I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but  

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field. 

The tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they’re scattered or revised. 

For a second I hear “Like that gather-” as an imperative: Do it that way, gather in that manner, before the noun “gathering” gathers across the margin. I briefly hear “one of each I”—each of us is a field of various “I”s—as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has “planned” it. (The comparative metrical regularity of “Like that gathering of one of each I planned,” the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when “to gather one,” at the end of the seventh line, repeats “of each,” as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between “each” and “kind”—and a kind is a gathering of likes—between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.)

Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways.

Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides.

The subjects of our Writers at Work interviews, too, slip between worlds. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Art of Fiction interview, describes “the woeful treadmill of needing approval” that drove her, at the height of critical and commercial success, to leave her American life behind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she tells Francesco Pacifico, with whom, in Rome, she spoke in her new language. And in her Art of Poetry interview, Alice Notley describes the need, in her work, to go beyond conscious thought and the “scrounging” of everyday life—beyond, even, the grief of losing loved ones. “You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you,” she tells Hannah Zeavin, before adding, casually, “I started hearing the dead, for example.”

Perhaps a kind of doubleness is fitting for the spring we’re in: the season of hope, which is, this year as ever, filled with dread. When we asked the Swiss artist Nicolas Party to make an artwork for the cover of our new issue, he sent us not one image but two. Like in de Chirico’s The Double Dream of Spring, painted early in the First World War, each image exerts a kind of formal terror, at once seductive and monstrous. We decided that, for the first time in the magazine’s seventy-one-year history, the issue would have twin covers. Subscribers will receive the cover featuring a still life, an array of uncannily sagging apples and pears against rich blue. Buyers at newsstands and bookstores can pick up the version featuring a coastal landscape, albeit one in which the ocean is green and the sky a candy pink. If you’d prefer to alternate between realities, you can always have both.

The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell stories. When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He declines in a huff. Konrad’s parents, by contrast, love telling stories. They are almost addicted to it, and they argue over who will go first. They therefore decide to keep a list, so that everyone gets a go. When Roland, the father, has told a story, the mother puts an r on the list. When Olivia, the mother, tells a story, the father enters a large O. Every now and again, a small s finds its way on to the list in between all the r’s and o’s—Susanne, too, is beginning to enjoy telling stories. The family forms a small storytelling community. Konrad is the exception.

The family is particularly in the mood for stories during breakfast on the weekend. Narrating requires leisure. Under conditions of accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the patience, to tell stories. We merely exchange information. Under more leisurely conditions, anything can trigger a narrative. The father, for instance, asks the mother: “Olivia, could you pass the jam please?” As soon as he grasps the jam jar, he gazes dreamily, and narrates:

This reminds me of my grandfather. One day, I might have been eight or nine, grandpa asked for strawberry jam over lunch. Lunch, mind you! At first we thought we had misunderstood him, because we were having a roast with baked potatoes, as we always did on the second of September …

“This reminds me of … ” and “one day” are the ways in which the father introduces his narrations. Narration and remembrance cause each other. Someone who lives completely in the moment cannot narrate anything.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, I’m talking about one of my most anticipated memoirs of the season!

There’s a whole lot to love about science fiction and fantasy (SFF): fabulous world-building, epic adventures, fantastical creatures, awe-inspiring technology. Surely no nonfiction title could live up to the excitement that a good SFF book can deliver?

As a devoted nonfiction reader, I can assure you that is not true! Nonfiction can weave a tale just as irresistible as anything that sprang from a fiction writer’s imagination. A skillful nonfiction author uses the same methods that make fiction so entertaining and applies them to events that happen in real life. And, in some cases, nonfiction books can also shed light on plot points or devices you see in sci-fi and fantasy or on the authors themselves, giving you a better appreciation of their work.

This list features eight nonfiction titles that will interest SFF fans in different ways. No matter which one you choose to dive into first, it is sure to satisfy your need for larger-than-life adventurers and fantastic quests that are far out of the ordinary. You’ll get to travel to places that are inaccessible to most readers, and you’ll even get to see how common SFF tropes bring life to other genres. It’s a great reminder that literary categories are neither discrete nor set in stone—that’s part of the magic of reading.

For a son of the titular city, reading Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother’s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. “At least you got to leave,” I want to tell him. “Imagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.” He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole.

Still, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a “maddening Babel.” The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads. He wrote, “This ‘gypsy’ business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone … I feel they are trying to chain me down.” With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los Ríos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: “What we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.”

I visited Furnald Hall on a Thursday in January. It was around 3 P.M. The sky, vacuumed of its gauze, had begun to pale. I went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I’d leave quickly. Perhaps it was because I was rereading the section in Poet called “Poems of Solitude in Columbia University” or because it was shortly before registration for the winter semester, but every sound in the hallways was harsh and detached—hoarse conversations behind half-closed doors, the thin complaint of de-icing salt underfoot. Room 617 was locked, but 618 was being moved into. With the student’s permission, I examined the room and looked out the south-facing window onto campus. The student asked me what or whom I was searching for. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t rewild the sycamore skeletons that were now clinging to the day’s last light; I couldn’t properly conjure the summer of 1929; but I did wonder if it was from this vantage that Lorca dwelled on his former lover, the supposed careerist.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

It’s Friday. The sun is out. Baseball is back. March Madness has begun. And I’ve got a case of the wiggles. Let’s keep it lighter today.

Worth a Thousand Words

T, the New York Times’s style magazine, does all kinds of cool shit (oh, to have the budget of a traditional media outlet!), and it’s always a treat when they go bookish. This week, artist Marcus Jahmal offers an illustrated guide to the new books of the season. It’s fun and interesting, and it’s not your usual “here’s a picture that sums up the themes of the book” approach. For reasons that go unexplained, Jahmal instead decided to open each novel to page 76 and capture the action from a selected quote. My kingdom for a companion interview with the artist about how and why he shaped the project this way. 

Your Daily Dose of Inspiration 

Five years ago when he began classes at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ajibola Tolase was sure he’d never realize his dream of being a poet. Tolase, originally from Ibadan, Nigeria, struggled through school and then struggled to find work. After a long string of failures, he took a flyer and applied to poetry programs at two U.S. schools. It was a smart gamble. His debut collection, 2,000 Blacks, will be published in the fall, and he was just awarded the prestigious Cave Canem Prize, putting him in the company of numerous Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winners and two U.S. Poet Laureates. May his efforts succeed!

The Book is Not Always Better

For my money, Nicholas Sparks should retire from writing books and set up a James Patteson-esque idea factory for romantic tearjerkers. Dude came out of the gate with The Notebook, and that story still has legs! The new Broadway musical adaptation opened last week, and it sounds like a smash. Sparks’s flavor of romance—though he claims he writes “love stories,” not “romance novels” (he’s wrong)—has never been my jam, but hear me out. Ryan Gosling’s live “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars was stellar, and if the producers want to talk him into taking a spin on Broadway, I will certainly be open to giving them my dollars. They have to be thinking about this, right?!

What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. 

The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers.

Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. 

One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. 

The National Book Critics Circle honors excellence in literature and focuses its work on elevating the conversation about books, reading, and criticism nationwide. The group formed in 1974 at New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. There are currently 600 members who are editors or literary critics.

Every year, the group honors the best of the prior year’s books published in English with the National Book Critics Circle Award in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism. The 2024 awards were given this year on March 21.

This year’s winners in each category are:

Additional awards were handed out by the group as well. They included:

You can learn more about the National Book Critics Circle at their website and discover the previous award winners.

Misconceptions about book bans are legion. When they’re perpetrated by folks who are against book banning, the truth is, those myths emerge not out of evil or desire to misinform. Instead, they come because this moment in book bans is unlike any other in American history. They also come because the average person—be they a book lover, a library worker, an educator, or simply someone who cares about democracy—is not steeped in this news day in and day out and, thus, does not see the whole of the picture. It’s not bad information. It’s a lack of information.

Let’s talk about a small number of misconceptions and why it is important to get these facts correct.

Book bans make kids/teens hurry to read the books being banned

This is not true, and it’s a statement that is shared with all of the love, thought, and care in the world—it’s also perpetrated by some of the biggest names in the book world who think they’re doing a favor by repeating it. Unfortunately, the sentiment and belief is not true.

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: “Acid Baby Jesus,” “Haight Street Art Center,” “I’m Still Voting for Zappa.” As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the first floor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter.

The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials—illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards—used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are flying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations.

Balancing this carnivalesque excess, at least to some degree, is a modernist sense of order. This announces itself principally through two core features of the blotter form: repetition and the grid. Many frames house full “sheets” of blotter: square or rectangular pieces of cardstock, printed and often perforated according to an abstract rectilinear grid demanded by the exigencies of blotter production. These grids are made up of individual hits or tabs, generally a quarter inch square or so and numbering anywhere from one hundred to four hundred to nine hundred units per sheet, depending on block size and design. While some sheets are illustrated with a single image that cloaks the entire grid, many assign the exact same figure to each hit, resulting in sheets that loosely resemble Andy Warhol’s canvases of Campbell’s soup cans. Other framed exhibits contain mere fragments from larger designs, sometimes nothing more than a single, hairy hit, perhaps the last extant example of a run from the eighties that has otherwise been literally swallowed up.

How to refer to all this paper? Users have called the stuff “blotter” or “tickets,” while police have used terms like “paper doses.” These days such pieces are often known as “blotter art,” a term that in many ways reflects the III’s own efforts to reframe this illicit ephemera into aesthetic objects (which is why I will stick to the more neutral “blotter”). There is another factor: over the last few decades, the blotter format has become a genre of popular art and a perfectly legal collectable. Though formally resembling their illegal forebears, editions of so called “vanity blotters,” undipped in LSD and frequently signed, are produced for collectors and casual fans rather than drug traffickers—who nonetheless can and do dose such wares when they need or want to. Though ignored by the larger art world, the vanity blotter market keeps on trucking, despite (or because of) the low cost of entry and a lack of critical valuation or collector apparatus.

What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it?

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it.

We are excited to announce that on April 2, at our Spring Revel, Moira McCavana will receive the George Plimpton Prize, presented by the 2020 winner, Jonathan Escoffery, and the Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Caleb Crain by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent and recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Isabella Hammad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, Emma Cline, and the 2023 winner, Harriet Clark.

Moira McCavana is the recipient of a 2019 O. Henry Prize, and her work has appeared in Guernica, The Drift, Harvard Review, and The London Magazine. Her debut short-story collection, Electrodomésticos, was published by Sarabande Books in February. “Every Hair Casts a Shadow,” which appeared in our Fall 2023 issue (no. 245), is narrated by Inma, the owner of a failing shoe shop in Barcelona. The Paris Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Every Hair Casts a Shadow” leaves most of its mysteries intact. Moira McCavana traces disparate characters in their obscure movements through grief. One believes her dead son communicates through trivia questions on a television game show. Another takes an interest in a younger man, her only employee in her failing shoe store, who charms her “by asking about my parents despite my age.” The young man shows a touching kindness to their few customers: “I watched Víctor’s silhouette sit the man down on the bench, remove his shoe, and gently extend the man’s foot out before him, nestling it inside the metal measuring device,” writes the narrator. It is only in the story’s last line that we learn about the “you” to whom the story is addressed.

Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize is awarded to a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year and is given in memory of the Review’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Emmanuel Carrère, Harry Mathews, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist.

And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude—an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel, Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave.

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise.

The weather is getting warmer, and the flowers are blooming, which makes March a great month for reading outside (though if you have allergies like me, maybe pack a box of tissues with you!). I often bring along a children’s book on our outdoor excursions, and there are lots of March children’s book releases to choose from.

While March always has a lot of book releases, this March has just SO MANY. I know I say this every month, but because of the unusually high number of March children’s book releases, I had an extra hard time narrowing this list down to ten books. All this to say, if you want to read my reviews of even more awesome March children’s book releases, you should subscribe to Book Riot’s kidlit newsletter. Several books I review this month are inspired by the author’s experiences or the author’s family’s experiences, whether it’s about growing up Deaf, housing Korean War refugees, or grappling with mental illness in middle school. Several of these March children’s book releases made me cry, and just as many (and sometimes even the same ones) made me smile and laugh out loud. I include historical fiction, fantasy, novels-in-verse, funny read-alouds, and more.

There’s something for every reader! I hope you enjoy these March children’s book releases as much as I did.

I’m a big reader of historical fiction, but I have a soft spot for books that go way way back in time. Reading books set in ancient worlds is often purely escapist, but also brings me a specific kind of comfort. This might not make sense to some since the thing about ancient civilizations is that they tend to sort of…collapse. But reading about people living, loving, losing, and ultimately persisting in antiquity helps me make sense of the world I live in now. It reminds me that the problems of my own life mostly aren’t new and that, in general, they too shall pass.

You may be wondering what “ancient worlds” means, exactly. This is where I’ll confess that I’d written half of this post when I second-guessed whether my picks technically made sense or if I’d really just run with “set a long-ass time ago.” The answer is a little bit fluid, but generally, ancient civilization “refers specifically to the first settled and stable communities that became the basis for later states, nations, and empires,” beginning with the invention of writing about 3100 BCE and lasting for more than 35 centuries. And while this definition makes sense since writing made historical record-keeping possible, humans, of course, existed long before writing did.

There are thus many, many ancient civilizations in our global history (this Britannica list is almost 90 entries long ), and it turns out my “long-ass time ago” rubric aligns pretty well with reality. Huzzah! The books I present you with below range from mythology retellings to history-inspired fantasy. They will whisk you off to ancient India, Greece, and Egypt, to the Pre-Columbian Americas, to ancient China, Pompeii, and more.