Like many great works of art, James Joyce’s Ulysses has an existence beyond the printed page, an artistic half-life that has endured now for 100 years. It is a novel to learn from and obsess about, and you can spend a lifetime immersed in its pages. Nevertheless, many uninitiated readers view Joyce’s epic with paralyzing fear, something the author didn’t exactly allay with this admission in the mid-1920s: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” The stance is flippant, though in many ways, Joyce intended for the novel to be intimidating. Ulysses is not fast food. It discomfits conventional wisdom, challenges ossified beliefs, attacks commonplaces, jogs perceptual patterns. Many of the emotions and actions plumbed in the novel are unsettling. But if the fictional world of Joyce’s making is contradictory and multilayered, so too is human existence, with its jumble of joys and frustrations.
At 77, and releasing his first novel in over 15 years, Holleran feels as though he has reached “the end of the arc,” he said in a recent interview. So it’s appropriate that in “The Kingdom of Sand” — out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus & Giroux — death is the subject.
“But isn’t everyone obsessed with death?” Holleran, whose real name is Eric Garber, asked during a video call from his home near Gainesville, Fla. “We all think about the transitory nature of life.”
When Caroline Knutson began walking laps at the Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon, in 1982, she felt like she was onto something. She had signed up for TOPS — Take Off Pounds Sensibly, a nationwide nonprofit wellness group — and it provided new friends as well as a new routine. She chatted, shopped and exercised, on dark winter mornings as well as light summer ones. Back then she drove herself to the mall and walked without assistance. By 2013, when the The Statesman Journal caught up with her, she was vision impaired and using a rolling walker. Her daughter had to drop her off, but she still showed up most weekday mornings at the mall. Now she made one half-mile loop of the mall rather than six to eight.
“Asked how she navigates the mall with such poor vision, she chuckles through her response: ‘I’ve walked there since 1982. I know that mall,’” reads the Journal profile. After heart surgery in 2003, a doctor suggested she get on a treadmill. “I’m a mall walker!” Knutson’s daughter remembers her mother proclaiming.
The dominance of blue in such lists doesn't surprise Lauren Labrecque, an associate professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies the effect of colour in marketing. Like a Pantone-sponsored party trick, she'll often ask students in her classes to name their favourite colour. After they respond, she clicks on her presentation. "I have a slide already made up saying '80% of you said blue'," Labrecque tells them. She is usually right. "Because once we get to be adults, we all like blue. It seems to be cross cultural, and there's no big difference – people just like blue." (Interestingly, Japan is one of the few countries where people rank white in their top three colours).
When Alan Turing first proposed his eponymous Turing test in 1950, he tried to reframe the question “Can computers think?” into a more unambiguous counterpart: “Can computers imitate human thinking?” He argued that imitation, rather than the nature of thought itself, could be more easily measured, which would in turn lead to a more scientific understanding of the nature of artificial intelligence. Yet, as the films above demonstrate, this question about whether computers can think — and, if so, how they might act on these thoughts — has been at the heart of many science-fictional imaginings of the future. As a result, many of these narratives rest on the central antagonism between human beings and nonhuman machines. The harder it becomes to tell machines apart from humans, the more threatening their imbrication in our lives becomes.
In her new novel, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn stages a decidedly different dynamic. Although the characters in her novel are split along a human/computer divide, the “robot uprising” that Ravn depicts does not categorically target the human world. Unlike HAL’s attempted sabotage of the American space travel enterprise, and unlike the Terminator’s mission to effectively exterminate humanity, the humanoids in The Employees seek to overthrow the reign of work, rather than the reign of humans.
Place, like class, is often understood by Americans to be a temporary state of affairs on the way to something — or somewhere — better. This rootlessness, this faith in mobility, has found its way into many contemporary books, wherein the settings are more like painted backdrops, inert and somewhat arbitrary. But there’s an older, perennial instinct in American literature to claim a place as one’s own, to study it minutely and evoke its ultimate mystery. It’s this instinct that’s on full display in Adam White’s vividly rendered debut novel, “The Midcoast.”
The novel is a whodunit of sorts. But it is also a thought-provoking drama which routinely strikes a number of serious notes about man's inhumanity and the traumatic effects of conflict. As Edward reminds us, "War poisons everything that it does not destroy."
Sedaris presents himself as a damaged specimen, scarred by a cantankerous father and an alcoholic mother, hen-pecked by four domineering sisters, additionally suffering from a lisp, a nervous tic and the usual addictions. All the same, this feisty fellow has undertaken to set the world to rights through comedy. His recent volume of diaries, A Carnival of Snackery, surveys a panorama of “war and calamity – natural disaster, mass migration, racial strife” and asks whether humour can make these afflictions endurable. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of autobiographical sketches, he broods about the cosmic injustice of Covid-19: noting that a million Americans died in the pandemic, he fumes that he didn’t get to choose a single one of them.