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.