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Club Calvi needs your vote to help choose its next book!
We may receive commissions from some links to products on this page. Promotions are subject to availability and retailer terms. Please consider joining our Facebook group by CLICKING HERE. Find out more about the books below. Which FicPick will get your vote for the next Club Calvi read? You can help decide the next book for Club Calvi! Three new novels are our Top 3 FicPicks, but only one can be the Readers' Choice. Which book would you like to read? In "Sleep" by Honor Jones, a recently divorced mother returns to her childhood home in New Jersey with her daughters. She's forced to confront her childhood trauma and the family secrets she has avoided for much of her life. "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle is about a man who can taste the favorite food of ghosts, and reunite them with their loved ones during a meal. His unique palate takes him to New York City's restaurant scene where linking life with afterlife comes with dangerous consequences. In "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone, a doorman stands guard for the famous and wealthy residents of a luxury Upper West Side building where inside drama plays out while outside conflict rages during a day that brings New York City to the brink and may end in murder. Voting closes Sunday, June 1 at 6 p.m. You can read excerpts and get the books below. The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes. CLICK HERE TO VOTE ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Sleep" by Honor Jones Riverhead books From the publisher: Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away. Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents' bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone. Honor Jones Lives in Brooklyn. "Sleep" by Honor Jones (ThriftBooks) $21 "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle Simon & Schuster From the publisher: Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can't exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he's never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he's tasting. And everything changes. Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he's prepared. He thinks his life's purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him. Daria Lavelle lives in New Jersey. "Aftertaste" By Daria Lavelle (ThriftBooks) $23 "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone MCD/FSG From the publisher: Chicky Diaz is everyone's favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York's cultural elite. Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she'd quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can't bring herself to leave him. Yet. And downstairs in 2a, Julian Sonnenberg—who has carved himself a successful niche in the art world, and led a good half-century of a full and satisfying, cosmopolitan life—has just received a devastating phone call that does nothing at all to alleviate his sense that, probably for better and worse, he has aged out and he's just not that useful to anyone any more. Meanwhile, gathered in the Bohemia's bowels, the building's almost entirely Black and Hispanic, working-class staff is taking in the news that that just a few miles uptown, a Black man has been killed by the police, leading to a demonstration, a counterdemonstration, and a long night of violence across the tinderbox city. As Chicky changes into his uniform for tonight's shift, he finds himself breaking a cardinal rule of the job: tonight, he'll be carrying a gun, bought only hours earlier, but before he knew of the pandemonium taking over the city. Chicky knows that there's more going on in his patch of sidewalk in front of the Bohemia than anyone's aware of. Tonight in the city, enemies will clash, loyalties will be tested, secrets will be revealed—and lives will be lost. Chris Pavone lives in New York City. "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone (ThriftBooks) $23 Excerpt: "Sleep" by Honor Jones Thursdays were usually Ezra's night, but today was his girlfriend's birthday, so he'd asked Margaret to swap. She was glad to do him a favor, gladder still of the bonus night. She wanted as much time with the girls as possible before they all went to New Jersey for the weekend. She wanted to stamp in their minds that they were her children, that they lived in Brooklyn, that they didn't belong to Elizabeth's house with the marble counters and the swimming pool. At 5:00 she buzzed his building, and before she'd even climbed the first grim stair she could hear her children. "Mommy!" "How was the afternoon?" she asked Ezra. "Jo had that playdate but wouldn't play," he said. Jo and Helen had each wrapped themselves around Margaret's legs, and she was lifting them like heavy shoes. "Jo," Ezra said, "it's rude not to play." "Guys, go get your stuff," Margaret said, as she tried to pry the girls off her legs. They just laughed. "Try to walk, Mommy," they said. Ezra never got them ready to go before she arrived. She wasn't sure if it was because he didn't think to or didn't want to or if it was more intentional—if he liked prolonging this time with her. It was never pleasant; she was never so sweaty and shrill as when she was trying to get her children's shoes on. "Socks and shoes! Socks and shoes! Helen, how many times do I have to say it, put on your socks." Maybe it was somehow helpful to him, seeing her struggle so ineffectually like this. "What's wrong?" he asked her. "Nothing," she said, meaning: this. Ezra was a managing editor at The Really, which he described as a small, tech-focused digital magazine, though in fact it was published by a branch of the PR department of the world's most powerful social media company. In his seven-year tenure, the magazine had cycled through many names: Ikon, Aria, Interrobang. He seemed to spend most of his time in meetings brainstorming new names, or in meetings about best practices for future meetings for brainstorming new names, or in meetings to discuss the demographics of those future meetings and how to ensure that everyone participated equally in the important work of brainstorming new names. Occasionally he worked on an infographic about disinformation. He was paid as much as an entry-level coder, which was to say, far more than she was. She could ask him for child support but didn't want to, and he hadn't offered for the obvious reason that the divorce was her idea. He wore black hoodies and cared about all the right things and was widely admired professionally for being almost entirely egoless. But Margaret had found it frustrating to be dominated by a husband who acted so insistently uninterested in power. When he faded into the background, he expected her to fade too, bundling up her wifely skirts and following him down the dim passageways of self-effacement. Ridiculous to be resentful of that still. This was what came of lingering. What on earth were the girls doing? Helen was lying on the floor coloring. One sock was on one foot. Jo was in the bathroom. "Ezra, can you help with Helen, please?" she asked him, in the fed-up-wife voice she knew he hated. "You don't have to use that voice," he said. "I'm already helping," he said, though he wasn't. "JoJo, what are you doing? We need to go eat dinner." "I want some scream." "What?" "Some scream." She was rooting around in the medicine cabinet. She knocked over a bottle of mouthwash. Band-Aids and hair ties rained down. Margaret was trying but failing to pick things up faster than Jo knocked them down. A jar of antiaging moisturizer clanked into the sink, the overnight evidence of Ezra's girlfriend. Margaret was worried it had cracked, but it hadn't. She picked it up and thought about opening it. She wanted to know what it smelled like. But that would be weird and invasive. She opened it anyway. It smelled good—warm and citrusy, like cream and oranges. She badly wanted to touch it, but that would be weird and invasive and perhaps even, in the girlfriend's eyes, unsanitary. She touched it anyway—stuck just the tip of a finger into the whipped pearlescence. She was happy that Ezra had a girlfriend. Delighted, actually. Though the thought of her—a teacher named Anaya who wrote out grocery lists for elaborate dinners with different-colored gel pens that he persisted in magneting to his refrigerator—did seed a terrible panic that in ten years he would be happily remarried while Margaret would be alone with a vibrator with cat hair sticking to it. "What birthday is it?" she'd asked Ezra, about Anaya's celebration that night. The answer: her thirtieth. Margaret rubbed the cream into the skin between her eyes, into the wrinkle that was forming there. Jo knocked over Ezra's electric razor, and his beard trimmings went everywhere. "Okay, enough, enough," she said. "Jo, stop touching everything." Guiltily, she put her finger back into the cream and smoothed the surface flat, as if covering up a bootprint in the snow. "I'm begging you, go get your socks." "Some scream," Jo said. She was holding up a tube of toothpaste. "She means sunscreen," Helen called from the other room. Ah. "You don't need sunscreen, JoJo," Margaret said, taking the toothpaste from her hand. "The sun is already going down. Shoes and socks!" she said again, in a bright desperate voice. Helen stood in her single sock, taping her picture up against the window. The sky outside was golden with late-day sun, but the light stopped abruptly at the glass. Inside was already beginning the blue evening, shadows padding the corners of the room. On the couch was Ezra, watching her, looking more cheerful than she'd seen him in weeks. "Mommy, come see," Helen said. "I drew a picture of Grandma's house." From Sleep by Honor Jones. Copyright © 2025 by Honor Jones. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Return to top of page Excerpt: "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle BITTER The first time Konstantin Duhovny tasted something he hadn't actually eaten he was eleven, seated on the edge of the public pool in Brighton Beach, his heels churning grey water into foam. He was watching the backs of the other boys—the ones he was supposed to be swimming with, but who never invited him, even out of politeness, into their circle—as they splashed about, showing off handstands and lung capacities, spouting chlorinated water a foot into the air like porpoises. He watched them all afternoon—Mitya and Sasha and Misha K. and Misha B. (whom they kept calling Bear because of the thick, black hair up and down his back)—until, one by one, their fathers finished their waterlogged Russkaya Reklamas, scratched their nipples through threadbare white undershirts, and peeled their pasty bodies from the rubber loungers, signaling quitting time. Kostya had come chaperoned by his cousin Valerik—not his real cousin, but the teenage son of Tetya Natasha, not his real aunt but an acquaintance of his mother's—who had promptly dumped him when his girlfriend whispered something about a kissing booth at the boardwalk nearby. Don't you move, Valerik had hissed at Kostya. I'll be back. That had been two hours ago. As the last boy, Mitya, raised the handle of the chain-link fence, Kostya felt himself blister with jealousy. There was no one to ferry him home, just like there had been no one to slather sunblock onto his back—which he could already feel was red and tight and burnt—and just like there would be no one to teach him how to talk to these boys in a way that made it clear that he was one of them. But then, of course, he wasn't one of them. Their fathers were alive. He kicked faster at the water, kicked violently, kicked at the fathers and sons, kicked at the great cavity of longing inside himself, this way of missing someone, missing them desperately, missing every part including those he'd never known, a pocket so deep he thought that if he could only reach inside of it, worry its lining long enough, break through it to the other side, to where empty could grow full as a belly round with food, he might just find what he was looking for. Right then, something traveled across his tongue, and Kostya stopped kicking. It coated the inside of his mouth, thick as paste, the taste—the uneaten taste—overpowering. It was savory, salty, the texture mealy, slightly sweet and fatty, something tart, barely, and then, at the tail, in the back of his throat, bitter, bitter, blooming like a bruise. Good, but also bad, just a little bit like s***. He wondered briefly whether one of the boys had found a way to make him ingest a turd—it seemed the sort of thing that boys with fathers could do to a boy without one—but just as quickly, the sensation vanished. Kostya smacked his lips, trying to call it back, but there was nothing left now, only a warmth spreading slowly across his tongue as he choked back tears. It was only in the absence of the taste that he suddenly recognized what it had been. Chicken liver, sautéed onions, fresh dill garnish, squeeze of lemon. Pechonka. His father's favorite dish, according to his mother, who invoked it infrequently and had stopped making it after he died. Kostya had never tasted pechonka. He just knew, like an instinct, like another sense he'd only now become conscious of, that the ghost of that dish—not its taste, but its aftertaste—had just been inside of his mouth, spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again. From AFTERTASTE. Copyright © 2025 by Daria Lavelle. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Return to the top of page Excerpt: "The Doorman" by Chris Pavone FRONT DOOR Chicky Diaz stands on his little patch of the earth, the clean quiet sidewalk in front of the Bohemia Apartments, thinking: there sure are a lot of great places to kill someone in this city. There are the sprawling industrial zones in Hunts Point and Maspeth. There are the underpasses of bridges and highways and on-ramps and off-, all those loud echoing voids littered with abandoned vans and homeless camps and piles of trash. There are the late-night-creepy canyons down in the Financial District, and the creepier step streets up in Washington Heights, the ends of elevated subway stations, underground ones too. There are hundreds of miles of waterfront with car-sized boulders and crumbling piers that jut out into the deadly currents of rivers and canals and bays and the mighty Atlantic Ocean. There's that weird-a** auto- repair shantytown out in Willets Point, a place that reminds Chicky of nothing in the States so much as that time he and his buddies took a wrong turn in Panama City. A few wrong turns. There's all of Staten Island, probably, though in truth Chicky has never stepped foot. Just driven through that time with Julio to visit Reggie who was living rough in Rahway. But he's heard. There are the parks, ten thousand acres of hills and woods and beaches and ponds, grass ballfields and concrete courts and golf courses and even a lawn-bowling green of all things, just a few minutes from here. The bowlers wear all white. They basically are all white. Signs at entrances claim park closes at dark but there aren't many gates that close and no attempt at enforcement. Has anyone ever been deterred by a Parks and Rec placard? It's like no spitting, no loitering, no jaywalking. The type of laws that make a mockery of the very idea of laws. No jaywalking. What an idea. The best place to kill someone, though? That's right at home. Away from witnesses and good Samaritans and security cameras, in environments that can be controlled and crime scenes that can be scrubbed, evidence that can be destroyed on the one hand or manufactured on the other. Behind the locked doors and closed curtains of aluminum-sided Capes in Elmhurst or Flatlands, of brownstones up in Harlem and out in Park Slope, of luxury lofts in Tribeca and s***** lofts in Bushwick, of little Tudors out in Forest Hills and huge Tudors up in Riverdale, of slums in the South Bronx and Brownsville, of the housing projects that are everywhere, in every corner of every borough, even places you'd never expect-the Alfred E. Smith Houses just a couple blocks from City Hall, or the ones practically spitting distance from right here. Every class and every race and every religion and every sexual orientation, everybody's every body, shoulder to shoulder. This f****** city. Eight million people. Every one of them can be killed. Chicky looks across to the park's dark that's broken up only by streetlamps along roadways and footpaths. To Chicky these pools of light seem to increase the menace more than lessen it, drawing attention to just how little safety is out there. Even here on fancy Central Park West with fancier Fifth Avenue on the far side, on these streets that are homes to millionaires and billionaires and the biggest museums of the greatest city in the whole wide world. Even here, danger is right over there. This is one of the main reasons Chicky's job exists to begin with. Ensuring safety. Trying to. Chicky has been here for twenty-eight years. Longer than anyone else on staff, longer than most of the residents too. Chicky is who comes to mind when people think of a doorman at the Bohemia, residents and visitors and regular guests, the extended families who descend each Thanksgiving to watch the parade. In all these people's mental dictionaries, the definition of doorman is Chicky Diaz in his spotless uniform and bell crown cap. He's woven into the fabric of the place. The job suits him. Chicky is always quick with a smile or a joke or the door. He never hesitates to grab a bag or hail a cab, to gently shoo away gawkers or panhandlers, to commiserate about the Mets or the Nets or even the godforsaken Jets. Chicky is not a particularly religious man but he does believe in god, and it's obvious that he has forsaken the Jets for some unknowable reason. It seems impossible for any sports franchise to be so bad for so long. Espe- cially a team that plays in a major market. The majorest. And yet. Mysterious ways, they say. Chicky never fails to remember a resident's name or a visiting grandson or a close friend or "friend." He never calls in sick, never leaves early, never arrives late. He never complains or rolls his eyes at a ridiculous request, of which there are plenty. He is unerringly patient and unfailingly nice. He is relentlessly upbeat. Or he was. On the next block a tiny old woman is walking a tiny dog, both miniatures. But otherwise there's nothing but red traffic lights and red taillights and a red light at the end of an awning to beckon a yellow cab. Good luck, this day and age. Taxis don't roam like they used to. Somewhere a car guns its engine in a way that sounds hostile. Chicky feels a tingle on the back of his clean-cut neck. Every place to kill someone is also, obviously, a place to get killed. It can happen out on the sidewalk in a hail of automatic gunfire, the murder attempt of a coward who's sitting safely in the passenger side, random bullets hitting thighs and butts and arms but mostly trash cans and windows and innocent passersby. Sometimes little kids, babies. It's surprising how many gunshot targets manage to survive the indiscriminate spray. Not the one well-placed bullet to the head. No one survives that. But that requires a whole different set of balls. To walk right up to a guy, maybe even look him in the eye, boom. It can happen at any moment, anywhere, to anyone. Right here, right now. You might never know that you're about to get killed. You might never know that you're about to kill someone. Chicky sure as f*** hadn't. The Doorman by Chris Pavone. Published by MCD x FSG, May 20, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Chris Pavone. All rights reserved. Return to top of page
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Novel About Motherhood, Childhood, and Secrets
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Honor Jones's debut novel, Sleep, starts with a child's perception of the world around her. I've known Honor, a senior editor at The Atlantic, since we were both children, and reading the book was a little like immersing myself in our own long friendship. I asked Honor a few questions about Sleep, which is out today. You can buy it here. Walt Hunter: I think I was one of the first people to read the whole novel—is that right?—which is an incredible gift for an editor, not to mention a friend. You're an editor, too, and a journalist. What are the differences, for you, between writing fiction and writing nonfiction? Honor Jones: You were! And you gave me the most brilliant notes. We go back: I'll remind you and everyone else here that you also read and advised me on my thesis in college! I see how the idea of moving from fact to fiction could feel really unmooring, but I basically think that writing is writing—you're always thinking about voice, about structure. What really matters is that you have a purpose: something that needs to be said or done in the text. If that's the case, then there's always something dictating what the story needs, even if, instead of news or history, it's only the demands of the story itself. That said, it was hard—and exciting—to try to leave my journalist self out of the sentences. I had to go through and cut like a thousand commas out of the book. During the editing process, I also accidentally called the book title 'the headline' so many times that it started to get embarrassing. Walt: When I think about the novel, the first thing I think about is your style. What does a novel allow you to do that a news story doesn't? Honor: One thing it lets you do is write what a character is thinking and feeling about what's happening, even when she doesn't understand what's happening. This was important because the beginning of the book is told from the perspective of a child. I also felt that I was often exploring an idea that I couldn't argue or defend. A novel is a good place for that, especially if the idea is weird or perverse or otherwise hard to talk about. Walt: The main character, Margaret, is a sharp observer of her world—someone 'on whom nothing is lost,' to borrow a phrase from Henry James. We start the book in the dampness under a blackberry bush—such a tangible detail! Honor: I knew that I didn't want the child in this story to be special or precocious. She has no exposure to the world of art or ideas. She knows next to nothing about history or politics. She's growing up in the '90s, and I have this line about her education lying entirely on a foundation of American Girl–doll books. She simply has no context for what happens to her. But she's trying really hard to make sense of it anyway. She's naturally probably a perceptive kid, but she's also that way because she has to be, because she learns that she has to protect herself. And I think that sense of watchfulness defines her as she grows up. In the sections that follow, she changes in all these ways while remaining fundamentally the same person. I was interested in that—how she can't shake her own history, how many of her choices as an adult are defined by the events of her childhood, how she has to learn to be a mother while remaining a daughter. Walt: The novel is also psychologically astute in any number of ways. For example, we watch the friendship between Margaret and Biddy as it develops over a long period of time. And Margaret's relationship with her family members is, of course, at the center of the book. What are you exploring with these long-term ties? Honor: I loved writing this friendship! You can probably recognize aspects of the girls we both grew up with in the character of Biddy. She's sort of a composite of all the best friends I've loved through life, while also being her own person—ballsier and bolder than any of us were at that age. Biddy really is Margaret's family, the person who stays alongside her through all the years. One thing I find freeing about their relationship is that, even though Margaret keeps this terrible secret from Biddy, in some ways, it doesn't matter. The novel is so concerned with the danger of secrets and the power of disclosure, but Biddy just loves Margaret. She is the one character for whom the truth would change nothing. A lot of the book is about Margaret trying to understand the people around her, but people don't really explain themselves. (Margaret doesn't, either—people keep asking her why she got divorced, and she never has any idea what to say.) When she finds the courage to ask what is maybe the most important question in the book, the answer she gets is profoundly insufficient. I think some readers might find that frustrating, and would rather the book build up to a final confrontation and resolution. But that's not what I was interested in. I think trying to understand, failing to understand, knowing a little more, knowing yourself better—that's what it's about. Walt: The first part of Sleep is set in a place—wealthy suburban New Jersey—where social class has an infinite number of near-invisible gradations. It reminds me a lot of where we grew up, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. You manage to sneak in so many small details—of decor, especially, but also of social decorum—that reveal these distinctions. They make sense to me, the child of a reporter, whose family never quite fit into the whole milieu. And I recognize myself a little in Margaret—she's not entirely comfortable among the heirs and heiresses. But of course the book is also very tender, in its way, to the people in it. Why write about this place, these people? What did you learn? Honor: The thing that really marks her as an outsider in this social world and class happens when she grows up and gets divorced. But she's always felt like an outsider and an observer, as you say. I wanted to show how, as a child, she's learning about class as if it's just another language. Why does her mother care so much about this particular neighbor? What are they conveying by having this particular pet? It was fun to write about all this signaling from people who are quite incapable of communicating in other ways. Walt: One scene that sticks in my mind—that really keeps me up at night, sometimes—is the one at the party in Brooklyn where we almost suspect that Margaret's child might be in danger. There's genuine suspense there, even some terror. Honor: I think the big question of this book is: How do you raise a child to be safe without raising them to be afraid? What's the right amount of vigilance? Should you—can you—trust the world? I think this feeling of domestic horror will be familiar to a lot of parents. It's a lovely day on the playground, and then suddenly you look up and you can't find your kid. He's fine! He's just behind a tree or whatever. But immediately you're aware of the worst-case scenario. Terror is always an option, and those darker feelings lie right up against the joy and fun of parenting. I think there's a lot of the latter in the book, too. Walt: Does fiction have an ethical responsibility when it comes to representing a moment, or repeated moments, of trauma? What is that responsibility? Honor: If there's anything I think fiction shouldn't tolerate, it's squeamishness. In Sleep, for instance, I had to say what happened to Margaret. I had to describe it in simple language. It had to happen in the beginning of the book. Her particular form of trauma is quieter than many others—there is no violence, for instance. But it's still insidious. Margaret might not understand what's happening, but I wanted the reader to know. You could imagine a different story: a divorced woman's self-doubt, a mystery unfolding, a revelation of memory … but I could not have written that book. It would have felt dishonest. The mystery isn't what was done to her—it's what she does with herself after. Related: 'Skin a rabbit': a short story by Honor Jones 'How I demolished my life' Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The debate that will determine how Democrats govern next time Adam Serwer: Due process is a right, not a privilege you get for being good. Good on Paper: The myth of the poverty trap Today's News The Trump administration announced a nearly $142 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. In return, Saudi Arabia would invest $600 billion in America's industries. President Donald Trump declared that he would lift sanctions on Syria, ahead of his visit with Syria's new president. Russian and Ukrainian delegations are set to meet this week for their first face-to-face talks since 2022. Evening Read How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap By Adelle Waldman Several years ago, to research the novel I was writing, I spent six months working in the warehouse of a big-box store. As a supporter of the Fight for $15, I expected my co-workers to be frustrated that starting pay at the store was just $12.25 an hour. In fact, I found them to be less concerned about the wage than about the irregular hours. The store, like much of the American retail sector, used just-in-time scheduling to track customer flow on an hourly basis and anticipate staffing needs at any given moment. My co-workers and I had no way to know how many hours of work we'd get—and thus how much money we'd earn—from week to week. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic America is the land of opportunity—for white South Africans. ChatGPT turned into a Studio Ghibli machine. How is that legal? What the U.K. deal reveals about Trump's trade strategy Is the AfD too extreme for democracy? Weight-loss drugs aren't really about weight. Culture Break Watch. These are 25 of the best horror films you can watch, ranked by scariness, David Sims wrote in 2020. Discover. Gregg Popovich, former head coach and current president of the San Antonio Spurs, shared his life lessons with Adam Harris. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Novel About Motherhood, Childhood, and Secrets
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Honor Jones's debut novel, Sleep, starts with a child's perception of the world around her. I've known Honor, a senior editor at The Atlantic, since we were both children, and reading the book was a little like immersing myself in our own long friendship. I asked Honor a few questions about Sleep, which is out today. You can buy it here. Walt Hunter: I think I was one of the first people to read the whole novel—is that right?—which is an incredible gift for an editor, not to mention a friend. You're an editor, too, and a journalist. What are the differences, for you, between writing fiction and writing nonfiction? Honor Jones: You were! And you gave me the most brilliant notes. We go back: I'll remind you and everyone else here that you also read and advised me on my thesis in college! I see how the idea of moving from fact to fiction could feel really unmooring, but I basically think that writing is writing—you're always thinking about voice, about structure. What really matters is that you have a purpose: something that needs to be said or done in the text. If that's the case, then there's always something dictating what the story needs, even if, instead of news or history, it's only the demands of the story itself. That said, it was hard—and exciting—to try to leave my journalist self out of the sentences. I had to go through and cut like a thousand commas out of the book. During the editing process, I also accidentally called the book title 'the headline' so many times that it started to get embarrassing. Walt: When I think about the novel, the first thing I think about is your style. What does a novel allow you to do that a news story doesn't? Honor: One thing it lets you do is write what a character is thinking and feeling about what's happening, even when she doesn't understand what's happening. This was important because the beginning of the book is told from the perspective of a child. I also felt that I was often exploring an idea that I couldn't argue or defend. A novel is a good place for that, especially if the idea is weird or perverse or otherwise hard to talk about. Walt: The main character, Margaret, is a sharp observer of her world—someone 'on whom nothing is lost,' to borrow a phrase from Henry James. We start the book in the dampness under a blackberry bush—such a tangible detail! Honor: I knew that I didn't want the child in this story to be special or precocious. She has no exposure to the world of art or ideas. She knows next to nothing about history or politics. She's growing up in the '90s, and I have this line about her education lying entirely on a foundation of American Girl–doll books. She simply has no context for what happens to her. But she's trying really hard to make sense of it anyway. She's naturally probably a perceptive kid, but she's also that way because she has to be, because she learns that she has to protect herself. And I think that sense of watchfulness defines her as she grows up. In the sections that follow, she changes in all these ways while remaining fundamentally the same person. I was interested in that—how she can't shake her own history, how many of her choices as an adult are defined by the events of her childhood, how she has to learn to be a mother while remaining a daughter. Walt: The novel is also psychologically astute in any number of ways. For example, we watch the friendship between Margaret and Biddy as it develops over a long period of time. And Margaret's relationship with her family members is, of course, at the center of the book. What are you exploring with these long-term ties? Honor: I loved writing this friendship! You can probably recognize aspects of the girls we both grew up with in the character of Biddy. She's sort of a composite of all the best friends I've loved through life, while also being her own person—ballsier and bolder than any of us were at that age. Biddy really is Margaret's family, the person who stays alongside her through all the years. One thing I find freeing about their relationship is that, even though Margaret keeps this terrible secret from Biddy, in some ways, it doesn't matter. The novel is so concerned with the danger of secrets and the power of disclosure, but Biddy just loves Margaret. She is the one character for whom the truth would change nothing. A lot of the book is about Margaret trying to understand the people around her, but people don't really explain themselves. (Margaret doesn't, either—people keep asking her why she got divorced, and she never has any idea what to say.) When she finds the courage to ask what is maybe the most important question in the book, the answer she gets is profoundly insufficient. I think some readers might find that frustrating, and would rather the book build up to a final confrontation and resolution. But that's not what I was interested in. I think trying to understand, failing to understand, knowing a little more, knowing yourself better—that's what it's about. Walt: The first part of Sleep is set in a place—wealthy suburban New Jersey—where social class has an infinite number of near-invisible gradations. It reminds me a lot of where we grew up, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. You manage to sneak in so many small details—of decor, especially, but also of social decorum—that reveal these distinctions. They make sense to me, the child of a reporter, whose family never quite fit into the whole milieu. And I recognize myself a little in Margaret—she's not entirely comfortable among the heirs and heiresses. But of course the book is also very tender, in its way, to the people in it. Why write about this place, these people? What did you learn? Honor: The thing that really marks her as an outsider in this social world and class happens when she grows up and gets divorced. But she's always felt like an outsider and an observer, as you say. I wanted to show how, as a child, she's learning about class as if it's just another language. Why does her mother care so much about this particular neighbor? What are they conveying by having this particular pet? It was fun to write about all this signaling from people who are quite incapable of communicating in other ways. Walt: One scene that sticks in my mind—that really keeps me up at night, sometimes—is the one at the party in Brooklyn where we almost suspect that Margaret's child might be in danger. There's genuine suspense there, even some terror. Honor: I think the big question of this book is: How do you raise a child to be safe without raising them to be afraid? What's the right amount of vigilance? Should you—can you—trust the world? I think this feeling of domestic horror will be familiar to a lot of parents. It's a lovely day on the playground, and then suddenly you look up and you can't find your kid. He's fine! He's just behind a tree or whatever. But immediately you're aware of the worst-case scenario. Terror is always an option, and those darker feelings lie right up against the joy and fun of parenting. I think there's a lot of the latter in the book, too. Walt: Does fiction have an ethical responsibility when it comes to representing a moment, or repeated moments, of trauma? What is that responsibility? Honor: If there's anything I think fiction shouldn't tolerate, it's squeamishness. In Sleep, for instance, I had to say what happened to Margaret. I had to describe it in simple language. It had to happen in the beginning of the book. Her particular form of trauma is quieter than many others—there is no violence, for instance. But it's still insidious. Margaret might not understand what's happening, but I wanted the reader to know. You could imagine a different story: a divorced woman's self-doubt, a mystery unfolding, a revelation of memory … but I could not have written that book. It would have felt dishonest. The mystery isn't what was done to her—it's what she does with herself after. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News The Trump administration announced a nearly $142 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. In return, Saudi Arabia would invest $600 billion in America's industries. President Donald Trump declared that he would lift sanctions on Syria, ahead of his visit with Syria's new president. Russian and Ukrainian delegations are set to meet this week for their first face-to-face talks since 2022. Evening Read How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap By Adelle Waldman Several years ago, to research the novel I was writing, I spent six months working in the warehouse of a big-box store. As a supporter of the Fight for $15, I expected my co-workers to be frustrated that starting pay at the store was just $12.25 an hour. In fact, I found them to be less concerned about the wage than about the irregular hours. The store, like much of the American retail sector, used just-in-time scheduling to track customer flow on an hourly basis and anticipate staffing needs at any given moment. My co-workers and I had no way to know how many hours of work we'd get—and thus how much money we'd earn—from week to week. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Watch. These are 25 of the best horror films you can watch, ranked by scariness, David Sims wrote in 2020. Discover. Gregg Popovich, former head coach and current president of the San Antonio Spurs, shared his life lessons with Adam Harris. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Childhood Trauma Gives Way to Adult Ambivalence
What surprised me most about Honor Jones's debut novel, 'Sleep,' wasn't its smarts or its savvy, or even its astute renderings of motherhood, daughter-hood and the fraught enterprise of trying to regard each one through the lens of the other. No, what surprised me was that out of its careful, orderly prose — every word neatly placed as if on a well-set table — grew an exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material — the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll — and with similar delicacy and humor. But 'Sleep' also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing. 'Sleep' doesn't have the best start, but stick with it. The novel opens with the slightly humdrum threshold moments of 10-year-old Margaret's life as she begins to notice her body and debate who she is in the world, a girl or a woman. (At the shoe store: 'She definitely wasn't going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn't going to wear purple velvet stilettos either.') It all feels like a familiar coming-of-age story until Margaret experiences something no child should, putting a more sinister spin on what it means to 'come of age' well before your time. From here the third-person perspective matures into Margaret's adulthood, and the novel matures into something more poignant, and interesting, as well. Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It's the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — 'by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,' Margaret thinks. 'How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?' Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered? Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives. If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of 'Sleep' is that it's grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling. Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra's apartment. She's trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra's new girlfriend's anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother's house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo's birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It's in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry: It's chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window. Jones is very good at capturing how trauma can taint even small moments like these, in subtle and insidious ways — which is perhaps why she's styled her prose so tightly. There are no crescendos here, no soaring, looping sentences full of ecstasy or dread. Instead she's hung her prose on a tension rod of unease, a proxy for how Margaret experiences her everyday life. It's tidy, and it works.
