People just don't read here. Now that I’ve had my own experience in France, those words haunt me. What is the role of the author as a public intellectual in a country where so many people don't read? The truth is, I have no clue… but I'm sure the answer is somewhere out there, and probably the only way to find it is to read a lot.
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” Julianne Moore’s character whispers gloomily in Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December. The scene that quickly became iconic online for how amusingly melodramatic it is also captures, perhaps inadvertently, America’s strange relationship with the oblong food. Is there such a thing as having enough hot dogs? As a culture, the answer seems to be no. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council estimates that we eat somewhere in the region of 20 billion hot dogs every year, or about 70 per person. (Hot dog eating contest champion Joey Chestnut once downed a record 76 in 10 minutes.)
The hot dog’s popularity isn’t exactly surprising. It’s an undemanding food, coming to you precooked and ready to eat. It’s so easy to make that a child could do it, and indeed many of us did as kids. During the Covid lockdown, when other people had their hot girl walks, I entered my hot dog era, eating nothing else for a week straight in the stifling kitchen of my apartment. It turned out that I wasn’t alone: In March 2020, hot dog sales were already up by 127 percent for the year.
Time was that drinking a Bloody Mary was the closest you’d get to feeling like your cocktail was a meal. But ever since PDT put bacon-washed bourbon in an Old-Fashioned in 2007, cocktails have found inspiration from the dinner plate. While the Benton’s Old-Fashioned still reads like an Old-Fashioned, today’s food-inspired cocktails invert the formula from a cocktail with food flavors, to food in liquid form. In other words, it’s no longer about infusing a bacon flavor into a cocktail, but making a cocktail that tastes exactly like bacon. These food cocktails are everywhere, and they’re starting to get a little weird.
Laura van den Berg's State of Paradise is a wonderful, enigmatic novel that effortlessly blends the commonplace and the extraordinary. A true-to-life narrative about a woman learning to navigate the world after a strange pandemic, dealing with her work as a ghostwriter, and experiencing a devastating storm in her native Florida, this novel is also a surreal exploration of memory and the lingering effects of trauma seasoned with elements of mystery as well as science fiction.
In this way, Williams affirms her well earned status as one of our most celebrated, living iconoclasts whose superpower may derive from her refusal to traffic in the familiar, and who, by sheer bravery, manages to keep us on our toes even now, after all this time.
Novels about the writing of novels carry some risk. They can be self-regarding, they can be bewildering, and they can be slyly exacting, forcing the reader to retrace their steps in pursuit of objectivity while gleefully manipulating the only truth: that is, that this is all made up. Kemp – who was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writers’ award in 2020 for her debut, Nightingale – deftly avoids the first two of these pitfalls while triumphantly embracing the last.
“Does it ever end?” asks one character, as yet another man hurts yet another woman. But this isn’t an issue-led book: it’s women-driven. In counterpoint to suffering and survival is the bright, bold story of the bonds of friendship between these women, of a passing on of kindness, and of memory.