Hot tea — it has to be unhealthily hot — has a deep emotional relationship with the drinker. Its dimensions encompass far more than the gustatory, starting with its magical ability to get chronic malingerers out of bed every morning. That first chastising sip constitutes a tiny tour de force of hope that, like a tingling hot bath, cauterizes other pains. Those grieving the loss of a loved one have found that hot tea can seep into places that, to quote poet William Wordsworth, "do often lie too deep for tears."
It's hardly surprising, then, that it's not just tea drinkers who are addicted to the seductions of hot tea — writers are, too. Across tea-drinking cultures, in China, England, India, Russia, Egypt or the U.S., writers have milked hot tea for all its worth to add a splash of narrative panache to comic or erotic scenes or to build mood, momentum and character.
The New York City to which Frank Lloyd Wright returned in late 1926 was dramatically different from the metropolis he had encountered in 1909, but its evolution was not a mystery. The dramatic skyscrapers, the stock market, airplanes, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, radio, and even organized crime, which gave the 1920s their fame, did not appear from nowhere. All had developed from the preceding decades. The risk was large, but for greater New York, still barely 20 years old, “the ties that bound—subways, bridges, schools, amusement parks, police, theaters, jobs, water, public health, Tammany, the excitement and pride of living in a great city—overmatched the innumerable antagonisms and kept them with bounds.” Squinting at risk, its citizens might assume “so far so good.”
I have seen so many posts across various websites and Facebook groups this week all centered around one theme: wedding photography. Wedding season is well and truly upon us and I guess that everyone who’s getting married this summer has already booked their photographer. But their guests who are getting married next year or the year after? They’re the ones probably starting to think about who’s going to photograph their big day. And it’s a huge decision to make.
So why this article? What has riled me up so much that I feel the need to write about it?! Well to start with, I am not nor have I ever been a wedding photographer. So I’m not touting for business. But when people book a photographer — any kind of photographer — I want them to get what they’re paying for. I love value for money no matter what your budget. But certain threads and posts written recently by professional photographers make me think that not everyone has the same standards and that really winds me up.
Like many funny novels, “How Not to Die Alone” is influenced by the adage that humor equals tragedy plus time. We root for Andrew to come clean and connect, as much for his benefit as our entertainment. He will, of course — the book’s title tells us as much. But Roper aspires to more than a yuk-yuk sitcom resolution. He wants to show that Andrew can’t live authentically until he reaches back and confronts the heartbreak that derailed him in the first place. It’s a risky proposition for any novelist, particularly a rookie, but when Roper makes it work, the payoff is tremendous.
“Eden of dangerous things,” the novelist Lauren Groff once described Florida. Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote of the “ground so rich that everything went wild” — not least the writers themselves. What other state so reliably produces such rowdy, uninhibited imaginations? Hurston, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Alissa Nutting, Laura van den Berg, Jennine Capó Crucet. They have created a literature full of mirages and (actual) sinkholes, poised on the hazy borders between man and nature, ripeness and rot, tragedy and gag.
And life and death, in the case of Kristen Arnett’s “Mostly Dead Things,” an irresistible first novel set in the hard sunshine and “juicy green” of Central Florida, featuring a family of taxidermists, suicides and ruthless intimacies. A clan after Diane Arbus’s very heart.
May 31 marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, and the best present we could possibly receive is Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The connection between the Good Gray Poet and this young Vietnamese immigrant may seem tenuous, but with his radical approach to form and his daring mix of personal reflection, historical recollection and sexual exploration, Vuong is surely a literary descendant of the author of “Leaves of Grass.” Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal.