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Thursday, April 4, 2019

Heaven Or High Water, by Sarah Miller, Popula

“Sunny day flooding” is flooding where water comes right up from the ground, hence the name, and yes, it can certainly rain during sunny day flooding, and yes, that makes it worse. Sunny day flooding happens in many parts of Miami, but it is especially bad in Sunset Harbour, the low-lying area on Miami Beach’s west side.

The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900; in the 2000 years prior, it did not really change. The consensus among informed observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13 and 34 inches by 2050. By 2100, it is extremely likely to be closer to six feet, which means, unless you own a yacht and a helicopter, sayonara. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do so more quickly.

Thus, I felt the Sunset Harbour area was a good place to start pretending to buy a home here. Amazingly, in the face of these incontrovertible facts about the climate the business of luxury real estate is chugging along just fine, and I wanted to see the cognitive dissonance up close.

The Colors Of Our Dreams, by Jesse Russell, Claremont Review of Books

Blue remains the favorite color of Westerners, who most prefer to be dressed in navy (once a symbol of rebellion, now a symbol of conservativism and boating club seriousness). Color may change its meaning and its symbolic association, but the underlying structure of reality built (and then painted) by a Divine Creator remains a firm constant throughout time and space—the protests of postmodern blue devils notwithstanding.

Learning To Love The Worst Commute In America, by Devin Murphy, Literary Hub

My life has made me four different people. Three of which I love. I’m a father of three, a creative writing professor, and a novelist. The problem is I could not figure out how to do all these things in the same place. So when I leave the house to go to teach my classes, I have to travel from my home in Chicago through the heart of Illinois, to Peoria, 182 miles away, essentially making my fourth role in life that of a long haul trucker.

The deal is my wife made it clear she wants to live near her family in Chicago. She has built her own company, and my children get to grow up doted on by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a built-in community who love them. To have a dream job of working with vibrant, passionate young writers, I drive to a classroom that is very, very far away. When I started doing this I was not a father with the bone-deep knowledge of how hard childrearing is and how painful missing any of it can be. When the kids came, instead of staying overnight as I had planned, I began doing round trips, spending six hours a day in the car several times a week, and this has become my routine, for the last seven years.

When Did America’s Heart Turn Cold On Buffet Chains?, by Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox

Chicken wings aren’t good, yet the ones at Ponderosa Steakhouse in 1999 were delicious. The chain of buffets was founded in 1963 by Dan Blocker, who played Eric “Hoss” Cartwright on Bonanza, and enjoyed its peak popularity when TV Westerns were still big. Ponderosa was the name of the ranch on Bonanza. When I was 5, as I was in 1999, I did not care about these facts — I had no concerns at all, personally, and Wikipedia did not exist, generally — but I deeply cared about Ponderosa Steakhouse. I begged to go there.

Most of this love affair was actually with the ability to play grown-up and select my own food and carry my own stuff — and serve my own ice cream! — but I stand by it. A buffet is a glamorous idea; it provides you with the otherwise difficult-to-accomplish joy of eating many small servings of many different delicious things all at the same time, regardless of whether they are meant to be served together. Yet the Ponderosa Steakhouse in Canandaigua, New York, is now a parking lot for a Starbucks.

How Should A Millennial Be?, by Madeleine Schwartz, New York Review of Books

“The great millennial novelist”—the mantle has been thrust, by Boomers and Gen Xers alike, upon the Irish writer Sally Rooney, whose two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners both appeared before her twenty-eighth birthday. With this mantle have come prizes and money. Nearly every review has mentioned at least the prizes.

The Deeply Wacky Pleasures Of Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explode”, by Katy Waldman, New Yorker

Such verbal raptures may ensorcell seventh graders and leave older readers occasionally feeling that they need to lie down. But the fecundity of Alison’s writing is of a piece with her larger mission: to turn narrative theory into a supersaturated mindfuck of hedonistic extravaganza. It is a special kind of literary criticism that can make the reader appear to herself a prune, or a prude. For Alison, reading is “motionless movement.” Her book takes the shape of a roller coaster.

Metropolis By Philip Kerr Review – The Last Outing For Bernie Gunther, by Adrian McKinty, The Guardian

Wonderfully plotted, with elegant prose, witty dialogue, homages to German Expressionism and a strong emotional charge, this is a bittersweet ending to a superb series.

'Boy Swallows Universe' Is A High-stakes Coming-of-age Story, by Ellen Morton, Washington Post

“Boy Swallows Universe” hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak. The events of Eli’s life are often fatal and tragic, but fate and tragedy do not overpower the story. Eli’s remarkably poetic voice and his astonishingly open heart take the day. They enable him to carve out the best of what’s possible from the worst of what is, which is the miracle that makes this novel marvelous.

In ‘Chronicles Of A Radical Hag,’ Women Find Their Voice Thanks To A Comatose Columnist, by Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post

The title might put you off: “Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes).” A little cutesy, a little long-winded. But even if Lorna Landvik’s latest novel might also be described as a little cutesy and a little long-winded, it has substance and purpose.