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    Book Review: ‘The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,’ by Grace Lin

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    THE GATE, THE GIRL AND THE DRAGON, by Grace LinFall into a hole and thump into Wonderland. Open a wardrobe and step into Narnia. Board a train on Platform 9¾ and end up at Hogwarts. Crossing thresholds comes naturally to children, which is one of the reasons middle grade fantasy is so popular. The quests are timeless.Cue Grace Lin, whose latest novel, “The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,” embraces this trope as well. Her setting is a bustling urban center, in the middle of which stands the Old City Gate. Passing through it is uneventful for humans (aside from entering a neighborhood filled with dangling red lanterns and traditional foods and crafts), but for a group of mythical creatures called Gongshi, it’s the only way back to their realm of grasslands, rivers and mountains.Gongshi are lively and fun-loving, but once they’re in the modern world they manifest as stone, standing silent and still. They hide in plain sight in the form of statues, highway pillars and necklace pendants. Lifeless to the human eye, they watch over the city’s populace and protect them from danger. All Gongshi take their job seriously — except for one.Lin’s main character, Jin, is a Gongshi lion cub who would rather play with his friends than play guardian. Early in the book, he becomes angry at his father and accidentally knocks over the Sacred Sphere, a golden ball that is never to be moved. As it bounces out of the house and through the Old City Gate, Jin chases after it, trying desperately to catch it. But he fails, and the gate clangs shut behind him. Jin is now stuck on the wrong side. Will the impetuous cub ever see his parents again?From “The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon.”Grace LinFor the remaining 300 pages, Jin is on a quest to reopen the gate and return home, an adventure that’s both physically and emotionally taxing. Along the way he meets a girl, a sculptor and a dragon who takes the shape of a worm — not all of whom he can trust. Meanwhile, the other Gongshi spend several chapters also trying to reopen the gate, in hopes of rescuing Jin and retrieving the Sacred Sphere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Yourself on the History of How Books Were Made

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      Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about literary culture. This week’s installment tests your knowledge of the global evolution of books themselves. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to further reading on the topic. More

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      2 Books to Keep You Pleasantly Diverted

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      A collection of autobiographical sketches; a complicated Japanese mystery.Archive Photos/Moviepix, via Getty ImagesDear readers,There’s a movie house here in New York that, on Sundays, shows a series of revivals appropriate for kids, complete with booster seats. My 5-year-old and I go often, and, a few months ago, went to see the 1944 musical “Meet Me in St. Louis.” We were having a lovely time watching the Technicolor evocation of 1903 St. Louis, and Judy Garland asking us to meet her at the fair and pining for the boy next door, when an old man in the row behind us hissed, loudly, “JUMP HIS BONES!” He continued to repeat this exhortation whenever the teenage characters of Esther and John Truett had a scene together. The kids in attendance seemed confused, but mercifully uncomprehending.I came home bursting with our adventures, but also eager to reread the Sally Benson book on which the musical was based. And, accordingly, next time I had access to my boxes at my parents’ house, I dug out my paperback.—Sadie“Meet Me in St. Louis,” by Sally BensonFiction, 1942Benson was known as a short story writer; both this book and her collection “Junior Miss” were composed mostly of stories she’d published in The New Yorker. Originally, the semi-autobiographical sketches gathered here — about growing up in a large St. Louis family — appeared between 1941 and 1942, as a series she called “5135 Kensington.” But by the time the book was published, the MGM adaptation was already underway, and Benson changed her title to match theirs. She also added four new vignettes, and structured the book as a year in the life of the Smith family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      These Are the 381 Books Removed From the Naval Academy Library

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      The Navy released the titles of 381 books on Friday evening that were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library on the Annapolis, Md., campus this week because their subject matter was seen as being related to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion topics.President Trump issued an executive order in January that banned D.E.I. materials in kindergarten through 12th grade education, but the office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth informed the Naval Academy on March 28 that he intended the order to apply to the school as well, even though it is a college.Read the Navy’s list of removed booksRead Document 19 pagesFirst on the list is “How to Be Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are “The Making of Black Lives Matter,” by Christopher J. Lebron; “How Racism Takes Place,” by George Lipsitz; “The Fire This Time,” edited by Jesmyn Ward; “The Myth of Equality,” by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.The list also includes books about gender and sexuality, like “Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex” by Elizabeth Reis, and “Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes” by Gerald N. Callahan. President Trump issued a separate executive order in January proclaiming that there are only two sexes.The academy began pulling books from the shelves at Nimitz Library on Monday evening and largely completed the task before Mr. Hegseth visited midshipmen on campus Tuesday afternoon. More

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      Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93

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      “Only men,” he wrote, “understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity.” His message resonated: His book “Fire in the Belly” was a best seller.Sam Keen, a pop psychologist and philosopher whose best-selling book “Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man” urged men to get in touch with their primal masculinity and became a touchstone of the so-called men’s movement of the 1990s, died on March 19 in Oahu, Hawaii. He was 93.His death, while on vacation, was confirmed by his wife, Patricia de Jong. The couple lived on a 60-acre ranch in Sonoma, Calif.Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been “overeducated at Harvard and Princeton,” fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books. He became a well-known figure in the human potential movement of that era.In the 1970s, he delivered lectures around the country with the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. He also gave workshops at two of the wellsprings of the New Age: Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Mr. Keen’s specialty was helping middle-class seekers slough off the expectations of family and society, and discover what he called their “personal mythology.”A long conversation that the ruggedly handsome Mr. Keen had with the journalist Bill Moyers, broadcast on PBS in 1991, brought him national exposure the month that “Fire in the Belly” was published. The book spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.“Fire in the Belly” spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.BantamWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Bad Nature,’ by Ariel Courage

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      In Ariel Courage’s novel, “Bad Nature,” a powerful career woman sets out on a road trip intending to kill her father.BAD NATURE, by Ariel CourageFor many people, being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 40 might prompt an instant reassessment of priorities. For Hester, the narrator of Ariel Courage’s debut novel, “Bad Nature,” this means immediately quitting her job in Manhattan to drive across the country and murder her father.It’s the sole item on her bucket list, and it’s also unfinished business: Her first attempt, at 13, when she shot him with a BB gun to stop him from abusing her mother, coincided with his permanent exit from their household. Since then, their relationship has consisted of Hester checking the internet now and then “to confirm he was alive and therefore still killable.” Think of “Bad Nature” as the anti “Eat, Pray, Love.”Personal-crisis travel narratives by white women, both memoirs and fiction, tend to follow certain conventions: protagonists embarking on journeys of earnest, emotional introspection in response to devastating news. These women tend not to be jerks. Hester — a lawyer who spends her days negotiating settlements for her conglomerate employer’s E.P.A. violations — runs right over these expectations with her Jaguar E-Type, then throws the car in reverse to do it again.Putting an unlikable heroine in the (literal) driver’s seat of a debut is an admirable feat, and Courage pulls it off through her character’s ruthless self-awareness, acerbic humor and one-liners so hilarious it’s tempting to read them aloud. “I wondered what my tumor was up to,” she thinks. “My breast was such an inhospitable place, meager and thin. I pictured my tumor like a goat on a cliff’s face, hunting for roughage to gnaw on. You almost had to root for it, the underdog. I called it Beryl.”Over the course of her journey — which quickly strays from the linear path she’s planned — Hester is not immune to personal growth, but “Bad Nature” is refreshingly more interested in social critique — particularly of American individualism and its harm to the collective good. Before she’s even left New York she’s already picked up a hitchhiker named John, a radical environmentalist (and sometimes eco-terrorist) whose current mission involves breaking into government “cleanup” sites and documenting their chemical damage via artistic photographs.Guiding Hester to several of these sites along her westward route, John becomes an unlikely but convincing foil to her amoral, fur-wearing consumerism: He’s “a species of ethical genius” who shuns materialism, shows interpersonal care and has an encyclopedic knowledge about the environmental impact of every human action, from drinking coffee to shooting someone. John challenges Hester’s long-held yet barely examined values by forcing her to confront the tangible fallout of the same kind of work that made her wealthy — and its link to terminal illnesses like her own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Liz Moore on ‘Long Bright River’ and the Slow Burn of Success

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      Suddenly Liz Moore blazed, comet-like, onto small screens and best-seller lists. But her writing career has been a slow burn.No matter how you slice it, Liz Moore has arrived.This month, an adaptation of her blockbuster novel “Long Bright River” started streaming on Peacock. And her next book, “The God of the Woods,” now on the best-seller list for 36 weeks (and counting), will soon hit the million mark in sales — a distinction normally reserved for celebrities and novelists recognizable by last name alone.Moore isn’t one of those authors. But, over the past two decades, she’s proved to be “a writer who can do anything,” as her editor Sarah McGrath put it.Moore taps into an elusive sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, populating vividly drawn settings with characters who seem to live, breathe and make terrible mistakes along with the rest of us. Her novels can be enjoyed by, say, a teenage girl and her 50-something father, defying genre and categorization to such an extent that, from one to the next, a reader might not register that they’re written by the same person.“I get messages saying, I loved your new book. Do you have any others?” Moore, 41, said during an interview at a cafe in Philadelphia. “Or they’ll call ‘The God of the Woods’ my second book because ‘Long Bright River’ was my first that broke out.”In fact, “The God of the Woods,” a mystery about siblings who disappear 14 years apart, is Moore’s fifth book. She wrote her first, “The Words of Every Song,” while she was a student at Barnard College. Shortly after she graduated in 2005, she signed on with an agent who’d come to campus for a panel on the publishing industry.“I reached out and said, ‘I have this manuscript of interconnected stories about the music industry. Would you be interested in looking at it?’ She said yes,” Moore recalled. “Only in retrospect do I realize what a lucky break that was.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Molly Young on Space and Music

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      A Booker-winning novel; a rocking essay collection.Édouard Manet/Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial CollectionDear readers,Do you know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut? The distinction rests on where the -naut was trained: Cosmonauts hail from Russia and astronauts from the United States, Canada, or Europe. Not China, though: The Chinese version is a taikonaut. If there exists another job with three different names of equally silky mouth-feel, I cannot think of it.The -naut distinction is one of several vocabulary upgrades you might receive from Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital,” which has taken the books desk by storm. Nobody pays us to get obsessed with specific books all at once; it just happens. (If we got paid, you’d know. Our fingers would be heavy with diamonds.)To counteract the expansive dreaminess of “Orbital,” I got down and dirty with Ian Penman’s collection of music essays. If you’re hankering to see the likes of James Brown and Prince (among others) treated with the penetration of an X-ray machine and the besottedness of a poet, Penman is your fella.—Molly“Orbital,” by Samantha HarveyFiction, 2023We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Actress Candy Clark Captured Some of the Most Famous Faces. Then She Put Them in a Drawer.

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      The actress Candy Clark documented her unlikely journey through 1970s Hollywood in a series of Polaroids, now published in a memoir.Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked the actor Rip Torn out of assaulting the director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with the painter Ed Ruscha, she was grazed by a stray bullet on the thigh. Once, she pinched David Bowie’s nipples.In Los Angeles, a city built on oversize lore and swaggering legend, where does one file away stories like these? Revealing but not gossipy. Candid but not lurid. Occasionally surreal but consistently sweet.“It’s a confessional era, right?” said Candy Clark, a former actress who wears a neat blonde bob and Warby Parker glasses, sitting in a booth at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. It was a recent Sunday afternoon, and Ms. Clark — the one behind the wheel of Mr. Bridges’s van, the starlet who tried to flirt with Mr. Spielberg, the peacemaker, the bullet-wound victim and the nipple-twisting culprit — was nibbling on pita and hummus.Dodging a life of mundane midcentury expectations, she started a modeling career in New York and went on to become a darling of the “New Hollywood” era in the 1970s. During her five decades onscreen, she collected over 80 film and television credits, establishing herself as a ubiquitous face who played mostly free-spirited lovers and burnouts like Debbie Dunham in “American Graffiti,” the part that earned Ms. Clark an Oscar nomination. It was her second-ever acting role.“It was my arrival,” she said, recalling the nomination. “You’re just the center of the universe, and it’s really wonderful.”A young Ms. Clark with the X-70 Polaroid camera she used to take photos of her fellow actors, before many of them became mega-famous.Candy ClarkWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More