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      3 Poets Who See Society Freaking Out, and Respond in Kind

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      New collections from Alexandra Teague, Daniel Borzutzky and August Kleinzahler tap into a strain of cultural anxiety.Are you overwhelmed? I know I am. Even with recent sparks of hope, there have been a hell of a lot of slings and arrows lately. We have not been fine. But when things get tough, we can turn to poetry. Of course, poetry’s as overwhelmed as we are, anxious company, as these three new books amply illustrate.Alexandra Teague meets this moment with megaphones blaring in her fourth collection, OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFYING (Persea, paperback, $18) — the volume knob on most of these poems starts at seven and goes way past 11. They portray an oversaturated America where “the man in the size-twelve heels calling Girl, how do these look?/would never tell you walking in this country is free.” This multiscreen, surround-sound blitz is often thrilling — Teague seems to have an everlasting supply of ideas, and she is frighteningly clever. Her best lines are like stand-up tragedy.Everywhere Teague looks she sees the rapid degradation of human civilization and the planet along with it. “Because something has to be to blame,” she recruits Yeats’s rough beast, that famous harbinger of doom, as her avatar in a series of poems that journey into the bowels of a fallen nation plagued by guns and “foreclosed windows. Meth.” The beast is, of course, an embodiment of the horrors humanity has wrought, “made of the past like a junk shop/with split-frame washboards/and dolls with crazed, crazy eyes.” Teague’s beast reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ “person man,” the one who was “hit on the head with a frying pan”: sad, sympathetic and a bit blank.In Teague’s more personal poems, all that churning associative machinery sharpens her metaphors to startling points, as in the gorgeous “The Horse That Threw Me,” a visionary lyric, one of the finest I’ve read in years. Figures braid and cascade until horseback riding becomes synonymous with the will to live: “Didn’t you want to canter beyond yourself? Of course you/did.” It’s a glorious poem, and there are more. But be warned: Teague dramatizes a seriously overwhelming world by seriously overwhelming her readers. This book may induce authentic anxiety. But so does your phone, every time you pick it up.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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      2024 National Book Award Finalists Are Named

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      Percival Everett’s “James,” Salman Rushdie’s “Knife” and Diane Seuss’ “Modern Poetry” are among the honorees. Winners will be announced next month.This year’s finalists for the National Book Award include the novel “James,” by Percival Everett, a retelling of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of an enslaved man, “Knife,” by Salman Rushdie, a memoir about the stabbing attempt on his life and his recovery, as well as books translated from Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and French.The National Book Foundation announced its 25 finalists on Tuesday for awards across five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. The winners of the National Book Award, among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States, will be announced in November.The fiction finalists also included Miranda July’s “All Fours,” about a 45-year-old artist whose road trip is cut short for a torrid affair. ’Pemi Aguda’s “Ghostroots,” a debut short story collection set in Lagos, Nigeria, was also on the list, as was “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar, a book about addiction, grief and art, and “My Friends,” by Hisham Matar, which follows three Libyan exiles living in Britain.In the nonfiction category, Kate Manne’s “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” explores weight stigma in different facets of society, including health care and employment. “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” by Eliza Griswold, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, documents the rise and fall of a progressive Christian church. In “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” Jason De León embeds with human smugglers. Deborah Jackson Taffa examines her Native identity and her family’s history of displacement in “Whiskey Tender.”The poetry finalists include Diane Seuss, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the same category in 2022, and m.s. RedCherries, who was nominated for her debut poetry collection, “mother,” which is about an Indigenous child who is adopted by a non-Indigenous family. Anne Carson’s “Wrong Norma” is made up of prose poems and drawings about everyday life. Fady Joudah’s collection “[…]” is about Palestinians and the horrors of war, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Something About Living” is about the erasure of Palestinian history.In translated literature, Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library” is set in a dystopian future. It was translated from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. “Taiwan Travelogue,” by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, is about a Japanese writer and her relationship with her Taiwanese interpreter. “Where the Wind Calls Home,” by Samar Yazbek, translated from Arabic by Leri Price, is told through a 19-year-old soldier who is trying to survive the Syrian Civil War. “The Villain’s Dance,” by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, was translated from French by Roland Glasser and “Ædnan” by Linnea Axelsson was translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel.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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      Find the Book Titles Hidden in This Story

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      “I don’t care if you have roots in the business, but I think being a detective is a risk and an unsuitable job for a woman,” said Doyle, as he picked the lock on the door. “Just say the word if you want to stay in the car.”“I’d say that word is misogyny,” snapped Duncan as they entered the apartment. “My dad knew I had the right stuff — and usually the scruples — to be a P.I.” She glanced around the spotless home. “And I fortified myself this morning with a big bowl of Wheaties, the breakfast of champions.”“Time and again I’ve seen awful things in these searches,” said Doyle, as he looked around. “But there’s no sign that something happened or evidence someone in the final days before self-harm.”Duncan checked behind a curtain and saw an imprint on the shag rug where a suitcase had clearly been stored. On the desk sat an open book and a brochure for a Poconos resort. “Song of Solomon 2:16, a verse often used in weddings, is underlined in this Bible,” she announced. “Maybe this is just a love story with a secret elopement.”“I don’t care if you have roots in the business, but I think being a detective is a risk and an unsuitable job for a woman,” said Doyle, as he picked the lock on the door. “Just say the word if you want to stay in the car.”“I’d say that word is misogyny,” snapped Duncan as they entered the apartment. “My dad knew I had the right stuff — and usually the scruples — to be a P.I.” She glanced around the spotless home. “And I fortified myself this morning with a big bowl of Wheaties, the breakfast of champions.”“Time and again I’ve seen awful things in these searches,” said Doyle, as he looked around. “But there’s no sign that something happened or evidence someone in the final days before self-harm.”Duncan checked behind a curtain and saw an imprint on the shag rug where a suitcase had clearly been stored. On the desk sat an open book and a brochure for a Poconos resort. “Song of Solomon 2:16, a verse often used in weddings, is underlined in this Bible,” she announced. “Maybe this is just a love story with a secret elopement.”“I don’t care if you have roots in the business, but I think being a detective is a risk and an unsuitable job for a woman,” said Doyle, as he picked the lock on the door. “Just say the word if you want to stay in the car.”“I’d say that word is misogyny,” snapped Duncan as they entered the apartment. “My dad knew I had the right stuff — and usually the scruples — to be a P.I.” She glanced around the spotless home. “And I fortified myself this morning with a big bowl of Wheaties, the breakfast of champions.”“Time and again I’ve seen awful things in these searches,” said Doyle, as he looked around. “But there’s no sign that something happened or evidence someone in the final days before self-harm.”Duncan checked behind a curtain and saw an imprint on the shag rug where a suitcase had clearly been stored. On the desk sat an open book and a brochure for a Poconos resort. “Song of Solomon 2:16, a verse often used in weddings, is underlined in this Bible,” she announced. “Maybe this is just a love story with a secret elopement.” More

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      John D. MacDonald Knew a Hurricane Like Helene Was Coming

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      John D. MacDonald was eerily prescient about the risks of human-driven climate disasters in the region.When I learned early Friday morning that Cedar Key, Fla., had been flattened overnight by Hurricane Helene, one of the first things that came to my mind was a song lyric by Jimmy Buffett — early Buffett, before he became a walking tourist attraction. One of his better songs is “Incommunicado,” released in 1981. It begins: “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key/That’s what old John MacDonald said.”Buffett didn’t get it quite right. McGee, the tanned, laid-back antihero of John D. MacDonald’s terrific thriller novels, didn’t hang out in Cedar Key. He docked the houseboat he lived in — it was named the Busted Flush, because he’d won it in a card game — on the opposite coast, in Fort Lauderdale.But Buffett clearly knew MacDonald’s own geography. The novelist, who died in 1986, spent most of his adult life in Sarasota and on nearby Siesta Key, just a few hours south of Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. When Helene scraped ruinously along the central and northern parts of the Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night, it was taking aim at MacDonald country.There are many reasons to read MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels, which include “The Deep Blue Good-By” (1964), “Pale Gray for Guilt” (1968) and “The Dreadful Lemon Sky” (1974). They’re sly, satirical, tattered around the edges. Kingsley Amis thought MacDonald was a better writer than Saul Bellow. All of the McGee books have colors in their titles. MacDonald was among the first to use this sort of mnemonic device, as Sue Grafton would in her alphabet series, so readers could remember which ones they’d read.Another reason to read MacDonald is that he was eerily prescient. How much so? He saw Helene coming, more clearly than most. Here is a paragraph from his novel “Dead Low Tide,” from 1953:You pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Key a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. … It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges and start it all over again.In his 1956 novel “Murder in the Wind” (also published as “Hurricane”), he wrote about a storm named Hilda — not Helene, but close enough — that destroys the area around Cedar Key. In an author’s note at the front, he urges anyone doubting the plausibility of such a disaster to remember that just six years earlier, a hurricane had put much of the region underwater.“Though the chance is statistically remote,” MacDonald writes, “there need only be the unfortunate conjunction of hurricane path and high Gulf tide to create coastal death and damage surpassing the fictional account in this book.”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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      Inside the Sally Rooney Fan Base

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      We explore some of the most passionate fans in literature.On Wednesday, a crowd of mostly young women, many carrying bookstore tote bags, filled a venue on the bank of the River Thames. They — we — were there to hear the Irish novelist Sally Rooney discuss “Intermezzo,” her latest novel.Rooney is a literary star, and each new release is a highly anticipated and heavily marketed cultural event. Fans attend midnight release parties. The lucky few who get advance copies wield them as status symbols on social media. “I did post the book,” a 26-year-old Rooney fan told me. “Everyone knows I’m obsessed with her.”Rooney’s writing embodies a kind of cool that feels of the moment. Her style is unforced, spare and incisive — the literary equivalent of Gen Z’s habit of omitting capital letters from text messages, or the doe-eyed, bored poses of influencers on Instagram. “If writing is almost too effusive, too emotional, it becomes a bit cliché,” another fan told me. “I think her writing feels really fresh because it’s pared back.”The simplicity of Rooney’s language is part of its power. Her most emotionally resonant sentences have word counts in the single digits, and they arise in mundane situations. “Normal People,” Rooney’s second novel, is about two young people, Connell and Marianne, who are negotiating their relationship, with its various power imbalances, while feeling out their place in the world. I think about this scene a lot:“She smiled, rubbed at her nose. He unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders. They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”Many of the Rooney fans I spoke with at the book talk on Wednesday — all in their late 20s — praised the emotional truth of her writing. “I couldn’t believe that somebody had written something that I related to so much,” a fan said of “Normal People.” Rooney’s books deal in the fraught business of interpersonal relationships — the difficulty of vulnerability, miscommunication, understanding one’s own power over another. At an “Intermezzo” midnight release party in Brooklyn.Ye Fan for The New York TimesHer characters often consider their political and social context, what it means to be young and to be in love right now, at a time when connection can be difficult and things appear to be falling apart. In Rooney’s third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the character Alice writes to her best friend, Eileen:“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?”At the event, I found myself thinking about Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour, which I attended a couple of weeks ago. There are, of course, considerable differences between Rooney and Swift. Yet their fan bases are demographically similar — there is certainly overlap — and they share a desire to see themselves in their idol’s work. I thought, then, about how few avenues Rooney’s fans, as opposed to Swift’s, had to connect to her. A key part of Swift’s appeal is her willingness to narrate her life as it happens. She courts her fans’ investment not only in her work but in herself. Swift is an active participant in her celebrity. 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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      Brontë Sisters Plaque at Westminster Abbey Typo Fixed

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      Punctuation delayed, but not denied: A memorial to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë at Poets’ Corner in the celebrated London church finally gets its accent marks.For 85 years, the names of three of English literature’s best-known writers, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, were featured in Poets’ Corner, the Westminster Abbey nook dedicated to great poets, authors and playwrights, but something wasn’t quite right: They were missing the accent mark.This week, the error was fixed when six diereses — umlaut-like punctuation dots, each just about a third of an inch in diameter — were added above the E of the famous last name.It’s a small but sizable victory for three sisters who could not publish under their own names nearly 200 years ago, even as their novels “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” helped change the portrayal of women’s lives in fiction.“Those three women fought harder than most to have their voices heard, to have their work understood on its own merits, and it endures,” said Sharon Wright, who discovered the mistake while visiting Westminster Abbey in London in January. “We can at least get their names right.”Ms. Wright, who describes herself as a stroppy Yorkshire woman like the literary sisters, was researching her upcoming book “The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar,” when she visited the plaque. Ms. Wright, who also edits the Brontë Society Gazette, a periodical for Brontë fans, compared the plaque with how the women had signed their own names, and saw the discrepancy.“Three of our greatest writers, and their names are spelled incorrectly,” Ms. Wright said at the abbey on Friday. “You can’t make it up.”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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      Jhumpa Lahiri Declines Noguchi Museum Award Over Kaffiyeh Ban

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      The museum said the Pulitzer Prize-winning author withdrew her acceptance after it fired staff members for wearing clothing expressing political views.The Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri has declined to accept an award from the Noguchi Museum in Queens next month in disapproval of its new ban on political dress for its staff, which led to the firings of three employees who had worn kaffiyehs to signal solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” according to a statement emailed by the museum on Wednesday.“We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views,” the statement said of Ms. Lahiri. “We remain committed to our core mission of advancing the understanding and appreciation of Isamu Noguchi’s art and legacy while upholding our values of inclusivity and openness.”The museum, founded nearly 40 years ago by Noguchi, a Japanese American designer and sculptor, announced last month that during their working hours employees could not wear clothing or accessories that expressed “political messages, slogans or symbols.”The policy, which does not apply to visitors, was instituted after several staff members had, over a period of months, often worn kaffiyehs — scarves associated with Palestinians — for what one fired employee termed “cultural reasons.” The museum defended the prohibition earlier this month, saying in a statement that “such expressions can unintentionally alienate segments of our diverse visitorship.” A significant majority of staffers signed a petition opposing the rule.Lahiri and Lee Ufan, a Korean-born minimalist painter, sculptor and poet, were to have received the Isamu Noguchi Award at the museum’s fall benefit gala next month. Ufan could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, but is still scheduled to receive the award, the museum said.Lahiri, who was born in London, won the 2000 Pulitzer for fiction for her debut, the story collection “Interpreter of Maladies,” and has since published several books of fiction and nonfiction in both English and Italian. She is also the director of the creative writing program at Barnard College. Through her literary agent, Lahiri declined to comment.Questions of how to express solidarity with Israelis or Palestinians have divided cultural institutions since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 of last year, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip has killed more than 41,000 people, according to the local health authorities.Lahiri was one of thousands of scholars who signed a letter to university presidents in May expressing solidarity with campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, calling it “unspeakable destruction.”The museum’s budget is supported by royalties from furniture and lighting designs by Noguchi, who died in 1988. The staff petition alludes to his voluntary internment in an Arizona detention camp for Japanese Americans during World War II in an effort to improve conditions there. More

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      All the Reviews of Sally Rooney’s New Novel, “Intermezzo”

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      “Intermezzo,” the Irish novelist’s fourth novel, is one of this fall’s most anticipated books.Seven years into her writing career, a new book by Sally Rooney is all but guaranteed to be an event.Rooney, an Irish novelist, has been hailed as a voice of the millennial generation, a writer who can marshal the economic uncertainty and emotional precarity that haunt young adults into moving, thorny romances that question intimacy and the value of art. Her 2017 debut, “Conversations With Friends,” was followed by “Normal People” in 2019 and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” in 2021.She has met both critical and commercial success. And with her increased profile came increased scrutiny: those who say her novels are smut thinly disguised by intellectual, refined prose. Or that, despite being written by a self-proclaimed Marxist, the sexual politics of her books can seem awfully retrograde.Regardless, critics are largely positive on her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” about a pair of Irish brothers mourning the recent death of their father, and the women they both become entangled with. (Note: Several of the articles below are behind subscription paywalls.)What did we say?“Clearly this book is going to divide people,” writes our own Dwight Garner, who is very decidedly not divided in his enthusiasm for Rooney’s latest.Rooney’s writing about love hits as hard as it does because she is especially adept at evoking loneliness, for which love is a salve. There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea.What did she say to us?While many reviewers have been sure to point out how “Intermezzo” is told primarily from the perspective of two men, as opposed to Rooney’s previous books, she told The Times’s David Marchese that it wasn’t an overly intentional choice.Interestingly, the first voice that came to the page for me in this project was Margaret’s — the character who becomes entangled in Ivan’s life in the course of the book. It certainly wasn’t that I sat down thinking, I have to write a book where the male voice is central. I just felt my way through the story that seemed to emerge when I encountered these characters, which is what I always try to do.She’s trying something new.Laura Miller at Slate writes that this is “deeper territory for Rooney.”While sadder and less of a page-turner than her three previous novels, “Intermezzo” is in many ways a more truthful book. As delicious as Rooney’s earlier love stories have been, they tend to conclude with a tidiness that defies reality. It’s very rarely the case that two people finally becoming a couple will solve most of their problems, and loss inevitably waits around each of life’s corners. “Intermezzo” is the work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing, but in a direction that might inspire fewer bucket hats, tote bags and Netflix adaptations. Perhaps not all of her current fans will follow her there, but the ones who do won’t regret 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