This year, I turned 30, a development that came with a breathless sense of dread at time’s passing. It wakes me up in the early mornings: Nocturnal terror breaks through the surface of sleep like a whale breaching for air. My ambition and fear kick in together until I get up, pour myself some water and look out the window at the squid-ink sky and the string of lights along my neighbors’ houses. I lie down again after finding firmer mental ground, dry land.
So when a guy that my friend was seeing evangelized about “time slips” — a genre of urban legend in which people claim that, while walking in particular places, they accidentally traveled back, and sometimes forward, in time — I was a ripe target. Curious and increasingly existential, I Googled these supposed time slips. I found a global community of believers building an archive of temporal dislocations from the present. These congregants gathered in corners of the internet to testify about how, in the right conditions, the dusting of alienation that settles over the world as we age can crystallize into collective fiction.
The result is not so much a novel of ideas as a novel of concepts. That’s not a criticism — “Termination Shock” manages to pull off a rare trick, at once wildly imaginative and grounded, and readers who go in for this world-building will likely leave with a heightened concern for all the ways in which we are actively making the planet inhospitable. Like T. R. Schmidt’s sulfur gun, this novel is both a response to a deeply broken reality, and an attempt to alter it.
If you’ve ever tried counting sheep and found yourself, rather than dropping off, wondering if there might be some kind of design underpinning the leaps and bleats of your woolly friends, Tom McCarthy’s new book might be for you. “The Making of Incarnation,” the British writer’s fifth novel, is an investigation of pattern and connection set in the world of motion studies. And lest that sound dry, rest assured it also asks such big questions as how can you fake zero-gravity love-making onscreen? and what happens if you put a bobsled in a wind tunnel?
When she isn't writing best-selling novels that explore Native American life, Louise Erdrich runs a bookstore in Minneapolis that sells Native literature and art. Her latest book, "The Sentence," combines her interest in both a shaggy-dog ghost story that unfolds over a year in a city scarred by the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.
Tishani Doshi’s fourth volume of poetry, following 2018’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, marks a transition in her exploration of growing and aging as a woman. Where her earlier work focused on the internal and the bodily, A God at the Door reinvents the ancient equation of femininity and the natural world in order to address the intersections of female experience and a larger set of issues, including aging and mortality, war and poverty, environmental disasters like climate change and the pandemic, and legacies of racism and genocide.
I am your leader
and I can’t answer