I wanted to recommend a different song this week, but it seemed like every news story, headline, and push notification I encountered kept nudging my consciousness into some area within my brain that contains lyrics about firearms, some mental storage locker I rarely open: “I gets down like brothers are found ducking from bullets / Gun control means using both hands in my land, where it’s all about the cautious living.” Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, rapped those lines on De La Soul’s 1996 single “Stakes Is High.” The eponymous album, Stakes Is High, was a kind of rebuke against the first glimmers of hip-hop’s big money “shiny suit” era and the hackneyed materialism and narrative clichés that came to be associated with it. Posdnuos and his partners Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, were tired of mafioso rap, “video vixens,” weed talk, brags about luxury gear. Dave’s verse, a list of the things that make him unwell, cleverly flips what it means to be “ill” in the hip-hop sense: 

I’m sick of bitches shaking asses 
I’m sick of talking about blunts
Sick of Versace glasses
Sick of slang
Sick of half-assed award shows
Sick of name-brand clothes 
Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks 
Cocaine and crack which brings sickness to blacks 
Sick of swole-head rappers with they sickening raps 
Clappers and gats making the whole sick world collapse 
The facts are getting sick, even sicker perhaps
I stick a bush to make a bundle to escape the synapse

Although Dave’s delivery is fierce, this litany of mid-nineties rap’s most overdone iconographies has a lulling effect; as flashy as it is, the music he calls out in that list is thematically listless, of no real consequence. It’s all about the minutiae of the moment, the micro-timeline of rap stardom. There is no consideration of the future. On this song, De La Soul considers a more expansive timeline: the fate of meteors, the trajectory of bullets, but also the lifelines of children. The Stakes is High album cover is a black-and-white photo of a group of kids: the kind of gathering Kathy Fish references in her flash fiction story “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” (2017), which has been recirculating after the Uvalde massacre—“Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target … A group of schoolchildren is a target.” The song’s music video illustrates the perplexing apathy of the grown-up world: the trio vacillate between performing the song with brio and hanging out lethargically, letting the external world dictate their energy levels. Except for a mural in the background of one scene and a couple shots of a school bus, there are no images of children in the clip; it features adult angst and malaise. 

The video is framed by the group’s appearance as guests on The Maury Povich Show. They’re there to discuss how much rap music “dictates real life,” and vice versa, ways “to keep it real.” Shots of Povich posing questions to them on a studio set are intercut with clips in which the men carry out everyday tasks: folding laundry, cutting grass, raking leaves, buffing a car, washing the dishes, falling asleep with a newspaper in hand, playing basketball with friends. American daytime talk shows, especially those that aired in the nineties, often showcased the country’s worst fears, or otherwise the most provocative topics in the national discourse. Rap was one of them, but so was white supremacy and domestic terrorism; Stakes Is High was released just fifteen months after the Oklahoma City bombing. By appearing on this faux-episode, De La Soul commented on their public perception while also situating themselves as participants in the spectacle, and as possible consumers of it. 

Money talks—so goes the truism—but rarely is it the subject of fiction. “Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much,” Hernan Diaz observed during a conversation in early spring about the impetus behind his latest novel, Trust. Taking the mechanics of capital as its inspiration, Trust seeks to fill this gap. The novel features a New York financier and his wife, moving between genres (a novel, a memoir, a diary) and time periods (the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the eighties) while exploring the fabular nature of capitalism. As one character declares halfway through, “Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support.”

Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, also reimagines America’s particular illusions. The novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a Swedish immigrant during the California Gold Rush. Born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now living in Brooklyn, Diaz is erudite and energetic both on the screen—our conversation began as a Zoom call when Diaz was on a fellowship in Italy—and on the page, in the email back-and-forth that followed. As he would go on to explain toward the end of that initial call, “Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else.”

INTERVIEWER

Some days after Barry’s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of his I did not yet own. For a year, I picked at the stack, revisiting passages I recalled vividly or had forgotten. The words would come when I was ready, I figured, so I scribbled sentences on scraps of paper, lost them, found them, rewrote them, in an ambulatory manner I thought might have pleased Barry. He was the only writer who made me feel virtuous for my slowness, which I once heard him call “patience,” though I believe even Barry knew the fine line between virtuousness and slacking off. He had told me he sometimes admonished his students, “I cannot teach you discipline, and I cannot teach you hunger. You have to find those things inside yourself.” 

It was his request that I write this essay. Or maybe it was not a request, but a suggestion. He had asked it in a way so gentle, so lacking in urgency, that I would sometimes feel as if I dreamed it, but then I would relisten to a voicemail he left me, which I had saved, and there it was: “I’ve got a kind of favor to ask.” 

When I returned his call, he told me a man was writing a profile for the alumni magazine of the college Barry had attended. The man was interviewing some celebrated writers about Barry’s legacy, but it had struck Barry that these writers were all of his own generation or one below him. Did he even have a legacy if few young people read his work, he wondered? Was there any space for his work in the collective conscience, amid an economy of distraction and a literary world enamored with speed? This was two months before he died. I had known Barry only four months.

He asked me to “think about this,” in case the man writing the profile gave me a call, and maybe also to write about his legacy myself if I felt compelled. This is how he was, his profound gestures composed of language so light it seemed to drift off. I told him I would. 

I’ve always kept diaries in the style of a catch-all notebook: flipping through them reveals poems, dated journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books, phone numbers, and overheard dialogue. I found this page in the middle of my diary circa freshman year of high school. I was practicing my grown-up-style handwriting and forgery of my mother’s signature in order to excuse myself, and sometimes my friends, from school. I was failing pretty spectacularly to be convincing, at least to my eye now, but as I recall it mostly worked. I was fourteen or fifteen and immensely frustrated that my teachers insisted on droning about mathematics and the branches of government and books by boring straight people when I had my own reading list to attend to, as well as drugs with which I was eager to experiment. At this point, I had already known for some years that I wanted to be a writer. At the end of the year, I would drop out to pursue a different sort of education.

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Barbara Deming Foundation, the British Library, and others. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.

En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.”

     “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” 

     “Is it the far side of Belmullet?”

Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.”

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetry magazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

A couple of years ago, I sent my parents a chapter from the manuscript of a memoir I’d written. I couldn’t not send it, though I waited—partly out of cowardice and partly to prevent them from claiming a bigger editorial role than I could tolerate—until the copyediting stage, when it was too late to make substantive changes. While working on the book I’d been able to suppress any anxiety over what my family might think or feel about it, but once it was finished I remembered (you really do forget) that those it describes are not merely characters in a story but people in my life. And then, suddenly, everything I’d written about them was available for preorder. 

The memoir, which sprang from my attempt to reclaim property owned by my great-grandfather in Poland, was hardly a lurid tell-all. On the contrary: it was polite, restrained. The chapter in question was really the only one I felt nervous about, because in it I mentioned a falling-out and subsequent legal fight among my father and his siblings. On first reading my parents were, as I’d feared, hurt, embarrassed, betrayed, blindsided—but after some difficult conversations, we agreed that I could address their concerns by deleting a couple of sentences, altering a handful of words, and changing the names of my uncle and aunt, a gesture my parents felt would go a long way in demonstrating that my intentions weren’t to harm or disparage. This last request created an unexpected wrinkle—in the event that anyone sued me for libel, I would no longer be able to invoke the standard defense that it was all true—but I was fine with it, and the publisher’s lawyers, given how vague my account of the dispute had now become, eventually gave the go-ahead. So my father’s brother became “Hershel,” his sister became “Leah,” peace was restored, and the knot in my stomach loosened. But a few months later when I received the galleys, my mother read the sensitive section in context and wondered if Leah might after all have preferred to appear under her real name. I said it wasn’t too late to depseudonymize her if that was what she wanted, so my mother called Leah and read her the chapter over the phone. 

Leah, my mother reported back, was livid. Beyond annoyed or disappointed—she was furious, hoarse with anger. She doesn’t understand, my mother said, why you even have to publish the book. The problem, it emerged, didn’t have to do with how I’d portrayed Leah, who was barely mentioned—she got a couple of lines of dialogue and no description, as in literally not a single descriptive word—but with how I’d portrayed her mother, Bubby, my grandmother. Or more specifically—because Bubby was also barely in the book—how I’d portrayed Bubby’s sofa, and how that portayal, in turn, implicated Bubby. 

What it came down to was a throwaway line, a quip, in a paragraph describing the shiva after Bubby died, in 2005, while the family rift was still very much ongoing. The scene had stayed with me all these years, and I included it in the chapter because it was strange and tragic and funny, and so poignantly captured the tension between the siblings: three adult children, two of them not talking to the third, stuck on the same sofa for a full week as they received well-wishers. To quote the offending paragraph in full:

For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, Solmaz Sharif, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by the preliminary judges, Sumita Chakraborty and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, the final judges—Victoria Chang, Brian Teare, and Phillip B. Williams—awarded this year’s prizes to Jada Renée Allen, Sasha Burshteyn, April Goldman, and Kristina Martino. The runners-up are Jae Nichelle and Daniel Shonning. The Paris Review Daily is pleased to to publish the poems of this year’s winners.

The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

Between 1963 and 1972, Tonks published two collections of poetry, six novels, a large body of literary journalism, and an experimental sound-poem. She was a serious stylist, writing in the tradition of French nineteenth-century novels and those preeminent portraitists of the modern metropolis: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. As a hip young thing, a fixture on the London scene, her writing captured the pungent, punchy essence of that city in the Swinging Sixties. But she was also an experimental writer and a pioneering mixed media artist; her 1966 “Sono-Montage” was made in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the now-legendary musician and composer Delia Derbyshire (most famous for her electronic arrangement for the theme tune to the cult British TV series Doctor Who). Poetry readings “can be very boring,” Tonks told an interviewer in 1968—“I want to bring poetry into its own dramatically.”

As such, Tonks sat somewhere between the establishment and the avant-garde; as concisely summed up in this description in The Guardian in 1970: “She has a white Italian sports car, a French purple velvet trouser suit, and lives in a Queen Anne house in Hampstead.” Nowhere is her particular eclecticism more in evidence than in The Bloater, which documents London’s cultural vanguard with Tonks’s signature caustic humor and stylistic flair. Originally published in 1968, it sets the tone for the three novels that followed it—Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970), and The Halt During the Chase (1972)—all of which are variations on the same theme: stories of the breakneck romantic escapades of young Tonks-like heroines.

***

Last year, when my mother moved apartments, I came into possession of a largeish Prada box full of my childhood diaries. They go from 1981—I was four, and dictated the diary to my aunt—up to the nineties. I still haven’t read most of them. (I think it was a handbag, and not a small one, that originally came in that Prada box.) It is hard work to feel love for one’s childhood and adolescent self. Reading this entry, for example, I feel ashamed at my eleven-year-old self’s American imperialistic attitude towards my grandparents, who hadn’t heard of a planetarium before but “liked it very much.” It’s interesting that I then apparently felt I had to explain the concept of a planetarium for the benefit of people “a million years from now.” The whole entry gives me a “dutiful” feeling, when I read it now. I think I used to feel like I had to be writing all this stuff down, maintaining a chatty, “delightful” style, explaining every last thing down to the speech patterns of my fifth-grade science teacher, and appealing to some kind of “universal” reader who would understand it all and give each detail its proper value (although apparently this person also wouldn’t know what a planetarium was). What even is a childhood diary—for whom do we keep it?

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Its sequel, Either/Or, will be published on May 24.

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I frequently feel saddened and angry that animals—whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat—mostly ignore or even run away from me. For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable’s animated film Penumbra, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant—“representing all animals or the animal as such”—that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too; from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. There are two humans, but they’re dressed as creatures: “Juliana Huxtable,” the defense, is costumed in furry-esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and “Hannah Black, genus homo, species sapiens” recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida’s reading of Plato, the father of reason or logos). The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair—and very low poly count—playing field of unreality. And so the debate begins.

But it’s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely; her nonhuman “kin,” never. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. It’s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to “decenter” people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black’s breathless address. “Through the use of language,” she begins, “I will show you, and you will understand, and through doing so you will have to admit that you do not fundamentally sympathize with the principle of the animal, you respond to abstract concepts, you know how to come when your name is called.” 

Yet the dazzling avalanche of words that follows is less an airtight argument and more a poem with the rhetorical texture of a rant. Penumbra isn’t just an intervention in theory masquerading as video art; it brilliantly reveals, aesthetically, what analysis cannot: the illogic, the nonhuman, within language and hence within us. Black’s rapid-fire circumlocutions and cascading repetitions are actually impossible to follow; instead, they are reduced to an ebb and flow of breath and rhythm that wash, anxiously, over us. The animals, of course, refuse to respond to her questions, her attempts at taxonomy: “Do you deny that you practice cannibalism?” Legally, the word penumbra refers to constitutional rights inferred using interpolative reasoning; in science, it connotes the gray area between a light and a shadow. This trial is an arbitration of gradients via an indictment of law: a tragedy of reason that makes a mockery not just of justice, but at all of our attempts at living in harmony.

It’s a sign of our species’ self-hatred that most people in Sunday’s audience at Metrograph—where the film screened along with two others from the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement—seemed to interpret Penumbra as a celebration of the inevitable triumph of the inhuman. Maybe they’re right. And no one wants to sympathize with the prosecution! But I felt so bad for us, the tiny minority in a universe that, though sensate, is senseless. As Black’s character says, “We have tried to hold on to the collective being, but the animal refuses to speak to us. All that we know about brutality we learned from animals. We learned how to treat each other as food, we learned how to die indifferently.” Aprés nous, le dèluge, I thought, despondently, leaving the theater.

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As the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade and dramatically decrease access to abortions across the country, the romance book world is fighting back. The Romance for Reproductive Justice auction is offering over 200 packages, including signed/annotated romance novels, author chats, manuscript queries, swag, and more in exchange for donations to National Network of Abortion Funds’ Collective Power Fund. The auction starts on May 21 and runs through May 23.

In early May, Politico leaked an initial draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision, which guarantees a constitutional right to abortion. Although the opinion isn’t final and abortion is still legal in the U.S., abortion rights activists are preparing for sweeping limits to reproductive freedom across the country. If Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortions according to the Guttmacher Institute. With little recourse for fighting the coming SCOTUS decision, pro-choice activists are looking for ways to increase access to abortion if Roe v. Wade is indeed overturned.

Meet Cute Romance Starts an Auction

That’s where the Romance for Reproductive Justice auction comes in. Meet Cute Romance Bookshop & Fizzery, a new romance-focused bookstore in La Mesa, California, jumped into action following the leaked SCOTUS documents.

“There was, very clearly visible on social media, a lot of anger in the romance community in the wake of the leaked Alito draft,” said Becca Title, founder of Meet Cute Romance Bookshop & Fizzery, in an interview with Book Riot. “Organizing this auction was a way for me to channel my own anger into something productive, and I have heard from a lot of our donors that the ability to donate gave them a similar outlet.”

In yet another ill-planned publicity stunt by a democratic elected official, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot — who did not step in to help Chicago Public Library workers during the pandemic — posted a photo of herself reading a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in Houston’s Brazos Bookstore.

Behind her are several other books that have seen book challenges or outright bans in the last year, including Melissa (formerly George), Let’s Talk About Love, Go With the Flow, and more. Right-wing media seized this opportunity to call hypocrisy, much as they did when California’s Governor Newsom posed with a pile of banned books. Though he held Beloved, the media focused again on the carefully-placed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, noting that Lee’s classic has been “banned” in several blue states.

Both publicity stunts did a good job once again confusing the public about the difference between a book ban and a curriculum update. While To Kill a Mockingbird has indeed been challenged and banned, the qualifier that it’s been banned in blue states is a conscious effort by right-wing banners to suggest that a book by a white woman about racism being replaced by books by Black authors who experience the true effects of racism is revoking free speech and freedom to read. As much as there is to dig into this willful misrepresentation, the real issue worth addressing here is how many public figures in speaking out against book bans refuse to engage with the issues of sex and gender (and indeed, race as well).

Among the most banned books in the past year are those which highlight sex, sexuality, and gender. PEN America’s report on book bans in US schools shows that queer characters and topics of sexuality are two of the biggest reasons a book is banned, falling right after books with protagonists of color. These categories, of course, overlap significantly, as seen through the books the American Library Association identified as the most challenged in 2021.

While there’s a range of ereaders on the market, there’s no arguing that the Kindle has taken the top spot in terms of popularity. But narrowing down your ereader purchasing to a Kindle is only the first step. After that, there’s the crucial question of which Kindle model to get. Two of the most well-loved Kindle models are the Paperwhite and the Oasis. They both have similar sized screens and share a lot of features. So, the Kindle Oasis vs. Paperwhite: which one should you get?

First, a little bit of history. The Kindle Paperwhite came out in 2012, and its latest generation/update was in 2021. The Kindle Oasis came out in 2016, and its latest generation/update was in 2019. I will be comparing the most recent generations of both, though because the Oasis has not been updated in three years, it will likely either see a new generation in the next year or so or be officially discontinued.

The Republic of Kenya is the 29th most populous country in the world, home to more than 47,600,000 people, and the third largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has an incredibly rich history, tracing primate habitation for more than 20 million years. Its borders encompass major cities of Nairobi, the current capital, founded by colonialists in 1899; Mombasa, the original capital, founded by Kenyans in 900 CE; and Kisumu, one of the oldest settlements in Kenya and located on Lake Victoria.

The country was invaded by Omani Arabs in the 17th century, who then established a slave trade with Portuguese colonialists. In the 1880s, Germany established Kenya as a protectorate (a deeply colonialist word), calling the whole country the “East Africa Protectorate,” which was transferred to the British in 1890. It was renamed Kenya in 1920; from 1952 to 1959, the Mau Mau people in Kenya fought a rebellion to release the country from British rule. On December 12, 1964, the Republic of Kenya was officially established and functions today as an independent democratic republic, although it is still considered part of the British Commonwealth.

With such a deep history and so many diverse voices — both African and not — in its history, it is no surprise that Kenya’s literature is equally multifaceted and beautiful. I’ve gathered ten books about Kenya here from Kenyan authors, based on recommendations from Kenyan readers and bloggers.

The Best Books About Kenya

If you grew up within the bounds of Western civilization, chances are you’ve heard of Mother Goose in one form or another. Maybe she was the charming and comforting old woman on the cover of the book your parents read to you at bedtime, or maybe she was an actual goose. Whatever the case, the nickname Mother Goose has been synonymous with childlike nursery rhymes and fairytales for centuries, but her true origin is up for debate.

Although she only came into prominence in Europe and North America between the 17th and 19th centuries, Mother Goose’s origins date back to as early as the 8th century CE. Betrada II of Laon, mother of Charlemagne (AKA Charles the Great, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire), spent frequent time in children’s company telling them folk and fairytales.

Her most common nicknames were “Queen Goosefoot” or “Goose-foot Bertha,” as she suffered from a malformation of one of her feet. Some accounts suggest that it was Robert II of France’s wife who was Queen Goosefoot, as her name was also Bertha and her common nickname was “Bertha the Spinner” — referring to someone known for “spinning” fantastic tales that enthralled children. Another theory is that the original Mother Goose was the Queen of Sheba, who was known for having a “strange foot” that resembled that of a goose or swan.

Meanwhile, in France by the time of the mid-17th century, nicknames such as “Mère L’Oye” or “Mère Oye” — roughly translated to Mother Goose — were used as descriptors of women of a certain age who enjoyed delighting children with fairy and folktales. It was Charles Perrault who, in 1697, published his revered and largely influential collection of stories Histoires ou contes du temps passé often supplemented with the subtitle Contes de ma mère l’Oye.

English European readers, however, were already familiar with their own iteration of Mother Goose by the 17th century in the form of Old Mother Hubbard, a nursery rhyme by English poet, Edmund Spenser, first published around 1590. In the 1690s, as Perrault was gearing up to release his own goose into the wild, Madame d’Aulnoy — a French author of literary fairytales — began publishing collections under the pseudonym Mother Bunch, a figure similar to that of Mother Goose.