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.