The fact that it is still in production today (the 36th season is airing in the US with a 37th already commissioned) is a source of wonder and despair for golden-era curmudgeons. Yet there is an audience for modern Simpsons, people who love it – some who even prefer it to the early seasons. Other aficionados argue that the series is undergoing a modern renaissance, a second golden age after the struggles of the middle seasons.
My perception of loss altered that day. I discovered that small cracks of possibility reside in the dense tapestry of grief and that a painful void can also become a place of freedom and adventure.
Unusually for Stephenson, Polostan is a straight historical novel, without any fantastical or SF elements. Reading this very enjoyable confection, I found myself approving Stephenson’s change in writerly direction. Only when I reached the end of my proof copy did I realise that Polostan is only part one of a projected series, the Bomb Light cycle. It’s very possible that, as subsequent instalments are added, the whole will accumulate into a more typical infosprawly meganovel after all. It doesn’t matter: this book works as a standalone and ends neatly, an excellent adventure story in itself.
Dickinson finds words for what each woman would tell the world if she had been free to expose her reaction to the life she was enduring. Each of Harlow’s postcards begins with a quoted excerpt—mostly unsavory—from biographies of her experiences and then imagines Harlow’s thoughts about the events. Smith’s thoughts are not prepared for by the words of an external author, with a few exceptions. Instead, her postcards follow designations for her condition under her best-known song titles, like “Tain’t Nobody’s Buzness If I Do.”
Blythe’s gentle, loving spirit inspired a battalion of protective “dear ones” who helped him live and die at home. But this warm biography touches its subject’s inner steeliness too: the needy hearts of others were viewed as a distraction from the essential life-task of writing. When a grieving Julia Blackburn sought comfort in her friend, Blythe explained “with a sort of determined finality that he had never loved anyone enough to feel the pain of loss”.