In her new book of autobiographical essays, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives (7 hours), Mary Laura Philpott writes with gusto and pathos about navigating two extremes: practicing for what will never happen and postponing the inevitable. From removing turtles from her doorstep to dealing with middle-of-the-night emergencies, from controlling cholesterol to shopping for cashmere, Philpott assembles a trustworthy menagerie of lessons for daily life.
Philpott reads her own audiobook with a Southern lilt, at times laughing or on the verge of tears, and she builds an easy connection with her reader as she details a variety of struggles and triumphs. When she describes coming to terms with being identified as “mom” in public, she is as real and reassuring as the best kind of parent.
Written as the author’s oldest child was getting ready to venture off to college, Bomb Shelter offers hope for a better future.
As a mother of three, I can attest that parenting often feels like it comes at you fast: the meals and snacks, bedtimes and books, laundry and more laundry; the hat-straightening, screen time-monitoring, play date-booking and chore-reminding whirlwind of it all. That’s why it’s fantastic when someone thoughtful manages to hit pause on the relentless motion and reflect on what it all means. In Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, Keith Gessen does just that.
Covering everything from the surprises of a home birth to the days of desperately reading parenting manuals through a sleep-deprived haze, Gessen’s essays are at once intensely specific (he lives in New York, is the son of Russian immigrants and works as a literary writer and editor) and deeply relatable (even to me, a woman who lives in a suburb in the Midwest). For instance, he writes that fatherhood opened up heretofore unexamined aspects of his personality. Why, he wondered, did he want to speak to Raffi in Russian, even though all of their relatives are able to speak English? It is a mystery, more of a gut instinct than a bilingual regimen, that prompts his wife (the novelist Emily Gould) to nickname him “Bear Dad.” Throughout Raising Raffi, Gessen’s profound ambivalence over his Russian heritage feels pressing, heartfelt, sad and real. He also writes about the COVID-19 pandemic with a clarity that parents who have been raising young children during the last few years will appreciate and remember.
Gessen’s book raises the big questions: Who am I as a parent? What exactly am I passing down to my kids? And can I even really control what I pass down to them? Gessen’s essay about sports, for example, gently probes the pros and cons of getting Raffi to play hockey, eventually folding back and looking at itself as Gessen realizes that his own attachment to hockey wasn’t the best thing for him. Other essays, like his one on picture books, demonstrate the deep, abiding connection one can feel with a child through repeatedly reading poetry and stories.
This book is thoughtful, companionable, funny and memorable. Readers will return to it again and again—and will hope, like I do, that Gessen publishes a follow-up about Raffi’s next five years.
David Sedaris’ latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, finds the author in late midlife, mining his life, the lives of his family—including his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, his siblings and his 98-year-old dad—and their surroundings for comedic stories. In the book’s opening essay, “Active Shooter,” Sedaris and his sister Lisa visit a firing range in North Carolina, which offers him a chance to plunge into the oddities of gun culture as they learn to shoot pistols. It’s a perfect David Sedaris essay: one that lures you in with funny family anecdotes and self-deprecation, gives a sideways look at some aspect of society, then ends with an unexpected emotional punch. This essay, like several others here, also offers deft, sharp commentary on masculinity. One of the collection’s delights is a commencement address delivered at Oberlin College that skates along on the surface with funny throwaway lines and ridiculousness while offering slyly sensible life advice underneath.
The collection progresses somewhat chronologically, beginning with essays that look back to Sedaris’ childhood and to his young adult years when he was writing plays with his sister Amy in New York City. Later essays recount Sedaris’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, walking New York’s empty streets and wondering if his livelihood—reading works-in-progress to audiences all over the country—is gone for good. But in 2021, he returned to the road in a changed America, making pointed observations about different states’ vastly different approaches to the pandemic along the way.
These essays offer plenty of laughs, but the tone is often dark as Sedaris contemplates his dad’s failings, and his own. “I’m the worst son in the world,” Sedaris jokes to a nursing home aide about not visiting his dad more often. At first these confessions feel callous, but as the essays reveal more about his dad’s abusive, competitive behavior, such remarks take on a different feel. In “Unbuttoned,” I teared up at Sedaris’ evocation of both the pain of such abuse and the unexpected moment of connection between the two men at the end of the elder Sedaris’ life.
Happy-Go-Lucky is an entertaining collection, both cringey and poignant as it celebrates love, family and even aging in an inimitably Sedaris way.
Happy-Go-Lucky is both entertaining and poignant as it celebrates love, family and even aging in an inimitably David Sedaris way.
If you’re not familiar with Jon Mooallem’s writing, his new book of essays, Serious Face, is calling your name. Mooallem (This Is Chance!) has been writing for The New York Times Magazine for more than 15 years, and his latest book rounds up 11 of his best pieces from those years, plus one more written in 2022, into a transporting series of deep dives into surprising characters and situations.
Mooallem excels at writing about everything from climate change-fueled natural disasters to eccentric individuals. In “The Precise Center of a Dream,” for example, readers meet a man named Jacques-André Istel, who happens to be the father of modern skydiving and who created his own town (Felicity, California) in the middle of the desert. Mooallem’s observations can be beautifully delicate; about Felicity, he writes, “It was as if the entire town had sprouted from some preverbal place in his imagination—some need for beauty and meaning.” From that quirky end of the spectrum, Mooallem’s range as a writer stretches all the way across to quieter, more poignant essays like “A House at the End of the World,” his portrait of noted hospice worker B.J. Miller of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and of a 27-year-old man who died from mesothelioma under Miller’s care.
Mooallem can also be deeply personal. The title essay describes his uncanny resemblance to the Spanish bullfighter Manolete, who was hugely famous not only for his bullfighting skills but also for being ugly. “Why These Instead of Others?” is his completely captivating, edge-of-your-seat account of a remote kayaking trip he took with two friends at age 23 to Glacier Bay, Alaska—and the life-and-death rescue that ensued. His writing is equally riveting in “We Have Fire Everywhere,” about a group of people’s narrow escape from the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in 2018. Mooallem typically lets his subjects speak for themselves and isn’t one to make many pronouncements, but here he writes, “It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce.”
Like the very best essay collections, Serious Face takes readers to unexpected places, exploring a meaningful mix of joy, tragedy and downright absurdity. The subjects vary widely, but Mooallem is such a gifted storyteller that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s writing about; readers like myself will be ready to follow.
The subjects in Serious Face vary widely, but Mooallem is such a gifted storyteller that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s writing about. All of it is gripping.
The ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic have left us with many lingering questions: How long can a virus live? Why weren’t we better prepared to handle the virus? How long will vaccines keep us safe from the virus and its variants? How can we distribute vaccines and other medical interventions equitably to protect and save human lives? What kinds of robust public health policies do we need in place to help us mitigate the effects of widespread outbreaks in the future? Scientist Joseph Osmundson answers these and other questions in his luminous and stunning Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between.
As Osmundson dives into the intricacies of science and medicine, he also takes time to consider the emotional toll of gauging health risks. In a world full of viruses—and especially in light of the most recent pandemic—we will always face the risk of infection, he says. He thus challenges readers to “reframe the very notion of risk, of fear” since “the more we all minimize risk, the less there is to fear.” Though perhaps eschewing this fear is easier said than done since, as he writes, “there are 250 million viruses in every 0.001 liters of ocean water, and so 7,393,387,354, more than 7 billion viruses, in 1 single fluid ounce, a mouthful.” Moreover, all viruses are so different from one another that what we learn about HIV or Ebola, for example, may not help us understand or diminish the effects of coronaviruses.
As a queer person, Osmundson candidly shares the moments he has calculated the risk of contracting HIV while having sex. At the same time, Osmundson points out that being queer provides him and others with a “legacy and a history of care even in the face of systemic oppression.” Queer people, he observes, have been “training for this moment—to sacrifice, in the face of a virus, to care for one another.”
Despite the ubiquity of viruses and their variety, Osmundson illustrates that humans and viruses evolve together. Recognizing this provides hope for all of us, he insists, especially through the development of vaccines. In addition, we can learn from our responses to HIV and COVID-19 and find the paths we need to follow for more robust public health: research into each virus, development of drugs and vaccines, community-led vaccination and health programs, and universal healthcare.
A collection that weaves together the raggedness of the personal with the chaos of the political, Virology will take its place next to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journal as a model for cultural criticism. Sparkling prose, glittering insights, lucid thinking and accessible writing about sometimes difficult topics makes Virology a must-read. It’s one of the best science and medicine books of the year.
Sparkling prose, glittering insights, lucid thinking and accessible writing about difficult viruses make Virology one of the best science books of the year.
We tend to believe that some things get lost in translation, but perhaps, as Jhumpa Lahiri suggests in her absorbing new collection of essays, Translating Myself and Others, some things are also gained. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and has subsequently enraptured readers with her penetrating novels and stories. She famously moved to Rome in 2015 and began writing in Italian, publishing in Italian and translating the work of Italian novelist Domenico Starnone into English.
This linguistically bifurcated existence has inspired much thought on the art of translation, which Lahiri says has always been a controversial literary form. The short essays she collects here—some written in English and some translated into English from Italian—explore her passion for translation, a subject she previously taught at Princeton. Yet interwoven with some of the more arcane nuts-and-bolts issues that face the literary translator are other things that Lahiri, as a writer of fiction, has learned from the process of rendering the words of other writers, as well as her own, into a new tongue. “Now that I have become a translator in addition to remaining a writer, I am struck by how many people regard what I am doing as ‘secondary’ and thus creatively inferior in nature,” she writes. “Readers who react with suspicion to a work in translation reinforce a perceived hierarchy in literature between an original work and its imitation.” Indeed, translators rarely even get recognition on a book’s jacket, or enduring recognition outside of academic circles. And yet, so much of the world’s literature would be inaccessible to us without their intensive work. Throughout these essays, Lahiri shows how painstaking and full of care the process of translation is.
Essays on translation might seem an unlikely conduit for a writer’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, but Lahiri is an engaging guide, and her pensive ruminations provide a window into her soul. In “Why Italian?” she ponders the longstanding connection that she, a woman who was already fluent in English and Bengali, felt to Italian even before learning it and why she was compelled to write in it. “Where I Find Myself,” fulfilling the clever double meaning of its title, examines how Lahiri finds new intentions when she translates her own work from Italian into English (something she long avoided doing but has now embraced), sometimes revising the original Italian in the process in a kind of reverse engineering that she compares to a tennis game. In a very moving afterword, “Translating Transformation,” she reconsiders her mother’s recent death through the prism of Ovid, whose masterwork she is currently co-translating. “In the face of death,” she writes, “the Metamorphoses had completely altered my perspective.”
Translating Myself and Others is a subtle yet ultimately engrossing work, somewhat academic at times, yet infused with the kind of understated, often startling capacity for observation that has always been Lahiri’s literary superpower.
Master storyteller Jhumpa Lahiri spins thoughtful and personal essays on the unsung art of literary translation.
Author Mary Laura Philpott has crafted another witty, heartfelt memoir-in-essays with Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. To celebrate its release, we asked Philpott a few questions about her favorite bookstores and libraries, both real and imagined. (Spoiler alert: Her method for organizing her own bookshelves is every bit as charming as you’d imagine.)
What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store? I go right to that front table to check out new fiction and nonfiction. I’m also a sucker for a good display. It’s fun to see what booksellers are showcasing on a given day.
Do you visit bookstores differently after having worked for Parnassus in Nashville? I pay more attention to the shelf-talkers—the little cards on which booksellers write up their favorite reads. That’s partly because I often know the people writing them! But I also know now how hard booksellers work every day, and I know it takes extra time to come up with a concise blurb that somehow conveys what they love about a book. Same goes for librarians. A lot of librarians and booksellers are really good writers!
Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child. I went to an elementary school for a few years that held chapel services in the mornings, and for the littlest kids the services were conducted in the library. We sat cross-legged on the floor in rows. It was my favorite room of the school, but it drove me crazy to be expected to concentrate on singing hymns when all the books were RIGHT THERE.
While writing your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful? Oh my goodness, so many! The first thing that comes to mind is actually from an airport bookstore. I can’t even remember what city I was in, but I had just gotten off a plane and checked my email. A newspaper editor had asked if I could write about a book, but the deadline was going to be tight. I knew if I could get the book in my hands before I got on my connecting flight, I could use my airborne time wisely and start working on it. So I dashed into a Hudson Booksellers shop and explained all this in a breathless and verbose and probably nonsensical way. The staffer knew exactly the book I was talking about. She also helped me find a new travel charger for my phone, because I realized I’d left mine in a hotel. I love airport bookstores!
“More of an open YES to every opportunity I get to see a beautiful library or shop I haven’t seen before.”
Do you have a favorite library from literature? I can’t stop thinking about the virtual library in Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. One of the plotlines involves a teenage girl all alone on a spaceship; the idea is that she was part of a mission to populate a distant planet after Earth became uninhabitable, but somehow she ended up as the only one alive on the vessel. She has a headset she can put on to enter a library where she can find any book ever written, plus video archives of human history. There’s more to the story about the importance of reading and the evolving life of literature from generation to generation, but I don’t want to spoil anything. Everyone should read this book; it’s a big, strange, amazing masterpiece.
Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? Not a list, per se—more of an open YES to every opportunity I get to see a beautiful library or shop I haven’t seen before. Thankfully my children are used to this by now, so no one balks when we’re on vacation and I make everybody detour into a book spot.
How is your own personal library organized? Not alphabetically or by genre or color. I shelve books together that have something thematic in common or that I feel would be friends. For example, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is next to Karen Thompson Walker’s books, which are next to Ling Ma’s Severance. All the end-of-the-world gals have their own little neighborhood.
“I love any bookstore animal. Give me bookstore lizards, bookstore chickens, bookstore goats!”
What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore? I marked the publication date of Taylor Harris’ memoir, This Boy We Made, on my calendar and went to buy it the day it came out.
Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs? I’m more likely to pet a bookstore dog than a bookstore cat because I’m allergic to cats, but I like the cats just as much. I love any bookstore animal. Give me bookstore lizards, bookstore chickens, bookstore goats!
What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack? Oh, I can’t eat in a bookstore—I’m too nervous about spilling things, and I need my hands free for making book piles—but I love a hot beverage once I’m home and settled on the sofa with my new reads.
Author headshot of Mary Laura Philpott by Heidi Ross.
Jessi Klein’s second essay collection, I’ll Show Myself Out, finds Klein in her 40s, parenting a toddler and trying to regroup in unfamiliar Los Angeles, a world away from her beloved New York City. “I constantly feel like I’m a leaky raft in open water,” she writes in “Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City.” It’s a thoughtful essay that laments the changes of midlife and motherhood; it also had me laughing out loud, wishing I could share it with a friend.
Some of Klein’s essays are light—the one about her love for designer Nate Berkus, for instance, or learning to live with her ugly feet—while others dig a little deeper. She builds one essay around the “underwear sandwich,” a contraption postpartum moms wear to cope with bleeding and birth injuries, somehow managing to make fresh, feminist points in the process (and, yes, making me laugh out loud again). These voicey, funny essays give unexpected dimension to familiar topics, such as how widowers remarry faster than widows or that the mommy wine-drinking trend is out of hand.
One of the collection’s themes is anxiety—Klein’s, her partner’s and her child’s—and how it can rear up in the most innocuous-seeming moments. Another is Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, which Klein muses on to marvelous effect throughout the book. She turns the narrative template on its head, positing that pregnancy, birth and early motherhood are full of rigors and pitfalls, as difficult and life-altering as any masculine adventure. “We just feel the guilt of being terrible monsters, ironically, at the exact moments that we actually, as mothers, become the most heroic,” she writes.
Klein, who has produced and written for TV shows such as “Saturday Night Live,” “Inside Amy Schumer” and “Big Mouth,” fills in the picture of a woman at midlife who’s beginning to make sense of it all. This collection is as entertaining and heartfelt, personal and comic as they come.
Jessi Klein’s second essay collection is full of voicey, funny pieces that give unexpected dimension to the familiar topics of motherhood and midlife.
If Gary Janetti’s keenly observed memoir of his formative years, Start Without Me: (I’ll Be There in a Minute), is any indication, he’s always had a sharp eye and a sharper tongue.
That sarcastic sensibility has earned him fame and acclaim as a writer and producer for “Will & Grace” and “Family Guy,” creator of the British sitcom “Vicious” and star of the HBO Max animated show “The Prince.” Now, in this follow-up to 2019’s Do You Mind If I Cancel?, which focused on his career beginnings, the raconteur extraordinaire journeys back to his precocious childhood in 1970s and ’80s Queens, New York.
Those years had many glorious moments for Janetti, and readers will gleefully snort at his hilariously spot-on recollections. In grammar school, “The Carol Burnett Show” provided life-affirming joy. In freshman gym class, he discovered a prodigious talent for and love of square dancing. During his sophomore year, horrified by the prospect of football, he cleverly manipulated the system by spending gym periods with a guidance counselor (and drawing from soap operas to keep her hooked on his imaginary troubles). Always, movies and TV were a balm for his inability to connect with other kids and his fear of people finding out who he really was. “The things I liked, I liked too much. The things I didn’t, all other boys did,” he writes.
Some essays give insight into how things got better for the grown-up Janetti, providing moments of loveliness among the operatic complaining. For example, after a lengthy critique of destination weddings, Janetti reveals with a wink that he married TV personality Brad Goreski on a Caribbean cruise.
Start Without Me is equal parts acid and heart. It’s a collection of sardonically funny stories about a firecracker of a kid who hadn’t yet found his kindred spirits. It’s a series of entertaining tirades about life’s indignities. And it’s an engaging look at the origin story of a man who, despite years of self-doubt, has finally embraced his particular superpowers.
Gary Janetti’s keenly observed, hilarious memoir of his formative years in 1970s and ’80s Queens is equal parts acid and heart.
Tajja Isen’s debut essay collection reveals her as a multihyphenate talent—voice actor, singer, editor, writer, law school graduate—with a delicious knack for wordplay and language. In Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, Isen writes about the disparity between the “token apologies and promises” made by white people and what Black people actually want and take for themselves.
The strongest essay, which lends its name to the book’s title, examines the relationship white women have to power and pain, which Isen dubs the “aesthetics of vulnerability.” Continuing a thread from the previous essay about the popularity of Black trauma writing, Isen looks at how self-indulgence has been romanticized by white female artists. “If you’re always in pain you’ll never want for material,” she writes of these white artists’ impulse to glamorize their sadness.
Another standout essay is “Hearing Voices,” Isen’s personal exploration of voice acting as a transformative and potentially empowering art form. In addition to outlining her own experiences as a Black voice actor, she discusses “Big Mouth,” “Central Park” and “The Simpsons,” three animated shows that cast white actors to voice nonwhite characters and then apologized for this choice in 2020.
This essay also underlines a central weakness of the book: It already feels dated. Scanning the table of contents feels like reading a list of Twitter’s most popular trending topics from 2020. In the churn of the modern news cycle, it seems inevitable that not every moment referenced would have cultural staying power, but it’s especially frustrating when Isen chooses intentionally ephemeral data points, like viral trailers for made-for-TV movies or deleted Instagram posts.
In the book’s most compelling moments, Isen makes the churn the point: Whatever Starbucks or Lena Dunham did and subsequently apologized for in 2020 is something they’ll do again in 2030. Rather than revealing a new issue, the “Big Mouth” casting controversy confirmed something Isen had already learned early in her voice acting career: “The problem is the ivory grip on what Black sounds like.”
Throughout the collection, Isen engages the greatest hits of leftist Twitter discourse but with the type of nuance that’s impossible in 280 characters. She admits to “keeping an eye on the writers at the vanguard, seeing what kind of behavior gets rewarded,” and that’s reflected in the originality of Some of My Best Friends’ content—but it’s Isen’s original perspective and clever language that will win over readers.
Tajja Isen’s debut essay collection reveals her as a multihyphenate talent with a delicious knack for wordplay and language.
Parents express affection in different ways. The care packages Mary Laura Philpott received when she was in college are a perfect illustration: If the package was from her mother, it would contain sweets, maybe something practical, perhaps money. But if her dad sent the box, it was almost always filled with canned food. It became a joke between Philpott and her roommate—“Here we go, another bomb shelter box”—as they slowly worked their way through the accumulated display of her father’s care.
Now, as a mother of two, Philpott expresses her love for her children through worry, often wishing for an actual bomb shelter to protect her family from every affliction.
This was especially true the morning Philpott and her husband, John, awoke to an unusual sound: a thump that turned out to be their teenage son in the throes of a seizure. Philpott’s anxiety levels skyrocketed in the aftermath of this event, and she began obsessing over ways to protect her boy and his younger sister.
Bomb Shelter is full of laugh-out-loud moments as Philpott weaves her recollections of growing up with present-day observations about her children’s adolescence. However, she is equally gifted in delivering heartbreaking moments, such as her husband rifling through their son’s belongings looking for any sign of a vape pen in an attempt to explain the seizure. (“He stuck a USB thumb drive in his mouth and tried to suck air through it. Nothing.”)
Fans of Philpott’s previous essay collection, I Miss You When I Blink, will find even more to love in Bomb Shelter. As Philpott grapples with anxiety, she seeks—and gives—comfort in the world around her. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, she prepared a Christmas dinner for a college-age couple who couldn’t go home for the holiday. “You build, if not an actual shelter, a box of food,” she writes. “You let that surge of caretaking energy go where it can—if not into saving the world, into saving this one day, or at least this one meal, for this one pair of people.”
Philpott’s openhearted joy and fear is relatable regardless of your parenting status—a reminder that, even amid the most frightening challenges, we are rarely alone.
The openhearted joy and fear woven throughout Mary Laura Philpott’s second memoir-in-essays is relatable, even comforting.
Women wearing red cloaks and face-concealing bonnets at political protests in recent years speak to the enduring popularity and relevance of Margaret Atwood’s most well-known book, The Handmaid’s Tale. In a 30th-anniversary essay about the novel, featured in her delectable new collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, Atwood lays no claim to prescience, but of course, she is just being humble. (She is, after all, Canadian.) With an inquiring mind and the razor-sharp intellect to fuel it, this cherished and award-winning writer, now 82, is never afraid to push boundaries or speak her mind about the things that matter to her and, collectively, to many of us. What may surprise casual readers of Atwood’s work is the way her mind is honed by a delicious wit that makes reading her thoughts on a wide array of subjects as entertaining as it is edifying.
There are more than 60 wide-ranging pieces gathered in this capacious collection: essays, speeches, reviews, introductions and appreciations. Somehow the book manages to be both an enchanting hodgepodge (in the best sense) and a cohesive amalgam of a writer’s vision. Many of the entries tap into one or both of Atwood’s primary concerns: literature and environmental science. The daughter of a scientist, Atwood has true bona fides in the latter category and has been sounding the call for climate change awareness for some time, such as with the MaddAddam trilogy.
In addition to providing invaluable insight into her own work, Atwood digs with enthusiasm into Shakespeare, Kafka, Dickens, Dinesen, Bradbury and the ancient Greeks. She writes with cleareyed affection about women slightly older than her who paved the way, such as Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rachel Carson, a clear favorite, makes numerous appearances, and the book ends with a brief reflection on the 2020 death of conservationist writer Barry Lopez.
This is the third collection of occasional nonfiction pieces Atwood has assembled over her 60-year career, and she divides it into five sections reflecting societal changes over the course of the last two post-9/11 decades. Some of the pieces are quite current—there is a piece on quarantine, for instance—but as one might expect, Atwood avoids a straightforward or navel-gazing approach even when contemplating our current state of affairs. Instead, the COVID-19 piece hearkens back to the everyday realities of quarantine (against diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough) when she was a child in the 1940s.
While no means an autobiography, Burning Questions scatters a generous enough smattering of personal recollections and details throughout to grant intriguing, often charming insight into Atwood’s singular life, from girlhood to her life partner’s death in 2019. Years ago, a lesser-known Toronto-based writer told me that “Peggy” Atwood was always a welcome—and hilarious—guest at dinner parties. That appraisal stayed with me, and upon reading Burning Questions, there can be little doubt it’s true.
Ann Patchett’s new essay collection, These Precious Days, reinforces what many longtime fans like best about her writing: its levelheaded appraisal of what is good in the world. In one essay, she describes a photo of herself as “joyful.” She had given this photo to the Academy of Arts and Letters when she was inducted, and it brightly contrasted with the somber photographs of her colleagues. The photo was appropriate, however, since reading Patchett’s work does inspire a kind of joy—tempered by an awareness of what can be lost. When Patchett does convey fear or regret, it’s because she knows that life can change in an instant and that precious things need to be guarded. For instance, after Patchett became unexpectedly ill after a bad experience with psychedelic mushrooms, she apologized to her husband “for being careless with our lives.”
She writes in the introduction that what interests her at this stage in life is exploring the things that matter most. For Patchett, that means essays about friends and family (“Three Fathers” and “These Precious Days” are especially wonderful) and about reading (specifically, the works of Eudora Welty and Kate DiCamillo). She also pulls back the curtain on the writing life, letting readers see her daily habits (early-morning walks with the dog, restorative dinners, occasionally demanding travel), her work with publishers and her intense privacy while composing. She could write a novel, she says, without showing anyone a single page.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into upheaval, Patchett found the work of a novel too overwhelming. Essays, though, were approachable, and she found herself returning to the form again and again. Though readers will cheer when her next novel emerges, this collection is a balm for the moment, a candle that sheds warmth and light during a dark season.
Ann Patchett's tender essay collection is a balm for the moment, a candle that sheds warmth and light during a dark season.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
