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”.