You’d likely recognize the image of a person in a sleek gown of silk velvet, languidly playing with a long strand of pearls around her neck (and possibly clutching a rose between her teeth), as an early icon of sexually-emancipated modern womanhood. Who among us can’t identify strewn rose petals, piles of silk pillows, a tiger skin by the fire, and slinky lingerie as the trappings of a classic seduction scene? Consider the many disaster scenarios—a snow storm, a rock slide—that trap lovers together to justify lots of long, heated kisses and caresses pressed against palms, necks, and breasts. How many times you have watched a whirling partnered dance end in a quiet clinch in a corner? Or embraces by heroes whose show of force in the moment explains why the heroine finally succumbs to the temptation?
Every cliché has its origin story. Many of the over-familiar visual signposts of the modern romance began with an eccentric middle-aged British sex novelist with flaming red hair and a fondness for cats. During the 1920s, while Prohibition roared, Elinor Glyn (1864-1943) created the mold for how the modern love scene looked. Glyn invented, and then literally staged, these and many other familiar scenes. Her dozens of “trashy” bestsellers drove the romance novel in a more explicitly erotic direction, adding the special sauce that would make it the 20th century’s bestselling genre. Later, on movie sets, she taught the founders of the Hollywood movie colony that they could make the display of sex tasteful—just acceptable enough to the moralists—by making it glamorous. Madame Glyn (as she insisted on being called when she came to Los Angeles) personally styled Hollywood’s first sirens and Don Juans, teaching them how to walk, dress, talk, make love, and—most importantly—manage the attention that they courted and feared in equal measure.
"So what kind of mysteries are these?" Sawyer asked.
"I don't know," said Fischer. "Like, Agatha Christie puzzle mysteries."
"I'll be honest with you," Sawyer said, speaking in the blunt mode he says was typical of Hollywood types of the era. "I read a few of those when I was younger and they bored the shit out of me and I won't write them for you."
"Then what will you write?" Fischer said.
"I want to write 'The Maltese Falcon,'" he said, thinking of the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel that became one of Humphrey Bogart's most iconic films.
As his former wife once told him, Paul is not “good at life.”
Paul — “The Great Man Theory,” a wickedly insightful novel about modern America, doesn’t give him a last name — certainly has little in his life to show for his 46 years. He is divorced and forced to move in with his mother, his 11-year-old daughter pays little attention to him, and his teaching position at a local college has been knocked down a notch, so he is forced to take a night job as a driver in the gig economy that he disdains.
The first sentence of Emmanuel Carrère’s novel “Yoga” outlines the whole book, so I give nothing away by saying that it is about trying to write what Carrère calls “a subtle little book on yoga,” an effort derailed, over the course of four years, by terrorism, the refugee crisis, the loss of his editor and a “melancholic depression” so deep that he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Yet it is also a book about yoga, about the ways in which meditation means, to borrow a phrase from Lenin, as Carrère does, “working with the available material.”
The most plentiful items in the canal – other than wine bottles and mobile phones – were bicycles. Nine years earlier, in 2007, Paris had launched a bike-share scheme, Vélib’, in which 14,500 rental bicycles were introduced across the city. As the waters were drawn off, the skeletal forms of dozens of Vélib’ cruisers could be seen half-buried in the sludge on the canal floor. There were scores of other bikes, too, of various makes and vintages, some of which appeared to have been maimed before being sent to their watery grave. There were bikes with bent and twisted wheels, or no wheels at all. There were bikes whose wheels and frames were intact but whose stems and handlebars were missing: headless corpses.
So we went out to see how dire the newspaper-acquisition situation really is. There are 276 licensed newsstands left in Manhattan, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, with more than half of those between 14th and 59th Streets. On a recent summer day, though, roughly half of the stands in Gramercy and Chelsea were closed, even on arteries like 23rd. They’re not being replaced, either: There were 66 applications for newsstand licenses in 2019, but fewer than 20 every year since. The dedicated news store (like Casa Magazines on 12th Street and Eighth Avenue, or Newspapers on 23rd, which stocks Chinese-, Spanish-, and Greek-language newspapers as well as the Jewish Press and the Irish Voice) is nearly extinct.
If newspapers-on-newsprint are in decline, then newspapers-delivered-by-kids-on-bikes seem like a relic of the even-more-distant past. But no one seems to know exactly how recently they disappeared.
The five stories in Banana Yoshimoto’s collection “Dead-End Memories” — first published in Japan in 2003, it is her 11th book to be translated into English — are strange, melancholy and beautiful. At the center of each is a woman negotiating the quiet fallout of personal history.
The British scholar Graham Robb is a modern-day “rooster to donkey” impresario. He is the kind of writer you want to sit down with over a fine Armagnac and say, “Tell me your best stories about France.”
In “France: An Adventure History,” Robb does just that. With joy, curiosity and more than a dash of ambition, he brings 2,000 years of French history to life, escorting readers from Gaul all the way to the eve of the pandemic. As a historian, Robb buries himself in national and local archives. As a vacuum cleaner of contemporary detail, he chronicles events by collecting whatever he can find: video footage, politicians’ speeches, press commentary, photographs, travel brochures, caricatures, street graffiti.
Words slip away; sentences are left unfinished. We are in the mind not only of the poet's mother but of the poet himself. Quite often, and this is deliberate, the precise location of the speaker is not clear. There are works which are monologues from the mother and others which are from the poet. Still others replicate the frustrating dialogues which inevitably are also part of the disease.
Seven years ago, when Tess Gunty began to write her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch,” she was 23, living in New York and experiencing a constant barrage of catcalls when she walked down the street.
She felt, she says, “like a deer living in hunting grounds.” As if her flesh didn’t belong to her. To cope, she would dissociate. “I started to feel this sort of alienation from my body,” says Gunty, now 29. “I started to feel like I had to leave my body in order to get to my next destination.”
The moon has a reputation for “magnificent desolation,” as Buzz Aldrin said when he stepped onto the surface more than 50 years ago. It has no atmosphere to speak of, and no protection from a constant stream of radiation, whether from the sun or deep space. During a lunar day, about as long as 15 of our own, nonstop sunlight makes the surface hot enough to boil water. A lunar night lasts just as long, only it’s unfathomably cold.
Yet hidden in this bleak picture are a select few places that might offer some respite from all those inhospitable conditions. And one particular spot that sounds almost … pleasant?
Everybody is like that in a way. Everybody is grabbing from the world bits and pieces of thought and fashion that they can mishmash into their own personal way of being. The more sources you borrow from, the more interesting your self is likely to be.
The other day, I used a Russian search engine to reverse image search my face, revealing hundreds of women with shaggy blond hair and bangs, women with white faces and blunt chins. I was curious if I’d recognize any of them as being my exact match, my true doppelgänger. I found a few that made me pause, but no one was close enough. There was no thrill of discovery, no warm feelings of belonging. I had hoped for more, for some evidence that my face is out there, living and breathing, moving through some city I’ve never visited, kissing people I have never met, maybe even smoking a brand of cigarettes I’ve never smoked. I wanted there to be someone who, despite looking just like me, isn’t.
What differentiates “Death Doesn’t Forget” is its sense not of despair but of equanimity. The future is unwritten, in other words; it must be lived to be revealed. Even as the novel reaches its conclusion, Lin leaves open a number of questions about what will happen, what the characters will choose. In part, this is a convention of the series, since everyone must live to animate another book. But that’s too reductive for what Lin has done here, which is to write a crime novel as a slice of life.
It's a big, beautifully written novel about an underexplored topic, that succeeds in being both serious art and immersive entertainment.
Given the title of her memoir — “A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman” — a reader might expect to be immersed solely in a scientific story: how a geologist progressed over the years from hammering terrestrial rocks as a student to leading a deep-space mission. But this riveting book, beautifully written, is far more. With a brave candor, Elkins-Tanton examines all aspects of her experiences — personal and professional, the good and the bad — to plumb the very meaning of her life. She also offers novel approaches to education, tactics for handling sexual harassment cases in academia and new methods for team-building in scientific research that go beyond the “hero model.” “No single person can alone build human knowledge anymore,” she notes. “We need the breadth of ideas that comes from a diversity of voices.”
James Belich’s new book, “The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe,” shows the depth and longevity of the controversy over the sources and impacts of an era-defining scourge. Belich, an Oxford University historian, suggests that what is now known as the Black Death was so consequential that its effects equal those of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Renaissance. It’s a staggering implication, but he makes a decent case for it in this bold, tremendously researched work. From illustrating the plague’s effects globally to showing how central it was to Europe’s ascension, Belich demonstrates that the medieval pandemic influenced many aspects of human life.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the rock and roll movie had become a big tent covering a myriad of styles and intentions, some of the films very serious indeed. In Europe, auteurs Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni both measured the rock scene and exploited it for their own artistic ends with Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One and Blow-Up, respectively, while Britain’s Nicolas Roeg put a trippy and cryptic rock and roll spin on gangster movies with Performance starring Mick Jagger—a trick he would reproduce for science fiction films in 1976 with David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
It's one of a few such devices held at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London, helping to ensure that the world has an accurate shared sense of seconds, minutes and hours. They're called hydrogen masers, and they are extremely important atomic clocks. Along with around 400 others, placed all around the globe, they help the world define what time it is, right now, down to the nanosecond. Without these clocks – and the people, technology and procedures around them – the modern world would slowly drift into chaos. For many industries and technologies we rely upon, from satellite navigation to mobile phones, time is the "hidden utility".
So, how did we arrive at this shared system of timekeeping in the first place, how does it stay accurate, and how might it evolve in the future? The answers involve looking beyond the clockface to explore what time actually is. Dig a little deeper, and you soon discover that time is more of a human construct than first appears.
The stories all have McCall Smith’s characteristic charm, and make for easy and very pleasant reading. The short essays that introduce each story all invite thought. How should we behave when dealt a bad hand or experiencing injustice? Is it right to meet like with like? Sometimes it must be. Nevertheless, as in all McCall Smith’s work, we are reminded that the necessary quality in social life is kindness. Reading McCall Smith is always comforting, but there is an edge to his work too, for he does, in a quiet, well-mannered way, suggest that we look at ourselves, and that we should be as ready to judge ourselves as to condemn others; perhaps even readier.
To describe Elizabeth Hand as a mystery writer is to not have read another Elizabeth Hand book. Over decades, she has proved that she’s eclectic, genre-bending, and comfortable in fantasy and mystery, crime, myth, magic — and more. In “Hokuloa Road,” she explores the rich and diverse culture and environment of Hawaii — and seamlessly stitches this fascinating material into a girl-gone-missing story. It’s refreshingly and originally creepy.
Somewhere in the halls of hell, the terms “well researched” and “dull” were somehow conflated. The consequence is that books on historical subjects aimed at general readers either turn out to be simplistic or overburdened with minutiae. Happily, Angus Robertson has proven that the two adjectives need not be connected: he has written a thoroughly enjoyable history of Vienna which is both accurate and entertaining.
I have never known much about flowers.
I can smell something on them,
such that I want to cry;
because like all flowers they look like ideas.
I could go awn. We Anglophones wallow in orthographical muck. Attention must be paid.
The Singaporean supper joint clamors with sex like no other late-night eatery in any country I’ve been to or lived in. Look again at the above, and see what simmers below. University students with their crushes, frustrated young adults who can’t take each other back to their parents’ places, uncles looking to buy sex, and the people who sell it. Back when clubs were still open and drinking spots didn’t all but shut down at 10:30 p.m., people were cozying up under the buzzing fans, the bare light, of Spize, Maxwell, BK Eating House, too.
It’s that time between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., in that strange, lulling space between dinner and breakfast. You’re filled with desire to hold onto a day that’s already passed, but not yet finished. You text a friend: “awake? hungry? can pick me?” Just a bite of something before you can go to sleep. You need food, you need people. So you eat.
The line between art and agitprop can be narrow, and rarely more so than in Hollywood, where people sometimes struggle to know (or care) what art is to begin with.
This notion hovers behind Anthony Marra’s elegant new novel, “Mercury Pictures Presents,” in which Artie Feldman, the improbably endearing vulgarian who runs the book’s titular studio — the sort of B-movie factory that flourished in the slipstream of Hollywood’s majors during the Golden Age 1930s and ’40s — keeps his toupee collection displayed in his office and has never met a bad idea he didn’t love.
Katie Hafner’s taut and utterly delightful debut is a novel of multitudes. It is travel escapism, a family drama, a character study, social commentary on pandemic isolation and an incredible journey back to center. We are emerging from a period of forced introversion, and “The Boys” provides the perfect antidote. For anyone who now feels anxious about leaving the house or traveling abroad or re-entering the world, you will find, as I did, a kindred spirit in Ethan Fawcett.
When the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, electronic computer, known as ENIAC, debuted in 1946, great fanfare was given to the men who created it, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., among others.
But little attention was given to six women who played big parts behind the scenes, spending months figuring out how to program the computer with little more to go on than diagrams of the huge, complicated machine.
In the late afternoon of September 21, 2018, I exited my New York apartment building carrying a folding table and a big sign reading GRAMMAR TABLE. I crossed Broadway to a little park called Verdi Square, found a spot at the northern entrance to the Seventy-Second Street subway station, propped up my sign, and prepared to answer grammar questions from passersby.
This might seem bizarre to some, but to me it felt like destiny. I’ve been teaching writing and grammar for decades. I love grammar. I’ve studied twenty-five languages for fun. My bookshelves are filled with grammar and usage books, carefully alphabetized by language from Albanian to Zulu.
What I saw was the symptom of a universal story. All societies are locked in a dialectic relationship with water over time. It falls from the sky, comes from the sea, flows over land: floods, droughts, storms are expressions of Earth’s climate. People respond, finding solutions to protect themselves. It is a story of action and reaction, of water encroaching on daily life, of catastrophic failures, of people organising to shift water’s course or hold its force at bay. What propels this story forward over centuries is the fact that the solutions of any age are transformed – or rendered obsolete – by the changing expectations of those who follow, in a never-ending human dance with water.
What is it that’s so compelling about the wild horses of Sable Island? Maybe it’s that they turn up where horses have no right to be—grazing on a sand dune, or standing on a broad beach beside the speckled form of a gray seal, or galloping through the window of a gallery in Manhattan, where I was once stopped short, in passing, by an image of the tangled mane and salt-flecked coat of a stocky Sable Island horse.
It’s an unmistakable and shocking sight: a human body falling from the top of a tall building. On a clear October day, tourists and commuters moving through Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz square may have caught this glimpse, a few seconds of terror as a man fell from the roof of the 41-story Park Inn hotel.
The man was Salvatore Escalante. “I was screaming. Then I had to take a breath, and kept screaming,” recalls Escalante, who survived the fall because it was not exactly a fall.
Middle-aged woman trying to reconcile her sense of self with her rapidly receding youth? Check. Parent trying to protect her strange and vulnerable child during a pandemic? Check. Wife feeling trapped in a house with a less-than-perfect husband? Formerly creative person watching too much Netflix and drinking too much wine? Check and check. This is the COVID novel I’ve been wanting to read — the COVID novel that feels brilliantly true to real life while elevating the monotonous drag of lockdown into something funny, sad and universal.
The way we talk about the natural world is getting odder. In the early days of the pandemic, sightings of wild animals in cities and rideshare scooters abandoned in waterways prompted the “nature is healing” meme, with its suggestion that human inactivity was a boon to the planet. Writers have long picked up on this anxiety, composing stories that question assumptions about our connection to nature. Some depict plants communicating with people telepathically, while others imagine people’s moods influencing planetary collapse. Such premises insist that we are more deeply linked to our environments than we tend to believe. As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape, argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature—and, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other.
In 1954, when he was in his late 30s, the poet Robert Lowell was committed to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City after a manic episode. As part of his therapy, he began to write personal prose about his family and childhood, to tap into the torrents that streamed below the glacier of his intellect. This writing was a trial run, of sorts, for the autobiographical poems in his breakthrough book, “Life Studies” (1959).
The bulk of this material has never been published. It appears for the first time in “Memoirs,” a new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time.
We humans arrived in the midst of grass’s heyday, and it is doubtful we would exist otherwise. Homo sapiens evolved in and around the savannas of Africa, then spread around the world, often following grassy corridors. With the invention of agriculture, many societies fed themselves on domesticated grasses like wheat and corn, and on livestock that turned wild grasses into edible protein. We are, many of us, grass people.
But for all grass has done for us, we haven’t done much for grass lately. Grasslands rank among the most imperiled and least protected biomes on Earth. They are disappearing even faster than forests, and much of what remains has suffered varying degrees of damage. Their decline threatens a huge chunk of the planet’s biodiversity, the livelihoods of roughly 1 billion people, and countless ecological services such as carbon and water storage. Yet these losses don’t register with the same force as deforestation. Perhaps because we do not notice, or perhaps because we do not care.
If I mention a tearoom, I bet that puts you in mind of a small restaurant located in a grand hotel or a charming village. It will be decorated in either a flower pattern or pastel shades (or both), with comfortable chairs arranged around a low table, and fresh flowers on the table. Well-dressed guests—women mostly, but some men—pour loose leaf tea from fine China teapots into matching cups and nibble on crustless sandwiches, delicate pastries, and freshly baked scones served with jam and clotted cream. The conversation is light, friendly, and always polite.
Your image would be correct, in most cases, in modern times. But the history of the tearoom is more complex and meaningful than first meets the eye.
‘Power dwells with cheerfulness,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though we often think of cheerfulness as the opposite of power, as an insincere urge to liven things up, Emerson knew it to be a resource of the self, a tool for shaping our emotional lives that can help to relocate us in the social world and link us to community. At the present time, as we confront wave after wave of bad news sweeping the planet, cheerfulness is worth our consideration.
"When you're dealing with an octopus who's being attentively curious about something, it is very hard to imagine that there's nothing experienced by it," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. "It seems kind of irresistible. That itself is not evidence, that's just an impression."
Given this hunch as a starting point, how do you begin to explore the consciousness of an animal so unlike ourselves?
The feeling of being haunted has a way of collapsing one’s sense of direction and space. The presence of something blankets the world like mist, lingering, but impossible to locate. The feeling is inevitably followed by the question, “is it all in my head?” Maybe I’m projecting the rumblings of my psyche out into the world. Or maybe there was a glitch in the realm of the unseen, and maybe I was lucky to catch a glimpse of the ineffable. (Or maybe I’m not being haunted, but the FBI agent assigned to watch my every move isn’t as discreet as he thinks he is.)
The lines between what is and is not real blur often in the brilliant new short story collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Afghan-American writer Jamil Jan Kochai.
After embellishing the 19th century with alternative histories and fantastic developments in four previous novels, beginning with her best-selling debut, “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street,” Natasha Pulley grounds her latest work in an actual 20th-century event. “The Half Life of Valery K” takes off from a 1957 nuclear explosion in the Soviet Union, which blasted mortally dangerous levels of radiation into the atmosphere, and the ensuing coverup by the Soviet government. Exhibiting all the storytelling skills that made her earlier books so readable and popular, Pulley also offers a piercing study of how a police state deforms individual psychologies, personal relationships and professional ethics.
Sun Yung Shin dedicates her revelatory fourth collection, "The Wet Hex," to those "cast away," using a verb to remind readers that abandonment is an action imbued with intention and responsibility. In the formally innovative poems that follow, she demonstrates that castaways generate unique and vital knowledge from the obscure margins they have been consigned to.
“The Last Dress from Paris” is a book about discovering happiness. Oppressed by the world around them, Lucille and Alice take steps to forge ahead and change their lives, filling it with love and purpose. Combining this passion with incredible scenes from Paris and colorful descriptions of the Dior dresses, this novel is an amazing story to provide the reader with a glimpse of Parisian society during these two time periods.
One of the stranger aspects of lockdown for me was what I came to think of as my brain “defragging”. With so much less to do, so many fewer fresh memories to process, some kind of mental hard-drive utility seemed to spool up, intent on sorting through the inefficient data blocks scattered around my cranium. My nights began to be populated by faces I had not seen for years; long-submerged minor memories resurfaced at random. My dreams – particularly in the half-sleep of the morning – took on a kaleidoscopic quality of reflection and recomposition. Stuck in stasis, my mind decided to generate its own novelties: flowing and flashing through old files to turn the familiar contents of my memory into strange new matter.
I had forgotten about the defragging process until Will Ashon’s uncategorisable The Passengers brought it flooding back to me. Part oral history, part found poetry, his book uses the voices of ordinary Britons to produce a picture of the nation at a time of unique perspective. It is both a deeply quotidian book – the everyday as heard in the words of people you might meet at any bus-stop, pub, or supermarket – and an extraordinary one. Choral, polyvocal, symphonic, its evocation of Britain today had, for me, the special flavour of those lockdown dreams: an endlessly strange journey through the familiar.
The North, author Bernd Brunner tells us, has always had a profound influence on those who live farther south. It’s been feared, romanticized, mythologized and used for political purposes. While historian Brunner focuses his entertaining and thought-provoking cultural history on Germany’s relationships to the European north — Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland — much of what he has to say can be applied to the rest of the circumpolar north.
Pennywise is one of the most recognizable figures in the horror genre, right up there with Dracula and Frankenstein, or even a more recent frightful icon like Freddy Krueger. Originating in the pages of Stephen King's massive 1986 novel "It," this evil entity which likes to disguise itself as a sinister dancing clown has been terrifying audiences for decades. In 1990, a television miniseries starring the legendary Tim Curry as Pennywise was broadcast, causing an entire generation to develop coulrophobia.
Interestingly enough (given Pennywise's slumber cycle), 27 years later, a massive big-screen adaptation of the first half of King's book (that's how hefty the thing is) was released in theaters and became a blockbuster. With the success of part one, a sequel was released, called "It: Chapter Two." While not as strong as its predecessor, the second half of the clown's saga was enough of a success to prove that audiences just couldn't get enough of this interdimensional beast.
When I was little, I used to watch my Ammachi cook in her suburban-Ottawa bungalow, where the family gathered to enjoy these traditional Malayali dishes. I often found myself hoping I could replicate them once I got older. But, the more I think about the future, the more I worry about how difficult it will be to sustainably access the ingredients I would need to assemble these meals.
Inside the tiny shop, customers take their pick from a roster of signature ice cream and sherbet flavors that includes best sellers like Swiss orange chip, cookies and cream, and sticky chewy chocolate. Jim Laughlin, Campana’s son-in-law, has been the head ice cream maker since 2020 and shared that the shop makes about 150 gallons of ice cream every day. Customers can spot him preparing large batches of fresh ice cream by the entrance window.
“People don't realize that we make ice cream here,” Laughlin shares with a laugh. “Every single drop of ice cream has been made in-house since 1948. We're really proud of that.”
Colson Whitehead once wrote that all it took to belong in New York City was an act of remembrance—the summoning of a piece of the city that no longer existed. “You are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge,’” he wrote. “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” Whitehead wrote this essay in 2001 and it’s easy to understand why he was reflecting on what was missing: Two towers had left the skyline, and 2,977 people were gone with them.
Two decades later, an author has again taken stock of the city’s relationship with memory. His name is Zain Khalid, and his debut novel, Brother Alive, feels like the first since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that captures the mood of New York right now, describing a wounded city where, rather than holding on to what’s gone, residents are eager to rid themselves of the recent past.
Based on interviews with 40 active fiction reviewers for major newspapers, Phillipa K. Chong’s study Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times is a game attempt to survey a flagging field of cultural commentary that’s undergoing fundamental shifts. It is an index of Chong’s discernment that she has focused on one of the few intriguing spaces that her profession (she is a cultural sociologist at McMaster University in Canada) has yet to examine seriously, and one from which there is plenty of sociological conjecture to be harvested. Book critics anxiously assert their authority, yet evince uncertainty regarding whether anybody else agrees that they have it. The uncertainty of the critic’s place in American culture is present from the first pages of Chong’s study: A woman with “a review career that spans decades…for the most important and influential newspapers in North America” tells Chong in her interview that the idea of her possibly being a “tastemaker” is laughable. The scene neatly illustrates the challenges faced by external analysts in their attempts to decode a world as insular and disingenuous as literary criticism. But it also points to unspoken cultural tensions that inhibit a more candid attitude toward one’s own authority: In what sort of society would such a powerful tastemaker feel compelled to present themselves as something less?
If you plan on reading James Bridle’s “Ways of Being” — and I cannot recommend highly enough that you do — you might consider forming a support group first. The ideas in this book are so big, so fascinating and yes, so foreign, you are going to need people to talk to about them. Have your people on speed dial, ready to go. And make sure you set aside a good amount of time for reading. You probably won’t be reading this book once. You’ll want to read it several times. This book is going to stretch you.
“I honored their elegies rather than the continuing presence of vital, fluid cultures,” Savoy writes of the child-self that once believed in what Dina Gilio-Whitaker calls the “myth of the vanishing Indian.” I once believed that to be hyphenated was to be less than whole, that to be part of the diaspora meant that a part of me, and my family, was irrevocably lost to migration, extinct and extinguished, gone. But if “home lies in ‘re-membering,’” then home is not a place, but an action, an ongoing process. To traverse land is to trace the steps of your forebears, and to travel in search of heritage is to access our past by living fiercely in the present and finding what stories live there.
Richard Howorth is easy to talk to, even when he’s hard to hear. Earlier this year, while men hammered away on the other side of a wall in his hundred-and-sixty-year-old house, the fifth-generation Mississippian told me about raising his three children there and how one of them had already had her wedding reception on the property and another will have hers there soon and why handymen are so difficult to find these days and what one of the hammering men was doing a few weeks ago when he put his foot through the roof. Later, from a friend’s nearby home where no one was banging away in the background, Richard’s wife, Lisa, offered her own explanation for the construction work: “It’s so we don’t look like we live in fucking Grey Gardens.”
The Howorths’ home is nowhere near the Hamptons, but still merits its own documentary: the grit-lit author Larry Brown used to sober up on the front-porch swing; the novelist Donna Tartt stayed the night; the writer Darcey Steinke helped hatch a skinny-dipping plot in the parlor; the Jack-of-all-genres Alexander McCall Smith once showed up in a kilt and conducted a Southern outpost of his Really Terrible Orchestra. “We can’t talk about some of the people,” Lisa said, “because those stories end in the hospital or the county jail.”
In the tangled web of my teenage years, farther back than I care to admit, I had the uncanny ability of always knowing what was best for me. Or so I thought. When my parents told me it wasn’t unreasonable for them to expect me home by midnight after a night out with friends, I argued the point. When they told me I ought not to wait until the last minute to start that book report for school, my standard reply was that I had plenty of time, knowing I hadn’t even started reading the book let alone writing the report. More often than not the choices I made turned out to be not in my best interests, which proved two things: that my parents were right and that my adolescent hubris was doing me more harm than good. Three examples illustrate my deficient powers of distinction: Frankie Avalon or David Copperfield. Elvis Presley or Tom Sawyer. Dion and the Belmonts or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. I chose Frankie, Elvis, and Dion.
But just as that information once did, the minimalist menu is disappearing. Thanks to the realities of post-pandemic restaurant operations — smaller staff among them — more restaurants are reverting back to full descriptors, with long, double-barreled lists of details about provenance, sauces, cooking methods, and sides. “Now that print menus are slowly coming back, restaurants are more willing to provide longer descriptions, which also helps them lure diners,” says Guillermo Ramirez, creative director of the Miami-based marketing agency Gluttonomy Inc. To diners right now, knowledge is power.
“The body is a house. Who lives within?” as one poem has it, echoing 2 Corinthians 5: “Our body is the house in which our spirit lives here on earth.” There’s no doubting and no escaping the joyful, hopeful spirit that inhabits “The Poet’s House” — the spirit of poetry that by the end of this charming novel Carla so clearly embodies — and the irrepressible Jean Thompson so smartly imparts.
Picture a lone human walking across the rocky expanse of a planet, talking to himself as he goes—a lone human alert to signs that this is a planetary surface, to “the speed,” as he puts it, “of the planet rolling under your feet.” This is the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson somewhere high in the southern Sierra Nevada—“the heart of the range”—almost any time in the past 49 years. He could be a sunwalker from his novel 2312, but the planet is Earth, not Mercury, and the California sun won’t incinerate him.
Robinson is hiking off-trail, and—as he writes in his new book, his easy gait is a mode of being: “pedestrian and prosy.” He may be paying close attention to anything or nothing: his plantar fasciitis, a scatter of obsidian chips at a Native American knapping site, the way the mountains “seem to glow from within, to pulse with an internal light, under a sky as dark and solid as enamel.” Or he may be comforting himself “with my usual science fiction exercise,” imagining a scene elsewhere in time, working it through in his mind until he can say, yes, “it had been like that.”
The tension reflects the paragraph’s curious history as a punctuation mark and unit of thought. In fact, my opening question—what is a paragraph?—only gets more complicated as we gaze further and further into the past, as the paragraph gradually dwindles to a thin line in the margins. This backstory explains why it is so hard to say what exactly a paragraph is and, in turn, why we struggle now to legislate its parameters. But this isn’t an entirely despairing story: To recall the paragraph’s past lives is also to consider how previous generations have put their thoughts in order and to gain thereby a vantage to reconsider our own writing practices.
Grief debilitates us. It releases us. It fills and drains us. Grief is an emotion so fantastically real and powerful that it can easily take over all others. We have all encountered narratives of grief—the depression, the rage, the self-destruction. But what about the other things grief does? What about the layers that are not just private sorrow and darkness? What about the unforeseen ways it transports us out of our own lives and into something bigger?
One of my favorite horror movies is Poltergeist. I first saw it at nine years old, probably too young. The scene in which a character is induced by the house’s malevolent spirits to hallucinate peeling off his own face is with me forever. But what I find even more indelible is the ordinariness of the site of all that paranormal phenomena.
The book is just the latest entry in Moshfegh's current rise to literary fame. Over the course of the pandemic, her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a woman who tries to drug herself into sleeping through an entire year, became a hit – particularly among the bookish on TikTok. A Hollywood adaptation of Relaxation is in the works currently, but first the film adaptation of her debut novel, Eileen, is set to come out. But the come up hasn't stopped her from digging even deeper into what's become something of a signature style – writing in beautiful detail about the gross and disgusting. Which, for her, is just a way of writing about being alive while knowing you're going to die.
The key, as with most everything in life, is to build a habit of reading. What you’re trying to do is practice sustained attention. Like any habit, the trick is in figuring out what works for you.
The question anglers should be asking is: How do we forge ahead in the information age without compromising fisheries? To answer it, you must first identify the biggest culprits—in other words, which platforms burn fishing spots the hardest. Facebook and Instagram? Sure, grip-and-grins of trophy fish that show obvious landmarks in the background don’t help. Forums? In my experience, you give away too many goods and your post will get shut down. I’d posit that fishing apps produce more burn victims than any other platform. The good news is that some developers are coming up with ways to incorporate ethics into their apps, but to understand the significance of that, we must first look at Fishbrain—the app anglers love to hate and hate to love.
There have been 37 notable Sasquatch sightings near the town of Harrison Hot Springs since 1900. Called Bigfoot in the United States, and yeti or metoh kangmi ("wild man of the snows") in the Himalaya, Sasquatch is a tall, hairy, bi-pedal, primate-like creature of disputed existence. Regular sightings have kept the popular legend alive, but now it's being told from an Indigenous perspective. The change is driven by public interest in the idea of a Sasquatch rooted in spirituality and symbolism, rather than sensationalism. The creature is considered sacred to West Coast First Nations, particularly the Sts'ailes (sta-hay-lis), who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for at least 10,000 years.
A male user swipes right. A woman is notified. There is a pause. How to respond? “Having waited a requisite number of hours after receiving the male user’s message so as to appear sufficiently busy and not desperately alone,” Jem Calder writes, “the female user pieced together a response to the male user that sounded both playful and hedging.”
Millennial malaise and self-awareness, the effort to fight through alienation despite the awful sense that nothing is natural or right: This is the taut, weird, irresistible new terrain — as evidenced by the above, from a story called “Distraction From Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness” — that helps make up Calder’s brilliant, compelling and defiantly authentic new collection of stories, “Reward System.”
Castillo, in other words, isn’t merely interested in preaching to the choir that reading is important. She knows that — and hopes we do too. Instead, she’s asking us to investigate how and why we read: to pay attention to what information we’re ingesting and how we’ve been taught to interact with it. This is a particularly high-stakes argument right now, not just because of the recent uptick in book bans but also because the conversation between people who do read so often reduces book culture to hot takes and prepackaged talking points.
Together, above the kitchen sink, we peeled
a hundred russets. You taught me how
to scoop their eyes out. If we didn’t,
Experience the joy of not having to flag down a server for a small plate. Take a walk on the saucy side and dunk your spring roll straight into the soy sauce ramekin (trust me, it’s so much better than swirling it around on your shallow dish). See what it’s like to grab life — with your hands — by the squid ring.
Camilla Grudova’s debut, the short fiction collection The Doll’s Alphabet, was acclaimed as feminist horror reminiscent of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. In 13 often jarringly grotesque stories, Grudova built miniature scenarios to explore the disappointments of young women’s lives: dystopian worlds studded with double meanings and symbolic objects such as inscrutable dolls, mannequin parts and sewing machines. With slyly rococo titles such as Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead and The Moth Emporium, it was as if the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington had undertaken a collaboration with David Lynch.
Yes, it’s just a novel, but Holsinger has built an apocalyptic plot on ground more secure than the foundations of many Miami homes.
Truman had established the agency in 1947 after dissolving its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, at the close of World War II for fear it might evolve, in his words, into an “American Gestapo.” Now it appeared that his worst fears had come to fruition. When former Central Intelligence Director Richard Helms appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee nine years later, Senator Stuart Symington invoked the words of the 33rd president: “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position, and I feel we need to correct it.”
Author and political reporter Jefferson Morley captures these episodes in Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, a consistently engaging and sometimes riveting history of President Richard Nixon’s dealings with Helms.
Peña-Guzmán’s survey of dream research makes a strong case for the fact that some animals do dream, though as a philosopher, not a biologist, he ultimately poses more questions than he answers. How many animals dream, and which? His book doesn’t attempt to draw lines between species that dream and those that may not. (Elephants and chickens, sure, but what about bees? Sea sponges?) Instead, the book enters the far more slippery terrain of trying to build a unique case for animal consciousness. A mind that dreams is, Peña-Guzmán argues, necessarily a conscious mind.
An appropriate response to biosphere collapse is screaming, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is screamingly, bleakly funny. Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humor borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a gut-punching satire of the failure of the carbon offset project: unfortunately, it’s the beach read we deserve. Fortunately, it’s a savagely entertaining one.
Landscapes invite contemplation. Natural or built, eerie or spectacular, they’re spaces to project ourselves into. What if I lived there in the woods? What kind of person would I be if I lived by that seaside? What if I leaped off this cliff?
Elvia Wilk’s “Death by Landscape” inspires the same kind of rangy feelings. This book of essays — divided into four sections: “Plants,” “Planets,” “Bleed” and an epilogue — takes its title from a Margaret Atwood short story. The premise: Two teenagers go for a hike. One steps off the path and disappears forever. The other is left obsessed with landscapes. She sees her lost friend in them, only in the form of a tree.
“A Factotum in the Book Trade” is memorable because a) it’s well-written, and b) it’s close in touch with the books. Kociejowski, now in his early 70s, never owned his own shop. He struggled financially while raising a family on an employee’s earnings. He simply loved the work because, he writes, “the book trade is a floating world for people of intelligence unsuited for anything else.”
A bonus is that he’s funny. When he told a young woman, a former bookseller, that he was working on this memoir, she said to him: “Go on, young people love reading about old white men selling books.” That kind of comment, over there, is what’s known as taking the piss.
Who gets to tell their stories, and who is supposed to read them? In her new essay collection, “How to Read Now,” Elaine Castillo dismantles the notion that art should be separate from the artist, because our understanding of where a story comes from, and who is telling it, matters.
Today, my library shelves are filled with books by doctors, spanning the whole arc of a medical career—from “A Not Entirely Benign Procedure,” a memoir of medical-student life by the N.Y.U. pediatrician Perri Klass, to the self-lacerating retrospect of the British surgeon Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm,” which broods on mistakes made during a long and outwardly illustrious career. Somewhere between these, I can now slot in Jay Wellons’s vivid mid-career memoir, “All That Moves Us” (Random House). Wellons is the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, and has begun to write, as I did, after some twenty years in medicine.
His book unfolds in a harrowing series of operating-room vignettes, explaining the work of his hands while also evoking the tension in his mind and his heart. Before his medical training, Wellons was an English major at the University of Mississippi, where he took writing classes with the novelist Barry Hannah and the poet Ellen Douglas. It shows, both in his narrative control and in the freshness of his descriptive touches.
The right to be helped to die is the central issue in this novel, but the narrative theme is the effect on Erin, focusing on her sense of dislocation.
They’re a family of competitive swimmers – most powerful in the water. It’s the one thing the three women have in common; the thing both Erin and her mum admire Aunty Wynn for, but the last time Erin swam in a race she bombed out, badly. And she hasn’t had a lot of success in anything else since.
This is a story of that love, betrayals, and forgiveness, told with a backdrop history and of war, and what war can do to a person's emotional balance.
The onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic in the early months of 2020 – and the subsequent lockdowns which followed – provoked different responses in people. Some saw the periods spent confined inside as a depressive ode to lost time; others eagerly experimented in hobbies or binge-watched Netflix.
Carmel Bird – like many writers – spent lockdown reading. In the ‘strange beauty of the stillness of the solitude suddenly brought about by the pandemic’, Bird embarked on a journey to reread the texts which shaped her as a person, a reader, and a writer. Telltale is the result. Part-reading diary, part-intertextual memoir, Bird takes us on a narrative voyage of her bibliophilic life.
Well into the nineteenth century, most European swimmers were still using the breaststroke and backstroke, and keeping their faces out of the water, even in competition. That is, they swam even less well than the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans had in antiquity, since the ancient swimmers had at least used a crawl stroke. Some Eurasians were aware that Indigenous and Black American swimmers used an overhand stroke, which was much faster than the breaststroke. They saw that these “natural” swimmers used side breathing rather than holding their heads up out of the water. But for decades, swimmers from Britain to China resisted the crawl stroke. They saw the breaststroke as calm and rational, and rejected the crawl as excessively splashy and energetic. As swimming races became more competitive, however, slowly the advantages of the crawl stroke proved irresistible, and more swimmers began to use it.
When we refer to nouns such as ‘bread’ or ‘flower’ we know exactly what they are. These are concrete objects that we can see, touch, taste and smell. But time is an abstract concept, and one that philosophers have long struggled to define. In the 3rd century AD, St Augustine of Hippo (354 AD – 430 AD) made a series of observations about time that went on to influence countless philosophers right into the 19th century. Many of his thoughts on time still ring true with people today.
The American author Jean Hanff Korelitz has a knack for producing smart, psychologically astute page-turners. The Plot, pivoting on a case of identity theft, was 2021’s most entertaining highbrow beach read, while her adaptation of her noirish 2014 thriller You Should Have Known (retitled The Undoing) was HBO’s most watched TV show of 2020. Her new novel, The Latecomer, combines her interests in constructed identities and marital disarray within a mazy, old-fashioned Jonathan Franzen-style family saga.
Ned Beauman was listed on Granta’s once-a-decade list of best young British novelists last time out, in 2013, and his latest novel makes clear that, not yet 40, he’s absolutely worth a nomination next year too. Full of fun and big ideas, his conceptually tricksy novels crackle with comic zip, alive to the past (his debut, Boxer, Beetle, and second novel, The Teleportation Accident, dealt in different ways with the legacies of Nazism) as well as the present (his third novel, Glow, was an ultra-contemporary conspiracy thriller centred in south London). His fifth book, Venomous Lumpsucker, imagines a super-heated, algorithm-driven near future in which guilty hand-wringing about endangered species has led to a global trade in “extinction credits”, awarded by a regulatory body essentially enabling the richest firms and states to kill off all the flora and fauna they can afford – safe in the knowledge that tissue samples and genome data are securely stored in “biobanks” around the planet.
It is almost unthinkable that the now universally acknowledged masterpieces of modern art, such as Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Henri Matisse’s “The Red Studio,” were scorned by American museums and that wealthy patrons refused to buy even a single canvas by either painter. Though it is a truism that innovative art often finds difficulty at first in being accepted, you would think that at a time when the masters of modern painting were already lionized in Europe, Americans would not be so slow in recognizing their significance. Yet such was the case. Even after the 1913 Armory Show, which is usually credited with introducing modern art to this country, it took another several decades before it was possible to mount a full-scale Picasso exhibit, and years to get the Museum of Modern Art off the ground, much less turn it into the formidable institution it is today. “For nearly 30 years, the effort to bring modern art to the United States was continually impeded by war, economic crisis and a deeply skeptical public,” Hugh Eakin writes. “It was a project that might well have foundered, and almost did, but for the fanatical determination of a tiny group of people,” whose story he sets out to tell in this fascinating, immensely readable narrative.
Now the elder trees renew their patience. In the breeze their infant leaves murmur
until the rustle and roar of the Tall Ones shush the buds to sleep.
Their loud lullaby only ceases at dark.
Omer may not have all the answers, but she has done all of the reading: the theologians, the feminist scholars, the trauma experts. “The fundamental question of why God is a man in Islam, in Christianity, in Judaism, and in many others, it is because they were born in a social context of patriarchy,” she says. “Take Christianity – it rose up in a time of feudal lands, lords and kings. All of this is represented in biblical language we use today, so the way we relate to God serves male power and authority.”
Reading Holy Woman, it is easy to feel encouraged by some of the women Omer talks to, who are doing brave things to make space for themselves, like the Swedish queer priest or the female imam in Morocco. But some will find it hard to not see what they are trying to do as futile: some Muslims would never accept a female imam, and some Christians would be appalled by the concept of a female God. (As Omer writes, Vatican City, the heart of Catholicism, is the only place in the world where women still can’t vote.) What does reinterpreting scripture matter when a religion remains patriarchal in practice?
I teach a class called “Death,” on the question of whether it is rational to be afraid of death. Like all my classes, it is a philosophy class, so of course I assign the seminal philosophical texts on that topic. But I also assign Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”—a poem I strongly disagree with. In my class on the philosophical puzzles surrounding self-creation, we read contemporary philosophical essays—and we also read novels by James Joyce and Elena Ferrante. I teach Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Descartes’s Meditations: they are both about what it’s like to be trapped in one’s own head, looking for a way out. I pair Plato’s Euthyphro with Sophocles’s Antigone, because they offer contrasting portraits of the clash between human and divine law. In my class on courage, we read some Platonic dialogues, bits and pieces of Aristotelian treatises and all 24 books of Homer’s Iliad.
Looking back, I am surprised by how many pages of literature I have assigned over the years, far more than is the norm in college philosophy classes. I never formulated a plan to do so; I never self-consciously aimed for interdisciplinarity. How did my syllabi wind up populated by so many novels, stories, poems and plays?
In her first book of nonfiction, a collection of 17 essays accompanying the popular title piece, "The Crane Wife," novelist C.J. Hauser takes the reader along on a soulful journey of self-discovery as she brings together smart, astute observations on modern love and life.
The beach, Stodola writes, “plays host in our collective imagination to the highest form of leisure.” The author goes deep on what compels throngs of humanity to sandy destinations – and at what cost to the people who live in these delicate habitats year round. Copiously researched, featuring disquieting interviews with locals, oceanographers and coastal geologists, The Last Resort is a timely look at the social, economic and ecological tentacles of this industry, from St. Kitts to Hawaii to Senegal.
Johanson wasn’t so sure that consensus would stand the test of time. “Tracy’s not actually a bad person,” Johanson reasoned. “It’s only in McAllister’s head that she’s dangerous, and as a fellow misanthropic Xer, I see his point — Tracy is annoyingly eager, determined, and devoted to her school to the point of self-sacrifice.” Yet everything that made Tracy seem so annoying and even malicious to McAllister could, Johanson pointed out, be considered heroic — especially by the generation that was at the time just beginning to be called millennial.
More than 20 years later, Johanson has been proven correct, up to a point. As Tracy makes her return to pop culture in the form of Perrotta’s new Election sequel, the novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, she’s being greeted with the form of pop culture mea culpas that we have become used to rolling out for most of the prominent women of the Y2K eras: think piece after think piece about how we were wrong about Tracy Flick way back when. She has become a sort of fictional amalgam of all those wronged women, Britney and Hillary and Monica rolled into one obstreperous package.
Which are which can be hard to tell. But if you can take the time to distinguish compared to from compared with, discerning those rules worth fighting for is surely worth the effort too.
This past November, a health checkup by the Zoological Society of London revealed what the group hadn’t seen in the River Thames for more than 60 years: promising signs of life. Hundreds of species, including 115 types of fish, 6-foot sharks, seahorses, eels, and the occasional stray whale now call the body home. The Thames—the River of Death, the zombie river—can finally shed its “biologically dead” label, according to the society’s report. The resurrection has brought benefits both to the creatures who dwell within it and the ones who live, work, and play on its banks.
Crouch doesn't linger. He knows how to do a chase, when to blow stuff up and when to bring the house lights down. Like I said at the top, he's walked similar trails before. He knows where he's going.
But what makes Upgrade special is that his path is unique. He takes turns that are unexpected, explores some stunning vistas along the way, and even if the endpoint is a little bit obvious, watching him get there can be a lot of fun.
Despite its medieval milieu, “Lapvona” is a quintessential Moshfegh book. It has the warped earthiness of the author’s first two novels, featuring incest and sundry other perversions. There is a powerful undercurrent of allegory—the distance between reader and setting only emphasises how little has changed for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Here everything is corrupt, all motives are grubby, and you feel you need a shower to rinse the book off once you put it down.
The retired Canadian mycologist (fungus scientist) has written an accessible primer on a much-maligned category of organisms whose lives sustain our own. Without fungi, forests could not grow, agriculture would grind to a halt,carbon could not be recycled. There would quickly be no life at all.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 5, 1793, a couple of blocks from what is now New York’s City Hall, a gentleman with a reputation as a “rake” raped a 17-year-old seamstress whom he had carried into a brothel by force. No doubt countless cases like this one are lost to history — papers didn’t report on them, records (if anyone kept them) rarely exist, and they rarely went to trial. In fact, in the decade since the end of British rule, there had only been two sexual assault prosecutions in the city of New York. But this case was unusual for several reasons: Lanah Sawyer, the young victim, had the mettle to report the crime. The state prosecuted it vigorously. And an English lawyer newly arrived in America with a personal interest in rape prosecutions (his patron’s son was under indictment for the same) decided to take notes, producing the first published report of such a trial in the United States and the material for “The Sewing Girl’s Tale,” John Wood Sweet’s excellent and absorbing work of social and cultural history.
Dear Allen Ginsberg, I invoke you now,
the sandal-footed, supermarket bard.
We thought of you the other night, by chance,
though California wasn’t where we were.
Fox once spoke to an interviewer about “the strength of life” of the injured cat in “One-Eyed Cat,” which she called “the heart of that book,” and how much it meant to her. Her stories for young readers are often ones of resilience, showing lonely or uncared-for children struggling to make their way in a baffling and at times treacherous world. Many of these children are outsiders, and Fox always saw herself as someone with an outsider’s point of view. She was also exceptionally resilient and persistent, continuing to write, which she first began doing as a child, despite much disappointment and rejection. It is this grit that wins my greatest admiration. Without it, Fox’s strange, beautiful, truth-telling work would not exist.
When it comes to art against tyranny, no work is more seared into our consciousness than Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s dark, howling mural against fascist terror. Created in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War, it has in the 85 years since become a universal statement about human suffering in the face of political violence. Throughout World War II, it stood for resistance to Nazi aggression; during Vietnam controversies such as the My Lai massacre, protesters invoked it against the U.S. military. Today, its shrieking women and lifeless bodies conjure the corpse-strewn streets of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha after Vladimir Putin’s brutal assault.
But Guernica’s enduring status was hardly foreordained. Picasso was deeply apolitical and had shown little interest in the Spanish Civil War before he created it. Nor had he ever done a public mural, let alone one about a bombed city. And the work was so disdained when it was first shown that it very nearly didn’t make it past its debut.
In March of 2021, when I was struggling, like everyone else, in the claustrophobic reality of the pandemic’s second year, a literary agent in Paris wrote: he asked me to read a novel.
As I opened Mutt-Lon’s Les 700 aveugles de Bafia, I quickly realized just how much I needed that book. It is a raucous, madcap adventure through the tropical jungle, far-removed in place and time from my present, and yet the perfect homeopathic remedy for what ailed me.
Though imaginary numbers have been integral to quantum theory since its very beginnings in the 1920s, scientists have only recently been able to find their physical signatures in experiments and empirically prove their necessity.
Pete confirmed the ice’s driveability a few days before we left, but by the time we arrived it was too late — the ice had broken up, stranding his truck in McCarthy for yet another season until next winter’s freeze. C’est la vie. So we parked at the end of the road beside the Kennicott River near the toe of the glacier and walked over the metal footbridge with our gear for the week in backpacks, and then onward another five miles to the otherworldly snowbound ghost town of Kennecott. There, I’d spend the next week living off mac and cheese and instant oatmeal and falling in love with the peculiar little town of McCarthy.
In the 20 years since that first trip with Pete, McCarthy has become my primary home — and home to an increasing number of adventurous travelers, seasonal workers, and other independently minded individuals looking to get really out there, and who ultimately never leave. Some come for the glaciers or the rivers or the stunning alpine country. Some come for the remarkable history of Kennecott and its early 20th century copper boom that ended abruptly in 1938, leaving behind a footprint that evolved into modern McCarthy. More and more, though, (and even more surprisingly) people are coming all the way out to McCarthy to eat. Word is spreading, even among Alaskans in other parts of the state, that McCarthy’s culinary attributes match its natural wonders.
In March 2020, when pandemic stay-at-home orders had just started and everyone was figuring out how to get groceries and purchase in bulk for the next several weeks, I already had a chest freezer full of food and a pantry stocked with months’ worth of meals at my home in Fairbanks, Alaska. I had been living in the Arctic for more than a decade, and the fly-in community of Bettles, Alaska, had prepared me for pandemic life in ways I hadn’t realized.
Dairying is all Plagerman knows, and he’s counting on a niche market in Alaska to be able to keep his business running for the long haul. His family has farmed dairy cows for at least four generations, most recently in Washington state. Since he started milking in Delta Junction a year ago, he’s found that locals who rarely get really fresh milk or have never lived anywhere near a dairy farm have a thirst for his mostly grass-fed, nonhomogenized, glass-bottled stuff, even at a higher price. He hopes that the locavore market, his automated milker, and the relatively regulation-free farming in rural Alaska are enough to sustain his business into a future that looks increasingly complicated for small dairies everywhere.
Wild foods like fish, moose, and berries are plentiful in Alaska, but the state’s relationship to certain perishables like winter produce and milk has always been fraught. The vast majority of the state’s groceries come from elsewhere. To get to Anchorage, milk and produce must travel a minimum of 1,500 miles from Washington. And, especially in pandemic times, all kinds of things delay that trip. Empty dairy cases have been a regular sight in grocery stores statewide over the last two years, a sometimes spooky reminder of the Alaska’s tenuous food security.
For many of us, home is where the heart is. A safe environment and the epitome of ‘homely.’ But, for Janine Mikosza it was more complicated than that. In her memoir, Homesickness, she explores the many childhood homes she lived in before turning eighteen.
For every soldier killed in battle, many more are left seriously wounded, some of them with grotesque, disfiguring facial injuries. As Lindsey Fitzharris writes in her scholarly yet deeply moving book The Facemaker, about the First World War facio-maxillary surgeon Harold Gillies, it is said that in the Napoleonic Wars soldiers with disfiguring facial injuries would be killed by their comrades as an act of kindness, to spare them the miserable life that otherwise awaited them as social outcasts.
Writing a book is hard enough, so authors will sometimes use it as a chance to embark on something they have always wanted to do — take up dance, learn to juggle, travel the world, have more sex. The longtime New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson took a decidedly different tack, choosing instead to chronicle his sustained efforts to do something he knew he hated.
In “A Divine Language,” Wilkinson begins by admitting that he passed high school math only because he cheated. His memoir recounts the year he spent, not long ago, when he was well into his 60s, trying to learn the algebra, geometry and calculus that had confounded him decades before.
I was not dressed correctly when
motherhood interviewed me.
I wore flat shoes and a passport.
My knees were pearl handles,
my mind, on and off like static.
But I got the job.
Now here’s a new spin on “eating local” for you.
Supposing you were to pack a picnic for the Hollywood Bowl with exclusively created-in-L.A. foods.
What would be on your menu?
Reverse Engineering is a collection of seven short stories paired with interviews on how they were written — a niftily simple premise. Readers who might be worried about the cost to their enjoyment of seeing how the sausage was made needn’t be, as Tom Conaghan, the book’s editor, explains in his introduction: “Understanding writers’ craft is less like a nautical map than learning to read the stars — it’s not important knowing the route if the purpose of the voyage is to get lost.” He also makes the slightly less demonstrable claim, in the grand lineage of anthology provocation, that “[s]hort story readers are emotionally eloquent enough not to need consolation from life in all its heart-aching richness.” Like the canny horoscope writer, Conaghan can assume that we’ll enjoy being flattered too much to question the claim’s veracity. The stories collected here are unified only by what the editor calls their “vivacious diversity,” and the stories and interviews certainly display a broad range of approaches to the art; however, there seems to be something of a divide between feeling and argument as the anthology’s organizing, or at least driving, principles.
The very first line of her exceedingly moody story warns us to expect the unexpected: “The deep sea is a haunted house,” Armfield writes, “a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”
And yet even that gothic portent can’t prepare us for what lies beneath the surface of this queer romance.
The title sounds like a metaphor, but there really is a theatre made of a whale’s ribcage in this sweeping historical epic. It stands on a grassy headland on the Dorset coast, draped in scenery, the creation of young Cristabel Seagrave, whose passion for amateur dramatics ropes in family and servants alike at the Chilcombe estate. Here we have the country set in all their jazz-age glory, with cocktails at breakfast, costumes at teatime and a general sense that the world is a peach ripe for plucking.
When Chrysta Bilton’s mother found “The One,” she knew. He was a stranger off the street and not someone she would marry, but he was the man she would persuade to share his semen so she could “go home, pull out a turkey baster, and impregnate herself.”
That our existence begins with a clash of cells doesn’t mean that there isn’t something divine about it, Bilton believes. As one of 36 children conceived with sperm from the same donor, Bilton considers genetic inheritance and destiny from an unusual point of view in her memoir, “Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings.”
It’s not as though the first version of “An Obedient Father” was ignored. It met with the kind of success few first novels receive. It was excerpted in The New Yorker and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Sharma received a Whiting Award — career milestones for any writer. Novelists reached out to its 29-year-old author out of the blue. Sharma was not shy to say that among them was the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Still, the book would sell only adequately for a literary novel: according to Sharma, 6,000 hardcover copies and then 11,000 paperback copies over the next two decades, taking 17 years to earn back what the publisher advanced him for it and certainly not paying well enough that it let Sharma live off his writing.
Aside from those encouraging/discouraging realities, Sharma was secretly displeased with the novel when he published it. He’d had doubts, yes, but he had been arrogant enough, or insecure enough, or hopeful enough to want to be hailed as a genius, and when it was clear that, despite the praise the book received, “genius” was not a word being thrown around, Sharma’s sense of failure, of not living up to his hopes for the novel, was confirmed. In that little way, what he already knew to be true was borne out: Whatever the book did well, aesthetically, it had real things wrong with it, formal problems he hadn’t been able to name, much less fix.
In Iowa, I had dinner with an elderly woman who introduced herself only as “Mrs. Alvarez.” The train was rocking from side-to-side as it shot forward in the darkness, and she almost lost her balance when she sat down across from me at our booth. Mrs. Alvarez was short and stout, with curly grey hair cut in a bob. She wore a dark dress with large, round buttons.
“Would I offend you if I said grace?” Mrs. Alvarez asked me. “I believe in God, but I wouldn’t want to impose Him upon anybody else.”
“Not at all, please go ahead,” I replied, bowing my head as Mrs. Alvarez recited her blessings. When you’re travelling alone on the California Zephyr, the two-and-a-half-day Amtrak train from Chicago to San Francisco, you take your blessings as they come.
It can be hard to know where to start with Category Unknown, given that the book itself is already playing havoc with time frames in the prologue, which turns out to be anything but. But the central timeline is 1978 – 2008, accompanying the rise of Margaret Thatcher (and Debbie Harry) and the fall of Lehman Brothers. Its startling opening salvo, and interpretation of ‘prologue’ to mean a potted London pop cultural history, feel broadly suggestive of some desire to subvert expectations, be they literary, readerly or purely linear. Is this a bildungsroman, campus farce, or a big city drama? At times it seems as though it might be all three, reblended with wanton disregard for the conventions of genre. What is clear though is the referencing of a real-life backdrop – the 1981 New Cross Fire and its horrific fallout, as well as the wider racial antagonisms of the time – to remind readers that many of the issues around social justice today have in fact got far older roots. And indeed Category Unknown does not shy away from the less edifying aspects of this earlier historical period, be that the racial profiling of the hated SUS laws, intra-ethnic tensions, sexual violence or class-bound prejudice. It is one of its strengths though, that it manages to do so without any descent into diatribe, leaving the reader instead with the slightly queasy feeling that these are just everyday banalities, albeit mired, as Hannah Arendt would have it, in their own discrete forms of evil: bureaucratic, societal, individual.
Albert’s achievement in Human Blues lies in creating a character so difficult and contradictory that the reader can both love and hate her at the same time, like a friend whose strengths are inseparable from her flaws. Much like a real person, in fact. The other great accomplishment of this novel is that it is very funny. Aviva may be a recognizable type, but her type involves a heavy dose of self-awareness: “Aviva was ‘process-oriented,’ which meant a lot of floor time, a lot of candles, a lot of tunes on shuffle, and regular cannabis edibles.”
Where novels are often described as ambitious, and omnivorous, short stories are rarely presumed to have appetites — to run rampant through the reader’s mind, ravenous, devouring, feral. The most common metaphors that try to sum up the particular work a short story can do are postcards and photo albums, icebergs and carefully etched cameos: still, patient objects putting themselves on calm display. Perhaps that’s why the fierce little machines found in the Taiwanese American writer K-Ming Chang’s first collection, “Gods of Want” — the successor to her gutsy debut novel, “Bestiary” — feel so unexpected: Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive.
Barnes & Noble may not have such a radical and diverse cache of books, but it does offer the possibility of discovery in a way that algorithms and screens simply cannot. We need indie booksellers, but at this point, we need all the physical bookstores we can get. We need as many opportunities as possible to encounter books in the wild, offline, books we can pick up and be surprised by, books in spaces we can mill about and share with others.
I now know of Haunts as a strange, swim-y, cult book. In it, Sprawson works his way through every writer or artist to have ever so much as mentioned swimming. Through the eccentric swimmers who commit their lives to rivers, lakes and seas, Sprawson comes to understand the role of swimming in cultures as disparate as Weimar Germany and Japan’s Samurais. Like a conspiracy theorist he connects rough sea shingle to the class of boarding-school boys imposing themselves on politics to this day; he draws a line from octopus porn to waterfall swimming. Perhaps his greatest achievement is not that he includes so much, but that his connections, even at their most strained, are always persuasive.
Renewable energy is at a curious crossroads. It’s needed to avert further climate damage, and solar and wind power are now remarkably cheap. But even clean-energy proponents often dislike the aesthetics of the new technology. They’re happy for solar arrays and windmills to exist somewhere—just not within sight. Many homeowners’ associations refuse to let residents install panels.
This is the great new shift we’re facing. For decades, gas- and coal-fired plants were tucked far away from view. But now, power generation is visible all over. “There’s really no other energy source that people have that personal relationship with,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
Yet this struggle has a long history. Ironically, coal itself faced a similar pushback in the early 19th century, when it was the newfangled power source that promised to solve many of the country’s problems.
Throughout Nada Alic’s debut fiction collection, “Bad Thoughts,” sunny facades belie strange, dark interiors. The stories feature a privileged millennial milieu in Los Angeles with all its carefully observed trappings — neutral linens at a baby shower, destination bachelorette weekends, social media obsessions, alternative wellness practices and a chic, spare loft “furnished with gray modular furniture resembling life-size Lego pieces.”
Alic’s characters fear environmental catastrophe and freely discuss mental illness, but it’s all casual, often glib. At first, superficial appearances, 280-character missives and quick fixes seem to take precedence over authenticity or real intimacy. “Their generation had become utilitarian, efficient, machinelike,” Alic writes about a couple in “Ghost Baby.” But eventually, each story pushes into weirder, more vulnerable territory as it captures the (usually female) narrator’s borderline perverse thoughts.
Music journalists tend to be square pegs of one shape or another, and Kessler’s is a rip-snorting account of a misspent youth well spent; a background full of secrets and lies, French skinheads and sticky fingers. You’ll feel for him. His American father abandoned the family for a second brood, prompting the teenage music obsessive to leave home (then outside Paris) and return to London to duck, dive and skim the till in record shops until he found a way to turn an obsession into an income.
Land Healer is a deeply felt, often very moving book about farming; it is also a celebration of the British landscape and a record of Fiennes’s strange, itinerant life.
In "Heartburn," Nora Ephron calls the relationship with her best friends "a shrine to food", but Nora Ephron's entire life was a shrine to food. Even in the deepest throes of heartbreak, she knew just how to reach for the stovetop in a way that could melt away the sharpest edges of the pain, finding comfort in whichever mouthful would come next. Braving herself through the heartache, until she was ready to cook for someone new again.
Unlike the cockroach — the unofficial mascot of New York City apartments — ants aren’t quite as common in high rises, preferring soil-filled parks and yards. But now, scientists who study ants say a species from Europe has recently made the city its home, and the insects are now being found in living spaces several stories above the street.
The tales collected in Frederic Tuten’s The Bar at Twilight make me think of the sculptor Alexander Calder creating and playing with the elements of his circus, performing it in Paris for contemporaries and friends such as Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró. Later video documentation shows the artist taking his responsibilities as homo ludens very seriously as he demonstrates the possible range of kinetic combinations of elements he began creating in the late 1920s.
Although Tuten was not yet born when Calder began making his circus figures of wire and wood, his work shares the same sense of thoughtful playfulness, the imaginative reconfiguration of “stock” elements in different scenarios, and the pleasure in having in his audience a cadre of artistic peers. Many of those peers, in Tuten’s case, have stories in The Bar at Twilight dedicated to them. They hail from the worlds of music, theater, literature, and the visual arts, and the stories’ dedications often indicate both friendship and an aesthetic correspondence. Moreover, the association with the visual arts — particularly, painting — is germane to the way Tuten uses the medium of language.
In Let’s Do It Bob Stanley gives a quintessential account of the Birth of Pop, one which will send anyone again and again to their record collection to listen to the greatest artists, well remembered or forgotten, of the 20th century.
Nobody from California dreams about winding up in North Carolina, but plenty of girls from North Carolina dream about winding up in California. I’m one of them. On the highway where I grew up you’ll see two sorts of semi-trucks: regular semis and semis with gauged holes in their steel beds carrying the hogs to slaughter. Nobody wonders about the cargo that they can’t see in the regular semis. North Carolina is second in the nation for pork production; everybody knows where the hogs wind up, in the middle of a fast-food sandwich, and then, in your body.
The hogs cruising down I-40W in Wilmington pass by a highway sign that mocks you. It mocks you in a way only bureaucracy is capable of mocking, with concrete nouns and big-ass numbers. White day-glow capital letters chuckle the blunt, impossible signifier of: BARSTOW, CA 2,554 miles away.
In 1913, naturalists captured a flock of penguins from the Antarctic and brought them to spend the rest of their lives in the Edinburgh Zoo. The birds that survived the transition came to enchant the Scottish public with their antics. They could go from suave to goofy and back again, simply by gliding in the water, toddling around on land for a bit, then diving in once more.
Over the years, the zookeepers struggled to determine which penguins were male and which were female, renaming four of the five in the process. The complications only grew from there. Like most birds, penguins are socially but not sexually monogamous. Though they form lifelong unions, they are very happy to canoodle on the side — and there were only so many sexual configurations five of them could go through before one truth became self-evident: The penguins were bisexual. As zoo director T.H. Gillespie wryly observed in his 1932 recounting of these sexual triangulations, they “enjoy privileges not as yet permitted to civilized mankind.”
In “The Crane Wife” — the book, that is — Hauser takes stock of her life from the vantage of her late 30s, widening her lens beyond the scope of that story about a broken engagement. She’s hellbent on better understanding how the person she is now differs from the person she thought she would be — and what that difference means for the years that lie ahead.
Caring for an infant while working as a hired killer is not a good mix, and the inevitable complications soon threaten to get Patrick and Olivia killed. The result is a fast-paced crime novel that is both hilarious and hard-boiled, its main character both ruthless and oddly sympathetic.
Does an author’s work change when he dies? On May 6, 2021, I sent Roberto Calasso my translation of his unusually slim book, La tavoletta dei destini. He was to check through it before I sent it to the publisher. This was the arrangement with all the translations I had done of his work: he liked to stay in control and I liked the reassurance that he would pick up misunderstandings and missed nuances. “You have changed Sindbad to Sinbad,” he immediately objected. I told him this was the name that English and American readers were familiar with. “It has to stay Sindbad,” he said.
On the first of July, I wrote reminding him that my delivery deadline was just a week away. He was being slow even by his standards. “I trust you,” he replied. “Just send it as it is. I’m writing other things.” It was then I guessed that something was up. On July 28 he died. And in November I received the copy edit from the publisher for my comments.
When rain falls and water is plentiful, the sex lives of plains spadefoot toads are pretty, well, plain. Females prowl ponds for the suitor with the most winsome call; they pair off to couple, churning out legions of eggs that will hatch into, as genetics might predict, more plains spadefoot toads.
But when the weather gets drier and deep ponds more scant, as they often do in the North American deserts where spadefoots live, this narrative acquires a twist. Female plains spadefoot toads start seeking out not the duckish quacks of their own species but the baritone trills of the Mexican spadefoot toad. Atop the parched landscape, these odd couples mingle, yielding mixed-breed offspring that turn out stunted in some quite serious ways: Males are sterile, and females produce far fewer eggs. It’s a fate that most animals would take great evolutionary pains to avoid. When Karin Pfennig, a behavioral ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first noticed the behavior some two decades ago, “I thought it had to be a mistake,” she told me.
A doctor with wild grey hair and mutton chops holds a scalpel in his bloodied hand. He has paused for a moment, allowing one of his students to take his place and complete the incision. It’s a remarkably clean cut; the young man with the clamp has barely dirtied his shirt cuffs. Even so, the patient’s mother, if that’s who she is, weeps in the corner. She can see nothing but frock coats and a segment of open flesh.
The 19th-century Philadelphia-based artist Thomas Eakins did not paint surgery as it was, exactly, but he did capture something of its veiled sterility. There may be no gowns or masks in his earlier medical pictures, but the wool coats and shirts worn by the doctors only do so much to soften the atmosphere of the operating theatre. The overriding impression is one of detachment. The doctors may be just an inch from their patients, the scribes not a lot further away, but emotionally, they exist on a different plane entirely.
Venice is cursed. I walked cursed Venice in a cloud of confusion. Why did so many people bring so many roller suitcases? Did they not know they were coming to Venice? Did they not know Venice has a stone-stepped bridge every fifty yards? Sweat soaked beneath the savage sun, they heaved their suitcases — all of which were big enough to hide a dismembered body or two — up and down and huffed and seemed distraught at the amount of heaving required to make headway. I helped one woman carry hers. She had a broken foot, walked on crutches. Her presence in Venice mystified like an apparition of Christ in a New Jersey hedge. As I lifted her substantial luggage, careful to do so only with my legs, not my back, she intoned in German-accented English: Thank you, this broken foot of mine vould not keep me avay, nothing vould keep me avay from my dear Venice.
Her deranged veneration seemed omnipresent and fundamental to the core of the city. I felt surrounded by cult worshipers. But they all disappeared almost instantly when I ippon ura’d (“one street backed” as we call it in my Japan pop-up newsletters) the sinking town. It seemed as if very few were here to explore.
As part of the festivities, there’s a parade, concerts, a 5K run, a golf tournament and a bread baking competition. Thousands of people come out every year to this rural town of about 10,000 people.
But according to former reporter Catherine Strotz Ripley, less than two decades ago, residents of Chillicothe had no idea they even had this claim to fame.
“I don’t know how everybody pretty much forgot about it,” Ripley says.
Traders brought chillies from the New World to Yemen. Spring onions found their way into Ms Yeh’s bread because a mix of drive, luck, opportunity and tragedy brought European Jews and Chinese people into proximity in America. People move, and food reflects the mixing and adaptations that ensue. The world is richer for it, and so is the dinner table.
As I drove down the canyon and out of Sequoia National Park towards a town called Three Rivers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, I saw what looked like a painted wall of mountains that nearly brought me and my van over the cliff’s edge. I wanted to reach out and stroke my fingers against the trees on the other side of the canyon, to see if the vista resisted my touch. My favorite scenic Highway, the 178 between Bakersfield and Death Valley, appeared shortly thereafter. Navigating the dynamite-blasted twists and turns in the riverbed at dawn, left me slack-jawed. This is worth it, I said to myself, I am experiencing this, and the van trip is worth it. I had little idea California offered this abundance of beauty outside its cities when I lived in San Francisco during my early 20s, but, back then, I wasn’t seeking it out.
In “Nine-Headed Birds,” a story about halfway through K-Ming Chang’s new collection, “Gods of Want,” the narrator describes how her jiujiu (maternal uncle) took her to amusement parks and lent her coins to put through those penny-flattening machines. “I loved how skin-thin it was in the end, how the penny resembled none of the presidents,” she tells us. “I loved how easy its history was rewritten, forged into fiction.”
Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction.
Like many successful dystopian novels, “The School for Good Mothers” operates in a world that is unsettlingly similar to our own, offering up scenarios that feel both horrific and inevitable. If it seems like I'm being cagey, it's because I am. To reveal the surprises would only dull the terror Frida endures. To find out what Frida does to lose custody and the specific trials she and her cohort endure at the school, you'll just have to read it.
I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you know what anything means out of context. I had always thought the line was about her essays, about writing nonfiction to discover her own beliefs—because of course the act of making an argument clear on the page brings clarity to the writer too. She may have believed that; she may have thought it a truth too obvious to state. In any case, it’s not what she meant. She was talking about why she writes fiction.
The first partner to write on my risotto recipe was Al, and I was in love with him. I was also in love with the Ina Garten cookbook from which the recipe came. Al signed in 2011 (spring training, a rainy day) and 2012 (moonshine baby flights @ Sycamore Bar). Most nights Al and I drank infinite beers and cooked while fending off my roommates’ cats, who wished for nothing more than to sit in our mise en place. I told Al what to chop or stir (cold butter, broth) and he did so with a charming absurdity. He was a man playing the role of a man chopping vegetables. I loved these domestic feints and I think he did too, even as he felt the need to put a little distance between himself and the action. If there was a reason we broke up it was this: He was more afraid of becoming domesticated than I was.
A year later, when a new partner went to sign my risotto recipe, he paused, then asked: Who is Al?
We all know it’s good manners to never show up to a party empty-handed. Often, that results in people bringing a bottle of wine or a six-pack, which is all well and good. It usually gets drunk, or stashed away in the host’s fridge for the next occasion (though sometimes this results in me begging people to drink six-month-old Bud Light because I will never). But sometimes, one yearns for creativity when it comes to the party contribution. And I can’t stop thinking about the best one I’ve ever seen — showing up to a party with a 24-pack of Popeyes biscuits. Please, everyone do this.
It was in sixth grade that I discovered The Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Novel. During recess a thin, lonely girl named Carrie was hunched in a corner of the playground reading it with rapt attention. An avid reader myself, I was curious and went over to her. I hadn’t heard of the movie. We were way too young to get in, of course.
On the morning of October 8th 2013, no one could find Peter Higgs. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had been trying to get hold of him on the phone for hours—its custom being to try to speak to the winners of a Nobel prize in the moments before making the decision known to the world. Despite delaying proceedings that day until past lunchtime, the Swedes could not locate Mr Higgs and had to press on with the announcement of that year’s physics prize without his knowledge.
Frank Close’s new book tells Mr Higgs’s side of that story. He had spent a year preparing to disappear, it turns out.
If I ever need to be reminded of the importance of stories, I just think about Pops and Pompilio. Pops used to tell me stories about his father, Pompilio, every day. Pops told these stories ’cause he was mostly raised by his father; his mother died when he was a child. He told these stories ’cause what child exile wouldn’t tell the stories he did have of his father? He told these stories ’cause when Pompilio was on his deathbed, Pops told him that he’d live forever, ’cause Pops would tell his stories to his own family, to his kids, and we’d tell the stories to our families. We’d breathe life into the stories that made up Pompilio’s life forever.
When Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, came to Senegal last February for an economic summit, he took a break from conference rooms in the capital city of Dakar to get his hands dirty, literally, as he learned to make compressed-earth blocks from a mix of iron-rich soil, sand, water, and a bit of cement. His block-making tutorial was part of a groundbreaking event for a cultural institute promoting German-language study. The institute’s new building was designed by the distinguished Burkina Faso–born and Berlin-based architect Francis Kéré, who is renowned worldwide for his graceful structures adapted to their local climates. The building in Dakar is oriented so that nearby trees provide shade, and its thick walls—made of the type of unfired compressed-earth bricks Steinmeier tried his hand at making—insulate the interior from the hot Senegalese climate. A layer of claustras, or perforated walls, wraps around the building like a membrane, filtering sunlight and directing airflow.
Perhaps we love Attenborough because he is an advocate and practitioner of a special way of seeing and relating. His interest in the natural world begins not with the gaze of an empath, for whom another’s feelings become real because he feels them himself, but with the humility of an observer content to be an outsider.
For centuries, sailors have been describing milky seas, rare occurrences where enormous expanses of the ocean light up uniformly at night, at times stretching for tens of thousands of square kilometers, or more. W. E. Kingman, captain of the clipper Shooting Star, had this to say upon witnessing one in 1854: “The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.”
A milky sea even made an appearance in Moby-Dick, where Melville describes a mariner sailing through a “shrouded phantom of the whitened waters” that were as “horrible to him as a real ghost.”
The Poet's House, by Jean Thompson, is the newest addition to that subset of books that's staying put. It's a closely observed, droll, coming-of-age story about an insecure young woman drawn into a shimmering clique of poets; it's also a wise story about the corrosive power of shame and the primal fear of sounding stupid, unsophisticated and sentimental.
Rule No. 42, the King says, is that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court. Alice counters that she isn’t a mile high. And, anyway, it isn’t a proper rule, because the King just made it up, then and there. “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” the King counters. But, when Alice points out that if the rule was so old, then it ought to have been rule No. 1, the King shuts the notebook he was reading the rules from (and writing them into) and shuffles away in the face of her argument. It’s a rare moment in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” when reasoning as we would recognize it proves even minimally consequential.
“Rules: A Short History of What We Live By,” by the historian of science Lorraine Daston, similarly features reason, and rule-making kings, as charismatic minor characters. The shape-shifting rules themselves are the Alice that is interrogated. Daston analyzes rules as diverse as those for making pudding, those for regulating traffic, and those governing the movement of matter in the universe. In considering a series of historic anecdotes and texts, Daston helps us see rules (and their neighbors, such as laws and regulations) through the concepts of thickness and thinness, paradigms and algorithms, failures (it was nearly impossible to get eighteenth-century Parisians to stop playing ball in the streets), and states of exception. She writes, “Cultures notoriously differ as to the content of their rules, but there is no culture without rules. . . . A book about all of these rules would be little short of a history of humanity.”
Solitude is a given for a writing life. It has not only to do with the hours spent alone at a desk, but a sense of being alone in the world. Writing is not a team sport. Lifelong feuds between authors over an unkind review are the stuff of legend, while subtle put-downs and comparisons are hazards every writer has to deal with. But these are not the only ways in which writing is solitary.
Why? Because one day, perhaps very far in the future, there probably will be a sentient AI. How do I know that? Because it is demonstrably possible for mind to emerge from matter, as it did first in our ancestors’ brains. Unless you insist human consciousness resides in an immaterial soul, you ought to concede it is possible for physical stuff to give life to mind. There seems to be no fundamental barrier to a sufficiently complex artificial system making the same leap. While I am confident that LaMDA (or any other currently existing AI system) falls short at the moment, I am also nearly as confident that one day, it will happen.
We are led to believe that this is not Tremblay’s composition, but the found manuscript of Art’s memoir. A familiar enough conceit. But, to compound the layers of narrative, we discover that the manuscript has been annotated by a woman named Mercy Brown. She interjects whole pages worth of commentary at crucial points, directing her criticism, handwritten in red ink, at Art. The dual and dueling narrators lend the events of the book a high level of indeterminacy that proves both mysterious and entertaining.
Maine, long attractive to writers for its rocky coastlines, woodlands, and wildlife, lends itself to stories about tensions between locals and summer people, and between developers and conservationists. In her exquisitely written, utterly engrossing new novel, “Fellowship Point,” Alice Elliott Dark explores these strains while celebrating Maine’s gorgeous but threatened landscape. At the same time, she celebrates the beauty – and sticking points – of a lifelong friendship between two women whose choices have taken them down different paths.
Well, fasten your seatbelt — or better yet, put on one of those five-point safety harnesses — before you dig into “Human Blues.” Elisa Albert’s third novel takes off with magnificent speed and never lets up. There’s no time to take a breath as we follow Aviva Rosner, a singer-songwriter who has launched her fourth album, “Womb Service,” to growing acclaim. Aviva is way hipper than you or me. She throws out graphic expletives as often as my childhood Camp Fire Girls leader said, “Pep and go!” Her clothes are so fashionable, most people wouldn’t recognize them as style. And yet, she’s entirely relatable.
Jean Thompson’s wry, canny ninth novel (and 15th book of fiction), “The Poet’s House,” will delight Bay Area readers, as it’s entirely set here — San Francisco, Marin, Santa Rosa — with superb authority and wit. (Thompson taught, among many other places, at San Francisco State University.) But the novel may most strike home for poets and writers everywhere as it calmly, systematically depicts their worlds — and, let’s say, field behavior — unretouched.
Like jet travel itself, the tour is sometimes disorienting. You go to bed reading a chapter about Jeddah and wake up to find yourself in Delhi. But Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator, filling in the gaps with history, poetry, and lots of local color.
While he might lack the kind of insider's knowledge that comes from spending a lifetime in a city, Vanhoenacker has the benefit of making short but frequent visits to lots of places, with a pocketful of foreign currencies and a backpack brimming with curiosity.
Is it enough of an excuse that Stodola overindulged in luxury with the aim of writing this book? I’m not sure. I recognize that part of her point is to convey the mad hedonism of the resort world. Still, I felt better on arriving at her penultimate chapter, in which she brings the purpose of the book back into focus by suggesting ways to rethink the luxury resort. Stodola gathers a slate of proposals from environmentally minded people she meets during her travels, and does her best to stick to the practical, mostly avoiding the sweepingly wishful.
It should come as no surprise to readers of Geoff Dyer that The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings isn’t actually about the Swiss tennis idol, nor is it about the sport he mastered. Federer shows up here and there, slipped in among its pages like inspirational bookmarks. But as one expects from the author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It — which, spoiler, isn’t about yoga, but is, rather, a travelogue of sorts — Dyer’s latest effort ventures delightfully far afield from its conceit.
When London won the bid in July 2005, its backers billed it as a groundbreaking moment. Previous Olympics had done so much damage to host cities, leaving behind useless venues, unleashing property speculation and social displacement. But London’s bid was different. It vowed to be “a model for social inclusion”. Its legacy would be “the regeneration of the area for the direct benefit of everyone that lives there”. Sebastian Coe, chair of London’s organising committee, promised that the regeneration of the area in and around the Olympic park would produce 30,000-40,000 new homes, “much of which will be ‘affordable housing’ available to key workers such as nurses or teachers”.
Ten years on from the patriotic pageant that brought the nation together to bask in director Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, with its pastoral vision of merrie England and cavorting NHS nurses, just 13,000 homes have been built on and around the Olympic site. Of these, only 11% are genuinely affordable to people on average local incomes. Meanwhile, in the four boroughs the site straddles – Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest – there are almost 75,000 households on the waiting list for council housing, many living in desperate poverty. Thousands of former residents have also been rehoused outside the area since the Olympics took place.
Pterosaurs—an extinct type of winged reptile—were the first known vertebrates to take to the air and fly. Their sizes ranged from the very tiny (a wingspan of 25 centimeters) to the absolutely enormous (a breathtaking 10- to 11-meter wingspan). According to the lead researcher on the new work, Dr. Michael Pittman, the small aurorazhdarchid that was studied could have fit in the palm of your hand. Of 12 well-preserved pterosaurs from the Solnhofen Lagoon in Germany, it was the only one with preserved soft tissues.
It’s hard to name a historical figure who has inspired more writers than Joan of Arc. Yet it’s equally difficult to imagine a character more incomprehensible to the modern ear than the 15th-century French mystic, martyr and war hero.
In “Joan,” her affecting and adventurous new novel, Katherine J. Chen takes a lively stab, imagining the illiterate teenager as an abused child who uses her anger (and a remarkable tolerance for pain) to become an avenging warrior. Wowing crowds with feats of strength, breaking bones with her bare hands, this is Joan of Arc, Action Hero. Chen is certainly not the first writer to view such a mysterious life through the lens of contemporary genre.
This is a powerful and gripping novel of agony and the despair of regret. There are happy moments but the emphasis is on the horror of the feeling of helplessness because what has happened is immutable. No amount of regret, self-loathing or apology will remedy it. Nor will anything ameliorate the self-loathing that comes from disaster mainly self-inflicted. To present this in readable manner is no mean feat and is a tribute to Chris Womersley’s talent.
Crawford’s magisterial account sometimes feels overcrowded with details of this lecture given, or that essay published in a certain journal. Yet such comprehensiveness is, and will be, invaluable to scholars. And it means that the tender, elegiac final notes of this book are all the more striking. The portrait of the poet’s final years is one of joy – joy despite his own ill-health and the loss of many old friends to death’s reaping scythe. With his last breath Tom Eliot spoke his beloved wife’s name.
Viktor Shklovsky’s On the Theory of Prose is a classic. Nearly a century old, it’s still avidly read and discussed in MFA circles, thanks to its author’s meticulous dissection of the devices of fiction, likely more valuable than any of the most recent craft books on the shelves. Unquestionably, it has been a kind of ur-text for many fledgling novelists because it discloses so clearly what one writer calls the “narrative math” that underpins all fiction. But the influence of the book can be felt in most narrative media — if you know what to look for! In fact, novelist and critic A. D. Jameson goes so far as to claim, “I’ve yet to encounter a narrative — any narrative, in any narrative medium — that can’t be understood or explained in terms of Shklovsky’s analysis.” And Shushan Avagyan’s new and thoroughly updated translation, published by Dalkey Archive Press last December, offers a fresh opportunity to revisit this colossus of 20th-century criticism.
My Apple Watch is my conductor,
tells me to stand when I need standing,
reminds me to breathe when I forget,
Without the ability to feel pain, life is more dangerous. To avoid injury, pain tells us to use a hammer more gently, wait for the soup to cool or put on gloves in a snowball fight. Those with rare inherited disorders that leave them without the ability to feel pain are unable to protect themselves from environmental threats, leading to broken bones, damaged skin, infections, and ultimately a shorter life span.
In these contexts, pain is much more than a sensation: It is a protective call to action. But pain that is too intense or long-lasting can be debilitating. So how does modern medicine soften the call?
“Fellowship Point” is a novel rich with social and psychological insights, both earnest and sly, big ideas grounded in individual emotions, a portrait of a tightly knit community made up of artfully drawn, individual souls. In the end, as Agnes sums it up, “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”
In other words, fellowship is the point. Only connect.
How do you grow up and make your own life when you're tethered to others? Even harder if the people you're tethered to are both needy and slightly bonkers.
In her debut novel, "The Sisters Sweet," Minneapolis writer Elizabeth Weiss has spun a fascinating coming-of-age novel around this question, even imagining a literal tether. The result is a highly original, engrossing story about family secrets, hypocrisy and betrayal.
“The Mermaid of Black Conch” is told from three distinct narrative voices: the retrospective diary entries of David, the kindhearted fisherman who rescues Aycayia; a roving, omniscient narrator who allows us entry into the minds of characters both major and minor; and Aycayia’s own voice in verse. For a book with this much story, the changes of perspective allow for a nimbleness that does much with a relatively small space.
In 1993, Princess Diana asked her friend George Michael to help organize a benefit concert for World AIDS Day. He came through magnificently, lining up the other acts and delivering a strong and heartfelt headlining set of his own. Then when it came time for the show to air as a TV special, the English singer insisted on seeing the footage, altering the sequence of performers and recutting the shots of himself onstage because he thought his butt looked big. According to a former BBC producer, “‘Never work with children, animals or George Michael’ became an industry mantra after that.”
Stories like this show up over and over in James Gavin’s engrossing, depressing biography “George Michael: A Life” — acts of generosity followed by displays of petulance, creative aspiration soured into half-assed compromise. Michael emerges as a gifted, tragic and infuriating figure, whose tortured relationship to his sexuality steered him into artistic confusion and self-sabotage.
Technically, the poet and translator Boris Dralyuk (the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books) falls into the category of a first-generation immigrant, but he was brought to the United States from Odessa in the ’90s by his mother at the tender age of eight. So, culturally and linguistically, Dralyuk’s life and educational experience are arguably closer to a “second-generation” profile. In either case, the poems in his first collection meditate on evanescent California immigrant dreams.
C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency As Art is about games, and about why nobody should be ashamed of them — playing them, designing them, or discussing them with other adults. I read the book, and I stopped being ashamed. Unfortunately, I don’t know what a game is anymore. This is a review about that.
For many people, the pandemic clarified the significance of urban sound in our daily lives. Cities and Memory, a global field recording and sound art project, features more than 5,000 sounds spread over 109 countries and territories, some of which are magical moments of soundscapes transformed. In a recording from St. Louis, Senegal, you can hear an anti-coronavirus song blasting from the radio of a cab, with the singer “praying” in the local Wolof language that the virus will not reach his community. In another from Milan, announcements from the megaphone of a police car urge people to stay home as ambulances wail and birds chirp in the background. In Times Square, the sound of air conditioners drone through deserted streets. In Helsinki, a woman reads stories to children she cannot see in person. In Warsaw, a man hears birdsong that had not been audible before.
Now when did we last see a book of such stimulating complexity that’s so downright hopeful too? Maybe skip the vacation this year, and hole up with it.
Time Is a Mother continues Vuong’s exploration and questioning of the meaning of grief, of family, and the toll it takes on the body and mind in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Food at its best, comes straight from the heart. That’s clearly true here with chef Jose Pizzaro’s latest cookbook, which was published earlier this month, The Spanish Home Kitchen.
Its title is a clear indication of what’s to come inside – simple home recipes, passed down through the generations. It’s something we all love and cherish within our families, but not everyone would be as willing to share their heirloom cookery secrets as Jose is.
“The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn” jumps into this well-covered ground with gusto. Benefiting from the insights and wisdom of Robert S. McElvaine, a renowned scholar who has studied and lived through the period, “The Times” reflects upon the era’s consequential yet thorny legacy through an illuminating, provocative and entertaining lens. To do so, McElvaine sidesteps an encyclopedic account of the decade in favor of a focused examination of a 22-month period stretching from the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 to the fall of 1965 — what McElvaine dubs the “Long 1964” — as the starting point of what are now considered “the sixties.”
Created by lesbian feminists to distribute information and stories suppressed by the mainstream literary industry, Old Wives’ Tales was a rebellion, part of a movement of feminist bookshops that ignited in the Bay Area in 1970 and spread across the country. By 1994, 150 feminist bookstores were open in cities from Anchorage to Miami.
Today, Old Wives’ Tales has been gone from Valencia Street for decades. But Seajay’s store and the broader feminist bookstore movement it belonged to left a lasting impact on women’s literature and pioneered safe spaces for women, especially lesbians, at a time when homophobic and sexist violence was common.
As books about queer people and people of color are banned and lesbian elders fear persecution with an intensity they haven’t felt in decades, the undertold history of these stores has renewed relevance in 2022, and the successes and failures of these scrappy-yet-ambitious shops reveal important lessons about building feminist and queer communities.
The weather turned chilly with a threat of rain as the GPS guided us along winding back roads to Arrowhead. I was struck, as I often am, by the loneliness of so many of our American writers—Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau—each so isolated in their strange digs. “Isolatoes” was how Melville described the diverse crew of the Pequod, “not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.” It’s good to know that Melville, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, had the company of “a black Newfoundland dog, shaggy like himself, good natured and simple.” (“My shaggy ally” was how Dickinson referred to her own Newfie, Carlo.) Readers of Moby-Dick may remember that after Ishmael wakes up in Queequeg’s arms in the Spouter-Inn, and complains of the “unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,” Queequeg “shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water.”
But Melville’s closest companion at Arrowhead, by his own account, was its enormous central chimney, the first thing you see when you step into the cramped entryway. The imposing brick pile, twelve feet square in the cellar, is immortalized in the 1856 story “I and My Chimney.” The narrator’s wife, eager to demolish the chimney in order to have a proper entry hall, hires a shifty architect named Mr. Scribe to justify the renovation. The husband, who, like his beloved chimney, spends his time smoking and settling in place, resists.
Typically, if I said that I’d recently eaten an especially memorable dish, I’d probably mean I’d tried something new at a restaurant. But in Britain 60 years ago, to the mostly (but not entirely) gay male speakers of a dialect called Polari, this phrase had a different, codified, deliciously lurid meaning: Dishes have rims, if you know what I mean.
Polari has a complex hybrid genealogy, as it developed out of terms used in what was known as “Cant” as far back as the 16th century among thieves, evolving into fairground and theater jargon in the 19th century when it was known by its speakers as Palyaree, which then evolved into what we now call Polari. (As a stealth, informal practice, spellings for both the lexicon itself and its vocabulary somewhat varied; the term “Polari” was only codified with that spelling after 1950, following the lexicographer Eric Partridge.) The thread binding these forms is use by outcast or sidelined groups, and Polari as both a jargon and an ethos draws on the languages of the groups that populated these spaces: Romani, Jews, Italians, and the working class.
I’ve lived most of my life looking younger than my age. I love the shock on people’s faces when I tell them how old I am (“No! You can’t be!”), and I’m proud of the many times I’ve stumped the guy at the guess-your-age booth at the Canadian National Exhibition. I credit this, in part, to a secret formula. It’s not quite the fountain of youth, but it’s the greatest anti-aging potion ever discovered: swimming in cold water.
Around the world, woman novelists are refocusing literary narratives about desire, sex, and the body around their own experiences; some of these narratives explore society’s current hang-ups around women’s bodies, some paint a picture of a potential world full of guilt-free pleasure, and some explode the idea of gender determined by the body. Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs (2008), translated into English from the original Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd last year, for example, reflects sexual and societal pressures faced by Japanese women. As she writes from their point of view, Kawakami takes an unsentimental view of women’s bodies, of motherhood, and of the gendered basis of societal expectations.
The lively plot brings in a lot of fine things. It may also be a fair, if disturbing, reflection of a world where nobody need know anything except where and how to find out almost immediately anything they seek to know – a world also where, horribly, it seems you are never alone, never under the radar. The immediacy of information retrieval is good fun here, but also disturbing when you think about it.
“The Greatest Invention”, a new book by Silvia Ferrara of the University of Bologna, restores a sense of wonder at the imaginative leaps required to invent writing. Part of her story (translated by Todd Portnowitz) is familiar: the procession from drawings (a picture of a bull is just that, a bit of art) to visual icons (just a couple of lines to indicate, say, “house”), to symbols. The leap to symbols is crucial: these are distinct from the original referent, allowing them to stand for abstract things, including the many verbs that are hard to picture. Think of the floppy-disk icon meaning “save”, even when no floppy disk is involved.
Although “An Immense World” doesn’t quite plunge readers into other animals’ worlds, it does make a case for how much we humans miss — and misunderstand — when we fail to consider other animals’ worldviews. This, in itself, is a major achievement. Or, as Yong writes, “The task will be hard, as Nagel predicted. But there is value and glory in the striving.”