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The Spinoff
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
‘Like swimming in a sea of legendary writers': Tina Makereti's books confessional
Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Tina Makereti, author of This Compulsion In Us. The book I wish I'd written This changes depending on what I'm reading at the time, if it's good! Like now I'm reading Gliff by Ali Smith, and I wish I could write something like that. It's set sometime in the near future, and somehow post-apocalyptic, which also seems to be post-this-exact-moment, and tightly narrated so that you are inside this paranoid, limited world of a young person living in a high control society. But there's also a lot of beauty, particularly around words. Everyone should read Everyone should read whatever they want because all that matters is that they read. I'm avoiding naming a single book because I can't see how it's possible to name a single book. I saw someone else online saying this exact thing recently and even though it might seem glib and obvious, it's still profound. How about not judging what anyone reads? How about reading whatever gives you joy, or calm, or relaxation, or fuel? The book I want to be buried with No don't bury books! Someone else can read them when I'm gone! The first book I remember reading by myself I don't remember a specific book but I was obsessed with fairy tales, and Cinderella was my favourite for ages. Those stories are just so archetypal — I don't think anything can replace them, alongside folktales, legends, mythological stories, creation stories. I'm still fuelled quite strongly by those kinds of stories and I still enjoy reading or watching versions of them. Dystopia or utopia The only utopian works I think I've read or watched tended to be dystopia in disguise. I find it hard to imagine a story that is truly utopian. And dystopia comes so naturally. Dystopia is kind of the air we breathe, quite literally. Which makes me very curious about utopia… The book that made me laugh Michelle Duff's Surplus Women. It's laugh out loud funny, and that's not easy to pull off, especially when the subject matter can be confronting. The laughs come from Michelle's sensibility behind the stories, and also her willingness to just say the thing. Funny writers seem so unafraid. Encounter with an author Going to the Calabash Festival in Jamaica was wild — like swimming in a sea of absolutely legendary writers. I had encounters with a many incredible writers that week. A few embarrassing encounters too. Marlon James was there having freshly won the Booker, and I was reading The Book of Night Women, which is an extremely moving book, so I was having a massive fangirl moment. Marlon was quite distant though, which wasn't surprising. I don't think it can be easy to deal with all the attention that comes from winning the Booker. Eleanor Catton was there too and she seemed more relaxed than the year before when she had won! But the most impressive moment might have been at the end of the festival, when there was a big meal and drinks put on for us. I met poet Raymond Antrobus in line for kai, before he had won so many prizes, and later emailed him to ask if I could use his surname for a character in the book I was writing. I don't know what I was thinking. After I filled my plate I found a seat at a big table, full of friendly faces. A very distinguished looking gentleman came to sit across the other side. He seemed to know everyone else at the table, but when he clocked me, he stood again and extended his hand. He said, 'Hello, I'm Linton.' I shook, hopefully I introduced myself, I can't remember, but I do remember my face registering my dawning recognition and surprise. The women at the table nodded and laughed. 'Yes it is!' someone said. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jamaican-British dub poet, activist, musician. Absolute legend of legends. Inventor of form. I don't know if he's so well known here, or that I know his work well enough, but he sure had a presence. Best food memory from a book Got to be all the kai in The Bone People! And the booze. The big, hearty, straight-off-the-land meals in that book provide a much needed comfort: a counterpoint to the violence. Best thing about reading The feeling you get when you're so taken by a story that you absolutely have to get back to the book, and you kind of carry the story around with you when you're not reading – you might even think about the characters the way you think about friends or family. There are lots of great things about reading, but being so transported by a book, so in love with it, must be one of the most pleasant experiences you can have. I don't get that often anymore, so when I do have it, I really notice. Because reading for work is always my first commitment, I need something really enthralling if I'm going to read for fun. I reckon it must be a slightly different formula for everyone, and that's the nice thing. I often find what other people rave about just doesn't do it for me. Everyone has a slightly different alchemy in terms of what they need from a book. All of this applies to the process of writing too. Best place to read If I'm travelling alone, it's always good to read in cafes, restaurants, pubs even, certainly on public transport, in parks. Reading outside is always nice. This Compulsion In Us by Tina Makereti ($40, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available to purchase through Unity Books. This Compulsion In Us launches at Unity Books Wellington, 6pm, Wednesday 28 May. All welcome.
The Onion
27-03-2025
- Politics
- The Onion
Furious Trump Cancels ‘Atlantic' Subscription After 48 Years
WASHINGTON—In protest of the publication's coverage of the Signal breach, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he had canceled his subscription to The Atlantic after 48 years as a loyal reader. 'Their more literary stuff remains unimpeachable, but I just can't stand their political reporting anymore,' said the commander-in-chief, who confirmed that he had just wrapped up a phone call with the magazine's customer care team and had even rejected their offer of three months free. 'Their long-form journalism has stayed on point for years, long after most publications abandoned anything longer than 1,000 words, so it's a real shame. It's Mother Jones for me from now on. That, or I try n+1. I've been hearing really good things about it from Hegseth.' At press time, a frustrated Trump was reportedly trying to get around The Atlantic 's paywall to read an article about Ali Smith's new novel, Gliff .
Vox
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
A hippie memoir that will send you on a trek through Kathmandu
Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. To get new editions in your inbox, subscribe here . Any time I travel to a new place for which there is no Rick Steves guidebook, I feel a little cheated. Steves, with his impeccable recommendations, sensible budgeting options, and gently corny prose style, has served as the benevolent fairy godfather on more than one trip for me. So it's a treat to read his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail , and meet a Steves who is much younger and much more unsure — perhaps in need of a fairy godparent of his own. In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher who already had the travel bug. Together with a school friend, he was determined to make his way across the so-called Hippie Trail: from Istanbul to Kathmandu, an overland trek by bus and train through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences, and it's that which forms the basis of the new memoir — a young man's story, with minimal intrusions from the old one. Along the Hippie Trail, Steves got high for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned, it was 'as innocent as wine with dinner is in America.' Today, he's an advocate for legalized cannabis.) He rode an elephant in Jaipur and bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. The dreamy travel descriptions are fun, but what's loveliest in this book is to watch Steves slowly open his mind to a world that was bigger and more complicated than he ever expected. 'What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives?' he wonders. Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your mind to the world, but one of the others is reading, which allows you to brush up against the consciousness of another person, touching your mind to theirs. Here are some books to help you do just that. Here are some of the characteristics of the books of Ali Smith, who's been called Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting: sneaky serialization. (Her acclaimed seasonal quartet was linked by a tricky, easy-to-miss series of daisy chain connections.) Linguistic play. (She likes a prose poem integrated into the text and, if she can swing it, a long discussion of etymology.) A set of anti-fascist politics that is not optimistic so much as it is committed to resistance and to the resilient capabilities of art and beauty. (The seasonal quartet contained some of the earliest serious post-Brexit and post-Covid novels.) Smith's new novel, Gliff , contains all of the above, and yet it still feels new and surprising. It's simply not quite what you would expect Gliff takes place in a near-future dystopia, and it tracks two siblings with the fairy-tale names of Rose and Briar. Their bohemian parents have sheltered them from the worst of their authoritarian state, but the state takes its strange and absurd revenge. Sometime in the night, we learn through Briar's child eyes, someone comes to their house and paints a red line all around it, an opaque threat that nonetheless forces them to flee their home. Then the line comes for their camper van. It comes relentlessly, unstoppably, forcing Briar and Rose away from their parents, off the grid, into hiding, and even, eventually, away from each other. Gliff 's title comes from an old Scottish word with many meanings: It can be a short moment, a violent blow, a sudden escape, or a nonsense sound. Its companion novel is due to come out next year and is being advertised as 'a story hidden in the first novel.' It will be titled Glyph . What a treat, what an absolute delight this warm, funny novel is — which is a particular triumph because it is, in some ways, a Me Too novel. A little bit Slings & Arrows , a little bit Dorothy Parker, Mona Acts Out deals with the fraught relationship between esteemed Shakespearian actor Mona Zahid and her old mentor Milton Katz, who has been forced out of the theatrical company he founded after accusations of sexual harassment. Mona, who as she approaches middle age laments that she will soon have to stop playing Ophelia and start playing Gertrude, credits Milton with 'making' her. Yet she's never felt completely comfortable with the way Milton wielded his absolute power at their theater company, a dynamic tracked here with the nuance befitting a book that takes Shakespeare as its subject. Over the course of one disastrous Thanksgiving, Mona gets very high indeed and, little dog in tow, walks out on hosting her in-laws to ramble across Manhattan, trying to get Milton out of her head and also work out the mystery of why her hair currently looks so good. As Mona walks, she occasionally frets over the role she's currently playing: Maria in Twelfth Night , one of Shakesepeare's most sparkling comedies. Mona's playing it dark and cruel, and no one quite understands why: Isn't it supposed to be funny? With Mona Acts Out , Berlinski has pulled off the opposite feat. She's written a sharp analysis of something dark, and she's made it a pure pleasure to read. What a strange phenomenon the Disney Channel of the 2000s was: all those squeaky clean sitcoms about sweet kids with big dreams; all that ever-lurking paranoia that one of the sweet kids would pull a Britney any minute now. If you're a millennial, odds are that you spent some time with Disney Channel as your babysitter. It fed mainstream pop culture one giant pop star after another — and then, somehow, it seemed to fade away, consigned to irrelevance as abruptly and inexplicably as it became, somehow, central in its heyday. Or maybe not so inexplicably. Ashley Spencer's Disney High is a smart, rigorously reported piece of both cultural and corporate history on how a combination of luck and prescience shot the Disney Channel into the zeitgeist over the course of the 2000s, and how corporate inertia let it fall again. Few would call the work Disney built over that decade great art, but it was a hugely formative influence on the childhood and adolescence of a generation. In Disney High , Spencer shows us how it got there. Have you been following all this uproar over book blurbs? I wrote about it here. Happy Valentine's Day! LitHub has some advice from novelists on the art of the sex scene. At Harper's, climate journalist Justin Nobel tells the story of pulling his book from Simon & Schuster after the publisher was bought by a private equity firm with investments in oil and gas. Novelist Lincoln Michel makes the case that books will outlast AI. At the Paris Review, Jamieson Webster celebrates the word-drunk language play of Good Night Moon writer Margaret Wise Brown. See More:
Wall Street Journal
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: ‘Gliff' by Ali Smith
'Language is like poppies,' says a character in Ali Smith's 'Autumn,' from 2016. 'It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.' This is the impression cultivated in the splendid botanical gardens of Ms. Smith's fiction, where words bloom and flourish in their many definitions, both known and newly invented. The characters in her books—most of them preternaturally clever young people—are forever offering up coinages and wordplay ('Such good pun we're having,' riffs a woman in her 2011 novel 'There but for the.') They are constantly interrupting the action to look things up in the dictionary. 'It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean,' enthuses Bri, the narrator of Ms. Smith's 'Gliff.' But this novel, set in a totalitarian future in what appears to be Great Britain, is about the ways that language can be policed and abused. Bri and Rose are siblings who have become separated from their mother and are hiding from authorities in an abandoned cottage. They belong to the forcibly dispossessed class that authorities have dubbed 'unverifiables,' referring to citizenship status but also encompassing anyone who criticizes the government or utters taboo words. Ms. Smith's 'brave new unlibraried world' is an allegorical techno-dystopia in which meaning is violently regulated and imagination proscribed. Bri, whose gender is nonbinary (Bri is short for either Briar or Brice), is the older and more cautious of the siblings. Rose, more impulsive and passionate, has the idea of rescuing a neighboring horse who is bound for the slaughterhouse. She calls the animal Gliff, a name that Rose believes she has made up but which Bri discovers is an old Scottish word for, among many other things, a brief moment or fleeting glance. The mad, improvised act of freedom in caring for the horse, which leads to the siblings' capture, presages the chapters devoted to their grown-up fates, in which Bri, re-educated and assigned as male, becomes a soulless cog in the system while Rose escapes to lead an underground resistance movement. The linguistic wildness of Ms. Smith's writing, always a joyful signature of her books, contrasts effectively with the state's urge to restrict speech and silo the population into fixed and exclusionary categories. But elsewhere the novel's spirit of childlike wonder shades into the sort of didacticism customary to children's books. Authorities claim the property of unverifiables by painting red lines around it, a simplistic symbol of the repressive power of borders. The characters are either courageous freethinkers or cruel, jargon-spouting drones. Tyranny has little interest in nuance, so perhaps 'Gliff' is merely being faithful to its black-and-white outlook. But Ms. Smith's great strength is her grasp of the strangeness and multiplicity of language. It seems wasteful to display those virtues in a story whose meanings are all so plain.
