“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.