Throughout my life, magazines were something communal: passed around at a sleepover as a girl or shared in college when we were too broke to get our own subscriptions. Reading them was inextricably tied up with my friendships with other women. Whether it was fashion tips and dating advice or later, feminist essays and profiles of political candidates, the pages of magazines have always been something to be discussed and digested among like-minded women.
Magazines were an easy jumping-off point for making new friendships and maintaining old ones, because discussing articles about actors or books was really a way of asking people about their likes and dislikes, their hobbies, their passions, what they want and think about when they aren’t at school or work.
The facade of Paris’ most beloved bookstore is an invitation to step back in time. On passing the shops’ jade panelling and vintage signage, many begin to wonder if they’ve taken a wrong turn along the Rue de la Bûcherie and stepped into some forgotten quarter of Paris, somewhere the city of light still holds its honey glow. In fact, they have stumbled upon Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop with the kind of lineage that would make Louis XVI weep. Once the haunt of James Joyce and his contemporaries, the store has a hand in publishing some of the greatest and most adventurous novelists of the 20th century. In the 1950s, it was a hang-out spot for the beat generation, and today it endures as one of Paris’s most important cultural landmarks.
The “trash” in Shuggie’s name refers to waste from farmers and other food suppliers, which the owners repurpose in all sorts of ways: Bruised fruit gets blended into frosé slushies, fish bycatch crowns a salmon belly pizza, and buffalo-flavored chicken gizzards and hearts make the most of meat offcuts. With the exception of the pepperoni pizza, every item on the Shuggie’s menu has multiple ingredients that would otherwise go wasted. (Murphy does insist on canned Stanislaus 7/11 tomatoes and low-moisture mozzarella to maintain a consistent base of flavor for the pizzas.)
By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or a speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the woman's role in a male-dominated space, she actually joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation.
Alexandra Lange’s “Meet Me by the Fountain” is a well-researched introduction to the rise and fall and dicey future of an American institution. Perhaps the signature American institution; in a 1996 issue of The American Historical Review, Kenneth T. Jackson wrote that “the Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have a great wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.”
Jackson may have been stretching the case to make a (brutal) point, but it’s hard to argue against the mall as a ubiquitous feature of postwar America. Lange, a design critic, writes in the book’s introduction about her anxiety that malls were “potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study.” The fear diminished when she discovered how responsive people were when she mentioned the project. The response was nearly always an impassioned “Oh, let me tell you about my mall.”
More than anything, “Esmond and Ilia” is a reckoning with loss — personal and public. Wandering among ghosts, however, is a dangerous business, and the sensory memories this provokes, “fumes of rose water, pistachios and icing sugar from the Mouski, chlorine in the swimming pool at the Club,” weave a heady spell. “The dust from the desert gently powdering the surfaces all around,” Warner recalls. “Sugar melting in pans to make syrup. My mother’s dressing table glinting with glass.” Ilia and Esmond aren’t the only ones adrift in the mists of time: In the middle of it all, a little girl watches as her parents’ world goes up in flames.