We’re standing in the shadows of the 450-square-foot apartment that Egan and her boyfriend (now husband), David Herskovits, rented for $900 a month back in the ’90s, when she was still working as a “private secretary” to a novelist-countess (among other less glamorous money jobs) and he was starting out as a theater director, staging shows at nearby venues like La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Nada. The pair decamped more than two decades ago—first to an apartment near Penn Station and then to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where they raised two sons, but Egan never stopped thinking about that first apartment. It was where they used to host cast parties that “were so packed you could barely move,” and where she wrote her first book. She used it as a setting in A Visit From the Goon Squad, an audacious, polyphonic novel that circled around the music industry and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. In her recasting, the third-floor walk-up was home to Bix, a nerdy Black graduate student who predicted the rise of the internet. He is back in her mind-bending follow-up, The Candy House, now as a tech god whose memory-collection invention has sent the free world off its axis. Bix is a one-name master of the universe, but he dreams of returning to the place where he was a nobody and had the best conversations of his life.
Nestled in an old commercial-building structure on Los Angeles’s Jefferson Boulevard, alongside a panadería and a preschool, is a little library. Unlike the city library up the street, this one is solely focused on circulating books that explore radical political ideas, such as abolition and anarchism. There’s poetry, too, and even some zines.
The Radical Hood Library opened its doors in September, but can only do so one day a week due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. The library, founded by poet and musician Fatimah Warner, whose stage name is Noname, is the headquarters for the Noname Book Club. Although the book club bears Noname’s moniker, the efforts are not hers alone — and she would probably be the first to tell you so.
Might it be possible to write a perfect short story? Not just good, but perfect. It must be: the only thing the great stories have in common is how close they come to perfection. Which might be an overstatement, though it’s true that short stories are judged by simple criteria; there are hundreds of different ways a novel might succeed or fail, a story simply has to be brilliant. Which, for its writers, is liberating, daunting and relentlessly intriguing.
Scrabble players talk about rare and esoteric words constantly. The strange combinations and bizarre juxtapositions of letters, the aesthetic beauty and beguiling diversity of English. It’s one of the joys of the game. But they almost never get to play those words, because probability. To discuss and learn one of them, and the very next morning have it appear like a signal from a distant galaxy? And then to receive and process the signal? Utterly, mathematically, existentially nuts.
There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of “French Braid” offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace.
Fisher’s writing about his stream of patients is what gives this memoir its immediacy, its pulse. “The beauty of emergency medicine,” he writes, “is the way an entire team can enter a flow state — perfect immersion and focus with no gap between thought and action.”
His book derives its depth and tone from his arguments about the inequities of American health care. Fisher is moved, and infuriated, that so many African Americans die young because they lack access to decent insurance and treatment.
“Those who can, do science,” the economist Paul Samuelson once remarked. “Those who can’t, prattle on about methodology.” Until fairly recently this seemed to be the dominant attitude among mainstream economists, but a sea change came when the global financial system began to unravel in 2007. In the decade and a half since—painful years of sluggish recovery, stagnating real wages, yawning inequality, and populist upheaval—reflexive talk has exploded. Why was the crash not widely predicted? Was the “efficient market hypothesis” to blame? Have lessons from the Great Depression been forgotten? And why are core questions about finance, power, inequality, and capitalism still largely missing from Economics 101?
Far more than macroeconomic theory, it is microeconomic principles that define and unite the modern economic profession.
“Letter to a Stranger” is an endearing reminder of the humanity that surrounds us; messy, awkward, compassionate, vulnerable. Its bite-sized pieces allow you to jump in and out and skip around — though the smooth flow of categories is worth passing through once from beginning to end. Kinder's organization puts the essays in a pattern that could be read cyclically, inviting the reader to come back and start over.
The star-nosed mole can barely see, yet this hamster-size mammal is the fastest-hunting predator in the animal kingdom. Employing a snout equipped with 22 fleshy Cthulhu-like tentacles, it can identify and kill prey in less than the blink of an eye. As Jackie Higgins explains in her brilliant new book, “Sentient,” these heightened tactile abilities make this little-known creature the perfect specimen to help scientists explore the sense of touch in other animals, including humans.