Only thirty-eight years old, the tortured poet John Thompson died in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1976. His second book of poetry, the scarcely finished Stilt Jack, was published two years later. It has been deemed a minor Canadian classic—the kind of book that, in a more just or literate world, would be hailed as a national treasure. It has also been taken to suggest that Thompson—by all accounts, an alcoholic—was so in love with death that the coroner was wrong to rule his demise an accident.
The first of thirty-eight ghazals in Stilt Jack establishes the dismal mood: “Now you have burned your books: you’ll go / with nothing but your blind, stupefied heart.” In an essay on Thompson, poet, critic, and journalist Michael Lista writes that Stilt Jack “opens with a tone any barfly will recognize, the self-admonishing second person of your conscience telling you that you’re ruined.” Seemingly innocuous, that same word—barfly—reappears as the title of Lista’s disturbing new volume of poetry.
Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.
Gardens are, or at least have the potential to be, an enormous but as yet untapped solution to the climate and biodiversity crisis. But what are we doing? Disappearing them beneath plastic and paving. Beneath weed-suppressant membranes and “decorative” purple slate chips. Beneath cars, beneath gravel, beneath entire new homes. Beneath large stones and driftwood to make them look like the beach (my absolute favourite).
Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.
The concept of literary debuts is a particular obsession of the publishing industry. I understand the appeal: Novelty attracts attention, and attention garners sales. It’s one of the most surefire sources of publicity in a time when the amount of content produced rapidly outpaces consumer interest. It also creates the opportunity for authors to debut in multiple disciplines or genres, allowing audiences to be reintroduced to a talented author in a new context, as is the case with the revelatory short story collection Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao. Ninetails is the author’s fiction debut, although she’s previously published 3 acclaimed collections of poetry: Mad Honey Symposium, Oculus, and The Kingdom of Surfaces. It’s a frequently surprising collection of short stories that shows just how much Mao’s time as a poet has sharpened her skill as a writer, and signals the entry of a bold new voice in fiction.
The excellence of Barry’s work is difficult to quantify. His prose has an unusual quality; a laughter than is by turns mocking, sly, despairing and disbelieving, yet it is never vicious. This novel could not be described as a comedy – it is too full of pathos, regret, disappointment and reasonless suffering – yet it is not exactly tragic, and it is certainly not maudlin.
The World’s Biggest Bookstore closed its doors for good 10 years ago this spring, and the public nostalgia for the store even today is proof of how loved it was, for both casual and passionate readers. And it was the kind of bookstore you don’t see today, where every section overflowed with the latest, greatest and maybe not-so-great. Having everything available at your browsing fingertips felt like a brick-and-mortar Amazon, but with smiling staff whose knowledge of, say, Canadian literature or hip-hop magazines levelled up this bookcore experience.
In the 20th century, as Siam became Thailand and Malaya became Malaysia, both countries used food as a tool to establish modern national identities. Far from the border, government ministries and capital residents began to distinguish their food cultures from their Southeast Asian neighbors. Two purportedly distinct food identities emerged, contained by a set of unique national dishes like pad thai and nasi lemak, even though the countries grew similar produce and shared pantry ingredients.
Yet people in southern Thailand and northern Malaysia continued cooking foods that defy this sort of tidy nationalization, part of a larger, ongoing — sometimes violent — struggle to maintain identities along the border.
When I’d interviewed for the gig, I’d been warned that Judith had a certain “New England” reserve and could be hard to get to know; words like “prickly” and “formidable” had been used to describe her. That hadn’t been my first experience of Judith, but, nervous all over again once we were officially on professional terms, I’d doubted myself, succumbing to the tropes long used to demonize powerful women. And so, when Judith had suggested lunch, I’d assumed that she would present me with a finished meal. That she would want to present herself to me the same way: Composed. Complete. That she wouldn’t want me to witness her in the process of making.
Judith’s performance of formality, I’d soon learn, was but a practiced facade, an affect she’d spent her life using to gain entry to spaces reluctant to let women through, and as a protective shield wherever, whenever, and with whomever she wasn’t sure it was safe to drop her guard.
By which I mean: I was wrong.
Music can affect your mealtime, just as it can affect all human experiences to some extent. But what if music were treated not just as background to your food, but as an ingredient? Can music go beyond ambience, to directly enhance and complement tasting, chewing, swallowing? Can music be not just “the food of love,” as Shakespeare wrote in the opening of Twelfth Night, but the food of … well, food?
Often playful but still powerful, the messaging within this collection encourages the reader to pay more heed to the world of which they are a part and in which they live. Humans are not presented as evil but rather drifting, often mindlessly. That this will lead to their eventual destruction is made obvious without the need to articulate.
An impressive and always engaging debut from a writer whose future work I now look forward to reading. Original and entertaining, these stories make full use of the form to hold attention in a world designed to distract from critical thinking.
The teenager’s experiences show us not only the lack of agency girls and women had in the 19th century, but serves as a reminder of the battles still fought for female autonomy today.
A philosopher by training (she calls herself a “possibly eternal PhD candidate” at Harvard), Rothfeld is skilled at drawing on markedly different perspectives and contexts to build a broad, cohesive argument. Over the course of a dozen essays, she treats the cinema of David Cronenberg as seriously as television police procedurals, while Marie Kondo’s war on clutter receives as much consideration as the philosophy of John Rawls and Amia Srinivasan. Because, while many think aesthetic values grow out of moral ones, Rothfeld suspects the opposite may be true: we don’t judge to be beautiful that which confirms our existing moral views; we discover serious moral positions embedded in beauty. Bearing this in mind throughout her collection, Rothfeld doesn’t want to convince her reader of any particular stance as much as she wants to evangelize a broader critical orientation—one defined by sustained, energetic engagement with the object.
Pictures tell stories. We learn this from our earliest days. Our parents read to us—lulling us towards sleep in that sing-song cadence we know so well—and we are enraptured not only by the words, but with the images that compliment them. Sure, we may outgrow our love of picture books, but we never forget the indelible joy of seeing a narrative unfold before us. Perhaps that’s why so many of us love comic books and graphic novels, and why nearly all of us are drawn to TV and film.
But pictures don’t have to be expressly tied to a complimenting narrative in order to tell a story. For instance, think of a favorite photograph—or better yet, go find one. (Yes, right now. Look in the frames on your desk or your wall, scan the covers on your bookshelves, or even (sigh) scroll through your phone if you must.) Find a photograph that compels you to know more—about the setting, about the subject, even about the person on the other side of the camera. How many stories could that one photograph tell?
In my own family, Marmite has been a unifying force, gumming down friction between generations and in-laws; I’ve watched it bind my Kashmiri mum and her half-Madarasi brother-in-law as they swapped tips and tricks on the best shops to find the last available jar. Given that they’re two Pakistanis from families with no Marmite in their DNA, I’ve come to suspect that a relationship with Marmite is less about either instant hate or an “acquired” taste and more about how you’re introduced to it.
But the novel rewards alertness. Beneath its lush, impressionistic surfaces are solid structures, and for a careful reader the story becomes clear, or nearly so. (Some of the book’s mysteries remain unsoundable, at least for me, which is a quality I prize: one can return, again and again, to the inexhaustible text.)
Fenton, a longtime reporter for the New York Post whose previous book “Stolen Years” was a nonfiction study of 10 men and women wrongfully imprisoned, has written a big-hearted novel about the enduring importance of faith and family. While some of the plot twists are a little meshuga — the Yiddish word for crazy — overall, the book is a lot of fun.
Elaine May is one of the key architects of American comedy; an alumna of the influential Kennedy-era underground scene in Chicago that gave us the O.G. “Saturday Night Live” cast and film director Mike Nichols. Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon have name-checked May as a comedy hero. And yet, despite seven decades as a filmmaker, actor and screenwriter whose movies are entrenched in the Hollywood canon, May is that rarity: a film legend who has opted out of public life. We know the work, but not the creator.
If ever you’ve feared that the internet has become less weird, this should ease your mind. Birds Aren’t Real had its first dose of major mainstream attention in late 2021, thanks to a surreal New York Times feature by Taylor Lorenz. Now, the group’s two leaders, Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos, have published their manifesto in book form. Over nearly 300 pages, they reveal how the bird genocide plot was hatched by notorious CIA director Allen Dulles—when he wasn’t spearheading the MK-Ultra mind-control program. Using stolen documents and confidential transcripts, they also show the complicity of presidents from Eisenhower to Biden. Alongside this revisionist American history, the book offers a field guide for recognizing bird-drones in the “wild” as well as instructions for resistance. There’s also a word search (AVICIDE, CIA KILLED JFK).
Know one last thing: It’s not real. Birds Aren’t Real is an elaborate and successful prank. Everyone is in character, from McIndoe and Gaydos down to the TikTokers going off on Thanksgiving (a suspiciously bird-centric holiday) in the comments. Every document in the book is total fiction. I’d even go so far as to say that birds are probably real, after all. But none of this should imply that what the bird truthers are up to isn’t serious or helpful. Our dragon-ridden age needs its wise fools.
In translating the stories in Selected Stories, I have resisted the temptation to make the English more vivid, expressive, and colorful than Kafka’s plain and understated German. That plainness was a deliberate choice, a rejection of the “high-flown stuff” (almost none of which has survived) that he wrote as a youth while he still was, as he put it, “mad about grand phrases.”
Kafka’s usually clear and dispassionate tone—Samuel Beckett, who read The Castle in German, called it “almost serene”—heightens the uncanniness of the events depicted in his stories while also enabling us readers to detach ourselves from the protagonist and to perceive layers of irony and, yes, humor hidden in the interstices of his sentences.
In the summer of 1948, a young American, a Bennington College graduate visiting Paris, lost her purse in the Jardin des Tuileries. Inside it were her passport and ticket home. Many travelers in her situation would panic. She decided it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to leave France. She quit her job at Doubleday, then the biggest publisher in New York, and moved into a friend’s aunt’s apartment, where she launched a clandestine supper club to support herself. Perhaps she’d “open a small restaurant,” she wrote to her horrified parents. In another letter, she reassured her father that although she knew she’d made a risky choice, “one has to take chances and there are many advantages to be had. Anyway, I am an adventurous girl.”
That girl was Judith Jones, one of the most important editors in American history. She pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of a slush pile during her second stint at Doubleday—in Paris this time, in 1949—a discovery for which her male boss took credit. Eight years later, she moved to Knopf, where she worked until 2013, publishing authors such as John Hersey, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. She was an avid cook—that supper club of hers was a hit—and, as an editor, single-handedly elevated the cookbook to its contemporary status, working with all-time greats including Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Irene Kuo, Claudia Roden, and many, many more.
One of the many vignettes that comprise Lauren Cook’s book of strange reflections, Sex Goblin, begins “It’s a book about living.” That is exactly what Sex Goblin is: a book about the many possible experiences, emotions, and epiphanies a life can include, which, as in life, may or may not ever be resolved in a way one would call “satisfying.” In fact, we are given glimpses of several possible lives that run the gamut from prosaic to bizarre, and are often both those things at once in the way that most lives are. Sex Goblin appears to be a record of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes these thoughts and feelings are conveyed through stories; other times, they are written plainly as single sentences or short paragraphs. By means of its diaristic form, Sex Goblin asserts the importance of individual experience apart from its larger, societal context, seemingly in an effort to reclaim that which is personal from the jaws of the universal.
O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.
In 1637, a Londoner named Mabel Gray lost her spoons. After looking everywhere, she set off to consult a wizard. That wizard directed her to a second, who sent her to a third, and she wound up taking a lengthy trek around the city, paying for ferries across the Thames and tromping through livestock yards and sketchy neighborhoods. According to Tabitha Stanmore—who opens her charming book Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic with this account—the whole process would have cost Mabel the equivalent of a skilled tradesman’s pay for a week. And as much as Mabel’s quest sounds like the premise of a fairy tale, Stanmore insists that there was nothing especially unusual about it.
Cunning Folk is packed with anecdotes about “service magicians”—people who offered a range of everyday magical help for a fee—in late medieval and early modern Europe (roughly the 14th to late 17th centuries). Stanmore’s sources are court records from the time, which provide fascinating windows into what people fought about, and therefore what they cared about, during the Middle Ages, even if the piquant little stories they tell don’t always come with a satisfying ending. Did Mabel get her spoons back? We’ll never know.
“The Road to Dungannon” is short but packed with anecdotes and long but pithy quotations from contemporary authors — the transcriptions alone were presumably a massive chore, as many conversations took place in presumably cacophonous public spaces. Though Pearson’s extensive knowledge could induce guilt in the reader for knowing nothing about some of his more modern subjects, the occasional reference to Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor offers an intellectual lifeline. And he confesses to the same difficulty reading some of Joyce as anyone else.
I realize now that my summer reads may be out of step with many others’, but we all are, I hope, transported by our picks, because that’s what good literature can do.
However, unlike our unicellular ancestors, we are ethically conflicted about our looming fate. How much more should we grow as a species? Do we have an obligation to leave future generations with a biosphere that is as rich and diverse as the one we inherited? How should we distribute the associated costs between poor and rich nations, between producers and consumers, and between institutions and individuals? These are important, pressing issues. Beneath many of these questions lies a more fundamental ethical quandary: what should we do about our ability to so easily dominate other species and the environment? It is a problem that has become urgent. Should we disavow our dominance and attempt to minimise it? Or should we embrace our powers to alter Earth and its inhabitants?
Perhaps we shouldn’t do either.
"Wake up! The sea is taking it all away, it's taking it all away!" were the first cries Claudia Ramón heard that night, when a fierce wave lashed her town. "It was my cousin who warned me, and I ran to take out my personal things. If she hadn't grabbed my arm tightly, the wave would have rolled me over too," says the young woman standing on the rubble in the sand.
Where the family bodega used to stand there's now only a huge sinkhole. In the background there's the squawking of seagulls and a calm, silent horizon, oblivious to the roaring wind that mercilessly lashed the landscape of Las Barrancas, Mexico, in the early morning of October 2, 2022.
From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7, the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy: “In the winter of 2012, against my better judgment and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing – much as I said they were – and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.”
For all of the transformations of the past two decades, however, Kuper is always alert to the city’s particularity. This is the immutable essence – to be found in the daily pleasure of the menu du jour or just the snarky, nasal banter at your local zinc (bar) – that makes Parisians love their city, and foreigners such as Kuper (and me) love it even more.
Venezuela had six glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, located about 16,000 feet above sea level. By 2011, five had already disappeared, but the Humboldt Glacier located near the second highest mountain in the country, Humboldt Peak, resisted the onslaught of the weather. Scientists believe its disappearance makes Venezuela the first country in the Americas — and the first country in modern history — to lose all its glaciers.
Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent.
The vivid, tense character of Isabel is the first great achievement in “The Safekeep”; her fears and her worries and her isolation, her determination to stay in her grief and shut others out, the way this armor slowly and then quickly cracks apart. A close second is the novel’s structure: a steady revelation, piece by piece, that continues to deepen the narrative with each chapter.
“I don’t seek to leave you in the foetal position,” writes Clayton Page Aldern, a neuroscientist turned environmental journalist. The Weight of Nature, his elegant, convincingly argued book about how climate change is altering our minds, bodies and brains, didn’t make me want to curl up silently; it made me want to shout, to rouse people from their slumber. Aldern asks whether we are awake. The answer for most of us is no. Too many people, especially politicians, seem unable or unwilling to comprehend the dangers posed by a warming world and prefer to carry on, head in the sand, with business and life as usual. Aldern shows us that the world we knew has gone. The choice he offers us is to continue to make things worse, or to confront the crisis and work together to reduce harm and become more resilient.
Countless young writers have asked the unanswerable question: how to write about family members without wreaking havoc? How to approach the urgent and inescapable material that has shaped your life without rendering that life unlivable – because you have included too many details about Aunt Joan or (almost always) portrayed one or more of your parents in an unflattering light … Given that fiction is always on some level born of experience (even when set in another century or on another planet), and that experience so often involves family, how to write fiction at all?
When my husband and I were looking to join a community pool a few years ago, we only had a couple of requirements: a low-key and judgment-free vibe, members who were already friends, an adequate amount of adult swim time, and an old-school snack bar. You know the ones. More shacks than kitchens, these snack bars are keepsakes from my youth. They’re run by middle schoolers still figuring out how to calculate proper change and their “menus” are handwritten in Sharpee and only mildly accurate. They are perfect.
Travelling from Miami to the island of Key West, Florida, hasn't always been the carefree drive it is today. In the early part of the 20th Century, the only way to make the journey to the southernmost point in the continental US was a day-long boat ride, and that was dependent on weather and tides. But thanks to a stunning engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway that stretches 113 miles from the mainland's southern tip across 44 tropical islands on 42 bridges, I was seemingly floating across a necklace of mangrove forests and cays as I drove to a place where North America and the Caribbean meet.
Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World is a wild amalgamation of genre elements that pulls readers into a unique postapocalyptic world in which another end is imminent. Told with surprising speed, given its depth and scope, this bizarre whodunit also works as a science fiction allegory full of mystery that contemplates the end of the world and what it means to be human.
This is an impressive debut; I already look forward to Van der Wouden’s next. She can draw characters with nuance, without fear too; she creates and sustains atmospheres deftly, and ultimately delivers a thrilling story.
The question of Yoko Ono’s marriage to John Lennon sits like a water buffalo at the center of any conversation about her eight decades of work as an artist. It is oversized, hairy, imposing, impossible to ignore, tricky to get around. Do you tiptoe past it, slink away from it, or approach it head-on?
As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?
What I expected to find upon opening Anna Noyes’ debut novel, was a story of sisters, a story of myths and traditions, a story brimming with nature and mystery. While all this is here within the pages, I found so much more brewing beneath the surface: how we understand one another, what we know to be true versus what we wish to be true, and, perhaps most importantly, what it means to be a woman who has been told what to believe her whole life.
While driving through a neighborhood that endlessly replicates clone homes or traveling a city where once bustling factories have shuttered their industry, one might wonder who designed these domestic dystopias and apocalyptic sites. In Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition (2024), Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing provide an answer: modernity did.
Acknowledging plants’ agency could rid science of this vestige of the past, and, Schlanger wagers, bring about a new paradigm, one that integrates nature with humans and acknowledges the agency of all life. “Plants will go on being plants, whatever we decide to think of them,” notes Schlanger. “But how we decide to think of them could change everything for us.”
The language of paradigms and paradigm shifts is ubiquitous except among the people most familiar with its source: historians and philosophers of science. Once upon a time—let’s say the late 1960s—a reference to “paradigm shifts” primarily signaled knowledge of Thomas Kuhn’s historicist approach to the philosophy of science. Kuhn’s 1962 classic, transformed our understanding of scientific change and has become a foundational text for historians, philosophers, and social studies of science. It is nonetheless unusual these days for anyone who studies science professionally to invoke the term “paradigm shift.” The concept has become completely unmoored from the term.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in other words, is one of those books that everybody knows but doesn’t read, or reads once and shelves. On rereading my copy, neglected since a first-year graduate seminar in the history of science over 25 years ago, I was struck by Kuhn’s insistence on the power of historical research to puncture idealized claims of scientific progress. Paradigms and normal science? Sure. But the truly radical idea here is that outsiders—in this case, historians—can offer better insight into the inner workings of a profession than the practitioners themselves.
Editor is a job title that feels deliberately obfuscating, like chief financial officer or art dealer. Within it lay multitudes of duties, predilections, sensibilities and manias. An editor can, should, or ideally will be: punctilious and attentive to detail, in grammar and in tone; personable with their authors, wide readers, fast readers; politically savvy, especially in the larger houses; sensitive to cultural shifts but loyal to the text; possessed of some degree of business nous. In other words, the editor is a kind of polymath. That professional managerial culture, in all its departmentalization and political quackery, no longer champions the polymath, renders the editor—a really, truly good editor—rare and invaluable.
Shaved ice is prominent in many cuisines, from milky Korean bingsu to New Orleans’s beloved sno-balls. There really isn’t a consistent definition of a “Texas snow cone,” though, at least in terms of texture — but the lack of purism here means that variety is what defines the Texas cone.
Every morning I stumble upstairs with a cup of coffee in the dark so that I can start the work of fiction while still dreaming. My inner editor has a voice like Grace Paley’s, wry and skeptical, and it’s best that she remains asleep while the work is still tender. I close the door in my study, which is the room where my younger son spent his babyhood. His own newborn dreams still drift like jellyfish across the walls; all I have to do is reach out a hand to touch one sliding by. When I sit down, I pick up my tiger’s eye mala. I can’t see it there in the dark, but it is cool to my hand, and the noise the beads make when I lift them is drowsy. I meditate on the beads, my breath sending me deeper into my dream state, but now I’m lucid and in control. When I reach the tassel, the scenes I am working on that day have somehow opened up to me in my subconscious, where the true work of writing is done.
AI is not evil, believes Alegre, but it has no moral compass. Guiding the direction of “scientific endeavour” to safeguard human rights is up to us as sentient beings. There is nothing inevitable about where we are going. We have a choice.
A building is not, of course, a living thing but buildings can die, and a fascinating, indeed haunting, new book offers us a graveyard in black and white.
A few miles from my home lies a 175-acre garden cemetery full of hills and glens, groves and clearings, fountains and ponds and winding footpaths. The layout is such that no matter how often I go walking there, the place remains capable of bewildering me. Suddenly I’ll come around a curve to experience the pleasure of finding myself somewhere other than where I’d expected.
Occasionally I’m able to slip my bearings altogether and for whole seconds turn in place before recalling in which direction the entrance lies. How fatly the birds trill then, how sharp the air tastes. In these moments before reorienting myself, the world reveals itself as giddily, lavishly alive. Can anything compare to the wonder of being lost?
Recently, I’ve felt that the TV landscape, in all its modern sensibilities, seems to be closing the book on a particular image of what it means to be young—no longer a child, but not quite an adult. Teen TV was once as triumphant as it was confounding; to see it become an endangered species is as alarming as it is depressing.
From their inception, Western encounters with the mountain now called Everest were intimately tied to visualising and integrating it into the developing mapping of the region. To climb the mountain, one had to know it – its height, its approaches, its composition, crags and crevices. Recording the geography of Everest is a process that involved various individuals and continues to this day, thanks to the changeable nature of mountainous terrain and the alterations wrought by increased human interaction and climate change.
For most of one’s life, “stuff” is temporary. You buy new fluffy towels and you know that, someday, you’ll have washed the life right out of them and they’ll start to fray and you’ll cut them up and turn them into rags and then use those rags for a painting project one weekend and they’ll be garbage. Dishes break, spoons get lost, books are borrowed by a friend and never returned. Toys are handed down to younger children, shoes lose their soles, luggage zippers break. Some things have a longer lifecycle: clothes, if chosen wisely, can last years, through many seasons and trends and countless wearings. But they, too, will eventually thin and tear. Yes, a few objects will outlast us; we can imagine our jewellery going on to children or grandchildren, and a solid hammer can be handed down over a few generations. But most of the goods that pass through our hands are short lived in the grand scheme of things. We will always need another one, of whatever we’ve just bought, at some point.
Until one day we won’t.
Beginning a Claire Messud novel is like beginning a journey: coat on, suitcase in hand, you reach for the door and turn the knob, knowing you’ll be profoundly changed by the time you return. As I began Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, the feeling was the same, though having gained by now some wisdom from previous experiences, I had the sense this time to bring a bigger suitcase, as it were, to fit more souvenirs. Here is a book to savor, to slow down to, to mark up and reread. Like in traveling, when we can feel more attuned to the present moment but feel the insistent tug of excitement (or apprehension?) for what will come next, This Strange Eventful History presents a lush space to explore—to be able to luxuriate in a single paragraph or chapter while sensing the bigger story at hand, then discovering, sometimes from different vantage points, how the micro connects to the macro, is a lasting gift.
In The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall (2023), Cookie Woolner uses the backstage meeting between Dunbar-Nelson and Waters as a thematic framework for the larger narrative she explores in her study of the Jazz Age: how Black women—musicians, actresses, writers, and middle- to upper-class clubwomen and society ladies—“craft[ed] queer kinship networks.”
Thinking about envy a lot this past year, while feeling envious and then writing about feeling envious, I searched for ways to understand it better. One way was time: the common refrain of “feeling left behind” in envy—something I’ve felt sporadically about my writing, career, and home life—suggests its temporal aspects. Envy, I noticed, is often recurring and assumes a linear timeline, that there’s a specific order or time frame in which professional milestones or life stages should happen. On top of that, the privacy and shamefulness of envy can reinforce this linear worldview. Not only did I not want to talk to friends about being envious, especially if I was envious of them, I realized I also didn’t know who my closest friends envied, if they even struggled with it at all.
When I first started reading Anna Akhmatova in earnest, I was fascinated, thrilled . . . and also (you probably can guess already) somewhat resentful. Akhmatova is widely considered one of the greatest Russian poets. I’m just some wannabe American with a long-forgotten vaguely Russian Jewish ancestry. It would clearly be silly to resent her talent or her renown, and since I am obviously mature and not silly, I did not resent either of those things much.
Instead I started resenting all her translators who can read Russian and translate Akhmatova because they are not sad uncultured monoglots like myself.
Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character.
If you find that shame frequently haunts you, it could be helpful to reframe how you view shame, what it’s for and its source. While many people experience shame in response to the perceived judgements of others, the ancient philosophical tradition of Confucianism characterized shame differently. In Confucianism, shame is a crucial tool that leads you toward your best self, and you have more power over it than you know.
In Stephen King’s world, “It” is a loaded word. It’s hard not to picture Pennywise the Clown haunting the sewers of Derry, Maine, of course, but in the horror writer’s newest collection of stories, “You Like It Darker,” “It” ranges from a suspicious stranger on a park bench, to an extraterrestrial being bestowing a gift that helps best friends realize their potential, to telepaths whose sole job is to keep airplanes from falling out of the sky.
Ghost Mountain is the richest and grandest of Hession’s works, yet remains firmly in the bracket of warm and quiet novels of his former works. Death after death can do nothing to detract from page after page of delight. The novel makes a motif out of summing itself up in the most succinct and accurate of ways: Ghost Mountain was Ghost Mountain.
Los Angeles tends to strike outsiders as a borderless mishmash of suburbs spread over an unfriendly landscape with no significant natural source of water. When it’s not on fire, it seems to be sliding into the ocean or collapsing under the weight of its own untamable development.
And yet Los Angeles transplants will still brag to their loved ones across the country that they could go skiing and surfing in the same day (if for some reason they felt so inclined). As the conservationist Craig Stanford reminds us, however, you don’t have to drive to Big Bear or the beach to feel the pulse of nature in L.A.
Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. We are clearly stuck with it and it would itself be a silly kind of nostalgia to think we could ever go back to some imagined pre-nostalgic age.
It began with clocks. Then old dolls with cracked faces, typewriters, cameras, Victorian scrap books, animal skulls, and California pottery. Last month it was cobalt blue bottles. Currently, it’s “death assemblages,” communities of different organisms fossilized into a single rock. I’ve been digging them out of the sand at the beach since the last storm. Some of these rocks are covered with beautiful calligraphy in a strange language I can almost decipher. These are the ones I take home.
While my collections might seem random, there is a unifying theme. Every object holds a story. Each has passed through some sequence of events before it came into my possession carrying within it the latent memories of its history. My impulse is to coax forth the ghosts of the past that inhabit them.
My mother’s hearing loss started with the dissolution of high-pitched sounds, such as the subtle trilling of the migrating sandhill cranes where she lives near Waco, Texas. Soon high-frequency consonants melted into the din. Then whole sentences. What began as an irritation became a daily hindrance to social interactions. When we tried a new lunch spot, I realized just how isolating her hearing loss had become—especially in restaurants, where it can be difficult to hear over the din of talk-shouting conversation and blasting music. She couldn’t hear me praise the hand-formed huarache and missed the soft-spoken server’s offer of more iced tea, some dessert, or the check. The few feet separating us felt like miles; she retreated out of frustration and embarrassment, resigning herself to eating in near silence.
A good long conversation on screen isn’t a spontaneous construction but a deliberate exchange shaped by multiple creative minds. Each line of dialogue is honed to its most poignant expression. The entire sequence is made to feel like one perfectly calibrated whole. The initial chit-chat and personal shorthand is minimized. The dramatic revelations are heightened. The intrusions from the outside world enter the scene only as required. But the feeling of being heard, or somehow revealed, can be just as intense as in real life.
Flowers are often coded as sweetly feminine, especially in fashion, but their historical use is far stranger and more subversive. Before I became a writer, I trained as an herbalist, falling deep under the spell of medieval herbs, with their bewitching floral associations. Flowers had once formed a kind of secret language, an arcane code that only an adept could read. Bouquets, paintings, even dresses could carry a hidden message, by way of the humble plants they contained.
Historically, menopause has rarely been treated with compassion, more the butt of jokes—the hot flashes! the dryness!—and simultaneously something women must hide, elegantly.
Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, is hyper-aware of this way we’ve failed women. The novel is a funny, sexy, and loving portrait of a forty-five-year-old woman’s journey to becoming herself, to accepting sexual freedom, and to lifting up the women around her in the process.
Tan is always wondering what the birds are seeing, feeling, thinking — about the world, about one another and about her, the quiet giant who feeds them and is always watching.
This is the book’s signature blend: ardent and undying curiosity, mixed with equal parts wit, courage and respect for her (flighty) subjects.
Thinking about my life and the history of my family is interesting to me—just as it was for my mother—and I agree with Marilu Henner, who writes, “We all owe it to ourselves as living beings to take full advantage of our own experiences.” My preservation projects have given me a nearly Einsteinian view of time and mortality. I picture myself in a nursing home—not soon, I hope!—surrounded by photo books and letters and e-mail excerpts and portable hard drives, busily adding images to text, reading and rereading everything, creating compilations of compilations, contentedly living forever, backward and forward, until the end.
The narrator of What Kingdom never tells us her name—we don’t need to know. She tells us her friends’ names, though, and in the mental institution of Gråbøl’s imagination, selfhood is slippery and symptoms spread fast, so by learning their names we learn enough to recognize her too. Sara, Marie, Hector, Lasse, Waheed: her fellow patients; peer-sibling-soldiers stuck in the same peripheral space, struggling against psychiatry’s cold logic and diagnostic silos; actors forced to follow commonplace scripts of supposed care and cure. Incidentally, these narratives are as unrealistic and trite as too much fiction, especially fiction focused on institutionalization. These stories manage to find meaning and nuance only when their form refuses traditional narration, typically displacing normative, protagonist-based structures with an ensemble cast of characters you can’t always tell apart—characters stigmatized as ill and who might seem insane until you start to see through their eyes, until your newly clarified gaze lingers awhile in previously undiscovered corners that, however strange, often harbor truth.
Much of the interest in Long Island lies in what is not said: when someone is asked a question but doesn’t answer; when Jim finds that “there was nothing to say […] nothing he could find the words for now”; or when a character enters a room looking for someone, finds it empty, and the reader’s heart drops three floors. These silences and absences at the core of this subtle, intelligent and moving book mean the reader has to do a certain amount of work – but it is work very well rewarded.
As an example, there’s the question of form or genre. “And Then? And Then? What Else?” comes positioned as a memoir, but that’s not quite accurate. Neither is “craft book,” although there are a lot of notes on craft. More accurately, it’s what I want to label a process book, walking us through the author’s process as writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.
Handler gets at this from the outset: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It’s not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, of opinions and observations, that push back against our expectations. Yes, the author recognizes, we will have preconceptions; how, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we’ve read the saga of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Handler’s reputation, the work he’s produced, carries its own cultural weight.
Ornament is amazingly pervasive across time and space. To the best of my knowledge, every premodern architectural culture normally applied ornament to high-status structures like temples, palaces, and public buildings. Although vernacular buildings like barns and cottages were sometimes unornamented, what is striking is how far down the prestige spectrum ornament reached: our ancestors ornamented bridges, power stations, factories, warehouses, sewage works, fortresses, and office blocks. From Chichen Itza to Bradford, from Kyiv to Lalibela, from Toronto to Tiruvannamalai, ornament was everywhere.
Since the Second World War, this has changed profoundly. For the first time in history, many high-status buildings have little or no ornament. Although a trained eye will recognize more ornamental features in modern architecture than laypeople do, as a broad generalization it is obviously true that we ornament major buildings far less than most architectural cultures did historically. This has been celebrated by some and lamented by others. But it is inarguable that it has greatly changed the face of all modern settlements. To the extent that we care about how our towns and cities look, it is of enormous importance.
While this seems to be a minor issue here, it could be a problem in the long term. The more people feel that they can reject evidence as a matter of opinion, the more it opens the door to what the authors describe as "the rise of 'post-truth' politics and the dissemination of 'alternative facts.'" And that has the potential to undercut the acceptance of science in a wide variety of contexts.
A symptom of transformation is obsession: with yourself, with Meaning, with other people who look like Meaning. In All Fours, a funny and deliciously indulgent novel about changing course in midlife as an artist, wife, and mother, Miranda July writes with knowing depth about this kind of spiraling figurative masturbation. (She also writes about the literal kind.)
These are indeed our fine feathered friends, their adventures gripping as they face severe human-made dangers—gripping because Terese Svoboda has made what happens to such beings meaningful and important.
You stuff your biggest tote bag to the brim with all the beach gear you’re gonna need: towel, sunscreen, second sunscreen for your face, hat, water bottle, umbrella, the weird little folding camping chair that may or may not work.
The bag’s getting pretty full… Is there even room for a book?
Recent writing about perception by neuroscientists and philosophers has tended toward a disconcerting message: we have nothing like the simple, direct contact with the world around us that we might suppose. Instead, we are told, our brains actively synthesize a picture of the world, continually guessing, extrapolating, and projecting. Stronger versions of this view hold that what we perceive is a kind of simulation or model—not one imposed on us by some malevolent being but one we fashion ourselves. The simulation is constrained by physical stimuli from the environment—from something outside us, anyway—but the constraint can be tenuous, and ordinary perception may be akin to a “controlled hallucination,” as the neuroscientist Anil Seth has argued.
Against this background, it’s interesting to read two recent books by science writers—Sentient by Jackie Higgins and An Immense World by Ed Yong—that describe, among other things, the sometimes astounding detail with which our senses mediate our contact with the world. The senses of many animals, including ourselves, could hardly be more finely tuned to what goes on around us.
In many ways, it is obvious that furniture could be a direct expression of human thoughts and feelings. There is its closeness to the human body and its place at the heart of our domestic, social and political lives, both of which make furniture design a fertile medium for exploring the complexities of embodied experience.
Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but you’re only interested in the number of unique animals — all the ones that you haven’t counted already. What’s the best way to get that number? “The obvious solution requires remembering every animal you’ve seen so far and comparing each new animal to the list,” said Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But there are cleverer ways to proceed, he added, because if you have thousands of entries, the obvious approach is far from easy.
In bringing us to this world through Manod's eyes, Whale Fall provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people, and a singular, penetrating portrait of a young woman torn between individual yearning and communal responsibilities.
Rothfeld’s collection is a powerful meditation on this core human predicament: that what counts as the highest value in the “public” economic, legal, and political spheres—equality and predictability—counts for nothing or next to nothing once we pass into the parallel “private” spheres of art, sex, and love. All Things Are Too Small is an exuberant, moving, and ultimately persuasive argument for giving desire, whether in love or in art, its due. That is, for taking the risk that desire might, indeed, un-do us, and that this undoing might be worth the price.
These facts embarrass me, and I’m concerned I might appear to be bragging, announcing that I can finish a Scrabble game against a highly skilled bot in less time than it takes to brush one’s teeth. I’m not bragging. I’m confessing to being addicted to an ostensible word game that occupies more space in my brain than I’d prefer. Addicts are necessarily experts when it comes to the things that enslave them. No sommelier or “mixologist” can testify to any aspect of an alcoholic beverage with more expertise than a run-of-the-mill drunk playing keno in a dive bar.
Run-of-the-mill drunk in a dive bar. I was one once. I’d wake up determined to have just two or three drinks, then have many, many more than two or three. As with playing Scrabble, doing otherwise felt impossible. In Alcoholics Anonymous, we’re told that it’s common to substitute one addiction for another. Surely, I tell myself, this new unmanageability is preferable to the old one. It’s possible I’m right. It’s also possible I’m wrong.
As historian Maria Rentetzi writes, “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Trying to predict the wider social impact of any novel is a fool’s errand; the fate of almost all books is oblivion. But something about “All Fours” – its outrageous sexuality, its quirky humor, its earnest search for change – could, who knows, rally a generation of women who will not go gentle into that vaginal dryness.
This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.
Like all of July’s work, “All Fours” is a wild ride. It is deeply funny and achingly true. On what she feels is her marital responsibility to her husband, the narrator tells readers “sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.” While making lunch for her child, she relates: “The problem wasn’t the lunch, it was what came after, the whole rest of my life.” When she feels shame about spending hours on the phone with her best friend, Jordi, she remembers: “It was my one chance a week to be myself.”
In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader’s relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.
Polizzotti’s thesis is that Surrealism matters not only because the movement anticipated many of the progressive positions of our present moment, but also because its abiding faith in imaginative freedom and irrationality are tools that “we today might mobilize” in our efforts to envision a better and more just world. Polizzotti remains committed to this position even if, as he clearly acknowledges, the French Surrealists often fell short of their own ideals. The movement sought to align itself with anti-colonialism and with the people of the Global South, even as it practiced its own forms of Orientalism and exoticism, and even though, as Hal Foster writes, “colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility.” It sought to deploy “the subversive power of Eros” to challenge patriarchal norms, even as women involved in the movement were often relegated to the role of muse. For Polizzotti, these blind spots should not be ignored, but they should also not negate the movement’s broader significance.
In Amphibious Soul, Foster tells how the sea, or, as he refers to it, “Big Mother”, has healed him, both physically and spiritually. He’s referring to one patch of ocean in particular: the Great African Sea Forest, a wilderness of swaying kelp, sharks and violent waves off the Cape. This was where his actual mother swam, with Foster in her belly, until the day he was born; it’s where his father informally baptised him; and it’s where the adult Foster experiences a kind of rebirth and develops extraordinary relationships with its non-human residents.
Now, it seems, the 85-year-old is putting all his chips on the table one last time, with his long-awaited sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which debuts at the Cannes film festival this Friday. Nobody can quite believe it has happened: Coppola has been trying to make this movie for more than 40 years, during which the project has gone through innumerable rewrites, delays and false starts. It exists now only because he sold part of his successful winery estate to finance the movie when no one else would. So, will Megalopolis be one final masterpiece from the New Hollywood titan, or will it turn out to be a “really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject”?
But amid a music industry largely absent of benevolent big sister energy, Hanna really did function as something like a Sharpie-scrawled, Doc Martens-clad, Glinda the Good Witch for decades' worth of young women. These women saw themselves in her lyrics and sought her out after shows to disclose their own histories of abuse, trauma, and suffering, mostly at the hands of men who cared very little about what they had to say.
Rebel Girl makes it clear that Hanna has always cared about what women and gender-nonconforming people have to say.
So I would want to insist that a powerfully felt need for a kind of protective irony is at work here. When we are abusing like, we mean, and don’t mean, the words we are saying. Therefore, I would contend that the “hesitation” McWhorter identified is much more the central point of the matter, and that the indecisive behavior we are observing is more like a compulsive verbal tic than something creative in character.
A good writer can make any material sing. We hardly need another midlife crisis novel, marriage breakdown novel or sexual awakening novel, so it must be the singular ability of film-maker, artist and writer Miranda July – coming along to show everyone else how it’s done – that makes her new novel, All Fours, seem essential.
Outwardly, July’s sophomore novel is about the binary of heterosexual love and the claustrophobia inherent in being a mother in a heteronormative family. More broadly, it’s a book about straddling two worlds. Two states of being. Two identities. A person or a wife. An artist or a mother. A sexual object or an invisible body. Pre- or postmenopausal.
Gruesome yet cavalier, “When Among Crows” has action, romance, family drama, fantasy, and a healthy helping of mythology. Best devoured in one or two sittings, the story is tight, the lore inviting and the characters fun.
Coordination is accommodation. To coordinate in space, one makes room—a seat at the table. To coordinate in time, one clears calendars. Everyone, no matter their time zone, performs some version of this daily work. But in central time, that work feels, well, central to our lives. We can never be on time, not really, because our time is not our own. It’s always someone else’s: two hours ahead, an hour behind, today, tomorrow, and forever.
Most importantly of all, I’ve got the kind of brain that gets a lot of pleasure out of perfecting and maintaining daily domestic routines, so I don’t mind always having laundry to fold at 6:30 p.m. In fact, I find the rhythm of it quite satisfying. If this sounds like you, too: Join me.
Hamya’s latest possesses a poised, almost guarded self-awareness, but when her writing strays into more emotional territory it really shines.
The arc of Schneck’s three novellas—Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming—is away from, and finally back toward, a conscious relationship with her body, which at first unpleasantly historicized her, binding her up and making her too aware of the ways in which she wasn’t free, and which decades later became a place where she could shake off her anxieties and philosophize more plainly.
It's probably thanks to an octopus that Amphibious Soul is out in the world. Foster invites us now to recognize the intrinsic value of the Great African Seaforest ecosystem as a whole — and of all ecosystems that enshrine wildness.
Why is there alcohol there in the first place, you may ask? Because each process requires that wine grapes be fermented and turned into actual wine first. Only then can the alcohol be removed to produce NA wine. Didn’t I warn you about the contradictions?
A lot of things have changed in the half-century that’s passed since then. I stopped letting boys (then men) treat me badly. I stopped falling for bad, cool, heedless guys; instead, I married a good one. I started writing books instead of sad love poems; I became a college professor, an advice columnist, a college professor emerita. I had a child and we were thick as thieves and then she grew up, left home, started a career. Married her own good guy. Began a second, new, more rewarding and more taxing career. She’s 30 and she has her own full, complex life—she’s busy. In what slivers of downtime she has, there are friends to see, interests to pursue, trips to take. Sleep to catch up on. My texts to her start to pile up. Weeks pass—months pass—between phone calls.
Don’t text her, I tell myself. You texted her the other day—don’t send another text.
Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.
As i sat down with The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones’s new and final entry in The Indian Lake Trilogy, I was curious: how would Jones up the ante on a trilogy that had already touched on nearly every horror and slasher trope in existence by the end of its second installment? Apparently, the answer was simple: light the whole world on fire, raise the dead, and unleash as many monsters as possible on Jade Daniels, the trilogy’s final girl and protagonist.
Oh. And set the whole damn book on Halloween.
Murrin writes perceptively about love, desire and the limitations placed on women. While the denouement is melodramatic, this is a compelling, compassionate page-turner.
When I was conducting my research for my novel A Revolver to Carry at Night, I immersed myself in the correspondence, biographies, and works of Vera and Vladimir Nabokov’s biographies. It was in Nabokov’s poetic memoir, Speak, Memory, that I discovered the story that inspired Lolita, and began to understand Nabokov’s relationship with his novel and its subject matter.
Some scientists believe the universe wasn’t finely tuned to create intelligent life like us at all. Instead, they say, the universe evolved its own insurance policy by creating as many black holes as possible, which is the universe’s method of reproduction. Following this line of thinking, the universe itself may very well be alive—and the fact that we humans exist at all is just a happy side effect.
At the unlikely Chelsea block that’s remained the city’s wholesale flower market for nearly a century, distributors hustling to open up shop arrived on the block around 3 a.m. Then came the delivery trucks from Kennedy Airport, which started to trickle in by 4. What had been a quiet Chelsea block now rumbled with the clinks and clanks of metal carts wheeled between trucks and stores, as runners unloaded boxes of flowers that had passed through customs overnight, freshly cut from the soils of South America, Asia or Europe.
The examination of race and identity can be seen throughout literature, and increasingly today.
In her debut novel, The Library Thief, Kuchenga Shenjé explores these concepts — and the associated expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized. Shenjé delves into the past in this work of historical fiction, posing inquiries about Black people's lives in the Victorian era.
While the Corps provides the backdrop, this isn’t a war novel: it’s the story of a young vet desperate to shed the habits of mind and body that were drilled into him. Being tough, impervious to pain and dismissive of weakness may be useful attributes in combat, but civilian life requires a different set of coping skills.
This is a musician’s dream book, but it’s also a must-read story if you’ve never heard of Basie, Ellington or Armstrong. “The Jazzmen” may send you searching your music library, so make note.
In the weeks after the birth of my second child, I began saving pictures of Victorian hidden mother portraits, which are, to this day, interspersed on my phone with images of my newborn and my older child, sleepy and shocked by the transition to family of four, respectively. In the black and white photographs, Victorian mothers remain obscured so the babies can be photographed; they are often draped in sheets or curtains and holding their children, helping them stay still while the early cameras’ long exposure times captured infancy and toddlerhood. Like their mothers, I am nowhere to be found in my own pictures on my camera roll of that tender era.
What strikes me—and Kreizman, later in her essay—is the profound incompatibility between the object of the book and the ethos of productivity. Novels, in general, take a long time to create and consume. Unlike other cultural products like, say, the TikTok, they are not necessarily designed for single-use, speedy consumption. Their effects, too, are nebulous. Such that they cannot be repurposed for advertising in easy, obvious ways.
Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound.
At its heart, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book is a final love note to her husband. It will appeal to a reader of any political persuasion who wants to understand how history unfolds and marriages endure.
The Invention of Prehistory therefore ends with an impassionate call for radical modesty. It is time for us to admit that we simply do not know the deep past and cannot comprehend the “ecstasies and feelings and terrors” that our predecessors experienced. This recognition will then allow us to root advocacy for solidarity and equality on firmer grounds. Rather than far-reaching narratives that point to one key quality as the essence of humanity, we should accept our history for what it is: an amalgamation of disparate and diverse developments that led to very different modes of existence.
Today, we know that there are most likely billions of rocky planets circling their stars at just the right distance for life, not too hot and not too cold. But before Kepler-62, although astronomers had found planets in Goldilocks zones, they’d done it a different way, using the wobble technique, which gave them an idea of the mass of the planet but did not let them distinguish between rocky planets like Earth and uninhabitable small gas balls like Neptune. Scientists believed that warm, rocky planets like Earth existed, but it was by no means a certainty.
The astronomers involved in the Kepler mission discovered the two worlds circling Kepler-62 via the transit method instead. When a planet travels across our line of sight, it alters the amount of the bright stellar surface we can see. By observing the decreases in the star’s light, we can determine a planet’s size. Any planet for which we know both the mass and the radius is a rocky world if it is smaller than about two Earth radii. Kepler-62 e and Kepler-62 f were such small planets.
Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books. (It is almost 1,100 pages.) By taking up an audiobook alongside a physical volume and alternating between the two as circumstances require, the reader can keep a story going without getting stuck. The only downside is the tricky business of finding one’s place while jumping back and forth between media. Auster narrated his own audiobook version of 4321, so I had been listening to him talk quite a bit before learning he was gone.
My infant is six months old, the age when US-based pediatricians, nutritionists, and social media influencers unanimously say that babies should begin eating solid food. How they should be eating is a more divisive topic. Are you in the baby-led weaning camp, the old-is-new method of letting children pick up pieces of solid foods to bring to their mouth on their own? Or do you purée, preferring the peace of mind of fewer airway obstructions? Just a couple of decades ago, spoon-feeding powdered rice cereal was deemed by heath care experts to be the best way to introduce foods other than breast milk or formula. Today, whether mashed or cut into tiny fist-length spears, avocados are increasingly recommended as not just one of the first but THE first solid food for babies, by everyone from books to apps to social media influencers. The fruit’s status as a food that is mild in flavor, rich in nutrition, and not a common allergen has recently made it a quintessential kids’ food across the United States, ensuring new generations of avocado eaters for years to come.
Of course, let’s be clear: Hot dogs are not a prime protein choice. That said, they also inherently contain a certain iconography and nostalgia. Take for example the magical allure of a NYC hot dog cart: the steam, the sauerkraut, the relish, the gigantic jugs of ketchup and mustard, the soft, pliable, warmed rolls.
So to place hot dogs in a “fine dining” context has an inherent high-brow-low brow dichotomy that many have enjoyed tinkering with in recent years, at both high-end restaurants, mom-and-pop stores, hifalutin hot dog carts and more.
Flavor chemicals can be found in whole foods, like fruit, vegetables and meat. But food scientists can also play with them and find new ways of deriving them to help companies create processed foods like dill pickle-flavored potato chips or cherry soda — or, as it happens, barf-flavored jelly beans. Those distinctive or innovative taste profiles typically come from both natural and artificial flavors. But what actually are they? And how do they line up with the “real” thing?
What I did know was this: Every time I went to a bar, I sat on a stool. There were dozens or hundreds, maybe thousands of stool possibilities—every week, some new bar was opening with some concept (“Italian-American-inspired!” “The living room of downtown Manhattan!”) for which stools had been selected, presumably by an expert. Everything else about the bargoing experience has been endlessly elevated, twisted and riffed upon—it is a prime time to be a drinker in America! But is it, I wondered, a prime time to sit?
You don’t need to be a gardener. Your “garden” could be the things you cook for dinner. It could be the squirrels, pigeons, and skunks you see on morning jogs. I mean the impulse that leads people to take a photo of the same tree, every day for a year. Focus a small thing that doesn’t feel like a story—until you have seven years of it, and it is. Your children will thank you.
Either way, this is fizzier and more effervescent than her previous stories, in a way that’s delightful and precisely what you want to be reading in the month of July – whether you’ve been inspired by the novel to take it to a beach on Prince Edward Island (Fortune should win a medal for services to Canadian tourism, seriously) or just shivering in the chill of an over air-conditioned cubicle (when the boss isn’t looking).
Is that too much darkness for anyone to contemplate and get their head around? Jacobsen has done that work for us. Our duty is to accept that it’s better to know the truth about what may happen, what the darkest outcome might be, than to keep pretending that post-nuclear Los Angeles would look anything like it does in “Fallout.”
One of the earliest surviving accounts of tree houses comes from, of all people, first-century philosopher Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, published around 77 to 79, Pliny recounts a story about the Roman emperor Caligula, who appreciated the bounty of nature despite his tyrannical reputation. Pliny writes that Caligula was so "impressed" by a large plane tree that he had "benches laid loosely on beams consisting of its branches" within and held a banquet, calling it his "nest." Though Pliny’s story is only a few sentences in an expansive text, it neatly summarizes the lingering fascination with the tree house: It marries the sublimity of the natural world with architecture. Caligula was so struck by the plane tree that he didn’t just want to observe it; he wanted to inhabit it.
Over 1,000 years before the internet and smartphone apps, Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī invented the concept of algorithms.
In fact, the word itself comes from the Latinised version of his name, “algorithmi”. And, as you might suspect, it’s also related to algebra.
It could be said that I owed this very kind of wondering to him—to the metaphysical ambiguities and bewildering turns of novels like Moon Palace (1989), in which an orphan resembling Auster accidentally discovers his lost father, and Leviathan (1992), in which a man recounts the coincidences that led a friend to a grisly death. In particular, I owed it to his New York Trilogy, a stylized, philosophical, and metafictional treatment of the detective novel.
In his moving depiction of out and closeted LGBTQ+ characters struggling with their relationships, traumas and the precariousness of their own freedom, McKenna has created a tender portrait of contemporary queer London.
At a time when institutional life is collapsing, when the pandemic privileged family over friends, when work expands in ways that leave many too exhausted to socialise, Nelson demonstrates what it means to dedicate yourself to a cohort with seriousness and strenuousness.
Ray’s a Laugh is not just a document of a family’s struggle with poverty and addiction, but a complex and deeply human narrative of what it is to be trapped in cycles of love, neglect and self-destruction.
In a previous letter, Simone had asked André to tell her about his work. With war all around, André began his reply cautiously, warning his sister that past a certain point “you will understand nothing of what follows.” Over the next 14 pages, he sketched his idea for a “Rosetta stone” for mathematics. Following the example of the famous engraving by that same name — a trilingual text that made ancient Egyptian writing legible to Western readers through translation into Ancient Greek — Weil’s Rosetta stone linked three fields of mathematics: number theory, geometry, and, in the middle, the study of finite fields.
Writing was a refuge from all that. Writing was rest. The page was a place of order and controlled outcomes, and I worked from a firm set of rules. These weren’t the kind of craft suggestions I taught the students in my writing classes; they were of a different order and entirely arbitrary, and yet I adhered to them strictly. If one paragraph had seven lines, the following paragraph had to have three or four. The one after that had to have ten. Or one. Or be a single word. In the middle of a scene, I would stop everything and count. If the math didn’t add up, I made myself start over.
A coming-of-age novel with a quarter-life-crisis thrown in, “The Skunks” is told in a stream of consciousness with a cynical sort of oddball humor that’s completely Warnick’s own. Reading “The Skunks” is like drinking a cool glass of water on a hot summer day — it’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it’s wholly necessary, gratifying and gone before you know it.
Poetry is a form of scrutiny, an inquiry that, when it succeeds, advances further than it is possible to go in prose. Rowland Bagnall’s attractively questing second collection is an investigation of consciousness. Like Virginia Woolf, he records moments of being although, unlike her, his moments are likely to be guarded and seldom ecstatic and to involve openly philosophical reckoning. He is curious about how to situate himself – and by implication us – in time and space. The recognition that time can neither hold or be held is at once an ongoing preoccupation – and a provocation.
Across 12 essays, Attachments. catalogs the travails that beset today’s young fathers. Mann examines his feelings of protectiveness while watching his daughter at the playground, considers his own issues with body image as occasioned by watching Brad Pitt eat foodstuffs throughout his film career, and watches LeBron James make fatherhood a vital pillar of his public persona. Parenthood in general, and modern fatherhood in particular, proves to be an ideal subject for Mann’s approach. The strange mix of self-deprecation and self-congratulation produces a figure of humor and even pathos. See the dad of today patting himself on the back while he cries into his coffee.
The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.
The analogue revival is driven by people wanting to be active rather than passive consumers. The more they engage in the work required by analogue technologies, the more control they gain in shaping their desired experiences – first by learning the rules, then in their skilled application, and then, ultimately, in breaking the rules, generating happy accidents to be shared with like-minded others.
This curious, yet deeply creative, behaviour captures the imagination. Yet as Jean Clottes – a prominent Palaeolithic art researcher – succinctly put it, the key unanswered question for us all is: ‘Why did they draw in those caves?’
So, I could end this review by calling Tóibín a keen moral philosopher, but I’ll end it instead with the better compliment of calling him a great novelist who has written another wonderful book.
This exquisite account of the repercussions of the tiniest turn of fate can go only one way; and if the conclusion is all wrapped up a bit too quickly, given the methodical way we get there, it doesn’t matter much, as the pleasure lies mainly in the journey.
Stare at your crazy nails, Crampton subtextually urges. Ponder your pores. We’re all so weird and wonderful in ways that can’t be quantified.
What few of us know about, and what Schlanger makes the focus of The Light Eaters, is the controversy raging among botanists about plant behavior—and even about using the word “behavior” with regard to plants—resulting in career-scuttling opprobrium and professional taboos.
Lively and intelligent, if intermittently unpersuasive, Who Owns This Sentence? should be of interest to attorneys, artists, and everyone in between. Those of us who were taught in law school that “the law is a seamless web” will enjoy watching Bellos and Montagu demolish that cliché. Those who pick the book up without knowing the first thing about copyright will receive a first-rate education on a range of topics, including significant US case law, Soviet copyright, and the “copyleft” movement.
Keith Haring is to art what “Happy Birthday” is to the American songbook: a standard whose ubiquity hasn’t quite dulled its ritual magic. Since his death in 1990, Haring’s iconography—radiant crawling babies, barking dogs, three-eyed faces, rubbery bodies that are busily alive—has colonized vast swaths of cultural real estate. Has the work of any recent American artist been so relentlessly hawked? Haring is practically a public utility at this point. There are Haring mugs, T-shirts, sneakers, and tote bags; Haring bathrobes, rugs, pillows, and prayer candles; Haring playing cards, chess sets, yo-yos, and ice cream flavors. (The inventory includes curiosities such as sex toys and dog chews.) “The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb,” the poet Rene Ricard wrote of Haring. The next greatest thing is to come up with something so universal it can be sold anywhere.
At what point could this be deemed conscious behaviour? Sceptics point to the plants’ obvious lack of brains – yet one cognitive scientist involved in the new consciousness declaration pointed out that a cerebral cortex may not be necessary for simple forms of consciousness, opening the possibility of moving away from brain-centric definitions. Perhaps plants have no brain because their lifestyle doesn’t require one. They evolved to thrive while rooted in place. Without the need to move quickly across long distances, there may have been no need for a highly portable command centre. Like an octopus, which has fairly autonomous neurons distributed throughout each of its limbs, a plant might be more like a self-aware system than a consolidated processing centre.
This is an impressive debut novel from a journalist whose gripping story is about an ambitious reporter working for the fictional Irish Sentinel in 1968.
Doggedly pursuing a mystery following the finding of the remains of a missing actress called Julia Bridges, Nicoletta Sarto is a complex young woman who, while having her eye on the prize, is somewhat stymied in her personal life.
There is no one way to be Bolivian just as there is no one way to write a short story. In this light, the most important question is not “What is Bolivian literature?” but “What could Bolivian literature be?”
Judging by the futuristic and genre-bending stories in Colanzi’s third collection, You Glow in the Dark, this question of possibility looms large in her mind too.
Like an archivist, she straddles past and future, shaping these memories into a tale of grit and girlhood that at once disturbs, resonates and warns.
Though the OED is published by Oxford University Press, it is, in many respects, the spiritual and intellectual opposite of an elite university. For one thing, its admissions policy is quite forgiving. The dictionary is not reserved for an elite fraction of the English language. With some exceptions—dirty words, for example, were suppressed for many years—all words are welcome because the OED was conceived “with an impartial hospitality,” as Richard Chenevix Trench, future Anglican archbishop of Dublin, said in his 1857 lectures to the Philological Society, which led directly to the founding of the OED.
At the bar, I worked with a few people who had passed through Big Sky, and I’d heard about it as the epitome of these forces: great skiing, awful housing, billionaire indulgence. I had never been there; the $260 peak-season lift ticket was an obstacle for someone on a journalist’s salary. Even so, I began to poke around; I wanted to see the place that the New York Times dubbed “the future of skiing.”
And Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, has described as “the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States.” The club is one of the most exclusive institutions on the planet. Guards watch its gates, and Google Street View doesn’t show its streets. It has its own ski mountain, a fire department, and a restaurant overseen by a celebrity chef; people who have worked inside describe thirteen-thousand-square-foot homes and sharkskin bar tops. The club’s members reportedly include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Warren Buffett. As of 2019, new members put down a $400,000 deposit and paid about $44,000 in annual fees, according to Mansion Global. Those with the means can buy property on the club’s land, and sources note that sale prices can be well north of $20 million. Current and former employees insisted on anonymity, fearing retaliation from an institution that employs a private security force.
For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end. Airport thrillers are almost always fun; much contemporary autofiction is just a stretch, largely because it’s very hard for a book in which not much happens to be a page-turner. What a thrill, then, to come to Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about.
If Nicholas Rombes’s first novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, relies on descriptions of unseeable movies, supposedly by Deren, Lynch, Jodorowsky, etc., for its vertiginous coloring, The Rachel Condition bravely pushes into the things themselves: letters, reports, memoir, a strange genre novel, and annotations. Lacking the connective tissue of narrative cogency, and in their method more like video art than feature films, the texts force the reader into a reflexive state rather than a transportive one. What am I looking at now? What am I responding to?
Then, again, the author of Sipsworth, Simon Van Booy’s latest fiction, is a master of original stories full of deceptive simplicity. Here he creates with humor and poignancy a surprising and heartwarming tale about loss and love, seamlessly integrating details of Helen’s past into the present-tense narrative. Sections are named for days of the week, the weather always omnipresent -air crisp, “sky so blue it seems painted.” “Large puddles wear patches of fallen leaves.”
Women of means in Europe and the United States, including Becker, dominated botany in its earliest history. At this inflection point in the mid-1800s, men attempted to professionalize and “defeminize” the field, Zimmerman writes, moving science from the home into the laboratory and intentionally marginalizing women. The structures and expectations that came to define science workplaces were created at that time. Zimmerman uses this example to show how her experience as a 21st-century botanist is still influenced by these structures, at the same time that natural history — the foundation of all biological sciences — is on the decline. For women in the field, it’s a double whammy.
Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life is the most comprehensive biography of the singer to date, and aims to make the case for her importance. Gabriel—whose previous book, Ninth Street Women, was a joint biography of the painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell—has corralled an unimaginable amount of material and spoken to many of Madonna’s closest friends, though not to Madonna herself. She argues that Madonna’s greatest significance is social—her support of people of color, gay rights, and women’s liberation in a hidebound industry—rather than artistic. The singer is a “lightning rod,” Gabriel says in her prologue, “an irritant, sometimes even to her fans.” But, apart from maybe the Dreyfus Affair, do controversies last?
I’ve always been a sucker for buildings-that-might-have-been and this book looked right up my street: promising a massive global survey of weird and wonderful structures that didn’t make it beyond the drawing board.
We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. Maybe this is the case with professional art historians: I assume that they have – must have – a better visual memory than amateur art-lovers, and perhaps even artists. After all, literary critics in my experience have a better memory of books than most readers, and better even than that of many writers (and they have certainly read more than the average novelist, whose gaps are sometimes shocking). But memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us. As far as it is possible to generalise, I think we misremember small pictures as being larger than they are, and large pictures as smaller. Also, what we are remembering is not just the painting itself but its effect on us; and some parts of it will inevitably remain fresher than others. At least, in this age of mass colour reproduction, we can always check our memories – or so we believe. In my early decades, going to an art gallery abroad always culminated in a good deal of time spent at the postcard carousels; and over the years I have accumulated a vast collection of cards which I can use to check my memory. This ‘check’ can only be partial, however: there is the question of size (how accurately can and do we scale the image up?) and also of colour fidelity. I have a friend who, when she first started looking at art, would never buy a postcard of a painting she admired, for fear that the original would be supplanted in her memory. This was properly high-minded, but in practice, she reported, her remembered images were still subject to normal deterioration.
All, essentially, are merchandise, designed to entice enthusiasts of whatever pop-culture license they’re tied to. Usually, that’s a franchise of some kind—one that commands a loyal audience and for which a branded recipe book doesn’t look out of place next to shelves of T-shirts, plushies, hoodies, action figures, coffee-table books, board games, and everything else publishers release to the baying delight of eager fans. But the best of them are extensions of the worlds on which they’re based, letting readers engage with their favorite fiction in a new way by getting a little physically closer to it.
In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as “I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery”. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making.
How do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry’s novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry’s literary terrain. She cannot seem to escape its gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems only fitting that the Essex author’s new novel, Enlightenment, is a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inescapable loops.
From early on, Radcliffe was aware of two competing drumbeats—two inevitable destinies, usually somehow intertwined, that were being predicted for him: “ ‘You’re going to be fucked up’ and ‘You’re not going to have a career.’ ” He decided that he would do everything he possibly could to defy both.
“Looking back,” Radcliffe says—and he is offering these words at the age of 34, backstage at the Broadway theater where he is co-starring in the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along—“I’m quite impressed with 13-, 14-year-old me’s reaction to those things. To really, actually use them. To internally be going: Fuck you, I’m going to prove that wrong.”
When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback.
The signal, which arrived on June 10, 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts. In the last 10 years, astronomers have picked up nearly 5,000 of them. This one was particularly special: nearly double the age of anything previously observed, and three and a half times more energetic.
To answer the question of what we’re losing, think about what nightlife has given us. It was always a haven for outsiders trying to find, establish or shape their own communities. It brings people together and remains an insistently communal experience in an increasingly individualistic and closed-off late capitalist society. Gigs and clubs require us to be together – as friends, but also with those we don’t know. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, an academic who researches dance-music scenes, calls this “stranger-intimacy”.