“Two possibilities exist,” physicist and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote. “Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Chinese science-fiction author Liu Cixin begs to differ. In his mind-bending trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, adapted by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss as 3 Body Problem for Netflix, he convincingly argues that we’d be better off if we were alone in the universe and, barring that, that we should hide from whoever or whatever might be out there.
“1941” is my favorite film of Spielberg’s. It may not be his most personal movie (“The Fabelmans” is his family story, after all), but it’s the one in which he shows the most of his inner life—maybe even more than he intended. In “1941,” he lets his manic, movie-loving inner child loose and avows far more about his love of movies—and its connection to his fundamental worldview—than was prudent. It’s the film in which he lets himself go, in which he displays his cinematic id, and it’s perhaps the only one in which he suggests that he has an id at all. Yet the part of Spielberg that was unleashed proved unpopular. Critics panned “1941,” and, though it was neither a blockbuster nor a financial flop, it was a big disappointment after the smash hits of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Spielberg, chastened, never cut loose again.
But to Sebregondi, it meant something more personal, because she recognized, from her time as a student in Paris, the notebooks Chatwin described. Indeed, she still had several. Digging them out of old boxes, she looked at them for the first time in years—and with new eyes. Why had Chatwin become so attached to this particular model that he would order a hundred rather than risk running out? How could such a utilitarian object assume such importance? Then it struck her that she might have hit upon a solution to Franceschi’s challenge—a simple product, easy to manufacture, appealing to creatives and imparting promises of travel, of glamour, of discovery.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to walk up to a restaurant in a foreign city and ask for a table for one. Would the staff question my aloneness, I’d wonder? Would they feel I was taking up space? As I wandered the streets of Lisbon, I’d find myself mentally logging the location of any restaurant that looked like a good candidate: nice, but not too nice; busy, but not so busy the staff might resent me.
An epic adventure that is both a love letter to and a subversive send-up of the genre as a whole, it pokies gleeful fun at its most ridiculous tropes even as it embraces the very elements that have helped rocket fantasy to the top of virtually every publishing chart. It is pointed and hilarious, sincere and heartfelt by turns, building a fictional world that will feel familiar to readers but that takes narrative swings that are all its own. And, not for nothing, it’s genuinely one of the most unabashedly fun books that have hit shelves in recent months, briskly paced, often deeply silly, and self-aware in all the best ways.
On a quick pass through the first several poems in Willie Lin’s debut collection, Conversation Among Stones (2023), I somehow formed the impression that Lin rarely used the lyric “I”. When I went back to truly read the book, I saw that I was wrong. “I” appears in most poems, but so obliquely that the “I” itself is almost elided. The result takes the reader right into the title image, a “conversation among stones.” One of the pleasures and challenges of this book is struggling with the speakers to understand who they are and where they locate themselves while we ask ourselves the same questions.