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.