People book-club The Power Broker, pundits give it a prominent place in their Zoom backgrounds, and completing the book is something to brag about—at the New York Historical Society Museum’s special exhibition celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary, you can buy cheeky “I Finished The Power Broker” mugs.
I’m one of those Caro-crazed obsessives who has read everything he’s written—the books are well worth your time, and there’s no better place to start than this volume on Robert Moses, an unelected, and nearly unknown figure who nonetheless managed to build so many roads, bridges, and parks that he fundamentally changed America’s largest city.
Orlando is Virginia Woolf at play—a piece of frippery, pure queer pleasure, a little romantic, a little coy, hinting at secrets. I have returned to Orlando repeatedly over the years, most recently after a few lifetimes away. Each time, something different awaits. To return to Orlando is to travel in time. Woolf shows us how we might live multiple lifetimes in one life.
Oddly, the culture around me seemed to get more communicative as I aged. One day in 2019, I walked into a trendy Malaysian restaurant—Kopitiam, in lower Manhattan—and found the food of my childhood presented as cool, even chic. Enjoying it apparently meant something beyond enjoyment; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signalled both the rising fortunes of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own personality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” the novelist John Lanchester wrote, in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”) Americanness was shifting in its significance, too: for some people, in some places, flying a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything was Googleable and shareable, and social media was reducing cultural difference to a matter of style; as the novelist William Gibson observed, the virtual world was colonizing the real one. Every cultural act seemed to be becoming a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotes.
Is there a single silver teaspoon that has not stirred up the memory of seduction and rage? Is there a Fräulein in the house without vague, disabling despair? Ah, the fresh and full aroma of hysteria under a constellation of coffee cups!
Becoming a parent is life changing. Raymond Antrobus’ third poetry collection, “Signs, Music,” captures this transformation as he conveys his own transition into fatherhood.
The book is split between before and after, moving from the hope and trepidation of shepherding a new life into the world to the sleeplessness and shifted perspective of being a new father.
The title of Grabowski’s promising debut novel is, of course, an ironic reference to the Titanic. Here’s the book’s epigraph: “The only reason they say “‘Women and children first”’ is to test the strength of the lifeboats.” —Unknown. Women and Children First taps into today’s zeitgeist: it is filled with compelling women who are fighting not to go under.