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      2 Books for Rebels

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      A maid resists her employers; citizens resist their country.He would prefer not to: A scene from the 1970 movie “Bartleby.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesDear readers,Nowadays, nothing is more conventional than defying convention. Everyone from tech billionaires to hack politicians claims to be a rebel, a contrarian, a disruptor, which might mean that nobody is. Ostentatious badassery is a played-out pose. True resistance is rare and doesn’t always announce itself as such. The most radical slogan in literature might belong to Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”In that spirit, I lately find myself rejecting florid dramas of opposition in favor of modest gestures of refusal — acts of subversion motivated by impatience, or a plain indifference to the way things are supposed to be: the blithe insouciance of a servant upending the assumptions of her masters; the cunning of peasants bamboozling the royal tax collector. I recommend these books to stiffen your spine in the face of what and whoever wants to stifle your spirit, usually while telling you that it’s for your own good.—A.O.“Cluny Brown,” by Margery SharpFction, 1944Cluny Brown is not cunning or crafty; she doesn’t even think of herself as a rebel. The orphaned 20-year-old niece of a London plumber, Cluny is guileless, openhearted and supremely self-confident. She doesn’t do what is proper or expected, but what makes sense at the time, whether that is unclogging a sink, walking a dog or falling in love, first with a pharmacist and then … but I won’t spoil it.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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      C.J. Sansom, Mystery Novelist Drawn to Tudor England, Dies at 71

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      He wrote a popular series of books revolving around a hunchbacked detective, Shardlake, whose troubles echo the author’s experiences of childhood bullying.“Oh, goody! An 800-page novel about the peasant uprisings of 1549!” Marilyn Stasio, the longtime mystery and crime reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, began a column in 2019.It was an assessment of “Tombland,” the seventh work of historical fiction by C.J. Sansom to feature Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective whose exploits solving chilling murders in Tudor England come steeped in suspense and granular historical detail. Readers are made privy to the court intrigues of Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII, eavesdrop on women arguing in a market stall, and inhale the stench of London streets.Ms. Stasio’s enthusiasm was real, not snarky. “Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” she wrote.Mr. Sansom, who earned a Ph.D. in history and a law degree before turning to writing in his late 40s, quickly becoming one of Britain’s most popular historical novelists, died of cancer in hospice care on April 27. He was 71.His death was announced by his publisher, Pan Macmillan, which did not say where he died. In 2012, Mr. Sansom disclosed that he had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, but said it was in remission after treatment. The disease returned during his work on “Tombland,” forcing him to quit writing for six months. He eventually resumed working two hours a day and finished the book, his last to be published.“Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” a Times critic wrote in 2019 in reviewing Mr. Sansom’s seventh Shardlake novel. Mulholland BooksWe 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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      Paul Auster, Prolific Author and Brooklyn Literary Star, Dies at 77

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      With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author and patron saint of his adopted borough drew worldwide acclaim.Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.His death was confirmed by a friend, Jacki Lyden.With his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks, Mr. Auster was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”Though a New Jersey native, he became indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work — particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood.As his reputation grew, Mr. Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, who was raised in nearby Prospect Heights, wrote in an email. “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”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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      PEN America Has Stood By Authors. They Should Stand By PEN.

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      All strong institutions stand to benefit from internal dissent and external pressures. But too often, recent efforts to reform institutions have meant reconstituting them in ways that distort or fundamentally undermine their core mission.Nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies, university departments and cultural institutions have ousted leaders and sent their staffs into turmoil in pursuit of progressive political goals. In the wake of the 2016 election and the 2020 murder of George Floyd and in a rush to apply sweeping “In this house we believe” standards unilaterally, organizations have risked overt politicization, mission drift, irrelevance and even dissolution. And now the war in Gaza is ripping its way across American universities.The latest target is PEN America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to free expression by journalists and authors. Last week, after an increasingly aggressive boycott campaign by some of its members, PEN canceled its annual World Voices Festival, which was conceived by Salman Rushdie and was to mark its 20th anniversary in May. This followed a refusal by several writers to have their work considered for PEN’s annual literary awards. The ceremony awarding those prizes was also canceled.An open letter sent to PEN America’s board and trustees and republished on Literary Hub, now the de facto clearinghouse for pro-Palestinian literary-world sentiment, accused the organization of “implicit support of the Israeli occupation” and of “aiding and abetting genocide.” It demanded the resignation of PEN’s longtime C.E.O., Suzanne Nossel, and current president, Jennifer Finney Boylan. According to its 21 signatories, mostly up-and-coming authors, “among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”In response and in keeping with its mission of independence and free expression, PEN America accepted the writers’ willingness to voice their conscience. It has also made clear that there is room for more than one point of view on what constitutes genocide and on the current conflict in Gaza.“As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit,” PEN America stated in an open letter to its community.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 Memoirs by Poets

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      Carl Sandburg’s boyhood; Carolyn Forché’s political awakening.Antonin Thuillier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear readers,Not long ago at a book party (yes, they still exist), I fell into conversation with a well-known poet (they also still exist) who told me that, at her editor’s urging, she was hard at work on her memoir.How’s that going? I asked.“Oh, I hate it!” she told me merrily. She wasn’t used to writing long: “I want to cut every page down to a paragraph, and every paragraph down to a line. I want to be writing poems.”Fair enough. Just because somebody excels at one form of language is no guarantee that she will excel at another; in theory, asking a poet to write a memoir makes no more sense than asking a ballerina to play rugby. But some dancers, it turns out, are spectacular in the scrum. Here are two.—Greg“Prairie-Town Boy,” by Carl SandburgNonfiction, 1955We 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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      Helen Vendler: An Appreciation

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      She devoted her life to showing us how and why.Defenses of poetry by modern poets tend to accentuate the negative. “I too, dislike it,” says Marianne Moore, taking for granted that you feel the same way. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden admits. “A mug’s game,” T.S. Eliot calls it. William Carlos Williams observes that “it is difficult to get the news from poems.” The bad news about poetry is that it’s obscure, difficult, marginal — a trivial pursuit in a culture preoccupied with other fancies.The good news is that nobody told Helen Vendler. Vendler, who died this week at 90, was an admired professor and a tireless, sometimes combative critic. In both those roles she was, above all, a reader of poems. Not an ideal reader (every writer knows there’s no such thing), but an exemplary everyday reader. She read poetry because she liked it, because it stirred her to thought and feeling, because she believed it mattered in the world.“To know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life,” she wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1972, “makes you long for news of yourself, for those authentic tidings of invisible things, as Wordsworth called them, that only come in the interpretation of life voiced by poetry.” This was by way of saluting James Merrill as “one of our indispensable poets,” but Vendler was also making a case for the indispensability of poetry itself, in the most direct and personal terms. Poetry matters insofar as it matters to you.If it does — if, like me, you have spent at least some of your life over the past half century or so looking at poems — you are likely to find yourself in Vendler’s debt. And also, sometimes, in what can feel like a personal quarrel with her.She was such a ubiquitous presence — the go-to poetry reviewer for serious, nonspecialist publications like The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and this one — and wrote with such calm, rigorous authority, that some resentment was inevitable. The breadth of her knowledge was formidable, but her taste could seem narrow, her enthusiasm a form of establishment-friendly gatekeeping.She upheld a canon of the English lyric, of first-person poems grounded in strong feeling, passed down from Shakespeare and George Herbert (she wrote books about both) through the Romantics to moderns like Yeats, Auden and, above all, Wallace Stevens. Many of the contemporary poets she praised, like Merrill and Robert Lowell, could be assimilated to that lineage. She was suspicious of more experimental or avant-garde tendencies, and skeptical of poetry overtly political or overly personal. Her criticism, too, avoided the theoretical leaps and sweeping cultural statements that animated literary discourse in and out of the academy.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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      7 Books on Grief, Loss and Bereavement

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      Psychologists, counselors and other experts share the titles they recommend most.Joanna Luttrell is well acquainted with grief. The bereavement coordinator supports families that are navigating a child’s terminal illness at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis.From the moment they receive a diagnosis until a year after the loss, “I send letters, resources, emails,” Ms. Luttrell said, so that families know they have support. A big part of the process, she added, involves sharing books.If there’s a “challenging relationship or situation, I might send out a book right away,” she said. “If they’re looking to process their experience, and their emotional response to their experience, I will send one a bit later.”While grief is universal, it’s complicated and highly individualized, Ms. Luttrell said. Reading books can provide perspective and help mourners feel less alone, she has found.We asked Ms. Luttrell, as well as counselors, psychologists and other experts on loss, to recommend the most helpful books about grief.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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      Kathleen Hanna Reveals the Story of Her Life in ‘Rebel Girl’

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      The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wine glass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.Kathleen Hanna at home with her dog, Terry. While writing her memoir, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a D.I.Y. feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”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