Novels became central to the culture partly because they were the only available art form spacious enough for all the details authors needed to draw increasingly realistic pictures of their characters. But most of all, novels described what seemed the crisis of the modern self. And at their highest and most serious level, they offered solutions.
The sad truth is that the novel now doesn’t occupy the same cultural high ground, and it doesn’t typically feel to readers like a practical device for addressing problems. The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress.
It’s a high-class but increasingly common problem: being a former magazine editor in a digitized world that cares little about whose name used to be on top of a defunct masthead. (A masthead, for those unfamiliar with the term, lists in careful hierarchy the top staff of a publication and is most often printed on paper — which tells you pretty much all you need to know.)
At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015. Overnight Mr. Peres went from two decades spent as a coveted presence at fashion shows and parties in the world’s capitals to a divorced dad adrift in the ’burbs.
In distinct ways, Wiley and Sherald are committed to making black people present in painting: in portraiture, in museums, and by extension, in the American cultural imagination. Through experimentation and by plainly subverting the genre’s conventions, both artists take on this task deliberately in order to bestow dignity and humanity on those who have for centuries been marginal or invisible in the Western canon.
As documents of both the Obamas’ White House tenure and contemporary artworks that challenge tradition, these portraits cement the Obamas’ reputation as powerful shapers of history who are also modern, innovative taste-makers with a brand of their own. At the same time, the entry of these portraits into the museum’s collection represents a significant moment in the institution’s recent sustained effort to evolve longstanding ideas about the nature of American portraiture and its power through time to determine who is inscribed in this nation’s history and who is erased.
“I’ve never said my name on air in the 20 years I’ve been on,” C-SPAN founder and now-retired CEO Brian Lamb told an interviewer in 1998. “We asked a question in our polls a few years ago to see if anybody knew who the interviewers are. Of the seven of us who are regularly on the air, about 2.5 percent of people in the United States knew anybody by name.”
“That’s been our goal all along — to have that kind of feeling for people, that they came in, told their story and we weren’t there to intimidate them or be stars,” Lamb said.
In the late ’90s, it seemed the only place to find certain spice blends, outside of a few villages in India, was the kitchen cabinet of my parents’ house in southern Connecticut. Growing up, I’d aimlessly peruse our pantry, stumbling upon Skippy containers filled with mysterious powders in deep browns, reds, and oranges. A container of fresh masala eternally lived in the fridge crisper drawer. At the time, I didn’t fully understand these ingredients or how, exactly, they arrived in our New England kitchen. I just knew they turned bland pink chicken into delicious brown curries flecked with neon yellow turmeric, and transformed plain cubes of pork into bright orange sorpotel.
Almost every year until my sisters and I hit high school, my family would go to India to visit relatives. Unbeknownst to me, my parents weren’t coming back just with memories of home. They were also bringing back some of its tastes: foods from small villages in Mangalore, seaside towns in Goa, and big cities like Bangalore. They double-bagged masala packets, nearly the size of burritos, and stored them in aroma-concealing containers like pharmacy jars from my grandfather’s medical clinic in Mumbai. Other family members employed more elaborate measures. My great aunt would vacuum-seal her homemade masala and affix a homemade but very slick-looking label, disguising her mysterious sack of red powder as a fake store-bought product called Magic Masala.
If the 22 stories ("& Other Revenges") that make up Amber Sparks's newest collection, And I Do Not Forgive You, were a mix tape, or mix CD, or more contemporarily, a playlist, it would be the kind you'd listen to after a breakup. But also the type you'd sing along with while driving on a perfect summer afternoon. Or that you'd put on late at night, curled up next to your best friend, sharing headphones and a mattress and each other's warmth. Each story feels like it belongs here, but also like it stands alone so well you want to read it on repeat, and while the range of emotions evoked in the collection as a whole is broad, I found myself most often sitting with that indescribable ache that characterizes the bittersweet.
Part-way through this memoir of hospice medicine and living with loss, Rachel Clarke lists a few troubling ideas she prefers to avoid thinking about: global warming, far-right populism, email overload, menopause, declining numbers of bees and, of course, mortality. It’s become a truism that western societies have difficulties accepting death, but Clarke, whose daily work is to ease the suffering of the dying, has a different view. She sees sense in avoiding the contemplation of death, and often applauds her patients for it – right up until they no longer have any choice.
Daniel M. Lavery’s last book, the 2018 short story collection “The Merry Spinster,” was published several days after he came out as transgender. Those stories, rooted in fairy tales and children’s literature and trading in a blend of the wondrous and uncanny, employed a thin veil of allegory to tell a series of narratives about emotional abuse and toxic relationships. Inasmuch as they reflected his personal experiences, it was in the manner of all fairy tales — through archetypes and deep dives into the subconscious.
Lavery’s new book, “Something That May Shock and Discredit You,” pulls away that veil, dealing with his evangelical youth and his life as a transgender man. In pieces that seep through the barriers separating fiction, memoir and cultural criticism, characters wrestle with the consequences of their decisions as well as changes beyond their control. Chief among those characters is the author.