Like Utopia or God—or the nation itself—the Great American Novel is a prophetic ideal that we must not abandon; a means of measuring the height of our imagination and the failure of our reality, a concept that we ever orient ourselves, our boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past but staring ever hopefully towards the future.
In early October 2024, I stood in the shadow of Mount Hum, the highest peak on the Croatian island of Vis, as dozens of European volunteers hauled stones out of the ground. A mix of American blues and buoyant Yugoslavian revolutionary music carried on the breeze. The air smelled like rosemary and rang with the constant smack of axe against stone.
“Is there a hammer over there?” a middle-aged Croatian man yelled at me. I shook my head as I walked to an outdoor kitchen to chop onions. Cooking was the only practical skill I could offer my fellow students at the Island School of Social Autonomy (ISSA), a project cofounded by the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat “that imagines, experiments with, and cultivates forms of knowledge production and sharing that go beyond traditional notions of education and its purpose.”
British writer Karen Powell’s darkly atmospheric second novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” offers a fresh perspective on the talented Brontë family, whose childhoods on the isolated, rain-lashed West Yorkshire moors nurtured their hearts and fueled their imaginations.
The richly illustrated and imagined universe of Rachel Ang’s collection of comics I Ate the Whole World to Find You captures the vastness, the intimacy and the strangeness of human feeling. Across five stories, we follow Jenny – her relationships with the people around her, her past and the tensions in her understanding of self.