Michael Rips. Photo: Ric Ocasek.

Cooped up at home, many of us are now being kept company by our stuff, that antifunctional classification of belongings that rarely move from their spots on side tables and shelves, displaying little immediate value to anyone but their owners. The stories of how these things came to be, or how they came to be possessed by us, measure their worth, and those with a special sensitivity to that worth become collectors. Two writers have recently captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so, they show us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff. Michael Rips’s memoir The Golden Flea chronicles both the author’s lifelong pursuit of oddities and the disappearance of New York’s flea subculture into the anecdotal past (the Chelsea flea market on Twenty-Fifth Street, the last bastion of the once-glorious economy described in The Golden Flea, closed this year). Allan Gurganus’s recent story in The New Yorker, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” is a nested narrative, a story of an old portrait as told by a junk-shop owner to a graduate student whose academic specialty is collecting. The narratives of the painting’s subject and the student’s bid to possess the painting unspool alongside each another. As the modern person’s general interest in stuff wanes, both Rips and Gurganus are invaluable shopkeepers, telling us the story of something old in hopes we may pick it up and take it home. —Lauren Kane  Read More

Eimear McBride. Photo: Sophie Bassouls.

I have been a fervent fan of Eimear McBride ever since I first read her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Strange Hotel, her latest, does away with the stream-of-consciousness style she first became known for, but it’s no less recognizable in how it explores regret and memory. The plot is simple: A nameless woman checks into a hotel in Avignon, a hotel she’s been to before. She smokes, drinks too much, watches pornography on the hotel television. Her thoughts drift to all the hotel rooms she’s stayed in over the years, hotels all over the world. One hotel, in Austin, stands out; in that particular hotel, a particular man. McBride is skilled at the language of regret, the language of turning a situation over and over in your mind, suffusing it with an increasingly deflated sense of possibility. And for the reader, this is a novel to be mulled over long after it has ended. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Photo: Jane Breakell.

In a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved—surely!—by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, “don’t care where they grow”? Weren’t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom—a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way—admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx, spadix, corymb; bulblet, axil, umbel. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as “juice yellow.” He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. —Jane Breakell  Read More

Contributors from our Spring issue share their favorite recent finds.

Spread from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, by Emil Ferris

Very late on summer nights when I was a kid, I’d put our crappy pedestal fan on full blast, stick it right beside the couch so that it was refrigerating my face, and quite literally shiver my way through a spooky detective novel of choice. (Electricity was cheaper then.) Reading volume 1 of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters re-creates the goose-bumpy pleasure of an immersive mystery with horrors at every corner. The graphic novel is rendered in atmospheric detail by writer-artist Emil Ferris, using ballpoint pen to capture the fictional diary of Karen Reyes. Karen might be a ten-year-old girl or a budding werewolf—either way, the discomfort of living in an unfamiliar body is palpable on every page. The book is rarely formatted like a traditional multipanel comic. Instead, it spills out, free-form, with full-page panels and long text interludes. It has all the bizarro flotsam of an adolescent brain, too: sketches, taped-up photos, failed math tests, movie posters, covers of horror comics, and, of course, secrets aplenty.

In a very different flavor of diary, Emily Raboteau’s article for The Cut, “This Is How We Live Now,” documents a year of conversations about climate change with friends and family. These small, deeply personal conversations take place at birthdays, dinner tables, housewarming parties; in church basements; and online, all across the span of 2019. Raboteau braids the intimate, humdrum details of these events with observations of a planet in a state of almost unimaginable change: “Carolyn warned me at the breakfast table, where I picked up my grapefruit spoon, that I may have to get used to an inhaler to be able to breathe in spring going forward.” I am in awe of the impossible grace of this project, which dials down the scope of global change to its small-scale vibrations. For someone who needs a cool five or ten years to gain an ounce of insight, the perceptiveness of Raboteau’s climate diaries verge on clairvoyance. —Senaa Ahmad Read More

Samanta Schweblin. Photo: © Alejandra López.

There has always been art that appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient—Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction of “fifteen minutes of fame,” say, or Umberto Romano’s 1937 painting of a figure checking their smartphone. Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, published in the original Spanish in 2018 and due out from Riverhead in Megan McDowell’s translation May 5, is this kind of visionary: a novel of a near-future dystopia that has suddenly, in the months before its U.S. publication, become nearer still. Unraveling the premise is the pleasure of this book, but in briefest summary: a new toy called a kentuki appears on the market. Consumers can choose to own these stuffed animals, who move around on wheels and have cameras for eyes, or to “dwell” in them—purchasing a connection that allows users, from their computers or tablets, to control the toy’s movements and see what it sees. Each kentuki can form only a single connection, randomly assigned to people around the world, and when it is disconnected, the object becomes disposable. Indeed, the entire pleasure of the toy is built not on its possibilities but on its limitations: the dwellers cannot speak to the owners, though they can hear what is said to them. From within these confines, a global obsession emerges. Dwellers remain at home in front of their screens for days, hypnotized by their kentukis’ quotidian lives on the other side of the planet. Society divides into watchers and those who desire to be watched. The seemingly simple technology is inevitably bent to hold all of human nature—it becomes a cure against modern loneliness, a political tool, an entrepreneurial possibility (an industry of kentuki accessories springs up), a tool for blackmail, and, of course, a way to fulfill our basest desires (on the black market, pedophiles purchase connections to kentukis that dwell in homes with children). Each chapter is headed by the name of a city—Oaxaca, Zagreb, Vancouver, Lima—and the reader flits in and out of lives around the world, forced to confront the voyeurism that is the essence of fiction. At a time when most of us are indoors, reaching for one another through our screens, I can think of no book that more clearly illustrates how close, yet far, that still leaves us. —Nadja Spiegelman  Read More

Alia Volz.

California is rife with personal histories of various sorts—so many that one wonders if there’s anything yet to be discovered about the Golden State. Enter Alia Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, a beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city. During the wild and woolly seventies, Volz’s mother founded Sticky Fingers Brownies, a company responsible for delivering upward of ten thousand illegal cannabis edibles per month to San Francisco consumers. Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful. —Christian Kiefer  Read More