The imposition of a single time for Bombay was, from the outset, a thorny, charged issue that rankled the city’s pride and resurfaced repeatedly over a century. Bombay University was one of the arenas in which this battle unfolded. In April 1883, at a meeting of the University senate, the 40 or so attendees, including city officials, judges, and professors, debated: What time should the newly minted clock tower keep?
Forster didn’t dare usher readers further into his lovers’ future other than letting us know that they end up together. Dreaming up their material lives through the fateful years that followed would have sullied the idyllic “ever and ever” he’d suggested at the close of his book.
Enter: “Alec,” by William di Canzio, a novel that aims to both complete and complement “Maurice” by picking up Forster’s characters and thrusting them into the muck-riddled trenches of the Great War.
When I first heard about Woebot, the digital psychotherapy service, I scoffed. To me, a geriatric Gen Xer, phone therapy with Alexa sounded as impersonal and unsatisfying as phone sex with a stranger. I was similarly skeptical opening “The Very Nice Box,” a workplace satire that hinges, in part, on a millennial seeking e-counseling by app. But it turns out that the novel’s authors, Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman, are linguistic magicians, and their sparkling debut manages to expose the hollowness of well-being jargon while exploring, with tender care and precision, how we dare to move on after unspeakable loss.
While events in the past year have left some hoping for a “return to normal” in the coming months, others must continue to cope with a very different day-to-day life, including those affected by the consequential uptick of mental health crises. So how do we collectively and individually begin to confront the reality of our situation and move forward? This is perhaps the overwhelming question weighing on the protagonist of Emily Austin’s debut novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
The true horror of “The Other Black Girl” is that there is an undeniable truth in it. Black people must choose between tolerating an office culture that wants us to change, or working to change that office culture at the expense of job security and social rejection. And Black people must reckon with the fact that while there are many Nellas in the world, there are also many Hazels: those who are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that there is no “other Black person” in the office. While many people dread being tokenized, there is a quiet horror to the idea that some people actually enjoy it. By the end of Harris’ novel, Black readers will be forced to ask this hard and singular question: Which one are you?
Spy thrillers have always had a complex relationship to history. Even the most escapist fantasies rely on familiar backgrounds like World War II or the Cold War to supply context and credibility, raise the stakes and, most important, provide the villains. Yet, being popular fictions — at least that’s the hope — spy stories naturally push against fact as well, rewriting history, whether as wish fulfillment or what-if, worst-case scenario. In “The Cover Wife,” Dan Fesperman charts a different, braver course, working his fiction seamlessly into the facts, writing his characters into the past and weaving his story into the warp of history’s nightmares. The result is a sharp, smart novel that hits fast and hard, its reverberations echoing after the last page is turned.
show me how to make fun things
or happy accidents How to open up sis
‘s dolls, see how she blinks without a life