The very act of travel appears to throw up thorny questions about the suitability of the genre. Any long-haul flight, Atkins remarks, “can plausibly be described as an act of violence” due to the carbon implications. His contributors, unlike Buford’s (whose magazine cover featured a glamorous woman and a pilot with suitcases disembarking a plane), were “discouraged from flying” and the issue’s title — Should We Have Stayed At Home? — does not beat about the bush. The answer hanging in the air of “yes” might seem to “cancel” the whole literary genre.
Gonzo journalism was an attitude, an experiment, and a withering critique of hypocrisy and mendacity. It began as an accident, peaked with several works of startling power and originality, and eventually consumed its creator. By that time, however, Gonzo was shorthand for Hunter S. Thompson’s work, signature style, and the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the 20th century. Now, five decades after Rolling Stone published “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Gonzo journalism is due for a fresh review.
For months, Gonzalez had been brainstorming a plot engine that would drive her novel’s protagonist. “I’d written all these weird stories where she’s in different circumstances, but I didn’t have a larger vehicle for her,” she said in a Zoom interview.
She hopped off the train, walked into a Starbucks to ask for a pen and napkin, and scribbled a synopsis: “Robin Hood wedding planner robs from her clients, sends money to mother (revolutionary?) to fix house in Puerto Rico.”
I asked my girlfriend to marry me on Ash Wednesday. It was an accident—not the asking, the timing. The asking had been on my mind for the better part of two years. From almost the beginning of my relationship with C., I had known that I would someday propose to her, and, for almost as long, both of us had talked about the future in terms that made it perfectly clear we planned to share it. But unless your partner has spent years dropping hints about a Caribbean beach at sunset or you are in sudden need of a shotgun wedding, there’s no obvious moment to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with you, a fact that had become clear to me long before that particular Lent rolled around.
So many of us are thrown into friendships through sheer circumstance when we're children — proximity at school, parental friendships, a shared difference or minority identity — but as we grow older and begin to make our own choices about where we'll live, what we'll do with our time and who we'll spend it with, we lose touch. We drift, or we stop liking each other, or we get busy and forgetful.
The friendships that do survive feel precious, unlikely. One such is at the tender, beating heart of Jean Chen Ho's debut work of fiction, Fiona and Jane.
Through “Fiona and Jane,” Ho honors the hours put into a relationship, while also acknowledging the ways in which our lives are irreversibly changed by short-term engagements. The collection explores the dichotomy between deep and lengthy bonds, like Jane and Fiona’s, and fleeting encounters with lovers, fair-weather friends, colleagues, even parents.
Cities are, by their very nature, haunted places, Edinburgh perhaps more than most. A million lives, a million stories crisscross these streets, invisible psychogeographies built up in layers of memory and history ripe for excavation. In her new novel, “Luckenbooth,” Jenni Fagan traces the lives of nine “ootlins,” or outsiders: artists and dreamers, queers and mystics and vagabonds, criminals and cutups, winding upstairs and down in the doomed tenement block of the title. The result is a cabinet of curiosities that is both a love letter to the Scottish capital, and a knife to its throat.
The strength of this novel is not only as a puzzle to be unravelled by the astute reader but is a journey of discovery into some of the less pleasant aspects of those who are prepared to bend the law.