Year: 2022

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How Anton Chekhov became the playwright of the moment

More consumed with questions than with answers, Chekhov’s plays depict human beings rather than heroes or villains. Life is captured in plots in which not much seems to happen yet by the end everything is changed. All of this runs counter to our sensation-seeking, moralizing, politically divisive zeitgeist. But theater artists, filmmakers and novelists, drawn to the interior richness of Chekhov’s dramas, have discovered not only the timeliness of his untimely work but also its aesthetic pliancy and openness. Read more

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Shifty’s Boys by Chris Offutt

Offutt has fashioned a mystery plot that’s fast-paced, efficiently plotted, atmospheric, and compelling, but what again distinguishes the book is the author’s command of and affection for the setting and the people who live there. Come for the thriller, by all means; it delivers nicely. But stay for, and linger in, the marvelous incidentals and atmospherics: arguments about mall names; lore about snakes and birds and mushrooms; descriptions of a local shade-tree tinkerer’s Slinky-like version of a perpetual motion machine … Terrific characters; taut suspense. Another winner from Offutt. Read more

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New species of alga named for poet Amanda Gorman

Researchers discovered a new species of alga in central New York and named it Gormaniella terricola, with the genus named after poet Amanda Gorman. The new species is quite interesting in that its chloroplast genome is highly repetitive and contains quite a bit of DNA from fungi and bacteria, meaning it was likely invaded multiple times from other species through a process called horizontal transfer. Read more

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The Forgotten Noir Detective

…the investigator who was pulled off the 1929 case was one Leslie Turner White, who served as inspiration for Chandler’s Marlowe, and whose autobiography, Me, Detective (1936), played a pivotal if largely forgotten role in the formation of American noir. Read more

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The Walter Tevis Renaissance

Gin, bourbon, valium, weed, horse racing, nine-ball, poker, pills, petroleum, chess, sex, television, losing, winning—the novels of Walter Tevis are queasy with addictions big and little. Most are hazardous. Some are deadly. A few seem nice enough, but nice is usually booby-trapped somehow, so that a character can’t enjoy, say, a game of pool without going on a bender a page later. These are novels without rising or falling action; they move to the jerkier rhythms of recovery and relapse. Read more

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Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

The 12 essays in this superlative collection from New Yorker staff writer Keefe reflect, as he says in his preface, his abiding preoccupations: “crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” … Every one of these selections is a journalistic gem. Immensely enjoyable writing married with fascinating subjects makes this a must-read. Read more

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French author Alice Zeniter has won the eye-popping €100,000 Dublin Literary Award

The Art of Losing by French novelist Alice Zeniter has won the prestigious Dublin Literary Award, a prize which comes with a handsome glass trophy and the world’s largest purse for a single novel published in English—a whopping €100,000. Read more

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