A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.
So we approach a new Irving with caution but still a small flame of hope, which burns hotter when we learn that Queen Esther a mere 432 pages returns to the world of The Cider House Rules. That 1985 novel is one of Irving's very best, set largely in an orphanage in St Cloud's, Maine, run by Dr Wilbur Larch and his protege Homer Wells. In The Cider House Rules, Irving wrote about abortion and belonging with colour, comedy and an all-encompassing empathy.
When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015's Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft.
When Stephanie Burt decided to carry a pink and blue Taylor Swift tote bag to class one day in fall 2023, she just thought it would be a fun way to transport her books and laptop, and let her students know she was a Swiftie. The Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English had no idea that just one semester later she would be teaching a Taylor Swift lecture course to 200 undergraduates
Acocella's essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren-its title comes from their pet names for each other-and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir's love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic's equivalent of opening a song with the bridge.
"A writer," Saul Bellow once observed, "is a reader moved to emulation." But what if it's also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to read? For me, the act of setting words to paper always exists in conjunction with the question of what I have been reading-and why. Books, after all, require readers to bring them to life.
