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.