As the name suggests, her pity parties allowed her to wallow in her feelings of sadness and frustration in peace with only her stuffed animals for company. “I would just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling and just feel sad about things that happened and didn’t happen,” said Kelly. “Sometimes I would cry and then fall asleep, but then the next day was a new day.”
Those moments from her childhood in the 1980s stayed with Kelly and when it came time to write and illustrate her chapter book “Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey,” she knew she needed to include them in the story. A scene in which the young Marisol lets out her frustrations while alone in her room struck a chord with readers. “Whenever I give talks, there are always kids in the audience who are just nodding and saying ‘me too,’ ” she recalled.
To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses. Repetitions in particular rise instantly to the surface, and they give the translator particular pause when there is more than one way to translate a particular word. On the one hand, why not repeat a word the author has deliberately repeated? On the other hand, was the repetition deliberate? Regardless of the author’s intentions, the translator’s other ear, in the other language, opens the floodgates to other solutions.
I don’t remember getting married. It’s not that I was drunk or anything. I simply wasn’t there—I was sound asleep, 4,400 miles away. Thankfully, my groom’s sister was gracious enough to marry him for me.
In 2020, many couples discovered the charms of alternative ceremonies—the intimacy of a backyard wedding, the giddy conspiracy of elopement. It’s almost better with the excess and commercialism whittled away, they said on social media, the ceremony distilled down to its heart—two people in love, together. But what happens when the bride and the groom can’t be together for the wedding? Not even over Zoom?
What does hold everything together here, fittingly enough in a novel so much of which takes place in a bookstore, is the connection made through reading; and one of the great charms of "The Sentence" for an avid reader is the running commentary on books — recommendations, judgments, citations, even, at the end, a "Totally Biased List" of Tookie's favorites. As she tells us: "The door is open. Go!"
Travel writing seems to reward the young and agile. Have any of Paul Theroux’s recent books felt as ferociously urgent as his first? Later-life collections can find a once-intrepid (or at least tireless) scribe ready instead to ponder a bad knee or worse service at a restaurant, or generally to lament what once was or could have been.
Charles Hood, a Southern California writer now into his 60s, certainly has regrets. There’s his original decision to major in English long ago, a divorce of more recent vintage, choices he made as a father or teacher. But from these difficulties emerges the fascinating core insight of his new collection, “A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat”: that what appears to be ugly or awful can, with the right knowledge and context, be seen instead as unique, even gorgeous.