If God says no pork, how does He feel about a very persuasive forgery? And if only beef from the forequarter is permitted, how will observant Jews parse meat grown in a lab, no bones and no quarters at all? How do you bleed an animal with no blood or slaughter an animal humanely if there’s no slaughter? And if you give up meat for Lent, what constitutes a cheat?
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow's debut novel, is one for the favorites shelf. It will lead you on a journey through books within books, worlds within worlds, mysteries within mysteries, until, finally, you reach a deep breath taken after a perfectly satisfying last page. Your breath. The last page of the book in your hand. The kind of last page that bewitches your fingers and, yes, you are turning again to the first page before you've decided whether you'll reread the whole book now or just turn to a favorite part. There will be favorite parts.
Even knowing how it ends, reading again is fresh delight.
Allison has an eye for artistic affectations, nicely lampooning Sean’s simpering art school teacher and an enthusiastic critic from Frieze magazine, but he allows Sean’s passion for art to ring true. The book reflects both on how art can represent the body and how it makes itself felt through our bodies. Visiting Tate Modern, Sean makes Janet stare so hard at a Bridget Riley painting that she grows dizzy and has to clutch his chair for support. Who is dependent on whom?
What if there is no larger significance to anything we do, anything we think, anything we write? In her 2013 story “Cowboys,” Susan Steinberg teases the reader with just this possibility. “There is no intentional metaphor in this story,” her narrator insists. “There is no intentional meaning in this story.” This is typical for Steinberg. Over three books of short stories and a new novel-in-stories, Machine, she has continually given voice to narrators who painstakingly resist the definitive. They make frequent use of the conditional tense, wondering how things might unfold were such and such a thing to occur. They tease us with the possibility that what they said happened might not have really happened or might have happened differently than they said it did. And finally, as in the quote above, they dare us to find meaning — any meaning — in the stories they tell us.
While no one will be surprised to find these kinds of arguments playing out about immigration or the importance of NATO, finding it among staid physicists — and about the nature of physical reality — might not be so expected. But all too often over the last 100 years, this has been the case, as scientists have disagreed sharply over the meaning of their greatest and most potent theory known as quantum mechanics.
That's the fraught territory best-selling author and physicist Sean Carroll dives into with his new book Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. What makes Carroll's new project so worthwhile, though, is that while he is most certainly choosing sides in the debate, he offers us a cogent, clear and compelling guide to the subject while letting his passion for the scientific questions shine through every page.
Among modern art’s pantheon of -isms, “Surrealism” alone remains in everyday use. One doesn’t have Fauve experiences or Cubist dreams. And if one did, the sensations might in any case be described as surreal. Yet, perhaps because it was never strictly about form and attracted so many ponderous theorists, Surrealism is notoriously difficult to define. As Sue Roe ’s “In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, From Duchamp to Dalí” shows, from the outset, the movement’s meaning and conception were fluid.
Like success in the old saw, Surrealism has not wanted for fathers. Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray and André Breton might, to varying degrees, take credit. How are we to judge their claims to paternity?