March 4, 2025 Bookmarks Accurate Models of Reality 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, assistant editor From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life): Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like: … Money matters, but not nearly as much as we think it does. … We’re actually not very good at predicting what will make us happy. … If we’re on a bus or plane, we’re happier if we talk to a stranger than if we keep to ourselves. … Some of these statements might sound familiar to you. They come from experts who have published books about their research. Read More
March 3, 2025 On Books On Helen Garner’s Diaries By Leslie Jamison From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors, in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open. What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Read More
February 25, 2025 First Person The Living Death Drug By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver. My cousin Lorrie invited me on a ten-day retreat in Peru where we would partake in ancient ceremonies involving the Living Death Drug ayahuasca and— “Don’t tell me anything more,” I interrupted. “The answer is yes!” I never watch the trailer before going to the movie. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Even if sometimes that means the surprise ruins me. I met a big-personalitied Frenchman while traveling and did not take time to get to know him before marrying him and moving into his house in Paris. I guess I don’t feel any proprietary rights over my destiny. I allow the Parisian shopgirls to choose my outfits, and now I will let the Peruvian shamans choose my insides. Whatever they’ve got has to be better than what I got going on now. Lorrie and I tried to figure out when was the last time we’d seen each other. Thirty-six years ago, when she visited me in Philadelphia! “I was nineteen in my second year of missionary school,” she remembered. “And I was eighteen in my first year of peripatetic hedonism.” “I know,” she groaned. “I was terrified coming from my little Christian school to your filthy, vile apartment with your weirdo roommates. It was furnished with things you had literally dragged out of people’s trash.” She recalled the ‘art’ nailed on the wall above the couch where she slept: a shit- and blood-stained plastic music box in the shape of a church. The music-making part was broken and squawked at random all night long, she said. “And it was so cold my Walkman froze.” “Hahaha, your Walkman froze!” I couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know why I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. “Well, I loved you anyway,” she sighed. “And I you,” I said. “Did I tell you I’m Catholic now?” “Yes. And I’m a witch now.” We’d traded weirdness levels, and we still loved each other the same as we always had. We were the only ones who believed each other about the stuff that had happened in our family. Well, we were the only ones who said it out loud, the only ones who didn’t care about the money, and fucked them all off. Read More
February 21, 2025 On Music How Do You Write an Opera Based on Moby-Dick? By Sophie Haigney Gene Scheer. Photograph by Kate Russell. In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film. INTERVIEWER Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick? GENE SCHEER When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that. Read More
February 20, 2025 First Person I Once Bought a Huge Wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan By Ed Atkins The interior of a Walgreens in Orlando, Florida, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. Read More
February 19, 2025 First Person I Killed Wolf’s By Todd McEwen A history of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen. It was California, so, sandwiches. I sat by the window overlooking Balfour Avenue, at our kitchen table. Its plastic cloth, gray, with a fringe of white yarn. (How did she ever wash that thing?) My mother was moving between the sink and the stove, framed in the doorway to the dining room. Outside was a big lantana with orange moths in it. I remember this as the time when we started to talk to each other a lot. Was I four? I said to her that I was glad I didn’t have to go to school yet. “Oh, yeah?” she said. The sandwich dear to me in those days was Monterey Jack with mayonnaise and lettuce on Van de Kamp’s sliced white bread. MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN MAYONNAISE There was a perverse ancillary reason that I liked this sandwich: an ancient cartoon that returned again and again, on Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade on KTTV, which I never missed. In this, one of the hundreds and thousands of characters from the early days of commercial animation—Sparky? Inky? Horny? Drecky?—ate a sandwich that looked like mine and smacked his lips loudly while he did it. Of course, I could only smack my sandwich this way when I was in front of the TV and my mother was out of the room, and out of earshot. But it did make it taste better. A grilled cheese sandwich, made on our aluminum griddle with the rounded corners. Same bread, same cheese. Maybe Tillamook cheddar once in a while. Perfect. Golden. A big hand for my mom, folks. Honey sandwiches. Van de Kamp’s white bread, butter, and Sue Bee whipped honey. I still have a horror of honey you squeeze out of a bear. I liked peanut butter and jelly. Everyone does. But while Welch’s grape jelly was the national standard, I accidentally discovered that I also liked peanut butter and Rose’s lime marmalade, something my parents had around from a trip to Canada. What a little snob! But you should try it. I liked baloney OK, but I really liked liverwurst. My father was particular to call it braunschweiger. Oscar Meyer, or, better, Farmer John. My dad would add raw onion. A step too far for me at that time. But when I later encountered the liverwurst sandwiches at McSorley’s, packed with onion and mustard that blows your head off, I found that I was, in fact, prepared. Read More