The pack: that’s what they called it. A secret guide, discreetly passed to literary authors in need of money to sustain their ‘real’ art. Compiled by such an author, happy to share their experience of publishing erotica on Amazon, it offered advice to avant-garde writers keen to turn their hand to this lucrative genre.
And that’s what I like about you, non–morning person: your fastidiousness. Your great delicacy of being. You don’t bounce giddily from oblivion to wakefulness, taking it all for granted, confident of finding things more or less as you left them at bedtime. No, no, it’s a change; it’s arduous; it’s real.
Swan’s poetry in A Kinship with Ash gives voice to the desperate edge on which our fellow travelers and we reside, whether animal, plant, or human. The poet focuses on the earth’s ecology and the changing elements in nature. She does not concern herself with rhyme or meter, but chiefly with the content of her message. But this thematic concentration does not detract from the lyrical levels she attains.
What’s more, when Billy saves the life of a rape victim, he finds himself with a surprising confidante and helpmate in his plans for bloody retribution against his ex-employers.
All of this is handled with King’s customary skill at orchestrating suspense, but he also has other fish to fry.
It might come as a surprise to readers of Jackson’s crepuscular fiction (she’s most famous for her 1948 shocker “The Lottery”) that the letters here are mostly breezy and bright, full of droll anecdotes about her four children, driving lessons, many cats, merry overindulgence in cocktails, and endless attempts to lose weight (“i have the whole kitchen wall covered with calorie listings,” she wrote to her hypercritical mother in 1956.) But tucked among these letters are a tiny handful that are so jarringly sad that they detonate on the page, hinting at the source of Jackson’s dark vision. They belie the jaunty persona she presented to most of her correspondents and illuminate the lengths she went to conceal her unhappiness. That many other American women of the Jackson’s generation felt compelled to do the same, gives “The Letters of Shirley Jackson” deeper resonance.
Al Hirschfeld fairly Forrest Gump-ed his way through the celebrated entertainers of the 20th century, whether he was meeting Harry Houdini backstage during a vaudeville-loving boyhood, or welcoming Charlie Chaplin to his Bali abode, or witnessing a young Orson Welles stage an upstart opening that birthed the Mercury Theatre. The man — as artist — seemed drawn like a moth to the fame.
But the remarkable story of Hirschfeld — including the stage and screen history he bequeathed to us — centers on just how many of these stars he drew, and just how many of their live performances are frozen in time through his balletic line.
Eric Garcia’s outstanding book, “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation,” highlights how a lack of input from autistic people “can perpetuate stigmatizing ideas about autism,” which leads to his call to include autistic people in the conversations that concern them. As an autistic mother of autistic children, I couldn’t agree more with the main argument of Garcia’s book: “Society should stop trying to cure autistic people and instead help autistic people live fulfilling lives.”
In O’Leary’s recent photography book, “Record,” she depicts not the high-saturation drama of the political arena, but the “muted purpose” of federal buildings and the unnamed and unnoticed workers who fill them. Her photos are subdued not just in color, but also in mood, showing fragments of government structures up close — an anonymous window, a column’s base, a bucolic vent, a fossil-like handrail — with an enchanting, surprising quietude. In a capital city built to be iconic and singular, her images capture the poetry in the replaceable.
If I shut my eyes to the new dark
I find that I start to experience time
in its purest state: a series of durations
rising and dilating beneath my inwards gaze: