To access Rachel Cusk’s apartment in Paris, on the top floor of a narrow residential building in the Marais, you must first climb five flights of winding stairs. Once inside her place, you are confronted with yet another staircase, at the top of which runs a sleek corridor of rooms and a highly Instagrammable reading nook. From that level, there remains a final, minimal set of steps leading up to a loftlike living space, which gives way to a lovely terrace with unobstructed views that more than justify the effort needed to get there.
It is not every day that a writer you believe to be one of the greatest living novelists up and expatriates to a few minutes from your doorstep. In essay after essay, novel after novel, Cusk has demonstrated what the author Heidi Julavits aptly termed—in her review of Outline, the first in Cusk’s trilogy of innovative autofictional novels—“lethally intelligent” prose. Cusk’s is a literature of immaculately crafted observations, as aesthetically exhilarating as it is philosophically devastating. And I have a suspicion that this move to Paris—a city full of the sort of bourgeois social situations she captures with such punishing honesty—will yield something spectacular.
After a long drive, the only thing that makes our stomachs churn faster than a windshield smeared with bug guts is a windshield bearing no evidence of insect life whatsoever. It feels like a fundamental pillar of the planet’s ecology has snapped.
You’ve probably noticed it, too. On long summer road trips, tiny corpses once formed a crust so thick that the reduced visibility posed a legitimate safety risk. Now, many folks we spoke with can’t remember the last time they had to scour the bug gore from their RAV4.
Christopher de Hamel is a bookworm – or, to be more precise, a manuscript weevil for whom “mere printed books” are modish novelties – who has the rare capacity to turn a scholarly specialism into a humane and humorous adventure. In The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club, silent sessions in libraries are enlivened by De Hamel’s imaginary conversations with long-dead collectors and, at the end of a history that extends across a thousand years, he invites medieval monks, Renaissance princes, Florentine merchants and American industrialists to a notional dinner at which they all unstoppably talk about their shared obsession.
Francis Bacon famously said that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He’ll get no argument from me, but the great philosopher and essayist did leave out a fourth category: Some books we simply gobble up, unable to stop reading.
Normally, these are novels — particularly fast-moving fiction, thrillers and mysteries — but not always. Witness “Come Back in September,” by Darryl Pinckney, subtitled “A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan.” That address belonged to the brilliant Elizabeth Hardwick — she is pictured on the book’s cover — who, back in the 1970s, guided the 20-something Pinckney through the upper echelons of Manhattan literary and intellectual life. This memoir of that apprenticeship — by one of our most distinguished writers on African American culture, literature and history — provides a “you are there” account of those thrilling years.
It’s been almost 50 years since Stephen King published “Carrie” and upended mainstream publishing. Never before had a “horror writer” achieved the kind of mammoth sales King has enjoyed, nor attained the wide-spread popularity enjoyed by the prolific author.
Just after King’s 75 birthday, long-time King scholar, friend and collaborator Bev Vincent has taken the opportunity to update his “Stephen King Companion” with “Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences.” The subtitle promises a lot, and King’s loyal “Constant Readers” will be delighted with the results.
Many photographers have captured the dwindling ice of the Arctic, and this is critical. Few, however, have given much thought to dwindling human cultures lost with that ice. Axelsson has spent over 50 years depicting those cultures, and his contribution here presents a piece of the climate change tapestry that is too often overlooked. A warming Arctic is not only an ecological loss. It’s a human loss. And like the damage to the natural world, the cost of that loss cannot be calculated in dollars.
It headed out from Oz and colorized the sepia along
the unmarked Kansas county roads, then headed