“Okay, fine,” I said, when we saw the price of train tickets from Paris to the wedding we were attending deep in the South of France. “I’ll drive. But we’re getting a Citroën Cactus.” I had not driven in Continental Europe before, and had, by quirk more than anything else, only ever driven a succession of Cactuses; first my mum’s, then a different rental, then, finally, my own.

The Cactus is essentially a four-door, five-seat car, but one of deeply muscular proportions—when I sent a photo of my gray model to a friend who could barely believe that I drive, let alone own, a car, he replied, “It’s, like, a 4×4?” Then there is my favorite feature—unique, as far as I know, to the Cactus—a strip of “Airbumps” lining each side. Said to act as a buffer on collision-prone Parisian streets, they make the car look a little like it’s kitted out in a North Face jacket. Cactuses are not flashy, nor are they known for their reliability. Say the word Citroën to any man who is invested in cars and he will shake his head and start talking about “those French cars and their electrics.” But I have never loved anything because it is functional.

So if I was going to drive for hours on the wrong side of the motorway, I wanted a Cactus. Europcar, however, had other ideas.

“What is this car?” I said, when I saw the word Renault on the rental forms in Europcar’s Charles de Gaulle office. “We selected the Citroën Cactus.”

In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I’m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the hunch of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book’s particular smell—though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing—emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: here is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; here is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they’ll ever be again.

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one—in my case, my reading program circa 1990 was shaped by a saturnine and pinchingly generous librarian named Cynthia, who noted our shared inclination toward what I might now call optimistic gloom and gave me, at the age of eight, a children’s series on environmental disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Love Canal. It was Cynthia—alarmingly old, nimble, with fraying hair, and whose face seemed to shatter when she smiled (a wonderful moment in itself, though it was scary to see her face reassemble into its usual austerity, like watching the breaking of a water glass in reverse on VHS)—it was Cynthia who gave me Robert Cormier’s 1977 YA novel I Am the Cheese.

The cover of the book was promising, I saw. It showed a boy, such as I both thought and wished I was, maybe twelve years old, with a wistful, reluctant look, big ears, and sharp elbows; he’s in the gray wash of a prison cell with cracked concrete walls, a wood pallet for a bed, a key (weirdly—why the key?) on a peg behind him. And I had a hunch of the book’s smell, certainly: it was something contiguous to the feeling of a fall morning, and to the horizon looking south, out of town; contiguous, too, to the brackish salt sense of future adulthood, of workdays and money fear, of someone, someday, mysteriously wanting to kiss you. In it I sensed some shadow of the future—as adulthood is, for kids, both inevitable and impossible; as childhood can be intuited, when you’re a kid, as the long shadow of your own adult body cast back onto your child present. I Am the Cheese contained a message for me, I felt. I read the whole thing in one go, one morning in the back of our Datsun Maxima, headed to the mountains, probably, the Oregon Cascades, with the ever-present smell of cut grass and gasoline in the car from my father’s landscaping work; I read the whole thing as though goaded to—whipped on like a dog in a pack of dogs behind the musher of the book.

It’s a paranoid book, and desolate—written, I now understand, at the end of the Vietnam War, around Watergate, the grimmer surfaces of world order newly visible in the first hints of Cold War melt-off—and it was hypnotizing. I dread descriptions of plot, blow-by-blow accounts, but suffice it to say here: I Am the Cheese involves a family swept up in the nascent witness protection program via the father, a small-town-journalist-turned-whistleblower to the violent excesses of government corruption. The book unfolds through the consciousness of the family’s only child, a quiet boy named Adam, and it takes place in the fall, in New England (itself a thrill: me, who had never left Oregon except to visit, once, Fresno). And it is threaded through with references, tightening my ignorant heart to anticipation: references to jazz; to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; to petty shoplifting; to the perpetual haunting of the father; to shabby motels, diner hamburgers, pay phones; to conspiracies, details, forms of love and betrayal organizing like ice crystals just behind the surface of things.

Translated by Imogen Taylor

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me—she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its—midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film’s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another—decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip over, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle’s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

My parents both worked, and they both made good money, and I needed a car. It all felt very incidental. They had this image in their heads of an ideal weekend—the two of them driving around the Texas Hill Country with a large, iced drink in the cup holder. They’re sitting in the front seats, vintage-by-way-of-long-term-ownership Ray-Bans strapped on tight, and the top is, of course, down. After some searching, they found a fairly cheap used Mercedes-Benz CLK 320—convertible, two doors, soft top, black paint, black interior. They said I could drive it when they didn’t want to, which turned out to be basically every day.

I often forget that this can sound pretty cool. Not only the notion of having a car at sixteen, being able to get around or away if I needed or wanted to, but also that the car was a murdered-out drop top. It is cool to have wheels, especially in Texas. We lived in a suburb outside the Austin city limits, but my parents both grew up in small towns, one in South Texas and the other in the Panhandle. Getting a car, for them, had been the first notion of a kind of promise to leave those small towns. Leaving was, of course, the coolest thing a teenager could do—that great cliché articulated to me when my dad played me Bruce Springsteen songs. My parents saw this car and saw themselves having left, and they saw me in it, years later, as a kind of Ferris Bueller—loud, omniscient, and abjectly capable.

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

What are psychological safety books? According to Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety” and wrote one of the books below on the topic, it’s an understanding that it’s okay to express your ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes without “the fear of negative consequences” in group settings like a family, a workplace, or a friend group. Improving psychological safety in a group can increase engagement, improve decision-making, and “foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement,” according to Edmondson.

In a McKinsey article, social scientists believe psychological safety is a “prerequisite for people to be at their best in all aspects of life.” Improving psychological safety doesn’t just impact your workplace performance but also your personal life, too.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a priority for many people in leadership roles or organizations as a whole. According to a McKinsey Global Survey conducted during the pandemic, psychological safety and the behaviors that promote it, like establishing a positive team climate or setting up leadership development programs to improve open dialogue, were limited at modern workplaces despite how important it seems to be.

If you’re looking to learn more about the concept or make your workplace better in whatever way you can, read these eight psychological safety books to get started!

In response to the events unfolding in Palestine, as the death toll reaches horrific levels, I wanted to put together a list of fiction written by Palestinian authors.

A quick note: nonfiction and memoir are important, and I don’t want to take away from those. I encourage all those interested to educate themselves by reading nonfiction through reliable online sources and nonfiction books. Haymarket Books, in particular, has an excellent collection and has recently been giving ebooks on Palestine away for free on their website.

But fiction can be an accessible way of forging empathy and connection. We read and put ourselves in the shoes of the protagonists, see through their eyes, and understand their experiences and lives. These eleven books shine light on the experiences of violence, displacement, disillusionment, and hope of the Palestinian people. Please dig into these books with an open heart.

As always, please note that while I took great care to list content warnings where I could, things can fall through the cracks. Please do additional research on the recommended titles if needed.

Last October, I highlighted the movement happening in several communities and public libraries to declare themselves book sanctuaries. Book sanctuaries are institutions committed to upholding the First Amendment Rights of all citizens, wherein book bans and challenges must follow a specific procedure to be considered. They are places where books and the right to read them remain at the forefront of what an institution does, and well-funded, well-connected political groups do not get to wield their power in changing what is available.

The movement for book sanctuaries has only continued to grow since. States like Connecticut have developed grants for community libraries wishing to become such designees, and several libraries in the region have hopped on board.

Thanks to the work of Christina Perucci, a Reading Specialist and librarian who just completed her MLIS at San Jose State University, there is now a way to know what libraries or communities have worked toward the status of book sanctuary. She’s developed a database of all the book sanctuaries across the United States and Canada, which you can access here. It turns out that it is not only libraries or towns that are declaring their communities free from book bans and censorship. So, too, are other organizations and institutions, including a nonprofit, an acupuncture studio, and a cafe, among others.

“As a librarian and a book nerd from way back, I am terrified at the increasing success of book banners and the anemic response from ALA. The idea that the way to improve our schools or our society is by limiting access to information is so appalling to me,” explains Perucci, who began tracking book sanctuaries this summer. “I appreciate the bravery of libraries and librarians who are formally declaring themselves ‘book sanctuaries,’ especially those who are coming up with creative workarounds, like Brooklyn Public Library and the Digital Public Library of America, for those who may not have physical access to a sanctuary.”

While book sanctuaries will not stop book bans — only policy changes, adherence to current policy, and legislation will do that on any significant scale at this point — they are a reminder of how vital access to information and to stories is for so many.

I take pride in my disabled life, an existence full of joy and wonder. But sometimes, moving through the world as a disabled person can feel overwhelming. At every turn, there are reminders that this world wasn’t made with disabled people in mind. But when I pick up books by disabled authors, it’s like reading an encouraging note from a friend reminding me that there are a whole host of other disabled people trying to go about their lives just like I am.

2023 was a year star-studded with incredible works of disability literature. There’s a wealth of poetry, memoir, essays, and researched nonfiction. There are people who have been disabled their entire lives and people new to their lives as a disabled person. It’s one of the first years I can remember having to struggle to keep up with all of the books by disabled authors being published — what a great problem to have!

I’ve gathered together some of my favorite books by disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, and neurodivergent authors. There are some of my old favorites — like Jen Cambell, Samantha Irby, and Jenn Shapland — and some new-to-me favorite authors, including Tara Sidhoo Fraser, Janine Joseph, and Ashley Shew. Whatever kinds of books you enjoy, there is sure to be something on this list for you!

Annie Baker’s Janet Planet is a film that reminded me of what it is actually like to be a child: the boredom and fascination of learning to play a tiny electronic keyboard; the experience of faking illness so diligently that you kid yourself; those self-invented witchy rituals that offer the promise of control. Set in a crunchy Western Massachusetts town and mysteriously infused with the grain of an eighties family photo, it follows Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), an eleven-year-old with a wise, anxious face and a T-shirt down to her knees, and her single mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), as their household is disrupted by three visitors. Like Fanny and Alexander, one of Baker’s favorites, it’s a film framed by theater—there’s a culty open-air production with puppets and masks, a dollhouse with mismatched inhabitants. It also contains a scene with some of the best dialogue I’ve heard outside an Annie Baker play (while you’re here: you must read our excerpt of Infinite Life in issue no. 238!), in which two female characters have the kind of argument that only the closest friends can have, while tripping on MDMA.

—Emily Stokes, editor

RBMedia, one of the world’s top producers of audiobooks, has released a list of the ten bestselling audiobooks of the year. Some of the titles line up with bestsellers in print, like the newest book in Rebecca Yaros’s hit romantasy series The Empyrean. Others, though, seem to have found unique success with this format. Gigi, Listening by Chantel Guertin and narrated by Natalie Naudu has a celebrity author, which gives it a built-in audience in any format, but it follows a main character who travels to England to try to find an audiobook narrator she’s fallen for — it’s no surprise that readers would reach for the audio version of this story!

The audiobooks that topped the bestseller list range from literary fiction to kidlit, fantasy, comedy memoir, self-help, and even a history book: Emperor of Rome, written and performed by Mary Beard. Unfortunately, while this list represents multiple genres, the authors aren’t particularly diverse — these titles are disproportionately by white authors.

One exception is also one of the biggest books of the year in any genre: The Covenant of Water, written and performed by Abraham Verghese. This was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, who called it “One of the best books I’ve read in my entire life.” It came out in May and is still on the bestseller lists.

To see the full list, check out RBMedia.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

The arrival of fall always sends me running toward the kitchen. Summer is all about meals that do not require heat — sliced tomatoes on good bread, limey cucumber salads, bagels piled with pickled onions, scallions, and herbs. Despite the abundance of produce, summer is not my favorite time to cook. That distinction goes to fall, with its blessedly cool days and crisp nights. Fall awakens the cook in me again. Suddenly, I find myself craving complicated baking projects, warming soups and stews, and afternoons spent making elaborate meals for friends.

All this cooking excitement often leads me to new cookbooks. Fall is a big season for new cookbook releases, as illustrated by the books on this list, which are just a tiny fraction of all the cookbooks that have just been released and are still coming before the end of the year! My own cooking (and eating) tastes are wide and varied, which means these cookbooks are, too. I’m drooling over new books that delve into the cuisines of Taiwan, Nigeria, and Iran. Two of my favorite bakers also have new cookbooks coming out. I can’t wait to make some of the hearty feasts in Adeena Sussman’s Shabbat, and I already know that Simply West African is going to introduce me to many new favorite recipes. I hope these books inspire you toward your own kitchens. I can’t wait to get cooking.

In the months in which death swooped down on my father, circling on some days, and on others, its talons gripping the bars of the hospital bed where he lay dwindling, I found myself caught, as if on a Möbius tarmac strip, driving between Manhattan, where I live, New Haven, where I was teaching, and Long Island, where my father was dying. His death had been precipitated by a fall, but for years he had been kept alive by a series of red blood cell infusions; these had stopped working, and at almost ninety, one by one his faculties, until then intact, had one by one begun to fail. I had loved my father, but our relationship had not been an easy one, and his dying did not mitigate those complications nor make things easier between us. He was not a man who approved of my many casual arrangements and rearrangements or who participated in the give-and-take of ordinary life. He without fail believed he was right, but he also believed in portents and he was afraid of the dark. When I was a child his father died of the same blood disease that would kill him fifty years later, and early on the morning of that first death a flock of mourning doves alighted on the terraced lawn behind our house. Come and see, my father said. I was twelve, in my nightgown. A decade later, after my grandmother died, my father refused for the next ten years to sit in a darkened movie theater.

That fall, the autumn that turned into the winter of my father’s death, was for me more than usually fraught. A love affair had ended, or hadn’t—all that remained to be seen—but it meant that, as we were not speaking, he did not know that my father was dying, and I did not break our silence to tell him. A beloved dog, belonging to my middle daughter, a beautiful white Pyrenees, had developed epilepsy, which had resulted in seizures; during one seizure, the dog had badly broken her leg running into a tree; the decision was to put her down; my daughter, too, had a broken heart. I had an allergic reaction to my COVID booster, which resulted in a virulent raised rash all over my torso. And so on. Every Tuesday I drove eighty miles to New Haven from my house in Harlem, up the Saw Mill past Spuyten Duyvil and over to the Merritt Parkway, where the autumn leaves were so beautiful it was like driving up the bloodstream of a unicorn, and then from New Haven the next day one hundred miles to Long Island, over the Whitestone Bridge. My father had gout; he had pneumonia; he had dementia. He recognized me, or not. Afterward, I drove back over the Triborough to New York. The bridges were sutures over the bays and rivers. At the end of these trips I would park the car or put it in a garage a few blocks away from the house, climb up the stoop, go through the crowded little vestibule where steam hung in the air from the radiator, and then sit, still wearing my coat on the little sofa that was pushed against the wall. Sometimes I sat there for a few minutes, but more usually, I sat there for hours.

The sofa is a family relic. When I was first married, we found, in the attic space of a friend’s old chicken coop, the skeleton of a sofa. We were living in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue; the appeal of the forlorn sofa was that it was small. We brought it back in pieces tied to the roof of the car, and a few weeks later I had it re-covered with seven yards of pale silk twill embroidered with a pattern of pale red stripes and pink and yellow flowers: the choice of a person who has not yet had children or cats. A decade later the sofa moved to a larger apartment overlooking Morningside Park. By then I had acquired three children and a second husband, who conceived a deep dislike of the sofa, which he said was a Victorian copy of an early eighteenth-century design. There was a baby on the way. The brocade flowers unraveled. Laundry piled up on the sofa. When we moved to a drafty house down below the park, the sofa, now shreds, as the children liked to pick at the embroidery, was put between the windows at the end of the dining room until, in a frenzy of domestic renovation, it was shoved against the wall by the front door.

A peculiarity of the house to which we moved is that it is only fifteen feet wide. Sitting on the sofa in my coat, still as a figure hacked from stone, I looked almost directly into a corner formed by the back of another sofa, the curve of the piano, and the dim recess of the fireplace, encased in black slate. A space of no space. Before my father’s fall that summer, I was in Rome, walking almost every afternoon from Monti, near the Colosseum, east through the Porta Pia and then down to the Via delle Quattro Fontane and then to the river. The Italian architect Francesco Borromini, who often built in almost impossible configurations and made the air in those spaces eddy as if awhirl with swallows, was a master of liminal space, of small bivouacs, places to secret the self. Standing across the street and gazing at the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, it is difficult to see the entire facade from the street, jammed in the intersection of four streets. The visitor enters through a green door into a tiny elliptical anteroom that shudders open to the small nave; above, an oval full of light, punctuated by embossed diamonds and hexagons, lifts up the space of the church like a kite held aloft by the sky at the end of a string. Often there are students drawing in the pews, their necks craned upward. Sometimes I would sit there, too. My father was not a handy man, but one of the things he did make for me were kites out of newspaper, and I could imagine those kites swooping above the nave as they had swooped and veered over Riverside Park, the newsprint too far away to read. When I first came to Italy, when I was very young, I lived in Perugia, down one of the streets winding from the piazza, and every night we came to sit by the fountain, where at dusk the starlings spiraled above it like a column of ash and then flitted back down to eat the crumbs of bread we left for them.