The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus–level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium.
The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade survived World War II by fleeing his city, Vilna, now Vilnius, and wandering through the Soviet Union and its Central Asian republics. His wife and mother stayed behind and were murdered, probably in the Ponary forest outside Vilna, along with 75,000 others, mostly Jews. After the war, Grade moved to the United States and wrote some of the best novels in the Yiddish language, all woefully little known.
At some point during the winter of 1609–10, in Jamestown, Virginia, the starving English settlers are said to have begun eating one another. Meanwhile, back in London, the King James Version of the Bible, arguably the greatest work of prose in the English language, was receiving its final edits; it went to the printer the following year.
On the day after Christmas, the British novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi was visiting Rome when he suddenly blacked out in his apartment and woke up immobilized. “I then experienced what can only be described [as] a scooped, semi-circular object with talons attached scuttling towards me,” he tweeted 11 days later from his hospital bed. “Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency.
“Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner.”These are the first two sentences of The Mirror and the Light, the third volume of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell and the last book she published before she died on Thursday at the lamentably young age of 70.
Na Kim
This article was published online on March 2, 2021.Girl AF Klara, an Artificial Friend sold as a children’s companion, lives in a store. On lucky days, Klara gets to spend time in the store window, where she can see and be seen and soak up the solar energy on which she runs. Not needing human food, Klara hungers and thirsts for the Sun (she capitalizes it) and what he (she also personifies it) allows her to see.
Tim EnthovenAround 597 a.d., Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages.