“Northanger Abbey” is the least beloved of Jane Austen’s six novels. It also appears frequently in university-level literature classes. These two things are related.
On a Sunday morning in New York in 1989, a few women perused the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hidden among the regular punters, the anonymous feminist art collective, the Guerrilla Girls, went unnoticed as they carefully counted the number of female artists versus the number of naked women depicted in the artworks. They were on a secret mission to make people care about the racial and gender unfairness of the art world.
But why would a random compound detected on a planet so far beyond our reach be a strong indicator of life? Well, let's consider the story of DMS on Earth, a story of the strange and poetic ways life appears and reappears in different guises — and with different scents.
The island's evolution into a globally renowned open-air museum and international contemporary arts hub was all but assured in 1994, when Yayoi Kusama's yellow and black-spotted Pumpkin was added to the landscape's growing collection of public artworks. This iconic work has since become emblematic of Naoshima itself.
"[The] initial goal wasn’t to promote tourism," said Soichiro Fukutake's son, Hideaki, who now helms the Fukutake Foundation. "But rather to revitalise the region through art and help locals feel a renewed sense of pride in their hometown."
For climate activist Mike Tidwell, when the trees in his suburban Washington, D.C. neighborhood began to die en masse from record heat waves and rainfall, he felt their loss keenly. “You look at the Miller Tree before she died — arms outstretched in graceful pose,” he writes of a neighbor’s tree, “and you don’t see a soul?”
In “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street,” Tidwell explores the myriad impacts — emotional, physical, spiritual — of the climate crisis on the people, and the trees, who inhabit his block in Takoma Park, Maryland, a city of about 18,000 people. In the process, he writes, he discovers that “what was happening here, in the middle of Takoma Park, was probably a pretty good proxy for city streets and stressed-out societies everywhere.”
After thirteen years with a white-knuckle death grip on the steering wheel of their career, Bono finally learned how to take a breath. He embraced long lunches and late nights. Quality time with his wife and kids. And some partying too. “House parties, dance parties, our mates,” as he recalls of the early days’ scene. Bono flourished, finding lightness in himself for the first time in a long time. Maybe even ever.
Looking back, he might’ve gone too big. “I was going through the pure joy of having adolescence the wrong way around—having it in my thirties instead of my teens,” he recalls. “There was a moment where I had to ask myself, ‘Where is this self-love and where’s this self-indulgence?’ ” But he’s grateful all the same.
Time is layered in Northern Irish writer David Park’s latest novel. The past ever present, it underpins but also threatens to undermine the two protagonists.
“I was just about to turn seventeen,” writes Jay, the retrospective narrator of The South, celebrated Malaysian writer Tash Aw’s carefully sculpted new novel, “and at that age, what did I really know about time?” And over a series of taut chapters told from multiple perspectives during an extended stay at the failing farm that Jay’s family has recently inherited in the country’s southern region, the idea of time emerges as the novel’s true subject, its passing interminable one day and impossibly fleeting the next. The South also explores time’s inevitable effects on narrative and memory, and how each can shape and transform the other.
As “The Dark Maestro” recounts the activities of the crime syndicate, some of the passages are difficult to read. But they are not gratuitous. Slocumb is building the scaffolding for the real story, about a father who seems to have every strike against him, yet wants to learn to be a good person. It is about coming together as a family out of sheer love and appreciation for one another despite the chaos all around.
Whoever had the idea, what is not in dispute is that the notion of a pregnant Lucy Ricardo faced a steep and immediate uphill battle in the corporate suites of CBS and Philip Morris. While there was no codified ban on pregnancy on television, it was a mass-market medium, dependent on the blandest possible, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road appeal to the maximum number of viewers. And the act that produced pregnancy—that is, sex—was all but nonexistent on television, where even married couples typically slept in twin beds. It may be hard to imagine, but in 1952 pregnancy was still regarded as such a debilitating (or vaguely embarrassing) condition that expectant mothers were routinely dismissed from their jobs. The network and sponsor suggested alternatives: hide Lucy behind furniture (impossible, since Ball ballooned dramatically in her pregnancies); devote only one or two shows to the plotline; avoid showing the pregnancy at all costs. But Oppenheimer insisted that the story could be done in good taste, and Desi was adamant that an effective narrative arc required half a dozen or more episodes to track the progress from the first word of the pregnancy to the actual birth. Still, they got nowhere. Desperate, Desi appealed to the ultimate authority, the chairman of Philip Morris, Alfred E. Lyon.
Since Singapore was made a trading outpost by the British in 1819, scientists estimate that human activities, such as deforestation, have led to an extinction rate of 37%. Now, however, the country’s central government is working to protect and develop the natural world as part of its city-planning strategy, which it says will improve mental health, keep urban temperatures down and safeguard the country’s environmental legacy.
It was through this strategy that the Singapore freshwater crab found a reprieve. Shortly after the discovery that its numbers were dwindling, a sophisticated conservation strategy kicked into gear. The National Parks Board (NParks), Singapore’s nature authority, formed a working group with representatives from academia, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and international conservation specialists. Together, they developed a captive-breeding programme for the crabs and released some of them at suitable sites to boost wild populations. Today, J. singaporensis is still endangered, but not facing imminent extinction.
Growing up, I had the diet of a cautious senior. Mayonnaise sandwiches, boiled chicken, and well-done steak. What eventually changed that was a British science fiction show called Red Dwarf, a grungy space comedy about the last man in the universe. The main character, Dave Lister, was everything a nerd like me would think was cool—he was a carefree slob, he had dreadlocks and a Scouse accent, and nearly every meal he ate was chicken vindaloo, served “kamikaze hot.” That show and that dish introduced me to the guilty pleasure that’s equal parts addiction and toxic masculinity—eating the spiciest foods possible.
Your whole life is a research expedition, collecting specimens and building your pattern-recognition skills as you accumulate experiences and ideas about them, or at least mine has been. Around the time my book A Field Guide to Getting Lost appeared in 2005, I tried to reorient a class of wonderfully, frustratingly diligent journalism students who had been trained that writing begins with rushing outside to gather material, that you’re starting from scratch every time. Turning journalists into essayists in that long-ago class meant turning them from people devoting most of the time they had to collecting new material into hunter-gatherers in their own memories, experiences, and interpretations, curators in the natural-science museum of their heads, or at least trying to do so.
It is true that many of the stories are funny and thought-provoking. They’re what you’d call dark comedy. But in Autocorrect, there’s something further. Even in works of dark comedy, we often get a sense that a system of justice, sometimes called karma, exists in the world. A person behaves in an evil, cruel, or merely unpleasant way, and something bad happens to them in turn. One can either believe this is an aspect of wish fulfillment in art, or an intrinsic property to the real moral, spiritual, or even physical universe — the reader can decide for themselves. Autocorrect is willing to live outside of this framework.
Aftertaste pulls together familiar elements of romance and the supernatural, adding a dash of Anthony Bourdain-style bullishness and a pinch of Davelle’s own authorial smarts. I’ll bet there’s a run on fleur de sel right after publication day.
In the end, Journey to the Edge of Life is less a literary pilgrimage than an exorcism. Özlü has written through her ghosts and memories and past readings, emerging with renewed capacity for life and its shapeless wanderings.
At first, the plot unfolds slowly as the author introduces a new community of characters, but soon the pace picks up. As always with a Connelly novel, the characters are well drawn and the prose is tight, precise, and easy to read.
Now I’m going to make you disappear in this text. It’s as simple as that. In you go. But why, my friend asks, that’s what I’m asking you, I say, what’s this all about, she says, yes, I say, that’s what I’d like to know, too. In you go, I say, then shut the lid, then everything is calm and quiet. Calm and quiet sometimes occur in friendships, and there are different kinds: calm after the storm, calm before the storm, or simply calm. This last sort of calm has something to do with the disappearance of the friendship, that much is certain; perhaps this calm is not calm at all, but silence, and perhaps this silence itself is the cause of the silence, in which case the disappearance would be something circular.
I spend a lot of time worrying about how to better come across as professional and someone who is deserving of respect. Reading King's Holly stories helps me ease up on my anxieties surrounding all that because she shows that it's not about appearing to be something, it's about actually being it. And if people want to try to bulldoze you and are slow to realize the strength you have within, then those people are on the precipice of a big surprise that will only work in your favor when you accomplish your goals, as they busy themselves with underestimating you.
In summoning a Category Five hurricane to the page, I aimed to fictionalize the weather of now, and I’ve continued to look for ways to give imaginative voice to the unpredictable, turbo-charged winds of these days.
My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed remarkable, but as the months passed, it turned out to be harder to use the money than I thought. The rules were confusing, evolving. Every expense—a print cartridge, a pen, a meal with a student—required an array of online forms, approvals, files uploaded in special formats, and was a hassle for the beleaguered office administrator wrote me careful, patient emails about my failures.
Only books required a single, simple form. I soon understood that “anything” meant I could buy books.
“Steve Martin Writes the Written Word” is an aptly-named collection and excellent introduction to the comedian’s best writings, including some new material.
Hartman’s nine chapters periodize how Marx has been thought of in American history, from “Bolshevik” and “Prophet” to “False Prophet” and then “Red Menace.” If you’ve never read about Marx’s life, Hartman’s book doubles as a short biography; if you’ve never read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Hartman’s book is a primer on a variety of Marx’s most cited and important philosophy. If you’ve never read Marx’s interpreters—who are many, from Kenneth Burke to Frantz Fanon and David Harvey—Karl Marx in America is a road map. But the most interesting insight in the book comes from the laundry list of Marx’s haters, and their complete inability to land a good punch on our boy.
Sedgewick’s book doesn’t offer a clear answer on what it means to be a father, but he offers a series of enlightening stories about how several famous figures have approached fatherhood. It’s a motley assortment of dads, ranging from Plato to Bob Dylan.
On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What is this thing?” Brunet wondered aloud. He was behaving a bit theatrically, the professor Roberto Macchiarelli recalled not long ago. Brunet was a devoted teacher and scientist, then 61, but his competitive impulses were also known to be immoderate, and he seemed to take a ruthless pleasure in the jealousy of his peers. “Michel is a dominant male,” Macchiarelli told me. “He’s a silverback gorilla.”
Inspecting the skull, one could make out a mosaic of features at once distinctly apelike and distinctly human: a small braincase and prominent brow ridge, but also what seemed to be a rather unprotruding jaw, smallish canines and a foramen magnum – the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord connects to the brain – that suggested the possibility of an upright bearing, a two-legged gait. Macchiarelli told Brunet he did not know what to make of it. “Right answer!” Brunet said.
Yet, at 50 years old, Jaws is also a celebration of sharks, creating a fascination that helped lead to more than two generations of new shark researchers. Indeed, some of the people who have done the most for shark conservation worked on Jaws.
It is indulgence without punishment, goodness without suffering.
This is a novel that wants to be everything; it’s stuffed to the gills not just with corpses but with language, with games, with gorgeous costumes and period details. The effect is overwhelming. But as Schmitz and the Dadaists and a thousand cabaret artists know, aesthetic derangement is a fit response – perhaps the only appropriate response – to a senseless and cruel world ferrying itself towards destruction.
What lifts it beyond routine reminiscence (and makes the excess of cigarette cards and Airfix kits more bearable) is its evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms while still recovering from the privations of the 1930s and 40s.
In the autumn of 1635, a man arrived in London. In itself, this was not an unusual event: London was a thriving metropolis, and the seventeenth century was a time of rapid urban growth. People from across the country (and world) arrived in the capital every day. But Thomas Parr was no ordinary man. He had recently celebrated his 152nd birthday.
I had never been above a TV dinner, nor indeed television itself, though friends and colleagues from the literary and academic worlds seemed to watch it only at a remove, with the same kind of snobbish irony, perhaps, that gives us terms like ‘Daddy’s famous stir fry’. In intellectual circles, it can seem as though the only acceptable roles for television are self-conscious flights of regressive stress release or insincere mental flexing. Either you must act confessional about your shit-munching suckerdom for Succession, or you must make like Alan Bennett, semi-seriously professing Love Island’s genealogical relation to the Bloomsbury group. But television, to my mind, was neither a source of shame at this time nor of vigorous mental exercise. It was just entertainment, for which there is always a place.
That place, for me, was the sofa, on which, come the evening, I would have exhausted the day’s more obligatory distractions – slow book research and robotic thesis writing, punctuated by trips to the toilet and bouts of deep breathing through challenging pelvic events. My nightly TV watching began to assume a role like that of dinner itself – something you are going to do, whether or not the content is good.
Consider yourself kissed — and hugged and understood — by Jessica Stanley's smart, oh-so-relatable tale of a woman who seems to have assembled all the pieces of a happy life but feels like she's lost herself in the process.
What sets Consider Yourself Kissed apart from other novels about overwhelmed mothers who feel stretched to the limit and are disappointed by their partner's level of engagement is the way it braids its utterly sympathetic heroine's domestic drama with the concurrent rollercoaster of British politics and cataclysmic global events. In other words, it's a reminder that our life and our times are intrinsically connected.
There’s just one problem. Superyachts are a terrible asset class in that they lose value faster than you can say bonfire of the vanities. “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs,” argued the Financial Times, “only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.” But then again, as Veblen understood, maybe that’s part of the point?
My parents are both dead but they are not gone. We tell stories in order to live but also in order for the dead to live again. I am looking at my parents even as I type these words. My father is dressed in a white shirt with pale stripes and he is wearing a tie, even though it is a warm day. My mother is wearing a pale brown shalwar kameez with a dupatta draped around her neck. She is smiling warmly. When I look at her photograph, framed and on my desk next to the one of my father, I feel strangely reassured she is not really gone. I look at them both, and when I move closer to their paper faces, I swear I can hear them speaking to me: “Tell your stories,” they whisper, “but don’t forget ours.”
Wilson-Lee points out “the extraordinary energy invested by our culture in inoculating us against enrapturing speech.” The West is, he says, haunted by “nightmarish visions of Communist conformity and cult indoctrination.” And yet, at the same time, the modern world is propelling us ever further from individuality: Wilson-Lee describes the internet as a “superorganism” whose power to sweep us up into a collectivity exceeds that of the most skilled rhetorician. He stops short of commenting explicitly on the role of online misinformation in determining recent political events across the world, but it’s clear that Wilson-Lee has a point: language can transport us into chaos just as often as it can into sublimity and harmony.
In 1970, a team of six women climbed to the top of Denali — and, significantly, made it safely back down. This little-known expedition has finally been exceedingly well researched and told by author Cassidy Randall. For her examination of the women’s lives as well as the climb itself, Randall accessed notes and journals kept by the women, other records, interviews with the two living members of the team, and additional interviews with their children and other climbers.
Ruth saves me from despair. She tells me we will take it in turns to tell Max a reason we love him. We lean very close and revive each other with his myriad idiosyncrasies, a litany of his infinite seven-week-old self. I feel that if we stop, he will go. In this way, we cross London to Great Ormond Street.
I’ve thought a lot about why I’m writing this. I know that I’m repelled by the kind of spiritual vultures who might scour Max’s story for shareable aphorisms, and that ideally, I’d like to slap them with an injunction. On the other hand, I also know that what happened has changed me utterly, and confronted me with things about the world that I had never even tried to understand: how unbelievably precarious it all is, the breadth of what constitutes a meaningful life, and the medieval state of anxiety that the disabled world still produces in the typical one. I hate the way that disabled lives recede out of view because other people are too squeamish to talk about them, and I want to confront that tendency. Mostly, though, I think Max is already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met, and I want to tell you about him.
Vlasis calls this the "human ecology" of glaciers: a way of understanding not only ice, but how people interact with it. Nature isn't something separate from us, he says. "We are shaping and impacting in a lot of different ways".
By amplifying the sounds of glaciers, he hopes to develop a way of listening to global warming in real time. "We look towards melting glaciers as visual symbols of climate change. I wanted to know the stories that those sounds told, and I wanted to know how people had listened to glaciers throughout history."
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to be trivial or false. History itself might render judgment. Yet Daniel Kehlmann’s new book, “The Director”, suggests that such a combination is not only possible but, in the hands of a writer with saturnine wit, exhilarating. “The Director” is a complex entertainment—a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura.
“We were learning to love // the middle part best.” When the Horses (2025), Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, is an education in this odd kind of love, a book about the paradoxical blend of narrative and detachment it takes to see anything as the middle part. Callier focuses her attention on frozen images that gain a strange, mythic weight as they expand beyond the more knowable events that once defined them: to love the middle part is also to be free of the story that it encapsulates.
There are many ways of making contemporary fiction contemporary. So I may, I think, write about the intergenerational effects of genocide and forced migration without betraying an obligation to write about the particular genocide taking place just after the novel is set. I may let the shadow of contemporaneity hang over a story that becomes historical as fast as I write. I hereby make unacknowledged legislation. I ring the bell.
The Boys, in its prose and in its structure, is almost entirely made up of odd kinks of specificity – as are we all, of course, and as is the world. Hardly bothering with the conventions of “the novel”, it nonetheless – or perhaps I mean therefore – creates a mood that is less like fiction and more like life. It is a rather luminous, eccentric and memorable book.
Filled with imagination, wit and heart, The Wycherleys is a novel that delivers it all and still leaves readers wanting more. If you’re in the mood for a Regency-esque fantasy with modern attitudes and a genuinely lovable central duo, you’ll find few better than this.
I often saw the vagus nerve when operating, at the base of the brain or in the neck – a small, insignificant thing, the width of a thin matchstick. I knew it to be an important but rather boring nerve that had something to do with digestion and how fast the heart beat. I had no idea that in recent years it would become the centre of a major industry, claiming that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) will increase our “vagal tone”, leading to a longer, happier and healthier life. In The Great Nerve, Dr Kevin Tracey, a leading researcher into the vagus nerve and its electrical stimulation, tells us the treatment is“poised to revolutionise the way many millions… of people, are cared for… treating the inflammatory threats looming over humanity”. He looks forward to a “new age of bio-electronic medicine”.
In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf, the great modernist, the great acerbic, the great snob, wrote affectionate, traditional, old-fashioned belles lettres. She is constantly fresh, always surprising us. Who expects her to be an admirer of Moll Flanders? Everyone knows she called Middlemarch “perhaps the only novel written for grown-ups” (one of her few patently incorrect pronouncements), but she also wrote, “The compositions of Addison will live as long as the English language.” We know about her knowing (or not knowing) Greek, but she also knew enough to compare the lesser known Elizabethan and Victorian dramatists. Her friend Lytton Strachey did not care for Mrs Dalloway, but he thought The Common Reader was “divine, a classic.” It is un-put-down-able.
Then, a few weeks shy of my one-year work anniversary, I discovered that I was on a list of employees the publisher planned to lay off. I took it as a sign to finally listen to the voice inside me that had increasingly demanded I get out of the city. My friend Max, a skilled cook who worked seasonal stints in kitchens from Germany to Antarctica, referred me to Camp Denali, a family-owned, off-grid wilderness lodge in Denali National Park, Alaska, where I was hired as a baker for the summer. I bought a pair of hiking pants, packed a summer’s worth of underwear into a duffel, and hightailed it to Alaska.
In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use “mourning” or “grieving” because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” she writes, and words can only “fall short”.
She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. “Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,” she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the “abyss” she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.
When life is shaped too forcefully into an argument, its real texture is lost. On Breathing has retained that texture, that strangeness. My mind wandered into new plains as I was reading, partly because a lot of the material in On Breathing felt unexpected. But also partly, I think, because Webster’s curious, generous tone and method of approach invite an expansiveness of thought from the reader. I wouldn’t expect a book to offer more.
Reading “Lessons From My Teachers” feels like listening to a good friend share a few confidences on the fly, though Ruhl has taken care in the crafting of these essays. In an epilogue, she mentions “sending what I wrote to all the teachers I wrote about, the ones who are still living.” This is obviously an author who wanted to get things just right.
From smartphones to food, our daily lives leave a bitter trail of harm. Some become painfully preoccupied with these realisations; others, avoidant and numb – an even more psychologically injurious strategy. I oscillate somewhere between these two positions, which is to say, I am in dire need of some moral first aid. In No Straight Road Takes You There, a constellation of essays with interlinked themes, Solnit provides just that.
Is a River Alive? is Macfarlane’s attempt to imagine, beyond skull and skin, the overlapping fates of mind and matter, to tap out a new language in which wood and word and bird, brain and river and flame, might reveal themselves as equal sharers in a single source of being.
Most people have never heard of vacuum decay, but if it happened it would be the biggest natural disaster in the universe. Sure, an asteroid could destroy a city or wipe out life on Earth. A supernova could fry the ozone layer. If a blast of energy from a spinning black hole hit our planet, it could rip apart the entire solar system. As dramatic as these disasters are, they’d still leave behind rocks, gas and dust. With time that matter could come together again, making new stars and planets and maybe life.
Vacuum decay is different. This cataclysm would result from a change in the Higgs field, a quantum field that pervades all of space. It would be triggered by pure chance, creating a bubble that would expand at almost the speed of light, transforming all in its path. Inside that bubble the laws of physics we take for granted would change, making matter as we know it (and, consequently, life) impossible.
As childhood friends growing up in Carpinteria, California, in the 1970s and ’80s, we saw avocados every day. They were just as much a part of the “Carp” landscape as the beach town’s famous surf break. We assumed it had always been that way. Orchards blanketed the hillsides behind town, and significant hours of our childhoods were spent exploring the Parsons’ avocado farm— crunching through the fallen leaves, playing beneath shady canopies, and climbing among smooth branches. It was only after leaving home and heading east for college that we recognized just how much we had taken for granted. Avocados were part of what we left behind.
There’s something undeniably magical about that moment at a restaurant when a basket of warm, complimentary bread arrives at your table. It’s a simple gesture, but it feels like a little celebration: a soft roll, a crisp heel of sourdough, maybe even a golden square of focaccia, all arriving before you’ve even ordered anything. And yet, believe it or not, there are people out there who eye that bread basket with deep suspicion. To them, “free” bread is anything but—they see it as a stealth charge, baked right into the price of everything else. And while their skepticism may sound a bit crusty, well… they’re not entirely wrong.
“It’s all basic math at the end of the day,” explains Chad Colby, the head chef and owner of Antico Nuovo, a rustic Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. “Whether it’s free bread in a French or Italian restaurant, or free chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant, there’s an expectation of certain things. And a lot of places are having to rethink that.”
No matter if whipped into an icing, deep-fried and served with a sticky dipping sauce or simply steamed, tofu is a shapeshifter. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t; it’s just doing its own thing — and brilliantly at that.
I used to think I could use old computers to break open time and get everything back; to fold the screen in two and make a tesseract. I wanted to know what would happen at the end of my dream with the car, the airplane, and the hill. I wanted to go inside the stereoscope and see my grandmother in three dimensions in a place that no longer exists.
But when I finally went back in time, what I found instead were screen savers. Radios on repeat. Places where you could look at time and watch things move around inside it, at the speed of a telephone, just slower than light.
At its best, Crumb’s version of the twentieth century feels as timeless and earthy as Brueghel, an artist to whom he’s been compared. Crumb’s comics offer a similar sense of fleshy commotion, a panorama of human vice and folly presented without apology and with a caustic moral: Men are doomed; life is punishing; feast your eyes.
Love is a universally uncharted terrain, like life itself. Each of us, Faye reminds, has a body, a beating heart, and “a future beyond.” That future is shared, and it will require a community fixed in love for survival.
What if ground zero for an essential strain of 20th-century modern art wasn’t Paris 1907 (Pablo Picasso’s disjointed nudes) or New York City 1947 (Jackson Pollock’s drips) but rather San Francisco 1967, where Ruth Asawa made intricate sculptures alongside her six children in her Noe Valley home? What if Asawa, and other artist-mothers who were her friends and fellow activists, founded a new métier for modernism, one that runs entirely counter to the modernist trope of the solitary genius toiling alone in his spacious studio? Well, in fact, they did.
This is how I cook—not by recipe, but by intuition. By feeling. By experimentation. I pretend at being a Chopped contestant on the daily. This isn’t to say that I’m going into it with only a Santoku knife and a prayer. It’s actually the opposite. Because I’ve spent many years—my whole life, in fact—obsessed with cooking.
Maybe they’re healthy. Maybe they’re not. Maybe that’s not even the point.
The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work — still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere — that's part of the promise of America. But the pay-off feels much less certain to these characters. A winning lottery ticket, an inheritance, maybe even a union would have to come along to propel these characters to a place of greater humane possibility. Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.
The ruins of Rome have served as a Rorschach test for centuries, with spectators projecting onto them their hopes, fears, or even disappointments. As early as 1411 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras wrote of Medieval Rome that its ruins “seem beautiful even in their dismembered state”. Four hundred years later, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand detected instead “a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the brevity of our existence”, while the American scholar Henry Adams (1838-1918) gave a political twist to his reading of the runes: “Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America”. “What did I find in the Forum?” wrote Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, to a friend in 1849: “An archway and two or three pillars.”
Now Roland Mayer, the emeritus professor of classics at King’s College London, has produced a survey of this rich field of speculation, tracing Rome’s greatest ornaments from antiquity to the present day.
Last month I found myself on a Zoom call with the members of a book club who’d read my debut novel; truly, a bucket list moment in my writing life. Near the end of the call, someone asked the question I suspect every fiction writer gets at some point: Where do you get ideas from?
Simple, I said: I steal them. I was joking. Sort of.
"I did have problems with it as I now see the movie," actor Dustin Hoffman confessed to the BBC in 1970 as he reflected on his performance as the sickly New York grifter Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. "I can see where I am inconsistent in the character."
The film, released in cinemas on 25 May 1969, would go on to earn Oscar nominations for both Hoffman and his co-star Jon Voight, who played a naive young Texan with aspirations to be a rich woman's gigolo.
The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change. If this turbulent, mercurial tale has an anchor, it is its belief that “in order to extend life and preserve civilisation, we are obliged to rescue one another”.
Ocean Vuong is one of my favorite novelists, because he is a poet. His long-anticipated sophomore novel, The Emperor of Gladness is an admirable compliment to his resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through.
Throughout the book, one senses a tireless energy applied to dealmaking—and has a lingering impression that the thing being made, whether entertainment or dresses, is always a little less interesting than the money made by making it. And since, past a certain point, there’s not much more money to be made, the only thing left to innovate is the way you make it.
When they appear on TV or in movies, rattlesnakes are often sensationalised. They're depicted as menacing and vicious. Bryan Hughes, who has never got over his fascination with them, knows better. Rattlesnakes are wild animals whose lives are increasingly at risk from the expansion of human civilisation, and a society that doesn't really understand these reptiles.
"You're supposed to hate these things, you're supposed to kill these things – well, I don't," says Hughes. "I want to save them."
There is so much to tease out in this book, so many wonderful ideas explored: but one that has stuck with me is the idea that language can get stuck in the throat.
Things in Nature Merely Grow is a story of loss that is unlike any other book I’ve read. It’s a work of harsh beauty that exists in a different realm to most grief memoirs. That’s partly because of its startling poise and emotional restraint, and partly because it describes a realm of experience that is exceptionally strange and terrible.
I hope to never get sick on a flight again. But, should the worst ever overcome me again, I have a new appreciation for an unsung hero of aviation. If it weren’t for that simple paper bag, I would have ruined the pretty floor of an Airbus jet, possibly delaying a flight and destroying the days of over 100 people. Instead, I did my business in a bag, tossed it away, and got to walk away with clean hands and an intact dress.
Really, barf bags are just another reason why commercial aviation works so well today. It really seems like engineers and inventors have thought of nearly every situation that can arise in the sky, including when last night’s steak comes to haunt you on the runway.
At their best, purées deliver deep flavor, elegant texture, and incredible versatility. One of the most memorable examples I’ve ever encountered was a chicken liver mousse at Tuome in New York City. Piped from an iSi canister to give it body and loft, it arrived with milk bread and a drizzle of New York maple syrup. Light yet simultaneously rich and savory, it hd the essence of a savory frozen yogurt — indulgent without being heavy. I’ve been chasing that dish ever since.
One of the most refreshing aspects of this collection is that, despite how much it careens into grief, it never goes so far as to be despairing. Gander shows a strong respect for the human experience and all that includes — especially the darker parts of being a person. In doing so, he presents a collection that shows his grief without ever being overwhelmed by it, a delicate balance that communicates how deeply he loves and how actively he still lives.
I Want Everything is a playful, delicious tale of deception that speaks to the human cost of fulfilling naked ambition.
A poet’s grave is better than anything in the Louvre. In the dirt, beneath a large book-shaped stone, is a box containing a person who laid bare their heart for whoever cared to pay attention, and whose life was shaped by some of the same strange forces as your own.
Yes, gone are the days when an insular clique of critics had the ability to make or break artists’ careers — and good riddance. That was more power than anybody deserves. The quality of a critic’s work now carries more weight than their cult of personality. That’s not a bad thing. Insightful, incisive, and inventive writing will always have a future and an audience. So long as there’s art, there will be art criticism.
Art criticism is not in crisis. Good art criticism is the crisis.
It started with a thump, the grim sound of a bird hitting the window of my little office shack. When I ran outside to check, I found the first hermit thrush that I had ever seen in our yard, lying dead in the grass. As I lay those few feathered ounces to rest beneath a rose bush, my sorrow was tinged with something like embarrassment. Here I was, studying nature and writing books about it, and I’d had no idea that this celebrated bird was wintering in the shrubs just a few feet from my desk.
The book is a rigorous study into the chasm between how you dream your life may go and the realities of life. It examines the frustrations, the unexpected news, the ways decisions reverberate, the ways wealth – or the lack thereof – can compound.
Farrell has six volumes of poetry published; it would seem there were stories, opinions, reminiscences, jokes and goodness knows what else he wanted to tell, which he felt were better suited to the short story form rather than poetry. The result is a collection of short pieces with the lilt and beauty of poetry – lyrical verse, perhaps, in the wolf’s clothing of the conventional short story.
As John Scanlan demonstrates in his new book The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life, trash and the political imagination have always nourished each other. Taxpayer money handled by political criminals also circulates through similar secret underworlds. Mounds of refuse were stacked “higher than automobiles parked at curbs” in the Lower East Side during the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. It made the downtown Yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman, who was organizing a protest at the time against the government’s neglect of his neighborhood, wax apocalyptic: “Future historians would write that America was destroyed by a nuclear attack when in actuality the people just stopped picking up their trash.” The strike was only nine days long, but it forced Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to offer a new contract to the workers, proving that some vermin will run away from trash rather than toward it.
On reading this book for the first time, I bought a copy and sent it to some dear musician friends, where the wife of the partnership has early onset dementia. He pronounced it ‘consoling’. On re-reading the text I was alert to the slightly random nature of the experiences. But as a document of the extraordinary power of music to transform lives, even at the end, it cannot be faulted, and I would recommend it as a source of hope to anyone who is affected by life-limiting conditions.
Writers who contemplate going onstage tend to fall into two camps: those who know better and those who should but don’t. Of the second kind, The New Yorker has, over its hundred years, produced quite a few. Robert Benchley, one of the magazine’s founding voices (if on permanent loan from the Algonquin circle), was perhaps more famous in his day as a performer than as a writer. His sketch “The Treasurer’s Report” became a classic. He was eventually hired to narrate the musical-comedy film “Road to Utopia”—no small compliment, or challenge, given that it meant adding laughs to a prime Bob Hope–Bing Crosby comedy. Alexander Woollcott, another early contributor who left his title, if not his campy imprint, on Shouts & Murmurs, went on to play himself in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The character, Sheridan Whiteside, was based on Woollcott and intended to mock him—until he took the part himself, turning satire into homage by his living presence as a pre-mocked subject, like jeans sold pre-distressed. More recently, Calvin Trillin performed two funny and affecting solo shows drawn from his own work—“Words, No Music” and “About Alice.” Lawrence Wright has done a couple, too, including the more sombre “The Human Scale.” And, of course, there’s been a steady trickle of gifted performers who’ve leapt into our pages, and then leapt back out again, as slightly reformed characters, or at least more literary-minded comedians.
To come to the point—and it’s not a point that will survive an interminable buildup—I joined the company of these writers long ago, and am now returning to it. As it happens, I spent a good chunk of my childhood onstage, where I was, for a time, the Shirley Temple of the Philadelphia avant-garde theatre—a boast few could make, or would want to. At nine, I was cast as Galileo’s apprentice in a mid-sixties production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” one of the first shows directed by a newly minted impresario, André Gregory—already as sleek as a borzoi, with the same mesmerizing patter that would later delight the world in “My Dinner with André.”
Both the Bible and the Qur’an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, that of the shepherd Abel by his farmer brother Cain, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures. In the Black Sea region it started more than six thousand years ago, when farmers and herders found themselves cheek by jowl at two steppe boundaries: one in eastern Europe, the other in the North Caucasus. That encounter marked the beginning of a dance of death that, for millennia to come, would bind the two in mutual hostility and dependence. Each grew and attained new heights of sophistication thanks to the other, but any malaise that affected one affected the other too, and climate change periodically rolled the dice. It was against this backdrop that the Indo-European languages were born.
Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or going to one is a high-risk activity, if done properly. Trimalchio’s dinner party in The Satyricon concludes with him staging a dress rehearsal of his funeral; Edgar Allan Poe gives us the party as massacre in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. Kitty, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, compares her party nerves to ‘a young man’s feelings before a battle’, while Lucia in E F Benson’s Lucia’s Progress looks forward to the warfare.
The denouement, when it finally comes, is so gloriously absurd, you can’t help but salute Oyeyemi’s knack for artful nonsense. She is a gleefully unapologetic trickster; whether you adore this novel or chuck it across the room may come down to how much mischief for the sake of mischief you can handle. My bet is you’ll finish it, as I did, feeling bemused but also perversely entertained, and grateful for the ride.
Some 40 years later – as an editor – it’s now my job to figure out what makes a book tick (or more often, what it needs to make it tick). As an author, I dream of my own novels standing the test of time. As a reader, I love to luxuriate in fictional worlds. So, when a colleague and fellow author suggested tackling a bunch of classics to deconstruct them down to their skeletons, I was intrigued.
I had no idea what I was in for.
What these conflicting usages tell us is that the daimons of the ancient world were ambiguous beings, spirits with varying degrees of power that they could employ, or be made to employ, for good or evil ends. This is how they were portrayed in the Christian Bible where, in the Book of Matthew, Jesus admonished his disciples to ‘heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons.’ These daimons (translated as ‘demons’ in the English Bible) were unambiguously noxious, so that, when Jesus exorcised them, their victims were released from their sufferings. Such was the case of Mary Magdalene herself, ‘from whom he had cast out seven demons’. Yet, these same daimons were also cast as spirits capable of recognising and conversing with Jesus: ‘And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.’
I grew up near Changi, and therefore, in it. Ever since I was a child, before I even left the country for the first time, the airport represented free air-conditioning, clean toilets, and Wi-Fi—all publicly accessible 24 hours a day. Thanks to our public transit system, it’s efficiently connected to the rest of Singapore—an easy enough commute given the country’s small size. Here, heading to the airport feels no different from going to the mall. Growing up, I would sit cross-legged on the floor of Changi’s viewing gallery, where travelers could watch planes take off and land, and where I sought refuge from the equatorial heat while reading a book. I constantly campaigned for my parents to host my birthday dinners there. Sometimes, I would even slip into sweaters and pretend I was jet setting to a cold-weather country for a vacation instead of just the intensely climate-controlled airport fifteen minutes away from my house.
Everett’s novel proposes that each of us is a survivor of the hate crimes of the world: The very existence of such violence leaves us all wounded. The ending of the novel, which brings retribution for the initial murder and the ensuing acts of violence, reminds us that we cannot escape the effects of hatred by descending underground. Like the prisoners Plato imagines chained in a cave, Everett’s characters hope to dispel shadow play through the novelist’s weapons of the weak: dialogue and self-questioning
There is plenty of romance to Love Unedited, and much of it is the romance of independence: work, travel and having the courage of your convictions.
What drives these scenes is the dramatic irony of the audience knowing that, whether at the dentist's or in a tanning booth, the characters are unwittingly at the centre of a death trap. "[The audience] know that there's something in the room manipulating elements, so they're immediately empathetic to the characters, pointing and yelling at the screen," adds Perry. "So you're looking at a can of tuna and after two or three shots, that's no longer a can of tuna, that is an instrument of death."
Originally, however, the word stock, of Germanic origin, denoted a stump or stick (Stück), the lifeless mass that’s left behind once you’ve chopped down a tree—deadstock you might say. In recommending that we look again to the past to learn to live in the present and future, following Nature’s lead, I only hope not to have become a laughingstock, a compound derived from this original sense as a useless remainder, worthy only of scorn, a stick in the mud, as it were.
And yet anyone who has cut down a deciduous tree will know that it soon grows back. (Conifers, alas, tend not to.) Hence the idea of coming from good stock, meaning that one’s root system and potential for life is strong and vigorous.
If we one day encounter aliens through first contact or a signal sent across the galaxy, their language might be nothing like ours. After all, humans have evolved with certain cognitive abilities and limitations. Expecting intelligent beings with alternative origins to use languages like ours betrays an anthropocentric view of the cosmos. If we want to move beyond exchanging prime number sequences to figuring out what the extraterrestrials are actually saying, we need to be prepared.
Before making the transition from action passages to prose paragraphs, I’d always viewed screenwriting and literature as two distinct disciplines, but as I dipped my toes in uncharted waters, I began to realize how much the boot camp of TV had given me years of on-the-job training in the essentials of storytelling—from plot and structure to character development and dialog.
Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become.
Set in real places and liminal spaces, the poems in Jo-Ann Mort’s A Precise Chaos grapple with life’s inevitable transitions, contending, often concretely, with time as a relentless force. This dramatic impulse moves gracefully between glory days and decline as it takes up the challenges of war, friendship, and the wayward turns of the human will.
All of Us Atoms is best understood as a sort of love letter. The central theme is human interdependence – the idea, hinted at in the book’s title, that our sense of self is largely shaped by the roles we perform in our relationships with others. Axiomatic, perhaps, and borderline platitudinous, but it bears repeating. Caring is the only truly important thing we do in every phase of our brief time on Earth – “This constant procession of becoming and unbecoming. From each to each a legacy.”
You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts and electronically analyzed birdcalls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.
The fact is, though, that no language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. “English could of course die, just as Egyptian died,” says linguist Martin Haspelmath, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The more interesting questions are: when and how?
But lost places that catch our collective interest are often ones that can’t be found at all. Sometimes these are places where people lose themselves never to be seen again, where the unexplained keeps occurring and we’re left to make some kind of sense of it. Places lost to time, lost to sailors and explorers, lost to living memory.
Is comedy a deflection or a pragmatic approach to getting on with things in a world of misunderstanding and confusion? Certainly, Slags culminates in a confrontation that is more chaotic than climactic. But this is an undeniably fun read, the levity often lifted by an underlying sense of sympathy, affection and tenderness. Unsworth is riotous, rewarding company.
That’s All I Know is an utterly engaging tale of unendurable sadness and quiet desperation and of how we live with the decisions we make.
Goh has succeeded in writing a compelling narrative about the history of citrus. There are details that might have been glossed over, but only for the sake of creating a compelling narrative. She’s braided in her own story too, with her memoir providing the roots the citrus needs to flourish. Foreign Fruit unpeels the interwoven story of the orange and empire while raising questions of authenticity, otherness, and identity.
This book is an ingenious solution to the problem of biography in an age of global celebrity, where identity seems much less stable, a jumble of ever-changing projections and imaginings. It is hard to know what White himself makes of the continuing obsession with his subject. Dianaworld is a kaleidoscopic place, stuffed full with contradictory perspectives. But perhaps that is appropriate for a life that ultimately seemed so mercurial and slippery, so un-pin-down-able. As one visitor to Althorp comments at the end of a rather lacklustre tour of Diana’s childhood home, “Is there nothing else Diana? Is that it?”
"Womp, womp, womp." That's the sound, according to Grammy Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, of a sharp-rimmed glass cutting into just-right biscuit dough. Coming from Giddens' mouth, the timbre translates as a low note plucked from a double bass.
Giddens is an American scholar-musician whose folk, country and blues music illuminates the African lineage of the banjo and celebrates the legacy of the Black string band. But in 2020, at the outset of pandemic lockdowns, Giddens found herself craving something seemingly less academic: biscuits. Not the crisp British variety that Americans call "cookies" and "crackers". Not crumbly, sweetened scones – those she could buy in abundance in her adopted city of Limerick, Ireland. No, what Giddens wanted were flaky, buttery biscuits with a definitive rise, the kind that are ubiquitous across the American South.
On a slate-black night, I stare at a horizon freckled with stars. Only this isn't the sky, illuminated by hundreds of constellations; it's the muddy bank of a river, charged by a colony of glow worms.
"This is my TV," says David Finlay. "It's magical, like something out of Avatar." By day, Finlay works as a transport manager, but by night, he scours Australia's bushland and beaches chasing living light. "If you're tucked up at home, you miss these things. Everybody cocoons themselves at night, whereas I think, what fun can I have?" he says.
This is a new translation by Lauren Elkin of a shortish Simone de Beauvoir book, Les Belles Images, first published in 1966. The book’s aim is to identify the source of its heroine’s discontent. But on the journey inside her mind and life, we get a good account of how de Beauvoir saw the world in the 1960s — and in many ways, that world wasn’t a whole lot different from ours.
I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real number that is neither positive nor negative. It is neutral.
Why the negative association? Humankind has long harbored strong feelings toward zero; it was even banned in some places at one point. Xenophobia and ideology held back this powerful concept. Yet today all of mathematics is based on this number.
In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon. The penultimate book that Twain published in his lifetime, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), asked his readers to consider how few solid biographical details existed about Shakespeare the man, and how much critics had inferred from so little. They had built, Twain wrote, “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.”
Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.
Ron Chernow is best known for “Alexander Hamilton,” his 2004 biography that inspired the popular hip-hop musical. Chernow, who has also written books about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, is especially good as a popular historian, placing his subjects within a sweeping canvas of their times. That sensibility also informs “Mark Twain,” Chernow’s new biography of America’s most famous writer.
In true Chernow fashion, this is a book about not only Twain, but also the modern celebrity culture that nurtured his career – and that he helped in large part to create. It’s also the story of how Twain’s emotionally austere father shaped Twain’s hunger for attention, which took a strange late-life turn.
The subtitle of Shubin’s latest book suggests its scope — his quest to put polar science into a larger context for understanding our world and beyond, both in space and time. Readers who expect detailed narratives about his own research journeys will be disappointed; instead, the reward is a compendium of both historical and very recent scientific discovery at the poles — and its meaning for the future we face. As he says in his prologue, “In this book, polar science will be our lens to see the natural world and the extraordinary ways we have come to know it.”
In the days and weeks following her death, mama’s bones were everywhere—I excavated dried mango pits from the depths of her purses and from in between couch cushions; I found them scattered in the car and on her nightstand. When I was younger, I didn’t catch mama’s mango fever, much to her horror. “Dinkinish, yuh mus’ eat mango,” she exclaimed with Holy Ghost fire, kissing her teeth in disapproval. “Iz yuh culchah.” But after she died, as if by magic, I started craving the fruit, peeling them with my teeth, tearing through the flesh, sucking the pits. Mangoes followed me everywhere. Strangers offered them to me in parking lots and in the aisles of department stores. Once, a supermarket manager who had countless mango trees in his backyard slipped a bunch into my shopping cart, relieved to be rid of them.
The fullest day I know of begins with taking a portrait of a stranger in the middle of nowhere by 10 a.m. I do this while walking the historic roads of my home country, Japan. At 8 a.m. I set off with the goal of clocking some 20-40 kilometers, and by 9:50, I usually still haven’t taken that portrait. So I manically duck into whatever shop might be along the road (a tatami mat weaver, a gardening tools shop, a convenience store), or I’ll yell out to a farmer working their field: Good morning! Uhh, can I take your photo?! More often than not, they’re bemused (me, my quite obviously non-Japanese face, the fact that I’m in the middle of nowhere) and are happy to chat, and soon thereafter they’re happy to be photographed.
The novel is concerned with why people write; what it means to be an “African writer,” if that means anything at all. It is loosely but precisely engaged in conversations on the workings of writing to perpetuate or interrupt colonial narratives. But this is not the subject of the novel: rather, one facet of its writers’ experiences as writers. A writer writing writers (writing writers), the novel is a meditation on constructed worlds. Spared from the deluge and isolated from the world at large, craft and creation mingle into and revise the texture of the island. It is not always clear who are the living, and who are the rest.
At the heart of Gunk is a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family, and a suggestion of possible alternatives. It’s a radical thought, one that Sams is well placed to articulate, and she does so with tenderness. I am certain that with room to experiment, if she leans into her instinct for the eccentric and the uncomfortable, there will be much more acclaim to come.
Sometimes there’s light at the end of the rabbit hole. When Josef von Sternberg’s film “The Devil Is a Woman,” from 1935, was recently screened, I was curious about how it was received in its first run and found a sharply perceptive review of it in the Times, by one Andre Sennwald, whom I’d never heard of. It didn’t take long to discover that he was hired as the paper’s film critic in October, 1934, at the age of twenty-seven, and that he died in January, 1936, at twenty-eight—by inhaling gas from his stove, in what the medical examiner believed was likely suicide. In that short span, he wrote plentifully. He usually produced four reviews a week, plus a more extensive movie-centered Sunday essay. (The Sennwald archive on the Times site, starting with his first review, on September 18, 1934, includes more than three hundred pieces.) But it isn’t the quantity of his work that makes it worth revisiting. Rather, he counts as one of the most insightful and forward-looking of early American film critics. While fitting new releases into the commercial whirl of the day, he offers a passionate perspective—guided by discerning taste—that reaches further, displaying a self-aware devotion to the future of the art.
Knapp’s plotting is skilful, her tapestry of stories cleverly woven. Characters that play a significant role in one of the three storylines appear fleetingly in others. Personality traits and preferences emerge in subtly different forms. As nature meets nurture, Cora, Maia and Bear/Julian/Gordon grow into distinct versions but remain recognisably themselves. Each version contrives to inform the others.
From the beginning of this collection, Stockton’s voice is exploratory while maintaining an unflinching gaze towards the polycrises of our time. The poems are organized into seven distinct sections rather than stand-alone works, and across these sections, Stockton brilliantly considers how extractivism, power, and desire play into both our intimate and extimate relations, with a penchant for lyricism and the subtle interplay of ecopoetic, affective, and psychoanalytical syntax.
Traveling to Big Bend in 2017 was about the farthest I’d ventured in 20 years. And there was no way to turn around and go home, since our home was now the 19-foot camper we were dragging along behind us. This did not bring me the peace I was hoping to find. But change is never peaceful.
Ostlund’s writing is most at home in small schools, small towns and small dive bars, all of them imbued with a permanent sense of enclosure, claustrophobia and unease. Major cities loom on the horizon only as escape hatches.
Real feeling and believable characters? Not a problem. Kevin Wilson continues to do whimsy with as much heart as any writer ever has.
In New York, Keith McNally is the exception to the rule of restaurateur obscurity. Few people have been as recognized for their understanding of atmosphere as McNally, who chronicles his life and work in a new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. For the cost of dining at his restaurants ($31 for salade Niçoise at Pastis, $29 for eggs Benedict at Balthazar), one could easily find much better food in the city. But to the question of whether they make you feel good, the answer is usually yes. On occasion, during the heyday of his restaurants, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the most yes.
Lawyers love Jane Austen, disproportionately—often rabidly—so. A leading London jurist once memorably quipped of his devotion: “I read all six of Austen’s books every year, because if I didn’t, I would simply read Emma over and over.”
Young children playing on a beach today will live through perhaps the most consequential time for the human species in the past 10,000 years. They will grow up to see how this story ends, to see how our choices play out. If we use our great discoveries, apply our unique minds and direct our unparalleled communication and problem-solving skills to restoring our ocean, then those children will bring their own into a world where the biggest challenges our species has ever faced have already been navigated.
They will witness decades of recovery and restoration. They will see shoals of fish, roosts of seabirds and pods of whales beyond anything anyone alive has ever laid eyes upon. They will experience the rebirth of coastal communities and the turning point in the stabilisation of our climate. But more than that, they will live in a world where our species, the most intelligent to exist on Earth, has moved beyond trying to rule the waves and instead has learnt to thrive alongside the greatest wilderness of all.
A stunning bluefin tuna sat atop a pedestal. Its glassy eyes glistened in the natural light from the windows. I knew the tuna wasn’t alive — but boy, did it look like it was about to wink.
I went to my first tuna cutting at O by Brush, the one-Michelin-starred omakase option at Brush Sushi in Buckhead. As a handful of us took our seats around the fresh fish brought in from Mexico, chef Jason Liang picked up one of several knives (he also has a saw) and began slicing, hacking, and scraping. Off with the head, and then came the segments of fatty back (sekam), back cheek (kama-toro), collar bone, and that prized extra-fatty otoro belly.
It’s a compelling novel that fills one with an actual physical sense of dread, from the first words on the first page, and yet also offers glimpses of whimsy, beauty, and love. Florence Knapp’s debut novel, “The Names,” achieves this balance, highlighting the warmth and wonder of human existence, while weaving a tale of tragedies, ordinary and extraordinary, that befall its characters.
Sometimes sonic, sometimes meandering, sometimes all imagery, this collection pulls from all manner of structures and art forms to create a collage of language, cohesive and intentional, that meditates on this moment.
In Foreign Fruit, Goh turns oranges into a cipher, a way of writing about herself indirectly through a refracted lens that explodes the clean narratives she once reduced herself to. Each chapter braids together citrus's historical path across the globe with Goh's personal travels, family history, and meditations on hybridity.
Nearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally’s Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” McNally, 73, shows that he is, too.
Consideration of the restaurant cookbook might begin with a concession: these texts are paradoxical. A restaurant justifies its existence, at least partly, by not being its patrons’ home. The restaurant cookbook, then, seems to impose on its readers an assignment they can’t complete: to replicate an experience that won’t ever emerge from a list of ingredients and instructions.
The sun warms my face as I pause between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies to gaze at the rolling hills of Dumfries and Galloway beyond. I am not, surprisingly enough, in outer space. I’m at the Crawick Multiverse, a cosmos-themed land art installation in the south of Scotland that was built on the site of an old open-cast coal mine and is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.
The galaxies here are huge, spiralling mounds of earth, their perimeters reaching out towards one another but never quite touching.
It took me years to understand that most people accept New York’s mayhem as some kind of toll, a small price to pay for the panoply of delights available to them at a moment’s notice—whoever said “Nothing good ever happens after midnight” has never lived in New York. But anyone who has ever fallen in love with the city knows that they will accept myriad slights just to stay in that relationship—cramped apartments, troublesome neighbors, two trains and a bus home, the night shift. How many Hollywood movie plots hinge roughly on the idea that the hero will do anything, anything at all, not to be shipped back to the suburbs? It was my parents, however, who had chosen that plot; I was simply the culmination of it.
As they speak about their experience, it’s easy to slip into the shared mindset of Coulson and Lynch, who didn’t fear death itself, but feared not being able to use their time here to its fullest.
In Dream State, Puchner seduces us with a familiar and deeply secure narrative structure, only to undermine that structure, to force it to tell a tale of profound and fatal insecurity. But he tells his tale so compellingly, so engagingly, with such warmth and humour, that it’s not until you set the book down that you can appreciate the breadth and brilliance of what he’s done.
It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.’ She wasn’t entirely right, but Francesca Wade’s new ‘afterlife’ of Stein takes the sentiment seriously. The revolutions in language that preoccupied Stein in life were slowly appreciated after her death in 1946. Despite having an unpromising cast of scholars, librarians, publishers and fans, Wade turns the posthumous half of the Stein story into a narrative of suppression, revelation and hopes fulfilled. It helps that there is romance at the heart of it, and a secret notebook.
The book’s full title comes from a phrase in ancient Greek meaning “learning through suffering”, which is not as simple as solving what Nelson calls “the pain puzzle”. The pain endured by martyrs and saints suggests penance or ecstasy, but Nelson is neither religious nor seeking absolution. In trying to untangle the problem of her own pain and her experience of disconnection, she invites us to reflect on ours. In outlining her suffering, she prompts us to imagine our own. The singular as metaphor for the collective, urging us to fully inhabit the lives we have, in spite of bodily interruptions, or global distractions.
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump’s second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children’s-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as “Hamas”; on the street, I thought “hot yoga” was “hot dogs”; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising “Jan. Ticketing” said “Jia Tolentino” to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of “losing it” elude me. There are sometimes only images: foggy white drizzle, melted rainbows in a gasoline puddle, pink foam insulation bursting between slats of splintered wood.
Possibly, I should be writing this on the intake form at a neurologist’s office. Maybe the fog never cleared after my third round of COVID. Maybe it’s the self-severance of having two young children but pretending for half of the day that I don’t. Maybe this is exactly what my mother warned me about twenty years ago when she discovered my passion for marijuana. But I get the sense that quite a lot of people are feeling like this all the time now, too.
It occurred to him that his relationship with nature could be extended to the spirit world. “Over time, I started to view life and death not as separate things, but death as an extension of life, and life and death as points connected along a straight line. As such, I came to believe we could share our thoughts with those that have passed away,” he says. Death was on his mind: Sasaki’s cousin had just been diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live. He thought of his aunt, who had deteriorated rapidly after a bout of grief over her daughter’s cancer diagnosis. “I felt that our family should not have to suffer the same fate again.”
A year later, Sasaki stumbled across a white telephone box being removed from in front of a hotel in Kamaishi. “I imagined it would look beautiful in my garden,” he says. He couldn’t persuade the removal company to sell it to him. But serendipity struck. His friend said he had come into possession of a similar phone booth he could use. Sasaki rented a truck, drove to the neighbouring town and took it home.
A deeper current runs through the book, aligning Macfarlane’s work with a wider literary-environmental shift. As we discover the profound interconnectedness of flora, fauna and other forms of “life”, our language and conceptual frameworks expand dramatically.
"All we have photographically of the Cuyahoga fire in '69 is pictures of firemen mopping up, spraying the trestle, and then Carl Stokes, the mayor, on the tracks the next morning talking to the press about it," says David Stradling, professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, US. Earlier images of fires on the same river, such as that pictured above in 1952, nevertheless began to be circulated when the 1969 blaze occurred.
And yet, this short-lived fire on the Cuyahoga River became a powerful moment in the growing environmental activism movement in the United States. The images of the river's previous fires ignited national conversations on pollution and social justice, just as the US's nascent environmental movement was gathering pace.
Volumes of a writer’s selected or collected work usually have a kind of a grandness to them, an authoritative summing up that pretends to the definitive, and are the outcome of retrospective weighing: the author, if they have made the selections, or a custodian of their work — spouse, editor, literary executor — has looked at years of production and decided that these writings will stand for what the writer and their work was. You can go further into their corpus and search out the oddities, the minor, the incomplete and occasional, the neglected, but this material before you is the main substance — it will offer the most up-front and prepossessing (some might say imploring) portrait, a testament, for better or worse, of what is past and aspires toward the enduring, a record colored and oddly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of a particular mind either deceased or soon-to-be. And there, I’m not out of the first paragraph and mortality has entered, though I’d intended to hold it off longer. But how not to remark the truly remarkable fact that Cynthia Ozick, who has just published In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays, is ninety-seven years old?
Falling for Saigon is a different kind of book, as the title suggests. From the first pages, Stokes makes clear that this is his personal—informed but impressionistic—take on a city he’s come to love, in a country where he’s lived for 25 years. The legacy of war comes up in passing but does not take center stage, nor, Stokes implies, should it. “Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, whichever name you call it, contradicts itself. For it is large and contains multitudes,” he writes.
Eight months after doctors cut the cancer out of my mom, four months after her second surgery, three months after she closed the women’s consignment boutique she owned for 10 years, two months before her third surgery, and one month after my dad turned 60, my parents organized a family phone call. Those are rarely good. Considering everything that transpired over the past year, it was a call we should have seen coming. They wanted to sell the farm.
On a sticky, late-spring night in parts of the eastern United States, you might witness one of the wonders of the animal kingdom: a constellation of hundreds of fireflies blinking in unison. Only three of the 130 or so species of fireflies in the U.S. are known to exhibit this synchrony, and they do so for only a few weeks a year.
The displays have gotten so popular that the Great Smoky Mountains and Congaree National Parks hold lotteries for the privilege of watching the fireflies in the parks during their peak. If you are lucky enough to win that lottery, you might run into Orit Peleg, a computer scientist and biophysicist from the University of Colorado Boulder, setting up cameras to record the display with some of her research collaborators.
In 2024 a shockwave rippled through the astronomical world, shaking it to the core. The disturbance didn’t come from some astral disaster at the solar system’s doorstep, however. Rather it arrived via the careful analysis of many far-distant galaxies, which revealed new details of the universe’s evolution across eons of cosmic history. Against most experts’ expectations, the result suggested that dark energy—the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion—was not an unwavering constant but rather a more fickle beast that was weakening over time.
Death by a Thousand Cuts is a book about people living in the 21st century. It connects with our moment in history – but transcends it – by placing basic human struggle at the centre of each tale. These stories contend with the effect that abject loneliness has on our souls when our private hells make us public spectacles, and with the particular kind of loneliness that often accompanies chaos, and ultimately, the loneliness that is found within it.
Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations”. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah’s new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds.
Researchers predict they’ll be able to start outsourcing more tedious sections of proofs to AI within the next few years. They’re mixed on whether AI will ever be able to prove their most important conjectures entirely: Some are willing to entertain the notion, while others think there are insurmountable technological barriers. But it’s no longer entirely out of the question that the more creative aspects of the mathematical enterprise might one day be automated.
Our tastes are influenced by what we see. Close your eyes and think about the perfect croissant, burnished and golden brown. A juicy tomato, ready to eat, vibrantly red and practically screaming, “I’m ripe!” For those of us who can see, color is one of the most powerful influences that shape our perception of food, and in turn, how it tastes.
Tara Selter runs an antiquarian books business with her husband, Thomas. They live on the outskirts of a town in northern France, although Tara often travels to book fairs here and there, as she has done – to one in Bordeaux – when her life changes. On her way home she stops in Paris to collect some books for clients. She checks in to a hotel on the evening of 17 November, keeps numerous appointments on the 18th, burns her hand while spending the evening with friends and calls Thomas from her room before going to sleep.
But the newspaper she picks up at breakfast the next day is dated the 18th. A simple mistake, she thinks, until someone in the dining room drops a slice of bread and hesitates over what to do with it, just as she watched him do the day before. She checks other newspapers at a kiosk; withdraws cash and studies the receipt; calls her husband, who doesn’t remember the previous night’s conversation. She still has the burn, but everything else she did on the 18th, including the purchasing of books, which she finds back on the shelves of the shops where she bought them, has been reset. For Tara, the 18th of November is happening again.
This would be a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties. But Bouverie rises to it with aplomb. He has trawled through more than a hundred archives and researched great masses of diaries, memoirs, biographies and monographs. He writes gracefully and engagingly, and brings his subject to life with innumerable anecdotes and quotations. His judgement is level-headed, and he knows how to tell a good story. He has produced a major work of original history that is a pleasure to read.
In this way, there’s not a better time for the publication of Name; the book should be shoved in the face of every pseudo-intellectual reactionary in the New York literary scene participating in the glorification of conservatism in response to the rise of liberalism over the past decade. Debré asserts that neither the Left nor the Right is happy, that we have to strive for something different altogether. Nostalgia for tradition is a misguided attempt for comfort when what we need is the opposite: “Walk into the void, that’s it, that’s what you have to do, get rid of everything, of everything you have, of everything you know, and go toward the unknown,” she advises cosmically, opening a portal with her words.