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.