, two eminent experts on Einstein’s life and his theory of relativity — Israeli physicist Hanoch Gutfreund and German historian of science Jürgen Renn — offer an original and penetrating analysis of Einstein’s revolutionary contributions to physics and our view of the physical world.
As it does for many, my obsession with Agatha Christie started young. I was ten or so when I picked up my first Christie, fresh off a self-prescribed course of Greek mythology. Had someone asked me then to explain why reading a murder mystery from the heart of the twentieth century felt like a natural transition from the world of gods and monsters, I’d have been at a loss. Now, I can recognize that Christie has the rare ability to write “large,” making use of stock characters who interact in grownup ways amid life-or-death stakes—and rarer still, to do so by way of accessible prose. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s this “adult fairytale”-like quality that first drew me to Christie’s work.
But what kept me going? And going? And going?
My friend Janis would allay her fears of being alone with the argument that it would all be fine because she and another good friend of hers would “just live in The Golden Girls house together.” The concept of a house filled with one’s closest friends who live together and take care of each other in their senior years is an enduring source of comfort for her—as it has been for many women who worry they will end up spending this time in solitude. There is something inherently soothing about the show, particularly when confronted with a stressful, uncertain future; a friend recently told of The Onion’s famous front page after 9-11, showing a TV schedule with The Golden Girls on endless loop.
It was a midsummer afternoon and my old friend Dawn and I were walking from an un-air-conditioned Nepalese restaurant to our hotel in the dull, flat town of Montrose, Colorado. The sun seemed larger than usual, and brighter. It felt as if we were under a broiler. The road we were on was six lanes wide, or maybe eight. There was no sidewalk, so we were pressed right up against the curb, being passed by flatulent motorcycles—their riders helmetless—and eighteen-wheel trucks that were equally loud but at least generated a breeze. One of the many good things about Dawn is that she never complains about walking, never says, “You told me it was only another few blocks an hour ago,” never moans that her feet are tired or so swollen that her shoes no longer fit. The farther the better, that’s our motto.
Having witnessed my aunt’s success in corporate publishing throughout the 90s, and having watched well-paid editors played on films and TV shows, I hadn’t imagined my path toward a substantial income would be such an uphill shuffle—which is nothing if not a labor of immense love. And as for my book, it’s too incredible to believe that it exists; I can hardly bear to hold it in my hands.
Writing these words, I’m sitting in the living room of my childhood home, about five feet from the shelves that long ago contained those hallowed books from my aunt. In this exact spot, even before I had learned how to spell and write, I would scribble on blank paper with Magic Markers and staple the pages together—always, this desire, this drive to make books.
The book works as a juicy mystery — what really happened all those years ago? — but is equally satisfying as a story about the combative relationship between Amanda and Oliver, observed and commented on by Ellie Cooper, Amanda’s wry, kibitzing transcriber. It’s also an unlikely ode to the joys and frustrations of shoe-leather research, especially when the case is as crazy and convoluted as this one.
Before they went the way of the coal miner, music journalists were a definable demographic and music journalism an actual occupation. The good ones boasted cachet and influence; the best could inspire a generation. Tom Hibbert was perhaps the music journalist nonpareil for at least a dozen years between the early 1980s and 90s, an idiosyncratic stylist whose work graced the pages of Smash Hits and Q, where he repeatedly refused to kowtow to celebrities, irrespective of their status.
Phew, Eh Readers? – whose title alone gives those new to him a flavour of the arched eyebrow manner in which he wrote – is a collection of his finest and funniest writing, alongside fond recollections from those who knew him best: his wife, musician friends, fellow writers.
We went around the table introducing ourselves. When my turn came: “Hi, I’m Greg Zimmerman and I actually work here at StoryStudio. I’ve been here about a year. I haven’t written fiction in a long time. I’m excited to be in this class, but also really nervous.”
What if this class went poorly? If it did, how could I look my StoryStudio co-workers, many of them accomplished writers, in the eye? What if I scribbled some drivel and the instructor reported back, “Hey, you know that guy you hired last year? He’s not it.”
This brings us back to where we started: the affinities between a certain kind of modern architecture and a certain kind of classicism, both of which are equally committed to the same polluting, carbon-intensive construction technologies and global capital flows. Today, in the context of the climate crisis, concerns with style hide more urgent concerns about construction and materials. It is not just tedious but actively dangerous to carry on building in the old way, whether that’s concrete frames dressed in titanium or coated in neo-Georgian stock brick. So, is there an alternative?
As a result of Wang's mental state, his questions about the hatch, and the general unease that some Shuttle commanders had toward payload specialists not being full members of a crew, it's reasonable to conclude that Overmyer was concerned about Wang opening the hatch. This was relatively easy to do. After learning a hard lesson regarding cabin pressure and complicated locking mechanisms in the Apollo 1 fire, NASA had designed the Shuttle hatch to open outward. It was a relatively simple procedure, requiring little physical force, as the hatch opened into the vacuum of outer space. Overmyer was clearly concerned. So he put duct tape on the hatch as a stop-gap.
James makes a virtue of her story’s artifice because the historical setting is a lens through which to examine contemporary debates about the legacy of colonialism, particularly as it relates to plundered treasures. The title is made explicit in the name of a card game Jehanne plays with the elderly and canny Lady Selwyn, but throughout the novel, objects and people are appropriated by the powerful, in a world where “race is the final ranking”. Loot is a vivid and witty reimagining of an episode of history that continues to shape the present, and the ways we think about art, identity and ownership.
A man once came up to Pablo Picasso in a railway compartment. Why, he asked, did the Spaniard not paint people as they really are? “What do you mean?” asked Picasso. The man produced a photograph from his wallet and said: “That’s my wife.” Picasso responded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat?”
Terry Eagleton’s delightful new book, The Real Thing, explores what artistic fidelity to the “real world” involves, and why, in particular, many of us still like reading “real-life” dramas – such as the latest Tessa Hadley or Karl Ove Knausgaard – and regard the new Richard Osman thriller or the latest instalment in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games franchise only through disdainful lorgnettes.
Martyrdom is ultimately a story somebody tells about us; better to have one to claim for yourself.
Trillin’s new book is called “The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press.” It’s an assortment of profiles, essays, columns and a few examples of light verse, all of them about journalism, written originally for The New Yorker, The Nation, Time and other outlets. A few go back as far as the early 1970s. New money for old rope, in other words. But it makes sense to have this material in one place, and this book is buoyant and crunchy from end to end.
In “How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins” (Bloomsbury), Helena de Bres aims to rescue twins from the gothic, from horror movies, and from singleton scrutiny, the better to return our gaze and testify to the experience of twindom from the inside out. De Bres invokes twins from life and legend—the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker; Tweedledum and Tweedledee; her own identical twin and herself—to examine how multiples complicate our notions of personhood, attachment, and agency.
Even before the arrival of a murderous mouse, the field of copyright has been full of dramatic turns, as a new book, “Who Owns This Sentence?”, recounts. That is because “copyright is an edifice of words resting on a long and complicated string of metaphors and double meanings,” write the authors David Bellos, a professor at Princeton, and Alexandre Montagu, a lawyer. Over centuries artists, authors, lobbyists, publishers and public officials have defined and redefined the meaning of copyright, with debate and legal changes happening beyond the public eye.
My complaints with QR code menus are minor but many. I love the communal aspect of dining out with friends or family, and I hate the way that QR code menus take me out of the shared moment and force me to look at my phone (which, of course, leads me down the rabbit hole of checking my various notifications). I hate the way QR code menus mean scrolling, pinching to adjust size, and sometimes juggling between multiple tabs instead of just having to glance over a page or two.
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”
What is the impulse behind art? “I have to be moved in some way,” the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. “They just don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.” And that, he said, was why he played.
Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move anyone else as that work moved me—as “Gimme Shelter,” Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.
For a second, in the dark, we revert to the tender beings we were born as, forgetting to wear the suits tailored for us by society’s merciless designer. We realize we have a role to play, however small it seems: not in a world of puppet masters, but among the forces of the natural world.
Martin’s subtitle, “A Personal and Pyronatural History,” alludes to her impressive interweaving of various narrative modes. The result is a deft tessellation of medical memoir, local reportage, and ecocritical and literary meditation. Martin situates the worsening wildfires amid deficiencies in California’s housing stock and the politics of disaster response; with grim, unrelenting curiosity, she considers the catastrophes’ implications for migrant workers, land-based industries, and community-supported agriculture networks. She is at her most compelling, though, when looking inward to examine lived experience and the often problematic or insufficient narrative frameworks in which those experiences are couched.
The book is at its most fascinating when explaining what our bodies are doing and why. The point of having periods (something many people who menstruate have wondered about) is to help humans give birth to healthy babies. But they are a drain on a body’s resources, and they can go wrong. Gunter is evangelical about sharing knowledge, insisting that painful periods are not just an inevitable part of life; that debilitating conditions can often be treated; and that no woman need suffer in silence or shame. At times it veers towards diagnostic handbook territory, but those bits can be skimmed or skipped. Think of Blood as like a Haynes manual for your uterus.
“One may as well begin with Socrates.” So opens Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960.” Observe how that sentence conveys a certain offhand jauntiness, yet subtly reveals a distinctly learned author: Krishnan, who teaches philosophy at Cambridge, implies he could have chosen any number of other philosophers instead of Socrates. At the same time, his decision to create this particular sentence indicates a writer confident enough, and well read enough, to echo one the most famous first lines in 20th-century British fiction: “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” the opening of E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.”
Being made of myth and materials, the suburbs are a hard place about which to tell stories. In the last century of American literature, only a handful of good novels unfold there. Even fewer plays and poems. Shaped by restrictions, built on erasure, the suburbs seem tailor-made for horror films. Tales that turn the racial covenants and landscape destruction—that also made the suburbs—inside out; these stories typically speculate through monsters what all that control over the suburbs is meant to keep at bay.
There is, however, at least one great book to have emerged from the suburbs. It is Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, D. J. Waldie’s slim 1996 work, an orchestrally paced ode to the town of Lakewood, the planned city of 80,000 in Los Angeles County where Waldie has worked for the city since 1977. Unfolding in 316 short, numbered sections, Waldie’s book loops through the town’s founding, his family’s story, and the urban history of the West, mapping each upon the other with harmonic grace.
Ours is a haunting time, haunted by restless pasts, by memories that refuse to be forgotten, by ghosts demanding justice. Sometimes the ghosts surprise you, lurking as they can in the smallest objects, the tiniest bits of ephemera that you almost forgot about.
It turns out that regular cells—not just highly specialized brain cells such as neurons—have the ability to store information and act on it. Now Levin has shown that the cells do so by using subtle changes in electric fields as a type of memory. These revelations have put the biologist at the vanguard of a new field called basal cognition. Researchers in this burgeoning area have spotted hallmarks of intelligence—learning, memory, problem-solving—outside brains as well as within them.
For much of the book, these threads of inquiry proceed in parallel; when they synthesize, they truly sing. "Both manners of living with uncontrollable events required me to let go of any sense of an ending," Martin writes. The Last Fire Season eschews a redemptive arc in favor of witnessing and sitting with the discomfort of reality, with understanding that, as Martin puts it, "what happened to the land would happen to me."
But what is extraordinary about “Aednan” is not so much its beauty as its restraint. Lesser writers might have indulged more in the dramatic sweep of this story, but Axelsson is content to let its particulars speak for themselves — the sudden strangeness of sedentary apartment living after ages on the move, the shock of the harsh Swedish residential schools, the grimness of a life alienated from one’s origins and the awakening of later generations to a new, assertive Sámi political identity.
While basing a novel on actual events can be an easy out for the writer, who, freed of the trouble of constructing a plot, bops around episodically, producing a book that reads like a series of blog posts rather than a coherent whole, histories, personal or otherwise, can also be turned into inventive and intelligent narratives. David Winner’s “fictional memoir,” Master Lovers, is the latter sort. Note, however, that he didn’t write his own memoir (although his presence in the narrative is all but ubiquitous); instead, he both discovered and subsequently imagined a life for Dorle Jarmel Soria, a great-aunt who outlived the 20th century: born in 1900, she died in 2002.
Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having one is a mark of success. Written by Jackie Bennett, with stunning color photographs by Richard Hanson, this is a handsome coffee table book sure to spark interesting conversations among those who leaf through its thick pages.
It turns out that we don't entirely know how the radiation is produced. There are several competing ideas, but we've not been able to figure out which one of them fits the data best. However, scientists have taken advantage of an updated software package to model a tidal disruption event and show that their improved model fits our observations pretty well.
This is the story of a fabulous book that almost never was. A lush and vicious novel with the pacing and urgency of a thriller, “The Fetishist” revolves around desire and revenge, focusing on the abduction of a classical musician with a history of predatory behavior by the punk-rocker daughter of his former paramour, who had killed herself after being spurned by him. It’s the second novel by Katherine Min and it arrives nearly four years after her death.
Do the things we know truly serve us? Is the literature we love of any use when the world we inhabit capsizes? Nunez’s doubt feels necessary and valuable. How remarkable, then, that her work, and all the doubt it contains, still reassures us, and leaves us, as the novel reaches its extraordinarily hopeful and disarming last line, with the feeling that we have been helped.
In its own sparkling way, You Only Call When You're in Trouble, is concerned with the question of endings, of what we leave behind — whether it be our work, our worst mistakes, our most loving-if-flawed relationships.
Conquest and colonization have long been fertile subjects in fiction, from Joseph Conrad to present-day writers such as Zadie Smith and Imbolo Mbue. Like them, Chan uses colonialism as a lens through which to examine such themes as racism, colorism, status, poverty and violence. But “The Storm We Made” is less interested in probing the geopolitical and moral questions arising from colonialism than in humanizing the effects of oppression on a few individuals.
With the country locked in ice, “True North,” Andrew J. Graff’s warmhearted story about a summer of white-water rafting, sounds like the vacation we all need. Graff’s second novel offers just enough drama to be exciting and just enough reassurance that everybody will get home safe.
This is why the multiverse is an immensely appealing device in fiction, but also why it’s ultimately unsatisfactory as a means of narrative self-exploration. The multiverse is too multi. Human beings can’t accommodate notions like infinity, and moreover, our lives don’t hinge on endless possibilities, but rather on starker binaries like Frost’s splitting roads. Our regrets are small, in the grand scheme of things, and any attempt to extend our regrets into cosmic proportions tilts the realm of human meaning somewhere bewilderingly distant from what we understand.
I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. “Call me Ishmael,” the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.
Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.
If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.
I'd seen the word on social media. Mid. The show was mid. The song was mid. The rapper was mid. So many shows, songs, rappers, and more are unknown to me, trees in the now-bewildering wilderness of pop culture that the young navigate effortlessly.
But I rapidly deduced that mid is not good. Mid is mediocre. Middle of the road. Meh. And then I realized—I am mid.
An equally remarkable panorama of American life, this new novel invites the reader to sink into a deep, demanding, constantly wrong-footing story of millennial lives misdirected and decisions catastrophically made. It is American storytelling at its best. While The Nix tackled America’s lost legacy of 1960s radicalism, Wellness zeroes in on a smaller, more intimate canvas, while still tackling a few big questions. What is truth? What is love? And therefore, inevitably, what is true love?
The second full-length poetry collection from Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon seeks to explore the dualities present within the poet’s experience of motherhood. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears employs a variety of poetic techniques to build the collection: shifting between prose poetry, sestina, ekphrasis and erasure to consider its subjects.
In her debut poetry collection, Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali presents a stirring examination of faith, womanhood, and cultural inheritance through lyric poems that reimagine female figures and stories from the Islamic tradition. Published by Alice James Books in 2024, Theophanies blends confessional verse, mythology, and spiritual realism to convey a contemporary Muslim woman’s complex relationship with her religion and its patriarchal legacy. What violence, cruelty, and historical misogyny have we not read in texts preserved for holiness?
Much has been written about the many alarming political impacts of recommendation algorithms. But less focus has been given to the dulling effect that algorithms have had on culture, perhaps because there are no elections at stake when Netflix keeps recommending cozy British murder mysteries. But as Chayka writes in “Filterworld,” the days or months or years caught in the undertow of that gentle stream of algorithmic recommendations are “not limited to digital experiences on our screens.” The colorless efficiency that used to exclusively identify Silicon Valley artifacts has seeped into everything we consume, whether music or television or fashion, in an effort to make that consumption as continuous as possible. Trained on data sets whose size is nearly unquantifiable and whose provenance is often dubious, algorithms offer us more of what we — and thousands of others just like us — have already expressed some interest in. For the sleepwalkers of Filterword, past is present and future, too.
In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka says he never would have fallen in love with Coltrane's song if he'd heard it on Spotify. He says he doubts Spotify's algorithm would even suggest it, because the song is so long. And that, even if it did, he wouldn't have learned anything about Coltrane as an artist, because the Spotify interface doesn't provide the same context that an indie radio DJ does, sharing details between songs. The person behind the song choice, he argues, made his budding interest in Coltrane possible in a way modern recommendation systems cannot.
By common measures, Manjula Martin is not a hopeful person. “In the current discussion of climate change,” she said, “‘hope’ is often used as a shorthand for returning to normal, otherwise known as business as usual.”
The sentiment pervades the writer’s new memoir, “The Last Fire Season,” but it prompts an important question, which I brought up during a video chat with Martin in late December: Why would people who feel hopeless about climate change still be motivated to do anything about it?
On a ride into the nascent park in late November, just days before it was legally declared, Thomas Walschburger, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, explained why it was needed so urgently. Cattle rearing, the traditional livelihood of the region and one that was easier on its rivers and soils, was giving way to a new agricultural frontier. Fields of African oil palms, and white-trunked eucalyptus trees, were encroaching ever closer to the park’s boundaries.
The sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of the llanos can support these commercial crops only when doused with fertilizers and calcium carbonate. But intensive agriculture compromises the water, and the ability to sustain life, in a key transition zone between the llanos and the Amazon. The hope is that by protecting this small puzzle piece of savanna, a whole lot more can be saved.
Having had so many of their body parts appropriated for the purposes of swearing, surely women should now be free to curse at will and at length. And, indeed, various studies over the past few years suggest thatwe do; the gap between men and women when it comes to words such as “fuck” has dramatically decreased. There is, after all, nothing like letting fly a volley of profanities and oaths when you drop a brick on your toe or when a talentless oaf gets the promotion you know should have been yours.
A few years ago, Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs poked around the internet for a global map of the world’s rivers, one that categorized them based on their ocean destination. He came across maps of the major rivers plus others that captured the local footprint of individual streams. But he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list,” he says.
Murnane has described his fiction as “no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of his mind”. This may seem blandly self-evident, but it is the quality of his descriptions and reflections on those contents that make his books so interesting; and it is a mistake to read them with a view to what they omit (plots, characters, issues) rather than what they include.
Set in Malaysia between 1935 and 1945, Vanessa Chan’s impressive and assured debut offers a little-told perspective on a turbulent period of history. Inspired by her own grandparents’ experiences under British colonial rule and Japanese occupation during the second world war, Chan – who lives in the US – captures the hope and the hardships of this extraordinary decade.
Such roaming, sentence-driven stories won’t work for everyone. The voice can at times overwhelm some traditional narrative pleasures. Characters don’t always feel fleshed out. Plots exist but can be so submerged in jumbled timelines that readers may scratch their heads. But anyone who enjoys poetry in prose, who feels enlivened by language and struck by sentences, will find much to admire in “Burn Man.”
One of the strengths of this book is its long view. This isn’t the glowing self-righteousness of the newly converted, nor is it the post-mortem of a couple who played with fire and burned everything to the ground. This is a marriage that has been open for six-plus years and remains so. The primary relationship that feels turned inside out is the author’s relationship with herself.
Eminently readable and always engaging, Failures of Forgiveness brings a care and clarity to the complex concept at its heart, ultimately asking us to enlarge the ways we understand—and practice—forgiveness. As Cherry admonishes in a line that becomes something like the book’s refrain, “Forgiveness does not always look the same in all cases.”
“I think alone is sexy,” writes Athena Dixon in the opening installment of her “memoir in essays,” The Loneliness Files (2023). It’s New Year’s Eve, 2021. The pandemic is at its peak, and Dixon, alone in her Philadelphia apartment, has donned a green dress and red lipstick. The poet and essayist drinks, dances, and watches the countdown with only herself for company—a solitary state she initially characterizes as “mysterious.”
Whether you have inhaled this kind of information for decades, as I have, or you’re a neophyte who only knows him as the author of Blowin’ in the Wind or Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine may fill you with as much surprise and delight as I got from it.
What I really wanted was to understand where Bigfoot came from. What would research reveal about the folklore and anthropological backstory of Bigfoot? Was it an actual zoological possibility or a human-wide cultural delusion, a manifestation of a universal desire to believe in the unbelievable? While I had my doubts about Bigfoot, the point wouldn’t be to prove or disprove whether it existed, but to try and set aside my own convictions, unpeel the oniony layers of belief, and understand something about Bigfooters and the culture that shaped them.
I spent the better part of a year going on “expeditions” to suspected Bigfoot haunts across the country, attending conventions and festivals, and taking part in one Bigfoot film shoot. Knowing as little as I did, I thought America itself might poke its head out from behind Bigfoot’s shadow.
In September 2020 — perhaps fueled by an interest in apocalyptic fiction prompted by covid-19 lockdowns — “Parable” appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time, 27 years after publication.
Butler didn’t live to see the renewed interest in her ninth novel — she died in 2006 — but she indicated that the issues faced by the characters in “Parable” and by the United States today were inevitable.
“The Fetishist,” the delightful, fantastic, fabulous and unfortunately posthumous second novel by Katherine Min, might be the first literary work by an Asian American woman to “deal squarely with queasy questions of desire and politics between a white man and an Asian woman.”
For survivors of trauma, the mercurial nature of memory can bring about untold grief, especially in the search for some kind of certainty about what happened and why. That mutability has shaped many a survivor’s story. In Katia Lief’s psychological suspense novel “Invisible Woman,” it also frames a larger mystery, unsettling two women who once shared their promising lives.
Blood is a compelling example of how science communicated with clarity, relatability and wit can satisfy our needs of belonging and care, which have been mastered and sometimes manipulated by the wellness industry. With the transparency of science, Gunter shows that bodies become more, not less intriguing. She acknowledges that doctors have let women down grievously: by disbelieving them, dismissing their priorities, excluding them from research, co-opting them into experiments without consent, making health decisions on their behalf and, frankly, treating them no better than sheep. But rather than rejecting science, activist researchers, clinicians and patients must continue to row back this “medical disenfranchisement”, armed with books such as Blood and evidence about their bodies.
Something magical happens when a scientist writes with chalk on a blackboard. Hollywood directors know this, and have harnessed it in films from A Beautiful Mind to Oppenheimer. But no one appreciates the power of this venerable technology better than physicists and mathematicians, who infinitely prefer the humble blackboard to its high-tech rivals. The question is, why? What does slate-and-chalk offer, which cannot be simulated by paper or plastic?
For Pico, humanism, science and magic were one and the same. Though they may not know it or deny the fact, 21st-century Silicon Valley techno-futurists are his heirs. The implication of Grafton’s mind-changing book is that our age of science may be one of the most extreme periods of magical thinking in history.
People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash. Movies love them as love at first sight, dramatic speeches that change everything, trouble that can be terminated by shooting one bad guy, and other easy fixes and definitive victories. Old-school radicals love them as the kind of revolution that they imagine will change everything suddenly, even though a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness.
Maybe religion loves them too, as conversion, revelation, and sudden awakening.
It took years to learn that both my body and stories deserve to exist—the body regardless of its shape, the stories regardless of their origin.
The novel elicits questions of what it means to preserve humanity, and evokes a haunting future if the earth were not cared for properly. Scarier than the betrayal humans freely dish out to one another and the planet is a sense that a future generation could truly live in a time when all food is manufactured into existence, left only for the richest.
This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes “Ilium” such an unexpectedly moving novel.
In the end, Whittock cannot answer definitively the question he starts with, but he has produced a deeply researched and engrossing book that fully explores the multiple dimensions of the Viking story in the Northern hemisphere. Any reader who wants to know more about their legacy will find Whittock’s book full of anecdotes and insights.
The North American Great Lakes, sometimes called inland seas, are the world’s largest freshwater system. They seem as immense and ancient as any ocean, but Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, as we know them today, are younger than Stonehenge. For generations, people watched them form and adapted as the landscape changed again and again.
Between the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago and about 3,000 years ago, the entire Great Lakes region experienced dramatic shifts in environment, climate, and elevation. Glaciers that covered it retreated in fits and starts, and paleolakes formed and disappeared again, leaving behind boggy tundra. The bedrock itself rose and fell like a very large trampoline. Through it all, humans moved across the landscape, hunting, foraging, and even trading along networks spanning thousands of miles.
If the restaurant's claims are to be believed, it's here that King Henry III picked up a fork for the first time and popularised its use in France.
Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.
Chan’s chronicles of atrocities against Malayan children serve as a bracing reminder that despite the way World War II is often depicted in fiction, it was not romantic. “The Storm We Made” invites reflection about who should be considered the main characters of this war. It’s clear that people in every locale affected by its brutalities deserve to be protagonists, and Chan’s novel proves there are still fresh perspectives to reveal.
Celebrating true love but also acknowledging the dark forces that haunt refugee and immigrant lives in transition, this YA graphic novel attains epic dimensions in capturing the complex, bittersweet journeys of its fully-realized characters.
Cynthia Zarin has been hiding in plain sight. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say the culture hasn’t pigeonholed her. At 64, she’s had a career as gloriously peripatetic as any I’ve encountered: a longtime New Yorker staff writer; the author of five volumes of poetry, two books of nonfiction and several works for children; a Guggenheim fellow who has seen two of her poems staged as ballets; and for some time a poet in residence at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where she was given an office up a “very, very windy stairway” overlooking its vaulted Gothic Revival interior.
Now Zarin has made another exhilarating pivot, publishing her first novel. The spare and impressionistic “Inverno,” out this week, functions in a lot of ways like a poem. Opening in February “near the north ball fields in Central Park in the snow,” the book relies less on narrative than on a series of overlapping memories and references, moving back and forth through space and time, reflecting both a keen sense of immediacy and a lifetime of experience.
Sam took the billet of steel, holding it by the rebar handle in a heavy blacksmith’s glove, and he carried it to the forge, with its interior of tangerine flame. The forge is a black cylindrical furnace, 16 inches long, as big around as a gallon of paint, and open at both ends. Two propane torch nozzles entered the top to provide the fire. The floor of the forge was populated by glowing white rocks of fractured firebrick. And it roared like a lion. The heat rising from it was so intense that the waves appeared to be dissolving the brick building I could see across the alley through the open roll-up door. I sat at Sam’s workbench. Although I was 20 feet away, the heat on my face was like summer sun.
Sam placed the billet among the white-hot rocks and we waited. He talked of the metal’s need to heat all the way through and “relax.” As we watched, the dull deck of gray cards began to wake up and take on the qualities of a living thing. Among the glowing rocks, it seemed to stir and issued a low, dark color. He had put two kinds of steel in the stack that became the billet, 1095 and 15N20, because he was making Damascus steel, a special kind of steel for swords and knives that combines metals to form beautiful patterns by way of forging and pounding, crushing (called “upsetting”) and twisting. Damascus is not particularly superior to other steels. It’s just prettier. But it has acquired a special mystique because hundreds of years ago, as early as the fourth century B.C., it came into Europe from the East by way of Syria. That steel had a wavy pattern in it. So by analogy, people today call steel that has a wavy pattern “Damascus.” The Crusaders were armed with Damascus blades. It was said that theirs were quenched in the blood of dragons. And it was also said that those blades could do battle with the Saracens and afterward still sever a feather floating in midair.
I realized many authors have “apprenticeship novels”—novels written before the author’s published debut, which don’t get published but which help the author grow. Novels the author now agrees should never have been published. Novels the author has no desire to revisit. It’s not for the faint of heart: pouring huge amounts of time and energy into writing that might never end up on anyone’s shelves. But in today’s frenetic, time-optimizing, productivity-worshiping culture, there’s something beautiful to me about the patience and commitment of the apprenticeship novel.
And so my thoughts, as thoughts about writing often do, take me back to Mom.
Playing Monopoly may be objectively flawed—stolen property, wealth inequality, family feuds, socioeconomic disparity—but its place in modern culture is more robust than ever. And ironically, Monopoly’s applications in the real world often critique the very things the game itself champions. We may never get to play the anti-monopolist version of Magie’s The Landlord’s Game anymore, but maybe we could try living it.
Readers familiar with Barrett’s work will immediately recognise the world of Wild Houses. Small-time County Mayo crooks Gabe and Sketch abduct Doll English, the younger brother of a local lad who owes them a few grand in drug debts. They all hole up for the weekend with Dev, a troubled and introverted soul whose remote farmhouse doubles as a convenient location to keep a hostage. From here we follow Doll’s girlfriend Nicky as she attempts to uncover what has happened and to bring Doll back home unharmed. In essence, the novel is a caper, the heaviness of the criminality undercut by bungles and incompetence. On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.
A COLOPHON IS THE DESIGN OR SYMBOL publishers place on the spines of their books. Glance at your bookshelves, at the bottom edge of each volume, and you might see the Knopf borzoi, the three fish of FSG, the interlocking geometric shapes of Graywolf. They are designed to be clean and distinctive but unobtrusive. The colophon is not what sells the book, after all. The author does. One doesn’t buy A Dance with Dragons because it’s published by Bantam. One buys it because it’s written by George R.R. Martin.
Yet Dan Sinykin, a scholar and critic, has made the colophon and the commercial realities it represents his primary field of inquiry. His new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, tracks the progress of U.S. fiction from the postwar era to the present from the perspective of the colophon. Harcourt, Brace; Pantheon; New American Library: these and countless other publishers provide the institutional setting of Sinykin’s account. His cast of characters includes editors, agents, publicists, fundraisers, accountants, and others who belong to the ranks of literature’s wage laborers, toiling away behind the veil of the colophon. Though often unknown, they take center stage here, their talents, idiosyncrasies, and shortcomings on full display.
That story had yet to be told. The more I learned about the camera obscura’s cultural history in the 18th century, the more I wanted to reveal what to me are its most compelling attributes: with their centuries-old mechanisms, camera obscuras free you to transform spaces into realms of the imagination that root you more deeply into both a physical and a mental space. By giving you direct and intimate access to inner spaces, camera obscuras render external worlds the user’s own dominion. In this way, the device helped me answer questions at the heart of my book: Why does spending time in certain spaces make us feel more connected to our thoughts and feelings? How did minds and spaces come to be linked, to such an extent that representing everyday physical settings in painting and literature became a critical maneuver in developing a realistic sense of inner life? “Spatial formalism” is the term I developed in my book for this approach to the inextricable material links between space and psyche.
“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.
“Strip search?” one of the men joked.
“Parking,” I said.
A collective groan. The goddamned parking.
In what he refers to as a “sort of epilogue” to his colossal novel, The Suicide Museum, Ariel Dorfman thanks the Spanish author Javier Cercas for the use of this quotation which appears as an epigraph: “Epic, history, poetry, the essay, journalism, memoirs: these are some of the genres that the novel has swallowed throughout its history.”
The quote is an appropriate primer for what is to come in the nearly 700 pages that follow. Dorfman’s prodigious body of work includes fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry, and plays (including Death and the Maiden), and clearly distinguishes him as an unusually versatile and prolific writer who moves between genres with the same grace he moves between continents, languages, and cultures.
With a plot full of trickery, sleight of hand, soaring ambitions, dangerous rivalries and heartfelt passions, the action bowls along at a fine pace, taking us on a memorable journey through a richly imagined world and a spectacular cast of characters.
You Dreamed of Empires, the latest novel from Álvaro Enrigue, newly translated by Natasha Wimmer, is a story built on what-ifs. Set entirely on the day in 1519 when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés was welcomed into the palace of Moctezuma, ruler of Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City, Enrigue spins a seductive tale despite the fact that everyone already knows how, in reality, it ends—spoiler alert: Spain won. And yet, immersed in the world Enrigue builds, we read beyond the shadow of this ending hoping that just maybe, this time around, the story will be different. In his hallucinatory prose, anything could happen.
Paola Magni didn’t plan on getting involved in her most infamous case. As a forensic entomologist, she researches how insects and related creatures found at crime scenes can help investigators solve mysteries. She frequently works with public health officials and coroners, who, perhaps surprisingly, are often repelled by vermin, critters and crawlers. “Pathologists hate bugs,” she says of the doctors who examine corpses. But her comfort with these widely loathed creatures, combined with a talent for communicating forensic concepts to the public in press interviews and on social media, have propelled her to the forefront of innovations in forensic biology. She has consulted on dozens of homicide cases and suspicious deaths all over the world. In association with the local health service, she established Italy’s first forensic entomology laboratory, then housed in the Turin morgue. A smartphone app she created called SmartInsects, which helps investigators identify bugs and guides them in how to collect samples, has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, mainly by pathologists, law enforcement officers and students. And by applying her expertise to all the living organisms that arrive opportunistically at crime scenes like uninvited party guests, from flies to barnacles, Magni has become a leading figure in the burgeoning field of aquatic forensics, which extends the science of criminal investigations to evidence found in bodies of water.
But in 2012, before she became an international figure, she was still completing her doctorate in biology in her native Turin, in northern Italy.
Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.
“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”
But as satellites fill the skies, astronomers who planned to rely on the Rubin telescope for scientific discovery are concerned.
“The whole point of Rubin is to open up this new window into the universe to find things that we didn’t even know to look for,” Dr. Rawls said. “And if instead we’re going to look through the equivalent of a windshield of bugs, you don’t know what you’re not going to see.”
A small number of northern long-eared bats have learned to avoid fungi-infested cave colonies, tapping into a previously unknown behavior to roost in trees that grow near the Atlantic Ocean. By escaping the risks posed by mountain life, these bats are confronting a new mortal threat: coastal developers. This problem goes beyond South Carolina and is likely much bigger than bats.
Today, white-nose syndrome is wiping out an entire branch of the bat family tree in America’s Southeastern forests. Northern long-eared bats landed on the federal endangered species list in March; scientists anticipate at least two more bat species could soon end up on the list, spurring protective measures that could put the brakes on development to ensure their survival.
No machine could deliver the surprises, the tonal shifts and the blend of empathy and irony that make it so satisfying. And it is, not incidentally, evidence that Fitzcarraldo is fashionable because it continues to pursue its own vision through work as singular as this.
Love and time. Each is commonly said to have the power to heal, but “Inverno” is all about that other power they share: to annihilate. As the narrator finds herself “running behind something or someone that is leaving forever,” the reader finds herself slowing down, the better to savor Zarin’s allusive, evocative prose. To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art. There is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written.
And while Enrigue’s interpretation of this brutal period of history doesn’t rectify any of the atrocities that follow, it is a thoughtful reminder of the dangerous power that accompanies self-deception and the ideas of chivalric romantic bullshit that all empires are built on.
As I set out to summit a pile of books that no one in my life thinks I should (or can) climb, I’m hoping I might be able to identify in them some of that foundational concern and care for others. I know there is no guarantee that I’ll get anything out of the endeavor. This is, after all, a self-improvement project begun in January. The odds are good that I’ll give it up the way I have every other. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll at least manage to clear out a few inches of closet space before I do.
But no matter how great your god complex, all the returns-on-investment occur ‘out there’ in space and time, and won’t make anyone rich in the here and now, in the direct manner of, say, asteroid mining. After 1,000 human lifespans, cosmic expansion will still be in its infancy. Don’t expect so much as a snapshot from the nearest large galaxy for at least 5 million years. This pulls us back to the central question. If every direct, tangible benefit is deferred to a weird kind of technological afterlife, why would anyone do it?
The real product of the early space programme was a taste of a new kind of purpose and meaning
Identical twins are always a source of fascination, and Jacqueline Roy’s novel charts the lives of a pair, Selina and Zora, who seem even closer than most. “We were joined at the hip – that’s not a metaphor,” insists Zora, in a striking first line; she claims to remember the operation that severed their tiny, conjoined bodies as babies. But separating herself emotionally from her sister in adulthood will prove more difficult.
In his expansive scholarly analysis, Recuber examines more than 2,000 digital texts, from blog posts by those who are terminally ill to online suicide notes and pre-prepared messages designed to be e-mailed to loved ones after someone has died. As he notes, “the digital data in this book are sad, to be sure, and they have often brought me to tears as I collected and analyzed them”. Yet, they are well worth delving into.
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?
In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says. Sure, Earth could be swallowed by the sun and destroyed. But in some scenarios, Earth escapes and is pushed farther out into the solar system.
Now a nearby planetary system has offered clues to our planet’s cosmic hereafter. About 57 light-years away, four planets orbit a sunlike star that is some 10 billion years old—about twice as old as the sun, and already in the advanced stages of its life. Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist specializing in planetary habitability at UC Riverside, recently modeled what might happen to the elderly system’s planets when the star becomes a red giant in a billion years. He found that most of the inner planets will be engulfed but that the outermost known planet, which has an orbit somewhat similar to Venus’s, might survive.
As the novel’s deliberately ambiguous ending suggests, however, what is often surprising about last things is that they have lasted so long, and will keep on lasting. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end.
Last year, I started to notice a particular phrase cheerfully uttered in my direction when I entered a store, hotel, restaurant, yoga studio — even the venerable halls of the JFK Delta SkyClub: “Welcome in!” I heard the greeting for the first time about five years ago on a trip to Los Angeles, but since then it has seemingly made its way across the country and taken hold in every corner of the hospitality industry in New York. Curious if others had noticed the same thing, I asked my Instagram followers: “Death to ‘welcome in’,” one friend said. “It’s so cringey!” said another. Like me, others felt it had come out of nowhere and was suddenly everywhere.
How did this happen? How did this phrase replace the classic “welcome!” as the standard greeting in hospitality spaces?
Working in books journalism, it’s rare to come across a recently published novel for which you have not a single shred of preconception. But that was my purely innocent state when I spied a copy of “Weak in Comparison to Dreams,” by James Elkins, a longtime professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Advance ignorance can be useful for reading, watching, listening — expectation influences and sometimes even deforms reaction — but it was especially helpful in this case because the book is so very peculiar. Even having finished it, it’s hard to place. Elkins, who is 68, has written many works of art history and criticism, but this is his first novel. A deeply unconventional debut, it’s an invitation into a teeming imagination.
Brody skillfully creates a unique, memorable case study of familial love and grief and examines how seeking truth and closure can turn ugly. A psychological thriller that also thoughtfully explores social media culture and the dangers of obsession, Rabbit Hole is a heart-wrenching reminder of the complex humanity behind every true crime story.
With “Poor Deer,” Oshetsky proves herself the bard of unruly psyches. She shows how loss warps our realities, and how that distortion can be both a coping mechanism and a destructive force.
Stories about the power of stories are an easy sell; in part, I think, because they subtly ennoble the producer and the consumer of those stories, shedding a glow of valour on the profession of the former and chosen leisure pursuit of the latter. Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories – and the spiritual and emotional succour they give – though, fortunately, too much of a clever one to fall entirely into the mode of blithe self-congratulation.
In sum, “Beatrice’s Last Smile” provides insightful and instructive reading, yet also makes clear that the Middle Ages are too rich, too complex, too diverse for any one book or historical approach to do those astonishing centuries full justice.
When I was a teenager in South Jersey and getting a driving lesson from my dad, he casually mentioned that I should look in the rearview mirror every now and then to see what was going on behind me. To borrow an expression from my Italian grandmother, I remained with my mouth open—that is, I was astonished. How was it possible, I wondered, to look in front of me and behind me at the same time? In that instant, I probably knew that I would very soon become a passionate nondriver, but I couldn’t have imagined that I would find my calling doing the very thing I thought impossible: looking forward and backward simultaneously.
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of Paris, built more than 150 years ago. Moss and algae now festoon the stone entrances and exits, with doors that lead down to the hidden world of the Paris catacombs below. Inside the Petite Ceinture, the silence is palpable; the darkness, seemingly eternal; the echoes, endless; the phosphorus mushrooms glowing in the darkest recesses, unworldly.
As long as there’s something to quit, I have the potential to feed this addiction of mine, which will inevitably lead to the ultimate quitting: death. See you in health.
“Chevengur,” the first and greatest novel by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov, tells two stories: an ironic parable of nascent Soviet Russia and the woeful history of the book’s publication. When Platonov finished it in his late 20s, not long after the death of Lenin, early readers cautioned the young novelist against the folly of emphasizing verity over glory: “I want to warn you now,” his editor said after reading a draft in 1927, “to correct it and erase the impression that it creates.” Maxim Gorky was more direct: “Whatever you may have wished, you have portrayed reality in a lyrico-satirical light that is, of course, unacceptable to our censorship.” Joseph Stalin simply scribbled “Bastard” over Platonov’s work.
Reading the book, these sentiments seem reasonable. Many colorful words could describe “Chevengur” — hilarious, harrowing, poetic, mythic — but flattering, at least of state-run communism, isn’t one of them. While Platonov thought he had written an “honest attempt to portray the beginning of communist society,” his British publisher has pitched it as “The Soviet Don Quixote,” a phrase that’s on the money. The eponymous town where half of the book is set, and the La Mancha-esque region that surrounds it, are rife with quixotic characters caught in the spirit of a revolution that is swallowing them alive. Interpreting the novel as ridicule, Stalin halted the publication of “Chevengur.” Though Platonov wrote (and was occasionally published) until his death in 1951, his novels remained censored until Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in the Glasnost era.
A poet and journalist who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, Howsare looks behind those numbers, at the deeper questions of human-animal coexistence. Her thoroughly researched and comprehensive book combines science, philosophy and history, delving into the role of deer not only as prey and pest but also as neighbor and artistic inspiration, from N’laka’pamux mythology to the Deer Lady on “Reservation Dogs.” Deer, she writes, are “a single node where many of my questions — about damage, repair, myth, nourishment, and the things that divide us — might come together.”
Now that I’m publishing my first novel—a work of historical fiction set in 1930s and 1940s colonized Malaysia, called The Storm We Made, about an unlikely female spy and the impact of her actions on her three children—I’m facing familiar questions about my research process. The questions seem innocuous enough, and well within the realm of reasonable questions to ask of an author of historical fiction. Friends and well-meaning readers want to know which authors’ research processes I mirrored, whose methods I preferred, whose I found cumbersome. An easy question, a throwaway—something I should have no problem answering. They want to visualize my process. Did I scour old Malaysian newspapers, stain my fingers black? Did I lock myself up studying ancient and fragile tapes to understand what people wore at the time? Did I interview thousands of survivors? And even though it seems simple enough to answer, I admit—I am defensive, crushed by the specificity of their questions, terrified to confront the very simple truth.
Because the answer, I’m afraid to whisper, is I did none of those things.
Beside Scotland’s Crathes Castle, beyond the ornately sculpted hedgerows and formal gardens, is a simple grass field edged with willow and alder trees. Beneath this pasture, known as Warren Field, are 12 sunken pits carved 10 millennia ago by Stone Age hunter-gatherers. For decades, their purpose was unknown.
But to Vincent Gaffney, a professor at the University of Bradford, in northern England, the pits formed something distinctly cosmic: a clear curve from right to left, bent to the horizon—a pit for each of the 12 moons in the lunar year. As each moon arrived, Gaffney hypothesized in 2013, perhaps the people of Warren Field lit a fire in the corresponding pit or placed a marker in front of it, denoting which month they were in. The dugouts were a permanent way to mark each moon—and, he suspected, to account for the difference between lunar and solar years.
Old people have falls. I had only just turned 52 one week before the September evening I collapsed. But the year from 51 to 52 had been a remarkably bad one. I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding. I sent applications to other publications and got thoughtful rejections. I sent more applications, and they went unanswered. I made an appeal for paid subscriptions at a newsletter I’d been writing. Its revenue flattened out at about 20 percent of my share of our living expenses. The household finances began to drain.
I picked up an adjunct gig, teaching a writing class on Zoom, three straight hours a shot, and the anxiety of filling the time — of giving the students what they were paying for — gathered into a lump in my upper torso until I couldn’t stand the taste of the herbal tea that was supposed to relax me and give me something to do with my hands on-camera. My shoulder locked up. I got pins and needles in my arm.
“The Waters” is a thought-provoking and readable exploration of eccentricity and of all different kinds of love — familial love, romantic love, love of knowledge, love of animals and love of one’s own environment, even when it is a difficult place to live.
Thirteen Ways To Kill Lullabelle Rock is smart, pacy and intelligent. It is even, despite the harum-scarum murders, surprisingly moving. Most importantly, it is the opposite of po-faced. There are comic set-pieces and clever one-liners (her car provides inspirational quotes like “Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Already Taken”). In many ways it would be an excellent series of half-hour films. Despite the rather shaky nature of the character Lullabelle’s thespian skills, it would be a Kind Hearts And Coronets challenge for an ambitious young actress.
In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sigh, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.
In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves.
It finally snowed a bit in Omaha, and on Christmas Day, no less — a bit of temporary relief. I’m not worried that my grandchildren, if they ever materialize, will grow up not knowing what snow is, as my friend suggested. But I wonder if, somewhere down the line, one of my descendants will build the last snowman in Omaha.
Ultimately, though, becoming a crossing guard is as close as I’ve ever gotten to balancing my art and mental health and money. In fact, after working this job for six months, I’m not sure my dream is to be a 100 percent butt-in-chair novelist anymore. I like being out in the world and interacting with people. And—bonus!—I’ve got a whole new set of experiences and material to pull from.
If you’re a gardener, that’s a siren song for you. What will you put in your pots and plots this spring? What colors will you have, what crops will you harvest? It never gets old: put a seed no bigger than a breadcrumb into some dirt and it becomes dinner in just weeks. All it needs, as in the new memoir “The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation” by Raquel Willis, is a little time to grow.
It is those who are closest to us, most similar to us, with whom we have the greatest disagreements. Mine is this: I do not think bookselling is an art. I think it is a job. I don’t mean this derogatorily; jobs are just as important to analyze as most art, if not more so. But a job is a material thing, a book is a material thing—a product—and if we are going to analyze material things we should set forth on the basic understanding that, as a job, bookselling is a victim to much the same trappings as any other job: the exploitation of its workforce. Bookselling is not a special case, but it does exist at a (somewhat) interesting crossroad between the “artistic” world of literature and the material world of retail, from which I see, in both directions, roads paved with the broken backs of workers, with no eventual culmination to art.
Is there any doubt that a service entrance designed in 2023 would be very different? Contemporary architects would scoff at the console bracket with its carved garlands, the paneled and studded door, and the fanciful Art Deco pediment. What is the function of all that bric-a-brac? they would ask. Why all the fuss when a flush door with a thin steel frame would do just as well? Why carve words when a ready-made embossed plastic plaque is available? Isn’t it all just a waste of money?
Similar questions were posed a long time ago, in a lecture given in Vienna on January 21, 1910.
True, getting old brings visible signs of physical decline, and may rule out some activities and opportunities. But in other ways, aging can involve growth and improvement—of character, perspective, and overall happiness. In a real sense, we should start looking forward to being old.
Shoot the Moon is a thoughtful, playful novel that ultimately uses the vastness of space to evoke that of each complex and multifaceted human life.
These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin). These slashing pieces often attracted angry letters, a few of which are printed here. Hitchens’s rebuttals are printed, too. They remind me of Kafka’s injunction, in his diaries, to “use the attacker’s horse for one’s own ride.”
The real shock of the book is not what’s unfamiliar, it is how much of it seems to mirror today’s obsessions and controversies. Yes, some of the treatments and rituals read as unusual to us now, involving goat fat, marrow, bran and bloodletting. Some ingredients, like mercury and arsenic, are toxic in quantity (but were employed nonetheless for skin lightening or other cosmetics) and would not be used commercially today. But other things — how much depilation to engage in; “breast bags,” a.k.a. bras; labiaplasty; lightening the hair and skin; as well as gender transitions for men and women — could and do fill our brains, our conversations and our feeds.
New Year’s Eve comes around once a year, unless you’re time-zone traveling. On Sunday night, high above the dropping balls and popping champagne corks, some flight crews and passengers will ring in the New Year multiple times. For these special celebrators, midnight strikes again and again and again.
Mansour emerges as part of the last decade’s larger literary project centering women writers and artists who risked being left on history’s cutting room floor. Mansour has been brought to our present-day attention alongside notable peers such as Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.
At their best, these essays retain the tender fluency of love letters written in the throes of a new relationship. In Basilica, Zarin recalls a time she used to hang out every afternoon inside the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, admiring the frescoes, but even there she is conscious of “seeing through your eyes, which in any case had become a habit”. In Rome, the absent paramour is a “ghost”, who stalks her thoughts while she crisscrosses the Tiber looking for traces of the ancient theatre of Pompey, or dips into Henry G Liddell’s A History of Rome in a bar. After a while, Zarin reflects, “the ghost one knows too well is oneself”.
Few writers dare to cover the history of a single place over such an extended period. That Romano has done so is a gift. His book opens up new perspectives, helping to clarify both continuities and ruptures in the city’s history. Above all, it is a reminder that the future is never predictable.