It’s occurred to me to wonder what Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” would be like if the two survivors were not a father and son but a mother and daughter. I picture the mother plodding through the ashy landscape, coughing, wishing she had some Kleenex. The daughter sulks and dreams about that cute boy at school. They pause to shoot a marauder. They raid a drugstore for tampons. They trudge on.
There are echoes of my fantasy…
Read More ...In the beginning, before the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. Qfwfq can tell you about it: He was there. “Naturally, we were all there—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time, either: What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” …
Read More ...The photograph on the cover of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy shows a stern intellectual: the Nobel Prize winner, the author of novels that have changed the way America sees itself. In her work, too, she has been implacable in her determination to expose America’s forgotten past. A brilliant stroke of timing: A Mercy came out in the euphoric week of America’s presidential election…
Read More ...John Adams, the first United States envoy to the Netherlands, could have been the prototype for an American in Europe. When he arrived on the Continent in 1778, two years after the Colonies declared independence from England, the 42-year-old New England farmer, lawyer, and leader of the Revolution had never traveled farther from home than […]
Read More ...The “home” Marilynne Robinson writes about in her new novel looks at first like an American cliché of contentment: a little Midwestern farm town in the 1950s, and in it the large, comfortable house of the widowed reverend Robert Boughton. In this house in Gilead, Iowa, he and his wife raised their eight children, Boughton’s […]
Read More ...I think I must have been the last person in the developed world still writing love letters. By 19th-century standards I don’t suppose they were very romantic. J. and I were children of a less gushy, more cynical age. We had already gone way beyond kissing each other’s letters, but felt we were being very daring—stepping over an invisible line of appropriate distance and refusal to hope—on the rare occasions when we wrote “I love you.”
The point is, we wrote letters. Long ones, handwritten, with stamps…
Read More ...My pick in the Village Voice Best Books of the Year list.
Read More ...Like so many mysteries, it started with a body. While Russell Shorto was working on The Island at the Center of the World, his best-selling history of New York City’s Dutch origins, he came across a footnote about René Descartes. Specifically, it was about what happened to the French philosopher’s body after his death in […]
Read More ...The poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell met in 1947 at a New York dinner party held by Randall Jarrell. She was 36 and had just published her first book of poems. He was 30 and had just won a Pulitzer Prize. Later, she wrote that she’d gone to the party with “fear and trembling.”
“Then Lowell arrived and I loved him at first sight. . . .
Read More ...Lisa Jardine’s new book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (HarperPress, 2008) opens in 1688 with the coup that put Holland’s William of Orange on the throne of England. The “Glorious Revolution,” the British historian and biographer argues, was not a revolution at all, but a Dutch conquest. She proceeds, through personal and public documents, to trace the bonds between the two countries…
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