In Balle’s five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking.
The only thing is: Balle got there first. When Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil hit the big screen in 1993, the kernel of Balle’s story had already been stewing in her brain for six years. An obsession in her 20s with James Joyce’s Ulysses – set entirely on 16 June 1904 – had led her to wonder how much a single day could contain: “The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?”
When I was young, I thought I’d stop having nightmares. I imagined growing up was supposed to be about leaving childhood fears behind. But now that I’m older, I know that it doesn’t work that way. I’m still scared; it’s just the things that terrify me have changed. My greatest fears no longer happen at night, when my eyes are closed. Instead, they happen in the light of day. When I am awake.
Maybe I’m Amazed opens with John Harris’s 15-year-old son, James, ecstatically absorbed in a live performance by Paul McCartney, “so held in the moment that he is almost in an altered state”. Harris then loops back to before James’s birth, and tells the story of his son’s arrival, his preschool diagnosis of autism, and how his differences manifest as he grows up. James loves music – the Beatles chief among a rich buffet of bands and tracks he listens to, over and over – and so Harris divides the book into 10 chapters named after songs, each with a particular resonance.
I did not set out to write a book about a very-pregnant woman trying to survive an earthquake. I did not set out to write a book at all. I was simply a very-pregnant woman with a horrible case of insomnia, lying awake at night imagining a massive earthquake. Would the roof cave in? With my stomach as distended as it was, would I even fit under the bed? Would I have to give birth alone, without running water or a doctor?
I lay in bed on my phone, reading accounts of women giving birth in Haiti after the earthquake, in war zones, during snowstorms. I tried to prepare myself by watching YouTube videos of women giving birth alone in the woods. The volume turned down low so I wouldn’t wake my husband sleeping beside me. Tears streamed down my face.
As Fosse says, “literature is also a way of learning to die.” When the plane finally started its descent, the imposing clouds gave way to a white haze, and I saw grids of suburban houses, the illuminated blue squares of the occasional pool, tiny car lights on the freeway, a house just like my parent’s new house in the suburbs, the chain restaurant where we went for my dad’s birthday, my parents doing their weekend shopping at Costco, my dead grandmother’s razed house in Kharkiv, the cat that ran away when I was a child, the whole of my life in miniature, laid out below me. . . I had become so immersed in the rhythm of Fosse’s sentences that my flight had merged into the novel, and his narrative logic blended with my own memories. Holding the slim novel in my hands, I felt closer than ever to death, and when the wheels of the plane finally hit the runway, I felt like I had just managed to avoid it.
“Oh my God!” he cried, slinging the cards across the felt while his 30-year-old son, EJ, filmed the disaster on his iPhone. “We cannot win a hand!”
That, of course, is his schtick. Vegas Matt’s legion of fans follow him for exactly one reason, and that’s to watch him lose—and, on seldom occasions, win—unconscionable amounts of money. That $30,000 wasn’t even close to the worst drubbing he’s taken: In 2023 he and a few friends lost $147,000 on a high-stakes slot machine in about three hours. (The description on the video read, “Nobody should gamble like this, my friends got a little carried away.”) A year later, he managed to blow through about $43,000 in a single afternoon. All told, in 2024 he reportedly suffered $404,000 in gambling losses. Yet, somehow, he has managed to turn losing money into an enviable living—and is one of the only people on Earth to do so.
Animals often engage in play, from the spectacular to the subtle. Hyenas stage mock brawls, cats spin in circles chasing their tails, octopuses play push-and-pull with bottles, dogs bury sticks only to dig them up moments later… Even polar bears have been spotted playing with dogs, grabbing them in what looks like a hug, rolling in the snow, and letting the dogs gently nibble their lips. Such scenes make us grin with delight. But is that all there is to it?
Even beyond white tablecloth establishments, the love for this dish extended everywhere. President William Howard Taft hired a White House chef specifically to make turtle soup. Campbell’s sold cans of mock turtle soup. And iconic cookbookThe Joy of Cooking featured a turtle soup recipe as recently as 1974.
But unlike some other food trends you may be familiar with — hello, cake pops in the 2010s — turtle soup wasn’t a short-lived fad that lasted for only a few years, and turtle has a long history in American food culture.
Wenstrup’s grace, humor, and vulnerability are profoundly touching in light of the cruel role museums have played in the lives of Indigenous peoples globally. The Americans who trust these cultural institutions may not realize their grim origins, which critics classify as taxonomizing projects borne of colonialism. Wenstrup is undoubtedly aware that for hundreds of years Europeans—as a precursor to establishing museums—displayed Indigenous humans as living rarities at public fairs as early as 1501.
How do you find meaning in a novel that rejects it so thoroughly? The publisher’s blurb for The Theory of Everything, Yumna Kassab’s new work, describes it as many things, among them “a rant, a manifesto … a dramatisation of actual events, a horror-scape … five mini-novels or else five post-novels … an agreement, a wink”. In perhaps her most ambitious work to date, all of these things could be true.
With its poignant rendering of a loving relationship undertaken against great odds, compounded by a hostile political climate, A Room Above a Shop is a powerful and luminously pure novel. At 53, Shapland has arrived with his talent fully formed.
As Shubin demonstrates in “Ends of the Earth,” the stark polar regions present extreme challenges not only to humans, but to all living things. Yet, through adaptation, life finds a way. “Success and longevity in the polar world is something different altogether from life elsewhere,” Shubin reflects in the book’s last chapter. “It is a story of Survival of the Resilient.”
Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.
Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.”
When Vi Liu finds a strange blob outside a college town dive bar, she’s not sure what to make of it. Eventually, and with a little help from Vi herself, the blob will morph into something beyond her wildest imagination.
“I was thinking about relationships and how mysterious they are and how difficult it is to find someone to connect with,” says author Maggie Su on the concept behind her debut novel, “Blob: A Love Story.” The initial idea, she adds, was, “What if we gave this character exactly what she thinks she wants, which is this blank slate, and what could possibly go wrong with that?”
In this sharp, sophisticated novel of forecasts and insightful takes, what I found most powerful was the great bewilderment that the characters share. Lalami traces the upheaval of AI through systems and structures into personal lives, close relationships and quiet thoughts. Sara privately questions whether she has a hidden potential for violence. An interlude at the centre of the novel follows a tech executive who is straining to make sense of her vast yet miserable power.
The book might seem, at first blush, like a departure for Green, who’s best known for his bestselling young adult novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and
The rules of K-pop fandom are pretty simple: be loyal. Your boy band must be number one. Be faithful, steady, and true. No one had to teach me the rules for me to know them. I was born and raised in the United States and grew up with K-pop from a distance, the internet at the time a fledgling technological wonder that required a phone line and constant arguments with your parents because they needed the phone, they were waiting for a call, but you also needed the line—you needed to log onto Soompi, the primary Korean American forum at the time, to get more news about H.O.T., the K-pop boy band that established the formula for idol groups that still exists today.
The more we try to live up to those words, the further we get from ourselves. In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
If you’re wondering how we arrived at this pass, Carr is your man. An eloquent, levelheaded writer, he has been sticking pins into the hot-air optimism of Big Tech since 2001, when, as editor of the Harvard Business Review, he published several politely skeptical articles on the uses of what was then the new “information technology.” Less politely, and with sharper pins, Superbloom appraises the past and present of that technology and issues a warning about its future.
One of the first stories I’d published was about a highly dysfunctional family. After reading it, my mother called me. She was livid. “How could you?” she asked. “You’ve humiliated us.”
I was confused. The story bore no resemblance to our family, but my mother said, “I know it’s not us. You know it’s not us. But everyone else is going to think it’s us.”
Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar are on the road between events when I beam into their car via Zoom. They’re both in the back seat, their attitudes upbeat despite the sporadic rain pattering on the roof. It’s the beginning of a four-day rush through the wider San Francisco region, over the course of which they’ll be reading at bookstores, schools, and other gatherings, everywhere from Menlo Park to Sacramento. They’re talking about the high school they’ve just visited, with Orange—an Oakland local—breaking off now and again to give directions to their publicist in the driver’s seat.
But the novel is underscored by a lacerating humour, even in its bleakest passages, and offers a refreshingly uncompromising study of working-class life, with its calluses, oil burns and hypocrisies laid bare. The result is a terse, bracing whirlwind of a book.
Biographies – along with the passage of time – can soften negative impressions of cultural figures. By giving readers context, good biographers deliver a more nuanced portrait of their subject’s life and encourage greater empathy.
That conclusion is in keeping with the book’s sympathetic portrayal of Ono, a longtime friend of the author. As a young journalist, Sheff conducted the last joint interview with Lennon and Ono, for Playboy magazine, spending three weeks with them in New York City in August and September 1980. When Lennon was murdered months later, Sheff became, he writes, “one of the people who circled the wagons around [Ono] as she struggled to survive a period she would later describe as the season of glass, when she was as fragile as glass and almost shattered.”
Carol Leifer, the prolific sixty-eight-year-old comedian and television writer (“S.N.L.,” “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Hacks,” etc.), has many skills. One, perhaps unsurprisingly, is delivering funny speeches, a gift for which she’s now giving back, with a book titled “How to Write a Funny Speech . . . for a Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation & Every Other Event You Didn’t Want to Go to in the First Place,” co-written by Rick Mitchell. Another talent: dancing, which might come as a surprise to those who’ve heard the rumors that the rhythm-challenged “Seinfeld” character Elaine is based on Leifer, who dated Jerry Seinfeld in the late seventies.
Stripping divorce of practical and social baggage means that the focus of “No Fault” is internal by necessity: the book explores the end of a marriage primarily in terms of how it might change its central players’ feelings. Mlotek is, by her own admission, wary of discussing her feelings, and inclined to address painful episodes in her marriage with scrupulously evenhanded poise and diplomacy—as is her birthright, being the child of a divorce mediator. But, as the divorce gap implies, feelings among the divorced are not always so easily managed.
With hundreds of interviews from the musicians, promoters and others, Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour compiled a comprehensive and entertaining oral history of the festival that was crucial in the rise of alternative rock in the 1990s.
This tendency towards nostalgia is alluring, but, as Crane points out, it runs the risk of augmenting our memories through a rose-tinted filter. Dig deep enough, and most of us would probably find that our first relationship wasn’t as hearts-and-flowers as we like to think.
Marni Appleton’s bittersweet debut collection of short stories focuses on the experiences of millennial women – their obsessions, friendships, betrayals and crushes. Appleton is good on mother-daughter relationships. In the title story, Ana is alienated by the realisation that everyone around her is pregnant. As she obsesses about the breakdown of her friendship with Chloe, tormented by her upbeat social media posts, we realise there is more going on: Ana is projecting her pain about her bipolar mother and conflicted emotions about having children.
To what extent are our identities shaped by genetics compared to our social environments? Is the science around this reliable, or has it been influenced by the biases and power imbalances – both overt and covert – that structure our societies? Such questions have long intrigued researchers and societies more generally, and they are taken up afresh in a recent book by Shoumita Dasgupta, Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins. Dasgupta undertakes an ambitious project: disentangling the legitimate findings of biological and genetic sciences from the deeply embedded social biases that usually distort their interpretation. The book makes a critical intervention against genetic essentialism – the belief that complex human attributes, including race, gender, and identity, can be reduced to simple genetic determinants.
Marking World Poetry Day, Longleat in Wiltshire has revealed the little-known poem that shows you can find at least 32 words which rhyme with Longleat.
It was composed by Countess of Morley Frances Talbot, a published writer at the time. There was speculation that she could have been behind Jane Austen's classics when they were first published anonymously.
Aflame is an extended answer to the question Iyer asks himself of why, year after year, he still comes back “to the little cluster of huts upon the hillside.” It would be insufficient, by way of an answer, to invoke the “silence” in the book’s subtitle, for it is not obvious what the author means by the word. Certainly, he does not mean something as simple as the absence of sound. Birdsong, people shouting, even the noise of a bulldozer, he writes, are sometimes part of the silence he enjoys at the Hermitage.
It is a strange and beguiling experience to find music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer colour and nuance, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it.
This is the effect of reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant study of the Beatles’ music, a book that offers not only a lesson in listening (again) but an enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss.
These determinations of cells’ fates — what type of specialized cell they will become — occur in stages throughout embryonic development. Because each cell type has a characteristic pattern of gene activity, scientists assumed that the decisions cells make are dictated by genes: specifically, networks of genes that turn each other on and off, initiating a cascade that forms the correct types of cells in the correct order.
But genes are not the whole story. New research has shown the extent to which cell metabolism — the chemical reactions within a cell that provide energy and materials for growth — has an important, underappreciated role in directing cell fates.
On one level, Nova Scotia House is a poignant love story about a survivor whose life partner was snatched away far too soon. On another, it’s a cathartic tribute to the many others lost to the same disease.
When an express train smashes through the barriers at Montparnasse, screeches across the concourse and emerges through an exterior wall, panicked onlookers assume it’s a terrorist attack. Plus ça change; this happened in October 1895 and is the inspiration for Emma Donoghue’s new novel, which takes place on that train as it hurtles from Granville to Paris.
The antagonism has abated in recent years, but the John-Paul duality persists. Heavy rocker versus cute populist. Working-class rebel v smug bourgeois clone. Tormented genius v girly sentimentalist. Strawberry Fields Forever v Penny Lane.
Ian Leslie takes on these tired polarities by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: “passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy”. However much at odds temperamentally, John and Paul were an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Beatles, with George and Ringo (not much featured here) as add-ons. The emotional ties they shared, not least the early loss of their mothers, weren’t ones they could talk about, so they sang them instead. As Paul put it: “You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people.”
A menu is both a statement and an invitation. It may appear as a mere list of a restaurant’s offerings, but after setting a mood with the decor and a welcome greeting, a menu is the first time the restaurant kitchen communicates directly with the diner. Because of the messaging opportunities, many restaurants have ditched the staid trio of appetizers, entrees, and desserts for phrasing that speaks more to the actual experience they’re creating, which is usually not so staid and traditional.
This is overall a good thing, allowing more restaurants to use vernacular specific to the cultures they represent, or just have more fun with language. But lately I’ve been noticing more restaurants embracing that fun at the expense of actually telling the diner information like how big a dish is in comparison to others. When did we become allergic to the word “appetizers”?
Something in contemporary Western diets must shift, for both moral and ecological reasons. Fortunately, there are alternatives to our current food system – ways of eating that are equally, if not more, nutritious but without the suffering and climate impacts of factory-farmed meat. Unfortunately, many people find these alternatives disgusting.
I know, because I’ve been one of those people.
Marcy Dermansky’s Hot Air had me questioning reality from the very first page. But that’s life, isn’t it? The most unrealistic anecdotes, the zaniest events, are usually the ones that actually happened.
Celebrity chefs have grown into brands far beyond the confines of their restaurants. They’re sales platforms selling television shows and cookbooks and merchandise. That’s all possible because of the cultlike following in their fan base. It’s the public’s intrigue in their personal lives that likely will entice readers to pick up Laurie Woolever’s memoir, Care And Feeding. And they will likely be delighted to find the book a deeper exploration of restaurants, marriage, parenthood, substance abuse, work, hopes, and dreams than simply the exposition of the secret lives of master chefs.
I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake.
Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”
But excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had inspired a new science: investigating antiquity by digging objects out of the earth. And Layard was one of its most spectacularly successful practitioners. Enduring lethal epidemics, stultifying heat, vermin-infested camps and the hostility of Ottoman authorities, he made a series of discoveries beginning in the mid-1840s in what is now northern Iraq: 2,500-year-old Assyrian palaces paneled with exquisite alabaster bas-reliefs and guarded by stone gods and monsters. In vivid detail, the friezes depicted corpse-covered battlefields, battering-ram-wielding soldiers breaking down city ramparts, archers in stallion-drawn chariots, bedraggled captives, vassals bearing tributes, kings attended by eunuchs, and royal lion hunts in the bush. Unreadable inscriptions swirled around the carvings. Layard and his protégé, a Christian Arab from Mosul named Hormuzd Rassam, also unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets in the royal library of the Assyrian king Sennacherib at Nineveh. Layard, Rassam and other researchers guessed that the tablets were filled with information about astronomy, medicine, religion, politics, laws and everyday life in the Assyrian Empire.
To a certain extent, all rented properties are haunted. The spectres of previous tenants lurk in the bedside tables and slogan mugs they left behind; their fag smoke lingers in the carpets; the post they failed to redirect piles up in the hall. Neighbours, too, can feel like phantoms: we might rarely see them, but we hear their footsteps and their music, inhale their cooking smells, or simply somehow sense their recently departed presences on the communal stairs. As for landlords: they’re probably the biggest ghouls of all.
In light of all this, it’s perhaps surprising that we haven’t seen more housing crisis ghost stories, or, as Róisín Lanigan’s debut has been billed, a “gothic novel for generation rent”. I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is the story of Áine and Elliot, who have just moved into a rental together in a gentrified area of London. It’s a flat that, ominously, no one else seemed to want. They are both keen to enter a more adult stage of life, but something about the place unnerves Áine from the very start.
In The Antidote, Karen Russell, America's own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhumes memories out of the collective national unconscious and invites us to see our history in full. There are, alas, no antidotes for history. Our consolations are found in writers like Russell who refract horror and wonder through their own strange looking glass, leaving us energized for that next astounding thing.
Told with McCann’s incomparable prose, “Twist” opens a window into an obscure way people on earth are connected, told by a man who is himself fairly broken.
For Matt Ridley anyway, the argument is over: sexual selection accounts for the blue hue of a black grouse, for the song of the lark and the butterfly’s wing. It accounts for our human traits, even our brains. Starting some three million years ago, the human brain underwent rapid expansion. This did not happen to other primates, which survive quite well without. Why? The theory of sexual selection suggests that in aeons past we must just have fancied each other’s braininess, males and females both, and mated accordingly. It became a runaway success. We bred huge brains into ourselves, by ourselves. Our brains are a “baroque” feature all of our own, and “one of sexual selection’s greatest creations” – greater even than the peacock’s tail.
I am going to admit here that upon publishing my sixth novel, I still don’t have a regimented process. I still feel panicked before I sit down to write. Sometimes, I think I will never write another book again and feel awful. Eventually, I get back to work. I find a way that works for me and for a little while I am happy. And then circumstances changes and I have to come up with a brand new way to work.
On Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, four lanes of traffic lurch under power lines, screeching and growling day and night, past a shuttered auto body shop covered in faded graffiti, a cargo truck repair facility, and a liquor store. It’s all cinder block structures until the corner of Manhattan Avenue, named Mario Costa Plaza. There, a white-paneled, circular building with a dotted red crown looks like it could light up and lift off into outer space — White Mana Diner.
The building was constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows to showcase how you could cook, serve, and plate burgers without moving your pivot foot. That was a year before McDonald’s first opened. Louis Bridges bought the building and transported it to its current location in 1946. It still retains its charm because longtime owner Mario Costa hasn’t changed much, least of all himself.
Wry, strange, and generous, Murder by Memory is a fantastic series opener, with a vivid setting and intriguing characters that leave readers wanting more.
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. Born in Zanzibar, Gurnah, now 76, moved to Britain in 1968 as a refugee of the Zanzibar revolution. His books often feature people who leave what they know and arrive “in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions”, to use the words of a character from his 2001 novel By the Sea. Theft, Gurnah’s first book since his Nobel win, is in part a continued inquiry into familiar themes of exile and memory, home, longing and loneliness. It is also a poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal, set against Tanzania’s tourism boom during the 1990s.
In dramatising the difficulty of escaping the shadow of a past its protagonists can’t understand, Gurnah flirts with crushingly gloomy determinism as well as the sunnier possibilities of hope, and it’s not the least of this wonderful title’s achievements that it leaves you wondering to the very last which way he’s going to go.
The need to be carried has been used to naturalize gendered divisions of labor throughout Western culture. False histories of early human life are everywhere, spread across high-school classrooms, university departments, bestseller lists, even the familiar shorthand of “caveman” behavior in cartoons and movies. Like a nebulous fog that obscures the road ahead, these impressions merge to create a hazy wall of so-called logic, disguising hard-edged exploitation: back then, someone needed to carry the baby, and it makes sense that it would have been the body that was also in charge of feeding the baby. And if the person’s hands were busy carrying, then naturally, those that weren’t busy in such a way should have been contributing to the well-being of the group in other ways, like through hunting, protecting, discovering, inventing, adventuring, ruling. This all sounds reasonable, practically magnanimous, even communal—from each according to their ability, et cetera.
This rearrangement, or rearticulation, has implications for storytelling at large.
It is 7.30am. The sky is a pink-and-gold blur, and the breeze is invigorating. It’s a perfect day to walk from my London home to the source of the River Thames. I’m travelling light – phone, sandwich, water bottle – so I need nothing but a pair of capacious pockets. I have been walking the 185-mile Thames Path National Trail, with my friend Rhiannon, for more than four years. We do it bit by bit, a section at a time. No need to carry a heavy backpack. No need to book a hotel or pitch a tent. No need to use up weeks of precious holiday. No need to fret about whether we may fall out, or whether one of us will prove more ruggedly resilient than the other; nor any of the myriad factors that must be considered when planning a long-distance hike with a companion. And yes, we’re always back in time for a night in our own beds.
Sometimes reading poetry can feel exhilarating, like you are finally seeing and being seen. Other times it’s a slog that leaves you desperate for a nap to process what you just read. Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, “We Contain Landscapes,” is a healthy mix of both.
The magic trick of “Perfection,” like “Things” before it, is to reveal readers to themselves—gently, in the way a therapist might encourage a patient to arrive at an unflattering truth. This original misapprehension might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility, Latronico suggests. You, contemporary reader, are the victim of poor training. You have been duped into turning any text into a catalogue of fleeting images. You have been distracted from what is right there on the page, waiting to make you actually happy.
This little website will be on break for a couple of weeks, from March 5 to 19. See you soon.
Works of imaginative literature are not manuals for life, though they might along the way gift us with some wisdom; they are sites of discovery and rediscovery.
The whole “local” author issue is superpuzzling. I thought being Canadian was good enough.
Mirzakhani was an influential cartographer of the hyperbolic universe. While still in graduate school, she developed groundbreaking techniques that allowed her to start cataloging these shapes, before moving on to revolutionize other areas of mathematical research. She hoped to revisit her map of the hyperbolic realm at a later date — to fill in its details and make new discoveries. But before she could do so, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 2017, just 40 years old.
Two mathematicians have since picked up the thread of her work and spun it into an even deeper understanding of hyperbolic surfaces.
There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower. If you’re lucky enough to have an Agave americana on your land, wary enough to stay clear of its sharp-toothed leaves, and patient enough to hang around for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, at last, with the sight of its butter-yellow blossoms. Likewise, if a copy of “The Underground Man,” a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly, it’s a book in full bloom.
The cause of that flowering is not hard to find. You hear a hint of it in the opening sentences: “A rattle of leaves woke me some time before dawn. A hot wind was breathing in at the bedroom window.” At once, we are on our guard; since when did the weather become an intruder, stalking us while we sleep?
A London political adviser who was living in the English countryside during the pandemic, Dalton knew next to nothing about hares. Yet when she found that the leveret hadn’t moved for hours, she decided to take it home and try to save it — despite her fears that by interfering she might hurt its ability to return to the wild.
What follows, as recounted in the new memoir, “Raising Hare,” was an unexpected experiment in coexistence.
But something was wrong. I felt uneasy about my ability to perform my duties as a physician. Some kind of inner harmony was gone. Before my vacation, I had enjoyed the pleasure of working along a single groove, endlessly repeating surgical cases with unwearied regularity, and making snap decisions with confidence. The unexpected had never really startled me, and, at times, I even hoped for something out of the ordinary. Now something was different – off. I was filled with doubt, born of I knew not where, to which I returned unceasingly. How was this possible? One day I was perfectly fine, and now, after just a few weeks away, confidence and sureness were gone. Simply put, I had lost my professional intuition. Although that explanation may seem imprecise, intuition is real, and, without it, experts lose their bearings. What had once seemed sure and certain for them becomes a question for enquiry.
I didn’t fully appreciate how trying I’d found my first successful pregnancy until I finally met the enigmatic figure who’d been hiding in plain sight. Flooded with relief that the pregnancy was over, I also started to understand what it had cost me. Having never experienced any kind of disordered eating before, I had become someone whose life was dominated by food aversions and the fear of throwing up, especially in public. A couple of years later and pregnant for a second time, I was revolted by even the smell of my toddler’s nursery, by the normally delightful smell of my toddler, and became reluctant to leave the house in case I saw a wet leaf on the ground that made me think of lettuce.
On the face of it, Robert Seethaler’s new book might seem twee. The novel – an instant hit upon its German publication in 2023 – is set in Vienna in 1966. It tells of Robert Simon, who follows a long-held dream when he gives up doing odd jobs around the market to set up a cafe, which becomes a hub of community.
But Seethaler’s prose is unexpected, taking the novel, far from being an easy-sailing story of the simple joys of community-building, somewhere knottier.
Romney’s book is as sharp an examination of the “great forgetting” of female writers as you could wish for, uncowed by big-name critics, buoyed instead by the instincts of a single reader trusting her honest enjoyment over dusty tradition.
Rebecca Romney, the author and occasional “Pawn Stars” guest who wrote “Bookshelf,” is a fan of Austen. But her point in the book, subtitled “A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend,” is that Austen didn’t spring out of the grassy fields of the English countryside as a fully formed bestseller machine. There are clues throughout her work that she read widely, not only enjoying many female novelists who preceded her but often name-checking them in her work and sometimes borrowing plots and character ideas.
Exploring how radio transformed the lives of Britons between the two world wars, it’s a striking read in our smartphone-dominated world, as we witness another radical invention quickly becoming part of everyday life. A portal into other places from your own house was also an easy concept to sell. Take the cover of the first Christmas issue of Radio Times from 1923, one of many fascinating images in the book, showing a rapt family gathering around their small set.
In Theory & Practice, De Kretser gradually, delicately, picks and plucks at the notion of “truth” in literature – questioning first the trustworthiness of the novel and then the trustworthiness of autobiography – until, by her book’s end, all certainties have been dismantled, and it’s hard to know what it is, exactly, we have read. Her excellence as a writer lies in the fact that she manages to make a novel that effectively acts as a deconstruction of the novel form feel like a pleasure, rather than a chore. She offers us the theory, while revelling in the practice; she exposes the lie to us, but permits us to love it anyway.
Hybridity is fashionable; fragmentation is part of the world in which we live. What, after all, does it mean to be ‘truly known’? It’s difficult now to write a serious realist novel like Adichie’s earlier works. But that – the full imagining of other lives from both inside and out – is where I think her heart and deepest talents lie.
“Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of their introduction to their new edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson. That may be true, but we learn that writing letters and poetry became nearly inseparable activities for much of Dickinson’s life. Not that you would fully appreciate that fact by reading through the previous “definitive” edition of Dickinson’s letters, edited in three volumes by Thomas H. Johnson in 1958 and also published by Belknap/Harvard. As I flip through my copy of Johnson’s Selected Letters, I see fragments of poems, often just a stanza, attached to the prose correspondence. In contrast, skimming through the 2024 Letters of Emily Dickinson, readers will encounter a book that seems almost to be a hybrid of epistles and poetry.
Grief is an intensifier. It doesn’t often – despite what films and television would have you believe – cause you to act massively out of character. Like motherhood or any other huge life upheaval, its actual effect is to strip away the nonsense and leave your essential nature, your core, not just intact but now unobscured by everyday concerns and frivolities.
So it was no real surprise to find myself, in the immediate weeks after the death of my beloved dad in 2023, flinging myself into books. I would have done so literally, if I could. I wanted to gather my physical books into a wall – or better yet, a cave – around me that would both protect me from this new reality and let me cry in peace within it. Failing that, I took mental refuge in them instead.
That Dave Eggers published such a heartfelt defense of radical honesty in personal writing in type so tiny I can barely read it, in material he deleted from later editions of the paperback, feels just about right. I hope Eggers never has to answer another question about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in his life. But I’m grateful for the big, huge mistake he made by writing it, and I hope that people keep on reading it, long after we’re all gone.
Burgers are delicious, of course, and offer something familiar on a menu that might be intimidating to guests who are picky or less than adventurous.
But they also lower a restaurant’s per diner check average, muck up the kitchen, and require a ton of work. Many restaurants with complicated, intricately built menus, have become glorified burger joints when diners decide the burger is the thing to get.
Some of Held’s intertwined stories last a while, other shoot past us like comets, leaving only a trail of themselves behind. And yet if the stories Michaels wants to tell are “sometimes too intimate to know,” her project as a novelist is try anyway, to do whatever she can to capture in words the elusive nature of our strongest emotions–anger and fear and loneliness and, above all, love.
It is a human summons, the human summons: “Freely you have received, freely give.” Dante Di Stefano’s Standard Time answers that summons, as typified by the penultimate poem in the book, explicitly addressed to the reader, in which the receiving and giving includes this exclamation: “I love the simple music / of these infinite mouthings // (not my own, but ours always).”