It’s become one of the most important rites of passage in the book-publication process—more meaningful to some writers than a book party or book-cover reveal. For many authors, in fact, no book deal is complete until they’ve posted it.
It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book.
It was November 16, 1974—a turbulent time on planet Earth. The cold war was reaching its crescendo, and the world economy was still sputtering from a Middle East oil embargo that was imposed the previous year. The U.S. had retreated from its crewed forays to the moon but was still fighting in Vietnam, and the resignation of scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon was still reverberating. The Beatles had effectively disbanded earlier yet would officially do so before year’s end. (John Lennon’s solo single—“Whatever Gets You thru the Night”—topped the U.S. charts that very day.)
Against that dark background, this first-ever interstellar transmission was both a literal and figurative ray of light. Astronomers had already started eavesdropping on the heavens, hopefully awaiting murmurs from beyond that would break our seeming cosmic solitude. But this was something different—an intentional summons, perhaps an invitation for communion with hypothetical beings among the stars. Sent using a powerful radio transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, it signaled the start of an age that is still unfolding, in which our rapidly changing technological civilization confronts an uncertain fate beneath a silent sky and grapples with how to present itself.
Like many other cephalopods, two-spot octopuses are masters of disguise. Observations from almost a century ago detail this octopus’ effective camouflaging practice, with one 1937 observation remarking on a wild two-spot octopus’ ability to rapidly alternate between mottled patterns and solid colors. Their colorful “flashing” is enabled by a complex web of chromatophores: These color-changing organs have a distinct pigment sac that sits beneath the surface of their skin and expands and contracts to reveal different hues.
After all, what or who confers “importance”? Our experts do, for one thing. But we also determined it had to do with reach and scale, with the sense that a recipe represented a clear shift in some aspect of home cooking for some significant number of Americans. “American cooking”? Rightly and necessarily a sprawling thing made by immigrants, shaped by the push and pull of assimilation, separatism, and syncretism, utterly dependent on the open migration of flavors and ideas. Last, what even is a “recipe”? There are many excellent dishes from the past century that, upon examination, are innovations rather than discrete entities recorded for replication in the kitchen. Roasted Brussels sprouts, fajitas, chili crisp, and Spam musubi were all nominated and ultimately dismissed for this reason.
Before the railway, the River Thames brought fresh fish into London markets via ice boats. Fish spoil quickly due to enzymes and bacteria, a process that is slowed by chilling. In England, the fishing fleets of Harwich began using ice to preserve fish at the end of the 18th century. The ice, collected in winter and stored in icehouses for several months, was instrumental in securing the time needed to bring fresh fish to urban markets, of which London was the most important. As London’s urban population swelled, so-called “wet” fish became a widely available, but expensive, alternative to cured fish. In fact, the capital was unique among British inland cities in its proportion of fishmongers to butchers, in part due to its size and centrality. In 1842, London had one fish dealer for every four butchers, whereas in Warwickshire the ratio was one to 27, in Staffordshire only one to 44. These relations would soon shift, propelled by the combined effect of urban growth, railways, and trawling.
While successful songwriting partnerships abound, literary fiction created by two or more authors is rare, and short stories produced by two hands are unicorns. Step forward plucky micro-press Scratch Books, which has set out to rectify this situation. Duets is a volume of co-written short stories by some of the genre’s best current practitioners. The results are startling, occasionally baffling, but never less than thrilling.
In a solidly-plotted historical thriller with danger lurking around every corner and intrigue brewing from the lowest dungheap to the highest palace in the land, the realisation that these murders are inflaming existing rivalries to the point where an epic confrontation is almost unavoidable raises the stakes even further. There’s no sign here that the dark and brooding Jonas Flynt’s adventures are running out of steam yet.
What is gout that we are mindful of it? An extraordinarily painful condition, as some of us know from personal experience, gout can feel like your nerves are seeking sweet release through your skin. I had my first attack when I was 28 years old, cycled 20–50 miles a week, ate a mostly vegetarian diet, and rarely drank. A sudden pain in the large joint of my right big toe led me to the doctor. Blood tests led to my surprising diagnosis. This was not the classic 18th-century “old, corpulent, port-and-pheasant” gout but “young, cool” gout, if such a thing exists. I have a modern medical explanation, rich in genetics, but reading Steven Shapin’s Eating and Being: A History of Ideas About Our Food and Ourselves (2024) reminded me that for many centuries, my suffering would have been understood differently. Physicians and laypeople alike saw health and disease as arising from diet and personal comportment, which were tools for managing our natures. Modern clichés like “you are what you eat” are echoes of an ancient and enduring system of care encompassing bodies, diets, and personal identity. Medicine often began in the kitchen, or as Andrew Boorde insisted in his 1547 Breviary of Health, “a good cook is half a physician.”
The Moon’s influence on our planet is undeniable. Its gravity pulls the waters of our oceans, creating the tides. Its light cues the migration of birds, the foraging of wildebeests, and the synchronized mating of corals. It is not surprising, then, that since ancient times, humans have wondered if the cycle of the Moon might exert similar power over our minds.
When you see a mammatus cloud, you can’t believe it’s real. It’s as if it were sculpted or painted by a drugged artist, even though it is completely natural. We know how clouds form: from water vapor evaporating from the warm Earth and rising. The warm water vapor is less dense than the cold upper air and rises due to buoyancy pressures, like those that lift a balloon filled with helium or some other gas lighter than air. And we understand that there are complicated variations of temperature and density within clouds. But we really don’t know exactly what leads to these weird pouches dropping down from the undersides of clouds.
This revelation reinforced my realization that science knows a lot, but it doesn’t know everything, even about purely physical phenomena like mammatus clouds. I must admit that even though I am a scientist myself, I prefer a world in which there are still mysteries.
But amid such promising developments are worries among some scientists and environmentalists who fear humans will repeat the errors that resource extraction has wrought on Earth. There have been multiple ecological catastrophes — from the mountains beheaded in West Virginia to the tailings dams that poison watersheds in South America — resulting from our efforts to mine coal, gold, lithium, and other minerals to sustain ever-more-complex supply chains and fuel human growth.
If we have mining in space, do we need a preemptive anti-mining campaign to protect our solar system from rampant exploitation before it is too late? Earth-bound environmental advocates and astrobiologists alike have concluded that, indeed, we need an environmental movement in space.
Along a gentle bend of the Los Angeles River, in a stretch of land called Taylor Yard, a sound like a high-pitched record scratch can just be heard above the cacophony of city life. This is the call of the least Bell’s vireo, an olive-gray songbird that is only five inches from tip to tail. The riparian species native to Southern California has lived an endangered existence for more than 40 years. Now, the small bird’s return here symbolizes a new future for one of the country’s most maligned waterways.
What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning.
More profoundly, their unease regarding the future of human sovereignty and solidarity rings even truer today. As our climate deteriorates and geopolitical stability crumbles, there have been renewed calls for planetary coordination and control, whether through geoengineering or governance.
What does this difference in name for a similar concept—one having the sense of including everything, the other the sense of remainder—imply for those who live in these languages? How do the two concepts affect creative practice? When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world?
Nevertheless, Hall’s novel is much more ambiguous than a simple “NO!” After all, saying no to the past is the easiest of gestures. His vision is far more ambivalent, given the slipperiness of language. Literature – and art in general – doesn’t save us from atrocity or the progress of history, even when it is a protest against it.
It is also a protest against time and ageing and the inevitability of death. One gets the sense that the novel’s exuberance, its long, looping sentences, is what keeps Hall going: so long as there is a thread, no matter how shredded, there is life, there is meaning.
What is a day? It is a cell of time that can be subdivided into smaller units: 24 hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds. It is a human fiction, a means of imposing order on an unfathomable duration called life. It is an embodied experience that can feel long or short, interesting or boring, each a unique confluence of meteorological, physiological, and sociological variables. Billions of us go through one at a time. Afterward, we expect the next to come, punctually and without fail. But what if it doesn’t? What would we do?
Ask Tara Selter. The time-stuck protagonist of Solvej Balle’s miraculous septology, On the Calculation of Volume, has been trapped in the same day with no end in sight.
Can there be art after Auschwitz? Can there be peace of mind? In The Land in Winter, Miller’s characters have looked into the abyss. It makes the ordinary business of living at once very difficult and very necessary.
“Real change is often only seen in hindsight,” Irish writer Niall Williams observes in “Time of the Child.” This theme runs through many of his novels, which look back on pivotal points when the winds of change, however subtle, could be felt rustling through rural communities.
Oaks are primed with genetic flexibility that allows them to solve ecological problems. But the current rise in global temperatures far outpaces its fastest previous climb, posing a problem even these “protean” adapters cannot solve without human intervention. Hipp’s work shows that conserving oak species will preserve invaluable nodes in our genetic web.
It’s difficult to approach a figure such as Parker and say something new. Haven’t we heard it all before? And yet, as Crowther observes, the writer Wyatt Cooper “famously wrote that whatever you think Dorothy Parker was like, she wasn’t.” Throughout the book, Crowther leans into this unknowing, a move made all the more impressive since it has been achieved without the assistance of any dedicated, official archives. Parker’s Hollywood years have long been overlooked because people didn’t put too much stock in her work there. To be fair, neither did she.
Sylvia’s diaries, meticulously kept for almost every day from 1944 to 1949, reflect her early realization that you could broadcast your own life, as Jack Benny did on his radio show (another of her favorites). The show dispensed a running commentary on his funny failings, his desire to get ahead, and his preening, and had a cast—including Rochester, the faithful, if not uncritical African American factotum—that became Benny’s retinue, commenting on his every mercenary move.
Some years back, Talavera and his team realized they might be able to track the butterflies indirectly, by studying the pollen that accumulates on their bodies. Every time a butterfly visits a flower for a sip of nectar, it also picks up grains of pollen. If the researchers could identify plants from their pollen, confirm where and when the plants were blooming, and keep tracing them as the butterflies reached different geographic regions, perhaps they could trace the butterflies’ overall journey. “The method is like we put a GPS on them,” Talavera says. “Because we cannot do that, this is the closest we can go.”
In a world where you can make an icebox cake instead of an ornate French Christmas cake, why would you choose to make the Bûche de Noël?
For one thing, it felt luxurious, spending a day on this one task. I pulled my kids back in the mix to decorate the cake, quoting Julia when she made this Yule log in an episode of The French Chef in 1964: “Scuttle it up a little bit so it looks as barky as you can make it.”
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead connects the people of today with the women of the past. What appears to be mere nonsense on the surface is, in reality, nonsense with a purpose.
An ode to fish and chips, corn dollies and driving Ringtons tea vans, Wendy Pratt’s seventh poetry collection is a greasy but glorious celebration of the coastal working class. Her deliciously joyful outlook on life oozes gratitude and a sparkling sense of humour, hitting as sharply as the salty ocean breeze.
While many animals have mastered the ability to enter torpor, it’s something that eludes us humans. Curiously, despite decades of research, human hibernation remains among the few questions that still belong to both science and science fiction. Is there something special about our nature that prevents us from hibernating? Will we ever know what it is like to hibernate? Clearly, being in torpor and being outside of it corresponds to states that are worlds apart. In our daily life, we are trapped within a very narrow range of physiological parameters, and rarely venture into other dimensions of existence, apart from sleep. This does not suggest, though, that this is all we have. On the contrary, humans have always been remarkably creative and imaginative with respect to changing their state of body and state of mind, for example by taking mind-altering drugs, entering a state of deep meditation, or even willingly changing metabolic rates. While we could possibly find a way to enter hibernation or a similar state, we do not have an immediate or urgent need to do so, as we have developed, and perfected, other ways to deal with adversities. We can make fire and electricity, can build shelters and manufacture warm clothing, get food easily, and spend tremendous amounts of energy derived from outside sources to preserve our own limited supply. Paradoxically, it appears that we are too smart and technologically advanced to hibernate – something other creatures we consider inferior just take for granted.
It’s no coincidence that at a time when pubs and alcohol consumption are on the decline, bakeries are appearing at a rate of knots. Amy Gastman, founder of plant-based bakery Crumb, believes the bakery boom is a byproduct of the cost of living crisis: “I think it’s a result of people perhaps not having the money to spend on ridiculously expensive restaurant meals but still wanting to treat themselves,” she tells me. “Indulging in a croissant or a cookie or whatever is like a little luxury. It feels indulgent but in a small way. I know a lot of people would feel comfortable paying £4 for a cookie but less likely to spend £150 on dinner.”
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone’s house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice. There weren’t any hotels on the small island where she lives in the summer, and she’d seemed so genuine when she extended her invitation that we really couldn’t refuse. Mary and Hugh went to college together a hundred thousand years ago, back when tuition was affordable and you could study things like acting without bankrupting yourself. Her auburn hair had turned mostly white since I’d last seen her, fifteen years earlier, and she wore it in an untidy bun.
In an age of divisiveness and bad news, it’s a book where a family finds their way back to each other. A dazzling debut — readers will be anxiously awaiting the sequel.
A welcome addition to the literary dance canon, “City of Night Birds” is most compelling when its interpersonal dramas test the novel’s central question: whether, as one character opines, “Love doesn’t set anyone free. Art does.”
Winton offers a salutary warning of the future that awaits us if we continue to ignore the climate crisis, and his book serves as a powerful call to action.
“If you are tempted to use such a phrase as just a cat,” the author warns early in his new memoir, “I can only hope that you read on and discover not only that she ruled her untamed world, but brought life-affirming purpose to my own.” Throughout the 352 pages of My Beloved Monster, Carr, an American crime writer and military historian who died earlier this year from cancer aged 68, sets out what may be the most effusive paean to cat love ever committed to paper.
For those who suffered through chemistry class convinced that the Periodic Table actually was a manual for alien tortures, Mark Miodownik has a belated, but welcome, antidote.
He makes the whole thing interesting. “It’s a Gas” is truth in advertising.
I sometimes think of mysticism – the name we give to ecstatic, transformative experiences of absorption into absolute reality or, if you will, into God – as the subject that fascinates where all others merely interest. And yet it denotes something singularly hard to talk or write about, indeed virtually defined by its ineffability. On Mysticism, the philosopher Simon Critchley’s stab at effing the ineffable, feels oddly timely. As he notes: “There is an awful lot of mysticism about. More than ever in recent years.” He doesn’t speculate, but the widespread interest may point to that metaphysical restlessness that wells up during periods of acute cultural change – the return of the transcendental to a reality system no longer adequate for the times.
On the other end of that drone was Wesley Sarmento, a grizzly bear management specialist for Montana’s department of fish, wildlife and parks (MFWP) who has spent the last six years testing different non-lethal methods for scaring bears away from human habitation, a practice commonly referred to as “hazing”. In research forthcoming in the journal Frontiers of Conservation Science, Sarmento – a PhD student at the University of Montana – shows that aerial drones outperformed all other hazing methods tested in his experiments. They provide a way to move grizzly bears away from humans that is safe for humans and animals alike.
This is a lengthy book, and some readers may find that the action occasionally drags. Yet the third act, in which Slim confronts nemeses old and new, is especially thrilling stuff, and I defy any reader to reach the bleak but cathartic conclusion and not want to dive into another adventure with the redoubtable heroine. Porter has been compared to Mick Herron and Gerald Seymour, and it’s easy to see why, but The Enigma Girl is the work of a wholly individual and readable talent.
“Tooth and Claw” is a brilliant bite-sized thriller, with Johnson’s signature Western twang and twisting path on which the plot follows. He delivers on yet another addition to Longmire’s story, one wreathed in forgotten legends, dangerous enemies, and exotic environments. Whether a longtime fan of the series or a first-time Longmire reader, “Tooth and Claw” deserves a place on your shelf.
There was a great irony in this. When Murakami first became a big name in Japan, thanks to the runaway success of Norwegian Wood in 1987, critics were quick to point out how un-Japanese he was. Born in 1949, during the postwar Allied Occupation of Japan, Murakami read European and American novels in English while at high school, studied drama at university and ran a jazz bar with his wife in Tokyo before going full-time as a writer. He had little time for Japanese literature, after hearing his parents — both of whom were teachers — go on about it ad nauseam while he was growing up.
Realising that all this had left him unable to write fiction in his native language, Murakami composed his early lines in English and then translated them back into Japanese. His relatively modest English vocabulary compelled him to write in short, simple sentences. A style was born, with which millions of readers around the world would one day become intimately familiar.
3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach in Westerly, Rhode Island. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless.
Kamayan (from kamay, “hand,” in Filipino) refers to the pre-colonial tradition of eating without cutlery. Sixteenth-century Italian scholar and explorer Antonio Pigafetta, who documented Philippine history during the Magellan expedition, noted that natives used wooden spoons for serving and cooking—but not for eating.
Nowadays, kamayan is synonymous with a communal feast of rice, grilled or roasted meats, seafood, and fruit, all laid atop a banana leaf-lined table, floor, or ground. The bounty is often enjoyed on beach outings or at home on special occasions such as birthdays. Today, Filipino American chefs are bringing the tradition into their restaurants.
At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in.
More than five centuries ago, only eight years after Columbus’s slipper touched the white sands of San Salvador and seventeen prior to Luther’s hammer hitting the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, either Hieronymus Bosch or a student of his purchased from a Brabant merchant a rectangle of Dutch poplar about five feet long and four feet wide and with oils as red as blood and as blue as Heaven, as green as the earth and as black as death, painted the aforementioned scenes in a composition entitled The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. An entire moral universe recorded on wood from a tree felled in the Low Countries more than half a millennium ago, the vagaries of pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and wrath rendered in exacting detail, and the costs of such transgressions indicated in the corners of the piece.
It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission. The Soviet Union might have beaten the Americans in the race to human spaceflight – but the Americans had now shot the first galactic colour photographs.
Monday was for the blahs. Wednesday was hump day. Sunday—or Saturday, depending on your Lord—was God’s day. But Friday was your day, the bright-line demarcation between when your body belonged to The Man and when your body belonged to you. As Loverboy sang back in 1981, “Everybody’s working for the weekend.” But now everybody’s just working. The wired-all-the-time technological “innovations” of the past two decades mean that we never stop punching the clock. Now the clock punches us.
None of which augurs well for TGI Fridays, the original fern-bar-turned-mall-canteen-turned-ubiquitous-franchise, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this month. Why thank anyone that it’s Friday when Friday is just another day?
When she’s not gazing up into the night sky, the teen narrator of Inga Simpson’s terrific new dystopian novel, The Thinning, spends a great deal of time looking anxiously at the bright orange watch her mother has strapped to her wrist. Fin Kelvin is her name, and like the reader, she doesn’t know whether she’s living at the end of the world or on the cusp of something new.
Undoubtedly, the various genres require different approaches, but Moss largely confirmed my own beliefs about the creative process. It’s hard work, as book’s title suggests, but you do it because you love it, you can’t stop doing it, and, above all, you believe that something worthwhile will come out on the other end.
Zeldovich has spun a thrilling tale, but one hopes it’s just the beginning and middle of the story, with the climax of phage-fueled medicine yet to come. Indeed, as Zeldovich writes, “These phages might be our best weapons against the next bacterial pandemics.”
Samantha Harvey very nearly gave up on her novel Orbital, which last night won this year’s Booker prize. Set on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles from Earth, Orbital follows the day-to-day lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they hurtle through the universe at 17,500mph. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. “I am so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she laughs, when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. “I’m so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.”
After a few months of dabbling with other ideas, she opened the abandoned word document on her computer by mistake. When she read it she found it had an integrity and pulse that drew her more than any of the other projects she was working on. “I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be afraid of this. If I can do it in a way that’s different to the way astronauts write about their time in space, then maybe there’s something here.” So she climbed back in and achieved lift-off.
But the halcyon days of youth linger in the mind the way the briny taste of an oyster lingers on the palate. My friend Julia writes in the group chat one day, nostalgic, saying that she had just assumed life would always be like that—and then it wasn’t. “I’ve never again had an oyster I didn’t pay absurd amounts of money for,” she says. “I’ve never again eaten oysters until my belly was full.”
Julia now lives in London, England, but I’ve returned to the coastal Pacific Northwest after decades inland. So what’s my excuse? Why haven’t I harvested shellfish for more than 25 years? I call up Camille Speck, the Puget Sound intertidal bivalve manager at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, to see if collecting and eating bivalves is still a thing. Her answer surprises me, given that my youthful experiences of eating wild shellfish feel like semimythical memories from a bygone golden age.
Rupert Everett prefaces his suite of short stories with an account of the showbiz ruse that provides the title, a grim little routine whereby American film producers intoxicate a would-be screenwriter into feeling that a deal has been done, only to then forget them entirely. Will Everett’s readers offer up the English equivalent, murmuring “Darling, you were marvellous” before moving swiftly on? Well, the collection certainly delivers what Everett’s fans will be hoping for: quality time in his inimitable company. But it also delivers much more. Sometimes, it is simply the energy and poise of the prose that arrest one’s attention; often, it is Everett’s combination of studied carnality with an outlandish gift for invention. This is a storyteller unafraid to spike his black comedy with sudden and strongly brewed emotion – and vice versa.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the famous opening line from Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. In her compassionate, engaging, readable debut novel The Truth About my Daughter, author and GP Jo Skinner reveals the actions, outcomes, betrayals and secrets of the memorably dysfunctional Steinbauer family through the weary yet discerning eyes of Fin (Josefine), the eldest daughter.
Somewhere in the sky above, the mosquito drone of a plane’s propeller neared. Since Abram Kameraz had begun to commute by train from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to the suburban town of Pavlovsk earlier in the summer of 1941, attacks by enemy planes had become a frequent cause of delay. Through the carriage window, Kameraz saw the road was littered with bodies. These men, women and children had been killed by German planes which had strafed and bombed the crowds of refugees as they fled towards the city. As Kameraz caught the silhouette of a German Stuka cresting the horizon, the driver stopped the train and ordered the passengers to run to a nearby ditch for cover.
Kameraz, 36, was a potato specialist, one of about 50 botanists who worked at the Plant Institute, the world’s first seed bank, situated off St Isaac’s Square in the centre of Leningrad. The institute’s potato collection contained 6,000 varieties, including many rare cultivars – the largest, most diverse potato collection yet gathered in history, a crop of inestimable scientific importance. And right now, hundreds of delicate South American specimens were planted in sheds in the fields on the outskirts of the city, in the path of the advancing German army.
In Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the observer is drawn into a simple domestic scene: the titular woman stands illuminated in the light of, we presume, an unseen window. The expression on her face as she reads is perhaps one of surprise, certainly one of concentration. In this vivid, static painting, she seems even more still and more rooted, unmoving though clearly moved by what she is reading. And the observer is similarly absorbed by this intimate moment.
This interpretation, such as it is, is arrived at first through the eyes: the light and color, the posture of the woman and her expression, the singularity of the room. Vermeer’s painting is a touchstone of sorts in Naomi Cohn’s compelling memoir, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight. To her, with her very limited ability to see, the story is not in the painting; it is the painting. “Who cares what is on the letter?” she writes. “Look at how Vermeer makes folds with paint. Look at the intensity of his looking, how he chose what to see.”
It’s hard to believe that a TV show based on a series of commercials with the same punchline — an American football coach confused by the rules of soccer — could have lasted beyond an episode or two. It’s even harder to believe that it became an Emmy-winning hit with a cast invited to the White House to talk about mental health.
There’s a lot to learn from the unlikely success of “Ted Lasso,” the hit Apple TV+ show featuring Jason Sudekis as its mustachioed, wholesome namesake. Jeremy Egner’s “Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show that Kicked Its Way Into Our Hearts” is the best place to learn it.
Few foods can compete with olive oil. Its salubrious properties have turned it into one of the most recognisable symbols of healthy living as well as a sign of tacit resistance to the industrialisation of food and loss of authentic flavours. Its rich history, stretching back to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians, plays an enormous part in its ongoing symbolic associations. Across a range of Mediterranean cultures, olive oil has been an inordinately versatile and useful product, even regarded as a means of connecting with the divine. Today, it sells in pricy green bottles that promise a ‘Mediterranean’ lifestyle. And yet, the distinctive flavour of extra virgin olive oil is a modern invention. The trail of its peppery note leads straight to the core of the Industrial Revolution and the reinvention of olive oil as a global commodity.
Because the temperature of the sand incubating a sea turtle’s egg will determine the hatchling’s sex, exactly where on the island a given egg ends up has intergenerational repercussions. Eggs laid on Ascension’s white sand beaches may grow up male or female, depending on air temperature, rainfall, and other variables. But those laid on the island’s stretch of black sand beach—which soaks up the tropical sun’s heat and holds it—will always hatch female. Those females will grow up, mate, and return to the same beach to nest—and their offspring will be female, too. Historic temperature reconstructions suggest that “in the last 150 years, there wouldn’t have been a single male turtle produced” on the black beach, says Graeme C. Hays, a sea turtle biologist at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. “It was just so hot.”
The Old Neighborhood deserves attention. It gives voice to Edgewater’s past, most of which—the streets, the homes, the lake—remain unchanged despite the partial facelift it has undergone. The geography has a story, along with those who lived there. The novel makes this real.
It can be disheartening to consider the fight for women’s rights from more than a century ago may have progressed so little today, but it’s not all hopeless. Ham balances moments of joy with the challenges of the day, and Molly teaches us never to give up in the face of setbacks, becoming more resilient and taking the future into her own hands.
Revolving around the murder of an investigative journalist at TrueCon, a rightwing conference held in a crumbling stately home in the early days of Liz Truss’s premiership, it features an exploration of how and why things fell apart, a deft tracing of the history of American conservatism and its arrival in the UK, and a white-haired, hard-drinking detective called Pru Freeborne (or, of course, Proof Reborn).
Do you know a word for the interior world shared by lovers? A place—a paracosm beyond others’ imaginations. Sustaining love requires continually building that place, living in it, speaking its particular languages. It is a place to approach, but never arrive. Ambiguity, longing, and mystery fuel the approaching.
To love a landscape is no less effort, and no less imagined even in all its obvious palpability. My daily life as a field scientist is the repetitive prayer of muscle memory, the Latin naming system of plants, and the attempt to capture entropy by drawing it on a page. All this, a means to peer outside myself, to slow down, to look back, to wonder. To find wonder.
I am lying in a hot bath filled with seaweed. After a week learning about the stuff, collecting it, drying it, eating it, feeling it slippery beneath my feet, this is the first time I’ve bathed in seaweed and, yes, in the steam and candlelight, I get it – I get what the fish are crazy for. The fish, the crabs and, I’m learning, soon everybody else.
Not only are Owen’s ideas arresting, but also her artistry. Clarity, concision, impact, originality of vision and ease in employing poetic technique impel one from line to line and leave us with images to ponder. The characters, though not human, arouse a lasting empathy.
Marie Curie carried out some of her most pathbreaking work under an actual glass ceiling and the toxic particles that swirled beneath it eventually killed her. What Dava Sobel wants to convey to us in this unabashedly feminist account of the great woman’s life is that the metaphorical glass ceiling was just as toxic to the society over which it was clamped.
Watt was writing about the eighteenth-century English novel—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Lukács was writing about the nineteenth-century European and Russian realist novel. The question Edwin Frank asks in his new book, “Stranger Than Fiction” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is whether there is such a thing as the twentieth-century novel. Is it profitable to talk about the twentieth-century novel as something different from the nineteenth-century novel or, for that matter, from the twenty-first-century novel? Frank thinks so: in his view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it.
We’re used to hearing “middlebrow” used as a pejorative, a knock on overly accessible, “normie” content. But as a third path between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” it doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s a relief to occasionally watch a film that doesn’t insult or overly challenge our intelligence; accessibility with some standards isn’t always a bad thing.
There is something about an island that stirs the imagination. Or, in any case, it seems to stir mine.
A few years ago, on a trip to the Côte de Granit Rose in Brittany, I walked along seaweed-strewn sands towards one of the many tidal islands dotted along that coastline. As I approached I noticed that on the nearest island, there was a tiny house – a single cottage, all alone – and I felt a familiar prickle running up my spine, the shrinking of the scalp that tells me to pay attention, that there’s something here: the beginning of a story.
“It’s only a racetrack. There’s nothing really to see.” This is what the woman said to me over the phone. I think her underselling the racetrack maybe had to do with my accent, so very not British, and hers so obviously so. It was evident to her that we had come from far away, and this clearly meant wanting to see something more than a racetrack in rural Yorkshire, so she didn’t want to promise more than she could possibly fulfill. But, really, I didn’t want to see something; rather, I wanted to feel something, and I wanted my dad, who had travelled with me, my husband, and my mom, to feel something too. Almost eight decades earlier, this racetrack was the last place my grandfather Malcolm “Mackie” MacLeod had ever stepped foot. This was before he got on a plane the night of January 14, 1945, and then never stepped foot anywhere again. He was a bomber pilot, a flying officer. He flew Lancasters—lumbering behemoths that carried huge payloads of bombs. The planes also had the downside of being nice, big targets in the sky.
“Don’t ever call this work, ok? Ever.” I can't help but think of this line, which Beth Dutton shouts to her husband, Rip Wheeler, in Season 5, Episode 6 of “Yellowstone," America’s most watched television series. They’re on horseback overlooking a golden Montana meadow, as he leads the team of ranch hands on a cattle drive, moving hundreds of animals across the mountain.
Cut to me, suddenly in their shoes. It’s raining and I’m on horseback, wearing a black, floor-length slicker while gently driving annoyed cattle (and their precious calves) to their pens, in a Montana valley surrounded by mountains. I tilt my head to the clouded sky, smile, and take a deep breath. I'm doing it.
Sometimes, obsession is sparked by one defining moment. An all-consuming tragedy can mutilate a person’s mind, flaying it layer by layer until only fixation remains. Obsession can be a nest. Rotting twigs of unreciprocated love and fear as its foundation. Nick Cutter burrows into the human psyche and concocts unfathomable horror in his new book, The Queen.
“Those Opulent Days” is subtitled “a mystery,” which is odd as the one at the book’s center is useful for driving its plot forward but doesn’t really feel like the point. Instead, the novel’s main interest seems to be its character studies and historical setting. 1920s Vietnam is lushly and lovingly described, and its characters vividly realized. Rather than being a mystery, the novel has far more in common with noir: It examines the dark griminess that is part and parcel of the spectrum of humanity.
Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse, and in Morning and Evening, his newly republished 2000 novella (elegantly translated by Damion Searls), we follow one person’s passage from womb to Earth, and from Earth to the afterlife, in a near seamless progression. This, then, is not a novel that describes a life; it is a fable about the very beginning and end of a life – a metaphysical ghost story.
Like many literary works from antiquity, the poems of Catullus survived by the slenderest of threads. After his death at a young age in the late 50s BCE, his poems certainly had an afterlife. They were read by Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius and were a strong influence on Martial, who died at the beginning of the second century CE. Two Latin writers in the later second century knew Catullus’ work—Aulus Gellius and Apuleius—but thereafter the poems, all 116 or so of them, seem gradually to disappear and might easily have been effaced from literary history, as so much of ancient literature was. That this did not in fact happen is suggested by the sudden appearance of a single poem, an epithalamium, in an anthology constructed in the ninth century, a manuscript which miraculously still survives in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Hundreds of years later, a single complete codex surfaced in the early fourteenth century in Verona—Catullus’ hometown—but like many manuscripts it subsequently disappeared too. Fortunately it had been copied, by whom and how often is unclear, but the three earliest surviving codices all bear some relationship to it, directly or through an intermediary, now also lost. We have to imagine also that at one time in the early transmission of the Catullan corpus, some scribe, in an increasingly Christian culture, thought well enough of the poems to copy them from scrolls into a codex, dirty words, out-of-date political invective, antiquarian vocabulary, homosexual verse and all. That broad-minded scribe and undoubtedly many others after him allowed Catullus to “last . . . beyond one lifetime,” as he expressed it in the dedicatory poem to his book, a destiny not shared by any of the other poets in his circle, whose works are entirely lost. In 1472 the poems were printed for the first time, by a Venetian printer, assuring them permanence in the literary record. They have been edited, printed, and translated into many languages—a few even into Esperanto—hundreds of times since then and are now on every educated person’s canonical list of the poetry that will never be out of favor.
Discovered more than 160 years ago, the fungus’s actions are as mind-boggling as they are macabre. Scientists have long wondered: How does the fungus manage to control the fly’s brain? How does it “know” to do it at a specific time of day? What genes within its genome help it to become a master manipulator?
Today, a flurry of experiments is starting to unravel the science behind this eerie mind control.
It is a cold, autumnal wee hour of the morning in Istanbul and I am sipping a sweet, orchid-root-flavoured drink called sahlep and smoking a water pipe. I’m lurking outside a nargile (hookah pipe) joint on a small road called Ticarethane Sokak in what is known as the Old City or Historic Peninsula. This is where many of the city’s great monuments are, including the Hagia Sophia mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Hippodrome. This is also where Inspector Cetin Ikmen, the central character of my novels and subsequent BBC TV series The Turkish Detective lives. Like Ikmen, I enjoy wandering the city in the dark early hours of the morning. When only the hardiest, the mad, the bad and the protectors of the city roam the streets, so also do the phantoms appear.
Coe’s subject may be inertia and nostalgia, but The Proof of My Innocence is full of energy. It’s a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricksy jeu d’esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read.
Somewhere between a cosy mystery and Sam Wiebe, Barcelona Red Metallic keeps readers riveted, curious, and unnerved — just the things we crave from a murder mystery.
Eschewing gossip and speculation, Max Dupain: A Portrait focuses on the work, which, when considered as a whole, is diverse, brave, not always successful, but yearns for something that might be considered the truth. It isn’t all about a young man lying face-down on a beach.
Before Sunday, I had never run 26.2 miles in my life. Like many people preparing for their first marathon, I spent months training for the actual race and weeks constructing a perfect playlist for it. This was a meticulous, almost scientific process. For the first few miles, I queued up some chill live sets from the War on Drugs. For the straightaways of Brooklyn: Big Thief. For the grueling inclines of the Queensboro Bridge: a turn to metal, with some propulsive Iron Maiden, Screaming Females, and the Sword. I timed my mix to end with the Detroit Cobras’ “Feel Good,” a song that makes me smile and jump around every time I hear it — even, I theorized, after running for four hours. It would have been a great playlist, if I’d ever gotten the chance to hear it.
You may think it’s a few weeks early to celebrate the new year, but that’s only because you’re Earthist: November 12, 2024, marks the new year for Mars, when the calendar turns the page from 37 to 38.
And here I am, still putting 37 on all my checks.
“All academia is dark academia.” I said it without thinking, a knee-jerk reaction to a literary label that had been assigned to me but always felt ill-fitting. Until that moment—discussing my first novel, If We Were Villains, with the Folger Shakespeare Library book club—I hadn’t really understood why. It was the “dark” modifier I disliked. Not because what I’d written wasn’t dark, but because darkness is so intrinsic to academic life that it struck me as unforgivably redundant.
Chickens are in need of a little extra love these days. Like dogs, they, too, have been frequently surrendered to shelters in recent years.
But “What the Chicken Knows,” like so many of the author’s previous works, is less about what separates humans and animals, and more about what brings them together.
For anyone passionate about both Agatha Christie as well as a wee bit nerdy when it comes to names, in reading any of her novels or short stories readers are immediately provided with a wealth of memorable and often unique names: Hercule, Amyas, Linnet, Odell and Honoria are a small sampling of some of her more unusual and eclectic character nomenclatures. Aside from simply being fun to come across, though, Christie’s use of names in her mysteries also give us a glimpse into a variety of fascinating topics, from societal conventions to Christie’s takes on characters who hail from outside of England.
Within the world of bees, the Smeathman’s furrow bee (Lasioglossum smeathmanellum) is an unlikely survivor. Many a “bee-loud glade”—as the poet William Butler Yeats described—has gone quiet as bee populations worldwide succumb to myriad threats. But the Smeathman’s, a jewel-like sweat bee native to the United Kingdom and Ireland, is thriving.
In some ways this is daringly old-fashioned writing, its forms as retrospective as the bombed city and prewar furniture. There’s an omniscient narrator, no trendy close-third here, and, as the quotations suggest, no coyness about adjectives. This novella isn’t a parable or a political fiction, as many recent short novels have been. It’s a pen portrait of a particular family in a particular time and place, quick and bright despite – or maybe, oddly, because of – the magnificently Victorian tendencies of the prose.
You’re diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 46. How do you react? In all likelihood with rage, grief and self-pity, especially if, like Simon Boas, you were told it was only acid reflux, and cancelled scans and bureaucratic cock-ups further delayed treatment. You love your wife, you have a great job, you’re addicted to cheese fondue and muscadet, and death will take all that away. A nightmare, it seems, but far from bewailing his lot Boas tells us how insanely contented he feels and “how lucky it is to have lived at all”.
At the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards once stood a monument to one of the greatest movie flops of all time. A 300ft-high plasterboard Babylon, with walls wide enough to shoot chariot races on, it was flanked by giant white elephants (oh the symbolism!). Intolerance (1916), a three-and-a-half-hour silent movie, performed so catastrophically at the box office that its megalomaniac creator DW Griffiths couldn’t afford to demolish the set. For years it remained, crumbling, as a warning to Hollywood – “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Thankfully Hollywood didn’t give two hoots, because otherwise we’d have missed out on Tim Robey’s erudite and brilliantly entertaining chronicle of movie excess.
Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.
Reading Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize short-listed novel Stone Yard Devotional, I wondered whether most people haven’t, at least at one point in their lives, considered disappearing. For me, this desire began as early as in my teenage years, when I fantasized constantly about running away. Like the protagonist in the novel, it was less a running toward something, as much as it was a wish to not be embroiled in the demands of the world. That is to say, like the nameless woman in the novel, I was not running toward God, but rather fleeing from what a friend of mine calls “the vortex” of marriage, a mortgage, and raising kids in what sometimes feels like a relentless struggle lasting every last minute of our lives to become “a have,” instead of “a have not.” To make a difference. To matter.
But how to keep the demands of the world at bay—how to quiet the noise?
In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
Disgust and delight, it has been said, live in close proximity; in Eliza Clark’s debut collection, they share a home and a bed. These 11 stories revolve around food, sex, gender, power and the body; they veer from realism to sci-fi, fairytale, horror and post-apocalyptic dystopia. This is a book that seems crafted from the stuff of our deepest fears and our most illicit desires. You read on, by turns engrossed and grossed out, as though in the thrall of some demonic power.
Daughterhood’s particular contribution to this canon lies in its attempt to hold both sides at once: there is the daughter’s perspective, and there is the mother’s, and there is an imperfect zone somewhere in the middle, with room for both.
Peter Ames Carlin’s book isn’t just a cultural biography of the band going back to its formation in the-then sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s also a poetic meditation on what made so many of the band’s songs stand out, and continue to shine.
But considering the way that many recent novels reference recent, niche cultural fragments most relevant to an incestuous class of urban media professionals, future generations would need a comically thick companion book. (How to succinctly explain the hilarious-to-me line, “I don’t use TikTok because it makes me feel like I’m having a seizure, but lately I can’t open Instagram without being bombarded by some ‘sapphic bookstagrammer’ or ‘queer radical sex therapist,’” from Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain?) The text is not timeless, and is not trying to be. It’s of an era, gone as fast as brat summer or hot girl summer or the summer of Barbie—a cycle of buzzwords to describe the same concept.
Both Darwin and the ship’s Captain, Robert FitzRoy, were deeply concerned with which books to take on board and how to fit as many as possible. FitzRoy writes that ‘considering the limited disposable space in so very small a ship, we contrived to carry more instruments and books than one would readily suppose could be stowed away in dry and secure places’. Darwin lived for five years in a cabin that also functioned as the ship’s library; perhaps some 400 volumes were crammed into a roughly 10 ft by 11 ft space. He slept and worked surrounded by teeming bookcases, bindings eroded by damp sea air and swaying slightly with the tide.
His favourites are clear from his papers, and his 1833 reference to Jane Austen’s Persuasion is one among many. Two years earlier, when he first began the journey as a fresh university graduate, he told his sister Caroline: ‘I will not take Persuasion, as the Captain says he will not read it, & there is no danger of my forgetting it.’ His correspondence is dotted with Austen references in a way that conveys a genuine fluency with her work. ‘Lydiaish’ means flirtatious, ‘like Mrs Bates’ code for overly doting, ‘like Lady Cath. de Burgh’ stands in for stern, and ‘a Captain Wentworth’ was his cousin’s term of endearment for Captain FitzRoy. His private notebooks likewise reference numerous Austen characters, and three of Austen’s novels figure on his 1838-40 reading list.
Instead of being a place to organize your thoughts, this was a place to organize your junk. Some people have no problem throwing away the random objects they collect from events or occasions—concert wristbands, dried flower petals, or ticket stubs. But if you’re like me, you’re holding on to these small tokens in every drawer, purse, or cabinet. We can’t bear to part with them, but what use do they have? Cue in junk journals. Think of it as a less polished and structured scrapbook with a lot less pressure on perfection.
Not all monsters are imaginary—real life holds plenty that is terrifying—and Lilliam Rivera’s Tiny Threads comes marked by both kinds of fear. The author of four highly regarded novels for young adults, Rivera is making her first foray into adult fiction with a narrative that blends horror, style, and a strong grasp of social inequity.
I love debut novels that feel stuffed with every idea an author has been waiting to express. Tom Pyun’s “Something Close to Nothing” feels like one of those books. It begins as the story of a gay couple’s tragicomic surrogacy journey but then expands into much more.
In just 67 pages (16 of which are glossy color photographs) Montgomery introduces us to her “Ladies,” the ever-changing flock of hens she raised on her New Hampshire farm for decades starting in the 1980’s. Blending her personal experiences as queen of the coop with everything you’ve ever wanted to know about chicken behavior, it’s a fun and informative way to spend an hour.
In Candid, Sammy interviews over thirty women across various genres and instrumental backgrounds, along with thirteen men, to share their experiences with women in music. This balance is one of the book’s strengths: while the women provide first hand accounts, the men offer outside perspectives, presenting a broader, unbiased look at industry dynamics.
These stories amount to wish fulfillment for people who want to believe stereotypes about German austerity, which may be a measure of the Grimms’ success. Their aim in collecting such folklore—alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. (Toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.)
Inspiration was all around him – biographers and critics have identified everyone and everything from his mother-in-law to Castle Park in Michigan as reincarnated in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Dorothy was named after a real child, the deceased baby niece of Baum and his wife Maud Gage. But it took an entire century for the inspiration of the Wizard himself to be identified – Washington Harrison Donaldson, balloonist and colleague of famed circus master P.T. Barnum.
Lady Chatterley's Lover went on sale immediately afterwards, as Penguin had prepared to distribute it in the event of acquittal. They had to work with a new printing firm as their usual one refused to touch it. But the trial had the effect of promoting the book, which sold out of all 200,000 copies on its first day of publication. It went on to sell three million copies in three months.
The High Line, in other words, shows how reuse can unlock possibilities in both good and bad ways. On the one hand, it lets us experience the city in a whole new way and converts what had been a garbage-filled, abandoned track into an active public space. On the other hand, it has been the most efficient and effective tool of gentrification possible. These two outcomes, which are completely intertwined, are intrinsic to all the kinds of imaginative reuse that I have been describing, but their effects are particularly amplified in the case of reused transportation infrastructure.
Alan Bennett, now 90, hasn’t published anything original in book form for five years. In the meantime – the Covid years and the Johnson years and the Truss month – readers have had to be content with the peerless annual diaries he writes for the London Review of Books, yearly proof that his special ear for English comedy and sudden pathos is undimmed. This novella is in part his reflection on those years, set inevitably in a care home, the unlikely frontline of national crisis during the pandemic.
Double Happiness follows Siemienowicz’s memoir, Fallen, which explored the turbulent waters of an open marriage and the complexity of marrying too young. In this latest narrative, we follow the exuberant Anna. She’s married to thoughtful scholar Brendan, with whom she has a son, Luka. She’s been ‘good’ recently and, by good, we mean she’s avoided having another affair. Life is peaceful, if not a little monotonous, until she meets Jeremy – an easy-going, charismatic filmmaker – at a writers’ festival in Melbourne. The pair bond over sharks and Australian cinema.
The terms “chat” and “chat is this real” have exploded in popularity over the past few years. The term, originally used in contexts like “chat, this real?” to “chat, am I cooked?” stems from the world of Twitch and Discord, as streamers ask their audience for clarification, support, and answers—all within the confines of the stream’s chat window, where viewers can communicate with the streamer through text. But now, it’s become adopted as IRL slang, used in any context, for any reason at all.
What once looked like a generational change to public space in the American city has instead returned to a bunch of curb parking. What went wrong?
Absolution continues to refuse to offer any answers. You obviously don’t get to the end of the book and suddenly realize the solution to climate change. You barely even get any answers to “What the heck is Area X, anyway?” But the answers aren’t the point. It’s how terrifying the questions are.
Think of it as a brilliant exercise in multi genre collage, a mash-up of some of the best elements of the thriller, the novel of ideas, anarchism, philosophy and quantum theory.
When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
When I began taking my morning run up the middle of the Diagonal—along with all the local runners—I entertained the thought that has plagued countless American visitors to Europe since time immemorial: Why can’t we do this? My case of Europe envy was exacerbated by recent events in New York City: for example, the plans for radically reimagining the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights—the so-called triple cantilever—that went exactly nowhere. And then, of course, there was New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute decision to shut down congestion pricing, a system (for which $500 million worth of sensors had already been installed) that would have charged drivers a $15 toll for entering Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours. The billions of dollars collected were supposed to fund a variety of much-needed mass transit projects. Instead, this bold change, along with so many others, had seemingly evaporated on the brink of implementation.
As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell us, and this emergency calls for some urgent semiotics.
There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt, which would now become yours. You didn’t have to turn to the back of the in-flight magazine to see some stranger’s—or, more likely, strangers’—handiwork on the crossword, or wonder what flavor of sticky substance someone had spilled across its pages. Nor was it required to retrace the doodles drawn on the ads for UNTUCKit shirts, It’s Just Lunch, Hard Rock Café, Wellendorff jewelry, companies selling gold coins, and Big Green Eggs. But it’s clear that with the last print issue of Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and the last such magazine connected to a major US carrier (with the exception of Hana Hou!, for Hawaiian Airlines), it is the end of an era.
Male hysteria was not the only concern of the early suffragists. They also needed money to run their campaigns and publish their newspapers and organize their marches. Fortunately, a model for women’s fundraising already existed. During the Civil War, women eager to do their patriotic duty for the war effort took a good, hard look at their own practical skills. They couldn’t fight or hold public office and many of them didn’t have money of their own, but they knew how to cook. They could bake cakes. They could make pickles and jam. They could compile their best recipes into cookbooks. And then they could sell these things for money that they wouldn’t have to turn over to their husbands.
For suffragists, selling food and community cookbooks served another purpose: This very public focus on food proved that they were not neglecting their womanly duties. Far from it! Even though many of the contributors to these cookbooks were prominent teachers, physicians, writers, and ministers, they still knew the proper way to run a home and, what’s more, they had professional training. As Hattie A. Burr, the editor of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, notes in her introduction, “A book with so unique and notable a list of contributors, vouched for by such undoubted authority, has never before been given to the public.”
Eventually, I would learn that stories are not just a way of communicating science; they are intrinsic to science, actually part of doing science. My own story of merging these Two Cultures – for me, literary writing and particle physics – was complicated by a Third Culture, religion.
I’ve learned that cemeteries, too, aren’t really for the dead. They’re for the living. They give us a chance to remember people as we wish, maybe to wash away some of the bitterness or hurt feelings we might have felt when they were alive. Our cemetery has been like that for me. But it’s also been a reminder that all things broken and complicated deserve a home and to be loved. For the first time in my life, I’ve started believing that I do, too.
The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy.
In detailed behind-the-scenes case studies, Makary, a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University, reveals how and why physicians often salute bad science and baseless opinions at the peril of their patients.