Set the first and last books in Cory Doctorow’s epic, three-book Little Brother cypherpunk saga side-by-side, and they read a bit like a creative writing master class on telling two starkly opposite stories from the same prompt. The common premise: Islamist terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge. Thousands die. The Department of Homeland responds by turning San Francisco into a fascist, total-surveillance police state. The protagonist, a digitally gifted, troublemaking teen, must decide how to respond.
Normally when the beloved children’s author puts pen to paper, the result is something surreal or fantastical. This is the creator of Round the Twist, the author of Unreal, known for writing about things like remote controls that can fast forward or rewind time; bugs that can turn your skin transparent; a long-dead fox that comes slowly back to life after being fed lemons.
For his latest work, however, he has made the move from fiction to reality, with a bittersweet memoir that offers an unexpected new context to his stories, navigated with both humour and sadness.
As we learned when researching “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World,” one of the few places “Hiroshima” did not appear in the year after its initial publication was Russia. That changed this past August, when the independent Moscow publisher Individuum and the online publishing house Bookmate Originals released the first complete Russian translation of the book to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombing.
Dolly Parton is loved for many reasons—the songwriting, the singing, the industry smarts, the cheeky cracks, the homey manner, the beauty, the verve, the hits. She is also loved for being loved, and loved transcendentally. During a red-hot summer marked in part by toppled monuments to slavery and genocide, a petition arose, directed at Tennessee lawmakers, calling for Parton to be pedestalled instead. “Let’s replace the statues of men who sought to tear this country apart with a monument to the woman who has worked her entire life to bring us closer together,” the petition proposed, soon gaining some twenty-three thousand signatories.
The country-music establishment can be about as partisan as they come, a rope line of old-school apple-pie values and unquestioning patriotism. But Parton is a true diplomat. A word like “crossover” scarcely encompasses a singer admired by Vanna White (who says Parton is her role model because she “hasn’t been affected by show business”), Björk (who has called Parton’s twanged crystal timbre “immaculate”), and Nicki Minaj (who nods Parton’s way in a guest verse on Drake’s “Make Me Proud”). A Dolly Parton concert is like a local census, bringing together peoples across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and, miraculously, political affiliation.
Everett’s new memoir, his third, is the story of his enduring obsession with Wilde and how it compelled him to make a film about the doomed writer, a decade-long quest that, though ultimately successful, brought him, at points, to the edge of reason.
In the West, the dominant image of North Korea normally rests on three main stereotypes: absurdity, poverty, and danger to itself as well as the world at large. An example of the first is the North Koreans’ fervent devotion to the ruling Kim dynasty; of the second, malnutrition and stunting; of the third, home-made nukes. These stereotypes are at the core of North Korean reality, and the new book by Andray Abrahamian does not seek to subvert them. However, as the author of a doctorate on North Korea, a sometime co-runner of a small, privately funded, North Korea-focused NGO called Choson Exchange, and a fluent speaker of Korean who has been to North Korea over 30 times since 2010, he does not stick to stereotypes alone.
Grandmother’s pyrohy oozing cherries, the soil
Fragrant with spring,