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.