#pynchon

#pynchon

"I've done a lot of time-dilated travel." This statement encapsulates the essence of Grace's journey, highlighting the profound effects of traveling at speeds approaching light, where time for the traveler slows down significantly compared to those remaining on Earth.

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, wakes up in space with no memory of how he got there, highlighting the film's intriguing premise.

In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.

My mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV.

Tracy Kidder's gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.

I think it probably started when I first made contact with Tom Clark. He was in England at graduate school and he asked me to be in a magazine he was starting. We somehow began talking about rock music and he subsequently sent me 45s by The Cream and Jimi Hendrix Experience, both groups being unknown to me.

I'll start with the obvious: even the thinnest novel is densely packed. There's just too much good stuff! That's partly why early studio heads preferred short stories and potboilers to classic doorstoppers like War and Peace . While you can write a novel to any length (and Tolstoy tried), knowing the reader will stop and start at will, in film you have a painfully finite amount of time before the audience itches to leave.

Obnoxious jewellery dealer Rodney Manderson has been killed outside the Bowery auction rooms, stabbed through the eye with the Victorian hatpin that his boss, Rose Bowery, has brandished in front of the nation on Bargain Hunt. As she discussed the pin's virtues as a deadly weapon as well as its millinerial uses, the fiercely loyal Rilke decides while feeling grateful to have skipped lunch and trying not to think of jelly to remove it before calling the police.

This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.

In 1968, a "good girl" is squeaky clean. She studies hard, follows the rules, gets into college and doesn't embarrass her parents. She doesn't lie or drink or do drugs. She doesn't participate in the Summer of Love or experiment with any of its alternative ways of living. She definitely doesn't have premarital sex, get pregnant and upend everyone's meticulously laid plans for her future.

Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.

This devastating début novel takes the form of an oral history about a tragedy that shatters a family. At its heart is a couple who arrived in the U.S. in the late nineteen-nineties as refugees from Afghanistan. They prospered, and brought up four children in an affluent suburb in Virginia. Rotating testimonies from people they know-family friends, a cousin, lawyers-offer theories about what led to the novel's central catastrophe.

Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.

The summer 2024 podcast series, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, centered on the sexual assault and abuse allegedly committed by the Good Omens and Coraline author, 65, against multiple women. Other alleged victims leveled their own accusations in the wake of the early episodes, with eight women's claims published by Vulture in early 2025, at which point, Gaiman was dropped by his publisher, Dark Horse Comics.

If Heaven, according to Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next.

Pierce launches us into this notion via a chaotic text conversation between the story's anxious antihero Tom Williamson and another senior partner at the equity firm where he works. "Your autocorrect keeps typing 'dead bodies,'" Tom writes, incredulously. But it isn't a typo. The service's slimy founder Auden White is pitching Tom's boss for investment. Wearing a black t-shirt and charcoal washed jeans, Auden spouts empty platitudes, like "spending time alone with a person who's dead is a profound emotional event."