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      Book Review: ‘Grief Is for People,’ by Sloane Crosley

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      In her new memoir, “Grief Is for People,” Sloane Crosley works through the death of a beloved friend and mentor.GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE, by Sloane CrosleySloane Crosley opens her new book, “Grief Is for People,” with an explanation: “Container first, emotion second.” It’s a four-word guide for the reader: Relieve yourself of the need to understand, and open your mind to the experience of death, suicide and the emotional debris found when you consider the ultimate inevitability.“Grief Is for People” is Crosley’s eighth book (counting the novel she co-wrote under a pen name and the anthology she edited) and her first memoir. In it, she ties together two losses she suffered in 2019. The first: the theft of a collection of jewelry, including a beloved green cocktail ring that Crosley inherited from her grandmother, which was stolen when Crosley’s home was burglarized one afternoon. Threaded with it is the death of Crosley’s close friend, mentor and former boss, Russell Perreault, who worked for years as the executive director of publicity and social media for Penguin Random House’s Vintage Books imprint. He took his own life just one month after Crosley’s home was broken into, and the close timing of both events intertwines them emotionally for her, ultimately altering the experience of both losses in her memory and hindering her ability to process either.The memoir is divided into five sections that allude to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression and Afterward (instead of acceptance). In each section, Crosley dissects her memories for missed warning signs, lamenting her inability to predict what, and who, would soon be gone from her life. In the Depression, Anger and Bargaining sections, she anxiously considers if this was the moment that changed everything or maybe it was that one; she wonders if there was a right question she could have asked Perreault, something to say that would have rescued him from his fate.Perreault was a robust and complicated figure — he was a friend and mentor to Crosley, yes, but, as Crosley recounts, he also faced a series of complaints about his conduct inside the workplace and was confronting a host of other unknowns (to the author and to us). After his death, Crosley wants to know much more about him. She interrogates every interaction from their time together, especially those nearest to the tragedy. She wonders about the lack of invitations to his home in upstate New York, which, it turns out, Perreault had begun filling with more and more objects. (“He wasn’t a hoarder per se, but he was engaging in a land grab for the past, for souvenirs of a more contented time.”)A vein of tension in Crosley’s memoir is the desire to hold the memory of Perreault close, while trying to anticipate what life will be without him. Without his living voice present, she’s left to sift through old text messages and wonder “where everything I loved has gone and why.”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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      Book Review: ‘Headshot,’ by Rita Bullwinkel

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      Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, “Headshot,” spotlights eight boxers in a national tournament and the struggles of their inner lives.HEADSHOT, by Rita BullwinkelIt takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as “Headshot,” Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, which is set in the world of young women’s boxing. To put this another way: Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.The young women in “Headshot” have driven a long way, many of them, to Reno for a national 18-and-under championship. Some have slept in their cars. The novel follows eight of these boxers, fight by fight from the semifinals on, in chapters divided into short sections. The event is at Bob’s Boxing Palace, a grandiose name for a cheerless warehouse. Its ring looks secondhand, as if it were bartered for on Craigslist, the author writes.To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement. “The people are like moths being lured to their own deaths, but instead of death all that awaits them are large, plastic, alcoholic slurpees,” she writes, an oddly incisive description of the American experience writ large. She is just as shrewd about the second-rate referees, one of whom resembles “a hated magistrate trying to give a speech to the masses during a time of war.” Whatever she turns her attention to glows under her scrutiny.A tournament bracket turned on its side, Bullwinkel notices, resembles a family tree, though almost none of these boxers are related. Some are still girls, really. But without straining, the author locates commonalities. Few are from stable families. They are flowers that bloomed in muddy vases. Several were the kind of children “who were made to believe by other children that they may not deserve to be alive.” They have something to prove, even if only here in “the abyss of boxing.”These women revel in their toned bodies, radiant with heat. A black eye is likened to war paint. A vein slithers like a baby snake under the skin. A left hook to the side makes sweat pop “like a shower of diamonds.” This is kinetic writing, but it would mean little without this novel’s undertow of human feeling and the rapt attention it pays to life’s bottom dogs, young women who are short on sophistication but long on motivation.The tournament bracket provides this novel’s scaffolding, each chapter a bout. We witness the boxers’ different styles and their variegated interior monologues. One mutters and grunts through her fights, the way Erroll Garner did under his piano riffs. Others walk in with all guns blazing.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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      What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath

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      Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her buzzy forthcoming memoir, to try to correct some of those misunderstandings and provide a fuller […] More

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      Two Sun-Splashed Novels

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      An overbearing mother; a vanished sister.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesDear readers,Every time I lose my bearings — and my soul — in a department store, I wonder: Is this how nonreaders feel at Barnes & Noble?No, I don’t want to try a new fragrance. Yes, I’d like a fitting room, but I don’t understand why the curtain is always one inch short of full privacy. Or why the escalator is too fast/too slow/surrounded by unavoidable mirrors that make me look like Danny DeVito’s mom in “Throw Momma From the Train.” Also, why are they pushing macramé bikini “resort wear” in February?You understand why I do most of my clothes-shopping online.Where I live in New Jersey, it’s so cold and relentlessly gray these days, it’s hard to believe we share a planet with white sand beaches. To this end, I’d like to recommend two sun-splashed books for those of us who are not in the market for a straw visor or a colorful caftan. These novels will make you feel better about bypassing resort wear for what companies, for some reason, insist on calling a “base layer,” but you and I can still think of as long underwear.Warmly,Liz“Here Comes the Sun,” by Nicole Dennis-BennFiction, 2016We 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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      Restoring the Past Won’t Liberate Palestine

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      Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel.“You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated news coverage claiming that Israelis had unusually high rates of skin cancer. (They do not.) Skin cancer, these posts claimed, was proof that Israeli Jews were not native to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea but are in fact white Europeans with no ancestral connection to the region, enactors of one of the worst crimes of the modern age: settler colonialism.On one level, the claims about skin cancer — like similar ones about Israeli cuisine and surnames — are silly social media talking points from keyboard warriors slinging hashtags, hyped up on theories of liberation based on memes of Frantz Fanon quotes taken out of context. In the context of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza — more than 28,000 people dead, mostly women and children — such posturing may seem trivial. But even, or maybe especially, at this moment, when things are so grim, the way we talk about liberation matters. And I find this kind of talk revealing of a larger trend on the left these days, emanating from important and complex theories in the academy but reflected in crude and reductive forms in the memes and slogans at pro-Palestine protests — an increasingly rigid set of ideas about the interloping colonizer and the Indigenous colonized. In this analysis, there are two kinds of people: those who are native to a land and those who settle it, displacing the original inhabitants. Those identities are fixed, essential, eternal.I have spent much of my life and career living and working among formerly colonized peoples attempting to forge a path for themselves in the aftermath of empire. The rapacious carving up of much of the globe and the genocide and enslavement of millions of people by a handful of European powers for their own enrichment was the great crime of early modernity. The icons who threw off the yoke of colonial oppression — including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Fanon — were my childhood heroes, and they remain my intellectual lodestars. But I sometimes struggle to recognize their spirit and ideas in the way we talk about decolonization today, with its emphasis on determining who is and who is not an Indigenous inhabitant of the lands known as Israel and Palestine.A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is at best a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” More

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      Alvin Moscow, Shipwreck Chronicler and Prolific Collaborator, Dies at 98

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      After writing a best seller about the sinking of the Andrea Doria, he was a co-author with Richard M. Nixon, Patty Hearst, William S. Paley and others.Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas, Nev. He was 98.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Nina Moscow.Mr. Moscow was a reporter for The Associated Press when he covered the court hearings focused on determining the cause of the violent collision between the Andrea Doria, which was en route from Genoa, Italy, to New York, and the European-bound Stockholm, in dense fog about 45 miles south of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts on the evening of July 25, 1956.In all, 51 people died. But in a remarkable civil maritime rescue operation, more than 1,600 passengers and crew members survived.In “Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm” (1959), Mr. Moscow described the moment of impact between the ships:“With the force of a battering ram of more than one million tons, the Stockholm prow plunged into the speeding Italian ship, crumbling like a thin sheet of tin, until her energy was spent. With the Stockholm pinioned in her, the Andrea Doria, twice her size, pivoted sharply under the impact, dragging the Stockholm along as the giant propellers of the Italian liner churned the black sea violently to white.”“Collision Course,” Mr. Moscow’s account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria, was a New York Times best seller for 15 weeks.PutnamWalter Lord, who had described the sinking of the Titanic in his book “A Night to Remember” (1955), praised Mr. Moscow’s “magnificent analysis of the accident and sinking” in a review of “Collision Course” in The New York Times.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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      Two Books That Scandalized Readers

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      A blues novel; a baseball tell-all.Truman Capote isn’t the only author who has ruffled feathers. (Painting: “The Threatened Swan,” by Jan Asselijn, circa 1650)via RijksmuseumDear readers,Thanks to “Feud,” “Answered Prayers” is having a moment. For me, reading about Truman Capote’s act of social sabotage is a reminder that books — short stories, even! — have always been the best vehicle for scandal. After all, not only do they shock; they last. Here are just two memorable examples.—Sadie“Mojo Hand,” by J.J. PhillipsFiction, 1966The back cover of my 1985 reissue features two blurbs: One by Alice Walker, one by Henry Miller. The author photo is a head shot of the author taken in her late teens, staring through prison bars at a point beyond the camera lens. “BUSTED,” reads the caption, “for participating in a sit-in, J.J. Phillips in Wake Co. Jail, Raleigh, N.C., August, 1962.”That’s as good an introduction as any to this genre-defying, wildly idiosyncratic, astounding novel. It’s the myth of Orpheus, told through the eyes of a Black teenager named Eunice Prideaux who becomes obsessed with the enigmatic blues singer Blacksnake Brown. Eunice more or less runs away from home to live with Brown in North Carolina; he’s presumably decades older, and by turns cruel and indifferent.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 National Book Awards Opens Up to Writers Who Are Not U.S. Citizens

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      The awards, which celebrate the best of American literature, are expanding the definition of who qualifies.Since their inauguration in 1950, the National Book Awards have set a lofty goal: to celebrate the best writing in America. And for most of the awards’ history, American literature was defined as books written by United States citizens.On Thursday, the National Book Foundation, which administers the prizes, announced that it was dropping the citizenship requirement, opening up the prize to immigrants and other longtime residents who have made their home in the United States.Ruth Dickey, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, said she hoped the change would help broaden the way the book world defines great American writing.“We are all deeply thinking about, how do we most expansively think about the literature of a place, and how writers contribute to that place?” she said. “How do we think about who are the writers who are part of a literary community, and who are we excluding when we draw certain boundaries?”In adopting the change, the National Book Awards are following other major literary prizes and organizations.Last fall, the board that administers the Pulitzer Prizes said that beginning with their 2025 prizes, permanent and longtime residents of the United States would be eligible for its awards for literature, drama and music. Previously, those categories were only open to American citizens, whereas the journalism awards were open to noncitizens whose work was published by U.S. media. The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation have also expanded their prizes to include poetry by immigrants with temporary legal status.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