Five books about the expedition have now been published; one more comes out in November. I hope a bookshop will display them all together — one story told six different ways.
That leaves my own version, which remains theoretical, at least for now. I’m still turning over my thoughts on my maverick great-great-uncle. I believe there are still parts of his story left to crack.
The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are rather small, and a vanishingly small portion of them have been studied at all, much less by cognition researchers. But the profile of one group of diminutive animals is rapidly rising as scientists discover surprisingly sophisticated behaviors among them.
“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”
It's a book that's filled with seemingly small moments that are actually anything but — Wu understands the human heart keenly, and her novel is a subtle but powerful triumph.
Author Alison Stine maintains eerie calm and quiet here, with just enough blanks left unfilled to leave readers feeling the cringey kind of unease that happens when you’re anticipating something bad and oops, it’s tomorrow. The story isn’t really even dystopian; it’s more futuristic, set in a possible someday time when society is almost entirely feral and the gulf between has and has nothing is as wide as an ocean full of plastic garbage.
Start it, and you can smell the tale from your reading spot.
In Louise Nealon's debut novel, "Snowflake," we are introduced to the world of life on a small Irish dairy farm by Debbie White, our 18-year-old narrator, who milks cows each day and prepares to enter university. While this may sound sweet and wholesome, what lies beneath the surface is anything but.
I sneeze and therefore I am
not of this kindling landscape,