October 31, 2025 Rereading The Visionary Company of Kathryn Davis By Alex Andriesse Photograph by Alex Andriesse. I used to live in a bungalow in Shattuckville, Massachusetts. It was a ramshackle bungalow, built during the Great Depression and renovated, desultorily, by hippies—the floorboards were stoppered with wine corks; a torn flannel shirt plugged a hole in the wall—and Shattuckville was a ramshackle town. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a town at all but a hamlet on a hill, home to about thirty people. At the bottom of this hill lay the North River, some houses and trailers, and a fluctuating troupe of cats and dogs. The road to the river had once had a bridge at the end of it, until about a hundred years ago a flood came and washed the bridge away. It was never rebuilt. In winter, when the leaves were down, you could see a remnant of it sitting on the far bank, over where a country store out of operation since Reagan’s first term still advertised Ice-Cold Coca-Cola. That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written. Read More
October 29, 2025 First Person My Truck Desk By Bud Smith Photograph courtesy of Bud Smith. After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired. First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot where the bulldozers parked either. Who would have stooped so low as to co-opt that piece of shit? It had no heat and no air-conditioning. The radio bubbled static. Door handles were missing. Floorboards, fenders, and frame all rusted and rotted. It certainly hadn’t been what could be called roadworthy. And, my God, the smell. I went into the machine shop. One of the welders lifted his hood and told me the bad news—they’d had to move the truck for a rebar delivery and the engine on that old thing finally blew, so the truck got dragged to the scrapyard. In a dusty corner, I saw a pile of salvaged tools from the truck. I took some wrenches and my tape measure but didn’t see what I was really looking for—my Truck Desk®. Oh well. Read More
October 28, 2025 The Review’s Review The Tootsie Roll: On Blue Cowboy By Laurie Stone Cowboy in action. Photograph by Erwin Evans, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The other day, I was on the phone with the playwright and actor David Cale, and he told me about filming a movie in Montana, where a cowboy gave him a cowboy hat. He wore it all the time. He wouldn’t take it off, even back in New York. Guys started hitting on him who would never have sniffed around before. Was the hat the germ for his latest monologue, Blue Cowboy? Sort of. In 2021, Cale was invited to Ketchum, Idaho, for a residency at the house where Ernest Hemingway had lived. When Cale learned that Hemingway had killed himself in the house, in 1961, he felt spooked and bought a plane ticket home. Then these elks appeared at the windows of the house, and Cale stood looking into the eyes of a bull elk. It was a staring contest. And because Cale fell into the eyes of the bull elk, he took it as a sign he should stay. Was the bull elk the germ for the monologue? Sort of. Ketchum, Idaho, it turned out, is crazy about dogs. It might be the most dog-centric spot in the States. Cale said that if a person is crossing the street with a dog, every car stops to let them pass, and there is no animal shelter in the area that kills a dog. Not ever. Was the dog thing the germ for David’s monologue? Sure, why not. After he decided to stick around, he biked to town one day—he doesn’t drive. He wanted to see something called “the trailing of the sheep,” a special day when like fifteen thousand sheep are herded from a colder climate on the mountains to warmer areas below, and at this event two cowboys in a car were throwing candy to children. One of the cowboys threw a piece of candy to Cale. It was a Tootsie Roll. Was the Tootsie Roll the germ for the piece? It was. Read More
October 24, 2025 On Books Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos By Rachel Cusk Photograph by Roger Pic. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide. Read More
October 24, 2025 On Books The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver By Amanda Fortini Jan Kerouac in Eugene, Oregon, 1983. Photograph by D. Alexander Stuart, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself “a gum wrapper in a whirlwind.” In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she’s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men’s club in Phoenix. It’s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence. Not surprisingly, the gig goes awry. The police raid the club for prostitution, and the owners are forced to reconstitute as a “massage parlor” in a trailer outside of town. Kerouac soon grows weary of the work, for which she consumes an obliterating combination of wine, soda, and “bennies” to produce “a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job,” as she winkingly puts it. She makes a snap decision to get back on the highway, leaving as hastily as she arrived: “Bounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air … never felt so free,” she writes. “I had $800 and I was going back to Santa Fe. … I was like Marco Polo bringing wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home.” Read More
October 23, 2025 History The Fall of a Sparrow By Rachel Eisendrath A male sparrow. Photograph by Rhododendrites, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I. He Who Noteth Everyone had fallen in love with the short (five feet, six inches), young (twenty-four years old), big-hearted leader of the Chicago Zouaves. Even Abraham Lincoln. The president and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth were as “intimate”—these are Lincoln’s words in a letter to Ellsworth’s parents—“as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” Lincoln had given Ellsworth a job in his law office in Illinois and then invited the young man to accompany him on his famous inaugural train journey from Springfield, Illinois, to the East Coast. In his hopeful idealism, Ellsworth seemed to exemplify Aristotle’s description of the virtues of young people: “They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions.” In this account, the young are by nature uncynical, hopeful, magnanimous—in contrast to the pragmatic, fearful, and miserly old, who may maintain their grip on money but not much else; as Mary Chesnut puts it, “all other muscles are relaxed by age.” Read More