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.