December 11, 2025 First Person Balthazar, 1997 By Heather Bursch Balthazar in the nineties. Photo by James Leynse/Corbis, via Getty Images. It was lunchtime at the restaurant. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, cutting the halogens from the side so you could see everyone’s lines and shadows and they could see yours. It was loud, and the air between me and the customers was caffeinated. Lunches were always rush, rush, rush. They gave us twice as many tables as they did at dinner, and I was usually behind on orders, showing up at the table pale and sweaty. At dinner, there was the wine haze. The lights were dimmer, and you could duck in and out of view. Dinner meant grappa and lingering and more time to charm the customers. At lunch, we turned our tables fast—it was the fall of 1997, and the crowds kept coming. I was twenty-six, with a bunch of other lives behind me—or beside me, or in front of me. Balthazar had just opened that April. I lied on my resume and I had the look. I checked the floor plan. I was penciled to work the big tables. The VIP section was easy to spot, and everyone wanted a seat at the red banquettes that lined the back wall. Was this a mistake? It was probably a test. Back then, the restaurant was always testing us, and we never knew if our customers were plants. Balthazar wanted stars from a New York Times review, and the general managers trained us to get them. One of the higher-ups (I’ll call her Debra) told us the restaurant hired an outside service to dine anonymously and rate the staff. If I hear something like this, I will approach every table with suspicion, asking myself, Are they a little too attentive? Too plainclothed? Too curious about the menu? Are they exchanging knowing glances after I mispronounce the name of a cheese or let a water glass sit empty while they thrum their fingers against it? I smoked a lot in those days and ate Clif Bars I’d stuff into the pockets of my apron. I looked like a French maid in my uniform. I bought black loafers with the thickest heels I could find. You think restaurant work is easy? You probably don’t think that. Maybe you think it’s hard, but honestly, if you haven’t served at a place like Balthazar in the nineties, you have no idea. Read More
December 8, 2025 History Thomas Manning (1772–1840) By Eliot Weinberger J. M. Davis, portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805, oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child. In the orbit of the Romantics, Manning was the best friend of Charles Lamb, close to the mad poet Charles Lloyd, and friendly with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. He knew Tom Paine and Madame de Staël in Paris, and was considered a handsome charmer in its aristocratic and intellectual salons. He spent twelve years in China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and was attached as a freelance interpreter to Lord Amherst’s disastrous expedition to Peking, which was expelled from the Forbidden City after one day, as Amherst had refused to “kowtow” to the emperor. He was perhaps the greatest English Sinologist of his time, before Sinology existed in England, and was the only one for most of the century who was not a missionary or religiously motivated. As an undergraduate, he had written a two-volume textbook on algebra. It was said that he spoke fifteen languages. He was anti-colonialist and anti-clerical, expelled from Cambridge for refusing to sign allegiance to the Church of England. In Asia he was on his own as an impoverished scholar, working for neither the British government or the East India Company, whose functionaries he found exasperating. He was famous in the cantonments for his erudition, his self-fashioned “Oriental” dress of silk robe and turban, and his waist-length beard. Read More
December 5, 2025 First Person This First By Eileen Myles New York City Marble Cemetery interior. Photograph by Dmadeo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. In issue no. 253, we published an excerpt of Eileen Myles’s “Bird Watching,” a poem written in 1978 and unpublished until now. In this essay, Myles reflects on the time when they wrote it—alongside drinking and dancing and falling in love in New York. “It was a movie for sure,” they write. I think Chelsea Girls is me teaching myself to be a novelist and Bird Watching [and Their First Three Books of Poetry] is me teaching myself to be a poet. Poets have the same rights as all other humans, but each of us in our own exact way has made that be our business. Possibly even being the lawyer of it. Constructing reality inch by inch in language. Making a new space I believe. All poetry is hyperbole. That can’t possibly be true, but it is. Excepting “Bird Watching,” which I think is the main heave of this volume, the three books here are sort of young me taking my measure, figuring out what I’ve got. This is so different from a selected, because it’s not so much about what matters but what I did. And across it all the person is variously asserting their gender and the blurriness of that enterprise (I’m heartened to see that in my twenties I really didn’t feel I fit in this or that gender. Or sexuality). And gender and genre are linked as always, because despite these being my first public assertions of being a poet, the person making them would often have preferred to be a journalist (wanting to be seen in the world rather than in language) and so the direction of some of the poems’ content feels like I was trying to have it both ways. I mean talking to some imaginary everybody, being fun and broad like the village voice. I even wrote for them a while. And then there’s the self that camped out entirely in feminism, even lesbian feminism, making tons of statements (which embarrassed me and I didn’t include in my selected) sounding to me by now (except for the part about shooting the pope) like a middle-aged man. I was trying to sound like the world or how a lesbian like me sounded in it but the result was some horny geezer, a guy being open about his lust for chicks—yet I was one. Read More
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