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.