I first came across the work of the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah when I was studying for field exams in post-colonial literature, in 2009, and what I remember most is the way his writing short-circuited my scathing analytical response, which had grown to monstrous proportions. At that point in my graduate career, I couldn’t get through a page of fiction without scrawling a mess of question marks and exclamation points and inane comments in the margins. But I sank into “Paradise,” Gurnah’s historical novel of colonial East Africa, published in 1994, like a person who still knew how to read for pleasure. My clearest memories of the book have to do with its sensory richness, its flashes of eroticism, and the protagonist’s dreamy interiority—though the novel’s evocation of a web of multilingual communities that are threatened by an encroaching colonial monoculture insured that I had lots to note down once I picked up my pen again.
The indie-pop duo, who've been a couple as long as they've been a band, travelled to Ipswich and made a movie about breaking up.
"We went from a day full of joy to an abandoned house full of cockroaches," says singer-songwriter Anthony West.
"And we spent the next week arguing on film," adds his musical and romantic partner, Josephine (Josie) Vander Gucht.
The story only gets weirder from there.
There is no denying that in his Tokyo Trilogy Peace has built an intricate labyrinth. But it gets better, easier to navigate with each rereading. Rewarding the reader generously in ways other, easier, books cannot.
That's the thing about a Gothic novel: It has to walk the line between horror and romance and not flinch away from either. The Death of Jane Lawrence is up to this task, even as it descends into a sort of frenzied madness as Jane's grasp on reality weakens and the haunting of Lindridge Hall threatens to consume her whole. By the time the book reached that point of no return, I was so invested that I would have followed Jane into the very depths of hell.
Michael Nava has set his eighth Henry Rios mystery novel in 1986, a year that seems both distant and familiar. The pandemic raging then was AIDS — a virus deadlier than COVID-19, if somewhat harder to catch. What should have been a simple public health emergency became a battlefield in the culture wars, because AIDS initially was seen as a “homosexual disease.”
At age 60, “edging toward the mid-to-late autumn” of his years, Tucci finds that food — specifically, the way food connects him to the people he loves — means more to him than show business. A handful of celebrity co-stars make cameos in “Taste,” but only because they happened to be sitting across from him at a memorable meal. This book focuses on Tucci’s more intimate food experiences: the eggplant parm hoagies his mother packed in his childhood lunchboxes, the coq au vin he ate on his first date with his first wife, Kate (who died of breast cancer in 2009), magnificent breakfasts on German film sets (“Someone please employ me there again”) and how he is passing family culinary traditions onto his children, one salami sandwich at a time.
Sutton Foster understands the power of time-consuming hobbies, especially those that yield tactile results. In her charming memoir, the two-time Tony Award winner and star of TV’s “Bunheads” and “Younger,” shows how projects involving colored pencils, epoxy glue and — chiefly — yarn have helped her cope with heartbreak and stress, including backstage spitefulness, tabloid voyeurism and a painful relationship with her agoraphobic mother.
An architect draws a watercolor
depicting two people about to enter
a meeting room, while someone
on the stairway gazes through windows