The earliest indoor shopping malls, with their I-shaped, bowling-alley forms, had no centralized place where groups could gather, nor much need for one. But by the early 1970s, and the advent of more complexly laid-out malls in T-, X-, or O-shapes, patrons might wander forever, missing each other in the long, low-ceilinged identical halls. Hence the atrium, which has its own storied architectural history: Ancient Roman houses were centered on open-air or skylit spaces, which provided daylight and breezes to the rooms surrounding them.
These courts often had an impluvium, or fountain, to catch rainwater from the roof, as well as furnishings for outdoor entertaining. In the shopping mall, the atrium serves a similar function, opening up the middle of a building lined with windowless shops; letting in light, water, and plants; and furnished like a living room. The atrium was the center of the social life of the Roman domus and so, too, has it been the center of mall sociability.
The moment the pumpkin toadlet leaps into the air, anything seems possible. The tiny frog, which is about the size of a honeybee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem launching itself high off the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet begins to soar, something goes awry.
The frog’s body, limbs splayed like a starfish, starts to spin. And then it falls, tumbling gracelessly until it lands on its rear or its head and unintentionally cartwheels or backflips to a stop.
The unnamed narrator of Jordan Castro’s The Novelist is not Jordan Castro. Castro, the author, wants this to be clear. So clear, in fact, that there is a famous writer named Jordan Castro within the novel. The unnamed narrator admires Jordan Castro—he’s everything the narrator wants to be as a writer, and he envies Castro’s intellect, success, and fame. What results is an engaging reflection on the anxieties of writing autofiction, and of the genre as it exists today. This is where The Novelist shines—not only in its exploration of the conventions of the genre, but in his experimentation with it as well. This novel, if at times tedious in its granular approach, breathes air into a tired form.
The true center of gravity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of essays on translation and self-translation is an extended meditation on Antonio Gramsci. For this Marxist intellectual, linguist, and politician who died in 1937 at the age of forty-six after more than a decade in prison, Lahiri writes, “[t]ranslation was a reality, aspiration, discipline, anchor, and metaphor.” Translation in its many facets and applications was a foundational pillar of Gramsci’s political thought and engagement as founder of the Italian Communist party. It was also an integral part of his emotional life and most intimate communications. In her sensitive and sustained reading of his Letters from Prison and his Prison Notebooks, Lahiri teases out the direct and indirect manifestations of translation in Gramsci’s life on these levels and more: linguistic, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and emotional. What becomes clear in her reflections on this “polyhedric” man, as well as in the nine personal essays in Translating Myself and Others, is that, in an echo of Gramsci’s experience, translation has become Lahiri’s primum mobile, the primary lens through which she views and understands the world on the page and off.
Death takes no holidays in his new collection of essays, “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Whether he’s writing about his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic or the slow decline of his fractious father, he’s whistling past the graveyard ― but still hilarious.
The singers have fallen asleep in their cars,
small camps smoldering. What they didn’t sing
ashes its leftover words in my mouth.
The mathematically optimal solution of buying four hot-dog packs (of ten hot dogs each) and five hot-dog-bun packs (of eight hot-dog buns each), to total forty hot dogs and forty buns, does not adequately solve the problem, as having forty hot dogs and forty hot-dog buns is undesirable for most households (or single people in need of hot dogs).