I love movie math. I love microrationalizing macroabsurdities, laser-focusing on hyperspecific justifications. 13 Going on 30 is a perfect proof. Once upon a time, it’s Jennifer Garner’s (Jenna’s) thirteenth birthday. She wishes she were thirty, she claims to her mom, having read a Poise magazine article touting the thirties as the prime of one’s life. “You’ll be thirty soon enough,” says her mother—and indeed, if Mom had known the film’s title, she might have clocked just how prescient she was. Jenna’s invited the popular clique, the Six Chicks, over for her birthday, despite the truth bomb from the boy next door, Matty, that “there can’t be a seventh sixth chick. It’s mathematically impossible.” The Chicks trick Jenna into “seven minutes in heaven,” that is, waiting blindfolded in a closet for a kiss (that never comes). When she realizes she’s been duped, she desperately chants the mantra she learned from Poise: “Thirty, flirty, and thriving.” By law of rhyme and the rule of threes, exactly thirteen minutes in, counting the opening credits, Jenna falls out of bed in her sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment.  

At thirteen, Jenna’s too early for everything: a retainer around her top teeth, tissue paper stuffed down her shirt to make breasts. At thirty, she’s already running late. Jenna tumbles into a waiting car; ten minutes later, she’s in a meeting for the editorial job she didn’t know she had thirty seconds earlier. The boss, with chin hair plucked into a devil goatee, pins up fourteen nearly identical magazine covers: Poise and its rival Sparkle are side by side. June’s Poise features Jennifer Lopez’s ten secrets; Sparkle’s got her eleventh. 

Math goes on. Manhattan-Matty and Jenna reunite, only for Jenna to discover that she’s been shitty to Matty in the seventeen-year blackout interim. There’s impossible real estate math: they live blocks away from each other, he in the Village with a sunken living room and a backyard, she near Union Square with a walk-in shoe closet. Even for 2004, the salaries don’t add up to a down payment on a fourth of one of them.

Time, like movie math, is bouncy: business day, lunar month, fiscal year. (I recently got into an argument about the existence of a “business week.” I argued pro: fourteen business days equals two business weeks.) I first watched 13 Going on 30 on a plane, flying backward in time. Now, I’m thirty-four going on seventeen. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching at the university where I did my undergraduate degree, but this is my last month there for the foreseeable future. It’s spring, so campus is getting ready for reunions. It’s a reunion off-cycle year for me—year thirteen—but Princeton’s reunions are famously a cosmic wormhole; even those of us who don’t believe in anything go into a New Jersey fugue state for a weekend that’s actually three days but one night. But in movie math, this all totally tracks: micro-obsessing over minutes lets you leap out of the frog-march of linear progression. 

There are dozens of censorship bills under consideration across the country. You can keep tabs on them and their status over at EveryLibrary, who have been diligently tracking them and getting people to write and show up to put an end to them. It will shock absolutely no one to see how many of those book ban bills overlap with 533 bills proposed this year targeting trans people.

But writing about the not good stuff doesn’t always seem to garner the same kind of fervor or action that writing about the (minimal) good stuff does. So this week, let’s look at the four bills underway that are doing the opposite: they’re proposing legislation to protect the right to read and the ability for librarians and educators to provide a diverse array of materials to patrons of all ages.

In other words, these bills will let professionals keep doing the jobs they’re educated and trained to do.

How is the happy ending in a romance “earned?” What sort of redemption arc or emotional growth does a main character need to go through to “deserve” love? What mistakes are “unforgivable” for romance characters to make? These kinds of questions trouble me as a romance reader because they can require the genre to provide moral justification for its existence. Not being deep in the discourse for other genres, I couldn’t say if other literature is similarly scrutinized. But I can say that I often find myself wishing people would hand in their romance police badges.

On the one hand, I understand people’s nature to be defensive of romance against all the naysayers. Romance lovers want to hold up shining examples of the genre. There are absolutely romances that show the redeeming or improving power of love. There are romances that demonstrate healthy ways to navigate rough spots in relationships. That doesn’t mean they all need to! There are also romances between people who are really messed up and choose each other in a cruel and uncaring world. Just because a romance can’t be staged as a morality play doesn’t make it bad, or not a part of the genre.

On one hand, everyone is allowed their preferences and boundaries. If you don’t want to read about a character having unprotected sex for whatever reason, you certainly don’t have to. And of course it’s valid for something like unprotected sex to be potentially triggering to a reader; that’s not what I’m talking about.

Also, pointing out stereotypes and tropes in books that prop up racism, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, etc. is worth doing. It takes work for people to recognize and unlearn these elements that have been baked into storytelling for too long. That’s different from passing judgment on characters behaving “badly.” So I invite readers who simply found Feyi offputting to consider their assumptions about this character’s actions.

What is literary fiction? I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I’m stumped. (Let me just say this up front: this essay is about 750 words, and I absolutely do not give a definitive definition anywhere in those words.) Like any genre or age category, “literary fiction” is a designation that is primarily a marketing tool, an idea of where to find a book in a bookstore…but genre is also supposed to give readers an idea of what to expect, at least in very broad terms, and I don’t think literary fiction does that.

A genre like mystery or romance tells us there will be a central [mystery/romance] plot with expected tropes, familiar structure, and a satisfactory ending where the main character(s) [solve the crime/live happily ever after]. There are always books that break the mold when it comes to tropes and structure, but they conform to the central plot and ending rules almost without exception. Likewise, a science fiction book will in some way involve fictional science, a fantasy book will explore the fantastical, and a suspense book will keep the reader in suspense. Historical fiction takes place in the past, crime novels concern themselves with, well, crime (but not necessarily the solving of it), etc.

But what about literary fiction? What can I expect from the genre? The best definition I can find is that it will have “literary merit.” Well, so do all of the other genres I just mentioned. Next!

After the undefinable “literary merit,” I most often hear that literary fiction has “beautiful writing,” that it is character-focused, and that it is not genre. Hmmm. I can think of books in every genre with beautiful writing, so that can’t possibly be a serious definition. As for character-focused, I suppose it might be true in broad strokes that genre books are plot-forward and literary books are character-forward, but there is simply no way that’s true across the board, or even close to it. Which leaves the idea that literary fiction is not genre fiction.

Well, what does “genre” mean here? Simply, it encompasses the genres like science fiction and fantasy, crime and mystery, romance and women’s fiction (another “genre” that seems to be undefinable and probably nonsense). So, according to this rule, literary fiction is always realistic and never focused on a romance or mystery plot. Again, I say: Hmmm.

There are not enough books about exercise for all bodies. I realized this while reading an amazing romance novel about a woman who falls for her fitness coach. I was intrigued by the fact that I could read it through Audible and I really loved the cover art. However, I felt nervous once I hit the synopsis. This was a book about a fat woman (yes please) using a fitness app (oh dear) with trigger warnings about discussions of weight loss and disordered eating (oh yikes). I was so torn because romances with fat main characters are my catnip, but I didn’t know if I could handle it if she became thinner and subsequently got her love, never mind the diet culture bullshit that might rear its head. I took a chance.

I’m so glad I did.

While reading this book (I promise I will tell you more below) I realized that there is a lot out there about loving your body and renouncing diet culture, but much less about how to embrace things that diet culture has ruined. Most people have felt some pressure to eat differently and exercise more to shrink, and since that rarely works, we see these tasks as punishing and broken things. But what if our society talked about exercise as something that feels good no matter how your body looks? There is movement in this direction, but it’s still rare for young people to be raised with this relationship to fitness.

Below, I’ve gathered books about exercise for all bodies. My hope is that we continue to move towards a discussion about bodies that is much more about how to feel good in them than how to shrink and shape them to meet a societal standard.

Happy May, YA fans! It’s finally getting warm enough that we are in one of my favorite seasons: hammock reading season. I hope that you’re well prepared for the warm weather ahead with the perfect comfy outdoor spot, all the drinks and snacks you need, some sun protection, and — of course — a healthy stack of good books. May is going to be incredibly kind to us and shower us with some amazing new releases!

While I’m sure you already have some of this month’s biggest titles on your radar — such as the new Becky Albertalli (Imogen, Obviously), Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls, the hotly anticipated follow up to Angeline Boulley’s first book, Warrior Girl Unearthed — I am going to be highlighting some other great reads that might not be on your radar already. From engaging YA stories that offer some incisive social commentary to swoony romcoms to horror, there’s a lot going on in May, and it was really difficult to narrow it down to just ten, especially as we have five weeks of Tuesday new releases! But all of these YA books absolutely deserve a place on your TBR.

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

Fantasy has always intimidated me. New worlds. Complex societies. Classes of magic I don’t understand. Unfamiliar, extravagant names making up a cast of characters I can’t possibly keep track of.

Forget it. I’ll stick to horror.

But then I read a book last year that I later realized was classified as dark fantasy, and I sort of liked it. And another one that was apparently historical fantasy. Also fun. And some works of magical realism. I really liked those, too. Had I just been wrong about an entire genre for 42 years?

It turns out that the fantasy I have trouble getting into is known as high — or epic — fantasy. High fantasy is usually set in a fictional world, one that typically has magical elements. These books have high page counts, high character counts, and high stakes. Oftentimes, there is an epic quest.

Meanwhile, the books I’ve been drawn to as of late are apparently low fantasy. Some elements of magic intrude into the otherwise normal world we’re most familiar with. These types of fantasy can also often overlap with other genres.

Each season brings its own vibe to a good murder mystery. Autumn is full of anticipation and sharpened school supplies, while winter serves bone-chilling dread with the help of long nights and brutal winds. Spring promises to unearth buried secrets after the snow thaws. Summer, though, is all about possibility. The long days and balmy evenings mean beaches and pool parties, backyard barbecues and sleep away camps, and that’s just a few of the promising settings for a page-turning murder. As sultry backdrops for people behaving badly, the summer months of June, July, and August bring the heat for crimes of passion in summer mystery books. Whether the characters are watching steam come off the sidewalk in the city or listening to waves crash on a deserted beach, a sweltering summer leads to tension higher than the temperatures. 

So put on your sunglasses and SPF and get ready to lose track of time getting caught up in murder and mayhem. Here are eight summer mystery books that offer exotic vacations, fatal wellness retreats, foreboding resorts, and plenty of sweating suspects to keep you turning pages in the sun.

Around the time he published some of his mostly famous works—Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, to name a few—Henry Miller handwrote and illustrated six known “long intimate book letters” to his friends, including Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Emil Schnellock. Three of these were published during his lifetime; two posthumously; and one, dedicated to a David Forrester Edgar (1907–1979), was unaccounted for, both unpublished and privately held—until recently, when it came into the possession of the New York Public Library.

On March 17, 1937, Miller opened a printer’s dummy—a blank mock-up of a book used by printers to test how the final product will look and feel—and penned the first twenty-three pages of a text written expressly to and for a young American expatriate who had “haphazardly led him to explore entirely new avenues of thought,” including “the secrets of the Bhagavad Gita, the occult writings of Mme Blavatsky, the spirit of Zen, and the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner.” He called it The Book of Conversations with David Edgar. Over the next six and a half weeks, Miller added eight more dated entries, as well as two small watercolors and a pen-and-ink sketch. The result was something more than personal correspondence and less than an accomplished narrative work: a hybrid form of literary prose we might call the book-letter. As far as we know, Miller never sought to have the book published, and the only extant copy of the text is the original manuscript now held by the Berg Collection at the NYPL.

Edgar had come to Paris in 1930 or 1931, ostensibly to paint, and probably met Miller sometime during the first half of 1936. At twenty-nine, he was fifteen years Miller’s junior. Edgar soon joined the coterie of writers and artists who congregated around Miller’s studio at 18 villa Seurat. His interest in Zen Buddhism, mysticism, Theosophy, and the occult apparently helped energize Miller to embark on his own spiritual pilgrimage, and to articulate what he discovered there in his writing. “I feel I have never lived on the same level I write from, except with you and now with Edgar,” Miller confided to Anaïs Nin. Miller left Paris in May 1939. Edgar eventually returned to the United States as well. Though the two men seem to have stayed in sporadic contact, they probably never met again. Except for a single letter from Miller to Edgar written in March 1937—a carbon copy of which Miller saved until the end of his life —no correspondence between them is known to have survived.

—Michael Paduano

March 17, 1937

The first and only time I went to the Walmart in Iowa City was surreal. When I was in high school, my parents’ business-oriented small press had published a book called The Case Against Walmart that called for a national consumer boycott of the company; the author denounced everything from the superstore’s destruction of environmentally protected lands to its sweatshop labor to its knockoff merchandise. So by the time I made a pilgrimage out to the superstore at age twenty-one, I hadn’t stepped in a Walmart for nearly a decade, and it had acquired this transgressive power—the very act of crossing the threshold was as shameful as it was thrilling. Immediately, I sensed the store’s anonymizing power: outside, I was nearby the Iowa Municipal Airport, en route to the Hy-Vee grocery store; inside, I was anywhere. I didn’t know what I expected, but it was wonderful, and terrible, and weird, and empty, but also full of stuff. In the real world, I was allergic to animals, but I found myself hypnotized in the pet aisle: snake food, dry cat food, wet cat food, Iams, I am what I am. Each shade of paint chip in the Benjamin Moore display bouquet was more erotic than the one before. Primrose Petals, I Love You Pink, Pretty Pink, Hot Lips. Everything was too bright, oversaturated, illuminated in fluorescent Super Soaker–level high beams. I wasn’t high; I didn’t need to be. I barely saw another human, but the accumulation of things constituted many lifetimes of living. I was in a mass graveyard—a place defined by, as Annie Ernaux puts it, “the dead silence of goods as far as the eye could see.”

From November 2012 to October 2013, in Look at the Lights, My Love—published in 2014 in France and in 2023 in an English translation by Alison L. Strayer—Ernaux recorded her visits to the Auchan superstore in suburban Cergy-Pontoise, an hour northwest of Paris. Like all of Annie Ernaux’s works, Look at the Lights plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire.

The Auchan superstore, the locus of Ernaux’s book, is a nesting-doll “self-contained enclave” within Trois-Fontaines, a conglomeration of the city’s public and private institutions: post office, police station, theater, library, etc. Ernaux describes the apparently normal, bustling village of Trois-Fontaines as a trompe l’oeil town, a privately owned corporate center that shuts down at night. “There is a vertigo produced by symmetry,” Ernaux writes, “reinforced by the fact that the space is enclosed, though open to the daylight through a big glass canopy that replaces the roof.” I’m reminded of the indoor mall in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas—the Forum Shops—with its sky-painted ceiling reminiscent in zero ways of the Sistine Chapel. The roof cycles from light to darker blue in an accelerated yet elongated version of time: days are thirty minutes, but there are no weeks or years.

Trois-Fontaines touts itself as having every service that people need, and then many that people don’t. In addition to the flagship Auchan superstore, there are: salons, pharmacies, a daycare, cigarette vendors, wheelchairs on loan, free bathrooms. And yet, Trois-Fointaines has no life of the mind: the bookstore and café closed long ago. Though Trois-Fontaines has the appearance of a bustling small community by day, because it’s privately owned, the center’s sealed off after business hours: “when you walk by it late at night,” Ernaux observes, “after getting off the commuter train, its silent mass is more desolate than a cemetery.”

I don’t usually write to music. I’m too susceptible; I find it can give what I’m writing a false, unearned resonance, like slipping a poem into Garamond to make it “better.” But there are two songs that are rhythmic enough, each in their own way, that I sometimes put on a loop when I’m revising. There’s something about the cadence and the breath in them that works for me, that creates a kind of chamber that keeps the outside world at bay. And though I’ve heard “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (a quote so apt, it’s attributed to no less than a dozen people), here goes:

“Spiegel im Spiegel,” 1978—Arvo Pärt 

The piece—in English, “Mirror in the Mirror”—begins with a simple ascending arpeggio, little triads that subtly alter, reflected back and forth like light on water, a mirror looking into a mirror. The melody stretches over and through the scales, extending like a long breath. The left hand on the piano arrives, eventually and sparingly, to ground the upward yearning, trees reaching toward light from the roots. The work is minimal in its composition, yet never fails to tug me out of my momentary preoccupations into a broader sense of time, drawing me into eternity through the little window of now. There are many beautiful recordings, but Angèle Dubeau’s version is a good place to begin, I think. If you put it on and close your eyes, everything will soon feel softer.

“Fleurette Africaine,” 1962—Duke Ellington

I have always liked categorical statements that are obviously wrong. When someone says to me “This is the way the world works,” I get very excited, even though of course nobody knows how the world works. Or, even better: “There are only two types of people in the world.” This statement is usually followed by two binary qualities that could be used to define and divide all of humanity. Such a proposition is clearly ridiculous and, to me, deeply appealing. This is perhaps why my favorite game is called Dichotomies.

The game originated because my friends and I are always talking about our other friends. One night my friend Nick and I began idly categorizing people we knew, somewhat arbitrarily, as either thunder or lightning. We knew immediately who was which: Nick and I are both lightning. Our friend Ben: thunder. Alex: lightning. Graham: thunder. Lily: thunder, though maybe she has a bit of lightning too? We discussed and debated. This dichotomy is a good one in part because of its ambiguity; not everyone interprets it quite the same way, but everyone has a strong instinct for what each category might mean, and a sense of who might be which. Our attempts at categorizing people opened up some interesting questions: Was so-and-so outgoing, or actually quite shy? Did he make a big impression at first, or grow on you later? Was there a certain kind of power in being thunder and a different one in being lightning? Which would you rather be? And why was it so easy to tell the difference?

So I began to think of other interesting binaries. Another friend and I decided that some people are “men about town” and some people are “helluva town guys.” (Gender-neutral.) As I see it, a man about town is someone who always has fifteen plans that they’re running to, someone who is excited to meet new people and try new things, someone who is essentially oriented toward the public sphere and the allure of the untried and untested. At a party, they will end up talking for hours to a fascinating stranger who they will never see again, but they’ll remember the conversation forever. A helluva town guy is someone who likes to go to the same bar every weekend and drink ten beers with their best friends and say, “Man, life is so good!” But they are also someone who might know the secrets of the city a little bit, who might take you to an unremarkable-appearing restaurant that turns out to be special. They are your quintessential regular; they return, and they identify with the fact of their continuous return. Sometimes helluva town guys might find themselves living man-about-town lives—but at their core, they remain helluva town guys, even if they’re going out five nights a week. Dichotomies are, crucially, not about preference; they are about someone’s essential essence.

All summer long I thought of other ways to divide the world in half: New Hampshire/Vermont, Picasso/Matisse, punk/hippie, still/sparkling, IPA/lager, Beatles/Stones, France/Italy, Bob Weir/Jerry Garcia, glamour/charisma, hater/enthusiast, ellipsis/etc., elusive/available, green/blue, beer/shots, Yankees/Mets. Many of these pairings betray my own particular interests—you could endlessly reformulate them, and in fact I do. The best ones are pairs that are not actually quite opposites but proximate and different. So I began to play this game with people, often in groups, where you might ask someone to go around and categorize everyone, even people they don’t know well. Or, if there are two of you—say, on a date—you might go through them together and discuss who falls on which side of the aisle. I began to play it endlessly, in almost any circumstance. I started keeping a note on my phone, a running list I could pull out when someone said, “Okay, do another one.”

I might not have read a single truly funny novel that year if my friend hadn’t stopped by my Los Angeles porch one afternoon carrying an out-of-print copy of Robert Plunket’s comic masterpiece, My Search for Warren Harding.

We were in the worst of days—the depths of the pre-vaccine pandemic—and our world was on fire, both literally and figuratively. The copy of the novel that my friend, the writer Victoria Patterson, handed over to me looked the way we all felt in those days: yellowing, battered, dusty from too long in storage. Tory bellowed through the muffling fabric of her N95 mask that it was one of her favorite novels—and really fucking funny.

I needed funny. I opened the book a few weeks later—and despite my allergic reaction to the mold in the edition, kept reading for the next 256 pages. When I was done, I sat in a kind of silent, focused delight. I held in my hands one of the best, and most invigorating books I’d read in years, and certainly the funniest—and yet, how was it out of print? Why had I never heard of this novel before now? (Later I learned Tory had actually written an excellent piece about it for Tin House magazine in 2015.) Why had it disappeared so fully from the literary landscape? And what did that say about this literary landscape if it could bury a book like this? Most intriguingly: Who was Robert Plunket?

The jacket bio for Plunket’s second (and, so far, last) novel, Love Junkie, published in 1992 and also out of print, reads:

In a novel that she had been trying to read the night before, she’d read the description of a late spring day as a glittery day, and she thought of that as she was walking with her daughters, and the dog, up through the boulevards. It was turning from a warm into a hot day, even though it was still morning, and not yet summer. The dog was panting, and they took a break, to drink their bottles of water thrown underneath the stroller. There was something filmy to the skin of her daughters, she had dressed them that day in their lightest clothes, and later, she had promised, they could put on their swimwear at the local splash pad. Before leaving she had quickly pulled their hair off their faces, and now they kept on taking off their hats and handing them to her, and she would throw them in the bottom of the stroller. They needed to get their hair washed tonight, she observed, as she looked at them, their curls greasy with sunscreen. The children had decided they wished to dress alike, or in corresponding colors, and today they were wearing shades of yellow. They were mostly quiet, strolling down the street, the older daughter riding on the attached wooden platform with wheels that trailed behind the stroller that they called the skateboard. She had found a piece of dark yarn and was finger-knitting with it, which she loved to do, or tying a piece of yarn into knots, or wrapping it around and around a stick. It was beginning to be the kind of heat in which one went about in a daze. Sometimes the children wanted to get out to walk and she would hold their hands while their father pushed the stroller, which was laden with provisions for the day. It was such a beautiful walk that morning. The green of the bushes and the trees at this time of year seemed lush and overgrown. Because of this green canopy they were in the shade most of the time, until they had to cross major streets and intersections. She felt that they were walking in a bright encroaching greenness, and had the sensation that they were alone with the trees and the gardens. When she got home she was supposed to work on an essay she had been commissioned to write, on an artist who painted landscapes that felt wild and overgrown like this while remaining strangely suburban. His green paintings felt like they were set in the middle of a forest, often enhanced with black glitter, iridescent beads, and black and green embroidery. There were no figures in his paintings, although there was a narrative, however mysterious, and suggestions of places where children were once playing, or, perhaps, of the abandoning of these spaces, for an unknown reason. There were cars parked outside with their doors left ajar, pairs of tents and treehouses, chairs overturned. This interested her more and more, the strangeness of an emptied landscape, and how then to write of this emptiness.

One day recently, during the baby’s nap, she had read a book on eeriness, which suggested that the eerie takes place within a silent and unpeopled landscape. Because she had been thinking of these paintings by this artist she didn’t know who lived elsewhere, on this walk she realized she was beginning to see the outside world like his visions, that it had taken on their strangeness. The landscape in which she was walking with her family that morning appeared to glow. In the novel she had been trying to read the night before, a woman keeps seeing a figure in green everywhere she goes, and reading it she thought that she’d love to write a text to attempt to speak to these abandoned landscapes that glowed green, like a strange green light. On their morning walk she remarked to her family that it was so strange that there was no one around. It was so silent out, except for birdsong. She had a thought—that the landscape they were walking through was like the paintings she was supposed to write about, except there was no birdsong in the paintings. Or perhaps there was, the thought continued, but she couldn’t hear it in the silence of the gallery in which she had originally seen them, with only the sound of her children and of her footsteps on the creaky wooden floors. On the long walk they passed almost no one else on the sidewalk, if anyone at all. Perhaps it was because it was morning, her husband remarked. Or perhaps the heat. Maybe everyone was inside, in the blast of air-conditioning already, having no desire for the outside. But there were still so many cars on the street, she replied. More likely those families who lived in the large houses went to other large houses on the weekend, especially for the holiday, large houses that were even more remote, more rural, even more beautiful. But when did they enjoy their gardens? Today, because of the holiday, there were none of the crews working outside, as there had been the day before, none of the fumes or roars of their lawnmowers and leaf blowers that were so noxious to walk by. She waved at a sole woman who was gardening outside, a sturdy homeowner who had most likely been in that neighborhood forever, before the change. The beauty and care of the gardens here always surprised her, especially in the intensity of early summer. There was a wildness to so many of them, especially now, at the peak, the overgrown rosemary, the reds and pinks of the rosebushes, the fragile tendrils of peonies jutting out. She knew that there was artifice to this wildness, that it was cultivated, but still she felt thankful for its beauty. Lately she had felt overcome by the visual splendor of the flowering trees outside of the large houses, the surprise to these full open flowers, almost obscene. It made her feel dizzy, or perhaps it was the heat. She hadn’t drunk enough water that morning, after coffee. The day before at the farmers’ market she had purchased two bunches of peonies, such as were flowering now, one fuchsia and light pink and the other pure white with speckles of pink. They had spent the day watching them, enjoying them, and wondering whether ants would be needed to open the few remaining closed bulbs in the bouquet. This morning her oldest daughter and her husband had placed an ant from the sticky kitchen counter on one of the flowers, as an experiment. When she had first seen the paintings of this artist, on the walls of a gallery, while she was wearing the baby, holding the hand of her daughter, she felt moved by them, especially by the flowering trees, embroidered with hectic and voluptuous clusters of red and pink thread. There were also all of his pool scenes, with the chlorinated light of the blue, that she thought of the day before, when they had proceeded on their walk in the other direction, toward the larger mansions near the park, and passed by the house on the corner where her daughter had attended a birthday party almost exactly one year earlier, as she had been in the same preschool class that spring with the boy who lived there, with his older brother and their parents. The preschool had taken place mostly in the park, in the style of forest school that became popular last year, and they were sent videos by the teachers of children, bored and hot, standing near a monument or excitedly playing in the nook of a tree. Her daughter had joined much later, and was an outsider to the group, but still was excited to be invited to the birthday party, especially because of the pool. The mother had been incredibly nervous, outside of her skin, for her daughter, who couldn’t swim, swim classes being almost entirely closed the past two years, and was swimming around in the artificially bright blue hole of water, with the shudder of its waves, and so she had purchased her a life jacket for the occasion and insisted she wear it. The horror and terror of the pool, and yet how inviting it was, its coolness. The father, who was much calmer about such things, was the one to take her, but then she joined with the baby later, wearing a long muumuu with painted flowers, walking by the blue-tinged hydrangeas that hadn’t appeared yet, so it must have been a little later in the year. When she came upon them at the party her daughter was so incredibly happy in the pool, her skin having that soaked, buoyant feeling children getwhen they are swimming, but she could hardly watch her, teeth chattering, swimming around and around in a circle, her life jacket not worn, clutching a pink foam noodle. What a luxury, to have a pool, she thought then, and also yesterday, as they walked by the house, past the gridded gate, and heard sounds of children playing and splashing inside, although they couldn’t see anything. Pools have to be fenced in, otherwise children would drown, her husband said to her in response, or something to that effect. It was the first time they had heard the family out in the pool that spring. When they got home from their walk the day before, she sat on the steps and watched the girls gleefully chase after the bubbles their father was blowing, the youngest especially desperate to catch one. They were framed by the green overgrown bushes in the front garden, and when she narrowed her eyes, she could imagine a field of green, with only the iridescence of the floating bubbles.

Circa 1969, the writer Albert Murray paid a visit to his hometown on the Alabama Gulf Coast, to report a story for Harper’s. Murray hadn’t lived there since 1935, the year he left for college. During his childhood, elements of heavy industry—sawmills, paper mills, an oil refinery—had always coexisted with wilderness, in the kind of eerily beautiful landscapes that are found only in bayou country. But as an adult, Murray was aghast to see how much industry had encroached. The “fabulous old sawmill-whistle territory, the boy-blue adventure country” of his childhood, he wrote, had been overtaken by a massive paper factory: a “storybook dragon disguised as a wide-sprawling, foul-smelling, smoke-chugging factory.” He imagined that the people who had died during his years away had been “victims of dragon claws.”

When Murray made this visit, he was in his early fifties and and was still at the beginning of his writing career. He hadn’t yet published a book. But over the next several decades, he would go on to write prodigiously, channeling into singular prose his memories of his old neighborhood before the arrival of the dragon.

The resulting work is a bildungsroman that unspools across four novels: Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996), and The Magic Keys (2005). All four were reissued by the Library of America in 2018 (following a 2016 edition of Murray’s nonfiction). They share certain themes in common with other novels about boyhood, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Adventures of Augie March; but thanks to Murray’s inimitable style, and the novels’ setting, there’s nothing else quite like them in American literature.

The novels also form part of a second canon: the growing body of literature on Murray’s neighborhood, a place of historical significance in its own right. That neighborhood is known as Africatown. Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon is also set there, and several books from the last twenty years have dealt with its history more systematically.