Next page is a newsletter written by Senior Correspondent and the book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publications, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. Subscribe to get a new edition in your inbox here.
Whenever I travel to a new place where there is no Rick Steven's Guidebook, I feel a bit cheated. With his impeccable recommendations, wise budgeting options and a gentle, horny prose style, Steves served as the godfather of the benevolent fairy on multiple trips. So it's a treat to read his new memoirs. On the Hippie Trailand meets a much younger, far more uncertain Steves – perhaps he needs his own fairy god.
In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher and had already had a travel bug. Along with a friend from school, he decided to cross the so-called Hippie Trail. Overland trekking by bus and train from Istanbul to Kathmandu, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He held a detailed journal of his experiences, and it is what forms the basis of a new memoir – the story of a young man minimizes invasion from the old.
Along the Hippie Trail, Steves was taller for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned that “Wine is as innocent as America with dinner.” Today, he defends legalized cannabis.) He is a jai We rode an elephant in the pool and were bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. While the description of a dreamy trip is fun, the most beautiful thing about this book is seeing Steves slowly open himself up to a world larger and more complicated than he had expected. “What did people think when we came and went in and out of their lives?” he wondered.
Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your heart to the world, but one of the others is to read. Here are some books to help you do exactly that.
Some of the features of Ali Smith's book are known as the Scottish Nobel Laureate: a sleazy serialization. (Her acclaimed seasonal quartet was linked by a series of tricky, easy-to-read daisy chains.) Language plays. (She likes prose poetry integrated into the text, and if she can waving it, she likes a long discussion of etymology.) She is committed to resistance and resilient abilities, so she is not optimistic. Politics set art and beauty. (The Seasonal Quartet included some of the earliest post-Brexit novels and some of the post-Covid novels.)
Smith's new novel, Glyphall of the above is included, but I still feel new and surprising. It's not just what you expect
Glyph It takes place in a nearby dystopia and follows two brothers with the names of Rose and Briar's fairy tales. Their bohemian parents have evacuated them from the worst of their authoritarian states, but the state takes that strange and ridiculous revenge. During the night, we learn through the eyes of Briar's children, someone comes to the house and draws red lines around it. Then the line comes for their campervan. It forces Briar and Roses mercilessly and unstoppably, leaving their parents, off the grid, and ultimately from each other.
GlyphThe title comes from an old Scottish word with many meanings. It can be a brief moment, a violent blow, a sudden escape, or a nonsense sound. The companion novel is scheduled to be released next year and is being promoted as “the story hidden in the first novel.” You can give it a title Glyph.
Mona will perform By Mishabellinski
What a treat, what an absolute joy this warm and funny novel. This is because, in a sense, I am a novel. Slightly Slings and arrowsa little dorothy hoodie, Mona will perform It deals with the difficult relationship between respected Shakespeare actor Mona Zahid and her old leader Milton Katz.
Mona laments that as she approaches middle age she needs to stop playing Ophelia soon and start playing Gertrude, believing that Milton “made” her. However, she never felt completely comfortable with the way Milton wielded his absolute powers in the Theatre Company. Here, they are tracked with dinance worthy of a book that features Shakespeare as its subject. In the course of one miserable Thanksgiving, Mona gets so high that the little dog tows, hosts step-in-law across Manhattan, drives Milton out of his head, unlocking her mystery why hair It looks very good now.
As Mona walks, she sometimes worries about the role she is currently playing: Mariain Twelfth nightone of Shakesepeare's most sparkling comedies. Mona is playing it dark and cruelly, and no one fully understands the reason: Isn't it supposed to be funny? and Mona will performBerlinski pulled away the opposite feat. She wrote a keen analysis of the dark, and she made it a pure pleasure to read.
Disney High: An untold story of the rise and fall of the Disney Channel's Tween Empire Ashley Spencer
What a strange phenomenon was the Disney Channel in the 2000s? Everything that one sweet kid can pull Britney right now is paranoia like never before. If you're a millennial, you could have spent some time on the Disney Channel as a babysitter. It gave mainstream pop culture one after another huge pop star. And somehow it disappeared and seemed suddenly and mysteriously unrelatedly entrusted, as if it had somehow become the center of its heyday.
Or maybe it's not so mysterious. Ashley Spencer Disney High It is a wise and rigorously reported part of both cultural and corporate history about how the combination of luck and science surprised the Disney Channel the era and how corporate inertia fell again in the 2000s. Few people called Disney's works that built great art over the decade, but it had a very formative influence on the childhood and adolescence of a generation. in Disney HighSpencer shows how it got there.
- Do you follow all this uproar over the book blur? I wrote about it here.
- Happy Valentine's Day! Lithub offers advice from novelists on the art of sex scenes.
- In Harper, climate journalist Justin Nobel tells the story of a publisher pulling his book from Simon & Schuster after he invests in oil and gas and is acquired by a private equity company.
- Novelist Lincoln Michelle claims that the book outweighs AI.
- In a review of Paris, Jamieson Webster said good night Author Margaret Wise Brown.
