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?