The Keep
By Jennifer Egan
Knopf
Egan's novel is inventive, suspenseful and more than a little weird. It begins with a cruel joke at a family picnic: A teenage boy named Danny lures his nerdy cousin, Howie, into the depths of an underground cave, then abandons him without a flashlight. Howie is found alive three days later, but each boy is, in his own way, traumatized by the prank. Fast-forward 20 years: Howie is a wealthy bond trader retired at 34, and Danny is an underachiever with a seedy employment history. Long out of touch, they reunite when Howie invites Danny to help renovate his new purchase, an isolated and rather ghoulish German castle. Could Howie be plotting revenge after all these years? That's the obvious guess, but the clever Egan (Look at Me) complicates things by inventing a parallel story set in a US prison and teases us by making the plot lines meet, then diverge, then turn back on each other again. The execution isn't seamless, but she has such a good time keeping all the balls in the air that we felt giddy just to be along for the ride. It's an addictive book, and good company on a hot summer day.
The Man Who Heard Voices
By Michael Bamberger
Gotham
Bamberger, a writer for Sports Illustrated, refers to director M. Night Shyamalan as “Night” throughout this book, reminding us repeatedly that 1) Shyamalan took “Night” in preference to his real name, Manoj, which endured “rituals of death” on its way to becoming an initial; and 2) Bamberger first met Shyamalan at a party and liked him, which must account for the admiring tone in these pages. This is the story of Lady in the Water and its transformation from a bedtime tale Shyamalan told his kids to the recent (and widely panned) film. It's also a story about Hollywood politics, artistic ego and the self-importance that big success (in Shyamalan's case, The Sixth Sense) breeds. The latter is illustrated when Shyamalan's assistant is dispatched to LA to distribute the Lady screenplay to Disney executives, an assignment undertaken with such gravity and paranoia that you'd think she was transporting plutonium. Bamberger offers an entertaining look at the making of a big-budget movie, but its portrait of the director will be hard for Shyamalan to live down.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
By Marisha Pessl
Viking
The early chapters of this first novel come at you in a rush, so cluttered and hyperactive that in just a few pages you'll find a hundred reasons to stop reading. But don't. Behind the bulk (514 pages) and the hoo-ha there's a voice to be reckoned with, a talented writer with a dazzlingly unpredictable story to tell. Throughout the book, Pessl fairly wallows in literary references and gimmicks. Indeed, she presents her novel as a literature class, with chapters titled Othello and Madame Bovary, line drawings meant as visual aids and a final exam at the end. At heart, though, it's really a mystery. Its narrator, Blue Van Meer (she was named after a butterfly) tells us of her nomadic life with her father, an academic lecturer, after her mother's death in a car crash, her senior year at a North Carolina boarding school, the students she comes to know there and the glamorous and enigmatic teacher whom Blue finds dead, hanged with an electrical cord in a pine forest. Was Hannah Schneider's death a suicide? Was it a murder? The best surprise of all in this audacious and flamboyant book is that we can't wait to find out.
The English Teacher
By Lily King
Grove
New in paperback is this wise and moving novel, set in the rocky landscape of family life. It begins as the title character, Vida Avery, and her 15-year-old son, Peter, move into the house of her new husband, widower Tom Belou, and his three children in a coastal New England town. Through Peter's point of view we see the tentative hopefulness of an only child who is about to get the siblings he has always wanted. Through Vida, we see that all is not well: She has married the sweet-tempered Tom but does not know how to love him. Vida has a secret that will lead to a rift in the blended family, but love and compassion prevail. When the novel was released last September, New and Notable praised King's “lovely depiction of wounded people struggling to find solace and stability in each other.” Other critics found pleasure in her “restrained and powerful” writing, her “psychological acuity and intelligence,” and her novel's portrayal of “the dizzying complexities of melding stepfamilies.” King's first novel was The Pleasing Hour, published in 1999.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would