Most people can picture images in their heads - the look of an apple, the appearance of their kitchen or the smile of their best friend - but not everyone can.
Those who cannot visualise anything in their mind's eye are probably among 1% of people with extreme aphantasia, according to a review of studies on the phenomenon.
At the heart of Dennis’ story is a failed therapy system endured by children in real life, and which Denfeld says is still in use today. Known as “holding time,” Denfeld brings the suffering of children subjected to this “care” to vivid life. Denfeld bases the details in this fictional novel on real-life experiences and issues she encountered as a foster parent.
In the 14th century, King Charles VI of France suffered from a curious, but by no means original, delusion. He believed his body was made entirely of glass. A relatively new material, both fragile and transparent, glass captures the hypochondriac’s acutest fear – brittle vulnerability – with their greatest desire: visceral omniscience. This human longing to peer inside our “meaty vessel” was answered in the 20th century by medical technologies, including blood testing, microscopy and imaging, which became widely available. Rather than soothe the hypochondriacal itch, however, this intimate access – along with Google’s democratisation of medical knowledge – has fuelled health anxiety to new heights.
Susan Pope arrived as a 5-year-old in pre-statehood Alaska from Buffalo, New York, with her parents and a younger sister. She has remained a resident ever since, with an extended family now including two near-adult grandchildren. “Rivers and Ice,” in well-crafted and insightful essay chapters, follows her life as both she and Alaska grew from raw beginnings to the present day. The whole forms a generational portrait of family and place, involving both love and loss and imbued with hard-won resilience.
In the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution gave way to the Progressive Era, and with it emerged a new middle class. As job conditions and wages improved, many Americans decamped from cities to the suburbs, where their children had much more space—and much more time. Americans became less worried about their children’s utility and more attentive to their development and happiness. By 1918, every state had passed laws mandating that children attend school. This meant the emergence of summer vacation, and as children began to seek both pocket change and entertainment, the lemonade stand—offering the chance to play at business, and for a cash reward, no less—presented itself as an apt activity.
But the Cadbury Creme Egg is also a candy anomaly. “There’s not another thing out there like the Cadbury Creme Egg, it’s both terrifying and delectable,” says candy historian Jason Liebig. “If you get the Cadbury Mini Eggs, for example, those aren’t dissimilar to other treats you can get throughout the year. Jelly beans are a lot like Mike & Ike’s. But a Cadbury Creme Egg? You’re not getting anything like that at any other time of the year.” And for many Americans, Easter is also the only time of year that we’re eating Cadbury-branded chocolate at all.
Why is it so dark, I ask. How can we continue our session? While all of this is happening, the folders get mixed up. And to my horror, my much-needed payment (a thousand-dollar bill, one fifty, and the rest mostly singles) has hit the floor and spread across the room. Even in the dark, the students notice my panic, and slide closer, hoping to catch at least a few dollars. If it’s a game, it’s certainly not one I enjoy.
Decisively, though her voice retains its sweetness, my host orders a stop to the chaos. She has become the good witch! She finds her way through the dark and whispers in my ears: Relax, my darling, you are sleeping and all you must do is open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes…
This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.
Reading James, I remembered when a working director once explained to me that the goal of the theatre-artist (her goal, at least) was to create a performance where the audience could sink so deeply into the material, they might forget for a moment they are watching a play. It saddened me: the limits of working with text on a page, the understanding that novelists might not be able to do the same. The good news is that while James may only be a novel about performance, it is a novel where the reader can sink in so deeply, they might forget it’s a reimagining.
The story is rich in satire, but also full of empathy. At its core is the residents’ struggle to cope with the inexplicable happenings, blaming interlopers, robbers, the mental decline of old age or dishonest tradesmen.
This book is an alarming mirroring of the present, as alarming as it is instructive, especially the attention given to the best way to effect change. Violence that attracts attention, or incremental legal progress?
Not all cookbooks take three years of development and three generations of input to develop recipes, but these extra steps taken by Taiwanese-Canadian home chef Tiffy Chen have paid off.
Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown—will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault.
And so modern Stoicism finds itself somehow settling into Successories-style aphorisms, screw-your-feelings machismo and the ends justifying the means. This is many things, but it’s not a coherent moral philosophy.
The narrative spine of "Wild Houses" has all the trappings of a thriller, but the nighttime quarry scene should give readers pause. Barrett, a native of Ireland’s County Mayo and now based in Toronto, is more interested in character than plot, and his story’s scaffolding is largely an excuse to delve into the psyches of Dev, Doll, and Nicky, Doll’s 17-year-old girlfriend who works at a nearby pub called the Pearl.
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
Supernormal experiences were a delicate question in the late 19th century, especially when they bore on such wobbly tenets of Christianity as immortality. Educated elites increasingly wished to strip religion of its supernatural excrescences and make it a sound pillar of society. The development of both anthropology and psychiatry encouraged them to explain away unearthly visions, ghosts or demons as relics of primitive thought or symptoms of mental illness. Yet the reductionism of these new disciplines was as brittle as it was ambitious, and Lang became their ardent critic. Like the SPR, whose president he later became, he sought evidence to challenge or at least stretch scientific naturalism’s pinched vision of reality. In a voluminous grimoire of ghost stories he published in 1897, he confessed that he was in a ‘balance of doubt’ about their truth. John Sloan’s new biography of Lang explores his attempts to frame and hold that balance. It reconstructs the development of a professional gadfly, who skipped across the hardening boundaries of literature, anthropology and history to insist on the strange origins of religion.
Composed of three narratives about 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas, Choice has been termed a triptych by its author and, like its visual forebears, the novel needles our moral impulses. The issues in question, from climate change to global poverty, are modern, but the novel’s interest in sin and virtue is redolent of the triptych’s medieval preoccupations. Where Choice differs is that, in its world, there are no unambiguous rights or wrongs. As one character observes of another: “No escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.” This is a triptych for a secular age – without hope of salvation, however hard humans try.
You can read “City in Ruins” as a meditation on honor, revenge and justice, but the book also challenges readers to examine beliefs about morality. In “City in Ruins,” whether you’re in the world of gangsters or law enforcement or the casino industry, Winslow shows us that morality rides a sliding scale.
It’s a beautiful story of life and love and loss, and the journey that all of these characters go on throughout the novel isn’t one that readers will forget in a hurry.
Around this time an efficiency manual called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich was all the rage. The magazine was profiling Tim Ferriss, its author, and although the profile was arch and as skeptical as a profile of a productivity guru could possibly be, that the story had been assigned at all confounded me. Still romanced by the legitimacy of having a 9-to-5, and largely unbothered by the difficulty of my job, I couldn’t imagine wanting to escape it. Not that joining the new rich didn’t sound appealing, but four hours wasn’t nearly enough hours to prove I mattered. If anything, I wanted more work. I was sure that this was a book for the desperate.
Over the decade that followed, I joined the desperate. How’d that happen? I’ll make it quick: I made a wish on a monkey’s paw for more and better work and some capitalist fairy godmother granted it to me. With it came a new problem: Showing up wouldn’t cut it anymore. I would have to be productive.
All humans know the feeling. This isn’t the dark of the inside of a tent on a moonless night, when the forest sways in purple starlight, nor is it a creepy basement where a thin ribbon of light can weasel under the door. You can feel this kind of dark at a place like Carlsbad Caverns, where 830 feet under the New Mexican desert, the rangers turn off the lights and let the children scream. It’s the kind that triggers some atavistic line of code that sends your amygdala rag-dolling over evolution’s awful ledges. How can I survive this? How can I escape it? And the worst: What else is in here, and is it hungry?
Evening comes. Time to be brave. I take one last look around outside and gather a few more nuts. A mountain chickadee twitters about. Deer slip through the grass. I go inside and seal myself into the room with a few necessities I’ll be able to locate by touch. A toothbrush. A Hydro Flask. A gray cotton onesie my wife got me for Christmas, because of the way it feels and smells—two senses the dark can’t steal. I light a small candle and turn off the overhead light, hoping to feel a sense of control for one last minute.
Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming’s limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.
From the very start, Memory Piece is a tale of escape and entanglement. Lisa Ko’s limber, ambitious second novel opens with three teen girls, bored at a Fourth of July barbecue, sneaking into a neighbor’s cookout to swipe burgers. The adventure jolts them briefly out of their boredom; it also creates a bond that lasts into adulthood. But Memory Piece is not, at its core, a novel of friendship. Ko isn’t especially concerned with the summer-afternoon alchemy that ropes her protagonists—Giselle Chin, who becomes a conceptual artist; Jackie Ong, a gifted coder who profits in the turn-of-the-millennium tech boom; and Ellen Ng, one of downtown Manhattan’s archetypal squatters—together for life. Instead, her central preoccupation is the doomed drive toward freedom—from capitalism, from expectations, from the public eye—that the three women share.
Phillips suggests an alternative, which he underscores through reference to the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. To resist habit’s deadening impact, Shklovsky tells us, we can turn to art, to literature: he writes that “[t]he technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”
In other words, literature helps us give up mundanity. It allows us to sit with the shapeless morass of time by framing it on the page. The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book.
Yet I have always felt that the story’s not the thing. Pace Hamlet, not even the play’s the thing. Hamlet the prince, Hamlet the play, the play within the play, the Ghost, Elsinore, Denmark, the great Globe itself: language was always the thing that all those other things were made of.
A blessing, then, that we are still close enough, for now, to know and love this writer in the original English. (Translations into contemporary—read: simplified—language abound, a running crib for English-class summaries.) What is to be found in abundance here is not to be found elsewhere, in spite of the writer’s having gathered disciples in every subsequent generation.
In short, the textbooks paint a picture of a cellular ‘assembly line’ where genes issue instructions for the manufacture of proteins that do the work of the body from day to day. This textbook description of the cell matches, almost word for word, a social institution. The picture of the cytoplasm and its organelles performing the work of ‘manufacturing’, ‘packaging’ and ‘shipping’ molecules according to ‘instructions’ from the genes eerily evokes the social hierarchy of executives ordering the manual labour of toiling masses. The only problem is that the cell is not a ‘factory’. It does not have a ‘control centre’. As the feminist scholar Emily Martin observes, the assumption of centralised control distorts our understanding of the cell.
Major changes upend one’s life, but a cancer diagnosis turns that shift into an ongoing, full-time endeavor. If only it were as easy as having surgery to excise the tumor away – and yes, sometimes that’s the case. But when you are in your early 40s, as Catherine is, or late 30s, as I was when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, you are involuntarily removed from everyday society and thrust into the alternate universe that is Cancerland.
Percival Everett’s novels seem to ward off the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism, yet they also have a way of dangling the analytical ropes with which we critics hang ourselves. His latest novel follows the misadventures of a runaway named Jim and his young companion Huckleberry in the antebellum American South. As in another novel featuring those protagonists, Jim has fled enslavement in the state of Missouri, and Huckleberry, Huck for short, has faked his own death to escape his no-good abusive Pap. As in that other novel, the two are both bonded and divided by the circumstances of their respective fugitivity as they float together on a raft down the Mississippi River. As in that other novel, the narrator of Everett’s book is setting down his story as best he knows how, but—rather differently—the narrator here is not the boy but the man who has been deprived of the legal leave to be one. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” Jim writes. The novel is titled, simply, “James,” the name Jim chooses for himself. In conferring interiority (and literacy) upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom, Everett seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins, exorcizing old racial baggage to confront the perennial question of—to use another worn idiom—what “Huck Finn” means now. And yet, with small exceptions, “James” meanders away from the prefab idioms that await it.
For a writer who often plays by few rules, Everett has drawn on what he knows best here — that freedom can be won, one word at a time. Add levity and serious intent and you have a novel that’s a class act.
If the googly eyes on the cover didn’t make it apparent, Ferdia Lennon’s knockout debut novel “Glorious Exploits” is hilarious. In fact, it’s loaded with dark humor literally from page one. Never before has history been such a riot, and so indelibly endearing.
The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.
The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.
Yet it is the incidental quality of shopping scenes that draws me to them. Rather than plot, they provide texture—the thickening of a world. In them, characters let down their guard. The low-stakes ritual offers up a moment of respite, even while storyline is breathing down one’s neck. Shop often figure as a kind of threshold in literature—between the known and the unknown; between ordinary life and adventure—an in-between zone.
Inevitably, in the middle of the night, as I had every other night, I had to pee. After a few minutes of trying to convince myself I could just go back to sleep, I unzipped my bag, stumbled out beyond the circle of expeditioners to do my business, and then slipped back in again.
Except that my sleeping bag wouldn’t zip. I tugged. I swore. I burrowed down again as far as I could, groped for my hot water bottle, tried to lie on the bag in such a way that my weight would hold it shut.
Born as part of the initial wave of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the radical ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only one requirement for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”
How worthy of respect is a justice system that focuses on retribution rather than protection of the community and the rehabilitation of perpetrators? It is a subject that demands more political and public attention than it gets.
Of course, the purpose of a novel is to entertain, but there is no reason why a serious subject cannot be examined in a compelling manner. With What I Would Do to You, Harper explores in some depth the pros and cons of an important issue in an engaging and affecting way. That is quite an achievement and definitely deserving of your attention.
The real world doesn’t deliver adversity in novel-sized chapters. Rarely do we enjoy perfect hindsight or the ability to glean meaning from violence or misfortune. In that sense, the unforgiving Ireland of Colin Barrett’s new novel, Wild Houses, feels uncomfortably familiar in its complexity and matter-of-fact ruthlessness.
The idea that experience needs to be ratified by reflection is central to Ernaux’s literary project. Time is circular. Experience is renewable. Nothing is lost, and every action makes a long shadow of reflection.
Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo. I had not come across her before picking up All Things Are Too Small and was unprepared for the book’s extraordinary clout and reach. She is an American journalist (a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times and a critic on the Washington Post), a philosopher, polemicist and a wit. She challenges, in this bracing, original and intellectually poised collection of essays, many of our unquestioning modern assumptions and, most persuasively, takes aim at the promotion of minimalism as an ideal for our living spaces, novels and ourselves.
The first sign that “Molly” is not going to be a typical memoir arrives on Page 20. That’s when the author, Blake Butler, finds himself on his hands and knees in agony beside his wife, whose body he has found in wild grass after she has ended her life with a handgun. It is at this moment that he is stung by a bee — the first bee sting of his life — on his right eyelid. It is as if the universe is declaring: Here is some extra awfulness, friend, just for you.
“Molly” carries on in this fashion. It’s an atrocity exhibition. Butler taps a vein of garish and almost comic malevolence that keeps flowing.
This is a rare novel, in that hostile landscape policed by cultural studies departments and the 3am stasi on social media, that is temperamentally unafraid of trespass. Andrew O’Hagan goes where his story takes him, deep into the lives of all the communities who live around “the Cally”, the main road that heads north from the capital’s new centre, King’s Cross. The result is a book – it’s hard to resist the word Dickensian – that feels as near an authentic slice of contemporary London life as any packed tube carriage.
The first section of Lisa Ko’s novel follows a Chinese-American artist, Giselle Chin, who in 1996 begins a durational work called Memory Piece: she writes down her memories for seven hours a day, for a year – and at the end she burns the lot. But in Memory Piece, the book, the documenting of life becomes something precious and worth preserving.
Gritty and refreshingly girl-centric, “Memory Piece” is finest as a novel of the analog, reminding, for example, how we once peered at “scrambled cable channels, the premium ones their parents used to subscribe to, and tried to decode body parts” — a time capsule of mixtapes, newspaper collages and Crystal Light.
It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.
It’s a triple-helixed biography of the main contributors to the counterculture comedy revolution of the post-’60s: “SNL,” the Lampoon and the Second City comedy troupe in all its stage and TV iterations. It’s a tale of Hollywood excess — both budgetary and pharmaceutical — that beggars belief. And, at its essence, it’s the story of a great American bromance, a partnership that was kept alive by one man’s creative discipline before crashing on the rocks of another man’s addictions.
Norwell kept a journal and also painted watercolor portraits of the places he passed through and the things he saw along the way. In his recent and thoroughly delightful new book “A Complex Coast,” readers are treated to both, allowing them to share, through words and imagery, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure by someone who approached his journey with an open mind and heart, and who captured it as it happened with his diary entries and paintbrushes.
What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb. One might have assumed from the millions of words devoted to the end of the world during the 1990s that the noise about it would reach a millennial crescendo, but instead it has grown and grown. In 1989, Susan Sontag suggested the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now was wishful thinking and what we are living with instead is “Apocalypse from Now On”. This must come to some degree from the fact that we absorb more news, which is to say bad news, than at any time in history. Speaking during the second world war, long before 24-hour news or the internet, the poet Wallace Stevens argued that the “pressure of reality” overwhelms our sense of perspective: “It is not possible to look backward and to see that the same thing was true in the past. It is a question of pressure, and pressure is incalculable and eludes the historian.”
What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness.
Some stories give you the unvarnished truth, some the varnished one. “Worry” is generous and wise enough to give both.
This isn’t a story about ChatGPT and the other large language models and their looming impact on everything from Hollywood to homework, though there is a bit of that. Instead, it’s an account of how the everyday algorithms we have already learned to live beside are changing us: from the people paid (not much) to make sense of vast datasets, to the unintended consequences of the biases they contain. It’s also the story of how the AI systems built using that data benefit many of us (you, ordering McDonald’s on UberEats) at the expense of some – usually individuals and communities that are already marginalised (the young immigrant worker picking up your Big Mac for a small fee).
During her brief and polarizing career in a male-dominated sport in a chauvinistic society, a focus on looks over brains was typically how it went for Lane, who died of cancer on Feb. 28 at age 90 at her home in Kent, New York. When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated (Fischer would too, 11 years later). She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians.
Lane marketed herself and, in the process, elevated chess’s profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism and classism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game.
A month later, Theda euthanized herself while I was still abroad. It happened after she’d attended a medical appointment with a neurologist who implied her suffering was her fault because—that neurologist believed—it had a mental health component at its core. I was staying at an Airbnb in Ithaca at the time. I hadn’t truly imagined Theda ending her life without calling me home. That day, Mum phoned while I was at a café getting ready to catch a bus to Albany. After the call, I remember walking down the main street toward the bus station on autopilot, unsure where I was going. Mum’s voice was playing over in my head, telling me that my sister was gone. It felt like I was watching myself from outside my own flesh.
I wasn’t mad at Theda for ending her life. She had chosen euthanasia after reaching the end of what she could tolerate. I knew that it no longer mattered whether her illness had been in her body or mind. All I knew is that she was no longer suffering.
The keys, knobs and levers of typewriters were made to do one thing, and one thing only: draw out words we each carry within us that have the potential to create meaning, achieve permanence.
In her debut novel, Allie Millington takes such magic a step further. Her titular character, a midcentury Lettera 22 (called Olivetti, after the company that made him), is a sentient if stationary being who — like so many teddy bears, action figures and sock puppets in children’s literature and pop culture — can worry, remember, love and fear. Olivetti lives, which is a boon to the Brindle family, particularly their quietly troubled 12-year-old, Ernest.
What this home turf lacks in breadth it gains in depth. Harris digs down through geological and historical strata, unearthing life stories from the second world war (Canadian soldiers, Polish resistance workers), the days of the French Revolution (bedraggled refugees arriving on the beach), travelling back to the age of medieval iron-working on the Weald and beyond, to the prehistoric era when Sussex lay under a shallow sea, quietly knitting itself together from chalk and fish bones. Far from finding dull familiarity, Harris discovers that “everything was stranger and more full of life than I’d had the wit to imagine”.
For me, who grew up with the hum of Saved by the Bell in the background after school, it felt like Lopez was releasing some sort of pent up Corporate Latino energy that only those of us who’ve had to code-switch to get by in our careers can relate to. I learned to master this ability early on in my own career in journalism. If you called me on my office line while working at the Orange County Register during the aughts, I’d go right into my telemarketing voice, very much giving Nina from the 1999 cult hit Office Space; hit me up on my cell, and you’d get “What up foo” Serena. I was often discouraged by my editors from writing about issues impacting the Latino community lest I be accused of activism. So I did much like what Lopez and countless others do: Get in where I fit in, raising my hand at every opportunity, placing my Latinidad not to the side, but not fully embracing my inner northeast SFV out loud in public settings either.
In competitive Scrabble, there’s Nigel Richards and everyone else. The 57-year-old New Zealander has won 11 North American and world championships combined; no one else has won more than three. He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words. He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots. He’s a gentle, mild-mannered, private, witty, unflappable enigma—the undisputed Scrabble GOAT, and one of the most dominant players of any game ever.
Nigel—one name, like Serena or Michelangelo—went viral in 2015 after winning the French world championship even though he didn’t speak French. He inhaled some large chunk of the 386,000 words on the Francophone list, and did it in a mind-boggling nine weeks. That same year, he won a tournament in Bangalore, India, with a 30-3 record. In one of those games, Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS (the plural of a Latin American dance). In another, he threaded ASAFETIDA (a resin used in Indian cooking) through the F and the D. Those words likely had never been played in Scrabble before, and likely won’t be again.
Here’s a thing: in the 10 days since, I’ve typed that word died hundreds of times, yet I’m still shocked every time I do so. Just when I was starting to get used to it, I got a text referring to my “dad’s death”. I’d not seen it expressed like that. Death. Death rather than died. It floored me. Odd that. Dying, too; I flinched as I typed that above. Wow. If even the most basic nouns and verbs lie in wait, scattered on this Via Dolorosa like shards of glass, how are you supposed to negotiate any of it?
Mortensen had recently completed a 10,538-mile bike journey from Spain to Singapore — and, by his estimate, the last section of a ride around the world that began four years ago. Yet he was enthusiastic about the unremarkable crossing: “No way! This is a new state biking for me.”
There were no waits (he made the light) or passport checks on that sunny Saturday in February. It was a stark contrast to the many questions, and occasional delays, Mortensen faced at some of the 26 national borders he crossed on his ride from Europe to Asia. Many people picked up cycling to provide some relief from pandemic lockdowns. But Mortensen, feeling caged, took his hobby to an extreme.
This is the great triumph of Carrie, that King somehow knew about all the loathsome ways the anger of a teenage girl can warp and protrude. Though I now regard my past self as an almost continuously angry person, I would never have thought to describe myself that way at the time. Like many girls, I saw anger as something abstracted, for other people, not something I could claim for myself. Instead I forced it back down until it re-emerged in some new, worse form: the punitive eating disorders, the subtle manipulation of coercible boyfriends, the quick razor slash on the thigh between maths and English. All worse and more tiresome things to experience and enact than simply being angry, but I didn’t have the language for that and still often don’t.
It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse. “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”
Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid black-comedy-cum-thriller about social climbing and murder in which Brideshead Revisited and Wodehouse are frequently and nudgingly referenced, and further back in the mix are The Great Gatsby, a dab of Patricia Highsmith and a lick of the Martin Amis of Dead Babies. Coming in the afterwash of Saltburn, it’s very on trend. Call it Brideshead gothic, perhaps.
Every mother is extraordinary, seen through her children’s eyes. Actress and playwright Sabrina Reeves’s compelling debut novel about an aging mother who becomes intimate with alcohol, focuses on her children’s efforts to get her the medical treatment that may save her. Hovering over Reeves’s mesmerizing text is the question faced by so many adult children — what do we do for parents who’ve become a “situation”?
Originally published in 1995 in German, the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Children of the Dead” is perhaps the only zombie novel written by a Nobel Prize winner. Of course — Jelinek being Jelinek — it is a great deal more than that: a savage reckoning with the Holocaust; an indictment of consumer culture; a compilation of ghastly erotica replete with undead orgies; an erudite display of Joycean wordplay; and a relentlessly bleak portrait of the human capacity for self-deception.
Some books are written with the intention of making readers think differently about the world around us, to make us interrogate long-held beliefs or ponder questions about our existence. Then there are the books that feel written for pure entertainment; those underrated stories that are the bookish equivalent of settling down with a jumbo box of popcorn and your favourite comfort movie. Ally Carter’s The Blonde Identity is very much the latter kind – a fun, fast-moving, romantic and adventure-filled book that provides a much-needed escape from reality. That’s not to say it doesn’t have heart – it wouldn’t be able to win readers over if it didn’t – but the best thing about Carter’s story is just how unapologetically tongue-in-cheek it is.
Tact isn’t a word you hear a lot nowadays. Perhaps we’re no longer all that tactful. But how tactful were modernist writers and thinkers? This is just one question posed by Katja Haustein’s new book, Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (2023): “What is the relation,” she asks, between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?
How can culture escape the doldrums of algorithmic capitalism? Through social housing, an expanded role for the state, the energy transition, fresh imagination in political thought, a new spirit of conflict between society’s owners and nonowners: all of that, yes, and (why not?) through stiffer regulation of the tech platforms as well. But what’s needed more than anything else, I think, is for culture—in the way that critics discuss it, institutions present it, and artists produce it—to recover a sense of its own historical importance. That means complete immersion in culture, the culturization of everything, the rediscovery of culture’s vocation as the motor of history rather than the scenery we all pass on the way to whatever is next.
There are no photographs of my father holding me as a baby. Or, if there are, I’ve never seen them. He’s never brought them out and gotten misty remembering the day his first child, his parents’ first grandchild, was born. He was not in the delivery room that morning; it would be many hours before he met his son.
This isn’t surprising—in those days, fathers took no part in childbirth. Our modern idea of the supportive husband crouching at his laboring wife’s bedside, holding her hand as she screams and sweats and shits herself, would have baffled and horrified a man of his generation—and in any case, my mother was unconscious through the whole thing, as was also the norm.
But there are certain aspects of Japan that are clear to anyone, even a young reporter on his first night in the country, dropped off the Narita Airport shuttle at the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. One of those things is the coming of the cherry blossoms. Every spring on Japan’s four main islands, from the southwestern reaches of Kyushu to the northern island of Hokkaido, the country pauses to witness the brief flowering of the sakura, the cherry blossoms. It’s a moment, a few days at most, when a country that otherwise feels as though it is in perpetual motion comes to a halt to engage in hanami — gathering to see the blossoms, well, blossom.
But thanks largely to climate change, that moment is more vulnerable than ever.
Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.
Two Hours is an impassioned account of the change we undergo as life pummels us – or, as Clara puts it, “the collision between my life story and the one I had imagined for myself”. To go back after the end, with everything she has been through, and see again her innocence and optimism at the start of the book, is heartbreaking. And if the end felt a bit too sudden to me, that’s mainly because I would have been happy to keep reading for ever.
You would be hard-pressed to find another trio who more cannily served the drive for growth in recent decades than the cofounders of Authors Equity, a new publishing house launched earlier this month. Authors Equity brings Silicon Valley–style startup disruption to the business of books. It has a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers; it has angel investors, such as James Clear, author of the mega-bestselling self-help book Atomic Habits and the über-successful mystery writer and Hillary Clinton coauthor, Louise Penny; and it is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead. It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells.
Madeline McIntosh is at the top of Authors Equity as its CEO and publisher. She graduated from Philips Exeter and Harvard before entering publishing. She recognized already in 1994, as the New York Times put it, “that the internet would irreversibly transform publishing,” and became a specialist in online sales at Bantam Doubleday Dell. She also anticipated the growth of audiobooks, becoming publisher of Random House Audio in 2005. Three years later, she moved to Luxembourg to work for Amazon as “director of content for the international rollout of the Kindle.” She came back to Random House in late 2009 and climbed to the top, becoming the U.S. CEO of the merged Penguin Random House—the world’s largest trade publisher—a position she held until early 2023, when she resigned, becoming a head that rolled over the botched attempt at the acquisition of Simon & Schuster, which cost PRH $200 million. McIntosh is only in her mid-fifties. She made her reputation by always being a step ahead of everyone else in terms of data and technology. Where does one go from the most powerful position in publishing?
I learned about suicide in real time, like discovering the existence of airtravel by spotting a jet arcing across the sky. The thirteen-year-old was dead, but how? In her own bedroom, covered in pink and posters? You said she did it by herself? On purpose? I was a few grades below her, and barely capable of boiling pasta alone.
I tried to enter her mind in the days before, and then in the moments before. How she had prepared to face her own death, as across town my sister and I prepared to face math worksheets and a mandatory bedtime. I tried to enter her parents’ minds, too. What could their conversations be—what dialogue can you speak in a house that has become a crime scene? Among my peers, the story of the girl’s death became a grisly mystery whose strangeness was unfolded again and again, like a contraband book of scary stories.
Re-imaginings of classic literature are challenging, often unnecessary endeavors. This one is different, a startling homage and a new classic in its own right. Readers may be surprised by how much of the original scaffolding remains and how well the turnabout works, swapping a young man's moral awakening for something even more fraught.
In the U.S., it is most often thought of as a feat of engineering that demonstrated American power and ingenuity. After all, Theodore Roosevelt secured rights to the area and constructed the canal shortly after France, builders of the Suez Canal, failed on a similar endeavor. Yet, historians such as Julie Greene recently have asked us to consider the perspectives of those who built the canal.
Cristina Henríquez’s engaging “The Great Divide” takes up that historical call by using the power of fiction to further imagine the lives of those who built and lived near the canal.
We live in an age increasingly defined by the upending of well-established orders. “Fervor,” in its unpacking of a family after the loss of its Holocaust-survivor patriarch, serves as a parable for the loss of a global accord created from the ashes of World War II. The book models the entropy that sets in when we forget why fragile harmonies are fashioned, however imperfectly, out of chaos. Enriching his story with detail and above all heart, Lloyd has crafted a lasting allegory of our dark historical time.
“Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany” explores the challenges the world’s largest news organization faced in trying to balance journalistic ethics with ability to cover World War II within the confines of a dictatorship. The book is a fair but blunt assessment of AP’s work during that time.
Not many lives reflect these successive eras of modern porn and our attitudes toward them more revealingly than that of Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle set out to produce hot, explicit films that rejected what she called, at various times, “plastic formulaic pounding dripping in your face porno” or “big-boobed babes having meaningless, passionless sex with some perfectly buffed ‘stunt-cocks.’ ” The results were mixed, but intriguingly so.
In an assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution” (Norton), the historian Jane Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and, in a curious way, representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology. Her life could not have unfolded as it did in any place but the United States, or in any time but the one in which she lived.” Kamensky was until recently the director of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, an unparalleled research collection on the history of women in America, and it was in this capacity, not as a fan of, say, “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls” (1978), that she got interested in Royalle. Reading the film star’s obituary in the Times sparked a thought. The Schlesinger had the papers of Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and WAP. What if Royalle, a very different kind of figure in the sex wars, had maintained anything like these comprehensive records of her own life and career?
Meet Myotis lucifugus, commonly referred to as the little brown bat. Or, as chiropterologist (bat researcher) Jesika Reimer fondly calls it, “the flying brown bear.” Little brown bats share many similar physiological and behavioral traits with Ursus arctos. Both are slow-reproducing mammals that can live for many decades in the wild. Both feed in a frenzy through the summer and autumn months to prepare for a winter in torpor, a state of metabolic rest. Yet the little brown bat weighs less than 10 grams.
“They’re so small and we’re so oblivious to them,” muses Reimer. “That’s why I love bats so much.”
One day in 1997, psychology professor Jennifer Mather answered her phone to hear the excited voice of Roland Anderson, her collaborator in a rather unusual study of animal behavior. “She’s bouncing the ball!” He was speaking in figurative terms, but ones he knew Mather would understand. The “she” was an octopus perhaps two or three years old, swimming in a tank at the Seattle Aquarium. The “ball” was an Extra Strength Tylenol bottle weighted to float just beneath the surface. And the “bouncing” wasn’t exactly bouncing.
Octopuses have an exhalant funnel, a siphon near the side of the head, through which they can jet water. The octopus had held the bottle with her arms and let it go; she then aimed her funnel at it and released a jet of water in its direction, sending it to the other end of the aquarium, where the water flow returned it to her. She was doing it again and again. After Anderson had seen her perform the feat sixteen times, he decided it was time to call Mather.
Vinson Cunningham, theater critic for the New Yorker, makes a cheeky move with his debut novel, “Great Expectations.” He borrows the title of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece to tell a different sort of coming-of-age story. His is about a young Black man, David, who goes to work for the first presidential campaign of an unnamed U.S. senator trying to become the nation’s first African American chief executive.
“The Haunting of Velkwood,” a memorable horror book by Massillon native Gwendolyn Kiste, questions if ghosts know they’re ghosts, and maybe if the living know. “Perhaps we’re all ghosts,” says a character who is definitely a ghost.
The concept of “genius loci” – the spirit of a place, often with a connotation of protection or nurturing – is the foundation of Esther Rutter’s revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue. Eliding three books into one, she explores her own terrifying mental collapse and tentative recovery, the lives of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their confrère Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the efforts to preserve the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere within the context of the Lake District as a whole. At times, the reader may feel a little too aware of the compression mechanism at work, but the book is nonetheless alive with fascinating episodes and potted histories and, even more importantly, a heartfelt commitment to the power of place and of poetry to sustain lives and minds.
This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut – “something outrageous”. Angie is so delighted with the result that Suzi is summoned to their home to meet David himself, a pale and epicene young man now going under the name of David Bowie. She styles his “mousy” hair into a spiky red feather cut, which he loves, and the look of Ziggy Stardust is born.
But how are we to appreciate these machines of both menace and beauty? Are they simply inanimate tools for writing, and nothing more? Or are they relics of the most odious regime in human history—cursed forever to be symbols of the Third Reich where they were birthed? And if such objects were born with some kind of original sin, is there any hope for redeeming them?
The smell of frying onions is normal and ordinary. It’s nothing but a first stop in a dinner with a flashier destination.
What we overlook is that the smell of frying onions – as they brown, as the sugars come free, as they soften – is much more than a smell.
This is a novel that explores, among other things: chosen vs. blood family, artistry, work, the internet, capitalism, activism, communal living, class, elitism, exploitation, surveillance, lesbianism, bisexuality, memory, time, and the particular thrills and rigors of being a young person in New York City, or just being a person at all.
That’s a lot. Still, for the most part, Ko pulls it off, like one of those towering “Great British Baking Show” confections that defy gravity.
In Your Wild and Precious Life, Jensen asks: what transformation can take place, in the midst of “a misery that approaches madness”? She is a novelist, someone for whom “words metabolise thought”, and so on the plane, flying to see her son’s body, she writes a sort of prayer, or spell: “Raph, you are a force of nature, and now you are one with that force. You are water, you are chlorophyll, you are moss on a stone, a bird’s feather …”
In my first life, I was a freelance writer. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too. Prolifically not myself, I wrote countless pieces of promotion for clients like New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, PBS, Disney, and Vogue. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends I didn’t know.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb, and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. It was an accident.
Strange as the 21st century is, I admit I didn’t imagine “cloned monster sheep” is something we’d be dealing with.
As someone who had previously only flirted with the idea of making sausages, I surprised myself when I came home at the start of February with a three-pound slab of pork belly and a $20 sausage stuffer. Perhaps it was a particularly celebratory Lunar New Year that enticed me to make my own fragrant and fatty slices of lap cheong to wok-toss into my favorite rice dishes. Or maybe it was my inner desire to see how the sausage really gets made.
There is something slightly ironic about a writer who doubts the power of the literary novel writing a book like James. But maybe he's right. That first warning in Twain's original did read "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." And look how that turned out.
In part that may be because essays have never commanded the interest or respect that fiction has, but it may also be because the reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Stevenson as a romantic fantasist. Now Trenton B. Olsen, an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University, has pulled together the most copious selection so far, reproducing not only Stevenson’s dozen or so celebrated essays but also his uncollected published essays and his undergraduate ones. All this gives us the chance to assess the range and stature of a writer who, according to Olsen, was in his day “considered the most successful essayist of his generation.”
Today, translators who are not content to toil in obscurity fight for their rights with the nearest weapon to hand: social media. They promote the authors they’ve translated, and they promote themselves. They muse about the nature of translation, post teasers from their latest projects, and share details of their private lives. Some post flattering selfies in states of undress. Like everyone else on social media, they try to be famous. The most energetic translator-activist on social media in recent years has been Jennifer Croft, an American who in 2021 organized a successful open letter from writers and translators demanding that translators’ names appear on book covers. As the translator of Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Croft had unusual authority. When she translated Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2022), her name was on the cover and she received royalties, unusual for translators.
Croft was right: translators’ names should always appear on the book cover. The quality of their work can make the difference between joy and bafflement, though the reader may never be certain what share of pleasure or irritation can be attributed to their efforts. There is a tragic surfeit of ham-handed translations that make it impossible to lose oneself in what was once a smooth-flowing text, and a quiet canon of excellent translations that go unrecognized. Some eager translators improve sloppy, repetitious originals. This kind of editing in translation is a crime for those who cherish “fidelity” above all else. But isn’t translation always a kind of threesome?
Instead, we are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing, for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility’.
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (2024), by media scholar Anna Shechtman (a former editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and currently an editor at large), is both a memoir and a cultural analysis of American crosswords from the 1910s through the 2010s. The book is also itself a kind of crossword, bringing together worlds that might not otherwise exist in the same place at the same time. Shechtman is a longtime crossword constructor, and constructors love answers that are 15 letters long because they traverse a standard American-sized puzzle grid. These answers, called grid-spanners, also often illuminate a larger theme or serve as seed entries from which the puzzle grows. Shechtman’s book has its own reveals and surprises too: one is CROSSWORD PUZZLE (15); another is ANOREXIA NERVOSA (15). Shechtman’s exploration of puzzle logic and anorexic thinking—and how she learned, physically and psychologically, to tease them apart—is the real enigma of her book-as-crossword.
Eula Biss wants me to be better and I’m not sure I’m up for that. When I refer to the quick several page essays that build up to her book Having and Being Had as prose poems, I do so to praise and not blame, warn, not scare. Her jewel-like essays are pristine and precise, exciting and exacting. They ask of you as reader to weigh every word for there’s always a bit more there (and it has to do with you). It’s as if the space between each period and the first letter of her next sentence is a silent accusation of your life.
His lessons – about love, family and connection – are “nothing more than a handful of useful, if not particularly original platitudes that I should have known all along”. This is the strength of Goldsworthy’s memoir: he doesn’t insist on his own uniqueness but offers himself as a vessel to examine something more universal.
We know from literature that if anyone is ever surprisingly unavailable for work, it is because they have turned into an enormous bug. Obviously this is the first and best theory regarding the whereabouts of Catherine, Princess of Wales: She is exercising her Kafka privileges and has turned into an insect, as a metaphor.
The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time, particularly before everyone else — in possessing a sensitivity to the zeitgeist. This grasp of the bleeding edge, crucial to literature considered broadly countercultural, is used by writers (in a downtown bar, or up in a garret) to make history, not to recall it, even if no one would be so dull as to admit such ambitions. After all, the other hallmark of coolness is effortlessness. And the felt effort of historical fiction — research, dates, facts, figures, articles of clothing you didn’t know the name for until you looked them up — is always present. To the uninclined reader, this is homework. It’s boring. Yet a desire to visit the past springs eternal. There’s always that child curled up on the train or plane with a brick of a book, immersed in a vast world, a somewhere that’s electrifying in how different its ordinary is. As the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, with great nostalgia for that innocent feeling, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
My story begins in the fall of 1970, when Mr. Horowitz became an associate fellow of Silliman College, my residential college. (He accepted this appointment with the proviso that—in his words—“I do understand that there are no duties and responsibilities attached to such Associate Fellowship.”) Two years later, Silliman hosted a small private reception for Mr. Horowitz, organized by John Palmer, dean of the college, and two students, Michael Palm ’73 and Thaddeus Carhart ’72.
The next year, I decided to follow up on this first meeting, with the unstated goal of nudging Mr. Horowitz toward performing in public again. I sent him a letter suggesting that a small group of students could visit him at his home. In a return letter, he expressed interest in a possible visit and said he was willing to correspond further. In April 1974, a letter from his secretary divulged his telephone number—a valuable and closely held secret. During the following few weeks, I talked to Mr. Horowitz three or four times on the phone. We discussed a variety of topics, while I engaged in the delicate task of encouraging him to play for us without scaring him off by seeming too insistent or eager. Once I gained his trust and convinced him that I could assemble an enthusiastic young audience, belying his concern that we “would rather go to a football game,” we planned a recital.
O’Hara is now working on a far larger project that aims to use genetic analysis to map the history of biodiversity in the oceans over the past 100m years. “My dream is to be able to say: ‘We can see that 20m years ago, all the animals in the Atlantic flooded downwards, and then the circumpolar current swept them around so they populated Tasmania,’ and so on. Because if we can do that, we can make an animated map that shows the swirling movement of biodiversity across tens of millions of years.”
Would such a map change the way we imagine the deep? It seems likely it would, if only because it would make it clear that the ocean’s depths are not an alien realm, but intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. In particular, such a map might provide an antidote to the tendency to treat the ocean – and particularly the deep ocean – as a convenient place to dump waste that is too dangerous or expensive to store on land.
I remembered what Jack Laws said: “Feel the bird. Be the bird.” What did the hummingbird see in my eyes? Is that how a bird evaluates trustworthiness? As he fed, I examined the tiny feathers on his head, the pink, orange, and red color at his throat, the wing blur, the exquisitely tiny feet. I tried to mentally recite what I was seeing so I could later draw the hummingbird: The overlay of tiny feathers on its head are successively larger as they move from the front of the bill toward the back of the head. The legs are short, and its toes are the width of dental floss. What is he noting about me?
Today, nearly two decades into our post-mall era, much more has vanished than just a single, central place to gather, shop, eat, and perhaps get your ears pierced or have studio portraits taken. No single location has supplanted the mall in fostering such formative extracurricular experiences as I and many others had. Nixon agrees, admitting that she rarely finds herself at the mall now. “People think that with social media, kids don’t need a place to come together. But they definitely need a physical space to go to.”
The terrors in Colin Barrett’s debut novel, “Wild Houses,” seep across the page like black mold. Oh, there’s action in this thriller, too — fights! kidnapping! extortion! — but what’s most harrowing takes place in the penumbra of small-town crime where hopes are snuffed out and opportunities are cauterized.
“White people love feeling guilty,” James announces, even though few of the white people in the novel seem much troubled by their consciences—so which white people is he talking about, exactly? Knowing Everett’s impish propensities, it’s impossible to read James—among other things, a litany of atrocities visited upon Black characters, set in the past—and not wonder if he’s still needling gullible white readers about what we expect from Black novelists. If he’s mocking us, well, he’s earned that right. Maybe he’ll even win a Pulitzer.
Perhaps the Collatz conjecture will be determined true or false in the coming years. But there is another possibility: perhaps it truly is a problem that cannot be proven with available mathematical tools. In fact, in 1987 the late mathematician John Horton Conway investigated a generalization of the Collatz conjecture and found that iterative functions have properties that are unprovable. Perhaps this also applies to the Collatz conjecture. As simple as it may seem, it could be doomed to remain unsolved forever.
When you open your TikTok “For You” page, it might feel like you’ve entered a time warp back to 2020, when, during the most uncertain days of the pandemic, many folks began baking their own naturally leavened bread as a sort of emotional survival mechanism. Today, although the threat of COVID-19 feels less immediate for many of us and there are no yeast or flour shortages, sourdough is once again having a moment in the sun.
The publication of Until August, a new novella by Gabriel García Márquez (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean), ten years after his death could be seen as a betrayal. His sons acknowledge as much. They admit in the book’s preface that Márquez himself, after working on this manuscript through memory loss near the end of his life, finally declared, “The book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
And yet it does seem to work. His novella, a small work of under 120 pages, is a mature story about laying tough truths bare: an older woman dealing with age, death, and love confronts the naked truth of her life and her own self.
A novel with the title “Martyr!” arrives on the scene preloaded and explosive. The word is fraught, even more so now than when the book’s author, the Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, chose it. There’s humor in the exclamation mark, but there’s something else, too. It signals that Akbar is fascinated with words in action, words that someone has reached for in a state of excitation, like joy or deep grief. The shouter of “Martyr!” bears something within him which he is determined to force the word to express. But the title’s punctuation ironizes or undercuts this intention, as if to suggest that language signifies in ways that are impossible to control. In “Martyr!,” Akbar plays this struggle—the struggle to make words mean what you want them to mean—for laughs, but he’s also deadly serious.
“Mother Doll” isn’t a ghost story but a meticulously layered tale of fabulist historical fiction where the details of the Russian Revolution are related with the same depth of detail as a trip to Disneyland. That said, Apekina hopes her novel isn’t branded as “supernatural.”
“I think it would be a little misleading. I don’t think it feels like a ghost story. It just happens to have a ghost in it.”
In my three brief years solving the Daily Times crossword, I’ve noticed a veritable shift toward more timely and wide-ranging clues, as well as more diversity among constructors, especially in age and gender. Of course, blind spots remain: I still cringe every time I see a clue such as “12 meses” and have to enter ANO—a Spanish word that, without the necessary tilde, means “anus.” But above all, with this change under way, I’ve noticed that the puzzles have gotten more fun—drawing on more varied topics, spotlighting icons and ideas that have long gone overlooked, pushing the boundaries of the English language in exciting new directions. Taking the crossword seriously results in a better puzzle—one that challenges and teaches, surprises and delights, day after day.
You hear these people sometimes when you watch the Oscars on TV. They are whooping because they are proud. But they are also whooping because, on some level, they want to remind the world about the mezzanines. They exist, too.
It is weird what gets you excited at the normal people Oscars. Obviously, there were no famous people on my mezzanine. But when Cillian Murphy won best actor and namechecked his children, a burble of excitement broke out in my row. There wasn’t a hope in hell that we would get close to Murphy himself, but his kids? Good enough.
ChatGPT and Bard can generate functional recipes. I know that because I followed them. But I knew, as the person who baked those cakes, that it was dispassionate and generic. My editor, Adi Robertson, compared one to a boxed cake mix, and another reminded me of sad cafeteria cakes. Sure, it hits the spot. Yes, it’s chocolate cake. But cakes can be so much more.
“Feeding Ghosts” is courageously and heartbreakingly bare, and Hulls’ attempt to present it all in a subjective manner only heightens the memoir’s emotional impact. Her words narrate the story while the art carries the weight of the emotions. And the author pauses more than once to remind the reader that a memoir is curated, and therefore only a slice of the truth. At the same time, hers is deeply grounded in historical fact. Pointing out when she takes artistic license only strengthens the story’s trustworthiness.
Everett, who is sixty-seven, deploys negative hyperbole with abandon, especially when describing the capacities of his own mind. He has published two dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and one book for children, all of which he summarily casts off as “shit.” “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is shit,” he told me the first time we met. “I’m just trying to make the best shit I can.” After a few meetings, he seemed worried that his shit would become mine, too. “You don’t have to read all this shit,” he said. And: “Do you always get the shit assignments?”
Everett is American literature’s philosopher king—and its sharpest satirist. The significant insignificance of language has long been a preoccupation of his fiction, which plumbs the failures of storytelling to capture (or enhance) the experience of life. In “Dr. No,” a gonzo spy thriller from 2022, a scholar who specializes in “nothing” learns his most important lesson from his one-legged dog: “What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would.” Other protagonists, among them a Derrida-obsessed baby, a philandering painter, and a down-and-out gambler, take for granted that meaning-making is a dance of false promises and willful delusions. Everett himself compares it to a con: “Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.”
Unfortunately, owing to the fast, cheap and chaotic nature of Taiwan’s music industry at the time, documentation is patchy. Recordings almost never included liner notes and rarely listed musical credits beyond the name of the singer. For many of those singers, no biographies exist.
So while social media has given us a sudden profusion of songs and videos, it has at the same time given us almost zero historical context in which to place them. But as more and more people look into these questions, they are finding some surprising answers.
The Hunter is undeniably a slow burner, and this is one of its strengths (as long as the reader is forewarned not to expect a conventional crime novel). French ratchets up the tension in increments, until the reader realises, along with Cal, that the plan has escaped Johnny’s control to a point where every possible outcome must entail terrible damage. By the end, these characters have taken on such solidity that, long after finishing it, I often catch myself wondering how they’re doing – a testament to the author’s mastery of her craft.
In his delightful 2021 memoir White Spines, he recounted how he couldn’t rest until he’d collected all the B-format Picadors published between 1972 and 2000, and now, in Shadow Lines, he focuses on hunting out, detectorist-style, those secondhand paperbacks within whose pages their erstwhile owners have left some inconsequential thing that, to him, is gold dust.
But this isn’t a nostalgia-laden book about a forgotten city. It feels full of life and urgency; it’s concerned with London “as it is now”. If you were to pick up London Feeds Itself in 30 years’ time, it would probably read like a time capsule from the 2020s, and the city would probably look quite different. You would hope, though, that at least some of the restaurants, bakeries and delis that Nunn’s book compels you to hunt down today would still be there, still bringing communities together, still feeding people.
As soon as we (explicitly or implicitly) put comparative values on different lives, she concludes, the results tend to feel either “cruelly unequal” or “brutally standardised”. The Price of Life forces us to some very uncomfortable questions about whether we can do better.
If you’re in need of a cathartic read that distills the anger and exhaustion of America’s overburdened mothers and wives, this is not the book for you. Instead, Davis offers a tour — part history, part sociology, part memoir — of the mucky middle where many women find themselves stuck, bogged down by sexist expectations, economic and practical constraints, and competing desires.
When I thought about the red-circle slash, which is meant to signify that something is off limits, my first thought was of its journey to the popular lexicon. It is a very simple sign, but it is also distinct from putting a red X on top of something, as one might have seen in the past.
So I looked around, and realized I had a problem: This is such a well-known, broadly used symbol that it can be hard to describe by the layperson. And because so few people think of such things, I only found a few people pondering what we should actually call this thing.
Diana de Avila was in her pool one day in 2017 when she was suddenly “dropped on the moon.” She had just gotten home from the hospital, where she had been treated for optic neuritis and vertigo, and she was trying to relax in the calm water. Suddenly, bright colors and shapes began to appear in front of her. Yellow took the form of a triangle; orange was shaped like a rectangle. She felt as if she could reach out and touch them. Most strongly, she felt a desire to create. “It felt like lightning,” de Avila says. “Like something turned on in a second. It was a mystery to me.”
She immediately began painting. She had no training in art. But her hands just knew what to do. “It was fulfilling to connect line and form. I let things be guided by intuition,” she says. Two hours later, the canvas was covered in splotches of teal, brown, and orange. She titled her first piece “Blobs and Boomerangs.”
“After Annie” is the quietest kind of story about everyone trying to figure out what they had and who they are now. What’s left when the center drops out? What do those spokes add up to with the hub gone? Maybe it’s something that is, against all odds, still rolling forward.
Ayana Mathis’s important new novel, The Unsettled (2023), bears within its title the affective work that it accomplishes. Through entanglements of generational memory, placemaking, loss, nostalgia, family, community, and social dissolution, the reader is dislodged from the comfort of neat resolution.
But despite its eerie neo-gothic setting, “The Variations” has a charm and warmth that echo its intentions: Langley aspires to make the power of music tactile, to explore why it has such a pull on us. Central to his explorations is the Agnes’s most famous alumna, Selda Heddle, a late-20th-century cause célèbre in the classical world — a rare female composer to achieve such heights. She has recently been found dead in a blizzard near her manse in rural England. Soon after, her grandson, Wolf, arrives at the hospice in a panic, before lapsing into a coma. There’s some understandable worry that earworms have a body count.
The Revolution Will Be Hilarious emphasises the power of comedy as a force for social justice and provides practical insights into its integration with activism. She effectively shows how collaboration between the two has the power to start meaningful conversations around racism, climate change, economic disenfranchisement, addiction and more. Borum’s work serves as a valuable guide for media and communication theorists, entertainment industry professionals, social activists, and comedians, showcasing the potential of collaboration between comedy and activism in sparking meaningful conversations on various societal issues.
At its best, the book asks readers to reconsider the instinct of rejecting the monstrous and to look harder, read closer.
That gap in the data — a yearlong interval between the plane crash and the start of barnacle growth — might be merely puzzling were it observed on the flaperon alone. But the entirety of the MH370 debris recovered so far displays this anomaly. Of the three dozen or so pieces of the plane that have been collected, not a single one has marine life on it that matches what you would expect to see if, as with the pumice Bryan studies, the debris had spent 16 months steadily gathering marine life from the waters it had traveled through.
One piece, a fragment of a closet door from inside the cabin, was found “heavily colonised by the Lepas anatifera barnacle,” according to an official report, but of the nearly 400 specimens recovered, the largest were just 20 millimeters long, implying an age of only “45 to 50 days.”
The second reason is that, psychologically, one of the drivers of our actions is our effort to minimize regret. If we make a choice and it turns out to be wrong, we feel bad. But what if we make a choice, switch, and then find out our first decision was actually correct? We feel worse. We know this about ourselves, and so, when presented with the option to switch away from our cup, it is not very enticing to do so.
At its finest, Clear is a love letter to the scorching power of language, a power that Davies has long understood. She writes with amazing economy: in a few words she can summon worlds. The darkly funny West somehow carried all the weight of American hope and hubris between its narrow covers. Clear is written with the same spareness but, despite moments of affecting poignancy, too often it feels underwritten, even thin. Animated by his boyish wonder and the careful ritual of his daily tasks, the silent, big-hearted Ivar comes slowly, tenderly, into focus; but serious, anxious John remains out of reach. Davies grants us only rare glimpses into his conscience, which he determinedly pushes to one side, and fewer still into his heart, so that his growing preoccupation with Ivar’s language comes to feel less like an awakening than a smokescreen, for the reader as much as himself.
Croft's novel is about a lot of things: the complexities and beauties of translation, climate change and the mass extinction of species, art's potential to save or destroy the world, obsession, lust, and much more. But perhaps more than anything else, it is about how impossible it is for anything living to be entirely, absolutely individual and independent.
Killers of the Flower Moon’s dominating mood is funereal, and it’s a film that wonders about our relationship to the dead, its chorus of funerals for its forgotten players like prayers to keep the history dramatized in the film etched in memory before the film goes where all films now go, in the great stream of content. Indeed, a question the film is asking has to do with its own usefulness, or the usefulness of any art in an age of algorithmically engineered taste, the primacy of the profit motive and the looming threat to human creativity posed by AI—to say nothing of the charnel house of history where the significance of billions of lives are muted by humankind’s knack for atrocity atop atrocity.
What’s the use of a film? Or a funeral? And what do we care?
For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales. John Marzluff, an ecologist in Seattle, once wore a rubber caveman mask while catching and releasing seven crows on his university campus; eighteen years later, crows that weren’t alive for the original experiment still caw at the mask. “I really didn’t know they were paying that much attention to me,” Marzluff told me recently. His study showed that crows not only retain long-term memories but also learn from their peers and pass behaviors from one generation to the next. Other experiments have shown that members of the corvid family, which includes crows, jays, and magpies, can read one another’s intentions, plan for the future, and solve puzzles using abstract reasoning and tools.
To Jiguet, the ridicule of the crows was a revelation. “I’m just realizing how intelligent they are,” he told me. When birds warn one another about individual humans, biologists understand them to have their own culture—defined as a behavioral tradition that a population maintains not through genetic inheritance but through social learning. That struck Jiguet as a cause for celebration, not culling. Wasn’t there a better way to relate to clever creatures? Or was cleverness precisely what made them pests? “It’s hard to live with animals that are intelligent,” Jiguet said. “They can challenge you, and you have to adapt.”
Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply breathe. Imagine that mucus—thick, copious, dark—had been accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways, but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward, in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This was what it once meant to be born with cystic fibrosis.
Then, in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.
I set myself the task of cooking a simple dinner, every now and then, the only criteria being that I had to be led by my stomach – it had to be something I really wanted to eat or cook. If it was good, I wrote it down in my orange notebook. Slowly, the orange notebook filled up. And slowly, I started to feel the life in my bones and the hunger in my belly. I realised the power this simple act of cooking and eating dinner with my friends and family had in my life.
“Helen Garner doesn’t overexplain” is an understatement. Things happen, as in a Richard Scary book, with great rapidity and often without apparent cause-and-effect. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would probably result in a bewildering mess, but Garner always has her finger on the pulse of the narrative, knowing just when to slow down enough for us to get our bearings.
In these, and many other details, Butler uses biography not voyeuristically, but as an attempt to wholly understand one person. Molly is a cautionary tale about the worst excesses of modern culture, but also a study of some of the most difficult aspects of human nature.
That’s why it matters that Butler wrote this book. Many suffer. Many doubt the value of their lives. “No one is special,” Brodak said. But, as Butler proves with Molly, the opposite is true.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last is one of a group of new novels examining gender, race and intimacy in the world of art and commerce. In the women's relationships especially, there are echoes of Kiley Reid's but here the clashes feel more real, possibly because they're inspired both by a true artworld tragedy and the author's experiences at Brown. And the novel works because Gonzalez approaches its questions through story and character, like a master portraitist, emphasizing granularity and precision. Recounting Anita's story in a nonlinear fashion, the mystery is constructed for maximum suspense, starting at the end of her life, dipping back through her marriage, and giving the narcissistic Jack a chance to speak for himself. The result is a story that moves around without ever losing focus.
Maitland is a precise short story writer, each being a shard from a life or a glance over one. The various protagonists are realist, historical and fictional; so we encounter Rapunzel and Andromeda alongside rebellious trapeze artists, sort-of suffragettes and a woman caught up the Peasants’ Revolt. It would be too easy to classify these works as “magic realist”, and there is an undeniable if faint family resemblance to Angela Carter. That said, while Carter tends to be rambunctious and transgressive, Maitland is more eerily quiet. It does not seem surprising that even the moments of cataclysm and catastrophe in her stories come with a whispered stillness.
Toby Lloyd’s slow burn of a debut novel is in the tradition of the pentagonal family saga, a subgenre that might include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Add to this formula the elements of religious mysticism, ethnicity (in this case Jewishness), and an exploration of the ethics around using family as material for literature, and you should have a truly combustible mix.
The cliche that we know more about the surface of the moon than about our own oceans is given vivid new currency in this blend of natural history, popular science, travelogue and ecocriticism by the Australian novelist and poet James Bradley. The book takes us from pole to pole and surface to bottom of the blue realm that covers most of Earth.
These questions lie at the heart of Marshall Sahlins’s final book, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Across most cultures, Sahlins observes, human life unfolds in continuous reference to other beings—supreme gods and minor deities, ancestral spirits, demons, indwelling souls in animals and plants—who act as the intimate, everyday agents of human success or ruin, whether in agriculture, hunting, procreation, or politics. These not-quite humans, or metapersons, can be found across all landscapes, from the Chewong “leaf people” in the Malay Peninsula to the Greenland Inuits, who had the idea that spirits animate each human joint and knuckle. Indigenous communities possess empirical knowledge about these spirit worlds, yet anthropologists often use the language of “belief”—or worse, “folk belief”—to describe them, an approach loaded with their own disbelief. Rejecting the obscurant category of “belief,” Sahlins asks: What if we saw metapersons as worthy of a science of their own? If we examine them as a ubiquitous global presence, and attempt to tease out general theories about their role in human political and economic life, what would this new science teach us?
Now, a decade after his death, his last novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month, with a global release in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On these somber pilgrimages, briefly liberated from her husband and family, she finds a new lover each time.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and will likely stir questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives.
Until August is a sketch, as blurry and flawed as sketches generally are, but a sketch from a master is welcome. This slight book is like a faded souvenir, tatty but treasurable for its associations with the fabulous imaginary world that Márquez conjured up in his prime.
Stevens takes no word or phrase for granted. If she uses commonplace language, she typically does so in dialogue, or as a kind of punch line when her voice seems to give up, briefly, on its distinctive, careful consideration: “‘Now we’re cooking,’ the American said. He snapped his fingers. Good to go. On a roll.” The clipped, oddly pleasurable rhythm of Stevens’s prose denotes circumspection and a commitment to precision. Rife with surprising and resonant phrasing, the style of these stories thereby reveals Stevens’s apparent authorial project, the reason that fiction seems to matter to her—which isn’t to demonstrate a judgment of the world or even to imagine a better one, but simply to try to locate language that’s adequate to the feelings and confusions of a particular moment.
Oyeyemi seems gloriously unfazed by such reactions. Parasol Against the Axe opens with what appears to be a vignette from modern life: “I found myself a member of a WhatsApp group that seemed to have been set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia.” But it quickly gets stranger. The narrator, who reads these complaints and writes an irate response, is Prague itself. In Oyeyemi’s world, the city is sentient — and mischievous. It is responsible for uniting lovers in surprise weddings (“Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy”) and tearing them apart; for harboring those on the run or for leading fugitives straight to the police.
Sometimes that happens. You have a late-night moment of insight and you write something on whatever’s available. For me, by morning, what I thought was a brilliant moment of insight usually looks more like a moment of delusion. Strike it! Cross it out! Not useful in the least!
But that next morning, when I read the sentence I had written, it wasn’t…bad. It was even kind-of good. In fact, it was the first kind-of good thing I had written in months.
Instantly I decided: The notebook was magic.
It’s a midweek morning and I’ve just woken up in a hotel room in Madrid on the first day of a minibreak. The day stretches deliciously ahead: shall I go first to the Prado, or the Reina Sofía museum? Shall I have brunch and a late-afternoon main meal, or tapas here and there? The Gran Via is just up the street; I fancy a wander around the shops, but I’ll probably leave that till later in the day.
The fact is, I can do exactly what I want, when I want, because I’m holidaying alone. Like an increasing number of older women in the UK and across the world (I’m 61), I’ve discovered the huge benefits solo travel has to offer. It helps me to recharge my batteries, it’s empowering and it doesn’t have to be horribly expensive (I generally travel off-season and midweek). It takes me out of my comfort zone in just the right way, allowing me to have the experiences, the food and the fun that I want.
A story of betrayal and unlikely friendships filled with reflective tidbits of wisdom, the novel blends WWII fiction with idyllic romance drama and a touch of macabre thriller for a polished addition to Brooks’ works.
The mood is dark, the tension is thick, and the stakes are high. And as usual, in a Tana French novel, the characters are well-drawn, the dialogue is superb, the settings are vivid, and the tight prose is often lyrical.
Robbie Coburn’s latest collection, Ghost Poetry is split into three parts and addresses with unwavering honesty what makes us human, shining a light on themes such as trauma, grief and suicide. What is remarkable about this collection is that, alongside these raw emotions, there is a message of hope. Coburn’s collection is masterful and breathtaking, against stark imagery that will burn into the reader’s memory.
Lo’s voice adds to the chorus of writers who, since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, have been writing about and recasting their roles as mothers and creatives. In Lo’s work she examines the life of the mother and creative artist ‘when my poetry practice was the five minutes I had to spare between folding the laundry and falling asleep’. Through lyric, narrative and ekphrastic free-verse poetry Lo examines these topics in ways that invite the reader into her world through intimate moments of motherhood and domesticity.
The Freaks Came Out To Write captures the elements that made a great American newspaper and the forces that killed it: the internet, the loss of advertising revenue, corporate greed, a changed New York City. There's still a monthly online version of the Voice, but as Romano says in her "Afterword" "The Voice ... is missing its mirror, New York, in its role as the center of the political and cultural universe. The internet has dispersed the culture."
The Voice was the living center of the marginal, the weird, the rebellious. In the space and time of reading this wild ride of a book, I returned to that creative, crazy margin, and I think many other readers will, too.
“My friends joke that I’ve become a pornographer,” says Lucy Roeber. “I haven’t, of course. But the English don’t know how else to describe a magazine about sex. So we joke about it instead.”
Later this month, Roeber and her deputy editor, Saskia Vogel, will publish the first edition of the revamped and relaunched Erotic Review. During the late 1990s, the Erotic Review was a high-end, lavishly illustrated print magazine, but for the past 14 years, it has languished as a little-read online newsletter. Now, at a moment when sex parties and orgies seem to be all the rage, it will be back to its pomp as a physical product, available from bookshops and published three times a year.
There are many interesting games going on in Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel about art and politics that seeks to skewer the prim puritans of radical wokery and the sweaty dinosaurs of the right. Part of the joke is that it is written very clearly in the style of, and in deep engagement with, a canon that literary America is doing its best to forget: Roth, Bellow and Updike are the obvious models. What’s more, as if snubbing his nose at those who will be looking for reasons to take offence, Taranto, a white male (he’s a former lawyer), writes from the perspective of a young Jewish woman, Helen, a graduate student. He takes great and obvious pleasure in describing her sex life, with a passage about masturbation that might have come straight from the pen of Philip Roth.
For those who came of age in the Vietnam era, whether they served, protested or did neither, the call of the past in “The Women” revives the physical and psychic pain inflicted on the grunts, the lasting sorrow of surviving family and friends and the nightmares and noises that continue to rattle battle-scarred veterans for years.
Splinters is a book about a woman who struggles to see herself clearly after a lifetime of being taught to find herself in the needs of others. This is an eternal danger for women, and mothers especially, a plight Jamison shares with the troubled Teen Mom cast and with Heather Armstrong, who died by suicide last year. But what makes Jamison’s memoir remarkable is its happy ending. Seemingly to its author’s surprise—although really in demonstration of her skill—the book provides a record of Jamison shrugging off a prewritten life and embracing the process of discerning her own.
Questioning the validity of “conquering” mountains isn’t new (see Nan Shepherd) and the ugly, racist side of mountaineering history will be familiar to anyone who has read up on the British Everest Expedition of 1953. Putting these two things together, though, raises uncomfortable questions about the still largely results-driven world of Western-style outdoor recreation. What are you trying to prove by doing that? And, culturally, where did the desire to do it come from? Important to try and see ourselves as others see us, even (or perhaps particularly) when we don’t like what we see.
Swisher looked at the screen and saw a book claiming to be a new biography of her, with an image on the cover that she immediately pegged as an AI-generated fake. While the book promised the inside story of Swisher’s life, the author was someone she’d never heard of. A closer look suggested that the book itself might be largely or entirely AI-generated, substituting generic descriptions of Swisher for factual details or anecdotes. Swisher was irritated but brushed it off, she said.
But when she looked at Amazon again this week, she saw spammy clone biographies of her had proliferated, as the tech blog 404 Media first reported. Each bore a slightly different title, author, and fake image of her on its cover. “There were dozens and dozens,” Swisher said. “I was like, ‘What is happening here, and why aren’t they stopping it?’”
For a brief period of time this month, I started to wonder whether I was the only female essayist in America who was not either getting or considering a divorce.
Sex, lies and podcasts converge in Amy Tintera’s “Listen for the Lie,” an edgy mystery that artfully blends our growing obsession with the true-crime genre and our ongoing predilection for murder, mayhem and quirky detectives in fiction.
Hortis, an attorney whose previous book chronicled organized crime, covers this material with workmanlike efficiency and a keen eye for courtroom theatrics. As quaint as some of the story’s details may seem, its themes feel remarkably contemporary: We still rush to judgment, resort to stereotyping and fall for all kinds of propaganda. If the narrative takes some time to get going, the reader is rewarded by the increasingly bonkers trials and their fallout. And it’s impossible to argue with the book’s thesis: “Tabloid justice would, one way or another, alter American law.”
“When I play it I’m gonna raise my horn a little bit,” Miles said. His customary playing stance, onstage or in the recording studio, was to point his trumpet straight at the floor as he played, a position that communicated contemplation and moodiness, though it was primarily a way of regulating his tone. “Can I move this down a little bit?” He indicated the mike.
“It’s against policy to move a microphone,” Townsend said, deadpan. The old church echoed with laughter.
Outside the 30th Street Studio, Manhattan was Manhattaning: rounded buses and big yellow cabs grinding up and down the avenues; car horns and scraps of radio music and pedestrians’ voices echoing in the deep-shadowed side streets. Outside, the everyday clamor and clash of a city afternoon in late-winter 1959; inside, the densest quiet as a passage outside of time proceeded: the recording of CO 62291, the number that would come to be titled “So What,” leading off the album soon to be known as Kind of Blue.
Folklore has existed in some form in every culture and, in each, it has brought underrepresented groups to the fore. As we look to expand the canon, folklore is a rich source of thought on topics of philosophic interest with the potential to uplift a wide range of voices who have thus far been largely overlooked.
Folktales puzzle and surprise and haunt. They make us ask ‘Why?’ And they invite us to imagine new ways to respond
What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it can’t fail to change the way you think about language. It feels like a privilege, too, to appreciate the passages that seem to have been written specifically to amuse her colleagues. Notably English’s version of a work by a Polish poet deemed untranslatable, which runs: “The world persists, but insecurely! / The rustling trees grow ultratreely!” You can picture translators gleefully texting it to each other with laughing-face emojis. It’s a glimpse into a profession that serves as a fascinating metaphor for our parasitic, multilingual, creatively prolific world.
This is a wonderful book about growing up, about a very young father raising his son, about the importance of school and its often special teachers, and about how much a caring community can contribute to a child’s life. We talk blithely of how “it takes a village,” but do we really know what that means? The Irish writer Elaine Feeney explores its many layers in her second novel, a work of such depth and compassion that it was no surprise to learn that it was on the Long List for last year’s Booker prize.
French’s dialogue is some of the best in the business, and it’s a delight to watch her move between American and Irish vernacular. In general, the novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native, and particularly the former’s determined need to idealize, to claim, to tint whole rivers green — “a bad case of allurement.”
Whether it is confronting the messy realities of death that leaves a trail of material and emotional debris for the living to clean up, or unpicking the intricacies of the familial and human ties, this collection turns out to be a potent distillation of lessons learnt over a lengthy life.
In 2002, Ishiguro chose a track by the American jazz singer Stacey Kent on Desert Island Discs and a friendship developed. Kent’s husband and collaborator Jim Tomlinson suggested to Ishiguro that he try writing her some lyrics – his first in 30 years. These were much better. Now, Faber has collected 16 of them (five as yet unrecorded) in The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, with elegant illustrations by Bianca Bagnarelli.
Ishiguro’s lane-changing is not unique. There are songwriters who write novels (Nick Cave, John Darnielle), novelists who have written lyrics for musicians (Michael Chabon, Polly Samson), songwriters who publish poetry (PJ Harvey), and poets who release albums (Kae Tempest). But whether lyrics are themselves a form of literature is still an open question. While they can certainly be literary, a lyric is just one channel for conveying meaning in a song. The vocal delivery, melody, rhythm, arrangement and production are all used to enhance, or sometimes subvert, what the words are saying.
The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley. His early projects were amusing experiments: X, a language that could only be written; Sheli, which included only sounds that he liked and was initially unpronounceable; and Zhyler, which he created because he enjoyed Turkish and which, in honor of the Heinz Company, had fifty-seven noun cases. In 2005, he graduated with a master’s degree in linguistics from U.C. San Diego. Two years later, he co-founded the Language Creation Society with nine other conlangers.
Peterson’s big break came in 2009, when HBO reached out to the Language Creation Society with a strange request. They were creating a television show (which would turn out to be “Game of Thrones”) and wanted someone to develop a language (which would emerge as Dothraki). Nothing like this had ever happened before, so the society organized a competition that would be judged by the show’s producers. After signing a nondisclosure agreement, applicants were invited to send in a phonetic breakdown of Dothraki, a romanized transcription system, six to eight lines of translated text, and any additional notes or translations.
The groundbreaking work that led to the homunculus was a major advance in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain, and the homunculus itself revolutionised the art of medical illustration. Yet modern research suggests that the homunculus is far more complex than originally thought, and some argue that it is incorrect and needs to be radically revised.
Plenty of novels and memoirs deal with anorexia, but few speak from a male point of view. Women are three times more likely to be anorexic than men, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, but the shelf of anorexia novels and memoirs would suggest an even greater gap. John Schumacher, a librarian and writer who has built a career of inspiring kids to love reading, puts Jake on that shelf in “Louder Than Hunger.” Schumacher, who goes by John Schu (because children call him Mr. Schu), has produced a harrowing and life-affirming novel-in-verse for young people.
At one level, this novel is an exciting adventure story that takes place in present day Australia. It has all the required elements: a chase, dangers overcome or avoided, the weak outwitting the strong, good triumphing over evil. Very satisfying stuff.
At another level, Donna M Cameron has taken this novel further by using it to give voice to those who warn of the dire consequences of our pollution of the planet. ‘Humans are bloody stupid,’ says Nia. ‘There’s people around the world already suffering, climate refugees already on the move. It’s easy to be positive if you’re ignorant and privileged.’ She foresees a future replete with ‘Super-storms, megafires… Killer virus, system collapse, hungry people with guns.’
Structured in short, chronologically ordered chapters, “The Freaks Came Out to Write” unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts. Romano escorts the reader from room to room, where a set of relevant players hold forth on the subject at hand. Here are Michael Smith and Lucian K. Truscott IV, hashing out how a line about the “forces of faggotry” made it into the latter’s firsthand account of the 1969 Stonewall protests. Over there, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, and Susan Brownmiller discuss the double bind of writing about women’s issues for a paper that afforded them, in Gornick’s words, “the most astonishing amount of space and time,” despite a workplace blighted by what the critic Laurie Stone elsewhere calls “ordinary, old-school, male fuckheads.” The sort of men who would publish a letter like the one written by James Wolcott, who would later become a staff writer, belittling her 1971 piece “On Goosing,” about being sexually accosted in public. “God help us if she ever gets raped,” Wolcott wrote. “We will be buried under an avalanche of rhetoric.”
The book’s hero turns out to be the elderly, unassuming Mr Ngatari, the “wizard” of Bogor who holds the secret to successfully propagating the plant, and therefore securing its future. Pathless Forest closes with Thorogood and Filipino colleagues poring over his cryptic instructions, and praying over their own grafted vine. Whether or not a foul-smelling, magnificent Rafflesia eventually blooms, this is a gripping, Technicolor account of why their efforts matter.
On your way out the door this morning, you grabbed your Mexican-made jacket, your Italian watch, and your Brazilian coffee and headed for your Japanese vehicle while thinking Chinese take-out might be good tonight. It will, but first: “Language City” by Ross Perlin. You’re obviously a person of the world. Why not read like one?