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.