Yanagihara is also a novelist with a large readership. Her 2015 book, “A Little Life,” begins as the story of the friendships among four recent college graduates, then cascades into an operatic, often appalling, chronicle of the abuse suffered by one of the protagonists. Like her magazine, the novel is proudly baroque. The critical reception to the book was very divided: it was called a “great gay novel” by one critic, and a “ghastly litany” by another. But it has sold more than a million and a half copies in English alone. It’s still easy to find readers talking online, with odd pleasure, about the emotional devastation that reading “A Little Life” brought upon them. TikTokers post videos of themselves crying after finishing the book.
Yanagihara is more confident talking about her magazine editing than about her novelistic abilities. She writes at night, for long stretches when the words are flowing. She completed her new novel, “To Paradise”—which stages three radically different narratives, set in three centuries, at the same town house in Washington Square—during the pandemic. Like “A Little Life,” it exceeds seven hundred pages. After she has hit on a plot and a structure she sticks to them, as if revising risks collapse. As she put it, “Once I’ve poured the concrete, I don’t rebuild the foundation.” Despite the extraordinary success of her fiction career, she regards it as a “slightly shameful” sideline. Indeed, she knows almost no other novelists, because she isn’t comfortable among them. She said, “I find that, whether from a sort of evil-eye avoidance superstition, or from not feeling that I quite have the right to call myself a writer—I don’t know what this is about, really, but I feel that writer is not something that I am, it is something that I do. And it’s something that I do in private.”
It had sunk in a matter of minutes. Wager did not consider the battle a victory but a devastating failure. As the flagship, the San José carried far more silver, gold, emeralds, and pearls than any of the merchant vessels. Wager’s prize had slipped his grasp, and its treasure now gilded the seabed at unknowable depths, along with the bodies of Casa Alegre and almost 600 of his men.
In the three centuries since, the San José has become a myth. Its legend is built upon gold, which does not oxidize. A gold coin will shine as brightly after 500 years on the ocean floor as the day it was minted. So too in the imagination.
"Here was a pattern of sleep unknown to the modern world," said Ekirch, a university distinguished professor in the department of history at Virginia Tech. Ekirch's subsequent book, "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past," unearthed more than 500 references to what's since been termed biphasic sleep. Ekirch has now found more than 2,000 references in a dozen languages and going back in time as far as ancient Greece. His 2004 book will be republished in April.
Is this trend simply a result of chance? Are contestants getting better at prepping — have they learned to game the game? Is this a case of improvement over time, much in the same way that top runners and swimmers are able to best the records set by their predecessors? Could the clues possibly be getting easier?
Liberation is at the heart of “Olga Dies Dreaming.” The story’s driving tension derives from questions of how to break free: from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from the traumatic burden of abandonment, from colonial oppression, from corrosive greed.
In Nigerian culture, "Wahala" means trouble. In Nikki May's sharply observed debut novel Wahala, trouble's name is Isobel, the new girl who shakes up the equilibrium in a tight group of Anglo-Nigerian friends.