Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.

The first January we live in Maine, the twenty-second month of the pandemic: we’re all so tired and almost everyone I know in New York is sick. My job has gone remote and I get up each morning to work when it’s still dark. I turn on the small space heater in my office and wrap a big blanket around myself, sit with my computer on my lap. Evening comes, and I text my friend five minutes before I teach at seven. I’ve been at my desk for fourteen hours but can’t think of a single thing I’ve done. What if I hate teaching now? I say. Babe, my friend texts back, it’s January. You hate everything.

The Januarys in high school are all track—all the early Januarys are in Florida and the monotony of those sunny, plastic, clear and cloudless days comes to feel like it’s assaulting me. I run four events at least. The two-mile is the longest, and the last race of the day. Late nights on the bus, the too-big jacket and sweatpants, crumbled rubber on bare thighs while I sit and stretch with my Discman, bile in my throat at the start; everybody cheers when I win, no one after talks to me.

The first January in New York, alone, on Tenth Street between C and D, I’m twenty-one. I call in sick to work. I tell them I got food poisoning because I’ve worked nonstop for months and I can’t fathom smiling another minute, another day, at some klatch of too-thin women who order just one order of our extra-special-everybody-loves-it chocolate-bag dessert with extra spoons, whipped cream on the side; at some guy, with his hand on the low curve of my back, who keeps sending back his steak. I count the cash stuffed in the dark wood box I keep by my bed and then I call again and tell them I threw up so much I ruptured my esophagus and now I have to go to the hospital. I think about how easy lying is. I read books all day, watch TV all night, hardly eat because I can’t afford to eat. The restaurant is uptown and I live downtown and I walk around the whole time assuming that I won’t get caught and I don’t. Oh God, they all say when I come back to work, their eyes scanning my face, you must have been so sick.

Right after ChatGPT was made publicly available, people kept sending Nick Cave algorithmically generated song lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. At first, he tried to ignore them, but they kept arriving. Dozens of them. After reading one that featured a chorus with the refrain “I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am the darkness, I am the light,” Cave felt compelled to respond with an open letter published on his personal website. “This song sucks,” the former punk musician begins. Real songwriting arises from the “internal human struggle of creation,” a process that “requires my humanness.” “Algorithms don’t feel” and cannot participate in this “authentic creative struggle.” Therefore, ChatGPT’s poetry will forever suck, because no matter how closely the lyrics replicate Cave’s own, they will always be deficient.

In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave). His argument is also totally familiar and banal—a platitude so endlessly repeated in contemporary discourse that it feels in some way hard-baked into the culture. According to historians of ideas (see Arthur Lovejoy, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred North Whitehead), this thesis took form sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. A brief and noncomprehensive summary: to preserve human dignity in the face of industrialization, philosophers and poets, who were later called the Romantics, began to redraw ontological boundaries, placing humans, nature, and art on one side, and machines, industry, and rationalism on the other. Poets became paragons of the human, and their poems examples of that which could never be replicated by the machine. William Blake, for instance, one of Cave’s heroes, proposed that if it were not for the “Poetic or Prophetic character,” the universe would become but a “mill with complicated wheels.”

These may have been radical ideas in the late eighteenth century, edgy ripostes to an Enlightenment discourse that had grown stale with its own self-assurance. But two centuries later, the versions of this argument that we have seen play out in response to corporate-manufactured AI hype come across as stale, self-aggrandizing, and distinctly conservative. It also does a disservice to Romanticism’s intellectual legacy, which offers a far more nuanced conception of creativity than Cave’s. In fact, within the Romantic canon there is a metaphor concerning how poetry is made that casts the poet not as an emoting, suffering, conscious being set apart from the inanimate world but as an instrument that takes sensory input and translates it, via some internal mechanism, into poetry. In other words, a kind of machine.

***

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much. It’s not what I would have chosen—who would choose an invasive species?—but my spouse and I agreed we would come up with a Yard Plan and make strategic choices, slowly and deliberately, including eradicating the ivy. Getting rid of ivy is notoriously difficult—my mom warned me it’s “backbreaking work.” I was also, when we moved in, finishing a book project, then in its sixth year and finally arriving at the fact-checking stage. The ivy project existed in the future.

One day, in a stolen moment of daylight, I was sitting around in our front yard with my spouse and small childwhen I noticed a little ivy creeper reaching out, venturing beyond its bed into the grass. The beds were bad enough as it was, but they certainly could not be permitted to grow. So, I grabbed it and pulled. It did not yield. Tough guy, huh? I regripped and pulled harder, and it popped out of the ground, spraying dry dirt in my face. I was elated. I had contained the ivy. I grabbed another vine and pulled.

That was the beginning. From that moment forward, all I wanted to do was rip ivy out of the ground. The ivy beds were just outside my office window, and I knew they were sending out their little traveler vines and growing their territories whenever I looked away. I started ripping ivy while the baby napped. I started ripping ivy while on calls with editors and sources. I invited a neighbor who had (in my defense, unknown-to-me) back problems to come over and rip ivy with me as a social engagement. (She joined me, and hurt her back.)

Ivy’s presence in a yard is binary: all of it has to go, or those green leaves will spring back up at the next rain. I heard this time and again from neighbors who wandered by as I hunched over my work; it seemed everybody had an ivy-pulling story. One couple stopped repeatedly to tell me that ivy is the work of the Devil. A man took pains to tell me I would never win—it would just come back again. Okay, I said. We’ll see, I thought.

Currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image is a dollhouse-size hologram that looks straight from the future. David Levine’s Dissolution, on view through March 1, is a sculptural, three-dimensional film: a cube-shaped space projected from below through a vibrating glass plate that hums and whirs like an analog projector. A twenty-minute monologue runs on a loop, voiced by a tired and paranoid human named Vox (Laine Rettmer), who has been trapped inside this machine and turned into a work of art. As Vox bemoans her predicament—existence as both human and artwork—disconnected images come and go: an octopus mining for crypto, fragments of classical sculpture, and a tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell (the last an homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature). The artwork contorts our own bodies, too; I found myself twisting around to see the object from every angle, hypnotized by its miniature beauty and disoriented by its dizzying colors and sounds. A suspicion toward beauty might be the subject of Dissolution, a piece influenced by Brechtian principles of estrangement and alienation: the small, buzzing machine pulls us in only for Vox to spit us back out.

—Elinor Hitt, reader

The work of history is slow, even for the merciless flow of commercial recordings, as is the influence of most compilation albums. Nobody is ever fiending for a compilation—not really. But let them soak, and they can reshape the past or propose a new future by clarifying the present. Wanna Buy a Bridge? (1980) and Platinum Breakz (1996) spring to mind: the former, put together by Rough Trade, definitively expanded the genre of post-punk; the latter, the first in a series released by Metalheadz, confirmed that drum and bass could channel twenty years of Black music into a single convulsive moment. Time Is Away have done something similar with Searchlight Moonbeam, a “narrative compilation” whose contents span almost ninety years of song and suggest a robust team of slippery dreamers.

Nearly seven years after Lin Yi-Han first published her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise in Mandarin, the English translation is finally on its way to publication in the United States—by HarperVia in May. The novel, which was released posthumously, greatly influenced the #MeToo movement in Taiwan; it was widely read and discussed for its depictions of sexual violence and mental health, and it has also raised significant awareness about sexual grooming.

This piece is one of the last nonfiction pieces Lin published before her death by suicide in 2017. It appeared originally in Mandarin, on BuzzFeed Taiwan, and reflects on the language we use to describe mental illness—words like psychopath, or telling someone to “go check themselves in” as though they were ill. Her descriptions of her time in a psychiatric hospital, layered with the scenes in the university library where she studied, are movingly drawn, and overlap thematically with much of her novel.

 The piece was translated by Jenna Tang, who also translated Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise into English. Tang first encountered Lin’s work in 2017 and immediately knew she wanted to translate it; she was drawn in by Lin’s lyricism and the echoes of Classical Chinese literature in her work, especially poetry. “I could feel her love for writers like Eileen Chang, Hu-Lan Cheng, and more,” Tang told the Review. Tang said, “The way she builds a sense of place through her writing makes me feel like she has always been alive and present with her languages.” The posthumous translation was especially challenging, she said, because she wasn’t able to consult the author on particular choices; still, what Tang describes as the tenderness of Lin’s style made it easier to feel close to the author, even at a distance. “Translating her work was like embodying that language full of warmth and love, which will never go away,” Tang said.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Farid Matuk’s “Crease” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The images and ideas in the poem started long ago, in college, when I met a brilliant artist named Jeannie Simms. Around that time, they were doing a series of photograms, images made by laying an object on photographic paper and exposing it to light, called Interiors: Little Death. Jeannie had said their process was “to make love” to photographic paper. The results are gorgeous ruins, pieces of photographic paper bearing no image but deeply creased and distressed by Jeannie’s touch. I’ve never stopped thinking about the poetics of that process—the intersection of abstraction and embodied desire it involves, the way it confounds the photograph’s habit of delivering bodies as spectacle. Now, almost twenty years later, I’m mostly interested in Jeannie’s desire to create a space where sex, ritual, and art are one and to make a trace there. “Crease” is part of a longer manuscript, and a lot of that book tries to attend to moments where we can sense that entanglement as ethical, sensuous, and joyful.

The part of the poem about the falling flowers comes from time I spent as a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. The school puts you up in a little house donated by the poet Josephine Miles in an area just north of the campus that houses many seminaries and churches. In March of 2020, the neighborhood fell into a routine of evening walks. It was good to be outside and to have a reason to walk slowly, to know most folks around you were caring for their own health and for yours too. But there was also an air of privileged piety about the whole scene—very different than the lives of the “essential workers.” Hence the surliness in the poem about everyone wanting their “stupid church high on a hill.”

On my walks, I kept noticing floppy flowers dropped on the sidewalk. I liked the idea that they were so heavy with their own sex that they had to fall off their stems. The flowers still looked utterly vital sitting on the sidewalk. I am in desperate need of anything heavy enough to crease the infinite regress of what’s given to us as Cartesian space, anything that will make the void fold back so that there’s no void. That’s where my drafts started to test variations on the somewhat familiar phrase “not with but of.”

In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sign, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.

Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a “scoop” on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro team. He quickly became one of the core reporters, writing everything from regular features—an On the Money column, which advised readers about how to invest in wine or bet on horses—to cover stories like “Our Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River—And Comes Back Alive!” A few months later, Moore approached Stratte-McClure about a new role. “Do you balance your checkbook?” Moore asked. “Of course. I’m a fanatic about it,” said Stratte-McClure. Moore’s follow-up: “Would you like to be publisher?”

Nothing else remotely like Metro existed at the time. Other English-language competitors like the Herald Tribune provided local news coverage, but the Metro offered a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry by writers such as Gregory Corso and capsule reviews of Paris’s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues. Stratte-McClure told me in a recent interview that the Metro routinely “tackled taboo subjects. Money, salary, who’s voting for whom, personal details about people.” The Metro also had a robust list of what was going on in Paris, such as job opportunities (“URGENT: Seek Modern Dance Teacher”), personal ads (“WIFE JUST DIED—looking for attractive woman dress size 36, between 20 & 31”; “I should like to offer my husband a totally original birthday present: a good meal out with an attractive girl/woman”), requests for information (“Have you had an abortion in Paris? Share your experience with your sisters”), events (such as, on Bastille Day, the Communist Party’s “traditional swinging affair on the Île Saint-Louis”), and shoestring-budget recipes (“In addition to being extremely good for your health, chicken livers are the biggest bargain at Monoprix”). The magazine allowed its writers the freedom to write what they wanted: to explore longer-form stories that leaned quirky, the result of enmeshment in a subculture or riffing on one’s pet topic.

It’s a holiday week, so let’s keep this short and sweet—and end another year of coverage on a promising note.

Earlier this month, I rounded up the current lawsuits pertaining to book bans across the country. Among them are two lawsuits in Iowa aimed at the state’s controversial SF 496, the bill that contributed to the use of tools like AI to determine whether or not school library books needed to be banned.

Lawyers representing Penguin Random House in one of the suits said that the attorneys representing Iowa reported that the law was being misused to ban LGBTQ+ content. Even though the state ban on LGBTQ+ instruction (whatever that means) would still apply to grades six and lower, this does not mean books with LGBTQ+ content cannot be made available in school libraries. Only books that depict “sex acts” as defined by state statute were subject to removal from school libraries.

In other words, those are not books with or about LGBTQ+ characters.

As Andrew Albanese wrote in a piece at Publisher’s Weekly, the challenges of navigating this new law—which passed with the help of state members of Moms For Liberty who have enjoyed a cozy relationship with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds—showed in the initial lawsuit hearing:

Despite my dad’s best efforts and his love of John Wayne, I was never a fan of westerns growing up. That all changed, though, when I discovered the world of alternate-history westerns. Alternate history books explore history through the question, “What if?” What if: angels and demons controlled a western town? What if: hippos had been introduced to the Mississippi? What if: abused women in brothels got their revenge? Those are just a few of the questions explored in the pages of alternate history westerns, a genre sometimes also referred to as “the weird west.”

Alternate histories often — but not always — blend history with fantasy or science fiction to reimagine what could have been. Think of the popular steampunk aesthetic, for example, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Alternate history can also be a great way to reclaim the narrative or frame history in a different way — something that’s especially compelling when you’re talking about a place and period as complicated and violent as the American West. While the westerns of old featured an all too predictable glorification of life in the west, despite the brutality that led to western expansion in the United States, these alternate-history westerns often feature more nuanced stories. And with a touch of magic or technology, they’re a lot more fun, too.

So giddy on up and find out how the west was weird.

Reading Legends and Lattes has gotten me thoroughly obsessed with the cozy fantasy genre, and lucky for me — and you — there are some really great books like Legends and Lattes out there to enjoy. Exactly what makes a cozy fantasy novel cozy can shift a bit from book to book, but there are some similarities across the board. They’re generally full of heartwarming characters, little to no drama, and relatively low stakes. And the addition of bookstores, coffee shops, tea shops, or bakeries doesn’t hurt. That might just be a personal preference, though.

When it comes to books like Legends and Lattes, in particular, I’m looking for books about characters finally looking to settle down, stories set in magical shops, casts of found families, friendship, and maybe a touch of romance. But most of all, I’m looking for books that invite you in and envelope you a nice, warm hug. Because that is what cozy fantasy is, really: the bookish form of pure comfort. And that’s what Legends and Lattes does so well. So brew up a pot of tea or coffee, drag out your fluffiest blanket, and settle in for the coziest of cozy books, just like Legends and Lattes.

Even if you don’t pay much attention to literary news, there are some book awards you’ve probably heard of: The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize. But these big-name awards are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens and dozens of smaller book awards out there, and paying attention to them will lead you to exciting books that get overlooked by the flashy, mainstream prizes.

One of the best things about these smaller awards is that they often recognize books from indie presses that don’t get huge marketing budgets. There are also lots of prizes designed to celebrate literature from certain regions and written by authors from marginalized communities. All literary awards are subjective and a bit random, but if you’re looking to expand your reading beyond the bestsellers, checking out the past and current winners of niche prizes is a great way to do so!

These eight nonfiction books have all won different literary prizes in the last five years. But many of them have flown under the radar and only have a few hundred ratings on Goodreads. In other words: these are hidden nonfiction gems, each of them brilliant in its own way, and you’re going to want to get your hands on them.

What do we remember about our favourite fantasy stories? Apart from the compelling plots and characters, we’re most likely to fall in love with a fantasy novel because of strong worldbuilding, whether that’s the creation of a fascinating fictional society, the inclusion of fun legendary creatures, or, in many cases, the construction of an interesting and thought-provoking magic system. Throughout the years of fantasy dominating as a genre, there have been many different types of magic systems, some well-explained, with strong structures, while others fall into the “no rules, just vibes” category. But what makes for the best magic systems in fantasy, while others are disappointing?

Many magic systems are based on concepts or ideas that exist in the real world. The wizards of Discworld devote years at university to learning spells from ancient times (or, in later years, simply enjoying big dinners and doing very little real magic). Some magic systems are based on maths, while others draw on crafts such as sewing or weaving. Some fantasy authors have created magic systems based on music, while others have taken a religious slant to their characters’ magical practices, having them work closely with gods to cast spells in their worlds. A good magical system is consistent, not too overpowered (even magic users need to struggle to make a story interesting), and is interesting enough to stick in the reader’s mind long after they’ve finished the story. Here are some of the best magic systems in recent — and not-so-recent — fantasy literature.

As every author has probably revealed in an interview at some point, writing a novel is hard work. Writer’s block is a constant professional hazard; characters can decide to do their own thing at a moment’s notice, and I can confirm that it’s a real struggle to stop a plot from getting soggy and slow in the middle. This doesn’t go away with practice; as Joe Fassler noted in his article My 150 Writing Mentors and Me, “The artistic process never seems to get easier, not even for the most successful, famous authors.”

In more practical terms, many writers are hampered by day-to-day life, like having to work a day job or the time-consuming commitment of childcare, something noted by the women writer’s magazine Mslexia: “Survey after survey has found that women spend more time on housework and childcare than men […] So it was for Mrs. Gaskell at the birth of the novel, complaining that ‘everybody comes in to me perpetually’ while ‘Mr. Gaskell just trots off to his study.’” There are also major structural inequalities within the world of publishing that mean Black authors and other authors of colour are underrepresented across the board, with the publishing world throwing up roadblocks such as “quotas for books by or featuring people of colour, a perceived limited appeal for these books and a feeling that authors of colour could only write about race issues.”

But when you finally get the book published, all the difficulties are worth it, right? Well, not always. Sometimes, authors deeply regret the books that they have published, even if — and sometimes because — those books made their names or brought them wild success. Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he tried to kill the character off permanently, only to be forced to bring him back after a public outcry. Agatha Christie resented the public demand for more Poirot novels; she found her creation irritating and hated all the idiosyncrasies she had given him, something she wryly references when writing crime author Ariadne Oliver’s hatred of her own fictional detective character.

Many of the books that authors regretted writing are well known, but others come as a surprise. However, it’s important to note that nearly all of the authors who went on to regret their books are white, and most are men. As the publishing statistics show, authors of colour struggle far more than white authors to be published in the first place — it’s likely that there are simply not enough books being published by authors of colour for those authors to have those same feelings of regret about the work they have struggled to get out there in the first place.

Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard. 

I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers; since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon. 

I first latched on to the Sphere in mid-2021, when architectural renderings had already been circulating for a few years. During the 2022 midterms, while election forecasters were waiting for late-breaking votes from Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is the county seat, I remember thinking that the Sphere would be the right place on which to beam the same consequential results in the future. If the electoral college was always going to turn random populations into oracles, why not enhance the effect and ground the abstraction with the most cosmic of shapes? At that point, the structure was still a giant salad bowl of curved steel beams just off the Strip; Madison Square Garden had been building the thing since 2018, and inflation had pushed the projected cost to $2.2 billion, nearly double the original budget. By September of this year they finished it, and U2 started its forty-show residency. I booked a trip to Vegas and bought a ticket to Postcard from Earth, the Darren Aronofsky “movie” that had been made for the venue. (Cheaper than Bono’s show.) It was all I could think about for weeks. 

Then I began having dreams that punished me for my enthusiasm. In them the Sphere was a pathetic size, the circumference of a backyard trampoline, languishing in roadside parking lots like a sheepish dumpster with a vending machine’s tepid glow. People whizzed past it in their cars as they would highway billboards for personal injury lawyers. And I guess that was the outcome I was afraid of. For me, the question of the Sphere was not really about the subjects that other journalists had focused on—the state of live entertainment, or what screens do to our attention spans—but about whether a physical object could still truly excite us, siphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions. (For the majority of human history, this type of adulation was mostly aimed at entities that were sacred, cosmic, or both, like comets.) That the Sphere was owned and operated by sterilized companies didn’t really matter to me; perhaps this increased the effect of the thing as a smooth, vacuous singularity of the masses. Once I got there, and once I went inside it, would the energy I had generated thinking about it have anywhere to land? I was hoping—and this might have been the optimism that the Sphere was brazenly promoting at a time when everyone seemed to be shorting it—that if you tore away all the facts about its content, you would still be left with what moved me against all odds: the shape, and the light.

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality. Holm’s Termush is both a realistic chronicle of a microsociety’s collapse and a surreal journey of a man confronted by crisis, remaking his surroundings as a way of coping.

The detritus and decisions of the past may still affect our future, in that the threat of nuclear holocaust has not left us, though it is far less pronounced than in the 1960s, when Holm published Termush. But in the interim, other disasters that manifest in largely “invisible” ways have overtaken us: our fear of radiation and immolation has led to climate crisis fear, which has led to pandemic fear. The grappling of minds with these threats leads to derangement and odd visions, because the elements of infiltration and contamination baffle the brain. Our hauntings in the modern era so often now are not ghosts but simply the things we cannot see—but that radically affect us.

Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.