When Zehme died on March 26, 2023, he left behind broken hearts and an unfinished book that had bedeviled him for the last two decades of his 64-year life. It was a book about Johnny Carson, the late-night television host of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” for nearly 30 years, until bowing out in 1992. When Zehme died, a New York Times critic referred to the book as “one of the great unfinished biographies.”
Well, it’s finished now.
My heart wasn’t supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and jumping every which way as my chest tightened. Was I having a heart attack?
The day was July 4, 2022, and I was on a 12-mile bike ride on Martha’s Vineyard. I had just pedaled past Inkwell Beach, where swimmers sunbathed under colorful umbrellas, and into a hot, damp headwind blowing off the sea. That’s when I first sensed a tugging in my chest. My legs went wobbly. My head started to spin. I pulled over, checked my watch, and discovered that I was experiencing atrial fibrillation—a fancy name for a type of arrhythmia. The heart beats, but not in the proper time. Atria are the upper chambers of the heart; fibrillation means an attack of “uncoordinated electrical activity.”
Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.
A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.
The Seoul neighborhood of Bogwang-dong sits on a steep hill rising over the Han River. In Korean, neighborhoods built on hazardous slopes are called dal-dongnae, or moon villages, because they seem to reach into the sky. Dal-dongnae are a legacy of the waves of rapid urbanization that drew millions of rural residents into the capital during the 20th century. Seoul’s landscape is defined by the contrast between the uniformity of its aspirationally-branded apartment complexes — Summit La Fiume, Lotte Castle, Mecenatpolis — and the sprawling mass of aging working-class neighborhoods that lie between the towers.
Each year, when the crisp autumn leaves fall to the ground, an image of a carefree Meg Ryan sporting a shaggy lob—carrying a pumpkin in one arm and shopping bags in another—circulates the internet. While I have never been so starry-eyed during my walks throughout New York City— usually I’m profusely sweating, dodging someone body slamming me, and avoiding a misstep into dog excrement—this particular moment from 1998’s You’ve Got Mail encompasses the magic of Manhattan as depicted by the late director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, an aspirational, autumnal bubble that oozes optimism and pumpkin spice.
As a kid, the movie’s world—one in which the characters were both the living and the dead—seemed more accurate than a world that only contained the living. In the first few years of my life, I lost my aunt, my grandmother, and my grandfather. It seemed to me that the death of a close relative was an annual event, and each fall when the wind picked up, I wondered who would be next.
In The Hotel, Johnson has given us a deftly constructed new version of a horror collection, with stories that slip in like mist under the door, just right for Halloween. But like all the best horror stories, they have deep roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted.
Rewitched is for lovers of aesthetically witchy stories full to bursting with cups of tea, autumn vibes and unlikely friendships that knit into a community.
Longtime Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert noticed a distinct shift under Stewart’s leadership and embraced it. “When Craig was there, it wasn’t so political,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2005. “Jon has asked us to be political, and to share his interest in doing political comedy that actually has some thought behind it.” Shortly after Stewart’s premiere as anchor of The Daily Show, on January 11, 1999, it was clear that the show had grown up a bit. The focus on pop culture receded as news and politics rose to the surface.
Not everyone was convinced. Herzog worried that politics felt “like homework.” He left the network shortly after Stewart made his debut, for what would prove to be a short-lived stint at Fox. “I was wrong,” Herzog admits. “He was right. And he remains right. Politics is culture.”
Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it.
Pressly’s book is a probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm, but it goes further than that. He argues for privacy, or what he more accurately terms “oblivion,” as not just freedom from surveillance but a positive, albeit essentially unknowable value—a place where true human depth and personality reside.
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.
Aciman’s elegant narrative is an echo of the in-between, the blurred passage into adulthood. He began to uncover an identity in the romanticism of European cities. He says that “Rome never asked to be loved,” and yet he learned to love it—for its flaws and for its holding of his family in their pain and displacement.
If someone decides not to read Munro because she enabled an abuser, or Tolstoy because he was an aristocrat and a patriarch, I would understand. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that, because one has denounced Munro or Tolstoy, others must agree that it would be wrong to read them. When writers confront me in these situations, I tend to shrug them off: some people have a natural tendency to police other people’s thinking. But I admit that I worry when the younger generations use language that they have taken from public circulation without thinking it through first. Phrases like “dismantle the canon” may sound fabulous, but if you were to press the students to elaborate, you would get a string of grandiose and empty words.
Thinking through—rather than just thinking—is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths. The point of writing and reading fiction is not to stay with the first thought or idea, nor the third or the fourth, but to push further until one says to oneself, Even though I haven’t thought through everything, I have brought myself as far as I can within my limited capacity. Without thinking through, thoughts are no more than slogans.
Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire. (I am also getting the impression that most books by young novelists are about sexual abuse. I know, I know—I shouldn’t be so squeamish. But I’m in the middle of an English winter, there’s no daylight after about eleven o’clock in the morning, I’ve quite often watched my football team play out a dismal, goalless draw…Give me a break until the spring, at least.)
The big secret of Western gardening is that it’s easy to grow things here. My garden is on a fearsome north-facing hill, surrounded by tall trees (the tallest—redwoods), but the back yard gets sun. It’s a cottage-style garden, which is to say that it’s motley and crowded. There are a few dozen rose bushes, various other perennial flowers, and a brace of fruit trees: the six apples, two plums (Santa Rosa and European prune), a persimmon (Hachiya), and a multi-graft Asian pear whose branches the local raccoons keep breaking in their nightly revelry. Living in the woods as I do, the border between the cultivated areas and the rest of the forest understory is porous. My garden is home to many birds, bugs, rodents, and other forest critters. In the giant redwood and oak trees that surround it, a family of acorn woodpeckers make their nests. Their red plumage looks like little fascinator hats, and their calls sound like a cackle. When I do my dawn patrol of the beds each morning, I imagine they’re laughing at me and my barren apple trees. I’ve made this garden a major part of my life, my personality, and my career. I even cast the apple trees as major characters in my memoir. And yet the fruits do not fall.
Sure, it’s still a passive activity, but listening to baseball on the radio requires a patience—and provides a catharsis—that evades us when we are scrolling our feeds for another dopamine hit between pitches on the big screen. So, as the Dodgers and Yankees resume one of the more exciting World Series in recent memory tonight in New York, make Vin Scully proud: flip on the radio, and take a game in that way. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The push and pull between structure and its disassembly preoccupies the poems in this book.
“Masquerade” is a meandering, surreal, and unsettling search for identity as Meadow examines the masks he’s worn throughout his adult life.
For a while, of course, Beryl’s Instant Mince was pretty much lost to posterity; cook books go out of print, and with them the culinary outrages of the past (“spoon the instant mince on to [buttered, white] bread and cover with HP sauce, also raw onion rings”). But now, like some horrible alien in a movie, it’s back, for another editor has seen fit to gather it into a new collection of author’s recipes titled Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, where it lurks next to several other equally unappetising confections: Robert Graves’s Mock Anchovy Pate, Norman Mailer’s Stuffed Mushrooms, Rebecca West’s Dutch Onion Crisps. As you may tell, this is not a book for the easily-made-queasy, and though I am usually implacably opposed to trigger warnings, I think it should have come with one: This Book Includes Scenes Featuring Large Quantities of Margarine and Fillet of Beef Served With Bananas. Some Readers May Find It Distressing.
I wear my mother’s cropped grey jacket to the book launch party in LA. Her navy blazer with pinstripes to my book reading in Brooklyn. Her leopard print scarf on my way to introduce Jennifer Egan at Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. In Seattle, Corte Madera, Kansas City, I wear her thin platinum bracelet beaded with the tiniest diamonds cuffed around my wrist.
Sacks showed generations of doctors (and patients) how medicine is just the starting point for an exploration of the possibilities of being human. With these letters, his legacy as an extraordinary writer, humanitarian and physician is secured.
In Rome on St Stephen’s Day 2022, the writer Hanif Kureishi took a fall that left him almost completely paralysed. Throughout the subsequent year he spent in hospitals – first in Italy, then in his home city of London – confronting the horror of his new reality as a severely disabled person, Kureishi dictated “dispatches” to his wife, Isabella, and his sons, which were published online. Helped by his family, the author has expanded these dispatches into a memoir of catastrophe whose driving question is nothing less than that of how its author is meant to go on: “Paki, writer, cripple: who am I now?”
I imagine that Shattered was at once the hardest and the easiest book Kureishi has ever written: hard because of the irreversibly awful circumstance that occasioned it; easy because, with material this intrinsically interesting – a reversal of fortunes so dramatic and grotesque – any halfway talented writer could fashion something readable. Sure enough, Shattered is an enthralling report on how a person can be forced to reckon with sudden, shocking change.
That’s baseball: elusive, uneasy, and mortal. Part of what brought many of us to the sport was the sense of intimacy we felt with players who came in all sizes, from almost every kind of community. We saw and heard from ballplayers every day, on the radio or in the news, and we grasped that foundational to this challenging sport was how they metabolized the possibility of failure—a seminal feature not just of their lives but of ours.
As a developmental psychologist who writes dark thrillers on the side, I find the intersection of psychology and fear intriguing. To explain what drives this fascination with fear, I point to the theory that emotions evolved as a universal experience in humans because they help us survive. Creating fear in otherwise safe lives can be enjoyable – and is a way for people to practice and prepare for real-life dangers.
It is a mistake, probably, to seek consonance in the work of several poets whose contributions to Poetry Business’ latest anthology are nothing if not eclectic. Yet there are contiguous stylistic threads in this fine, slim volume, whose presence may or may not be a consequence of the judicious application of editorial inference. Since most of us are given instinctively to the combing out of knots, it is satisfying to find verisimilitude in such a disparate selection of poems, even where the likeness is otherwise residual.
Like its predecessor, The Sequel is a novel about stories; an on-the-nose satire about the cut-throat publishing industry, and a Chinese puzzle of books-within-books and deliberately placed literary references for the cognoscenti.
Bret Shepard’s achingly beautiful collection of poems, winner of the prestigious Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is informed throughout by his childhood growing up in villages on Alaska’s North Slope, including Atqasuk and Browerville. The poems are infused with landscape imagery and a sense of loss. The words “absence” and “desire” appear again and again.
Researchers typically compare algorithms by studying how they fare in worst-case scenarios. Imagine the world’s most confusing street grid, then add some especially perplexing traffic patterns. If you insist on finding the fastest routes in these extreme circumstances, the 1984 version of Dijkstra’s algorithm is provably unbeatable.
But hopefully, your city doesn’t have the world’s worst street grid. And so you may ask: Is there an algorithm that’s unbeatable on every road network? The first step to answering this question is to make the conservative assumption that each network has worst-case traffic patterns. Then you want your algorithm to find the fastest paths through any possible graph layout, assuming the worst possible weights. Researchers call this condition “universal optimality.” If you had a universally optimal algorithm for the simpler problem of just getting from one point on a graph to another, it could help you beat rush hour traffic in every city in the world.
Why aren’t ghosts naked? This was a key philosophical question for Cruikshank and many others in Victorian Britain. Indeed, stories of naked or clothesless ghosts, especially outside folklore, are exceedingly rare. Sceptics and ghost-seers alike have delighted in thinking about how exactly ghosts could have form and force in the material world. Just what kind of stuff could they be made of that allows them to share our plane of existence, in all its mundanity?
Having The Empusium embody, on a structural level, this idea of reality as “blurred, out of focus, flickering, now like this, now like that” is a brave and interesting move. Speaking of Görbersdorf, Thilo tells Mieczysław that “one sinks into a strange state of mind here”. The same could be said of Tokarczuk’s novel, but as invitation rather than warning.
The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.
Experts now consider disinformation and misinformation to be the world’s top risks, ahead of climate change and extreme weather, economic crises, armed conflict, everything. How we communicate with one another and prove our points is more important than ever. The Chicago Manual of Style has been a beacon on a hill for more than a century. What do we do if—or as—people start to get all their information from TikTok? Is TikTok news? Is it information? Do we argue on it now, Tik for Tok? Or is it, like X, like Instagram, random snippets of media, sets of statistics, and examples from history and other pieces of future evidentiary arguments that may or may not be true, may or may not have been prepared and vetted by reporters and journalists and editors and fact-checkers of the kind that book publishers, newspapers, magazines, and television networks have been building as part of their epistemic architecture for centuries?
Do I think that every copy sold in the last two weeks has been print-on-demand? No. But I am willing to guess that most of them, ordered in the rush of excitement that follows the Nobel announcement every year, were printed at Ingram after the orders came in.
The movement toward repertory, however, isn’t only because of sudden changes in taste or just a case of people wanting to get out of their homes after being trapped in them. On a grander scale, it’s a Darwinian adaptation to a grim landscape largely created by the cynicism and miscalculations of the major Hollywood studio system. Nearly every decision the studios have made since the turn of the century has inadvertently supported and strengthened the position of repertory cinema as a counterbalance in the industry.
When rollercoaster fans speak of creativity, they speak of the old, the retired or the dead. They speak of Anton Schwarzkopf, late pioneer of the loop, and Ron Toomer, who became the first engineer to haul people up more than 200ft before sending them into a drop. They speak of Alan Schilke and Jeff Pike, both slowing down now, both admired for their structures that marry timber with steel. They speak of Werner Stengel, a living legend at 88, one of whose many new ideas was to send passengers hurtling around corners while tilted at 90 degrees. Because the work of rollercoaster creation asks for confidence of vision, the staying power to see through long projects, as well as an encyclopaedic grasp of which manoeuvres have and haven’t been tried yet, it is not a conspicuously youthful game. John Burton – a self-effacing aficionado of theme parks and musical theatre from Staffordshire – is an anomaly. He was only a few years on from working as a crab feeder at an English aquarium when he was invited to create his first rollercoaster. He was given an £18m budget, a patch of damp ground, and told: make it big. He was 27.
Sacks is an endearing and entertaining prose stylist – inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse – and the organisation of Letters, separated into broadly thematic, chronological chapters with concise editorial introductions, provides narrative momentum. The resulting book is far more engaging than the unwieldy reference text for Sacks specialists it could have been. It might, in fact, serve as a more affecting autobiography than his On the Move (2015), which occasionally slides into sentimentality.
On a spring day earlier this year, I stride with Dalla Ragione into the National Gallery of Umbria, in a 14th-century stone castle built atop the hillside city of Perugia. Umbria, a region in central Italy next to Tuscany, is known more for its lush green spaces, hillside cities and Etruscan and Roman ruins than for its art. But the painters of Renaissance Italy traveled between regions, and some of the works on display in Perugia are as awe-inspiring as those in Florence. We breeze through room after room, passing a blur of masterworks by the likes of Gentile da Fabriano and Benozzo Gozzoli, until Dalla Ragione stops before a radiant painting that fills an entire room of its own.
The arresting work is by Piero della Francesca, an artistic giant of the 15th century. It shows the Madonna, wrapped in a deep blue robe, cradling a towheaded baby Jesus. But Dalla Ragione points me to what looks like a small bunch of translucent marbles in Jesus’s tiny hand: cherries! They’re pale red with a white tint—acquaiola cherries, a variety that has almost disappeared in Italy but back then was quite common. Their juice was seen as symbolic of Christ’s blood. The vaulted ceiling, the spiritual imagery, the murmurs and footfalls of other museumgoers give the scene a sacred feeling.
But perhaps this year the reluctance to plant bulbs lies a little deeper than mere idleness. We are outgrowing our home, and soon we will have to find a new one. I have been aware of this for long enough to think about the garden in terms of how many seasons I will be able to bear witness to it, to have a cup of tea or do some gardening in it. Was the past summer our last one in the garden? Will we have another yet? So much of what I have planted is only just getting going: increasingly I think about the garden as something I have made that is only partially formed; that I will never be able to see it achieve its full beauty.
Genre fiction and YA both get passed over (too) frequently for not being “serious.” I want to really urge folks who veer away from either to try Such Lovely Skin. Schlote-Bonne understands plot structure, character building and emotional stakes. Her prose is exacting, evocative, honest. Schlote-Bonne wrote a book about a haunted video game that manages to be funny and real and moving. I can’t imagine dismissing this book.
For all his love of occluded words, this assured debut gives readers reason to hope Carter will continue unoccluding his own.
Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours, motoring across three countries, when a torrential storm broke loose on the plains of Belgium. Her wipers pulsed at full speed as the green fields of Flanders turned a blurry grey. Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Within 24 hours, it would be full of human brains – not modern specimens, but brains that had contemplated this landscape as far back as the middle ages and had, miraculously, remained intact.
For centuries, archaeologists have been perplexed by discoveries of ancient skeletons devoid of all soft tissue, except what Morton-Hayward cheerfully described as “just a brain rattling around in a skull”. At Oxford, where she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains, some as old as 8,000 years. Additionally, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of cases – more than 4,400 preserved brains as old as 12,000 years. Using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is leading a new effort to reveal the molecular secrets that have enabled some human brains to survive longer than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It began with my dad’s 8mm projector. When I was ten my father would let me play projectionist for the movie nights my parents put on at our house. I was hooked right from the start. The projector was one of the first mechanical things I was allowed to play around with and I loved it: I loved threading the film, the feel of the metal teeth of the intermittent sprocket, the rapid-fire hum of the projector’s motor and the acetate smell of the film and how it bubbled on screen when a piece got caught in the gate.
And there are monsters here, too: a subterranean essence hiding at the heart of the structure. It’s with this image—dog, tail and all—that we get a hint of what Haddon is about. Both this cover and the tales that lie beneath gesture toward something savage and incomprehensible at the center of ourselves. We catch it in glimpses, illuminated by terror and ecstasy. Haddon finds these devastating moments in the ancient and the modern, across centuries and across continents, in moments when mythic themes—the alternation of creation and destruction, the devastating transformations that result—repeat endlessly, the heartbeat of the human condition.
Novels about queer identity are as common as road trips these days. What makes this one stand out is seeing the journey to self-acceptance from the point of view of a woman born in 1941, who began to practice psychiatry at a time when homosexuality was considered a disorder and electroshock therapy an appropriate treatment. Yet Montague is such a gifted, sensitive and big-hearted writer that she can extend her imaginative sympathy even to Magda’s parents, whose strict Protestant religion taught them to revile this essential aspect of their daughter.
It's a challenging time for social satire: For one thing, the country sometimes seems as divided by what it finds funny as it is by politics. But Blood Test, a new novel by Charles Baxter, perhaps spans divisions because it draws upon a tried-and-true comic predicament: namely, the little guy who's forced to punch above his weight with a larger entity.
Walter, who has played more than a score of Shakespearean roles from Viola to Brutus, admits “I worship Shakespeare”. She nevertheless wants to take him to task for the limitations on his insights into women and women’s lives. Her book provides a series of supplementary speeches, mostly in rhyming iambic pentameter, introduced with brief but revealing snippets of her own connection to the characters across her career.
The Netflix adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 runaway hit apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind, concludes relatably. The movie—directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali—sees tween girl Rose desperate to find out what happens in the finale of Friends as the world literally burns around her. Even though there’s a major telecommunications breakdown, Teslas are going haywire, and wildlife is gathering as if in anticipation of Armageddon, Rose must find out what becomes of Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey. Do Rachel and Ross finally get back together? (Yes, even though Ross is a gaslighting softboy.) Do Chandler and Monica have a baby? (They have two, in fact.) What becomes of the iconic purple-walled loft? (Monica and Chandler give it up and move to the suburbs, thus signaling their descent into middle-aged uniformity.) More than just a reference to Gen Z’s pandemic-era obsession with bingeing a show that started 30 years ago this year, it’s indicative of our growing obsession with certainty in a world that’s anything but.
Today, though, the routes these ancient wanderers depend on are increasingly blocked. As the Galapagos’ human population soars—from about 2,000 in the 1960s to some 32,000 today—an expanding network of farms, roads, and tourist infrastructure disrupts the tortoises’ migratory paths, particularly on Santa Cruz. And beyond these roadblocks lurks an even more challenging barrier: nonnative vegetation that threatens to halt millennia of migration.
It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the gods.
More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan’s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.
With the Olympics coming up, Los Angeles has a once-in-a-generation excuse to do something radical. There’s a model many L.A. activists are hoping to borrow from Paris: build in disability access, multimodal paths, and bus lanes in the name of Olympic preparation—and then let them become daily infrastructure afterward. In Paris, pedestrian plazas and HOV lanes established for the Games have since been made permanent.
That was not how it went in 1984, in spite of the Games’ car-free triumph. “The Games are over,” Mayor Tom Bradley said at the time. “Let the traffic begin.”
Climate change has marked effects on the restaurant industry. Changing temperatures and weather patterns mean ingredients that were once common are now harder to come by, and sourcing ingredients from sustainable farms can often be more expensive. Some restaurateurs hope that by championing things like locally sourced produce and sustainable seafood, diners will understand what a climate-friendly diet looks like. But while speaking about the environment is important, “preaching,” as Goldman puts it, is a turn-off, especially in hospitality, an industry that consumers rely on to provide, among other things, a good time... without interruptions. This puts restaurateurs in a precarious position of having to communicate choices and challenges without sullying the fun of eating out. Climate messaging can’t work if customers are too put off to walk through the door once, let alone habitually.
When the plot puzzle begins to assemble in the final 100 or so pages, “Memorials” really takes off and becomes something altogether different, genuinely earning its placement in the horror section of the bookstore. Readers will have to decide for themselves if the payoff is worth it, but it’s an enjoyable enough ride.
Other dealers characterize Horowitz as a pulp-novel antagonist: the dastardly villain. It’s not just that he is brazen, or that his success inspires envy and flashes of antisemitism. It’s that rare books have always been a handshake business: the dealer Robert Wilson recalled approvingly that W. H. Auden invited him to cart away his books and letters and “send me whatever you think proper.” Few who’ve dealt with Horowitz would be as blithe. Ed Maggs, a prominent English dealer, told me, “Glenn is such a very clever guy, but I never knew that he particularly understood the truth. I would not trust him one inch.”
To many of his colleagues’ delight, Horowitz was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. A decade earlier, he had sold five legal pads scrawled with lyrics by the Eagles’ drummer and singer, Don Henley, including thirteen pages of work on “Hotel California.” He’d purchased the pads in 2007 for $50,000 and sold them five years later for $65,000, so his profit was trifling. But, when the two collectors who bought the pads later tried to auction off some of the lyrics, Henley became convinced that they’d been filched from him, and ultimately contacted the D.A. Horowitz and the collectors were charged with possessing stolen property, and Horowitz was accused of helping to fabricate the provenance of the pads.
People have been forgetting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. You spend thousands of dollars on the most important night of your life, and as the days tick down you get more and more excited—only two months until I see Taylor Swift! Only fifty-nine days! Only fifty-eight!—until the magical day itself. You get dressed up in imitation of one of her outfits. You wear a friendship bracelet, because there’s a Taylor Swift song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” where she mentions friendship bracelets. You write the number thirteen on your hand, because Taylor Swift sometimes writes the number thirteen on her hand. You’re so full of excitement it feels like your heart might burst. And then, suddenly, it’s night, and you’re streaming out of the venue with hundreds of thousands of other fans, and you have no memory of what just happened. You know, intellectually, that you were there for more than four hours as the world’s biggest pop star performed her entire back catalog for you, and you sang along to every song. But you don’t remember it. You can’t conjure the images, or the feelings. You don’t feel anything at all.
Dried cells—it’s what’s for dinner. At least that’s what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air.
But that’s exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In nature, these “autotrophic” microbes survive on a meager diet of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor drawn directly from the atmosphere. In the lab, they do the same, eating up waste carbon and reproducing so enthusiastically that their populations swell to fill massive fermentation tanks. Siphoned off and dehydrated, that bacterial biomass becomes a protein-rich powder that’s chock-full of nutrients and essentially infinitely renewable.
And yet, Strout is a magician. From what might seem cussedly bathetic, deliberately underplayed, she produces rabbit after rabbit; moments of such sadness or illumination that the reader may feel momentarily winded before being compelled to continue.
Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century, Franz Nicolay argues in a new book called “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” could be forgiven for assuming that working one’s way up from gigs to a steady job in music was a plausible career path. You might not make it as a chart-topping star, but there were still opportunities for “band people”—the “hired guns” or “side-of-the-stagers” who offered structure and support. Music was everywhere, and there had to be people to play it. Nicolay’s book details the lives of working musicians, especially those far from the spotlight: background vocalists hired for uncredited recording sessions, rhythm guitarists playing on freelance contracts. Not that the spotlight in question shines all that brightly to begin with; most of the dozens of artists Nicolay spoke to work in commercially tenuous realms, such as indie rock or punk, in which a band like Sonic Youth represents the imagination’s zenith.
But anyone who has streamed a song on their phone for free can sense that something has changed.
What redeems these pages are the parts where Pacino reveals his single-minded commitment to his craft. When he confesses that he was happiest during the four years he spent making Looking for Richard, or exhorts younger actors to believe in the story “as if it happened to them”, you sense that Pacino is still a twentysomething wannabe theatre actor at heart, furiously practising his lines aloud in vacant lots.
You needn’t be a le Carré nut to enjoy it, though, and while we’re undoubtedly in something of a glut of sequels and reboots, it’s far from unimaginative fan service. A loving tribute to a complicated father (as Harkaway’s dedication seems to acknowledge) as well as an excellent novel in its own right, and only the first of a new series, at least to judge from a broad hint dropped in the end matter. I can’t wait.
Annie Ernaux writes, early on in The Use of Photography, that words give her a more real sense of time than images (looking at the headlines of a newspaper in a photograph). In this book, the presence of images provides material to write against, dispute, and reinterpret; to invite the opportunity to write something a different truth. To bring the outside world in beyond the still lives, to enlarge the stories beyond the distance emanated in the photographs.
“To open up your writing space is more violent than to open up your sex,” A. muses, fondling the intellectual frisson of writing with a collaborator. Even so, the reader is conscripted into the co-creation of the book’s erotic imaginary. Like a communicant at Mass, the reader receives the bread. It is then upon us to do the work of imagining the flesh. In Ernaux’s words, “the highest degree of reality […] will only be attained if those written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.”
The roots of modern horror lie in the British Isles, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But Americans have made the genre their own, and despite the universal, border-crossing fears of death, pain, and decay that horror exploits, it’s American horror that dominates the form now. As Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary: A History of Horror, From Salem to Stephen King and Beyond points out, American writers, dramatists, and filmmakers would seize on Shelley and Stoker’s ideas. But also crucial to the American psyche is a historical trauma, the Salem witch trials, replete with the trappings of fictional scariness, but with an all-too-real human cost. It’s in that nightmare that the real heart of American horror beats.
The Golden Road is, then, a multifarious and engaging narrative, which, like Indian trade, takes us in many directions, peppered with lively stories and charismatic individuals. It will make you look at the world differently.
I have been thinking about memory these days, because I have been gathering contributions for Class Notes from my classmates at the Brearley School. Seven contributions have come in, either instantly or, after many weeks, reluctantly. They are long or short, emotional or matter-of-fact, describing adventures abroad or hard work at home, and now my job will be to cut and select, paraphrase and quote, and count words from each contributor—our entire collection will have to add up to no more than six hundred and fifty words. The hard part is trying to give more or less equal space to each of these life accounts, since some of us tend to recount incidents in great detail while others are tight-lipped. If nine of us altogether, including me and my co-agent, contribute notes, then each note is allowed a little over seventy words. If another contribution comes in at the last minute, we all go down to about sixty-five. Do I cut out the trip to Costa Rica, or the visit to the nephew in New Jersey? The recent grandchild, broken hip, or Scrabble competition?
“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”
Perhaps that’s no surprise given that the concept can be difficult for the brain to grasp. It takes children longer to understand and use zero than other numbers, and it takes adults longer to read it than other small numbers. That’s because to understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object.
Before you step into “Private Lives: From the Bedroom to Social Media,” an enticing exhibition at Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, let’s address the word intime, which anchors the French title: L’Intime. De la chambre aux résaux sociaux. You could be forgiven for instantly thinking of sex (intimate relations) or the body (intimate products). But intime encompasses more than the English translation, intimate.
I will leave it to the Belle and Sebastian obsessives, of whom there are many around the world, to figure out which details in this debut novel by the band’s lead singer and main songwriter are made up. As far as I’ve been able to work out, just a few names have been changed, of people and cafes. Apart from that, Nobody’s Empire could as well have been published as a recovery memoir. So let’s agree to call it autofiction, and take the book on its merits – which are considerable.
I thought I knew a great deal about language already. I had by then wandered in and out of five languages and was adept at comparing and contrasting them. But more than that, I felt I was made of language—that my soul was the product of all the language fragments that had blown my way and accumulated into a semblance of a whole, all of them held together by my ardor for their alchemies of sound and meaning. Nothing else in the world drew the same bodily response from me (I was just beginning to have an inkling that sex might have similar possibilities). I could imagine no version of my self that was not about language. I thought I knew language intimately, in a way that made me possessive of it.
What happened in that linguistics classroom was a shock to me. After the first session or two, I was certain that my life had changed, though I couldn’t have said exactly how. I did know that I was about to abandon my plans of becoming a novelist.
The physical form of a book is more than just its packaging; it’s integral to the story it conveys. In a world increasingly dominated by digital media, this aspect of storytelling deserves celebration. Books transcend mere narratives—they offer comfort and refuge.
There are likely a dozen novels in half as many years that, like Greathead’s, achieve a kind of synopsis of millennial life. Perhaps, as Tulathimutte suggested, there’s no singular generational novel. An interdisciplinary, multicultural generation of disparate individuals will never have one. But even in an era of individuality, Greathead has captured a sense of commonality we can all recognize in George. The Book of George is not the novel of a generation, but it is, at the very least, one of the many.
Melanie Cheng’s characters tend to be untethered and out of place. In her short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian premier’s literary award for fiction, the author introduced various people navigating disconnection. And in her debut novel, Room for a Stranger (2019), two adrift, solitary souls form an unexpected friendship. This interest in separation, in the ways we isolate from and reconnect to one another, persists in Cheng’s new novel, The Burrow.
Clean is an intense novel about class and power and the kind of deep down rot that lingers, despite the most vigorous scrubbing.
My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said the bookseller. The woman laughed and left. Bookselling is tough; that’s nothing new. In Riceyman Steps, a 1923 novel, the proprietor of the eponymous bookstore and his wife die of impoverishment and immiseration. In The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller, a 1931 novel presented as a memoir, the destitute bibliophile gases himself. As novels, they present a dark fantasy of bookselling; and, maybe unsurprisingly, both are British. The bookstore in the American imagination—established in part by Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop (1919), where customers receive bibliotherapy amid the lamplit labyrinth of a “warm and comfortable obscurity”—is a happier place. As scholars Kristen Doyle Highland and Eben Muse have demonstrated, ours is a fantasy of homey nooks where contingency and serendipity rule, outside the dictates of worldly time.
Evan Friss announces his commitment to this fantasy with the title of his new book, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. Typically, bookstore is American usage and bookshop is British. But the booksellers at Friss’s paragon, Three Lives & Company in Greenwich Village, think store “sounds too commercial” and prefer shop—so he does too. Three Lives is a place where life happens. Camille remembers to ask after your ailing grandmother; Richie pops in with a “wedge of Gruyére”; Adrienne drops off ballet tickets she can’t use. And fair, if Friss is a little biased: his wife worked there for eight years. A rheumatologist, “Dr. Gary,” once diagnosed her with shingles among the shelves. The novelist David Markson flirted with her, called her the “girl of my dreams.”
What would it take to grow plants to feed future astronauts on Mars? In science fiction, it isn’t much of a problem. Matt Damon’s character in the 2015 movie The Martian simply had to build a greenhouse, spread out human excrement, add water, and wait. The film got a lot of things right—bacteria in the human biome will be useful—but it didn’t account for the perchlorates. The potato plants that sustained him would never have grown, but even if they had, two years of eating contaminated, carcinogenic potatoes would have nuked his thyroid, boxed his kidneys, and damaged his cells—though he might not have realized it, because perchlorates are also neurotoxic. It would have been Matt Damon’s finest death scene.
At the time Andy Weir was writing the book on which the film was based, no one really knew just how plentiful and ubiquitous the chemicals were. Though they were first discovered by NASA’s Phoenix lander in 2008, it took subsequent rovers, and compilation of historic data, to confirm that not only are perchlorates everywhere on Mars, but they are, in fact, abundant. Overall, Mars’s surface has perchlorate concentrations of about 0.5% by weight. On Earth, the concentration is often a millionth that amount.
A concert begins with a series of reassuring rituals. First, the quick clip across the plaza, the flourishing of tickets, the awkward jostle of knees and coats. Then comes the hush between the audience’s hum and the first downbeat, the instant in which everyone present can legitimately hope for a miracle. What unfolds next is both foreordained and unpredictable: a performance superficially the same as any other rendition of the same score, but also profoundly different — wondrous, perhaps, or merely rote. Even when we know how the music will go, we don’t know how it will make us react.
As a society, we value that margin of uncertainty. We feel so strongly about preserving it that we erect large, expensive buildings for that purpose. A concert hall is a facility designed to generate indelible memories. This is where architects come in. Music can happen in a shed or a subway station. A violinist remains just as talented in her bedroom as on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But a great hall lies at the convergence of architecture, acoustics, and music. For the audience, the pleasures of seeing, hearing, and inhabiting a beautiful space merge in multisensory intensity. How high the ceilings rise, how intricately the walls curve and fold, how far the balconies extend, how steeply the floors are raked, how many seats fill how much square footage and what material they’re upholstered in — all these separately humdrum factors conspire to loft a crescendo so that it reaches the ear and hums through the body’s wires. We ask homes to give us comfort, offices to coax us into productivity, hospitals to help us heal; what we demand of concert halls is a regular opportunity to be moved.
We think of restaurant and pub closures in terms of chef and bar staff jobs lost and eating opportunities withdrawn. Our once vibrant hospitality sector, which pre-pandemic was worth almost £100bn, is shrinking fast. With it so are our lives. All of that is obviously true. But the impact of its sharp decline will be felt elsewhere too, not least at the very heart of our cultural lives. Because, as Tucci, Dornan, Casey, Graham and so many others attest, a web of hospitality jobs has long been what has kept struggling actors, writers, musicians and artists going through the lean years. They offer vital flexibility. In effect they prime the pump for the arts. Without those starter jobs, we limit who can make it to the few who have access to the bank of mum and dad.
As the days grow shorter and the night’s get colder, the urge to curl up with something darkly atmospheric and bewitchingly gothic begins to take its hold. Jennifer Delaney’s Tales of a Monstrous Heart is the sweeping slow-burn romantasy to lure you in with its Jane Eyre inspired vibes, ominous supernatural backdrop and brooding romance. But the best thing about this book, aside from the perfect blend of macabre fantasy and heart-stealing romance, is how completely unpredictable it is. From one eerie chapter to the next, you never quite know where this story is going to take you.
Write what you know they say, and Zoë Foster Blake has done just that, giving practical business insights throughout Things Will Calm Down Soon. This chick-lit is a cleverly disguised how-to guide for any young entrepreneur who wants to turn a product into a profitable machine. You can have it all, but at what cost?
Juice is a hefty book, in terms of pages and the future it sets out, and it keeps delivering.
Her novel resists obvious answers, rejects the attempt to neatly package something as complex and ordinary as a human life.
To write a biography of a figure as well known as Marie Curie and still offer something fresh or surprising is no easy undertaking. The double Nobel prizewinner is, as author Dava Sobel acknowledges, the only female scientist most people can name. She has inspired more biopics and biographies than I can count, including those written by her two daughters. Parents of young children will have encountered her story in almost every one of the worthy children’s anthologies that adorn school bookshelves: she features in Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, She Persisted Around the World and Little People, Big Dreams.
To help shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a bestselling writer of science histories, has interwoven her account of Curie’s life and scientific discoveries with those of dozens of female scientists who passed through her lab in Paris.
For many people, their exposure to science is limited to classes in high school and maybe a couple huge introductory science courses if they went to college. Students often leave these experiences with the impression that science is all about memorizing facts, knowing how to solve equations, and doing “experiments” that literally millions of other people have done before and to which there is a “right” answer.
The essential nature of science is completely lost in experiences like this, which—to be clear—have virtually nothing in common with doing actual science. At its core, science is about playing with stuff to uncover new things about the universe (which, by the way, includes our planet and everything on it) that are brand-new to you—and maybe brand-new to anyone.
Edith Holler is, in part, a love letter to the theatre, and one that gleefully embraces a Tim Burtonesque gothic theatricality. Carey, who has worked in the theatre, apparently began writing the book in lockdown when theatres had closed. It is also, more unusually, a love letter to Norwich. The book is steeped in the city’s history, featuring – among others – King Gurgunt, who sleeps beneath Norwich Castle, ready to rise in battle if needed, and the Grey Lady, a famous Norwich ghost.
Pacino’s account of New York’s postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic. He introduces us to his gang of little toughs, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey who bunk off school to play in the derelict allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny that they can sell for a dime. They can’t afford to join the Scouts so they beat up the kids who can – the lucky ones with two sober parents and a dad who has a job. It is, says Pacino, only thanks to Rose’s care and attention that he doesn’t end up the same way as his friends, all dead by 30 from being “on the needle”.
In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds. They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle. Americans once wanted a dog that barked at every noise, but modern life best suits a pet that will settle nicely under the desk during remote work, politely greet guests, make friends with cats, and play nice (but not hump) in the dog park.
Some might argue that marketing a substance as inert as water with a skull logo worthy of Post Malone’s neck is an exercise in commodifying irony. But I disagree. As it turns out, the water-slinging company’s rock ’n’ roll vibes are right at home in the untold—and surprisingly punk—history of canned water.
The setup for “Blood Test” is a careful-what-you-wish-for answer to that question. During a doctor’s visit, Brock is invited to take a blood test by a firm called Generomics Associates that “predicts behavior, tells you what you’re going to do before you do it.” Thanks to advanced medical technology and AI, we can now work predictive wonders for society. Great! Less great: The test informs Brock that he’s almost certain to commit a heinous crime.
A lot of criticisms of contemporary American life spill out of this straightforward, almost folkloric setup. It takes on scammy pseudoscience (think Theranos and its own false promises for blood tests). Gun culture. Legal mumbo-jumbo. Church culture. Protestant predestination. Cults. Manifest Destiny. The algorithm. Masculinity.
We humans are collectors. We collect the animate and inanimate until the mysteries of nature soak through and become, when we’ve forgotten we live in a compiled world, our natural shells.
Above all, the poems in Brutal Companion make beauty out of the cruel world we were all born into. This is the kind of poetry collection that heals.
Language is often cited as the quality that distinguishes us as humans. When I asked Robert Berwick, an M.I.T. computational linguist, about birds, he argued that “they’re not trying to say anything in the sense of James Joyce trying to say something.” Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that humans and songbirds share a trait that many animals lack: we are “vocal learners,” meaning that we can learn to make new sounds throughout our lives. (Bats, whales, dolphins, and elephants can, too.) “To me, the most amazing thing is that every generation of vocal learners has its own sound,” Kleindorfer said. “So, just like our English is different from Shakespeare’s English, the songbirds, too, have very different songs from five hundred years ago. I am sure of it.” We humans have long tried, often mistakenly, to differentiate ourselves from nonhuman animals—by arguing that only we have souls, or use tools, or are capable of self-awareness. Perhaps we should see what the birds have to say.
There's a reason the man and woman sitting on the mangy couch hold hands. They've endured what you and I have not, and what they’ve endured has led them to question whether to live. You see it in their faces, in their bearing, in the shared glances before speaking, a weighted maturity that slumps their shoulders and draws into sharper contrast their youth: he with his shaggy reddish-brown hair and childlike freckles, she with her olive complexion and taut cheekbones and tattoos up and down her arms.
From an outsider’s view, it seems like crabs appear so often because Mother Nature “loves” crabs. In the immortal words of English zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, who coined the term, carcinization is “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.”
The concept is so intriguing and delightful, it has spawned the crab meme, which swept some little nerdy part of the internet a few years ago and with it, a wacky speculation that we are all going to evolve into crabs one day. But all bizarre fantasies aside, what’s really happening here is far more interesting.
Acting out of impulse and spite? Refusing to learn from painful experiences and instead lashing out and self-medicating with mind-numbing technology? Forgive us, evolved readers between the ages of 18 and 30: it was 2004, and we were still reeling from the anticlimactic emotional terrorism of Y2K.
As I talked to more people about soursop, I began to think that perhaps the small-scale, slow cycle of the fruit was not such a bad thing. When I decided to make my milkshake, I was forced to sit with the fruit, searching for and eventually finding sweetness beneath the surface. I can’t say the same for most other food I consume. When I purchased my first soursop at RAYA, I saw the fruit’s novelty unfolding in real time, as a group of American tourists passed the store in awe. ‘Oh my God, look! All your exotic fruit right here!’, one said. ‘What the hell is a soursop?’ her friend shouted back. I hoped the sign that read, ‘Do not squeeze you WILL be charged!’, propped up against the soursop, would give them a clue.
We humans are collectors. We collect the animate and inanimate until the mysteries of nature soak through and become, when we’ve forgotten we live in a compiled world, our natural shells.
I don’t know if death is in the eye of the beholder, as Marlen says. Perhaps we do live our lives over and over until we get it right, achieve perfection. This notion is certainly more hopeful than thinking it all comes down to a final explosion of light, and then darkness. It’s an odd thing to say, but Krause renders the end of the world rather beautifully.
Shred Sisters is, indeed, incisive and wry; but, given its central subject — an upper-middle-class, Jewish, suburban family all-but-capsized by the mental illness of one of its members — this novel is anything but contained and controlled.
Certainly, it’s clear that Presley was nothing if not radically honest. It’s also striking how Keough seems to almost plead with the reader to understand and love her mother as much as she does. Ultimately, this is a book built on grief: Lisa Marie Presley’s for her father and son, but also a daughter’s for her mother.
Towards the end of the book, Ernaux asks herself the impossible question: “How do I conceive of my death… my non existence?” That, in turn, precipitates a short philosophical meditation on the unimaginable. “None of what awaits us IS thinkable,” she reflects, “but that’s just the point: there’ll be no more waiting. Or memory.” It is this “shadow of nothingness”, she concludes, that informs The Use of Photography and, indeed, all her work. Without it, she asserts, “writing, even of a kind most acquiescent to the beauty of the world, doesn’t really contain anything of use to the living”.
Smart, cutting, witty, lamenting, meditative, and sociological, these private thoughts reverberate throughout the novel’s 19 chapters. And with them Basran’s novel serves up a social commentary that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jane Austen novel. There’s family, there’s tradition, and there’s the inexorable force of them; and then there’s the price paid — compromises, sacrifices, postponed dreams, exclusion, conformity, resignation.
Like the work it describes, the subtitle of the Sámi poet Linnea Axelsson’s AEdnan: An Epic is a marvelous provocation. In her translation from the Swedish, Saskia Vogel has rendered Axelsson’s multigenerational story of a Samí family over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st in a vernacular so close to silence that it invites the readerly equivalent of straining to hear a whisper. The poem’s clean lines resemble some perpetual noon where ambiguities, like shadows at the sun’s zenith, must be compacted into such small zones that those who aren’t looking for them are likely to be fooled into thinking them nonexistent. AEdnan’s matter is the dispossession and forced assimilation of the Sámi—an Indigenous people who have traditionally lived in the north of the Scandinavian and Kola peninsulas—into Swedish society. Axelsson resists the sprawling sonority so often associated with epic poetry in favor of a tightly focused examination of the way historical tragedy reverberates in unexceptional lives: a couple named Ber-Joná and Ristin lose their child to the hazards of nomadic life in the first generation and the poem tracks the experiences of their descendants as the appropriation of their ancestral lands and Swedish prohibitions against their way of life accelerate, including the outlawing of Sámi languages and customs and the forcible removal, after the Second World War, of Sámi children to “nomad schools” meant to absorb them into the Swedish citizenry.
Al Pacino grew up running the streets of the South Bronx with his buddies, getting into whatever trouble might present itself. In his new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” he calls his little crew “a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles,” and describes how his three best friends, Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, eventually died of heroin overdoses. Pacino would confine his junkie life to the screen, in his 1971 breakout performance in “The Panic in Needle Park.” He would be the first to tell you that he was saved by art.
Throughout this discursively soulful book runs a series of interconnected questions: Why did I make it when so many others didn’t? Why can’t I just practice my craft and leave the stardom and celebrity part out of it?
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
When he died, on June 9th, 1870, Charles Dickens left behind an unfinished novel. It seems to have been a murder mystery of sorts, called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and he had only written six of the intended twelve installments. Dickens had told his good friend and John Forster a rough idea of the plot, but left no plan or outline for the remainder; “Nothing had been written of the main parts of the design excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance. . . the evidence of matured designs never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank.” Thus, when he passed away (of a stroke), he left the novel’s central mystery… well, a mystery.
Today, Santa Monica Beach is one of the most iconic in the world, stretching more than three miles (4.8km) with 245 acres (1sq km) of sand. In 2023, 4.6 million people visited Santa Monica alone. But it wasn't always like that – those golden beaches were once a rocky, wild coastline, until city officials decided to take matters into their own hands.
We live in an era of increasing sensitivity to the provenance of artifacts and their restitution. Major museums in the West devoted to the presentation and preservation of art objects have fitfully begun acknowledging their ties to histories of violence and plunder. Who among us can truly claim immunity when the past comes calling?
Cécile Desprairies’s “The Propagandist,” which was published in France in August, 2023, and long-listed for that year’s Prix Goncourt, is a case in point. Deftly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, this début novel offers a thoroughgoing inventory of French complicity with the crimes of Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. Desprairies, a historian of Vichy France, focusses on a single French clan, modelled after her own family—their ill-begotten gains and misbegotten ideologies. The result is at once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation.
A notable non-francophone example of the breed is American Arthur Barry – “the greatest jewel thief that ever lived,” per Life magazine – who, throughout the 1920s, unnerved (“terrorized” seems too strong a word for someone as polite, well-dressed and non-violent as Barry was) wealthy enclaves around Long Island and Westchester County, New York, with his daring and stealthy home invasions.
In his rollicking new book, A Gentleman and a Thief, Nova Scotia-based author Dean Jobb, mostly recently, of the award-winning The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, sums Barry up as “a bold imposter, a charming con artist and a master cat burglar rolled into one.”
The Nobel Prize, unlike any other institution in the world, compels readers and publishers to briefly pay attention to—more often than not—deserving writing they often haven’t heard of before, for at least a week or two and sometimes longer. Unlike the three most recent recipients (Fosse, Ernaux, Gurnah), Han was already somewhat of a star, so her profile will grow rather than explode. The problem is that we no longer have an ecosystem that can support many Hans, or Ernauxs, at once. The publishing industry is not currently constructed to cultivate or promote authors who are doing the kind of work the Swedish Academy seemingly wants to highlight.
In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.
In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.
There is, after all, only one book at a time. Right now it’s by Han Kang.
There’s something about this moment in history that makes reading about the middle-third of the last century an exercise in both processing the past and navigating the present. The decline of democracy. The rise of extremism. The geopolitical realignment, the effects of which are still being determined. The questions lurking, perhaps just out of conscious reach, including, “What would I do, if …”
In Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory, historian and journalist Patrick Bishop writes a biography of a city experiencing occupation and, later, liberation. Covering the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 to the aftermath of its allied liberation in the summer of 1944, Bishop captures the intricacies, events, characters and broader context of a remarkable moment in time that could have led to the destruction of one of the world’s historically significant cities.
If there is a message that Kershenbaum wants to get across, it’s that, as much as we’d like to be able to hold conversations with our pets or chat with chimpanzees at the zoo, it makes no sense to expect animals to communicate in the same way that humans do, “with the same equipment as we have, the same ears and eyes and brains.”
Indeed, as Pulp Fiction took over Hollywood’s imagination, its poster took over college dorm rooms across the country. The brainchild of Miramax’s creative director, James Verdesoto, it resembles a vintage, weathered paperback cover, foregrounding Uma Thurman in character as Mia Wallace lounging on a bed with her legs crossed in the air, holding a lit cigarette and staring seductively beside a pistol and pulp novel. It’s sexy, mysterious, and dangerous—a modern take on the mid-century femme fatale that could appeal to film bros and third-wave feminists alike. And perhaps most importantly, it’s a scene that never takes place in the movie itself. “It’s not like we pulled a still from the set,” says David Dinerstein, Miramax’s former head of marketing. “This was a photo shoot designed specifically to provide a feeling similar to the one you would experience after seeing the film.”
Three decades later, the Pulp Fiction poster remains inseparably linked to the movie’s groundbreaking success and evolving place in American culture. It’s iconic and cliché, empowering and provocative, an annual top-seller among online poster distributors and frequently purchased at college campus flea markets, where it’s still reaching new generations. To have it on your wall, whether or not you’d seen the movie, signified fandom, aspiration, and something else entirely. “Through association,” Verdesoto says, “you became as cool as the movie.”
I spent the evening texting with other parents to figure out how we would get through the following days. “If it’s a longer-term thing, we can accommodate a few kids if they send a teacher,” I wrote to the WhatsApp group. I’d just turned in the last draft of a book and had some time to help, and the caregivers were onboard. Other parents chimed in offering their apartments, too. The day care had been operating successfully for years; in my mind, “longer term” meant a week or two at most. This closure couldn’t go on for more than that, could it?
Supposedly everyone is afraid of public speaking, but some of us have reasons to dread it more than others—in particular, a writer who is bad at talking. How can someone who traffics in words for a living be bad at speaking? Shouldn’t the two go together?
Kate Atkinson’s title for her sixth Jackson Brodie detective novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook, offers a broad hint that she is about to play games with the genre of the British country house mystery. She quickly enables all the tropes—the estate with a deer park, the multi-room manor house—Burton Makepeace , the haughty aristocratic owner, her unappealing children, servants, the addled vicar, his handful of congregants, a war-wounded major, an escaped dangerous murderer, and various locals. She even mocks the authors of the kind of novel she is in the midst of writing, attributing people and plot lines to a Nancy Styles, the late author of “cosy” mysteries. She does invent a few new types, especially the seeming con women, or is it just one woman, who steals what might be priceless art. It’s obvious that Atkinson is amusing herself and her reader. But she gets away with it by transcending the cliches with an inventiveness that makes the types fresh and with the clever intertwining of multiple plot threads.
Based on an infamous episode from Georgia history as experienced by two childhood friends, Ain’t No Grave paints a unique picture of early twentieth century history. Versions of the story have appeared ever since these shocking events of 1915, most notably the musical ‘Parade,’ but Mary Glickman’s novel gives an inside view.
The altruism of the project is clear, however. I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You isn’t just about Hart explaining her absence over the past decade. It is also an attempt to make the best of a terrible situation by coaching others who may be struggling with long-term health conditions, and the grief and loss of confidence that often accompanies them.
He is very sweet about his children and hates Halloween, all of which means that, even if this particular book is more of a snack than a three-course meal, Tucci remains a fabulous charmer.
It was an obscure death of a man who had published a single book in his lifetime. Though that book, “Portraits in Life and Death,” was destined to become a legend, its legendary status arrived long after it would have been of any use to its author, who had longed to publish another book.
And these recent treats are but appetizers for the greatest undiscovered world in our Solar System left to be explored, a place that harbors dark mysteries we can presently only blindly stab at with blunt knives. I am speaking, of course, of Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa. Beneath a thick sheet of ice lies a vast, warm ocean. Scientists believe conditions at the bottom of this immense global sea are not unlike those near hydrothermal vents on the seabed of Earth’s oceans, where life on our planet may have originated. We can only guess at basic questions, like how thick is the ice? How deep is the ocean? What secrets are there to be plumbed in its dark depths? Could marine life really exist there?
The magic of this moment is that we are finally going. If you wanted to be alive for a real mission of discovery to an unknown but tantalizing world, this is it.
The problem is that, on many reefs, the number of parrotfish — and especially large ones in the Caribbean — has plummeted. Other algae grazers like sea urchins, meanwhile, have vanished, too. Some scientists say that’s why Caribbean reefs have failed to recover following climate-related impacts like bleaching and superstorms; there’s simply too much algae for coral to regrow.
On the flip side, these dynamics offer a bit of hope for an ecosystem that seems all but doomed: By protecting parrotfish, alongside efforts to rein in climate-warming emissions, countries might have a better shot at saving reefs.
It begins in questioning and resistance. It gathers equanimity. It ends in understanding, its final two poems moments of shattering clarity formed round the small/huge words, thank you, now, love. It is all voice, story, touchstone, tough liberation. A joy.
What do we think we mean when we say, “a writer’s space”? Is such a space different than, say, any other citizen’s space? Is the space of a writer a physical place—the place where the writing is done, the den, the office, the hotel room, the bar or café, the bedroom, upon a desk or table or any available fat and stable surface?
Or is the “writer’s space” an inner region of the mind? Or is it a psychological place deep within the recesses of the heart, a storehouse of emotions containing a jumble of neurological circuitry? Is it the place, whether physical or spiritual, where the writer tries to make sense of otherwise inchoate lives? In either case, is it a zone of safety that permits the writer to be vulnerable and daring and honest so as to find meaning and order in the service of story?
This is a common scene, whether I’m making dinner for two or six, whether I’m cooking lemony rigatoni with kale or enchiladas or chicken and dumplings. No matter that I’ve cooked for the people I love for 15-plus years. I still worry I haven’t made enough — or, more accurately, the quantity I deem to be enough.
But what sort of host would I be if I didn’t stuff my guests to the gills?
I was stunned to learn that J was older than me, as though it had not occurred to me that one could be an adult but remain cool. J had a husband, an artist with a nerdy affect. His skin was covered with tattoos, many he’d doodled on himself. He’d tattoo me, if I wanted? I was a kid, trying to settle on what kind of person I’d be. Maybe here was part of the answer. Also, I thought him almost unbearably sexy. I wanted to be just like him, and just like her. Weeks later, I stood in the kitchen of their apartment while he sketched out what I’d requested—a skull and crossbones, for reasons forgotten, if I ever had any at all. “It’s perfect because someday all you’ll be is a skull and bones,” he said as he ran the needle across my shoulder blade. “This tattoo will last until then.”
Since bursting on the scene in 2015 with “The Girl on a Train,” Paula Hawkins has established herself as a reliable writer of psychological thrillers set in the U.K. “The Blue Hour” doesn’t plow any new ground on that front, but it’s a tight story with interesting characters that keeps you engaged until the end.
Positively encyclopedic in its outlook, this is a book that takes you back, in a good way, to childhood, every dilemma, decision or future scenario carefully illustrated with a memory-boosting little picture. I agree wholeheartedly with our friends across the Channel. This is vital reading: every maison should have one.
In “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts,” Oliver Burkeman, a journalist turned self-help writer, argues that we ought to give up a little more often, and more pervasively. Burkeman focusses not on risky alpine adventures but on ordinary life. Many people, he argues, refuse to give up: they are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Unfortunately, Burkeman writes, experiencing life “as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer” has the effect of turning it into “a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.” As a counterbalance, Burkeman advocates “imperfectionism.” He invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.”
Planetary rings may be one of space’s many spectacles, but in our solar system, they’re a dime a dozen. While Saturn’s rings are the brightest and most extensive, Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune have them, too, likely the dwindling remains of shredded asteroids or comets. What’s more, four icy minor planets—Chariklo, Chiron, Quaoar, and Haumea—that orbit among or beyond our gas giants, also host ring systems. Even so, it would be fanciful to imagine that Earth once had a ring system of its own, wouldn’t it? I mean, that just seems almost too cool to be true.
Or is it?
It was only meant to be for a year. The restaurant was my husband Avi’s dream, not mine. As a time-poor novelist and mother of three, the very last thing I needed was another commitment to take me away from my desk. But I also knew that my comfortable London life as a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother was only possible because Avi was our family’s main bread winner. So when, in 2006, he was made redundant from his detested job in IT, I felt I owed it to him to help make his dream a reality.
You’d expect such a beverage to be niche, an acquired taste one orders from a specialty shop, not found in millions of homes and major fast food chains. But what’s even weirder than Dr Pepper’s flavor is that we’re living through a Dr Pepper renaissance.
I had never actually seen the Northern Lights. I’ve spent all of my adult life living in cities, so they’re something that I’ve just had to assume existed, you know, like stars. But I was intrigued and in need of some fresh mountain air, so I was in. At our arrival point at the Fairmont Hotel in Lake Louise, a body of water as crystal blue as a Halls Mentho-Lyptus Cough Drop, we met our guides for the event. Matt and Ben are Australians who have made their home in Banff and their living as astrophotographers. They’d be tracking the solar flares via the SpaceWeatherLive app, and if viewing conditions looked particularly good, regardless of the time of night, we’d have to drop what we were doing and go. We might get some 3 a.m. lobby calls. Listen, the last time I got up in the middle of the night to chase something down, it was Oasis reunion tickets, and that shit didn’t work out. But Matt and Ben are—in the grand tradition of Australians and Matt-and-Ben duos—extremely charismatic, so I was willing to go where they led me. Handsome people will never disappoint you. It’s science.
Mantel spoke about fact and fiction being blended in her work like olive oil and egg yolk in mayonnaise – you can’t return them to their original states. Here, Mosse gives us both the satisfying intricacy of historical fact and a fictional narrative that carries us along at a rollicking pace. The long, rich, tragic history of the Huguenots deserved a series of novels as brilliant and well researched as these, in which the past is felt deep in the reader’s bones.
Gayford understands that painting has often gone in and out of fashion: in his new book he writes that the mid-1980s was an interval “during which the medium was marginalised, declared deceased or moribund – as it has been more times than can be easily counted, ever since the 19th-century French painter Paul Delaroche first made the declaration that painting was dead in 1839”.
Confounding Delaroche, this book’s strength is that it darts from the greats of art history’s past – Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it – to contemporary painters such as Oscar Murillo, Jadé Fadojutimi, Cecily Brown, Eric Fischl and Frank Bowling, to whom he speaks, and about whom he bubbles with enthusiasm.
I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other in the city, as in Joey Gallo getting gunned down in Umberto’s clam bar in Little Italy. Morningside Heights was a place to avoid after dark, and Harlem wasn’t as friendly as it had once been. It is hard to evoke the mood of New York in the early 1970s, but it had a whiff of Belfast about it, violent, poor, and seemingly unchangeable.
In those days, I was a graduate student in the newly established MFA program at Columbia, where the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford was one of my teachers. Jean was in her 50s, slender, her hair short, her face scarred from an automobile accident that her first husband, Robert Lowell, had gotten her into in 1938. He had crashed their car into a concrete embankment, leaving her not only with a scar on one side of her face but also with a broken nose that never properly healed.
I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece.
It has been found that certain natural elements – particular flowers, landscapes and scents – can boost the brain more than others. Using these new insights, I scoured the UK to find the ultimate mental health walk. It is around 24km (15 miles), needs no orienteering skills and begins at 8.15am in Kielderhead national nature reserve, three miles from the Scottish border near Kielder, one of the most remote villages in England.
Fans of Robbie Arnott will be delighted to know that Dusk, his fourth book, encapsulates his signature style and exemplifies why he’s been the recipient of several major literary awards. The novelist once again foregrounds the natural world in Dusk and braids its beauty and violence into a narrative bracing and propulsive.
Coates writes that his aim in writing The Message is to “haunt” his readers, to give them images and ideas they cannot get out of their minds. In that, he succeeds. The Message is haunting. It gets under your skin. People who will not read other books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will read this one by dint of Coates’s unparalleled stature, and they will remember it.
Coates is the rare writer who can turn his political writing into haunted houses. And he’s never more effective than when he transforms himself into the main character.
What role can words play to mitigate the damage of a violent history? This question is at the heart of John Edgar Wideman’s “Slaveroad,” a searing rumination on what plagues and fascinates the acclaimed 83-year-old author as he confronts his own mortality and the familial tragedies that have long centered his literary work.
“I have to be beaten over the head with certain insights about life,” Burkeman said after we’d circled a portion of the park twice and found a perch that overlooked a meadow (he was desperate to make sure we were both sitting comfortably in the breeze). In Meditations for Mortals, his practical advice reveals a new take on his old message. Maybe we aren’t just afraid to die—maybe what equally intimidates are the real, unvarnished sensations of living: the fear of being unprepared, of letting a pleasant moment slip by, of facing even minor consequences for our actions. By the end of Four Thousand Weeks, he’d arrived at the realization about life that animates this new book—summed up in a favorite quote of his by the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” His solution? Develop “a taste for problems,” a readiness to say to yourself, over and over, that problems are “what life is fundamentally about.”
To read Djuna Barnes attentively is to begin to suspect how wretched she must have been. Her themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts. In nearly every other story, one encounters a man or woman on all fours, trembling, weeping, half mad with either lust or torment. In “Spillway,” the tubercular Mrs. Julie Anspacher returns from a long stay at a sanatorium with the dying child of a dead lover, and tries to explain the nature of her misery to her bewildered husband. “It is a thing beyond the end of everything,” she tells him. “It’s suffering without a consummation, it’s like insufficient sleep; it’s like anything that is without proportion.” Yet her suffering fills her with a hysterical joy—with the ecstasy of having become “alien to life.” When, at the end of the story, she lowers herself “down, down, down, down” onto her hands and knees, one wonders if she will ever get up.
We Solve Murders is an entertaining read, fast paced, bewildering so at times as the settings change so rapidly, and always great fun. It’s full of delightful characters.
Her latest book reflects a lifetime of keen observation, explaining the science behind a leaf while also wondering at its beauty, describing how trees seed the soil while contemplating history from a tree’s perspective.
I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother.
The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams. I was just a few months old when my family left its shores. My father’s job required our relocation to Magi, a village at the top of a tall, steep incline that overlooks another river, the Akanyaru. Beyond the Akanyaru is Burundi. For us to go down to the river was out of the question. Mama forbade her children to climb down the hill, even the intrepid boys, for fear of seeing us tumble to the bottom, where crocodiles and hippopotami crouched in the papyrus, waiting to devour us—not to mention, she added, the Burundian outlaws who lurked in the swamps along the banks, ready to spirit children away in their canoes and sell them to the Senegalese, who traded in human blood. For me, as for my brothers and sisters, the Akanyaru remained an inaccessible stream visible far below, like a long serpent amid the papyrus that barred our access to the unknown world stretching beyond the horizon—a world in which other rivers surely flowed, other rivers that I swore to myself I’d explore someday.
“It informed me that there had been others before as deranged by matters of the heart and loins as I was now.” This line from the story “Saint Catherine of the Fields” neatly describes the overarching theme of Kevin Barry’s short story collection, That Old Country Music. Admirers of Barry — and I count myself among them — will recognize the Irishman’s dark humor and lyrical tone in each of the eleven stories that make up this splendid collection.
In many ways, Ansari’s book is just one version of her family’s history. There are other versions, surely, in some of her relatives’ minds, and other written records, largely focused on the men in the family. In venturing through the past to honour her daadi’s memory, then, and connecting with so much of her family, perhaps this document is Ansari’s ancestral home. And maybe, sometimes, our stories can be inheritance enough.
In a text first published in 1991 and translated into English as “To Stay Alive”, Michel Houellebecq offered self-help advice to aspiring writers. Some of it was general: “Develop in yourself a profound resentment toward life… Ruin your life, but not by much… Be abject, and you will be true… When you provoke in others a mixture of horrified pity and contempt, you will know that you are on the right track.” Other tips were playbook-practical: “The mechanisms of the welfare state (unemployment payments, etc.) should be taken full advantage of… In a general way, you will be tossed back and forth between bitterness and anguish. In both cases, alcohol will help.”
If you leave out the people who didn’t complete the study, you’re excluding the cases where your drug did the worst, making the treatment look better than it actually is. You’ve biased your results.
Avoiding this bias, and doing it well, is surprisingly hard. For a long time, researchers relied on ad hoc tricks, each with their own major shortcomings. But in the 1970s, a statistician named Donald Rubin proposed a general technique, albeit one that strained the computing power of the day. His idea was essentially to make a bunch of guesses about what the missing data could be, and then to use those guesses. This method met with resistance at first, but over the past few decades, it has become the most common way to deal with missing data in everything from population studies to drug trials. Recent advances in machine learning might make it even more widespread.
Frankie is a gorgeous, tender story that manages to be sweeping and grand, while also intimate at the same time. At its heart, it’s the story of two friends, the different paths their lives take and the enduring power of their connection. It’s a pleasure in every way possible.
It is easy to love Griffith Park, with its stunning views and iconic observatory. Same goes for Joshua Tree National Park, drawing millions each year with its transcendent desert views and otherworldly flora. But who will care about the abandoned transit lines, the forgotten alleys, the dusty lots behind barbed-wire fences? Christopher Brown, that’s who. And readers of his essential new book about overlooked urban spaces, “A Natural History of Empty Lots.”
As she talks, clouds roll in, enveloping all but the highest peaks in a fluffy white blanket. “Since I began climbing mountains, I’ve learned the same applies to life,” she adds. “It’s not about getting to the top, but enjoying yourself on the journey. The most important thing is to be happy.”
Llusco, 39, is one of about 10 Indigenous female mountain guides in Bolivia. Her long black hair is tied in two plaits, linked with a large safety pin and wool decorations in red, yellow and green, the colours of the Bolivian flag. She is wearing a pollera, a voluminous floral skirt over layers of pink petticoats. She has paired it with a pink diamanté top, beneath a pink cardigan and a red fleece gilet. “I have never worn trousers to go up a mountain and I never will. Our polleras don’t impede us,” she says of the traditional Aymara garment.
If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.
For more than a decade, small tweaks to the traditional cup, along with a standardized lexicon of modifications (for warmth, sugar quantity, and ice level), represented the business’s key innovations. But, in the past few years, hundreds of thousands of new stores have opened in China, boasting expansive menus filled with what are known as xinchayin, or “new tea drinks.” With their fancy ingredients and highly involved storytelling, these businesses put Starbucks’ seasonal pumpkin spice to shame. Chagee, which sells a hundred million cups of “Bo Ya” annually, emphasizes that its jasmine-infused green-tea buds are picked exclusively in early spring. The chain Auntea Jenny is known for its unusual pairings—for instance, mulberries or hawthorn with Maofeng green tea. On Xiaohongshu, China’s answer to Instagram, influencers rate menu items in posts tagged “new tea drinks evaluation.” According to a report by the tea-research institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, by 2022, xinchayin chains had reached about forty billion dollars in sales. The industry is growing so quickly that one common scam involves fake Web sites posing as renowned brands offering franchise opportunities.
All My Precious Madness is an astutely observed portrait of intellectual melancholia. We tend to associate nostalgia with reactionary politics, but it can, of course, take other forms too: with his blend of sweary, disaffected rage and leftwing idealism, the narrator’s sensibility recalls the US comic Bill Hicks. Henry is down on England and Englishness, which he identifies with parochial conservatism, and romanticises Paris and Rome. For him, the humble espresso symbolises a world of possibility. “There is,” he declares, “every reason to live in Old Europe at the point of its demise and disappearance, rather than sniffing after the Zeitgeist, which is made of cables and clouds, brands and fragile exoskeletons amalgamated from images.”
When a story opens on a beach, in the wake of a harrowing plane crash, I think of Lost. It’s wired into my brain, a holdover from a very different era. But Madeline Ashby’s Glass Houses, apart from the plane crash, is not that kind of story—the kind that goes on, and meanders, and eventually lands somewhere not entirely satisfying. No, this is something very different: pointed and sharp, a thriller full of absurd tech, carefully laid plans, and extremely understandable anger. It is a rich text of rage and experience.
Putting two major supported studios in the spotlight, Studio A in Sydney and London’s Project Art Works, Watfern positions herself not simply as a researcher or writer, but as someone who constantly reflects on these experiences to unravel unconscious biases and unexpected learnings. Her recount of the time spent at these studios, with their workers and artists, feels incredibly lived in – almost biographical in a way that manages to remain humble and insightful.
It turns out that the unicellular ancestors of animals, way back then, were already remarkably well-equipped to take on teamwork. They probably could adopt a variety of cell shapes and do a number of jobs that came in handy for multicellularity. In fact, they might even have acted as groups, rather than single cells, from time to time.
“They were experimenting with multicellularity,” says Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, an evolutionary biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain.
And at some point, that experiment became permanent.
It’s not my lack of decisiveness that would provoke a mathematician’s ire (unless they were standing behind me in line). No, what really causes trouble is the idea that I can, in fact, choose exactly one piece or slice of any number of different cakes and tarts and take them home with me. That idea links to an unproven fundamental truth, the so-called axiom of choice.
At first, one would not expect this approach to violate any mathematical principles. But the conclusions that follow from the axiom of choice once sparked the biggest controversy in mathematics. That’s because this axiom leads to apparently contradictory results: for example, it can “magically” double a sphere or imply that there are finite objects that cannot be measured.
Mycelia have evolved to sense their environment, communicate over large distances, and transport nutrients. They are also naturally sensitive to light. It turns out this sensitivity can be used to power movement. The team created an electrical interface that interpreted the mycelia’s activity and translated it into information to move the robot parts. When stimulated by ultraviolet light, the robot fungi fled from the light.
And to be clear, I am not opposed to these oil-laden foods for health reasons. I don’t care what anyone puts into their bodies, but it’s time to stop pretending that state fair food is good. It’s all heavy and one-note, too sweet or too salty, and always too messy for the flimsy paper boats it is served in. My biggest gripe, though, is exactly how greasy these dishes almost always are, especially when you’re talking about something like a deep-fried Oreo. The breading on the exterior soaks up so much oil that you can practically wring them out, and that’s just gross.
At nearly 800 pages, Ahdaf Soueif’s 1992 debut novel is a rewarding undertaking, a sort of modern Anna Karenina set in mid-20th century Egypt, and later, England. A novel of such length contains many different things, including a changing Arab world and the gender roles within it, East versus West, modernity versus tradition, the influence of literature on maturation, and perhaps most of all, the place sex and sexuality have in our lives, and one’s yearning for sexual fulfillment.
The title of Melanie Cheng’s latest book, The Burrow, operates on two principles. It references the pet rabbit that’s adopted by the family at the centre of the novel, as well as inferring hidden sources of damage that lie beneath the rocky, unsteady surface.
Part of the story’s emotion comes from the contrast Erdrich establishes between a community that is economically tethered to a crop that is literally killing the earth and its inhabitants. “Sugar is a useless and even harmful substance,” thinks Hugo in a moment of reverie, “and although this nutritionless white killer is depleting the earth’s finest cropland, you forget that when you are eating blueberry crumble.”
Rooney’s ability to seamlessly present age-old questions and ideas within the reality of our current world—which, at times, can feel hopeless—seems to be, in part, what makes her a significant writer today. If Intermezzo is any indication, the author’s literary finesse grows with each new novel.
The Voice became many things to me: a place of drudgery and triumph and endless office politics, a writing school, a talent pool, my crucible and passport. For all its flaws, it is still the most diverse place I’ve ever worked. Eventually, I would move off the copy desk, file pieces almost weekly (a speed that alarms me now), and ultimately helm the Voice Literary Supplement. It all ended for me in the summer of 2006, when I was laid off with four other senior editors. In the aftermath, wounded but wiser, I distanced myself from the Voice. For a long time, I referred to it as the Paper That Shall Not Be Named. It meant so much to me, until it didn’t.
Perhaps I kept my distance too well. I recognize both the best and worst of my longtime employer in Tricia Romano’s excellent The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, but I do not appear in it. And though I was fascinated and occasionally shocked to read the thought-bombs of many former colleagues, my closest associates are nowhere to be found. (Romano and I overlapped; she was the nightlife correspondent, and a friendly face in the office.) At times, reading it felt like seeing photos on a realtor’s website of someplace I used to live, all Edwidgean traces erased.