My earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull! My favourite book growing up Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.
A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
In the self-conscious hallucinatory tradition of historical novelists like E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo, Enrigue keeps intrusively reminding us that this overpacked tale of the past is something he's constructing, as much as resurrecting. And, like his predecessors, Enrigue subscribes to a paranoid reading of history.
In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.
For decades, we smallfolk have been told that goodness is naïve, that moral grayness is sophistication, and cynicism is cleverness. Turns out, we do not want it. Most of us can only take an endless string of villains, liars, and normalized nastiness for so long. Our battered nervous systems want a hero to root for who would not lie to us or betray us.
At first sight, Winslow Homer's " The Brush Harrow," which depicts two young boys, a horse, and a harrow against an arid landscape, evokes a feeling of somber isolation - but it's hard to pinpoint why. During a talk by curator Horace D. Ballard at the Harvard Art Museums on Jan. 29, visitors learned that Homer painted the scene in 1865, as the Civil War was ending, making the emotional underpinnings of the work clearer.
When the people who are after me get here, they'll arrest me and put me on trial, or they'll disappear me to some black site. Or they won't bother with any of that and they'll just kill me. All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel's prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success: I am a fucking genius, a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.
Are heroes real, or are they simply stories we tell ourselves? Either heroes are objectively real-brave people who perform extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice-or heroism is merely in our heads, a social construction shaped by culture, media, and wishful thinking. This debate shows up everywhere: in classrooms, in popular culture, and even among scholars who study heroism for a living.
What, you wonder, could possibly have prompted the powers that be to commission an adaptation of a postwar allegory that throws into dreadful relief the impulse to tyranny, the fragility of democracy and the brittleness of our veneer of civilisation in this shining year of 2026? We may never know. Did I mention it takes place on an island in which all normal social rules no longer apply and the inhabitants are protected from any punishment or consequence, no matter what appetites emerge?
So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker's 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say die, preferring euphemisms such as pass away.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, my uncle and aunt gave me a copy of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, a standard-bearer for children's folklore that was originally published in 1962. I was immediately dazzled by the book: D'Aulaires' was my first exposure to Greek mythology, and I marveled at its vibrant cosmology, its richly illustrated tales of deities whose omnipotence was matched only by their strikingly human, self-indulgent caprice.
After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It's a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.
