After a year of hearing about the unstoppable rise of food delivery, I expected a truly wild and alien vision of the future to be presented at the Food On Demand conference in Las Vegas, a convergence of various food-service delivery, production, and mobile ordering companies — delivery robots bumping into my legs, self-driving vans filled with pizza freshly baked en route, maybe that noodle vendor from the Fifth Element hovering outside my hotel window. These conversations, after all, were happening within the halls of exxxcess: past the glass Chihuly blossoms hanging in the lobby of the Bellagio, past the extravagant autumnal display of mushroom and dragonfly sculptures towering overhead in the hotel’s conservatory and botanical gardens, past the all-Christmas store and the chocolate fountain in the bakery, away from the caviar bar and the casino and the wedding chapel and the tourists with foot-long daiquiris and the famous dancing fountain and the life.
In the windowless beige back rooms, a hundred men (it was vastly men) championed their data collection and organization apps. They asked seemingly easy questions: Why shouldn’t you be able to order not just food, but flowers, toiletries, and shoes? Why should geography determine what restaurants you can order from? Why should you ever have to leave the house? Andy Rebhun, SVP digital and marketing officer for El Pollo Loco, noted during the drone demo that “I really don’t feel like customers should have to travel to pick up their food.” And I sat, watching the drone video and dudes exchanging business cards while making small talk, thinking, oh fuck and is that it?
Perhaps it is raining, the river in winter roar, breaking from the spine of its straightened banks and stretching flood arms out across our paddocks. The river has been farmed for only a hundred years. I am almost a teenager. Inside our Wairarapa farmhouse my father shows me his copy of the Tao Te Ching from the 1970s. “Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. / Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better.” Outside the river rips up fence posts and wires. The next day my mother, at her most anarchic, will have us three kids out there rafting on tractor tire inner tubes. We rise and soar with the wild waters, which resemble nothing we could ever own.
It was a sign that she loved me that she baked something especially for me, but it was a misunderstanding: I didn’t like poppy seeds. I always wanted my brother’s cookies, but he never shared them, and I was too nice a kid to set my grandmother straight. Instead, I would try scraping the seeds off with my fingers, only to come up against grandma’s egg glaze — it cemented those seeds in place.
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it.
One of the editors who worked on my first book asked me to make it “more universal”—which, she quickly clarified, meant “hetero.” It was a book for the mainstream after all, a work about technology and how it changes our lives. There was no need, went the argument, to gay things up. Queer elements would ostracize straight readers, or worse, make them uncomfortable. This was 2013, and the discomfort of the majority was still seen as a death knell for mainstream authors.
We know them only from black-and-white photographs, taken at the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh at the very end of their lives. Blindfolds removed, they stare, squint, smirk, glance away from the camera’s glare, moments before they were ferried away to the killing fields outside the city. A small boy perched in a chair, mouth gaping in terror. An adolescent girl, prim and composed, eyebrows arched. A young mother clasping her infant, a tear visible along her cheek, eyes glistening with the foreknowledge of her fate, and her son’s.
They are among the ghosts that haunt Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, his gut-wrenching, beautifully crafted collection of linked stories about survivors of Pol Pot’s Rouge’s four-year genocide, which claimed nearly two million (and likely many more) men, women, and children deemed enemies of the Khmer Rouge.
Devotees of cozy mysteries, rejoice: Nita Prose's debut, The Maid, satisfies on every level — from place to plot to protagonist.
In a fancy urban hotel, a guest lies dead, and the main suspect is Molly Gray, a member of the cleaning staff whose devotion to her work is matched only by her love for her deceased grandmother.
Let the locked-room hijinks begin!
Each page of Sara Freeman’s debut novel holds a slim paragraph, two at most. And if there are two paragraphs on one page, then these are divided by the symbol of a crescent moon, so that at no point is any section of text close to touching another. At all moments, the writing in Tides has to contend with an expanse of vacant space. The experience of reading such a novel is like travelling through a series of expertly designed studio flats. You marvel at every interior you come to: a whole unto itself, not a foot wrong in the design. But then you turn the page and enter yet another four walls, the last beginning to fade from your mind. Only at the end are you able to conceive of all these paragraphs at once, imagine a whole tower block of crafted text.
John Richardson, who died in 2019, set the standard for modern artists’ biographies (and we are living through a golden age of the genre) with the first three volumes of his Pablo Picasso biography. The first volume was published in 1991.
The fourth and final volume, covering the 10 years after Adolf Hitler came to power and ceasing, unfortunately, three full decades before Picasso’s death in 1973, is a worthy follow-up to its predecessors. Completed in difficult circumstances — Richardson was in his 90s and going blind — it is only about half their length. But it is just as rich, just as astounding.
We started talking about the multiverse
before the twentieth century, a different way
of making sense, acknowledging
the changeability and indifference.