Something is rotten in the village of Little Nettlebed. There isn’t enough rain. A sturgeon of ungodly proportions has been beached on the bank of the Thames. Worse, five sisters have tried to save its life, defying both the mysterious beneficence that brought the fish to shore and local norms dictating that it must be killed for food. In the glow of the late-afternoon sun, the world is no longer beautiful.
In some ways, Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a horror-tinged Victorian critique of the perils of existing in thrall to one’s own image, is a story ready-made for 2025. The title character, a young man of striking beauty, begins the novel as a vain but apparently harmless naif.
Early in Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, the narrator, on a late night train, watches her traveling companion become engrossed in a book. When she asks about it, the woman balks at the interruption. “Her soul,” the narrator observes, “seemed to slot back into her body.” A good book can briefly steal your soul, replacing it with its own.
But some books make you fight for that privilege; Taiwan Travelogue is one.
Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era.
Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It’s both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards.
World War I is over. Humanity has gone through hell and emerged strung between merry, hectic giddiness and entrenched, unspeakable grief. And Lord Peter Wimsey—scion of the aristocracy; military hero; buoyant connoisseur of wine, rare books, piano music, and women—is on the hunt for his next beguiling case.I first encountered Wimsey, the most famous creation of the mystery novelist Dorothy L.
The group biography has been around for centuries: There was Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written some 1,900 years ago and a staple of classical education ever since; the Bishop Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century biography of the four distasteful sons of the Frankish King Clovis I; a swarm of medieval hagiographies that bind together the lives and miracles of saints.