The night I broke my back in a ballet rehearsal was not the first time my own body betrayed me, but it was the first time I realized how I had been complicit in its sacrifice. It was a late-night rehearsal for a piece I was in as a college dance major, a misstep, a falling out of sync with my partner. The steps led me to him but the music seemed to lag, so I jumped late, or he caught me late, and we fumbled in the seconds before gravity took over. In a moment that has cleaved my life in two, I felt a snap down low, where my back was often sore, and before I knew what had happened I was on the floor staring at the ceiling, wanting only my mother. The other dancers’ faces appeared, sympathetic, but I was scared by how acute the pain was, and what it would mean about finishing my rehearsal that night.
That night in the hospital a doctor showed me, with the tip of his pen, the tree trunk of my spine, where two vertebrae had compressed and begun to leak fluid, and where my spine had fractured. My entire pelvis had also dislocated, something that had happened before and has happened since, but not with the same suddenness. I saw the doctor size up my frail frame, noting the fine hairs that had begun growing on my shoulders to keep a starving body warm. But I wasn’t ready to have that conversation for another year or two; that night, all I could focus on was whether I would ever dance again.
After knowing all of this, I don’t feel nearly as weird about saying “diggle dog” anymore. It’s a testament to me and my partner’s bond, and a way to strengthen it.
It’s also a little weird, though.
Barbara Kingsolver’s plump new novel, “Unsheltered,” is about writers and academics, past and present, who can’t hammer a nail. They live in old New Jersey houses that are crumbling.
Life pinches them in other ways. This book’s central character, a laid-off journalist named Willa Knox, asks this question: “How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their 50s essentially destitute?”
“A Mind Unraveled” is inspirational in the true sense of the word rather than in a gimmicky, self-help sort of way. It is written with great verve and wisdom by someone who has closely and thoughtfully detailed his own plight as well as the journey out of it. I found myself reading it obsessively, the better to discover what happens to Eichenwald as he stumbles from one traumatic misadventure to the next while managing all the while to keep his eye on the larger picture. It is a book to take heart from.
Near the still center of “The Blue Fox,” a sleek little enchantment by the Icelandic writer Sjon, a naturalist pauses to watch the sunrise while puffing, unexpectedly, at a pipe filled with “opium-moistened tobacco.” I can’t speak firsthand to the effects of that particular brand of pick-me-up, but I imagine them as very much like those from inhaling any of the four short novels Sjon has published in English since 2013. For the duration of the dose, the given world stands out with heightened clarity, to senses softly dilated, while at the edges trippy flickerings — like “the oldest tomcat in northern Europe” brushing against the naturalist’s foot — sharpen our attunement to all that might be possible. Reality lends weight to imagination, and imagination gives color to reality. The blueness and the foxness, as it were, are mutually stimulating.
From a distance, “CoDex 1962,” Sjon’s newly translated triple-decker, might look like a simple enlargement of the principle, composed as it is of three short novels: “a love story,” “a crime story” and “a science fiction story.” These works were first published at intervals spanning 22 years, so we can track, as the pages turn, Sjon’s abiding interest in history, science and everydayness, on one hand, and folklore, myth and fabulism on the other. Yet in ways small and large, the formulation of “CoDex 1962” departs from that of “The Blue Fox” and its siblings, and rather than toking gently on opiated tobacco, the reader of the trilogy may feel instead as if she’s ingested the legendary substance that crops up in an epilogue: “A fungus that can spread underground to cover an area of 60 square kilometers … probably the largest individual organism on earth.” In short, this book is psychedelic, it’s potent and it wants to consume the whole world.
The epigraph of Jeff Jackson’s harrowing sophomore novel Destroy All Monsters invokes the ghost of Johnny Ace, the first historical rock martyr, an accidental gun suicide on Christmas Day, 1954. Like any number of musicians who died young, Ace’s early demise imbues his music with a posthumous sense of vitality. Whether through violence or accident or overdose, untimely ends yield relevance . . . except for when they don’t. Which variable is more potent: the music or the story? Tragically, the same might be said of the coverage of violence: does media coverage plant seeds waiting to bloom in concert halls, public squares?
“The Poison Squad” offers a powerful reminder that truth can defeat lies, that government can protect consumers and that an honest public servant can overcome the greed of private interests.