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      Two Books From Down Under

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      Scrappy domestic novellas and a novel about the unhappy rich.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York TimesDear readers,Maybe it was too many formative basic-cable viewings of “Muriel’s Wedding,” or the fantastical names of their snack foods (Cheezels, Witchetty Grubs, Tim Tams). But as a kid I always imagined Australia to be a sort of sunny, not-quite-real mirror-world; a dusty cosmic boomerang plopped down in the South Pacific, overrun with strange animals and extravagantly diphthonged accents. (Also, Vegemite.)Their literature, like their toast spreads, has perhaps proved too strong an extract: Aside from a few household-ish names like Peter Carey and Liane Moriarty, Australian novelists never quite seem to crack the American consciousness the way those from closer corners of the Commonwealth regularly do. (Time will tell if Alexis Wright, whom we recently profiled, will prove an exception.)The books in this week’s newsletter, though, make bracing use of that famed predilection for pungency. They also have a particular feel for the painful unraveling of intimate relationships; a scorched catalog of long-held resentments and alliances shifted in the night. And those themes are universal, even when the signal has to traverse the salty trough of a 9,000-mile-plus culture gap. (What is this charming thing they call a “dunny,” you might pause in your reading to wonder, until Google helpfully explains that it is some sort of diminutive for toilets. And a Hot Milo? Not an unusual sex act, it turns out, just a brand of cocoa.)The first pick here comes from a grande dame of Australian letters, although she would probably balk at the term. The second I plucked from the three-dollar shelf at a Hudson Valley bookstore one wind-bitten day in late December — or as they know it in Melbourne, peak summer.—LeahWe 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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      Molly Recommends 2 Books Set in Italy

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      A travel memoir; a novel about boredom and erotic reverie.“A Saint Reading,” circa 1470Bartolomeo VivariniDear readers,To quote Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka:Hold your breath/Make a wish/Count to three/Come with me and you’ll be/In a world of pure imagination.Instead of touring a surreal chocolate manufacturer today, we’re wishing ourselves to someplace much realer and saltier, which is … Italy! I was fortunate enough to travel to lovely Parma last month on assignment for this newspaper. That article isn’t print-ready yet, but I will alert you when it’s out. Until then, we can armchair-travel together through the power of text.The only thing I read while in Parma was a phrasebook that proved indispensable for ordering cornetti and requesting napkins after being aerially struck by an Italian pigeon. But the real gold was what I read before the trip, in anticipation.Buon divertimento,Molly“Boredom,” by Alberto Moravia; translated by Angus DavidsonFiction, 1960We 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 Match Up These Short Stories and Their Screen Adaptations?

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      This 1950 film, a psychological thriller about four differing eyewitness accounts concerning a pair of crimes, was directed by Akira Kurosawa and is considered a cinematic masterpiece. Most of the script was adapted from “In a Bamboo Grove,” a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, with elements of another Akutagawa story as well. What is the name of the film? More

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      2 Books That Wring Every Ounce From Their Story Lines

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      An editor recommends an Irish novel about a banker in trouble and a Swiss novel about schoolgirl obsession.Sang An for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.Dear readers,At this point in the year, I’m not dreaming of the bounty waiting for me in the months to come.It’s not winter doldrums that get to me, but sobering, practical realities. The Christmas bills come due. The body labors under the wreckage of a monthlong caloric assault. So this is when I’m at my thriftiest, hunting (metaphorically) for bowls of thin broth that can sustain me as if I’d eaten laksa cooked down from the bones of a yak.Relatedly — somehow, I swear — I think often of the French chef André Soltner and his concept, by way of his mother, of the 13th egg: Whenever she cooked with them, she made sure to scrape out the remaining white that clung to the interior of the shell. Voilà! This is how she got 13 eggs from a dozen.The novels I recommend here are of that magic omelet variety: They let nothing go to waste. Bon appétit!—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?  More

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      DeSantis Drops Out, While Haley Is Still In

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      More from our inbox:Diverse Life ExperiencesSaving Landmarked Places of WorshipBooks as DecorationRon DeSantisNicole Craine for The New York TimesNikki Haley is the last woman standing in the Republicans’ presidential race, but she faces a tough challenge in toppling Donald J. Trump.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “DeSantis Decides to End Campaign for White House” (front page, Jan. 22):When I saw the news that Ron DeSantis was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not that I’m a fan of Mr. DeSantis; hardly, I’m not even a Republican. But, for the sake of our democracy, a part of me had hoped that Mr. DeSantis or Nikki Haley, or the two of them together, might have waged a distinct and spirited enough campaign to overcome the angry, populist, cultlike sway that Mr. Trump holds over G.O.P. voters.It’s becoming increasingly clear that both campaigns have fallen short. Meanwhile, a slew of Republican political leaders will continue to stick their heads in the sand about the dangers that Mr. Trump poses to the nation and instead endorse and proudly campaign for a man they know is not fit to be the leader of the free world.Watching all of this unfold is proving to be a grotesque and terrifying portrait of human behavior.Cody LyonBrooklynTo the Editor:As Ron DeSantis fades from the national scene after running one of the most incompetent presidential campaigns in memory, we should remember some of the damage he inflicted on his home state, Florida, to gain national attention.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?  More

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      Nikki Haley’s Books: What to Know

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      Her writings provide insights into her upbringing and identity, often glossed over on the stump, as well as her politics and ties with Donald Trump.If you plan to run for president, they say, write a book. Nikki Haley has written three.The first book, “Can’t Is Not an Option” (Sentinel, 2012), captures her upbringing in Bamberg, S.C., as one of four children in the only Indian American family in town. It also traces her ascent into politics, from a little-known state lawmaker to the first woman and first person of color to serve as South Carolina’s governor.She published her second, “With All Due Respect” (St. Martin’s Press), in 2019 after she left her post as ambassador to the United Nations in President Donald J. Trump’s administration. The 272-page memoir, released in a media blitz in which she echoed White House talking points against Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and defended his character, follows her transformation from governor to diplomat. And her 2022 collection of essays, “If You Want Something Done” (St. Martin’s Press), whose title comes from a Margaret Thatcher line she has deployed on the national debate stage, details the lives of pioneering women.Like all memoirs, Ms. Haley’s books tell a carefully curated story, skipping over controversies that would cast her in a less positive light. Here are a few things we learned from them.Her Indian-born parents were reared in comfort.Ms. Haley often says that she was born and raised in a rural town of 2,500 people and two stoplights, but she says little on the campaign trail about her heritage.Her mother and father, Raj and Ajit Randhawa, are from the Punjab region of India and left a life of affluence and comfort to come to the United States.Ms. Randhawa, who lost her own father at a young age, was raised “in a six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikh religion, to which she belongs,” Ms. Haley writes in “Can’t Is Not an Option.” Ms. Haley’s mother had attendants for her every need, including hauling her books to class, and earned a law degree when many Indian girls did not finish high school.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?  More

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      Taking a Cue From the Squirrels in My Birdhouse

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      Just before 2023 gave way to 2024, my husband and I drove down a mountain, talking about how to manage election-year anxiety. Specifically, my election-year anxiety. We had just spent a few days in a cottage in the woods, and we were jazzed on silence and stillness and the obligation to do nothing but walk together among the trees. To listen to the wind in the trees.We weren’t making New Year’s resolutions, exactly. We were feeling for ways to carry those days of calm into a troubling new year. I was proposing things like eating by candlelight every night or reading only poems after 5 p.m. My husband was proposing things like hiding my phone.For most of 2023 I managed to avoid poll-related panic by reminding myself that the election was still more than a year away. There were plenty of other calamities to worry about in the meantime — climate, biodiversity, war, gun violence, racism, health care access and the persecution of my L.G.B.T.Q. neighbors, just for starters. But lurking beneath it all was an understanding of how very much worse such troubles would get if autocrats took control of the American presidency in 2024.My husband is not very worried about the election. He trusts that American voters aren’t fools. He is able to check the news at night and only a moment later fall into the sleep of winter bears. I, on the other hand, will lie awake if I so much as glance at the headlines after dark.I found I didn’t worry so much while I was out on book tour last fall. There is really nothing like spending time in libraries and bookstores to give a person faith in humanity. I am profoundly direction-impaired, and solo travel can be disorienting for me, every street bewildering in the dark. But inside those little lighted spaces, people were nodding and smiling. People were reaching out for my hands.They would go home with a book, or sometimes a whole stack of books, and I was reminded yet again of how this commonplace miracle of connection — between writers and readers, between readers and one another — persists across distances. Every time I left a bookshop or a library last fall, I was filled with love for the sweetness in people.But it’s January now, and there is nothing to distract me from a looming election during which a shocking number of Americans hope to see an aspiring dictator reinstalled in the White House.My husband and I saw the New Year in as we always do, with our closest friends, and the next morning I woke up smiling. But when I went to the bedroom window to look for my first bird of the year, there were no birds to be seen. A squirrel peered at me from our largest birdhouse but quickly ducked back into the shelter of the leafy nest she’d built inside the box. She raised a litter of babies there last summer, and I’m pretty sure at least one of those youngsters, now grown, was inside with her on that cold New Year’s morning.When I stepped outside my own house, all was silence. No towhee scratching in the leaf litter. No winter-drab goldfinch picking through seedcrowns in the pollinator garden. No thirsty bluebird at the heated birdbath. No robin harvesting the last of the pokeberries. Not even any crows stalking across the churned soil where our late neighbor’s house so recently stood.According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on New Year’s Day sets a theme for your year. A robin can be a sign of renewal. A starling suggests adaptability. A crow might mean a year of wit and problem-solving and maybe even a little mischief. What did it mean for the new year to dawn entirely bereft of birds?I know that songbirds are quiet in cold weather, conserving their energy for warmth. I know they take shelter on gray days when hawks are on the wing, hunting while they can fly without casting a warning shadow. But my first thought on that silent New Year’s morning was not a realistic recognition of the cold or the drear. My first thought was an atavistic, apocalyptic fear: This what it will be like when all the birds are gone.After an hour of scanning the trees, I finally heard a blue jay, and then the returning call of another, and a moment later the first bird of 2024 appeared. Its colors were muted on that gray day — in birds, the color blue is created not by pigment but by the interaction of light and feather — but the blue jay’s impossible beauty was as clear to me in that instant as it has ever been in all my life of loving blue jays.The birds weren’t gone, of course. Like the squirrel in the nest box outside our bedroom window and the opossum tucked between the floor joists under our family room, they were only keeping still in the dense protection of pine and cedar, or roosting in the boxes they nested in last spring. In bad weather they always shelter together, sharing warmth — bluebirds in the nest box in our front yard, chickadees in the box under the climbing rose, Carolina wrens in the clothespin bag by the back door.The natural world does not exist to teach us how to live, much less to match our purposes, and the first-bird game is only a bit of whimsy. But in that moment of whooshing relief, after a blue jay finally flew from a pine, I found my lesson for the coming year. And it had nothing to do with where I keep the phone or how often I check for news, and very little to do with silence or candlelight or even poetry.To make it through the gathering disquiet, I will need embodied connection. As my wild neighbors did in the uncheery newness of an inhospitable morning, as I did myself in all the lovely places I visited on book tour, and in the company of dear friends on New Year’s Eve, I will need to seek comfort in the warmth of others this year. Whenever the cold creeps in, wherever the dark night pools, I will need to look for others. I will need not pixels but voices. Not distances but reaching hands.Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More