As the email chain went on, accumulating dozens of suggestions and incorporating the feedback of a widening gyre of stakeholders, the tone began to change. Every time I thought we might be getting close, a new problem sprung up, a steady whack-a-mole of fears that we might do something—or, worse, had already done something—to turn off a reader. There were more doubts brewing about the original subtitle than I’d realized. Lip service wasn’t just “vague,” it was also “academic.” In fact, so was essays. It was “hand-wringy.” It gave people “bad vibes.” It wasn’t punchy. It wasn’t funny, or it wasn’t funny enough. Actually, what if we just changed the title altogether?
What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure. Looking back now, decades later, I chuckle at how earnestly I believed that to be a real poet I had to earn the approval of an academic gatekeeper. As if a poet were like a doctor or a lawyer, a practitioner whose title is contingent on meeting strict criteria. Certainly, no one awarded John Keats or Percy Shelley a license to practice blank verse.
Endless pages have been written about the cultural meaning of the selfie—whether it represents the essential vanity of millennials and Gen Zers or, as many feminists have argued, it offers a vital source of self-definition that short-circuits the male gaze. A large chunk of research done on selfies focuses on the effects they have on the self-esteem of teens and young adults, periods of life that were already marked by self-consciousness long before filters came along to confuse things.
There is far less research on the long-term effect of this behaviour: how taking and sharing selfies over a period of decades affects a person’s perception of aging or time itself. Women around my age—those of us who live on the line between baby Gen X and elder millennial—are watching our identities shift in real time in a way no previous generation has experienced en masse.
But one of the greatest strengths of this novel is the way in which it conjures Ellen’s experience of the world, which is both absolutely full but also constrained by her deafness. The reader finds herself mouthing words, discovering the “homophenes” – words that look alike on the mouth when spoken – which Ellen studies on Bell’s behalf. Some of the plot hinges on the fact that to a deaf observer, the words “Mr Gray” – as in Elisha – “mercury” and “mystery” can all look the same. These are hidden treasures for the hearing reader to discover, for this is a book that offers insight as well as delight. Novels can open up worlds in the way no other form can: this accomplished debut is proof of it.
In Kinderland, the escape from brutality, poverty, and abandonment comes from a child’s power to imbue the world with magic.
One of the fascinating aspects of this book is the complicated nature of the encroaching criminality. At first it seems as if a “just like” slipped into an “actually is”. But how convincing this is depends on a huge amount of genuine knowledge.
The Voice ultimately changed how editors hire, how writers write and what subjects we think of as belonging inside a newspaper, all topics that are central to “The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture,” a salacious oral history of the publication that reads like a night at a gossipy media party. Author Tricia Romano, a former Voice nightlife reporter, is the ideal guide through the gathering.
Like the railway and the telegraph, western civilisation was invented in the 19th century. It had located its noble roots in classical Athens and Rome, and from then, so the story went, white Europeans embarked on a smooth progression of gradual sophistication and enlightenment that culminated, not coincidentally, in the glories of the British empire.
That’s not quite how it all got started, argues ancient history professor Josephine Quinn in this fascinating account of the cultural and martial doings around the Mediterranean in the two millennia BC, and thence up to the middle ages. For her, “civilisational thinking” itself is the enemy, not only in historiography but in modern geopolitics.
In stories where characters are in grave societal peril, I believe we shouldn’t lose sight of their humanity. Indeed, in the darkest of times sweetness and beauty have a way of flourishing. Stories are empathy generators. Far be it from me to flatten my characters and destroy the opportunity for connection. More than ever, now is the time to recognize the depth and grace of our marginalized communities.
The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long, and at 1.33MB, it almost hits the diskette’s limit of 1.44MB.
However, a new study shows that humans may not be alone in their love of playing practical jokes. Animals can tease each other too. Together with colleagues, Isabelle Laumer, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), watched over 75 hours of videos of great apes interacting with each other. Great apes are our closest living relatives, and include orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. The apes in the study all lived in zoos, and were filmed attending to their daily routines.
Members of all four species were observed teasing one another. The researchers identified 18 distinct teasing behaviours, with the top five including poking, hitting, hindering the movement of a fellow ape, body slamming, and pulling on a body part. Some apes repeatedly waved body parts or objects in front of their fellow apes' faces, or, in the case of orangutans, pulled each other's hair.
Have you ever seen a girl and wanted to possess her? Not like a man would, with his property fantasies. Possess her like a girl or a ghost of one: shove your soul in her mouth and inhabit her skin, live her life? Then you’ve experienced girlhood, or at least one like mine. Less a gender or an age and more an ethos or an ache, it’s a risky era, stretchy and interminable. It doesn’t always end. That ever-gnawing void can make you want a body to match, one that looks as hungry as your heart is.
Sobbing and throbbing, a lot of the most beloved icons of girl culture are very, very sad, and very, very skinny. They are beautiful, and their sorrow only adds to their sex appeal. Tears drip down cheeks onto supple pouts, but that suppleness never extends to the rest of their physical forms, which tend toward extremely slender. Bodies shrink to ever-smaller sizes as sad girls lose their appetites, distracted by all that emoting.
While poetry will never reach the height that the Victorians thought it would, there is no reason for this art form to die off. It is a powerful and moving form of writing that captures stories and weaves them through personal and intense emotions and it demands a home in the modern-day newspaper. After all, a newspaper is made to communicate stories and information to the masses and as T.S. Eliot said, “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”.
In Grief Is for People, her first full-length book of nonfiction, Crosley drills much deeper to examine the greatest pain she has known: the loss of her best friend (and former boss) to suicide in July 2019. Her new book is a meditation on loss and grief that combines her verbal alacrity and mordant wit with moving descriptions that capture the ache of sleepless nights in which "the hole in my heart was like a wind tunnel that whistled straight through until dawn."
To be sure, some of the entries in “The Lede” seem dated, but only because, according to the calendar, they are dated — who today under the age of 60 remembers Russell Baker and Molly Ivins, two additional Times greats? But precisely because they seem dated, they show that good writing (and, a happy corollary, good writers, like Baker and Ivins) never really grow old. These pieces are the Dorian Grays of journalism: the writer grows older (he’s 88 now) but in a way — in the way they are written — the pieces do not.
Before Sarah Rachul was a Disney adult, she was a Disney baby. “I don’t really ever remember a time when the Disney movies or characters weren’t a part of my life,” says the 29-year-old account director, who is based in Ohio. When Rachul was a toddler, her parents and grandparents began taking her to Disney theme parks; today, she holidays there regularly, usually with a pair of mouse ears atop her head. Sometimes, she subtly dresses up like Disney characters, which is known as “Disney Bounding” (full-character costumes are banned inside the parks, so guests aren’t confused with employees). She even hosts her own podcast about Disney, The Pixie Dust Project.
Rachul is a proud “Disney adult” – a nebulous and often pejorative term for a grown-up who is a fervent fan of the Walt Disney Company. In the popular imagination, a Disney adult is a childless, self-infantilised and overly excitable millennial; someone who lacks both self- and social awareness. People have said as much to Rachul. In 2022, 2.2 million people watched a video of her breaking down in tears upon meeting a Goofy mascot at a Disney park – many commenters told her to “grow up”, but others told her she was “pure”.
As a repository of language, New York is nowhere near utopia. But it could be almost like a modern Babel—not the one from the biblical myth, cursed and divided by mutual unintelligibility, nor a “Babel in reverse” that steamrolls languages into a single tongue, but one where hundreds of languages thrive in a diverse network. Could there be a version of the city in which English, Chinese, Spanish, and other widely spoken languages are useful tools for mutually intelligible conversation, not killer languages whose speakers assume their speech is superior? In this imaginary—but not impossible—New York, it would be a place where vastly different languages would be recognized, interpreted, and enjoyed, not wished away or weeded out.
If you have been to the Melting Pot before, it was likely on a date. Maybe it was a first date, where dipping bread cubes and apple chunks into a pot of burbling cheese, cooked right at your table, offered a welcome distraction from the awkwardness of getting to know a new person. My own first experience at the restaurant was a first date with a man whose name I do not remember, but I vividly recall that I accidentally (lightly!) stabbed him with a fondue fork whilst reaching for a chunk of bread.
The most dramatic steakhouse performance is the act of sending back the steak. To be clear, I have never in my life sent a steak, or any meal, back. May I die first. But I do love watching people send their steaks back. In the steakhouse, only you, the patron, know the ideal wellness or rareness of the steak you have ordered. Too rare or too well, either way, servers whisk steaks back to the kitchen upon request with absolute understanding, a grave affirmational nod. It is an expected part of each evening. Oftentimes, steaks return looking exactly as they did when they were first delivered.
The Turtle House is an intergenerational story, yes, but instead of centering on inherited traumas, it focuses, rather, on the potential for strength and resilience in an uncontrollable world.
“I do think I know a hot dog from a real artist,” Joan Acocella observed modestly last year. Few would disagree. Watching her tell them apart, with an occasional blast of her savage wit, was a treat for readers for four decades. Sadly, the publication of her new collection, “The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,” comes just weeks after her death Jan. 7 at age 78. Bringing together some of her smartest and most entertaining pieces on literature and language published between 2007 and 2021, the volume must now serve as a makeshift monument to Acocella’s career.
Remotely is a pandemic book. Confined to their San Francisco home during the COVID-19 lockdown, the critic and his wife, photographer Lucy Gray, obsess over TV, he writes, “because she and I have always reckoned we were living in a story, talking to each other and to the TV. And one point of television was to give us all a way of talking to ourselves about what the world might be.” So, the book becomes a dialogue, with Lucy’s character speaking in italics.
This form lends Remotely much of its poetry. But how so? For one thing, Thomson cunningly matches form and content.
One of the most expansive memories ever documented belonged to a Russian newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky. For much of his life, he was oblivious of the peculiar nature of his memory. Then, in his late twenties, the young reporter’s habit of never taking notes during morning staff meetings caught the attention of the editor of his Moscow newspaper. Shereshevsky told the editor he never wrote anything down because he didn’t need to, then repeated verbatim the long list of instructions and addresses for that day’s assignment.
The editor was impressed, but even more interesting to him was that Shereshevsky seemed to think there was nothing unusual about this. Wasn’t this how everyone’s mind worked? The editor had never seen anything like it, so he sent Shereshevsky to have his memory tested.
While there’s no evidence yet that the dark dimension exists, the scenario does make testable predictions for both cosmological observations and tabletop physics. That means we may not have to wait long to see whether the hypothesis will bear up under empirical scrutiny—or be relegated to the list of tantalizing ideas that never fulfilled their original promise.
For 35 years, Soul Train was the beating heart of Black pop culture in America, considered appointment television for the millions of people who tuned in to discover the latest trends in music, dance, and fashion. In its more than 900 episodes, it launched musicians like Teena Marie, Curtis Mayfield, and the Jackson Five, and others like Vivica A. Fox, Jody Watley, and Rosie Perez, to new heights of fame. Now, 54 years after the groundbreaking show’s premiere, its impact on culture and history hasn’t diminished.
When designing their layouts, malls took a cue from an industry that has perfected the art of separating people from their money: casinos.
How is it that these brainless, disgusting maggots are doing a better job than doctors? Well, they’re hungry.
Had I ever seen so much bare flesh in one room? Naked in a mixed-gender Austrian sauna, I sat opposite two dozen other nude people on wooden benches. Even after more than a year of living in Europe, as an American, I still felt a little uncomfortable sitting there in nothing but my own skin.
The sauna master came in to warm things up. Tall and lanky, wearing just a towel wrapped around his hips, he wheeled in a cart with several grapefruit-size balls of crushed ice infused with essential oils like black pepper, lime and eucalyptus. After a short speech telling us to leave immediately if we felt dizzy, he placed one of the ice balls onto a tray of hot coals, and it began to sizzle. The smell reminded me of an expensive aromatic candle: a touch sweet, a touch spicy.
Of course, in reality, no one cared. Do you care if you see someone alone at a museum, church, lecture, or book signing (all of which I’ve, of course, attended solo)? No, because you’re too busy thinking about your own life. You’re at the event to see a superstar, an author, a famous painting—not fixate on some random person. If I do notice someone alone in an unusual setting, like a national park or a festival, I admire their chutzpah. They’re not sitting around waiting for the planets to align, they’re off and adventuring on their own.
Unapologetically queer (in both senses of the word), this story of grief, love and mental illness unravels slowly. The pace means that in lesser hands it might founder, but Matthews’s writing is brilliantly assured. Skipping effortlessly between past and present, she wields language powerfully and brutally, yet with a lightness of touch that is deceptively seductive. It’s hard to believe it’s the work of a first-time novelist.
Flock thereby aligns her subjects with the divine and the damned. Just as these women alchemized their pain into power, so too does The Furies forge their narratives of loss into myths of reclamation.
The female shoots the enticing potion from holes just above her eyes. She’ll return to the male’s den each day, dousing her prospective lover over and over until he comes around to her, letting her into his den without harm. During her two weeks with her new mate, she’ll molt her shell and allow him to fill her new sperm pouch. While males will fall victim to this seduction regularly, females are more selective, saving up sperm to use for years to come, says Prager.
Lobsters are just one sea creature that reminds us land-dwellers how strange sex under the sea can be. From fish making bass-music mating calls that can travel miles inland to an octopus sealing the deal by handing off an arm that’s full of sperm—there’s no one right way of getting it on in the ocean.
One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth.
How to comprehend the vastness of the cosmos; how to comprehend not just the mystery of our place and purpose within it, but also our own lives as we live them on earth? Martin MacInnes’s Booker-longlisted third novel, “In Ascension,” is an elegiac voyage through these questions, a vaulting exploration of the interplay between the micro and the macro, the human and the otherworldly.
A riveting debut that blends crime fiction with social commentary, Tierney’s storytelling and nuanced character development offer a thought-provoking exploration of darkness, resilience and the human capacity for both good and evil.
When did blogging become indistinguishable from a marketing strategy? Amid such business school terms as content ecosystem, video embedding, cross-channel promotion, and user experience, have we lost sight of the basic purpose of a blog: to communicate?
Not Phillip Lopate. In 2016, the respected essayist, short story writer, film critic, novelist, and poet accepted a challenge from the editors of The American Scholar to write 45 new essays on his blog in the space of a year. Lopate agreed, despite disdaining the very idea of the form. But he soon discovered that the freedom to “exit quickly” was only one of the blog’s advantages.
So, why does Hitch still matter? What can we learn from him today? Eloquent conviction, for one. But, more importantly, his skill for close textual readings of a “subtle and suspicious-minded kind” (as Parker dubbed it), brandished with equal potency in all directions. Few idols were sacred for Hitchens (though he revered George Orwell and Thomas Paine, largely for their clarity of vision), and his nimbleness of mind allowed him to see threats brewing that dawned too late for many.
Of course, great mountains are dangerous places, for all who do business on their flanks: Avalanches have taken the lives of climbers and snowboarders in equal measure. But to me the choice is stark, pitting the nobility of ambition against the ache for the merely thrilling. Whether to plant a flag on a summit and look with the pride of achievement up into the endless blue — or to risk ending the ride of a life with that terrible airless dark, and that ghastly, immemorial whumpf!
I’ve come to lightly dread a server asking “Have you dined with us before?” Not because I feel uncomfortable being new, or insulted if they don’t recognize me from a previous dinner, but because I know my answer does not matter. It’s not a real question, but an overture to a canned speech about every single dish on the menu.
Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man.
We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to get confused between: Is this a theme park of Italy or is it just lovely and pleasant.
Relationships between humans and animals that emerged from these meetings of different peoples planted the seeds of many of today’s ethical and environmental challenges — from colonial wealth and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples to the modern meat industry. They even explain people’s bonds with their pets.
When was the last time you had pure, light-hearted, smart-aleck, gee-whiz, smack-your-forehead, geeky goodness from a book? If it’s been awhile, you’ll want to find “How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi” now.
You won’t be sorry you did, once you dip into the facts you didn’t know you needed to know, offered to you informally here, and with a slice of sarcasm. Authors Balakrishnan and Wasowski break their book down into 11 basic categories, but the knowledge inside it runs from arthropods to World War Z and lots of other subjects in between.
In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.
But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace.
The menu featured just five tacos to start — chicken, ground turkey, ground beef, pinto bean and the shrimp taco that Burrell had been perfecting since adolescence. Generously doused in a sweet and tangy sauce, cooked in butter and wrapped in a corn tortilla that’s dipped in the same sauce before getting crisped on the grill, the shrimp taco quickly became the signature item.
“It was new, it was different — people lined up,” Burrell says.
What she didn’t know then was that she belonged to a pioneering class of Black chefs in L.A. Like her, many were trained in their home kitchens. Nevertheless, the still-growing group put their stamp on the taco, inducting it into California soul cuisine.
The books I tend to remember are those that take a seemingly simple, self-evident idea and then show that it is in fact fraught with ambiguity and ethical implications. Chipping away at our epistemological certainties, ameliorative conceptual analysis of that kind invites us to investigate whether our core ideas are sound enough to help us accomplish vital cognitive and practical social tasks, including legislation and the building of moral consensus. The French philosopher Manon Garcia’s thought-provoking book The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (2023) subjects the notion of consent to such analytical probing and demonstrates the ways in which it is laden with problematic prejudices, old and new.
It is a writer’s work to wrestle coherent storylines out of the mess that is real life (that’s what dictators employ writers for). It sometimes feels as though Ings has bitten off rather more material than he can successfully digest for us, but his book is enlightening and surprisingly entertaining.
When young writers, particularly would-be journalists, ask me for advice about improving their thinking as well as their writing, I tell them to consider some topic about which they have strong personal feelings.
Then write an essay arguing vigorously in favor of the other side’s opinion. Make sure it is loaded with facts and figures to support the thesis. And construct your argument with just the one hand—no other hand, please.
We thought we knew how Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.
We didn’t expect that it would go mad.
A chicken recipe calls for a half cup of red wine, but you never have leftover wine for cooking with because why on earth wouldn’t you just finish it? A corked bottle, at someone’s house, with two inches of wine at the bottom? It’s so quaint it makes you chuckle. What are they — Amish? You open a bottle, pour half a cup into the pan, and then drink the rest of it while the chicken cooks, like a normal person.
In the shed outside your house, where the garbage goes, some of your empties are stashed on the floor in assorted bags and boxes because the 50-gallon recycling bin is always already full of them. When you see them, you flush with shame.
More than anything, this is a novel about the power and importance of stories.
Why we feel so deeply and act so strangely toward these twilight creatures is the subject of Erika Howsare’s consuming The Age of Deer. In this profound and courageous walkabout of a book, she traipses into a dense thicket of social and economic history, myth and imagination, culture and ecology. The result both pleases and demands.
What, then, should we make of the philosophers who write self-help books? Are they bowing to market forces, dumbing down ideas to cash in on a credulous readership? Or returning to a calling they should never have renounced, “a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy”—in the words of Theodor Adorno, no admirer of dumbing down or cashing in—“but which … has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life”?
Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead of him was a 15-meter drop leading to a place no human being had seen before.
Getting there had taken two helicopters, three weeks of test dives, two tons of equipment, and hard work to overcome an unexpected number of technical problems. But in the moment, Harris was hypnotized by what was before him: the vast, black, gaping unknown.
And yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, 9pm is the hot new bedtime – not for middle-aged tired people, but for twentysomethings. The young people of today, it seems, are taking control over their sleep routines and prioritising shuteye over fun. A 2022 analysis found that Americans in their 20s were getting, on average, nine hours and 28 minutes of sleep a night, up from eight hours and 47 minutes in 2010. The WSJ quoted one 19-year old as saying: “For me, nothing good happens after 9pm.”
What is the world coming to when teenagers believe that? Why would anyone – young or old – want to go bed at nine? And what would happen if I tried it, just for a week?
Fourteen Days chronicles how Covid-19 exacerbated a fever of competing rights and fierce arguments over free speech and silencing. And it inadvertently pinpoints the effect that lockdown had on literature: how it has become increasingly solipsistic and autofictional, with lived experience valued over creative storytelling. The power of much of the writing here is undeniable, as is the sense of personal testimony. The fact that it doesn’t cohere as a novel is perhaps the point, giving us a more accurate reflection of the fractured world we came back to. The imagination remained socially distanced, leaving us with a strange sense of collective isolation.
McDowell also offers a rich picture of 19th-century Romanticism and her respect and admiration for her heroine is admirable. Claire’s life was disordered and often unhappy, the kind of life understandably usually judged a failure, and, though the failures were usually on account of her own difficult temper and egocentricity, she at last meets with kindness and admiration in this fine novel.
This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.
It is tempting to look for parallels with human empires. Perhaps it is impossible not to see rhymes between the natural and human worlds, and as a science journalist I’ve contributed more than my share. But just because words rhyme, it doesn’t mean their definitions align. Global ant societies are not simply echoes of human struggles for power. They are something new in the world, existing at a scale we can measure but struggle to grasp: there are roughly 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
It’s all in O’Connor’s distinctive vision of the world – as a comic mess – and in the way she tells them: a buzzy, hectic style that disarms the reader with its intimacy. Her hapless heroes and heroines are often looking for love – “You throw your knickers, like pasta, up against the wall. If they stick, you fancy him” – but usually in the wrong places.
In antiquity humans were referred to as “mortals,” which meant that they were destined not only to die but also to suffer loss, misfortune, and disaster. By comparison with the immortal gods, even the loftiest mortals are losers in the long run (as Achilles realizes in Hades). In his book In Praise of Failure, the philosopher and essayist Costica Bradatan reminds us that we flash into existence between “two instantiations of nothingness,” namely the nothingness before we were born and the one after we die. Each one of us, ontologically speaking, is next to nothing. And each one of us, despite our precarious condition, has something to lose. “Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature”—all, according to Bradatan, seek to make our next-to-nothingness “a little more bearable.”
As Gibson writes, the legacy of the bluestockings was to lay the foundations for a whole new world-view. It was the basis of all that followed: for women’s right to an education, to earn an income, to vote, to bodily autonomy. It is a call that echoes down the centuries, and attempts to silence it continue.
The last time I sat down with Peter Ackroyd to talk about the idea of England was over a very long dinner, involving, at his cheerfully belligerent insistence, four bottles of wine, bookended by several rounds of whisky and brandy. That evening, 25 years ago, ended with the biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake lying flat out on the cobble stones outside a restaurant in London’s Charterhouse Square, disputing the material reality of the moon, while repeating a demand to “take me home Timmy and tuck me up”, an invitation I declined.
When I arrived to resume that conversation a quarter of a century on, last Tuesday, Ackroyd recalled our previous encounter with a bit of a wince. “I think we did this before in my drinking days,” he suggested, by way of hello. He runs through one or two recollections of that night as if from a former life, including his memory of trying to tell my fortune (“something once happened to you near a river…”). Ackroyd is now 74 and looks far trimmer and brighter-eyed than I remember. It is, he says, seven years since he gave up the drink (even a decade ago he was suggesting that he was down to two bottles of wine a night). “In the end I just got tired of it,” he says. “And also, it wasn’t good for my health. I mean, I was drinking far too much; it was like Niagara Falls.” He misses nothing about that previous life, he says, with half a smile and half a grimace. “Not least because it caused immense embarrassment and frequent physical pain.”
As a student, I religiously ate a large banana before every paper of my finals; as a journalist, I won’t write a piece, or even head out to do an interview, without having first had a slice of toast. Such an attachment to regular meals is, admittedly, connected in part to the fact that I am – let us use the chic French word – a migraineur. Headaches are more likely when my blood sugar is low. Mostly, though, it’s because I listened to mother. How can a person think clearly, let alone run a country, on an empty stomach?
For what is cutlery, in the end, but a system of control, imposing distance not only between diner and dish but between diner and self?
But this book is not simply a dirtbag adventure narrative. Instead, it is a literary journey and a wide-ranging meditation on questions of travel in the 21st century. When so much of the world is accessible, in person or online, what does it mean to walk across an unfamiliar landscape? “The walking,” writes Caswell, “never gets easier, but you get better.” Places like Iceland are becoming overtraveled, but Iceland Summer takes readers to places they have never been. Julia Oldham’s illustrations evoke contemporary graphic novels so that the beauty of the place, the imagery, and the narrative are rendered in casual, comic tones. Icelandic place names and family names cascade through the prose, which makes the journey both outlandish and hilarious.
Michael is best known as a singer and widely recognized as a songwriter, but his greatest skill may have been production. The acoustic guitar that opens his 1987 solo single “Faith” hovers with perfect clarity just the right distance from the listener’s ear, as if the guitar player was strumming just a few feet away; in a decade practically synonymous with stiff, booming percussion, his drum programming has a deft, humorous touch that verges on virtuosity. “I’m a producer before I’m a singer sometimes,” he says in Wham! “I construct what I do.” Michael had the commercial aspirations of a global superstar like Madonna, but he also had a perfectionist streak more befitting a chart eccentric like Kate Bush. In the thirty years between his first solo single in 1986 and his death in 2016, he released only five studio albums, one of them a covers album. In the same span Madonna released eleven, David Bowie ten, and Prince thirty-one. (Bush also released five albums of studio material in that period, one of them a covers album—of her own songs.)
In 1993 Michael performed with the surviving members of Queen at the Wembley Stadium tribute concert for Freddie Mercury. “I just wanted perfection,” he reminisced, “which is what I always want.” To rehearse, “everyone else went for an afternoon. I went for five days. Because it had to be perfect.”
In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for mathematics?”
Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles, billiard trajectories like Donald’s are predictable and well understood — even if they’re difficult to carry out in practice. However, research mathematicians still cannot answer basic questions about the possible trajectories of billiard balls on tables in the shape of other polygons (shapes with flat sides). Even triangles, the simplest of polygons, still hold mysteries.
Yet for many in the modern United States, there’s something uniquely unpalatable about eating brains, a squeamishness that goes back only a few generations. Before the mid-20th century, Americans treated the brain like any other cut of meat, especially in areas where livestock animals were raised. At least one company, Rose, still markets canned brains soaked in milk (a typical initial step when preparing brains to remove the blood). Scrambled eggs and brains was once a classic American breakfast pairing, appearing in Fannie Farmer’s influential 1896 cookbook and many others. “When [brain] is lightly cooked and pan-fried, it has a very similar texture to scrambled egg,” says VanHouten, who included a recipe for the dish in her own cookbook, It Takes Guts. “Mixed together, you barely even taste [the brain]. It’s just adding a little bit of richness to your eggs.” Farzin points out that you can use brains the same way as egg yolks; even in custard-based ice cream or an emulsified “brainaise.”
Because of current publishing trends, as well as the accident of Ong’s identity, Fixer is more likely to be recuperated today as an addition to the Asian American canon rather than a continuation on an age-old theme. But like many postwar American novels, it is obsessed with the craft of writing and not a little resentful of its practitioners. William’s victims are mainly the power brokers of American letters—authors, poets, publishers—and his story unfolds as a rageful dispatch about the bruisings and indignities one suffers in a publishing world overrun by poseurs. The novel would have us believe that William is set to destroy their lives, exposing the horrid quality of their writing as he wrenches into his possession their cultural capital. But revenge has no guarantees; Fixer is, after all, the vigorous but doomed effort of an author critiquing literature through literature. The New York book world, decaying from the inside out, cannot be killed or saved—especially if we won’t stop reading about it.
A level of macabre curiosity and an ability to stomach some very frank descriptions of what it takes to care for the dead are absolutely necessary. However, for anyone who has touched death, and been left mystified, “All the Living and the Dead” is essential reading.
“King Nyx” is a book that understands that the crumbling mansions of gothic fiction merely materialize the minds of their female protagonists. It also understands that they must understand this fact, too, if they are to reclaim what is properly theirs. Or, as Bakis put it to me when I made my way to see her in New York’s Hudson Valley on a snowy day last month, it is about finding your voice again when it has been taken from you — perhaps as much by circumstance as by malice.
By 2001, Morrisseau paintings routinely fetched thousands of dollars on the market. The works he now denied having painted were no exception. The auctioneer had advertised them as being from Morrisseau’s hand and claimed to a reporter writing about the dispute that, though he had obtained the paintings from an obscure seller, he had no reason to doubt their authenticity—he had already sold 800 of them without a single buyer’s complaint.
Morrisseau, though justifiably incensed, wasn’t surprised that imitations of his work were being sold as authentic on the open market. As early as 1991, the Toronto Star reported the artist was complaining about being “ripped off” by fraudsters. But for years Canadian law enforcement did little to investigate the artist’s claims that forgers were imitating his work. Eventually, in the face of this inaction, Morrisseau’s lawyers advised him to notify galleries and auctioneers that they were selling fakes and warn them that they could be the subject of a court injunction, civil action or criminal complaint. Still the sales went on.
Keng enjoyed a distinctly southern childhood — spent “suckling nectar out of honeysuckles, going to country fairs and fishing off the dock of Lake Altoona” — that was flavored with dishes from her parents’ home country, sparking a lifelong interest in global cuisine. As a kid, she worked in several of her parents’ retail stores at the local mall, including one that sold (you guessed it) egg rolls and sweet tea.
“This oddball pairing went ‘viral’ and folks lined up for what at first had seemed more like cultural confusion than culinary fusion,” Keng said.
This is the end. I can’t go any further. I’ve come as far as possible; to the northernmost limit; the same latitude as Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula and parts of Alaska. It’s taken me years to reach here by boat. But in case you wonder, I’m not floating in pack ice in the Arctic; I’m in northern Lancashire, on the border with Cumbria at 54 degrees north, at today’s northernmost limit of the navigable network of inland waterways of England and Wales.
Diane Oliver was a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop when she died in a motorcycle crash at age 22. Before her death in 1966, she published four stories in such journals as the Sewanee Review. It’s hard to know what brilliance she might have bestowed on the world had she lived longer, but the newly published collection “Neighbors and Other Stories” provides some inkling. Oliver’s perceptive, insightful work reflects great talent and ambition. The ease and elegance of her prose are striking, as is her faith in her readers’ intelligence — the certainty that they will see glints of subtext without the need for explication.
An examination of adolescence and death and consumption and spectacle, “Big Mall” ponders why the mall makes us feel good, and bad. Much of the book is introspective; some of it looks outward at the cultural forces that spread this particular facet of American commerce across the globe. The motto “No ethical consumption under capitalism” resonates throughout.
“Write while lying in bed,” I tell my creative-writing students. I am trying to get their attention, sure, and the suggestion carries a rebellious flair.
What I know that they don’t yet is that the weight of the work we have to do as artists, in a world in which time is money, can press so heavily upon us that, well, we need to lie down sometimes.
Scott Guild’s debut novel, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a postapocalyptic world populated by plastic figurines, dominated by inescapable advertising, in thrall to virtual reality and fearful of increasing acts of eco-terrorism as well as government clampdowns.
Scott Guild’s first solo album, “Plastic,” is a dark and entertaining saga about a postapocalyptic world populated by plastic figurines, well, you get the point.
First, I think we need to get Barbenheimer out of the way. I very much doubt that Scott Guild intended Plastic, his debut novel about life-sized plastic figurines and the nuclear Armageddon that threatens them, to come so close on the heels of Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s films. It’s a fascinating accident, though: while Plastic is a far more fantastic narrative, it’s drawing from some of the same cultural concerns that fueled the films and the discourse around them. Alongside the novel’s inventive and humorous imagery, Plastic is deeply invested in questions of authenticity in the face of commercialized social pressures, and in the burden of responsibility—at individual and planetary scales—within that society. Also, there are dance numbers.
At once a book for adults that's full of elements that make it feel like a fantasy YA novel, a story about survival and danger that starts with a group of dead kids and only gets weirder from there, and a narrative that shows a mighty writer with a unique voice at the height of her powers, The Book of Love is, simply put, a magical, confusing, heartfelt, strange, wonderfully written novel that delivers everything fans of Link's short fiction expected while also packing a few surprises.
While Archive reads principally as a psychological novel (rather than a capitalist critique), the book is permeated by Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism—the notion that we’re so overwhelmingly engulfed by our capitalist reality that we can no longer imagine alternative ways of living. This is certainly the case for the narrator, who is so immersed in his archival work that he continues half a decade after his dismissal. Any questions about his task have been quelled by the capitalist status quo; productivism reigns supreme.
Women’s stories and the significance of their interior lives are too often dismissed as narcissistic navel gazing. In My Brilliant Sister, Brown, like Franklin, like many other peers and predecessors, celebrates the kind of egotism that allows women to see themselves as significant, and their stories – creative, domestic and otherwise – as worthwhile.
One of the world centres for pet food innovation is located on the site of an old horse farm, deep in the rolling green fields of the British Midlands. The Waltham Petcare Science Institute in Melton Mowbray is the science arm of Mars Petcare, a leading company in the pet food industry. The research that takes place there determines the future products of dozens of pet food brands: Iams, Cesar, Whiskas, Sheba, James Wellbeloved, Pedigree, Eukanuba and more.
About a third of the staff at Waltham work in its research labs. The other two-thirds are dedicated to feeding, training, exercising and maintaining the living spaces of the real stars of the show: the 200 dogs and 200 cats that live at Waltham and test the products developed there. The 200 dogs belong to four different breeds, chosen to represent different canine sizes: labradors for big dogs, beagles for medium, and norfolk terriers and petit basset griffon vendéens for small dogs. Almost all the cats on site are domestic shorthairs, but the odd longhair can also be found.
When Akito Kawahara was 8 years old, his father took him on a members-only tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His father, the renowned conceptual artist On Kawara, had introduced him to butterfly collecting early, and Akito had already amassed about 500 of his own specimens. Seeing the enormous cabinets and extensive floor displays of butterflies and other insects on the museum’s fifth floor, Akito was thrilled, but what really captured his attention was an unassuming chart posted on the door of a curator’s office. It was a phylogeny of butterflies—an evolutionary family tree—and it contained many blank spaces.
“I was so surprised that scientists didn’t know everything about this, and it became my childhood dream to figure out where butterflies came from, how they evolved and how they’re related to each other,” says Kawahara, now a 45-year-old entomologist at the University of Florida.
There’s no established job description for climate communicator—what Swain calls himself—and no traditional source of funding. He’s not particularly a high-energy person, nor is he naturally gregarious; in fact, he has a chronic medical condition that often saps his energy. But his work is needed, he says. “Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today,” Swain says. “I connect the dots between the two. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how a warming climate affects day-to-day variations in weather, but my goal is to push public perception toward what the science actually says.” So when reporters call him, he does his best to call them back.
If The Vaster Wilds is primarily a page-turning survival yarn, it also very clearly offers Groff an opportunity to reflect on the place of women, not just in early 17th-century North America and Europe (in England she was “called many things, Girl, and Wench, and Fool, and Child, and Zed”), but in the general scheme of the patriarchy.
Someday, surely, probably someday soon, someone will write the book that More was marketed as: an upbeat, sassy, tale of a woman’s sexual awakening and how great opening her marriage was for her. In the meantime, we are left to wonder why people were so eager to see victory in a story with so much suffering, why the story of a woman’s relentless capitulation to male desire was sold as a feminist feat. And to note that, in a harsh irony, the media treatment of More was yet another time that Roden Winter finally got the nerve to say what she wanted from her marriage and her sex life—and nobody listened.
We’re not talking of different editions here, but of different texts, different words. In fact, people say and think having read Kafka or Dostoevsky, but what they have actually read are the words of Willa and Edwin Muir, Susan Bernofsky, Christopher Moncrieff, or again those of Constance Garnett, David McDuff or Michael Katz, to name just a few of the English translators of these two masterpieces of world literature.
The Montana hillside on which Switalski and I now stood was a prime example of an unglamorous yet powerful tool for protecting our biodiversity—road removal, commonly known as road decommissioning. In the early 2000s, the Forest Service brought heavy machinery to this old logging road, ripping it up to permit new grasses, shrubs and trees to sprout from the stirred earth. Waist-high thimbleberry bushes now covered the slope, and Douglas fir seedlings plunged roots deep into the loosened soil. It seemed improbable that 30-ton logging trucks had ever trundled through here along a ribbon of asphalt-hard dirt. “One time, I was skiing with a buddy of mine around here and we passed an old road,” Switalski said as we wandered through the clearing. “He didn’t believe there had ever been one there. That’s the ultimate sign of success.”
This dystopian drama is a shout of millennial protest and a bleak workplace satire. Desperate to impress at the Archive, Abernathy speaks in vacuous bullet points and cloaks his feelings beneath a mask of positivity. His supervisors sniff dismissively at his case notes, but he wrangles a promotion, and begins a sweetly low-key romance with his neighbour Rhoda. Yet work is poisoning him: he develops a cut that will not heal and snaps at his new assistant. Doubts swarm in his mind. Does he understand the first thing about the dreams he witnesses? When he siphons away their trauma, do the dreamers lose something of themselves? And where, exactly, do those nightmares go?
I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a rare thing: a genuinely successful rock novel, which many authors have attempted before, to decidedly mixed results. Stovall doesn't fill the book with name-dropping or long discourses on music; she conveys the essence of punk and emo through the prose itself.
Once he’d left Walden behind, in the following 15 years of his short life, Thoreau changed his writing and living style almost entirely: Instead of having an experience and then writing about it, he wrote while he lived, on the road with his pencils and in his attic at night. Thoreau turned the experience of being himself into something that happened in the present. If we take away anything about what it means to go to Walden, it should be this: By the time Thoreau finally wrote about his life at the pond, years after he had experienced it, he’d realized that one gains virtue not by leaving society—society and nature and the individual are far too enmeshed for that—but by standing inside the moment, and opening your arms to more.
McMahon has set himself an almost impossible task: to analyse humanity’s most powerful and contested idea throughout history and across the globe. Most attempts at total histories of ideas fail. Depth is sacrificed to achieve breadth, the reader is marched along too strict a chronological path or the author gets stuck in an etymological quagmire. But McMahon succeeds. This book is deeply researched, tightly argued and sparklingly written. It ought to be read by anyone interested in equality, and also anyone interested in people, history, God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love.
Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences. Frequently repeated words may gain a carapace that resists our scrutiny: take “dignity”, for example, which Marianne Brooker regards with “mild suspicion” as “too clean-cut and classed”, with “none of the chaos that makes us human”.
Andrew Stauffer’s book is a sound introduction to many aspects of Byron’s life, and the selected letters (varying from an almost real-time report on seductions in a stately home to Byron’s despatches from the hectic and disease-ridden Greek port in which he was to die) allow the reader to see something of the chronic restlessness and contrarianism of the man.
Thick roots tumble across a dilapidated house, the snake-like trunks of a banyan tree framing where the front door once stood. Its walls have been hollowed by decades of typhoons, monsoons and summer humidity, now little more than loose, moss-covered stones and mortar dust. Vines tease through cracks in the foundations and fallen leaves litter the rotten floorboards.
This scene wouldn’t look out of place deep in the Malaysian rainforest or the verdant foothills of India. But photographer Stefan Irvine snapped these pictures just a stone’s throw from one of the most densely populated cities in the world, a global metropolis of steely skyscrapers and gridlocked traffic.
Glantz stared at the dregs pooling at the bottom of the wine bottle beside her.
She typed out an ad on Craigslist: “Professional bridesmaid – w4w – 26 (NYC). Let me be there for you, this time, if: you don’t have any other girlfriends except your third cousin, twice removed, who is often found sticking her tongue down an empty bottle of red wine,” she wrote. “You need someone to take control and make sure bridesmaid #4 buys her dress on time and doesn’t show up 3 hours late.”
And then she went to bed.
Hewitt’s poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals. In some of his best poems, nature offers the means of disguise, raided like a dressing-up box. In an untitled poem, he writes about the night: “And I, androgyne of the garden, raise my arms for the gown night holds above me, let fall over my cool skin and slink from the field through the brush, at dusk.” In another untitled poem, he pictures how it might be to “step naked inside/the original night blue dress/its torso of silk…” In Immram, he remembers bathing in silver waters: “Even my skin/sang in its cold dress.”
Taken as a whole, “Lede” paints a portrait of a disappearing journalistic world — of newspapers, mostly, but also of magazines. It contains not a whiff of sentimentality; Trillin is too clear-eyed for that. But readers might feel bereft, noting how much has changed in the 60 years since he started writing, how diminished newspapers have become, how robust newspaper wars once were, how many larger-than-life writers have died or moved on. In short, how things used to be in the trade.
Ultimately, though, this is a sensitively written and generous piece of work. Vera-Gray’s lack of judgement shines from her prose and from her approach to her interview subjects, allowing women no longer to be simply the passive product in the conversation around porn.
Britain has always been a place of innovation, especially when it comes to science. Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are obvious examples. Both left a lasting impact on the field of science, and you’d struggle to find a person who didn’t know about these great men. But famous names can sometimes overshadow other individuals who are also worthy of praise.
At a time when female scientists were almost unheard of, an ingenious young woman named Ada Lovelace completed an ingenious piece of work, proving that imagination is a vital part of scientific innovation.
And yet, for all my nostalgia, I like the way I read now. There are stacks of books in my house that will never be depleted, not just because I’m constantly adding to them—true—but because I simply can’t get to them all, not in this lifetime, not at the slower, more attentive pace at which I now read. Reading is no longer a race that I might win, but a lifelong companion, a dear friend who’s always there for me but never, ever asks for a slice.
Instead, her intensely evocative powers are reserved for things you don’t normally think of as objects of romance: nature, music, friendship, a little tin cup.
This is a vividly written, absorbing memoir of a life filled with triumphs (including her daughter Susan’s own successes as an Olympic gold medal-winning rower) over near-constant adversity. The precise reasons for the continual undermining of her research and academic prestige are left open, though Breaking Through hints that science today suffers because it requires its practitioners to publish papers in numbers rather than merit and to seek grants for safe research, as opposed to risky but potentially groundbreaking work. Quantity not quality has become a career driver.
“Life is short,” she observes. “You don’t want to have regrets that you didn’t get to know a friend because they were different from you, whether that be a person, or an animal, or a vegetable. Try it and see what you think.”
In “Misunderstood Vegetables,” Selengut offers an ethos of redemption and respect, diversity and inclusion, acceptance and love. That might sound like a lot for a book about vegetables, but it’s a book about vegetables beautifully done.
A “sand motor” isn’t an actual motor—it’s a sculpted landscape that works with nature rather than against it. Instead of rebuilding a beach with an even line of new sand, engineers extend one section of the shoreline out into the sea at an angle.. Over time, the natural wave action of the ocean acts as a “motor” that pushes the sand from this protruding landmass out along the rest of the natural shoreline, spreading it down the coastline for miles.
“The Adversary” is a beautifully written, immensely powerful and subtly ingenious novel. Its greatest — which is to say, most monstrous — revelations are so discreetly offered that you could miss them; but when you realize them, they practically take your breath away. They did mine. And when I turned the last page, I just sat there, utterly stunned by this novel’s terrible force.
Now Robinson has written her own exegesis of the first book of the Bible, called Reading Genesis. It follows Calvin’s in treating scripture as art. She knows that such literary analysis may offend modern-day literalists: “To suggest craft in the making of sacred text disturbs some people, as if the Holy Spirit would never descend to the strategies of nuance and emphasis that heighten the intelligibility of a story.” But an aesthetic appreciation of the Bible doesn’t diminish its holiness, she says; on the contrary, artistry is divine. Robinson derives this lesson from Genesis 2:9, finding it in the second story of Creation. God, designing Eden, puts in trees. The first thing the verse tells us is that they’re “pleasant to the sight.” Only after that are we told that they provide good things to eat. Robinson notes that God gave us the gift of enjoyment—which was “nothing less than a sharing of His mind with us.”
This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not. She makes her case.
This is soup, dangit — it’s practically medicinal in its healing properties, both physical and mental. You wouldn’t dollop caviar with a metal spoon or pour an IPA into a champagne flute, so why shouldn’t soup be granted the dignity of its own dedicated vessel?
The heightened expectations I was feeling changed the experience of shaping the nori, rice, and fillings. Where once it had been fun—mucking about—it became work. What I needed to do was to hear, think about, and implement the feedback while still thinking of the process as play. I needed to retain my sense of it as joy.
‘But isn’t it boring?” asked my partner. I had just explained the concept of Alphabetical Diaries, a book which delivers almost exactly what its title promises. The novelist Sheila Heti kept a journal for more than 10 years; she then culled sentences from the pages and arranged those sentences in alphabetical order. The book proceeds from A to Z: in the first chapter, each sentence starts with A, in the second each starts with B, and so on. The structure of the book is slick and oddly captivating. I read it over the holiday season, when lots of people were coming and going from the house, and everyone seemed to want to know more about it. Their curiosity turned quickly to scepticism – the historically correct response to the avant garde.
So, to answer the question: Yes. Absolutely. The book is boring. Sometimes. It’s also thrilling, very funny, often filthy, and a surprisingly powerful weapon against loneliness, at least for this reader. How it achieves all this has to do with the sentences themselves, but even more than that with the unlikelihood of their arrangement; it’s the sentences’ crackpot proximity to one another that makes them sing (admittedly a very odd song). From the W’s: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp on the front and the other in back?”
In Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, Jennifer Metsker gives us over to a mind that makes and unmakes the world. Metsker’s speaker revels in sensory experience even as she troubles the notion that one’s senses are a pathway to truth. While the speaker leads us through a vivid landscape of dead pets and disintegrating language, she bobs in and out of psychosis and interfaces with the banal strictures of care facilities. Through visions and perambulations, Metsker renders a world in which the borders of illness and wellness, reality and unreality, remain perpetually unstable.
A question arises from Ernaux’s body of work and from its attempt to exhaust inexhaustible memory. How does a writer “carry to completion” something lived if writing that thing down—as with the observer effect in quantum mechanics—changes and even adds to the original experience? As Ernaux said in her Nobel lecture: “I conceived of writing as nothing less than the possibility of transfiguring reality.” Imagine Sisyphus finding an additional boulder each time he returned to the bottom of the hill. The question is in sharp relief in The Young Man; it is like an echo laughing back from the epigraph.
Ultimately, Fitzgerald argues that instead of trying to fix the city we might do better to try to fix ourselves — and to question the “anti-urban” philosophy dominating public discussion. Throughout this eclectic book, Fitzgerald’s contrarian outlook is a touchstone.
He despises the Paris streetscape (for its “mix of imperial pomp and saccharine cutesiness”), but he loves Sheffield city centre, and he wryly suggests that we might need to completely reconsider the values we reflexively assign to the city and to nature.
Carine didn’t have a clue that this might be coming, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. The bus, which sat roughly 20 miles down a rough 4×4 trail from the nearest highway, had been a source of concern to Alaskan authorities for years. Too many visitors, inspired by her brother’s story, had gotten into trouble while attempting to visit the site; too many formal and informal rescues had been necessary. In the previous decade, in separate incidents, two young women died on their treks. Both drowned while attempting to cross the cold, fast-moving Teklanika—the same river that had barred Chris, who was 24 when he died, from retreating to the highway as his food supply ran out.
In the eerily quiet early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed that someone in the local government had decided that now was the time to remove the temptation of the bus for good.
The seed of inspiration for author Grace Lin’s ninth and newest children’s book was actually planted almost 20 years ago, right after the release of her 2004 book “Fortune Cookie Fortunes.” She found that in so many cases, when speaking about fortune cookies, people would say, “Oh, fortune cookies aren’t really Chinese . . . with some sort of disdain or disgust. Lin added “as an American-born Asian person who has struggled with her identity . . . I could easily see the same words about me.”
So, Lin took it upon herself to “show this kind of food some respect,” though she says that it took her many years to ultimately put this book together because she needed to find self-acceptance in her own identity before she could make it.
In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction. And color.
Men no longer drop dead as readily as they did a century ago, and can remain in charge for what seems like forever. If modernity has meant challenging the elderly, demanding that they share their power and resources, then our postmodern age is one of their most successful re-enthronements.
Abernethy is building the bristlecone clock to run for the next five millennia, the estimated lifespan of the hardiest trees in the Great Basin. If the clock serves its intended purpose as a philosophical instrument, people will turn away from it much sooner than that. As the clock unwinds, people will direct their temporal gaze to the environment shared with all other life on Earth.
Everyone knows by now that a virus can bring a nation to its knees — the tiny terrorists of smallpox, Spanish flu and COVID-19 have disrupted America’s story in lethal and tragic ways. But what if one small glitch in a virus’ makeup changed everything? What if the smallpox that raged through America’s Native population had been replaced by a less lethal variant? What if Native Americans survived smallpox, fought white invaders to a standstill and created their own version of a modern society?
This is the premise of Francis Spufford’s dazzling new novel, “Cahokia Jazz.” Spufford, an award-winning British writer, tells an intricate, suspenseful and moving story that rises from the mists of America’s prehistory and morphs into an alternate version of America’s story. Part world building, part detective noir, part savage critique of our country’s (real) history, Spufford builds his creation on the foundations of a real place that grew, thrived and then vanished.
But the major point of Sharlene Allsopp’s debut is that nothing should be seen just one way.
Covering topics ranging from the deliciousness of that twist in “Gone Girl” and the joy of Amish romance novels to the semester she spent decoding George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Reed — who teaches writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Pittsburgh — chronicles her lifelong relationships with books and reading.
Underlying each essay, though, is a conviction that people should read what they want to read. The latest Emily Henry book, “Moby-Dick” and tomes on U.S. history, she explains, all offer value to the reader.
I am standing on the sand at Scheveningen, The Hague’s most famous beach resort, in the act of niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. I try not to think about whether I am really doing nothing if I am standing on a beach. Maybe I should be sitting down? But then I would be sitting down. How do you niksen properly? Being effortlessly aimless next to me is Olga Mecking, the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. In the three years since the book was published, she has become the Netherlands’ go-to authority on doing sod all. I suddenly remember there is a pancake house back on the promenade. Does eating pancakes count as doing nothing, or is it too much like doing something? Maybe I am not cut out for niksen.
The schism turned out to be even more catastrophic than either side could have imagined. It left Tran without the peppers he needed to meet the ever-growing demand for his sriracha. Since he lost Underwood’s chilies, his massive factory in Irwindale, Calif., has operated sporadically, at a fraction of its capacity. For the first year after the split, Huy Fong got by on stockpiled mash and Mexican chilies, which were cheap because of a glut. But supply has often been spotty since then: In the first half of 2023, Huy Fong had no chilies at all.
Underwood, meanwhile, faced financial ruin: The vast swaths of land that he had purchased or leased to grow jalapeños couldn’t be planted without a buyer. He was locked into 25-year leases on much of the land he had expanded into, and he didn’t have cash on hand to pay his own suppliers. He took out loans, sold some parcels, and laid off 45 workers.
Both businesses lost millions. The two men became bitter enemies—and they offer sharply contrasting accounts of what went wrong.
Considering his writing routine, it should come as no surprise that Sims’s latest story collection, the excellent Other Minds and Other Stories, is preoccupied with the way technology has interrupted our lives. In “Unknown,” a man is driven to the brink by the repeated calls from a mysterious unlisted number. In “The Postcard,” the narrator blindly follows the directions of his GPS, eventually walking into a waking nightmare. In “Portonaccio Sarcophagus,” a character wanders through his mother’s neighborhood on Google Street View hoping to see her face though all he finds are the app’s faceless creatures.
In someone else’s hands, these might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing—part existential horror, part philosophical exploration.
In a novel about identity, where the layers of assumptions and misconceptions are slowly peeled away to reveal a long-lost sense of self, we never learn our main character’s name. She remains anonymous and yet familiar. “Maybe you think you know her,” Sweeney writes in the opening pages. “Or you know her type.” Perhaps that’s the cleverest thing of all in this sharp and timely story. It could be any one of us.
In a book so focused on the tendency for humans to ruin and destroy, it serves as a reminder that maybe all but our most lasting damage are impermanent in the long run—a bleakly hopeful idea to propel readers through Colanzi’s more chaotic tales of destruction to follow. The collection strikes an overall tense tone with small notes of this sort of existential optimism, as people continue to reach and fail in a world of nuclear power and toxins, and yet the world persists.
With this story for adults, Link is wending her way through an old-growth forest of fantasy novels that stretches from “Harry Potter” to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” adventures in which a small group of young people must confront a dark challenge and a maniacal adversary. But she’s also cutting her own distinctly Linkian path by following the struggles of modern-day teens as they figure out who they are and who they love in an unstable world shimmering with deception.
But once in a while, you find someone from history who seems to have been on the right side all along. Annie Besant (1847-1933) was such a woman, and is the subject of Michael Meyer’s A Dirty, Filthy Book. An early trade unionist, a preacher of “free thought”, an anti-colonist, a campaigner for women’s rights, and, crucially, an early advocate for birth control; Besant was a one-woman revolution. Or, as Meyer puts it, “a badass, a battering ram, a woman who inspired the next generation of social reformers”.
Kershenbaum no doubt sees Why Animals Talk as a book about biology. I prefer to see it as a humble, genial, scholarly, impeccably clear meditation on our own Umwelt. He challenges us to consider that there are ways of being in the world other than ours. Our old instinct is right: if we learn how to listen properly, animals really can tell us something significant about the world that we wouldn’t know without them.
In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.
But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.
It should have been clear to me that there was something besides being a sucker for pain that kept drawing me back into the cinema. Some strange kinship I felt with Sadako. I’d understand in years to come that I’d been investigating my own fear, wanting to know what it was about her that filled me with terror in a way no other movie villain ever had. Even later in life, I would understand that this is where my fascination with monsters—how we create them, why we create them, how what we fear says something about who we are—surfaced into consciousness.
But it would take many a horror movie more for me to make that leap. For the time being, all I knew was that I was swearing off television.
The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.
Nicholson’s unenviable twist, though, is that he’s walking on the sands of an hourglass. He has a diagnosis of a rare bone marrow cancer—“not rare enough, obviously.” But this writer from the industrial English Midlands has been walking all his life and intends to “continue as long as [he] can.”
Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, “Leaving,” cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet.
The dispute has highlighted a fundamental predicament: The art world is crawling with counterfeits—estimates of the proportion of art on the secondary market that isn’t what it claims to be range from 40 to 70 percent—and it can be maddeningly difficult to distinguish a forgery from the real thing. Attributions can flip repeatedly during the life of an artwork, a phenomenon that has become even more common as experts reassess collections with help from new scientific techniques. The result is that the question of authenticity, which seems like it should be cut-and-dried, has come to seem quite fluid. That can create confusion, but also opportunities.
Why do Americans need Bigfoot?
This question propels John O’Connor’s “Secret History of Bigfoot,” a farrago of participatory journalism, anthropological speculation, pop-culture parentheticals and broadsides against Donald Trump that often seems stuck together by sap and tar. And is none the worse for it.
After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and some of my classmates would shudder whenever the number 23 appeared in any context. Other people became fascinated by this form of numerology because as soon as you pay more attention to a certain thing—including a number—you get the feeling that you see it too often to be purely coincidence.
For a long time, people assumed that the late mathematician John McKay might have fallen victim to this same phenomenon, known as the “frequency illusion,” or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. In McKay’s case, the number that captured his imagination was 196,884.
Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?
She had lived in Singapore for 37 years, grown up and discovered her queerness and found the courage to leave her mother’s homophobic home there. She’d worked as a teacher, writer, artist and curator there. She’d fallen in love and had her heart broken there. Despite her appreciation for the island — and especially the community that helped to keep her afloat — the relief of being away from an overbearing and overreaching government was palpable.
In the title essay of her new collection, “Dinner on Monster Island,” De Rozario grapples with the complexity of this feeling, wondering whether leaving her fellow artists and activists behind makes her a monster. Much like the rest of the book, this piece refuses simple answers.
Dunia Ahmed disappeared over a year ago. But before she vanished, weird things were happening, including multiple attempts on her life. So, obviously, two self-proclaimed journalists start a podcast to monetize her tragedy.
In her third novel, “Almost Surely Dead,” Amina Akhtar departs from trends and fashion to sink deep into a missing-person mystery with humorous cynicism and an increasingly creepy edge.
If you crave romances about beekeepers in the Algarve, or sagas of whimsical poisoning in Kensal Green, Nicolas Lunabba’s memoir probably isn’t for you. The clue is very much in the title. Will You Care If I Die? is a raw, intimate story of desperate trust and betrayal, of people perpetually balanced above a terminal abyss. Elegantly translated by Henning Koch, the prose juggles twisted humour, poetry, love and polemic in an aching, challenging journey. Lunabba anatomises what happens when a guarded heart surrenders and when someone always told they were worthless is redefined as precious by even one person.
Sendak died almost 12 years ago, but his studio is exactly as he left it. There are his pencil cups and watercolor sets; there’s his final manuscript, for a book called “No Noses.” And there, glowing like a ripe tomato, is his red cardigan, draped over the back of an empty chair.
Standing among Sendak’s books, art and ephemera, it was easy to imagine that he’d stepped out for his daily 3-mile jaunt down Chestnut Hill Road. Surely he’d come back, pop in a Mozart CD and get cracking on a new project. There were his walking sticks by the front door; there were his poster paints, wearing price tags from an art store that closed in 2016. There was his stereo, labeled with homemade stickers marked “power” and “volume.”
For a brief moment in the Renaissance, in between the invention of the microscope, printing press, and pencils – along with other technologies that uphold modern society – upper class men were rather preoccupied with erecting another innovation: the codpiece.
Group ordering is the perfect solution to every dining complication: Can’t decide between savory or sweet for brunch? Share a stack of pancakes and a frittata! Don’t want too much food but want to try multiple things? Go halfsies on a bunch of small plates. It’s even an economical hack, as splitting things cuts down on the bill.
Through the principal magi of the high Renaissance, Grafton examines the often uneasy, sometimes beneficial, three-way relationship that existed between religion, magic and science. From outre self-publicists like Faustus to respected scholars such as the Florentine friends Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who attempted to synthesise occult knowledge (including Jewish and Islamic learning) with Christian doctrine, he traces the expression of a desire for a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos and man’s place within it, as well as the drive to control the natural world, that paved the way for the evolution of scientific method. “The magus,” he writes, “is a less respectable figure than the artist or the scientist… but he belongs in a dark corner of the same rich tapestry.”
Child piano prodigy Ruth Slenczynska received an urgent telegram in 1934: Famed pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff couldn’t play at his performance in Los Angeles because of an elbow injury. Could she fill in?
Slenczynska was 9.
If you’re a vacation prepper like me — think a pin-clustered Google Maps and dossier-level Google docs — joining a line is a way to stay present and not overthink every decision. Now you’re a temporary part of the local community. All those sets of feet are a collective vote of confidence. What you’re about to eat is worth it.
Andrew Leland addresses this prevalent fear of blindness among sighted people in his heart-wrenching new memoir The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (2023), which details the writer’s progressive loss of vision from retinitis pigmentosa. According to Leland, “[t]here are a few common souvenirs that sighted tourists tend to take away from day trips to the country of the blind. The primary one is pity masquerading as empathy: ‘How difficult their lives are,’ one might conclude, while more quietly affirming, Thank god for my eyesight.” Leland occupies an unusual position: not only is he losing his sight as an adult, but he’s also losing it gradually. He perceives the world with a “paradoxical double vision: through sighted eyes, and through blind ones,” and is thus particularly attuned to the challenges, slights, and condescension to which blind people are frequently subject.
From her base in the Forest of Dean, Lyons taps into networks of local enthusiasts, wildlife photographers, rangers and boar-haters who help her find traces of the elusive animals. Groundbreakers is rich in evocative accounts of her own solitary, wonder-charged encounters, from resonant snorts and grunts in the darkness to glimpses of sows leading litters of the boarlets known as “humbugs” for their striped coats. Their advocates describe boars’ many contributions to our ecosystems: ploughing up the earth for tasty acorns, tubers, bulbs and grubs, they benefit wild flowers, trees, birds and other animals. They encourage the return of a shrub layer in woodland, and break up the choking swathes of a single plant species – in Britain usually bracken – that spring up on depleted and mismanaged land.
Waidner’s humor is similarly accessible — playful and unpretentious; and their prose, despite being peppered with foreign phrases and grammatical oddities, is disarmingly smooth. But working hard just beneath the surface of this feisty, funny, easily digestible insanity are bigger ideas, about who deserves to be rescued from tough circumstances, and why. What happens if the person in need of assistance doesn’t match the image of a model recipient?
Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art’s sake—that is, for beauty’s sake. But why do we possess a sense of beauty to begin with? A question we will never answer. Perhaps it’s just a kind of superfluity of sexual attraction. Nature needs us to feel drawn to other human bodies, but evolution is imprecise. In order to go far enough, to make that feeling strong enough, it went too far. Others are powerfully lovely to us, but so, in a strangely different, strangely similar way, are flowers and sunsets. Art, in turn, this line of thought might go, is a response to natural beauty. Stunned by it, we seek to rival it, to reproduce it, to prolong it. Flowers fade, sunsets melt from moment to moment; the love of bodies brings us grief. Art abides. “When old age shall this generational waste, / Thou shalt remain.”
If the past 50 years have taught us one thing, it’s that the problem of reconciling quantum physics with gravity is much more difficult than anyone thought it would be. After so much trial and failure, it certainly seems that we are missing something big.
At some point during the past few years, I looked around to find my apartment — nay, my body — had become a temple to everywhere I’ve ever eaten. Mugs and hats from local grocers, hoodies from roadside diners, T-shirts and totes from damn near everywhere else. I’ve had to install more hooks in my kitchen mug rack. I’m thinking of buying a second dresser. I need a 12-step program for tote bags. What, exactly, is happening?
Yet, Hill’s penchant for super-abundance equips him well for the task of capturing the contours of modern American life. Wellness is the kind of novel that feels genuinely capacious and lively, full of interconnected rooms stuffed with unexpected fascinations. A reader emerges from Hill’s world of Wellness with a keener eye for the tragicomic maladies of marriage, and a greater ear for the strangely affecting rhythms and algorithms of 21st-century life.
I was in Los Angeles on one of the occasions when Malibu burned, in the 2018 Woolsey Fire. More than 30 miles away, in West Hollywood, not knowing any better, I went about my day, like everybody else, walking, shopping, doing errands, even as white ash fell onto our heads, as gently as snow. I thought about that day as I read Manjula Martin’s memoir, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. And I thought about everything we have learned and haven’t learned since, over the past five painful years of fire and smoke.
When Rachael Kay Albers was shopping around her book proposal, the editors at a Big Five publishing house loved the idea. The problem came from the marketing department, which had an issue: She didn’t have a big enough following. With any book, but especially nonfiction ones, publishers want a guarantee that a writer comes with a built-in audience of people who already read and support their work and, crucially, will fork over $27 — a typical price for a new hardcover book — when it debuts.
It was ironic, considering her proposal was about what the age of the “personal brand” is doing to our humanity. Albers, 39, is an expert in what she calls the “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online. She’s talking about the hustle bro “gurus” flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady “passive income” schemes, yes, but she’s also talking about the bizarre fact that her “65-year-old mom, who’s an accountant, is being encouraged by her company to post on LinkedIn to ‘build [her] brand.’”
Mitch Ammons knows his story could have ended like the stories of so many buddies from his darkest years—with an obituary. Instead, the longtime addict changed course in a manner that is, without hyperbole, beyond belief.
It’s tough to fully grasp the scale of this turnaround until you see Ammons run—to see him metronomically cruise 4:50 miles for more than an hour or to watch him push himself to the brink of consciousness in an interval session at sunrise. Then you can absorb the way he embraces suffering—relishing the revelation of what his body can do while immersing himself in pain that must feel like a cosmic body rub compared to waking up every morning in opiate withdrawal.
The very term “concept” is difficult to define. A good rough idea of what it means is that concepts are all the properties, examples and associations we think of when we use, hear or read a word. For instance, the concept of “birds” might include the following: they have wings and can fly; blackbirds are a good example of them; and we associate them with nests and animals in general, among other things. Concepts are different from dictionary definitions, which are rigorously determined and specific (and usually need to be learned). When we use language in everyday life, however, our concepts are central to what we actually mean.
This is the success of Spectral Evidence: Pardlo’s sensitivity, emotional intelligence, and insistence on an embodied (distinctly not spectral) treatment of race and womanhood. It is not just a book about racialized/gendered violence and its inheritance. It is not just about our national identity and the ways it is bound up in that violence. Spectral Evidence is about the self, the way it works, and the ways these histories are inscribed upon it.
Technology’s ubiquity throughout the collection only serves to better highlight the humanity depicted and examined within it.
In Kiley Reid’s novels, there are no real heroes or villains, just people navigating the considerable pitfalls of life and slipping up along the way. Bad judgment, yes. Bad people? That’s a little simplistic for Reid.
“For the most part, I think people are trying,” Reid says via Zoom from Ann Arbor, Mich., where she’s lived since she began teaching writing at the University of Michigan in 2022. “Sometimes their attempts make them falter a lot, and I like to replicate that with my characters.”
The best part about being a successful painter, says Weyant, is still the opportunity to paint. Her friend and portrait subject, the writer Emma Cline, remembers being at a dinner party with the artist. “She kept slipping off to the bathroom to look at photos on her phone of a painting in progress—basically so she could continue ‘painting’ in her mind while still being at the dinner.”
But at this level, there is a risk that painting will take a backseat to other duties. She describes to me the period following her Gagosian solo debut, in late 2022. “All of life felt like work,” she says. “Parties and dinners and schmoozing. I just felt like I was losing the plot of it.” The existential dread crept in. “I felt like I had crossed all these lines and goals…. And I didn’t feel any better than I did before. It was a weird feeling: This isn’t feeding me in the way I wanted. I don’t like it.” Then she got to work on her most recent show, which opened at Gagosian’s Paris outpost last fall. One painting features a stark question, painted in bubbly capital letters, suspended over a vase of flowers. “THIS IS A LIFE?” the painting wonders.
These days I often wonder how many of our stories are true, how many are imagination or misplaced longing, but I refuse to believe that my grandmothers were just ordinary women who lived, then died, forever lost to me. Somehow we are all still connected through both the toil and pleasure of kitchen labor. I’m closer to them when I cook. I become them when I cook.
The Cloud Notebook is a triumph of participatory reading. It creates a whole world and theorizes its creation at once through the reader’s encounter with the world/text. Consciousness, in the form of the reader, is echoed in the notebook’s fictionalized writer, elaborating the present as lyric subject, moving towards the totality of the world as it comes into being.
“One Wrong Word” delivers a close look on how a stray word, a bit of gossip, can be detrimental. Ryan takes the often-used phrase “words have power” to a different dimension in her 15th novel, with savvy plotting and characters that avoid cliches.