| Elif Shafak at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Oct. 15, 2024. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP); Ann Friedman. (File photo courtesy of Planet Word) | | This week, on opposite sides of the globe, two thoughtful women who have dedicated their lives to the power of language voiced cris de cœu. I was so moved by their remarks that I’m going to let them largely speak for themselves here. At the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak said, “In a world that remains deeply polarized and bitterly politicized, and torn apart by inequality and wars, and the cruelty we are capable of inflicting on each other and on Earth, our only home, in such a troubled world, what can writers and poets even hope to achieve? What place is there for stories and imagination when tribalism, destruction and othering speak more loudly and boldly?” (I’m quoting from notes that Shafak sent to me.) Shafak, whose most recent novel is “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” spoke with longing for the 21st century that never arrived — or at least hasn’t yet. She recalled the flutter of international optimism when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire broke apart, and the internet promised to create a well-informed electorate. In those heady days, for a moment at least, it felt possible to see a bright future for peace and democracy. “Fast forward, today,” she said, “we are living in a world in which there is way too much information, but little knowledge and even less wisdom.… As we scroll up and down, more out of habit than out of anything else, we have no time to process what we see. No time to absorb or reflect or feel. Hyper-information gives us the illusion of knowledge.” “For true knowledge to be attained we need to slow down. We need cultural spaces, literary festivals, an open and honest intellectual exchange.” Shafak’s insistence on the importance of informed empathy, thoughtful dialogue and truthful language resonates with an emphatic statement issued that same day right here in Washington. Ann Friedman, founder of the Planet Word museum, cast aside the strategically circumspect rhetoric of museum directors and said plainly that she is “fed up.” “For us at Planet Word, where we have always believed that words matter and that people have the choice to use their words for good or ill, I am despairing of the hurricane-force tsunami of lies, hate-mongering, and fear-mongering that we’ve been subjected to…. Is this what we have to look forward to in the future? Can our democracy hold up against this storm of untruths?” Friedman clicked through a list of crucial public debates that have been swamped by flamboyant falsehoods — from immigration to abortion, climate change and election integrity. When decrying the divisive state of our political language, commentators typically feel compelled to strike a pose of long-suffering equilibrium, as though the arsonists and the firefighters are equally guilty for showing up at the same burning house. But Friedman isn’t coy about pointing to the preeminent source of disinformation in America: “Former President Trump has continued spewing this same claptrap.” “None of this is to say that people can’t legitimately disagree on policies or political beliefs,” Friedman readily concedes. But “verifiable facts do exist.… Proclaiming and defending the truth, truth based on reliable, provable facts, is what allows democracies to survive. We need to dig for the facts and the evidence and hear what candidates truly believe if we are to make wise, informed choices in the voting booth. There are enough topics to legitimately disagree about that we certainly don’t need a volatile cocktail of lies stirred into the mix.” Friedman concludes, “It’s high time for us all to get to work digging the truth out of the rubble.” Hear hear. ❖ Books to screens and back again: - “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” an autobiographical movie written and directed by the painter Titus Kaphar, debuts today in theaters. The film, starring André Holland and John Earl Jelks, is about an artist challenged by the arrival of his estranged father. On Nov. 19, Kaphar will release a companion book containing a marked-up facsimile of the script, hundreds of film stills and paintings from the movie (Rizzoli, $150).
- “Rivals,” starring David Tennant, Alex Hassell and Emily Atack, starts streaming today on Hulu (trailer) This steamy series, about financial and sexual conquests in the British TV industry in 1986, is adapted from the second novel in Dame Jilly Cooper’s popular Rutshire Chronicles. (Here’s a review of the first book from The Post’s archives.)
- The third season of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as defense attorney Mickey Haller, started streaming last night on Netflix (trailer). This season is based on “The Gods of Guilt,” Michael Connelly’s fifth Lincoln Lawyer thriller, which our reviewer Patrick Anderson called “the best one yet” (rave).
|  | | Running Press; background photo of Dean Village in Edinburgh, Scotland (Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | | Let’s do the time warp again. In 1979, a few high school friends and I drove from our Christian prep school in the suburbs of St. Louis to the Varsity Theater to see a midnight showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Everything about the experience shocked me — from Dr. Frank-N-Furter creating a sex monster to moviegoers throwing toast at the screen. Licentiousness! Food waste! Given the grotesque role that meals play in the movie — “Meatloaf, again?” — it’s possible that no one’s been shivering in antici … … pation for the officially licensed “Rocky Horror Cookbook.” But half a century later, here it is — just a jump to the left — lavishly illustrated with color photos and drawings. Written in ghoulish good humor by Kim Laidlaw, this diabolical cookbook “beamed directly from the galaxy Transylvania” goes way beyond anything Riff Raff and Magenta whipped up. Laidlaw serves “Pelvic Thrust Pizza Sticks,” “Thrill Me Chill Me Spicy Gazpacho,” “Hot Patootie Potato Leek Soup,” “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me Smothered Breasts” and so much more. As in 1979, I’m still dry, so I can’t recommend the chapter on “Sassy Sexy Drinks,” but the desserts are to die for — including “Dammit Jammit Tartlets” and “Rocky (Horror) Road Ice Cream Sandwiches.” So come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab. Someone you know would surely get a kick out of this for Halloween but is afraid to ask. P.S. Speaking of haunted food: There’s still time to order spooky literary treats from Open Book Chocolates, like “The Raven,” a dark chocolate bar inspired by the “velvet-violet lining” in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem (details). ❖ |  | | The 2024 Kirkus Prize winners. (Doubleday; Avid Reader; Candlewick Press) | Literary awards and honors: - The Kirkus Prizes were announced Wednesday night in New York. Fiction: “James,” by Percival Everett. Nonfiction: “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham. Young Readers’ Literature: “Gather,” by Kenneth M. Cadow. Each of the three winners received $50,000.
- Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye has won the Wallace Stevens Award. The prize, announced this morning by the Academy of American Poets, is worth $100,000 and honors “outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career.” Evie Shockley was named the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which carries a $25,000 prize for “distinguished poetic achievement.” A statement from the Academy described Nye and Shockley as “two major voices who have made a space for the extraordinary possibility of poetry as a register of observation and reflection, compassion and togetherness, justice and grace.”
- “Absolution,” by Alice McDermott, won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. The honor, worth $25,000, is funded by thriller writer David Baldacci and his wife, Michelle. In a review for The Washington Post, Hamilton Cain called McDermott’s Vietnam War-era novel “beautifully conceived and executed” (review). McDermott will accept the award at a ceremony at the Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Conn., on Nov. 1 (tickets).
- “All the Sinners Bleed,” by S.A. Cosby, won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery by the members of Mystery Readers International. Cosby’s novel, about a serial killer in a Southern town, was also one of The Washington Post’s 12 best thrillers of 2023.
REVIEW By Charlotte Gordon | | | |  | | (Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury; background photo of trees in Bethesda, Md., by Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | | By some astonishing wizardry, 20 years have passed since the publication of Susanna Clarke’s masterpiece, “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” (review). That magical story about bringing “practical magic” back to early 19th-century England won the Hugo Award for best novel, sold over 4 million copies and cast a spell on a generation of readers. Pundits called Clarke’s novel “Harry Potter for adults,” but that’s an insult to her boundless imagination and wit. In “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” the ghosts of Dickens and Austen mingle with a wholly original spirit of historical fiction and fantasy. On Tuesday, Bloomsbury will release a special 20th anniversary edition with an introduction by V.E. Schwab, who describes how reluctant she once felt to pick up this 800-page tome with footnotes. But once Schwab started reading, Clarke’s novel enchanted her: “It’s not that she tells the story of a world possessing magic,” Schwab says. “It’s that she convinces us that magic lives in ours.” Superfans will want the gorgeous three-volume edition of “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” illustrated by Charles Vess with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, from the Folio Society ($230, details). Also on Tuesday, Clarke will release a slender new fable called “The Wood at Midwinter,” illustrated by Victoria Sawdon. It’s about a young woman named Merowdis who, despite preferring animals and the solitude of the forest, desperately wants a child. The story begins around Christmas when her sister drops her off in ominous woods where Merowdis likes to walk. There are traces of the Grimm Brothers’ eerie atmosphere and A.A. Milne’s ironic humor: “The trouble with being patient,” Merowdis thinks, “is that, generally speaking, there’s no one to see you doing it.” The animals talk to each other; and the trees talk to Merowdis. As a snowstorm picks up, she experiences a fantastical vision of motherhood. “Humans aren’t meant to live in the woods,” Clarke writes. But “saints do shocking things. It’s what makes them saints.” If you squint just right, the lacunae in this fairytale are kind of haunting. And very dedicated readers will be curious about the story’s allusion to Jesus. But most children will feel mystified by “The Wood at Midwinter,” and most adults will feel mystified by its $16.99 price tag. In the afterword, Clarke explains how she was influenced by Kate Bush’s “50 Words for Snow” (2011). “Bush has been singing about this same woman — or a version of her — since ‘Wuthering Heights.’ ... Some stories sink down into your bones.” Clarke claims Merowdis’s hometown used to be carefully described in a footnote in “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” but when she looked for it again, the footnote was gone. “Some fairy has removed it for reasons of his or her own,” she writes. With its elliptical narrative, “The Wood at Midwinter” reads like that fairy is still removing things. ❖ |  | | The Experiment; background photo of Shakespeare’s Globe in London. (Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | | “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.” Last Saturday, Dawn and I saw a terrifically energetic production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Folger Theatre in Washington. (In this “Romeo and Juliet,” Republicans and Democrats are fighting.) And in New York, playgoers have been feverishly buying up tickets to the “Romeo and Juliet” production starring Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler (tickets). Deadline reports that the seven preview performances at Circle in the Square Theatre sold 103 percent of the available seats. If that sounds — as Juliet says — “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,” remember that this is a play about dangerous excess. After all, when Friar Lawrence explains his crazy scheme to save the young lovers, he assures Romeo that he’ll soon be called back to Verona “with twenty hundred thousand times more joy.” Just how much joy is that? Rob Eastaway considers such quantitative questions in a curious new book called “Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times.” It presents the Bard’s characters as calculating in a way you probably never considered. “Much Ado About Numbers” is not all cheesy puns, although there are plenty of those (“Henry the Fifth, aka Henry the 20%”). Eastaway demonstrates that Shakespeare was keenly aware of “the mathematical ideas that were circulating in his lifetime” — in commerce, science, music, cartography, games, calendars and even magic. Once Eastaway starts looking, he finds mathematical references all over the plays. For instance, I’ve read “Romeo and Juliet” dozens of times, but I’d never noticed that Mercutio calls Tybalt “a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic!” What would be in such a book in the 16th century? And how did Shakespeare multiply? Shepherd’s Son in “The Winter’s Tale,” says, “I cannot do 't without counters.” Given the rapid development of markets in the Elizabethan era, it’s not surprising that numeracy was crucial. “Measure for Measure” isn’t just a moral equation; it’s an economic one. “Money runs as a rich seam throughout Shakespeare’s work,” Eastaway writes. “Everywhere you look there are people who owe money, or are trying to steal it, pay it, borrow it, lend it or earn it” — from “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” to “Hamlet” and “The Merchant of Venice.” But the author ends by striking a skeptical note. In a tricky section on “Codes and Conspiracy,” he warns against the temptation to see meaningful patterns in the “pseudo-mathematical analysis of Shakespeare’s work” that suggest he was a closeted Catholic, or that he translated passages in the KJV Bible or predicted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Those claims just don’t add up. Count on it: This quirky little book will multiply the fun for any general reader interested in adding to their understanding of Shakespeare. ❖ |  | | (Union Square Kids; Random House Books for Young Readers) | | Celebrity children’s books are typically so frighteningly awful that I’ve even stopped making fun of them. But — surprise — two new Halloween picture books by famous performers are quite delightful and would be a treat for any little ghoul you happen to know: - Lance Bass, a former member of the boy band NSYNC, hits all the right notes in “Trick or Treat on Scary Street” (ages 4-8). The rhyming story, comically illustrated in lurid shades by Roland Garrigue, leads costumed kids through a spooky town — “No tricks allowed, just tasty treats.” Might a vampire be “tearin’ up my heart”? Have no fear: The kids’ nervous trek leads to a Halloween disco.
- “Spooky, Scary Skeletons” (ages 4-8) is a picture-book version of the 1996 hit song by the late Andrew Gold. (Renditions on YouTube and TikTok have reportedly been viewed 8 billion times.) “Shrieking skulls will shock your soul,” but Polona Lovsin’s sweet illustrations show little children playing in costumes, which makes clear that “spooky, scary skeletons are silly all the same.”
|  | | “Let’s eat too much and drink / our faces off,” Kim Addonizio writes in her new collection, “Exit Opera.” “Anything else is a waste of time.” But there is no time to waste in these brash, witty poems. “Sometimes,” she says, “writing feels so stupid I think I should get out into the world & do something / like repairing fountain pens, milking snakes, something useful.” No, please hang on and keep writing, Ms. Addonizio. And stay encouraged. As you say, “Neither despair nor a dearth of taxis can last.” Ohio Who am I to say that the hawk circling above the deck
wasn’t really the murdered sister of our host,
as she insisted? Who says the dead stay dead, anyway
or even human — for all I know our souls stream out and leap
into the nearest form, manzanita, termite,
light pole, to begin the challenges of figuring out
when to break into blossom, how to find a mate
or glow softly each evening
without a single glass of wine. Our host
was downing grape juice and growing wild-eyed
about the government, unable to stop reliving
that day on the Kent State Commons over fifty years ago
when the Guardsmen turned in unison and fired on the students.
She was right about politics and false narratives
but wrong about the winged creatures swarming
from the eaves as we talked. Those weren’t moths
but they were sort of lovely until we realized
they were busy eating her guest house
on the California coast, in the pleasant weather we were enjoying
thanks to the drought, grateful that smoke from the wildfires
had drifted elsewhere. As she kept on
I felt sympathy leak out of me until all I could think of
was how to be alone with my lover
and forget about my country’s many crimes,
one of which was killing a college girl. Who, why not,
might have been coasting the thermals all day
looking to survive by killing something else. Who am I to say
a word. It’s not my story. My love and I excused ourselves
and went inside to make dinner. In the nearby cove the breaking waves
endlessly bashed themselves against the rocks. Excerpted from “Exit Opera.” Copyright © 2024 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton. | _tstmp_1729211904-1280-0.jpeg) | | Novelist Ash Davidson with Rich Charles, Ron Charles, Sr. and Sandy Charles at Campus Coffee Bean in Flagstaff, Ariz. (Photo courtesy of Deanna Charles) | | Last week, on a trip with my brother and his wife, my folks finally got to see the Grand Canyon. It was, I’m told, beyond words. On the way back home, they stopped in Flagstaff. At Campus Coffee Bean, they happened to run into Ash Davidson, the author of “Damnation Spring,” a novel my parents loved. (I did too.). Davidson is the communications director for Grand Canyon Trust. Knowing my very thoughtful sister-in-law, I suspect this author encounter was not entirely accidental. Curiouser and curiouser: In last week’s newsletter, I oh-so-cleverly quoted something the Mad Hatter says at his tea party: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.” Alas, Mark Burstein, president emeritus of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, tells me that Alice, not the Mad Hatter, made that remark. And it’s not from Lewis Carroll’s text; it’s from the 1951 Disney movie. (Now watch me fade away until you can see only my embarrassed grin.) Mr. Burstein notes, “The amount of misinformation out there about Carroll is mind-blowing, and he particularly gets more than his shares of misquotes or mis-attributed ones.” I’m hoping the Queen of Hearts takes mercy on me. Send any questions or comments (or corrections) about the Book Club newsletter to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week’s issue about efforts to censor a Little Free Library here. Tell your friends who might enjoy this newsletter that they can read it every week by clicking here. (No, they don’t have to subscribe to The Washington Post.) And remember, you can find all our books coverage, updated every day, here.
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