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.