December 4, 2025 First Person Scenes from an African Childhood By Patrice Nganang Photograph courtesy of the author. Papa Mama was a man my age today, but by my standards then, he was an old man. I remember him being small in stature but agile on his feet. He wore slippers. He usually dressed in a Hausa gandoura and chechia, the northern classical attire, and had a chewing stick. And he always spat, which I never liked. He was the one who welcomed clients into the garage and settled transactions. This was when his face would brighten with a happy smile. He would snap back to his angry figure the moment he saw a kid misbehaving around, then would mechanically return to the client. The day Papa showed up with me, he was in prayer in his small shack. We waited outside. I would never figure out if he lived in the shack or elsewhere, as night never saw me at the garage. “This is the boy.” Read More
December 2, 2025 Bookmarks The Eyelashes of the Twentieth Century By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (newly reissued by Riverhead), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones: He was often prone to falling into a mindless state, staring at the world in front of him as if it were a picture. Down below, people walked along the asphalt road, herding cows; dogs were running, a man burst into sudden laughter, little bells tinkled on the sheep’s necks, skin itched, higher up a man carried a hare he’d poached, he waved to someone, smoke from the chimneys drifted into the sky and birds flew to the west. This picture goes on forever; it seems to be eternal. It’s a scene that people happen to, rather than it happening to people. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve this young border guard, with a face as ruddy and glowing as a Bath bun, was riding his huge motorbike slowly through the snow. Read More
December 1, 2025 At Work Catching Up with Helen Fielding By Rosa Lyster Photograph by Romy Curran. Bridget Jones made her first appearance in February 1995, complaining amiably about her publishing job and obsessing over her rakish boss in a diary column in London’s Independent newspaper. “Last Tuesday, at the Cheapskate’s Wine Guide launch, weeks of flirtation appeared to climax. When the others were boring on about Stephen Fry […] Daniel moved behind me and murmured, “So … will I see you?” and then, more quietly, “I mean … see you?” – so horny.” The writer of the column, Helen Fielding, had already published one novel, Cause Celeb, but it was Bridget—a worrier, a charmer, an expert at having a good time—who would make Fielding famous. The diaristic column, published anonymously at first, was a smash hit. Readers responded immediately to Fielding’s vivid portrait of single life in nineties London. Her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary—whose structure and characters were based loosely on those of Pride and Prejudice—was published less than a year after that first column, and Bridget became a kind of generational touchstone, a beloved figurehead and a lightning rod for critique. Fielding, who was thirty-seven, originally from West Yorkshire, and still working at the newspaper, meanwhile became almost as famous as a writer can get. What is so striking, reading those very first columns thirty years on, is that it’s all there, right from the beginning: the levity and humor, even the influence of Austen. (Even before Fielding named her heroine’s love interest after Mr. Darcy, Bridget was moodily watching the BBC adaptation of Persuasion and concluding that she was Anne Elliot.) We can see Bridget’s combination of self-awareness and obliviousness, her cheerful resignation about the possibility of behaving like an idiot again sometime soon. Her voice is so instantly recognizable that one might forget that she didn’t always exist, that Fielding made her up, one day in the nineties. I caught up with Fielding about her writing life and the years since those early columns. She has gone on to write four more books—three more Bridget Jones novels and one standalone spy novel—and to work on the wildly popular film adaptations. Over Zoom, we talked about the role Austen has played in her work, her penchant for and methods of social observation, and what it’s like to have an alter ego. She is thoughtful and funny, with a finely tuned sense of the absurd. INTERVIEWER Did you always know that you were going to be a writer? HELEN FIELDING Words were the thing felt I had a facility with. I knew what to do with them, which I didn’t feel with a lot of other things—cooking, driving, anything practical, I wasn’t very good at. But I always wrote, starting when I was very small. I remember I put the word immobilized in an essay and a teacher at school wrote, “Whose word is this?”—implying that my parents had done my homework. I used to read a lot. Just anything. I liked words and all my family were all very funny, so we were always fooling around and making jokes. I grew up in the industrial north, it was quite sooty and dark. I’d read Jackie Collins and think, Oh, if I was a writer, I could have a swimming pool and be free and not have to go to work and I could go live somewhere hot. INTERVIEWER How do you write? Do you write every day? FIELDING I will if I’m in full-on mode. With a novel, there are some phases where you’re just thinking and gathering material and then it’ll get a momentum. I tend to do an old-fashioned working day, about ten till six. I don’t work in the evenings, and I don’t work on the weekends, so my mind knows, Okay, it’s time to do the writing now. When you get deep into a novel, into a flow state, it’s really nice and you don’t want to stop doing it. But before you get to that point, it’s harder. I always feel a bit unsettled if I’m not writing regularly—it’s like I haven’t got my handbag or something. Read More
November 26, 2025 Dispatch Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing By Oliver Egger All photographs by Oliver Egger. Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport truck. They rise and circle higher into the morning air. Strong gusts from the south-southwest soon scatter them into hundreds of solitary black dots across the slabs of clouds. They could fly anywhere. They could head north to go swimming in the cool rush of the Middle Raccoon River. Go southwest to inspect the quality of lampposts in Omaha. Or simply land on and rest in one of the maples below. But each pigeon, as if pulled by a magnet, turns due east. They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home. Or so I heard. While the pigeons were being released on that morning of Friday, October 17, in a field in west-central Iowa, I was nearly four hundred miles away, sitting in a dinky Sheraton Hotel near O’Hare Airport for the board meeting of the annual convention of the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU). The ARPU is the largest pigeon-racing organization in America, with 6,650 members, but this summit on expanding vaccine accessibility for their birds, boosting youth participation, and updating pigeon tracking software was before an audience of no more than fifteen, which, as one hour became two, dropped to a die-hard five. As a man in a USA trucker hat rose to ask the board about their pigeon lobbyist (yes, even they have one), the hundreds of airborne pigeons were locking on to the exact coordinates of the home lofts—scattered in backyards and garages within a fifty-mile radius of this hotel—where they had been raised. As they soared over cube-cut farmland, scanning for hawks with their orange eyes, they had no idea that fifty thousand dollars were at stake, that the humans that raised them were anxiously waiting for them to swoop in, or that they were competitors in the convention’s main event: the yearly ARPU combine. No, they were just trying to get home. Read More
November 25, 2025 Rereading On Private Dreams of Public People By Toye Oladinni Andy Warhol, 1967. New York World-Telegram and Sun photograph by Ed Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress collections, public domain. “I keep having horrible nightmares that blood is coming out of my mouth,” Candace Bushnell confessed to the dream analyst Lauren Lawrence in the early 2000s. Bushnell’s column Sex and the City was then the basis for one of prime time’s most popular shows. Through her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, Bushnell and her lifestyle were adored by millions. Lawrence didn’t interpret that dream in the way you or I might; her reading may have been colored by her own adulation. Terrifying? No: the dream is “hot and gutsy.” The gore pouring out Bushnell’s mouth is a blessing that means her writing is “pure and true” and, happily for her career, its nightly recurrence implies she will “never be drained of her creative juices.” This is all fantastic news but there’s one issue: The dream is obviously a nightmare. Lawrence never addresses Bushnell’s subconscious horror. As far as she’s concerned it might as well not exist. The dream is one of dozens collected in Lawrence’s 2002 coffee table book, Private Dreams of Public People. There’s a paradox here: once they are mass-published, of course, the dreams are no longer private, but the allure of the exposé is the compilation’s main selling point. Despite its origins in the phantasmagoric, Private Dreams follows a clear format. Each celebrity is placed into a category (“Society Dreamer,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Entrepreneurial Dreamer”). Each dream is followed by Lawrence’s analysis. Lawrence, who has a M.A. in psychology, built a career on public dream interpretation, as the dreams columnist for the New York Daily News and on an A&E show called Celebrity Nightmares Decoded. Lawrence solicited the dream entries directly from stars like Paris Hilton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Moss, and the vice-presidential runner-up Joseph Lieberman. Donald Trump turned her down. (“I don’t have time to sleep let alone dream,” he says in the Declinations section. “I’m too busy building back my empire.”) To these she adds some dream descriptions clipped from Vogue, Elle, and, for Martin Luther King Jr., the History Channel. I was never quite clear on how Lawrence got close enough to America’s A-list to pull the book off, but a late, casual reference, in an analysis of one of her own dreams, to being “driven around town in my Rolls-Royce” and doing “substantive damage to my husband’s American Express card” fills in some of the blanks. In 2002, the list price of Private Dreams—now out of print—was thirty-five dollars, but in the introduction, Lawrence promises something priceless: The book will surpass the “paparazzi phallic lens … intent on mating with the intangible inner being of fame.” It will actually allow us to “get into bed with the celebrity mind and nestle with its glittery, klieg-lit unconsciousness.” Read More
November 24, 2025 Home Improvements My Illegal Revenge Pool By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of the author. I was married to a moody millionaire Parisian and I was trying to stay with him—I still loved certain things about him, and I loved everything about my stepchildren and the French way of life. But it was hard. My husband wanted to be who he was, and he wanted a happy wife. Not easy to have both at once! I did all these things—got on Zoloft, got a dog, went to spas and Belize and the opera—to make me so-o-o happy it would last through his tirades. He knew he was a monster—he was an honest man—so he did things to help too. He built a cabin outside our home in France for me to go be alone in to recover, and he gave me money to put down on a dilapidated hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old house in Pittsburgh for me to go be alone in and recover even farther away from him. Read More