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.