But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is.
In Brooklyn, the borough associated with the “hipster” revolution from the late 2000s, writers energised by the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 retain their faith in left-wing politics through new “small” magazines. But on the island of Manhattan, a self-consciously transgressive artistic and literary scene is brewing downtown. In podcasts, plays and literary journals, a different sensibility is being elaborated. Scornful of the “woke” sanctimony of Brooklyn-based media, some flirt with alternative ideologies, while others claim not to be interested in politics at all.
The Wise View, with its conservative acceptance of the status quo, stands in the way of a greater societal commitment to finding out what aging is, and slow it down, halt it, or perhaps even reverse it. Thankfully, we find ourselves at a turning point in history where the old stories in praise of human mortality are beginning to lose their grip. We are less willing to see death as a just divine punishment, less certain of an afterlife, less inclined to accept that everything that happens by nature is thereby good, and we are no longer certain that nothing can be done about death. We are beginning to allow ourselves to openly admit what our actions already say: namely, that we want youth and life and that we hate aging and death. A rebellion against death is brewing.
When Sara, one of the protagonists in “Yerba Buena,” was a girl, she and her family used to play a game. They started with a blank piece of paper. Each person in turn would begin to sketch, slowly building the scene. As Sara and her brother watched, “their father moved his pencil, faint lines that turned — as if by magic — into places and things they recognized.” Suddenly, there it was: an entire world, familiar yet strange, and within it, a story.
This, too, is how Nina LaCour, who won a Printz Award for her young adult literature, weaves together her first adult novel. Chapter by chapter, she switches between perspectives to craft a quiet love story about two young women in Southern California who are figuring out what it means to build a home and to choose to invite someone to share in it.
In the introductory note to “The Foundling,” Ann Leary suggests a conundrum. How could an “early feminist” like Margaret Sanger — a pioneer of reproductive freedom, a tireless activist for progressive reform — proclaim in 1922 that “every feebleminded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period” and expect modern-thinking people to agree with her?
Sanger doesn’t appear in “The Foundling,” but her ghost haunts its moral landscape as the fictional Agnes Vogel, a psychiatrist whose crusade for women’s rights and social reform propels her to the directorship of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, a public asylum founded to sequester “unfit” women so they don’t breed others like them. If that description rings of dystopian satire, it’s not. Leary was inspired by the experience of her own grandmother who, in the 1930s, at the age of 17, worked as a stenographer for the director of a similarly named institution in rural Pennsylvania.
What do we owe the ones we love, really?
There are many moments in “Nightcrawling,” the fierce, lyrical debut novel from the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Leila Mottley, that prompt shades of this question. How do we divvy up our successes or our shortcomings? When personal well-being is inextricably linked with the collective, then abandoning others in order to find it constitutes a type of betrayal. Either we owe our people nothing, or everything.
The novel’s chapters alternate between Yu-Jin’s perspective in the years leading up to her death and Min’s attempts to understand what happened afterward. As the voices build, they slowly reveal a powerful story about the pressures experienced by young adults living in Korean society.
When he finally gets back to his "live audience — that unwitting congregation of fail-safe editors" with a 72-city tour in the fall of 2021, he describes a world that is no less unscathed by COVID than he is by his father's life and death. It's a world that has gone as topsy-turvy as the title of the book's final essay, "Lucky-Go-Happy": a "divided, beat-up country...weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in. All along the West Coast I saw tent cities." Also, Help Wanted signs, belligerent passengers harassing flight attendants about mask mandates, and angry graffiti ("Eat the Rich") on boarded up storefronts. Coming from a writer who can find twisted humor even in a "massively difficult" father, this dark view is sobering.
It makes a certain brutal sense that in 1963 this spinster (a term Pym embraced) would be sheared away from British culture, along with Harold Macmillan and below-the-knee hemlines. Pym’s novels are filled with the arrivals of new curates, the struggles of “decayed gentlewomen,” the ditherings of clerical and academic wives. Each self-denying single woman, like the heroine of “Some Tame Gazelle,” Pym’s first novel, is deemed “fortunate in needing very little to make her happy,” though the blunt, truthtelling housekeeper generally knows better. Life in Pym’s world is spiced up by the occasional emergence of an exotic or a rogue: the Hungarian businessman in “Civil to Strangers” (written in 1936 and published posthumously), the womanizing widower of “Jane and Prudence” (1953). But there are always altars to be decorated, charitable jumble sales to be organized, improving lectures to be attended. Anyone in 1963 who still wanted fiction set in the vicarage, publishers thought, could go back to Jane Austen, the writer to whom Pym has ceaselessly, and often wrongly, been compared. Her novels may seem to come down, like Austen’s, on the side of sense, but the inner life from which they sprang was a maelstrom of sensibility, a confusion of disproportionate feelings lavished upon badly chosen men.
I am sitting in Massachusetts General Hospital. My sister has just emerged from surgery for a very rare vulvar sarcoma. I’m due to stay overnight as support. A text arrives from my husband informing me he’s just seen the preview for a movie based on the same subject as my novel-in-progress. The movie, Augustine, is a French film about the young hysteric Augustine Gleizes and her relationship with renowned French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. I’d been praying that no one would tell this incredible but little-known story before I did. I immediately enter a tailspin, exacerbated by the bad timing: my sister’s undergone a successful operation, and here I am, having a meltdown. I can’t pull myself out of the spiral: I’m too late—I’ve missed my chance to produce the first work of art about Augustine and Charcot. My debut collection, Hangings: Three Novellas, was published eight years earlier. Why has it taken me so long to complete this novel? I post on Facebook; friends try to calm me; my sister is incredibly gracious; and I feel guilty for requiring comfort rather than giving it.
It will be another nine years until the novel is finished.
Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ground squirrels start to rally from hibernation. It’s tempting to say that that they are “waking up,” but hibernation is more complicated and mysterious than a simple long sleep: Any animal that can spend months underground without eating or drinking and still emerge ready to face the world has clearly mastered an amazing trick of biology.
In a Bennett novel, stories aren’t passageways toward a higher plane. Stories are essential; they don’t have to promise salvation to do their work. Living in a book is like living through the years, she says, not a substitute for life but life itself. The wonder of “Checkout 19" is that such a compact novel could accommodate Bennett’s sprawling imagination. Wry, hilarious, melancholic, narcotic, bracing — how can so many contradictory adjectives be true at once?
Ingle spins a yarn which many women can relate to in terms of themselves, their mothers or the grandmothers. In spite of her nationality Ingle stands for traditional Irish motherhood and its enduring power.
In my favorite type of Sedaris essay — the kind I’ll keep rereading — the author takes an unusual or taboo topic, such as death or incontinence, and then shows us how a group of flawed characters including himself circle around that topic; but then, in the last paragraph or two, he unleashes a blast of tenderness or humanity that catches you off guard.
Sitting on the porch of the house
the father doesn’t remember is his own,
“The idea of collaboration in other media is expected, whereas for whatever almost superstitious reason, in the book world, it’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author,” Jennifer Croft, a translator and a key player in the effort to translate Ukrainian literature into English, told me in an interview.
There’s no good justification for this. Translating literature isn’t a mere technical exercise, subbing one word for another. It isn’t something Google Translate can do. Translation is an art that requires channeling an author’s voice, tone, intention and style. A great translator even has the power to improve upon a work of art, as Gabriel García Márquez often said of his English translator, Gregory Rabassa.
I can’t hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book’s extraordinary emotional geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty; the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it’s as if a bell sounds). All I can say is that I loved it. Somehow – those tears again! – it brought things back to me, and by doing so, it made me remember what’s really important in life; how glad I am myself to be tethered to certain people, certain places.
Central to the book’s argument is that technology profoundly colors Gen Zers’ lives. Born into an Internet-wired world, they must straddle the real and digital spheres in order to survive, adeptly using one to reinforce the other. Yet “[a]s technology evolves, so do associated social codes and behaviors.”
In a sense, writing a book is easy. You just keep putting one interesting sentence after another, then thread them all together along a more or less fine narrative line. Only, it isn’t easy – in fact, it’s famously difficult, a daunting and arduous labour that can frequently leave you in a state of utter nervous exhaustion, reaching for the bottle or the pills. Since his creative breakthrough with The Adversary, published in 2000, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère has done something doubly amazing: he’s pioneered a unique and captivating new way of telling a true story, and he’s made it look easy. Or at least, he makes it go down easy for the reader. His fiendishly personal “nonfiction novels”, which encompass subjects such as dissident Russian literature or the story of early Christianity, unfold in a condition of perpetual climax, locked to a point of fascination from first page to last.
The picture for a jigsaw puzzle I have been meaning to work on is of a stomach full of biscuits.
A biscuit is often a thin, flat, edible disk typically associated with the British. It’s as stiff as an upper lip. You have to suck on it to extract any flavour.
A cookie, on the other hand, is a biscuit that’s become bloated, soft, and sometimes crunchy, as if it has lost control of its biscuit self and is now an embarrassment to others.
The ice cream cone is never the star of the show.
Its role is clear: Keep the scoop upright, don’t leak and don’t upstage the main player.
But being that supportive takes work. Which is why David George believes that the cone deserves more respect.
Some people think my published work — weekly reviews, monthly roundups of favorites, spring and fall dining guides — reflects all the calories I’ve consumed on the job. The truth is, I eat at far more restaurants than you read about, north of 125 a year. I’m a lucky grazer. My budget allows for scouting, and sometimes it takes two visits to determine a place isn’t worth telling the world about.
I bring all this up because I’m asked about how the job is done every week — by neighbors, people I meet at the parties we’re now going back to, followers of my weekly online dining Q&A.
If I knew it was to be my last flight, I would've flown somewhere more remote than Mallorca.
Antarctica or Papua New Guinea, maybe: once-in-a-lifetime destinations that require serious effort to reach. I might have taken a private plane to French Polynesia, sipping Champagne the whole way and then sliding down the inflatable evacuation slide by way of a final hurrah.
With her new book, “River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,” she takes a similar slice-of-the-story approach to the decades-long Nile drama, focusing on the bitter rivalry between explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. And while her book is neither as infectiously readable as Moorehead’s (which is now outdated) nor as comprehensive and deeply researched as Jeal’s, she does add a new dimension to the story. Perhaps as a corrective to the Anglocentrism of earlier accounts, she brings a third figure into the foreground: Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a formerly enslaved African who acted as guide and interpreter for Burton, Speke and several other explorers over the years. It’s a refreshing shift in emphasis and certainly overdue, but since relatively few details about Bombay survive in the historical record, there are limits to how much Millard can tell us.
Even satirists get the blues. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that satirists are among the likeliest to get the blues, given the pomposity-skewering nature of their work. It shouldn't surprise anyone that David Sedaris' latest collection, the ironically titled "Happy-Go-Lucky," has more touches of melancholy than in previous books. And that's saying something for a man who had to endure a stint as a department store elf, as he recounted in "Barrel Fever."
In this story, despite
our reservations, we do have kids.
We adore
their tiny furred faces and deep
pooled eyes.
I am not unpacking my library. No, I’m not. I pace around the living room of our newly rented apartment, which isn’t even so new anymore, but it still doesn’t feel like home. In Russian, we say: “Why are you standing there like an impoverished relative?” In Yiddish it’s something about standing around like a golem. I say both of those admonitions to myself, almost out loud, but all of our new things here—couch, bookcases, built-in shelves, fake fireplace—continue to feel foreign to me, and even our old things, the very few we could bring here with us, feel out of context. My doumbek drum functions as a miniature coffee table with a tall stack of magazines and books, and a cup of coffee tilting ominously.
For many children of Asian immigrants, success is seen as hinging upon assimilation into white culture, which continues to dominate many spaces that can lead to upward mobility (this is part of the complex and hugely detrimental model minority myth). Food is one of few more visible ways to reclaim that heritage; and that very reclamation influences and complicates the identity of those of us who are assimilated.
The bicycle was invented in 1817 — much later than salt, trees or sheep, if you look it up. Indeed, as Jody Rosen points out in his excellent new book, “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle,” “the first bike came into the world a decade and a half after the invention of the steam locomotive.” It seems startlingly late for the arrival of such an intuitive and simple form of transportation, and that recentness suggests that, for all Rosen’s dutiful consideration of the possible antecedents of the bike (an unconvincing image in a centuries-old stained-glass window in Buckinghamshire, England, for instance), he might be precluded from the effects that similar microhistories can achieve.
In fact, the opposite is true: The narrow subject and relatively brief time frame of “Two Wheels Good” make it a crystalline portrait of modernity, the vexed, exhilarating, murderous, mechanized world left to us by the 19th century. The bicycle has touched nearly every element of life on earth since then, it turns out. The Vietcong used bikes in their counterraids; Susan B. Anthony once commented that the bicycle had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”; it was a Parisian bicycle maker who patented the ball bearing, the so-called atom of the machine age. We even rode it into the age of flight, in a sense: The Wright brothers were bike mechanics.
To write about Naples, you really need to be a poet—or, even better, an antiquarian bookseller. Mr Kociejowski is both and has produced a delightful work that is as eclectic, labyrinthine, ironic and shocking as the city itself.
When I was growing up, my father — always eager to instruct his backward son — would regularly intone the phrase, “I shall pass this way but once.” Since Dad wasn’t one to care about anybody outside our extended family, he never quoted the rest of the old Quaker proverb: “Any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now.” No, he simply meant that I shouldn’t put things off, imagining that I’d come back to them at some later date.
To my surprise, this paternal advice became, without my quite knowing how, the abiding principle of my professional life as a writer and reviewer — at least until recently. Over the years I’ve certainly returned several times to a handful of writers, most prominently those twin monsters, Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov, but in general I’ve never counted on rereading anything. I give each book or subject my best, then move on to something new.
Bayesian persuasion is an idea only a little more than a decade old that’s being used to study phenomena as varied as advertising, the law, bond ratings and parking enforcement. A working paper this month uses it to analyze political lies. The authors conclude that politicians will lie more when they know they’re being fact-checked. (Finding a real-life example of that behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Peranakan cooking, a Southeast Asian cuisine with multicultural roots, created and popularised by nyonyas (Peranakan women), is often labour-intensive and time-consuming. Sometimes it takes several days to prepare one dish. Take ayam buah keluak (chicken and black nuts stew) for instance. The buah keluak, a nut native to Malaysian and Indonesian mangroves, has to be soaked in water for three to five days, changing the water every day, before extracting the black paste inside the nuts.
The protagonist of this debut novel by the Scottish actor and screenwriter Kenny Boyle is Wendy, a recent graduate stuck in a dead end call centre job. But the story starts with her hiding after an art heist, along with a precious stolen painting, in the attic of her grandmother’s house in Glasgow. The tale of how she comes to be catapulted from boredom to daring adventure is also a quirky and honest portrayal of early twenties friendship.
The first thing to say about Ardal O’Hanlon’s Brouhaha is that is very good. By good I mean it is humane, clever, funny, gripping, complex, serious and surprising. It won’t win the Nobel or the Booker, but it ought to have a fair run at the Bollinger Wodehouse prize. It is comedy crime, which is a difficult genre to make work successfully. If the comedy is too overt, the harm to others is diminished. If the crime is too forward, the witticisms seem a little puerile. But O’Hanlon gets the balance perfectly right. I laughed out loud, and I sat and wondered about the horrible truths. That is no small achievement.
In Bittersweet, she starts off with an intriguing idea: why are we so taken with sad songs? Referencing songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, she explores the reason that she is so drawn to music with melancholy – and alights on the “bittersweet”; those rare moments we experience joy and sadness at the same time.
Nomatter how many times it happens, I’m still excited every time I get my hands on an advance reading copy of a book that has yet to be published. How thrilling to turn to page one with almost no idea what I’m in for, before review coverage has begun, before any overly enthusiastic friend gives too much away.
When I received a galley of Gone Girl in 2011, I had no preconceived notions other than the fact that I knew that author Gillian Flynn had written two prior thrillers, and I’d been a fan of her work when she was on staff at Entertainment Weekly. I was certainly not primed to expect a perfectly paced and perfectly nuanced he said/she said story, especially not one with an audacious plot twist that strikes right smack in the middle of the book and absolutely blows up every word that has come before. I had never read anything quite like it. I still have never read anything like it. Although now, ten years after the official publication of Gone Girl, many others have tried to emulate its style and edge.
I’m deep in the stacks of the London Library, trying not to get dizzy as I look down into a multistory drop from the iron-grille floor, when an older man approaches me, looking lost. He’s trying to find the music section, located… somewhere in the darkened rows of books. As a visitor to the historic members-only institution, it takes me a beat to realize that not only do I have zero clue where the section might be, it seems unlikely that I’ll be able to navigate my way out of the building’s origami-like interior without help. (Spoiler: I don’t.)
But therein lies the beauty of the London Library. From an idiosyncratic filing system, to a building that encourages exploration, it’s an institution where serendipity and tactile history meet. Which is why it’s the latest selection for Beast Travel’s once a month series on the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries.
According to my paternal grandmother, I’ve always been receptive to spirits. She likes to remind me how I would wake her up in the middle of the night, hyperventilating as I tried to explain that my spirit had left my body, that I had found my nose pressed against the ceiling as I hovered above my bed; that I had lost my eyes and couldn’t see. Back in my body, I rubbed my arms and wrapped them around my legs, not sure if I had actually returned. For many nights, I continued to jolt awake, crashing back into my body as if dropped from a great height.
From the polyamorous cigarette cult of “Nicotine” to the naive addict of “Doxology,” or the white girl raised as Black by a lesbian mother in “Mislaid,” Zink has taken high-concept premises to transgressive extremes with clever self-assurance. Whether your first Zink novel is your last depends on your taste and also on which novel you happen to pick up. And while “Avalon’s” scope might feel smaller than the purview of her previous books, it turns out to be incredibly pleasing — if sometimes also baffling — to see a writer this intelligent keep the focus of her gaze this tight.
“Either/Or” is a sequel that amplifies the meaning of its predecessor while expanding its philosophical ambit — in short, the best kind. Elif Batuman picks up the story of Selin Karadağ, the wry heroine of “The Idiot ” (2017), in her sophomore year at Harvard. As she observes the absurdities of college life circa 1996 and the rules and beliefs that seem to govern contemporary behavior, she asks herself vital questions about love, life, literature and what Alanis Morissette is really for.
Test tubes adorn the cover of “The Latecomer,” glassware signifying the in vitro origins of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s protagonists, the Oppenheimer triplets, Harrison, Lewyn and Sally. Our gifted narrator, who shall remain nameless so as not to spoil a wonderful twist, introduces us to these three, starting before conception — and explores their family tree (roots to branches). The result is a sparkling novel that is in essence satirical and wise, in style old and new.
I like to stroll the graveyard in the middle of town
With my friend Anne, though we seldom agree
On what an epitaph we happen to read implies.
By relentlessly piling on common slang to describe the approach and eventual explosion of the physical violence and sex it denotes, Melchor makes us see it all at once, in constant winking multivalence: like a taut ribbon of sense flashing in the wind. When combined with the incantatory rhythm of her prose, the effect is a force field of language and text, sound and image, history and politics, desire and pain, that really does feel like coming into contact with an undercurrent of human life. It is a marvelous trick of art, albeit a trick in the same sense that a microscope is a trick of optics. I reckon the best judgment on Fernanda Melchor is still that of her contemporary Guadalupe Nettel: “She makes magic when she writes. She activates, like one who knows a secret code buried in our memory, the primitive cadence of language.” Why would anyone who has lived in this world expect that experience to be anything other than overwhelming, violent, frightening, and leavened if we are lucky by a dark sense of humor and brief flashes of beauty amid ugliness and self-destruction?
Chaon creates a daring irony in the disconnect between the road warrior’s self-deceit and the reader’s skepticism. The mystery, the moral audacity, the sense that anything is possible in these early pages refreshes not only the hit-man trope but also the world itself. Chaon taps into the prurient thrill of riding shotgun with the unpredictable, and the question dawns: Just how lawless and unhinged will the world of “Sleepwalk” get?
Niyi Osundare’s newest collection of poetry, Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet, lets the earth speak. He shows us how the planet is ailing—cutting through all the tricks that the powerful play to continue to milk the land—via the direct address and the personification of the environment, forcing us to consider how we might help protect Earth from those who are killing it. Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet is thus a plea to save our planet, our homes, our lives.
The last entry in the collection is a short essay, part paean to books and to a life of reading, part aesthetic manifesto. In it, Tuten has some choice words for “likable” or “relatable” protagonists, “the expected staples of standard-issue fiction,” and he holds up Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” as a model for the way it “sidesteps the rules of normative — and predictable — fiction.”
Tuten could easily be talking about his own work. “The Bar at Twilight” is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the firm impress of the soul.
The house is in Chatou, a southwest suburb of Paris.
It has proper French tree lined streets and stag beetles
noisily hovering under a fretted iron street lamp.
My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter—red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels—offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. flight bound for Zurich.
Before being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. Bernard, a Christmas-present puppy whose name was Jingles and who was eventually run over by a car, like so many dogs on our street, which is another reason more people should ride bikes. I didn’t mind about the missing handlebar grips. I tucked a stuffed bear into my red wagon, tied its rope to my seat post, and scooted down the sidewalk, dragging the wagon behind me, my first bike hack. Far from being a jet-setter, I have always been an unhurried bicyclist, something between deliberate and fretful. Jack, a speed demon and a danger mouse, but above all a gentleman, would wait for me at every telephone pole. Jack and Jill went up the hill, everyone would call out, as we wheeled past. Pbfftttttt, we’d raspberry back.
Still, the act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. Although wiser people tell us not to read comments, with today's technology, readers' responses are exceedingly difficult to evade. And try as we might to ignore them, the words of critics can still wound us.
How, then, should we think about displaying ourselves — or at least our thoughts and words — in public? And where does the allure of public writing leave the activity of scholarly writing?
I always knew why I loved reading happy endings, but it wasn’t until I became a writer that I understood the appeal for their creators: the consolation of leaving one’s characters to a now-uneventful future where nothing too dramatic will ever happen again. But lately in the pandemic, as I reread my favorite novels, I have fallen victim to the allure of something much harder to pin down: the unhappy happy ending.
If you wanted to write a screenplay for a blockbuster film, Aristotle is the last person you might ask for advice. He lived more than 2,000 years ago, spent his days lecturing on ethics and earthworms, and never saw a movie in his life. But some of the best contemporary writers of stage and screen, such as Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet, think that this ancient Greek philosopher knew exactly how to tell a gripping story for any age. ‘The rulebook is the Poetics of Aristotle,’ Sorkin says. ‘All the rules are there.’
In the 15 years since he began “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” his Food Network flagship, Mr. Fieri, 54, has become perhaps the most powerful and bankable figure in food television, the éminence grise of the eminently greasy. And by dint of that show’s success — and Mr. Fieri’s runaway celebrity, and that golden porcupine of hair, and maybe that one review of his Times Square restaurant a while back — certain perceptions have attached to him through the years, perpetuating the caricature he still often seems eager to play.
He would like a word about all that.
“Secret City,” by James Kirchick, is a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means?
This third Kawakami co-translation from Bett and Boyd contains ample evidence of a thriving collaboration. Their choices are especially strong in scenes where Fuyuko finds emotional relief in language. One drunk evening, “with a cheek pressed against the floor,” she flips through flyers and various ad books that have accumulated in her mailbox. Her copy-editor mind, even inebriated, spots seven errors, which she can’t help marking with her fingernail, defaulting in her off-hours to the work that has become her only stable identity. There is something delightfully bookish, and true, about her attraction to “a substantial booklet made with good-quality paper.”
“Raw”, a word that will probably be used a lot of Nonfiction, captures its headlong intensity but simultaneously undersells the authorial alchemy at play here. Because this novel blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love, compassion and creativity. And in its bare-knuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted – it’s almost shockingly exposing. More so, perhaps, than true nonfiction.
Following up on a well-received debut novel is never an easy task, but it’s what Brendan Jones faced after his 2016 tale “The Alaskan Laundry” drew widespread acclaim. That book offered a poignant meditation on how people come to Alaska hoping for one last chance to redeem themselves, and how Alaska can repeatedly derail such efforts. It was one of the finest works of Alaska literature to emerge in the past decade, and it left readers with high expectations for where Jones would go next.
On his second outing, Jones answers that question by sidestepping those expectations and writing a young adult novel that explores similar themes while highlighting his versatility as an author. This time, however, he also dives into the ecological and economic conflicts that bedevil Alaskans, stakes out some middle ground, and gives his readers a story that’s both heartwarming and hopeful.
Set on a Single Day When Everything Seems on Edge, as a Climate Protest Takes Hold in Dublin, It Follows Ruth, a Therapist Who Herself Seems at Breaking Point, and Neurodivergent Teen Pen, Who Needs “Not So Much a Label as Strategies to Calm the World’s Chaos”. Told From Their Alternate Perspectives — With a Handful of Other Key Voices Sprinkled in — as the Day Creeps Along, Pine Says It’s About What Happens When You Stop Asking the World for Permission to Be Yourself.
With a Twisty, Evocative Plot, and a Prose Style That Deftly Pivots From Spartan to Poetic, Lockhart Delivers a Captivating, Cautionary and Ultimately Rewarding Atmospheric Mystery Told as a Haunting Confession That Lingers in the Imagination Long After Turning the Final Page.
But the first shot of New York City in You’ve Got Mail is not of one of these idyllic quarters, one of these provincial and folksy avenues dotted with decorative gourds or blooming flower boxes, persistent details of a district so charming and precious that it might have been embroidered rather than built. The first shot is a stark computerized rendering of the city, not at all like the real thing.
The film opens on a digital image, a dark screen with a few swirls and floating loops moving about. The title appears over this animation, typed out with a blinking cursor, as if on a word processor. But this is not intended to simply evoke a computer, it is intended to evoke the internet (the script refers to it as a visualization of the term “cyberspace”); we can hear the wails and chugs of dial-up in the background.
Ten days before my father died, he suffered a small stroke and fell. Or perhaps he fell and then had the stroke. Either way, it surprised me when people asked what was the cause of death. I mean, he was 98! Wasn’t that cause enough?
I visited him shortly after his fall, flew down from New York with Amy and Hugh. Gretchen and Paul met us at Springmoor, but he was essentially gone by then. There was a livid gash on his forehead, and he was propped up in his bed, which seemed ridiculously short, like a cut-down one you’d see in a department store. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and behind his lips swayed a glistening curtain of spittle.
Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino: His films are violent but often hilarious, exulting in the history of cinema, from spaghetti westerns to slasher films to auteurs such as Welles and Kurosawa.
The same can be said of Dan Chaon's brash, exuberant new novel, "Sleepwalk," a Tarantino vibe in book form, with nods to Pynchon-paranoia and Kerouac-style road epic, Greek myths and dystopian fiction. "Sleepwalk" draws on an array of genres and narratives, but it's also a visionary work, a preview of a nation just minutes away.
If “cultural good” strikes you as a maddeningly vague descriptor, I regret to inform you that In Praise of Good Bookstores won’t give you the ah-ha specificity that you might be seeking, or that might help you win an argument with my dad. It does, however, put forth a moving and capacious argument that seems less concerned with convincing skeptics that there is something urgent and necessary about spaces devoted to books (and to their thoughtful, algorithm-free curation) than it does with validating, heartening, and invigorating believers. Deutsch calmly and deftly defends the value of bookstores while eschewing the panicky self-justification and broad-strokes condemnations of our bloodless, anti-intellectual plutocracy that some might default to (read: that I might default to), instead favoring a quiet, loving return to what drew us book-lovers to bookstores in the first place.
Struggles we had
a name for and those
for which we didn’t.
It was a hot and dismal day in Charlottesville, Virginia, in June 1815 as Thomas Jefferson watched the last of ten wagons carry away his entire personal library. His beloved 1744 edition of Cicero was headed north along with nearly 6,500 other volumes, and the Sage of Monticello was bereft. “I cannot live without books,” he wrote to John Adams shortly thereafter.
Liquidating his library had been a painful choice, but Jefferson had compelling inducements. For one, the former president was facing some $20,000 in debts, and the library would net him nearly $24,000. But Jefferson had a second motive: His books were bound for Washington, D.C., where they would become the cornerstone of the rebuilt Library of Congress, which the British Army had torched the previous year, along with everything else in the old Capitol. Jefferson was now the founding father of the nation’s restored library.
A product of the incarceration herself, Yamamoto’s stories focus on the camps, but also on the life of Japanese Americans after they were released, bringing a keen eye to the complex relationships that exist between first-generation Japanese Americans and their children. Perhaps what is most striking about Yamamoto’s stories, though, is how easily they could be written by a Japanese American author today, though many of them were written over fifty years ago, so focused are they on issues of race and the gendered expectations of women that still exist. Reading a Yamamoto story now makes you realize that her work was ahead of its time, but also that the struggles of the past are still with us in the present.
You should know, before you begin this journey, that “This Time Tomorrow” is a story about time travel. So prepare your suspension-of-disbelief mind muscles for the heavy lift. Or just settle in for the ride, confident that Emma Straub will conduct you to the welcoming place where fiction and wishful thinking align. There are plenty of signposts to ease your way.
Archaeologist and journalist Mike Pitts, who has studied the ruins for decades and co-directed excavations at the site, offers readers an in-depth assessment in “How To Build Stonehenge.” While he doesn’t try to answer the first question of why – writing that “imagination is the only limit” to finding a motive – he does break down the second question into several components: how the stones were obtained, how they were moved to the site, how the structure was erected, and how its construction has changed over time. Overall, the book feels geared toward readers who relish granular technicalities of geological analysis. Yet for those who are more interested in the human aspects of Stonehenge’s construction, Pitts’ review of how megaliths have been handled over time still proves noteworthy.
“There is nothing that doth more advance and sour a man’s misery”, the eulogist said at the funeral of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in April 1646, “than this one thought and apprehension: that he was once happy.” Before the outbreak of the English civil war, Rawdon had been a highly successful merchant in London; his unofficial motto, “win gold and wear gold”, hints at his style. But history knows him as a leading royalist officer in the defence of Basing House.
The siege of that house is the immediate subject of Jessie Childs’s riveting new book. The mansion, part of which was a castle, was reputed to be the largest private residence in England. The estate was the Hampshire seat of John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, a Catholic royalist. The nickname Loyalty House derived from “Aimez Loyauté”, the Paulet family motto.
“The biggest miracle was getting nine broadcast series scheduled,” Wolf says in our mid-April conversation. “The bigger miracle will be getting all nine of them renewed.”
Spoiler alert: The miracle happened right on cue, just as the television industry prepared to gather this week in New York for the first traditional upfronts week since the television landscape was upended by the arrival of Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+ and others.
In a country better known for its sushi, sashimi and noodle dishes, the simple roasted sweet potato – or yaki-imo – doesn't garner as much attention. But this hearty vegetable, yet another import in a sizeable list of historical introductions to the island nation (ramen, for example), has long been a beloved winter snack eaten in the cold months after its harvest. A favourite in Japan since the 1600s, yaki-imo's moist, chewy texture and burnt-caramel scent still inspire nostalgia – as do the trucks that are gradually disappearing as sweet potato sales move to convenience stores and supermarkets.
It’s nearly impossible to define kueh (sometimes written as kuih), the genre-bending dessert/snack that exists across Southeast Asia—specifically throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
You probably have an insulated cup, either given as a gift or purchased on your own, tucked inside the depths of your cabinet. Over the past decade or so, few home goods as humble as this have gotten as much shine. Thanks to wildly popular brands like Yeti, the multibillion dollar “hydration” market is dominated by vacuum-insulated cups that make bold promises about how long they can keep your water cold — and coffee hot — and everyone’s obsessed with them.
In 1966, Boston’s public television station produced two groundbreaking TV shows in the same studio.
One was Julia Child’s “The French Chef.” The other was “Cooking with Joyce Chen.”
A half-century later, almost 20 years after her death, Child still looms larger than life in American culture — she’s even the subject of a new HBO series — while Chen, who died in 1994, has largely faded into the mist of Chinese American history.
It’s a culture that seems to carry over practices virtually unchanged over millennia, yet embraces the new relentlessly, an island nation that dwelled in enforced isolation for centuries, yet eagerly adapted the foreign when available, from shock doctrine Western industrialization after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the packs of leather-clad, 1950s-style rockers I would see gathering in Yoyogi park on Sunday afternoons. Land of contrasts and all that. Tread carefully here, and know the many, many things you don’t know.
But there are certain aspects of Japan that are clear to anyone, even a young reporter on his first night in the country, dropped off the Narita Airport shuttle at the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. One of those things is the coming of the cherry blossoms. Every spring on Japan’s four main islands, from the bottom reaches of Kyushu to the southern tip of Hokkaido, the country pauses to witness the sakura, the brief flowering of the cherry blossoms. It’s a moment, a few days at most, when a country that otherwise feels as though it is in perpetual motion, comes to a halt to engage in hanami — gathering to see the blossoms, well, blossom.
But as an examination of mental health, of how physics and art and consciousness all have their role to play in it — are indeed intertwined with it — and as a novel of ideas that also creates a fully fleshed narrator with a convincing inner life, “The Red Arrow” succeeds. It is a beguiling and ruminative synthesis of strange couplings: art and physics, psychology and psychedelics, characters and ideas.
A house where no one lives
needs someone to draw it full of glass,
then smash that glass to bits.
Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for its variability in language and perception. How can we know that what we are seeing is the same as what someone else sees? How can we separate what we are seeing from the thing itself? Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in his Remarks on Colour, “Where do we draw the line here between logic and experience?” In the Remarks, written the year before his death in 1951, the philosopher’s thoughts about color invariably lead back to the study of philosophy. What things are knowable? How are they known? What can be determined through philosophical reasoning? Wittgenstein reflected, “Colors are a stimulus to philosophizing.”
It has been years since my mother roasted a salmon head. But I can still hear that tick-tocking toaster oven, a sign of the dish’s imminent arrival at our dinner table. The “head” part of it all was scary to me as a child, but as an adult, I find myself craving the fishy butteriness of the cheek meat, what I call the bone marrow of the sea. Stirred through a bowl of freshly steamed Calrose rice (maybe with a dab of doenjang, that salty dream of a soybean paste), roasted salmon head is easily in my Top 10 favorite things to eat. But without the rice? Not so much.
Hernan Diaz’s new book, “Trust,” is about an early 20th-century investor. Or at least it seems to be. Everything about this cunning story makes a mockery of its title. The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book.
Translating Myself and Others is a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they're complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. "Look," her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.
A lot has changed in the last few decades. Some of it is good—when there were only a few opportunities on a few channels, they overwhelmingly went to straight, white men. That, slowly, has changed, and is changing. Writers’ rooms are more diverse than ever.
But the hunger for content brought on by the explosion of streaming has stretched the old, ad hoc training system to its breaking point. There simply are not enough experienced showrunners to head all the shows being made. Moreover, shorter episode orders and script writing for a whole season finishing before production has begun has robbed new writers of concrete experience they would have gotten even a few years ago. When those writers go on to pitch their shows, there’s a chance they’ve never seen one of their scripts actually get filmed. And, again, there aren’t enough experienced showrunners to pair with them.
But that is the last table. There is no photo of the man with the treasure-hunt winner. What comes next is not from an epic quest that ends with the knight winning the hand of the fair maiden. Don’t misunderstand. The maiden is here, but she is sitting in the second row wearing a brave smile as her brother and parents wrap her in a group hug.
The reason for her sadness becomes clear once the visitors step beyond the table. On the floor are smashed pieces of green wood twisted in a way that suggests remnants left over from a home demolition. But they’re not. They are the remains of a canoe.
The one behind my building had never caught my interest, a no man’s land of garbage bins, utility lines and vines. But when the stabbing happened, I’d just become a father, and we had recently moved from the basement up to the second floor: a slightly bigger unit with an alley view. With a mixture of curiosity and parental concern, I began to reappraise the world outside my window: a hundred-metre back lane in the middle of downtown Toronto, bordered by modest apartments and regal dark brick homes. A world where a hidden city came alive each day.
For anyone who lived in New York in 1996, the book provides sweet snippets of lost memories and associations. Alice recalls her friends lying on the grass in Central Park “waiting for J.F.K. Jr. to accidentally hit them with a Frisbee” and the pleasures of a fresh bagel from H&H, “steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands.” But its most complex and specific evocations are reserved for the relationship between an amiable, if slightly checked-out, single father and his city-kid daughter, a girl expected to be the solid one in the relationship. What she wants out of time travel is not so much to fix herself, but to unstick her father, who has stalled out romantically and creatively. For her father, storytelling will prove the path forward; for Alice, it’s a way to see the richness of the path itself.
Emma Straub's fifth novel is an entertaining charmer that unleashes the magic of time travel to sweeten its exploration of potentially heavy themes like mortality, the march of time, and how little decisions can alter your life.
This is philosophy, wrapped in mysticism, encased in a ghost story, in which a series of real, flawed, and essentially likeable characters become trapped, and grow. As such, it is a fine first novel that is more than worth carrying on a portion of your own journey along life’s train line.
These details, in general, won’t surprise anyone who kept up with Gunn’s poetry, which was metrically sophisticated and dealt sometimes with earthy topics such as LSD, the Hell’s Angels, sex and its itchy discontents, and gay culture writ large.
Gunn was not a confessional poet. These letters have been anticipated, by many, because he rarely spilled his guts on the page. There’s been no biography. These letters are what we have, and they don’t disappoint.
Despite the catchy title, solving the murder isn’t really the point of this book. Instead, it’s an intriguing look at the sordid Gilded Age history of a respected and storied academic institution.
Yet we’re not close to consensus on central questions of economic statecraft. Can the cycle of booms, bubbles, and busts be moderated? How much money can a welfare state redistribute to the poor without encouraging dependency? Economists, for all their hardcore mathematizing, still disagree with one another on basic issues. Which raises a question: Was it a mistake to entrust them with public policy in the first place?
Elizabeth Popp Berman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, certainly thinks so. In her new book, “Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy”, she argues that the mid-century turn toward “the economic style of reasoning” had devastating consequences for progressive Democrats.
A shortcut. A tunnel. A bridge through spacetime that lets you skip through all that boring space travel and speed to the fun stuff. It’s a staple of science-fiction, and it’s rooted in science-fact. How difficult could it be?
Here’s a hint: incredibly difficult.
I can count the number of interactions I’ve had with my waipo on two hands. Several times when I was a kid visiting Taiwan from California, once on a family vacation to China a couple years back, and the most recent two times at her home in southern Taiwan when I was recording her and her recipe for zongzi — a pyramid-shaped rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves — for my upcoming cookbook on Taiwanese cuisine.
I haven’t seen her since.
It is a bold author who heads off potential criticisms of their work with a self-aware allusion, but in Emily St John Mandel’s ambitious new novel, the character of the writer Olive Llewellyn is confronted by an unimpressed reader in a book-signing queue. Her interlocutor impatiently claims “there were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t ultimately”.
Some may agree with this as a description of Sea of Tranquility, but it also elegantly anticipates censure of this thought-provoking read.
How does a man turn into an island? Oppression and scarcity and disempowerment, yes; the bafflement of trying to form coherent selfhood without strong role models, certainly; and at the base, always, an absence of empathy and of love.
No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.
It may not sound like it, but joy is a vital ingredient in Ruth & Pen. Sometimes, accessing it requires thinking back to the past or imagining a fanciful future; more often it’s to be found in life’s small, everyday details – a serendipitous painting or a pleasing idiom, a train pulling in to the platform so that the carriage door is exactly in front of you.
For philosopher Victor Menza, whose book The Rabbit Between Us has recently been published (nearly a decade after his death), an affinity for rabbits emerged in childhood and remained with him throughout adulthood. Rabbits like Brown Bunny, a childhood stuffed toy who accompanied Menza as he navigated family disruption and later became a companion to his daughter as she, in turn, navigated family disruption, and a rabbit’s foot he carried for good luck throughout his childhood and adolescence, are just a few of the many rabbits who accompanied Menza’s development and whose presences he explores in this book.
Yet The Rabbit Between Us is about much more than one man’s relationship with rabbits, literal and figurative. This is a book about loss, in which rabbits figure prominently as symbols and messengers.
"Are you in any pain," and the 1-to-10 pain scale, have become part and parcel of American health care. But does it make sense to reduce pain to a yes-or-no binary, or a number on a scale? Haider Warraich, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor, says absolutely not. In his new book "The Song of Our Scars: An Untold Story of Pain," Warraich argues that modern medicine has "asked people to take the most complex experience they could ever have, one that fundamentally challenges the artificial distinction between the body and the mind, between the physical and the metaphysical, one that has emotional, spiritual, genetic, epigenetic, evolutionary, racial, and psychological dimensions, and reduce it to a single number on a 10-point scale."
Deborah James has been dying in public for five years. Since her diagnosis of terminal bowel cancer, she has become famous and beloved as a tireless campaigner, co-host of the award-winning podcast of You, Me and the Big C, author of a book about cancer and a humane and life-affirming contributor to the conversation around how we face death. Now she has said she is at the end of her life. She is no longer being kept alive in hospital, but has returned to her parents’ home to die with her husband, children and siblings around her.
The phrase “end of life” has become a tag in familiar phrases: end-of-life care, end-of-life pathway, end-of-life wishes. The phrase “good death” is bandied about with no context. But at least we are starting as a society to talk about death. The brilliant, intimate, funny, flaying books and articles and programmes and podcasts by people who are dying have immense value, for they allow us to think of our own endings, and how we want to die says something about how we want to live.
The first law of travelers’ tales is simply put: the worse, the better. No reader wants to hear of well-made plans or sunsets that paint the sky in glorious reds and purples. Give us a ship trapped in the ice or desperate wanderers sitting down to a meal of frozen boot. Better yet, give us two Victorian rivals in East Africa, supposed colleagues who were consumed with hate for each other, weak from fever, half-starved and half-blind but nonetheless obsessed with solving a mystery that had mocked the world for 2,000 years.
In just 200 pages, there are uncomfortable questions raised about the necessities of survival, power imbalances and the ways our fate is controlled by forces outside our control and whether we can take any of that control back.
In Portable Magic, Emma Smith wittily and ingeniously studies books as objects, possessed by readers not produced by writers. Her title, borrowed from an essay by Stephen King, emphasises the mobility of these apparently inert items and their occult powers. Like motorcars or metaphors, books transport us to destinations unknown, and that propulsion has something uncanny about it. Smith begins with sorcerers conjuring as they consult books of spells; she goes on to examine the varieties of magical reading, which range from the “spiritual transcendence” of Saint Augustine, who was converted by a random perusal of the Bible, to the “dark arts” of a “necromantic volume” such as Mein Kampf, distributed to all households during the Third Reich as a sinister talisman, the “bibliographic manifestation of Hitlerism”.
It was the thirteenth of the month –
the month concerned was April –
and I was drinking crème de menthe
and pondering on Virgil.
Audiobooks weren’t just tolerable alternatives to wood-pulp-and-ink tomes. In many ways they actually expanded my enjoyment of books. Rather than listen curled up in an armchair, I could pop in earbuds, walk the mile from our house to Lake Michigan, and spend hours by the water with Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys playing in my ears. There is an emotional heft to hearing Trevor Noah’s memoir in his own voice as he cycles through phrases in Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, and other tribal languages that I would have lost on the page.
“There was a sense of longing for childhood and longing for those experiences of going down to Pier 39,” Rice told me about the feelings a recent trip to the city evoked in him. “I still have a picture they took as you got on the ferry: I’m about 4 years old in this big puffy jacket. … I guess I’ve always had this sense of connection with it.”
It’s a connection many who were raised in the Bay Area feel to the landmark, and it feels totally authentic in the novel.
The poems in “The Hurting Kind” embody such an existential tension: the terror of dislocation and loneliness, the intention to record (or see) things as they are. Broken into four sections, each representing a season, the book offers reflections on nature; on love and family; and most particularly on isolation, including that of lockdown. “I am the hurting kind,” Limón acknowledges in the exceptional title poem. “I keep searching for proof.” For proof, yes — proof of life, for one thing, but also proof of living, the commitment to face each day, each circumstance, as it comes.
And so we are off, on a thrilling and often terrifying ride through transplantation and the theories and techniques that made it possible. It begins in Renaissance Italy, where the push for rhinoplasty came not from kings but from the general populace, who had perfected skin grafts long before the European medical profession — such as it was. (The “Sushruta Samhita,” a 500 B.C. Sanskrit text that Craddock cites, described skin grafts, among hundreds of other surgeries.) Craddock’s tantalizing opening assertion is that late-16th-century specialists were merely catching up with farmers, who had long ago learned a way to graft skin from an arm to a nose, masking nasal bridge collapses caused by syphilis or mutilation from duels, both common. “In Italy, skin grafting had evolved as a peasant’s operation, linked culturally and technically to the farmer’s procedure of plant grafting.”
Now, at 58, he might just have invented a whole new style of celebrity memoir. Good Pop, Bad Pop is described in its subhead as An Inventory, which is a polite way of describing a glorified attic clearance. Cocker confesses to being an inveterate hoarder of tat and ephemera, compulsively squirrelling away all kinds of apparently random objects. Over an itinerant musical life, these were transported from property to property in black bin liner bags, before being stuffed into the cramped loft space of a Victorian London house for over 20 years whilst the now celebrated pop star went off to live in Paris, marry and start a family.
In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.
Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader. Take the opening section: You settle in, become absorbed in the story and, then, 100 pages or so later — Boom! — the novel lurches into another narrative that upends the truth of everything that came before.
Ultimately, Hershovitz's approach, in betting on his children's endless capacity to ask trenchant questions, has a bittersweet aspect — it's at once like faith and doubt. Rex and Hank's childhood years are finite. The portal to their seemingly infinite aptitude for wonder may close once they reach adulthood. Nevertheless, Hershovitz reminds parents to embrace our children's "strangeness" as long as we can, and maybe in the process find our way back to the questing child-philosopher within us.
Before I started reading “In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy,” I was reasonably sure I was not interested in learning about Minnie Pearl (1912-1996), the country-styled comedian who wore a straw hat with a price tag hanging off the side and opened her act by bellowing “Howdy!” I was certain I was familiar with Joan Rivers’s biography as we had briefly worked together on a project and I had been a fan of hers for years.
But Shawn Levy, whose previous books include biographies of Jerry Lewis and the Rat Pack, has done a sensitive job telling the stories of the nine pioneering women he has designated as those who cracked the glass ceiling of comedy.
Epstein’s idea for quality paperbacks was simple: buy the rights (at low cost) for out-of-print hardcover classics and scholarly works of likely appeal to students and educated general readers—about 10 to 15 percent of the book-buying public, and a dependably steady customer base—and then republish them in affordable paperbound editions. Print them on durable paper with attractive cover designs and sell them in bookstores. If well chosen, the titles could sell respectably (or better) year after year in the backlist.
What can’t be named can’t be questioned in this new novel by Minneapolis writer Kelly Barnhill, which immerses readers in a post-World War II period of conformity and repression with a speculative twist.
It’s hard work, reading breathless accounts of long-ago gossip from parties you weren’t invited to, or descriptions of boozy lunches from days gone by. In Circus of Dreams it’s clear that John Walsh had a fabulous time on the British literary social circuit in the 1980s; perhaps the rule is that the more enjoyable the soirée, the less suited it will be to later recollection.
The reader may raise an eyebrow when imagining Walsh and the novelist Graham Swift emerging from a drunken lunch “sloshed and euphoric, like John Wayne and Lee Marvin singing ‘The Moon Shines Tonight on Pretty Red Wing’ in The Comancheros”. (I think Swift is Wayne in this scenario, and Walsh is Marvin, but frankly the whole thing seems a tad unlikely.) That reader may sigh when Walsh, invited to a party at the Chelsea flat of Lady Caroline Blackwood, reports: “I had to pinch myself to stop blurting out, ‘Oh my God you were married to Robert Lowell – what was that like?’”
Eternal life, in heaven or through reincarnation on Earth, is promised by many faiths. For a simple reason: it eases the fear of death. The idea of living for ever has other devotees, too. It is now pursued by a motley crew of fringe scientists, cultish groups and tech billionaires, united by a conviction that a way to make humans immortal will eventually be found. Meanwhile they pin their hopes on experimental, often fraudulent therapies that promise rejuvenation.
In “The Price of Immortality”, Peter Ward, a journalist who has written for The Economist, delves into the origins of these beliefs and the science of purported cures for ageing. He spends time with groups such as the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, where congregants discuss food supplements and cryonics (the freezing of bodies at death in the hope that they can be revived later).
It’s not difficult to imagine why novelists might want to escape the confines of the present day in their fictional universes – especially in the current political climate. I wonder also whether the pandemic and resulting lockdowns contributed to the sense of time as elastic or illusory; a concept that snapped in March 2020 (how often did you say the phrase, “It’s like Groundhog Day” during the lockdowns?). Fiction usually fulfils the desire to escape, and a time travel book ratchets that up a notch. Do we delve more into the speculative realm the worse life gets?
In his writing, Bohjalian is anything but a kitten. Lesser writers could not tackle 10 narrators, the complexities of racism in America, African politics, violence both foreign and domestic (as in inside a New York apartment) and make the pieces fit seamlessly together. But Bohjalian — whose books include “Hour of the Witch” and “The Flight Attendant” — has shown time and again that with him, you don’t know what you’re going to get, but you know that the getting is good.
One of the more promising treatments for dementia has been “reminiscence therapy,” which employs artifacts and photos to improve mood and awareness. Some have even built “dementia villages,” which recreate settings from patients’ younger days: movie theaters, diners, bus stops. While proponents claim such environments bolster patients’ humanity, others have criticized them as “Truman Show”-style stagecraft.
Underlying these more immersive interventions, of course, is some degree of deception, and not all the memories wrested free are happy ones. The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace — whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious — is the central question of Georgi Gospodinov’s newly translated novel, “Time Shelter.”
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” is a book that grabs the reader, holds them tight, and doesn’t let go even when it ends. It’s equal parts haunting and uplifting, ugly and beautiful, quiet and powerful. The book is a work of historical fiction, but so painstakingly informed by research and elegantly written that the reader is left desperately wanting to spend more time with the fictional characters.
Alice Hattrick’s new book, Ill Feelings, out in the US today and the UK last year, shines a light on the differences between illness, sickness, and disease. Hattrick, who was diagnosed at an early age with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and later with Fibromyalgia, is no stranger to the pain associated with being unwell. Still, their illnesses, which are both characterized as having “symptoms of illness without any known cause,” are often written off by medical professionals, who deem the pain psychological rather than physical. Through a deep dive into the history of ME/CFS, as well as an exploration of their relationship to their mother, who shares the same ME/CFS diagnosis, Hattrick unpeels the layers of their “ill feelings” to redefine how we think about the body’s relationship to pain, in the process providing us with a new way to understand what it means to be chronically ill.
The chastening of America, with civil unrest, expatriates looking on in humiliation, and citizens of other countries savoring the once mighty country’s downfall, is the grim scenario Ken Kalfus envisions in his latest novel, “2 A.M. in Little America.” Whichever side one takes on the issues bedeviling America, readers familiar with his work will probably agree on this point: Kalfus is a perceptive guy. Whether he’s writing about Russia and radiation poisoning in “Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies,” 9/11 in “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” or the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga in “Coup de Foudre,” Kalfus has a gift for penetrating to the core of current events and presenting issues in a provocative way.
In recent weeks my world has been tainted by a break-up… I've ended a month-long relationship with Billy Connolly, the much-loved Scottish comedian – via my audiobook app. I've spent hours listening to Billy reading his life story – his comedy, his music, his love of digestive biscuits, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do without his lilting Scottish tones. It was the same with past audio-based chums: Dave Grohl, Peter Frampton, Barack Obama, Roger Daltrey. And where would I be without comedian Bob Mortimer, with his relatable life story and tips for carrying "pocket meat"? (…For those who don't know who or what Bob Mortimer is, "pocket meat" is more innocent than you think.)
A little over a century ago, anyone looking out over the water on the eastern edges of Amsterdam on a clear day would have seen Dutch fishermen hauling their nets from the sea. Today the view is very different – more than 200,000 people now live in a spot that was once covered by the waters of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea created when the opening into the North Sea was cut off by a long dyke in the 1930s.
The settlement created where water once lay is Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands, growing from non-existence in the 1970s to the country's eighth-largest city today. If Atlantis was the ancient city myth says disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern riposte, risen from the sea. And it has done so as perhaps the world's most experimental city, realising differing expressions of the concept of "design for living".
Yet despite their best efforts, the scientists were unable to recover nearly 5% of the Christmas Island rat’s genome. Many of the missing genes were related to immunity and olfaction, two highly important functions for the animal. “It’s not just the irrelevant stuff that you’re not going to get back,” Gilbert said. “And so what you’ll end up with is nothing like what went extinct.”
Though the results from Gilbert’s group are new, in many ways they underscore something that many scientists have understood for a long time. “The biggest misconception about de-extinction is that it’s possible,” said Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
For all its open sky, “The Lioness” better resembles an Agatha Christie locked-manor-house mystery, with bodies falling like clockwork, than a gripping survivalist yarn.
Where Bohjalian one-ups Christie (with apologies to the grande dame) is in his character development, going beyond the primary question (what do these Russian mercenaries want with their kidnapped Americans?) to explore the psychology of the survivors. Each chapter alternates real-time drama with backstories that may or may not overlap. The result is a puzzle along two axes, interconnecting individual survival stories with a larger, much more sinister game afoot.
This is a comedy that takes the tragedy of immortality seriously. It flips the fear of oblivion on its head to meditate on the terrifying suspicion that “the abyss of eternal nothingness was just a pipedream.”
If Limón sometimes looks too hard for the bright side, it’s because she acknowledges the darkness everywhere. It’s only when a poet pretends that the mysteries of the unspeakable can be solved with words, that language can and should take the uncertainty out of the questions, that poems fail. Limón, though she is sometimes guilty of optimism, has no such illusions.
A line, a lip, a like-
ness reclaimed
I used to dream of owning a home with a library like the one in Beauty and the Beast. A ladder that glides along the impossibly high shelves filled with more books than you could read in 10 lifetimes. That was before I understood that the idea that you would have one house that you were able to live in for many years (and god forbid, add shelving) would itself be a fairytale. Packing up these books, disassembling their low-grade flatpack bookcases, hauling them across the city and interstate, and trying to reestablish this budding library time and time again has made me thoroughly fall out of love with my old dream.
Well into the 19th century, picturing foodstuffs and household items was estimated to take a little skill but not much of a brain. Still today, painting a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers is an intro lesson of art class.
But I’m fascinated by still life. By its silences. By this one in particular, painted in 1635 by the specialist Willem Claesz Heda.
This past December, three months after the Sultanate of Oman lifted its Covid-19 travel restrictions, I flew from my home in Paris to the southern city of Salalah, intending to explore the entirety of Oman’s coastline from south to north.
For the next three weeks, I would be traveling solo across the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, clocking more than 2,600 miles, improvising campsites, off-roading with middling success, loading my rental car onto ferries to reach remote islands, passing military checkpoints and, finally, reaching the northern tip of Oman and the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most geopolitically contentious and carefully monitored waterways in the world.
Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender. To know that the world is here to both guide us and lead us astray. Toward the end of the long poem, Limón writes: "I will not stop this reporting of attachments. / There is evidence everywhere." So don't stop looking. Just be open to what you may find. And know that the world is watching you, too.
“This book came out of years spent learning to be a writer, a process that will never be complete,” Maggie Shipstead writes in the acknowledgments of her first story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A. It may sound over-earnest – indeed, the whole section does – but with Shipstead there’s always a sharp layer of self-awareness just beneath the surface. In this case, it works as a knowing wink to the reader, since the second story in the book, Acknowledgements, is narrated by a solipsistic young male writer as he considers how best to use his novel’s acknowledgments to air long-held grievances against former mentors and women who’ve turned him down.
Hana Videen is one of a rare and treasurable breed of enthusiasts who want to remedy such misconceptions. Since the fall of 2013, she has taken to Twitter every day, as @OEWordhord, to post a single example of an Old English word. More than eight years on, the fruit of this slow accumulation is her first book. I doubt that I’m alone in frowning at the proliferation of nonfiction that began life as burblings on social media, and there’s an undelightful subgenre of Twitterature consisting of volumes that merely pile up linguistic trivia. But Ms. Videen is both a passionate medievalist and a relaxed, lucid writer; the pleasure she takes in her subject is infectious.
Dementia is a land where my mother lives. It is not who she is. I think of it as an actual place, like the Acropolis or Yonkers. A place where beloved and ancient queens and kings retire, where linear time doesn’t exist and the rules of society are laid aside. Whenever I go to my parents’ double-wide in Hayward, Calif., I am really traveling to Dementia.
Thinking of it this way allows for magic to happen — for her to remember my name suddenly and to know my husband — and for there to be a boundary between me and the treacherous drop of despair. Each time I go to see her, it’s different. I’ve learned to set expectations aside, like an umbrella on a sunny morning.
One late afternoon in 1993, when the air cracked with spice and decay and the precise chill of what was to come, I picked up the kitchen wall phone and dialed my father in Florida. Even then, we spoke rarely — once or twice a year. I didn’t call him because his wife always answered the phone. He didn’t call me because — well, I don’t know.
I was 25 that autumn, living in the rural township of Center City, Minnesota, with my husband and children: Sophie, a feisty foal at two, and Max, a round-bellied baby just stretching past colic. Our old Victorian home, all gingerbread and sloping floorboards, overlooked North Center Lake, and, although I didn’t yet see this, all that wide open blue made for a painterly but desolate view. I was lonely in those years, full of longing. I imagined, as many do, especially in the liquid dreamscape of new parenthood, that I might finally speak to my parents about certain lost things, like my childhood. On this singular fall day, I wanted to understand what my father knew about my stepfather Mafia, the other man I called daddy. The man who, with his strong hairy hands, shaped me into the woman I would become.
Historical fiction, at its best, is a visceral, not academic, enterprise. It provides dual pleasures to the reader: the pleasure of time travel and the pleasure of time’s echo. It’s one thing to know intellectually that history repeats itself and another to see history enacted through a well-crafted, defamiliarizing narrative. The echoes I heard in “Forbidden City” — narcissistic leadership, a revenge-thirsty body politic, women and girls treated as things — both unsettled and compelled me to consider the present anew. I can think of no higher praise for this ambitious and impressive novel.
With so many different characters, each with a distinctive personality and back story, we are also likely to see at least parts of ourselves. This is the other danger lurking in the pages, and from this we cannot look away. The questions are as haunting as they are inevitable: What might I do in these circumstances? How far would I be willing to go? In our answers, we are bound to feel unease. If we’re honest with ourselves, that is.
Book Lovers is a beautiful homage to eldest sisters everywhere, those who feel the pressure to stand in and mother their younger siblings well into adulthood.
Emily Henry explores familial obligation and at what point you're giving too much to those you love that it becomes detrimental to your own wellbeing.
I learned about negative space in art class.
My teacher said, without the emptiness
between the objects, they would clash
into each other and become one.
Ms. Romney is an established seller known to “Pawn Stars” fans as the show’s rare books expert. But at 37, she represents a broad and growing cohort of young collectors who are coming to the trade from many walks of life; just across the aisle, Luke Pascal, a 30-year-old former restaurateur, was presiding over a case of letters by Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
Michael F. Suarez, the director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, said that these days, his students are skewing younger and less male than a decade ago, with nearly one-third attending on full scholarships.
Beneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It’s as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.
Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil – less than a teaspoonful – contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.
Ada Limón is a professional poet: She does not support herself with a teaching position, has no day job or independent wealth. She is a poet who makes a living off her poetry.
She recognizes this makes her something of a unicorn.
As stimulating as it is to consider a Vancouver shaken and splintered in 45 seconds or partake in the thought experiment of how you might react in a catastrophe, the novel’s core is not what the disaster looks like — smoke, fires, thousands dead, an “orgy of annihilation.” It’s the human story — Anna, Joe, Kyle, Dodie and the Stedmans. Suffice it to say disaster does not bring out everyone’s best. Peck also factors in the whims of fate: Not a soul emerges unscathed in this intense and absorbing drama.
In most accounts of the fight against Nazi Germany, the Americans and the British get to be the good guys. But in “The Newspaper Axis,” Kathryn S. Olmsted levels a damning indictment against six of the most powerful English-language publishers of the World War II era. Although they claimed to be patriots, they used their influence to downplay, condone and sometimes even promote Adolf Hitler’s rise.
At the tone, the time will be that night
when the glass glowed before the sound came,
the moment recorded itself and outside
there were reeds at the winter’s edge,
Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is most of all trees. They are not only beautiful and lovable in their own right, representing the innocence of nature and a contrast to people, who express themselves in buildings and other structures—they are also revealing: we can learn much from them about the age and type of arable land there, the climate, the weather, and the minds of the people. I don’t know how the village where I now live will present itself to my mind’s eye later, but I cannot imagine that it will be without poplars, any more than I can picture Lake Garda without olive trees or Tuscany without cypresses. Other places are unthinkable to me without their lindens, or their nut trees, and two or three are recognizable and remarkable by virtue of having no trees there at all.
Written at the dawn of German Romanticism, Novalis’s “Hymns to the Night” opens with a paean to day and then an abrupt pivot: “I turn to the holy, unspeakable, secretive Night.” There’s an exuberance, a literal breathlessness as the poet moves beyond the Enlightenment to seek inspiration in the darker, intuitive currents of our psyches, a precursor to Freud’s model of the unconscious. We may have evolved as a diurnal species, but at night we’re our most human, meandering among dreams and desires.
I thought of Novalis and Freud as I avidly read Mieko Kawakami’s “All the Lovers in the Night,” her engrossing, fine-boned new novel, deftly translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Night, for this author, is an uncanny space where anything can happen, and narrator Fuyuko Irie’s preface unfurls as evocative fragments: “The red light at the intersection, trembling as if wet, even though it isn’t raining. Streetlight after streetlight. Taillights trailing off into the distance. The soft glow from the windows. … Why is the night so beautiful? Why does it shine the way it does?” Kawakami drops the Novalis-style lyricism immediately, though: The 21st century demands a flattened, deadpan voice, as Fuyuko tries to liberate herself, in fits and starts, from the miasma of her life.
For all its fluency in the languages of gaming, addiction and tech, “The Candy House” is a social novel, a kind of “Middlemarch” for the 21st century with an aptly whirling form. The characters’ stories are not wrapped up neatly; there are reversals and redemptions and, above all, an assertion that imagination can still trump technology.
This hope is subtle, redemptive, simple, and it makes Losing Face a stunning work: an evocative exploration of what it means to falter and to flail, to rise each day knowing your setbacks are embedded deep within you, and to turn up for the people you love even though they’re as screwed up as you are.
Of course, the flipside to such remorseless, brilliantly withering contempt is sentimentality. It is perhaps the most difficult genre to do well, and Toltz does it humanely, compassionately and unforgettably.
But literature is a domain often regarded, however snobbishly, as antithetical to the sorts of stimulations available on MTV. What’s more, the lofty, cerebral associations of the written word did not align with the channel’s bawdy reputation. The knowingly provocative music video for Duran Duran’s 1981 single “Girls on Film” initiated what critics regarded as a catalogue of garish smut. As early as 1983, journalist Steven Levy described MTV in a Rolling Stone cover story as “the ultimate junk culture triumph.” The channel won a Peabody Award for its 1992 “Choose or Lose” programming, which sought to mobilize young voters, and succeeded in its aim—at MTV’s inaugural ball, newly elected president Bill Clinton declared, “I think everybody here knows that MTV had a lot to do with the Clinton–Gore victory.” Still, the channel’s efforts to achieve something so serious as heightened political awareness were widely lampooned.
But MTV did not cower before mockery. And though its faltering start augured an uncertain future, the brand’s imprint, MTV Books, ultimately captured the hearts of its target audience of elder millennials who kept their dog-eared copies of The Perks of Being a Wallflower close and lovingly at hand. I was among them. A fickle fan of MTV’s television programming, I wondered whether MTV Books could offer me the nourishment I only occasionally found in the channel’s prodigiously splashy media. It did. And, in so doing, it secured my allegiance to that hell-raising colossus that loomed at the back of my generation. MTV Books was the MTV I wanted.
Determined to disseminate his ideas, Galileo published an imaginary, biased conversation in vernacular Italian that ostensibly weighed up geocentrism and heliocentrism, but provocatively voiced the pope’s own arguments through an obtuse Aristotelian called Simplicio. Although a version of Galileo’s model eventually claimed victory, the pope won that round of the battle by sentencing him to nine years of house arrest. Some 300 years later, contemplating the innovations of relativity and quantum mechanics, the German theoretical physicist Max Planck pronounced that ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
With its sweeping and incisive vision, its proof that you can trap lightning in a bottle, “Companion Piece” shares the best qualities with the quartet to which it plays companion, offering a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.
Steve Toltz’s fabulously impressive third novel, following the 2008 Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole and 2015’s Quicksand, cannonballs straight into heady existential questions, magicking up a vision of human life at once generous and absurd while wearing its considerable ambition lightly. Very lightly. A few pages in, realising that the story is told in a compulsively jokey, determined-to-impress voice with even the dialogue consisting entirely of well-timed one-liners and off-the-cuff aphorisms, I groaned: “Oh Christ – 400 pages.” But a headstrong novelist sets the parameters of their own realism, and soon the style clicked. Once it did, I struggled to keep track of how much there was to admire in Toltz’s relentlessly lively sentences, offbeat insights and unfaltering narrative energy.
Humans love a good, old-fashioned morality tale told from the perspective of an animal. “Watership Down,” “Animal Farm,” “The One and Only Ivan”: These beloved books, and so many others like them, take life’s toughest challenges — death, belonging, fear, loneliness — and make them a little easier to swallow.
Joining the menagerie is Shelby Van Pelt’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut about what it feels like to have love taken from you, only to find it again in the most unexpected places. The best part? It’s narrated by Marcellus McSquiddles, a giant Pacific octopus who cannot only think and feel as humans do but also pick locks, squeeze out of his tank at the aquarium to go on late-night snack runs and serve as the town’s secret matchmaker.
Even if we ourselves haven’t experienced parental loss at a young age, we recognize the driftlessness and yearning of young adulthood. But it’s not merely its relatability and poetic nature that makes We Do What We Do In The Dark so notable—its artful narrative structure creates a profound reading experience.
This is called In Love because Amy and Brian are in love, and what she ends up doing for and with him is an enormous act of love. Never have I read a book so full of compassion and hope amidst such ethically complex decision making. How it can be so life affirming is testament to the writer's ability to express such an experience. Incredible.
The concept behind interactive storytelling isn’t new. Arguably, it goes all the way back to the I Ching or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese manual of divination and prophecy that employs cleromancy (the tossing of lots) to read its predictive text. Before the computer age, contemporary scholars Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland make the case for expanding the definition of the rudimentary interactive form to include “alternate endings to any narrative, either from authorial revision (as in Great Expectations [1861]) or deliberately (as in The Threepenny Opera [1928])”.
But it’s American authors Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins who get credit for pioneering the concept as we know it today with the 1930 publication of Consider the Consequences! The romance novel, which included 43 alternative endings, empowers the reader to decide the fates of Helen Rogers and her suitors Jed Harringdale and Saunders Mead.
It started up again with something innocuous: An extra pair of fuzzy slippers under my side of the bed in case the world ended at midnight. Each summer the California skies turn the color of a rusted cast iron from wildfire smoke. The frequent, rising king tides threaten to deposit flopping pink salmon on the doorstep like a Postal Service baby, surreal and unlikely but historically congruent. A new reality. The pandemic rages on. There’s war, immense and urgent suffering. But I’m not thinking of any of that. Instead, I am transfixed with the probability of earthquakes.
When we first encounter Sandy Gray in “Companion Piece” she is in a sorry state, beyond caring, even about a bit of wordplay, though all her life she’s “loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick.” So it’s a measure of her recaptured mojo, or more likely of Ali Smith’s unfailing wizardry, that by the end of this brief novel the mere word “hello” had me near tears.
The slow, magnetic mystery of Hernan Diaz’s Trust, out today, makes the most of the multilayered resonances of trust as a concept, scaffolding generational fortune, market forces, and human relationships into a fascinating whole. Conveyed in four parts, each of which comprises a manuscript telling a different version of the same tale, the novel tracks the lives of Andrew and Mildred Bevel while also telling a story of capital, power, and destruction in early twentieth century America.
In the end, as Sheehy tells us, physics is not just about the search for how the Universe works: “Physics is all about people.” Her journey through the history of particle physics reveals the extraordinary ingenuity of experimental scientists and their selfless dedication to answering big questions about matter and the universe. It is a field that has brought huge benefits to humankind, from new medical imaging technologies to cancer treatments. But in the end, it may well be the physicists’ example of working together to solve problems that will prove the most valuable to us all, at a time when the world faces unparalleled challenges. As Sheehy says: “There is nothing more powerful than humans who come together in collaborative endeavour.”
Lewis-Stempel is an amusingly eccentric guide to the ancient, and sometimes gruesome, business of sheep-farming. A Country Life columnist who’s authored more than a dozen books on nature and wildlife, he now sets out to challenge perceptions of “our most misunderstood farmyard animal” through a combination of history, folklore and personal experience.
Geoff Powter is a veteran climber who was also a practising psychologist in Canmore for many years. “When I was counselling, I heard time and time again that people coming in were thankful they had a climber-therapist who they could talk to because they hadn’t had so much luck with ‘civilian’ counsellors,” he says. “Why? Because in their minds, the people they were talking to were criticizing mountain sports and trying to get them to explore things like leaving the sport, or questioning the community’s cultural norms around death as part of the game.”
That disconnect is part of the reason therapy hasn’t traditionally been part of the culture of mountain sports, even though the risk of loss and trauma is baked in. Barry Blanchard, a climber and long-time professional mountain guide in the Canadian Rockies who’s one of the co-founders of Mountain Muskox, never heard about mental health care from the older mountain guides who mentored him. Blanchard, now 63, first found his way to therapy in 1986, after an accident killed two of his clients on a guided trip. The anchor holding him and his group on a steep snow slope sheared through the snow, sending them sliding. Their long fall brought an avalanche down with them. “I was probably one of the first mountain guides to be involved in therapy,” he says. He only wound up in counselling because a close friend connected him to a psychiatrist who had been a climber himself.
“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.
“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”
But in February 2017, the media reported on a recent paper by Lin Cheng-Horng, director of the Taiwan Volcano Observatory, that argued there was a magma chamber beneath Datun – the hallmark of an active volcano. Downtown Taipei, with its skyscrapers, bars and restaurants, is just 15km (9 miles) away. Five million people in Taipei and New Taipei cities are well within reach of the impacts of an eruption. In a worst-case eruption scenario, hot lava could engulf residential settlements at the foot of the park, while the cities could be covered in swirling clouds of volcanic ash.
Behind the scenes, Taiwan's government swung into action. First, it ordered scientists to find out as much as they could about the volcanoes and the risks. Then, in May 2018, it tasked the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), its meteorological and forecasting agency, to work with scientists, government agencies and officials to hammer out procedures for an early warning system. It was unveiled to the public little more than two years later, in September 2020.
The food itself hardly seems worth the attention. The offerings are standards of Cantonese cuisine, with options like stir-fried tomato and eggs, sweet and sour pork, or braised beef and turnip. They are ordered cafeteria-style, by pointing or shouting one’s order to an expectant worker with a ladle. Even the name given to these establishments is as no-frills as their menus: “two dishes and rice.”
But that plainness is the point.
For many years now, I’ve left home early in the morning. I’ve walked down the street leading to the train station, crossed, gone in, come out the other side, continued another couple of blocks, and then shut myself in a room to write all day. Seven minutes of walking. In the evening, every evening, I do the same thing in reverse. I lock the door to my office, walk back through the station, arrive home, leave my small backpack with my laptop in the entranceway, greet my wife and daughter, and then we sit down to dinner, and each of us reviews our day. I’ve always spoken quite a bit without ever saying what goes on in my office.
Some nights, after dinner, we watch a movie together, chat together on the couch, invite someone over for a drink or for tea, read our books in the same room or in separate rooms. Then we go to bed, and in bed we’ve told each other the most important of things and the most insignificant, recapped the following day. Sometimes we make love, other times not, some evenings with passion, other times not, and we fall asleep holding each other or each of us on our own side.
By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake, and stories versus lies — with their often blurred boundaries — Companion Piece challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate. Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel — including Sandy's dreams and childhood memories and the terrible ordeals of a talented, steely 16th century waif — that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.
In a pandemic-ravaged and post-Brexit Britain, our narrator, Sandy Gray, who is anything but gray, character-wise, though in her present state of personal and political despondency she might well feel she is, receives an unexpected call from one Martina Pelf, formerly Martina Inglis, a university acquaintance who has recently been held for seven and a half hours at border control, an officer annoyed by her dual citizenship (“Is one country not enough for you?”), and Martina is calling to share this with Sandy, and to ask Sandy a question — and so begins Ali Smith’s 18th book, the superb novel “Companion Piece.”
King’s book is a well-calibrated celebration of “bad” taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, “The Jersey Shore,” the Cheesecake Factory, the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie and (in this book’s silkiest essay) Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist.
That King writes about these things while alluding to Sontag and Updike and Penelope and Odysseus without once seeming like she is otherwise slumming is part of her achievement.
This is John Higgs’s second book about the poet, following 2019’s manifesto, “William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever,” from which this project was spawned. That the English author, journalist and cultural historian has previously written about Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the electronic rock band the KLF and a whole host of both old- and newfangled strangeness supplied some advance notion of who his Blake might be. I was prepared for the far-out, whoa-dude version of Blake. Fortunately, Higgs dismisses the idea that Blake “took psychedelic drugs, and this was an explanation for his work,” but my expectations were not entirely misdirected.
The first time I fell asleep at the wheel, I was 19 and a few miles south of where the 101 drops out of Downtown into the 5. I was in typical Los Angeles afternoon stop-and-go traffic, which always starts around 3:00, sometimes even on the weekends. I caught my head falling against my neck and told myself, out loud, to wake up. I turned the radio louder, kept driving, and, despite the warm Californian day, left the heat turned up. The car was my sanctuary; it was a place to relax, my own private world. My backseat was filled with heeled boots and crumpled jeans. Stained coffee cups were piled up in the median, and a gold medallion hung from the rearview. The environment was mine. I chose the conditions, and I liked it to be hot. My body melted into the driver’s seat like a warm bath.
When I came to once again, I was being propelled toward two bright tail lights too fast. I instinctively slammed my foot as hard as I could on the brake, but it was too late. The front of my car crumpled easily against the vehicle in front of me. I was spending a lot of time on the road then, commuting to L.A. for work multiple times a week from a small town in North County, San Diego. If I left at 4:30 in the morning, I could do the trip in an hour and a half, but it usually took me closer to four. This is when I’d fall asleep: sitting in gridlock traffic, cozy from the heat and lulled into a dream-space by the monotony of the drive and the West Coast sun. I had two more accidents during this year of commuting. Luckily no one was ever hurt.
Research by Samson and others in primates and nonindustrial human populations has revealed the various ways that human sleep is unusual. We spend fewer hours asleep than our nearest relatives, and more of our night in the phase of sleep known as rapid eye movement, or REM. The reasons for our strange sleep habits are still up for debate but can likely be found in the story of how we became human.
At its best, the tender and fragmented narrative feels like a metaphor for experience – how we only ever know part of the story of our lives and control even less. Since grief and trauma hold space alongside the laughter, it's best for readers who like to be put through their emotional paces before the happy ending.
“The Last Days of Roger Federer” doesn’t begin, or end, with Roger Federer. He shows up now and again, as an example of a talented individual in the last days of his career, facing the decision all tennis players must face, of when to put down the racket for good. (As of this writing, the 40-year-old star says he will be back on the court in the fall.) This is one of the themes of “Last Days”: When do you stop? How do you know when something is over?
Geoff Dyer is interested in a lot of things, many of which make their way into this book. Anyone who picks up “Last Days” expecting a book about Federer, or about sports — and not, say, about Bob Dylan, or the painter J.M.W. Turner, or Beethoven, or the book about Turner and Beethoven that Dyer wanted to write but never will — will be in for a surprise.
As a Shakespeare scholar, Emma Smith is known for her work on the First Folio, a newly-discovered copy of which she authenticated in 2016. But it was with This is Shakespeare (2019) that she reached a wider readership, delighting non-specialists with her subtle yet no-nonsense insights into the plays. That book was based on a series of podcast lectures, its oral origins traceable in the lively accessibility of its literary voice.
Her talent for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose, is apparent in Portable Magic, which transforms the dusty scholarly discipline of bibliography into a world of wonders. Despite the subtitle, this is not a conventional history in the sense of a chronological narrative. Instead, it is a series of freewheeling essays, based on case studies, in which Smith explores what she calls “bookhood”: a concept that focuses on the material culture of the book, while revealing how inexorably it is tangled up with human desire, aspiration and power.
After I lost my breast, I became a woman
sutured by a kind of knowledge.
You never know precisely how much time you have left, despite what life insurance industry mortality tables or death-prediction startups might claim. Now, an emerging field of death tech is capitalizing on such anxiety by pitching individual immortality as deepfakes or AI-driven chatbots. Meanwhile, we’re facing an ongoing environmental catastrophe perpetrated by colonialism and relentless extraction. These two forms of existential uncertainty may seem separate—but they are intrinsically related.
Early in the 19th century, an unknown musician somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains discovered that a steel handsaw, a tool previously used only for cutting wood, could also be used to produce full and sustained musical notes. The idea had undoubtedly occurred to many a musically-inclined carpenter at other times in other places.
Recently, after a particularly invigorating car wash, I had a yen for a slushie. Maybe the warming weather inspired me. Perhaps the proud signage of the QuikTrip convenience store nearby activated an unconscious desire. No matter, a slushie I did get. At QuikTrip, it’s called a Freezoni, a curious, quasi-Italian aspiration that bears no relation to the dispensed product. To my palate, the slushie wasn’t good: too wet, not frozen enough, like it was already half-melted from being left too long in a vehicle cup holder.
This made me wonder: Why are slushies so different from one another? Then the thought solidified into a more existential brain freeze, as I realized that I could not even guess what might separate a Freezoni from a Slurpee, let alone an Icee from a slush. What the hell is a slushie, anyway? I had no idea, and barely any intuition.
But the writing always crackles, written by someone who clearly knows what it’s like to desire another woman in ways you just barely understand. Sometimes, it’s good to feel lonely. It’s a reminder that an alternative feeling lives somewhere out there, that real connection is possible, even if it’s just beyond your grasp. Even the possibility of love, and being loved, is enough to keep driving us forward.
What would it be like to study music with a legendary composer in his prime? The latest novel by author and filmmaker James Runcie, “The Great Passion,” deftly evokes the rigors and rewards of studying with Johann Sebastian Bach. Crafted with storytelling “both earnest and exuberant,” it’s a symphonic, contemplative pleasure.
Like a sculpture made of ice cubes, each spartan prose brick accumulates into a single structure. Short as it is, "Very Cold People" feels monumental: an icy cenotaph for a not-so-distant past.