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.