I’m called a writer, or often more specifically, a mystery writer. But the truth is that I think of myself primarily as a storyteller. And as a storyteller, I believe I have a sacred duty, a sacred promise to fulfill. Homer states it beautifully in his epic Odyssey: “Sing in me muse, and through me tell the story.” I believe the best stories come from a place deeper than our conscience thought, and as storytellers, we’re simply the vessels for the telling, channels for the greater truths.
In the past 40 years, more and more scientists have probed the phenomenon. Yet despite almost half a century of investigation, researchers still don’t agree on what’s happening during NDEs, or whether they can be explained at all. Some attribute them to hallucinatory flights of imagination, the last gasps of a dying brain. But others are exploring what NDEs may unlock about our understanding of human consciousness — and the possibility that it continues even after our bodies and brains power down.
There were times when I could only drag myself in three-day-old clothes to stand over the counter, knife in hand, inelegantly dice an onion, dip it in salt and devour it with white bread — a combination that still produced a burst of freshness and sensation so acute that it made my teeth ache. On days like that, just glinting through the tears wrung out by these pungent talismans, once believed to guard us from otherworldly evils, gave me a jolt of vitality. Tasting the stinging sharpness felt as if I were borrowing a bit of their aliveness, at a moment when mine couldn’t be found.
That afternoon, diners got the full buffet experience, and the scene appeared shockingly normal. People lined up at the carving station, waiting for a sliver of Wagyu, a hunk of prime rib and a slice of brisket. They scooped up individually plated, split rods of bone marrow waiting to be slurped. The space between the guests was less than six feet.
Nearby, mountains of crushed ice were sheathed in dozens of pounds of stacked crab legs, shrimp, oysters and scallops on the half shell, lobster claws and snow crab.
It is not incorrect to say that, for years, the way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether. It is not incorrect to say that we hardly invoked her name or told stories about her.
Kat Chow’s memoir, “Seeing Ghosts,” is a memorial to her mother delivered in a graceful, captivating voice. Like several acts of tribute to the dead in this book about grief and family, immigration and ancestors, it’s accomplished long after the loss that it marks. Chow’s mother died of cancer 17 years ago, when the author was only 13 years old. The passage of so much time hasn’t dulled the ache. A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is.
Atticus Lish’s second novel, “The War for Gloria,” is, by and large, a monster — solemn, punishing, kinetic, in easy contact with dark areas of the psyche, and yet heartbreaking in its portrait of a mother and son facing her mortal illness.
The stories are not flawless, and the achievements of stylistic originality, the shocks, often come at the expense of heartfelt connection with characters, but honestly, in this case, it’s more than a fair trade-off, to be pierced and thrilled again.
The universe is changing. But scientists didn’t realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that they’re hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.
In his new book, “Flashes of Creation,” Paul Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago.