The group of fish that moved onto land gave rise to almost half of all vertebrates today, including all amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and us. And although we probably cannot trace our family tree directly back to Tiktaalik, “an animal very much like Tiktaalik was a direct ancestor of humans,” said Julia Molnar, an evolutionary biomechanist at the New York Institute of Technology.
If Tiktaalik is our ancestor, then perhaps our holding it accountable for the chaos it sowed is an expression of love.
“Can somebody dim the Dan Flavin?” It’s not a request one generally hears at a restaurant, but on the inaugural preview night at Brutalisten, the artist Carsten Höller was pulling cords from their sockets at random, still working out a few kinks at his restaurant, including toning down the glaring fluorescent tubes of the Minimalist masterpiece on the dining room’s wall.
Most kinks had already been dekinked, with a miraculous same-day installation of Mr. Höller’s made-to-measure furnishings just before guests arrived, and the staff, outfitted in his custom-designed gray boiler suits, was unflappably cheery.
Yet what makes Kawakami’s novel so brilliant is an understanding of why women might willingly adhere to regressive modes of performative femininity, even while they criticize it. The desire to be loved is no small thing.
Magpie shocks and distresses in a way that only good psychological thrillers can, but it also provides a catharsis, depicting the frustrations of womanhood in all forms. It also shows that, when faced with motherhood, a woman will do absolutely anything in her power to protect what she has.
It has been a while since front pages were dominated by mob wars and Mafiosi bodies strewn across city pavements. So Gleeson’s book, “The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster,” is a useful reminder, especially for Mafia romanticizers, that we’re dealing with sociopathic knuckle scrapers who settle scores with casual brutality. Gotti was no exception, never mind the “Dapper Don” image he cultivated, that of a wisecracking wiseguy with a knack for beating the rap.
Why is the Anglo-Saxon world so individualistic, and why has China leaned towards collectivism? Was it Adam Smith, or the Bill of Rights; communism and Mao? According to at least one economist, there might be an altogether more surprising explanation: the difference between wheat and rice. You see, it’s fairly straightforward for a lone farmer to sow wheat in soil and live off the harvest. Rice is a different affair: it requires extensive irrigation, which means cooperation across parcels of land, even centralised planning. A place where wheat grows favours the entrepreneur; a place where rice grows favours the bureaucrat.
Libraries and rare book collections often carry volumes that feature poisons on their pages, from famous murder mysteries to seminal works on toxicology and forensics. The poisons described in these books are merely words on a page, but some books scattered throughout the world are literally poisonous.
These toxic books, produced in the 19th century, are bound in vivid cloth colored with a notorious pigment known as emerald green that’s laced with arsenic. Many of them are going unnoticed on shelves and in collections. So Melissa Tedone, the lab head for library materials conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware, has launched an effort dubbed the Poison Book Project to locate and catalogue these noxious volumes.
What makes things really challenging is that the universe does a good job misleading us with what appears to be simplicity. The ground is down there; space—which has no grains as far as we can see—is up there; time moves forward. The trick for all of us, physicists included, is not learning new truths but unlearning old falsehoods. Galileo Galilei’s seminal book, which explained the motion of the earth, is perhaps history’s best example of that process.
“It’s meant to convince you that the earth goes around the sun and that the earth rotates,” Rovelli says. “But what’s remarkable is that the actual arguments for the earth moving take a few pages. Most of the book is devoted to trying to bring the reader out from the obvious conviction that that’s impossible.”
One answer is that contemporary popular culture loves familiar successes—witness the current fad for remakes, reboots and the ever-expanding superhero “universes”. Child was wildly popular, with a literary and television career spanning the 20th century’s last four decades. Studios and publishers imagine that she has legions of fans who will eagerly watch and read anything about her.
But that is too cynical by half. The real answer is that Child lived a bold and eventful life, capacious enough to offer nostalgia to those who remember her and inspiration to those who do not. In effect, she was a populariser of French cuisine—but that carries the implication that she somehow diluted it for the masses. In fact, her recipes are not simple or dumbed down: they are clear.
I was sure I’d have plenty to learn, not only about Dylan, but also about myself and why I have such a personal attachment and urgent need to hang around his universe. I wonder if he understands and contemplates the major effect he has on people. Not the wackos who stalk him at hotels or want to work in his gift shop, but the masses who quietly marvel at his music and always stick up for his voice when others say it sounds like a leaky sewer pipe about to burst at the seams.
Still, no one writes the minutiae of life like Stibbe, and here she has delivered a captivating portrait of friendship that is as tender as it is funny.
A married woman could not sign a contract, nor draw up a will. She had no debts — which sounds great, until you realize that she could not owe money, because all her money, even that she earned herself, belonged to her husband, as did all her possessions. As did her children.
That this changed was in part due to the heroic campaigning, and the tragic story, of Caroline Norton, as conveyed in Fraser’s new book.
In other words, I've slowly taken back a slice of my day that for far too long belonged to work for no other reason than I let it. I even start my workdays a little earlier than I used to, if only to eke out time for my glorious midday break.
But the book’s real strength is not its crime-solving (Fischer concludes with a plausible if not provable suspect); it’s the way Fischer, who is also a film producer, helps us see how revelatory motion pictures were at the time.
Once you let go and allow the story to sweep you away, you’ll see how absolutely dazzling it really is. Author Sheila Williams takes readers on a sort of adventure in the beginning, before plunging us into a horror story that’s told with a voice that’s mournful but calm and proud.
Portable Magic is a love song to the book as a physical object. In tactile prose Smith reminds us of the thrills and spills of shabby covers, the illicit delight of writing in margins when you have been told not to and the guilty joy that comes from poring over traces left by someone else. It is these haptic, visceral and even slightly seedy pleasures of “bookhood” that she brings so brilliantly to life.
In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement”, the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.
Many things keep me awake at night. I worry about my kids’ future. I worry about rising sea levels and declining democracies. But if I’m being honest, those worries aren’t the main cause of my insomnia. No, what robs me of the most sleep is an innocent-looking little grid of seven letters that pops up on my iPhone every day. I speak of the delightful and infuriating New York Times Spelling Bee.
To be precise, it doesn’t pop up every day. That’s the problem. For some reason, the genial sadists at the New York Times puzzle section have scheduled the find-a-word game to appear every night at 3 a.m. Which means that when my body wakes me up around 4 a.m. for a bathroom break, against my better judgment, against many promises I’ve made to myself, I grab my iPhone and click on the Spelling Bee, unable to fall back to sleep until I find the hidden word that uses all seven letters.
At some point in life, we come to realize that we exist in a context. If you are a scientist, you might make a small but useful contribution in your subfield, a subfield that is impossible to explain to anybody else. If you write short stories for literary magazines and exist in that ecosystem, you may not really exist to people outside of it. And — for most of us — our lives form part of the circumference of that context. We live a little while and then we go into the ground. Our children, if we have them, remember us, their children remember us a little less, their children even less, and so on until we are part of a school genealogy project.
In The New York Times review of the original Seven Steeples, Ben Bradford wrote: “For this gentle minister, Maine’s nature world is an over-arching cathedral…” and then he quoted a sentence that I vigorously underscored in red—it marked the moment I realized the extent to which my Seven Steeples had been channeling its namesake. “Every trip down the road…” Henrichsen wrote, “…was an experience of worship.” Time and again her descriptions stirred in me a weird nostalgia for a place I’d never visited and a faith I’d never practiced, but most of all for a time when nature thrived and could be observed and adored without the awful knowledge of climate change and habitat loss.
Morton remembers his younger self scornfully thinking: "You're still trying to work out your stuff with your parents! Does it ever end! Christ, you must be thirty years old!"
"And here I was, at sixty," Morton dryly comments.
No, it never ends. But one thing that sets Tasha far apart from the usual one-sided literary conversation with a deceased parent is Morton's rigorous attempt to see his mother, Tasha, whole — as a person — not "just" in relation to him, or, God forbid, an eccentric "character."
To read Davis’ elegantly written but sometimes harrowing memoir, Finding Me, is to understand just how hard this spectacular performer has worked to build the career and life she has today—and to acknowledge that even for a performer as outrageously gifted and dedicated as Davis is, the ingredient X known as luck can never be underestimated.
genius of planets & stars, rotations & spinning,
meteorological time maybe, geologic maybe. &
The food writer works with a short deck: of all the senses, taste has the fewest descriptors. (The great late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold used to tease me for calling too many salads “juicy,” and I teased him for overusing his iconic phrase, “shatteringly crisp.”) But one does eternally seek a juicy new angle, a [shatteringly] crisp new lede. Thus, Dana is so thrilled to learn her dinner companions are polyamorous—not because she’s personally titillated, but because she the term will enliven her write up: “The word polyamorist, with all its frisson, was like a jewel plopped in my lap,” she says, and starts composing first sentences: “I was at dinner with the polyamorists when… .”
A good guest doesn’t pretend they live in someone else’s home, they acknowledge their status and appreciate their temporary dwelling. In the queue, when I stopped evaluating from a place of certainty—whether of false objectivity or burdening judgment—and began reading with curiosity, my standards for the substantial and the transformative in my poems, the poems of others, and in myself, were both raised and expanded.
I am a lifelong lover and obsessive consumer of all kinds of genre fiction in many mediums, from the original Star Trek series to yakuza and samurai films, from JG Ballard’s sci-fi nightmares to PG Wodehouse’s sparkling farces. But if there is one genre form that attains a kind of Platonic perfection, the genre of genres, I believe it has to be the mystery, specifically the detective story.
Yet now, for the first time in more than a half-century, scientists are in the throes of changing the definition of the second, because a new generation of clocks is capable of measuring it more precisely.
In June, metrologists with the B.I.P.M. will have a final list of criteria that must be met to set the new definition. Dr. Dimarcq said he expected that most would be fulfilled by 2026, and that formal approval would happen by 2030.
It must be done carefully. The architecture of global measurement depends on the second, so when the unit’s definition changes, its duration must not.
There was no impending sense of doom. There was no shift to the wind, or darkening of the clouds. No lightning, no thunder. In this little patch of Hell Creek, Montana, all is as it ever was as far as the dinosaurs are concerned. But more than two thousand miles away, a chunk of extraterrestrial stone more than seven miles across just slammed into the Earth. In the hours, days, weeks, and years that follow, the consequences of the impact will wipe out about 75 percent of all species on the planet. This is how the end of the world starts.
If New Yorkers are unflappable, impervious and stoic on the sidewalk, we are raging, delighted, terrified, dancing, sobbing messes in the subway tunnels. How unsurprising, then, that the subway should be a pool of our collective pain amid the pandemic. The platforms are often a display of the frustrations of the unhoused and unemployed. The anxieties of those living without economic, emotional or medical support. The fears of immigrants and Asian and other nonwhite populations who find themselves scapegoats yet again.
A History of Dreams integrates two main stories within a complex plot: a friendship story of women’s bonding and the sisterhood intertwines with a story of societal change due to political oppression.
The title is layered. The dreams refer not only to the protagonists’ aspirations for education and professional lives – torn asunder by the political machinations of an increasingly authoritarian government; but also to the night-dreams experienced by those who have drunk their bewitched potions. The reference to history incorporates the lineage of witchcraft; as well as the fictional importation of factual European history through the rise of the Nazi party in ‘sleepy Adelaide’, where ‘nothing happens’.
Attorney Emma Averell is experiencing the worst round of sleeplessness ever in the tense “Insomnia,” British author Sarah Pinborough’s gripping psychological domestic thriller. It’s not the lying awake night after night that bothers Emma. It’s that she fears she’s following a pattern set by her mother — insomnia resulting in a psychotic breakdown just before she turned 40.
Whoever said that university politics are vicious because the stakes are so low probably never served on a ministerial search committee.
Michelle Huneven’s delightful new novel “Search” reveals the inner workings of just such a committee. It takes the form of a comic memoir-with-recipes by a restaurant critic and food writer enlisted to help pick a senior minister of her progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California.
Jacobs’s love for puzzles is infectious, and it’s not hard to understand why. Puzzle people draw us in with their monomania. “I’m a sucker for people who are passionate about something,” Jacobs notes, “regardless of how silly that passion might seem to others.” He shows us how you can even cherish puzzles that you don’t have the patience (or skill) to solve.
In the morning in the Forum bookshop I sit up in the pulpit of the old Methodist chapel, looking out across a congregation of books and picturing this space filled with people dancing to the “silent book disco” I’ve just been told about. But there’s no one dancing here now, so I finish signing books and talking to the bookseller, and set off on my bike for the high ground between England and Scotland, the road climbing quickly to a ridge of knuckled stone and the weather closing in around me.
I am cycling – as well as jumping on the odd train – to as many bookshops as I can get to in a week. Having conducted my last book tour entirely online, it feels good to be outside again: meeting people and holding books and putting miles beneath my wheels. It’s been a while since I’ve been out in the world like this, and I’m interested to know what the place is like. The roads are quiet all the way to Carlisle. There are Ukrainian flags hanging from windows, and builder’s vans outside every other house, and the occasional stink of a lawnmower. The hedgerows are getting ready to come out.
The hyphen continues to serve a dual purpose: it both connects and separates. In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered; and it is instrumental in the formation of compounds, where it is famously subject to erosion. Yesteryear’s “ball-point pen” became the “ballpoint,” “wild-flowers” evolved into “wildflowers,” and “teen-age” found acceptance as “teenage” in most outlets (but not in this one).
‘You have to feed the earth the way you feed people,’ my grandfather used to say. To me, it was such a beautiful statement, full of nature’s wisdom. We took from the earth, so we had to give back to it. Summers here were short and often cool and rainy, but in his orchard strawberries started turning red in June and tomatoes ripened all the way into September. And our apple and cherry trees bloomed and bore fruit year after year, fragrant in the spring and delicious in the fall. To me, this was the circle of life, and our excrement was as inseparable from it as we humans were inseparable from nature. It wasn’t ugly filth but potent fertiliser we carried within us.
Even our language constructs suggested that. In Russian, the word for fertiliser is udobrenie, a derivative of dobró, meaning good and rich. So the common toilet jokes revolved around that concept too. When my little cousins were being potty trained, we called the moment they had to go as giving out dobró or bogatstvo – the riches. I knew that other people, who lived in big apartment buildings, didn’t have septic tanks, but I was sure that their riches also went back into the soil somehow. If not, what would they eat? The earth couldn’t produce forever without being fed – it would grow barren. I thought the whole world lived the same way.
Each time, I dutifully followed Leave No Trace principles, which maintain that except in especially sensitive ecosystems like deserts or river corridors, the best practice for disposing of human waste in the wilderness is to bury it in a cat hole that is six inches deep and at least 200 feet from any water. Generations of outdoor enthusiasts have been taught that doing so avoids polluting water, minimizes the risk of spreading disease, and maximizes the rate of fecal decomposition.
Yet as the number of people using public lands has exploded in recent decades, scientists and land managers are pushing back against this time-honored wisdom. With so many more people playing—and pooping—outside, they say, it’s time to update our backcountry poop etiquette for the 21st century.
Before the Nanki train lines were blasted from the mountains, and the lonely National Route 42 was carved out alongside the coast, these highland paths were in active use. People young and old would walk and haul their goods, stopping at a teahouse at the top of a pass for some yomogi mochi, or mugwort rice cakes, or maybe a few dango rice balls slathered with soy sauce and grilled over charcoal.
We’ve glimpsed deep, eternal springs of grace. We’ve seen a sign that the world will be made new. We can participate in that work of renewal. We can bring joy to others. But, to do so, I have to get to know it first. I have to take Easter’s dare to dive deep into hope.
Of course I am not suggesting that the publisher of Julian Barnes’s new novel are issuing a warning to the naïve or unwary reader who only expects or hopes for a good story. In truth only a reader coming new to his work might look only for that. There is always a story in his novels, sometimes half-buried, but you read them because perhaps more than any of his contemporaries belonging to the fine vintage laid down almost half a century ago he satisfies Austen’s description of the art and craft of fiction.
Poguemahone is a love song to the underbelly of London in the early 1970s with Brendan Behan newly dead, and fondly remembered for ‘pissing in the fish tank’.
Everyone is watching and rewatching The Exorcist and listening to ‘Tubular Bells’ and life is edgy and urban with band members and actors dropping into Nano’s club under Piccadilly Circus and no one has time to go to bed or work.
Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.
There is not a scintilla of evidence that other universes exist, nor any idea of how to detect them, much less how we might go about visiting the one next door. But none of that has kept the idea from becoming a trope of science fiction, modern cosmology and popular culture — movies, in particular. Hardly a new Marvel film comes out without its heroes bopping in and out of strange space-times on some quest or another.
So meet Evelyn Wang, a middle-age Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat and has issues with her taxes, her traditionally forbidding father (newly arrived from China) and her lesbian daughter. In the new film “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” Evelyn has been picked to save the realm of universes from a destructive demon because she is such a loser in this one. Above all, she must reconnect with her daughter, the main agent of chaos in her local cosmos. Thus, she finds herself careening through alternate universes and alternate versions of the self she might have been.
Did Dana Schutz, a white artist, have the right to paint Emmett Till? Was it fair that a white historian, David Blight, won a Pulitzer for his biography of Frederick Douglass? Should Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner be the ones to update “West Side Story,” a musical conceived by four Jewish men but fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives?
Let’s make it personal: Am I, as a new columnist for The Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?
Into this fraught conversation comes a new book by Walker, “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire,” released last week by Simon & Schuster, a collection of her diaries spanning 1965 to 2000. The book covers the period when Walker, 78, became a towering figure in the American cultural landscape, and precedes the accusations of antisemitism in recent years.
If you love to read, you probably have a TBR or “TO BE READ” list somewhere. The list may be neatly organized in a spreadsheet, scribbled on a piece of paper, or just mixed up thoughts dancing around in your brain. Nevertheless, you definitely have a list of books that you really want to read someday.
But what if you accidentally find someone else’s list? Would you be encouraged to read all of the books, some of the books or simply throw it away? In the book “The Reading List” by Sara Nisha Adams, the story centers on a list of books that someone finds and shares with other people. The titles on the list are books that we might find familiar. Some of them you may have read!
Something I’ve been thinking about lately, as both a writer and a teacher of writing, is how difficult it is to make everyday events feel fascinating in fiction. “Marrying the Ketchups” is a good example of a book that performs this magic trick. Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that propulsiveness is a quality that’s hard to explain and harder still to teach — but if Jennifer Close ever felt like running a course on it, I’d sign up.
Deutsch writes passionately and eruditely about the value of literature, the community it can engender and the patience required to sell books with integrity, but “In Praise of Good Bookstores” is more than a mere paean to independent brick-and-mortar shops. Deutsch also presents models for their continued survival.
Though I’d heard of them
I swear I’d never once even seen them
Last year, the team behind The Simpsons produced a video for the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga that debuted in October at Paris Fashion Week. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) It featured the show’s characters walking a runway in Balenciaga designs, and was, depending on your worldview, what you might call a long commercial for the brand or a short episode of the show. David Silverman, a veteran Simpsons producer and animator who directed the short, describes it as “one of the hardest things I ever did.” Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s artistic director and, like a lot of 40-somethings, a fan of The Simpsons since childhood, gave note after note, trying to strike the right balance between caricature and sincere presentation of his clothing. “Simpsons characters,” Silverman says, are “quite different from human proportions, so in some respects we took great liberties. Cheating, we call it.” It took a year’s worth of work and in the end gave the people something they didn’t know they needed: an animated Homer Simpson—a lovable oaf who once gained 61 pounds to qualify for disability so he could work from home—posing in a red Balenciaga puffer jacket, a more recent iteration of which costs $2,850.
That the fashion industry now looks to The Simpsons for inspiration is odd for a group of characters who have, for the most part, never changed outfits. But Bart—with his skateboard and his malleable mind—is a proto--hypebeast if there ever was one. And in a recent episode parodying contemporary fashion, The Weeknd voiced the owner of a white-hot new streetwear company, Slipreme. Adidas has a Simpsons sneaker line, and Nike has made a shoe with a Marge Simpson color-way (featuring swaths of blue, like her hair, and light green, like her dress), which fetches an ungodly average price of $873 on the resale market. From the outset, the show’s creators always understood its business cachet. In the ’90s, The Simpsons shilled Butterfingers and plastic key chains—and mocked itself for its craven commercialism. As one Springfieldian says after encountering the latest example of the Simpson family selling out (an ad for a record, The Simpsons Go Calypso!), “Man, this thing’s really getting out of hand.” Three decades later, it’s a testament to the show’s longevity, not to mention American progress, that the Simpsons still appear on key chains, only now they’re made out of calfskin, by a luxury fashion house, and cost $260.
Who among us likes a wrap? Not “occasionally eats” or “will scarf in a pinch” but like-likes — who prefers a wrap? Or to use a Kondo-ism, for whom does a chilled sandwich wrap “spark joy?” Please point me to one person on this side of the metaverse who genuinely relishes sandwich fixings tightly rolled inside a cold, stiff emerald-tinged tortilla. My theory? The mythical wrap lover does not exist.
Not very long ago, eagles were rats in America’s public imagination. Despite the bald eagle’s position as a national symbol, the actual bird was widely despised until about the mid-20th century. Before that point, many people treated them like rodents and killed them without discretion—while also unselfconsciously admiring the bird’s likeness on government seals, coins, and memorabilia. In The Bald Eagle, Jack E. Davis offers a twofold biography: He traces the histories of both the emblem and the creature and describes how patriotic pleas for conservation finally allowed their public perception to merge. Most revealing is what he says about American exceptionalism.
But nostalgia is often not what we need. Comforting memories tend to filter the past. Jennifer Niesslein dives into this ambiguity in her new collection, Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia, a free-ranging mix of nine personal essays that entwine family history, social commentary, and pop cultural musings as the author plumbs her own rearview-mirror longings and white America’s revisionist histories.
In this exhilarating book, Terry Eagleton describes the sea change in literary criticism that occurred between the two world wars. The five intellectuals he concentrates on here are inevitably male – as well as Richards, there is TS Eliot, William Empson, FR Leavis and Raymond Williams – since Cambridge, the university with which they were all connected, was not particularly welcoming to female academics. Or, indeed, to anyone at all: most of the time these men appeared to dislike each other intensely and enjoyed saying so. Indeed, Eagleton’s great achievement here is to look beyond the scrim of five tricky personalities to identify the continuities in their work, which added up to a revolution in the way that people – not just professional academics, but the whole community of readers throughout the English-speaking world – thought and talked about books.
In her new book, “The Palace Papers,” Tina Brown takes on a centuries-old institution of strong personalities, byzantine rules, a definite pecking order and mercurial public support.
I don’t mean the monarchy. I mean the press.
Like a lot of us, A.J. Jacobs spent a chunk of the past two years doing puzzles, but at least he got a book out of it.
"The Puzzler," which he began before the pandemic, is the result. Like the self-described human guinea pig's other books — "The Know-It-All," about reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the self-explanatory "The Year of Living Biblically" — it charts an experiment. But this experiment is easier to relate to and less rigid since — instead of following a predetermined course — the book loosely chronicles him taking a stab at more than a dozen kinds of brain-teasers.
It’s almost impossible to think of E.L. Doctorow as underrated. His third novel The Book of Daniel propelled him into “the first rank of American writers,” in the words of New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and the sensational critical and public reaction to his follow-up book Ragtime ensured that he would stay there. He won major prizes for his novels, including two PEN/Faulkner Awards and a Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013. He received criticism for how he fictionalized historical figures, and not all his books were critical or commercial successes. But by the time Doctorow published his final novel Andrew’s Brain in 2014, a year before his death, the common consensus was, in the words of George Saunders, that he was “a national treasure.” In 2015, Former President Barack Obama paid tribute to Doctorow by calling him “one of America’s greatest novelists.”
But even adored novelists can have underappreciated strains in their legacies. Doctorow is justly acclaimed for his historical fiction, but not for how often said forays into historical fiction turned out to be crime stories. He filled his books with all sorts of scoundrels and depicted miscarriages of justice, the machinations and murders of gangsters, as well as a memorable investigation into a missing person.
The forgotten divine, the longed-for divine, the ordinary divine—“grandmother’s father’s sister’s best friend’s chocolate barbecued kimchi parathas pumpkin pie stew”—this is what Fu’s characters seek through their fantasies, technologies, and dreams.
Sprawling and wildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and also consistently readable and engaging, “Making History” dives deep into the way history-driven scholars and artists — from Burns to Shakespeare to Herodotus — have shaped the collective memory of humankind. Championing both famous and largely forgotten historians as well as storytellers, filmmakers and photographers, Cohen’s volume offers memorable anecdotes and reasoned judgment as it explores themes including the foundational mythos of the Old and New Testaments, the Roman era, the contributions of history-maker historians from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill, Black American history from George W. Williams to Ibram X. Kendi, historical works from medieval texts to the New York Times Magazine’s recent “1619 Project,” and the failure of Japan to prosecute war criminals after World War II.
He is a sensitive and articulate polymath who can elucidate ideas with wit, humor, and style. Because, for him, the line between music and life is so permeable, what he has to say is as revealing about life as it is about music. His is a rare talent.
On this Earth Day, it's still an open question to what degree our planet will remain habitable in the coming years.
To increase chances that it will, it's critical to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy internationally, and on the individual level for each of us to reduce carbon emissions stemming from individual habits. These are among the main takeaway messages from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released on April 4.
That report led to worldwide headlines about the climate crisis. Moral philosopher and former journalist Elizabeth Cripps offers an equally urgent message in What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care, published in the U.S. last week: Efforts to contain global warming will succeed only if they are coupled with policies of climate justice.
Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls;
I think I must get some to you
but how is the question
in these times
With no successor yet announced, the question of which path the Book Review will take becomes more pronounced. Continuing to chase an audience whose attention might be elsewhere with hat tricks, celebrity contributors, and recommendation lists may be tempting to the new editor, even if recent history has provided little indication that doing so strengthens the Review’s influence or authority. Alternatively, the Book Review could choose to prioritize the sort of reader who cares about and is invested in literary criticism in its own right. Whatever the case may be, resting on legacy alone isn’t an option. Like any institution that seeks to be all things to all people, the Book Review risks being a publication that doesn’t much appeal to anyone.
Say “the artist’s life” and already we are in thrall to the old romantic myths: the garret in winter with wind lisping through the cracks, the dissolving nights at mirrored bars nursing absinthe, the empty pockets, the feral hair, the ever-looming madhouse. Or let us reach further back in time to a Taoist philosophical text circa the late fourth century B.C., which tells of a Chinese lord who summons artists for a commission. They compliantly line up before him with brushes and ink, ready to compete for the job — all but one, who trails in late, then goes back home, disrobes and sprawls on the floor before starting to paint. The lord approves: “This is a true artist!”
When Alan Turing turned his attention to artificial intelligence, there was probably no one in the world better equipped for the task. His paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) is still one of the most frequently cited in the field. Turing died young, however, and for a long time most of his work remained either classified or otherwise inaccessible. So it is perhaps not surprising that there are important lessons left to learn from him, including about the philosophical foundations of AI.
In many ways, Century 21’s world of tomorrow has become the world of today. The U.S. emerged victorious in the Cold War and successfully shared the fair’s vision with the world: one of American ascendance, scientific progress and capitalist consumption. World’s fairs, meanwhile, have seemingly fallen out of fashion in America. The last time the U.S. hosted one was 38 years ago, in 1984, when New Orleans presented the Louisiana World Exposition.
“The purposes of the fair have been taken over by other mediums,” says Lydia Mattice Brandt, an architectural historian at the University of South Carolina. “The way that [fairs] offered fantasy … is today so easy to get in other ways, whether it’s physical experiences like theme parks or movies [and the] internet.”
Who among us in these anxious times cannot relate to bouts of sleeplessness and the resulting brain fog and dishevelment? “Insomnia” is a nimble suspense story, but it’s even more disturbing as an account of how a restless brain can weaken and lethally doubt itself.
Maybe you’ve heard the adage inviting you to walk a mile in someone’s shoes before you judge them. Taken literally, the phrase suggests that walking is the physical key to gaining understanding of others—and ourselves. Ben Shattuck puts that to the test in his debut, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. Reeling from another nightmare about his ex-girlfriend, Shattuck took a shower and, as the water washed disturbing dream scenes from his mind, imagined Thoreau smiling on the beach. Without considering consequences, Shattuck packed bread, cheese, and the copy of Cape Cod he had been reading into his backpack, then set off to recreate Thoreau’s 1849 walk along the Cape. Six Walks is the moving account of Shattuck’s journey to find peace by undertaking six of Thoreau’s nineteenth-century walks: along Cape Cod, up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, through the Allagash, and then, a few years later, back to the Cape.
Juggling motherhood and creative work can leave one feeling like an iconoclast and a failure all at once. “The Baby on the Fire Escape,” Julie Phillips’ tremendous group biography and exploration of what she identifies as a “mind-baby problem,” focuses on women of the mid-20th century onward, when “motherhood went from being an accident and obligation to being a choice.”
I’m not particularly interested in having sex with a robot, but the money is good, and I’ve never been to Las Vegas. Also a roll in the synthetic hay is not the actual assignment. I’ve come to the Erotic Heritage Museum to attend a talk on sex, love, and technology. Still, a part of me wonders if I can capture the whole story without boinking Emma, the museum’s resident sexbot. The possibility of such a tryst has been the subject of some discussion among those involved with my trip, including my editor and the museum director, which has left me a little squeamish, not to mention embarrassed. But I remind myself that shame has no place in the brave new world of “digisexuality.”
It was a December afternoon, and across the small table sat the Diallo brothers, Rahim and Mohammed, their own excitement tempered with apprehension. The Diallos, who emigrated from Guinea to the U.S. as teenagers and put themselves through college while working in restaurants and driving cabs, are the owners of the Ginjan Café, a cozy spot across from the 125th Street Metro-North station that has struggled since the commuter hordes began mostly staying home. Stanton is the creator of Humans of New York, the popular publication that has given him more wealth, freedom, and influence than he, a man whose dreams have always been outsize, ever imagined. What started in 2010 as a quirky street-photography project has morphed into an uplifting social-media empire with nearly 30 million followers on Facebook and Instagram combined who visit to affirm, relate to, and weep for the ordinary people on display. Now Stanton was planning to feature the Diallos on his blog, and all three men were hoping that the publication would result in a bonanza of sales of the Diallos’ specialty ginger juice, Ginjan.
“Authenticity” is a loaded word that many chefs like Tong stay away from, because the very concept discriminates against food that has evolved over years and generations. It implies that food needs to conform to a set of standard dishes and flavors determined at an arbitrary time and place, even as new ingredients are introduced and as communities migrate. There is an expectation that a dish should look and taste a specific way in order to be valid, and the onus often falls on the chef—not the critic—to be perfect ambassadors of their culture’s cuisine. It’s an unrealistic standard that’s destined to fail, because what is authentic to one person might be completely unfamiliar to another.
In the realm of Chinese cuisine, this type of gatekeeping has left many Chinese chefs and food writers bewildered and second-guessing the food that they grew up eating.
Sea of Tranquility is a profound meditation on what it means to live through a disaster, itself a reminder of the random events that shape our lives and how, through our choices, we imbue them with meaning.
St. James’ creation of a modern haunted house story works well as the author also focuses on family bonds and destructive gossip. St. James excels at delving into the psyche of her characters.
The past moves me
from closed closets
to sealed envelopes.
We stood by the ruffled water on the breezy Greek shore, in an uncertain light of evening. It was early spring, Sunday, a feast day, and we were told there were celebrations earlier, of which this was the aftermath — this silence in the village and beside the water, beside the shuttered houses and the empty little pier, where the sea grasses bent this way and that in the wind and the sky was as though absorbed in a private process of transformation, a movement out of winter that had not yet been accomplished. This was not our country: We had only just arrived, and the celebrations had not included us. We didn’t mind, having paid the price of inclusion earlier in our lives. In fact our feelings had become more or less irrelevant, without our entirely noticing. So that the old terror, of exclusion — or abandonment perhaps — didn’t trouble us, any more than the thistledown troubled us whirling softly off the vegetation by the water. We stood and waited for the boat.
What I remember is our numbness, a numbness that used to be a closeness until we became confined in one another and in our troubles and had gone white and dead, like a foot in a tight shoe. Our bodies were stiff and disoriented, standing by the water and the pier, waiting for the boat to come. The sky and the empty bay seemed enormous, because they represented the fact that our confinement had ended and the world had cracked or split open, and we were released. The freedom of outside was incomprehensible. It made our imprisonment and our stiffness seem like choices we had made, a way we had decided to live. Around the bay in the coming dusk lay the bluish mounded shapes of islands grouped one behind another, so that their mystery and anonymity became almost intolerable from the perspective of the pier, became the object of mingled sorrow and desire, the desire to know or be that farthest island half-glimpsed behind those unknown others and hence even more mysterious than they.
Unfortunately, we don’t know whether secure cryptography truly exists. Over millennia, people have created ciphers that seemed unbreakable right until they were broken. Today, our internet transactions and state secrets are guarded by encryption methods that seem secure but could conceivably fail at any moment.
The Thanksgiving stuffing of my childhood never involved bread. Instead, my mom would render pancetta, cook aromatics in the gleaming fat, spike it with Madeira wine, and toss those richly flavored ingredients with almonds, green grapes, and dark slivers of wild rice. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried — the recipe came from Martha Stewart, after all, as published in the November 1999 issue of her famous Martha Stewart Living.
No micronation has ever succeeded in becoming a country – but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily fail. Success depends on what a micronation set out to achieve.
Every now and again, a first novel appears in a flurry of hype and big-name TV deals, and before the end of the first chapter you do a little air-punch because for once it’s all completely justified. Lessons in Chemistry, by former copywriter Bonnie Garmus, is that rare beast; a polished, funny, thought-provoking story, wearing its research lightly but confidently, and with sentences so stylishly turned it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.
Winslow says he didn’t read Greek and Roman classics until adulthood, when he discovered parallels to the real-life mob stories of his youth. “I saw every theme that we treat in modern crime fiction,” he says in a letter to readers, “power, murder, vengeance, corruption, justice and redemption.”
“City on Fire” explores these enduring themes in the story of two Providence mobs in the mid-1980s.
For years, if you wanted to see “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth at the Museum of Modern Art, you had to track it down in a corridor near the escalators. It was Wyeth’s most famous painting, but it didn’t fit into the modernist paradigm of art history. You got the feeling that the curators would have buried it in the racks if it weren’t so popular. Sharing “Christina’s” exile was a painting from a different tradition by the Russian American artist Pavel Tchelitchew (pronounced cha-LEE-cheff), “Cache-cache (Hide and Seek),” another work of art on the wrong side of history that pleased people who didn’t know any better.
Tchelitchew and his art have escaped from their quarantine, and both figure prominently in Patrick Mauriès’s “Theatres of Melancholy,” an alternative history of modern art that makes the case for the importance of a loosely aligned group of painters termed the Neo-Romantics. In Mauriès’s view, some are as important as the abstract artists who came of age during the period between the world wars.
The most enduring pain is in the impossibility of understanding why. Trujillo’s mother had bouts of depression throughout her life. Is this knowledge enough to alleviate her daughter’s agony of self-blame? With suicide, Trujillo writes, “only one person ‘gets’ an ending; the rest of us are left with a story abandoned midsentence.” Fearlessly, Trujillo attempts to complete the sentence. For many who have been touched by suicide, her hard-earned story will be a helpful companion.
What surprised me most wasn’t how difficult this was. I was surprised because it was familiar. It turned out I was already used to living in this gap, stuck in that silence between thoughts and words. Grief had already taken my ability to speak, to write, to be me, and it was a language I’d had to learn alone; I hadn’t had someone to practice with me.
Most of my books are in good condition because I am careful. I don't write in them (anymore). I don't break the spine (at least, not on purpose). I don't drop them into the tub nor dog-ear the pages.
That said, I have a number of books that are falling apart, ripped and torn, drawn in and beat up. I could easily replace them, and yet I don't. They are among the books I love the most, perhaps because each rip and scribble tells a story.
At 62, Grey is ready to take control of a narrative that has been in the public domain for so long, it has achieved mythological status. As recently as 2007, this newspaper referred to “Jennifer Grey syndrome” — the phenomenon of too-aggressive plastic surgery — as if everyone is in on the joke. How long must one woman pay for a personal decision? Why should any human being be boiled down to a punchline?
In the 1963 film Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor's Egyptian queen rejects an invitation from Marc Anthony's envoy, while sitting naked in a milky flower-filled bath, idly toying with a golden boat. The film may have had its issues – famously, the spats between Taylor and her co-star lover Richard Burton – but the iconography is familiar: in ancient Egypt, queens and goddesses were renowned for their power and sensuality, for their deep associations with the natural world, and with motherhood and healing. Taylor's Cleopatra is frequently shown bathing and being pampered, as she would have been in real life: the beauty rituals of wealthy ancient Egyptians were lengthy and complicated, beginning with long milk baths infused with saffron oil.
Neither element was accidental: the lactic acid in milk would have helped exfoliate the skin, while saffron has been used to treat a variety of conditions for thousands of years. The spice is carefully harvested from the orange stigmas of the purple Crocus sativus flower. Grown in the hot dry belt of land that runs from Spain in the west to Kashmir in the east, the spice is known as "red gold" for the intensity and price of its production. Flowers must be picked at dawn by hand, and those thin threads delicately scraped. It takes almost 5,000 flowers to yield just one ounce of saffron threads. Prices are already high and, as climate change threatens farming, they're set to go higher.
In his newest collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong masterfully eludes this obstacle. The poet’s language recognizes the trauma of death, but also revels in the glory of life . In this book, Vuong grieves the loss of his mother, but he also celebrates her existence. His strategy is to focus on the small moments in life that give our closest relationships their meaning.
Following the lesson of negative theology, the best way to begin explaining what this book is would be to say what it is not. It is neither a work of traditional art history nor one of literary critical reading. Nor is it a work in the history of ideas, notwithstanding its astonishing erudition. Drawing on all these methods and approaches — and with extraordinary attention to language and style — Paper Graveyards amounts to something truly interdisciplinary. None of the disciplines Cadava draws on is summoned as a mere superfluous illustration of the argument; each is interlaced with the arguments and logic of other disciplines. This is a most challenging way to think, requiring knowledge not only of how different epistemes approach the same question or object, but also how one might fuse those different approaches into a seamless and compelling argument.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh wanted to leave behind her hometown of Derry, Ireland from the start. She grew up in a fractured household with a Catholic mother and Protestant father – an abnormal pairing in the Irish community at the height of the Troubles. Her family home in the Protestant Waterside area shattered into pieces by a petrol bomb one night, causing ní Dochartaigh’s family to escape to new towns. Most of ní Dochartaigh’s life has been an attempt to suppress memories of conflict and danger, and her coping mechanism became the observance of natural forces and suspension into Irish folklore culture. Ní Dochartaigh’s memoir Thin Places tells of how her early days growing up in the Troubles pushed her to flee Ireland, and how finding “thin places” in nature healed her own perceptions of a homeland that was ruptured by religious and ethnic tensions.
On the corner of Boyd and Fox streets in Portland, a mural depicts a classic winter landscape with the message, in large letters formed by chunks of ice: STAY POSITIVE. It was a useful, if serendipitous, admonition as I came to the end of Porter Fox’s book about climate change, “The Last Winter.” In the face of the terrifying statistics that he cites page after page, positivity, if not optimism, is the only way.
Think about the changing climate in terms of seasons, a leading glaciologist tells Fox. Summer is overtaking winter; spring is coming earlier and earlier, permanently shrinking the cryosphere, that world of mountain glaciers and continental ice sheets. This was what drew the attention of the author, a life-long skier, to the dire threat of global warming.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? This house, quiet
as sunlight, grass on the other side of these windows
You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising — but also potentially dangerous — new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to get better at anticipating its consequences. But then the strangest thing happens: You notice that the writer has, seemingly deliberately, omitted the very last word of the first .
The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind; the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English; you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another; you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever — perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word.
Sitting at a big wooden table at Ken Ruzicka’s home on a cold November morning in Fire Island Pines, the 79-year-old artist and landscape designer is telling me how he acquired the table. We’re surrounded by space heaters, which keep the one-story cottage warm, and his own artwork, accumulated from more than 40 years of painting; a smell of summer mold hovers in my nose as Ruzicka explains that the table comes from famed furniture designer and friend David Ebner, for whom he made a garden in exchange for the table many years ago.
Just who was this man? And why did he matter to so many people in so many different places? The historian Jerry Z. Muller has been studying the Taubes legend for many years, and now we have this fascinating, judicious biography. “Professor of Apocalypse” is at once a history of ideas, a gripping psychological melodrama and a study of the surprising power of intellectual charisma to make and unmake lives.
As Insel acknowledges in his new book on the state of our nation's psychiatric care, "Healing: Our Path From Mental Illness to Mental Health," this failure to make a major difference in the lives of people suffering from serious mental illness — say, chronic major depression or schizophrenia — haunts him. "Our science was looking for causes and mechanisms," he writes, "while the effects of these disorders were playing out in increasing death and disability, increasing incarceration and homelessness, and increasing frustration and despair for both patients and families." He argues that while research should continue to play the long game, mental health policy urgently needs major reforms now.
Seven in the evening
the announcement blew up
the city’s telephone lines
My sedan was jogging down the lane
In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share.
Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.
“Take My Hand,” the latest journey by novelist and professor Dolen Perkins-Valdez into historical fiction, is a jewel of a book but not an easy one to read. The author of the 2010 bestseller “Wench” and “Balm” (2015) was inspired by the groundbreaking prosecution of the former U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare after it failed to protect thousands of poor, Black and mentally challenged girls and women from surgical sterilization without their consent.
Heavy lifting. But Perkins-Valdez uses her inestimable talent of braiding memory with fact to take readers deep into the late stages of the civil rights movement through the intertwining stories of 23-year-old Civil Townsend — a new, gung-ho nurse working at a family planning clinic and the slightly bougie daughter of a doctor and a complicated artist from Montgomery, Ala. — and her first patients, India and Erica Williams, poor rural Black girls who are 11 and 13. India, not even menstruating yet, and her sister are secretly surgically sterilized under Civil’s watch.
The thoughtful, hybrid style, mixing the personal and theoretical, that characterized Maggie Nelson’s earlier books—such as The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007) and The Argonauts (2015)—continues in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, published last year. The book, she tells us, grew out of a desire to understand freedom; it came from questions that arose as “an unexpected subtext” to her 2011 book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, which considered representations of cruelty and violence in art. “I had set out to write about cruelty,” she writes in the introduction, “then found, to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell.”
Thirty-five years on, what to do with a life this well told is a conundrum biographers can’t avoid. Sturgis is the first to accept that he isn’t here to tell a new story. Neither does he defend a new position. His self-assigned task is to comb, to mend, to retell. In tandem with a “growth in knowledge about the incidents of Wilde’s life,” he proclaims, “it has become more and more apparent that Ellmann’s book — for all its many and great virtues — is not quite satisfactory.” (A handlist of corrections to Ellmann’s book, compiled by the German scholar Horst Schoeder, takes up more than 300 pages in its expanded edition in 2002.) Sturgis describes scholars having to “correct or amend the picture framed for them by Ellmann.”
As imperfect as Hunt's book is, though, it also feels like a book that will last as a polestar for writers in years to come. It's a handbook for writing about loss and death that isn't sunk in morality and sentiment. It offers us permission to use the oddest, unlikeliest pieces of ourselves as object lessons in mortality. And it's an example of how to write about the subject with verve and openness. "Everywhere we walk or swim is a cemetery," she writes. But, she's quick to add: "Everywhere is sacred."
Does the pattern that was you have a chance
against the universal disassembling?
Here’s a story I used to tell myself: I moved to Los Angeles to get away. From winter, for one thing, and the weight of history. To find a bit of freedom, or maybe distance. For me, now as then, the two amount to pretty much the same. Or better still, space — the space to stretch, the space to fail, the space to carve a passage for myself. In other words, the space to write.
I was wrong about this, as it turns out, but I was also correct. That’s the thing about Los Angeles: Everything we say about it is both true and false. City of sprawl and city of neighborhoods. City of the future and city of the past. This is particularly so when it comes to writing, which has long existed here along the edges — except, of course, when it has not. Film and poetry and fiction. Literature of exile, literature of place.
I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a definition this ambiguous. It’s both helpful (there’s a limit to coherence, and the limit is aesthetic) and unhelpful (enough for what, or whom?). It reminds me of a dictionary entry for “detritus” that I copied down in a notebook: “the pieces that are left when something breaks, falls apart, is destroyed, etc.” That seemed so artfully vague to me, so uncharacteristically casual for a dictionary. It has a quality of distraction, of trailing off, of suggesting you already know what detritus means. Part of me resists the question of what poetry is, or resists the answer — you already know what it means.
But let’s answer it anyway, starting with the obvious: If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry. Nonwords with rhyme and meter, as in “Jabberwocky,” also are poetry. And since words in aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, which lines on the page accentuate, any words composed in lines are poetry. There’s something to be said for the obvious. Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing one has overlooked.”
When an underwater volcano in the Pacific island nation of Tonga erupted violently in mid-January, it spawned a tsunami that devastated many of its islands and struck far-off shores across the ocean.
But the huge volcanic explosion also generated something that scientists hadn’t seen in more than half a century: a planetary-scale pressure wave, or shockwave, in the atmosphere.
A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and positioned like a clever trap between arrivals and the taxi rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or something to munch? I opted for Doritos, keying in a three-digit code and touching my card to the reader so that the packet moved jerkily forwards, propelled by a churning plastic spiral and tipped into the well of the machine. My Doritos landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day.
Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, the man who owned and operated that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These weird, conspicuous objects! With their backs against the wall of everyday existence, they tempt out such a peculiar range of emotions, from relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee. For decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron. I figured that by spending some time in the closer company of the machines and their keepers, by immersing myself in their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made generations of us buy? Johnny Brod seemed a good first person to ask.
Reading and books have always enabled Hunt to commune with the dead, connect across boundaries of space and time with other voices, transcend human limitation and loss. “I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead — those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am,” she insists. “In books we can find our ways back to the worlds we thought were lost, the world of childhood, the world of the dead.” “The Unwritten Book” ponders and enacts this art of losing with an intoxicating blend of humor and pathos.
It’s a strange, murky book, this one, which drops you right into its menacing rot from the first line and doesn’t let up for another 211 pages, or rather, when it does let up, it’s only to push you into stranger, murkier, even more menacingly rotten territories. Missouri Williams’ first novel, The Doloriad is a book of worms, incest, decay and extreme violence with interludes of queasy comedy and thwarted transcendence.
Zorin’s book achieves the ultimate expectation set by the biography genre — he creates a consistent representation of Tolstoy’s integral personality.
Attitudes to the BBC are, for the most part, spirit-sappingly predictable. Politicians of all parties believe it is biased against them. One powerful lobby claims it is a hotbed of radicals bent on undermining national identity, another that it is the mouthpiece of the establishment. Some critics denounce the licence fee as insulating the BBC against the bracing winds of competition, while others complain that the corporation has already abandoned its public service remit in the search for profit. One chorus takes up the theme that programming remains ‘elitist’ and ‘middle class’, another that it has become demotic and debased. Many people seem to feel that so long as The Archers and the shipping forecast are left untouched, then all is right with the world; others seem to think that the problem is precisely that The Archers and the shipping forecast have been left untouched for too long. It’s not easy to come up with any really new complaints about the BBC.
Wander into nature and give a good shout, and only nearby birds, frogs, and squirrels will hear you. Although sensing noise is a critical survival strategy for land animals, it’s a somewhat limited warning system, as sounds—save for something like a massive volcanic explosion—don’t travel far in air. They propagate much better through water, with undersea noises traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles, depending on the conditions.
Those conditions are rapidly transforming as the oceans warm. Changes in salinity, temperature, and pressure change how the sea sounds, with unknown impacts on the life-forms that depend on that noise to survive.
A dozen twists of a knife were all it took to tarnish the unblemished reputation of Washington’s oysters. It was 2017, and Teri King, an aquaculture specialist for Washington Sea Grant, a marine research institute, had been invited to shuck shellfish at a seafood event in Shelton, Washington. She was there to teach people about the local oyster industry, which is prized for producing delicious half shells with perfect, pearly white interiors. But her lesson soon took a dark turn. As she wedged her knife under the lip of an oyster, it split a hidden blister inside the shell.
What a word! Just typing it seems like a waste of life, a drain on my vital reserves. Well, it’s up there now and I’ll refer to it sparingly, judiciously. It does exist as a word (hence the problem we face), and even if it exists as a concept—(which I want to challenge)—I have doubts about the bulk of the instances in which it’s used. How often do we let this dubious term slide in as knee-jerk name for a whole lot of time, experience, sensation and movement that I (personally) would rather call my life?
The power of “A Tiny Upward Shove” rests in her insistence that even the murdered had agency in their lives, no matter how forgotten or lost to themselves and society.
To read Rivers of London is to enter a world we thought we'd left behind as children, one where magical impossibility becomes possible and absurdly plausible. Fans of a darn good crime novel who never knew they would enjoy a fantasy novel will absolutely love this series.
Ask her about the title of her new memoir, “Hello, Molly!” and she volunteers that Allison Saltzman, an art director at HarperCollins, came up with it. Praise her “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Dr. Beaman’s Office,” in which Tim Meadows performs the robot as Dr. Poop, causing Shannon to break out laughing, and she’ll offer, “Adam McKay wrote it.” Mention you enjoyed the first two episodes of her Showtime series, “I Love That for You,” premiering April 29, and she’ll give props to show creators Vanessa Bayer and Jeremy Beiler, showrunner Jessi Klein, director Michael Showalter and costar Jenifer Lewis.
But “Hello, Molly!” is all about Shannon, and it thrums with her indefatigable and fearless spirit. These qualities were instilled in her following the tragic death of her mother, sister and cousin in a 1969 car crash that she and her father, who was at the wheel, survived. She was 4 years old. “I was tough,” she writes. “When you lose a parent, you don’t want anybody to treat you differently. You want to blend in.”
It took novelist Brian Morton decades to realize that he didn’t always have to say yes to his mother. “It can take the better part of a lifetime to learn that you don’t actually always have to be so damn good.” Welcome to “Tasha: A Son’s Memoir,” Morton’s bracing account of his late mother’s final years.
There is something solemn about mornings, when the world is quiet and the shop is calm. The books are illuminated by a dim natural light. When empty, the bookstore is filled with community, with our collective memory—with aspiration both communal and individual—and when full, the bookstore often maintains a quiet usually obtainable only in solitude. The arguments and enthusiasms contained in the volumes on the shelves create their own communion with the individual reader, while also providing a mechanism for discourse. It is a public square, no less articulate for most often being mute.
My first reading of Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations happened on a train stirring eastward through Pennsylvania on a day that was spring by calendar but not in sight, the fields still sere, the sunlight thin. In the quiet car, the living hum of bodies and tasks carried on around me, each of us experiencing a communal kind of solitude, while I sat in the deep winter of the collection’s second poem. Hathaway writes, “Yesterday the river ice, till now page-blank, was annotated / by coyotes. I followed their new year letters down along the / west side of the island[.]” These lines’ playfulness is sheer delight. I was also taken by the impulse toward collaboration in the construction of their image: the speaker stands open to envisioning such a text (in and through the movement of the coyotes) and brings curiosity to it. This feels different from simple visual eavesdropping; the coyotes and the speaker are engaged in an act of creation, even though each is separate from the other.
And now we have arrived — or seem to have arrived — at Emily St. John Mandel’s wildly anticipated novel, “Sea of Tranquility.” It’s a curious thought experiment that borrows from the plague terror she spun in “Station Eleven” and the perception-bending tricks she played in “The Glass Hotel.” (Fans will even catch some characters from that previous novel flickering through this new one.)
“Sea of Tranquility” is an elegant demonstration of Mandel’s facility with a range of tones and historical periods.
A sense of unpredictability mixed with inevitability pervades the novel, with taut, aphoristic observations on everything from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Questioning the nature of selfishness, love, and subjectivity, Julian is reminded that “humans love from themselves. They can’t love from anywhere else.”
You Still Look the Same is a powerful and necessary collection that breaks silences and speaks to the griefs and joys we all experience. Life is a constant process of separation; nevertheless, in Doctor’s poems moments of love and laughter always resurface.
Dense and rich as a black Christmas cake and alternately whimsical, sweet and dark, “Things They Lost” is a complex work, brimming with uncompromisingly African magical realism, about the ambiguity of toxic mother-daughter relationships and the urgently restorative nature of friendship.
Deer Man follows the story of someone who turns his back on society and spends seven years living in a forest among roe deer. We discover very little about the events that preceded this decision. Exclusively home-schooled, the young man was clearly lonely. And there’s something amiss in his relationship with his family. Yet a fleeting encounter with a young buck draws him into the woods around Louviers, France, and off he goes. It’s fairytale stuff, both in its transformational force and its unspoken darkness. The lack of information about his life – the ruthless absence of autobiography – can seem odd to a modern reader. Yet the strength of this book is its singular focus on the deer.
I read somewhere that people don’t mind a long wait for
the elevator as long as there’s a mirror in the lobby.
Across the plain, flat
joy a boat sails.
Red is an abiding marker of transgression. The metaphor dates back at least to the Old Testament and is still embedded in everyday language: to be caught “red-handed” is to be discovered committing a crime. But red is also a metaphor for all kinds of psychological states. It is commonly identified with lust, love, embarrassment, and anger—even emotion itself. There is a logic to the connection. We often think of emotion as a kind of heat: we speak of “burning resentments,” “smoldering desires,” and “fiery tempers”; and if they get the better of us, we are sometimes told to “cool down.”
Natural history can certainly accommodate a profusion of perspectives – indeed, it will always benefit from greater diversity in how we look and think. But I wonder if there are unhelpful dichotomies in play, where we pit ‘knowledge’ against lived experience, against emotional engagement, and where the idea of scientific expertise in nature summons nothing in us but Linnaean binomials, mothballed drawers of beetles, airless data, the charts and graphs of dead white European men.
Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says.
Then EG met Fedorenko. “She didn't have any preconceived notions of what I should or shouldn't be able to do,” she recalls. And for Fedorenko, an opportunity to study a brain like EG’s is a scientist’s dream. EG was more than willing to help.
“In Japan, many kids go to neighborhood schools on foot and by themselves, that’s quite typical,” said Hironori Kato, a professor of transportation planning at the University of Tokyo. Typically, Japanese children don’t actually run errands for Mom and Dad in the city at two or three years old, he notes, as they do in the show. But the comic, TV-friendly premise exaggerates a truth about Japanese society: Children in Japan have an unusual degree of independence from an early age.
On a personal level, in between receiving this book and writing the review, a family member transitioned from this plane to whatever may be next, so Vuong’s virtuosity and vulnerability resonated in a way I hadn’t anticipated. But that’s the essence of Vuong’s talent: he alchemizes deeply individual experiences with universal emotions into what is both familiar and new. I recognize and honor Vuong’s personal trajectory—the scarring brambles and stunning vistas of his road, often so different to mine—yet equally I am ever cognizant of how similar we are, as sentient beings on this rock at this time, embracing beauty and loss, the past and present, sometimes in the same breath.
Through these characters, and their relationship to each other, Naga dissects the shifting, slippery shapes of belonging and power under global capitalism. What happens when American and Egyptian notions of identity collide — within a person, within a relationship, within a city? Who belongs to a place — the locals or the people the economy is designed to attract?
The convulsions of the 1980s – a decade of excess and agitation and collapse – reached the unlikeliest quarters. While other parts of the world dealt with revolution and meltdown, the mean streets of literary London were also in ferment. If you assumed the world of books to be a tiny backwater, John Walsh is here to make you think again. Circus of Dreams – no skimping on the grandeur there – recounts a brief period when publishing almost became bold and writers became almost famous. Books suddenly infiltrated the news pages via awards (a bolstered Booker prize) and marketing gimmicks. A major new book chain (Waterstones) appeared in the high street. A whizzy new members’ club (the Groucho) opened in Soho, the improbable brainchild of a bunch of publishers.
Now I find that the processes of rereading, investigation and reflection have led me to the best time in my life. Reading memoirists raised issues in my mind about memory, truth telling and artistry. In weaving together these aspects of my own reading experiences in my thesis, I discovered parts of myself and aspects of my most intimate relationships that I had not previously explored.
Since then, probably every single major scientific discovery has used mathematics in some form, simply because it is far more powerful than any other human language. It is not surprising that this has led many people to claim that mathematics is much more: that the universe is created by a mathematician.
So could we imagine a universe in which mathematics does not work?
The movie has many lessons to teach the steep costs of attaining and retaining power, what a man gains and loses from pledging his loyalty to his family's greatness above all else.
However, as my husband showed me, even a person who doesn't live and die by Coppola's masterpiece may somehow have learned how to make Peter Clemenza's sauce.
A daughter of parents who abandoned their literary aspirations to support their family of eight, Hunt asks, “What projects don’t exist because I exist instead?” While considering German writer W.G. Sebald’s death at age 57, Hunt imagines a library filled with “all the books dead authors would never write because they had died too young.”
Hunt visits that and other made-up libraries throughout “The Unwritten Book: An Investigation,” the intense new memoir/essay collection from the novelist and short story writer behind “Mr. Splitfoot,” “The Dark Dark” and other works that search for life among the shadows. Just as Tweedy champions the music of fictional bands in his song, Hunt is fascinated by books that appear only in other books, books destroyed by authors fearful of publication and books left unfinished or unattempted by their creators.
In “Let There Be Light,” a work of biblical interpretation in comic book form, the cartoonist and illustrator Liana Finck presents us with a female God who is anything but supremely perfect. Omniscience, omnipotence? Forget about it. Visually, she’s just plain silly, if also adorable in a totally unawesome kind of way. She wears the kind of crown that a little birthday girl gets to wear on her special day. I’m guessing it’s constructed of shiny gold cardboard, an imaginative leap permitted by Finck’s minimalist black-and-white drawings. As another sign of her ontological status, Finck’s God carries a wand like the one that Glinda the Good Witch wields in “The Wizard of Oz.” Actually, Glinda’s wand is bigger, which probably makes Finck’s God feel bad about herself. She’s very prone to feeling bad about herself. No act of creation goes unpunished. The words “And God saw that it was good” never once appear. Instead, she feels disappointment, despair, an increasingly urgent desire to hide away.
In other words, Finck’s God is an artist, which is to say a being plagued with self-doubts. More significantly, she’s a female artist, which means she’s infinitely more plagued by self-doubts.
“Making History” is a survey—a monster survey—of historians from Herodotus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s description) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. Cohen’s coverage is epic. He writes about ancient historians, Islamic historians, Black historians, and women historians, from the first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. He discusses Japanese and Soviet revisionists who erased purged officials and wartime atrocities from their nations’ authorized histories, and analyzes visual works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the best record of its time, pictorial or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)
to disappear in time
we collect memories
stoke the fire
half-woman half-man half-animal half-bird
We live everyday on the brink of the abyss. Artists feel this. They smell darkness, inhale light. In what may be the oldest Greek myth of the gods, even Zeus himself, the almighty, journeys to the great goddess, Night, and asks her: What should I do? After their meeting, he recreates the world anew. Night is our most ancient councilor. In night, we dream. In dreams, we see reality in true tokens of its strangeness, its wonder, terror, and grandeur. “In art,” says Makoto Fujumura, “we do not ‘obliterate the darkness;’ art is an attempt to the define the boundaries of the darkness.”
What future do we face? What future do we want? What must we do to get there?
These three questions preoccupy us all. We can’t predict the future. However, we can imagine it and even design it; no outcome is predetermined and, as cognitive human beings, we retain the agency to shape the world we want. Perhaps most critically, we can also prepare for the future, by confronting both the risks that we can mitigate and the things that will surprise us. As the most effective conduits for ideas, narratives have the unique power to help us determine what’s going on, what lies ahead, and what needs to be done.
Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples is a tale told through absence. Her third novel – Baume’s debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize – is a love story. But it’s a love story clipped of cliché: there’s no Richard Curtis meet-cute, no unhinged exes orbiting malevolently, little interiority and less conflict.
Longtime Alaskans have watched our glaciers recede as well, perhaps not as closely as Wadham does, but we see it in real time. “Ice Rivers” offers an explanation of what we are witnessing, why it is happening, and what we are losing. The success of Wadham’s book is her ability to feel this loss on a personal level, and to convey to us why we all should.
This book fascinates, illuminates and horrifies in equal measure, yet never falls into the trap of sensationalism or voyeurism. It’s an elegant examination of how the act of murder uncovers truths society never wants to confront.
Gardens knit us into the cycles of life: every winter is a preparation for more permanent losses, every spring a reminder of the possibility for renewal ahead. Lulah Ellender began writing Grounding after her mother’s death; sorting through the family home, she found a diary that her mother kept recording the rhythms of her gardening year and this becomes a guide for her own engagement with her garden. Ellender realises that her garden – as a physical space and as a way of being – represents a point of communion with her mother, a way of keeping in touch with her via the mediums of plants and flowers. “Her tasks are my tasks now,” she writes.
Some people break into show business; others burst. Like her famous character on “Saturday Night Live,” the nervous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, Molly Shannon was more of a battering ram, laying siege to the false-fronted structures of Hollywood with blunt, repetitive force. When you reach the part in her new memoir, “Hello, Molly!,” where the fortresses finally crumble for her, you want to get out the pom-poms and cheer.
A cultural dope is someone like me or you, a consumer of culture or a “creative content provider” (through social media aren’t we all these days) who produces, or consumes, the preexisting cultural artifacts of the dominant political economy while functioning under the illusion that what they are creating or consuming –– a TV series, a song, a novel, etc. –– is “new.”
The pathway to becoming cultural dopes runs from Virginia Woolf to the Frankfurt School to Fredric Jameson, among others.
If you haven’t had to go through this particular indignity, I’ll tell you: There’s something about losing at Wordle that stings a little differently than any other defeat. You feel deprived of that little dopamine hit you were counting on. An internal monologue where you have to talk yourself through the five stages of grief becomes necessary.
“Cooking is serious science. In fact, it’s chemistry.” These words may not seem revolutionary today, but 60 years ago the suggestion that an element of women’s work could be approached with the rigor of a laboratory experiment was bold indeed.
The earnest speaker of this truth is 30-something scientist Elizabeth Zott, the protagonist of Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel “Lessons in Chemistry.” Elizabeth’s surprise platform? The set of 1961’s hit TV cooking show “Supper at Six,” of which she is the reluctant host. How Elizabeth lands in front of the camera, rather than under a fume hood, receives frank, satisfying treatment in this briskly paced, often funny, occasionally troubling, brew of a book.
Whether he’s talking politics (“De bourgeois take from de poor an’ give to dem self. De rich take from everybody an’ put it in a tax shelter”), sharing wonderment (Okay. Je l’admets. I never seen nutin’ like dat before. Dat were preddy awesome”), or evading a question (“You dun wanna know, brudder”), Theodore, better known as Thierry, is a born scene-stealer. A character vividly embodying a carpe diem philosophy (that tilts toward unapologetic hedonism), he’s the unfiltered truth-teller and forthright core of The Little Brudders of Misericorde, the accomplished debut novel by Victoria’s David M. Wallace.
Thierry’s also a mouse, one who speaks French and English (and, presumably, Mouse).
The name of Delia Ephron’s new memoir, “Left on Tenth,” not only gives driving directions to Ephron’s apartment in New York, it also delivers a poignant play on words. Ephron’s husband of 35 years, Jerry, died of cancer in that apartment in 2015. Ephron was left a widow on 10th Street. As titles go, it’s an impressive combination of witty, sad and memorable — just like the book itself.
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago is among the most venerated in the world, so it's fitting that its director, Jeff Deutsch, has written a book attempting to define what makes a successful bookseller.
The country in which I was born
cannot be seen anymore
you can smell it sometimes
turning a corner, crossing a sewer
Eat, Pray, Love ended up being a real treat, a lovely combination of beautiful descriptions and emotional intensity. Gilbert speaks eloquently and openly about romance, longing, insecurity, depression, grief, faith, and a sense of belonging in the world, rendering the sort of feelings and experiences most people keep to themselves with words that make them sound simultaneously unique and communal. The insights offered in the book were also refreshingly realistic—rather than the trite fair-weather mysticism that many inspirational bestsellers have to offer, I found some real transformations, as well as the acknowledgement that, change as we will, there are certain demons we will always have to fight.
The W boson, one of the tiniest, most elementary particles in the known universe is causing a big ruckus in the field of particle physics.
New findings about the particle, which is fundamental to the formation of the universe, suggest its mass may be far heavier than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics—the theoretical “rulebook” that helps us make sense of the building blocks of matter. If true, it could signal a monumental shift in our understanding of the universe.
The Sears catalog was mailed to far-flung rural addresses and priced within the realm of the people who lived there. Both young Willie Nelson in Texas and also a young Doc Watson bought their first guitars out of its pages; Watson grew up within twenty-five miles from my grandparents’ house in North Carolina. In the Jim Crow era, when visiting an actual storefront held danger and menace for Black Americans, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, and numerous other Delta blues musicians bought their first Stella guitars from Sears.
I used to believe that my grandma, Evelyn, had ordered the entire contents of the new house straight out of its pages too, but this was furniture-making western North Carolina before most of the factories were shuttered. My father says she bought most things from stores in town. Still, she’d grown up the only girl in a household of boys in a hardworking farming family, and her mother didn’t have time to waste on pretty things. If Evelyn had an interiors magazine, it was the Sears catalog.
Always different, always the same.
Which is to say, whatever the size or mood or condition of the room, whether there’s hair coiled blackly in the bathtub or an orchid in a vase on the table, what greets you as you open the door, every time, is a neutral waft of possibility. A sense of your self-in-waiting. Who are you going to be in here ? As you mingle with this careful anonymity, as you drift and lightly settle into this fancy or not-so-fancy non-place, what might happen?
Recently, a few days before the third anniversary of my uncle’s death, I visited Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, where my grandmother — his mother, who died four months after him — had once studied piano. As I approached the conservatory, I silently asked her for a sign to show me she was there. Immediately two birds swooped so close to me that their wings almost brushed against my face, and I watched as they flew up to a tree bursting with white flowers. It was eerily similar to a tree I’d looked at just after learning my uncle had passed away. The living search for signs — for answers — just as we do when we read books.
This search forms the backbone of “The Unwritten Book,” Samantha Hunt’s first work of nonfiction, which contains a book within a book — chapters of an unpublished novel written by her late father about a secret society of people who can fly without wings. “I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead—those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am,” Hunt writes. Some of those are referenced throughout, including the work of W.G. Sebald, who died in the same year as her father. “[Sebald’s] death was the start of the ghost books,” she writes, “the start of my imagining all the books dead authors would never write because they had died too young.”
This is the reality all across Heartbroke — there is no one coming to rescue these characters, no redemption to be had under the harsh sun. While Bieker might not mend their broken hearts, she honors their pain and their undying longings, and will leave you aching for them.
Bolaño once described his fellow countryman Emar as “the Chilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the unknown soldier”—perhaps an acknowledgment of how Emar seemed to embody an anonymous sacrifice made to the cause of literature. Yet Yesterday shows that Emar hardly deserves to remain unknown. It’s clear that the legacy left by this charming, strange, and formidable writer has more to offer.
If all works of literature are haunted by the ideal forms of which they are but imperfect instantiations, then the blank book – as envisaged by Carrión – symbolises the refusal to compromise authorial vision.
When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator.
Sea of Tranquility is an escape room of a book: a whodunnit, in a way, with one clear right answer. In that way, despite its plotlines about time travel, moon colonies, and airship terminals, it feels like a throwback to Mandel’s earlier work. It’s a simpler book, a neater book, than the two that preceded it. Written in Mandel’s past and ours, intertwining imagined past, present and future timelines, it somehow bears us deeper into the past and not the future. Time travel, after all, works in both directions.
Nafisi’s new work is a stunningly beautiful and perceptive illustration of how we rethink our lives by looking for the mysteries behind the fault lines that kept us imprisoned. She continues to circle this theme, often retelling stories, sometimes reimagining them in a different way from her other works. She isn’t being duplicitous with us, but rather attempting to find solid ground as the ghosts of her past continue to haunt her.
David Flusfeder is a semi-professional poker player, who knows all about the thrill of the gamble. In Luck, he bypasses the scientific harsh truth about randomness and probability and instead has written a book about the human side of luck, which he defines as “the operations of chance taken personally”.
Levy doesn’t delve too deeply into any individual story. But the overview serves as a useful starting point for comedy buffs wanting to learn more about each of these trailblazing comedians.
On August 17, 1960, five young Britons were approaching the stage of a small night club in Hamburg, about to play music in that city for the first time. To reach the stage, they had come an almost unimaginable distance. From their home, in Liverpool, they had driven in a cream-and-green minibus to the port of Harwich. The bus, teetering under the weight of amplifiers and instruments, had been lifted onto a ferry by a crane. At first, the stevedores had refused to handle such a precarious load; a photograph captured the moment just after they changed their minds, with the sixties hanging in the balance.
The musicians slept on benches as the ferry churned across the North Sea toward the Hook of Holland. From there, they drove to the West German border, where they told officials that they were students, bringing their guitars for “sing-songs” with friends. They were young enough to encourage the ruse—during the long ride, their manager had recited “The Wind in the Willows” to entertain them. Four of the five were teen-agers: John Lennon, nineteen; Paul McCartney and Pete Best, eighteen; George Harrison, seventeen. The fifth, Stuart Sutcliffe, was twenty, barely.
France’s Palace of Versailles was designed to make jaws drop. It wasn’t just its colossal size, tons of marble, and painted frescoes that stunned 17th-century visitors (and continue to impress eight million annual visitors today). The gardens were also a symbol of Louis XIV’s power, showing off the ordered wizardry and wonder that made designer André Le Nôtre’s jardin à la française, or French formal garden, widely copied in Europe.
But fewer than 700 feet from the palace, the discreet Queen’s Grove stood in complete contrast with Le Nôtre’s geometric precision. Here, Marie-Antoinette enlisted the finest botanists, architects, and horticulturists to create a secret refuge from the prying eyes and rigid rules of the 18th-century royal court.
Often ignored in the pandemic’s up-and-down, zig-and-zag, here-and-gone restaurant policies is a higher mandate that applies to 4 million people nationwide. They are tasked by God with a directive that is both centuries-old and recognized by pandemic CDC tweets: Ramadan, the ninth month of Islam’s lunar calendar, which marks the revelation of the Koran to the prophet Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel with broad, month-long, dawn-to-sunset fasts that end with a three-day festival called Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast.
The Long Now Foundation is “about much more than the clock,” I was told. Indeed, Long Now’s headquarters at San Francisco’s Fort Mason — a converted military site turned arts and culture center — hosts a seminar series on long-term thinking, a steampunk bar called the Interval, two projects to preserve linguistic diversity, a platform for placing bets on future events and a research program examining dozens of long-lived organizations across the world.
“Since moving to Texas, the clock has become a lightning rod for criticism and scorn.
I love a novel that provokes me. That pokes at and upends my emotions. Novels whose craft buffets me drunkenly down impassioned pages. Sentences that make me squirm or yearn, bristle or seethe, or sink deeper into the chair where, after checking to make sure no one’s watching, I greedily read on. I’m not talking about escapism or manipulation for its own sake, clickbait from lazy writers who play on emotions instead of having something to say or the ability to say it artfully. I simply mean those authors who can compel me to endure, consider, and maybe appreciate that which, outside their fiction, I might never endure, consider, or appreciate. Sometimes my collusion is easy to win; other times I respond almost in spite of myself.
The luxuriously disquieting and lexically dynamic fiction of Argentine author Ariana Harwicz offers many examples of such coerced complicity. Delectable images that would prompt stunned silence, disapproving frowns, illicit twinges if presented out of context or crafted by a less engaging author. And she never tells you how to react: you’re left chained to the crag, exposed to the elements.
Boy Parts is about how images appropriate and deceive—from security camera footage to art exhibitions, the visuals in this novel conceal as much as they reveal. But the novel is also about how language can do the same, and more. As rhetoricians have known since antiquity, language creates its own mental images that persuade not the eye but the heart. This moving power of words is responsible for fiction’s most intense pleasures, but it can also be used manipulatively. Irina’s words steer other characters, as well as draw the reader in. Clark never lets language out of her sight, making her novel a brilliant reflection on how fiction works as well as its delights and its dangers.
“Let’s Not Do That Again” is a political comedy of manners that reads like the love child of Page Six and a long episode of “Veep.” I mean this in the best possible way. If you like your humor dark and take guilty pleasure in imagining the messy lives of others, you will enjoy Grant Ginder’s fifth novel.
“The Candy House,” which passes the microphone to a number of peripheral “Goon Squad” characters, is similar in its anti-chronological structure and chameleonic virtuosity. But given its subject matter, it might be better to describe it as a social network, the literary version of the collaborative novel written by your friends and friends of friends on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist. It is a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes.
The 50s, or to be more exact the period from 1946 to 1963, marked what Norman Mailer dubbed at the time the “years of conformity and depression”.
Except it didn’t, or at least not for everyone. As James Gaines shows in this revelatory study, beneath the Pleasantville surface of postwar America there churned all manner of resentment and refusal. Everywhere he looks, Gaines finds individuals who insisted on marching to their own drum, even when that brought them into direct and even dangerous conflict with the newly oppressive status quo. In the process, he sheds light on a whole range of underground movements tackling everything from race relations to working-class feminism by way of non-binary sexuality.
What I didn’t know then was that, even as I ambivalently placed the overhead film on the projector, the concept of the tree of life had begun to wilt. Four decades on, it’s morphed entirely.
‘That whole abstraction of evolution as being a tree, we always knew was a little inadequate,’ Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the book An Introduction to Population Genetics (2013), told me by video call. ‘But now we know it’s really inadequate.’
According to Islamic tradition, ashure – which is frequently dubbed "Noah's Pudding" – was prepared as a celebratory dish by the prophet's family after surviving the great flood and washing up on Mount Ararat, on the fringes of what is today the north-eastern borderlands of Turkey. Legend has it that this cornucopia of a dessert, which usually includes around a dozen different grains, fruits, nuts and legumes, was concocted by combining whatever ingredients were still left on the Ark.
The resulting dish is mildly sweet, rich and savoury with notes of fruit. When prepared hot, ashure takes on a comforting consistency resembling porridge; when served cold it congeals and takes on more of a custard-like texture.
In the history of everything, there have been two Big Bangs.
One happened 13.8 billion-some years ago, and it created the universe.
The other one happened in mid-20th-century Southern California, and it created Fast Food America, a universe of its own, with a constellation of burger-and-burrito chains, all composed of the basic elements of salt, fat, sugar and pleasure.
Fifteen-year-old Mungo shows the kind of vulnerability that makes people want to cradle him — or crush him. He’s the tender Scottish hero of Douglas Stuart’s moving new novel, “Young Mungo.” It’s a tale of romantic and sexual awakening punctuated by horrific violence. Amid all its suffering, Mungo’s story makes two things strikingly clear: 1) Being named after the patron saint of Glasgow offers no protection, and 2) Stuart writes like an angel.
Speculative fiction often uses the future to decode the present. Here, Mandel folds the past into the mix, as well, creating a speculative universe where each plotline’s ending doubles as a trapdoor back to another plotline’s middle. And this mix of old and new doesn’t stop with her funky timeline. Although Sea of Tranquility is set largely in the future and adorned with sci-fi flourishes, it raises old questions about how we can make meaning.
Following a superb stylist like Mandel is like watching an expert lacemaker at work: You see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between. As in her best work, including “Station Eleven,” she is less concerned with endings than with continuity. In “Sea of Tranquility,” her vision is not quite as bleak, but it is as strong — I won’t say prophetic — as ever.
Sea of Tranquility is a tale of retrospects, of foresights, of the same moment layered on top of itself like repeated musical notes and of quotes that echo across time.
One of the many wonderful things about “Atomic Anna,” a book about Chernobyl, yes, but also about comic books, the power of math, finding one’s truth, and love, both biological and found, is the core group of women who ground it. We shift from Anna to her daughter, Manya — renamed Molly in America — who has grown up in Philadelphia with adoptive parents, refuseniks whom Anna helped to escape Russia. Then there’s Raisa, Molly’s daughter, who rivals her biological grandmother in terms of mathematical genius and spirit. We peer into their lives and trajectories as Anna moves through time, trying to figure out how to set things right and how to convey her needs to her loved ones, even as things inevitably change when she touches the past. The novel is masterfully plotted — one has to imagine an enormous whiteboard was involved as the author charted out what any given move might set in motion, each outcome with its own stack of connected dominoes.
David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.
They knock on cupboards & ribs,
steal mothballs from the wardrobe’s dim corners
& patch them into their wings.
They scream when the kettle boils.
“I guess to do something fully, you have to believe it will change everything,” Egan said. “And I, for some reason, have a delusionary ability to think that about what I’m working on.” I asked how she deals with the disappointment of returning to a world unchanged by her work. “It’s just the feeling of getting it right.”
For Egan, getting it right has to do with fulfilling a reader’s craving — the word “craving” appears in the first line of “Candy House” and the last chapter of “Goon Squad” — for mystery and imagination, as opposed to the barrage of information, the much emptier imagistic titillations, that we find much easier to access.
I used to think I was just being nostalgic for a sweet, geeky connection between father and daughter. Dad was trusting me to find out a statistic, like a football score, perhaps. But Dad and I weren’t rooting for players to score goals. We were rooting for players who had come together in the studio in the service of a piece of music – something stitched together from wisps of melodies, harmonies and rhythms, something that also, enchantingly, stitched us together. We were rooting for the two of us to be people for whom songs were extensions of their ordinary lives.
When I think of him, Dad always looks like he did in the porch, leaning over on his walking sticks, his eyes full of love, me looking into them for acceptance. When I think of him there, I also think about how he trusted me to tell him a story about a song. It still breaks my heart that I couldn’t stick to that promise.
It may seem improbable today, but some 75 years ago, classical music was a lingua franca for the average American, regularly heard and pervasive in mainstream popular culture. Film soundtracks of the Hollywood studio era either directly quoted or deliberately evoked the vocabulary of 19th-century symphonic and operatic literature, with many of the film composers themselves (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman, among them) émigrés from the European concert world. Classical musicians were frequently portrayed as romantic or tragic characters in the movies, on radio, and in legitimate theater, regarded not as elite types but as Everymen. Clifford Odets’s popular 1937 play Golden Boy (later a movie and a Broadway musical) was about a young man torn between being a prizefighter and a violinist, a dilemma unlikely to have befuddled Muhammad Ali or Tyson Fury.
Comedians Jack Benny and Henny Youngman came on stage with violins as props; both played the instrument competently though abused it humorously during their standup routines. The trope of the struggling musician or composer finally making it to Carnegie Hall was portrayed in countless movies, including a 1947 film actually titled Carnegie Hall. In the 1946 Warner Brothers film Deception, Bette Davis two-times her cellist lover Paul Henreid with classical pianist-composer Claude Rains; the same year, the same studio put out Humoresque, in which arts patroness Joan Crawford commits suicide Virginia Woolf-style when her love affair with the young concert violinist she has sponsored (John Garfield) goes sour (Isaac Stern dubbed Garfield’s violin-playing scenes). Could any film credibly essay a similar plotline in today’s culture?
"The name is Inuktitut for the skin blemishes or pimples caused by the very cold weather," explained Isabelle Dubois, project coordinator for Nunavik Tourism, who had previously only visited the crater in winter when the landscape was covered with snow.
I looked out of the window to distract myself from our second landing attempt and thought how apt a moniker it was. The tundra here is pockmarked by clefts, fissures and depressions filled with tiny pockets of water. Yet amid the myriad indentations, the eponymous crater stood out significantly.
Sublunary editions’s 2022 publication of Magdalena Edwards’s debut translation of a lone story by Julio Cortázar is an event. “Letters from Mom” (“Cartas de mamá”) is the opening story in Secret Weapons (Las armas secretas), Cortázar’s seminal 1959 postmodern pentad, and until now the only one untranslated into English. Four of the five stories appeared in a collection of 15, first published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories (1967; trans. by Paul Blackburn) and later republished in paperback as Blow-Up and Other Stories. But Edwards’s translation means that, for the first time, English-language readers can appreciate the context and range of the five stories comprising Secret Weapons, written before his 1963 novel Hopscotch made Cortázar famous. Through these stories, as Cortázar himself affirmed, the author discovered his métier and began to mature as a writer of fiction.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s tender paean to motherhood and community (originally published in French in 2008 and seamlessly translated by Jordan Stump) explores how exile robs people of their traditions and identity.
Kofman’s multi-layered memoir / manual is a fascinating read; ripe with truth, experience, and actionable advice. This is no generic guide to word-spurtage, but a carefully constructed collection of writerly guidance and literary wisdom. The Writer Laid Bare draws figurative maps around writerly obstacles, highlighting routes for overcoming creative, emotional, and practical roadblocks, with an admirable emphasis on honesty, bravery and contemplation.
Phillips’ knack for making the past feel immediate is on point in the well-plotted “One-Shot Harry,” his first novel about Harry Ingram, a freelance photographer whose work appears in newspapers and magazines serving Los Angeles’ Black community during the 1960s. Although this Harry is fictional, Phillips’ inspiration for this character came from two real Black photographers from this time period, including Harry Adams, who was nicknamed One-Shot Harry for his quick work.
Long though it is, Richardson’s Life was never intended to be definitive since many important archives are still closed. Nevertheless, it is an anthology of memorable gossip from the margins of Picasso’s life.
Last night
I saw that the moon
Was empty in the sky.
The stars around did
What they do.
They are
For many of us the news that there is an “Atlantis” off the coast of Yorkshire—a region best known for its tea, puddings, and the Brontë sisters—will come as some surprise. One might wonder what other metropolises, mythical and otherwise, lurk off the coastlines of the world’s countries.
The answer, an elementary search will reveal, is a lot. Some were destroyed by coastal erosion; a few were deliberately submerged by people; others were erased by weather events; and at least one was the stuff of legend before archaeologists uncovered evidence of its existence.
Now, at the age of 61, this period is nearly at an end. I know I’m not headed for the academic tenure track — my PhD is an end in itself. But I’d do it again. New knowledge enriches you, regardless of how old you are. My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it.
The writer of a successful first novel – and they don’t come much more successful than Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain – has two choices when it comes to the follow-up. Either they seek to prove their range with something entirely different, or they capitalise on that early success, giving readers more of what pleased them first time around. Stuart has opted for the latter course: Young Mungo is set in the same world and at more-or-less the same time as Shuggie Bain. It turns around the same basic friction: a young man growing up in grinding poverty who, because of talent, temperament and sexuality, is particularly ill-suited to the hard-edged world of the Glasgow schemes.
If Young Mungo doesn’t raise the same immediate thrill as Shuggie Bain – the sense of discovering a new voice of coruscating brilliance – there’s a richer, deeper pleasure to be gleaned here. Young Mungo is a finer novel than its predecessor, offering many of the same pleasures, but with a more sure-footed approach to narrative and a finer grasp of prose. There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth.
One striking feature of “Four Treasures of the Sky,” Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s engrossing, eventful first novel, takes the form of an absence: Although much of this epic late-19th-century tale unfolds in the American West, there is not a memorable moment involving a horse.
The dearth of pounding hooves and accompanying dust clouds is telling; Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life.
The novel is a whodunit of sorts. But it is also a thought-provoking drama which routinely strikes a number of serious notes about man's inhumanity and the traumatic effects of conflict. As Edward reminds us, "War poisons everything that it does not destroy."
Throughout the book, Marron continues to challenge himself to toe that line, which is what makes the book far more interesting than if it merely showed him bonding with his trolls. The book shows that connecting with the "other side" is endlessly complex, a constant push and pull that requires significant work and emotional sacrifice. At the same time, he shows that doing so can be powerful, important, and in some cases, can actually change minds.
If you hadn’t heard of Coleg Harlech in Wales, an adult education college whose endangered brutalist structures are “probably the most sheerly convincing 20th-century buildings in the entire country”, don’t worry. You are not alone. And it is precisely because works like this are obscure that Modern Buildings in Britain had to be written. For one of its strengths is the devotion and persistence with which Owen Hatherley has sought out gems across the country: a radar station in Fleetwood, an experimental plastic classroom in Preston, the magical Pannier Market in Plymouth, the modest 1950s Edgbaston offices of the Engineering & Allied Employers’ Federation.
Publishers emphasise the continued value of the customary audiobook, read by a single narrator, as well as its appeal to listeners. (Many youngish adults recall with fondness Stephen Fry’s rendition of the “Harry Potter” books.) Yet the reason modern iterations impress is that they draw from a well of 21st-century technological innovation and creativity alongside a venerable tradition of oral storytelling.
“I.C.E. vehicle” (pronounced “ice”) is similar. I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene. Like meatspace, it’s what the journalist Frank Mankiewicz called a “retronym” — a new term that’s invented for something old because the original term has become ambiguous, usually because of some development such as a technological advance.
A new book from TASCHEN, Dig It!: Building Bound to the Ground, looks at how humans have carved and dug into earth’s surface by offering a visual survey of architectural projects that “merge building and ground.” Such merging, the book argues, counteracts a long and destructive history of domination and separation from the surface (a.k.a. the natural landscape or unbuilt environment). It takes the Back to the Land movement literally, not just getting back to the land but into it.
In his 1964 lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Martin Heidegger proposed that philosophy’s historic function of providing a unified account of the world was growing obsolete. Cybernetics, the postwar scientific research on technical systems, was outperforming philosophy in this traditional role. Influencing everything from art and sociology to computation and neurobiology, this ambitious new discourse envisioned the relationship between a system and its environment as a series of feedback loops determined by communicative exchange. Deemed capable of accounting for everything from a cell’s interaction with its surroundings to the economics of human labor, cybernetics presented a more coherent metaphysical system than Plato or Hegel could have imagined.
While clearly impressed with these advances, Heidegger’s proclamation of the “end of philosophy” comes with a major warning. Though cloaked in the organic language of growth and spontaneity, this new mode of scientific inquiry risks a colonizing attitude toward human beings and the natural world. The technological ethos of postwar scientific advancement, for Heidegger, threatens to reduce even the arts to mere “regulated-regulating instruments of information” wielded for power and profit. For this reason, as Yuk Hui suggests in his new book, Art and Cosmotechnics, Heidegger turns to artists like Cézanne and Paul Klee, seeking to uncover a more ethical relation between human life, art, and nature.
It was the kind of party that I would have liked to have gone to, had I been invited; at a Brooklyn apartment a block from my own, overlooking the river and the bridge, the entire mile of it—or is the bridge a he, a beautiful recumbent sailor?—and its stone towers, one hundred yards tall; ships’ horns yawping over the water, shouldering through the December air, and all that muffled by the windows, by the Victrola, by the chatter and the holding forth on poetry and such; sofas and corners, coats heaped on the bed, whisky and gin on ice from the juddering fridge; and underneath, the seethe of possibilities—japes and aperçus, misapprehensions, confessions, attachments ill-advised and fortuitous, vertigoes, oblivions till dawn and beyond. It’s what I’d like to watch: altercations, perhaps, and sex quavering in the air; then moths stampeding from the piled winter coats, beating their wings against the windows, beguiled by the lamps on the bridge.
Oh dear, that was just writing; words upon words, layer cakes of words, fussy as candelabra. Where are the people? Where are the smells, the sizzle and clank of the steam heat? Where are the things, not the metaphors and adjectives and attitudinizing, but the things themselves? There’s nobody home in this, no carpet and wallpaper and leaks in the ceiling, no pots on the stove, no hairs on the bathroom floor, no stains on the sheets. It’s just writing, words atop words, like snow accreting, like dandruff, confetti, Legos in a sack. It’s prose imagining how poetry sounds. But as Robert Lowell said, “Why not say what happened?” Why not “give each figure in the photograph his living name?”
I have been Heidi since I was about a year and a half. At that time, we were stationed in Ft. Devon, Boston, and my grandmother, Ruth Barrett Haley, had come to live with us in our very small army quarters. She must have been surprised to learn that her daughter was now calling herself Louise, not Sally, as she had been known her whole life. My mother’s maiden name was Sarah Louise Haley: Sarah after her maternal grandmother, Sarah Ann Hemming from England; and Louise, after Louise Duplesis Haley, her paternal grandmother from Maine. But my mother had never liked being called Sally, so as soon as she got married and moved out of the house, she began calling herself Louise. Did changing her name upset my grandmother? I’m pretty sure it did because, perhaps in retaliation or revenge, she was the one who changed mine. But first, more confusion about my name.
The running gag of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is that Ernest is entirely honest – a rare reliable narrator – but that the truth can hide as much as a lie. And so Stevenson’s novel sets out to bamboozle us despite, and with, full disclosure. No clue is left un-signposted. No moment of cleverness left uncelebrated. No punchline left unpunched.
As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty. Charged with “a potency of ideas simmering,” “The Candy House” is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction to “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.”
Between the self Alexis Sears presents on the “My Journey” page of her website and the self we meet in her debut poetry collection, there’s an apparent disconnect. On that web page, we find undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins with distinguished mentors in poetry, an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, teaching experience, world travel, and a book prize. In the book, we find the trauma of a father’s suicide, depression, obsessions concerning love and sex and beauty and race — a panoply of confusions and wounds. I would fear making the rookie mistake of identifying the narrator with the poet, were it not for the directness of the “About My Writing” page on the same site, where Sears says plainly: “[M]y poems tell the story of my life as a biracial 20-something seeking joy and healing in the wake of a traumatic event.”
And now that I’ve assured you that I haven’t made a rookie mistake, please forget that one-sentence synopsis. You’ll get much greater pleasure out of watching Sears’s themes unspool themselves slowly over 80 pages of poems. The title Out of Order is doubly ambiguous — a machine out of whack, a failure to follow the rules of decorum — but it also points to the way events in the book are set out: not chronologically, but in scenes and hints scattered across the book’s four sections.
This novel cuts you and then bandages you back up. A few pages later — another slash. Yet Stuart doesn’t delight in misery the way writers such as Hanya Yanagihara seem to. Misery is just a necessary ingredient in his novels of sentimental education, the hit of salt that makes the sugar sing.