Hey, Zoey; You Could Make This Place Beautiful; The Light Eaters – review

 

Review

In brief: Hey, Zoey; You Could Make This Place Beautiful; The Light Eaters – review 

A thoughtful meditation on love and loneliness via an AI-based sex doll; an outstanding debut memoir of infidelity’s aftermath; and a passionate and insightful botanical study

Hannah Beckerman

Sunday 19 May 2024

Sarah Crossan

Hey, Zoey

Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp320

When protagonist Dolores discovers an AI-programmed sex doll – Zoey – hidden in the garage, it spells the end of her stilted marriage. With her husband gone, Dolores finds herself talking to Zoey, an interaction that eventually forces her to question her own emotional detachment from the wider world and to confront her past traumas. Highly inventive, astute and funny, Hey, Zoey is a thought-provoking reflection on loneliness, love and the search for connection.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

Maggie Smith
Canongate, £10.99, pp320 (paperback)

Smith is a celebrated poet (Good Bones went viral) and her outstanding debut memoir recounts the aftermath of her husband’s infidelity and her subsequent divorce. In a series of short vignettes, Smith reveals her emotional acuity and quiet wisdom on love, trust, marriage and motherhood, as well as the nature of creativity and the ramifications of success. As a chronicle of a divorce and a meditation on parenthood, it’s unflinching, insightful and exquisitely written.

The Light Eaters: The New Science of Plants

Zoë Schlanger
4th Estate, £22, pp304

As a reporter on climate science, Schlanger has a long-held fascination with plants and the complexity of their evolution. In her debut book of popular science, she provides both an overview of botanical history as well as the latest research on the way plants interact, compete and survive. Schlanger’s passion for her subject is palpable in a book teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights, from the incredible endurance of fern sperm to the ability of tomato plants to turn caterpillars into cannibals.

THE GUARDIAN

Jane Fonda / Cannes 2024

 

Jane Fonda

Cannes 2024

Alice Munro dies 92

 

Alice Munro
Illustration by David Levine

Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro dies at 92

BIOGRAPHY

• 
  
• 
  
• By Rachel Looker
• BBC News

14 May 2024

Canadian author Alice Munro, a 2013 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has died at the age of 92. 

Munro wrote short stories for more than 60 years, often focusing on life in rural Canada. 

She died at her care home in Port Hope, Ontario on Monday night, her family confirmed to the The Globe and Mail newspaper. 

Munro was often compared to Russian writer Anton Chekhov for the insight and compassion found in her stories.

Her first major break-through came in 1968, when her short story collection, Dance of The Happy Shades, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won Canada's highest literary honour, the Governor General's Award.

In 1977, the New Yorker magazine published her first story, Royal Beatings, based on punishments she received from her father when she was young, and she went on to have a long relationship with the publication. 

Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, and her stories are often set in the area, and chronicle the region's people, culture and the way of life. 

She said in an interview with the Guardian in 2013 that she had been "writing personal stories all my life".

"Maybe I write stories that people get very involved in, maybe it is the complexity and the lives presented in them.," she told the Guardian in 2013. "I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people."

Munro won the Man Booker Prize International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2009 before going on to win the Nobel Prize in 2013. 

In a statement at the time, the Man Booker judges said she "brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

Her last collection of stories, "Dear Life" was published in 2012.

BBC

My best shot

Michael Schumacher on the phone in Japan: Jon Nicholson’s best photograph

‘“What do you want me to do?” he said when we got to his trailer. I couldn’t have him just staring at me, so I said: “Maybe pick up the phone?” I don’t know if he called anyone’

Interview by Richard Williams

Wednesday 8 May 2024

Igot into photographing motor sport through my friendship with Damon Hill. When we met, 40 years ago, I had a job in the marketing department of an office supplies manufacturer and he was mostly on a motorbike, either earning his living as a dispatch rider or racing at Brands Hatch. Then he switched to racing on four wheels – his dad, Graham Hill, had been a double Formula 1 world champion. Damon is a really shy bloke and it was important to him to be with people who weren’t just fascinated by his family history. I didn’t know one end of a racing car from the other.

THE GUARDIAN 

Women / Red

 

Women

RED

Marilyn Monroe in New York

 

Marilyn Monroe in New York

Marilyn Monroe wear a sleeveless sheath white dress and gloves at the Plaza Hotel Fountain in New York City 1957. Photo by Sam Shaw.

Source:ELLE

 

Paul Auster

‘I remember Paul Auster’: a tribute by Jonathan Lethem to his friend

The author of Motherless Brooklyn recalls his deepening relationship with the late author - from a chance book signing to becoming a confidant during tough times

Jonathan Lethem

Thursday 2 May 2024

remember the first time I approached Paul Auster. This would have been in 1987. I was an aspiring writer working at a bookstore in Berkeley and Paul appeared at another bookstore nearby, to read from In the Country of Last Things. It seems likely to me now that this was the first time a “major” publisher had sent him on a US book tour. The New York Trilogy was published in hardcover by a small publisher called Sun & Moon Press; up to that point he’d been a poet and translator. Paul signed a book for me. I never told him about this.

 

A Life in Words: A Conversation with Paul Auster ’69 and Dan Simon ’79

Jill C. Shomer

Winter 2017-2018

In October, Columbia College Today spoke with author Paul Auster ’69, publisher Dan Simon ’79 and former College professor of English and comparative literature Michael Wood in the green room of the Union Square Barnes & Noble. The three men were connected by Auster’s newest release, A Life in Words, a written conversation about Auster’s art and craft, compiled from three years of dialogue with University of Copenhagen Professor I.B. (“Gitte”) Siegumfeldt. The book was published by Simon’s company, Seven Stories Press, and Wood was to interview Auster about the work that evening at the bookstore. At the time, Auster’s novel 4321, which follows main character Archibald Ferguson along four synchronous but different life paths, had recently been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.