Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares80 Views

      in Elections

      2 Books That Capture New York

      by

      A stroll around the city with a great stylist; a comic novel of love and real estate.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesDear readers,I don’t make any special claims for New York except that it’s the city I know best. Well, that and the fact that people really do talk a lot about real estate, a subject that somehow manages to be tedious and thrilling, crass and impersonal all at once.The other day, I cried on the subway. This in itself wasn’t a big deal; if you live here long enough, the law of averages dictates that at some point you’re going to sob on an uptown 2 train while people studiously avoid your eyes or, occasionally, glare at you with faint irritation. It has always felt to me like a safe place to cry — a sort of international waters.Of course, on this occasion, I ran into someone I’d known slightly since kindergarten. We ignored the fact that I was weeping and talked vaguely about real estate and our plans to skip an upcoming reunion. I got off two stops early for both our sakes, bought a large pineapple juice and thought about E.B. White.—Sadie“Here Is New York,” by E.B. WhiteNonfiction, 1949We 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

    • 100 Shares96 Views

      in Elections

      Book Review: ‘The Spoiled Heart,’ by Sunjeev Sahota

      by

      “The Spoiled Heart,” by Sunjeev Sahota, contrasts race and class struggles in the story of a man’s downfall.THE SPOILED HEART, by Sunjeev SahotaThe titular spoiled heart of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel is not spoiled in the sense of being overindulged. It is spoiled in the sense of being ruptured, through hardship. A tragedy in which a man comes to personal and profession ruin, the novel explores whether the ruination is self-inflicted or societal, and whether it is a degenerative condition or if some radical surgery can reverse it. Certainly, Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence.Sahota’s fourth novel is his first to be set entirely in England. His debut, “Ours Are the Streets,” portrays the radicalization of a young boy in Sheffield and his life-changing return to his home in Pakistan. “The Year of the Runaways,” a Booker Prize finalist, follows three housemates in Sheffield and the interconnected tales of their migration from India. “China Room” counterposes the story of a young bride in 1929 rural Punjab with that of a second-generation immigrant battling addiction in 1999. Gender inequality, cultural alienation and generational trauma are some of Sahota’s favored themes, and they carry over into “The Spoiled Heart.”The protagonist is a 42-year-old factory manager in Chesterfield named Nayan Olak, who is hoping to advance his career by running for general secretary of Britain’s biggest union. The caregiver to his abusive father, Nayan grieves for his mother and son, who died in a fire in the family home and shop some 20 years prior. His marriage didn’t survive the tragedy, and now, in the fall of 2017, he is finally pursuing a love interest: Helen Fletcher, newly returned to her hometown with her son.Helen is a home health aide, so when she turns down an offer to care for Nayan’s father, we sense a conspicuous withholding of information. She and her teenage son, Brandon, have had to relocate from London after a public furor over remarks Brandon made at his job that were deemed racist — a story that Helen doesn’t disclose until it finds a horrible parallel in Nayan’s life.Withheld revelations and dark secrets drive the novel’s family saga and romantic strands. But the story’s engine lies in the union leadership contest between Nayan, who is running on a class-struggle platform, and Megha Sharma, a self-described change candidate fighting for racial equality. They’re both of Indian descent, though Megha hails from a wealthy family while Nayan had a far less privileged upbringing.The campaign escalates to a heated town-hall debate comprising the last act of the novel, in which the left eats itself by pitting identity politics against class solidarity. (Sahota himself has said in an interview that Prime Minister “Rishi Sunak is not my racial friend, he is my class enemy.” This might have been Nayan’s line if the novel were set a few years later, after Sunak’s rise to power, also as a professed change candidate.) Ultimately, the politics become personal, and the descending arc of Nayan’s life steepens.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

    • 150 Shares157 Views

      in Elections

      Do You Recognize the 15 Chapter Book Titles Hidden in This Puzzle?

      by

      Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda.Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda.Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda. More

    • 100 Shares134 Views

      in Elections

      Undeterred, Salman Rushdie Discusses His New Memoir, ‘Knife’

      by

      Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was blacked out, because his right eye had been blinded in the assault. But anyone wondering whether the author was still his old exuberant self would have been immediately reassured by the way he began his remarks, with a racy impromptu joke.“I want to remind people in the room who might not remember that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ was published in the same publishing season as Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’” he said, riffing on an earlier speaker’s mention of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler. “And when Jacqueline Susann was asked what she thought about Philip Roth’s great novel” — with its enthusiastically self-pleasuring main character — “she said, ‘I think he’s very talented but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’”It was classic Rushdie, improvisational literary wit deployed during a solemn occasion, in this case his acceptance of the organization’s Centenary Courage Award. It was also a triumphant signal that his brush with death — more than three decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder over the novel “The Satanic Verses” — had dampened neither his spirit nor his determination to live life in the open.His new book, “Knife,” which will be published April 16, is a harrowing account of the attack and its aftermath, and a reminder of how gravely injured he was. It’s also a deeply moving love story that attributes much of his recovery and good spirits to the tender, brave support of his wife of three years, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. (They met at an event in 2017 and flirted over drinks at the after-party; he walked smack into a glass door as he attempted to follow her onto the roof deck. The rest is history.)“I wanted to write a book which was about both love and hatred — one overcoming the other,” Rushdie said in a recent interview. “And so it’s a book about both of us.”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

    • 88 Shares134 Views

      in Elections

      The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic

      by

      To understand the state of men in this country, it’s necessary to know three things.First, millions of men are falling behind women academically and suffering from a lack of meaning and purpose. Second, there is no consensus whatsoever on whether there’s a problem, much less how to respond and pull millions of men back from the brink. Third, many men are filling the void themselves by turning to gurus to guide their lives. They’re not waiting for elite culture, the education establishment or the church to define manhood. They’re turning to Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and a host of others — including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson — to show them the way.Not all of these influencers are equally toxic. Tate, for example, is in a class by himself. He’s a pornographer who is facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. Peterson, by contrast, mixes good advice with a bizarre ideology. He’ll swing between compassionate insight and wild conspiracy. I’ve known men who genuinely improved their lives through elements of Peterson’s teaching. But to spend time watching and reading these gurus as a group is to understand why men continue to struggle even though the market is now flooded with online advice.It’s as if an entire self-help industry decided the best cure for one form of dysfunction is simply a different dysfunction. Replace passivity and hopelessness with frenetic activity, tinged with anger and resentment. Get in the weight room, dress sharper, develop confidence and double down on every element of traditional masculinity you believe is under fire.Yes, men are absolutely feeling demoralized, as Richard Reeves put it in his brilliant book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” But what is the influencer advice in response? Lash out. Fight. Defy the cultural elite that supposedly destroyed your life.I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics, for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.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

    • 163 Shares156 Views

      in Elections

      Faith Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life Into Quilts and Children’s Books

      by

      A champion of Black artists, she explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media and later the written word.Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose pictorial quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died on Saturday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Barbara Wallace.For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.Ms. Ringgold’s art, which was often rooted in her own experience, has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America.“Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of her work at ACA Galleries in Manhattan. “She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”The hallmarks of Ms. Ringgold’s style included the integration of craft materials like fabric, beads and thread with fine-art materials like paint and canvas; vibrant, saturated colors; a flattened perspective that deliberately evoked the work of naïve painters; and a keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives.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

    • 75 Shares156 Views

      in Elections

      2 Books About Other People’s Money

      by

      A tax manifesto by Edmund Wilson and a money-themed story collection.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesDear readers,I’m surprised by how rarely I encounter money in fiction — not casual hints of its abundance (trust funds, oversaturated educations, uninterrupted sleep) or painful absence, but actual grimy bills, checks uncovered long past their 180-day lives, the siren calls of Klarna and Afterpay.Strange, too, that so few books deal substantively with a near-universal vexation, by which I mean the tax system. Then again: To most reasonable people, taxes are a stand-in for drudgery. They are stressful. They are unfair and, at worst, insulting. (Have you filed yours yet, by the way?)But taxes also offer ample material, it seems to me, starting with the existential questions they bring up. What is my life worth? What do I owe? What is enough?At this point I should confess I have a perverse patience for the U.S. tax code, not least because I marvel at the obstinacy of its idiom. You mean to tell me that we have recondite, intricate rules boobytrapping our finances that require a specialized degree or a Rosetta Stone to interpret, and interpreting them incorrectly could lead to ruinous fines, prison or both?And we’re supposed to just take this?Plus, it’s fun to read about other people’s money. So in that spirit, here is a selection of books that grapple with these questions. One note, to pre-empt any howls of oversight: In the same boneheaded, stubborn vein that for years led me to compute my taxes by hand, I am not including the U.S. tax system’s most famous starring role in fiction, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, “The Pale King.” That book momentarily elevated the I.R.S. into a literary sensation, just as Nicholson Baker’s “Vox” did for phone sex, and plenty others have written about it. Taxes should be a little tough, and I’m not one to give myself an easy out. But I’ve always gotten a refund.—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

    • 138 Shares142 Views

      in Elections

      Review: In ‘The Outsiders,’ a New Song for the Young Misfits

      by

      The classic coming-of-age novel has become a compelling, if imperfect, musical about have-not teenagers in a have-it-all world.For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with eyewitness authority to teenage alienation. Even if its poor “greasers” and rich “socs” (the book’s shorthand for society types) now seem like exhibits in a midcentury angst museum, their inchoate yearning has not aged, nor has Hinton’s faith that there is poetry in every soul.These tender qualities argue against stage adaptation, as does Francis Ford Coppola’s choppy, murky 1983 movie. (It introduced a lot of young stars, but it’s a mess.) The material doesn’t want sophisticated adults mucking about in it or, worse, gentling its hard edges for commercial consumption. Harshness tempered with naïveté is central to its style and argument. To turn the novel into a Broadway musical, with the gloss of song and dance that entails, would thus seem a category error worse even than the film’s.And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see.Also key to the show’s power is the director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.Some of those sobs came from teenagers, who can’t have seen in recent musicals many serious attempts at capturing the confusions of youth. Though witches, princesses and leaping newsboys can be entertaining, their tales are escapes from reality, not portraits of it. From the start, “The Outsiders” is gritty — literally. (The stage is covered with synthetic rubber granules that kick up with each fight and footfall.) There is no sugarcoating the facts as Hinton found them: Her Tulsa, Okla., is an apartheid town, the greasers subject to brutal violence if they dare step into the socs’ territory or, worse, lay eyes on their girls.But the unavoidable cross-clan romance — between the 14-year-old greaser Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and the soc Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) — is something of a MacGuffin here. The score, by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, gives them just two songs, neither really about love.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