My faith first wavers in the train station parking lot. It’s not really even a station—there’s no ticket booth or shaded bench, just a scythe of pavement cleaving the railroad tracks, a half-flight of concrete steps, and a gravel dugout. The train from Paris was an inrush of rolling farmland and blazing expanses of mustard and the dancing specular light of phone screens on the train car’s ceiling. The connecting station had a ticket machine, an espresso machine, and a vending machine that dispensed wedges of fresh Comté. Winding farther into the countryside, every house had a trampoline in the yard. All this bucolic wonder and you could still be bored. As we pulled into the village, I saw a pair of listless children sitting on the sun-drenched mesh of one, inhaling the scent of warm plastic.
I look for habits. Would they wear habits? Lots of nuns, I read on the internet, have updated their wardrobes to include cotton skirts and tasteful khaki chore coats. A few even wear denim, to better identify with the common man. They’re invested in volunteering and protesting and cave-aging small-batch cheddar. I chose Benedictines because the order has a tradition of hospitality, and because the names of the abbeys are beautiful: Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Our Lady of Grace.
This growing body of evidence is beginning to rewrite our assumptions about death. If life can persist—or even reorganize itself—after clinical death, then what exactly does it mean to die? Perhaps this “twilight” zone isn’t an end point, but a hidden stage of life we’ve only just begun to understand.
Nock Loose is a fascinating weird book written by a very gifted person. In their scathing and hilarious Author’s Note, ‘cretin by habitat’ Patrick Marlborough avers that Australia is ’a deeply humourless country with incredibly thin skin … stretched tight over an atavistic ever-thrumming nastiness’. The result? ‘Danoz Direct, JB Hi-Fi, highway tolls, Chris Lilley, Barnaby Joyce etc.’ And now, happily, this book is their wildly entertaining, go-for-broke response to the ‘inevitable curdling of our violent colonial origins, the barbarousness of which is ongoing’.
Life is hard but books like this – books that are funny, romantic and heartwarming – remind us that it’s pretty wonderful too.
Cancer was no longer a shameful obscenity but a rallying cry. Shattering the silence was undoubtedly progress. But with this shift came new metaphors – and new expectations.
You can tell men’s cycling isn’t a serious sport because the “Big Six” athletes come from four small nations—Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Slovenia—with a combined population of 38 million. Meet the rogues’ gallery of minor European whiteness: Remco Evenepoel, Wout van Aert, Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel, Primož Roglič, and Tadej Pogačar. Add the top women and you at least get one Italian, the excellently named Elisa Longo Borghini, and possibly a Pole, the dashing Kasia Niewiadoma. But in women’s cycling the top ranks are if anything more dominated by the vestigial organs of Westphalian sovereignty, the Benelux countries. Unquestionably the best three women, the frenemies Demi Vollering, Lotte Kopecky, and Lorena Wiebes, hail from Belgium and the Netherlands. Is there any other global athletic endeavor whose competitors are only becoming more white and less international?
To love cycling of all sports in 2025 requires a hard look at yourself, and perhaps some special pleading. As a white guy of a certain age—with knees too old to keep running, too much pride to join the old folks at the pool, and newfound disposable income to blow on carbon fiber and lycra—I fit the profile.
“How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?” asks the narrator of Girl, 1983, Ullmann’s latest novel, now translated into English by Martin Aitken. The book seeks to answer this query by recasting personal writing as a conversation between recollection and amnesia. For the protagonist of Girl, 1983, this relationship is intensified by competing desires: to recover the lost shards of a painful adolescent memory, or to let them fade into oblivion.
There’s a real sense of trepidation in these later chapters but there’s also a beautiful feeling of hope; a belief in the unending power of simple human kindness. It’s an incredibly ambitious novel and Stiefvater pulls it off with admirable ease, weaving together themes of class, war, love and wonder.
What does it mean to lead a good life? How far should a person be willing to go to help others and make the world a better place? Ben Brooks brings a practiced, light touch to these profound questions, which drive his new novel, “The Greatest Possible Good.”
What's compelling about seeing the story of Lemire's work life unfold is the tremendous creativity he has sustained over time, which shows no signs of slowing down. He describes a creative practice of juggling multiple projects at once, an approach that counters the trap that many artists fall into when they hit a wall on a major project. He speaks candidly, too, about the depression and anxiety that has plagued him since his youth. It's making comics, he explains, that brings him back to himself when he feels most unsettled.
While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison’s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison’s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison’s novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams’s interest lies in showing how Morrison’s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing “explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader”.
I used to think everyone who read books also re-read them. I was surprised, once I was an author, to discover that there are plenty of book lovers who once they’ve read a book never pick it up again, no matter how much they love it. I don’t think such people are wrong—we have limited time, and there are always new books beckoning—and yet I can’t help but feel that such people are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures, of picking up a book which you already know from both personal and previous experience that you are going to love.
Perhaps my family was exceptional in its love of conversation, but all families are, to some extent, learning spaces for how to talk. This is the paradox of growing up. Language is learned in the family; it solidifies our place within it, but it also allows us to move beyond it, giving us the tools to widen our experience with people very different from ourselves.
With a sweet tooth that often leads me to scan the dessert menu before the main course, I find myself calculating exactly how much room to save. Fortunately for sugar lovers like me, restaurants worldwide are elevating desserts from an afterthought to the main event.
These aren’t bakeries, but upscale establishments and bars devoted entirely to multi-course dessert dining.
So in some ways, despite being the fifth Trainspotting spin-off so far, Men in Love makes perfect sense as a novel in 2025: old rope in a contemporary culture made mostly of old rope. It displaces 2002’s Porno as the original’s most direct sequel, taking place in the immediate aftermath of the drug deal/betrayal that closes it out.
Despite its elegiac tone, in Absence there is an underlying philosophical wave of hope. Ernst Bloch saw art and literature as vital for encouraging hope and envisioning a better future. For Bloch, hope was an existentialism. Art and literature are powerful tools that allow us to express our human desires and to push towards a better lived reality. This idea of absence—of what’s missing—this loss isn’t necessarily only the end of something. For our narrator, these reveries and ruminations lead to new understandings, new connections. This loss becomes an echo, a ripple, that reaches out and connects the disparate cast of characters in this book—an interconnected ensemble cast, using moments and fragments to build a mosaic of emotional resonance. It shapes, and reshapes, understanding, grief, and identity.
If I couldn’t trace my fish back to the source, what could I learn if I switched directions? Could I follow a salmon from net to plate?
Hoping for traceability, I scanned a QR code on a package of “Responsible Choice” frozen sockeye. It opened the grocery store’s home page.
Flummoxed, I bought chicken. And vowed to learn more.
Hong Kong, 1941. Newly-wed Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn floated into Victoria Harbor on a Pan-Am clipper. She was to cover the Sino-Japanese War for “Colliers Magazine,” and he was the unwilling companion, or U.C., lovingly nicknamed by Gellhorn. Though she noted in her memoir, “Travels with Myself and Another,” that he was also “better at the glamorous East” than she, “flexible and undismayed.” Hemingway was fresh off selling the movie rights to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” At the height of his fame, money in his hand, and ripe to live like royalty. The Prince of Hong Kong, as it were, albeit for a couple of months.
We come to this Pearl City with his footprints in our pocket, ready to discover where he planted them.
“All history is contested,” Tessa Hulls writes early in her extraordinary graphic novel/memoir, “Feeding Ghosts.” “Evidence exists as a field of dots. And we connect them according to what lenses we employ to examine the past.” To this she appends, “But there are unequivocal facts.”
The line captures the story that Juneau resident Hulls, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category, deftly and beautifully weaves in this story of how histories, both global and within families, shape how we are formed and what we become.
The stories anatomise how technology and, particularly, social media distort its characters’ view of themselves, but the collection also emphasises their culpability in this degradation.
“I know that anything I’ve lost,” one character suggests, “has been given away freely.”
This is a spellbinding book by a skilled writer. The result is a read that’ll have you in its thrall from start to finish. The Bewitching is a resounding affirmation of Moreno-Garcia’s talents as a horror writer and offers an inventive merging of witch lore from two different North American traditions.
Here is the past, drawn without sentiment, but also without judgment, something of an achievement in our violently sententious times. Warm and inspiriting as well as delicately painful, it surely heralds the arrival of a big new talent in the world of the cartoon.
For several years now, I have been reading these early theorists, thinking that their vision of geological and evolutionary time might give me a context for understanding not just the age of mountains but something more current. It’s one thing to hear of the millions of years it took the Andes to rise; it’s quite another to hear that, in mere centuries, the oceans may reach levels of acidity not seen in 300 million years, or that the earth is the hottest it has been in the past 125,000 years. These days, geological forces, formerly the stuff of earthquakes and volcanoes, have escaped the confines of deep time to present themselves daily, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
In the 1980s, as Americans were swept up in a fitness craze and growing obsession with personal wellness, self-betterment projects extended from the outdoors to domestic interiors. Bathrooms in particular got larger and larger (some large enough to do cartwheels in), as did bathtubs and showers. Interior designers promoted renovating one’s bathroom to feature the latest high-tech gadgets and encouraged people to reconceive of these spaces as “luxury spas.” These architectural changes imagined that media practices and hygiene practices could seamlessly coexist. Over time, bathroom culture expanded well beyond basic hygiene.
I can trace my personal descent into what science journalist Ed Yong calls “birder derangement syndrome” back to when I started referring to myself as a “sewage lagoon aficionado.” It wasn’t just that I had taken to setting my alarm for 4 a.m. during spring migration to be in position just in time for the peak dawn chorus, or that I was cancelling all non-bird-related social engagements in May, but that I had started planning vacations around proximity to wetlands and sewage lagoons to maximize roving insect populations, which translate into bird sightings.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to be what some might call a “normal person”—waking up at civilized hours, going to the movies, and wearing something more presentable than ultraviolet-safe hiking pants with a bird-themed T-shirt, trail shoes, and a Tilley hat. But I’ve realized that I’m at my best when I’m birding: curious, my sensory antennae on high alert, attuned to the nuance and detail of the world around me, fully present. I agree with Yong that birding is “more meditative than meditation.”
Thanks to Edmond Albius, an unsung Black botanical genius on the French island of Réunion in the 19th century, vanilla literally flowered. And thanks to Gaëlle Bélem, the Réunionese novelist long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Albius’ remarkable story has found its champion.
She was still so new to the sport that she barely knew the rules of competitions. Floating on the surface before her first official dive, she asked the judge whether she should submerge before the judge finished counting down or after. “She was like, ‘Read the rule book!’ ” Burnett recalls, laughing. But she performed well during the tournament, reaching 65 meters.
That same judge told her, after she had completed her dives, that she ought to try for the U.S. women’s free diving team. Athletes must apply to compete in a world championship, and the deadline was imminent. “I was on a high,” she says. “I was like, Oh, f— it, I’ll just sign up.” She was startled when she was one of four women chosen for the U.S. team.
After working as a critic for various publications in the UK for over a decade, I was haunted by the desperate look in the eyes of the hundreds of performers I’d been sent to review, a look that fell somewhere between pleading and confrontational. I held an unsettling suspicion: that people who make art are usually desperate for the approval of critics, yet sometimes they don’t—or can’t—think of critics as fully human.
“A Marriage at Sea” is an enthralling account of a partnership in extremis, and of how the commonest hazards of married life—claustrophobia, codependence, boundarylessness—become totalized amid disaster.
Castillo is a writer of razor-sharp acuity who takes seriously the sinister instrumentalisation of storytelling, in a world increasingly veering right. As a novel of ideas, Moderation contains terror enough to keep you reading, and looking for signs of the nightmare its author has taken the time to document.
“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” These questions about our place in the world, famously asked in an 1897–98 painting by French artist Paul Gauguin, are as relevant today as they were at the turn of the last century. And, in the ambitious spirit of Gauguin’s beautiful and controversial masterpiece, Lucas Schaefer’s much vaunted debut novel The Slip raises issues of race and entitlement, as well as the malleability of identity, all in one big, sloppy, and occasionally gorgeous package.
Nothing is harder to find these days than quality time with oneself. We are always trying to run away from ourselves, chasing a million distractions. Yet the solitude we crave and, perhaps, dread, is right within our reach, within a moment’s capture. In An Island to Myself, Michael McGregor, in luminous, evocative prose, reminds us why it’s worth our while to embrace the present and seize the day. Maybe even on the island of our choice.
The heart of an empath beats behind every page of The Roma: A Traveling History. The book is, first and foremost, a critique of stubborn stereotypes and historical crimes against the ethnic group known variously as Romani, Travelers, Zigeuner, and by other names. It provides a useful overview of the political and legal mechanisms behind institutionalized racism and ethnocentrism against the Roma in Europe. But at its core, this book is an ode to Madeline Potter’s people and culture. Her upbringing in a Romani family during a time of upheaval—as nomadic traditions are eroding rapidly in the face of globalization and technological advancements—lends an important authenticity and lived experience to her writing. The book rests on a foundation of her nostalgia for those years and her desire to celebrate and revivify her heritage.
It’s clear how much Lee cherishes his connection to Martha’s Vineyard, a place that’s easy to love. And in these pages, he’s crafted a must-read for anyone who seeks to know the island with depth that extends well beyond its superficial myths.
Truth is, we don’t know how the Tree of Life will fall, and we don’t know when. It could happen in five years, in 40 years, or tomorrow; perhaps, as you read this, it has already happened. But we do know this: The Tree of Life has led a singularly strange existence.
On the one hand, I am aware that every generation complains that the kids who come next are doing everything wrong and have gotten stupider and less respectful. I fear falling into this trap myself, becoming an old man yelling at cloud.
On the other hand, with every new story, I find myself asking: … Can the kids read, though?
In Havoc, Waits mines the rich seam of girls’ school fiction to delirious and rewarding effect. There are welcome echoes of St Trinian’s – the shade of Alastair Sim hovers over the staffroom, comforting and anarchic at once – and there is abundant Ealing comedy in the madcap chases through school corridors and machinations in the lighting gallery during the school play. Yet beneath the comedy lies a distinctly unsettling undertone: the girls experience a convincingly visceral terror that edges towards Shirley Jackson territory and gives their hysteria an extra dimension. This, along with a genuine unexpectedness in the characterisation and a lot of very funny dialogue, loosens things up and brings real originality to the game.
In 1950, during her junior year at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich attended a reading by Robert Frost, then in his mid-70s and comfortably exercising his rustic poet persona. Afterward, in a letter, Rich gushed to her parents that the acclaimed poet “talked so acutely and honestly about poetry that I sat there swelling inside with a great and joyful assent.” That reaction epitomizes Rich’s lifelong, single-minded dedication to the craft of poetry, which was, as Hilary Holladay writes in a preface to her The Power of Adrienne Rich (published in 2020 and newly released in softcover by Princeton University Press), “as close to a religion as anything she would ever know.”
Technically, the evidence is circumstantial. Pipes with cannabis residue were dug up in Shakespeare’s garden, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Shakespeare is the one who put them there. (Hey, maybe they were planted in his garden by Sir Francis Bacon, right?) So Professor Thackeray, being a smart and thorough scientist, decided to obtain conclusive proof. He asked the Church of England for permission to exhume Shakespeare’s corpse and run the necessary tests in order to answer, once and for all, the question of whether Shakespeare smoked pot. Guess what the church said. No way, not a chance, that’s not a question they want answered.
But if Shakespeare was a stoner, he faced a thorny dilemma. On the one hand, he enjoyed using drugs and wanted to include depictions of drug use in his plays. On the other hand, he didn’t want the church to ban his plays for immoral content. So how did the greatest writer of all time resolve this dilemma?
How is it possible that a bioweapons accident that killed dozens was kept secret for decades, even in the Soviet Union? As the Washington Post reporter David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand, his history of the Cold War arms race, the answer lay in the nature of the weapons themselves: “Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists.”
Unlike a missile silo, easily distinguishable from the air, a laboratory where bioweapons are being developed doesn’t look that different from a benign medical laboratory. Unlike nuclear warheads, which leave clear radiological traces in their silos and are unmistakable in their use, a weaponized pathogen and the outbreak it would cause could be difficult to discern from a naturally occurring one, giving any attacker plausible deniability.
In impish yet tender style, Irvin thoughtfully explores what it means for a mother to care for a daughter in a world where male violence is everywhere. Life Cycle of a Moth is the very best kind of fiction: with the book open, you feel utterly transported; once you close it, you see how cunningly it holds a mirror up to reality. I can’t wait to read whatever Irvin writes next.
After a somewhat slow start, the action in the novel speeds up as the story advances, and the end approaches with multiple twists and surprises.
“It is surprising to think that I have had Parkinson’s for almost 30 years. For most of that time I have been remarkably well,” Smith writes in the acknowledgements. “But this disease takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady and I will miss him.”
The spectres that haunt our dreams and hypnagogic states are unreal, but they are also vivid manifestations of what troubles us, Akbar concludes. Acknowledging that is not a cure for the vulnerability that night ushers in, but it is a step towards allowing a little light into the darkness. This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours.
I used to love my Teflon pans. I crisped tofu, fried latkes, and reduced sauces to sticky glazes in them, marveling at how cleanup never took more than a swipe of a sponge. Then I started to worry that my skillets might kill me.
You think you want a cheese with pedigree. The kind that reeks of washed rinds, that crunches with tyrosine crystals, that bears the name of a tiny European village in delicate, old-world type. But what you actually want — what your body, your cravings, your Fourth of July grill night wants — is ooze.
Ooze like only American cheese can provide. And yes, I mean that American cheese: the creamy, melty, ultra-processed stuff you grew up with and now pretend to be above.
Ní Chuinn’s stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren’t their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history.
These stories — which were published between the mid 1950s and early 1990s — touch on loss, exile and the distance between people who are intimately connected. They are vital and lively, but not maudlin.
In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the “pistol” emoji, supposed to represent a “handgun or revolver”, does not show either: instead you’ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it. No doubt this change contributed significantly to a suppression of gun crime around the world, and it remains only to ban the bomb, knife and sword emoji to wipe out violence altogether.
As Keith Houston’s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political.
John Warner’s examination of the relationship between writing and artificial intelligence is, indeed, about more than words. Much more. While it provides a sometimes dizzying amount of information about both the promise and limitations of artificial intelligence, it ultimately deals with something infinitely more basic: the nature of our humanity.
Price works in a mode that he calls “urban panorama”—a sociologically rich realism that depicts the tensions of city life. “Lazarus Man,” though it is written in this way, is unlike anything else he has published. The novel is animated by the explosion of a Harlem tenement building and the confusion and collective soul-searching that follow, but it’s not a “thriller,” Price said, sounding proud to have written a book in which, as he put it, “nothing remarkable happens.” Composed of snapshots and fragments, it’s told in a mournful and introspective style that subverts, or mocks, the comfortable arc and resolution of a police procedural: there is a mystery (a man who went missing after the building collapse) and a cop (named Mary Roe) who is trying to solve the case, but Price is uninterested in her pursuit. He explores, instead, her reckoning with aging and divorce.
Billy Mitchell, the most knowledgeable and masterful Pac-Man player ever to drop a quarter in a machine, is a hard man to find. When I asked one of his best friends, Walter Day, the best way to get in touch with him, Day told me, “First I spend an hour praying to God, then I visit a psychic, then I place a classified ad, then I hire a plane to carry a banner that says CALL ME BILLY! and make it fly all over South Florida. Because he might be anywhere.”
After some seventy phone calls, I manage to arrange a meeting with Mitchell at Ricky’s, the restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, that he took over from his father in the mid-1980s. Mitchell is probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time. When the Guinness Book of World Records first included a listing for video games in 1985 (discontinued in 1987), Mitchell held the records for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time. In 1999, he achieved the Holy Grail of arcade gaming, executing the first-ever perfect game on Pac-Man. The feat requires navigating 256 boards, or levels, and eating every single possible pellet, fruit, and ghost, for the highest score of 3,333,360, all without dying once.
This convenient, catch-all, somewhat mysterious product may be divisive, but you can’t deny its staying power. From no-effort whipped cream substitute to “healthy” dessert base endorsed by fitness influencers, Cool Whip has shape-shifted through the decades to meet America’s cravings.
The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.
Identity politics can be summed up by the old New Yorker cartoon – why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else? The most interesting aspect of the argument here is the stress on having no identity, not having a different identity. There is something appealing about existing in a state of positive provisionality rather than deracinated neutrality, though it might require a degree of sanctity to achieve it.
As you read this, there will probably be a cup of tea going cold on Veronica Pullen’s kitchen counter. Every time she wants a cup, Pullen makes two, one milkier than the other. She drinks the milkier one (she likes her tea lukewarm) immediately. She lets the other one sit for 40 minutes before drinking it once it has reached optimum temperature. It is an efficiency – albeit a tiny one – that she has been perfecting for two years. A copywriter and online trainer, Pullen, who is 54 and lives on the Isle of Wight with her husband and their chihuahua, says it takes her five minutes to boil a kettle, so she saves five minutes with every other cup. Over 24 hours, that adds up to 20 minutes saved. Across two years? She has clawed back slightly more than 10 full days.
Pullen is just one of many people incorporating microefficiencies into their daily lives. There are people who brush their teeth in the shower; lay out their clothes the night before to save time in the morning; boil hot water for the day first thing and keep it to hand in a flask. But are these small, savvy streamlinings that shave minutes (sometimes, just seconds) off a task merely fun life hacks? Are they a symptom of a snowed-under society? Or are they indicative of an obsession with productivity?
Fear is rarely rational or proportionate. Occasionally we fear genuinely dangerous things (guns, say), sometimes we have entirely irrational fears (balloonsor dead birds) and other times our fears may be part of our evolutionary inheritance.
I saw my grandmother across the street when I was in line for a free ticket to a fancy talk by Annie Ernaux. I had never heard of Annie Ernaux before this afternoon, but I did always relish the exhilaration of standing in a queue—perhaps even slightly more, depending on the weather, than I enjoyed seeing my dear grandmother.
While many historical fiction novels focus on the battlefield, Dear Miss Lake uses the war as a backdrop for a more lighthearted, compassionate story — not about soldiers on the front line, but about the civilians holding everything together at home.
If you consume too much true crime it starts to infect your routine. Let your dog off the leash in any lonely overgrown place and you’ll start to worry she’ll come bounding out of the undergrowth with a body part in tow. Maybe that’s my personal fear, but Joyce Carol Oates taps straight into it with the gripping, disgusting and darkly comic opening to her latest novel, Fox.
Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.
The first Superman strips were written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, and published in Action Comics magazine in 1938 by DC (or National Allied, as the company was then called). And in those, he was a far more unruly, and in some ways far more modern character. He was "a head-bashing Superman who took no prisoners, who made his own law and enforced it with his fists, who gleefully intimidated his foes with a wicked grin and a baleful glare", says Mark Waid, a comics writer and historian, in his introduction to a volume of classic Action Comics reprints. "He was no super-cop. He was a super-anarchist." If this rowdy and rebellious Superman were introduced today, he'd be hailed as one of the most subversive superheroes around.
In the end, the journal isn’t a practice in narcissism, but a practice in attention. To keep a diary is to say: I am paying attention to my life, and I believe that it matters. That might be the most radical act of all.
In the book’s physical edition, the reader chooses which half to read first by flipping the book over. (Both the electronic and audio versions put the novella first.) Really, readers should begin with the memoir: It is both better and makes better sense of the fictional part. The novella—consulted second—acts as a kaleidoscopic lens on the first part, adding complexity and color to the memoir’s narrative. But this is no binary divide. Both sections play with form, both are filled with philosophical reflections, both resist linear narrative as they explore our messy desires, compulsions and repetitions. This is a looping Möbius strip of an inquiry, unyielding to easy resolution.
We were in Central Park after dark scanning the shadows for movement. Every now and then a rabbit, raccoon or rat scurried by. But they weren’t the animals we were looking for. Suddenly, sirens punctuated the quiet as emergency vehicles sped along a nearby road. The park’s only resident pair of coyotes began calling as if on cue. We listened to their yip-howls, grabbed our cameras and hurried to the nearest lookout.
Central Park’s ghost dogs are famously good at hiding, but their loud howls enabled us to find them on a nearby lawn. Romeo and Juliet, as we’ve come to call them, were out in the open bonding affectionately with each other. Romeo, the smaller of the two, playfully lay on his back with his paws in the air, much like a domestic dog looking for a belly rub, while Juliet licked him on the face. Something caught Juliet’s attention, and she looked up, flashing her alert, amber-brown eyes. Romeo stood, and his upper coat—a mix of gray and brown with reddish hues—became visible. They trotted off together, and we photographed them while admiring their perky ears, long legs and bushy tails. Soon, they disappeared into the darkness.
Yet arguably the novel's biggest impact has been the conversations it has started. Women, especially, have pressed the book eagerly into the hands of friends, sisters, mothers, strangers, urging them to read it. Many have called it life-changing. Some have hated it. But everyone who reads this book has something to say about it.
Taking on a big book is making the time to relax, but also to think in the longer term and commit to something bigger. So many people picking up bigger books and reading them with others is a sign that we want to look forward, to think deeper, and to seek community and connection. Sounds like a hot summer to me.
The journey started with a train to Paris, arriving at Gare de Lyon. I decided to take an Uber to the airport. That was super interesting, because Uber drivers always like to chat, and when you’re sitting in the car and say “I’m going to Antarctica for a year” they just look at you, with the three backpacks, like, You’re not serious, right?
At the Paris airport, I met some of the French crew for the first time. We flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, (with a layover in Singapore) and that’s when I really connected with the other two women going to Antarctica. We sat next to each other, discussing things like, “How is it going to be?” “What did you pack?” “Did you take more clothes than they’re giving us?” “Do you have special equipment?” It was a chat about everyone’s strategies, what we did, what we had, if we took medical supplies from the lab.
Everyone is searching for something in Kyoto: the “real Japan,” a moment of Zen, the perfect shot. What they find amid the rising tide of tourists is something else — a modern conundrum with no obvious solutions. Tokyo and Osaka are big enough to soak up tourists in the same way New York and London can, but Kyoto is hemmed in by mountains, which keeps the city from expanding. (There are 1.4 million people living in Kyoto today, as many as there were in 1975.) It also makes the glut impossible to ignore.
Like a summer vacation, “The House on Buzzards Bay” moves at a languid pace showing the calm, restful days at a beach house, until those peaceful times take an abrupt turn.
Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr became chair of Condé Nast, the magazine group owned by his father’s media company, Advance Publications, in 1975. Under his stewardship, Condé’s roster of glossy publications – titles such as Vogue, GQ and Glamour – broadened to include Architectural Digest, a revived Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Newhouse spent big in pursuit of clout, and his company’s extravagant approach to expenses became the stuff of legend. Condé positioned itself as a gatekeeper of high-end living but, as Michael Grynbaum explains in Empire of the Elite, its success in the 80s and 90s was down to its willingness to embrace “low” culture.
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the collectors, the enthusiasts, who want to keep, save and preserve: “Nequid pereat,” they might say, “Let nothing perish.” Then there are the others, already on the phone to the skip-hire company. Lally MacBeth is firmly of the former persuasion. If you’re of the latter, The Lost Folk might make you hyperventilate, so crammed is it with places, practices and stuff. The word “save” appears many times. So indeed does the word “skip”, as in “saved from a skip”. But persist, because you might see the culture of the UK in an unexpected light.
Let’s call it writing for its own sake. Not only because it is a book of poetry—my first form, my first love, both text and subtext of so many youthful notebooks of secret writing—but also because of the circumstance of its release. No one will ever be able to buy this book, or to review it. No one will ever recommend it to a friend. Such mechanisms are rendered moot, inoperable, by the very nature of its creation. For me, this has become almost entirely the point. To be freed from the apparatus, the machinery of publication: It represents a liberation. It brings me back to a condition of…innocence is not the word I want, but maybe artlessness. It recalls the ways I wrote when I was young. It reminds me that before I ever thought about engaging with a reader, I had to write first for an audience of one. To explore, of course, the febrile nature of the language, as well as my relationship to it. But also, equally essential, to activate a conversation with myself.
Claire McCardell hated being uncomfortable. This was true long before she became one of America’s most famous fashion designers in the 1950s, her influence felt in every woman’s wardrobe, her face on the cover of Time magazine.
As a young girl growing up in Maryland, she hated wearing a dress when climbing trees, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t wear pants with pockets like her brothers—she had nowhere to put the apples she picked. At summer camp, she loathed swimming in the cumbersome full-length stockings women were expected to wear, so she ditched hers and went bare-legged in the lake, even though she knew she’d get in trouble. When she was just starting out as a fashion designer, in the 1930s, she went on a ski trip to New Hampshire and one evening saw a woman shivering in a thin satin dress. Why, McCardell wondered, couldn’t an evening gown be made out of something warmer, so a woman could actually enjoy herself?
I simply looked out the window with a natural, recurring, reflexive interest at the field where the cows liked to stand and occasionally walk, very rarely run, and when something I saw struck me, I made a note of it. Was it communication before it was published?
So, don’t let the bright summer colours confuse you; this is a book about friendships, grief and the reality of long-term relationships. You’ll tear through it, but you’ll still have to pause from time to time to have a bit of a cry.
Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It’s a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the “real” world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it’s hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness.
Whether you believe in ghosts or you scoff at the idea of a spirit world, this novel will satisfy your cravings with lots of hair-raising moments and one or two moderately-explicit eyebrow-raisers, along with an intriguing back-story that includes a bit of mystery. But it’s not all boo-who: author Clarence A. Haynes injects enough excitement and humor to keep even the most sober-minded reader entranced with a plot that’s twisty fun.
The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.
The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.
Moving to Paris made my cheeks hurt. After a decade since I’d last worked in France, I found myself back in the land of one of my ancestors’ other colonizers. My Broca’s area could still conjure the language easily enough. But the fast-twitch fibers in my orbicularis oris had atrophied, making the physical production of French’s extra vowels sounds more labored and slower than I was trying to talk.
Not far from one of Milan’s last remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door, sandwiched between shuttered storefronts. Cross the threshold, and you’ll enter a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is Il Meneghello, the workshop of some of Italy’s last known great tarot artisans.
Inside, on the register, is a portrait of its original owner, Osvaldo Menegazzi. While tarot may be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it was always first and foremost about the art. Before his death in 2021, he had become world-famous for his painstaking, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world’s most ancient and storied tarot decks. His desk, a mess of paints and materials, is just as he left it.
The summer of 2023 was all about tomatoes, but not in the way you probably envisioned. Tomatoes became more than just a seasonal cooking staple — they became an aesthetic, an online trend and a way of life. Tomato Girl Summer paved the path for the eponymous Tomato Girl, a young woman who dons flowy dresses and silk headscarves à la Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe while embodying a picture-perfect lifestyle filled with scenic walks along the Amalfi coast and afternoon feasts of antipasti. Red is a core color of the Tomato Girl’s wardrobe, but certainly not a requirement. Her overall aura is bright and blushing with ripeness, much like the juicy produce.
A year after its inception, the “tomato girl” enjoyed a resurgence, this time with literal tomatoes.
Rigorous yet casual, funny and fierce, intimate and formidable, Pause the Document invokes the documentary impulse and turns it back on itself in ways that are seriously playful and deeply enjoyable.
“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.
What makes Shattered Lands remarkable is not just the breadth of its archival reach or the linguistic range of its interviews (from Bengali to Burmese, Urdu to Konyak), but the way it reframes south Asia’s history through the lens of disintegration.
When I first heard Britney Spears, I was five years old, escaping interminable reruns of the Twin Towers collapsing to dance to “I’m a Slave 4 U” with my sister in her bedroom. She was 11 years my senior; it had not occurred to me until then that she was anything other than a babysitter, much less a dance partner, a friend, someone with whom I could share a cultural touchpoint. Waiting similarly bridges this gap. Maybe things are worse now, or at least the charade of promise has disintegrated, but isn’t clarity the first step toward change? When the dust from the car chases and the haze from weed settle, we find Jeff with his own marquee, trumpeting a simple truth: not much is different, but everything could be.