Within every terrifying story about a shape-shifting killer clown, homicidal father in a haunted hotel or super flu that depopulates the planet, the relentlessly prolific writer has filled his pages with equally powerful supplies of strength, selflessness and even hope. That may be why so many readers, many of whom discovered his books when they were kids themselves, have remained loyal over 45 years of storytelling.
The author is about to turn 72 as he publishes his 61st novel, “The Institute,” about children who display supernatural abilities being forcibly rounded up for study by a shadowy organization that brutally discards them when their usefulness is exhausted. Those who think of King primarily for horror may be surprised by how much warmth there is in a book that sounds so coldblooded.
Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, Tompkins often struggles to have enough energy for everyday activities like going to the grocery store or to the movies. Even writing, that is to say, anything that requires rigor, whether it’s mental or physical, poses a unique challenge for someone with this condition. What’s left for Tompkins is plenty of bed rest and time to read. But even that is fraught with a sense of guilt — she must learn to embrace and see the value in doing nothing.
These are the sort of biographical details and contextual information dismissed as irrelevant by the new historicist professors she studied under at Yale, and Tompkins’s memoir acts as a de facto repudiation of that mostly defunct school of criticism. One of the book’s main arguments is that the author and the text are funhouse mirrors of one another, both revealing and concealing the other, but so too are the reader and the text.
The wry, singular stories of the US short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg aren’t easy to pin down. Temporally fluid, chatty without being workaday, they don’t rely on plot yet aren’t person-has-thoughts narratives either and are often built from a dizzying array of moving parts. If there’s a secret, she isn’t giving it away, telling interviewers that she considers writing a “holy” act not to be “approached casually”, but also that she writes by “just sitting down and seeing what my hand does”.
Today, Maoism is often remembered in the West as something kitschy — Andy Warhol silk screens, or Shirley MacLaine’s bizarre fandom — but at its height Maoism was one of the most important chapters in the Cold War. Especially in the global South, Maoism contributed to a series of remarkable events, including the greatest debacle of American military history (the Vietnam War), one of the most infamous cases of genocide (committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) and an epic guerrilla campaign (conducted by the Shining Path in Peru).
This history has not been adequately told in one sweeping, accessible book — until now, with Julia Lovell’s “Maoism: A Global History.” A professor of modern Chinese history and literature at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, Lovell has previously translated some of China’s most famous novelists, including Lu Xun and Yan Lianke, and written several books about important historical events or objects, like the Opium War and the Great Wall.
Mountains hued purple
morning light softly serene
forest capped in snow.