Latest news with #HouseoftheSacredSisterhood
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Inside a Sadistic Sisterhood at the End of the World
Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings doomed to create dystopian conditions wherever they go? In the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica's brilliant, chilling new novel, 'The Unworthy,' the young, unnamed narrator enters a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood after spending an unspecified amount of time wandering a landscape ravaged by climate catastrophe. Is this place, overseen by the Superior Sister and an unseen, all-powerful He, a refuge or a nightmare? And what exactly happens when a member of the unworthy class is elevated to the rank of the Chosen? These are among the questions that propel this slim, suspenseful novel. Amid global hunger and drought the Sacred Sisterhood has managed to cultivate a steady food supply — even if it involves eating a lot of crickets — and drinkable water. But danger abounds. The hierarchy is at once enigmatic and brutally enforced. Sacrifices are demanded. The punishments for infractions, administered by the sadistic Superior Sister, include whipping, disfigurement and being buried or burned alive. The mind-bending violence crushes any possibility of fellowship between the women who have found their way to this place (in the opening chapter, the narrator recounts dropping cockroaches into the pillowcase of another sister and then sewing up the slip). The unworthy are quick to turn on one another, claws out and teeth bared, in the name of survival. The horror is made visceral by Bazterrica's feverish, mythic prose, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses: 'There's something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being. … Something was throbbing in the air, silent and bestial.' Some sentences break off midstream; others contain words crossed out. We witness the narrator's struggle to wrest the unspeakable into language. The act of writing sustains her. She writes in the blue ink left behind by the monks who once tended this land; she writes with charcoal made from plants; she writes with her own blood. The writing is a mortal risk: She must hide these pages meticulously, so they're not discovered by the Superior Sister. She creates a record of both her cloistered, terrorized life with the Sacred Sisterhood and the world she knew before. The memories of her mother and of Circe, her companion after the apocalypse, are especially vivid and anguishing. Like Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower,' this dystopian narrator feels compelled to make a record of the end times; for both women, to write is to preserve a drop of agency, of humanity, in a blasted world, where survival often demands a willingness to commit unfathomable violations. 'Without mercy you survive,' Bazterrica's narrator says. To write is to process the new reality that is taking shape, the new story that is unfolding, and that will no longer die with her. 'Why put myself in danger with this book of the night?' the narrator writes. 'Because if I write it, then it was real.' The scrap of humanity the narrator has preserved through the act of writing is awakened when a mysterious stranger, Lucía, appears inside the walls of the Sacred Sisterhood. She seems to be a wanderer, as the narrator once was, and is taken in. Before long, Lucía displays otherworldly powers and, perhaps even more shockingly, a sense of compassion. 'The Unworthy' is a novel filled with secrets, and part of the thrill is cracking open one forbidden door at a time. Given that it's populated almost entirely by women, it's striking that patriarchal violence is at the center of the Sacred Sisterhood's rotten core. Solidarity between the unworthy, then, becomes a way to fight back. A secret bond forms between Lucía and the narrator, one that reminds them both that communion with others will always generate more strength than remaining crouched in suspicious solitude. These glimmers of hopeful connection are, of course, radically fragile — at any moment the two could be discovered and killed — but they are nevertheless critical to the narrator's emotional opening. In the novel's final moments, she remembers what survival is really for.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
21 Books Coming in March
Dream Count It's been years since Adichie, the author of 'Americanah,' released a work of fiction; now she returns with the stories of four women navigating life during the pandemic. Centered on Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer based in the United States, the story also swivels to her cousin, her best friend and her housekeeper, as each woman grapples with familial and romantic love. Raising Hare During the height of the Covid lockdowns, a workaholic British writer and political adviser rescues a newborn hare — and soon adapts her frenetic existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate. 'I'd been waiting for life to go back to normal,' Dalton writes, 'but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?' The Unworthy The Argentine writer's slim, suspenseful third novel is a dystopian eco-horror story set in a religious order called the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, which promises a sadistic kind of salvation from the global drought and hunger beyond its walls. When a wanderer arrives at the Sisterhood's walls seeking refuge, the narrator and the convent's leaders must contend with a compassion they've long been missing. The Trouble of Color In a deeply personal work of social history, Jones, an award-winning writer and scholar, looks back at more than 100 years of her own family's experience to examine how America's 'jagged color line' has shaped their destinies and sense of identity. From enslavement to 'passing' to anti-miscegenation laws, no one in the six generations Jones chronicles has been untouched by the question of color. The Antidote In April 1935, an otherwise sunny Sunday afternoon in America's Dust Bowl turned black in a powerful storm that gave the region its name. The 'Swamplandia!' author's latest, historical novel imagines the event's effects on five distinct characters — including a farmer and his niece, a photographer and a mystical 'prairie witch' — in the fictional Uz, Neb. Stag Dance In her new collection, which gathers three stories and a long novella, Peters introduces a series of explosive scenarios — a hormone-destroying pandemic, an unexpected boarding school romance, a gender-bending party of lumberjacks, a taboo fling at a trans women's community weekend — that explore the complexities of queerness and trans life. Care and Feeding Woolever's memoir of life in the food world's fast lane is populated with boldfaced names; she worked closely with both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. But ultimately, this is her story — one of being a woman in a changing industry, as problematic as it is exciting. We Tell Ourselves Stories Joan Didion grew up in the California of Hollywood's Golden Age and with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, worked in the film industry writing screenplays. In this fresh take on the iconic writer, Wilkinson, a New York Times film critic, argues that the movies — from Didion's childhood obsession with John Wayne to her aesthetic of dread and estrangement and the cinematic shots that structured her work — profoundly shaped her outlook on the country and her signature style. On Air It is a truth universally acknowledged: Public radio has always needed support from listeners like you. In this brash, swear-y backroom history, a decade and a half in the making, Oney shows how a loose network of radio stations called NPR struggled to stay on the airwaves and became a singular force in American life. Hypochondria Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, part history, Rees's genre-bending meditation on hypochondria references everyone from Freud to Kafka to Seinfeld in a provocative search to find out why, exactly, we believe we're sick. Sunrise on the Reaping Fans of apocalyptic fiction can rejoice: Collins is back with another installment of her best-selling 'Hunger Games' series. This book focuses on the 50th running of the titular games — in which adolescent tributes must compete in a battle royale to the death — and its eventual champion, Haymitch Abernathy, whom readers of the original trilogy will know as Katniss Everdeen's louche mentor. Stop Me if You've Heard This One What do a lesbian clown, an aquarium store, an older magician and an existential crisis have in common? They all feature in Arnett's latest, a funny and heartfelt tale of one woman grappling with grief, love and how to move forward. Red Scare Conspiracy thinking run amok? Antifascist institutions turning against themselves? A cowed public terrified of its government? With more than a few winks at the present, Risen, a New York Times journalist, draws readers into the zealous panic that seized Capitol Hill in the 1940s and '50s and explores the culture beyond McCarthyism that made it possible. Theft The Nobel laureate's 11th novel follows three young people in post-revolutionary Tanzania: Karim, a gifted student and future government official who was all but abandoned by his mother as a child; his schoolteacher wife, Fauzia, whose adult life is overshadowed by her bouts of childhood illness; and Badar, a servant who becomes entangled in the couple's lives as they get older. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Jones's latest horror novel opens with a discovery: A century-old diary is found in the walls of a parsonage. Inside is the story of Good Stab, a Blackfoot man who was turned into a vampire after a massacre of Indigenous people and, using his terrifying new powers, sought revenge for America's sins. Abundance The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson want you to hold space to dream about utopia. No need to tighten the belt, they argue: We have everything we need to build the future that liberals want, clean energy and affordable housing included, today! Their book explains how. The Colony In the Swedish musician's disturbing, engrossing first novel, an incongruous group of individuals — a rootless Hungarian man, an animal-rights activist, a woman who murdered her husband, an ant specialist and her unwanted child — form a tiny, virtually silent commune cut off from society. Taking place over many years, with interludes into the characters' back stories, 'The Colony' asks: Is this an Edenic laboratory of human cooperation, or something more like a cult? Twist McCann's latest novel takes readers onto a cable repair ship, whose crew maintains the vast network of undersea tubes that carry the world's data and power the internet. Among those on board are an Irish journalist hoping to revive his career and the crew's chief, who must contend with a series of cable breaks off the western coast of Africa. Elphie Thanks to Maguire's 'Wicked' (and the musical it inspired), we know what college life was like for the green girl who became L. Frank Baum's Wicked Witch of the West. This prequel — Maguire's eighth foray into the land of Oz — immerses readers in Elphaba's childhood as the elder daughter of a fanatical father and a self-involved mother, prone to jealousy but full of hope. There Is No Place for Us The phrase 'working homeless' should be an oxymoron but, as this book shows, in America it describes a common reality. Goldstone, a journalist based in Atlanta, follows five local families through stints of couch-surfing, car-living and squalid extended-stay hotels, all while the adults struggle to hold down jobs — heartbreaking evidence that, as he writes, there isn't a single city in the country where 'a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.' Yoko Sheff first interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, months before the former Beatle was murdered. He and Ono stayed connected; now he's produced a capacious biography, foregrounding her work as an avant-garde artist and musician and attempting, once and for all, to banish the stereotyping that has shadowed her for decades.
