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,