As an earnest young physician, I wanted to provide him with a different kind of experience. So I turned away from the computer screen, with its long list of routine questions, and asked, “What gives you purpose as you face your own mortality?”
It had never occurred to me to pose such a question to a patient before—I asked on a whim. In response, Jim reached into his sports-jacket pocket and pulled out a rectangular black leather calendar book. He was, he said, a poet. He handed me the book. Inside were some of his own poems, and copies of verses written by some of his favorite poets—Carl Sandburg, Walter de la Mare—typed out and carefully stapled or taped onto each calendar page. Writing poetry, he said, was one of the main sources of joy in his life. “I’ve always appreciated the verse,” he said, with Shakespearean flair. But it was only in the past few years that he had found himself writing all the time.
Death Valley is both the lowest land in America and the hottest place on Earth. Its ancient salty lake bed, when plundered for its valuable minerals a century ago, gave rise to fringe communities on the edge of the desert and on the edge of life. One of those towns is Death Valley Junction.
The settlement is like nowhere else in California. The old elevated Death Valley Railroad that once carried borax out of the valley to Los Angeles now splinters into the sand. Derelict cottages and sand-beaten mills bake in the sun, looking like they could blow away in a strong wind. The place is in disrepair, save for a lone icon of American eccentricity, the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, that is open for business today, if you can find the lobby.
In her latest publication, Comfort Me With Apples, Valente truly embraces mysteries—not just that of the story she’s telling, but also in the genre she’s playing in and what puzzle box she’s giving to her readers. While this may seem like a domestic mystery from the outside, once you start turning pages, more and more trappings fall away as the true shape of this tale is revealed.
The latest novel from Domenico Starnone wrangles its players into a knot of unease. “Trust” puts the focus on a Roman husband and wife, their work, their passions — and their nagging sense of doom, even as things seem ever more solid. The husband, our narrator, suffers the dread worst. A rising star of academics, his books doing well, nonetheless he feels like a sham.
Psychiatrists call this “impostor syndrome,” and Starnone renders the anxiety so vividly, he raises goose bumps.
It is easy to satirise our digital world of funny cat pictures, insistent acronyms and thundering banality. It is also easy to be uncomfortable and even outraged about the erosion of privacy, creeping surveillance and an easily stoked-up blame culture. It is even easy to be circumspect about tech-billionaires who want everyone to see how big or fast their rocket is. But easy is not good; and Dave Eggers manages to walk a tightrope across multiple incomprehensible things.
I missed them again this year.
I was immersed elsewhere
when the weather broke
and enough rain came.
It was the winter of manatees, Captain
Rhonda and her chartered pontoon boat
floating down the Crystal River. It was the winter