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      Book Review: ‘Us Fools,’ by Nora Lange

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      “Us Fools,” by Nora Lange, is a tale of two sisters living through the diseased expanse of the country’s recent history.US FOOLS, by Nora LangeJoanne’s voice has always been in Bernadette’s head. The Fareown sisters can’t escape each other, even if they can escape their roots. Growing up on their Illinois farm in the 1980s, Jo and Bernie have learned to fend for themselves, largely by sticking together.Their parents, distracted by the farm crisis that is burying their neighbors and much of rural America with them, spend most of their time “lovingly fondling each other like a set of keys.” The girls are restless and hungry, sick of the bland food their chain-smoking mother serves them. Instead, they devour Nietzsche and Woolf, home-schooling each other in their attic.In “Us Fools,” Nora Lange’s tender, exquisitely funny and supremely strange debut novel about these sisters, nothing much happens. Also, everything happens. The story opens in 1987 with Jo, age 11, taking a leap from the family’s roof, to “experience falling.” She’s the charismatic older sister, prone to violence and performance art, and Bernie, our narrator, is nearly effaced by her sister’s outsize shadow. Bernie dreams of a different life, one in which she can afford vitamins and other modern luxuries, and she tries to fight the designation her sister gives them: “junk kids.” But, like most of Jo’s forceful visions, it proves irresistible.The opening pages inform us that we are looking back at their childhood from 2009, as Bernadette holes up in a Super 8 in Bloomington, Minn., to make sense of her family’s history, “examining the contents of our lives like receipts.” The sisters are grown, and Joanne, still unpredictable as ever, wants a baby.In between these two coordinates, we travel with the Fareowns from the farm to Chicago and then to Deadhorse, Alaska, as Bernie tries to cure herself of “love-loathing” her sister. Bernie goes to college, Jo goes to an institution. But these and other medium-size events — deaths, moves, breakups, jobs, the stuff of most novels — take place between commas. They are the clauses dependent on Bernadette’s enduring interests: grand observations and minute movements. “Back in the Midwest,” she recalls in an early chapter, “the rate of suicide rose, so too did the number of New Coke haters.”In almost every exhilarating sentence, Lange tries to plug the vast, diseased expanse of our country’s history into this particular set of characters it has doomed: “The term ‘nuclear family’ had been installed in America like the questionable electric wiring in our house, which would fail.”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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      How Uvalde’s Newspaper Kept Going, Despite Unimaginable Loss

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      Craig Garnett, the publisher of The Uvalde Leader-News, opens up about covering a tragedy that was — and is — too close to home.Craig Garnett played many roles as he drove around Uvalde, Tex. in his white pickup truck.He was a proud father, pointing to the stadium where his son played football before switching to golf. He was a local historian, describing how farmers sold angora fiber to be spun into mohair at a mercantile near the main drag. He was an amateur lepidopterist, gently waving away swarms of monarch and snout butterflies that were migrating through town for the second time this year.But, approaching Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were gunned down in their classrooms on May 24, 2022, Garnett slipped into the role he’s best known for, as publisher and owner of The Uvalde Leader-News.Calmly, candidly, with a journalist’s eye for detail and a citizen’s disbelief, Garnett narrated the view: There was the drainage ditch where the shooter crashed his grandmother’s Ford F-150 before firing through the windows of the fourth grade wing. There was the door he walked through. The funeral home survivors fled to. The driveway where 376 law enforcement officers mobilized for 73 minutes before ending the carnage. The street where parents waited. The white crosses, one for each victim.“Devastating,” Garnett said. He pulled away from the gated, partially boarded-up building in silence.The offices of the Uvalde Leader-News are on the town square, across from a small park with a fountain.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesA memorial in a central plaza is bedecked with flowers, mementos and pictures of victims.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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      Try This Quiz on Books That Were Made Into Great Space Movies

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on fiction and nonfiction works about space exploration that were adapted into popular films.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions. More

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      Molly on 2 Alternatives to Certain Current Events

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      An underground party memoir; an argument for nonhuman life.Bequest of Florence S. Schuette, 1945Dear readers,For reasons that need not be stated, here are two books that represent an alternative to the pace of the news. Enjoy at whatever speed suits you.—Molly“Health and Safety: A Breakdown,” by Emily WittNonfiction, 2024When I say this book is breathtaking, I am not trotting out a metaphor; it really did alter my respiration! Sometimes in the direction of excited quickening, other times toward a sorrowful (temporary) arrest. “Health and Safety” is a memoir in the form of fieldwork; its topic is a specific pre-pandemic party scene in New York that revolved around music, dance, sex, design and consciousness-altering drugs.Witt, a staff writer at The New Yorker, takes pleasure seriously in a way that few contemporary American writers do. The book laces strands of history and brain chemistry and auto-anthropology into her account of a lapsed fairyland — a smattering of clubs and illegal venues in 2010s Brooklyn that attracted people who were keen on losing their minds in a specifically connoisseurial way.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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      New Horror for Readers Who Want to Be Completely Terrified

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      Curdle CreekBy Yvonne Battle-FeltonThe town at the center of Yvonne Battle-Felton’s new novel, CURDLE CREEK (Holt, 292 pp., $27.99), is a small, all-Black, separatist community with a strict population policy: “One in, one out.” To keep the enclave safe, there are many yearly rituals required of residents, including Moving On, Warding Off, the Calling and the Running of the Widows.Osira has always lived in Curdle Creek, but she fears her standing because her children broke the town’s rules and ran away. Then her father’s name is called for a murderous ritual, but rather than submit, he flees. With her position jeopardized, Osira is forced to prove herself by traveling into different realms to answer for Curdle Creek’s sins and make things right … whatever that means.“Curdle Creek” explores the sacrifices people are willing to make for safety, and how surrendering freedom for the common good can sometimes morph into self-immolation. Power struggles, pettiness, violence perpetrated in the name of religion, along with dark secrets hidden in the fabric of the community, make life in the small town a repressive, stressful nightmare. With tight dialogue, elegant writing and a startling ending, this is a wonderful novel about the worst monsters of all: people.Nether StationBy Kevin J. AndersonIä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Rejoice, Cthulhu devotees, Kevin J. Anderson’s NETHER STATION (Blackstone, 308 pp., $27.99) is a fun, pulpy mix of science fiction and cosmic horror that clearly admires, and pays homage to, H.P. Lovecraft.Cammie Skoura is a neurodivergent astrophysicist who investigates wormholes. She and a professor have spent years studying one wormhole in particular, Nether, but after losing an important research probe, they had to abandon the project.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 Novels About Complicated Nuns

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      An atheist in a convent; a bloodthirsty reality show hostess.Slawomir Kaminski/Agencja Gazeta via ReutersDear readers,What a joy to begin this column from a place of abundance! Forbidding, austere, often terrifying, occasionally ecstatic abundance!I’m talking, of course, about nuns in literature.Though I come from a mixed-faith family, I have basically zero real-life experience with Catholicism and its servants. So my research for this newsletter has been eye-opening. I knew about Muriel Spark’s allegorical treatment of Watergate enacted by a cunning abbess (only you, Muriel). Ditto Denis Diderot’s “La Religieuse,” which began as an extended literary prank and somehow became a proto-Enlightenment cri de coeur.But there’s more. I dare you to remain unmoved by the correspondence between the 12th-century philosopher-nun Héloïse and her illicit husband, Abelard, who was castrated after he impregnated her. (For good measure, both were then cloistered.) Nor can we forget Teresa of Ávila, exhaustive chronicler and enthusiast of mortifications of the flesh.So, yes, nuns have provided a true buffet, even for us spiritual mongrels. Were this a semester-long seminar I could reach back to some of the very first women of God in literature (Chaucer’s Prioress, Margery Kempe) — but to meet the moment, here are two more recent treatments of literary sisters.—JoumanaWe 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 Safekeep’ Is a Story in the Shadow of Anne Frank

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      In Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” the writer spins an erotic thriller out of the Netherlands’ failure to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.The author Yael van der Wouden stood in her slippers at the front door of a canal house in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Let me prepare you for the journey ahead,” she said, smiling. “There will be a lot of stairs.”She turned and led the way through a long darkened hallway, up a narrow staircase, to another winding hallway, and up more stairs to reach her attic-level apartment in the back of the building.“My landlady calls it ‘het achterhuis,’” said van der Wouden, once inside the cozy interior with slanting roof beams, decorated with books and bric-a-brac. “She’s about 90, and I don’t think she quite understands what that means to me.”“Het Achterhuis,” is the Dutch title of Anne Frank’s famous World War II diary. In English, it is often translated as “the secret annex,” referring to the storage space where the teen diarist and her family hid to escape the Nazis for more than two years. But “achterhuis” is also just a term for the back part of a house, and van der Wouden, who is Israeli and Dutch, does not fault her landlady for missing the reference.“It feels like just another part of existing invisibly, where no one quite thinks about the full effect of their words,” van der Wouden said.“The Safekeep,” van der Wouden’s debut novel and one of six books shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is full of such clashing perspectives. Words that mean one thing to a character can hold explosive charge for another. Seemingly innocuous objects like silver spoons, or a single shard of broken china, become emotional land mines.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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      The Australian Ballet’s ‘Oscar,’ Ventures Into New Romantic Territory

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      The Australian Ballet’s premiere of “Oscar,” based on the life of Oscar Wilde, explores the love relationship between two men.Boy loves girl. Prince enchanted by princess. Or swan queen, sylph, fairy, doll, peasant girl or courtesan.The central narrative elements of the full-length story ballets familiar to audiences mostly share a single element: The central romantic relationship is between male and female characters. Since many of these ballets (“Giselle,” “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty”) date from the 19th century, that’s not surprising. But well into the 21st century, ballet — unlike opera, film or theater — has been slow to take up the challenges of telling other kinds of tales.That changed last month, with the Australian Ballet’s premiere of “Oscar,” about the life of Oscar Wilde. Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon and set to a score by Joby Talbot, it is the first full-length narrative ballet that makes a gay hero and his love for another man its central subject.In a video call, Wheeldon pointed out that Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake — which featured an unhappy, repressed prince falling in love with a fiercely alluring male swan — was a groundbreaking forerunner, although not a classical ballet. But since then, he said, almost no narrative dance work has put a gay romance at its heart. David Bintley’s 1995 “Edward II” depicted something of the king’s relationship with Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall, but even the Yuri Possokhov-Kirill Serebrennikov “Nureyev” at the Bolshoi almost entirely skirted the issue of the dancer’s sexuality.It was time for something more. “I wanted us to be a company that tells stories that resonate, to be bold in our storytelling,” said David Hallberg, the artistic director of the Australian ballet. “Oscar Wilde wrote these beautiful tales, but was persecuted in a way that is still true for many people today.”Wheeldon, a major choreographer, clearly likes a narrative challenge. He has created the full-length “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “Like Water for Chocolate” for the Royal Ballet, and directed and choreographed (and won Tony Awards for) two Broadway shows, “An American in Paris” and “MJ: The Musical.”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