I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to see fatphobia everywhere in American fiction. It did not come all at once, but little by little. I saw it when I was in graduate school and a man turned in a story where a boy looks at a fat girl and thinks not all humans are made in God’s image. I saw it at a bookstore where the bookseller recommended me a novel about a fat man whose life consists only of sad drudgery until an “inciting” incident. Huh, I thought, to the feeling rising inside of me. That’s my life they’re talking about. My image.
I am a novelist and a fat person, and the feeling came again this past March when I saw several writer acquaintances sharing a list The Atlantic put together of 136 works that define the Great American Novel. But while the list highlighted characters of diverse races, ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and sexualities, those with disabilities were virtually absent. And by my count just one of the selected novels was substantively about a fat person. In the introduction, the list’s authors characterized their mission as selecting works that “accomplished ‘the task of painting the American soul.’” But what about the American body?
The world’s most famous cat seems to be everywhere—and nowhere. It appears on cartoons, T-shirts, board games, puzzle boxes, and glow-in-the-dark coffee cups. There’s even a gin named after the celebrity animal—boasting “a strong backbone of juniper.”
But its origin story is almost as mysterious as the scientific principle it was enlisted to illustrate. While Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger concocted the conceit of the cat, he was not the one who popularized it. The fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after American science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s Cat,” 50 years ago. It was just one of dozens of works published by Le Guin, who died in 2018 after a long and celebrated career.
Today, nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is processed, packaged, shipped, and stored under refrigeration. In the century since Chicago’s banquet, the so-called cold chain—the shipping containers, trucks, warehouses, ripening rooms, tank farms, walk-ins, and fridges through which food moves from farm to table—has transformed what we eat, where it’s grown, the layout of our cities and homes, and the very definition of freshness. But perhaps its most remarkable imprint can still be found in how our food actually tastes, for better and for worse.
I’m fascinated by interruptions. Things are running along one way, one sort of conversation is ongoing, reality is like this not that and then suddenly—everything changes. There’s a further question of when interruptions are admissible, even welcome, and when they are forbidden. My story in the latest Spring issue of The Paris Review is about a dinner party that gets interrupted. The interruption is bad news for the host (an imaginary Icelandic philosopher called Alda Jónsdóttir) and bad news for the person who does the interrupting (another imaginary philosopher called Ole Lauge). But it’s even worse news for a beautiful poached salmon, minding its own business at the center of the table.
Valérie Perrin's novels have been enormously popular in her native France, and it's no wonder. Forgotten on Sunday, her third to be translated into English, evokes something of the heartwarming whimsy of the 2001 movie, Amélie, which gets a shout-out in the book.
A recurrent theme in Perrin's novels is the life-changing magic of friendships across generations. Her latest is narrated by a charming misfit, a 21-year-old nurse's assistant at a retirement home in her tiny village. Justine Neige is so interested in her patients' lives that she often stays after her shift to hold their hands and talk to them. She announces on the second page: "I love two things in life: music and the elderly."
For all its socially conscious and contemporary twists and turns, this unashamedly emotional novel is working on a very deep level, striving to embody in its storytelling the assertion that, regardless of culture or sexuality, in the end – and in the beginning, and in between – only love matters. In this endeavour, it triumphantly succeeds.