Day 13: What are you excited about?
Ho hum, haven't felt much excitement the first part of this year for very obvious reasons… I'm sure that lovely feeling will return but at the moment, it doesn't feel appropriate most of the time. All part of the grieving process I'm sure.
I am though, excited for my granddaughter, Caitlin who at the grand age of eleven became Dorset County Athletic Champion for throwing! She also came second in the short distance running and the relay. What a star. And in September she goes to 'big' school and will be taking part in the girls football and rugby teams. She isn't particularly a tomboy, with tumbling sun kissed blonde hair and blue eyes but she loves her sport. In fact it's Caitlin who will sit and watch the footie matches with her Dad instead of her brother. It's lovely to see her participate and take such an interest when at that age, their are so many competing distractions, particularly for girls.
Don't like the connotation of God that goes with the term blessing (Google it and see what I mean) so shall be writing this post in the context of something that helps or brings happiness.
Like many of us I imagine, I tend to focus on what's troubling me rather that what is going well, or brings me laughter, and I've probably covered these in other posts but that's not a bad thing.
My family: Husband, Simon who is a constant source of support and makes me laugh when I want to cry. Son, Ben of whom I couldn't be any prouder of what he has achieved. He is the living example that conformity in education isn't always the best path. And his lovely wife, Claire and mother to grandchildren, Morgan and Caitlin, who are growing up far too fast. And I'd have to include the animal family we've collected since living here.
My Lifestyle: Which could encompass all five if I separated the things that bring happiness since we moved here. The main thing is living more on less. Quality not Quantity. That kind of stuff. It was a huge risk but so worth it.
My Veggie Garden: which links with number two I suppose, but it is so satisfying eating fresh stuff picked from the garden only moments before. It's hard work but fulfilling.
My Writing: or just being creative. I write every morning without fail and have started a Doodle course – love to scribble and colour in. Must be my inner child struggling to be seen. I do work through a lot of angst in my morning pages which helps me every day.
My Friends: Who I could count on one hand, true friends who I don't see very often but when I it's like we only met the day before. They know who they are.
I'm used to answering this question in my writing. What if the character says, does, doesn't do this. What if the setting was here rather than there. What if I kill off one of my darlings. What if I end the chapter, sentence, paragraph with this rather than that. What if she was a he or a creature of non definitive nature?
I don't often think 'what if' about my life if I'm honest. I'm more of a keep moving forward kind of girl then thinking about what's gone past. I might ask the question to help me make a decision but once it's made that's it. Can't change it.
If I'm forced to think about it, I'd probably pick my first career choice to ask the question. What if I hadn't chosen to go into nursing. It was pretty much predicated for me from an early age. With a mother and grandmother both in the nursing profession I had two great mentors to look up to. And I had nurses kits for birthday and christmas presents quite regularly. My dad did offer to set me and my sisters up in a business, like hairdressing once. I would have given it a go, but it never got further than that. I don't think I have the social skills to be a hairdresser.
Nursing was a tough choice and one I couldn't keep up in the end. I was one of the youngest District Nursing Sisters in the Health Authority at the time and I had to follow the tough path that my mother trod. I found it difficult to leave the patients, their problems and their families at the front door when I got home and so by the time I was thirty had moved into management and then teaching and education. All of which required me to be more extrovert when my preference is definitely more introvert.
Writing has always been my 'dream', not a career choice, not until these past few years. I always viewed it more as a hobby. It's much more than that, it's a passion, a need I have to fulfil.
Enough of 'what ifs'. I have a novel to edit.
Some of these prompts are very taxing, but I suppose that's exactly their purpose. Anyway, just a reminder that everything I'm writing about is my personal opinion, if you don't agree that's fine I'm not expecting that. So today, in this mad, mad world that seems to be imploding the thing for which I feel most strongly about is religion and the way it's being used to maim, kill and wreck humanity.
I know it's probably been the same since days of old, but these last few weeks seem to be filled with atrocities that I feel like doing a 'Grandma Lamb'. Lily was my dad's mum and whenever anything bad came on the telly she would turn around in her favourite swivel chair (which was pretty hard for her as her feet didn't touch the ground) and refused to watch or listen. Ignorance isn't the answer but what is?
I'm not religious, my parents did loosely connect with their christian faith when we were younger and we were packed off to Sunday School. But it's not something I've felt I've needed. I have faith I suppose, not sure if I can label it or even if I should. We had a Humanist celebration for our wedding, which was wonderful. We wrote our own service, read out poems and lit three candles to symbolise the two of us becoming one. My aunt, uncle and cousin all had Humanist funerals, buried in wicker coffins and a service where we celebrated their life and my nephew had a naming ceremony rather than a christening.
*Humanism emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over acceptance of dogma or superstition.
Mmmm… not sure at all about this post. Depends on who is giving the words I suppose and who determines that they are full of wisdom?
My nan used to regularly share her thoughts on how things should be done. She was a terribly superstitious person. No walking on the cracks in the pavement, breaking mirrors meant seven years bad luck, no opening umbrella's inside (why would you in the first place?) and no new shoes on the table. Children were definitely seen and not heard. My mum and dad even had to move the date of their wedding which they'd planned for May – 'Marry in May, Rue the Day'. Were they words of wisdom? I don't know she certainly believed them.
I do believe that we learn from our failures and mistakes though, hence the quote at the beginning of this post. I think we should encourage our children to make mistakes, take chances and support them in doing so.
And this guy seems to hit the nail on the head in many ways for me.
This prompt had me scratching my head, there are so many things I struggle with! But my biggest struggle has to be, after nearly nine years, is learning the Italian language. Before we moved over here, we did go to Italian lessons in Shaftesbury and it was one to one with a fabulous and passionate teacher. I actually think I talked better Italian when I was a tourist rather than now as a permanent resident. Not sure why that is. And when we did move over we went to our friendly neighbour weekly and she taught us from her son's school books, which was fun and helped with our initial integration. For a couple of years I also helped another local boy with his English. For one reason or another those sessions petered out.
Although we both have quite a large Italian vocabulary and can understand most of what is being said, for me it's the reply that's the hardest. It's all to do with confidence, give me half an hour and I'll have the perfect response but that isn't helpful for the conversation and these Italians love to speak at speed! The other issue is the dialect. The Italian we learn only became the official language not long after the second World War and a lot of the elderly folk still speak their own local tongue.
I've slightly amended the prompt for todays journal. It did ask me to list the ten favourite songs I'm loving right now, but these are the top songs that I always go back to. In no particular order, but the first one on the list always brings me to tears. Every time.
Well, it's already been won and that isn't about to change. But how did Simon do it?
He accepts me for who I am, probably more so that I do myself. He doesn't want to change me.
Flowers. He used to buy me freesias when we lived in the UK, here he bought some bulbs that come up every year and they're my favourite.
Basically, he's my soul mate. We just fit together, like a jigsaw.
Ireland – Simon grew up in Ireland and we've been talking about going to visit in 2018 for our 20th wedding anniversary and 55th and 65th birthday treats. It may even be the venue for our annual family get together, so that will make it even more special.
Europe – I know that probably counts as more than one but it's my list. I'd love to get one of those old camper vans and be a bit of hobo, animals in tow of course (and Simon).
Egypt – getting a bit more adventurous now. I've always been fascinated by the pyramids and pharoahs. Lots of rich material for a story I should imagine.
Tasmania – I don't know why just looks idyllic!
Wolf Moon – the setting in my fantasy story, or any setting for that matter. Wouldn't that be cool?
Ciao for now – off home tonight- yippee!
Right at this moment, I can only think of one person who inspired me the most and still does, even though he's not here in person. It's got to be my dad. His stock solid belief in me as a writer (or whatever I wanted to do in my life, nurse, trainer, manager, self employed director) is key to my driving force and yearning to pick up my pen again.
I've been in the UK for over a month now (home on Thursday! Hoorah) and been sorting through a few things, mainly photo's which has evoked many wonderful and treasured memories. One drawer was full of things collected by Dad. Each and every one of the magazines I'd been published in, newspaper cuttings recording me moving from Crewe to a job in the West Country, cuttings from every play my sister had been in (and my brother), programmes from everyone he attended, videos of every TV role she had, notices of sports events and things published locally about one grandchild or another. A treasure trove of memories and a demonstration of his pride in his children.
Thinking back, Dad believed in all of us but didn't believe in himself in the same way. His elder brother was very academic and didn't suffer the ill health Dad had as a young adult. Contracting TB meant that he wasn't eligible for National Service and delayed him starting his apprenticeship for two years. And he didn't learn to swim until we, his five children, taught him on holiday when he was 4O, yet it was his dad, Pops, who taught us!


text:
By Roald Dahl
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Book Previews
Most Anticipated: The Great 2023A Book Preview
Editor - 1.9.2023
Welcome to our biannual Great Book Preview! We've assembled the best books of 2023A (that is, the first half of 2023), including new work from Nicole Chung, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Claire Dederer, Brian Dillon, Samantha Irby, Heidi Julavits, Catherine Lacy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rebecca Makkai, Fernanda Melchor, Lorrie Moore, Jenny Odell, Curtis Sittenfeld, Clint Smith, Zadie Smith, Brandon Taylor, Colm Tóibín, and many, many more. At 85 titles, you may notice our 2023A list is a bit trimmer and more selective than in year's past. We wanted to make sure that our list comprises the books that we are truly anticipating the most—which is to say, we've carefully curated our selections to showcase the very best books coming out in the first half of 2023. We hope you enjoy! Love reading our Great Book Previews? Learn how you can support The Millions here. January Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor Part crime thriller and part saga of the powerful Wadia family, Age of Vice roams across India, from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the cauldron of New Delhi. Three lives intersect in this world of lavish estates, extravagant parties, drugs and seamy business deals: Ajay, the watchful family servant; Sunny, the playboy heir; and Neda, a journalist out to expose the consequences of corruption. The writing has authority. Kapoor, author of the novel Bad Character, grew up in northern India and has worked as a journalist in New Delhi. The result is an addictive, vivid spellbinder of a novel. —Bill Morris Decent People by De'Shawn Charles Winslow Winslow returns to the fictional Southern town of West Mills for a second time in this expertly-plotted and character-driven follow-up to his award-winning debut novel. In the 1970s, an investigation into a triple homicide reveals surprising and profoundly sad layers of reality for the townspeople of West Mills—the trauma and ramifications of segregation, class, deeply kept secrets, and underlying homophobia. A haunting, page-turning mystery, Decent People makes a must-read on anyone's literary list. —Jianan Qian The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley In this debut novel, a perpetually single Black lawyer, Aretha, falls in love with Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur who shares a brownstone with a stable of bizarre roommates. When Aretha moves in with Aaron, she gets caught up in their household dramas, which range from illegal gun sales to half-baked schemes to prepare for the end of the world. It will not surprise people who've read Cauley's essays—or seen her work on The Daily Show, or read her excellent tweets—that The Survivalists is, according to Tom Perrotta, an "edgy" and "darkly funny" book. —Thom Beckwith Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm Malcolm was a master of reportage, able to dissect and decipher her subjects with startling precision. (Also one of my own writerly heroes.) She often mused on the relationship between journalist and subject; in much of her journalism, she judged her subjects from a cool distance. How, then, would she approach a memoir? What would a self-portrait by one of our most formidable portraitists look like? These were the questions that exhilarated me when I began Malcolm's posthumous memoir. Still Pictures is as much a look at Malcolm's own photos and memories as the nature of photography and memory, written with all her characteristic style and clarity. —Sophia M. Stewart The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer In this philosophical and theological travelog, Iyer searches the globe for paradise. Not for himself—he wants to understand the idea of paradise, that incentive and dream and goal that undergirds the world's religions. Maria Popova herself, the brilliant mind behind The Marginalian, has called Iyer "one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time" and I expect The Half Known Life will further cement that status. —SMS OK by Michelle McSweeney In this slim and lucid addition to the Object Lessons series, which explores the hidden lives of everyday objects, linguist and author Michelle McSweeney unpacks the phrase "OK," coined 200 years ago and now ubiquitous in spoken English. As an object, "OK" reveals how technologies inscribe themselves into languages—originally, it was an acronym that stood for "all correct," a phrase which marked some of the earliest printed newspapers as ready for publication. From there, McSweeney traces the word's evolution through the present, illuminating the ways in which its meaning developed over time. —TB The 12th Commandment by Daniel Torday Torday presents a provocative and unexpected tale of contemporary Jewish life that owes less to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow than it does to Cynthia Ozick and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The 12th Commandment concerns the historical sect known as the Dönmeh, Turkish followers of a seventeenth-century Jewish pseudo-messiah who outwardly practice Islam but who are actually adherents of an esoteric kabbalistic faith. "Weird folk," explains a character, "They're like Jews and Muslims at the same time. Or something." Unexpectedly set among an imagined group of Dönmeh in small-town Ohio, with a noirish murder plot driving the action, and The 12th Commandment will appeal to fans of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but Torday's unique imagination and vital vision are his own. —Ed Simon Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein The story begins when Valeria Cossati—a 43-year-old office worker, self-sacrificing wife, and mother of two—buys a thick black notebook and begins writing at night—her thoughts, experiences, and fury. What follows over the course of six months are reflections on motherhood and femininity in postwar Rome that were as urgent and revelatory in the 1950s, when the novel was originally published, as they are today in post-Roe America. In the words of Annie Ernaux: "Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe." —Jenny Wu Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter by John Hendrickson I've been waiting for John to write this book since I first read his paradigm-shifting Atlantic article "What Joe Biden Can't Bring Himself to Say." Like Biden, John is a person who stutters. In Life on Delay, and with profound intelligence and insight, John examines his own stuttering life, as well as the lives of many other stutterers, to probe the many contradictions of disfluency. John has become something of a torchbearer in our community, and this book is going to be an essential contribution to the (currently very limited) literature of stuttering. I hate when people call certain books "important"—but this book is very important me, and will be important to a lot of people. We've been waiting a long time for a book like this. —SMS The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by John King When I began my undergraduate studies, I was disappointed by how little nonfiction appeared on the syllabi of my Spanish literature classes. Then I encountered Llosa, a Nobel-winning nonfictioneer and intellectual heavyweight (and occasional novelist) who rose to prominence during the Latin American Boom. In The Call of the Tribe, he maps out the minds that shaped his own: Sartre and Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek and Isaiah Berlin, and many more (mostly male) writers and thinkers. It's a pleasure—and a pleasurable challenge—to read Llosa on the roots of his ideology. —SMS The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega Ever since I visited the Cloisters for the first time earlier this year, I've been hungry to learn more about medieval life, and specifically women's place in it. Enter The Once and Future Sex, the subtitle of which quite directly addresses this yen of mine. Janega, a medievalist by training, makes middle-age sociology accessible, highlighting how archaic notions of femininity continue to shape modern womanhood in ways both subtle and overt. Beauty, sex, work, labor, motherhood, decorum—no aspect of women's lives goes unexplored in this rigorous study, which also highlights many of the era's subversive trailblazers. —SMS Black and Female by Tsitsi Dangarembga Zimbabwean writer Dangarembga explores the long shadow cast by imperialism in her own life, and the lives of all African people, in this volume of essays. The personal and political commingle (because, as all feminists know, they're one and the same) as Dangarembga excavates her own history and the history of her nation. The result is a clear-eyed look at what navigating life and art-making as a woman in Zimbabwe has taught her, as well as the possibilities and limits of a distinctly Black feminism, which she calls "the status quo's worst nightmare." —SMS A Guest at the Feast by Colm Tóibín One of Ireland's greatest living novelists, Tóibín is known the world over for his fiction. That's why I'm so curious to read his new essay collection, to see how he transfers his mastery across genres. A (supposedly) great compliment is to be called a nonfiction writer with a "novelist's" sensibility—the implication being that nonfiction is best when it reads like fiction. (I disagree!) This isn't Tóibín's first foray into nonfiction (he's written books on Elizabeth Bishop; contemporary queer artists; and the fathers of famous Irish writers)—but it is one of his most intimate. This is clear from the book's outset, which features one of best opening lines I've read in a minute: "It all started with my balls." —SMS Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois I always love reading Dan Kois's criticism (if you haven't yet read him on Tár, please do yourself the favor—and prepare to have your mind blown) so I was thrilled to hear about his forthcoming novel, a coming-of-age set in New York City at the turn of the millennium that wrestles with art, friendship, and what it means to cultivate a creative life. Our very own Lydia Kiesling blurbed it and gave it what is in my book one of the ultimate compliments: "poignant without being treacly." A near-impossible literary feat—I can't wait to see (read?) Kois pull it off for myself. —SMS Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns A retelling of the movie Taxi Driver featuring a ride-share driver? An incredible premise for a novel that explores work, class, and solidarity (or the lack thereof). Damani Krishanthan works for an Uber-like company, scraping by after her father dies during his shift at a fast-food restaurant. During a summer of uprising, she drives through throngs of protestors trying to make enough to cover rent. A relationship with a white wealthy protestor goes south, prompting a dramatic ending (considering its cinematic source material, I can only imagine). —Lydia Kiesling The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker Abby, a young economist, can't sleep the night before the talk she is scheduled to present tomorrow, optimism and John Maynard Keynes. A lapsed optimist struggling to support her family, she feels grossly unprepared to offer any insights into Keynes. With wry humor and true wisdom, Riker, co-founder and publisher of Dorothy, a Publishing Project, transforms one woman's insomnia into an enchanting and playful exploration of literature, performance, and the life of the mind. —JQ After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz At the turn of the twentieth century, three queer women—Rina Faccio, Romaine Brooks, and Virginia Woolf among them—make the same decision: They take up their pens or paintbrushes to define their lives and their identities on their own terms. Taking cues from the Greek poet, After Sappho, Schwartz's Booker-longlisted debut novel, reimagines the intertwined voices of those pioneering women artists in the collective first-person, whose courage and struggles never cease to inspire and encourage those who come after. —JQ Hanging Out by Sheila Liming We've all heard the admonitions to slow down, drop out, resist the rush—but what does that actually look like? "Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others," writes Liming in her treatise on the subject, the follow-up to her 2020 book What a Library Means to a Woman on Edith Wharton and book collections. Hanging Out, an endearing and revealing book, is well-timed, but as she notes, "we were having a hard time hanging out well before COVID-19 came along." She makes a compelling case for us to get together. —Nick Ripatrazone Call and Response: Stories by Gothataone Moeng This debut story collection joins a chorus of literary voices rising out of contemporary Africa. Set in the author's native village of Serowe, as well as in Gabarone, the thrumming capital of Botswana, these stories are spun from the struggles of women seeking to reconcile ancestral expectations with imported dreams—a girl who hides her sexual exploits from her family while her older brother flaunts his conquests; a young widow who ponders the custom of wearing mourning clothes for a year; a woman who returns from America, ashamed to have given up on the land of opportunity. The great Namwalli Serpell praised the collection for its "sharply observed vignettes," which together amount to a "beautiful" book full of "deep insight." —BM Black Empire by George S. Schuyler Originally published in serial form in the 1930s, Black Empire is the masterwork of George S. Schuyler, a journalist, Harlem Renaissance man, socialist-turned-arch-conservative, and creator of acid satires. This novel is the story of Dr. Henry Belsidus, a Black genius who sets out to cultivate a global network that will reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for their crimes against the world's Black population. Schuyler's earlier novel, Black No More, is a satirical romp about a Black man who turns his skin white. In all his work, Schuyler work confronts an abiding and urgent moral quandary: How far should one go to bring justice to an unjust world? —BM February Where I'm Coming From by Barbara Brandon-Croft Drawn & Quarterly has never let me down, and its winning streak won't be snapped by this collection from the first Black woman to have a nationally-syndicated comic strip. In the witty and groundbreaking "Where I'm Coming From," which ran from 1989 to 2005, nine Black girlfriends deliver insights and punchlines in equal measure, touching on politics, race, relationships, and everything in between. Tayari Jones says that Brandon-Croft's work has "aged beautifully," hailing the collection as "both ahead of its time and right on time." —Evan Allgood Brutes by Dizz Tate This surreal and ambitious debut novel, written partially in first-person plural and billed as "The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project," follows a clan of teenaged girls in Falls Landing, Florida, as they grapple with the disappearance of the local preacher's daughter. Brutes's adolescent cast, time-jumping narrative, and promise of violence evoke the hit show Yellowjackets. Mariana Enríquez calls it "a beautiful and deeply strange novel, full of dread and longing." —EA City of Blows by Tim Blake Nelson I love movies, but Hollywood—both the city and the industry that undergirds it—has never much interested me. Honestly, celebrity culture in America baffles me. But when a Hollywood insider and an accomplished playwright—and, not to mention, a fine actor—decides to satirize the toxic culture of Tinsel Town, I'm in. Nelson's debut novel follows four men fighting for control of a script and a place in a rapidly transforming Hollywood. There's something sustaining in a story that shows how beautiful people can be just as petty—just as ugly—as the rest of us. —Il'ja Rákoš Couplets by Maggie Millner Lovers of horny, rhyming poetry rejoice: Millner's "love story in poems," arrives a week before Valentine's Day, just in time to tie your brain to its bedposts. Kink and queerness, power and polyamory—this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all. Read an excerpt in BOMB to see why Elif Batuman, Garth Greenwell, and Leslie Jamison are all head over heels for this clever, seductive story of coming out and coming of age. —EA The Black Guy Dies First by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris This collaboration between Coleman, a scholar, and Harris, a journalist and film critic, explores the history of Black horror films since 1968. Named for the well-known cinematic trope, the book spans cult classics like Spider Baby up to commercial and critical successes like Get Out. According to Kirkus Reviews, the book is written with "keen observation, a satirical eye, and a genuine love for the subject." —Edan Lepucki Big Swiss by Jen Beagin "A sex therapist's transcriptionist falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions"—that was all I needed to hear to get excited about Beagin's third novel. Throw in blurbs from Melissa Border and A Touch of Jen author Beth Morgan, and I was all but convinced that Big Swiss will be weird and horny and unfettered in all the best ways. "Pick it up because you like cheese," Morgan urges, "stay for the brilliant sentences." —SMS Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop by Martin Puchner So many books these days are described as being "sweeping histories"; Culture, which promises in its subtitle to take us from our most primitive artistic impulses all the way to the machinery of modern-day fandom. But what intrigues me most about Puchner's latest isn't its scope—it's its driving question: "What good are the arts?" In my more hopeless moments, this question bubbles up inside me, and I'm chomping at the bit to hear Puchner's answer, grounded in history and informed by cultures around the world. —SMS Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix Following her poetry collection Build Yourself a Boat, which landed a spot on the National Book Award longlist, Camonghne Felix makes her nonfiction debut with this memoir, which charts a life-changing breakup and its many consequences for her life. When the author ends up in the hospital, she draws a parallel between her troubles as an adult and her childhood diagnosis of dyscalculia, a condition which makes it difficult to learn math or estimate place value. As she starts to tally her romantic miscalculations, she asks a wide-ranging question: who gets the right to freely express their own pain? —TB All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley A former New Yorker staffer turned museum guard is a pretty compelling tagline, to be certain, and Bringley delivers in this intimate and philosophical debut memoir—he muses on the artworks, coworkers, and museumgoers that surround him. Adding poignancy to the memoir's conceit, his observations are all permeated with profound grief as he reels from the death of his older brother. Bringly brings the Met to life on a grand scale and granular level. —NR The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith For her first foray into playwriting, novelist and essayist Smith reimagines Chaucer's Canterbury Tale about the Wife of Bath for twenty-first century, northwest London. Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her early fifties, tells her life story to strangers in a pub. In its review, The Guardian calls it "a celebration of community and local legends, of telling a good story and living a life worth telling. Not bad for an original text that's 600 years old." —EL Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris I went to college in the Bay Area, where the allure of Silicon Valley was palpable. My classmates posted about their internships at Twitter and Microsoft, wore t-shirts with emblazoned with the logos of Google and Linkedin, and went on to get jobs with six-figure starting salaries. I remembered my dad's quaint stories of growing up in nearby Los Altos and struggled to reconcile that history with the present. Harris's comprehensive history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalism to free love to big tech, does just that. Palo Alto spans centuries in order to thoroughly demystifying the region's economics and unearth its enduring legacy of settler colonialism. Users by Colin Winnette I worked for years as a consultant at American-based IT companies with teams in Kyiv, and among those Ukrainians I knew who were handling the code, it was rare to find anyone who worshipped Steve Jobs, loved tech, or saw STEM work as anything particularly noble. No true believers in panaceas or "essential" tech. Here, in the fictional world of Winnette's latest novel, we encounter a strong critique and timely caution that my Kyiv ITshnyks certainly understood well: the devastation that awaits when we entrust the mechanisms we've built to do our thinking, our feeling, and our living for us. —IR I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai In her follow-up to her 2018 novel The Great Believers, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist, Makkai brings us to a New Hampshire boarding school. Film professor Bodie Kane has been eager to forget her four awful years there, which included a murder of a classmate by the athletic trainer. But when she's brought back to campus to teach a two-week course, everything she thought she knew about the case is thrown into question. Makkai plays with true-crime tropes to deliver a literary exploration of friendship. —Marie Myung-Ok Lee Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman Michael Shulman is one of the great profile-writers of our time, and one of our best writers, period. (His New Yorker profiles of Jeremy Strong, Bo Burnahm, and Adam Driver long ago took up permanent residence in my brain.) What Schulman, a student of personality, could accomplish in a study of the Oscars—that most official of personality contests—is limitless. It's also just a perfect opportunity to spill so much celebrity gossip. I imagine devouring this book poolside, while sipping on a blue drink; a big umbrella overhead, a little umbrella in my glass. Slime by Susanne Wedlich, translated by Ayca Turkoglu Primordial slime has long been considered a cornerstone of life on Earth; without it, the natural world would be unrecognizable. Slimy substances like mucous and slobber are also common features of fictional monsters in popular culture from Lovecraft to Alien. Munich-based science and nature journalist Susanne Wedlich's ode to the semi-liquids that hold our world together—and our minds in awe—reminds us "we are sticky beings living in a sticky place" (TLS), whether we like it or not. —JW March Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova What lengths would you go to get back someone you've loved and lost? Just for a bit, to look in their eyes one more time, or tell them what needed to be told? But play that possibility out to its inevitable conclusion and it's difficult to envision anything good coming from it. In Córdova's horror debut, a grieving mother in Mexico City goes to unimaginable extremes to bring her late 11-year-old son back to life, only to discover that there are worse things than death. Grief, she learns, is not something to be trifled with, or worse, avoided. —IR Francisco by Alison Mills Newman Though it garnered plaudits from Toni Morrison when it was first published in 1974, Newman's autobiographical novel has long been out of print. Now, a reissue by New Directions—with a new foreword by Saidiya Hartman—promises to introduce a new generation of readers to Newman's innovative and genre-bending story, which draws on the author's experience as a young actress in 1960s Hollywood. —TB The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia In her new novel, the Mattia reinvents the roman à clef with a magical realist memoir that puts the dusty genre of autofiction to shame. Sifting from multiple narratives—and dimensions—The Fifth Wound is a romance, a meditation on transphobic violence, and a speculative tale of time travel, ecstatic visionaries, and mystical union. Transcending the limiting confines of not just society, but reality as well, and Mattia's novel promises the reader an experience that recalibrates simplistic notions of truth and fiction, reality and illusion. —ES Saving Time by Jenny Odell I love books that force me to recognize or reconsider the structure of existence—and Odell's book does just this, in a way that's both enlightening and generative. Her previous book, How to Do Nothing, was a runaway hit about what happens when we subvert the temporal expectations that are placed upon us: "Letting go of one overwhelming rhythm, you invite the presence of others. Perhaps more important, you remember that the arrangement is yours to make." Odell demonstrates how it's never too late to save the time we have left. —NR The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe In 1958, at the age of 27, Rona Jaffe published her first novel, a revolutionary portrait of three young women employed at a New York publishing house. Renowned for its frankness and honesty, particularly in its depictions of sexual harassment, The Best of Everything is, per Michele Moses, "what you would get if you took Sex and the City and set it inside Mad Men's universe." Now, for its 65th anniversary, Penguin Classics is reissuing the novel, complete with a new introduction by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme, who is the perfect voice to prime us for a retro romp through postwar New York and its attendant glitzy patina. —TB Raving by McKenzie Wark Wark's entry into Duke University Press's Practices series, which spotlights the activities that make us human, invites us into the underground queer and trans rave scene of New York City. A bombastic collision of sound and movement, raving is, to Wark, the ideal activity for "this era of diminishing futures." An avid raver herself, she blends academic analysis with her own first-hand accounts, all relayed with sensual, staccato prose. "Some come to serve looks; some come to leave their sweat on the dance floor," she writes. "I'm the latter kind. I want to be animate and animated on the floor." —SMS Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty From 1960 to 1996, more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, and tens of thousands more disappeared, after an American-backed coup gave rise to a steady march of genocidal dictators. Decades later, anthropologists like Alexa Hagerty are working to exhume and examine the dead, piecing together their bodies and their stories in an urgent but potentially quixotic quest for resolution, and attempting to bring a sense of humanity to the forensic sciences. —EA How to Think Like a Woman by Regan Penaluna In her first book, journalist Penaluna, who has a PhD in philosophy, explores the oft-forgotten and under-taught feminist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catherine Cockburn. Blending biography, criticism, and memoir, Penaluna explores the lives and beliefs of these thinkers, as well as the ways women—past and present—have been devalued within philosophy, academia, and history. How to Think Like a Woman serves as an alternate philosophical canon, where women and their intellect are deeply and rigorously examined. —Carolyn Quimby Y/N by Esther Yi "Y/N," short for "[Your/Name]," refers to a type of fanfiction that allows readers to insert their own names into brackets in the story, so as to imagine themselves in romantic scenarios with popular idols. In Esther Yi's debut novel, our narrator devotes herself to writing fanfic about a K-pop star named Moon. When Moon suddenly retires and retreats from the spotlight, the narrator embarks on a transnational search that unveils the absurd innards of a Korean entertainment company, as well as the loneliness of modern life and the various fantasies we enact to try to escape it. Yi, a Leipzig-based writer, has earned comparisons to Elif Batuman, Thomas Pynchon, Yoko Tawada, and Marie NDiaye. —JW How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of a Suicidal Mind by Clancy Martin Clancy Martin has tried to die by suicide more than 10 times. In How Not to Kill Yourself, he speaks frankly about these attempts and the thoughts that fueled them. In probing his own experiences, he inevitably comes to larger conclusions about the nature of the self-destructive mind and the philosophy of suicide. He also turns to other writers who have attempted suicide and written about it, from Yiyun Li to David Foster Wallace. Written with surprising tenderness and humor, this memoir-cum-critical-inquiry is a perspective-shifting study. Biography of X by Catherine Lacy With a title that recalls both Alex Haley's biography of Malcolm X and Gertrude Stein's consideration of her partner Alice B. Toklas, Lacey audaciously explores the contingencies of identity, memory, and history in her latest experimental novel. Lacey's novel takes place in an alternative history where the American South separated from the United States and was governed as a fascist theocracy only recently being reabsorbed into the wider nation. Ostensibly The Biography of X is about the titular unknown, a celebrated but mysterious artist, and her widow's account of that life as much as can be assembled. But with cameos by such twentieth-century luminaries as Sontag and Bowie, the novel is also a biography of American art and theory which understands that sometimes history is best understood at a slant. —ES The Last Catastrophe by Allegra Hyde This collection of 15 stories by the author of Eleutheria continues Hyde's interest in humanity grappling with climate change. Alexandra Kleeman writes that these speculative stories are "dazzling, inventive, and glinting with dark humor." Spaceships, AI, zombies, and body-switching abound. I, for one, am most excited to read the story about the girl growing a unicorn horn! —EL The New Earth by Jess Row A century which began with 9/11, and has so far seen economic collapse, a ground war in Europe, a global pandemic, and the rise of neo-fascism is painfully interesting. Jess Row's latest novel interlays these interesting times on a family drama among the privileged Wilcoxes of the Upper East Side, from 2000 to 2018. The global perspective becomes synonymous with the vantage point of daughter Winter Wilcox, who on the eve of her wedding must grapple not just with her estranged family, but the ways in which her personal tragedies from years coincide with both parental secrets and historical injustices. "Disguising your origins is a deeply American impulse," Row wrote in 2014, "but that doesn't make it any less compromising," a theme heartily interrogated in The New Earth. —ES Chlorine by Jade Song Song's debut novel revolves around high-schooler Ren Yu, a competitive swimmer who spends her days in the pool. Her immigrant parents expect her to train hard and secure a college scholarship, but she aspires to transform into a mermaid, freeing herself from the terrestrial world. A spiky, sapphic coming-of-age that embraces fantasy and horror to explore girlhood and its discontents. —JQ In Search of a Beautiful Freedom by Farah Jasmine Griffin A new volume of collected essays both new and previously published by Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia. Following her last book Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, these new and previously unpublished essays range in topic from Covid to the efforts to ban Toni Morrison to the life work of Odetta. Griffin's insights into Black music, feminism, and literature are unparalleled. —LK Affinities by Brian Dillon When I read Dillon's previous books, Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, I considered them a diptych: two close looks at two literary forms (the essay and the sentence) that were driven by what Dillon himself calls his own "affinity." It turns out, Essayism and Suppose a Sentence were really the first two entries in a triptych! His latest book, Affinities, centers on images, from photographs to paintings to migraine auras. Why do images make us feel the way they do? Why are we drawn to certain images over other ones? Dillon is one of my favorite writers, thinkers, and close-readers, and I can't wait to read him on the pleasures of looking. —SMS Above Ground by Clint Smith I long for a literature—especially a poetry—of joy; life is too short and bland without it. Smith's new poetry collection teems with images of love and fatherhood. Great poetry comes in many modes and subjects, but there's something unique about a book of verse that makes me want to hold my own children a little tighter, as I think of his description of delivering a bear hug: "my arms are still / open like a universe / in need of a planet / to make it worth / something." Juxtaposed with lines of grief and recognition—"men attempting / to unlearn the anger on their father's / tongues, the heat in their hands"—Smith's songs of joy are that much sweeter. —NR Ada's Room by Sharon Dodua Otoo, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi Otoo's debut novel is about four women, all with the same name: Ada, a mother in fifteenth-century West Africa; Ada Lovelace, the real-life programmer in Victorian England; Ada, a prisoner in a concentration camp in 1945; and Ada, a young Ghanian woman in present day. As Otoo connects their narratives across centuries, the linear confines of history break down and a profound sorority comes into focus. R.O. Kwon calls this one "thrillingly, astonishingly original." —SMS April This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes Taking place in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, this collection of crónicas—narrative nonfiction pieces that blend reportage with novelistic structures—explores the criminal underworld, shedding light on social problems that manifest in gory headlines. As in her novels Paradais and Hurricane Season, Melchor draws empathetic portraits of deeply unsympathetic figures, forcing her readers to understand the mindsets of monstrous characters. —TB Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Ever since the moment I finished Adjei-Brenyah's surreal, satirical, and original debut story collection, Friday Black, I've been not-so-patiently waiting for whatever he wrote next. In his upcoming debut novel, two female gladiators fight to the death for their freedom on the hugely popular and controversial TV show, Chain-Gang All Stars, which airs on CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment). With his sharp eye for satire and reverence for humanity, Adjei-Brenyah's latest explores the exploitation, violence, and false promises of the prison industrial complex, capitalism, and the country itself. —CQ Work-Life Balance by Aisha Franz, translated by Nicholas Houde This graphic novel, which was originally a comic series published by Colorama, concerns three friends who, disillusioned with their work lives, seek help from the same therapist. Franz, who lives in Berlin, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times book prize for her previous book, Shit is Real, which the Guardian called "a wise and funny journey through loneliness and confusion." Her latest sounds just as promising. —EL Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe The latest book by scholar of English literature and Black Studies Christina Sharpe takes the form of a series of 248 notes on history, art, literature, and life whose meanings accumulate over the course of nearly 400 pages. At the center of the resulting polyphonic portrait of Black existence is the figure of Ida Wright Sharpe, the author's mother. Saidiya Hartman calls Ordinary Notes "an exquisite text" that "demands everything of the reader and, in turn, offers us a vocabulary for living." —JW A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung Chung's bestselling memoir All You Can Ever Know, published in 2018, cemented her as one of this generation's great chroniclers of family, both adoptive and biological: its limits and possibilities, what it means, how it shapes us. Her follow-up, which follows Chung as she mourns her parents and navigates the institutional inequities baked into American society, promises to be just as poignant. Blurbers Megha Majumdar, Julie Otsuka, Imani Perry, and Bryan Washington certainly think so. —SMS Second Star: And Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm, translated by Jody Gladding A runaway hit in France, Second Star is a collection of vignettes about life's smallest and simplest moments, from washing your windows to peeling a clementine. With evocative descriptions of taste, touch, and sound, Delerm zeroes in on the sensations and pleasures that, while often overlooked or taken for granted, can make us feel most alive. Linger in the moment, he says, stay a while—be here, now. —SMS Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld I first encountered Curtis Sittenfeld in high school, when my dad's then-girlfriend gifted me a copy of Prep. It was smart and sexy and felt like a portal into womanhood, which I was on the precipice of. Sittenfeld knows how to write romantic comedy without ever slipping into the saccharine, the chivalrous, the cliche. (Also, Brandon Taylor is a fan!) So I can't wait for her new rom-com, about a comedy writer whose decision to swear off love is rocked when she falls for a pop star. —SMS Sea Change by Gina Chung Chung's debut centers on thirty-something Ro who feels stalled in her life—heartbroken after a breakup, father missing, mother remote, friends drifting away. She's also stagnating at her job at a mall aquarium, where one of her favorite sea creatures (and last remaining link to her father), an octopus named Dolores, is about to be sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private collection. Joseph Han called Ro one of his favorite Korean American characters of all time. —MML The One by Julia Argy Argy's debut novel, about a woman who's a contestant on a Bachelor-style dating reality show, has garnered some killer blurbs. Julie Buntin writes, "I could not stop reading Julia Argy's smart, funny, and tender debut novel about falling in love and finding oneself on and offscreen," and Claire Messud calls it "riveting, astute and darkly comic." —EL Without Children by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington As a mother of three myself, I'm interested in why people become parents—or don't. In Without Children, Heffington, a historian of gender, explores the long history of women who did not become mothers, for a variety of reasons. Situating what seems to some to be a modern phenomenon within a larger historical context, this one seems like an essential read. Ada Calhoun deems it a "timely, refreshingly open-hearted study." —EL The Double Life of Benson Yu by Kevin Chong I hear the word "metafiction" and I usually figure I'm in for a cerebral workout and probably a headache. While Chong's story of a graphic novelist focusing on his art in an attempt to process his difficult youth is indeed a workout, it's also a hugely engaging, headache-free read about a world, Chinatown, and a creative outlet, graphic arts, that I know nothing about. Yes, there is a lot of darkness in this story, episodes that could present challenges to some readers, but ultimately the heft of this novel lies in its powerful reminder that unless we confront our demons, we'll never exorcise them. —IR Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key An essay collection about unpartnered life set to the soundtrack of Joni Mitchell's Blue—so thoughtful of Amy Key to write a book specifically and exclusively for me! Looking back at her past romantic longings and collisions, Key considers the (inflated?) value of romantic love and finds her contradictory feelings on the matter reflected in Mitchell's lyrics. There's nothing poor-me about Arrangements in Blue; in Key's hands, solitary life becomes more capacious—and more complicated—than I ever thought possible. —SMS The Ugly History of Beautiful Things by Katy Kelleher In this deeply researched collection of essays, Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores the hidden histories of our favorite luxury goods, revealing how even the most beautiful objects have dark, unsavory backgrounds. In a blend of historical, scientific and autobiographical writing, Kelleher explains why some red lipstick contains beetle shells, why certain perfumes include rodent musk, and why a fancy class of dishware is made with the ashes of cow bones. Along with helping us understand how these objects came to signify beauty, Kelleher reveals the price workers pay to bring them to us – and suggests a few ways we can ethically appreciate their products. —TB May Written on Water by Eileen Chang It is no exaggeration to say Eileen Chang has shaped our perceptions of modern cities in China. Before her, big cities were monstrous, with myriads of people often seen as sordid sinners. Chang portrayed Shanghai and Hong Kong as the intersections of tradition and modernity, of the East and the West. The pleasures of modernity embody new ways of life. The subtleties of everyday life signify people's pursuit of happiness. Chang is sharp, rebellious, and unique. You will find even her examination of Shanghainese food eerily resonating. —JQ Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst When Mickey Hayward loses her coveted media job, she pens a scathing letter about the racism and sexism she's encountered in the industry. It's met with silence and soon forgotten, until a media scandal catapults the letter—and Mickey—back into the spotlight. This witty take on fame, media, and the institutions that rule our lives, Homebodies already garnered blurbs from Danielle Evans, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Bryan Washington. —SMS Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby If you've read Irby's previous collections, or even skimmed her Instagram, you're likely waiting for her next book of hilarious essays. This one sounds promising: it has a skunk on the front and covers everything from working in Hollywood, to getting a "deranged pandemic dog" (per the jacket copy), to being turned away from a restaurant for being dressed inappropriately. I can't wait! —EL Dances by Nicole Cuffy At the age of 22, Cece Cordell is catapulted to fame when she becomes the first Black principal dancer in the history of the storied New York City Ballet. But her achievement doesn't feel right, and she she soon embarks on a journey to find a missing older brother— and the pieces of herself that have been devoured by the voracious machinery of the highly competitive ballet world. This debut novel by the author of a decorated work of short fiction, 2018's Atlas of the Body, is an examination of the physical and spiritual costs all artists must pay in the pursuit of their art. —BM Monsters by Claire Dederer How to separate the art from the artist? A question I—and most cultural critics—have been wrestling with for a long time now. In Monsters, Claire Dederer takes a stab. Inspired by her Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?," Dederer takes on Hemingway and Picasso, Miles Davis and Roman Polanski, to construct a deeply personal theory of art, genius, and cruelty, written from the perspective of both a critic and a fan. I've been counting down the days to this one for a while. —SMS Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis In her blurb for Davis's debut novel, the writer Samantha Hunt tells me everything I needed to know: "Like a tightly rolled spliff passed around the room," she writes, "you will inhale Dykette." Following three queer couples on a 10-day country getaway, Dykette takes on desire, debauchery, and destruction through a distinctly queer—and propulsively entertaining—lens. —SMS Avidly Reads Screen Time by Phillip Maciak Phillip Maciak is one of the best TV critics alive right now, full stop. Whether he's writing about Girls or Station Eleven or Bluey, his criticism is always characterized by wit, insight, and a remarkable propensity for close-reading. So yes, I was over the moon to learn about his new book of cultural criticism and history, Avidly Reads Screen Time, about how we define screens and how they define us. There are three Mad Men screen caps within the book's first 30 pages, so, yeah, it's gonna be ridiculously good. —SMS Thinning Blood by Leah Myers Leah Myers is likely the last official member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe as a consequence of blood quantum laws. In a work of memoir and family excavation of her ancestors lives' in the Pacific Northwest, Myers explores the meaning of legacy, documentation, belonging, and weaves between and together her own life, the lives of her ancestors, and the hypotheticals of future generations. —LK King: A Life by Jonathan Eig Martin Luther King Jr. has, at this point, been flattened into an icon. The Selma to Montgomery march, "I Have a Dream," his assassination—this is what his life has been boiled down for many of us, and in the American imagination as a whole. King the leader, the orator, the pastor, the martyr—what about King the man? Eig's forthcoming tome on King, the first full biography in decades, contains new research and shines a fresh light on King's life, relationships, and interiority. —SMS A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs I've recently realized that I will read just about any book of nonfiction that has the word "women" in the title. A Life of One's Own is no exception, though the draw certainly does not end at its title. Biggs's latest combine memoir, criticism, and biography (my favorite literary concoction) to study how women writers across the centuries—Plath, Woolf, Morrison, et al.— have carved out freedom for themselves in their lives and work. (I suspect this one will be a great companion to the aforementioned How to Think Like a Woman.) —SMS The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor Everyone's favorite Booker Prize shortlister, national bestseller, Story Prize winner, Henry James prefacer, litcrit-newsletter purveyor, tweet-sender, and sweater-enjoyer Brandon Taylor, returns in May 2023 with The Late Americans. Like his acclaimed 2020 novel Real Life, The Late Americans is set in a small midwestern college town; also like Real Life, it is more accurately set in its young characters' exquisitely sensitive and private psyches. Its three protagonists, and a larger constellation of midwestern eccentrics, artists, and academics, confront and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery leading to a trip to a cabin where they bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered. —Adam O'Fallon Price The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling Earling reimagines the well-trodden tale of Sacajewea and her role in the fateful expedition of Lewis and Clark in this historical novel. Endowed agency, authority, and interiority, Earling's Sacajewea rewrites the version of herself handed down through American history. Her life before the expedition comes into vivid focus, as do her complicated feelings about her role in charting the course for American imperialism. Night of the Living Rez author Morgan Talty praises this "transcendental work of literature" as "striking" and "elegant." —SMS On Women by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff Susan Sontag, Merve Emre—the collab of the century? I'll read anything by either writer, so I will of course be reading this. Sontag's takes on feminism, sexuality, beauty, fascism, aging, and more are the focus of this seven-essay collection, introduced by Emre and edited by Sontag's son David Rieff. Always drawn to the grey, the murky, the complicated, here Sontag considers the ubiquitous, amorphous forces that shape women's lives with her characteristic curiosity and authority. —SMS Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza In her debut memoir, Brooklynite Possanza dives into the archives to recover the stories of twentieth-century New York lesbians. Sifting through records she finds role models and cautionary tales, juicy gossip and heart-wrenching regret. Writing with empathy, wit, and imagination, Possanza constructs a personal, political, and romantic history of lesbian life and love. —SMS June Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 by Chris Payne Emo exploded just as I gained consciousness as a human being with aesthetic tastes. For me, and many of my peers, emo music was a formative force in our lives, enunciating the frustration and darkness that many of us found ourselves newly harboring as adolescents. So I can't wait to read Chris Payne's oral history of the genre, which uses interviews with My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, and more to reconstruct emo's meteoric ascent and profound cultural footprint. —SMS Wannabe: Reckoning with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris Harris, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, always has a take. Movies, TV, music—she's got an opinion and she's excited to tell you about it. Adapting her radio presence into book form, Wannabe sees Harris turning her talents for critique and criticism inward, looking at the media that has shaped her life and examining its effects. From Clueless to the Spice Girls, New Girl to Chance the Rapper, Harris teases out the connections between her identity and her love of pop culture with wit and elan. —SMS Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva Oliva is a writer, translator and immigration activist who has translated for people seeking asylum along the US-Mexico border since 2016. In this work of memoir and journalism, which won a 2022 Whiting Nonfiction Award, Oliva describes her experiences of translation, describes her own Mexican-American family's relationship to the border, and interrogates notions of citizenship and belonging. —LK I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore Moore's first novel since 2009's A Gate at the Stairs, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (that title!) is a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries about grief, devotion, and narrative. I'll be honest, I have no idea what this book is actually going to be about (the descriptive copy sums up the plot thusly: "A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .") but the intrigue makes it all the more anticipated. —SMS Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits My first introduction to Julavits was 2015's The Folded Clock, which I read the week after I first moved to New York, back in 2020. I've been waiting for her next book ever since. It's finally here—Directions to Myself sees Julavits studying what she calls "the end times of childhood." She writes about her son's upbringing as well as her own to find answers about motherhood, family life, and growing up. George Saunders calls it "an absolute stunner." I predict I'll feel the same. —SMS [millions_email]
Made of Sterner Stuff: On Roald Dahl and 'Love From Boy'
Christian Kriticos - 9.8.2016
As a fellow English boarding school veteran, I have always felt a certain kinship with Roald Dahl. His famous autobiography of his childhood, Boy, memorably captures the hierarchical structure of boarding school life, and although Dahl's experiences were somewhat more brutal than my own (I was never forced to thaw a frozen lavatory seat with my own posterior) there is a definite sense of recognition in reading about his childhood days. However, upon reading Love from Boy, a newly published collection of Dahl's letters to his mother, I feel as though I may have to discard any claim to familiarity. As it turns out, there are even more differences between the boarding schools of the 1930s and those of the 2000s than were previously evident to me, and, if I learned anything about myself reading Love From Boy, it is that, had I been unfortunate enough to live in Dahl's day, I probably would have ended up like "poor little Ford," a briefly-mentioned fatality of one of the school's many measles epidemics. If the measles did not claim me, there would have been no shortage of other possibilities for a premature snuffing-out. Dahl, made of far sterner stuff, and arguably the most effortlessly macho of all 20th-century writers (including the posturing Ernest Hemingway), survived them all: being forced to fight a fire in his boarding house and then spending the night in the "black and charcoaly" building on "brown and nasty" beds; coming under fire when a student accidentally used live ammunition instead of blanks in a field-day training exercise; and experimenting with eating boiled lichen on a school trip to Newfoundland due to a lack of sufficient food. Dahl detailed all of these horrors in regular letters to his beloved mother, and continued to write to her faithfully up until her death. Donald Sturrock, author of the acclaimed Dahl biography, Storyteller, collects a selection of over 600 of these surviving letters, dating from 1925 to 1965, in this new volume, entitled Love From Boy, after the phrase Dahl affectionately used to sign off his letters from school. After he left boarding school, Dahl's adventures continued and became even more outrageous. He moved to Africa, working in Tanzania and Kenya for Shell, where he contracted malaria, fought off a black mamba snake, and invented the game of strip darts. When war broke out in 1939, Dahl trained to become a pilot in Egypt, Iraq, and Greece. He shot down at least five enemy planes during the war before crash landing in the Libyan desert and being sent home to England to convalesce. Following a chance encounter in a private London club, he was given a curious job offer and moved to Washington D.C. to work for the RAF. His military assignments there, as well as his own blossoming success as a freelance writer, soon launched him to the peak of American high society: he played tennis with Vice President Henry A. Wallace (winning 6-0, 6-0, 6-0), joined President Roosevelt for Thanksgiving dinner, went on a date with Ginger Rogers, attended a party with Charlie Chaplin, and worked on a major motion picture with Walt Disney. What is most extraordinary about this is the fact that it all took place decades before he found his ultimate success as a children's writer, which would not come until 1961 with the publication of James and the Giant Peach. These remarkable events (which must surely constitute one of the most interesting biographies of any writer) are all detailed in Dahl's letters. Although one might feel a sense of unease reading or critically analyzing personal letters that were never meant for publication, Dahl's may prove an exception since, as Sturrock argues, they were always written "primarily to entertain." Therefore, although there might be a few personal details, such as inquiries about relatives, all in all the letters are highly accessible for those otherwise unfamiliar with Dahl's life, and primarily document his extraordinary anecdotes in the ever-humorous style of a born entertainer. My personal favorite of his many comical descriptions concerns the two elderly patients he shares a hospital room with after recovering from surgery, who fart "quite openly and unashamedly just as though it was like saying good morning." For those (like myself) who are fond of these kinds of immature observations and jokes, there is plenty more to be found in Love from Boy, including Dahl's description of a statue of a bison whose penis is painted bright red by vandals -- "a very fine sight;" a picture by Dahl of "Hitler fucking himself," annotated with an instruction to "note the smile of ecstasy on his face;" and a warning against the painting of toilet seats, lest some unfortunate "adhere to it," followed by a conclusion that this would be "an excellent cure for constipation." (Another difference between Dahl and myself: I would never dare to record any of these things in a letter to my mother, for fear she would be scandalized to the point of fainting, or worse.) Although the letters themselves are fascinating and consistently funny, if the book has one flaw it may be that Sturrock tries too hard to force his theme of motherhood. It is clear that Dahl and his mother had a devoted relationship, but none of her letters survive, making the conversation in this collection entirely one-sided. Sturrock's conclusion that Dahl's mother "was an essential and invaluable foil" for the development of his writing is something we just have to take his word for. As a noted biographer of Dahl's, it is likely that Sturrock is privy to more insights into her character than we are, so his conclusions may be valid -- they are just not made immediately evident from what we have collected in Love from Boy. Nonetheless, the book does a valiant job of collecting these letters for the first time and providing sound biographical context for them. For fans of Dahl's writing there is also an additional layer of enjoyment, as one can seek out potential origins for elements later found in his fictional works. One obvious example is the cat, Mrs. Taubsypuss, whom Dahl and his fellow Shell workers took care of in Dar es Salaam -- she later gives her name to the U.S. President's cat in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Other more subtle details, such as Dahl's descriptions of flying, may be the catalyst for scenes from his final book, The Minpins, which features miniature people flying on the backs of birds. Likewise, his eventual disillusionment with high society excesses ("Dinner of course was eaten off gold plate, but it tasted just the same") may contain the seeds for the spoiled and greedy consumer-obsessed characters that populate Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Reading Love from Boy, one gets the sense that it was inevitable that Dahl would become a great writer. Not only did he get plenty of practice, composing a huge number of letters, all in a style that served to sharpen his skill as a humorist; but he also lived more in the 10-year period from his leaving school to the end of the war than most of us do in a lifetime. He carried with him a rich memory of innumerable fascinating anecdotes and ideas -- enough to fill countless books. Love from Boy provides a wonderful summary of this extraordinary life and an intimate insight into his development as a writer. It will prove a charming read for anyone who has ever enjoyed his work. Plus (did I mention?) it also has lots of rude bits, which is always a nice bonus.
The Way We Used to Walk the Dog
Nell Boeschenstein - 8.10.2010 | 16
1. As had become our Saturday morning summer routine, my friend and I were sitting on the benches outside of our local café nursing iced coffees and watching the neighborhood go by. "That's a weird outfit," Anshu said, nodding in the direction of a man whose printed belt matched his printed shoes, which matched his printed hat. "Is it just me or are there more lesbians around here than there used to be?" I responded. "Maybe." She chewed on her straw. "Remember that time in college when it snowed two feet? I want it to be cold like that now." I nodded. We were silent, taking in the traffic and the people coming and going and the small dog that was tied to a signpost and the woman who was having a battle of the wills with her bike lock. Anshu's eyes then landed on a girl—about nine or ten—sitting with her mother on the bench beside us, oblivious to everything, her nose in a book. "She's reading The Witches," Anshu said, nudging me and nodding in the child's direction. "I can see the words 'Norwegian Witch' from here." I looked over. Sure enough, I could read the large, child-sized font from where I sat as well. I looked again at Anshu, who is not known for her soft side. I could almost reach out with my bare hands and grab hold of her desire to be picked up out of her own body and replaced into that of the girl's. "I love Roald Dahl," Anshu was growing more misty-eyed by the second. "I wonder if her mother gave her the book?" "I don't know," I said noncommittally and eyeing the girl's mother who, like us moments earlier, seemed preoccupied by the intricacies of traffic patterns. Anshu was on a roll: "James and the Giant Peach, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits. Do you remember The Twits?" I smiled. I wanted her to keep indulging the nostalgia. From there we traded childhood reading habits. Anshu had grown up Indian-American in Seattle and I had grown up Just Plain American in Virginia, but our formative literary lives had been the same. We remembered bringing books to the dinner table and we remembered being told to put them away and participate in conversation. There were the flashlights snuck into bed for reading after lights out. I was indignant all over again about Amy stealing Laurie out from under Jo even if Jo didn't care. Anshu described running across her backyard in Seattle the way she imagined Anne ran across the fields of Prince Edward Island towards Green Gables. We both remembered how, when we walked our family dogs, we would leave the house with a leash in one hand, a book in the other. The walks, which without a novel seemed endless and boring, would be over and we'd be back at our front doors—dogs relieved, parents satisfied—before we had even had a chance to look around and take note of the clouds, the weather, our fellow dog walkers, trash days, "For Sale" signs, the Volvos parked in driveways. I wondered whether these experiences were some of the things that had led us to be, at thirty, sitting together on a bench in Brooklyn: single, childless roommates. 2. If we are lucky we are read to before we read to ourselves. That is where it all originates. For me, the beginning of the story went like this: Dinner is over. It was creamed asparagus on toast and I had seconds. Dad is doing the dishes and my sister is upstairs in her room finishing her homework. The dog is licking the dishes sitting pre-washed but still dirty in the dishwasher. It is almost my bedtime, but first mom will read a chapter aloud. Every night for almost two months we have been sitting down together on the couch at this time and, as dusk gathers outside, she has been reading me Little Women. Before starting, she reaches an arm around me. There's a part of her that is a would-be actress and so she is good at reading, doing distinct voices for different characters in their various situations: Meg leaving home, Jo cutting her hair, Beth exclaiming over that piano, Amy telling Jo she's fallen for Laurie, Marmee in the arm chair by the fire reading letters from their father on the front. At the end of each chapter, my mother gets quiet and still for a moment. By now it is completely dark outside and I can't believe how quickly the time has passed. I can't even see the trees in the front yard. Then: "Bedtime," she announces decisively. I protest. Just a few more pages. One more chapter. But my mother grew up in the fifties on a chicken farm in rural Maine and has the get-on-with-it attitude of that time and place. "No, it's off to bed with you," she says taking her arm from around me and closing the book. "Another chapter tomorrow night." And so it would be until there were no more chapters because the little women had all grown up. 3. If there is one thing that can consistently reduce even the most hardened cynic to a sentimental softie, it is the books she read as a child. Of course, we still read, my friends and I. We read on the subway and on the couch or in bed just as we used to do. But it's not the same: the subway ride ends, the couch inspires naptime, a flashlight under the covers is absurd. I certainly can't remember the last time I heard someone say, "I was walking down the street reading a book when...." The closest I've come to witnessing such a scenario was last summer when a friend and I were going hiking. She had her nose in the trail map and we had yet to leave the parking lot or break a sweat when—not looking where she was going—she fell off the curb, cutting herself so badly she ended up needing to go to the hospital and foregoing the hike. In the time between now and when we last walked the dog and read a novel at the same time, it seems we've lost the ability to read and walk simultaneously. These days, I put dinnertime ahead of reading and fit the latter in where I can and when I feel like it. Often, until I am directly confronted with the sight of a girl and her book—a sight outside the purview of my current routines—it can slip my mind that I, too, used to read like that. To love reading like that. As it was with our first loves, we fall hard for our first books. When we were with them the rest of the world fell away. And as with our first loves, we will never let go of ourselves like that again. I've asked myself when it was I read for the last time as a child, but the question is as pointless as asking when me and my first love lost what it was we once had. The answer is probably nothing more than, "One day the magic was there and the next day it wasn't." At some point I just took the dog for a walk without a novel, looked around, and either the things around me had changed or I had. The diminishment of the intensity is an evolutionary imperative. We reach a point at which we no longer allow ourselves to read like that because if we did we would never get anything else done. We wouldn't meet new people or remember to make those doctors appointments. If we still read with the intensity of an eight-year-old or loved with the intensity of a novice, at thirty we might forget to leave the house at all. 4. While the same could be said for boys—who I am sure have their own list of classics that conjure a unique common history—I am speaking here for girls. Girls and the books that taught them everything from how to reach out and touch something fuzzy to what it was like to get their periods and find an insane not-so-ex-wife in the attic. Just a list of titles is enough to conjure the timeline of an entire X-chromosomed American childhood: Pat the Bunny, The Runaway Bunny, Blueberries for Sal, The Lonely Doll, Miss Rumphius, Madeline, The Secret Garden, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, Ramona Quimby Age 8, The BFG, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague, Julie of the Wolves, Jacob Have I Loved, Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca, Jane Eyre again, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre again, Ethan Frome... Somewhere around Ethan Frome is where the unselfconscious abandon began to dissipate in lieu of simply sincere appreciation and sometimes even a little critical distance. Whereas I can't count the number of books I couldn't put down in the first fifteen years of my life, I could name on two hands and feet the number of books I've felt that way about in my second fifteen years. But that fact does not make me sad or give me pause and not because I tell myself that if it were otherwise I would have ended up a hobo. What seems to matter most is that I had those first fifteen years to begin with. My friends feel similarly. One formerly horse-crazy friend talks often about her childhood passion for the Marguerite Henry books. Another friend has an entire shelf devoted to her childhood library, and that's where she turns on the days when she's tempted to get in bed and never get out. Another friend has taken it all a step further than the rest of us and is getting a Ph.D. in Y.A. Literature, writing academic papers on Ramona and The Twits that she then presents at high-brow conferences across the country. These are the things we have carried with us and as such are the things we have to give away. When I turned thirty this year, the same friend who had fallen off the curb and gone to the hospital gave me her three favorite Y.A. novels from childhood. A few months earlier, she and I had compared notes on what we'd read when we were young and she had learned that her favorites had not been on my early reading lists. When I told her I hadn't read Caddie Woodlawn she said, "You haven't?!" as if I just told her I had never brushed my teeth. With this birthday present she had wanted to rectify that—to her mind—gaping hole in my life. I haven't read the books she gave me just yet, but the fact that she gave them to me at all is just it: Not only do we hold these books we've read and characters we grew up with close, but we want to share them, to pass them on. As of my writing this, my friend who fell off the curb is also single and childless. I am not convinced I was the person she wanted to be giving books to that day. 5. When people have children, some are reluctant to admit it, but they have a secret preference in their hearts for a girl over a boy or vise versa and for a multitude of reasons. I am nowhere near the stage in life of being a parent myself, but when the time comes as I hope it one day will, I often think I want a girl. I want this because I recognize even now how much it will matter to me to know and understand how she is feeling and what she is learning and experiencing all for the first time. I know too how difficult it will be to access these complicated growing-up emotions of hers, ferreted as they will be inside a person not myself. To put a book that was once special to me into her hands and watch it become special to her is one way to do that. At least for a little while. But before I send her off to read on her own, I want to be able to sit on the couch with her and do the voices of the characters. As it is with my mother, there is a would-be actress inside me, too. It will be getting dark outside and the spot on the couch where she and I will sit will be the only well-light place in the house. A husband will be doing the dishes and have a dog to keep him company and help with the grunt work. He won't be watching because he wouldn't want to intrude, but he will listen from the other room. I will put my arm around her and start like this: CHAPTER ONE: Playing Pilgrims Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug… Seen from outside the window, she and I in the arms of the light beside the couch might make you think that here is where the entire world begins and ends. [Image credit: Frank]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
author: Jajati K. Sahoo
username: jp0d
categories: [frameworks platforms, clojure]
---

# Getting Started with Clojure

In this guide we'll introduce Clojure and how to write your first program
in Koding.

Clojure is a functional programming language that features a concise syntax,
elegant concurrency support. The best feature of this language is it's ability
to compile into Java byte code and running it on the standard JVM.

## Setting up Clojure

Clojure is written in Java and is available in the form of a Jar file. To use
the Clojure interpreter, one must download it from the maven repository below.
The below command will download Clojure in the current directory.

$ curl -O -J -L http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/clojure/clojure/1.6.0/clojure-1.6.0.zip

If the link doesn't work, please take the latest Maven repository from
Clojure website.

## The Clojure Shell or the REPL

To enter the Clojure shell or REPL, execute the following command from the [Terminal][terminal].
To be able execute the following you must have a valid JRE in your VM.

```clojure
$ java -cp clojure-1.6.0.jar clojure.main
Clojure 1.6.0
user=> (+ 10 10)
20
```

## Creating a shortcut for Clojure.

If you wish to create a shortcut to the Clojure shell, you can create a small script and put it
in the `~/bin` directory. You could name the script `cloj.sh` and put the following content
there.

```sh
#!/bin/bash

java -cp /home/your_user_name/clojure-1.6.0/clojure-1.6.0.jar clojure.main
```

Then use the following command to make it executable.
```sh
chmod +x ~/bin/cloj.sh
```

To access the Clojure shell, you can type `$ cloj.sh` command anywhere from the [Terminal][terminal].

## Install [Lein](http://leiningen.org/)
`Lein` is the build tool for Clojure. It creates the project structure and builds your
Clojure application. The following steps may be used to install Lein.

- First download the `lein` application using the following command in your ~/bin directory.

```sh
curl -O -L -J https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein
```
- Make it executable using the command `chmod +x ~/bin/lein`
- Run the `lein` program from [Terminal][terminal]. It'll download itself.

[koding]: https://koding.com
[ace]: https://koding.com/Ace
[terminal]: https://koding.com/Terminal
[lein]: http://leiningen.org/

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
reflections on a strange summer Olympics
by Geoffrey Churchman
Aside from the fact that it was a year late because of a world-wide flap over a new coronavirus, and a rule that everyone not actually competing was expected to drape a piece of cloth over their faces, the two main things that stood out from the TV coverage of the Tokyo games were, firstly: the very efficient organisation that Japan did: everything seemed to happen with the precision of Japan's high-speed Shinkansen trains; secondly, the constant mention of oppressive weather conditions there affecting participants in outdoor events.
Viewing the events in a living room in Waikanae when the weather outside was cold and frequently wet, it was hard to relate to the descriptions of heat and humidity — like I suspect most folks, I wished that some of the heat could make it down here and so equalise temperatures a bit. 🙂
Despite the restrictions because of virus concerns, the world's greatest sports fest lived up to what it was expected to deliver, and particularly interesting were sports making their first appearance at an Olympics: surfing, skateboarding, baseball/softball, karate, and sports climbing.
The 50 km fast walking and the 42 km running marathons demonstrated that they are extreme endurance events: like most 60+, there was the inevitable contemplation that there's no way I could manage even a tenth of the distances nowadays at those speeds — about 18 km/h average for the latter — and in 28 degrees Celcius at 70% humidity. The race walking event has been dropped from the schedule for Paris 2024 because there is no equivalent race for women. The 50km walk will be replaced by a mixed-gender race walk team event.
Back to the China virus — I couldn't help wonder how much the Japanese had lost from having almost no paying spectators in the venues. Surely some, "socially distanced", could have been allowed? The NY Times estimates the loss on the games at $US 35 billion. Even the TV1 presenters wondered why on earth were the medal winners forced to have their cloths on their triumphant faces during the medal and flag raising ceremonies, particularly when they were over, they came off for celebratory pics. Instead of the symbolic pieces of cloth, why didn't they have a giant coronavirus ornament floating over the main stadium? 🙂 Six people including two Georgia medalists weer removed from Games for the breaking Cv rules. Vazha Margvelashvili and Lasha Shavdatuashvili, who won silver medals for Georgia in judo, had them removed after going sightseeing.
In the main stadium the individual challenges always make for better viewer experiences, these include the javelin, shot put, discus, long jump and high jumps, and indoors, weightlifting is always fun to observe. The more artistic competitions — gymnastics and team swimming displays — are always pleasant to watch, even when mistakes happen.
Here's hoping the Paris Olympics in 2024 won't be marred by coronavirus craziness. In the meantime, plenty of sportspeople everywhere will have new heroes to inspire equal or better feats.
1 thought on "reflections on a strange summer Olympics"
Roger Dewhurst said:
On a medals per capita basis NZ did pretty damn well, indeed better than all the biggies.


text:
Book & Literature
'50 New Life Mantra's – a business and personal guide by Social and Serial entrepreneur, Mr. Agnelorajesh Athaide, to be unveiled by Capt. Raghu Raman
Book & LiteratureEdu Events
By India Education Diary Bureau Admin On May 28, 2020
Mumbai: In a virtual book launch event scheduled for Saturday, 30th May 2020, renowned strategist, risk management expert and founding CEO of the National Intelligence grid, Capt. Raghu Raman, will launch a book, 50 New Life Mantras – a business and personal guide, penned by Social and Serial Entrepreneur, Mr Agnelorajesh Athaide. Scheduled for 4.30 PM, the book launch will take place through an FB Live session and will involve a discussion on the significance of the insights shared in the book, with the current COVID-19 crisis.
Mr Agnelorajesh Athaide is the Chairman, St. Angelo's VNCT Ventures and a social and serial entrepreneur with varied business interests. His unique zeal of seeking out opportunity in adversary, and his rags to riches journey, is an inspiration to many young entrepreneurs. Harnessing his harsh life lessons and learnings from the various challenges he faced on the business and personal front, Mr Agnelorajesh Athaide has been able to envision the opportunities that are waiting to be explored, in the current times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book, '50 New Life Mantras' is a compilation of these learnings, in a crisp and impactful manner. Targeted to benefit not only the entrepreneurs but also students, start-up founders, and anyone who is seeking a 'user manual' to navigate these tough times, the book touches upon varied aspects of this new normal life. And this to be launched by none other than Capt. Raghu Raman, the risk management expert, strategist, and founding CEO of the National Intelligence Grid, is a testimony to the author and the book, in itself.
Capt. Raghu Raman has been revered as an Author, Storyteller, motivational speaker, and the founder CEO of the National Intelligence Grid. As an expert strategist and risk management professional, Capt. Raghu Raman has endorsed the book and will be launching the book officially in the virtual event, followed by a discussion. Speaking about the book, and the launch event, Capt. Raghu Raman said, "Mr Agnelorajesh is a dynamic and positive personality with a zeal to excel and an equal amount of compassion and eagerness to spread hope and help people, in whatever little way he can. And these little efforts are the ones that go a long way! I am happy to be a part of the launch of this book and hope that it reaches maximum people. Agnelorajesh's infectious zeal and optimism is very well reflected in every page and can be a life changer for most."
Speaking about the book and the significance of the book, Mr Agnelorajesh said, "Whenever I've faced any adversity in life, I've looked for those subtle takeaways. This book is a compilation of the umpteen positive possibilities that came along the tide of COVID-19. It is a collection of tips, tricks, and tactics of how industries can adapt to keep pace with the changing times. It's about strategies that can be tweaked to get optimum results despite the challenging circumstances. This book is an 'antidote' for all who believe that life is on a lockdown mode. It isn't. It is eternally evolving. And I hope maximum people are able to leverage these insights to make better choices and look at the brighter things in life."
The book is going to be launched on Saturday, 30th May 2020, at 4:15pm, through an FB live session.
The link for the same is: https://www.facebook.com/events/201978067453473/ One can click the link and register to participate in the virtual event.
President Meric Gertler invites graduating students, family and friends to U of T's virtual convocation
At age 18, U of T's youngest grad has accomplished more than most – and she's just getting started
A book on Kalidasa & his wife Vidyottama authored by Dr. Kamal Kishor Mishra…
Inauguration of Orion 2023 – The Annual Cultural, Sports and Business Fest of Sri Sri…
Tete-a-tete with eminent translators of Hindi and Urdu literature
Kevin Feige, producer and president of Marvel Studios, named USC's 2023 commencement…


It has an UPX option, so you can compress it to add only 3 MB to the build.
The previous win2003 software hive was also causing problems..
Ove has sent me an english XP hive that he's using as source, using this replacement hive script with XP as source should give the expected results without any error messages.
Cant test it at the moment. Well! not untill the Standard XP Build Script is fixed to work with my XP version.
Can you post some screenshots.
It would likely stomp people with slower connections..
The results are quite good, producing a 45Mb ISO using explorer..
Have you used the updated registry hive from my above post?
You'll need to use all three files posted in the first two posts to get it running without errors..
errors are gone. Why don't the shutdown/reboot commands work?
Gets rid of pop ups that assume you've never used windows before.
Thanks for the Picture. Does it have a right click on desktop ability?
Windows 2003 server version is coming soon !!!!
I would also like to see this..
Hmmm.. it's actually portuguese, I've used a portuguese XP version to make the reg files for these hives, and it should be possible to make them based on the inf files from your local XP source, but I still haven't had much time to explore this option as I needed, perhaps someone else would like to jump in to the rescue?
Please disregard that registry suggestion I got it backwards.
Ye right click works but nothing happens when you click an option.
I have made a new version of Explorer.
It can be shut down now thanx to Paraglider.


Brian K. Vaughan's name might be synonymous with the best in escapist comic book entertainment, but underneath the science fiction and fantasy, his critically acclaimed stories almost always carry with them a deeper, more realistic message. Y: The Last Man tells the tale of a future gone horribly wrong, but it's also a poignant commentary on gender roles in society. Mayor Mitchell Hundred of Ex Machina may have the ability to speak with machines, but he also speaks out on issues like gay marriage and educational funding. With Runaways, Vaughan shifts his focus to a slightly younger audience with a tale of colorful characters and fantastic powers. Look behind the superhero action, however, and his true story reveals itself as a metaphor for the timeless generation gap that exists between children and their parents.
Pride & Joy is essentially a collected origin story, giving Vaughan the responsibility of establishing his young protagonists and laying down the groundwork for the mystery they've been unexpectedly brought into. The primary characters are unlikely allies brought together by a common threat -- a sort of super-powered Breakfast Club -- and they're all distinct and likable, thanks in large part to Vaughan's believable dialogue. As the runaways' own powers emerge and the stakes are raised, their future together is cast in doubt. But just when the subject matter gets a little too heavy, Vaughan injects some humor or teen drama into the proceedings, reminding us just who his intended audience is.
Though most readers won't be able to relate to kids who can shoot fire from their hands or speak telepathically with dinosaurs, anyone can appreciate their ultimate act of rebellion. After all, who among us hasn't wanted to throw their parents through a second-story window at least once in their lives? The Runaways are children on the cusp of adulthood, forced to make their own decisions for the first time, and ready prove themselves to the deceitful grown-up world around them. The adults, meanwhile, are oblivious to modern technology -- right down to the easily guessed computer passwords -- and dismiss their offspring/opponents as mere children, a move that may ultimately prove to be their downfall.
Adrian Alphona's pencils are sharp and fit the story's light tone well enough, although his proportions seem a little skewed from time to time. His style has an overall Manga feel to it, which makes sense, considering that this is a Marvel Age book (Editor's Note: Marvel Age is Marvel Comics' kid-friendly line), and those crazy kids can't seem to get enough of that "Japanimation" these days. ("Why, when I was their age, when we wanted to see Japanese-influenced drawings, we would walk to Japan!") The artwork does the trick, although between the book's dark backdrop, lower-quality paper and unwieldy digest format, there's a shadowy sort of haze that makes it harder to read without lighting directly overhead.
Though Runaways is aimed at a younger crowd, it's a lighthearted and engaging story that any fan of superhero comics can enjoy. Pride & Joy sets the stage for what seems to be a promising ride. The Pride's motivations have yet to be revealed, the kids' confidence has evolved to match their newfound powers, and a traitor may be lurking in their midst. With a new monthly title currently re-launching in stores after a short hiatus, this digest-sized collection and its two subsequent follow-ups are a relatively inexpensive way to catch up on what you may have missed.


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