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      Book Review: ‘Beartooth,’ by Callan Wink

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      In Callan Wink’s new novel, two brothers struggling to make ends meet are forced to turn to shady ventures.BEARTOOTH, by Callan WinkAny reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit “Yellowstone” would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink’s new novel, “Beartooth.” Although both are set in Montana, their perspectives are radically different.Whereas “Yellowstone,” channeling “Dallas” and “The Godfather,” focuses on a rich and powerful ranching clan that defends its immense landowning interests through coldblooded violence and high-level political skulduggery, “Beartooth” shows us the struggles of two ordinary members of the rural precariat: the brothers Thad and Hazen, trying without much success to make ends meet after the death of their father. There are no prize stallions, private helicopters or cowboy hats to be found in “Beartooth” and no patriotic paeans to private property either.Wink offers instead a rawer, much less melodramatic version of the contemporary West in which the main challenge is not to conserve power and perpetuate a dynasty but to put new tires on the old truck, fill the propane tank for winter and fix the leaking roof.Plunged into debt by the cost of their father’s medical treatments, Thad and Hazen, who usually get by cutting and selling wood, are forced to resort to more lucrative but less legal ways of earning money. The novel opens with them hunting black bears out of season in order to harvest their gallbladders for the Asian market, a scheme suggested by a sinister local fixer called the Scot.As the story develops, the growing conflict between Thad and the Scot, an odd character who has a murderous past, wears a kilt and plays a set of bagpipes he has fashioned himself from bog oak and elk hide, generates most of the novel’s dramatic energy, while the sudden and unexpected arrival of the brothers’ previously absent mother, a hippyish van dweller named Sacajawea (after Lewis and Clark’s guide), provides a more emotionally nuanced domestic subplot.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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      At 83, Anne Tyler Has a New Novel. She’d Rather Talk About Anything Else.

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      While many of her contemporaries are playing canasta, she’s releasing her 25th book. There’s no mystery to it, Tyler says: Start on Page 1, then keep writing.Anne Tyler and I sat facing one another on a couch overlooking a man-made pond at her retirement community outside of Baltimore. She moved there in 2022 and likes the place well enough, with its woodsy walking trails, salt water pool and art studio.But when I asked Tyler, who is 83, what clubs or activities she’s joined at the sprawling facility, her answer was an apologetic “Nothing?”Tyler is too busy writing books. Her 25th novel, “Three Days in June,” comes out on Feb. 11, and she’s already percolating another.“I absolutely have to pick up a pen every weekday morning,” she said, opening a drawer to show her collection of Uni-Ball Signos in black ink. “They’re non-friction. I used to wear a Band-Aid on my finger, and now I don’t need one.”This is what passes for a revelation from Tyler, who rarely gives interviews and gracefully dodges questions about work. It’s not that she’s secretive or superstitious about her “craft” (a word she’d never use in this context). She just doesn’t understand what the hoopla is about: She established a writing routine and stuck with it, simple as that.Tyler has now been a fixture of the literary world for more than 60 years.When her first book, “If Morning Ever Comes” was published in 1964, the Times’s critic described it as “an exceedingly good novel, so mature, so gently wise and so brightly amusing that, if it weren’t printed right there on the jacket, few readers would suspect that Mrs. Tyler was only 22.”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 Your Knowledge of Famous Author Couples

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      Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. Ahead of Valentine’s Day, this week’s installment celebrates romantically linked authors and poets of the past and present literary world. 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 the books if you’d like to do some further reading. More

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      Book Review: ‘After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart,’ by Megan Marshall

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      The standout essays in Megan Marshall’s “After Lives” recall her troubled father and the fate of a high school classmate.AFTER LIVES: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, by Megan Marshall“All biography is autobiography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, but most biographers are marginal by definition: parasites or scavengers, “the shadow in the garden,” to quote a godfather of the genre, James Atlas, in turn quoting his thorniest subject, Saul Bellow. When they step out of the margins it’s often because something has gone wrong.In 2017 the highly esteemed biographer Megan Marshall, who won big prizes for her books about long-dead Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters, tried interlacing strings of her own life story with that of her former poetry teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, and was thanked with mixed reviews.Now Marshall is making another halting run at memoir, with a modest collection of essays on topics including her paternal grandfather, who worked for the Red Cross in France after the First World War and photographed the burial of young American soldiers; a run of left-handedness on her mother’s side of the family; and a trip the author took to Kyoto during typhoon season. This is not a typhoon-like book that will knock you over with its coherence, but irregular winds blowing this way and that, some hotter than others.The most compelling essay, “Free for a While,” is about Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old killed in a shootout that made front-page headlines in 1970. He had taken courtroom hostages in an attempt to force the release of his older brother George Jackson, the author of the best-selling Black Power manifesto “Soledad Brother,” from prison. Jonathan happened to be Marshall’s classmate at Blair High School in Pasadena, Calif., which canceled her planned salutatorian’s speech devoted to him (she managed to barge up and speak anyway).To read her account of the boy she knew as “Jon” getting laughs playing Pyramus from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in their A.P. English class — “Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die” — two weeks before his death, and to discover the devastating origin of the essay’s title, is to yearn for an entire new suite of intellectual property — book, play, movie — devoted to this 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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      Trading Hope for Reality Helps Me Parent Through the Climate Crisis

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      When I gave birth to my first child, in 2019, it seemed like everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. He came out white and limp, his head dangling off to the side. People swarmed into the hospital room, trying to suction his lungs so he could breathe. Hours later, my husband and I stood in the NICU, looking down at this newborn baby, hooked up to wires and tubes.We had spent months talking about how to protect him from various harmful influences, and here we were, an hour out of the gate, dealing with a situation we hadn’t even considered. Had his brain been deprived of oxygen for too long? Would there be lifelong damage?That night in the hospital, I learned the first lesson of parenting: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it. This applies to your child’s personality, many of his choices and to some extent his health. It also applies to the growing threat of climate change.The climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Here in Oregon, we’ve endured several severe heat waves and wildfires in recent years. As the impacts compound, it’s clear a lot of people around the world — many of them children — are going to suffer and die.Globally, one in three children is exposed to deadly heat waves, and even more to unclean water. A study estimated wildfire smoke to be 10 times as harmful to children’s developing lungs as typical pollution. Researchers also concluded that nearly every child in the world is at risk from at least one climate-intensified hazard: extreme heat, severe storms and floods, wildfires, food insecurity and insect-borne diseases.If you are someone like me who has children and lies awake terrified for their future, you should not let hopelessness about climate change paralyze you. In fact, I would argue that right now the bravest thing to do — even braver than hoping — is to stop hoping.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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      2 Books for Anxious Minds

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      Nadine Gordimer’s stories; Margaret Atwood’s sketches.Librado Romero/The New York TimesDear readers,How’s your attention span these days? Mine seems to have surrendered almost completely to fidgety unrest, an anti-flow state you might call gerbil-esque (fuzzy, skittering, frequently stuck on a wheel).Nobody wants to go full hamster. So it helps to have a day job that relies at least in part on getting lost in literature; the reliable lure of other voices, other rooms. But often lately I find myself reaching for great minds in small doses, concentrated pellets of wisdom and perspective that I can hold in one hand. And I have found myself especially soothed by the pithier works of two famously sharp women not known for suffering fools.Which is not to say that the books in this week’s newsletter are devoid of whimsy or delight. Intermittently, there are dips into the strange and fantastical; sometimes even a recipe (for poison, but still). Both bring a welcome bite and astringency to their tone, a sort of bracing witch hazel for the soul.—Leah“Loot and Other Stories,” by Nadine GordimerFiction, 2003We 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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      Can You Identify These London Locations in the Books of Charles Dickens?

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      A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — and in the works of Charles Dickens, that character was 19th-century London. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights locations or landmarks around the city that are mentioned in five of Dickens’s books, and each question offers a London-themed hint to help jog your memory. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading. More

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      Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?

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      When “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success “Glicked” — a reference to the portmanteau of “Barbenheimer” that described the joint cultural triumph of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.It was painful because the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.Whereas “Wicked” and the “Gladiator” sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays — through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments. Neither is as egregiously mediocre as “Moana 2,” the other blockbuster of the season: The musical numbers in “Wicked” and Denzel Washington’s Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that’s absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither are anything like the expression of mass-market creativity that we used to call The Movies.I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” is supposed to be cultural ferment: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck.Or maybe not stuck so much as completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.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