You don’t encounter the fiction of Joy Williams without experiencing a measure of bewilderment. Williams, one of the country’s best living writers of the short story, draws praise from titans such as George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and Lauren Groff, and many of her readers, having imprinted on her wayward phrasing and screwball characters, will follow her anywhere. But the route can be disorienting, like climbing an uneven staircase in a dream. Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking. For years, Williams has worn sunglasses at all hours, as if to blacken her vision. The central subject of art, she has written, is “nothingness.”
What qualifies as upcycled foods? According to a newly coined definition, they are ones that “use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.” Basically, it means no longer putting agricultural leftovers in the trash and into incinerators and landfills, but back on our plates.
Disgusting? Not necessarily.
In its 1,600-odd years, any number of phantasmagorical vessels have floated down Venice’s Grand Canal, often during regattas or elaborate ceremonies dedicated to the sea. On Saturday morning, a decidedly unusual head-turner took a spin: a gigantic violin, carrying a string quartet playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”
In her latest novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Rivka Galchen reimagines a real-life witch hunt that took place in Leonberg, in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, in the 17th century. The accused: Katharina Kepler, mother to famed astronomer Johannes. In her fictionalized account of a true story, Galchen neatly splits the difference between respecting the record of Kepler’s life and taking careful liberties to build out the world around her.
I do not know the whole allegory from start to finish—
at most a white maculation, vertebrae, chasm, & clatter.