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