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.”