Today I find a ticket to the Met from a couple months ago when Tildy was home on break. We went to the museum? How nice––I had no idea. Back at college now, Tildy explains over the phone that it was a big day. First, I had that medical procedure, then we had lunch, then we went to the museum. She tells me about the onigiri we got at a Japanese grocery store to eat in the park and the sphinx with the archaic smile we saw in the Greek sculpture gallery. Apparently, she’d written an essay about that sphinx for her art history class, and I’d read that essay and liked it. Extraordinary, what other people manage to remember!
The big events that fall off the edge of my mind are the showiest evidence of my memory problem, so I’ve got examples ready for any neurologist who seems overly reassured by my ability to pass the dementia test. Sure, pin a prize on me for spinning up words that start with the letter F. But how about Tildy’s high school graduation last year? Or dropping her off at college a few months ago? I’m no expert, but I feel like normal people remember that kind of thing. I did too, once upon a time.
Vanishing World narrates the creep of a new worldview – that all sex is wrong, unclean, and masturbation the only appropriate way of relieving unwanted urges – radiating out from the scientific and social experiments of Experiment City. As its grip on Amane tightens, her relationship with her stubbornly old-fashioned mother deteriorates. The final stages of the plot rehearse a scenario familiar from Murata’s previous books, in which one character takes the urge to control the behaviour of others to its logical extreme. This recycling is evidence, I think, of the strength and singularity of the author’s vision. It’s also a reminder of how quickly even the strangest ideas can become convention.
Alice Vincent, once music editor on the arts pages of the Telegraph, spent years of her life “setting the measure of a pop star’s performance in 450 words and a few tiny stars… leaving shows halfway through because I was bored or arrogant”. In the world of music journalism she was “silently lobbying for access to the boys’ club. I still don’t know if I ever gained entry”. Vincent was an obsessive music lover who listened to so many records, and went to so many gigs as a teenager, that she damaged her hearing: “There was a time in my life when sound felt like it was everything to me because it moved my body and it smoothed my brain and elevated my being into higher planes.” In Hark, Vincent has set out to think about listening and gender – but also to answer questions that, like her, haunts so many of us in adulthood. Why do we stop listening in the same way as we get older? Why is our relationship with music, as she puts it, withering?
One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay higher wages. But it also comes from popular psychology. As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are “entrepreneurial.”
In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age.
In the century since its début, in April, 1925, “Gatsby” has been adapted for film at least five times; mounted on the stage, with and without musical numbers; and even turned into a video game, in the style of Super Mario Bros. As early as the nineteen-fifties, Scribner’s was selling more than thirty thousand copies each year, and by the end of the sixties that figure was closer to half a million. By some estimates, the total worldwide sales of the novel are now upward of thirty million copies. How did “Gatsby” grow so great, and why has it endured so long?
The answer is high-school English. More than any literary prize or celebrity book club, the school syllabus shapes American reading. This year alone, roughly seventeen million students will take their seats in a high-school-English classroom, and a great many of them will be sitting down to a copy of “The Great Gatsby.” For decades, Fitzgerald’s novel has been among the most frequently assigned texts in American secondary schools, and reading it—or, at least, pretending to have read it—has become a national rite of passage. But “Gatsby” ’s place in the high-school canon was hardly inevitable, its path to the classroom winding at best.
“Fireweed” by Lauren Haddad follows lonely housewife Jenny, whose husband works long stints away at a farm. In Prince George, Canada, she lives alongside a widowed Indigenous mother who the neighborhood looks down upon. An educated white woman goes missing along the highway, drawing national attention, but when Jenny’s neighbor, Rachelle, disappears next, no one cares.
What follows is a desperate search for self-absolution as Jenny first tries to ignore the situation, then obsesses about it. Haddad’s debut novel shows off her mastery of prose and physical description, infusing each page with believable realism.
Flynn is a writer who understands the power of the offbeat. His vision is neither nihilistic nor sentimental; it is, in the best sense, playful. And like the best speculative fiction, it uses its imagined world not to escape the real one, but to refract it. This is a story about children, yes– but more tellingly, it is a story about adults: their cruelties, their hopeful delusions, their bureaucratic failures.
“Awakened” is a story of enormous heart, and it’s not only for those burned by former literary heroes; it’s also for those who need a reminder of what it’s like to see childlike wonder as an adult navigating a sometimes cruel world. For those who love massively multiplayer role-playing games but are turned off by the rampant misogyny that tends to overtake those spaces. Or, honestly, for people who just want a fresh, modern take on a magical quest. Osworth’s writing is captivating and luscious, full of Easter eggs and savory balance of sensory descriptions, exciting adventure, lifelike dialogue and gratifying revelations.
Against the backdrop of our all-but-mandatory participation in a tech culture that values us mostly for our insatiable discontent, it seems almost radical to celebrate any desire’s true fulfillment. Who are we, says Sky Daddy, to deny the Lindas of the world theirs?•
Say Everything rises above the usual Gen X biographies and presents us with a self-aware and contemplative view of a turbulent life and the times in which it has been lived.
What this really comes down to is the slightly embarrassing fact that scientists don’t even agree on what “life” means in the first place. So how would we know if we’ve made it, if it doesn’t resemble life as we know it?
We are faced with a choice. We can recognise that quantum mechanics – with all its weirdness – is a purely symbolic framework for predicting the probabilistic outcomes of our experiments. It is indeed a calculational trick, not to be taken literally, which allows us some ability to get a handle on an otherwise unfathomable atomic and subatomic world.
Or we can recognise (with Einstein and Schrödinger) that quantum theory is at the very least incomplete, and deeply unsatisfactory. A theory capable of fathoming the atomic and subatomic world ought to be possible, if only we have the will to look for it, and the wit to find it.
As Koreans who have lived through the fortnightly car-park-supermarket-lorry rationing days, it’s both fascinating and confusing to see the meteoric rise of our cuisine across just two decades. Even as we are relieved that we can now easily access Korean food around London, we’ve also been curious to figure out what lies behind this rapid escalation in popularity. Though finding Korean food may now be straightforward, the journey to get here has been far less so.
I can’t help but wonder what Castelveto and Evelyn, two of the patriarchs of salad orthodoxy, would make of today’s sweet salad renaissance — those jiggly, kaleidoscopic creations that, against all odds, can be as unexpectedly sophisticated as they are nostalgic. Even when chopped Snickers bars and whipped topping make an appearance. One imagines their horror deepening upon encountering “Sweet Farm!” the new cookbook from Food Network star and author Molly Yeh released in March.
The insight—that the pause between waves of pain offers an opportunity for respite, however fleeting—is one that reverberates after Nelson’s final pages. We trust the wry self-awareness of someone “trying to act nonchalant, and not like someone who keeps a 10,000-word pain history on her desktop,” because our collective pain history runs to infinite pages. Concluding a book grounded in the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nelson avows, “the moment for the lesson is now,” and her “now” lands with startling prescience in our “now” of excruciating uncertainty and ongoing dismay. These hard-won lessons of resilience and stamina offer, if not consolation, then indispensable counsel.
Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.”
A century before publishers started marketing novels as “essential sad girl literature” and newspapers ran headlines about the “cult of the literary sad woman”, Mary MacLane confessed all, at the age of nineteen, and became the enfant terrible of American letters, seemingly overnight. “This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything—to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. . . . These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.”
Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.
After surveying the past 2000 years, he writes, “there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex. There are multiple Christian theologies of sex, many of which have over two millennia been downright contradictions of each other.” When religious authorities attempt to ground their directives in tradition—be it admonishing couples to have more kids or prohibiting abortion—they rarely understand the history they cite.
I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public. For just as long, students who sit there have been answering any question asked of them—or at least tried their best.
By nine o’clock, the student center is quiet. That’s when people like Beulah call.
We share our homes (sometimes our beds) with them, but how much do we really know about what dogs think and feel? Whether chihuahua or husky, domestic dogs descended from wolves, but their behaviour, says Clive Wynne, psychology professor at Arizona State University and director of its Canine Science Collaboratory research lab, is “substantially different. You can tame wolves, and they can be really affectionate. But taming wolves is quite challenging, whereas taming dogs is so easy that you hardly ever talk about ‘taming’ dogs.”
If you find it difficult to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying or dead river. This is easier. We know what this looks like. We know how it feels. A dying river is one who does not reach the sea. A dying river’s fish float belly-up in stagnant pools. Swans on the upper Thames near Windsor now wear brown tidemarks on their snowy chest feathers, showing where they have sailed through sewage. I recently saw a Southern Water riverbank sign badged with a bright blue logo that read “Water for Life”. The sign instructed passersby to “avoid contact with the water. If you’ve had contact with the water, please wash your hands before eating.” In parts of this septic isle, fresh water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable.
De-extinction has been talked about for decades. But Colossal's three dire wolves – which are actually grey wolves that possess 20 edited genes that are meant to give them dire wolf-like features – represent the most serious effort to date to make that lofty vision a reality.
In the wake of the dire wolf announcement, however, many scientists have criticised Colossal's approach. They see efforts to bring back long-extinct species as costly wastes of resources and a distraction from the significant work that's needed to save still-living species.
‘I think this is as far as we can go,” I say, glancing down at the military post, barely 100 metres from the Zakagori Fortress, the forced endpoint of our day hike through the Truso valley in northern Georgia. Beyond the fortress lies disputed land, a seemingly endless expanse of yellowing pastures swelling beneath ice-capped peaks, where only a few wandering sheep dare to roam. Just beyond our line of sight is Russia.
It can be difficult to be honest and take an earnest inventory when writing about oneself. As a person with enough food and body issues to fill a book (which I did), I found my body, as a topic, especially tough. I have read a lot of writing on bodies—their needs, their shapes, our wars with and on and for them. At first, I was just a consumer, searching for myself and my truth in their pages, but never finding quite what I was looking for. By the time I finally sold my book pitch for A Physical Education, I hadn’t found an ideal role model for this kind of writing, which meant I’d have to assemble the plane as it was taking off.
In the Protestant Christian tradition that my father grew up in, Adam and Eve learn about sex from an apple.
This is an improbable lesson because nearly all the apples we consume are from trees that reproduce asexually. Apple trees in bloom have both male and female reproductive parts, and their flowers may exhibit several varieties of male-ness and female-ness along a spectrum of different stamens, stigmas, pigments and perfumes. They get help with pollination from other species like bumblebees and honeybees that scurry around their branches in a literal orgy of pollen. Not all apple flowers are sexually productive; some of them, apparently, just like fluffing the bumblebees.
“So, no blonde fries,” says chef David Viana of the platonic ideal of disco fries. “It can’t be mushy. The gravy has to slap. And some people say you can’t have too much cheese, but if it gets too heavy, it actually makes it stick together too much.” As a self-described “Jersey boy,” Viana takes his disco fries seriously.
If you grew up outside of the northeast, you may have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Listen In” does a solid job in showing us how, like most domesticated technology, radio first arrived as novelty, then settled comfortably (perhaps too comfortably) into the background like a piece of furniture, albeit one that entertained you.
Sarah Leavitt’s Something, Not Nothing is a poignant and raw exploration of grief, art, and joy in the aftermath of tremendous loss. In this collection of short comics, Leavitt shares the artwork she created after the death of her partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, who was herself an artist and activist.
If we stop expecting female friendship to be frictionless, women like me will stop wanting to abandon a close relationship every time they feel jealous or hurt. With this book, Watt Smith provides us with a blueprint for how to sustain friendships that are flawed, and sometimes painful – but more meaningful because they are real.
At this point the problem, if it really is a problem, is more or less agreed upon: that sometime in the past ten years, it became unfashionable (or worse) to write about men. That is to say, the twentieth-century archetype of the meat-eating, whiskey-guzzling, four-ex-wife-having man of letters is done. There’s a new unspoken understanding among literary young men: instead of aping DeLillo or McCarthy or Pynchon, they’d be better off following the lead of Amor Towles and Anthony Doerr—laying low till middle age, then specializing in the sort of inoffensive historical fiction that gets turned into prestige miniseries and movies released on Christmas Day.
I’m joking. Sort of.
Thirty-five years ago today a revolutionary new era of astronomy began when the Hubble Space Telescope, tucked onboard the space shuttle Discovery, blasted off Earth into history. The next day a robotic arm tipped the telescope into orbit from the shuttle’s cargo bay. Within a month Hubble had truly begun its mission, gazing out at the cosmos for NASA and the European Space Agency with its 2.4-meter-wide starlight-gathering mirror—the largest ever launched to space at the time.
For more than a millennium, Japanese people have admired the delicate sakura petals as a symbol of transience and beauty. Today, this national pastime has blossomed into an international obsession, with millions of tourists from across the world descending on Japan to sip seasonal sakura-themed Starbucks drinks and participate in hanami (cherry blossom viewing) picnics and festivals from March to May. But while the world waits with bated breath for the cotton candy-coloured blossoms to burst each spring, one of the most important and least understood roles in the trees' maintenance lies with their behind-the-scenes caretakers.
Yes, horror can be a lot of fun, and that's what makes When the Wolf Comes Home special. This novel takes elements of contemporary horror — a fresh voice, a new angle, diversity — and mixes them with a bizarro fiction approach to reality — there are no rules, reality is flexible, cartoons can come to life, and the laws of physics don't really matter as long as the story is great.
In both his poetry and prose, Hewitt seems to me to be working, with immense fidelity and skill, towards a singular vision, in which profound sincerity of feeling – and the treatment of sexual desire as something close to sacred – is matched with an almost reckless beauty of expression. What is that, if not bravery?
Indeed, if there’s anything that Kemp seems to ask of the reader, it is to loosen up and have fun. I did, and I adored this novel: it’s a clever and wholly original skewering of the modern dating landscape, our obsession with true love, and the outlandish lengths we’ll go to in its pursuit.
Lydia Millet's Atavists: Stories has a somewhat misleading title.
Is it full of stories? Yes. But they share characters, themes, worries, and even a subplot about watching a certain kind of pornography on the living room computer. So, is it a novel in short stories? Something like that. But it's also a book that seems to have one foot planted very firmly on some ideas, on some questions and observations and hot topics, which — mixed with Millet's keen eye and sharp prose — leads to passages that seem to have been plucked from larger essays. In short, there's a lot going on here — and most of it is great.
Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global attempts to chart the story of the Indo-European languages and the people who spoke them. These languages, which include English, Latin, Greek, Russian and Hindi, form a vast family that spread across much of Eurasia and are spoken today by nearly half of the world’s population. The book covers an enormous swathe of human history and draws on archaeology, genetics and linguistics to frame a narrative about this influential linguistic legacy. Spinney, best known for her 2017 book, Pale Rider, on the Spanish Flu, brings a journalist’s eye to the task and a clear desire to make the topic approachable.
Lippard, at eighty-eight, is one of the best-known multi-hyphenate art writers (-curators-critics-activists) of the past half century. Her career has focused on the large realms of feminism, activism, place, politics, and culture. She has also, in recent editions of El Puente, noted “two recent road kills: a deer and a racoon,” summarized local meetings about road signage, and edited an obituary, her name appearing not as a byline, but at the bottom corner of the newsletter’s final page, near the classifieds, some of which have continued to run unchanged since the mid-nineties, when El Puente began. El Puente, which Lippard often refers to as a newsletter (“What’s the difference?” she asked me), is an extraordinary (mostly solo) work of journalism, a map of history in progress, revealing a shifting landscape.
Looking back towards the Earth, Cernan commented: "the clouds seem to be very artistic, very picturesque. Some in clockwise rotating fashion… but appear to be… very thin where you can… see through those clouds to the blue water below."
It is an enduring image of the beauty but also the vulnerability of our planet – adrift as it is in the vastness of the Universe, which hosts no other signs of life that we have been able to detect to date. But ours is also a planet of great change. The tectonic movements that shift the landmasses move too slow for our eyes to notice. Yet another force – humanity itself – has been reshaping our planet at a pace that we can see. Urbanisation, deforestation, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are altering the way the Earth looks. So how, over the 50 years since that iconic image was taken, has the Blue Marble changed?
Whenever I’m cooking with peas, I always prefer frozen over fresh. In fact, I’m an ardent believer that frozen peas are superior to their fresh counterparts. It’s simply more convenient to have a bag of shelled peas ready to use rather than doing the hard work yourself. Frozen peas are also more vibrant in color than fresh peas. And they are sweeter and more crisp in texture — I’ve found that fresh peas are often quite starchy and mushy once cooked.
Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.
In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak.
Octopuses have attracted fascination for millennia. Aristotle (384–322 BC) was one of the earliest fans we know about. Among his other accomplishments, Aristotle was a talented biologist and named over five hundred species of birds, mammals, fish, and invertebrates in his History of Animals, written in 350 BC. Most of his invertebrate observations came from his time on Lesbos in the Greek islands on underwater swims in the Pyrrha lagoon (now called the Gulf of Kalloni). It is mind‑bending to read of his fascinations with octopuses and his observations of their denning behavior and how they change their color and form. He must have spent a lot of time watching them 2,500 years ago to observe what they eat, how they hunt, and how they age.
It’s an hour past sunset, and I’m alone atop a mountain in Southern California, surrounded by darkness. I’m fixated on a 5-gallon bucket, a halo of eerie blue light emanating from the top. A swarm of moths frantically pursues the light, completely entrancing me. This isn’t some odd form of meditation—I’m an ecologist who studies pollinators. Many of these moths (around 60 percent of them, I will later discover) are carrying tiny pollen grains on their long, straw-like mouthparts. Although moths might not be the first creature most people think of when they hear the word “pollinators,” they may be some of the most important on Earth, according to recent research. Globally, moths may even rank with the planet’s most famous pollinators—bees.
It is human nature to prefer our landscapes neatly framed – walls and wooden fences create the illusion that the great outdoors can be controlled and contained. Yet Karen Solie’s wildly unpredictable collection Wellwater flips the script. In this blazingly honest catalogue of human-made hazard and harm, we celebrate instead the contemporary landscapes refusing to be tamed.
The book does not answer all the questions it raises, but that’s okay. It wisely illustrates the process of grief—the stumbling in the dark, the importance of small comforts, and finally, almost, letting it go.
Great Big Beautiful Life is complicated and emotional; sweet, sexy, and ultimately what you expect from the queen of contemporary romance: full of love. Henry would say that, at its core, so is this great, big, beautiful life we get to live.
Lefevre writes with insight, curiosity, wisdom and compassion, guided by her garden and a profound appreciation of what a gift it is to age.
Alan Weisman has found an all-world cast of scientists, engineers and environmentalists who have dreamed big and worked passionately to repair some of the world’s wrecked ecosystems and also to develop processes that, for example, use far less energy than we get from oil
For those like biologist Christopher Murray who has spent decades closely studying alligators, it's high time to move past their reputation as cold-hearted killers and recognise the varied roles they're playing as caring and constructive ecosystem engineers. While the cute, herbivorous beaver is widely celebrated for stewarding temperate wetlands, it is the "gnarly swamp monsters" who deserve plaudits in the southeastern United States and many other places, says Murray, associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "I think we're just beginning to understand that crocodilians, in general, and specifically alligators, do a lot more good than we think."
When I first knew myself, there were only two of us. Me and the other, and that was it. That was our entire universe. I could see nothing in front of me, I perceived nothing except this single other thing surrounding me on all sides. So I called it just that, nothingness, but not emptiness. No place was empty of it. I was always staring at nothing, and nothing was staring back at me. There was little else to do.
When it was just the two of us, we were not hot before cold, light after dark, yin balancing yang. We were opposites, as different as two things can possibly be, but the world was far too simple then to allow for anything more. Features would come later, when many other things also existed to provide a context for such nuances.
As fans of the genre know, horror is often about borders—between life and death, the human and the monstrous, the known and the unknown. The new anthology Global Indigenous Horror, edited by scholar and poet Naomi Simone Borwein, invites readers to consider how horror can become something more fluid—less about containment than about transformation and exploration.
So the recent release (in paperback) of the 600-page biography Kubrick: An Odyssey would seem to be mammoth overkill. But Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams, building on their previous studies of the filmmaker, along with twenty-nine dense pages of sources and a lucid chronology of Kubrick’s doings, generate plenty of rewarding insights into an unparalleled body of work.
But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page.
On the day after Boxing Day last year, my dad and I went to buy some cabbage. My aunt and cousins were joining us for dinner that evening and we had a meal to prepare. The local supermarket was closed and the cabbage, sourced from an Italian deli around the corner, was obscenely overpriced. In a bind, we bought some anyway and headed back home to begin cooking. Standing around the kitchen island chopping and peeling vegetables, preparing a rib of beef and assembling a side dish of dauphinoise potatoes, we listened to music and chatted. The meal was a success and the cabbage – lightly browned and decorated with caraway seeds – tasty. But most important was that, for the time we had spent cooking, I felt closer to my dad.
Associating rebirth with cycles in nature isn't just a Christian or even religious thing. In temperate climates, especially, every year life that seems to die in autumn is resurrected in spring. Even where trees don't drop their leaves and the earth doesn't sleep under a blanket of snow, subtle changes may indicate a slowing, a retreat, a sense of suspended animation. And now, in the spring, as sap begins to flow, buds begins to form and shoots begin to sprout, life is resurrected. Animals emerge from hibernation, like Sleeping Beauty woken from her death-like 100-year sleep.
But some animals, and a few other organisms, take the analogy one step further: apparently dead, they then, it seems, come back to life.
In Elvira Navarro’s stunning, bewildering novel, our loved ones are simultaneously gone without a trace and present in every moment. “Just how far do the dead travel with us?” Adriana asks. The Voices of Adriana is an audacious metatextual attempt at finding out.
The Homemade God moves between being a page-turning mystery and an astute study of family dynamics, and readers who like a book to pick a lane and stay in it may find this frustrating. But Joyce is a thoughtful writer, and the narrative gear-changes echo the novel’s concerns: the gap between image and reality, the difference between who we are believed to be – by ourselves and others – and who we really are.
The character-driven novel strikes the perfect balance between sharp-witted banter and a deeply relatable portrayal of womanhood that readers will carry with them, much like the series’ legacy.
Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.
But how much have things really progressed? While the International Booker might have heralded a rise in the status of literary translators, is there a commensurate deepening of appreciation for, and understanding of, translation itself? While translators are being made more visible, is translation being made more invisible?
I suppose I could be forgiven if I had taken a hard look at myself in the mirror the morning after that manic night in Boothbay Harbor and then let the Northwest Passage scheme float back out into the snowy dreamworld whence it had come. But in the days that followed, the idea stayed lodged like a splinter in my brain. And instead of creating a laundry list of excuses why I couldn’t do it—too much time away from home, too dangerous, too far, too cold—I asked myself one simple question: Was it even possible to sail a boat with a plastic hull through the Northwest Passage?
If the galaxy can give rise to a planet like Earth to develop life and technology, then we cannot rule out the possibility that other such planets exist. And if they do exist, and are actively exploring space like we are, isn’t it possible that their exploratory spacecraft could be lurking nearby? The possibility is worth keeping in mind as exploration of the solar system continues. But unfortunately, most scientific enquiry has tended to ignore the possibility of looking for extraterrestrial technology in nearby space, preferring instead to look far away.
The moment I step onto the platform, I take the deepest breath I’ve taken all morning. My more-than-an-hour-long commute involves a fifteen-minute walk to the subway station. Still ahead of me: one eastbound train, one southbound, a streetcar, and a seven-minute trudge through rain or snow. Once I step on board the subway, I’m ready to settle in.
At parties and dinners, I complain to anyone who will listen about this injustice (“more than an hour!”). But on these mornings, as I choose the perfect seat (window, facing forward), flatten my bag in my lap, and slip my headphones on, I am almost giddy: a whole hour with nothing to do.
Blue Light Hours by author and Grinnell College instructor Bruna Dantas Lobato perfectly encapsulates the sweet melancholy of being a child who has left, and a parent who has been left, immersing the reader in gentle goodbyes.
Ariel Courage’s debut, Bad Nature, supplies a snappy-enough premise: After receiving a terminal prognosis from one of her (many) New York City doctors, Hester, a once-highly-optimized corporate lawyer, resolves to kill her father—but not before setting off on a circuitous road trip across the United States.
Within the first 20 pages of David Szalay’s new novel, “Flesh,” I knew that I would be writing about the book, but I truthfully had no clue what I might have to say.
Several days after finishing the novel, I find myself in the same state of mind, which is a testament to the novel’s unusual approach, and because of that approach, its haunting power.
Emotional intimacy is at stake in Thomas Morris’s latest story collection, Open Up. The stories feature characters struggling to find connection with others, and not often succeeding. These results are particularly depressing given that many of the relationships Morris explores are those of families—fathers and children, especially. Too often these characters, who are expected to be close, end up with distance between them.
The flower is a sexual organ. Our preeminent symbol of romance, the biology of the rose is mechanistic and doomed—though, maybe that’s just the problem with biology… Roses bloom; with a little help from insects, pollinate and are pollinated; wilt; and die. Sneezing in springtime, we are overtaken by the desperation of the flowers, sending themselves into the wind. “How could I forget,” Reines writes in one poem, “I always wanted to give my heart to the world.”
By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore.
There seem to be two themes in Elissa Altman’s passionate memoir Permission: one, the trauma of writing about a hitherto suppressed family event; the other, to judge from repeated words and phrases, a sense that she will never ever feel fully released from being ostracized for writing it. But the argument at the center of Permission is firm: one needs permission to write a memoir because no one owns a story. This is what Elissa Altman teaches her own students in memoir writing workshops.
What van Leeuwenhoek discovered next went beyond anything he could have imagined: After adding water to a glass tube that contained dried sediment and rotifer tuns he’d collected from a rain gutter, van Leeuwenhoek watched in wonder through his homemade microscope as rotifers came back to life. “I examined it, and perceived some of the Animalcules lying closely heaped together,” he wrote in a letter to the British Royal Society. “In a short time afterwards they began to extend their bodies, and in half an hour at least a hundred of them were swimming about the glass …” As a good experimentalist, he repeated the process by drying out other rotifers and witnessing the same phenomenon numerous times—even after samples were desiccated for a month.
“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation.
After a while it is clear that someone, or something, is following us. A figure, some distance back. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t appear to draw any closer, or get further away. It seems to remain, matching our pace, just at the edge of vision – at the edge of the dusk now descending over the grand Lincolnshire parkland surrounding Burghley House. When we stop, the figure vanishes. When we set off again, it returns. A shrouded shape; a shadow stalking our steps.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. The old Roman highway we’ve been intermittently tracing from Water Newton to Stamford is a nine-mile track layered with history. Now overgrown and concealed, it was once a bustling leg of a great north-south thoroughfare that has run, in some form or another, like a backbone through the body of Britain for at least 2,000 years. A unique assemblage of ancient trackway, Roman road, medieval path, pilgrim route, coach road and motorway. Today, hereabouts, its modern incarnation – the A1 – loops west, leaving, as it does in many places, forgotten, discontinued ghost highways to their own devices.
There was some irony to it all: Once you tell people where to find quiet, the place becomes less so.
When the couples therapist inevitably asks, I’ll have an answer ready: The trouble began in August 2017, when my boyfriend and I moved in together, and I quickly revealed myself to be an absolute ding-dong at loading the dishwasher.
Eugen Bacon’s A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is an exploration of contrasts, as suggested by its evocative title. This collection of short stories by a British Fantasy Award winner showcases Bacon’s distinctive voice in speculative fiction. The book deftly navigates themes of identity, memory, trauma and the complexities of the human experience, often through a lens that integrates elements of African culture and folklore.
If you believe in fated mates, “Zeal” is a page-turner that will teach readers a few things about our past.
Before entering Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, visitors must walk over disinfecting mats to rid their shoes of bacteria or other pathogens. Next to the mats is a sign whose admonition seems at once both practical and religious: “Cleanse your soles.” Whenever I visit, as I often do, this sign always makes me smile: this ritualised cleaning is an important measure to prevent outbreaks of disease among the garden’s 730 species, but it also seems to be some kind of spiritual act.
Anyone tempted to jump that mat should read Liz Kalaugher’s new book, a wide-ranging, thorough and persuasive investigation of the ways in which we have made non-human animals sick. Her book reads as a kind of shadow history of human endeavour and innovation, tracing the calamitous price that trade, exchange and intensive farming have exacted on everything from frogs to ferrets. It’s a measured and detailed account, but below the calm surface you can hear an anguished cry imploring us to open our eyes and see how our own health is intertwined with that of other species.
“You once said to me that I would always be isolated,” wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo in 1884. It was the second time that year that he returned to this assessment by the person who knew him best. Vincent argued that Theo was wrong: “you’ve decidedly mistaken my character.” But a new book by Miles J. Unger shows us how Van Gogh, even when he went to live with Theo in crowded Paris and spent his days with fellow artists, was always alone.
I want to apologize, because we literary scholars have failed you. We’ve done so by praising and encouraging certain kinds of reading at the expense of others. In particular, in our writings, we’ve devalued one of the most popular kinds of reading—enjoying a story’s thrilling twists and turns, surprises and reveals—in short: reading for the plot.
There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, and the mysteries of the origins of the largest structures in the Universe.
Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to the far side of the Moon, using its bulk to shield our sensitive instruments from the cacophony of our planet.
Building telescopes on the far side of the Moon would be the greatest astronomical challenge ever considered by humanity. And it would be worth it.
The unnamed narrator in Austin Kelley’s madcap mystery, “The Fact Checker,” is a man beleaguered by uncertainties. He works on the staff of a magazine that is legendary for taking fact-checking to heroic and often obscure lengths. Kelley’s debut novel playfully jabs at two celebrated New York institutions: the New Yorker magazine’s storied fact-checking department and the city’s beloved farmers markets.
There are literary lines and angles to be studied, and accompanying them, inside information about publishing, reviewing, and the rare books trade for any bibliophile to savor. Failing that, you can just try to work out who the killer is. If the novel’s thoughts on the state of England, the kids today, or The Novel itself don’t interest you, this is a strong fallback option, and so it seems that something very ingenious is going on, like a game where you choose your own adventure. Whodunnit? When someone scores a clever goal or wins on a nine-darter, the commentator says, “He’s done it!” So too the book reviewer: Coe has done it, he really has.
That the narrator finds such freedom, such self-coherence, such sense in this scene only after she has discovered inside it no such sense or meaning is key to this novel’s deeply radical thesis. It is into the unwritten, into meaning’s absence, that we are free to project meaning of our own.
Like many people, I find that memory leads to memory. We can remember a lot, if we give ourselves the time and space to try.
By the time Songkran, Thailand's new year based on the Buddhist calendar, arrives in April, the temperatures in the Southeast Asian country are soaring. The sky is typically blue and spotless, so reprieve under the shade of a passing cloud is non-existent while the humidity is as thick as a fleece blanket. One way to cool off is in the country-wide water fights that take place during the annual celebrations (this year from 13-15 April), which include water guns, buckets and coloured powder smeared onto the face like war paint. Another way to celebrate and cool off is to eat khao chae.
Khao chae (soaked rice) is an icy, seasonal treat that marks the beginning of summer in Thailand. The history of the dish can be traced back hundreds of years to the Mon people, an ethnic group that originated throughout Myanmar and Thailand and integrated into what was then Siamese society in the 16th Century.
An element of the ironic or comic is often present in this collection, but some of the strongest work is represented by poignant passages that reach an emotional high. Much of this is due to McBrearty’s superb prose style, his capacity through language to go straight to the heart.
In her quest for the whole truth, Nadia Mahjouri weaves a poignant dual narrative with converging storylines. Her debut novel, Half Truth, invites readers to navigate the complexities of womanhood through the parallel journeys of Zahra and Khadija, two women in search of one man. The book captures the beautifully chaotic essence of their experiences.
Originally known as psychosurgery, this uncommon approach to mental health care involves operating on the brain to alter its function. After lobotomies left many vulnerable patients disabled in the mid-20th century, the practice lost momentum and acquired a stigma. But surgeons in the field continued to refine their techniques. Now, psychiatric neurosurgery, a more nimble descendent, has seen an uptick in the treatment of conditions like severe OCD, and — more rarely — treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. Researchers say it may also prove beneficial in other hard-to-treat conditions, like anorexia nervosa. In other words: Some now believe that for a small group of patients who have exhausted standard therapies, the removal of brain tissue is a valid treatment path.
There’s something about luck that inspires skepticism or rejoinder. Partially, it’s a question of terms. It’s hard to agree what exactly we’re talking about. The word is slippery, a kind of linguistic Jell-O. The critiques come from left and right, from those who see luck as a mask for privilege and those who see it as an offense to self-made men. Voltaire, with the confidence of the encyclopedist, once declared that one can locate a cause for everything and thus the word made no sense. Others dismiss it as mere statistics, still others as simply a term the godless use for God. It can call to mind an austere medieval manuscript, two-faced Fortuna, one side beaming, the other weeping, ordinary humans clinging to her fickle wheel.
When the RMS Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, some 1,500 men, women and children lost their lives. News accounts told of victims going “down with the ship” or coming to rest in a “watery grave.” However, hundreds of passengers and crew members had left the ship before it split apart, disappeared beneath the waves and settled at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, two and a half miles down. These individuals floated in the sea, buoyed by cork-filled life vests, until the freezing water sucked the heat from their bodies. Although the official cause of death was often listed as drowning, most victims are believed to have died from hypothermia and related causes. In the coming days and weeks, their corpses would be carried by the currents, spreading over a vast area. Some would not be found for a month or more. Others would never be found at all. Today, close to 1,200 Titanic victims overall remain unaccounted for.
It is of course the critic’s bad habit to read autobiography into fiction, but Porter has conjured such intensity here, and such tangibly real characters, that it feels like the gospel truth. This is a book that works both as a tribute to those who died of the cruellest disease, and as a more general lament to love, loss and remembrance. It is profoundly, bracingly human.
I first saw one of the ISMs books in a museum bookstore—the Whitney’s, I think. Pale blue, beautifully made and about the size of my hand, Hirst-isms felt like something I wanted to own, even before I opened it up and began browsing through the quotations by Damien Hirst: “Life’s infinitely more exciting than art” and “If I believe in art as much as I say I do I’m lying; but I do.”
An urgent call to arms and a necessary popular education in one of humanity’s most profound illnesses, Everything is Tuberculosis will stand out as one of the best non-fiction reads for 2025, suitable for almost any reader.
Variations of similar human tensions unite the twelve stories in this collection. In each, at least one character stands out as mastering one or more measure of significance—wealth, talent, success, fame. The people stand out when compared with the American population in general. They live in upscale communities, enjoy affluent lifestyles, thrive in prestigious careers, attend competitive prep schools and top level colleges. Anyone driving through their neighborhoods or attending their social events would be envious. Yet some in those upscale communities are not satisfied with their own lives. In the stories often the most seemingly privileged, apparently at the top in the eyes of others, are most unfulfilled.
Name isn’t a manifesto for a new world, but it’s all the more effective as a work of demolition that makes new manifestos possible.
A lecture, like a poem, can traverse a great distance in a short span. There are, in total, three lectures contained within The Unsignificant. What begins the book is an inquiry—not an answer. Reddy’s questioning allows us to connect his exploration of art to what we want from art and art’s relevance to our experiences. Always curious about how the artist influences us, Reddy directs us to the background in the first lecture, and we find ourselves in this space—the space any poet feels compelled to inspect.
At the highly impressionable age of eleven, I moved with my mother from the smallholding that had shaped my young life and nascent imagination to a wonderful bungalow in the suburbs of Bulawayo. All the houses looked the same—modest single-story abodes tucked away on acres of land and bordered by bougainvillea or hibiscus hedges. All houses that is, save one. The house that broke the uniformity was not a house at all but a castle—a seemingly abandoned, crumbling ruin hidden behind a fortress of never-green savannah vegetation—situated two houses down from where I lived. The entire place was shrouded in mystery for me. Who had built it and why? And, perhaps, more importantly, why had they abandoned it and left it to decay? While I had much curiosity and strong powers of invention, I must not have possessed even a modicum of courage for I never ventured onto the property to steal my way into its cavernous interior, scurry along its secret passages, creep up its decrepit stairwells, encounter its undoubtedly many ghosts and find myself trapped in one of its ancient chambers. However, it was a place that undoubtedly haunted me throughout my life’s journey for it will probably not surprise you to learn, Dear Reader, that after such an auspicious beginning, I have written an African Gothic novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People.
At least, I think that is what I have done. If you type ‘African Gothic’ into your favorite browser chances are that the search will not yield many results that seem pertinent to what you are looking for. You will be encouraged by certain results only to be disappointed when you realize that they point to canonical texts of African Literature onto which literary critics have read ‘elements’ of the Gothic.
For more than 50 years, Ny-Ålesund has housed an international community at the top of the world just 1,200km (745 miles) from the North Pole. Remnants of scientific equipment from the mission which mapped the lines of longitude which define our time zones, still stand at Ny-Ålesund. More recently, Nasa used the base for its satellite lasers and measurements of the Earth's electrical field. Now, scientists from 10 countries live there to conduct their research. For almost three months at a time, they wake and go to sleep in darkness. Their experiments stretch from space to the mysteries of phytoplankton, microplastic pollution, walrus behaviour and alterations in Arctic cyclones.
The need to protect the unique polar archipelago resulted in the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act, which was one of the world's first international environmental protection agreements. But the impact left on this pristine landscape by the researchers is necessary, the scientists say.
The highs of communal dining can be so much higher than when you’re at a private table, the thrill of an entirely unpredictable evening on top of having a good meal. Unpredictability can also bring deep lows. As I left after that recent meal, I realized that while the dishes had been sublime, the story of the night was about the annoying man. But it made me want to return, to gamble another night to see if the company could match the food. What a risk, but what a reward.
At a brief 164 pages, this novel is a stark yet superb exercise of narrative control, equally unsettling and fascinating, worryingly plausible. Harpman provides just enough detail for us to draw our own conclusions about the cataclysmic event that occurred and what purpose these women served in captivity. We relate to our narrator as she reconciles her place as heir apparent to a vast and empty world.
While The Many Lives of Anne Frank is almost too exhaustively detailed, and at times disorganized, Franklin makes a young girl who has mutated into a cultural phenomenon come alive in her own mercurial right. In doing so, she deepens the tragedy of Anne’s end and renders her own book as much an act of devotion as of scholarship. In Anne’s introduction to Version B, she had written, “Neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.” How wrong she was.
Christian Dines' hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move. But the game was switched off and his hands were free. The US-based sustainability advisor had also noticed how, when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or "collect" them, like weapons or power-ups in his game.
He swallowed hard. "I thought, 'what the hell is this?' It was something I'd never experienced before as a gamer," he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines' virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality.
How one navigates and deals with perfidy is one of the questions that Zora Neale Hurston raises in her posthumously published novel, The Life of Herod the Great. A work of historical fiction focused on the story of King Herod and his ties with Sextus Caesar and Marc Antony in the first century bce, the novel required more than 14 years of research and is a text of considerable and sublime genius: a study of how ancient military empires were able to engulf a series of territories through puissance and deceit. But at the root of the novel is something far less grand and more commonplace: What does one do when one is betrayed? How does one gauge and handle treachery?
How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions.
The premise of Rot, Padraic S. Scanlan’s comprehensive, elegantly written, and heartbreaking account of what was surely the most terrible catastrophe to befall Ireland in the modern era, is succinctly expressed in a passage from the book’s epilogue: “The structures that built and justified British imperial power in Ireland meant that in 1845”—the first year of the Great Famine—“the leaders of the United Kingdom could find no other way to explain the worst subsistence crisis in the new country’s short history than a definitive lack of civilisation among the Irish. The empire could conceive of no other useful tools to meet the crisis than the principles of the free market and the workhouse.”
In September 2021, Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh and his team were sailing around the wild and remote Chukotka Peninsula in Russia's extreme northeast. They were hoping to visit Wrangel Island, a well-known gathering place for polar bears, when the weather turned.
"We faced a heavy storm, with super-strong wind and waves, and we tried to find a place to shelter from the storm because the boat was small," Kokh recalls. They sheltered near the rocky shore of a small, uninhabited island called Kolyuchin, home to an abandoned Soviet-era weather station – and made an unexpected discovery.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew, one of the most devastating tropical cyclones in U.S. history, ravaged Elliott Key, Florida. “Most of the island was covered in seawater, and about a quarter of the trees were either toppled or completely broken,” says Sarah Steele Cabrera, a biologist at the University of Florida. “There was not a leaf to be seen.”
At the time, conservationists fretted that the enormous hurricane was going to wipe out the last of the island’s Schaus’ swallowtails (Papilio aristodemus), a species of endangered black-and-yellow butterfly native to southern Florida and now found only on Elliott Key and nearby Key Largo. And the butterfly’s numbers on the island did take an initial hit from the storm. But only four years later, much to scientists’ surprise, the population jumped dramatically. Now, a 36-year-long dataset shows that Schaus’ swallowtails saw similar post-hurricane population bumps after two subsequent hurricanes: Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017.
As a nonflier and a travel writer, I spend a lot of time on trains. Train food, I’ve come to learn, is its own distinct and expansive category. It encompasses prime rib and crabcakes and the tinkling sound of wine glasses shaking in the premier train dining car; railway baron-style hotel restaurants with impeccably marbled rib-eye steaks and raw oysters flown into the Rocky Mountains; harrowingly timed DoorDash deliveries to refueling station stops and microwave nachos from the snack car; and coolers of food brought from home.
I often bring my own food on long train rides: okra stew and crab rice, or perhaps my dad’s spaghetti and meatballs, as well as fruits and cakes, all packed in my trusted backpack cooler, along with an electric travel Crock-Pot that has saved me on many Amtrak trips. But as Amtrak’s California Zephyr looped around Donner Lake on a trip this past fall, I found myself — too tired to pack a meal this time around, and with a delivered bag of fast food as a consolation prize — sharing a meal with fellow passengers, siblings Elizabeth and Leon from Michigan. They had brought food, mostly grown or raised on their small farm: squash, radishes, grapes, boiled duck eggs, homemade bread, and nut mix. They were going camping in California and liked to remain healthy. “We want to know what we’re eating,” said Elizabeth.
I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly married and fresh out of college) crisscrossed America, hunting for small-town cafés, diners, and BBQs, compiling a book that would be called Roadfood.
Back then, to review these unheralded mom-and-pop cafés was strange. Foodies (a term that had yet to be popularized) were interested only in eating at gourmet bastions in big cities or abroad. These Continental restaurants were expensive; they served French or northern Italian food and had waiters wielding big pepper mills.
My father is a man of shortcuts and a mental map of Chicago. He has never needed a paper map or a GPS, has never relied on a cell phone for navigation. He knows how to get anywhere in the city in under twenty minutes, and when you give him an address, he has the easiest route calculated within seconds, and a story to go with it. Sometimes his information is outdated: he thinks a neighborhood is still a Polish enclave when it’s been Mexican for years, or he refers to a recently gentrified area as a Puerto Rican port of entry. But he always knows how to get there, and can usually find a bakery or coffee shop in the area where someone still knows his name. He gets energy from fanning out into the neighborhoods and striking up conversations with strangers. His is the art of conversation, of asking questions and caring about the responses, of knowing when and where to leave the best tips. Maybe this particular brand of education inspired him to push me out of our neighborhood when it was time for me to go to high school.
“Time to grow up now,” he said one day, as he handed me a CTA bus token.
Stories of divorce and the disappointments of maturity emerge, along with a hazy account of the family house the narrator’s parents grew up in, in which all that went wrong with grandmother Beezy “had travelled backwards to infect all the stuff that had happened before, all the way back to their births and before that even, and everything tasted a little bit like sadness”. Bamford shows that what we do and who we are as adults makes the world in which children act and grow – especially those stories in our childhoods from which we have not escaped.
Nature today, Nicolson points out, is “residual, what is left over after what we have done to it. The large and overarching story of English birds in the last century is mournful.” Migrating birds are caught and shot by the million long before they reach our shores. Bird-friendly habitat is eaten up by intensive farming. Even our bird-feeding habits can be harmful, spreading disease and skewing the evolutionary odds against the more timid species. Britain, it seems, is a nation of bird lovers who don’t know how to love. Bird School is not a bad place to start learning.
Great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present: They're both timebound and timeless. And, boy, does Gatsby have something to say to us in 2025.
Paradise lost? Maybe not. When was there an idyllic Times Square, exactly? The historic fantasy of the Great White Way as a glamorous montage of gleaming marquees, sparky backstage romances, and elegant audiences reveling in black tie was a Hollywood concoction, arguably false from the start. The movie that first spawned it, the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical 42nd Street, was, like the Broadway stage adaptation a half-century later, a laundered version of its source material, an eponymous 1932 roman à clef by Bradford Ropes. In the novel, Broadway’s backstage is presented as a sweatshop commanded by sadistic directors and illiterate, penny-pinching producers, many of them sexual predators, who drive the performers and backstage crew to exhaustion and, in one instance, death. The neighborhood they toil in is rowdy and often tough.
Did Times Square make a comeback after that? The advent of sound in Hollywood six years ahead of the Busby Berkeley 42nd Street had already triggered a Broadway decline, knocking the number of new productions down to 174 for the 1932–33 season from its peak of 264 in 1927–28, when The Jazz Singer supercharged talking pictures’ usurpation of the stage as the foremost medium of American mass entertainment. As television caught on in the 1950s, the erosion continued. By the early 1960s, a typical Broadway season would field on average 60 or so shows. Even decades before the pandemic, that number had fallen into the 30s.
Carlstrom’s debut has almost everything: comedy, action, adventure, philosophical musings, banter, alcoholism, crimes, weird cult-y things, and even some modicum of closure. And while the ending is abrupt, it’s also comforting, as well as oddly convincing given the sheer absurdity that precedes it.
Koethe’s new collection looks upward at the most distant galaxies and downward at the inarticulate dead, continuing the central quest of his poetic work, which is examining—between the certainty of death and the unknowability of the universe—the nature of human selfhood, shorn of superstition. As “someone whose only heaven is here,” the poet-philosopher has long preferred “axioms” to “angels” and is interested in how we answer our essential human questions with reason and imagination, apart from religious orthodoxy.
The literary appetite for motherhood narratives is bottomless these days, to judge by the feverish reception accompanying recent titles like Miranda July’s novel All Fours and Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters.
Chantal Braganza’s initial idea – to write a straightforward book of essays on “the culture of motherhood,” she says – would have fit neatly into this ever-expanding genre. Instead, Story of Your Mother is something looser in structure and harder to classify: an expansive hybrid of memoir and essay exploring identity, labour and care, which manages to be both intellectually rigorous and compulsively readable.
A few years after the probes zipped past Titan, Kevin Zahnle, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, was mulling over the moon’s atmosphere when he found himself asking a deceptively simple question about how planets work: “Why is there air?”
Most scientists thought atmospheres around planets—and the odd moon like Titan—were a question of starting materials. If a growing planet gobbled up enough easily vaporized material, it would have an atmosphere. Otherwise, it wouldn’t. Scientists also knew that atmospheres cling to worlds because of gravity, and that the very smallest worlds lack the heft to hold onto air. But then observations of Mars suggested that, surprisingly, it too had lost substantial amounts of air.
Inside the shop, just behind the counter, is a large blown-up photo of a young man whose lower face, neck, shoulders, and chest are covered in thousands of bees. His dark eyes stare solemnly, his naked forehead exposed like a bare moon in a galaxy of bees. I can’t take my eyes off the photo. I want to meet this solemn man, a legend I’ve only read about. Mostly I want to be in the presence of somebody who can speak for bees. Not about bees—I’ve already met plenty of people who can do that. I want to meet the humans who can speak for them. I’ve heard they are in the mountains of Slovenia and in the Himalayas of Nepal. And also right here in downtown Oakland, California.
What Kitamura achieves in Audition is great not only because of the two competing narratives, but because of the interplay between them, and the questions they raise about which (or if both) are performances. How many realities can the narrator be separate from at once, and from how many does she know that she has removed herself?
A woman meets a man half her age at a sleek Manhattan restaurant for lunch. Is he her lover or her son? If the former, then you might expect her to wield the power, like the character of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” Mike Nichols’ 1967 film about a young man who has an affair with one of his parents’ friends. If the latter, then you might expect the young man, Xavier, to wield the power because youth outshines age and parents, for the most part, are willing to go to almost any length to make their kids happy.
In her latest novel, “Audition,” Katie Kitamura exploits all the tension and ambiguity inherent in that opening scene to craft a short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along. Or, to quote Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Tim Bouverie has reverted to a traditional form to present the past afresh. His focus is not on the battlefield, nor on the Home Front, but on the relations between the allies who opposed Hitler. In the foreground are the leaders, especially Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, of course; but there are also walk-on parts for the foreign ministers, the ambassadors, the emissaries and others who participated in their discussions. This is a work of old-fashioned diplomatic history, which provides new perspectives on subjects that seemed familiar. One of its merits is to present the choices that faced the allied leaders as they appeared at the time, rather than with the benefit of hindsight.
Even in December, early mornings are rarely pleasant on much of India's Andhra Pradesh coast. The air is already muggy by 06:30 as a crowd mills restlessly on platform five at Visakhapatnam (Vizag) railway station. However, these would-be passengers are no ordinary commuters, but travellers gathered for an experience. When the Visakhapatnam Kirandul Passenger Special rolls onto the platform, the crowd's relief is palpable; the two vistadome coaches at the back of the train that they've been anxiously waiting to board are air-conditioned.
Indians have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of queues, so a mad scramble ensues as the train comes to a halt. Things settle down as it chugs out of the station and gradually picks up speed. The Visakhapatnam Kirandul Passenger Special also serves as a regular commuter service headed to the town of Kirandul in Chhattisgarh state, about 400km to the north-west, and takes about 14 hours to traverse the distance. But those in the vistadome coaches are interested only in the first leg, to Araku Valley. This serene hill station is about 120km away but takes four hours as the train winds its way through a whopping 58 tunnels cut through the Eastern Ghats. The two vistadome coaches – with their extra-large windows and rotatable seats – are designed to provide panoramic views of the area's mountain peaks and valleys and its gentle forested slopes that end in rushing rivers and streams, gorges and rocky promontories.
Above all, the frames of a comic lend themselves so perfectly to Auster’s city setting and his stories’ themes of chance and loneliness. They bring irresistibly to mind doors and windows; a sense of what lurks unseen beyond apartment landings. Push against them, dear reader, and who knows what you’ll find.
At the Bottom of the Garden, however, is a gothic novel in the old-school mode, a story of powerful psyches contending with the ever-present threat of the supernatural knocking around in the shadows and pushing the boundaries of sanity. Combining traditional set pieces (gardens and forests and bedrooms and other secluded removes from society) with a wryly contemporary narrative voice, Camilla Bruce has crafted a fast-moving modern fairy tale that recalls variously the Brontës, Shirley Jackson, V. C. Andrews, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Lemony Snicket.
“I have so much love for Cohen’s work. I had to do something with it, or the love I had would be incomplete.” So Christophe Lebold told me over Zoom from a small room at the University of Strasbourg in France, where his shaven head, elegant but simple clothing, and intelligent, sensitive face highlighted against the bare white walls of the room helped to invoke a Cohen-esque atmosphere for our discussion. Lebold, who teaches classical and modern literature of North America and Britain and theater studies at the University of Strasbourg, is the author of a recently published book on Cohen called Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall. The book went through two editions in French and was translated into English by the author in 2024.
It is an engaging, jazzily poetic, and erudite presentation of Cohen’s life and work as a modern rock ’n’ roll Kabir, a unique poet of defeat and transcendence, the love of God and the love of women, and the game of seeking enlightenment where only “beautiful losers” win. Lebold wrote his PhD on the songs of Cohen and Bob Dylan and regularly teaches the songs of singer-songwriters like Nick Cave and Lou Reed as literature. His keen powers of analysis and intense interest in his subject are evident on every page, and having taught and written about Cohen for years, I was in awe at how well-informed and up-to-date Lebold is with the available sources.
“I was having a hard time on that trip because I didn’t understand the point of Tokyo without drinking,” she tells me over a video call from her home in Queens, New York, in February of this year, ahead of the release of her new book. “Acting out sexually was a way to escape that.” She takes a reflective pause. “I’m a different person now, you know, just trying to decentre myself. As much as I thought I was a worthless piece of shit, I also thought I was the centre of the universe. I think that’s a common thing in addiction.”
Care and Feeding is a blisteringly candid and laugh-out-loud account of hedonism and heartbreak. It chronicles Woolever’s two decades as a food writer, editor, chef and assistant to two of the USA’s most notorious chefs – Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain – men whose own challenges with addictive behaviour at times seemed to mirror her own. “Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,” Woolever writes, as she sets out her own chaotic journey of misadventures while working in their shadows. It’s common practice for prominent celebrity chefs on both sides of the Atlantic to heavily lean on the work of others when releasing books under their names. “Without the Tonys or Marios of the world, there would have been no book, or TV show or magazine work for me,” she writes. “The flip side of this, that the end products, credited solely to the marquee men, wouldn’t exist without the work of women like me.”
The Beatles remain the world’s favorite story, getting more beloved every year. Their friend Derek Taylor called them “the 20th century’s greatest romance,” but as it turns out, the 20th century was just the beginning.
"It's beautiful," says Corey Tarwater, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in the US who began researching O'ahu's ecosystems in 2014. Sounds like the "cheww-chewww" song of the pale green warbling white-eye and the chattering, almost electrical call of the red-billed leiothrix surround you. "There's really neat lizards around," adds Tarwater. "There's these highly structured forests with these amazing tropical plant species."
For hikers setting out on O'ahu's mountain trails, these are thrilling wildernesses within easy reach of Hawaii's capital, Honolulu, says Tarwater. Yet nothing is quite as it might seem, she adds. "You wouldn't know unless you study them, but if you walk around any forest around Honolulu, there's not going to be one single native plant species there."
For nearly 20 years, I’ve been researching and writing about the human brain as a storyteller. My work has unalterably changed the way I see the human world in general, and myself in particular. It has helped me understand everything from political hatred and religions to cults to the nature of identity and suicidal thought. It has even made sense of my own lifelong struggle with making friends.
Street photographer Rodney DeCroo says he has zero interest—he puts an expletive in there for emphasis, then repeats the phrase for still more emphasis—in photographing “hipsters in $500 jeans” on their way to some punk rock show. He’s also not interested in the “very composed” shots he sees, taken by some contemporary street photographers, “where there’s a tiny profile of a person walking, and there’s a shot of a ray of light coming between two enormous skyscrapers. And they waited there, when they noticed that shaft of light was coming through. It’s all very well done, technically. And a lot of that is about how anonymous and how tiny we are in the face of modern society. And I’ll be honest: it doesn’t interest me that much.”
By contrast—even in reaction—DeCroo is interested in “the guy who, maybe he’s 52, he’s been living on the Drive for 30 years, maybe he’s always been single, and he’s going to walk into SuperValu to get some cat food and some lunch meat to make sandwiches for work tomorrow.”
Imagine yourself in the cockpit of a fighter jet, practicing maneuvers over the desert of the American Southwest. Suddenly your altimeter reading is falling, and you must act quickly. The complex panel of instruments in front of you should be second nature to use, but in the moment of crisis, the panels blur together, and your muscle memory must take over. You begin to make adjustments to solve the problem while simultaneously considering the worst-case scenario. A voice interrupts you, firm but calm, in a soothing alto that reminds you of your mother: “Pull up … Pull up … Pull up,” it repeats, and you do what the voice commands, avoiding disaster.
Sometimes you need to leave a place before you can write about it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel, written almost entirely in South Yorkshire dialect, spans nearly 20 years in the lives of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to the drug spice. It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.
In 2018, staff at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago began to notice something unusual about a male polar bear named Siku. He was losing hair, revealing patches of black skin underneath. Evidently itchy, he was scratching and rubbing himself against his enclosure. Kathryn Gamble, the zoo's director of veterinary medicine, had a hunch what was wrong: allergies.
But what would a polar bear be allergic to? Gamble and her colleagues anaesthetized Siku and conducted a skin test, injecting small amounts of various allergy-provoking substances into his skin. Siku's skin reacted against house mites, as well as elm, mulberry and red cedar pollen. Oddly enough, "one of the things that he initially showed a very strong response to on his skin was actually human hair dander", Gamble recalls.
The novel succeeds as both a satire and a poignant examination of the complex calculations women make when it comes to intimacy — not just as a potential lover but as a friend. Opening oneself up to physical and emotional vulnerability is, in fact, really weird.
Behind all the nonsense and the glamour, it’s easy to forget that Carter was a truly great editor, a natural risktaker and ideas guy, who commissioned Monica Lewinsky to write about her experiences, tracked down the true identity of Deep Throat, and before the world changed and the money ran out, honoured a principle that imbues this joyful memoir: “A journalist’s life in those days [was] just plain fun.”
We are in a trap of economic rationality that has transformed the source of our sustenance into a site for ever more extraction and exploitation. The Commune Form maps a route by which we can begin to reclaim this common inheritance, before we find that it is forever lost.
Problematic is a word currently deployed rather in the way, in Victorian times, cloths were draped over naked statues. When we designate a person, or an event, or a text problematic, we simultaneously indicate its impropriety and choose, politely, to gloss over the details. Signifying disapproval, the word, in its delicate obfuscation, relieves us of the need to specify exactly what disturbs us. As it deflects, it reflects our incuriosity, and the presumed incuriosity of our interlocutors: you need not pay attention, we suggest, because problematic is all you need to know.
At 70, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book, Lolita, is decidedly problematic. It is, after all, a novel narrated by a pedophile, kidnapper, and rapist (also, lest we forget, murderer) who tells his story from prison, who relates his crimes with a pyrotechnic verbal exhilaration that is tantamount to glee, who seduces each reader into complicity simply through the act of reading: to read the novel to the end is to have succumbed to Humbert Humbert’s insidious, sullying charms. Framed by the banal platitudes of John Ray Jr., the fictional psychologist whose foreword introduces the account (“‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”), Humbert’s exuberant voice seduces the reader, even as so many of the novel’s characters are foolishly, sometimes fatally, seduced. What are we doing, when we read this book with such pleasure? What was Nabokov doing, in writing this unsettling novel?
Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.
A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.
All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
Ben Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what’s next?
It’s a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy’s marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college.
If “The Impossible Thing” were a song, we’d call it a banger.
Like Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Belinda Bauer’s 10th novel is a pure pleasure machine, all the moving parts of which are designed to delight. It took a while for “The Impossible Thing” to come together, apparently — previously a book-a-year writer, Bauer has taken four years since “Exit” — but, holy mackerel, was it worth the wait.
But for those with the patience to read multiple accounts of the same failed errand and prepared to appreciate (perhaps to identify with, at least a little) the sometimes terrifying, often bleak and desperate visions experienced by travelers in the dark, this journey into a bedeviled night will repay the effort.
Thomas Jefferson devised his own special way to stay focused on this radical yet simple message of Jesus. He decided, Pagels tells us, “to ‘correct’ the gospels by cutting [the miracle stories] out of his own Bible with scissors, leaving intact only the teachings that he found rationally comprehensible and morally compelling.” On display at the Smithsonian, his Bible is an extraordinary example of the drastic measures sometimes required to stay focused (the cut-out sections of his book are reminiscent of CIA-redacted documents)—an even greater challenge today in our digital media-saturated world. Books like Pagels’s go a long way to help us achieve this focus.
Like Utopia or God—or the nation itself—the Great American Novel is a prophetic ideal that we must not abandon; a means of measuring the height of our imagination and the failure of our reality, a concept that we ever orient ourselves, our boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past but staring ever hopefully towards the future.
In early October 2024, I stood in the shadow of Mount Hum, the highest peak on the Croatian island of Vis, as dozens of European volunteers hauled stones out of the ground. A mix of American blues and buoyant Yugoslavian revolutionary music carried on the breeze. The air smelled like rosemary and rang with the constant smack of axe against stone.
“Is there a hammer over there?” a middle-aged Croatian man yelled at me. I shook my head as I walked to an outdoor kitchen to chop onions. Cooking was the only practical skill I could offer my fellow students at the Island School of Social Autonomy (ISSA), a project cofounded by the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat “that imagines, experiments with, and cultivates forms of knowledge production and sharing that go beyond traditional notions of education and its purpose.”
British writer Karen Powell’s darkly atmospheric second novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” offers a fresh perspective on the talented Brontë family, whose childhoods on the isolated, rain-lashed West Yorkshire moors nurtured their hearts and fueled their imaginations.
The richly illustrated and imagined universe of Rachel Ang’s collection of comics I Ate the Whole World to Find You captures the vastness, the intimacy and the strangeness of human feeling. Across five stories, we follow Jenny – her relationships with the people around her, her past and the tensions in her understanding of self.
This sounded doable. I really did want to be reading more again. Reading had been a core part of my personality ever since I was a kid devouring Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books by the stack, throughout my college years as the only English major to ever actually read everything that was assigned in literature classes, and into my adult life. But my kids were little, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book with more words than pictures. And, I was a novelist, dammit! How could I not be reading?
In 2025, the notion that I should feel bad about eating candy or drinking a can of soda feels particularly outdated. It’s not like this is the 16th century and I have to worry about some overzealous cleric coming to drag me off to a convent in punishment for the sin of gluttony. What I do feel bad about, though, is the idea that there are people out there learning the same bullshit diet-culture lessons I was taught in the 1990s, and feeling actual guilt around the eminently human pursuit of consuming and enjoying sugar — or fat, or salt, or whatever the health bugaboo these “guilt-free” products purport to solve.
When is a novel like an archive? Or is it the other way around? On the most basic level, each represents a storage-and-retrieval system for information and memory. And yet, what does that mean in terms of narrative? Both the novelist and the archivist, after all, are storytellers, seeking patterns in the data and the details they have gathered. Both fulfill a necessarily subjective function in that regard. As Stacy Nathaniel Jackson observes in his first novel, The Ephemera Collector, “impressions aren’t that difficult to manipulate if you try hard enough.”
“Sour Cherry” is beautiful and harrowing. With a writing style that had me mesmerized from the first page, Theodoridou has an amazing talent for storytelling that’s so effective that the ending — while predictable and maybe even unavoidable — still stunned me and moved me to tears.
Rawson’s stated objective in writing this book is: “to interrogate how that shaping has happened, where it hides from view, what its consequences have been and whether uncovering its workings might help us change.” She succeeds in that goal, proffering a fresh understanding of reality – via deep insights into the present and penetrating pointers to a better future.
Unsettled: A journey through time and place results from Grenville’s wanderings through her family history. It is a beautifully written exploration of geography, spirituality and settlement. Those who come to Unsettled looking for the sparks of beautiful characterisation that make history visceral in her fiction, however, may be disappointed. In her attempt to grapple with history, Grenville prioritises a careful examination of the past that is often more concerned with systems of power and linguistic history. This makes Unsettled more of a thought piece than an intimate journey, as Grenville trips across New South Wales and records her observations and research.