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18 Jul, 2024

- Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

- Book Review: ‘Women in the Valley of the Kings,’ by Kathleen Sheppard

- Suzanne Nossel, Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, on Her Reading Life

Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

What if the star of “The Matrix” worked with a sci-fi novelist to tell the story of an 80,000-year-old warrior who can rip people’s arms off but struggles with loneliness?

China Miéville, left, and Keanu Reeves collaborated on “The Book of Elsewhere,” a novel set in the world of the BRZRKR comics that Reeves imagined and co-wrote.

By Alexandra Alter  18 Jul, 2024

Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.

“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”

From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”

For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?

“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”

Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix.

Panels from Reeves’s BRZRKR comic series, which has sold more than two million copies.

And now, Reeves is releasing his debut novel, “The Book of Elsewhere,” which he co-wrote with the British science fiction author China Miéville.

Set in the world of the BRZRKR comic, “The Book of Elsewhere” is a mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and mythology, with a heavy dose of existentialism.

To call it a weird book doesn’t begin to capture its genre-defying, protean strangeness. It centers on Reeves’s 80,000-year-old warrior — called Unute or sometimes B — who is freakishly strong, able to rip people’s arms off and punch through their chests, but has grown weary of his deathless state. It’s a pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller, but it’s also a moody, experimental novel about mortality, the slippery nature of time and what it means to be human.

[Embedded audio available]

At first, Reeves and Miéville might seem an odd pairing. Reeves is a movie star who has starred in billion-dollar action franchises like “The Matrix” and “John Wick,” as well as cult classics like the stoner time-travel comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and the surfer crime thriller “Point Break.” Miéville is a Marxist who holds a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics. He’s known in literary circles for his heady, politically charged sci-fi and fantasy novels, among them “Kraken,” which features a squid-worshiping cult, and “Railsea,” set in a dystopian world that’s covered in railroad lines and populated by giant naked mole rats, which is both a homage to “Moby-Dick” and a critique of modern capitalism.

“It was important to us approach this in a way that did something new,” Miéville, standing, said. “It’s another version of storytelling, which I love,” Reeves said.

But from another angle, the Reeves/Miéville partnership makes aesthetic, cultural and even philosophical sense. Both pose mind-bending questions about the mysteries of existence in their work and often smuggle in those ideas through action-filled plots. Reeves grew up devouring science fiction by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, and later came to love Miéville’s short stories, which he called “a wonder.” Miéville, for his part, loves how, in movies like “The Matrix” and “Johnny Mnemonic,” Reeves was able to “combine propulsion with astonishing spectacle, with heretical philosophical provocation and investigation.”

In a joint video interview, Reeves, from his home in Los Angeles, and Miéville, in Berlin, both used the word “preposterous” to describe how surreal it felt to work with the other. They spoke about their first meeting, in Berlin during the summer of 2021, in the giddy way a new couple talks about how they first got together.

“The Book of Elsewhere” is due out on Tuesday.

“China, you were very prepared, which I really appreciated. He had a little book and a pencil, which I loved, I was like, yes,” Reeves recalled. “And he was like, I’m going to do a bad China” — he broke into a British accent, imitating Miéville — “‘I’ve been thinking, and I have a few questions for you.’ And I was like, please.”

At the meeting, Reeves told Miéville that apart from a couple of key plot points and character traits that had been established in the comic, Miéville could do what he liked with the source material.

Reeves’s openness convinced Miéville that he would be able to write something narratively interesting, and deliver a book that didn’t feel like comic-book merch or a tie-in.

“It was important to us approach this in a way that did something new, that did something that was very specifically literary in the sense of using the novel and using the novel form, that nonetheless was unabashedly and joyfully a BRZRKR novel and that honors the source material,” Miéville said.

As for why he wanted to write a novel, and how his literary projects intersect with his film career, Reeves had an answer that he apologetically acknowledged was “so obvious and reductive.” “It’s another version of storytelling, which I love,” he said.

Reeves in, clockwise from top left, "The Matrix Reloaded," "Point Break" (with Patrick Swayze), "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum" and "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" (with Alex Winter). Clockwise from top left: Warner Bros.; 20th Century Fox; Niko Tavernise/Lionsgate; MGM

One of his collaborators on the comic book series, Matt Kindt, has another theory about why Reeves has invested so much in the warrior character. He thinks Reeves, who has remained a rather enigmatic figure despite his decades in the spotlight, sees aspects of himself in the warrior — a figure who is worshiped and gains a cultlike following, but is lonely, treated as alien, burdened by other people’s misguided ideas about who he is.

“I could tell it was a very personal story,” Kindt said.

In some ways, he added, the story seems like an oblique response to Reeves’s iconic roles in hyper-stylized action movies, as a larger-than life, invincible figure who kills again and again but can never die.

Reeves said he didn’t realize at first how much of himself he was putting into the warrior character, but he’s since come to see how his metaphysical preoccupations shaped the story.

“It surprised me in the creative act, what gets revealed to oneself,” he said. “Maybe the creative act is a kind of talking, you know. And so maybe I have father issues and mother issues. And maybe I think about death.”

He continued.

“Maybe I don’t understand the violence of the world. I don’t understand that we all know we’re going to die, and we kill each other over things that are, perhaps as you look back at them, not so important. Maybe I wonder about the world, you know, how did we get here, who are we.

“I wonder about technology. I wonder about this kind of extinction motive that it seems the species has. I don’t know why we’re in such a rush to get off the planet and become digitized. Maybe I wonder about love. And the power of it. Why is death so strong and love so frail, and yet it’s the strongest force on the planet? So, I like to think about those things, and I thought maybe I found that they could come out in a comic book.”

In addition to “The Book of Elsewhere,” the BRZRKR comic is inspiring a live-action film and animated spinoff.

Besides the peculiarities of the novel itself, there is also the weirdness of the fact that Keanu Reeves wrote a novel. Other movie stars have done it — see Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Sean Penn, Ethan Hawke, Jim Carrey — with mixed results.

That Reeves handpicked an award-winning novelist as his wingman, rather than quietly conscripting a ghostwriter, was a sign of his utter seriousness. They mapped out the plot together, but when it came to the actual writing, Miéville took the reins, creating an outline and delivering a draft, and making revisions based on Reeves’s suggestions.

Still, some might dismiss a Keanu Reeves novel as a vanity project, akin to a celebrity releasing a perfume or a tequila. Already, “The Book of Elsewhere” is proving to be somewhat polarizing. It drew praise from one of Reeves’s literary idols, William Gibson, who called it “exceptionally innovative,” and won accolades from Kirkus Reviews for its “playful, even poetic language.” But it got a deflating pan in Publishers Weekly, which called it “leaden” and “tedious.” A Booklist critic was both enchanted and baffled, positing that the narrative might be a meta-commentary on “some of the popular Reeves internet memes,” like Sad Keanu, inspired by an image of a glum-looking Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a park bench. “Whatever it is, it works,” the review concluded.

At first, “The Book of Elsewhere” reads like a propulsive black-ops spy thriller, with scenes of carnage that bring to mind Reeves’s role as a puppy-loving assassin in “John Wick.” It opens with a scene of grotesque violence, as a secret military unit is ambushed by a suicide bomber targeting B, the warrior, who has agreed to let the U.S. military use him as a weapon in exchange for their help solving the mystery of his existence.

But pretty quickly, the novel veers into denser philosophical territory.

“It’s a big ideas novel that’s run through with an action story,” said Ben Greenberg, who acquired and edited the novel for Random House, where it is being released by the imprint Del Rey. “It feels very diffuse until it starts to congeal slowly. I don’t think people would be expecting that from a Keanu Reeves novel.”

“Show business looks at it like, What else can we do, but I come at it from the artist’s side, like, What else can we make,” Reeves said.

“The Book of Elsewhere” is punctuated with dreamy, second-person interludes from B’s lonely eons upon the earth, as he observes the rise and fall of civilizations, technologies, species, religions, languages and ideologies. There’s an extended cameo from Sigmund Freud, who tries to treat the warrior’s incurable melancholy. B reflects on meeting Karl Marx (“always much funnier than most people make him out to be”) and the playwright Samuel Beckett, who, in the novel’s loopy alternate history, once cast B in his absurdist play “Krapp’s Last Tape.” There’s a central plot element that involves a magical, immortal deer-pig — specifically, a wild, tusked Indonesian pig called a babirusa — who has been hunting B for 78,000 years, and becomes both his nemesis and the closest thing he has to family.

The narrative is littered with arcane facts and references. Among the terms I had to Google: sastrugi (snow that’s been shaped into wavelike peaks by wind), smilodon (a fanged feline predator that lived in the Pleistocene epoch), Urschleim (a term coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel for a primordial slime from which all life emerged), khesheph (a kind of ancient near-Eastern magic) and glyptodon (a giant armadillo that went extinct around 12,000 years ago but, in B’s telling in “The Book of Elsewhere,” managed to survive in France until the 400s A.D.).

“There is play in this as well,” Miéville said. “It’s not all existentialism and Freud. It’s an opportunity to imagine glyptodons in early Burgundy.”

At the mention of glyptodons, Reeves rolled backward in delight, letting out a high-pitched “hee-hee” and flashing the rock n’ roll sign with both hands.

Reeves has other ideas for new works based on the character, including, possibly, an epic poem.

“Show business looks at it like, what else can we do, but I come at it from the artist’s side, like what else can we make,” Reeves said. “From the very beginning I was hoping that other creators and artists could play, as China said, with the toys.”

He’s not sure yet how the version of the character that Miéville developed in the novel will influence the comic and other projects going forward. But he’s fairly certain it will surprise him.

“That’s to be revealed to me,” Reeves said. “There’s a lot to think about, what it can be and how it will affect the canon, as I go back and play with my own toys.”

The Lost Art of Mummy Smuggling

In “Women in the Valley of the Kings,” Kathleen Sheppard introduces us to a group of 19th-century archaeologists who changed the field forever.

Marianne Brocklehurst (left) and Amelia B. Edwards documented their archaeological expeditions in Egypt.

By W. M. Akers  17 Jul, 2024

WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, by Kathleen Sheppard

Let’s say it’s 1873. You’re an intrepid Englishwoman sailing the Nile in search of adventure and history and souvenirs. You’ve sneaked a painted sarcophagus onto your boat. You open the lid, unwrap the occupant and admire what you declare to be a “festive object and not at all a funereal old frump.”

The next day, cabin stinking of dried death and customs officials ready to impound your find, you have two choices: dump the mummy overboard or rewrap it and hope nobody asks about the smell.

This was the situation faced by Marianne Brocklehurst, an adventurer whose story is told in Kathleen Sheppard’s “Women in the Valley of the Kings,” a new history of Egyptology that prioritizes the women whose contributions, for good and otherwise, shaped the field. While men opened tombs and won headlines, it was women like Brocklehurst, Emma Andrews, Margaret Alice Murray and Caroline Ransom Williams who frequently funded the men’s expeditions, organized their digs, tracked and cataloged their finds. Sheppard calls these women “the pillars on which the male heroes of Western Egyptology stood.”

Without glossing over the “vandalizing and pillaging” that accompanied their work, she celebrates her subjects as trailblazers. Other histories might claim that “men got dirty, had adventures and excavated artifacts” while women did the dull work. Sheppard argues otherwise.

Her first hero is Amelia B. Edwards — a onetime companion of Brocklehurst’s — who turned her 1873 trip into a best-selling travelogue, “A Thousand Miles Up the Nile,” and founded the nonprofit now known as the Egypt Exploration Society. She funded expeditions run by Flinders Petrie, whom she appreciated for his gentle excavating and thrift.

On American lecture tours, she commanded fees second only to those of Charles Dickens, and she inspired a generation of would-be Egyptologists in a time when, writes Sheppard, if “one had the time to travel and the money to support excavations or purchasing artifacts, or both, that was enough to make you an archaeologist at this point in the history of archaeology in Egypt.”

Edwards was also queer. In England, she lived with and cared for Ellen Braysher, an older woman whom she loved deeply. On her one trip to Egypt, she traveled with Lucy Renshaw, whose breasts she described in a poem as “twin blossoms” that “I would barter my soul away but to kiss.” Many of the women in this book are lesbians, and Sheppard makes clear that this is no coincidence. Foreign adventure is always tempting to those restricted at home, and in an era when every traveling woman needed a companion, queer women were uncommonly at ease.

“These long-term same-sex relationships were often necessary for women to participate in the field,” writes Sheppard. “Two wealthy, educated women could work without needing a man in a period when it was almost impossible for a woman to do so on her own.”

Sheppard resists the temptation to present this history as an uncomplicated feminist triumph. The work these women enabled was often destructive, even criminal, and supported by a colonialist structure that bound millions to a rigid hierarchy of class, sex and race. But reading Edwards’s story, particularly in conjunction with “A Thousand Miles Up the Nile,”

reveals a seductive side to colonialism that remains frighteningly appealing even now.

It is hard to read Edwards’s account of her first close look at the ancient city of Giza without feeling the joy of a queer woman claiming her place in the world: “When at last the edge of the desert is reached, and the long sand-slope climbed, and the rocky platform gained, and the great pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon. It shuts out all the other pyramids. It shuts out everything but the sense of awe and wonder.”

But that awe and wonder must always be tempered by ugly reality. Edwards later tells of a trip across a field of plundered graves, and the way all European visitors shift rapidly from disgust to eagerness.

“Shocked at first, they denounce with horror the whole system of sepulchral excavation, legal as well as predatory; acquiring, however, a taste for scarabs and funerary statuettes, they soon begin to buy with eagerness the spoils of the dead; finally, they forget all their former scruples and ask no better fortune than to discover and confiscate a tomb for themselves.”

As for Brocklehurst and her mummy, Edwards writes that, “unable to endure the perfume of their ancient Egyptian,” Brocklehurst “drowned the dear departed in the Nile.”

But Sheppard tells another story. The mummy, later identified as a girl named Sheb-nut, was smuggled out of Egypt and back to England. If you want, you can visit her there — in a museum.

WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age | By Kathleen Sheppard | St. Martin’s | 307 pp. | $30

Suzanne Nossel Is Heartened by ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’

Alexander Lefebvre’s new book is a ‘call to action about what we are trying to defend, and why,’ says the head of PEN America, which has been pummeled with disputes about speech, activism and Israel.

18 Jul, 2024

What books are on your night stand?

Charlotte Lydia Riley’s “The Free Speech Wars.” She and I have agreed to write for a Penguin Random House UK series of short books that will offer opposing views on substantive issues of the day. Ours will address the question “Is Free Speech Under Threat?” (You can guess which side I am on). I badly want to read Salman Rushdie’s “Knife” and have brought it with me on a few short trips, but not yet found myself in the emotional space to dive in. And Sarah Lewis’s “The Unseen Truth,” which isn’t out until September, is a riveting account of the visual lenses through which we do and don’t see and understand race.

Knowing how embattled writers are right now, is it hard for you to simply read for pleasure?

Honestly, yes. We are dealing with the horrors of war between Israel and Hamas, with a devastating toll on all those affected, including writers. In Ukraine, writers are fighting on the front lines, and our colleagues at PEN Ukraine are using books and literature to nourish an embattled nation. Our core work is on behalf of individual writers who are threatened, jailed and sometimes tortured or killed because of what they express, and those numbers are going up. It does make it hard to sleep sometimes.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

My breakthrough was “Danny and the Dinosaur” by Syd Hoff, when I first realized I could read on my own. Things took off from there, and by second grade, I had honed in on paperback love stories that I couldn’t possibly have understood. I still have a dog-eared copy of “Anne of Green Gables,” given to me by my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dorros, as a prize with the inscription, “Suzanne, I know you wanted a love story, but this is a timeless tale I hope you will enjoy.” (I did eventually, after getting over my initial annoyance at being told what to read).

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

A novel has to be immersive, and a world needs to come to life, drawing on places I have been or can imagine. I set Elizabeth Strout’s books near a summer camp in Maine where I was a counselor. My setting for Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West” was Hong Kong. I can conjure the image of cabins in the woods at Camp David that lodged in my head when I read Lawrence Wright’s “Thirteen Days in September.” That said, it’s hard to inhabit a different geography and world by reading just a few pages a night. I need a certain amount of time for the landscape of the book to set up camp in my brain. So, my ideal reading experience is on a beach or a Balinese bed poolside, shifting from position to position throughout the day to avoid sunburn while being lost in another realm.

Writers have a lot of opinions. What makes you good at getting them to work together?

The main thing is to agree not to agree on everything. If you tried to create PEN America today it would be impossible to get such a large collection of writers to agree on anything; they would never sign on to a single organization. We cannot move in lock step with every writer or partner on every issue — the opinions among such a diverse group make that impossible. Our charter is to champion the freedom to read and write and defend the liberties that make it possible, and that’s where we find common ground.

What’s the last great book you read?

Call me a nepo-spouse, but my husband, the historian David Greenberg, has spent the last five years researching and writing “John Lewis: A Life,” which will be published in October. We all know enough to admire Lewis, but understanding his bare bones upbringing in rural Alabama and subsequent rise to national prominence at such a young age, his fearlessness in facing down beatings and jailings, and his stalwartness in standing by his ideals through a lifetime of Washington wheeling and dealing is staggering.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

Alexandre Lefebvre’s “Liberalism as a Way of Life” helped me to better understand the interplay between culture and liberal values that is at the heart of so much of my work. At a time when liberalism is under assault from multiple quarters in the U.S. and around the world, Lefebvre offers a rousing case that liberalism is not only the best political system, but also a spiritual touchstone that makes for a rewarding life, warm relationships and a thriving society. It’s a real call to action about what we are trying to defend, and why.

What’s the last book that made you laugh?

Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg’s “Roctogenarians.” I went to college with Mo, so if he is getting ready to contemplate how to rock those later decades of life, I’d better be doing the same.

17 Jul, 2024

- Book Review: Best Graphic Novels in July

- Loved ‘Couples Therapy’? Read These 11 Books

- Readers Respond to the ‘Best Books of the 21st Century’

Pulp Homage and Art-School Laughs Brighten July’s Graphic Novels

An unlovable heroine, a cyborg in search of missing parts, the restoration of a classic work and a series that is always worth the wait highlight four new volumes.

By Sam Thielman  17 Jul, 2024

A rule I’ve developed is that if a book makes me laugh loudly enough to be embarrassing on the train, I have to find a way to write about it. In that spirit, THE WENDY AWARD, by Walter Scott (Drawn & Quarterly, 200 pp. $22.95) is the latest and arguably greatest in Scott’s screamingly funny series about Wendy, a fine artist whose work about a fictional character named Wanda draws on her own life to a disturbing degree. (Just so you’ve got that straight: Walter, who is a real fine artist, makes comics about Wendy, the heroine of the book, who makes comics about Wanda.)

Wendy is a mess. Blessedly, she is not a lovable mess — much of the joy of “The Wendy Award” comes from Wendy’s complete lack of lovability, or even likability. She is needy, always late, self-involved, insecure, inconsiderate and generally a walking disaster.

Walter Scott’s hapless heroine can’t catch a break in “The Wendy Award,” when she is told she can’t cry in a coffee shop.

Wendy’s alcoholism comes to a head during “The Wendy Award,” and while Scott finds some of the requisite pathos in Wendy’s confrontation with herself, he steadfastly refuses to couch it in a way that’s not funny. The effect is remarkable: It’s a story of personal dissolution, betrayed friendship, and tentative recovery with a hefty cast of rich characters, but it’s almost purely comedic, drawn in a deliberately simple near-scrawl. In an era where it’s hard to avoid soulless computer-generated simulacra of art — especially at the comic-book store — “The Wendy Award” feels especially vital.

You can’t fault Atsushi Kaneko for a lack of ambition: The manga veteran has chosen to adapt Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga “Dororo” as SEARCH AND DESTROY (Fantagraphics, 224 pp., $14.99) with the same sense of mayhem he brought to “Bambi and her Pink Gun.” Tezuka, who died in 1989, is best-known to American comics readers for “Astro Boy” and “Buddha,” one a beloved children’s franchise and the other a masterly multivolume biography of Siddhartha Gautama. But “Dororo” is as intense as any contemporary manga fan could want. The original story follows a young man whose father, an evil samurai, bartered away parts of his son’s body to four dozen demons in exchange for power and wealth. In Kaneko’s sci-fi retelling, the child is a girl named Hyaku whose body has been parted out to future Japan’s corrupt middle class of gangster-bureaucrat robots, and whose formidable cyborg prostheses give her enough of an edge to reclaim her transplanted parts.

The cyborg Hyaku faces down a doomed robot adversary with an important question in Atsushi Kaneko’s “Search and Destroy.”

“Dororo” had at its core a faith in human nature; Kaneko’s vision is far more cynical, but his version of this story is more interested in class and prejudice than Tezuka’s was. I miss Tezuka’s gorgeous drawings of monsters from the original book, but Kaneko’s richly imagined future society and the balletic choreography of his fight scenes are certainly suitable replacements.

Richard Corben, who died in 2020, was one of the most gifted artists to emerge from the wonderfully fertile 1960s underground scene, but, like too many of his peers, his early, influential comics have either not been reprinted or were dreadfully mangled by a parade of now-defunct publishers. It is therefore a joy, if a slightly strange one, to read Dark Horse’s hardcover editions of his works, lovingly restored by the artist José Villarrubía, one of Corben’s final collaborators. DEN 2: MUVOVUM (128 pp., $34.99) is the second in Corben’s saga of his largely unclad hero, Den, and his various adventures among alien worlds and alien maidens. It’s an improvement in every way on the jokey first volume in the series. The “Conan the Barbarian”-style stories are as frank and silly as anything Robert Crumb drew, but Corben worked primarily in painted colors, and with a facility few of his peers ever matched.

Den escapes from a monster’s burning fortress near the end of “Muvovum,” Richard Corben’s long-out-of-print adventure story.

If I had to put my finger on when, exactly, I felt sure that Matt Fraction and Terry and Rachel Dodson were going to stick the landing of “Adventureman,” their neutron-star dense pulp sci-fi series, it was probably about halfway through this most recent volume, GHOST LIGHTS (Image Comics, 64 pp., $14.99). I can even tell you what page: It’s the one where Chris, a heroic cowboy using the nom de guerre of The Crossdraw Kid, stampedes through the subway tunnels under Manhattan, reins in his teeth, six-guns blazing with special bullets that can kill ghosts, wishing he could share his one-liners with somebody other than his horse, Big Man. “Horses got terrible sense of humor,” he narrates morosely.

The writer Matt Fraction and the husband-wife artist team of Terry and Rachel Dodson offer multiple perspectives on 1940s-style pulp heroics.

“Adventureman” comes out too rarely, but when it does it’s absolutely worth the wait. The story follows Claire, who has inherited the mantle of Adventureman, and with it a whole host of weird bad guys and allies, some of whom are drawn from her life as a single mom with bad hearing and a troublemaking kid named Tommy. For pulp fans, it’s a treat to see how Fraction and the Dodsons map the adventures of old sidekick-heavy pulp novel series, notably “Doc Savage,” onto a cast of characters more familiar to contemporary readers, like Claire and her sisters, who seem to have stepped out of an especially good family sitcom.

The Doctor Is Out: What Do I Read Now?

These stories of relationship dramas and evolving partnerships will fill the “Couples Therapy”-sized hole in your life with wisdom, schadenfreude and humor — and sometimes all of the above.

On the docuseries “Couples Therapy,” Dr. Orna Guralnik helps real couples (and one polycule) work through struggles with intimacy, communication and commitment.

By Sadie Stein  17 Jul, 2024

It can be hard when shrinks go on summer vacation — especially in a summer when each news cycle seems to bring more upsetting developments to process. And it doesn’t help that the fourth season of the cult favorite Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy” has just wrapped, so even affordable, vicarious therapy is off the table. Without our weekly fix of Dr. Orna Guralnik’s deep nods and cathartic sympathy crying — and with the good doctor’s own much-anticipated book still months off — what are we to do?

The series, which started airing in 2019, did not seem to have the makings of a hit: real couples, sitting on a Brooklyn sofa, telling a therapist their problems. At worst, thought skeptics, it sounded voyeuristic and upsetting; at best, boring and contrived. Long before Annie and Mau were a twinkle in my eye, or I’d wept over Season 2, or I’d had wildly differing feelings about different strangers named Josh, I, too, was one of those people. “Watch it,” said a co-worker. “Nothing you thought will ever be the same.” Forty-five minutes in, I was hooked.

There are many reasons “Couples Therapy” has broken through: the happy surprise of seeing our perceptions change, the age-old distraction of other peoples’ problems, the actual applicable advice, Dr. Guralnik’s glossy mane and teeny tiny braids (a major discussion point on message boards).

But even if you aren’t a fan of the show, these shoulder-season reads will get you through August with wisdom, schadenfreude, dysfunction, pain and humor — and sometimes all of the above. It’s not a spoiler that most of these couples could use a session or 10.

Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox (1970)

Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a childless couple in their early 40s living in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (they’re the gentrifiers). Life seems comfortable — until Sophie is bitten by a feral cat and their carefully ordered existence begins to crumble. There’s even a kitchen renovation in this sharply observed, humane classic of New York marriage. (Read about the book’s legacy.)

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison (2024)

Fast-forward 50 years to another Brooklyn and another couple — this time the author and her writer husband, whose acrimonious split Jamison chronicles with characteristic intimacy. It’s been called “memoir as therapy.” (Read our review.)

Memorial, by Bryan Washington (2020)

Mike and Benson, a young gay couple in Houston, are … fine. A chef and a teacher, they have built a functional and loving, if unexciting, life together. Everything is challenged when Mike has to go to Japan to see his dying father, while Mike’s mother comes and lives with Benson. Let’s just say the unexamined life gets very, very examined — to moving and comic effect. (Read our review.)

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan (2007)

We meet Edward and Florence on their 1962 wedding night at a small hotel in Dorset, England, where the realities of their pasts, expectations and feelings about intimacy collide painfully. Decades later, both characters reflect on the experience. A quiet, gutting gem of a novella. (Read our review.)

Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag (2017)

The protagonist’s hardscrabble life in Bangalore changes abruptly when his uncle starts a successful spice company. Allegiances are tested; close-knit generational bonds begin to fray. Whom to marry — and why — is suddenly an open question, and love vies with pragmatism in this often wrenching, frequently funny, sort of cautionary tale. (Read our review.)

The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (2015)

Nelson’s fierce, genre-bending memoir-cum-critical-treatise freed up a generation to meditate on queer identity, power struggles and the nature of love in a time of theory, and it has quickly become a modern classic. Nothing — gender, parenthood, fidelity, the perils of overthinking and certainly not the author’s own relationships — escapes the writer’s gaze. (Read our review.)

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)

Brooks’s autobiographical novel of growing up in 1920s Chicago is a master-class in detailing family dynamics. In some ways, this is a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a subtle depiction of a couple’s shifting intimacies. (Read our review.)

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1857)

Flaubert’s masterpiece is not just the definitive novel of 19th century French realism, or of provincial mores, or of frustrated desires, or of unhappy marriage — although it’s certainly all of that. Its appeal lies in the eternal human pastime of judging others while recognizing that, in the words of the author, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” (Read our review of a 2010 translation.)

Seven Days in June, by Tia Williams (2021)

As teens, Shane and Eva had one passionate week of first love, which ended badly. Now adults — he’s a “serious” novelist, she’s a popular writer of erotica — they reconnect in Brooklyn’s Black literary scene. They’re prey to the speculation and gossip of their shared milieu, but also dealing with the pressures of rebuilding trust and translating youthful excitement into a lasting relationship. (Read our review of Williams’s latest book.)

Fair Play, by Tove Jansson (1989)

Mari and Jonna are long-term companions, two artists living in both interconnected Helsinki apartments and on a tiny, remote island. Not much “happens” in this autobiographical series of vignettes — they hang paintings, patch a fishing net, take a road trip, gently argue, get crushes — but it’s a thrilling depiction of a real creative life in which true intimacy does not require drama. (Read more about the book.)

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, by Nigel Nicolson (1998)

I know someone who gives this book — a combination of Sackville-West’s own writings with her son Nigel’s dissection of his parents’ marriage — as a wedding gift to everyone he knows, convention (and registry) be damned. The couple in question had a famously idiosyncratic, and successful, marriage: While she pursued relationships with women (several famous), they remained companions and best friends to the end. (Read our review.)

Readers Have Thoughts About the ‘Best Books of the 21st Century’

They wanted to know where the poetry and the genre fiction were — and they also wanted to let us know which books were missing.

17 Jul, 2024

When the Book Review published a list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century last week, hundreds, then thousands, of readers weighed in, lamenting what was missing and trading reading recommendations in the comments. Others voted in a reader’s Top 100 poll — stay tuned for that list. Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Some of you liked the list!

Ferrante, truly, forever. A major feminist Bildungsroman covering the slings and arrows of the second half of the 20th century deserves the No. 1 spot. — Kerry Gaertner, Beacon, N.Y.

What I love about lists like these is that they can serve as a lifelong syllabus or homework assignment, not to mention a reason to pick up a book you would never have anything to do with otherwise. Would I have picked up Anthony Powell’s A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME series without Modern Library’s list of the top novels of the 20th century? Not likely, and what a shame that would be. I don’t read much fantasy, but now my interest is piqued by THE FIFTH SEASON. I never would have given it a second glance, but now I mean to read it. And that’s a wonderful thing. — Becky Lake, Santa Clarita, Calif.

In some ways, this list is flawed. But, in other ways, it is brilliant. Who cares what the actual list is. If it gets me, you and lots of other people reading these and lots of other books, then we are better off for having it in the world! Stop quibbling and open a book. — Tom Braun, Ann Arbor, Mich.

This is exactly how literary prizes should be run: You ask a large, diverse, but uniformly brilliant group of people about the best books they’ve read over a significant period. You don’t ask four people to speed-read 300 books, and then make a decision in two days. This article provides a far more thoughtful, useful aggregation of expert opinion. — Raphael B. Folsom, Norman, Okla.

Others weren’t crazy about it.

A predictable list. A disappointing list. So much political correctness. That can’t be good for art. — Joyce Marshall, Provence, France

Once again, a timid “best of” list that plays it safe. Oh so predictable. Nary a shocker. How refreshing it would be if the list included a single, unexpected entry. Hmm. Perhaps a latter-day Mary Higgins Clark. Wouldn’t that be a showstopper? — Tom Davidson, Somerville, Mass.

More than a few readers wondered where the poetry was.

Remarkable how poetry has just disappeared from cultural significance. This should tell us something. Critics are able to register the stories that we tell ourselves, but they’re not able to hear the songs that we sing. — Jeremiah Crotser, Houston

I think the lack of poetry on this list completely disqualifies it from any serious contemplation. Were there any poets in the 500 people surveyed other than Claudia Rankine? Out of the thousands of books of poetry published in the last 24 years only one is worthy of the list? There are significant contributions to the literary world coming from poetry. Diane Seuss’ FRANK: SONNETS, Tracy K. Smith’s LIFE ON MARS, Ada Limón’s BRIGHT DEAD THINGS, Natalie Diaz’s WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC, anything by Etel Adnan. — R.L. Selden, Wilmington, N.C.

Lovers of genre fiction were disappointed.

It would have been nice to see more genre fiction (Ted Chiang, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Susanna Clarke). Much of it will endure longer than some titles on this list. My pick for an absorbing, fun, escapist read from a popular writer would be Stephen King’s 11/22/63. And thank you for reminding me how many of the titles I own should be on my ’24 TBR shelf (like AUSTERLITZ). — Paul Cowling, Los Angeles

Most of the NYT list are books people think they ought to read rather than the popular fiction most of America really is reading. America reads romance novels, mysteries and science fiction but there were few of those on the 100 books list. — Shelina Shariff, Forest Hills, N.Y.

And a whole bunch of you let us know what was missing.

Where are Emma Donoghue’s ROOM, Susanna Clarke’s JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL, Gary Shteyngart’s SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY and nonfiction by Jill Lepore, Susan Jacoby and Louis Menand? — Julian Gerstin, Brattleboro, Vt.

No Sally Rooney!? — Sheila Heti, Toronto

I knew there would be books I hated on this list and there were, and I’m OK with that. What I will not accept quietly is that somehow this list omits anything by Louise Erdrich, arguably the best American author alive today. That is a crime. — Vanessa Bembridge, Minneapolis

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume MY STRUGGLE is the 21st-century work that has most deeply affected me. Knausgaard’s intertwining of histories — his own and our world’s; his subtle and overt experiments with structure; his keen observation of the everyday and exploration of the passage of time; and his bravery as a writer in undertaking this impossible project all make “My Struggle” worthy of recognition. — Selma Thompson, New York

No Lauren Groff? Speechless. — Sarah Allan, Cincinnati

Personally I am crushed that ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE did not make this list — it is one heck of a masterpiece. If you’re reading this, Mr. Doerr, you have my undying respect and awe. — Jennifer Locke, Londonderry, N.H.

We are so lucky that books like these are being published at a great clip, even as very bad people are trying to push them off the shelf at an even greater clip. That being said, I’m sad that some really worthy books did not make the cut: Elizabeth Kolbert’s THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, Sheri Fink’s FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL, Ben Fountain’s BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK, and a personal favorite: CITY OF THIEVES, by David Benioff. And LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN — how is there nothing on this list by Colum McCann? Most egregiously and most surprising to me: no HAMNET? — Lauren Phillips, Bellingham, Wash.

Any list that leaves out Haruki Murakami’s KAFKA ON THE SHORE as one of the best books written in the 21st century is incomplete. — Edward Park, Culver City, Calif.

Damon Galgut’s ARCTIC SUMMER is a poignant fictional imagining of E.M. Forster. While it is probably not popular enough to make this list, I would suggest it to anyone who loved Colm Toíbín’s “The Master.” — Kate Milkens, Brooklyn

Lots of fantastic, well-deserving books here, but I’m very surprised that Tommy Orange’s THERE THERE didn’t make the list! And I would definitely have included books by Yoko Tawada and Olga Tokarczuk. — Marit Reynolds, Minneapolis

I was hoping to see some books by Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, Paul Auster. Oh, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, especially THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE. Stephen Markley’s THE DELUGE. Gail Honeyman’s one and only but fantastically written book, ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. Books by Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ayad Akhtar are also missing. All I am saying is, we need another list. — Sohana Nasrin, Tampa, Fla.

No Margaret Atwood! How can this be? — Eithne Murray, Carlow, Ireland

Thank you! What a pleasure opening this list every morning this week. I’m a bookseller who will use this list for sure. Disappointed not to find Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS or Amor Towles’s A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. — Amy Halvorson Miller, Yakima, Wash.

Am I correct that James McBride is not on this list? The absence of THE GOOD LORD BIRD makes this entire process suspect. Brilliant, hilarious and poignant. I thought perhaps you were saving it for No. 1, but at the end of my scrolling it still wasn’t there. — Steven Freedman, Lawrence, Kan.

Where is LIFE OF PI? Have we collectively forgotten that masterpiece? — Diana Kelley-Lurio, Buchanan, N.Y.

A final word we can all agree on?

Let’s all just take a year off and read! — Maureen Fitzgerald, San Francisco

16 Jul, 2024

- Book Review: ‘The Art of Dying,’ by Peter Schjeldahl

- The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army

- How Do You Tell Immigrant Stories? Dinaw Mengestu Has an Answer.

- Book Review: ‘The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,’ by Margalit Fox; ‘The Incorruptibles,’ by Dan Slater

- Edward P. Jones on ‘The Known World,’ Still Acclaimed 20 Years After Publication

- Book Review: ‘The Bright Sword,’ by Lev Grossman

- Book Review: ‘The Rent Collectors,’ by Jesse Katz

- Book Review: ‘Banal Nightmare,’ by Halle Butler

- Book Review: ‘Bright Objects,’ by Ruby Todd

The Art Critic Who Changed Many Tastes, Including His Own

Peter Schjeldahl’s final book collects the essays and reviews he wrote in the years after a cancer diagnosis.

Peter Schjeldahl (1942-2022).

By Dwight Garner  15 Jul, 2024

THE ART OF DYING: Writings, 2019-2022, by Peter Schjeldahl

One day in 2019 the art critic Peter Schjeldahl was rushing to catch a bus. He leaped over a chunk of broken asphalt, caught a toe and fell. His glasses were smashed; there was blood. He was taken to an emergency room in Greenwich Village.

A CT scan, intended to check for neck injuries, revealed a spot on his left lung. Not long after, an oncologist told him he had six months to live. He beat that diagnosis and died four years later, in the fall of 2022.

Schjeldahl’s sensitive and moving new book, “The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022,” collects his final essays and reviews. It has two distinct parts. The first is the stark and droll title essay, which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 2019. The second and larger part comprises the increasingly personal and plain-spoken art reviews he continued to write for that magazine.

Like Karl Marx and Jim Harrison, who died at their desks, and George Orwell, who was writing a book review when he died, Schjeldahl wrote until the end. We can be grateful for that because we have this book.

Like you, perhaps, I’ve read Schjeldahl’s art criticism for decades, first in The Village Voice and then in The New Yorker, where he became head art critic in 1998. Along with Time magazine’s mercurial art critic Robert Hughes, he taught me how to see. Schjeldahl’s tone was shrewd but rumpled and bohemian. It wore well over time.

He was a reliable dispenser of epigrams, a quality he did not lose after his cancer diagnosis. Here are a few sentences from his new book:

I swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.

If people praising you knew the half of it, they’d think twice.

A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it.

He’s Donald Judd; you’re not.

The less you see, the dumber you get.

Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.

Loving art always involves catching up to ourselves.

If I were paid by the word for this review, I would (and could) keep going.

This collection’s title essay has been widely discussed. Read it if you haven’t. His private life has been pored over as well. Upon his death there were many obituaries and appraisals. Not all the press was positive. His daughter, Ada Calhoun, published a well-received memoir, “Also a Poet,” in 2022. It had much to say about his distracted, substandard, “safety third” parenting style.

Given all this, let’s consider Schjeldahl’s final art reviews. There are 45 of them here. Most are Covid pieces, of a sort. Like the rest of us, he was trapped indoors, hunkered down, mostly in the home he and his wife owned in the upper Catskills. Galleries were closed. He reviewed at least one show from its catalog.

He was depressed. He definitely did not quit smoking. “Quit now?” he wrote. “Sure, and have the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal.”

Finally allowed back into galleries, it was as if Schjeldahl had corneal transplants. He was ambushed by beauty, and he transmits that wide-open feeling. Walking into the Frick for the first time in ages, he felt he was coming home.

The misanthrope in him did miss face masks. He dug these because they reduced “unsought conversation.” They also hid his “chagrin at failing to recognize people who did address me. (‘Good to see you’ goes only so far.)”

The surest sign that someone has genuine taste, Auden wrote, is that they’re uncertain of it. Auden could have been talking about Schjeldahl. He buffs and revises many past opinions. “I remember hating those on my first sight of them,” he said about Gerhard Richter’s chromatic abstractions, before finding them “miraculously, often staggeringly, beautiful.” He calls Richter’s 1988 portrait of his daughter Betty, her upper body seen from behind, as “the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the last half century.”

He was slow, he admits, to come around to Philip Guston’s work. He recalls actively disliking Andy Goldsworthy’s snaking stone wall at Storm King. Now he finds it “rigorously intelligent as well as ecstatic.” Goldsworthy’s formidable but mischievous wall is among my own favorite works of art.

The late Schjeldahl was a lover not a fighter. His highest praise? It was to admit he wanted to steal certain paintings. About one of Mondrian’s “plus and minus” paintings, he wrote, “I want one!” Sometimes he did open his wallet. “Writing a check is intrinsically more sincere than writing a review, because the expense hurts,” he wrote.

There are few entrails on the floor of this book. But Schjeldahl did not become utterly toothless. He was no fan of J.M.W. Turner, or the artist and designer Kaws. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was “puerile.” He had no special fondness for Marcel Duchamp. The work of the Russian artist El Lissitzky was “annoying.”

He was unsure what to make of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. He liked a lot of what he saw, while noting the show’s “overt embrace of identity politics” and its plethora of styles “that have yet to demonstrate staying power.” “Hating the Biennial is practically a civic duty, or a pledge of un-allegiance,” he wrote. He didn’t hate this one.

The Biennial review is a reminder that Schjeldahl exited lockdown into a world transformed by new social and political forces, including Black Lives Matter. Art fueled by these forces could be galvanizing, by braving the “routine chaos” of the world, but it was too often predictable and prescriptive. “Must ideology define us?” he asked, in a review of another show dominated by political themes. “Can we demur from one extreme without implicitly being lumped in with its opposite?”

In a short story titled “Café Loup,” Ben Lerner wrote, “Nothing is a cliché when you’re dying.” You feel that in these reviews. “I’ve been feeling apologetic to certain trees, near my home,” Schjeldahl wrote, “for my past indifference to their beauty.”

He was especially taken with one of the great Helen Levitt’s street photographs, a scene of three boys play-fighting that channels “millennia of human experience.” It was something to hang his tattered soul on. He wrote, “I can still see it with my eyes closed.”

THE ART OF DYING: Writings, 2019-2022 | By Peter Schjeldahl | Abrams | 284 pp. | $30

The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army

“Revolution is the job of poets and artists,” says Ko Maung Saungkha, leader of a rebel militia fighting the Myanmar dictatorship. He is not the only poet commander in a country with a strong tradition of political verse.

Ko Maung Saungkha, center, a poet who is a rebel commander in Myanmar, on the first day of training for new recruits in Karen State, in May.

By Hannah BeechPhotographs by Daniel Berehulak  16 Jul, 2024

Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.

The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.

“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.

He amended his statement.

“Especially poets,” he added.

To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.

The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.

“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”

Ko Rakkha, foreground, a drill sergeant and also a poet, with the pen name of Thit Pin, addressing the new recruits.

As their training began, more than a dozen enlistees collapsed from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves.

“The point of the training is to learn how not to die,” Mr. Rakkha said.

Myanmar is a country entranced by poetry. Poets are celebrities, accorded the kind of adulation that, in other places, might be showered on actors or athletes. And verse, delivered in punchy rhymes made easy by the Burmese language, has long been political, used to galvanize the masses.

Irreverent and waging a personal war against portliness, Mr. Maung Saungkha, 31, would not pass central casting for a battle-hardened militia leader. Before Myanmar’s military junta seized full control of the country three years ago, he had gained a reputation as a literary wunderkind, standing in front of City Hall in Yangon, reciting his antiwar poetry. But the army coup in 2021, which displaced a civilian leadership and ended all political reforms, changed him.

“Words are powerful weapons,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “But against the military, we need real weapons because they don’t fight fairly.”

Mr. Maung Saungkha, center, arriving to address the recruits.

Ko Linn Htike, center, another poet and a soldier in the militia.

Mr. Rakkha organizing the recruits before lunchtime.

In the tradition of Myanmar poets, Mr. Maung Saungkha was quick to oppose the junta’s power grab. Earlier, as much of the country’s political leadership ignored or even justified the military’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims, Mr. Maung Saungkha defended the minority group. He also went to prison for writing a poem in which he juxtaposed a national leader and male genitalia.

Since the coup, at least half a dozen poets have been killed, as the military junta crushes dissent. More than 30 poets were imprisoned in the aftermath of the coup, according to the National Poets’ Union.

With the help of longstanding ethnic militias, the rebel movement now claims control of more than half of Myanmar’s territory. After a concerted offensive last autumn, the resistance is now threatening major urban areas. Still, the country’s heartland remains in junta hands. And while the resistance says the Myanmar military’s casualty count is high, many rebel soldiers are dying, too.

Mr. Maung Saungkha’s Bamar People’s Liberation Army, or B.P.L.A., does not fight as a separate army. Instead, its troops, which train in the forests of eastern Myanmar where an ethnic militia has given them refuge, are dispatched to other rebel armies. Since the fighting force formed in April 2021, more than 20 B.P.L.A. soldiers have been killed in action. In 2022, Ko Linn Htike, also a poet, was hit in the leg by mortar fire, just one week after he finished basic training. It took him months to recover. He has not written about his injury.

“I can stand the sound of guns,” Mr. Linn Htike said, explaining how he has come to dread another feature of life in the trenches. “The sound of cicadas on the front lines, that I cannot bear.”

Drills for the recruits as the jungle simmered in the heat.

A Poet’s Life

Mr. Maung Saungkha began writing poetry as a child. He entered comic verse competitions, and at bookstores, on the way home from school, checked the poetry journals — mimeographed compendiums of thin paper — to see if his entries had made it. Barely in his teens, he discovered he was a published poet.

His poetry matured into a bawdy, brawling verse. As he was coming of age, before 2010, the military completely controlled the country, with its censors slicing through media. There was almost no internet and few captivating T.V. shows. Cellphones were an unaffordable luxury. But people needed diversion. So comedians traveled the country, performing in village squares. Puppeteers roamed. Entertainers, poets included, knew to trade in allegory and allusion.

In college, from 2010 to 2012, Mr. Maung Saungkha studied chemical engineering, which led to a brief stint working at a sunscreen manufacturer. But he also started the Poetry Lovers’ Association, which was far cooler than it might be in other countries. The group attracted the attention of military minders, who were suspicious of any subversive meaning. When the lovers of poetry tried to attach their club symbol — a dove holding a pen in its beak — to their graduation gowns, the university rector said “no.”

Mr. Maung Saungkha was already part of a long tradition of political poets. Burmese kings employed troubadours to rouse soldiers in battle. An anticolonial movement depended on poets and other writers outsmarting British censors. When a paranoid general staged a coup in 1962, bringing a nation then known as Burma under what would become half a century of military rule, he targeted poets and other freethinkers. One poet died of a hunger strike in a remote island prison.

In later years, poets helped lead democracy movements that were bloodily suppressed. Others were arrested, such as one who wrote a poem in which the first letters of each line put together called a former junta leader “power-obsessed.”

In 2015, the military allowed general elections for the first time in a generation. Among the candidates who ran for the National League for Democracy, led by the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, were nearly a dozen poets. All won. In Naypyidaw, the junta-built capital, a former defense minister lost his parliamentary seat to a poet who spent his years in prison carving his verse on scraps of plastic because pens were banned.

Mr. Maung Saungkha’s poetry did not dwell in a gauzy past. He referenced Haruki Murakami, Cat Power and a girlfriend’s breasts. He wrote of the intimidating muscle of social media.

Mr. Maung Saungkha with a book of his poetry.

All I have to do is stroke my smartphone

to stoke war

In 2015, just as the National League for Democracy won the elections, Mr. Maung Saungkha posted a poem about a president (unnamed), a tattoo (of the leader) and a penis (his own).

On my manhood rests

a tattoo portrait of Mr. President.

My beloved found that out,

after we wed.

She was utterly devastated,

inconsolable.

Mr. Maung Saungkha was thrown in prison for defamation and violating a telecommunications act. By the time his trial wrapped up, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy headed the civilian side of Myanmar’s government. Nevertheless, Mr. Maung Saungkha was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. He was 23 years old.

Poet 23 loves freedom.

He never wears undies.

He despises dictators.

On Feb. 1, 2021, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing ordered the arrests of Myanmar’s elected leaders, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi included. His coup yanked a young populace, which had embraced the country’s integration into the global economy, back into a closed, paranoid world.

Mr. Maung Saungkha joined hundreds of thousands of other peaceful protesters in Yangon. When the junta cracked down, he learned how to use a slingshot and craft Molotov cocktails. After soldiers combed each neighborhood, trying to obliterate dissent, he escaped to an area under the command of the Karen National Liberation Army, an ethnic armed group that has been fighting the Myanmar state for generations.

There and in other borderlands, a shadow pro-democracy government formed. Its defense minister is the poet who in the 2015 elections defeated the military’s former defense minister.

Cleaning plates after lunch.

A Poet’s Militia

Mr. Maung Saungkha did not know how to raise an army. Nor did most of the actors, lawyers, writers and even a runway model who tried to form guerrilla forces of their own. In unfamiliar jungles, given sanctuary by ethnic rebels wary of the new arrivals from the cities, they tried. Most failed.

Mr. Maung Saungkha’s militia is the largest of those that survived. First, he designed a logo: a dancing peacock. He came up with the name after the country’s Bamar ethnic majority, which has long occupied a privileged place in Myanmar society. Only those who identify as Bamar can rise to the top echelons of the military, whose history includes targeting ethnic minorities, using rape as a tool of war and ringing villages with land mines, human rights groups say.

For decades, Myanmar’s democratic opposition was personified by a single woman: Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose party has dominated Myanmar’s elections. But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, now 79, did not cultivate political heirs. Her cult of personality endured even as she failed to stand up for Myanmar’s ethnic minorities.

Although Mr. Maung Saungkha is Bamar, he decried the military’s ethnic chauvinism. He called the army’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims a genocide, a designation that the United States later came to use. Should the military fall, Mr. Maung Saungkha said Myanmar will only succeed as an equal federation of ethnic groups. In such a formulation, the Bamar, represented by his army, will be just one more ethnic militia.

But Mr. Maung Saungkha is wary of any future role in government.

“Revolution is the job of poets and artists,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “Politics is the job for someone else.”

Among his fighters now is Ma Wai, who before the coup was working as a saucier in Dubai, stirring hollandaise and reducing stocks. She was, she said, not political, but she happened to be home when the junta grabbed power three years ago. The resumption of full military dictatorship horrified her. She joined Mr. Maung Saungkha’s fledgling army. She is not a poet, she says, but she can speak like one.

“One drop of water, like me, is nothing,” she said. “But a wave is powerful.”

Ma Wai, left, a fighter with the militia. “One drop of water, like me, is nothing,” she said. “But a wave is powerful.”

Mr. Maung Saungkha said he was a “metrosexual,” using a newfound English word.

Lunch break for the recruits.

Three years after forming his militia, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s body is soft, his jawline less defined than when he sweated through his own basic training. About the only decorative items in the jungle shack where he sleeps are empty bottles of Johnny Walker. Squatting in a forest clearing where a bamboo pipe dripped rainwater for bathing, he groomed himself with an electric shaver.

He is, he said, deploying a newfound English word, “a metrosexual.”

Some of his underlings grumble about Mr. Maung Saungkha’s tendency to sleep past reveille or to spend his evenings attending Zoom meetings with armchair warriors discussing theoretical concepts like restorative justice.

Mr. Maung Saungkha dials in from the middle of a mosquito-swarmed forest, the only light coming from a candle jammed into an empty beer can. He visits trenches on the front lines, giving pep talks to the recruits who joined up because of him. Traveling near enemy territory, he sleeps in Buddhist monasteries, which have been hit by Myanmar military airstrikes. He may look slightly sheepish when he strokes the pistol at his side. But he is not playing at war.

At the basic training in May, his new recruits before him, Mr. Maung Saungkha raised a finger at one soldier. Her battle cry, he said, was hardly befitting that of a soldier. The young recruit, not quite five feet tall, blinked. Her jaw tensed. A rivulet of sweat surged down her cheek.

“If you feel tired, think of the people who have been killed and jailed,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “We fight for them.”

Mr. Maung Saungkha’s voice softened. She would be OK, he told her. She blinked again, wordless.

Later in the day, the soldier crumpled in the heat. Fellow recruits dragged her off the field.

“For peace in Myanmar, we need war first,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said that night. “When I have time, I will write a poem about that, about our revolution.”

A recruit is overcome with heat exhaustion.

How Do You Tell Immigrant Stories? Dinaw Mengestu Has an Answer.

The Ethiopian American novelist also talks aesthetics and the inspiration behind his most recent novel, “Someone Like Us.”

Dinaw Mengestu writes about characters who often exist in “more than one place at a time.”

By Anderson Tepper  13 Jul, 2024

The novelist Dinaw Mengestu thinks deeply about how stories are told, especially migrant tales. His earlier books — “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” “How to Read the Air” and “All Our Names” — explored the psychic tolls on Ethiopian immigrants of being adrift in an alien American landscape.

With “Someone Like Us,” out this month from Knopf, Mengestu approaches this essential material from a variety of angles. The main character, Mamush, who was born in the United States but lives in France, is a disillusioned journalist. He returns to visit his mother outside Washington, D.C., and finds that Samuel, an enigmatic father figure and member of the local Ethiopian community, has mysteriously died.

Mamush embarks on a quest to unravel the secrets of Samuel’s life and death, searching his own foggy memories as well as a paper trail that includes court documents and parking tickets to flesh out Samuel’s precarious, itinerant existence as a cabdriver in America.

“If looked at closely,” Mamush says, these records “say something about a larger story still being written about America and why people came to it and what they found when they did.”

Sitting outside his home at Bard College, where he founded and directs the Center for Ethics and Writing program, Mengestu spoke to the Book Review about the hidden lives of his characters, who often exist in “more than one place at a time.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When your second novel, “How to Read the Air,” came out in 2010, you said you planned to write one more book in a cycle about the African diaspora, likely followed by one without the “same sense of dislocation and displacement.” That didn’t exactly happen with “Someone Like Us.”

No, I actually went back, which I was really happy about. The book goes back geographically, though on a larger scale, to the first novel, which was centered in one neighborhood in D.C. This one is about the second generation that has grown up in the U.S., straddling economic ascension but also in a strange position because they’re neither here nor there. So, no, this book felt much more like a return — there’s even a character from the first novel who reappears.

The novel poses the question: How do you tell an immigrant story? Where do you begin? The fragmented structure of the book — which jumps between Samuel’s life in Ethiopia, Europe and America — reflects that dilemma, right?

Yes, as much as the narrator might want to understand Samuel, there’s also a sense that there’s a limitation to how fully we can truly understand his experiences. And for me, that’s a kind of respect for Samuel’s enigmatic quality and the complexity of the characters. That gap becomes part of the narrative, part of what the story is trying to deeply engage with.

It’s interesting how the perception of Samuel changes over the years. When he first came to this country he stood out, he says, but now he’s just one of a million foreign-speaking cabdrivers.

He actually kind of disappears and becomes invisible because he becomes lost in this larger narrative of the immigrant cabdriver. For him, there is also the sense of not having done anything that distinguishes him. He realizes he wasn’t able to reimagine himself.

He has one big dream: To create a fleet of taxis that will shepherd immigrants caught in “wrong” places to where they feel safe. How did that idea come about?

I was first writing this in the summer of 2020, so I was thinking about the particular type of vulnerability that you can feel as a Black man, compounded by the sense of being an immigrant: The fact that you don’t always necessarily trust that you can get from Point A to Point B safely. But there’s also an economic aspect to it. Samuel’s a hustler — he wants to make something.

Samuel is a ghostlike presence throughout much of the book, but Mamush, too, tends to slip away and vanish. His wife complains, “You’re like a doughnut. There’s a hole in the middle, where something solid should be.”

I guess it’s a quality I find myself drawn to in characters, because it gives you the ability to create somebody who observes the world. But in his case, that emptiness says something fundamental about his own kind of damage.

Mamush has lost his faith in covering “tragic” immigrant stories and war zones. How do you see your own reporting — from Darfur, among other places — in relation to your novel writing?

I always thought of the nonfiction I did, especially concerning conflict, as a way to do what I sometimes couldn’t do in fiction: write very explicitly about a political reality. I guess in this case, the novel became a way to be somewhat critical of how I wrote those things to begin with, or the way those things are always narrated.

How does Bard’s Center for Ethics and Writing tie in to this idea of how stories are told?

When I started directing the writing program here, we wanted to move away from the idea of teaching writing as a purely craft-based project and figure out how to foreground aesthetics. How do we examine aesthetic considerations that can be made more complicated by the fact that sometimes we want to take on real political issues, which requires a more nuanced and intellectually rigorous aesthetic structure?

Immigration has become such a politicized issue in this country. Did that affect how you wrote this book?

Completely. I mean, all those ideas that went into the making of the center have dramatically changed my own approach to writing. How do I implicate myself as narrator in the telling? What does it mean to take on that work in a way that feels “ethical” (which is different from “moral”)? It’s not about trying to represent the right version of the story — you’re trying to represent a story that respects its variations and nuances.

Finally, I’m wondering if you can now say that your next book will take you in a different direction?

What I’m working on now does feel slightly different, but who knows where it will go. My first novel had a narrator named Sepha, which is my baptismal name. And this narrator’s nickname is Mamush, which was my nickname growing up. That makes me think I have to be done, because I don’t have any other names!

Well, you did call your last book “All Our Names.”

Yeah, I have a thing with names. I need to branch out.

When Gangland Was Jewish

Two exuberant new books chronicle the heyday of New York City’s criminal underworld on the Lower East Side.

Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz (seated, left) and Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg (seated, right) in 1912, after they were arrested on charges of murdering a New York City bookmaker, Herman Rosenthal. Both men were convicted and executed in 1914.

By Debby Applegate  16 Jul, 2024

THE TALENTED MRS. MANDELBAUM: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, by Margalit Fox

THE INCORRUPTIBLES: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld, by Dan Slater

One hundred years ago, New York City was in the midst of what newspapers decried as “a Jewish crime wave.” The causes were complex, but most observers at the time laid the blame on Prohibition, which created a lucrative black market for alcohol overnight.

“Shifty-eyed boys of the slums,” a reporter noted in 1922, “suddenly began to wear $200 suits of clothes, to flash five-carat diamonds, to drive high-powered cars, to shoot craps for $100 a throw.” Led by Arnold Rothstein (nickname: “the Brain”) and fueled by the phenomenal profits of the bootleg booze trade, Jews by the mid-1920s dominated the illicit industries of gambling, narcotics, labor racketeering and loan-sharking in the city.

The sordid but riveting history of the Jewish contribution to organized crime is told in two exuberant new true-crime books, “The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,” by Margalit Fox, and “The Incorruptibles,” by Dan Slater. Together these books chronicle the heyday of the Jewish underworld on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, from the Gilded Age, when Jews began challenging Irish control of gangland, through the Jazz Age, when the Italian mob began to wrest away power.

Fox and Slater, each a seasoned journalist and author, write in a breezy, fast-paced style. They revel in the Dickensian details of the demimonde — the colorful lingo, intricate professional techniques and social snobberies of the criminal classes — looping through decades of political and economic history that spills over into chatty footnotes. We learn how to blow a safe, poison a horse, manipulate a stock, bribe a cop and shoplift a bolt of silk. Who knew that the floor managers at Macy’s doubled as pimps who enticed shopgirls into the sex trade or that hatpins could be wielded as weapons?

“The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum” serves up a platonic ideal of the criminal mastermind. Fredericka Mandelbaum was a clever 25-year-old in 1850, when she arrived in the United States from Germany. Her husband, Wolf, worked as a peddler, and Mandelbaum began her career the same way, hawking lace door-to-door on the Lower East Side. By 30, she had established herself as a reliable “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. Converting plunder into clean cash is critical in any underground economy. But Mandelbaum had grander ambitions. She began cultivating her own army of skilled pickpockets, shoplifters, housebreakers, bank robbers, safecrackers, metalsmiths and black-market vendors, aided by scores of unscrupulous policemen, magistrates and politicians.

Soon Mandelbaum was commissioning major heists. In 1869 she pulled off what was then the largest bank burglary in American history, stealing nearly $1 million (close to $20 million today). By the mid-1880s an estimated $10 million worth of goods had passed through her hands (approximately $300 million now). In 1884, the police finally mustered enough evidence — and gumption — to arrest her. But when they released her on bail, she fled to Canada, taking nearly $1 million worth of loot with her. She died in exile, still running a small fencing operation in Ontario.

“The Incorruptibles” picks up the narrative where Fox leaves off, in the 1890s, as immigrants from Russia, Poland and Hungary began flooding into New York. Slater offers a more panoramic view of the underworld, framing his story as an epic battle between the gangsters, with their co-conspirators in law enforcement, and a small cadre of Jewish reformers — “the Incorruptibles” — who are determined to clean up the Lower East Side.

Many of these villains, like Big Jack Zelig, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg and Mother Rosie Hertz, are longtime legends. Slater gives center stage to Arnold Rothstein, the infamous dean of gangland, who was accused of fixing the 1919 World Series and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write “The Great Gatsby.” In the mode of Mrs. Mandelbaum, Rothstein was a criminal visionary who commanded a national network of bookmakers, bootleggers, blackmailers, drug dealers, con artists and corrupt lawmen. His murder in 1928 marked the beginning of the end for Jewish dominance of the underworld.

Both Fox and Slater stress that organized crime depends on organized corruption: the crooked cops, judges and politicians who serve as the “Bureau for the Prevention of Conviction,” to borrow a phrase from one former police chief. Unfortunately, the men in blue rarely come alive on the page the way their criminal colleagues do. But Slater finds an exception in the character of Abraham Shoenfeld, an undercover investigator, vigilante and chronicler of the twilight world. He is the rare moral crusader who is as fascinating as his foes. Six feet tall, with beefy forearms, a booming voice and an air of “Hungarian arrogance,” Shoenfeld was a brilliant autodidact who left school after ninth grade to fight crime in his community. “I was, plainly, very angry; maybe this is an understatement of my feelings,” he recalled. “I keenly felt the shame and disgrace that the men and women [of the underworld] were heaping on the body of law-abiding and respectable Jews.”

Yet Shoenfeld was no outsider like Nick Carraway, gaping at the gaudy gangsters. He was one of them, a childhood pal of Lefty Louie and former lover of Tony the Tough, a prostitute turned labor union shtarker (a thug hired to beat up scabs) turned vigilante. When Judah Magnes, the rabbi at the wealthy uptown German synagogue Temple Emanu-El, expressed shock that Jews were involved in the sex trade, Shoenfeld was unfazed. “If it is any consolation, sir, there is no Jewish way of being a whore,” he replied.

No one understood the shadowy world of the Lower East Side better, in all its perverse ingenuity. If we know more about the Jewish demimonde than we do about the Italian or the Irish, it is not because the Jews were any more criminal than their neighbors. It is because the Italians and the Irish did not produce their own Abe Shoenfeld, whose candid, firsthand reports from the heart of the ghetto remain unrivaled.

THE TALENTED MRS. MANDELBAUM: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss | By Margalit Fox | Random House | 301 pp. | $32

THE INCORRUPTIBLES: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld | By Dan Slater | Little, Brown | 419 pp. | $32.50

Visiting an Elusive Writer, and Revisiting His Masterpiece

Our critic talks to Edward P. Jones about how he imagined “The Known World,” recently voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century.

“After 10 years of living with this thing in my head, I had to invent my own place, and I could see it as well as anything,” says Edward P. Jones about the rural Virginia county where his novel “The Known World” is set.

By A.O. Scott  16 Jul, 2024

“May I ask what this is about?”

Edward P. Jones and I were in an elevator, not far from the White House in Washington, D.C., on our way up to The New York Times bureau. Jones’s most recent book was published in 2006. Why did I want to interview him now?

Thus it fell to me to inform him that, in a recent poll commissioned by the Times Book Review, his only novel, “The Known World,” had been voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century so far. (The book placed fourth overall). Breaking that news was not a bad way to break the ice.

He seemed pleased—“Number four,” he whispered to himself, smiling — and maybe also a little bit surprised. That was how I felt too.

Can a book, or an author, be lauded and overlooked at the same time? “The Known World” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Jones has been a MacArthur fellow, and his two short story collections, “Lost in the City” (1992) and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” (2006, and No. 70 on our list) are plumed with awards and nominations of their own.

Dawn Davis, who edited “The Known World” and is currently an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, recalled by email the experience of seeing the novel into print. “I remember telling the copy editor that we were stewards of a masterpiece,” she wrote, “so to take extra care, that the book would be assigned to our children’s children.”

Its canonical status is hardly in doubt, but at the same time, 20 years after its publication, “The Known World” can still feel like a discovery. Even a rereading propels you into uncharted territory. You may think you know about American slavery, about the American novel, about the American slavery novel, but here is something you couldn’t have imagined, a secret history hidden in plain sight.

The author occupies a similarly paradoxical status: He’s a major writer, yet somehow underrecognized. This may be partly because he doesn’t call much attention to himself, and partly because of his compact output. (When I asked, he said he wasn’t working on anything new at the moment, though there was a story that had been gestating for a while.)

Jones, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, is not a recluse, but he’s not a public figure either. Our meeting place was his idea. Jones doesn’t drive or use a cellphone, and when I asked, via email, if I might come to Washington to interview him in person, he suggested the bureau, “a fairly brief ride” on the N bus from his apartment.

Not wanting to intrude on his privacy — he also asked not to be photographed — I agreed. But I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed. Washington is a city I’ve experienced on a handful of tourist excursions and 28 times, not counting repeat visits, as a reader of Jones’s short fiction.

That’s the number of stories collected in “Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” books that do for the nation’s capital what the writings of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner did for Mississippi: bring its hidden corners, human idiosyncrasies and deep history to vivid life. So I was hoping for a bit of literary sightseeing — a chance to encounter, in Jones’s presence, the actual landscape of his fictional world.

I need not have worried. As we settled into a Times conference room, he noted that we were just around the corner from 819 Connecticut Avenue, formerly the home of a French restaurant called Chez François. “My mother worked there for 16, 17 years as a dishwasher,” he said — from the 1950s into the early ’70s. “In the morning she would vacuum the dining room, peel potatoes. Now my office at George Washington University is diagonally across from the hospital where she died.” There was palpable feeling in the way he related these facts — “I always think about my mother at times like this, because she meant the world to me,” he said — but also an almost objective interest in the facts themselves.

Jones’s mother, like most of the adults he knew growing up, was from the South. He considers himself at least partly a Southern writer, living in a Southern city. That regional background is evident in the cadences of his speech, in his humor, in the warmth and the guardedness of his manner. On the day of our meeting, he was wearing gold-framed glasses and a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. He was born in 1950, and his beard is mostly white.

“By the time I was 18,” he said, “we had lived in 18 different places in Washington, mostly in Northwest.” Since then, apart from his years in college (at Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass.) and graduate school (at the University of Virginia), and brief spells in Philadelphia and “across the river” in Arlington, he has spent most of his life in the District of Columbia.

“The Known World,” from 2004, is Jones’s only novel; the 2006 story collection “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” is his last book.

Two of his three books are also rooted there. I’ve written about those before and would happily delve into their intricately counterpointed structure and quotidian epiphanies all over again. But what had brought me to Washington on a merciful low-humidity summer day was “The Known World.”

That book is set in the middle of the 19th century in Manchester County, an imaginary section of rural Virginia mapped with a care and precision that matches the real-world urban cartography of the story collections. “My original intention had been to use some fictional place in South Carolina,” Jones said, “but I had never been to South Carolina. Then I was going to go visit a guy I went to grad school with, who was from Lynchburg, Virginia, but I never got around to that. So after 10 years of living with this thing in my head, I had to invent my own place, and I could see it as well as anything.”

The novel takes in a wide cross-section of Manchester County’s population in the decades before the Civil War. The reader meets dozens of characters, Black and white, enslaved and free, all of them connected in some way to Henry Townsend, a free Black man who is also a slave owner, with 33 human beings in his possession at the time of his death.

“I don’t think that I really would have been interested in writing a book about white slave owners,” Jones said. “I also think that if there had been no Black slave owners that I would not have been able to come up with that concept.” But there were a few—“just a kind of footnote, or maybe something in passing that a professor had said” — and that fact opened up an unexplored corner of history, and suggested a resonance between past and present.

In the early 1990s, as the novel began to germinate, Black conservatives (including Clarence Thomas, his Holy Cross classmate) were coming to prominence. They were among the inspirations for Henry Townsend. “Not only Black conservatives,” Jones pointed out, “but Black musicians, movie stars and sports people. And I said those kinds of people, without political or social consciences, those Black people would have owned Black slaves.”

The point of writing about a Black slaveholder isn’t to engage in a kind of perverse historical whataboutism, but rather to expose the profound moral corruption of a system that held people as chattel based on their race. Henry Townsend does a monstrous thing in acquiring human property, but neither he nor his mentor (and erstwhile owner), the white planter William Robbins, is entirely a monster. The “peculiar institution,” as it used to be called, is a human institution, with laws and customs and loopholes that sometimes disguise but more often rationalize its bottomless cruelty.

Henry’s parents, Mildred and Augustus, scrimped and toiled to purchase their son’s freedom from Robbins, their former master. Their sense of betrayal when he becomes a master himself, and their helplessness in the face of his choice, are dominant chords in the book’s symphony of tragedy and absurdity.

“Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus asks. “Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to,” is Henry’s answer. “I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”

For him, owning human chattel is a sign not only of worldly success, but of existential liberty. The world is divided into slaves and masters, and his parents’ painstaking efforts to find another way to live — to be decent as well as independent and prosperous — make no sense to Henry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpTUVzYPOM

I had always assumed that “The Known World” was the product of prodigious, grinding research, but when I asked Jones about that part of the project he had a different story to tell. “By the time I started to think about the whole thing I had 40 books on American slavery,” he said. “And I’ll never forget this: The first book I started reading was about slavery in Virginia, and I read 50 pages. I think I got one or two nice facts. By the time I got to about Page 50, the will left me. So I stopped after that. The next year I picked it up, and I had to read the 50 pages again, and I stopped around the same place. And I’ve never been back to any of the books.”

My mistake had been assuming that the novel, which feels absolutely true on every page, was in some way an empirical achievement, rather than a triumph of imagination. Repeatedly in our conversation, Jones asserted the fiction-writer’s freedom — his delight and also his duty — to make things up.

This isn’t an absolute liberty. The laws of cause and effect, of time and space, must be observed. “I tell my students that this kind of thing is permissible,” Jones said, referring to the prerogatives of invention, “as long as you don’t have someone walking down the road in 1855 wearing a Rolex watch.”

“Another thing that I tell students,” he continued, “is that 5,000 years ago, people were doing awful things, and they’re doing awful things now, and 5,000 years from now they’ll still be doing awful things, if people are still around. People don’t change, so as long as you can zero in and get the emotion right, then you can throw in all the other stuff, and you don’t need to do a lot of research.”

Not that the contemplation of human awfulness is the whole of the job. The people in “The Known World” can be tender, brave and silly, qualities of the species that have also endured for thousands of years. What remains startling — what may explain the book’s enduring power more than anything else — is their vividness and variety.

The book took shape in Jones’s mind long before it emerged on the page. When I asked him, at the end of our conversation, about his writing process, he said he didn’t have one: “I do a lot of things in my head, and I haven’t done anything for a while. The hope is, once I get back to it, I just sit down and start working.” I look forward to that, and in the meantime, I will continue to marvel at the work he has already done.

King Arthur Is Dead. Long Live King Arthur!

In Lev Grossman’s new book, “The Bright Sword,” an eager adventurer stumbles into a Camelot that has fallen into hopelessness and disarray after the death of the king.

By Kiersten White  16 Jul, 2024

THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur, by Lev Grossman

King Arthur is dead. What now?

With this question, Lev Grossman’s new novel, “The Bright Sword,” joins 1,400 years of storytelling and resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales.

The aspiring hero of this epic is Collum, an adventurer who is equal parts naïve and sardonic. He survived a brutally abusive childhood by promising himself someday he’d be a knight under King Arthur, and so, now a young man, he steals a suit of armor, crafts a new life story and sets out to join the Round Table.

But when he arrives, he finds Camelot in shambles. The hero he admired was killed in a battle just weeks earlier. Ambitious would-be kings and powerful fairies are amassing on the borders. All that remain to uphold Arthur’s legacy are a handful of downtrodden knights and Nimue, Merlin’s apprentice and usurper. (Grossman’s version acknowledges that the Merlin of tradition is a sexual predator, and Nimue, a bold young woman trying to reconcile her Christian faith with her elemental magic, makes a far more interesting mage.)

Thanks to Collum’s boost of enthusiasm for the lost ideals of Camelot, the knights ask for a “great marvel,” which opens a magical portal and sets them on quest after quest in pursuit of … well, they’re not exactly sure. Collum and the knights of the Round Table don’t know what to hope for: A new king? To get the old one back? A new Camelot or the same Camelot or just a Camelot they can survive in?

The book is long, more than 600 pages, and it feels long. The story meanders, but other than a few back story chapters that are, if not unnecessary, perhaps mistimed, nothing feels superfluous. This is a narrative that demands and rewards patience.

Story lines veer from mundane to absurdly fantastical in the blink of an eye. Supernatural contests against devils and the Green Knight contrast with desperate, messy knife fights with humans. Climactic battles happen far before the end of the book, leaving the reader wondering what could be left. (Turns out, quite a bit.) But it’s exactly this weirdness and rejection of expected structure that proves Grossman knows what he’s doing.

Traditional Arthurian legends balance two opposing imperatives: reveling in magical paganism and reassuring us that God is the ultimate and only power in the world. Grossman successfully leans into this fundamental contradiction. One of the best scenes in the novel is an epic battle between the devious Morgan le Fay’s magical forces and literal angels from on high. Collum is initially joyous at the divine intervention and then becomes utterly bereft as he realizes that none of it matters. All these otherworldly powers are incapable of caring about human life and ultimately two sides of the same coin.

The main story line of the novel belongs to Grossman’s newcomer, Collum, as he becomes a knight and joins the search for a king. But he is far more than another inserted character playing in the world of Camelot. His journey is poignant and essential as he moves from trying to become part of a story to realizing that stories are lies we tell to make sense of a reality that defies simple narrative.

The other characters — a compelling collection of knights, jesters, queens, kings and mages — are equally strong. Standouts include Sir Dagonet, a heartbreakingly wrought jester-knight who can’t seem to find any joy in the world, and Sir Dinadan. Dinadan is one of the best knights to come out of modern Arthurian tales, with a story proving sometimes the best marvels are the ones we make ourselves. He gets the novel’s last line, a startlingly perfect sentiment that had me teary. The one exception to the expertly updated characters is the aforementioned Morgan le Fay. Grossman never quite knows what to do with her power and anger. But that’s a minor quibble, given the complexity, depth and sheer volume of the cast of characters.

Grossman, who is best known for his The Magicians series, is at the top of his game with “The Bright Sword,” which is full of enviable ideas and execution. Few authors could accomplish what he has, grounding such an ambitious novel in so much tradition and history while still making it accessible and deeply affecting.

This Camelot is far more diverse and thoughtful than past iterations. It’s also way more depressed. None of the characters are who or where they hoped to be in their terrifying, Arthur-less world. With their leader gone, so, too, are their dreams of transformation. The valiant, weary adventurers in this tale never know quite what to hope for, but that might be the point. They just keep hoping anyway. We didn’t need to know what happened after Arthur died, but Arthuriana is far richer for the fact that Grossman, like countless storytellers before him, couldn’t let the dream of Camelot go.

THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur | By Lev Grossman | Viking | 673 pp. | $35

A Brutal Gang, a Dead Baby and a Struggling Immigrant L.A.

Jesse Katz’s true-crime narrative, “The Rent Collectors,” delivers a nuanced portrait of a community racked by poverty and violence and deprived of opportunities to get ahead.

A street across from Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park in September 2007, days after the shooting death of Luis Angel Garcia, a 23-day-old infant, by a member of the Columbia Lil Cycos gang.

By Ben Ehrenreich  16 Jul, 2024

THE RENT COLLECTORS: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA, by Jesse Katz

On the evening of Sept. 15, 2007, 18-year-old Giovanni Macedo marched down a crowded sidewalk in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, pointed a .22-caliber pistol at the head of a street vendor named Francisco Clemente and pulled the trigger five times. Clemente was severely injured, but he survived. One of the bullets that Macedo fired, though, killed an infant sleeping in a stroller a few feet away. His name was Luis Angel Garcia. He was 23 days old.

For decades, MacArthur Park has been the beating heart of immigrant Los Angeles, a mainly Central American community that, for all its vitality and hustle, carries a supersize portion of despair. Within a few blocks of the park that shares the neighborhood’s name, you’ll find the usual miseries of 21st-century urban poverty plus the legacy of traumas inflicted by U.S.-sponsored death squads in Central America during the 1980s; constant pressure from a historically corrupt and brutal local police force; and the myriad humiliations suffered by people with the wrong kind of papers. The territories of four neighborhood gangs compete around the park; in the first decade of the millennium, shootings were not uncommon.

The killing of Luis Angel Garcia, though, was different. It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the neighborhood. The chronically amnesiac city raced as always into a shiny future just out of sight, but long after the candles and the flowers had disappeared from that busy patch of sidewalk, everyone remembered what had happened there.

So I was glad when I learned that the veteran L.A. journalist Jesse Katz had written a book about the incident. I was also apprehensive. In most media narratives, there are only two kinds of immigrants: victims and victimizers, angels and thugs. The shooting seemed made for this kind of dichotomy. Clemente was as noble as they come. He and his partner, a Los Angeles police detective told Katz, were “just outstanding people,” “true righteous victims.” And the baby was just a baby — his middle name was even Angel.

Macedo, meanwhile, a son of Central American immigrants, was a high school dropout who had joined the Columbia Lil Cycos, a subset of 18th Street, one of the most infamous gangs in the hemisphere. He was every Trump voter’s nightmare, baldheaded and tattooed, with horns inked above his temples and a demon’s face covering the back of his head.

My anxieties, fortunately, were misplaced. In Macedo, Katz found the story of a lifetime. Macedo’s bad aim put the entire gang in jeopardy. Killing a baby triggered an automatic “green light” from the Mexican Mafia, the prison gang that serves as an informal judiciary among Latino street gangs. It meant “open season” on the Columbia Lil Cycos. The gang’s higher-ups saw only one way out. They drove Macedo across the border to Mexico, where they garroted him with a rope and tossed his body into a gorge. But Macedo didn’t die. By the time Katz reached him, he was back in the United States, serving a 51-year prison sentence in Southern California.

It’s a credit to Katz’s skill, compassion and sheer doggedness — he interviewed everyone from Macedo’s cellmate to his mother’s relatives in El Salvador — that Macedo emerges from this narrative not as the demon that he flirted with, but as an all too ordinary kid, sad and scatterbrained, neither malevolent nor particularly brave. His desperation for affection and belonging drove him to join the Columbia Lil Cycos and eventually annoyed the gang’s elders so much that they put him to the test. As the man who orchestrated Macedo’s botched execution put it, “He was a homie, but he was questionable.” When Clemente repeatedly refused to pay the “rent” the gangsters demanded for the right to hawk cheap headphones on the sidewalk, they put the gun in Macedo’s hand. Failure to do the job, he knew, would mean his own death.

“The Rent Collectors” is filled with such choices that are not choices: impossible crossroads in the lives of people constrained on all sides by forces that will not bend. Katz is acutely attentive not only to the flesh-and-blood personalities that make his story so compelling, but to the structures that both shape and confine them: the city’s hungry and impenetrable bureaucracy, its armies of police, the shadow universe of the prison system and the constant threat of deportation for sins as basic as working to feed one’s family. The state emerges as a character too, a predatory giant, blind and bumbling, creating the very conditions that it tasks itself with correcting.

Katz’s prose, dotted with street Spanish and macho metaphor — “His voice was low and sputtery, like an idling muscle car” — leans toward the hard-boiled. Don’t be fooled. For a tough-guy book about tough guys, this is a work of almost unerring tenderness. If its subtitle promises “redemption,” the book itself delivers something more honest: stories about people broken by powers larger than they are and who nonetheless find the will to fight on.

THE RENT COLLECTORS: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA | By Jesse Katz | Astra House | 310 pp. | $28

And Now, the Millennial Midlife-Crisis Novel

In Halle Butler’s new book, “Banal Nightmare,” a 30-something woman returns to her hometown to get out of a rut and reassess her life after a bad breakup.

By Amil Niazi  16 Jul, 2024

BANAL NIGHTMARE, by Halle Butler

There are some novels so searingly precise in their ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat. Halle Butler’s latest, “Banal Nightmare,” is one such book, with painfully accurate renderings of everything from the lackluster dating pool of heterosexual men (“For the love of god, no more losers, no more strivers, no more men with something to prove about themselves”) to the imbalance of domestic duties between the sexes (“She did all of the laundry, cooked all of the meals, took out the trash, cleaned, shopped, paid the bills, all of it, he did none of it, she did all of it, holy god for 10 years all of it”) to the pampering of millennials (“the coddling infantilization of her generation, who, though well into their 30s, seemed to need constant affirmation and authoritative direction to make it through the week”).

The novel follows Margaret Yance, or “Moddie,” a 30-something woman living in Chicago who has just broken up with her boyfriend of 10 years. After the split, she flees the city for the summer, returning to her hometown, a place that is simply referred to as X. Back in this small, do-nothing community, she reconnects with old friends in an effort to escape the intrusive thoughts about her ex and about her every fault, desperate to relieve herself of the impending feeling that she has already failed at life. Of course this is all easier said than done, and Moddie starts the book struggling to rid herself of, well, herself. “The worst parts of Chicago had followed her here,” she thinks, “because the worst parts of Chicago had been inside of her.”

As Moddie begins to clumsily insert herself into her hometown’s social scene, she tries to navigate her friends’ domestic struggles. Because she’s not the only one floundering — everyone around her, it seems, is also coming to grips with their own relationship highs and lows, career realities and visions for the future. Often, this leads her to bleak realizations about “how unessential she was to the rest of the world now that she was childless, unemployed, middle-aged and single.”

As she settles in, Moddie makes a million little social missteps, unleashes long and dramatic soliloquies onto her best friend, Nina, and spends her nights punishing herself for her breakup. But as the summer winds down and a chill hits the air, Moddie begins to interrogate why she’s prone to certain toxic behaviors and habits, and through some unearthed traumas, begins to let go of her own expectations to be anything other than her entire, authentic self.

If Butler’s previous novel, “The New Me,” skewered the precarious nature of temp work, “Banal Nightmare” captures the frustration, malaise and anxiety millennials may be feeling as they age. As the millennial midlife crisis rears its head, our generation looks to the culture to help us make sense of this milestone. Though the novel often feels meandering when the point of view shifts from Moddie to those of her friends and peers — their reflections on art, marriage, kids and work can often feel like misplaced diatribes — “Banal Nightmare” will have many millennials intently nodding along to Butler’s clever insights.

While not necessarily the first in the category of the millennial midlife novel, “Banal Nightmare” may be one of the most essential. It does for this generation what movies like “The Big Chill” and “A Woman Under the Influence” did for previous ones. Though the picture the novel paints of this generation’s 30s and 40s may be grim, it will be immediately and uncomfortably relatable to anyone who has spent nights chain-smoking on a balcony, contemplating their own personal, sexual and social mistakes.

BANAL NIGHTMARE | By Halle Butler | Random House | 315 pp. | $28

‘Bright Objects’ Brings Together a Cult, a Comet and a Widow Out for Justice

Set among the fevered residents of a remote Australian town, Ruby Todd’s debut novel considers how grief can draw people to extreme beliefs.

By Ivy Pochoda  16 Jul, 2024

BRIGHT OBJECTS, by Ruby Todd

HBO’s Covid hit series “The Vow” unleashed what has become an almost insatiable appetite for cult documentaries — the more extreme, the more addictive. By now we are all but inured to the wild things people do to belong: drinking colloidal silver, getting branded, stalking their supposed “twin flame.”

Because Ruby Todd’s debut novel, “Bright Objects,” is loosely based on the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members, with the help of phenobarbital, imagined they could hitch a ride on the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997, you might expect some of the same emotional pyrotechnics and bizarre antics you found in 2023’s hottest cult documentary series, “Love Has Won” and “Escaping Twin Flames.” Instead, Todd has chosen a quieter and more unusual route toward understanding the extremity of belief.

It’s 1997 in the small Australian town of Jericho. A newly discovered comet, St. John, is approaching Earth — its impending arrival summoning fevered responses from the town’s residents, most of whom are searching for outsize meaning in the sky. One of these searchers is Sylvia Knight, whose husband, Christopher, was killed by a hit-and-run driver two years earlier. Tortured by the fact that the killer remains at large and unwilling to live without Christopher, Sylvia has set a date for her own death.

Before she can carry out her plan, she finds herself torn between a surprising new lover, Theo St. John, the astronomer who discovered the comet, and Joseph Evans, a local mystic with increasingly fatalistic notions about the comet’s approach.

At the outset Sylvia tells us that she has died twice within two years — the first time after the car crash that killed her husband. The second, well, those of you familiar with Heaven’s Gate will be able to guess what’s in store for those in Joseph’s orbit.

“Bright Objects” is not a rapid-fire page-turner or a wild freak-fest: It is instead a slow-burn meditation on grief, hope, mortality and what Joseph promises are “the laws of cosmic synchronicity.” Sylvia vacillates between quiet rage at the man she believes killed Christopher and an almost preternatural calm as she considers the world she is about to leave — while also trying to make room for her feelings for Theo, who provides her with the “opium of intimacy.”

There’s a soothing, near-mystical quality to the book’s language, a sense of being borne along on unseen currents, especially where Sylvia’s new lover is concerned. “I knew that should anything happen to break the motion of what our bodies were doing,” she thinks, “the atmosphere we’d entered would lose its blind logic, we’d question the terms of our surrender, and arrive in the room self-conscious and separate again.” What is on the page holds up a mirror to what is in the sky — luminous, unusual, unexpected.

And yet, when it comes to weighty prose, there can be too much of a good thing. Too often, Todd breaks the spell and stops the story. She describes rooms “holding themselves discreetly, as if attesting to the inherent rectitude of the lives lived there.” The comet pilgrims stand “with appurtenances of greater seriousness.” What’s more, Sylvia’s obsessive observation of every door, hand gesture and fleeting thought kills the vibe.

Still, a less daring and more conventional writer would have exploited and exaggerated the weirdness on display here. But Todd seems to understand that, at core, all cults and their leaders are the same — insecure, exploitative, duplicitous and a tiny bit boring. What’s more interesting is what attracts people to them, what compels them to believe, to relinquish their grip on reality and, even more fascinating, what inspires them to withdraw and return to the world.

A less daring writer would also have played Joseph’s endgame and his cult’s kookiness for maximum effect. But Todd has a brilliant trick up her sleeve, something more shocking than Joseph’s deadly agenda — a feint that brings “Bright Objects” to a remarkable conclusion as unexpected as it is poignant, and more original and human than any conventional cult story.

BRIGHT OBJECTS | By Ruby Todd | Simon & Schuster | 352 pp. | $28.99

15 Jul, 2024

- What “Hillbilly Elegy” Tells Us About J.D. Vance and the 2024 Election

- 3 Book Critics Dissect the 100 Best Books List

- In These Thrillers, Everyone Has Secrets. Big Ones.

- What Our Broken Politics Owe to the Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt

- Book Review: ‘Rat City,’ by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

- A Family Tour of Crete and Athens

‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Gets a Blockbuster Sequel

Our critic traces J.D. Vance’s shift from bootstrap memoirist to vice-presidential candidate.

Senator J.D. Vance in Manhattan in May. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance suggested that the American working class is to blame for its own troubles. Now he appears to doubt that thesis — or at least the political utility of saying as much.

By A.O. Scott  15 Jul, 2024

“I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,” J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with “a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.” His memoir reads a little differently now.

[Embedded audio available]

This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as of Monday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has been made of his political evolution over the past eight years, from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist, from analyzing right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts (including in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times) as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse.

This turnabout is notable because part of the legend of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that liberals were its intended audience and biggest fans. Published by a major trade house, respectfully (if at times skeptically) reviewed and widely discussed, it was both a message to the establishment and an application for membership.

The book tells the story of two migrations. One is the large-scale movement of poor whites, among them the author’s maternal grandparents, from rural Appalachia to the cities and towns of the Rust Belt. The other is Vance’s path from one of those places — Middletown, Ohio — to the geographic and demographic precincts of the ruling class: New Haven; Silicon Valley; Washington, D.C.

To the extent that “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bootstrap narrative — the chronicle of a young person’s rise in the face of adversity — it can be read as a vindication of the status quo. An imaginary reader, comfortably ensconced in the seat of relative privilege, will be gratified to learn that this ambitious Ohioan has pulled up a neighboring chair, and fascinated by the story of how he got there. The tale is painful but also inspiring. Vance’s childhood was shadowed by his mother’s struggle with opioid addiction, but he was saved by his loving grandparents, in particular by his salty, tenacious grandmother, Mamaw, whose portrait is the book’s most memorable literary achievement.

Mamaw, the Marine Corps and Ohio State lifted young J.D. out of Middletown and helped give him the confidence and the skills to write “Hillbilly Elegy.” (Yale did its part to supply him with connections, most consequentially his mentor and contracts professor Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” among other books.)

Part of the message of this kind of memoir is humble and aspirational: If I can make it, the writer suggests, anybody can. But that encouraging moral is accompanied by the somber acknowledgment that many people don’t. The plucky, lucky protagonist is at once representative and exceptional, a paradox that gives personal reflection the weight of social criticism. What’s stopping everyone else? Why do so many of Vance’s peers seem destined for joblessness and underemployment, substance abuse and domestic chaos, poverty and despair?

Often, in the autobiographical genre to which “Hillbilly Elegy” belongs — a genre whose shelves are full of books by Black, Indigenous and immigrant writers — the answers are systemic. What the author has overcome is injustice, prejudice, a fundamental unfairness in the way the world is organized. The implicit political claim is usually more reformist than radical: We need to fix things so that more kids like this can make it, by removing barriers and expanding opportunities.

Vance’s argument is emphatically not that. If the Americans he calls hillbillies — a somewhat elastic category that can be regional (Appalachian), ethnic (Scots-Irish) or sociological (white working class) — are falling or stuck, it’s largely their own fault.

The same cultural traits that make Mamaw and her kin such vivid presences on the page and in Vance’s life — love of fighting, clannishness, hatred of authority — have trapped them in poverty and dysfunction. “Working class” may be a misnomer: “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” Vance writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

The harshness of this judgment — and the cultural determinism underpinning it — drew some criticism, including from writers with backgrounds like Vance’s. At the same time, the idea that members of a marginal or disadvantaged group have caused their own misfortune is music to the ears of those in power. If those people are just that way — lazy, uncooperative, sexually promiscuous — then any policy designed to help them is useless.

That kind of argument has long been marshaled by conservatives against social programs aimed at African Americans, Latinos and the urban poor. Vance was not the first writer on the right to wield it against rural and proletarian whites. Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” published in 2012, anticipates some of the themes of “Hillbilly Elegy.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, Kevin D. Williamson published a series of caustic essays in National Review linking the rise of Trump with the decline of the white working class, concluding that the woebegone citizens of places like Middletown had “failed themselves.” “Nothing happened to them,” Williamson wrote. “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation.”

In the years since, it’s safe to say that this perspective hasn’t found much purchase on the intellectual right, which is now less interested in diagnosing Trumpism than in writing its playbook. Vance has been part of both projects, which has involved a change in tone and orientation, and not only with respect to Trump himself.

There is a tension in “Hillbilly Elegy,” a dissonance between the way Vance celebrates his family and the way he sells them out, othering them in the service of a dubious argument. I say dubious because it’s clear now that he doubts the thesis that the American working class is to blame for its own troubles, or at least doubts the political utility of saying as much. He is more apt to blame China, NAFTA, Mexico and certain corporations, and also the political and cultural establishment that he was once determined to join. In other words: He has turned against the most devoted readers of his book.

Read by A.O. Scott

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

3 Critics + 100 Books = Something to Argue About

The good news: Our “Best Books of the 21st Century” list showed surprising affection for works in translation. But where are Sally Rooney, Ayad Akhtar and others “explaining how we live now”?

15 Jul, 2024

The ballots have been counted. Enter the experts, to decode the numbers. Not statisticians, but rather our very well-read staff book critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai, here to analyze our 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list — and to reveal some of their own preferences. Scott Heller, an editor at the Book Review, posed the questions.

We were deliberately loose about how the people we polled could define what made a “best” book. How did you define it?

JENNIFER SZALAI First, I had to actually enjoy the book. I know that sounds ridiculous, but given how many books announce themselves as “important,” that was a necessary condition. I also wanted something that — I’m just going to say it — stayed with me in some way. That’s not to say I remember everything in the book, because I have a terrible memory for certain details. But the experience itself had to resonate.

DWIGHT GARNER I had no idea what “best” meant, so I went by feel. Each book on my list, I’d like to think, has a certain sting in its tail — a lasting sting. Each puts a prickle on my neck. They’re written by writers who see the world as if it were new.

There’s a tendency when making book lists — especially ones that will be made public — to reach for high-minded titles because, you know, they’re testaments to your discerning nature and the fineness of your moral weave. I check my moral weave in the mirror at least twice a day. But I tried not to fall into that trap.

ALEXANDRA JACOBS I think of “best” as synonymous with “heft”: not pages but intellectual, emotional. What’s still reverberating, even 20 years later?

How did you jog your memory? Did you use any of the cheat sheets we offered to survey-takers?

JACOBS I didn’t! But after I made my list I looked back at the 10 Best we’d done for each year. Frankly, I was surprised at how few I remembered. It’s been a long almost quarter-century. A lot has happened … to understate things. In 2000 there weren’t iPhones, broadband was new, the Twin Towers still stood, Trump was just lightly poking around at a presidential run.

GARNER I went to my bookshelves and stood there, gawking, with a pencil and paper. I don’t keep books I don’t like — in Manhattan apartments there isn’t room — so these were a good guide for me.

SZALAI A combination of list consulting and bookshelf consulting.

“A lot has happened” in the last 25 years, as Alexandra gently puts it. When you look at the Top 100 do you detect the shadow of 9/11 or the digital revolution, to name just two landmarks of this century?

JACOBS I see, subtextually, a story of the internet and how it’s shrunk the world and widened our perspectives almost indefinitely, and how literary culture is no longer taking place exclusively in smoky French cafes or Ivy League universities. At least, the cafes have Wi-Fi now.

GARNER I was surprised how few books, at least in the upper reaches of the list, dealt with the internet. It’s as if people, in their reading, wanted to flee it — they wanted immersive experiences. (There are more books that deal with it further down, like Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”) I was glad to see Lawrence Wright’s indispensable “The Looming Tower.” I also wish William Langewiesche’s “American Ground” and Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” had made this list. It is very shrewd about emotional life in the wake of 9/11.

SZALAI A post-9/11 book I wanted to see on the list is “Homeland Elegies,” by Ayad Akhtar, which is set against the backdrop of this country’s spiraling dysfunction. The story he tells is spiky and surprising and darkly funny. But even if a book doesn’t announce itself as being about 9/11 or the internet, anything so enormous and transformative will often wend its way into the writing, however subconsciously.

Hmm … Alexandra reads the internet all over the list, Dwight sees it minimally there. Jen, you’re the deciding vote!

GARNER Hey, I was talking about the top of the list, but …

JACOBS I think the internet is there even when it’s not there — if there are more historical novels, it’s because authors are avoiding the tremendous challenges that a supercomputer in every pocket poses to narrative.

SZALAI That’s a great point, Alexandra — I do think that one of the (many) things the internet did was change the way a lot of people read, so it makes sense that novelists would be attuned to that, even if their response is to offer a counterpoint.

Let’s focus on the Top 10. Are there any books up there that surprised you?

JACOBS Three books in translation! [Note: “My Brilliant Friend,” “2666” and “Austerlitz.”] If you look at the last time we did something like this, it was Updike, Roth, DeLillo — with Toni Morrison at the top, but otherwise pretty much a white-masculinity summit. This time, Jonathan Franzen is the only white American man in the Top 10; it’s kind of like how American men have disappeared from the final rounds of tennis’s U.S. Open.

GARNER I was pleasantly surprised to see Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” in the top ranks. It’s a difficult book; it’s not easy to grasp in a hurry. What a wild intellect Bolaño had! I didn’t expect Elena Ferrante at No. 1 but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. It’s beautifully written but also entirely approachable.

SZALAI I wasn’t expecting “Austerlitz” in the Top 10, but was happy to see it there. It’s a looping and mournful book, and the hybrid form that it takes — essay, novel, travelogue — defies easy summary, too.

Why does Ferrante make perfect sense as No. 1? It’s wild to look back and see that The Times covered it with a freelance critic running through a shortlist of novels, i.e., barely noticed it.

GARNER I love the way she snuck in and built a readership organically, before the critics began catching up.

JACOBS I think partly because she — whoever she is — is a franchise, which is the story of literary success these days, high and low …. Also, because her true identity is unknown, it’s like a metaphor for how everyone has an avatar these days, a separate identity on … THE INTERNET!

GARNER I hope Alexandra turns out to be Elena.

JACOBS Only my hairdresser knows for sure!

Are there any Ferrante dissenters in our midst? Or, at least, readers who feel like they’re good, but not major books?

JACOBS I’m the opposite, an assenter. I think the original dismissers were sexist, with an outdated idea of what’s major.

SZALAI I’m also an assenter, but the only Ferrante I put on my ballot (we could only pick 10!) was the wonderfully unhinged “The Days of Abandonment.”

Dwight, we count on you to disagree with the consensus. Tell me your take on the fiction picks surfaced in this survey.

GARNER It’s a strong list — many long books by boldface literary names — but I was surprised so many short story writers were left off. What’s more, an important new generation of writers were mostly left to cool its heels. There are no books by, for example, Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, Joshua Cohen, Catherine Lacey, Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, Atticus Lish or Teju Cole. These are writers that are explaining how we live now.

JACOBS Yes, on the new generation. The iPhone has been such a radical disrupter of the human plot — we need more digital natives, or at least Gen Xers, who’ve interpreted and integrated it into their fiction.

I do think there’s something about the cacophony and troubles of our present moment — the wars, the ecological catastrophe, the pandemic, just a general pessimism — that is causing authors, and readers, to veer either into the past or the future.

GARNER Also, no Gary Shteyngart? Like certain movies at the Oscars, he’s penalized, I think, for being funny.

Jen, you review nonfiction for The Times and we allowed people to put both fiction and nonfiction on their lists. Ultimately a lot more fiction made the grade. Does this surprise you? Did the hive mind get it right in terms of the nonfiction books that were singled out?

SZALAI Not at all surprised — my own ballot of 10 had more fiction than non. There are plenty of terrific nonfiction books, but fiction tends to be liberated from the duty of delivering information. That said, there is some nonfiction I would have loved to see on the list, including Emmanuel Carrère’s “Lives Other Than My Own.” If I describe the “plot,” it will sound unpromising: Carrère, who famously excavates his own self for material, writes about a municipal judge who died young, of cancer. But what Carrère does in this book is extraordinary.

GARNER I was a bit perplexed by the nonfiction choices, not because they aren’t good, but because so many genres are absent. Why so few memoirs? (I’d have liked to see Sally Mann’s, Jessica B. Harris’s and Margo Jefferson’s.) It’s been an intense era for food writing, yet bupkis! Rock memoirs: They’ve gotten very good. I’d have liked to have seen Keith Richards’s or Patti Smith’s or Bob Dylan’s or Bruce Springsteen’s. And two of my favorite books of nonfiction, by acerbic Brits — Martin Amis’s memoir “Experience” and Christopher Hitchens’s “Hitch-22” — are missing in action.

JACOBS Wait, is there no Amis? That would have been the right one, too. Granted, I’m biased as a onetime biographer, but, I was also absolutely surprised at the paucity and narrow range of biography selected. Only Robert Caro, David Blight, and Hisham Matar, which is really as much memoir? No women; no literary or art or music figures? What about Heather Clark’s “Red Comet,” about Sylvia Plath, or Mary Gabriel’s “Ninth Street Women”? Or the two about Patricia Highsmith?

Am I detecting in the verve of these responses that perhaps you were most enthused about memoirs in your 25 years of reading?

JACOBS I think you’re addressing Dwight here, but I’ll add that I was disappointed, given that there were a couple of really good graphic memoirs on the list, not to see Roz Chast’s “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” Eldercare being an almost universal topic that is about to hit America harder than a lot of the other stuff we’ve been fretting about.

GARNER I like memoirs. But even more. I like “unofficial” genres of writing — letters, journals, travel writing, that sort of thing.

SZALAI But would either of you kick something off the list to make room for one of the books you mention? (I say, with an evil grin.)

JACOBS I’d kick off Franzen, or at least knock him down. He’s had enough accolades! Besides, Oprah did it first.

GARNER I think I’m the only person in America who finds Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” to be a slog. It’s earnest and claustrophobic. I always open her novels and wonder, “Who died?”

SZALAI I feel like this gets to an essential question: What is a list for?

JACOBS To me a list is like popcorn. Salty! Even fibrous. But not a meal. (Well, unless you add wine.)

SZALAI Hard agree, Alexandra. Lists impose an artificial scarcity on pluralism and abundance. Which is why I have a general antipathy toward lists <ducks>.

Would you each share with readers one book on your own ballot that didn’t make the Top 100, but they should get started on stat?

JACOBS “The Best Minds” by Jonathan Rosen. It’s biography, it’s memoir, it’s a cultural history of mental health in America, and it’s got some literary history in there as well. I’ll probably be lowered into my grave bleating “Best Minds! Best Minds!”

I know she got heat not long ago for clapping on a sombrero, but I also think Lionel Shriver’s “The Post-Birthday World” could have been a contender. And since I’m a rabid Updike fan: “Licks of Love” could have snuck on too.

Updike! Twenty-first century?

JACOBS Yup, just barely! 2000, and such an unexpected treat to have a coda to the Rabbit tetralogy, which easily made our last big list of this sort, of course.

Who else wants to share?

SZALAI “The Inheritance of Loss,” a novel by Kiran Desai, which travels between the Himalayas and Harlem and captures so much — from the political upheavals of colonialism to the experience of being an undocumented worker in a rodent-infested bakery to what it might be like to be a spider. I returned to it recently and was amazed by how excellent it was — which doesn’t always happen when you return to something you loved, ages ago.

GARNER My favorite nonfiction book of the past 25 years is “Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo,” by Phillipe Lançon. To me, it belongs in the top five.

Why isn’t it better known?

I tried, when I reviewed it. It was published in France and didn’t get a major publicity push in the United States. It’s so humane and angry and subtle and heartbreaking. I give it to people all the time.

The final question comes from the editor of the Book Review, so you can blame or thank him for asking it: Did you count how many of the Top 100 books you’ve read? And how many was it?

JACOBS I told you: Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

GARNER I’d read every one of them twice, and some three times. To be honest, I was shattered at how many I’d missed. Gah. I have catching up to do.

SZALAI I haven’t counted — should I?

In These Thrillers, Everyone Has Secrets. Big Ones.

Our columnist on three riveting new reads.

By Sarah Lyall  15 Jul, 2024

In McLean, Va., Stella Parker’s pampered suburban life is unraveling. “Funny how things come full circle,” her weird neighbor Gwen says to her in an inexplicable doorstep confrontation.

What does that mean, exactly? Stella hopes that no one, especially her generally benign but often clueless husband, Tom — who, come to think of it, might be having an affair with Gwen — has figured out who she really is. “Stella tells herself that everyone has secrets,” Johanna Copeland writes in OUR KIND OF GAME (Harper, 291 pp., $30), a rager of a psychological mystery about toxic men, murderous women and the art of constructing fake realities.

The key to some of Stella’s secrets can be found in flashbacks to 1987, when teenage sisters, Julie and Paula, are dealing with snobbish kids at school and unhinged adults at home. Their mother is a magnet for men, but as soon as her boyfriends start abusing her — and they always do — they are fated to “move on,” as she puts it. This is a euphemism. “Can you help me retell the past so we can protect our future?” she asks her daughters.

Making these two stories converge in a coherent way is just one of the many high-wire tasks Copeland sets for herself in a novel as audacious as it is intricately plotted. Mostly she succeeds. If the men in the book aren’t as textured as their wives, girlfriends and daughters — and if poor Tom in the end might have to pay for the sins of others — well, this story belongs to its women.

In THE EXPAT (Pegasus Crime, 236 pp., $27.95), Hansen Shi’s taut novel of espionage and alienation, Michael Wang is a second-generation Chinese American caught between two cultures and comfortable in neither. After graduating from Princeton, he’s moved to San Francisco and taken a thankless job in the sleepy self-driving car division at General Motors.

Michael’s latest bravura proposal — 100,000 lines of code and a 3,000-word manifesto for “a cloud protocol that combines input from existing vehicle-mounted cameras to create a highly accurate 3-D map” — is dismissed by his tech-bro, jargon-spouting boss, Lucas. “Let’s not dwell on the computer stuff,” Lucas says. “We really need you to be more of a team player.”

Feeling invisible and unappreciated, Michael is ripe for recruitment by malign operatives. In a John le Carré novel, he would be a minor character, a walk-on pawn in a larger geopolitical game. But Shi, who works as a venture capitalist in New York City, has elevated a bit part into a leading role with verve and sensibility.

Michael is contacted by an enigmatic woman named Vivian, who compliments his code-writing style on Samarkand, a sophisticated online hackers’ marketplace. Before you can say “honeytrap,” he’s left San Francisco — no more “breathing the same air as these vape-inhaling boba liberals,” he thinks — and moved to Beijing.

But no sooner has he passed along a hard drive full of trade secrets to a Chinese venture capitalist/spymaster named Bo Song than he’s nabbed by the F.B.I. and threatened with prison unless he can deliver Bo to them. The novel is low on the mechanics of spycraft, but it’s a fantastic portrait of a man wending his way through a maze of his own bad choices.

At first, it’s unclear who did what to whom to cause so much trauma in Kimi Cunningham Grant’s absorbing THE NATURE OF DISAPPEARING (Minotaur, 294 pp., $28). Emlyn, 28, is working as a private guide in the wilds of Idaho and trying to recover from a not-yet-fully-explained terrible experience when her glamorous friend Janessa goes missing along with her boyfriend. Like many characters in contemporary thrillers, they’re social media influencers, and they’ve been chronicling their fabulous #vanlife adventure for their impressive array of followers.

Where could they be? Emlyn is haunted by her last conversation with her friend — “there’s something I need to tell you,” Janessa said, before the call dropped — and by the fissures in their once-strong bond. “Things had never been the same, since that summer, five years ago,” Grant writes. (Yes, later in the book we will find out what happened.)

Perhaps it’s unwise of Emlyn to agree to team up with her charismatic ex-boyfriend Tyler, a former drug addict who once abandoned her miles from nowhere and, she says several times, ruined her life. Maybe she loves him still? He now seems to be Janessa’s boss in a company that sells upscale camper vans, and he’s eager to find her, too. “Something happened out there,” Tyler says. “I can feel it.”

Grant does a fine job of describing Tyler and Emlyn’s descent into the wilderness to find the missing couple, and of retracing Janessa, Tyler and Emlyn’s complicated and emotionally fraught history. If she expects to emerge alive, Emlyn will have to find a way to overcome her crippling self-doubt and figure out whom she can trust.

The Nazi Jurist Who Haunts Our Broken Politics

A contempt for compromise. An expansive vision of executive power. Both owe much to Carl Schmitt.

By Jennifer Szalai  13 Jul, 2024

It was a curious line, not just for what it said, but also because of who was saying it. In an interview last month with the New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio who is vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate, declared: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.”

Vance was referring to the political theorist and Nazi jurist who provided much of the intellectual ballast for the Third Reich. Schmitt despised liberalism. Yet according to Vance, liberals are in thrall to this adamantly illiberal thinker, a man who extolled the dictatorial use of executive power to defeat one’s enemies.

That, at least, is what I think Vance was saying. His examples of Schmittian liberalism involved not jackboot autocracy but political correctness — an “absolutely tyrannical” force that meant “there was nothing you were allowed to say.”

In the rest of the interview, Vance seemed to have few qualms about wielding power to defeat enemies, as long as conservatives were the ones doing it. Asked about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Vance defended Trump (who, until he was injured by a gunman at a rally on Saturday, has talked incessantly about crushing his enemies). “I think that challenging elections and questioning the legitimacy of elections is actually part of the democratic process,” Vance said. “When they say, ‘He’s threatening the foundation of American society,’ I can’t help but roll my eyes.”

Vance’s comment about Schmitt, law and power acquired new resonance on July 1, when two events took place that happened to be connected with Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Each captured an element of politics that Schmitt would have recognized — and endorsed.

In Danbury, Conn., the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon entered a low-security prison to serve a four-month sentence, having defied a subpoena from the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Standing before a noisy gathering of supporters, the ever-confrontational Bannon railed against the “corrupt, criminal D.O.J.,” called himself a “martyr” and told a priest to “pray for our enemies” because “they’re the ones who are going to need the prayers.” He kept the fury turned up for nearly half an hour, signing off with “Victory or death!” It was a show of contemptuous, uncompromising fanaticism — and a faithful embodiment of Trump’s own scorched-earth, us-versus-them instincts.

That same day, 300 miles away, in the hushed building of the Supreme Court, a 6-to-3 ruling granted Trump considerable immunity from prosecution for trying to overturn the election. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion in Trump v. United States, solemnly declared a duty to rise above the pesky specifics of the case, explaining that to “fixate” on such “transient results” would distract from the loftier task at hand. “Our perspective must be more farsighted,” he wrote. A president’s “official acts” were effectively entitled to “absolute immunity.” Roberts said that the court’s conservative majority was merely appealing to “enduring principles”; legal scholars pointed out that the decision amounted to a sweeping expansion of executive power.

What happened in Danbury certainly looked very different from what happened in Washington. Bannon bragged about bucking the law; Roberts wrote about upholding it. Bannon reveled in chaos and partisan warfare; Roberts insisted that the court was keeping such forces at bay. Bannon has long fulminated against the conservative establishment; Roberts has long identified as an establishment conservative. (And unlike some of his fellow justices, Roberts isn’t married to someone “fond” of flying provocative flags or who tried to help overturn the 2020 election.)

But spiteful extremism and high-minded legalism don’t have to be incompatible. Instead of acting as a restraint on abuses of power, the law can also become an enabler. Presumably Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, knows this. After all, the thinker who both yearned for and justified the fusion of a country’s legal system with mass radicalization was none other than Carl Schmitt, the Third Reich’s “crown jurist.”

The ‘Friend-Enemy’ Distinction

Born in Plettenberg, Germany, in 1888, Schmitt described himself in a memoir as “an obscure young man from a modest background.” His biographer Reinhard Mehring says that he was frequently consumed by “intimate passions and tragedies” and craved the deliverance of “redemption.” Schmitt was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for a second marriage when he failed to get an annulment for his first. But God would remain a core part of his political theories. Schmitt’s idea of a divine sovereign merged with his idea of a state sovereign: Each was a figure of absolute authority, who provided the foundation for everything, including truth.

“I am a theologian of jurisprudence,” he wrote in his notebooks, someone dedicated to “a real Catholic intensification (against the neutralizers, the aesthetic decadents, against the abortionists, corpse burners and pacifists).” When Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933, he was already a middle-aged law professor, and he would go on to write his most brutal and antisemitic rationalizations for the regime he served. In 1935, he praised the Nuremberg Laws for dispensing with the commitment to “treat aliens in species and Germans equally.” By then, he had already defended the Night of the Long Knives — Hitler’s murderous 1934 purge of his rivals — as “the highest justice.” Schmitt’s apologia for Hitler’s death squads bore the title “The Führer Protects the Law.”

But it was Schmitt’s earlier work that laid the foundations for the Third Reich. Disgusted by the political impasses of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s post-World War I experiment with democracy, he constantly assailed liberalism for being overbearing and hypocritical, for trying to ram pluralistic tolerance down people’s throats. At the same time, he scorned it for being “torpid” and ineffectual, for forever postponing decisions in favor of “everlasting discussion.” As the intellectual historian Mark Lilla has observed in a classic essay, Schmitt was never able to resolve whether liberalism was too powerful or too weak. Either way, he viewed it as “contemptible.”

In books like “Dictatorship” (1921), “Political Theology” (1922), “The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy” (1923) and “The Concept of the Political” (1932), Schmitt elaborated on the ideas that would make his name, including the “friend-enemy” distinction, “decisionism” and the “state of exception.” Genuine politics, he maintained, was not a matter of negotiating among different interests and compromising accordingly. Politics was about distinguishing between friend and enemy. Every group wants power, but only the delusional liberal places faith in the possibility of a harmonious modus vivendi. Much better — and more realistic — to think in terms of “enmity”: “The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.”

Given such apocalyptic thinking, Schmitt scorned the endless haggling of “the liberal constitutional tendency” and venerated the decisionism of an unencumbered sovereign. A “state of exception,” or a state of emergency, “is principally unlimited authority,” he wrote. The sovereign has the right to total power — and gets to decide when to claim it: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

But this credo was not, Schmitt averred, an anti-democratic power grab. A real democracy requires, as he chillingly put it — a full decade before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor — “elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” Then it could dispense with liberalism, with all of its onerous rules and procedures, which only served to thwart a homogeneous people’s will. “Thus democracy and dictatorship could become not only perfectly compatible,” Jan-Werner Müller writes in “A Dangerous Mind,” his critical study of Schmitt; but dictatorship could in fact be democracy’s “most authentic expression.”

Giving Extremism a Patina of Respectability

Schmitt’s embrace of dictatorship wins few (overt) admirers, but even leftist scholars have been drawn to his exposure of liberal hypocrisies and blind spots. In “The Challenge of Carl Schmitt,” a volume of essays by various authors published in 1999, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe proposed that it was possible to learn from his “insights” in order to “rethink liberal democracy with a view to strengthening its institutions.” She suggested that the friend-enemy distinction was useful for conflict-averse liberals and that it could be tempered, stripping it of Schmitt’s intemperate antagonism.

But the intemperateness is the point — the extremist source from which Schmitt’s legal theories flowed. A watered-down version of the “friend-enemy” distinction gets mentioned a lot because issues of conflict and power are everywhere in politics. Yet “you don’t really need Schmitt to discover that,” Müller told me. “I think many references to him have been banal.” Vance’s accusation, of liberals loving Schmitt, was designed to generate outrage, not to illuminate anything. Müller characterizes it as “trolling.”

Where Schmitt may actually be useful is as a guide to the implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States. In a blistering post, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued that the majority’s reasoning “leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship.” Schmitt, she said, “offers some insight into the court majority’s mind-set” by showing how Schmittian assumptions about politics as a zero-sum struggle between friends and enemies can lead to a refusal to accept the other side as legitimate and, ultimately, to a Schmittian expansion of executive power.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her scathing dissent, warned that the majority had granted presidents enormously broad discretion to call something an “official act” (shades of Schmitt’s “state of exception”) and therefore behave with legal impunity. Roberts, deriding Sotomayor’s dissent as “short on reasoning,” accused her of “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” What Roberts deemed the “more likely prospect” was “an executive branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive president free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next.”

In other words, the majority decided that the greatest danger was a timid, hamstrung president who was fearful of prosecution — not, say, the “extreme hypothetical” of an emboldened president who compulsively looks for ways to consolidate his power and punish his enemies.

It’s a safe bet that Trump wasn’t even aware of Schmitt when he promised to start his second term as president by being a dictator for a day. Or when he tweeted, while in office, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” Or when he announced, in early 2020, that a president’s “authority is total.”

But the thing about Schmitt is that invocations of his name are less enlightening than the strange and terrifying story of the Third Reich’s legal regime that is embedded in his life and work. Here is how you use your power to crush your enemies. Here is why your democracy needs to be homogeneous. Here is how that democracy finds its proper form in a dictatorship. And here is the legal theory that will give far-right extremism a patina of respectability.

Vance supports Trump’s vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden. Yet he called “completely preposterous” the idea that “Trump becomes the dictator of America.” After all, Vance reasoned, when Trump tried to overturn the election, “he was using the constitutional procedures.”

A Phenomenally Weird Tale of a Man and His Rodent Metropolis

In “Rat City,” Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden explore the life, times and influence of the scientific Pied Piper, John Bumpass Calhoun.

[Embedded video available]

By Ian Volner  15 Jul, 2024

RAT CITY: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun, by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

There used to be a guy who’d turn up around New York wearing a two-tone Day-Glo mohawk, a pair of coordinating rats perched atop his shoulders. Tourists gawked; locals mostly hurried their steps. Notwithstanding the ever-smaller dogs favored by many of Manhattan’s elite, genus Rattus has never quite caught on with polite society.

Perhaps society should reconsider. As Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden make plain in their entertaining, phenomenally weird “Rat City,” there is a great deal more connecting us with our ubiquitous furry neighbors than we might imagine.

The authors’ unorthodox thesis pairs well with their unusual methodology, signaled by the book’s wordy subtitle: “Rat City” may well be the world’s first-ever work of socio-biographical-scientific pop history.

The biography at the heart of this improbable mishmash focuses on a person who, himself, combined some rather disparate qualities. Born in rural Tennessee in 1917, John Bumpass Calhoun — known as Jack to friends and family — was a devotee of nature from early childhood, a “country boy with his own small-bore shotgun,” ever curious about the inner workings of the animal world.

His curiosity would lead him to an ecology Ph.D. at Northwestern, then a post at Johns Hopkins, where his tale first collides with the bigger, furrier themes of the book. Beset, in the 1940s, by a near-Hamelin-level rat infestation, Baltimore turned to Calhoun and a group of his colleagues for solutions.

Calhoun’s idea? The team should build their own city block, seed it with vermin and take notes.

What ensues is the story not of one Rat City, but of a decades-long succession of Rat Townships and Rat Villages around the country, interspersed with the occasional Mouse Metropolis.

Far from eradicating Baltimore’s rodent population, Calhoun and his team of researchers became interested in the dynamics of their rats, specifically in how they responded to changes in their surroundings. The scientists’ conclusion, reached after much habitat-tinkering and behind-the-scenes academic drama: Not just the communal health but the individual psychological well-being of the Norway rat “must break down under the social pressures generated by population.”

The implications for humans living in crowded cities seemed obvious; Ramsden and Adams (a historian of science and an economist, respectively) tease out these lessons and then watch how they bounced across the interdisciplinary landscape from architecture to pharmacology.

Rat lovers, beware: On page after page, especially in the earlier chapters, vermin are poisoned, vivisected and bludgeoned; there are various “stress experiments,” toxic injections and forced exercise. There are also lengthy descriptions of the subjects’ “ritualized courtship,” as well as copious rat-on-rat violence.

In the latter two activities especially, Calhoun and his “Space Cadets” — so called for their interest in the behavioral effects of the physical environment — noted the gravest deviations from the norm as a result of increased density, even when resources remained abundant. Drifting into pathological withdrawal or compulsive sociality, the animals under study “ceased to be rats,” and eventually stopped breeding altogether.

In a 1962 report, Calhoun called this condition “the behavioral sink.” The phrase caught on: Tom Wolfe liked it; so did Hunter S. Thompson. The anxiety that such a sink might be waiting (or might already be taking hold) in America’s troubled cities produced a small welter of panic amid certain segments of the policymaking beau monde. (The Space Cadets’ own Leonard Duhl would take up an influential position at the newly formed Department of Housing and Urban Development.)

“Everything seemed to be coming together,” the authors write. They mean the various threads of Calhoun’s life and work — though they could as easily be speaking of strands of their own narrative.

In fact, neither quite merge. Among other things, Adams and Ramsden’s evident admiration for their subject clashes discomfitingly with what even they acknowledge are “the racial undertones” and general dehumanization in his equation of rats and lower-income city dwellers.

Moreover, the case for Calhoun as a major force in American urbanism is doubly undermined by the timing — as early as the 1930s, reduced density had already been a stated objective of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Franklin Roosevelt. And then there were the critical flaws of such insights as the ecologist did, later, contribute — too little density is the problem now most afflicting cities in the United States, driving up both home prices and social isolation.

None of this detracts too much from what remains a freaky romp down a peculiar passage in the history of ideas, full of oddball cameos (Aldous Huxley! Buckminster Fuller!) and some very sharp science writing.

Divorced from its unseemlier echoes — ones that Calhoun, to his credit, never sought to amplify — the underlying moral of “Rat City” is also worth pondering, especially by urbanites inclined to take a too-blithe view of their own presumed superiority over the lesser orders. The rat is us.

RAT CITY: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun | By Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden | Melville House | 358 pp. | $32.50

Of Demigods and Minotaurs: Greeking Out in Athens and Crete

On a family tour of Greece, the writer followed the small footsteps of some of ancient mythology’s biggest fans.

On a family trip to Greece, the writer explored ruins, toured museums, hiked gorges and more with fellow travelers who enjoyed boysplaining Greek history to strangers.

By Reif Larsen  15 Jul, 2024

Whenever our family goes on long car rides, we’ve found that the best way to placate our children is to listen to the podcast “Greeking Out” from National Geographic Kids. Narrated by Kenny Curtis and the all-knowing, snake-loving “Oracle of Wi-Fi,” the show retells stories from ancient Greek mythology in colorful ways. After 10 seasons, our two boys have become well-versed in the minutiae of mythos. Did you know that the blind seer Tiresias was turned into a woman by Hera for seven years? I did not.

“It’s true,” said Holt, my 10-year-old son.

My kids are not alone. Greek mythology has had a renaissance of sorts among young people, driven largely by the wildly popular Percy Jackson children’s book series (and movies and musical) about a troubled modern-day boy who finds out he is actually a demigod and so must attend Camp Half-Blood. Naturally, things get complicated.

My younger son, Max, 7, has fallen deep under the demigod spell. He is also a hedonist, a lover of pleasures and chocolate, and predictably his favorite god is Dionysus, god of wine, festivity and madness.

One of the author’s sons, 10-year-old Holt, favored Athena out of all the Greek gods. Athena is the goddess of battle strategy, wisdom and weaving.

Holt is more suspect of the Percy Jackson phenomenon. He likes facts, which is funny when you’re talking about mythology. Holt’s favorite god is Athena, goddess of battle strategy, wisdom and weaving. So I was always interested in some day taking my sons to Greece itself, source of all that history, where we could stare at ruins and try to square truth, story, wisdom and madness.

Our chance came when the Greek parents of one of Holt’s classmates invited us and another family to visit their family home on the island of Crete last summer.

“Be careful, we’ll come!” I warned. I wasn’t sure if their invitation was serious.

Their invitation was serious. Dead serious. When it comes to hospitality, the Greeks do not mess around — for them it is like an Olympic sport. If you go to a Greek’s house they will feed you food until you explode, and if you do not explode, they will feel like a failure. The only advice our Greek friends had for us before our trip was, “Don’t eat anything for a week.”

Ancient wonders

Our little American crew of four adults and four children (all aged 10 and under) began our visit to Greece with three days in Athens. Before the 2004 Olympics, I had heard Athens was a hot, dirty, busy city — difficult to get around and certainly not kid-friendly. In recent years, however, the city has undergone a wide-scale humanization and become an accessible, world-class metropolis where ancient wonders rub up against the trappings of modernity.

The writer found Athens to be an accessible, world-class metropolis where ancient wonders rub up against the trappings of modernity.

We visited early in the summer last year, before extreme heat waves and wildfires hit Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. It was hot but not yet too hot, and we were among the many visitors in the Greek capital who filled their days buying cherries in Monastiraki Square, being serenaded by musicians plucking folk songs and exploring labyrinthine streets in the ancient neighborhood of Plaka. We cooled off in the playgrounds and water features on the giant sloping roof of the new National Library and Opera House, designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

But the highlight of Athens was our visit to the Acropolis.

If you’re traveling with children, particularly those who enjoy boysplaining Greek history to strangers, I would recommend hiring a guide for the Acropolis — there’s simply too much to take in. Our guide with the tour company Greeking.me was a patient, lovely woman named Antigoni. She was incredibly tolerant of our kids and within minutes offered to hire them as guides, which obviously pleased Holt to no end.

At the Acropolis Museum, visitors can peer through its glass floors into the ruins below.

We began our tour at the quietly astonishing Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi. It’s built on an old archaeological site, and visitors can peer through its glass floors into the ruins below or gaze up to the Acropolis. The building seems to embrace the layered, messy, incomplete nature of history.

We spent nearly three hours going floor by floor, lingering on all the hundreds of carvings that once lined the Parthenon. The kids were transfixed. Antigoni explained that architectural refinements gave optical illusions to make the temple appear more perfect than it was. Over the centuries, Antigoni said, the Parthenon withstood all manner of earthquakes, shelling and plundering. Its enduring presence is a miracle.

A favorite at the Acropolis Museum: The giant Lego recreation of the Acropolis, in which various historical periods were represented in one diorama.

One of the highlights for the children was a giant Lego recreation of the Acropolis, in which various historical periods, from antiquity until the present, were represented in one diorama, as though time had collapsed into a single moment.

We then joined the sea of people flowing up the hill to the Acropolis itself, where the gates alone are worth the price of admission, as is the relatively petite-yet-exquisite Temple of Athena Nike keeping watch over all who enter.

Even in its perpetual state of rebuild, the Parthenon vibrates with idealism, all of those optical tricks and refinements acting as a perfect homage to that powerful, fragile concept called democracy, born on these very slopes.

I turned to Holt.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. Holt was always thinking.

“Nothing,” he said, wide-eyed. This may have been the highest praise coming from him.

Nearby, Max formed an invisible lightning staff and threw it into the crowd of tourists.

After our tour, ravenous, we descended back into the city to find one of Athens’s ubiquitous Greek tavernas. At the beginning of our trip, wary of young and hungry children, we would eat around 6 or 7 p.m. But where was everybody? It was only later that we learned this was an absurd time to eat dinner in Greece; Athenians do not emerge until 10 or 11. The prospect of eating this late with children gave me a minor panic attack.

In Athens, Greek tavernas are ubiquitous. The writer did not have a bad meal the entire trip.

Typical dishes include Dakos (a twice-baked barley rusk topped with diced tomatoes and creamy feta), melitzanosalata (a smoky eggplant dip) and tzatziki.

We were glad we followed our friends’ advice: We did not have a bad meal the entire trip. Yet as the parents salivated over the Cretan dish Dakos (a twice-baked barley rusk topped with diced tomatoes and creamy feta), melitzanosalata (a smoky eggplant dip), heavenly tzatziki and succulent grape leaf dolmades, the children resisted. We ordered multiple plain pastas for the children as soon as we sat down. The only exception was Max, who sampled the adults’ snails, mussels and anchovies, and was pleased with the gasps and groans from the other children. Dionysus, indeed.

Searching for the Minotaur

After our Athens whirlwind, we flew to Crete, where the ancient Minoan civilization blossomed 5,000 years ago while the rest of Europe was mired in barbarianism.

With our Greek friends, we hiked gorges and built intricate palaces on pink-sand beaches. We stayed outside the port city of Chania, where the signs of various conquerors are still in evidence, including Ottoman baths, Venetian arsenals and a graceful Egyptian lighthouse perched on the end of a long sea wall. We drank raki, the local liquor, and devoured seafood, like razor-thin sea bass carpaccio, and early harvest, locally made olive oil.

With its ruins, Crete’s port city of Chania still has the signs of its various conquerors throughout the centuries.

On Crete, the Palace of Knossos was the seat of the Minoan Empire.

At the Palace of Knossos, the seat of the Minoan Empire, we had another terrific tour guide, Akrivi Hatzigeorgiou, with the KidsLoveGreece.com tour company. She promptly handed all the children iPads with augmented reality apps that allowed them to see the ruins as they once were.

Akrivi showed us the palace’s sophisticated water management systems, the hidden network of signage and the throne room, with one of the oldest preserved chairs in Europe. We did not see the Minotaur that, as any good Greek child historian knows, supposedly haunted the labyrinth in the basement. In fact, we learned there was no basement at all and that there never was a King Minos, but rather a series of female rulers, a detail which had been conveniently overlooked by historians and storytellers since. Hearing this, Holt’s brain exploded. History evolves.

At the end of the tour, Akrivi thanked us. “The labyrinth is in our heads,” she said to the bewildered children. “The Minotaur is inside of us. We cannot beat the Minotaur, we must forgive the Minotaur.” Max nodded, as though he had known this all along.

On one of their last nights in Crete, the writer and his family finally did as Greeks do, and dined around 11 p.m.

A favorite dish: razor-thin sea bass carpaccio.

On one of our last nights in Crete, we finally did as the Greeks do and dined around 11 p.m. Our kids were not tired; the taverna was filled to the brim with locals. We ordered one last Dakos salad. A round of raki came. The children seemed to sense this would all become history soon. It was fine — after a week in Crete, you too will forgive the Minotaur.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024.

14 Jul, 2024

- Book Review: ‘Alexander at the End of the World,’ by Rachel Kousser

- Book Review: ‘Smothermoss,’ by Alisa Alering

Think Our Political Leaders Are Selfish? Imagine Working for Alexander the Great.

In a new telling of the Macedonian leader’s final years, Rachel Kousser shows what happened when dreams of conquest met reality.

A 16th-century depiction of Alexander the Great commissioned for the Mughal emperor Akbar, which imagines the Macedonian conqueror exploring the sea in a glass diving bell.

By Justin Marozzi  14 Jul, 2024

ALEXANDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, by Rachel Kousser

It is difficult to reach the end of the world when you don’t know where it is. That was the recurrent, ultimately insurmountable, challenge faced by the empire-building Macedonian king Alexander the Great during the last seven years of his life, a tumultuous period now under review in “Alexander at the End of the World,” by the classicist Rachel Kousser.

Her story begins in 330 B.C. just before the assassination of the Persian king Darius III, whom Alexander defeated at the Battle of Gaugamela the previous year, and concludes with Alexander’s death at Babylon in 323 B.C. Between those dates Alexander led an increasingly cosmopolitan army across much of what was, to Mediterranean people, the known world, rampaging through Iran and into Central Asia, over the Hindu Kush mountains and into the Indian subcontinent, subduing everyone and everything before him and picking up local warriors to fight for him along the way.

Unable to stand still, the 32-year-old conqueror was on the cusp of invading Arabia when death intervened. It was this final stage of his military career — teeming with brutality, conspiracies, compromises, failures, reversals and near mutinies — that, Kousser argues, made him great.

Her prose is bracing and her descriptive powers rise admirably to the task of portraying the world in which Alexander operated. Fresh from razing the Persian capital of Persepolis in 330 B.C., the Macedonian led an army of 17,000 toward the city of Ecbatana in northwestern Iran. The beginning of his journey was bucolic, the countryside “blanketed with the bright green leaves and pale blossoms of spring,” a vista of apple, mulberry, pear, quince and pomegranate trees. “On the plains,” she writes, “cattle and horses nibbled tender new grass, while along the rivers, a rich variety of aquatic birds taught their hatchlings to swim and fly.”

Kousser summons new archaeological evidence, some of which is persuasive, to support her argument that Alexander was more of an integrationist than is generally recognized. Cultural assimilation could go both ways, too. South Asian representations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, to give one example, testify to the widespread emulation of Alexander’s signature hairstyle.

The author’s characterization of the relationship between the king and his men as the campaign wore on — mutual adoration shot through with flashes of bitter recrimination — is especially convincing. Tensions quickly flared as Alexander attempted to meld his newly acquired Persian soldiers (soon to be joined in an ever-expanding army by Scythians, Bactrians, Sogdians and Indians) to his Macedonian military core. The Macedonians resented their king’s quick-fire embrace of Persian dress, customs and a wife, Roxane, along with his appointment of Persians to senior political and military commands.

Cultural fluidity aside, one sympathizes with Alexander’s mostly loyal, long-suffering and battle-weary Macedonian warriors. Alexander was a difficult, often reckless leader who at times needed saving from himself. On a hunt in 328 B.C., their glory-seeking king insisted on killing a lion single-handed. After he had shoved aside his bodyguard and killed the beast with a single throw of his spear, the Macedonians decreed that he was no longer allowed to hunt on foot and must always be accompanied by officers. Fat chance. “They were trying to bottle lightning,” Kousser writes.

At the heart of this book lies the defining question asked both by Alexander’s soldiers and by generations of historians ever since: Why did he keep campaigning so relentlessly, ever farther east? Why, for instance, did he seek to conquer India in 327 B.C.?

In seeking to answer this, Kousser faces the same difficulties encountered by Alexander’s earliest biographers, none of whose works survive in their entirety. In the fullest account, left by the Greek historian Arrian half a millennium after Alexander’s death, the Indian campaign was fueled by the king’s pothos (Greek for “a strong desire”) to have what he did not possess. He may have been equally driven by the fabulous riches India offered, as well as by simple curiosity. Heading south through the Indus Valley from pacified Afghanistan might also have appeared a sensible way to reach the elusive, encircling “Ocean,” which Aristotle, Alexander’s childhood tutor, considered to be the end of the world — the natural limit for conquests, mortal or divine.

In the final analysis, conquerors need to conquer and Alexander’s appetite, as Kousser makes clear, was insatiable. In Arrian’s words, “it seemed to him that there was no end to the war while an enemy remained” — a forerunner, perhaps, of the 21st-century, U.S.-led war on terror, once called the “Forever War.”

The costs of this obsession became clearer after his death. Had Alexander spent more time administering his empire, and less on its never-ending expansion, it might have been set on firmer foundations and not disintegrated almost immediately. Kousser does not press the comparison, but both the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and his Turkic successor Timur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, emulated Alexander’s epic feats of arms, but added longer-lasting imperial legacies to their astonishing achievements.

ALEXANDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great | By Rachel Kousser | Mariner | 401 pp. | $35

They’re Two Sisters on a Supernatural Mountain, Trying to Solve a Murder

Alisa Alering’s debut novel, “Smothermoss,” is an Appalachian mystery tangled with wild magic, queer coming-of-age and sisterly bonds.

By Lauren Beukes  14 Jul, 2024

SMOTHERMOSS, by Alisa Alering

In their deliciously weird debut novel, “Smothermoss,” Alisa Alering flashes us to rural 1980s Appalachia, where two young sisters at odds with each other — and themselves — are drawn into a murder that turns very strange indeed.

Growing up in a ramshackle house on a mountain, 17-year-old Sheila dreams of escape, or at least a life where their family doesn’t have to forage for mushrooms and dandelions or raise rabbits for the pot. The fantasy seems impossible, especially if “your dad is dead and your brother is in prison and your mom comes home from the Iron Mountain asylum at 8 in the morning in a wrinkled uniform with dark circles under her eyes.”

If she can’t escape, Sheila would like to disappear. She’s eating less and less, vanishing into herself. The weight of the world and her own self-loathing manifest as a thickly corded rope around her neck that hangs like a noose, invisible to everyone but her. But it catches on things and it drags her down. Worse, it adds a bright new strand with every new teenage humiliation — and maybe too with the unspeakable secrets she swallows, like her forbidden crush on her classmate Juanita and the way the women she sees in magazines make her feel.

She has a 12-year-old half sister, Angie, but they’re so different “they don’t even seem to be the same species.” Angie doesn’t care that the kids she goes to school with have decided she’s dirty and smelly, a liar and a thief. She’s preoccupied with drawing grotesquely beautiful monster cards she believes can divine the future, like her own D.I.Y. tarot deck, and pretending to be an action hero fighting imaginary bad guys in the woods.

Until, that is, a real bad guy arrives.

When a murderer bludgeons two hikers to death on Sheila and Angie’s mountain, he upsets the (super)natural order and unleashes a series of uncanny events that will force the sisters to come together to confront their own monsters — and take down a real one.

From the outset, Alering makes it clear that “Smothermoss” is no straightforward crime-and-coming-of-age story. The novel bristles with dark magic, from Sheila’s rope to Angie’s cards and tales passed down through the family. The mountain is both a setting and a character with its own complex mythology and powers. It’s the mountain that senses the murderer is like a “diseased fox” and views the hapless hikers as “rabbit women.”

It’s also overrun with bunnies, both real and supernatural. Some are benign, like the “rabbit-shaped puff” of consciousness that escapes a dying woman; others are more frightening, like the nightmare rabbit doctors Sheila remembers attending her in the hospital. At one point, “bones with swollen cotton tails” sweep Sheila off her feet during a flash flood the mountain unleashes in grief and rage after the murder, but whether the blood-tide of bunnies is real or in Sheila’s mind is unclear. Sheila doesn’t question it and we’re not supposed to either.

The novel has its own peculiar fever-dream logic, especially in the last third, where things get really weird and murky. Plot threads are left frayed and dangling, many mysteries are never resolved, and there are no real answers, which may drive readers craving a more traditional narrative nuts. I suspect Alering doesn’t care. They are following their authorial instincts the same way Angie reads her monster cards: by feeling their way along and letting the beasts of their imagination lead them wherever’s next.

The resulting weirdness does the opposite of weighing down the novel — it elevates it to something that is equal parts gruesome and gorgeous and otherworldly. “Smothermoss” is a compulsive journey through a wild, unknowable landscape and the wilder hearts of young girls trying to understand themselves, and find their way to each other.

SMOTHERMOSS | By Alisa Alering | Tin House | 254 pp. | Paperback, $17.95

13 Jul, 2024

- Book Review: ‘I Was a Teenage Slasher,’ by Stephen Graham Jones

Don’t Worry, It’s Only Your ‘Friendly Neighborhood Slasher’

In Stephen Graham Jones’s new novel, a young outcast is forced to become a murderer fated to enact gory revenge.

By Christopher Bollen  13 Jul, 2024

I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER, by Stephen Graham Jones

Literature has been a thriving hunting ground for the serial killer. If the 20th century brought about the emergence of the maniac repeat murderer as “a new kind of person … one of the superstars of our wound culture,” as the critic Mark Seltzer posits in his 1998 cultural study “Serial Killers,” then ambitious fiction writers were sure to examine this new human species under their microscope.

The apogee of serial-killer fiction arguably arrived in the 1990s, with the psychopath as first-person narrator in the radical nihilism of Dennis Cooper’s “Frisk,” Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Zombie.” But even the serial killer isn’t immune to trends. In keeping with our current century’s predilection for turning monsters and boogeymen into misunderstood outcasts, Stephen Graham Jones’s viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing new novel turns a gruesome murderer into “your friendly neighborhood slasher.”

The plot of “I Was a Teenage Slasher” is straight out of the horror section of the video store. It’s the summer of 1989, in small-town Lamesa, Texas. Our protagonist is Tolly Driver, an awkward 17-year-old. He and his best friend, Amber, decide to crash a party thrown by the cool kids — the same cool kids who, a few years back, caused the death of another student by forcing him to ride a pump jack, resulting in his accidental dismemberment. When this dead student reappears as a zombie at the party to enact gory revenge, some of his monster blood splatters into a cut on Tolly’s forehead.

The rest makes sense only if you’re willing to go along for the joyride. Infected, our narrator morphs into an unstoppable, superhuman killing machine, seeking out members of the school marching band who played a near-fatal trick on him. Tolly has no control over his new bloodlust, stalking and killing by night in a mask fashioned from his mother’s belts. As he proclaims, “I was the scary thing in the dark.”

Jones is no horror novice: He’s been publishing steadily for over two decades. Yet it was the success of his 2020 novel “The Only Good Indians,” which blends the struggles of contemporary Native American life with a supernatural elk story, that brought him a deservedly wider audience. “I Was a Teenage Slasher” is less concerned with vanishing cultural memory — unless that shared memory is of being a lonely American teenager with a love of 1980s slasher films.

Much of the story is understandably preposterous, and Jones is clearly having a fun time playing with horror-genre tropes. A few scenes lean too heavily on comic book conventions, and the problem with parody is that it often suffers the same tedium of the formulaic devices it sets out to critique. What saves the novel, what makes us not only follow Tolly but care about him as he bashes one teenager’s head into a camper and impales another with a twirling baton, is his spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades. “You’d think that, dragging bodies behind you, at some point you wouldn’t be able to keep moving, wouldn’t you?” our protagonist muses. “Not so. They’re all there, they never go away, but they’re tin cans, they don’t weigh anything. Just make a lot of noise.”

The story is narrated by a middle-aged Tolly looking back from the present day, a vantage point that casts Lamesa and its cursed citizens in the golden glow of nostalgia. That might be the creepiest part of revisiting the ’80s slasher horror genre as a whole: how innocent and uncomplicated the world it depicts tends to seem, even with a psycho killer on the loose. Maybe it’s because the line between good and evil, predator and prey, is so pronounced. Or, as Tolly quips, “The world’s so much simpler when you’ve got a chain saw in your hand.”

I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER | By Stephen Graham Jones | Saga Press | 372 pp. | $29.99

12 Jul, 2024

- Talking About the Century’s Best Books

Talking About the Century’s Best Books

A roundtable of Book Review editors discuss what surprised them, what delighted them, what will send them back to their own shelves.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen

So, you may have seen this big project we here at the Book Review just finished. Maybe “finished” is the wrong word, actually — there’s more to come! — but this week we rolled out the results of an ambitious survey we conducted to determine the best 100 books of the 21st century so far. We let our respondents define “best” however they saw fit, and set no limits except that their choices had to have been published in the United States, in English, since January 2000. (Translations counted.)

On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with his fellow editors Tina Jordan, Scott Heller and Joumana Khatib about the results of that survey and about the project itself, including the willingness of some participants to let us share their ballots with the public.

“We bent over backward to let people know this was anonymous and don’t worry, we’re not going to reveal who you pick, who you left off,” Heller says. “And yet so many people were willing to come forward with what they selected. And I think that’s one of the best things about it. The aggregated list is wonderful, and there’s plenty to argue about, but when you get to dig into what Stephen King put on his list — in fact, he put himself on his list, which I think people have gotten a kick out of — but many others came forward, and I think that makes for wonderful reading in and of itself. You get to see a lot of quirky choices that maybe many people didn’t vote for, but that individuals are passionate about. And I really enjoyed that.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Table of Contents

New York Times Books: 18 Jul, 2024

18 Jul, 2024

Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

Book Review: ‘Women in the Valley of the Kings,’ by Kathleen Sheppard

Suzanne Nossel, Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, on Her Reading Life

17 Jul, 2024

Book Review: Best Graphic Novels in July

Loved ‘Couples Therapy’? Read These 11 Books

Readers Respond to the ‘Best Books of the 21st Century’

16 Jul, 2024

Book Review: ‘The Art of Dying,’ by Peter Schjeldahl

The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army

How Do You Tell Immigrant Stories? Dinaw Mengestu Has an Answer.

Book Review: ‘The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,’ by Margalit Fox; ‘The Incorruptibles,’ by Dan Slater

Edward P. Jones on ‘The Known World,’ Still Acclaimed 20 Years After Publication

Book Review: ‘The Bright Sword,’ by Lev Grossman

Book Review: ‘The Rent Collectors,’ by Jesse Katz

Book Review: ‘Banal Nightmare,’ by Halle Butler

Book Review: ‘Bright Objects,’ by Ruby Todd

15 Jul, 2024

What “Hillbilly Elegy” Tells Us About J.D. Vance and the 2024 Election

3 Book Critics Dissect the 100 Best Books List

In These Thrillers, Everyone Has Secrets. Big Ones.

What Our Broken Politics Owe to the Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt

Book Review: ‘Rat City,’ by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

A Family Tour of Crete and Athens

14 Jul, 2024

Book Review: ‘Alexander at the End of the World,’ by Rachel Kousser

Book Review: ‘Smothermoss,’ by Alisa Alering

13 Jul, 2024

Book Review: ‘I Was a Teenage Slasher,’ by Stephen Graham Jones

12 Jul, 2024

Talking About the Century’s Best Books