Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens (Sept. 29th, Viking, 256 pp.). Technology makes it all too easy for companies to know just how much they can get away with charging each of us for goods and services. This book offers consumers strategies for fighting back.

Ply: A Novel by Hernan Diaz (Sept. 29th, Riverhead Books, 464 pp.). The author of 2022’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Trust, an intriguing mélange of overlapping tales about the wealthy, returns with a story set in a future world where government has failed and survival depends on clever adaptation.

Serling: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with TV’s First Visionary by Alan Sepinwall (Oct. 13th, Grand Central Publishing, 400 pp.). Rod Serling used his writing and producing talents to ask controversial questions — and sometimes answer them, too — in an era when that wasn’t done. In the process, he taught us that (in one way or another) we’re all in the twilight zone.

Stickman: A Novel by Jihoon Park (Oct. 20th, 7.13 Books, 206 pp.). At 27, Juni is both a frustrated (and drunk) rideshare driver and an aspiring author writing about the former classmate who committed America’s deadliest school shooting. Increasingly obsessed by his work-in-progress, Juni soon finds his own life unraveling.

Employee No. 9 by Kim Hye-jin; translated by Jamie Chang (Oct. 20th, Restless Books, 192 pp.). A beleaguered everyman struggles to weather life’s blows while working for a corrupt company — one that seems shockingly committed to ruining him.

The Natural Order: A Novel by Matthew Aldrich (Oct. 27th, Atria Books, 352 pp.). What if you were filthy rich and clever enough to create technology that enabled you to live forever — but others (including your own child) didn’t want you to?

Almost True: Stories from Jerusalem by Tal Shalev (Nov. 1st, Soncata Press, 192 pp.). In these 22 short, wry tales, American Israeli debut author Tal Shalev brings to life the vibrant city — and its equally vibrant and complex inhabitants.

William Howard Taft: A Great American Life by Walter Stahr (Nov. 10th, Simon & Schuster, 688 pp.). A fresh look at a president who focused on reducing the federal deficit and keeping the country out of foreign wars, and then went on to become a consequential chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Revenge Plot: A Novel by Stephanie Wrobel (Nov. 10th, Berkley, 416 pp.). In this thriller, a wannabe author has written a book that’s sure to get the attention of the literary agent he’s pursuing — because it’s all about her.

The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity — and My Longest Love Affair by Willie Nelson (Nov. 10th, Penguin, 208 pp.). Willie Nelson has been around forever (even longer than Keith Richards). He’s written countless classic songs and more than a few books in his inimitable and inspiring way. This one may be the 93-year-old’s swansong.

Camera Obscura: A Novel by Enrique Vila-Matas; translated by Valerie Miles (Nov. 17th, Yale University Press, 176 pp.). In a Barcelona populated by humans and androids, a widower attempts — over the course of 71 days — to reassemble a literary canon while simultaneously grappling with his own demons.

The Wrong One Died: Life and Death in America’s Collapsing ERs by Barbara Bond (Nov. 17th, Johns Hopkins University Press, 312 pp.). As much a memoir as a call-to-arms, this physician’s searing account of the nation’s grossly overstretched emergency departments should be a wakeup call for all of us.

One Step Away: My Story of The Andantes, Motown, and the Women Behind the Sound of Young America by Louvain Demps with Paul Milliken (Dec. 1st, Harper, 288 pp.). Maybe you’ve never heard of the Andantes, but you’ve definitely heard them: They were the female backup singers on dozens of classic Motown records, making the magic happen behind the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Temptations, and others. Now, a surviving member of the overlooked trio tells her tale.

Monday: In “A Column of Her Own,” Mariko Hewer reflects on Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken.

Tuesday: September’s “Bedtime Stories,” featuring Megan Mostyn-Brown, author of The Need: A Novel.

Wednesday: Podcast: Michael Patrick Cullinane, author of Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet.

Thursday: A review of The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn by Dave Zirin.

Friday: A review of Mother of Sorrows by Jurica Pavicic; translated by Matt Robinson.

Saturday: ICYMI: A review of Circle of Days: A Novel by Ken Follett.

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In Transformed by India, a book that is simultaneously a travelogue and memoir, Stephen P. Huyler shares with us his colorful and vibrant reminiscences about a country he first ventured to as a 20-year-old college student in the 1970s. That initial trip was followed by many others as Huyler embarked on a doctoral program in anthropology that required him to return repeatedly for field research. Later, he would go as an art collector and tour guide, drawn back to a place that seems to have, as the title says, transformed his life.

Beauty doesn’t fade. It feeds. 

Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation.

Isabella. An impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy’s artistry is brilliant, and Isabella seems so real that she garners millions of followers. But everybody knows overnight success doesn’t just happen. And when someone gets a little too close to the truth, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets. A modern reimagining of a classic tale, Incarnate is an illuminating, haunting tale of algorithmic worship and beauty that can kill.

Alma Katsu (she/her) is the author of Fiend, The Hunger, The Deep, The Fervor, and five other novels. Her work has won or been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Locus, Western Heritage, and International Thriller Writers awards, among others. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a 35-year career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband.

Jamie Flanagan (they/them) is an actor, writer, and Bram Stoker Award-winning screenwriter. Their writing credits include Netflix’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass,” “The Midnight Club,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

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Mad as Hell: How 60 Minutes Took on the Powerful and Made Television History by Harry Moses (Prospecta Press). Reviewed by Kitty Kelley. “Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Moses seemed to gallop toward exposé journalism, determined to wallop bad guys and canonize good ones. He best illustrates this in his chapters on the crew from ‘60 Minutes,’ where he was once a lead producer for Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, and Lesley Stahl, none of whom fare well in these pages. The adage ‘No man is a hero to his valet’ seems particularly applicable to this lot.”

Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette; translated by Kate Briggs (New Directions). Reviewed by Samantha Neugebauer. “Unlike Lili Is Crying, Twenty Minutes of Silence is a whodunit, albeit a stripped-down, experimental one. The premise is that a man — a father, a husband — has been killed during the night at his home in the north of France. His wife and 15-year-old son were home and, consequently, are the lead suspects. Their maid was also present, though she doesn’t provide anyone — the reader, the detective — any real clarity.”

The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music by Colin Asher (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Charles Caramello. “Colin Asher says of his engaging study, The Midnight Special, that ‘trying to write a definitive history of American prison music would be quixotic. This book isn’t that. Instead, it focuses on five albums and the lives of the musicians who made them, each of which has something distinct to say about the ways that policing, and incarceration, have shaped our musical culture — affecting our perception of an artist’s work, choosing who is able to perform, record, and tour, and influencing the development of musical style.’ Though clearer on what the book isn’t than on what it is, Asher’s précis captures its capaciousness and peripatetic focus.”

The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction by James Crawford (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Julie Dunlap. “More promising alternatives comprise the book’s vital last section, ‘Repair.’ Interviews with carbon-capture engineers, rebel architects, conservation biologists, and climate-lawsuit litigants signal that the ‘anti-extraction movement’ is diverse and growing. The son of a fossil-fuel engineer, Crawford writes movingly about an Indigenous-led campaign to stop oil drilling in an Ecuadorian rainforest, where saving giant otters, spider monkeys, 567 bird species, and trillions of insects is as important as supporting villages and reducing carbon emissions. In 2008, the effort culminated in the world’s first constitution to recognize rights for the natural world. To Crawford, that victory represents a perceptual shift toward understanding that ‘not extracting could be worth as much as extracting.’”

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“This Is Spinal Tap” feels like the ultimate cult film: powerfully appealing to a select group of fans, baffling to everyone else. Studio executives found Rob Reiner’s 1984 “mockumentary” utterly unfunny. Test screenings in Dallas and Seattle were disastrous. Many theatergoers thought it was a serious documentary about a real band. Either you got the joke or you didn’t.

In this hyper-arid place, Crawford envisions the Milky Way arching overhead as a river, “its waters shining a soft purple from billions-dense clusters of cosmic matter: stars, gas, nebulae, planets.” Lithium, he marvels, was created along with hydrogen and helium within 20 minutes of the Big Bang. “It preexisted even light itself.”

Such reveries of natural wonder buoy The Vanishing Earth, a consummate exposé of the pumping, blasting, stripping, felling, and leaching of what remains of the material planet. Crawford’s previous book, the richly historical The Edge of the Plain, explores how the human obsession with borders has shaped our societies, politics, and even destiny as the climate alters and destabilizes. Here, the task undertaken is also epic. The Vanishing Earth “is a kind of odyssey, or pilgrimage,” says Crawford, “to the literal and ideological frontiers of extraction — and their fast-approaching limits.”

Some of the most shocking tales collected along his journey reveal extractive capitalism at the edge of the law. A recurring theme is baneful abandonment. In Florida’s Bone Valley, mining companies gouge out trainloads of fossil rock to crush, and then chemically harvest the embedded phosphate for fertilizer production. But when a rock deposit inevitably plays out, firms declare bankruptcy and disappear. Left behind are towering plateaus of radioactive acidic waste. As a local water advocate tells Crawford:

“These are wastelands that will be wastelands for generations to come.”

Other operations are blatantly criminal. The author traces the origins of one sand grain until, through innovation he calls “true alchemy,” this most common of natural resources might help form a window, mobile phone, turbine blade, fracking solution, or, most likely, concrete. Spurred by insatiable global demand and shrinking supply, poachers in 2008 stole 500 truckloads of white coral sand off a beach in Jamaica. In fast-growing Singapore, the needs for sand for construction and island expansion are met through imports from less affluent countries. And a 2018 study indicates that less than five percent of 80 million metric tons of sand from Cambodia was exported legally. Writes Crawford: “The incredible extent of shoreline and coastal development” driving such colossal sand heists “is a kind of willful madness.”

The most heartrending stories unfold largely within legal boundaries. In the 1860s, prospectors who sifted gold from local creeks built Butte, Montana, and the boom persisted (despite dwindling gold) after the discovery of silver and other ores. Technology intensified extraction over decades, especially when electricity enabled access to a deep, pure dome of copper, one-sixth of the world’s then-known supply. Electric elevators lowered miners into dimly lit shafts to play their part in “an inexorable, irrevocable process: to take a mountain, tunnel into its depths, and empty it out.”

Operations continued despite the disaster on June 8, 1917, when 168 miners suffocated in the worst underground rock-mining accident in United States history. Competition with Chilean mines in the 1920s forced brutal new efficiencies: removal of the mountaintop and carving of “a giant, spiraling terraced hole” that swallowed the center of Butte “like an extractive Mobius strip.” Where once stood houses, businesses, churches, and schools is today the Berkeley Pit. Since the main mine’s closure in 1982, the former “Richest Hill on Earth” has filled with caustic, arsenic-laden water so dangerous that air cannons boom to stop migrating geese from landing in it.

A Superfund site since 1983, the infamous abyss draws waste-management experts from around the world. “In China,” reports one visitor, “there are thousands of Buttes.” Throughout the book, vivid descriptions of the scope and scale of destruction rival those in David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. Crawford, in fact, more forcefully portrays the pace and permanence of ruination. Extraction sacrifice zones, accumulating especially over the past half-century, “are the dark side reality of economic growth and political expediency,” he says. “And they are everywhere.”

Thankfully, the author also quests after solutions, though often with a modicum of doubt. A lithium-mine executive Crawford meets defends damage to Atacama ecosystems and Indigenous communities as an unfortunate but temporary consequence of the green-energy transition. Stefan Debruyne, a “lithium evangelist, a technoprophet,” envisions advanced methods that someday enable hyper-efficient metal recycling and extraction without freshwater consumption. “Right now, we are increasing the footprint,” Debruyne admits. “But this is an investment in our future.” A skeptical Crawford likens the viewpoint to “the original alchemist’s dream,” with technologies as saviors, if we can only find the right ones.

More promising alternatives comprise the book’s vital last section, “Repair.” Interviews with carbon-capture engineers, rebel architects, conservation biologists, and climate-lawsuit litigants signal that the “anti-extraction movement” is diverse and growing. The son of a fossil-fuel engineer, Crawford writes movingly about an Indigenous-led campaign to stop oil drilling in an Ecuadorian rainforest, where saving giant otters, spider monkeys, 567 bird species, and trillions of insects is as important as supporting villages and reducing carbon emissions. In 2008, the effort culminated in the world’s first constitution to recognize rights for the natural world. To Crawford, that victory represents a perceptual shift toward understanding that “not extracting could be worth as much as extracting.”

But healing centuries’ worth of extractive damage will require a colossal values change. Curative repair depends on a unified willingness to live amongst the ruins — like the residents of Butte who manage the pit instead of moving on — and an intergenerational commitment to rebuilding for tomorrow, a kind of collective “forever stewardship.”

Are most of us capable of such long-term thinking and fidelity to the planet and each other? Crawford hunts, he says, for “a fragile, incomplete map or schematic of some possible, viable future.” But readers may close the book wishing for one more investigation, perhaps grounded in interviews and writings by psychologists. In the face of so much anthropogenic devastation, we long for evidence that humans can relinquish the values propelling extractive capitalism, that society can shift in a new and permanently habitable direction. In 1864, George Perkins Marsh wrote: “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.” Why have we not absorbed this lesson and at least slowed the plunder?

Though its solutions are sometimes more aspiring than convincing, this book is nonetheless timely and profound. It sheds light in innumerable directions on our obdurate looting of resource-rich splendors from the Andes to the Boundary Waters to the deep-sea floor. The Vanishing Earth is essential reading for anyone who might carry a cellphone, purchase a car, heat a home, sip water, or vote on data-center zoning. In it, James Crawford brilliantly lays bare the landscapes we have riven to extract their treasures and the wonders remaining in urgent need of rescue.

Julie Dunlap writes and teaches about wildlife ecology, environmental history, and climate change. She co-edited the nature anthology Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (Trinity University Press).

In crisply constructed poems, Bliss delivers ways of looking at nature that allow us to see more deeply. We go into her poems quietly and, suddenly, something takes us by surprise.

The title poem, “Ghost Skin,” looks at first to be about a water snake shedding his skin in the summer heat. All of a sudden, there’s a chipmunk instead, filling his cheeks “Until he has chewed dried skin / to a pulp, smeared it into his fur” to camouflage himself.

Ever watchful and patient, Bliss seems to possess a kind of ghost skin of her own, enabling her to observe nature without drawing attention to herself. In another poem, she sits with her back against a tree trunk — “you sleep awake” — when along comes a mink:

Brown as wet duff he comes
Undulating along stream bank
Silent as breath, and right at your feet

Then there’s a deer in her back garden, one who knows her. They observe each other quietly, the deer and she, a certain trust passing between them. But a turn at the end invites a step deeper into intimacy, into a question about what it is we expect of each other.

In another poem, a cat worries her with its odd head movements, until the reason becomes apparent — he’s looking at fireflies!

But there’s also cruelty in the natural world. In “The Sandpiper and the Turtle,” a bird is “caught between struggle and surrender,” and Bliss wonders:

...what transfixes us so
traps us into watching such struggles,
mirroring the lunge to get free, even as we feel
the sourness of surrender welling in our gut.

Ghost Skin reminded me of Auden’s definition of poetry: “The clear expression of mixed feelings.” It’s that clarity, that sharp observation, the beautiful mystery that this poet discovers in things. 

*****

Poetry blends into prose poetry and then again into essay in Fady Joudah’s stunning new collection, Exhibit G: Poems Essays and Photographs of Gaza (Milkweed Editions).

In an early prose poem, he writes, “First they came for my grandparents, but my parents lived. Then for me but my children lived. Then they came for the media, and the media hailed the kingdom of nothing and severed our tongues.”

As a Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician, Joudah goes beyond his anger and torment at the Gaza genocide. The impulse to justify the existence of Palestine to the Western world in terms of genocide (particularly in the English-speaking world) fails, he writes, to acknowledge the collective inner life of the Palestinian people. This book shifts that narrative:

“When Palestine in English revolts, it’s because Palestine in Arabic gives it life, teaches it revolution. Palestine in English resists becoming ghost because Palestine in Arabic is never ghost, no matter the immensity of ruin or the duration of hibernation.”

Exhibit G celebrates a vital interiority in the living color of Arabic — not as a ghost but as an insistence of itself for itself. The photographs capture children and the openness of their smiles as they hold out bowls, both empty and full of soup; as they haul gasoline canisters for collecting water; as colorful striped umbrellas shade market-goers before a backdrop of collapsed concrete. A young woman pauses in her breadmaking to smile quietly. Child after child holds their fingers in a peace sign for the camera.

And, oh, the horse. He’s seen from above as his owner leads him through water — but his back is skinned. Is this a scene of horror or of ordinary tenderness and a routine domestic task? It cannot all be together in one frame. But it is. I’m looking and I’m seeing too much.

Food is central to culture, and Exhibit G, Joudah writes, “depends upon the work of a Palestinian collective,” and gives special thanks to the Gaza Soup Kitchen.

In “The Land Has Hands,” he writes of a woman returning to her kitchen after more than a year away and her sorrow at discovering the army has stolen a jar of makdous (stuffed eggplant). “Makdous, stacked and bathed in olive oil from her olive trees. The trees now scorched and bulldozed.” The loss of the makdous signifies the loss of domesticity, of sanctuary, the loss of providing for and nourishing your family:

“To eat makdous is an art and bread the artist. Your tongue will need to listen. You must bow to the land that gave you garlic and peppers and bow to the olive trees.”

The women of Gaza continue to prepare food for their families because nourishment is not merely of the body but also of the heart.

Joudah writes elsewhere:

“A brief mention of the effort taken to secure ingredients. A long fragment of a blown corrugated fence is the grille on which a row of large stock pots are placed. A math teacher gathers firewood in a wheelbarrow Chef Mahmoud sends me messages, nicknames me Abdul-Ghalabah, custodian of the wretched, tickles my Fanonian nerve. A giggle releases my tears.”

In “Wallah,” a medic travels in the back of an ambulance after pulling a body from the rubble but doesn’t recognize at first that it’s his mother’s corpse. He asks her forgiveness “like she had caught him sinning, he was pleading his case. Against the death toll. ‘On God’s life, I swear.’ Like he’d never do it again were she to die again.”

One of the final essays, “Exhibit G: Baby Moses & Khalas or Notes on Palestinian Interiority,” is a stunning piece of writing. In it, Joudah dissects and extrapolates from the story of Moses — the killing of every firstborn “to kill a people’s capacity to remain a people. To place their bond to place under unimaginable duress by turning it into nonplace.”

Khalas, he writes, means “redemption” in Arabic but has been abstracted over the centuries to mean “enough/it is finished.”

What is asked for in redemption? Not our humanity. That is surely a given. What is asked is that a people be restored to what was already their birthright, their right to their own interiority. Exhibit G is a radical demand for that justice and the refusal of Palestine to be reduced to a moral lesson.

*****

Russell Thornton’s Two Songs (Harbour Publishing) assembles 25 years of lyrical narrative poems from nine collections along with new, uncollected poems. Some are set in Tunisia, Peru, and Greece. But Vancouver, British Columbia, is the poet’s home. The two songs of the title, life and death, are intertwined and harmonize in his poetry.

Ordinary moments become bittersweet and freighted with the mystical when, for example, a mother lights her cigarette in the rain while waiting for a school bus, or when customers in the checkout line help an old woman locate a forgotten item.

Thornton grounds his poems in concrete detail but draws on light, wind, and rain to make them particularly evocative. Light fills up an empty bird’s nest “digging graves in leaves.” Winds are redolent with the scent of roses or are gusting off the inlet. Rainfall stops and then resumes as a mother lies on her deathbed. In one poem, rain falls like a voice of the dead, filling stillness and falling into itself.

The poet is conscious of the passage of time but equally attuned to continuity. He reflects on the ways in which people live within others, in the cells of the body as well as in memory. Dust and stones are also symbolic:

The dust may be me, but the dust forgets me,
It is too many things and holds too much more than me.

In “Playing with Stones,” Thornton pictures his daughter as an old woman, as though he is her child, grieving her as she will one day grieve when gathering stones to commemorate her loved ones.

Elsewhere, he ties the shoelaces of the father who once kicked him down a flight of stairs, remembering that the man was also once a child, praised for learning to tie his shoes. Different ways of seeing himself in others are everywhere in Thornton’s work.

He sees himself reflected in the natural world, too. In one poem, he encounters a coyote as he returns from dropping his daughter at kindergarten. Thinks about the darkness in himself, he ends: 

what is laughter in you and leaves your lips freely
is in me a howl I keep at the bottom of my throat
out of fear it will become sound and I will lose you in the light.

Another coyote, in a more recent poem, protects its young, eliciting in Thornton a confrontation with the vulnerability he experienced in boyhood. Now, he has become the aggressor. By inhabiting the perspective of others, he begins to understand himself. He states this clearly in one of the final poems, “One Morning”: 

It is not you at the heart of your life but another,
and wherever you look, it is another who shows you
How you were always hidden in what you see.

Thornton’s 2013 collection, Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain, established him as an important Canadian poet. His 2014 collection, The Hundred Lives, was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. Two Songs puts this work in a larger context, demonstrating his range and command as a lyric poet. It’s an exquisite collection. 

*****

Each of the five sections in Acie Clark’s debut, Small Talk (Hub City Press), begins with a “Small Talk” poem reflecting on change as the poet sits with his morning coffee. Clark has described the collection as a way of reclaiming small talk to engage with others when you move to a new community.

But this isn’t the superficial banter I usually associate with small talk. Instead, Clark employs it to reach across uncomfortable divides into unknown terrain, and, as a trans man, between one version of self to another. In “Submission,” he writes: “My body can be myself and I can be a place to be, / somewhere that can be gone / to.” And elsewhere: “No one here asked for a word to cleave / the moment from what will happen / into what is going on.” And, as a final example:

I recognize there is no separation
between the woods I know and the woods I don’t
only a limit drawn in me by what
has happened so far

But boundaries can be fuzzy, blending into a single identity. These explorations sometimes feel a bit like going through the looking glass. The poems contain many mirrors and reflective windows.

There are also several poems entitled “Temperance.” Temperance, as in abstaining from alcohol, is touched on. But a more resonant reading of temperance is found in the tarot card, which signifies the blending of opposing forces. It depicts a figure with one foot on dry land and the other in water, as water is poured between two cups.

“Is a shared body necessarily a precarious one” Clark asks in one temperance poem. Where does one mark off the divisions? And is it even necessary to do so?

I was moved by these poems but also found myself perplexed and occasionally saddened. In the most wrenching piece of the collection, “Absolution online,” a friend sends Clark a link to a virtual confession site. It’s meant as a joke, but the poem that emerges is far from one:

The first time I said sorry to a man for what he wanted from me, I was 6.
I wasn’t really aware I had a body yet. I can’t help it, he said,

so I had to help me split my body from what it meant to survive those
years of what couldn’t be helped, and now I go looking for us in every
poem, hoping to see myself standing there on the cliff of history, waving
back like someone I know.

It’s impossible to leave the old self entirely behind, however painful. “My life is a room I’m always finding myself walking back into.” There’s also the question of the “dead” name that can only be written as a bracketed emptiness “where the breath it took to say the name can live.”

In one poem, Clark writes of his father:

When he calls me by his daughter’s name I understand
he wants to speak to me without crossing the distance
I made by making myself this distance

I find this heartbreaking. When you make yourself into a distance, the onus is on your interlocutor. They must cross the distance by themselves toward you or else accept the distance and pretend it isn’t there. It’s hard to characterize this as “reclaiming” small talk.

Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t seem to get my footing when reading this collection. It might also be what the poet intends. Simple answers are elusive. The best you can hope is to join the poet in the complexity of his questions.

Clark writes in one poem about having been quite chatty as a child and of wanting to be quieter, more confident in empty space. I hope he’s getting there. In the penultimate “Small Talk” poem, he reflects:

I know a poem is not an answer
but a question we can live in. It’s a place to place my voice
It’s a still room still enough to hold the sound of all the change in it.

Amanda Holmes Duffy is a columnist and poetry editor for the Independent and the voice of “Read Me a Poem,” a podcast of the American Scholar.

Colin Asher says of his engaging study, The Midnight Special, that “trying to write a definitive history of American prison music would be quixotic. This book isn’t that. Instead, it focuses on five albums and the lives of the musicians who made them, each of which has something distinct to say about the ways that policing, and incarceration, have shaped our musical culture — affecting our perception of an artist’s work, choosing who is able to perform, record, and tour, and influencing the development of musical style.”

Though clearer on what the book isn’t than on what it is, Asher’s précis captures its capaciousness and peripatetic focus.

Basing The Midnight Special on “the fact that genius exists within society, not in isolation,” the author focuses on the lives and times of his subjects more than on their works. That is, he wants to plumb the circumstances — the where, when, why, and how — of the music’s production and reception, so he turns his insightful readings of albums toward that end. Those circumstances, of course, primarily concern “crime” and punishment — the latter being incarceration, the former often the consequence of racism, poverty, and/or addiction combined with systemic injustice. That indelible music emerged from them is the miracle.

Asher advances his argument through profiles of an eclectic group of exemplary artists and signature albums: Ledbetter (aka “Lead Belly”) and “The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs” (1940), Asher’s ur-text; Elmo Hope and his bebop “Sounds from Rikers Island” (1963); Johnny Cash and the live recording “At San Quentin” (1969); Ike White and the shape-shifting “Changin’ Times” (1976), “written and recorded entirely inside California prisons”; and, finally, Tupac Shakur and his “bleak and brilliant” bestselling hip-hop album “Me Against the World” (1995).

The five artists came from backgrounds as diverse as Ledbetter’s dirt-poor sharecropper family, struggling simply to survive, and Shakur’s well-educated militant family, fighting to remake society. They shared the experience, however, of incarceration, albeit varied in type, duration, and degree of brutality — experiences informed by the history and politics of race in America. Four of the artists are Black, and Cash, though white, also lived on the margins until finding acclaim. Nonetheless, the Black men were imprisoned, while the white man mainly visited prisons, a point Asher makes with conviction but without smugness.

The more important of Asher’s two lesser-known subjects, Hope was a prolific composer and recording artist, one among the many brilliant postwar jazz musicians addicted to heroin and denied a cabaret license and the means to make a living. Like Charlie Parker, Hope died prematurely of heart failure — an embodiment of the 1960 study “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians,” done in by drugs and by anti-drug hysteria.

Equally fated but sentenced at age 19 to a long stretch for murder, White, in Asher’s term, “thrived” in prison, writing his celebrated album “Changin’ Times” behind bars. For years, though, he shuttled in and out of prison and was shuttled from prison to prison — a case study in career recidivism and a gifted musician who ultimately committed suicide.

As a white man who spent only a brief time in jail and who died rich and famous, Cash serves as Asher’s point of contrast, underscored by the author’s casting of Ledbetter’s “Midnight Special” as “born of experience” against Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” a “fiction” by a self-styled Nashville “outlaw.” Although Asher praises Cash’s efforts in generating strong public support for prison reform, that slight followed the man in both life and death. A recent New York Times obituary for fellow “outlaw” David Allan Coe crowed, “Unlike Mr. Cash, who only sang about prisons and performed in them, Mr. Coe,” who served time in the Ohio State Penitentiary, “was the genuine article.”

Engaging as those three chapters are, Asher’s treatments of Ledbetter and Shakur bracket and most fully realize his book’s central theme of race. Ledbetter personifies the phenomenon of the obscure, Black, Southern blues artists who were discovered, recorded, and marketed by father-son team John and Alan Lomax and their imitators, who used a potent mix of admiration and exploitation. Tirelessly curating Lead Belly’s persona as “Famed Singer, Twice Pardoned Killer,” the elder Lomax did more than anyone to fix in the public imagination a pernicious association of Black music with criminality. For his part, Ledbetter “endured,” his dignity evident and his music timeless.

“The ‘rapper with a rap sheet,’ the press called [Shakur],” Asher writes, “1994’s version of ‘murderous minstrel.’” Shakur’s mother held leadership roles in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, and Shakur’s genius lay in transmuting hip-hop from “party music” into “a vehicle for the ideas his mother’s generation of radicals had advocated,” efforts that led to his being cast as a criminal — a role, in Asher’s mind, that Shakur had no choice but to adopt in order to co-opt. Prosecutors, in any case, used Shakur’s music as evidence during the infamous 1995 “rap murder trial” of artist Snoop Dogg, who was acquitted. Soon after, Shakur was murdered. (Ironically, a jury finally convicted his killer — 30 years after the fact — as I write this review.)

In the hands of an author as enthusiastic about his subject as Asher, this blend of gripping life stories, foreign (for most readers) social conditions, and brilliant art provides a heady read. Well-informed and well-written, The Midnight Special is a sprawling work packed with fascinating information, provocative insights, and shrewd analysis. It can seem uneven at times, but just where, I suspect, will depend more on the musical passions that the reader brings to the book than on any qualities inherent in it. 

Charles Caramello is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, VA.

Other nights, storms rip and torrents racket down on the tin roof. Lightning flashes; we count the seconds until thunder rolls, awe spiked with apprehension. One stormy night long before my family came to this Allegheny ridge in 1968, the barn was hit and burned. My husband, Harry, edges the herb garden with remnants of its charred fieldstone foundation.

The evening’s entertainment isn’t over after sunset, though. Twilight raises the curtain on points of cool light, silvery green and gold, tracing evanescent patterns. Sparks flicker in the tall grass between walnut trees and meadow; tiny shooting stars swoop down the hillside. The fireflies’ light show is a performance, but we’re only an accidental audience for their aerial mating dance.

Our kids used to play catch-and-release with fireflies, holding the glow in cupped palms, filling a canning-bottle lantern with light; freeing the captives before bedtime. Now, Harry and I are content to watch luminescent trails of skywriting — indecipherable messages — vanish like invisible ink.

Although the abstract cursive is illegible to us, the soft neon calligraphy is communicative. We learned more, leaving the porch grandstand to attend the Sunday evening nature talk “Fireflies Light Up the Night” at nearby Shawnee State Park.

Ranger George, the park environmental educator, called for a show of hands: fireflies or lightning bugs? I voted with Team Firefly. George refereed, explaining that, no matter our preferred colloquial name, all are beetles. Despite their usual drab daytime camouflage, their apt family name is Lampyridae, “shining light.” Pennsylvania claims at least 30 species. One, Photuris pensylvanica, became the official state insect thanks to legislative lobbying by schoolchildren.

During the talk, George demystified the glow without destroying its magic. An enzyme, luciferase, catalyzes a chemical reaction, creating light without heat loss (magic!). The flashes? Seductive Morse-code signals. Males and females broadcast their species’ particular timed sequence of long and short blinks. Recognizing the pattern, couples find each other and mate. Afterward, the female lays eggs in soil.

Within a few weeks, larvae hatch and live underground, preying on snails and slugs, for up to two years before pupating. A couple of weeks later, pupae emerge as fireflies, living at most a few weeks.

Ranger George has a hands-on, get-out-in-nature approach: Often, at the lake, he teaches kids and parents to make fish prints. Concluding his talk, he demonstrated a homemade firefly-flash simulator he’d constructed with an AA battery and a snippet of holiday wire with one tiny bulb. The plastic sheathing on both ends of the wire was stripped to expose the copper filaments. One end was taped to the battery’s negative pole; the other was left free. Turning out the lights, tapping the free end of wire to the positive pole, he created a pattern of syncopated flashes.

George then distributed simulators and a chart of signal-code patterns for 16 local firefly species. “Pick a signal,” he told us, “walk around the room, find someone flashing your signal.”

The group, a dozen adults and one kid, became a firefly mixer. Laughing and flashing, we wandered the room. When the party was over, George suggested taking the devices home to practice with our own backyard fireflies.

We did, but no fireflies were fooled. Just as well, perhaps. In P.D. Eastman’s 1958 Sam and the Firefly, communication between humans and firefly Gus, although moderated by wise owl Sam, causes chaos.

Falling asleep, I recalled a firefly night 14 years earlier. Daughter Martha was living in Mexico. I visited her in Chiapas. We traveled further south, joined by a young woman she’d met in language school, to see the ruins of Palenque and Bonampak near the Guatemalan border.

Our lodging was a thatched hut in a forest campground. Except for a woman tent-camping with her young son, we were the only guests. Howling monkeys in treetops did not dissuade me from morning swims in the shallow pool, but their nighttime shrieks amid dense tropical foliage spooked me.

Not my hut-mates. Martha and her friend, alerted by a signal system available only to those under 30, were invited to a party at a livelier campground. By flashlight, they applied eyeliner and mascara. Reluctant to stay home alone with the monkeys and lizards, I tagged along on a dark path laced with tree roots. Invisible monkeys followed, screaming overhead. The night came alive with a reassuring familiar flicker.

“What are fireflies in Spanish?”

“Luciérnagas, Mom.”

Music led us to a fire circle, dancing, and pulque. The uninvited, off-duty chaperone-mama, I sat in the shadows, looking into the darkness, enjoying the fiesta of las luciérnagas.

Now, September at the farm, the first yellow walnut leaves flutter down. Dark falls early. I fall into bed earlier, too, savoring a long summer read: What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison. Their correspondence concerns family, friendship, and the process of creating poems and stories. Last night, as crickets rasped a raucous farewell-to-summer chorus outside the window, I picked up Kenyon’s collection Let Evening Come, turning to the title poem:

...Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come...

This morning, we breakfasted on the porch. Two hummingbirds whirred, in needless competition over ample sugar nectar in two separate feeders, tanking up for the coming migration. Harry reported seeing a few fireflies after I’d turned in.

So tonight, I’ve stayed up late (for me). We sat on the porch swing, listening to crickets “warn everybody that summer cannot last forever,” as E.B. White says in Charlotte’s Web.

We watched the occasional shimmer of fireflies. Those shining lights will soon go dark. Almost time to pick up my knitting, finish the sweater laid aside in April. Time to let evening come.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Blogging as “Girl Writing” in the Independent bi-monthly, she lives in Washington, DC. For many years, Ellen practiced psychotherapy. Her new novel, Vanishing Point, is out now.

About the book:

“We know, we know: A book about authoritarianism? In 2026? What, are the writers living in some liberal snowflake nightmare land? Or Germany in 1933?

“Listen, we get it. There may not be much need right now for tips on how to live in an autocracy, but who knows? Maybe somewhere down the line, like this weekend, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now, you’ll come upon a bombastic military parade, or a masked federal agent cosplaying as Sergeant Slaughter asking for your papers, or an octogenarian former beauty-pageant mogul cornering you in the new White House ballroom, droning on and on about the evils of windmills, and you will be glad to have read this book.”

From how to stick your head in the sand to avoid thinking about your dictator, to the most effective ways to reeducate the masses, Obey in Advance has you covered — whether you want to Make Authoritarianism Great Again or not.

Hosted by Solid State Books, 2467 18th St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

Unlike Lili Is Crying, Twenty Minutes of Silence is a whodunit, albeit a stripped-down, experimental one. The premise is that a man — a father, a husband — has been killed during the night at his home in the north of France. His wife and 15-year-old son were home and, consequently, are the lead suspects. Their maid was also present, though she doesn’t provide anyone — the reader, the detective — any real clarity.

Bessette, who died in 2000, made up a word for her genre: the roman poétique, or the poetic novel. And it’s interesting to read these two short, poetic novels together. The experience is akin to meeting cousins and clocking the similarities in their features and mannerisms, while simultaneously noting their differences. Both books, despite their petite size, can be claustrophobic. They are (to their credit, perhaps) un-bingeable. When I tried to devour them in one sitting, it was like eating too much fudge — dense in its pleasure, identical in its bite.

During a book-festival panel last year, several novelists, including Joyce Carol Oates, were asked what had inspired their latest works. One by one, they answered by referencing a real, corresponding event from their life, but when it came to Oates, who was wearing a giant, witchy black hat, she said that she got the idea for Fox when walking in the woods. After coming upon a dead animal, she recalled imagining, What if I had come upon a dead person instead?

In similar fashion, according to the book’s introduction, the impetus for Bessette’s novel came from her twisting the details of an actual murder into fiction. Apparently, while on holiday with her children, they heard gunshots in their hotel. The next day, she read in the newspaper that a boy had killed his father.

But what if he hadn’t? her story asks. What if someone else did it? What if his mother made him do it? What if his father had — directly or indirectly — made him do it? Should we ever hold children responsible for their crimes? Stated or implied, questions like this spill from page to page with bon mots and cryptic subtitles scattered between:

                                    Shouting

                                                      SHOUTING

                                    before

THE UNIQUE CERTAINTY.

Before the grandiose, the gigantic, the luminous, the perfect cer-

                          tainty,

                          of

                                                            DEATH.

That is to say, death is the only perfect certainty; all other certainties we think we know — say, the identity of the killer in a murder mystery — can only ever be imperfect. Thus, the larger gesture of her text is to integrate perfect certainty, thereby making it imperfect.

She does this through employing different voices to tell the same story. In particular, Bessette interrogates the 20 minutes between the father’s death and the arrival of help. She also plays with repetition, pronouns, and prop rearrangement. In one section, the gun is declared to have been in one place; in the next, it is said with full confidence to be somewhere else. As a reader, I craved perfect certainty, but the author refused to indulge me.

Early on, the text asks, “How many infamous uncertainties have caused others to fall into a swoon, into delirium, into madness?” foreshadowing the kinds of associations the book called to my mind as I read, such as those murders that defined my childhood — the O.J. Simpson trial and the killing of JonBenét Ramsey — along with more recent unresolved questions (like, why did President Trump win again?). In each case, I’ve always been awed by people’s ability to drain an uncertainty of all its imperfections in order to get to an answer that makes perfect sense to themselves.

With the notion in mind that a novel’s form is a type of content and communicates meaning, I was also thinking a lot about omniscience while reading. The omniscient narrator, with its all-knowing, god-like voice, is not as popular a device as it once was. (At least, that’s what we often hear.) Yet, through stealthy switches between “I” and “my” into a nameless narrator or into “we,” Bessette shows that even when we believe we have outgrown omniscient thinking, we can and do use words, including collective nouns, to disguise our personal assumptions.

For example, during one retelling of the murder night, Bessette writes:

“We know this: why women lie awake in their beds in the dead of night. We know all about the light sleeping habits of nervous, dissatisfied, irritated, belligerent, preoccupied, troubled, querulous, unhappy women.”

If you’re anything like me, you might find yourself susceptible to this statement, its stacking of adjectives seeming like evidence. But wait. Who is we? And how does this particular we know? Twenty Minutes of Silence won’t tell us, that’s for certain.

Samantha Neugebauer is a global lecturer at NYU Washington, DC, and the author of the forthcoming story collection Villains. She is also a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and co-host of the review channel Short Story Boudoir on YouTube.

This podcast comes courtesy of That Said with Michael Zeldin. Listen to it here. (And read the Independent’s review of An Inconvenient Widow here.)

Moses grabs his title from the 1976 movie “Network,” in which Peter Finch, playing an angry prophet of the airwaves, instructs his viewers to rebel: “I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs…and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’”

Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Moses seemed to gallop toward exposé journalism, determined to wallop bad guys and canonize good ones. He best illustrates this in his chapters on the crew from “60 Minutes,” where he was once a lead producer for Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, and Lesley Stahl, none of whom fare well in these pages. The adage “No man is a hero to his valet” seems particularly applicable to this lot.

Having worked together for five “frantic years,” Moses gives Wallace, who specialized in “the ambush interview,” his own chapter. “It was exhilarating and emotionally exhausting,” he writes. “I ended up with an ulcer I named Myron (Mike’s given name).” He later reveals:

“I confess that I found many of Mike’s shticks amusing…Less amusing was the way Mike treated women on the staff. Each morning, he strode briskly down the hall, snapping the bra straps and pinching the bottoms of any female unfortunate enough to be in his path. Today, he’d be sacked.”

Moses recollects Rather giving new definition to the term prima donna, but he fires more damaging salvos at Sawyer, who, during an interview with Calvin Klein, insisted on peppering the designer with rumors that he was gay and had had every drop of his HIV-contaminated blood drained and replaced with healthy plasma. “I thought the tale was as absurd as it was impractical,” Moses writes, noting that he tried to explain to Sawyer that the story was about the billion-dollar fashion business Klein had built from scratch, not a take-down of the man’s sex life.

“He’s never acknowledged that he’s gay,” Sawyer insisted. “Doesn’t matter,” Moses shot back. She continued pushing the issue and finally asked Klein about his sexuality. Moses later excised the exchange from the tape, and nothing more was said about the matter.

The producer encountered a rougher go-around working with Stahl, who seemed to personify the blinding high beams of an egotist. When beginning work on their first segment together, he explained to her that the cameras and lighting needed to be positioned a certain way to minimize the interviewee’s cleft lip. “In order for your shot to match his shot,” Moses told Stahl, “I had to do the same with you.” But when Stahl saw the image on the monitor, she balked. “Change the camera angle. Change the lighting. Make it the way I like it,” she ordered.

Moses’ descriptions of Stahl as “imperious” might make readers cringe, as they imagine a witch on a broomstick. When he gave her the copy he’d written that introduced the piece, she rewrote it. Don Hewitt, the show’s executive producer, didn’t like her rewrite and told Moses to go back to the original. He did, and she flew into a rant. “I don’t care what he wants,” Stahl said, referring to Hewitt. “I won’t read it.”

At this point, Moses’ ulcer from Mike Wallace looks like a badge of honor alongside others he received, including an Emmy, a Peabody, an award from the Directors Guild of America, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Readers might wonder why the highly paid correspondents at “60 Minutes” (Stahl purportedly now makes $8 million a year) didn’t embrace with drooling gratitude producers like Moses, whose sole responsibility was to cast them as gifted journalists and compelling storytellers. Producers are like Iditarod dogs, pulling the correspondents’ sleds through miles of rugged, frozen terrain.

Of course, “No man is a hero to his valet” certainly also applies to Moses. “At CBS, the knock on me — accurate enough, as it turned out — was not my ability but that I was deficient in ‘people skills,’” he acknowledges. Fragile egos and demanding personalities aren’t unique to the newsroom, though. Moses recounts flabbergasting encounters with Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Arthur Miller, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sam Waterston, too.

By the end of his memoir, Moses admits he grew “weary of working with correspondents who asked the questions I had written, didn’t know the story as well as I did, and failed to get the best out of the interview subjects.” Blessed (or cursed) with a ripe ego and rippling self-confidence, he concludes:

“At the age of ninety, I am presently fit, disease free, and can function well enough without the aid of Prevagen.”

The odds for continued success are definitely in Moses’ favor — and it’s intriguing to wonder what his last act will be. Given his commitment to the little guy and his belief that most Republicans are suspect and corporations corrupt, one wonders if Harry Moses might make a Hail Mary pass at writing a presidential biography. One can only hope.

Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times bestseller biographies, including Nancy Reagan, Jackie Oh!, and Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with the Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, which is given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.

As I attempt to write my second novel, after having written an unpublished first one many years ago, I wonder: If someone as accomplished as Patchett is capable of writing a throwaway draft, my own capacity for bad writing is essentially bottomless. So, why bother?

Well, here’s the counterargument: Why not?

Writing for an hour after dinner or for a few hours on the weekend isn’t going to hurt anyone — least of all myself. (Obsessively watching YouTube videos explaining how super-intelligent AI could wipe out humanity, on the other hand, can give me an actual anxiety attack.)

So, in this otherwise stressful world, why not spend my time reading books and attempting to write a couple of my own? Surely it’s as good a way of living life as any. It may even be emotionally nourishing. 

Even so, the practice of writing fiction isn’t easy for me. 

Having a nine-to-five job is the first obstacle; I feel like I’ve earned some time to relax at the end of the day, so it’s challenging to push myself to work after work. Of course, many writers have had to do this. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was a government employee, and he wrote 80 stories and several early novels without making any money. Toni Morrison wrote three books while working as an editor at Random House. And Hanya Yanagihara was editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine until earlier this year. 

But let’s just say my willpower is slightly less sturdy than theirs. 

Another, more metaphysical, obstacle I face is the desire to be read by others. While writing is a solitary activity, it’s also an act of communion with the future reader. But not only must the novelist await the possibility of this gratification for years, she must ideally achieve the Buddha-like state of not expecting it at all since publication isn’t guaranteed.  

The biggest daily obstacle I face, though, is that I’m easily distracted. Thankfully, I’ve found a much more affordable version of Jonathan Franzen’s solution of writing in a bare studio without access to the internet: In my previous column, I wrote about joining a writer’s salon in DC, where I work alongside other people in a way that’s both soothing and distraction-free. Logistically, however, I can’t go there every day. 

If only I could come up with a ritual that would allow me to ease into writing on a nightly basis. In a Paris Review interview, Morrison described how she made a cup of coffee while it was still dark outside and then sipped it as she watched dawn break:

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.” 

I’m sure as hell not waking up to write while it’s still dark out. That sort of tenacity seems otherworldly to me. Instead, I’ve tried lighting post-dinner candles, but, I must report, this hasn’t made the transition as smooth as I would like. I’ve watched more than a few TV shows while subtle floral candle fragrance wafted in my direction. 

Anyway, all I can say is that, despite the challenges, I’m still writing. Yes, it’s slow and it’s uneven. But it’s progress. 

Ananya Bhattacharyya is a Washington-based editor and writer. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Guardian, Lit Hub, Baltimore Sun, Al Jazeera America, Reuters, Vice, Washingtonian, and other publications.

Donal’s out-of-wedlock birth does not hinder him from being his father’s presumptive heir as chieftain. One problem, though, is that Eóin is a captain with a fleet of ships — the O’Malley clan motto is “Powerful by Land and Sea” — and Donal does not like boats or the open water. Grace, on the other hand, revels in both, demanding at age 5 to accompany her father and his crew on trading voyages, a request he flatly refuses. Girls don’t sail.

Author Ariel Lawhon lays out this exposition quickly and neatly in the first few pages of The Pirate Queen, a captivating fictional account of this outsized and ever-surprising historical figure. Filling her tale with adventure, bloodshed, and much political intrigue, suffusing it with the sights, sounds, smells, and customs of 1500s Ireland and England, Lawhon draws from both the Irish folklore that surrounds Grace and the archival documents, primarily from the English point of view, that expound upon the pirate queen’s long and notorious career.

As Lawhon says in her author’s notes (which she emphatically warns us not to read before we have finished the whole novel, so I promise I won’t spoil anything):

“The Queen’s deputies, Governors, and sheriffs kept up a steady stream of enraged correspondence for roughly forty years, griping about Grace’s exploits along the coasts of Ireland, her efforts at open rebellion, and her shrewd political maneuverings.”

Fans of Lawhon know that she rarely tells a story in straight chronological order, to greater or lesser effect (I didn’t especially like the constant backing up in time in I Was Anastasia). Here, she uses an intriguing device based on the Celtic concept of a woman’s life stages: maiden, mother, matriarch. Chapters march forward in sets of these three stages, with helpful dates and notations of how old Grace is at each point. The chapters are accompanied by a quote from an apropos historical document.

I was skeptical of this approach, worried that it was gratuitous, but it turns out that it works exceptionally well, driving the action and building layers of suspense more effectively than if the tale had been told straight through. Reading it again in chronological order — as Lawhon herself suggests readers may want to try — markedly changes its feel and impact, illustrating that the author knew what she was about. She delivers a page-turner.

It won’t betray anything to say that Eóin eventually relents, realizing that Grace has a natural feel for the sea, the weather, and the ships, and that she is both clever and hardworking — even that she seems to have inherited an O’Malley gift of the Sense, which connects her to the sea god Manannán. But Eóin isn’t happy about any of it. “He needs her to be a noblewoman,” writes Lawhon. “He needs her to stay ashore and build his family name, to give him grandchildren. What he doesn’t need is for her to take after him.” Still, he begins to allow Grace to come on his trading trips to Galway. And whereas Maeve resents Donal, he and Grace develop a tight and enduring bond.

This litany of what Eóin needs from his daughter shapes a large part of her young life, overriding any desires of her own. As every girl born into nobility eventually discovers, she is merely a strategic asset, “a brood mare with nice manners,” as Grace spits at her father. She and Donal are fostered out for their formal education and finishing to the complicated clan interrelations of The McWilliam, where the younger son, Richard, teaches her the intricacies of knife fighting and so wins her heart. Too bad, though: She’s married off to a different man, whom she despises, and is sent off, forced to find her own way as Bean an Tí, the Lady of the House. Along the way, she has three children and gains the loyalty of much of the household.

Grace is 35 the first time she leads men in battle, but from there on, she is unstoppable. It may be surprising how much of the story takes place on land rather than at sea, but all that political maneuvering, including her historically documented parley with Queen Elizabeth I, really did happen on terra firma. Besides, there are only so many times Grace needs to prove to us that she can lead ships into a fight, or men on a battlefield, and win. She is powerful by land and by sea, and we are with her all the way.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s novel, Up the Hill to Home, tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. She reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. Follow Jenny on Bluesky at @jbywrites.bsky.social.

For more than 45 years, Nichols has devoted his life to recovering and preserving the stories of soldiers of African descent whose courage on and beyond the battlefield helped redefine freedom, citizenship, and democracy in America. In an intimate fireside conversation with Essence editor-at-Large Mikki Taylor, Nichols will take audiences beyond the history books and into the extraordinary lives of formerly enslaved men who became soldiers — men who risked everything to claim a freedom they had been denied and, in doing so, helped change the destiny of a nation.

Drawing from military records, letters, pension files, personal testimony, and rare archival images, Nichols brings these men out of the shadows of history and restores their names, their humanity, their sacrifice, and their heroism to their rightful place in the American story.

Hosted by MahoganyBooks National Harbor, 121 American Way, Oxon Hill, MD. Learn more here.

The Martians spotlights that volatile little corner of the American imagination where persistent obsessions — fueled by over-exuberant media — take hold and root. David Baron’s briskly entertaining social history homes in on the trio of decades framing the turn of the last century, chronicling the rise and fall of a stubborn belief that sociable aliens were gazing on us across the frigid darkness and longing to say, “Howdy, neighbor.”

Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools by Natasha Singer (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Aran Shetterly. “If I can’t stop looking at my smartphone, we all seem to be asking right now, what will this technology do to our children? Singer does not attempt to resolve these concerns, at least not directly. Rather, Coding Kids homes in on something more fundamental: the financial and political power Big Tech wields to tilt important debates about the physical, cognitive, and emotional effects of social media on children in its favor and to make skeptics feel like they’re fighting from behind, nearly powerless to resist the tsunami of new and untested technologies — and the curricula built around them — that are taking over our public schools.”

The Visionaries: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the Making of the Post-World War II Order by James Holland (Atlantic Monthly Press). Reviewed by Jonas Vaicikonis. “Holland writes with the confidence and clarity of an historian who knows his material intimately. But the book hints at fascinating questions it never fully explores. Many contemporary debates over globalization, sovereignty, foreign aid, and America’s role in Europe were already visible in the late 1940s. Holland touches on these issues but rarely lingers long enough to explore them in detail. A deeper examination of those fault lines would’ve made the book even more relevant to modern readers.”

Simple Stories by Lyonel Trouillot; translated by Willard Wood (Other Press). Reviewed by Susi Wyss. “What provides extra depth to these and the other tales in Simple Stories is the way Trouillot sometimes switches the point of view to provide the reader with a fuller perspective than what any one individual character sees and understands. In ‘The Prodigal Child,’ for instance, we meet a thirtysomething man who spent two years studying in Europe and is working on a ‘treatise on the negation and invention of self.’ He has nothing but disdain for his mother’s ‘coarse country manners…her peasant blouse and her stupid sayings.’ Only when the POV switches to his mother’s do we learn that he’s living in an asylum and what is happening to the manuscript he’s working on.”

The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell (Portfolio). Reviewed by Mariko Hewer. “For the most part, books about art crimes don’t involve a lot of bloodshed. Such stories seem better suited to an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ spin: eccentric, chaotic, even a little whimsical. But in The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy, reporter Matthew Campbell tells a very different sort of tale.”

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First things first: Ignore the back cover of this debut novel, which might lead you to believe what’s inside is low-taste horror. Ignore the cheesy title, too, with its obvious double meaning. Ignore its “parable” label; the narrative is far too complex for that. (Allegory would be more accurate, except that the characters emerge so fully as human, each with individual quirks, quibbles, and quiddities, that any inherent symbolism never dominates.) Despite the fact that it tells of girls allegedly able to turn into dogs, Xenobe Purvis’ The Hounding is a serious work of fiction.

In Oxfordshire, at the start of the 18th century, near the village of Little Nettlebed, which straddles the not-very-wide River Thames, the five Mansfield sisters, ranging in age from about 8 to 15 or so, are being raised by their nearly blind grandfather. Their parents are dead, and so, too, more recently, is their grandmother, for whom they still wear the deep black of mourning. The sisters are allowed unusual freedom to be outdoors at what is thought an unseemly time, near nightfall. Also unusual, their grandfather prizes their independence as much as they do — so much so that “he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls.”

A timeless backwardness pervades the village, even while changes are taking place. As the novel proceeds, the villagers’ general unease becomes more and more pronounced, caused by strangely hot, dry weather and its consequences: wells drying up, crops withering. Being or becoming a woman in this place means being looked down upon, despised, even feared, especially this bloc of five of them. Rarely is one girl seen without the company of a sibling. Often silent in public, they seem to communicate among themselves through looks and movements alone, much as animals might. When at home, their sprightly give-and-take is delightful.

Little Nettlebed is large enough for the vicar not to know everyone by name — or not want to, at least. In any case, it’s also large enough for the reader to be dizzied at first, yet soon one comes to be acquainted with the villagers and to know a few of them intimately, in addition to feeling a closeness with the sisters. The story is colored by the perceptions of the villagers, by their beliefs, their hopes, their fears, their prejudices, and their knowledge and ignorance.

The folks whose thoughts the reader is privy to are outsiders in one way or another — or feel themselves to be by virtue of their imagination, place in life, or temperament. Each has his or her own preoccupations and internal struggles, each his or her own decided opinions.

In this tightly plotted narrative, nothing is extraneous, nothing wasted. Everything said early in the story has its echo later on. One character, for example, who believes that he’s beheld an angel as a sign of divine choice, later dies with blood pooling around him ironically like wings. The prose is clean and spare, without modernisms or gratuitous archaisms. Dialogue demonstrates relationships among the characters while simultaneously moving the plot along and creating tension over what’s to come.

The sense of the period emerges, too. Describing haymaking, author Purvis says of one character that “all he knew was the task at hand…the sun burning the back of his neck and the handle of the scythe rubbing against his palms.” And of the time of day called cockshut, she writes, “The light was becoming thinner…things were not always as they seemed. Colours changed, and shapes shifted. Dim light deluded the eyes.” Similar imagery throughout sustains an unrelenting theme of blindness, of the inability to see clearly or make out what’s true.

Description for its own sake is minimal. You won’t, for example, encounter a verbal snapshot of the village. Yet the sky, the trees, the wildflowers, and the small animals along the river receive frequent attention. In brief sketches of the natural world, a sight, sound, or smell affects one of the characters, revealing a fresh thought, emotion, memory, or purpose. The beauty of the place can’t help but impress the reader, especially as it casts into stark relief the ugly urges of the people. “A treat for drinking men could mean only one thing: something was going to be hurt” — or worse, as when a badger is cruelly baited and killed outside the alehouse by a clot of drunken men and their dogs.

Perhaps you’re wondering how — or whether — the five sisters actually turn into dogs. That you must discover for yourself. Fortunately, this isn’t a story about pets but about women and their place in society, about the dangers of rumor and mob behavior, and about the perilous ripening of adolescence — surely as fraught today as it was in the 1700s.

[Editor’s note: This review originally ran in 2025.]

Marilyn Oser is the author of the novels This Storied Land, November to July, Even You, and Rivka’s War; the blog “Streets of Israel”; and other short fiction and nonfiction. A recipient of the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Prize, she has been called “a particularly gifted novelist” by the Midwest Review.

The Cambodian Civil War was a brutal and bloody conflict that left untold numbers of civilians dead or suffering under dictator Pol Pot’s regime. To add insult to injury, while citizens were dying of starvation or being shot in the killing fields, wealthy foreigners were instigating a roaring trade in looted antiquities stolen from some of Cambodia’s most revered sites:

“The conflict had sparked an explosion in looting, particularly the largest, most impressive works [from ancient Khmer temples] — near life-size statues whose theft might have attracted too much attention in peacetime…Some were moved by temple robbers who took advantage of the chaos, [while others] were almost certainly being stolen by the warring forces fighting for control.”

Campbell likens these thefts and the pieces’ subsequent sales to wealthy foreigners to the Lincoln Memorial “adorn[ing] the courtyard of a museum in Jakarta…Even worse, clandestine excavations, carried out by gangs of thieves using picks, shovels, and sometimes dynamite, routinely destroyed irreplaceable works.”

If the looters were at least capitalizing on a lucrative market in order to survive under a punishing dictatorship where even foraging for food was illegal, the same cannot be said about the Westerners who brokered further sales of the antiquities. Douglas Latchford, a British expatriate living in Thailand, quickly became an industry heavyweight, having access to teams of middlemen who would remove statuary and other masonry from sacred Khmer sites (including Angkor Wat and its environs) and ship it all to him.

Although Latchford generally didn’t feel the need to justify his decades-long plundering of Cambodia’s cultural and religious heritage, even his own arguments tended to feel garbled and maudlin. At one point, he claimed Buddhist priests told him that “in a previous life I had been Khmer, and that what I collect had once belonged to me.” (Using that same logic, readers might wonder whether they were millionaires in a previous life and, if so, are entitled to similar remuneration in this one.)

Of course, Latchford knew he was in tricky legal territory; the objects he was profiting from had been taken from Cambodia illegally by many measures. He often employed fraudulent testimonials and downright lies to convince his buyers, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that an item’s provenance was sound. For their part, those purchasing the obviously important artifacts tended not to ask too many questions, if any at all.

While the United Nations provided a framework under which plundered items could be repatriated, enforcement fell to the individual countries involved: Both the country in possession of the goods and the one they’d been swiped from needed to be willing to right the wrong. Further, in the United States, writes Campbell:

“the government would need to show where and when the statue was looted, and to demonstrate that Cambodian law had made such an act illegal at the time.”

Given that many of these artifacts were pilfered during the civil war, such a demonstration would prove difficult. Nevertheless, a cadre of improbable allies — a former looter turned state’s witness; a Denver widow who falsified provenances while signing her emails “Giggles and more giggles”; and an archaeologist who used superimposed images to pinpoint stolen items’ original homes — was increasingly willing to take on the challenge.  

This cast of unlikely characters helps this tale of “war, obsession, and a global art conspiracy” more than live up to its subtitle. Fans of true crime, history, and stranger-than-fiction, real-life folks will enjoy every page.

Mariko Hewer is a freelance editor and writer, as well as a nursery-school teacher. She is passionate about good books, good food, and good company.

To the two things nobody wants to see made — sausage and legislation — we should probably add a third: New York real estate deals. Manhattan developer Larry Silverstein, described as famous or infamous depending on who you talk to, signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center in July 2001, two months before 9/11. The morning the planes hit, he had a doctor’s appointment and didn’t make it to the Twin Towers for his usual breakfast with clients. It saved his life.

Along with the rest of the world, Silverstein watched in horror and disbelief as the buildings fell. In the aftermath of that horrific event, he joined New York City’s leadership in vowing to rebuild. The Rising is his account of how it happened. It’s not a pretty story.

Granted, this is the gospel according to Larry Silverstein, and he uses it to settle scores with the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, governors and mayors, architects, the New York Times, financial institutions, and others. He paints a world in which lying, threats, betrayal, broken promises, ignored contracts, and all sorts of other unpleasantries are standard operating procedure.

After the shock and horror of 9/11 and the subsequent vows to rebuild, Silverstein was left with a $10-million-a-month rental obligation on structures that no longer existed. The Port Authority insisted that a (prior) deal is a deal and didn’t honor its side of the contract when the parties involved agreed to initial plans to rebuild. This led to more planning, more lawyers, and expensive lawsuits against insurance companies that refused to pay up. Financing slipped away, architectural bills were astronomical, and on it went. Admits Silverstein:

“In truth, I am a control freak. I need to be in command, to be able to make the decisions that will affect my family and my business. During the terrible days and weeks after 9/11, I was not myself. I was not in control. For the first time in my life I felt that I was unable to handle things.”

Multiple new buildings were to be erected at Ground Zero, and each required designers, engineers, and special steel and other materials that would render them blast-proof. Every building required agreements and contracts with numerous entities, most of whom distrusted everyone else. The often-acrimonious negotiations took months and included intimidation, obscenities, and more broken promises.

Politicians held ribbon-cutting ceremonies to announce construction that would never take place. Banks guaranteed, and then pulled out of, financing. Would-be lessees agreed to multi-year, multi-million-dollar deals and then canceled, leaving Silverstein with no financial backing for his loans. Governors made pledges and then reneged.

At one point, the main building, the tallest, was to be called Freedom Tower, a response to the attacks that had brought down the Twin Towers. While the name sounded good coming out of grandees’ mouths at press conferences, potential lessees were concerned that, for terrorists, it might put a bullseye on the place. Eventually, the building was christened One World Trade Center. After long and bitter haggling, it was agreed that the Port Authority would build it, while Silverstein would take on the other buildings at the site. Each is a magnificent skyscraper.

Silverstein is a stubborn man, a self-made billionaire who appears to know everyone who’s anyone in New York. The haggling over what and how to rebuild the World Trade Center got very ugly, and the Port Authority initially offered hundreds of millions of dollars to buy him out of his original lease. He refused, explaining:

“I never considered the offers for a minute…No one seemed to understand that after 9/11 my involvement in the World Trade Center was not primarily about money or profit. There was something larger, more emotional, more significant motivating me. I was determined to show the people who had attacked America that we don’t give up.”

He certainly didn’t. It took 18 years to fill the holes left by Sept. 11th, but today, the site not only reflects Silverstein’s and others’ determination to answer the horror of the worst terrorist attack on American soil with something spectacular, but it also stands as a vibrant memorial to those who died on that awful morning.

The Rising is well written and easy to read. It opens a window into the dog-eat-dog world of commercial real estate in Manhattan, a world so unpalatable that I found myself wondering why anyone would want to be part of it. Then I remembered that billions of dollars are in play, and those with the stomach for the fight can make themselves very rich. In the bargain, if they’re lucky, they get to produce structures that lift our hearts and help us understand who we are.

Silverstein’s office is in one of the new towers he built. “I look out through a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass at a neighborhood that didn’t exist twenty-three years ago,” he reflects. “A neighborhood I helped to create.” In his 90s now, he feels as though he beat the naysayers who said he couldn’t do it. Clearly, he could.

[Editor’s note: This review originally ran in 2024.]

Larry Matthews is the author of Age in Good Time and other books.

Of course, that harried life she refers to is from the 1950s, a time we are supposed to idealize now. Lindbergh — yes, mother of the baby kidnapped and murdered 20 years earlier and wife of the famed aviator — writes:

“For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels with it.”

Replace “radio programs” with “social media,” and this list of distractions sounds remarkably modern.

I’m an historical novelist, so I am often casting my mind back to the past, reading books that were once popular but now have been forgotten. (Though one gift from the internet, its own sort of sea, is the creation of niches for the preservation and discussion of many of these gems.) I’m often struck by how contemporary are the concerns of long-dead writers. Which is to say, maybe humans are all still grappling with the same eternal problems.

Lindbergh herself makes the same argument:

“Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world [i.e., the pull of competing demands] back in the third century.”

So maybe, if we are struggling with the same problems, we can turn to some of our predecessors’ suggestions. Maybe history is a scribble, with recursive loops mixed in with the progress of social advances.

Lindbergh looks to the natural metaphors offered by the ocean and seashore for her instruction. The female paper nautilus, she writes, uses her fragile shell as a cradle for her young, then departs it to wander the ocean. That departure, Lindbergh suggests, offers a beautiful symbol for middle-aged women ready to leave the security of home and journey afar.

(Interestingly, it was a 19th-century woman, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, who first investigated the means by which paper nautiluses create their shells, and in doing so, she helped invent the modern aquarium. And Lindbergh became the first certified female glider pilot when she was in her 20s, so it seems she didn’t need to wait until midlife for the courage to soar!)

Lindbergh’s paper nautilus doesn’t only offer lessons for women, though. She suggests “both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit — qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected.”

I find this message from the past comforting. Yet I find it disconcerting to be comforted by gentle wisdom from a woman who was, in 1936, a personal guest of Hermann Göring at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. In her later-published collection of diary entries and letters from the time, Lindbergh wrote that she found Nazi-run Germany “thrilling.”

Presumably, she repented of those beliefs. Maybe it was even the burden of her disillusionment and chastening that offered her grace later in life. Her frustrations with her marriage to Charles, who had pushed Lindbergh toward fascism, prompted her journey to the Captiva Island seashore and her writing about grappling with her identity as a woman. And though her book counsels patience and faith, the year after its publication, Lindbergh began a long affair with her family doctor.

The past is complicated because people are complicated — which is all the more reason to roll up our sleeves and dive in.

Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow. She lives in Maryland with her family and four ridiculous cats. You can keep up with her and her future columns on Instagram or Substack.

The author of nearly a dozen novels, including The Ninth Hour, At Weddings and Wakes, After This, and the National Book Award-winning Charming Billy, McDermott is also the recipient of the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, and the Whiting Award, among other honors. 

In conversation with venerated book critic Ron Charles, McDermott will share some of what she’s learned during her long, illustrious career. Don’t miss your chance to hear from the master firsthand — registration opens Nov. 1st!

The 2027 Washington Writers Conference happens Apr. 30-May 1, 2027, at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda, 7400 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD. Learn more here.

[Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.]

Originally published in French in 2024, Simple Stories is set across multiple time periods, from the Duvalier era through present-day Haiti. What ties the many characters together is that they all live in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Saint Antoine, where, over time, in a sort of reverse gentrification, “the poor peasants moved in, driving the old inhabitants into less crowed, less decrepit parts of the city.”

Despite sometimes remaining unnamed, Trouillot’s characters are complex, varied, and as colorful as the crowded homes on the book’s cover. They include the trans mistress of a colonel “with no taste for violence,” a maid in dangerously obsessive love with her master’s son, and a poet who calls himself James Bond. Writers, poets, and artists figure prominently, as do controlling mothers and ne’er-do-well men.

“Casa Blanca,” which includes the first instance I’m aware of in which “Baudelaire” is used as a verb, tells the story of a small, meek teacher and Yolanda, a Dominican prostitute. Instead of taking her to bed, the teacher reads poetry to her — until one fateful night when a much bigger man competes for her attention.

“Family Spirit” starts out as a run-of-the-mill tale of a passionate love that fizzles out over the years and then morphs into a disturbing story about the lengths women sometimes must go to in a male-dominated society. As if to underscore the fact that this story could belong to any woman, Trouillot leaves the three main characters unnamed.

And in one of the most affecting stories of the collection, “The Promise,” wealthy industrialist Pierre Bonhomme, a self-made man who has reached an advanced age, is described by Trouillot as follows:

“He’d sold off his car collection and stopped listening to his favorite operas. You can be rich and still be hard of hearing. And the music that had once brought him peace and calm now seemed lugubrious, a portent of future evil.”

Notwithstanding his fear of death, Bonhomme takes off on a dangerous mission for reasons that become clear in the final paragraphs.

What provides extra depth to these and the other tales in Simple Stories is the way Trouillot sometimes switches the point of view to provide the reader with a fuller perspective than what any one individual character sees and understands. In “The Prodigal Child,” for instance, we meet a thirtysomething man who spent two years studying in Europe and is working on a “treatise on the negation and invention of self.” He has nothing but disdain for his mother’s “coarse country manners…her peasant blouse and her stupid sayings.”

Only when the POV switches to his mother’s do we learn that he’s living in an asylum and what is happening to the manuscript he’s working on. Similarly, in “The Trigger Event,” the anecdote an author tells the world about himself and how he became a writer is shattered by a letter from a woman who knew him way back when. Other times, the point of view is a communal “we,” as in the story “Sad Guitar,” the tale of a young musician who is sent by his family to make something of himself in the United States.

Collectively, the stories paint a complex and vibrant Haiti. Recurring themes include jealousy and revenge, ghosts and vodou, charm potions and witches, prostitution, family ties, and migration in search of opportunities — all set against the political backdrop of corrupt and ineffective governments that sometimes break even those not in the direct crosshairs of despots, bandits, and kingpins. But Trouillot’s Haiti is also a world of art and literature and love in its many forms, and in spite of the sometimes-heavy themes, he relates his stories in a cozy, almost chatty fashion. Even in translation, ably executed by Willard Wood, the reader feels as though they’re listening to the narrator as he regales a group of friends at a corner café.

In his prologue, Trouillot “dedicate[s] this book to the wounded and the outcast, who have a right to revenge and sometimes take it, if only in words.” By the end of the book, his not-so-simple stories have given a voice to those who don’t ordinarily have one — and remind us just how sweet revenge can be.

Susi Wyss is author of The Civilized World, a novel-in-stories set across Africa that was largely inspired by her 20-year career in international health. In addition to receiving the Maria Thomas Fiction Award, The Civilized World was named a “Book to Pick Up Now” by O, the Oprah Magazine.