Of true crime and bestsellers
Great Big Beautiful Life | Emily Henry
(Penguin India; ₹899)
The bestselling romance author and TikTok sensation (who's not on TikTok) has produced five hit novels, all of which have been optioned for the screen. Her latest is about two writers, Alice and Hayden, vying for the book coup of the century — by telling the story of an elusive socialite called Margaret Ives. This slow-burn romance brings to mind early Marian Keyes and Jojo Moyes, and like them, Henry explores big themes and ideas woven around love. And to write the character of Ives, Henry drew from several sources, including the real-life socialite Rebekah Harkness, who inspired Taylor Swift's 2020 song 'The Last Great American Dynasty'.
The Artful Murders | Feisal Alkazi
(Speaking Tiger; ₹499)
A missing M.F. Husain is already a compelling plot. Add a few murders, and you're hooked. This is a dramatic book, and its amateur sleuth — 'housewife-turned-Sherlock Holmes' Ragini Malhotra — is suitably dramatic too. Theatrical energy runs through the thriller, and Alkazi, who wrote it during the pandemic lockdown, draws on his stage background with good effect. The plot echoes yesteryear mysteries — Murder, She Wrote, Miss Marple, Agatha Raisin... Expect dry humour, intrigue, and plenty of red herrings but mind you, this is no psychological thriller. Nevertheless, the cosy mystery will keep you engaged.
Atmosphere | Taylor Jenkins Reid
(Hutchinson Heinemann; ₹899)
This might be Reid's most ambitious book yet: a sweeping story set amid NASA's shuttle programme in the 1980s. We meet astronomer Joan Goodwin, selected to train a new batch of astronauts, and with her, we embark on a heartwarming and eventually heartbreaking journey. Reid excels at building flawed, layered characters and finding emotional truth in extraordinary moments. We might soon see this sweeping, cinematic canvas on screen — Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the filmmakers behind Captain Marvel, are adapting Atmosphere for theatrical release.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil | V.E. Schwab
(Tor Books; ₹999)
For long-time fans of Schwab, here's a fun detail: her new book is set in the same universe — which Schwab calls 'the garden' — as her last book, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Calling it a vampire novel feels limiting, although we've seen how the genre can get a new lease of life in the hands of a skiller writer — think Sinners, or Interview with the Vampire and its latest, beautiful, rage-filled adaptation. A sapphic, immersive story about three women told through the lashes of time, this is a story about more than just blood.
When the Wolf Comes Home | Nat Cassidy
(Titan Books; ₹1,351)
This is how horror transforms when it breaks free of ghosts and jump scares. And Cassidy has long been a master of the form. With Mary and Nestlings, he gave us genre-defining stories. But When the Wolf Comes Home may be his best yet, with Cassidy's attempts at creating a literary universe, not unlike the author he feels a deep kinship with — Stephen King. In the novel, a boy, running from monsters both real and imagined, is rescued by Jess, an out-of-work actor barely holding herself together. Every scene tightens the noose, and what's more, the novel has a landing that truly sticks.
The writer is an independent journalist, editor, and literary curator.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
Amitabh Bachchan was replaced by Vinod Khanna in Shaque after 16 flops, reveals director Aruna Raje: ‘The producer just didn't want him'
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan had his share of struggles in the Hindi film industry before becoming one of the biggest actors in Indian cinema. The actor delivered 16 consecutive flops before writers Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar (Salim-Javed) saved his career by offering him Zanjeer in 1973. During his flop streak, Big B was replaced in several films. In a recent interaction, renowned director-editor Aruna Raje Patil shared one such incident when Amitabh was replaced by Vinod Khanna in the 1976 film Shaque. Recalling the incident, Aruna shared that the producer was adamant about not casting Big B in the film due to his poor box office record at the time. She said during an appearance on the YouTube channel Bollywood Crypt, 'Our first casting was Amitabh Bachchan and Waheeda Rehman. (Around that time) Amitabh's films flopped and the producer NB Kamat just didn't want him. He told us, 'The film won't happen'. So we said, 'All right, who else then?' He asked us to look for another actor, and a known one. So, we thought of Vinod Khanna and Kamat got a meeting with him for us and he agreed to do the film straight off.' In an old interview with The Filmy Charcha, veteran actor Raza Murad had also shared a similar incident when Amitabh Bachchan was ousted from the film Duniya Ka Mela due to his string of flops. He said, 'Amitabh Bachchan was thrown out of Duniya Ka Mela. The makers replaced him with Sanjay Khan. 16 of his films had flopped. Distributors said, 'nobody will turn up to theatres if he stars in a film'. At that time, his luck was not with him. But when the luck was in his favour, everything fell in place.' It was indeed luck that led Amitabh to bag Zanjeer, as all the other superstars of that time had refused to star in the film. Raza recalled the same and said, 'When director Prakash Mehra wanted to make Zanjeer, he went to Dilip Kumar, Dharmendra, Dev Anand, Rajkumar, and they all refused for some or the other reason. The subject was extremely hero-oriented, yet these superstars rejected it. Nobody knows why, but one can say that the luck wanted Amitabh Bachchan to lead the film. When nobody wanted him, and Prakash Mehra had no option, Jaya Bachchan (then Jaya Bhaduri) recommended that the director take Amitabh Bachchan, and the rest is history.' After Zanjeer, Amitabh went on to deliver many iconic films with Salim-Javed, including Deewaar, Sholay, Kaala Patthar, Trishul, Majboor, Shakti, and Don, cementing his place as the leading star of Indian cinema.
Indian Express
5 hours ago
- Indian Express
The Harvard-educated linguist breaking down ‘skibidi' and ‘rizz'
Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their 'seggs lives' and spoke about the importance of 'seggs education.' Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like 'cornucopia' for homophobia and 'unalive,' a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers' offline vocabulary. These words roll off the tongue for Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, 'Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,' these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon. 'The more I looked into it, the more I realized that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,' Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the Manhattan apartment he shares with a roommate and wearing socks stitched with tiny dolphins. Even those who steer clear of social media are not exempt. If you have encountered Oxford University Press's 2024 word of the year, 'brain rot' (the 'supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state,' thanks to a firehose of digital content), you, too, have had a brush with social media's ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard University to explain the spread of terms including 'lowkey' and 'gyat.' (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.) The videos are more rigorous than their informal quality might suggest. Each one takes four or five hours to compose, he said. He scripts every word, and combs Google Scholar for relevant papers from academic journals that he can cite in screenshots. He appears to be fashioning himself as Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. In the process, he has become a go-to voice for journalists and anyone older than 30 who might want to understand why 'Skibidi Toilet,' the nonsensical name of a YouTube series, has wormed its way into Gen Alpha's vocabulary. What he wants now is to be taken seriously outside of those circles. 'I want to balance being a 'ha-ha funny' TikToker with academic credibility,' he said. 'It's a little hard to strike that balance when you are talking about 'Skibidi Toilet' on the internet.' Aleksic settled in his living room, under the apparent surveillance of several stick-on googly eyes left over from his most recent birthday party. To the left of the entrance was a makeshift ball pit filled with orbs that resembled enormous plastic Dippin' Dots. (He installed it as a bit, but has come to appreciate its ability to foster conversation.) In person, he is animated but not frenetic, a click or three less intense than he appears in his videos. He is happy to lean into the persona of a fast-talking know-it-all if it means engaging people who wouldn't otherwise spare a thought for etymology. He started speeding up his cadence when he realized that brisk videos tended to get more views. 'I'll retake a video if I don't think I spoke fast enough,' he said. Just as Aleksic changed the way he spoke in response to algorithmic pressure, language, too, can be bent by users seeking an audience on social media. Take 'rizz,' which means something along the lines of 'charisma.' According to Aleksic, the word was popularized by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Cenat's every move. Soon, the word had been flagged by TikTok's recommendation algorithm as a trending topic that it could highlight to keep viewers engaged. Influencers — including Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in. This process slingshots trendy coinages into the broader consciousness. But it also yanks terms from their original context faster than ever before, he said. Words with origins in African American English or ballroom culture, for instance, are often mislabeled as 'Gen Z slang' or 'internet slang.' Aleksic tackles that well-documented phenomenon in a chapter titled 'It's Giving Appropriation.' Other sections of the book, which was released by Knopf this month, spend time with subcultures that play an outsize role in modern language generation, including K-pop fans, who boosted the term 'delulu,' and incels, or involuntary celibates, who popularized the term 'sigma.' Words have always traveled from insular communities into wider usage: Aleksic likes the example of 'OK,' which was Boston newspaper slang in the 19th century that spread with the help of Martin Van Buren's reelection campaign. (His nickname in full, 'Old Kinderhook,' was a bit of a mouthful.) But 'delulu' and 'rizz' didn't need the eighth president's help to travel across the country — they had the internet. And TikTok's powerful algorithm is more efficient at getting the word out than Old Kinderhook's most overachieving press secretary. Today, the cycle of word generation has been turbocharged to the point that some of its output hardly makes sense. Nowhere is that more evident than in a chapter titled 'Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler,' a chaotic mélange of slang that is hilarious to middle schoolers precisely because it is so illegible to adults. Words and phrases don't need to be understood to go viral — they just have to be funny enough to retain our attention. Aleksic argues that 'algospeak' is no longer as simple as swapping sex for 'seggs'; it is a linguistic ecosystem in which words rocket from the margins to the mainstream in a matter of days, and sometimes fade just as fast. When influencers modify their vocabulary and speech patterns for maximum visibility, those patterns are reinforced among their audiences. Aleksic said he works hard to keep viewers' attention, for example, jumping between camera angles roughly every 8 seconds. He longed for a forum in which he could discuss his ideas at length, and last January, he began refining an idea for a book about algorithms and language. That's an ambitious goal for a recent college graduate without an advanced degree or decades of research experience, the kinds of qualifications that abound in the linguistics publishing crowd. But youth has its upsides when it comes to the world of internet slang, said Gretchen McCulloch, the author of 'Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.' 'The tricky thing with internet linguistics is that the point at which you're the most qualified to speak about it from personal experience is also the point at which you have the least, sort of, academic credibility,' McCulloch said in an interview. She, too, is fascinated by how short-form video is affecting language, though she wonders which changes will be permanent and which will fade with time. Take the way that influencers often begin their videos with superlatives like 'The most interesting thing about …' Will those hyperbolic phrases bleed into other forms of communication, or will they lose their potency with overuse? There is a whole graveyard full of internet-speak — 'on fleek,' you will be missed — that has fallen out of fashion. While Aleksic wades through these big questions, he is also making time for really small ones. He is hoping to make a video about urinal conversations, which have been the subject of more academic papers than you might think. While we spoke, he pulled up his email inbox to scan through the questions that had come in from his followers. (He gets about 10 a day.) 'Somebody emailed me about the word 'thank' versus 'thanks,'' he said, scrolling through a message. 'You know, that's kind of interesting.'
Hindustan Times
8 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Why was Kis Cafe closed? San Francisco eatery's top chef fired after leaving TikToker in tears
A San Francisco restaurant was temporarily shut down after a TikTok influencer posted a video describing an interaction at the eatery that left her distressed. The co-founding chef of the restaurant was also fired. Why was Kis Cafe closed? San Francisco eatery's top chef fired after leaving TikToker in tears (Unsplash - representational image) A video taken at Kis Cafe went viral. The restaurant's other owner told NBC Bay Area that they plan to reopen the cafe with a new chef later. The eatery first opened earlier this summer, and is located in San Francisco's Hayes Valley neighborhood. "When we're ready, we will restart differently, separate from chef," the co-owner said. "This way my staff can also continue their livelihoods." The individual, who did not want to be named, stressed that he responded as promptly as possible after seeing the video featuring an interaction between his executive chef and the local TikTok influencer, itskarlabb. What does the video show? The five-minute long video shows an exchange between Executive Chef Luke Sung and the influencer, with the latter being left in tears. Initially, the TikToker described overhearing a conversation between the chef and a host, who had set up her visit. "This guy pulls up my TikTok and says that I have 15,000 followers, and some videos have millions of views, whatever, and this guy is not happy about it," she said in the post. She said that the chef approached her and had a direct conversation about her social media profile. "After scrolling like two times, he says to me that he doesn't think my videos are at the level at which he wants his restaurant to be represented," she said in the post. The restaurants issued an apology within two days and confirmed that Sung was not working with them anymore. Meanwhile, some neighbors said that they had planned to check the place out. "The menu looked decent, it seemed like a more approachable restaurant than the previous one that was in there. So, I was eager to try it," Brian Rohde said. Jacinth, another neighbor, said, "It's unfortunate that social media has turned to a state where you can type something, it can go viral from people who have no context of the situation, and ruin somebody's career." Meanwhile, the co-owner said he might now have to rename the restaurant and relaunch it. While he understands this will be challenging, he is ready to try and make it work, as are the rest of his staff. "I don't want to quit yet," he said. "This is my American dream. It's also my staff's."
