I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke. The image of my father at his desk. The sound of his diction and intonation as he brought each character to life and drove each plot twist home. In these things, I beheld the card catalog of the infinite library of his heart, the map of his soul, drawn with aching clarity in the topography of his books.
When my father unexpectedly died in 2016, I rushed home to North Carolina. The 6 hour-drive was exhausting, more emotionally than physically. Once there, I was unsettled, not just by the shock, but knowing my father died the day before on the couch I was now staring at and wouldn't dare sit on. A situation not unlike one anyone who has lost a parent has faced.
I opened the refrigerator, saw a bottle of local chardonnay, and smiled. It was a small gift from the universe.
The next day, upon arriving from London, my brother asked, "What's on the agenda?"
He meant wine.
Werner Herzog has portrayed the poetic excesses of human drama as the brilliant director, producer and screenwriter of more than 60 feature and documentary films, the author of more than 12 books and the director of more than a dozen operas.
His debut novel, “The Twilight World,” is a spare and lyric tale about Hiroo Onoda, a real Japanese lieutenant who terrorized the Philippine villagers of Lubang Island with guerrilla tactics for 29 years after World War II’s conclusion.
Since the remarkable success of her nonfiction debut, Three Women, Lisa Taddeo has specialised in writing with gloves-off candour about female desire, in particular the kind that modern feminists are not supposed to admit to. Ghost Lover, her first collection of stories, is peopled by outwardly successful, empowered women who are emotionally or sexually in thrall to men, often men who are not remotely worth the time spent obsessing over them. Sometimes the women themselves know it – “He has no idea he is not interesting” – but still they persist in their self-abasement: “She wanted him more than her whole life.”
Tracy Flick, the character created by Tom Perrotta in his 1998 novel, “Election,” and immortalized by Reese Witherspoon in the film version a year later, is back. Perrotta has set his darkly comic sequel, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win,” in a different New Jersey high school some 20 years after Tracy’s notorious bid to become student president.
In the 19th century, large numbers of people living in Southern and Central Appalachia supported themselves to varying degrees by harvesting herbs, roots and other medicinal botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands around them. These "sang diggers," as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance to the global botanical pharmaceutical trade are the focus of Luke Manget's "Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia."