Sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s, Cone was flipping through an issue of Rolling Stone magazine when he saw an advertisement for a $99 lifetime subscription to the magazine. He was already paying something like $19 a year for his subscription, so he signed up right away. After that, every new issue showed that his subscription would, in fact, expire—but not until 2059.
“I would always joke to people that Rolling Stone knows when I’m going to die,” Cone told me, chuckling about the absurdity of it. “Because when I’m 86 years old or whatever, will I expire first or will the magazine expire?”
At 51, Cone is still very much alive. But, in early May, he received an email that informed him that his lifetime subscription was, in fact, ending—at least in its current form.
There are a lot of terms for thoughtful cooking: “intuition,” “Old World,” “cooking with love.” Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s was the best. She called it “vibration cooking.”
This was also the title of her first cookbook, published in 1970, and she describes vibration cooking in the book’s second, very often quoted paragraph: “And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I can tell by the look and smell of it.” She encourages her readers to follow their own tastes and instincts: “Do your thing your way. The amount of salt and pepper you want to use is your business. I don’t like to get in people’s business.”
In the past month, millions of people have found themselves stumbling through the contorted and catchy syllables of a song about, of all things, a woman named Barbara and some rhubarb-loving barbarians who drink beer while getting their beards barbered. In German.
Or more rightly: Rhabarberbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbier.
It is a novel that makes profound and singular and visible private experiences often considered askance in American fiction, when they are considered at all. The effect is of a kind of openness, a nuanced patterning of shadow and light. “I wanted,” Kwon says, “to bring to what I was writing every ability I have as a writer and to say this, too, is literature.”•
When someone we love dies, many of us find ourselves coexisting within two very different worlds – one, the corporeal world of human existence, the other, the ethereal world of ghosts and the afterlife. Heartsease, by Kate Kruimink, skilfully explores both these worlds with paradoxical lightness and depth, sensitivity, and a hilariously rendered idiosyncrasy that is often particular to sibling relationships.
As with Chandler’s books, however, the main attraction of the Easy Rawlins novels is the superb prose. Mosley’s dialogue, much of it straight out of Watts and Compton, is pitch perfect, and some passages have the sensuous rhythm of a basement slow dance.