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.