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.