I knew about beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, and I was frightened by beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, because she was the first girl through whom I learned that if you are beautiful you may get killed, and once you are killed you will become the property of the country, and the country […]
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Not all of Hu’s jobs were in customer-facing roles. In 2017, he worked at a logistics warehouse for D Company, where the pace was grueling and the tasks—moving pallets, breaking down shipments, stacking and restacking parcels—monotonous in the extreme. He averaged only four hours of sleep each day, often leaving his night shifts with his […]
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The comparison may be less of a reach than it sounds, as there’s a shadow intellectual lineage, given Emerson’s handprint—and that of the transcendentalists generally—on the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, which Gilbert, long a sponge for spiritual wisdom, has lately immersed herself in and quotes multiple times here. The Big Book’s emphasis on an individual […]
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He notably failed to mention acts of political violence perpetrated by right wingers against the left—e.g., the June shootings of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers and their spouses, which killed State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband; the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, in an attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi (which Trump mocked); the January 6, […]
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“In 1991, there was something that he did when I was there initially training me to do massage, as he had trained a very dear friend who trusted him, spoke highly of him and directed me to him,” Michaels said, identifying herself as one of Epstein’s earliest known survivors. “And during that time where he […]
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Another heirloom of darkness was bestowed when Mrs. Roy and her two young children left the Nothing Man and sheltered in the cottage that had belonged to Roy’s maternal grandfather. Her grandmother and uncle arrived a few months later to evict the three under the banner of the Travancore Christian Succession Act, the state law […]
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Much of the issue here is that Lacey sketches her characters too vaguely for either of them to say something precise. At times, it’s hard to tell Edie’s and Marie’s dialogue apart, or even to remember which is which. Lacey’s prose in the novel half of The Möbius Book is vague as well. It has […]
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Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li Buy on Bookshop Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $26.00 Li, who left China in 1996 and now writes in her “adopted language” of English, doesn’t immediately appear to struggle with inarticulacy. Though she came to the United States to study immunology, Li, who is now 52, […]
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