Maybe this is what literature is now: the author as entertainer; where Dua Lipa has a book club; and where cooing over Zadie Smith in a 500-capacity tent on the Welsh border is normal activity for the literary parvenu. Demur if you must: why should novelists have to explain themselves to a coterie of drunk fans in cardigans? One visit to the green room, where the novelists and déclassé journalists are having as good a time as the audience, provides its own answer.
As the severity and frequency of climate change–amplified events increase, the way we communicate about them will need to become ever more sophisticated. What that means in practice is employing a variety of approaches, from highly aestheticized photographs to more personal approaches to classic reportage.
Part historical novel, part gothic tale, part mystery, The Spirit Circle celebrates the unconventional ways that communities can form, particularly among women, and the way that a desire to protect these connections can lead to powerful consequences.
However, photographers will not be able to do that alone. Editors, art directors, and curators will need to step up to their responsibilities to commission and seek out work that harnesses photography’s power to evoke emotion and empathy, helping us understand the urgency and existential nature of the crisis we find ourselves in.
Into this crowded field steps Jan Gradvall’s “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” a book that does not, in fact, tell the story of ABBA. Gradvall forgoes the standard band-bio form and opts instead for a rangy study of the group’s origins and legacy. It is a wise choice, and not just because there isn’t much to add to Palm’s seven-hundred-page opus. A band composed of two couples who got divorced and then chronicled the fallout in their music (if more obliquely than, say, Fleetwood Mac) may seem like a piquant subject for a biography, but the group members’ consummate professionalism and fierce protectiveness of their private lives have made it hard to fit their story into any of our received genres. There is surprisingly little melodrama or tragedy to draw on: just four co-workers.
Edward White has pulled off an unusual experiment in his biography of Diana, Princess of Wales – the life of one of the most famous women in history captured entirely in long shot. There are times when his resourceful use of contemporary Everyman diaries and interviews with insightful nobodies provides valuable historical insights, and others when it’s a bit like reading a profile of Lawrence of Arabia from the point of view of the sand. Only occasionally does the real Diana, the practised superstar I lunched with in New York six weeks before she died, break out of the suffocation of mass perceptions and cultural analysis.