For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology—the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets—hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration away. For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.
But alarms of late have grown more urgent. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds.
“People aren’t history,” scoffs Adela, vice secretary of the Ministry, whose work is shrouded in secrecy and subterfuge. This retort comes late in Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, “The Ministry of Time,” but it’s a telling line. Its dismissal of individual lives reveals the novel’s stakes. If people aren’t history, what is? This is a disturbing statement to come out of the mouth of a high-ranking British bureaucrat. For a book that could also be easily described as witty, sexy escapist fiction, “The Ministry of Time” packs a substantial punch.
It may be me, but I find the three stories of Russell Banks’ posthumous American Spirits collection to be examples of gallows humor despite the grim accumulation of fatal gunshots, dead children, and bodies in water. Even though each story culminates in disturbing death and disaster, I get the sense that the underlying point is a version of what fools these mortals be. I have no idea whether Banks emulated Kafka, who laughed aloud when he read Metamorphosis to friends, but Banks’ characters embody ludicrous human folly.
Passport Photos is a unique genre-bending book, constantly shifting among photographs, poetry, novel selections, essay passages, historical episodes, postcolonial theory, words on street signs, and Kumar’s often impassioned voice. His ability as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, with several books and many magazine publications, a Guggenheim grant, and a PhD, serves as the passport that gives him liberty to roam among all these sources as well as to explore myriad corners of human existence.
The book’s method involves transcending intellectual and literary boundaries, but the book’s substance focuses on exploring economic and social boundaries, those of living places, of education, of occupation, of income, of gender, of opportunity, and—most essentially—of power. Not only can a person in a booth on a border control another person’s ability to pass into a different circumstances, many other judges, seen and unseen, concrete or abstract, function as sources of domination that determine our choices and our opportunities.
Throughout the 500-plus pages of Dorian Lynskey’s overview of the art and literature of the end of the world, terrible things are done to the Earth. It is frozen, boiled, irradiated and desiccated. It is bombarded by asteroids, comets and rogue planets; volcanoes and earthquakes destroy it from within. The planet is depopulated, or overpopulated, then riven by pandemics, droughts and disease. The seas drain away or rise, drowning everything. And even if the Earth itself survives, its inhabitants are easy pickings for the genocidal zombies, aliens, robots and artificial intelligences that artists have imagined along the way.
In less skilled hands this 10-Armageddons-a-page pace might make for a depressing read, but Lynskey’s encyclopedic knowledge (we race from James Joyce to Joy Division, from Alan Turing to The Terminator), and his glee at the sheer inventiveness of the doomsayers’ creations, make this an unlikely page-turner.
But what those earlier readers didn’t yet know was that all of that verbal reading offered additional benefits: It can boost the reader’s mood and ability to recall. It can lower parents’ stress and increase their warmth and sensitivity toward their children. To reap the full benefits of reading, we should be doing it out loud, all the time, with everyone we know.
The promise of prosthetics is an ending of disability, but that’s a promise from people who don’t know disabled people or disabled communities. Disability is longstanding and not going away—the future will give us new ways to be or become disabled. New viruses, new patterns of animal migration and disease thanks to climate change, new weather patterns, hopefully new ideas of work and of good bodies, too.
There is much to love in My Favourite Mistake, from eye-wateringly comical turns of phrase (what could better capture two particular types of men than “Feathery Strokers” and “Beardy Glarers”?) to Anna’s over-it venting about everything from age-related invisibility to all the time she’s wasted “constructing complaints in a manner which made the fucker-upper still like me. Same with over-apologetic, explanatory emails of refusal.” Overall, there’s a depth to the novel’s modestly proffered insights that make its more escapist elements feel well earned.
A nuanced and remarkably assured exploration of Britishness, toxic masculinity and the pernicious pull of the far right, England Is Mine charts a rapid descent into extremism fuelled by fandom and disillusionment.
What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind: the “self-forgetfulness” it induces, a “trance of attention that is as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking”.
In a decidedly digital age, the modest postage stamp seems to be slowly vanishing from daily life—no longer ubiquitous in wallets or pocketbooks, useful but maybe not essential.
They’re so overlooked that the comedian Nate Bargatze has an entire bit about how stamps make him “nervous.” “I don’t know how many you’re supposed to put on [a letter],” he says. “And they change the price of stamps, and that’s not in the news, you know? You don’t find that out on Twitter. You have to find out from old people. They’re the only people that know.” (As someone in the news, I am duty bound to report that stamps’ price increased from $0.66 to $0.68 on January 21.)
Scientists should consider plastic, now a ubiquitous feature of the ocean, a kind of mineral, Zalasiewicz says. He compares plastic to amber, a rock formed from fossilized tree resin, which he calls its close geological equivalent. Though amber is chemically different from most plastics, it is also made of complex long-chain organic molecules that can survive for millions of years when buried in the ground.
That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.”
It’s the texture of Gabriel’s story that grabs you, much more than its portrait of American complacency and complicity.
Waiting for the Monsoon is a compelling and clear-eyed dispatch in the face of a cruel and relentless illness, or what Nordland describes as the “hawks’ boil”, a description of birds of prey circling their quarry. It is also the journalist’s autobiography, revealing how he survived appalling malevolence in his childhood and went on to have an award-winning career as a war reporter.
Despite becoming a romance reader relatively late, Henry now sees the genre’s hopeful endings as hugely valuable – after “a lifetime of being led to believe that these books were just no good, and finding out how completely untrue that was. Almost all of my favourite stories are love stories of some kind.”
Here is a gigantic monument to the idea that anyone can come into this land of opportunity and find possibilities denied to them in their homeland.
That’s the kind of visual that promises something provocative and possibly in touch with the complexities of America as a country.
When it is done well, as it is in Andrew O’Hagan’s hefty new novel, Caledonian Road, panoramic social realism can expose the inner workings of a society. The ability to move between social strata, dramatise the entangled lives of a large cast of characters in an agreeable “marriage of art and melodrama” (as O’Hagan has a character observe with reference to Balzac), inclines the form towards satirical observation and social critique.
As a woman who spent her 20s in often-dark, sometimes-damp basements waiting for the chance to tell jokes to a sparse audience, I’m fascinated—even scared—by anyone who thinks comedy is cool. Jesse David Fox, the author of the aptly titled Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work, is one such person. Chronicling the last 30 years of comedy, his book seeks to explain its evolution and artistic relevance in our culture.
The philosopher and philosophical counselor Samir Chopra invokes the long and distinguished lineage of anxiety in his wise, if sometimes circumlocutory, new book, “Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide.” “My anxiety made me who I am,” he writes in the introduction, “and I could not get rid of my anxieties without ceasing to be myself.”
Yuan Yang, the former Financial Times China correspondent, has written an engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women from her own generation as a lens.
AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.
So why am I asking such a dumb question? Because in 2020, easily within living memory, a white woman, Jeanine Cummins, published American Dirt about a Mexican migrant family, and protests flew targeting the author’s identity and claiming cultural appropriation. The question was whether a white author, even this particular white woman author, could write about people whose identity she didn’t share. Well of course she could. And she did, earning a seven-figure advance, receiving Oprah’s imprimatur, and staying on the bestseller list for 36 weeks. This white woman not only could write about whatever she wanted; she made bank in the process.
But there is one thing that sets 1994 apart: It might be the last calendar year not really captured online. Netscape Navigator, what would become many people’s default browser, launched December 15, 1994. America Online wouldn’t hit a million users until 1995. The age where nearly all culture would get consumed—and critiqued—on the internet was still in the distance. My memories of 1994 exist as they are; no one can go back and look at tweets, IG stories, or Facebook posts to watch their friend’s Ace Ventura impression or to recall how people reacted when Cobain died.
Polonius once asked Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” To which the melancholy Dane answered, “Words, words, words.” Anne Curzan and I both love the English language, she being more accepting of the new, while I instinctively value established grammar and usage as bulwarks against confusion, not a set of fetters that bind us. We both agree that people’s use of English brings consequences, often unforeseen and unintended. All of us, then, need to choose our words wisely. But which ones? “That,” as Hamlet once also said, “is the question.”
But in her view, the best way for humans to save themselves long term isn’t necessarily to fend off planetary troubles. It’s to get out of here. All planets — alien or not, polluted or not — will someday be rendered uninhabitable: The stars they orbit will go out “in a hot blaze of glory,” boiling life out of existence, or they will slowly get dimmer and their worlds slowly colder. Though this won’t happen to Earth for billions of years, if you would prefer neither, Kaltenegger has a suggestion: “Let’s become wanderers of this amazing universe,” she writes. “It does not have to end in fire or ice.”
“What is that you so beautifully do?” Henry James is said to have once asked someone, somewhere or other. And for no tribe of workers does the question make more sense than for book editors. What is it that they so beautifully do? Improve an author’s sentences? Bring order and serenity to clutter and turn chaotic manuscripts into transparent texts? Or is their practice more mysteriously metaphysical and personal? An editor may seem to be to the kingdom of literature as Cardinal Richelieu was to the kingdom of Louis XIV: the secret manipulator, content to shape events invisibly, to do the work and let the monarch—the author, so to speak—grab the credit and the table at the Café de Flore or, back in the Manhattan day, Elaine’s.
In the fall of 2020, bored and restless in Covid-restricted Spain, Ángel Guerra doodled a dream car. The automotive designer, then 38, wanted to make a tribute to his first four-wheeled love: the time-traveling DeLorean DMC-12 that rolled out of a cloud of steam in Back to the Future. The sketch that took shape on Guerra’s computer had all the iconic elements of the 1980s original—gull-wing doors, stainless-steel cladding, louver blades over the rear window, a rakish black side stripe—plus a few modern touches. Guerra smoothed out the folded-paper angles, widened the body, stretched the wheel arches to accommodate bigger rims and tires. After two weeks, he decided he liked this new DeLorean enough to stick it on Instagram.
The post blew up. Gearheads raved about the design. The music producer Swizz Beatz DM’d Guerra to ask how much it would cost to build. Guerra started to think that maybe his sketch should become a real car. He reached out to a Texas firm called DeLorean Motor Company, which years earlier had acquired the original DeLorean trademarks, but was gently rebuffed. The design seemed destined to live in cyberspace forever. Then, by some algorithmic magic, a different kind of DeLorean showed up on Guerra’s Instagram feed in the spring of 2022—a human DeLorean by the name of Kat. Her posts showcased her love for her puppy, hair dye, and above all her late father, John Z. DeLorean. Although the general public often remembers him as a high-flying CEO with fabulous hair and a surgically augmented chin who went down in a federal sting operation, Guerra chiefly thought of him as a brilliant engineer. He sent Kat a message with some kind words about her dad and a link to the design. Kat saw it and got stoked.
Reading On Death and Dying now is odd; even in a fancy 50th Anniversary Edition, it seems rooted in some distant past, and the lessons it offers appear either anachronistic or so thoroughly woven into culture that they’ve become redundant. Kübler-Ross was not alone in bringing attention to how shabbily we treated our dying, but it’s certainly a testament to the success of her work that death and dying care is a regular part of medical school training, that hospice care has been greatly destigmatized, that “Death Doula” is now a recognized occupation, and that all manner of organizations, formal and informal, exist to encourage us to rethink how we face death (including Caitlin Doughty’s The Order of the Good Death, with which I’ve been affiliated in the past).
Why did writers go there? They went for one another. I mean, how does that happen? There were people at the bar and you’d think, How the hell do these people all come together? People would pick each other up, and I’m sure they had affairs and all kinds of things. You had the feeling it was one of those places where everyone somehow “knew” one another.
Later I would learn that Gregorian chant is based on the cadence of human breath. At the time, all I knew was that no other sound came this close to silence. The words felt like a prayer that could go on forever, old monks dropping dead and new ones slipping into their place, only God to hear their song. In its peace, space and time stood still.
The silence outside the chapel was just the opposite: alive and tingling, tuned to something deep inside me. I had expected an absence, a mortification, not this electric energy. It felt charged, like those seconds at the end of a magnificent symphony just before the audience jumps to its feet in a thunderclap of applause.
I did not yet know, on that trip, how many different kinds of silence there are, and how they can heal or harm us.
I hesitate to use the term “experimental” here, as the term can be offputting and inaccurate. Instead, Ash is inventive, but the effect is not to obfuscate or abstract. The poetic interjections bring the voice of the main character into even sharper insight. Our inner worlds are never clear, or linear, or one-tracked. They’re jumbled with multi-tasking and questions and perceptions. What Louise Wallace has achieved with the poetry in her novel (much like what Max Porter has done in his hugely successful books Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and most profoundly, Shy) is distil the internal voice and place it on the page in a way that reflects, visually, the multiplicity of thought that anyone can have at any one time.
It’s often said that good luck is the result of good planning: you make your own. But is our luck in life ever entirely under our control? And how much luck, and planning, might be enough? Real Americans, Rachel Khong’s second novel, strikes directly at the heart of these questions.
Part true crime novel, part love letter to fine dining, and part takedown of capitalistic structures in modern-day Japan, Butter is a compelling and intensely readable take on what it means to enjoy life, and all the contributing forces that make that decision complicated.
The main takeaway from “Funny Story,” though, is that adulting is hard. This message is evident from the budding friendship between Daphne and Ashleigh — two middle-aged women struggling to connect amidst their myriad of responsibilities — and Miles’s constant worry over his younger sister Julia. In this way, perhaps it’s fitting that Daphne is the one telling the story, fully engrossing the reader into the fictional Waning Bay, Michigan.
It was a “revolution in kindness,” we read in “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals.” That’s how Bill Wasik, the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine, and his wife, the veterinarian Monica Murphy, describe the animal welfare movement, launched in 1866 after the Civil War when Henry Bergh, an American diplomat, founded the ASPCA, the first animal protection organization in the United States.
This well-researched book is an enlightening if somewhat rambling survey of how our treatment of animals has changed over the past century and a half. It is also, frustratingly, a testament to how much has stayed the same.
In the moments before her fall, Quinn Dannies felt weightless. She was finally strong enough to complete the climbing project she’d been working on for years. The afternoon was immaculate—the air cool, the light a soft amber.
Pulling through the crux of the boulder problem, her heel wedged perfectly into position, Dannies reached for the hold above. But, as had happened hundreds of times before, she couldn’t stick it. She fell. Unlike those other times, though, this slip would change the course of her life.
My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.
Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.
“My whole career, that’s what you did,” Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who worked as a maître d’ in the eighties and nineties, told me. Reservationists were trained to pick up the phone within three rings; they’d write the name in a log, underlining V.I.P.s twice. “And you damn well knew every customer,” he said. If a regular or a celebrity showed up without a reservation, Cecchi-Azzolina usually squeezed them in. “There’s some kind of alchemy in the restaurant world,” he said. “Somebody cancels, somebody’s late, and you’re out of the weeds.” One night, when he worked at the River Café, in Brooklyn, a man palmed him six hundred dollars for a table. He said he could tell the denomination of the bills by the feel of the paper in his hand: tens and twenties were worn, hundreds were crisp.
In 2024, plenty of diners are willing to part with six hundred bucks for a table, too, but they are likely paying it to a stranger, via an app.
The other day, a writer interviewed me about female friendship. She wanted to know why some of my friendships had fallen apart. I said it was owing entirely to me. She said why. I said I wasn’t trained to take other people into account, and people get worn out by that aspect of me. She said how, as a woman, did you grow up without being drilled to take other people into account? I said that’s an excellent question, and all I can say is I wasn’t trained to do anything. It was the glory of my growing-up years. Parents let you out to run like a dog, and if you came back, they gave you food. No one cared about me, because they had decided that whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it, and they were right. I have to tell you how much I love my parents for forgetting most of the time to tell me how to live.
Sammartino’s use of third person omniscient narration lets us into his striving protagonists’ heads, if only to see how limited their own omniscience is. Jumbled notions of the American Dream and religious redemption get tangled along dusty desert highways, addiction support group meetings, social media optimization scams, and exurbs bleeding into an unwelcoming wilderness. And above it all—like Fitzgerald’s watchful eyes of T.J. Eckleburg—stands the Eiffel Tower Dealership, the book’s brilliant name for those creepy Carmax Pez Dispensers offering you a salesman-less way to drive to your personal heroic horizon. And of course, Rizzo has flopped as a car salesman.
Open Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Lucky,” and thank God for the internet, because if you’re like me (well, poor you), you will want to look up and listen to song after song. The quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful singer-songwriter in the folk-rock mode of what the narrator, Jodie, calls the “four J’s” — Janis, Joan, Judy and Joni — largely (and minutely) imagines life as itinerary and playlist, with the 20th-century American songbook soundtracking the character’s every painstakingly mapped move.
Exotic as this tropical gathering of book lovers might have been, it’s just one example of a fast-growing business trend: literary-themed travel. We have the pandemic to thank. Reading surged in the early days of Covid, and the habit stuck as lockdowns eased: The biggest two years on record for print book sales in the U.S. were 2021 and 2022. Hotels and tourism companies, eager to lure back travelers, seized on the surge and began featuring books in their marketing. What began as a travel perk has become a full-blown movement to cater to readers with an explosion of new programming, from big-ticket experiences promising author access to solitary retreats. I know, I know—planning a trip around your reading list may never replace your annual golf weekend, but when else will you get the time to actually enjoy that stack on your nightstand? And if it all sounds like giving yourself homework, don’t worry—there definitely won’t be a quiz, and did I mention the drinks?
Today, however, things are different. Classical music has an image problem that feels like an existential threat. The pernicious idea of “elitism” — a word that was only coined in the 1980s — spread like Japanese knotweed through the pages of the press as the century neared its close. In the 21st century, classical music’s stock has fallen further still, to the point where it has become extremely difficult to make the case for it without apology. Why?
What makes Americans “real”? Is it our competitive drive? Our craving for wealth and status? Our insatiable quest for scientific advancement? Or is it — inevitably — the color of our skin and eyes? This concern spirals quietly, like a double helix, through Rachel Khong’s enigmatic second novel, “Real Americans.”
It’s a meet-cute in a non-patronizing way. It’s a modern love story, and one that you won’t be mad is slightly predictable — because it makes you feel good and makes you believe in a thing called love.
Filled with the lingering echoes of a former self, Hansbury has created a rich portrayal of moving forward in all life’s messy glory while wrangling with a painful past.
In Adventures in Volcanoland, volcanologist Tamsin Mather takes readers on a journey to some of the world’s most notorious and active volcanoes — from Mount Vesuvius in Italy to Masaya in Nicaragua. Her eloquent and enchanting book, which is rich in analogies and anecdotes, weaves together geological, historical and personal stories to explain how volcanoes work, how they have shaped our planet and how they have been understood through history.
Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours cobbling together a newspaper article. Jake explains: “Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare.”
What is extraordinary about that passage is not especially how journalism made do with typewriters and carbon paper before computers and the internet were invented. It is, instead, the appearance of the neologism by-line. Hemingway was coining a word to account for an increasingly common phenomenon in American newspapers and magazines throughout the decades of the 20th century. Signed articles could occasionally be found before 1926, but they were not the standard practice they would become a century later, when a piece without a byline (now usually spelled without a hyphen) is as rare as a bird without wings.
Far from being dormant, the sleeping brain burns glucose and pulses with electricity to produce dreams. But why devote this kind of energy to the creation of wildly imaginative and highly emotional nocturnal experiences for an audience of one – especially when they often seem nonsensical? I’m confident that we wouldn’t expend the resources required for dreaming, while leaving ourselves more vulnerable to predators, unless dreams were a vital feature of our minds.
I’ll allow that passenger lists may no longer make sense in our tech-surveillance world, where even a simple series of names would get scraped by algorithms. But I think we’ve lost some sense of camaraderie without them—lost that thrill of unfurling the manifest and wondering what you might find. These lists could impress, or they could disappoint, but they always entertained.
Self-Esteem and the End of the World (such an excellent title) may be described as autofiction. But the word “cartoon” is key here, because while regular autofiction is rarely funny – more often, it’s the polar opposite – Healy’s book is hilarious.
In writing such sympathetic characters, Henry also captures with precision the complexity of human interaction, from the emotional duress of miscommunications and mishaps to the heartbreak of friend breakups and the heady, steamy, unadulterated joy of falling in love.
Arguments will not stop us being curious about our origins as a species. Nor should they. When the French painter Paul Gauguin titled his grandest work “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, he was not simply asking three distinct questions. He was suggesting that questions about our present and future require a truthful picture of our past, a past that includes but isn’t limited to our prehistoric past. Perhaps the impulses that animate this insatiable curiosity are the same ones that send adoptees and the donor-conceived on quests to find their biological parents. They can seek this knowledge without supposing that their genetic inheritance is the only one that counts.
Yet, as those analogies themselves show, our natural curiosity is almost uniquely vulnerable to the usual enemies of truth: wishful thinking, delusion, fantasy. But fantasy is best corrected in the usual scientific way. We test our hypotheses to distinguish the true from the merely convenient or flattering. The real lesson of Geroulanos’s stimulating, provoking history is not skepticism, but humility.
In her travels, she picked up a lifelong habit of collecting textiles local to the places she visited. In Foothill Cabin (1977), she painted the room she shared with Garrity in Palo Alto, the wall behind her bed decorated with the tessellating hexagonal design of a phulkari she brought home from Pakistan. Among the many woven traditions she encountered were Panamanian mola, Pakistani ralli quilts, and Bangladeshi kantha; she was also inspired by distinctive forms such as sumukhwa, a traditional style of Korean ink brush painting, and wayang, the Indonesian shadow puppet theater.
All of these techniques and styles found their way into her developing practice. Becoming curious about her work is becoming curious about the history and practice of textile-making by women the world over.
At this time of year, you may find me doing one of two things. Either I will be standing in the garden, straining to see the first swifts wheeling in the sky above our house, or I’ll be swinging by the greengrocer yet again, in the hope of English asparagus. Officially, the asparagus season begins on St George’s Day, which falls on 23 April. But recent winters have been so warm, it has sometimes arrived as early as February. As I write, though, I’m still waiting: yesterday, the bunch I picked up and promptly put back down again came with a label that read “Peru”.
You could quibble with the likelihood of Stella’s adventure or even wonder what kind of visa she used to enter France, but who can care about odds or immigration status when total transformation is on the menu? Treats don’t need logic, and “The Paris Novel” doesn’t, either. When a waiter drops an extra dessert on the table, better not send it back to the kitchen.
When the narrator brings in other writers such as Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector, the effect is double-edged. Their words add texture (Lispector: “Before going to bed, as if putting out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day”), but they also remind us that these writers would never deliver a line as woolly or awkward as “I felt in the present like I was living always alongside what a previous body had felt like”. Nonetheless, this is a debut that mostly delivers interesting things, and promises greater ones to come.
“What if to translate was to look for lost words,” asks Mireille Gansel in a line from her genre-defying Soul House (2023), a meditation on poetry and translation as forms of hospitality, translated from the French by Joan Seliger Sidney. I misread this line at first, mistaking “words” for “worlds,” then wondered whether it couldn’t work both ways. Might the search for words really be a search for worlds, for a world or a house—like the spiritual dwelling invoked by the title—“filled with voices which enchant you—and with words which speak a soul language”? Gansel’s book, a bilingual collection of prose poems of varying lengths—some just a few lines in all, others spanning several pages—posits “words as shelter” while seeking “to make a word habitable.” Again, the slippage between word and world—as if to suggest that translation and poetry, in trying to make words habitable, also aim to increase the habitability of our world, or allow us to find or create hospitable words/worlds.
Who is George the Poet? A few years ago, the answer to that question would have been straightforward – he’s a beloved Cambridge-educated Ugandan-British spoken word artist, whose lyrical social commentary about British life had reached such a wide audience that he was invited to read a love poem at the 2018 royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He’s a writer and musician, born George Mpanga in 1991, whose poetry has been commissioned by the likes of Sky Sports F1, and who was offered an MBE. Today, defining Mpanga by those achievements feels problematic, largely because of how critical the 33-year-old poet is of his own rise to fame. “I got all sorts of privileges, awards, little nods, passes and pats on the back from the establishment,” he says now. “Going to Cambridge – these things are signifiers. The more I learned, the more I realised that none of it was a coincidence. Yes, I took myself to university. I made myself become a poet. But you can’t separate [my success] from its political utility to conservative interests.”
In the process of writing this profoundly life-affirming memoir, it is clear that Salman Rushdie has found his own peace. No one deserves it more. For the rest of us, though, his book should have the opposite effect. It should shake us from our complacencies. It should renew our resolve to confront and defeat the forces that led a young man to plunge a knife into an artist. Rushdie has done us a great service in writing this book. It is up to us now to heed its message.
At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.
Adam Phillips’s new essay collection, “On Giving Up,” presses at this same theme. What, other than the obvious, is aliveness? Phillips’s background is in psychoanalysis, both as a practitioner and an explicator. He is a prolific essayist whose other collections include “On Balance” (2010) and “On Wanting to Change” (2021), and since 2003, he has served as the general editor for Penguin’s retranslations of Freud. Naturally then, it is through the lens of psychoanalysis that Phillips views the question of aliveness.
As we slapheads know, bare bonces become inescapable identifiers and gag magnets. In Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair, Heritage reclaims the wisecracks. I snorted throughout what amounts to the funniest imaginable version of a grief memoir.
Take that, men. Graham’s dances were the manifestation of the female gaze in its purest form. The strength required to be a woman artist, the banishment of doubt needed to keep going in the face of incomprehension, the place of desire in the creative act, the need, too, for love—all this is the material of her dances. In Errand into the Maze Jowitt explains them to us with the clarity of a critic experienced in looking intently at dance. But if you want to get a sense of what it was like to be around Graham, to sit at her feet and learn her movement language even as she tore it out of her gut, to suffer her rages, and to see the tumultuous effect of her passions, you might want to look at de Mille’s Martha as well.
Everyone knows that our consumption habits are problematic and environmentally destructive: Canadians send more than a billion pounds of clothing, shoes, toys, and household items to the dump each year. But we have a hard time seeing books as mass-produced consumer items that ought to be consumed more thoughtfully, even though that’s what they are. A book is different from a pair of shoes or a scented candle—but is it that different? The kinds of excess we permit—even exalt—for books is unheard of for other categories of possessions. Even speaking of books as a consumer good feels vulgar, but I wonder if this sanctimonious attitude deprives them of their true value.
Every day I sat down to write was a gift I hadn’t expected. Every character was endlessly fascinating, every image I could captivate, every sentence I could manage was a petite miracle. I couldn’t drive myself like before, working six, seven hours, and then putting in a few more hours on book biz. Now, if I only got an hour—the eye strain told me when I’d had enough—I was grateful and longing to reenter the work again. I was back where I had started as a young writer, in the play and delight of the writing itself. Not without its accompanying frustrations and self-doubts (I was still me, after all) but it was a rebirth. “And now in age, I bud again. / After so many deaths, I live and write,” writes the poet George Herbert. Resets are necessary throughout a writing life, but especially after a lifetime spent in a craft when one can become jaded and wearied and stale.
Naysayers might associate puzzles — literary and otherwise — with boredom, frustration or tedious intellectualism. As though anticipating blowback, Fleming gets playful. As complex and interwoven as her acrobatic narratives are, they’re bewitchingly told. Intellectually stimulating and an offbeat dip into history, “Curiosities” appeals as a dense puzzle that’s intriguing fun.
But while “Worry” documents the ways we’ve slid toward a culture of loneliness, Tanner has crafted, in Poppy and Jules, a relationship fleshy enough to endure the online vortex. “I can’t build my whole life around my sister,” Jules yells at Poppy after an argument. “Why not?” Poppy asks, but Jules can’t come up with an answer.
But there’s another component to the theory—and this is where the conspiracy part comes into play. The Dead Internet theory states that this move from human-created content to artificially generated content was purposeful, spearheaded by governments and corporations in order to exploit control over the public’s perception.
Now, as a novelist, I love this theory. What a great setup for a tense techno-thriller! But as a journalist, I always thought it seemed pretty bonkers. That is, until recently. Lately, the Dead Internet theory is starting to look less conspiracy and more prophetic—well, at least in part.
Without understanding exactly how I’d gotten there, I straddled the side of a steep hill in downtown Singapore, stretching my arm into the branches of a belimbing buluh tree for plump yellow-green fruits. Tiled shophouses surrounded the hill, and beyond, the austere skyline loomed like a glittering tidal wave. I focused on a little cluster of fruit dancing just beyond my fingertips and went for the pluck.
From the base of the tree, MJ Teoh, head chef at Native, told me belimbing is a member of the starfruit family that produces small, powerfully sour fruit. From the restaurant’s air-conditioned dining room, she had tasked me with helping gather ingredients for the dinner menu. We also needed bunga kantan, known as torch ginger — a flower that grows like a pink flame and a key component for a local sweet-savory classic called rojak — and pepper leaves, flashy green leaves used as ground cover throughout Singapore that yield a sharp flavor, which the chef uses in a take on miang kham, a street food popular in Thailand.
In the end, Loss, a Love Story is perhaps best understood as an experiment, bearing unexpected and even incomplete—although always compelling—results. Ratcliffe suggests but never resolves the connections between her losses and reading. Instead, she highlights the perhaps obvious yet no less significant preservational and meaning-making power of literature—how, to paraphrase “Amazing Grace,” what once was lost now can still, at the very least through words and the worlds they create, be found.
The story explores identity politics, that complicated intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation that, depending on your point of view, promotes equity or sanctifies discrimination. It’s the kind of treacherous novel that Philip Roth might have written — and almost did with “The Human Stain.”
But I already regret that comparison. Although Sahota is just as clear-eyed as Roth about the crosscurrents of tribalism that contort our lives, his tone is always plaintive. No matter how deeply he sympathizes with characters’ grievances, he never sweats with the kind of rage that fueled Roth.
More deeply, though, this outlook is not new at all. There may in fact be a basic psychological explanation for why humans have always been fascinated by the end of days. Everyone knows that they are going to die. But we also all like to think that our particular span on Earth is somehow special. Perhaps speculating about the end of the world is a way of connecting those two things, of creating a grand narrative that aligns what are otherwise two random, unconnected plots. After all, by placing ourselves at the end of the biggest story of all, we simultaneously place ourselves at its centre: Après moi, le déluge.
But now, after having spent enough time in the ring, in the day to day grunt of fashioning people, places, and things out of thin air and exposing them to the elements to see how they fare or what comes of them—I know better than to assume what works in one exceedingly popular medium won’t apply to another. As The Office, Sopranos, and The Bear have shown us time and again, TV might just be the best writing teacher we didn’t know we needed.
If you find sufficient pleasure in satire and meta-narrative to dispense with old-fashioned relationships with characters, and are not put off by a Hampstead sex romp via holidays in Italy, this is a well-wrought and very clever book.
Sarah Langan's A Better World is one of those novels that burrow under your skin a little deeper with each chapter until you feel profoundly unsettled but also incapable of turning away. A very sinister thriller with a dash of science-fiction and full of inscrutabilities, this novel about a mother trying to save her family from a dying world is as entreating and creepy as it is timely and humane.
Burnside has here, I am certain of this at least, written a poem to keep by you, to dwell in, to make the reader think and feel at the same time, as one does when reading a Shakespeare comedy or an ode by Keats. There is magic here, sometimes troubling magic, but there is also good, illuminating sense. It appeals to the ear, to the mind, and to the spirit, and you will harvest more with successive readings.
If O’Hagan’s novel wants to offer us a glimpse of contemporary London, it hasn’t quite decided whether it is a window or a funhouse mirror. But it captures something of its dazzling and tricksy reflective surfaces, its winking outward charm, and the mouldering core beneath.
Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.
This bloody-minded serial killer fantasist and antisocial social climber would become Patricia Highsmith's best known and best loved creation. She published five Ripley novels in all from 1955 to 1991, the last a few years before her death. Since his debut, her all-American psychopath has inspired six screen adaptations, a play by Phyllis Nagy, and a musical staging. That legacy is a testament to Ripley's complicated appeal – amoral, unassuming and audacious — and Highsmith's scalpel-sharp writing. There's something irresistible about an unapologetic grifter, who seizes the chance at a better life by stealing someone else's. The text is rich enough to handle wildly different interpretations that feel true to the original and brilliant in their own right.
Last winter, I flew to Minneapolis to hear a funk quartet play at a bar. The weather was miserable: hard-frozen snowbanks in every gutter, skating-rink sidewalks, roads so ripped up by rock salt and plow blades that I had to return my first rental car, because it shook like a leaf if I took it above thirty. I had come to see the band Derecho (since rechristened the Derecho Rhythm Section), the newest project of Alan Sparhawk, who for three decades fronted the seminal indie-rock band Low, which he co-founded with his wife, Mimi Parker.
Sparhawk had grown his hair out during the pandemic, and the red-blond mane was still shaggy past his shoulders. He wore work boots, a black T-shirt, brown overalls, and a black beanie that came off as the room warmed up. As in Low, he plays guitar and sings lead. Cyrus Sparhawk, his and Parker’s nineteen-year-old son, plays bass and writes much of the music. On this icy night, the Sparhawk boys—abetted by Al Church and Izzy Cruz on percussion—served up two piping-hot sets of Roy Ayers, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Childish Gambino covers, alongside a handful of original compositions.
The flight from Istanbul to London took about four hours. Leaving the Balkans behind, my body traveled at a speed of 400 miles an hour over the Great Hungarian Plain, the snowy mountain passes of the Alps, the forests of southwest Germany, the Rhine and the Low Countries. Through the blurry windowpane I watched the continent slide by, its greens and browns smeared together like a spill of paint. Mountain ranges passed in minutes, great rivers in seconds. I tried to spot landmarks — Had I walked through that woodland? Had I crossed a bridge down there? — but none of it seemed remotely real. As the plane touched down in London, I had the sense that somehow, something had gone extremely wrong.
Nicholls is superb on the landscape of this beautiful part of the world. The novel describes two seductions: the first is the mutual, if awkward and bumbling, romance between Michael and Marnie; the second traces Marnie’s reluctant acknowledgment of the sublimity of the countryside. As the pair make their way through the hills and valleys, and Marnie’s self-imposed deadline passes, we find ourselves inhabiting first one, then the other’s perspective, our sympathies tugged in alternate directions. We see how each stands in the way of a shared happy ending and how infuriating this is, how senseless. The reader becomes so invested in the outcome of this unspectacular, everyday, cagoule-clad romance that it makes the whole world shimmer with a kind of secret possibility, as if such narratives are everywhere, just out of sight.
Some fiction is both story and testimonial — a bearing witness to lessons that must not be forgotten. Haunting and elegiac, “The Stone Home” is fearless in its clear-eyed recounting. It asks readers to consider our own secret histories, to allow hard truths to be heard and, in so doing, to never let such barbarity happen again.
As I read Stacey Levine’s new novel “Mice 1961” — which is not about small, intelligent rodents but about two young sisters and their live-in housekeeper — I laughed aloud many times. It was a startled, delighted laughter produced not by commonplace tricks of humor but something singular to Levine’s writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else.
“We are other,” runs the epigraph from Beckett, “no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” But Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech as “the essence of our humanity”. At one point he quotes Martin Amis: “When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t.” He has more than got away with this one. It’s scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a few jokes. Before the stabbing he was horribly overweight; after hospital and rehab, he finds he has lost 55 pounds, though it’s “not a diet plan to be recommended”.
Most birders have origin stories, the tales they tell of how birds, for whatever reason, moved from background to foreground in their lives. Novelist Amy Tan’s journey, catalogued in her delightful new nonfiction book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” began with a sketchbook and a pencil.
But what, I wonder now, is the end-game here? What if caring is sometimes simply, in essence, waiting for the sick person to die? What does it mean for care, the carer and the sick person when the intended goal is death? Can the carer still then be considered a “good carer”?
These are the questions posed by Marianne Brooker’s insightful and important new memoir, Intervals. For Brooker, “the practices of care go on and on,” to death and “even … after someone has died.”
The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen? How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft, and how?
If you refuse to pass judgment on these decisions, if you walk around thinking you’re the Messiah, you’ll wind up settling for inferior decisions, by which I mean imprecise, contrived, solipsistic ones. If, on the other hand, you condemn your decisions, you’ll lose the improvisatory momentum upon which all narrative construction depends.
To unearth queer history, researchers like myself must work with absences, deliberate erasures – lives and relationships that were hidden, denied or disguised. Byron researchers usually face an overabundance of material, but his queerness is still a question of fragments. Researching his sexuality requires the slow process of learning to recognise and connect codes and threads through his prose and verse.
If you were going to choose an author to rewrite The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim/James, it would be difficult to find a better candidate for the job than Percival Everett, the dexterous master of multiple genres whose bitter satire Erasure became the outstanding film American Fiction. Everett’s reframing of Mark Twain’s novel involves a radical perspective shift, creatively filling in narrative gaps along the way, but for the most part it follows the structure of the original. The endings, however, couldn’t be more different
Reading Fosse is exhausting and exhilarating, refreshing and unlimited; a large paradox. He falls into a distinct and remarkable Norwegian literary tradition with the likes of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard (who happens to be my favorite) and Henrik Ibsen.
Fosse is not for everyone, which means he is the standout for some. I happen to feel this gravitation toward his work. Find out for yourself where you lie.
Caleb Carr visits the grave of his beloved Masha, whom he considers the love of his life, every day. “We have a little chat,” said Carr, best known for his 1994 crime novel “The Alienist,” during a video call from his home in upstate New York. It’s late at night — Carr is a longtime night owl who does most of his work after it gets dark — and the author, who now has a long white beard, is thinking about grief and dying — subjects that linger over his new nonfiction book, “My Beloved Monster,” and loom over what might be the final months of his life.
Throughout Knife, Rushdie also makes clear that freedom of speech – a freedom increasingly under threat from forces on both the Right and the Left – is no luxury. “Art challenges orthodoxy,” he writes. “To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of the time… Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.”
Emerging from the various entries is a reminder, both haunting and comforting, that despite how singular our experience feels, we are all grappling with just about the same core concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all of our confusions are a single question, the best answer to which is love.
Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe that unhappy spirits can walk, slam doors, go bump in the night? Do you believe that objects can retain potency even, or perhaps especially, if violently uprooted from their culture of origin?
Here’s a less occult question: does anyone actually know what is in the British Museum (BM), that five-hectare compound, with its many-levelled 18th-century building plus its various outposts and stores? It is reputed to house eight million artefacts, not necessary fully catalogued, of which only a tiny fraction are displayed. As Noah Angell writes: “The British Museum is only marginally an exhibition space; in material terms it’s mostly a site of disappearance.” The objects disappear, and disappear again. This book closes just after the scandal broke about the hundreds of thefts from the museum, the subsequent sales on eBay, the resignations: proof, as the author has it, that the BM has no claim to being a safe steward of anyone’s cultural artefacts.
While we’re notoriously bad at intuiting how our minds organise phenomena like colours and smells, machines offer a potential route for outsourcing introspection, and doing it with rigour. They can be trained to mimic human performance on perceptual tasks, and they make available the internal representations they use to do this – the abstract spaces and coordinate frames in which the ineffable stuff of thought lives.
It’s surreal to review a book that made you feel physically sick. It’s even more surreal to give a book that made you feel that way a good review, to say that the nausea was somehow positive or warranted. But that’s the bind when writing about Lucas Rijneveld’s horrifying and brilliant sophomore novel, My Heavenly Favorite.
Thirst is, despite its slight missteps in structure, a visceral, powerful novel about the all-encompassing presence of death. For all that our majestic Gothic cemeteries are designed to distract us, in the midst of life, we are in death; in the midst of death, we are in life. Alive or undead, Yuszczuk reminds us, to be is to thirst.
Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.
West Virginia’s opulent Greenbrier resort has been a playground for princes and politicians since its opening in 1778. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountain town of White Sulphur Springs, the Greenbrier has expanded over the centuries, growing from a series of summer cottages to a palatial hotel surrounded by gardens and golf courses. So, when the resort broke ground on a new wing in late 1958, no one was surprised.
But observant locals soon noticed something odd about the project. The hole dug for the foundation was enormous, and vast amounts of concrete arrived every day on trucks, along with puzzling items: 110 urinals, huge steel doors. Guards were stationed outside.
So here's a question for you: Is it possible to run on a train roof and leap from one car to the next? Or will the train zoom ahead of you while you're in the air, so that you land behind where you took off? Or worse, would you end up falling between the cars because the gap is moving forward, lengthening the distance you have to traverse? This, my friend, is why stunt actors study physics.
The mindset that slots reading solely as a public act of brand maintenance or a coded invitation to some other interaction is too limiting. And look, if you meet someone over a book, great! If you’re killing time while waiting for someone, great! If you’re trying to be mysterious, that’s great too. But people in public aren’t riddles for you to solve, and not everyone reading at a bar is trying to tell you something.
And yet—for all the inconvenience—walking around the story in this way, I gradually fell in love with it, and the besotted need no convincing. When a writer has surrendered her will to control in pursuit of a more anarchic approach, the reader must do the same, or else set the book aside, go home. Parasol is captivating precisely because it is not believable. Instead, it is aware of itself thinking. But not in an annoying, intellectually domineering way; Oyeyemi is more interested in the imagination’s unjustifiable demands than demonstrations of her own brilliance.
How to Make a Bomb is, at one level, a satire of existentialism, suggesting that Nausea may be an unconscious elegy for the fantasy of white male omnipotence, masquerading as philosophy. It is also a comic novel about radicalisation: a literary Four Lions for the age of the “incel”. Nothing in Notman’s profile would mark him out as a candidate for censure under the UK government’s notorious “Prevent” programme. He is a hapless and inoffensive family man, who for reasons he can’t really explain, wants to blow something up.
The result is a riveting study of a “typical” 20th-century Irish family, one both destroyed and bound together by its secrets. And, in revealing the suffering that accompanies any effort to enforce sexual morality, it serves as a cautionary tale to those who want to uphold chastity and the nuclear family at all costs.
Everett doesn’t often validate specific interpretations or theories of his work. The fact that this work often manages to be simultaneously hilarious, ambiguous, deeply moving, and filled with a kind of muted anger at America complicates efforts to interpret either it or Everett’s politics. When he is in the humor to indulge interpretations, he will often entertain a potential reading by saying that it’s not what he intended, but, as far as he is concerned, the process of meaning-making, insofar as it can be said to be a duty, belongs to the reader alone—and it is the reader alone, through their engagement with the text, who completes this process of meaning-making. Everett refuses to hold your hand or tell you what to think. Curiously, this leaves you feeling like the wind has been taken out of your interpretation—or, in my case, my own.
To work in American media in the twenty-first century is to live as if the end is near. Your job, your publication, and your lifestyle are always on the verge of crumbling. It’s easy to wax nostalgic about a time when journalism was a more esteemed profession, or at least a more stable and better compensated one. But dread was the prevailing mood even when publications were thicker with ads and paid classifieds. In 1978 Kevin Michael McAuliffe wrote a history of The Village Voice called The Great American Newspaper. By then, he declared, the publication was already in decline: the paper’s pluck and lively spirit were destined to wither away as it faced its first crisis of succession, brought on by a series of new owners—first the patrician society man Carter Burden, then Clay Felker, editor of crosstown rival New York, and finally, worst of all, Rupert Murdoch.
While most science fiction cognoscenti agree that the genre isn’t really about prediction, it’s undeniably true that 18 years after her sudden, tragic death, Octavia Butler is being hailed as a prophet. Her scarily prescient portrait of the character President Andrew Steele Jarret and his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” in “Parable of the Talents” is one good reason why this is so. Add to that the gated communities and climate crisis forming the background of the previous novel in the “Parable” series, “Parable of the Sower,” and you’ve got yet more proof that this author knew what she was doing. And in keeping with her legendary generosity, Octavia shared some of that knowledge in “A Few Rules.”
The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”
Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.
At once a love story, a coming-of-age tale full of secrets and tension, and a narrative about wanting more and doing anything to get it, The Familiar is a solid entry into Bardugo's already impressive oeuvre.
At times we are ankle deep in the sea of life, and at others, when things are at their worse, up to our necks – adrift. No matter how well we plan and try to stick to the script, there is always a plot twist. This is how Jana Firestone describes those events that pull the metaphorical rugs from beneath our feet. After reading Plot Twist, one thing is certain, change is constant and we can take solace in knowing that, for all of us, the best laid life plans will inevitably take a turn.
Last night, you got between the covers and went to South America.
It wasn’t difficult. A few days ago, you walked around London in 1888; you were in the future before that; you’ve met con artists, florists, runaways and heroines, and you didn’t even have to leave your house. You can experience many things with a book, and in “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians” by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, you’ll read about a different kind of adventure.
Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they?—the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won’t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.
Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. (I say this as someone who writes at least twice a week.) Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. The best columnists lean into their good ideas and minimize their output the rest of the time. Most columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery, spitting out work that is acceptable enough to fill space on a page, yet rarely worth taking the time to read. Their careers are like room temperature bowls of cream of wheat left on a table, still edible but not appetizing. Other columnists are gifted with a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad. Thomas Friedman is the Platonic Ideal of this type: taken seriously by important people and utterly full of shit. Will smart phones change the Middle East? Thomas Friedman will most certainly coin a phrase to answer that question, and his answer will be wrong. This sort of columnist is actually malicious, but hard to uproot. The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions, like everyone else.
The most interesting variety of columnist, though, is the type who should never be there in the first place. This is the person who is handed a columnist job as some sort of professional reward, for reasons unrelated to editorial output, and who then proceeds to quickly use up their meager handful of ideas, and who then faces the existential torture of having to fill the empty space on the page every week without any of the intellectual tools that might make doing so manageable. Watching these people grow increasingly desperate, grasping for ever more trivial topics as time goes by, is like standing on shore and watching someone that you despise trying to bail out a sinking rowboat. You know that you should feel bad for them. And yet.
Framed by the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert, a lone man faces the camera. All around him, rough hills roll off into the distance. Clouds trail across an enormous sky, and mountain peaks decorate the horizon. “My name is Shaun Overton,” he says. He grins, then points to the barren ground at his feet. “And I’m turning this into a desert forest.”
Growing trees in this unforgiving terrain is a promise Overton makes every time he introduces a new episode of Dustups. The video series documents his attempt at “turning 320 acres of wasteland into a desert forest in the most isolated spot in Texas.”
Perhaps I should have. Written it down, I mean. As a writer, it feels like a duty. To keep a journal is a near-ubiquitous piece of introductory advice. Start a journal. Write in it every day. We hear so often about the journals of famous authors—Woolf, Sontag, Kafka, O’Connor, and so on—that it’s as if the rest of us are lazy, negligent, bad writers. Letting the raw material of our art slip through our hands. In a world of endless writing prescriptions and inspiration, such is the party line. As a writer, few things fill me with more guilt that I nevertheless, steadfastly do not do. Why is that? Every day, I wonder if something is happening to me that I’ll want to remember. I fail to write all of it down, and I repeat.
Put that way, it sounds like abject insanity. But hints abound that other notable writers are like the rest of us: abortive and lapsed in their recordkeeping, skeptical of what kinds of truth a journal offers anyway. They offer some hope for the rest of us, that lax recordkeeping is not the death knell for an aspiring writer.
With its fascinating backdrop, a cast of compelling characters, and a moral conundrum that will leave readers on the edge of their seats, Thomas’s debut has well and truly set the stage for one of this year’s most original historical novels.
Crash Landing is more literary than its action-packed cover art suggests. The conflicts are internal, the pacing measured, and despite all the skateboarding terms, the scenes about Woolf flow more organically than those set in the skatepark. Li Charmaine Anne’s writing invites reflection, and Jay’s story provides plenty of material.
For a book drenched in destruction, Everything Must Go is not depressing, and often wryly funny. It is incredibly deeply researched, fluently written, moving deftly between close-up detail and broad-brush analysis. And as a character in On the Beach explains, for “end of the world” we should really read “end of humanity”: “'It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along alright without us.’”
Bodrug, the author of the new book "PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking: 140+ Plant-Based Zero-Waste Recipes That Are Good For You, Your Wallet, and the Planet,” believes that entering the zero-waste space does not have to be very challenging at all — and, in most cases, can be both fun and imaginative, too. And, as inflation, “shrinkflation” and “greedflation” continue to cause food prices to skyrocket, this practice is something we all could get better at adapting.
José Andrés spends much of his time contemplating the unifying nature of food, both in and out of the world’s most dangerous conflict and disaster zones.
Her first standalone fantasy and her first historical novel, The Familiar is a rich and lyrical mix of genres and tropes. A tale set in 16th-century Madrid during the height of the Spanish Inquisition, it is one part political thriller, one part slow-burn romance, and one survival saga, with a dash of fairytale magic on top. A back-handed love letter to the power of language, the novel’s prose is lyrical and lovely, its story precisely plotted, and its characters richly and fully realized. This is not a book I suspect many of us would have expected Bardugo to write—the magical elements, while important, are not truly the story’s primary focus—but its absorbing mix of real-life history, complex female characters, entertaining wordplay, and generational resilience makes for a genuinely enchanting whole. Yes, it’s a quieter, more deliberate book than its author is normally known for, but it’s haunting in a way that will stay with you well after the last page.
Messud came closer to the true function of literature when she told Publishers Weekly: “We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
“Crooked Seeds” leaves us reeling, trying to get Deidre’s voice out of our heads: “I’m the one that needs help,” she screams. “Me. Look at me. I’m the one!”
Finding a Likeness, the title of Baker’s new memoir, is suggestive of his career-spanning analogical concern. What’s Baker been doing all this time, if not finding tender, outré likenesses everywhere he looks? Now he has tried out a different kind of looking: Finding a Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journalism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools (longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong literary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of representation.
In an effort to introduce “zing, bounce, vitality into traditional kids’ poetry,” Lee wrote Alligator Pie, a book of silly, joyful, charming nursery rhymes that is today a landmark of Canadian literature. Started when he wanted bedtime poems for his little girl but couldn’t think of any suitable ones, Alligator Pie has reportedly sold over half a million copies since its publication in 1974 and cemented Lee’s reputation as “Canada’s Father Goose.” Lee went on to write other popular kids’ books—indeed, he’s a prolific, celebrated former poet laureate of Toronto whose collections include the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Civil Elegies. But Alligator Pie pulled off a feat realized by few authors: it has lasted. My father read it to me countless times at bedtime, and I bought my family copy shortly after my first child was born, a “collector’s edition” released in 2001 (alas, it is too tattered now to interest any collector).
This year marks Alligator Pie’s fiftieth anniversary. The reason for its longevity is simple: it tunes young ears to the music of language. Full of jaunty linguistic sallies—the title poem blasts open with: “Alligator Pie, Alligator Pie, / If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna die!”—Lee’s book is one of the few that can actually inspire a lifelong love of poetry. And shouldn’t that be the goal of children’s verse?
I have to wonder now why I keep returning to this book. Beyond the spectacle of the murders—beyond the melodrama of Malan’s tortured relationship with his country, beyond the unanswerable question of what it means to be white—is a problem that continues to captivate me: the problem of love under apartheid, which is now the problem of love in the ruins of apartheid.
When I quit my magazine job, I decided to try my hand as an artist. It wasn’t entirely abrupt: In my work, I always found it satisfying telling stories in photographs and graphics and drawings, and in spare moments — a whim at first — I picked up a paintbrush to try making images myself. When I left my job, I began to paint more seriously. That was the beginning of my torment: I just wasn’t very good.
Fans of Bardugo’s work will find “The Familiar” a thrilling addition to her canon about oppression and liberation, and anyone interested in this historical period and the themes she’s exploring will find it engrossing. This is a story about the suffering that results when the majority imposes its religion on everyone else, using coercive authority to control the very identities of all. That, alone, makes “The Familiar” an essential read.
Gripping, painful, funny, horrifying, this is multi-level entertainment, a consummate performance to the last. Is there pause for thought when Jim says “white people love feeling guilty”, having told us on the first page that “it always pays to give white folks what they want”? Yes, after decades as a writer’s writer, Everett is finally hitting the big time, but somehow you doubt he’ll be giving anyone the chance to feel too cosy about that.
Simone Gorrindo, whose new memoir, “The Wives,” details her life as a military spouse, had an important motivation for writing her book. “When I got to Georgia,” — Fort Benning, the Army post in Columbus where her husband was stationed — “I was 28, an adult with my own education and career. I was one of only a few spouses who didn’t have children. In New York, everyone asks, ‘What do you do?’ In Georgia, that was not something I was asked. Instead the question was, ‘Where are your children? How many children do you have?’ It was an upending time for my identity. I had to figure out who I was.”
In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.
Now a new book will attempt to shine a light on the French naturalist’s extraordinary achievements and groundbreaking ideas, which date back to the 1740s. “Buffon was one of the very first people to postulate the change of species over time,” said Jason Roberts, author of a new book, Every Living Thing, which will be published next week, on 11 April. “He did not call it evolution – that word was coined later – but he was one of the first people to talk about it and suggest there was some kind of system.”
“Anyone can enter our championship, even if you’re five years old,” explains Nevins Chan Pak Hoong from the sidelines, appointed by the World Cube Association to oversee the competition. A speedcuber himself, he has been involved in organising the competitions for nine years. “It’s very wholesome. You could be sitting next to someone who was a world record holder,” he says (someone later tells me Chan Pak Hoong is, quite secretively, exactly that). Really, though, no one else matters. It’s about beating your past self again, and again, and again.
I am a serious newspaper food columnist. I am not tempted by the next viral pastry trend. I will not spend money on something simply because it is larger or smaller than it should be, or a hybrid of two things I like.
Also me: I spent an hour in traffic to drive to a bakery in Koreatown because someone I follow on Instagram posted a video of a “flat” croissant.
Don’t get me wrong. My breakfast order was delicious; not only was it airy verging on lofty, it was sourdough, strongly so. I’d gladly make a sandwich with it, maybe even deflate its loft into a bagel/panini hybrid. It could be croutons once it’s stale. I’d buy it again.
But it is not a bagel. Squishy, hole-less — it’s the end of the world as we know it. And I do not feel fine.
At its core, eating intuitively is anti-diet, meaning that it pushes back against “the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently.” However, that message often gets flattened by both critics and adherents, especially on social media where it is often positioned as a movement that greenlights eating past the point of being comfortably full. Anti-diet messaging is now also being twisted by major food companies who see it as an opportunity to cash in.
Yet stasis, implacability, mark Joan Didion‘s 1970 novel as surely as change. Its defining motif — in the form of freeway cloverleafs, coiled rattlesnakes, daily routines and calendrical rhythms — is the spiral or loop, and with it she paints the picture of an industry in decay, saturated with copycat movies, predatory men, hacks and hangers-on. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of Didion’s portrait is not the ruthless precision with which it renders the film business then, but the clarity with which it corresponds to the film business now. If you have ever had your agent dodge a meeting or encountered a unit publicist running interference on a scoop or been a third-string guest at an exclusive party, you have already lived out a scene from “Play It As It Lays,” which is to say that the broken Hollywood it depicts is decidedly our own. Its only real anachronisms, to today’s eyes, are Maria’s snobbish swipe at TV writers and the $1,500/month rent on her house in Beverly Hills.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares?” There is no more quotable novel about Hollywood than Carrie Fisher’s roman à clef, “Postcards From the Edge.” Fisher’s sentences bristle with caustic, self-effacing humor. Outside of her forays into that galaxy far, far away, that brand of sharp deadpan comedy is perhaps what the former Princess Leia would become best known for. And in her debut novel, the actress-turned-writer makes great use of her enviable way with words.
Most notably, Towles’s characters hit the page like fully sculpted marble: frank in their behavior, obdurate in their morality and, by and large, very good-looking. In his newest work, “Table for Two,” a collection of six short stories and a novella, Towles thrives at the crossroads of form and technique. There’s not enough room for a character to really mature in 30-odd pages; luckily, Towles doesn’t need them to.
Nonetheless, the task Eli Friedlander sets himself in his ambitious new study Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History is to transform Benjamin’s reputation from that of a philosophizing writer to that of a capital-P Philosopher. As Friedlander acknowledges, resistance to the idea of Benjamin as a philosopher (rather than a cultural historian or literary critic) is “understandable” given the sheer variety of his output, which ranges from essays on Proust and Baudelaire to pieces on Mickey Mouse and toys, as well as “radio plays for children and an endless number of reviews of books.” Philosophy typically becomes more accessible when we’re able to tie a thinker to a particular theory or idea, and, as Friedlander observes, Benjamin’s astonishingly wide array of writing can, for many, prove “just too much.” The main aim of Friedlander’s book, then, is digestion: he sets out to reveal “a ‘Benjaminian’ philosophy” by arguing that the overriding theme of Benjamin’s work is humanity’s relationship to nature.
“Somehow” is classic Anne Lamott, with passages that beg to be highlighted, mulled over and shared with friends and loved ones.
It’s a tale as old as time — the heartwrenching, steam-inducing, bodice-clenching story of a woman falling head over heels in love with a man who’s more red flag than person. Except in the case of the best-selling book A Court Of Thorns And Roses and its subsequent series, author Sarah J Mass didn’t just use these tropes to establish herself in the romance market— she used fairy porn to revive an entire subgenre of publishing.
Let’s wrench things into an imaginary present tense. Why do I decide to have a go? It’s not to honour or acknowledge Russell Jones or his parents. Sorry for that dismissal, but I’m just 17, and far too centred on my spotty self to consider anyone else.
Nor do I enter out of any commitment to literature/writing. My motives are much more focused. I want to win and have my name read out in assembly. I want applause. I want to be admired.
As you might expect, the book provides a clear insight into the immigrant experience in the sixties. She writes: “At times you might be openly abused, called names. That was very unpleasant. I think that’s why those of us who came from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia formed strong communities so that we could feel a sense of belonging.”
At once sweeping and incisive, Clein’s book positions eating disorders within histories of capitalism, technology, popular culture, and social media. The story she spins hasn’t simply stuck in my mind; it’s caused a reconsideration of language—the words I and the people around me use as we talk about our bodies, our relationships to food and movement.
As she relates in “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” Lamott has somehow (actually, on a senior dating site) found her Neal, and, three days after receiving her first Social Security check, became a first-time bride. In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux. “Love is compassion,” she writes, “which Neal defines as the love that arises in the presence of suffering. Are love and compassion up to the stark realities we face at the dinner table, and down the street, and at the melting ice caps, or within Iranian nuclear plants and our own Congress? Maybe, I think so. Somehow.”
Increasingly, food brands have been putting themselves through the same thought exercise: How do you capture the taste of space? Right now, I have the option of buying multiple space-flavored foods, all of them approximating the concept from different angles. Some use the lens of realism, drawing on what we know to exist in our galaxy. Others see the prompt more as world-building, dreaming up a galaxy and then flavors that might fit into it. Others still are hopping on the bandwagon in name alone, slapping the word “space” onto releases that would make sense in any other context.
For many New Yorkers, their local bodega holds a special place in their hearts. The bodega is more than just your average convenience store — or, god forbid, the tiny corner-store-sized Whole Foods Market Daily Shop. It’s a testament to the city’s vibrant immigrant communities, a cultural hub that’s steeped in rich history and filled with love from generations past. Where supermarkets are closed, the bodegas are open. Not to mention that these local stores are also home to some of New York’s most iconic dishes: chopped cheese, bacon-egg-and-cheese and chicken cutlets, just to name a few. Even amid a ruthless pandemic, the bodega persevered and continued to serve as the backbone of NYC. So it makes sense why bodega culture is such a big deal amongst city dwellers. Where you go and, most importantly, what you get matters.
There’s always a moment in the journey from Dublin to London – which I make every month or two, taking the land-and-sea route via Holyhead instead of flying – when I stop what I’m doing – reading or writing or chatting to the person next to me – and think: you don’t get to enjoy this from 40,000ft.
Thomas’s foundation stone is a peerlessly deft and nuanced skill at creating character, from the manipulative Isabella to the weak, snobbish, pampered Richard, clinging to redemption by a shred of honest instinct. But it is Evelyn on whose believability the novel rests, and she is a masterly creation: prickly, insecure, self-dramatising; an overthinker, at once sly and prone to blurting out truths; a zigzagger, a back-tracker, in flight from her own damage, lustful and with a hopelessly thwarted capacity for love. As a writer, Evelyn is also the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Thomas must carry off that fiendishly difficult trick of making her evasions and exaggerations visible while allowing them the power to deceive, and eventually, haltingly, guiding her towards revelation. Clever, emotionally resonant, packed with startling twists and dark turns and very funny indeed, this is fiction roaring on all cylinders.
As the title suggests, the story is bookended by two referenda, when the Eighth Amendment was introduced in 1982 and when it was repealed nearly 40 years later. Three generations of women, three different experiences of women’s rights, religion, and love pulling at their various sleeves, are detailed in the interweaving timelines.
Across from the swing set outside of Twilight Hall, in the New England Review office, a box of newly minted issues of Volume 45.1 sits beside a shelf of archival issues dating back to the magazine’s founding in 1978. Led by Editor Carolyn Kuebler ’90 and Managing Editor Leslie Sainz, NER delicately toes the line between maintaining a prestigious reputation and a welcoming appeal.
One question I often find myself mulling over while dining out is: When did the water glasses get so tiny? That gives way to other thoughts. Am I just uncontrollably, and perhaps worryingly, thirsty? Is the guidance that I drink eight glasses a day indeed bogus? Am I not supposed to drink this much water with a meal?
If you read slowly, that’s okay. If you read very few books, that’s okay too. The secret truth is that there is absolutely no reason to care how many books you read in a year, unless you like stats and numbers and tracking things and in that case, might I suggest a spreadsheet and doing your own tracking, far from the Goodreads crowd.
Perhaps we are drawn to mythical versions of girlhood—of innocence without consequences, of a singular and meteoric coming-of-age—because they allow us to imagine that we have stepped outside of the loop of life and its political and societal realities. But Headshot reminds us that we are always beholden to the larger world, even in the most fundamental sense. “Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever make. Tiny future fighters are nested inside infant bodies of baby girls,” she writes. “Men are dead ends, but girls are infinite backwards and forwards.” That Bullwinkel’s novel is no less gripping for this acknowledgement makes it all the more of a knockout.
Tommy Orange’s novels reveal stories that “bring you back better made,” to paraphrase a line from one of the characters in his latest book, “Wandering Stars.” For some readers, the journey may be harrowing, as Orange is unstinting in his depictions of the injustices and violent acts perpetrated against Native Americans. But the novelist also reveals the capacity of tribal identity to sustain and empower families, even amid ongoing struggles.
Parasol Against the Axe is a book about a physical place, the stories that make up that place, and the disembodied plane on which those stories and that place meet—say, a strange church where Hero encounters a cohort of worshipful mice, a Latin-speaking woman accompanied everywhere by two goats, and a couple of ambulatory statues. The extent to which the church and its inhabitants are real, as opposed to a kind of lucid dream induced by the city, is entirely unclear. In fact, throughout the novel, there is little clarity or definition to be found, just an overwhelming sense of immersion in a completely bizarre, completely enthralling world—one in which the bonds that hold together things like cities or friendships are dangerously tenuous.
This playing with time encapsulates the themes of development and entropy within the story. It also beautifully reveals the brittle hope that underpins human relationships: armed with the knowledge that William and Sybille’s relationship will not survive (William is mysteriously missing at the opening), there is a good deal of melancholy pathos in the depiction of the playful, optimistic stages of their burgeoning relationship at the end of the novel. And yet, at the same time, Holten manages the feat of intensifying the drama as the book goes on.
The project of Anna Jacobson’s remarkable debut memoir, How to Knit a Human, is to record the splintering of her self and memory after a severe psychotic episode. Jacobson was the subject of an involuntary treatment order and several rounds of ECT, in the aftermath of which she experienced serious memory loss. She lost her autonomy too, for a time, and How to Knit a Human is less a memoir of recovery than of reintegration, and a powerful reclamation of that lost autonomy through art. As the book progresses, Jacobson shifts the narrative mode from an unknown and unknowable third person to a steady assertion of the first person.
We live in an era imbued with an ambient sense of ecological loss, the existential disorientation of moving through our daily routines and raising our children against the backdrop of a great unraveling. There could hardly be a more urgent or necessary moment for the arrival of Lydia Millet’s exceptional new book, “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life,” in which the acclaimed novelist turns her substantial talents toward a different kind of story — a profoundly evocative ode to life itself, in all its strange and wondrous and imperiled forms.
From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaotic than we can imagine. Its waters move in ways that lack a terrestrial equivalent and, in doing so, the ocean shirks tidy metaphor.
Right now, in the Atlantic Ocean alone, a single current, the Gulf Stream, is moving more water than all the world’s rivers combined. Across the ocean’s face, invisible to the naked eye, hundreds of eddies are whirling. Most of them are larger than the state of Rhode Island and reach more than three miles into the deep.
Throughout history, those precious few moments of totality—and the rare natural conditions that result—have proved conducive to scientific discovery. During a total solar eclipse in 1868, a French astronomer became the first person to observe helium, spotting the element in the spectrum of the usually invisible corona. In 1919, a pair of astronomers who were watching an eclipse verified Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by measuring how the sun distorts the light from other stars.
Culture is a pendulum swinging back and forth between tail ends of a spectrum. If the previous decade saw conservative politics, liberalism is on the forefront; if the starlets of yesteryear were curvy, today’s will be skinny; if your closet is stocked with skinny jeans, be prepared for the takeover of the straight leg. Culture is constantly reacting to itself, swinging from one side to the opposite side, like how your parents told you to think of them as a friend growing up, so you’re going to tell your kids that you’re not their friend, you’re their mom. Like us humans, culture learns from the previous generation’s mistakes.
Alphabetical Diaries is drawn from a decade’s worth of Heti’s own diaries, about 500,000 words that she separated out into single-sentence strands and then alphabetized. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry (made with a cyborg apprentice), with a glancing nod to the tradition of the commonplace book, a sort of personal encyclopedia of the owner’s favorite quotes, facts, and memories.
Because of the conventions of English, the first page opens with “A book,” and Heti never misses an opportunity to make fortuitous play between chance and meaning. The randomization of the sentences is immediately compelling, trained as so many of us are to the disjointed syncopation of social media and text messages. There are enough personal disclosures to reassure the reader that she is really reading a diary. Any woman who has kept one will recognize the painful repetitions of heartbreak, yearning, and romantic disappointment. Certain names (pseudonymous or otherwise) pepper the text: when the “L” section comes around, a certain Lars dominates the page as he seems to have dominated the diarist, for better or worse. The diary brought me into a rapid felt intimacy with Heti: like any girlfriend, I found that I disliked certain of her beaus (e.g., Vig) immediately and felt vindicated with each small revelation of their shallowness and misdeeds.
More than two hundred years’ worth of narratives concerning the end of the world have been chewed through. Lynskey’s definition of what constitutes such a story is roomy. It can involve ‘the total demolition of the planet itself, the extinction of the human race, and the collapse of civilization, which is to say the end of the world as we know it’. That last allows a lot of space for interpretation.
I’ve got a bottle of whiskey and some ice that’s already started to melt (c’mon, this is Florida), so let’s jump straight to the questions before I accidentally wind up drinking a glass of water. Me, hydrated? What is this, amateur hour?
Giddy up!
Here is an origin story about origin stories. Once upon a time, we knew where we came from: Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Fall. Then came modern science, modern doubt. Geology, paleontology: The world grew older very fast. Skulls were discovered, and stone tools. Human origins became a problem and a fascination. Who are we? How did we emerge? And given who we think we may be, how should we live?
But over the past three years, Harper Collins’ designers have put their skills towards a new mission: saving paper. In an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of each book, they’re tweaking fonts, layout, and even the ink used. The goal is to pack more into each page, while ensuring that the pages are as readable as ever. And so far, these subtle, imperceptible tweaks have saved 245.6 million pages, equivalent to 5,618 trees.
Does the world need a sweet apocalyptic novel? Is such a thing even possible? This doomsday in daffodils will surely exasperate some readers, but for others — myself included — it offers an alluring itinerary toward hope.
From its intriguing prologue through to its dark twists and the dynamic mix of characters who are both caught up in and pulling the strings of this story, Darker by Four swiftly comes together to deliver the kind of immersive narrative escape that all the best fantasy novels – this one included – do so well.
The story unravelled before me like a true-crime mystery, nature edition.
I had my own questions about what had led elk to live here in the first place and why there wasn’t better signage warning drivers about them being on the road. And I wondered how many other elk had died in collisions.
The night after Bob’s death, I lay awake and thought about him on the pavement outside my home, dying. I needed to know Bob’s story and what factors led to his demise. What did this community’s love for this animal tell us about our relationship with the natural world? And what could Bob’s death teach us?
“I think I’m done publishing novels,” Winslow said, “but there’s a lot of research I want to do. There’s things I want to learn about. I’ll probably always write, but I’ve made this decision about publishing and it’s pretty firm.”
In addition to the political videos that he creates and shares on his social media accounts, many adaptations of his books are currently in development. “City on Fire,” for example, is getting a movie starring Austin Butler. Winslow and Butler are among the producers on the Sony pic. He will always be a storyteller — Winslow says every one of his novels has been either sold or optioned by Hollywood — just in different media.
“The Black Girl Survives in This One,” a short story anthology edited by Saraciea J. Fennell and Desiree S. Evans, is changing the literary horror canon. As self-proclaimed fans of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and “Goosebumps,” the editors have upped the ante with a new collection spotlighting Black women and girls, defying the old tropes that would box Black people in as support characters or victims.
So, no, this is not a “feelgood” book, but it did make me feel good – feel joy, in fact, at its precise pursuit of its vision, at its grownup complexity and at the way Deidre is such a perfectly realised fictional creation. Crooked Seeds is not a “book that feels like a warm hug” but more what Kafka called “an axe for the frozen sea within us”. When Deidre says something isn’t “my kind of thing,” and she’s asked: “What is your kind of thing?”, she replies: “I don’t know. Nothing really.” She is afraid of what is inside her coming out. But in this outstandingly good novel it does come out, it must come out, and the reader is the beneficiary.
As “Clear” opens, a somber, brave, flat-broke Free Church minister named John Ferguson is deposited, after a seasick-making voyage, at a remote northern Scottish island to evict — for a promised payment of 16 pounds — the island’s sole inhabitant, a shy, galumphing tenant farmer named Ivar.
It’s hard to overstate how deftly and viscerally Davies’s prose conveys this world. We see and hear and smell it, shiver with it. Every scene is imbued with austere beauty. Ferguson, on arrival, “squeezed the sea, as best he could, out of the sleeves and pockets of his coat and jumped up and down a few times in his sodden footwear in an effort to warm up.” He goes “picking his way over the rocks like a tall, slightly undernourished wading bird, thin black hair blowing vertically in the persisting wind, silently talking to his absent wife.”
Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?
These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. It is in part a history of the crossword puzzle, which was invented by Arthur Wynne in 1913 and quickly denigrated as a frivolously feminine pursuit. The press delighted in framing the crossword craze that erupted in the 1920s as a “vice,” sometimes even an addiction. Columnists and commentators went so far as to worry that the puzzle was a “threat to the family unit,” as Shechtman writes: Women suspected of contracting “crossword puzzleitis” were accused of neglecting their household duties to riffle through their dictionaries.
I get the sense that immigrant fiction as a genre already felt dated by the time I started writing. But if I love the endless domestic fiction of bored, lustful white people who hate their suburban hells and their Subarus and their families, why can’t they love my domestic fiction back? I want to write about my life in the suburbs, too, being raised mostly by my grandma while my parents worked. Talking back to her, being beaten by her, hating her, loving her, being with her.
Writing food as an immigrant body is always fraught. Food memory in so-called immigrant fiction has its own constellation of cliches all of which can and have been commodified, translated into English, sentimentalized on the internet (do you remember the jokes around cut fruit that haunted Asian diaspora Twitter a few years back?), used to sell cookbooks and TV shows. Food is the salve of the immigrant child brought to them by their otherwise stoic, silent immigrant family in the popular imagination.
There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed at first blush like a strange thing to say. Isn’t personality supposed to be something more than a mere gesture? Aren’t gestures, a form of non-verbal communication, supposed to convey aspects of one’s personality in the first place? The phrase eluded me for a while until I thought of it as describing what it might be like to be an actor — and, of course, Gatsby was always playing a role of his own invention — which is about constantly making successful gestures, which ultimately add up to creating a genuine personality, albeit fictional.
A text time-stamped 1:19 a.m. early Wednesday read, “I think it’s over, man.” It was a Los Angeles–based colleague at The Messenger. He’d received an unanticipated direct deposit and the sum totaled his unused vacation days. I guess in addition to good weather they have some solid labor laws in California. In New York City, I was laid off without additional pay. Plus it was raining.
It is a cool morning in March and I am wading along a muddy path, part of the vast, ancestral grounds of Knepp Castle in southern England. The scenery looks ancient and dramatic, a patchwork of well-trodden grass, deep puddles and tangled scrubs, studded with majestic, bare-branched oak trees. High up in the crowns of the trees are huge storks' nests the size of tractor wheels, their dark silhouettes contrasting with the pale blue sky. White storks glide through the sky and land in the nests, while others sit and warm their eggs. Every now and then, the air is pierced by a joyful clattering sound as they greet each other.
"We sometimes describe this as stork headquarters," says biologist Laura Vaughan-Hirsch, gesturing at the nests around us. She leads the White Stork Project at Knepp Estate, which started in 2016 and is part of a wider stork reintroduction project in southern England. As we talk, a stork in one of the highest nests climbs on top of another: "They're mating," says Vaughan-Hirsch. A short while later, a clattering sound is heard from the nest, which is, she explains "all part of the bonding".
The straw-headed bulbul’s population across its range in Southeast Asia has been decimated to meet this demand. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently lists the bird as critically endangered. The species is believed to be already extinct in Thailand and likely Myanmar, as well as likely extinct on the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. The populations in peninsular Malaysia and Indonesian Borneo are also declining rapidly.
The only place to buck the straw-headed bulbul’s declining trend is the city-state of Singapore. The highly urbanized island nation has emerged as an unexpected haven for the species, where the bird’s population is slowly, but steadily, increasing, thanks to over three decades of conservation actions.
That idea about falling into a cliche seems important in this book and in Thomson’s writing more widely. There is always a tension between the austere avant-gardist and the crowd-pleasing storyteller. How to Make a Bomb is a novel about a midlife crisis, elevated and rarefied by its protagonist’s exalted view of himself in a literary and historical tradition of suffering men.
As I read John Gray’s Feline Philosophy, I couldn’t help thinking of the concluding lines of Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But be”—revising them for Gray’s subject: A cat should not mean, but be. Cats, as Gray explains, have no problem just being. It’s humans who are driven to mean, to lead purposeful lives that matter. Can you conceive of a cat finding satisfaction in cutting off two seconds in its record time of dashing through the rooms of a house or proudly wearing a new Gucci collar or being promoted to managing pet? Gray makes the point: “If cats could understand the human search for meaning they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand, cannot help looking for meaning beyond their lives.”