But when I got an email a few weeks ago confirming I had qualified for an elite start I’d coveted in the New York City Marathon — with a time logged just before the pandemic — my excitement quickly turned to dread. This Sunday, I’ll probably run the slowest marathon of my life.
We can make good things happen over the course of 60 minutes. Or as the poet Mary Oliver might have more elegantly put it: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious hour?
One may read a sentence, write a sentence, be sentenced. The word’s meaning is informed by power: who wields it, who is subject to it. In Louise Erdrich’s dazzling sentence-soaked new novel "The Sentence", a woman named Tookie grapples with how the claims of the past – lineage, brutality, love – come to shape and illuminate the present.
Victoria Chang’s “Dear Memory” comprises words and illustrations that illuminate Chang’s path back into time. In a series of letters addressed to those who play a part in her memories, she explores with tenderness and compassion the ways that all of us construct our stories of what lies both in our family’s past and in our own lives.
K.M. Jackson's new How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days is a rollicking rom-com full of fun, complex characters, laugh-out-loud one-liners and the kind of delicious banter that keeps you smiling from page one to the very end.
Also, let's not forget that the main character is on a mission worthy of any Keanu Reeves fangirl or fanboy worldwide.
In his new book, The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination, Philip Ball argues that “the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas.” These stories, which “everyone knows without having to go to that trouble” of reading them, have “seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood.” Modern myths — of which Ball identifies seven, starting with Robinson Crusoe and ending with Batman — are not, despite their origins in specific texts, so much singular narratives as “evolving web[s] of many stories — interweaving, interacting, contradicting each other” — but with one thing in common: “[A] rugged, elemental, irreducible kernel charged with the magical power of generating versions of the story.” This fecund capacity to produce new narratives is what allows these myths to do their “cultural work”: they “erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears and dreams.”
Maybe you are not
wake up yet. Today is another