When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.” 

“It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie,” the greatest living actor continued. “Oppenheimer’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.” 

But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre and before that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—will basically always be the Chinese Theatre. I first encountered it in the film critic Nick Browne’s classic 1989 essay “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as an Ideological Form,” which examines the Orientalism of early film aesthetics, and the twenties trend of exotically decked-out American movie palaces that culminated, in 1928, “in the construction of Sid Grauman’s still famous (indeed iconic) Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, described as deriving ‘its inspiration from the Chinese period of Chippendale.’ It opened in May with the premiere of De Mille’s King of Kings with an evening of high ceremonies hosted by D. W. Griffith.”

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea.

In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down.

***

August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school.

Summer Streets, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will be shut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. this Saturday in Brooklyn and the Bronx; vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA season, one of summer’s great sporting pleasures. “This is the last matchup of the year between the league’s two superteams,” Oriana tells us. “The Liberty just beat the Aces in the Commissioner’s Cup, but go to get another preview of what the Finals showdown will probably be.” (The playoffs begin September 13.)

The U.S. Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, August 28–September 10: Our managing editor, Kelley Deane McKinney, recommends going on opening day, when there will be matches happening on twenty-two courts. A day pass will get you access to twenty-one of them. She advises anyone attending to skip the main court, Arthur Ashe: “The stadium is too big for tennis and the good seats are all corporate boxes full of people who don’t know or care about the games and chat loudly the whole time,” she says. “Real heads know that Louis Armstrong is the better show court, only seating fourteen thousand.” A tip: sections one and two get the most shade during the day, but every seat has a great view! You can skip the signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce, which features tennis ball–shaped honeydew pieces floating in spiked raspberry lemonade “for, like, twenty-two dollars. This year I bet it’s twenty-five.”

Just as artists explore other genres or forms of art, authors also dabble in new literary territories. Generally, when a new author starts their publishing journey, they must decide whether to go “young adult” or “adult.” That is, they must decide whether to write for young adult or adult audiences. A YA romance is vastly different from adult romance. YA contemporary fiction is not the same as new adult fiction. As a voracious reader, you would definitely tell the difference.

Although it’s possible for an author to write for both, usually only those that already have a solid history of work can manage to pull it off successfully. First-time authors don’t usually have this privilege because publishers don’t like to risk confusing readers. What if the author’s YA fanbase stumbles upon the adult (and steamy) book of the author? The experience can be jarring, messing up their unestablished branding. Thus, most authors in their early careers are advised to focus on one audience. Some writers get creative by using pen names for each genre or audience they want to write in, allowing them to easily switch between different writing styles. But the general consensus is that writers should build a strong foundation in one genre or audience first before trying out another one, or that they should make a transition or crossover to a closely related genre (for instance, from middle grade to YA, not YA to medical nonfiction all of a sudden).

Writing for a different audience is vital for career longevity and creative freedom. Here are eight YA authors who made the switch to adult audiences:

Road trips are often the subject of uplifting or heart-tugging stories — tales of friends bonding as they travel across the country, couples rediscovering why they love each other, or family members hashing out old arguments and ending the journey with a deeper understanding of each other. But sometimes, road trips can take a dark turn. You can break down and end up stranded in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by hostile people. You can end up fighting to survive harsh weather or hostile landscapes, risking freezing to death in the snow or being swept away by tornadoes. And let’s not even get into the terrifying possibilities that could occur after picking up a seemingly-pleasant hitchhiker.

A road trip always has the potential to turn into a horror story, and many writers have picked up on this. Horror road trips are a small but fun niche in horror, and they give the writer a lot of scope to structure their story in an interesting way. Horror road trip stories can be wide-ranging, using the scope of a long journey to build the horror; conversely, if the author decides to use the “we’ve broken down” trope, they can use the small space of the car or van to create a tight, claustrophobic story that ramps up the tension. However they play out, horror road trips can make for terrifying reads — so pick one up, settle in for the ride, and make sure not to stop the car for any strangers.

I didn’t grow up a reader. I grew up a storyteller and writer, but not a reader. There are a lot of reasons for this: my undiagnosed ADHD, my parents’ strict rules around consuming any non-Christian media, lack of access to books (my tiny Christian school didn’t have a library), ignorance that there were books available for kids my age, and fear, to name a few.

In college, I majored in English. You’d think that an English major would be reading non-stop for their classes. For neurotypical English majors, you’d be right. I can only remember finishing one book for school at the time. In the campus bookstore, I brought stacks and stacks of required reading to the checkout desk. “English major?” the clerk inquired.

“English major,” I confirmed. While I bought all these books and used all of them in my classes, I never finished them. I went to class, paid attention, took copious notes, and read just enough from the books to pull quotes for supporting evidence in whatever paper I was writing. I wasn’t stupid, even though I questioned that at the time. I found coping mechanisms to get through college. I knew that if I majored in something that I could write my way through, instead of test through, there’d be a good chance I’d graduate.

It was a weight around my soul, the secret shame of being an English major who didn’t read. I decided to take up reading the classics I missed in high school (see Christian education). As many times as I picked up The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t finish. I’d fall asleep, even when reading at the dining room table.

Then I found Twilight and Chick Lit, which was at its peak, and I started to read in earnest. But the shame remained. I didn’t want to like these books. I wanted to like books I thought of as the Great American Novel. I wanted to be a serious reader and a serious writer. So I stopped reading YA and Chick Lit. But the problem was, I didn’t start reading anything else.

To whoever is reading this: this is for you. While maybe that statement doesn’t have such a grand implication that, say, a 100,000-word novel would, nonetheless the meaning is the same. I spent my time, my effort, my very thoughts on this piece of writing for you to read. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, but you and I both know there’s never a guarantee there when it comes to writing. Regardless, this is for you.

Author dedications are one of the most personal and human-seeming parts of a published book. The acknowledgments, too, give an insight into the who behind the bound book in a reader’s hands in a way the author bio’s couple of sentences does not. But the dedication is so very personal, I can’t help but infer what is meant in the white space around the handful of words.

But where did this practice of writing the briefest love letter at the beginning of a novel come from? Dear reader, let’s take a little walk back through history and find out together.

We see the accomplishment listed among the best novels: just above the title or the author is the disclaimer “New York Times Best Seller” or “New York Times Best-selling Author.” But according to recent reports, nobody knows the inner workings of what exactly makes a book a bestseller on this list outside of those who work for The New York Times.

According to the NYT themselves, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” And that’s pretty much all they have to say about that, at least on the record. They say it takes into account sales numbers from all kinds of retail storefronts, be they big box stores, online retailers, or independent bookstores. But ever since the NYT Best Seller List made its debut in 1931, there’s been rumblings in the literary world of certain authors attempting to hack the system and “buy” their way onto the list.

According to an Esquire report from last year, the NYT has long denied using resources like ReaderLink or BookScan to accumulate sales numbers, since they aggregate data. They also only typically look at sales numbers from Amazon and other giant chains like Walmart or Target. Using resources like these would take away from the contribution of individual sales accrued at independent bookstores or specialty stores, and are therefore easy to manipulate.

“To my knowledge, The New York Times tracks sales of books, and the sales are what is ‘supposed to’ decide where those books sit on the list. However, the truth is, it’s much more editorialized,” stated a literary publicist quoted in the Esquire report. “There is quite a bit taken into consideration — i.e., are the book sales mostly bulk buys? Are they mostly indie bookstore sales? Are they mostly Amazon sales? Even which list the book would be considered for has a huge effect.”

In 1995, The New York Times Best Seller List introduced the dagger symbol, which indicates a book that has been bought in bulk and whose sales might not accurately represent its standing as a bestseller. This came after Michael Treacy and Fred Wierserma were accused of having spent a quarter of a million dollars that year on copies of their own book, The Discipline of Market Leaders.

How many adults read comics? My quick perusal of the research found a lot of older studies, but approximately six percent of millennials read comics every month.

How many adults talk about reading comics publicly?

What about graphic novels? Or graphic nonfiction?

Comics and graphic novels aren’t always seen as “reading,” even for kids. Parents, adults, and even educators fall back on tropes about how it’s not “real” reading, when in fact, the benefits of graphic novels have been long known: they can help engage reluctant readers, build vocabulary, help those with learning difficulties or diagnosed learning disabilities, encourage interaction with the text, and much more. Even for adults, graphic novels can help revitalize a reading slump, add interest to a challenging text, and make complex concepts similar by adding a visual component.

But graphic nonfiction…sounds much more “literary,” though I hate that term. It conveys a seriousness to the story or book. It’s often an apt descriptor, yes — but so might be “comic strip,” defined in Merriam-Webster as “a series of cartoons that tell a story or part of a story.”

On July 24, the Crystal Lake Public Library in the northwestern Chicago suburbs had a bomb threat. It came through a phone call. No bomb was found, and the incident was assumed to be isolated — just days earlier, the library had announced a new partnership with the local school districts to ensure any student who wanted a library card could acquire one, whether or not they lived within the tax boundaries.

This may have been an isolated incident at Crystal Lake, but over the last week, several more Chicagoland public libraries have received bomb threats. These include Wilmette Public Library in the northern suburbs, Warren Newport Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received a second bomb threat on August 21), Morton Grove Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received not one, but two threats), and Park Ridge Public Library, also in the northern suburbs. All of those happened Thursday, August 17, within a span of several hours, and all of the threats came via the various library “chat” reference tools.

Then on Monday, August 21, another bomb threat. This time to Oak Park Public Library in the western suburbs. The threat came via email the night before, Sunday, claiming that there were planned explosions the next day.

In under a month, that is six bomb threats within a small geographic area of Chicagoland, all at public libraries.

As of writing, there’s been no further information about the individual or groups behind these threats, and there’s been no information tying any of these incidents together. Whether or not they’re being explored is itself unclear — the above-linked article from the Chicago Tribune about the cascade of bomb threats on August 17 is, of course, paywalled.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M. My steering wheel was hot to the touch. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms; some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting. This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter.

I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip.

At the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. “I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said.

The dessert landscape in New York is generally defined by extremes—by how far flavors can be taken from their origins. ChikaLicious, the East Village dessert bar that opened in 2003 and is run by the chef Chika Tillman, is good for the opposite reason: its success comes from its dishes’ almost extreme subtlety of taste. I ordered a three-course menu centered around the bar’s star dish, the Fromage Blanc Island Cheesecake, a kind of cheesecake mousse that’s served (ascetically) in the form of a mound, on a bed of ice, atop a pile of white dishes. It was preceded by an ice cream appetizer with kiwi syrup, and followed by a plate of small cubes that felt like what eating (delicious) chocolate-flavored air might be like. Unfortunately for the subtlety, every flavor was also mixed with the taste of my own blood, which continually seeped into my mouth due to a post-tooth-extraction wound I’d suffered the day before.

Surprisingly, the best dish wasn’t even a dessert but the Very Soft French Omelet, which had the texture of omu rice without the rice. It came topped with truffle butter, was served with an herb biscuit, and was so good that it made me question why Chika was making desserts at all. Our final dish of the night—which, as with the omelet, we ordered in addition to the three-course cheesecake menu—was a plate of pink peppercorn ice cream that I found disturbing only because of how much it literally tasted like peppercorn.

But the food, bloody or otherwise, didn’t even really matter: the cuteness of the bar ultimately took precedence. The entire space could fit about twenty people comfortably, with most of the seats lining the bar, which doubled as an open kitchen. Chika Tillman, a kind of silent spectacle, prepared every dish herself there, while wearing a signature bonnet that she’d had specially made from the pattern of a baby’s hat, while her bow-tied husband (a former jazz musician) served the food on an assortment of heavily patterned china (he let me come to the storage space in the back to handpick my teacup). During the hours I sat at the bar, multiple regulars came to check in with Chika, among them a former sous-chef from Bar Masa who insisted, graciously, that I take a picture of his dessert (something served in a tiny Crockpot). If it wasn’t for my deep-seated fear of intimacy, I imagined, half-delirious from the wound in my mouth, that I would like to become one of them someday—a regular.

—Patrick McGraw

This week, the Review‘s staff and friends are enjoying a drop in temperatures in New York City and the beginning of the August slowdown. Here’s what we’re looking forward to around town:

“Not Tacos” at Yellow Rose, August (6 and) 7: The downtown restaurant Yellow Rose is known for, primarily, tacos. (And really good frozen drinks.) But friend of the Review and meat purveyor Tim Ring recommends their upcoming collaboration with the Vietnamese food pop-up Ha’s Đặc Biệt that will explicitly not be tacos. Or will it? Their event poster features the words “Esto no es un taco” in Magritte-like font below what might or might not be a taco, depending on your definition.

Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater, August 1–12: August is normally a quiet month for dance in New York City—for professional dance, at least. (We like to imagine that many people are dancing on their own.) But with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet on hiatus, our engagement editor, Cami Jacobson, recommends seeing the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce. This series will include some of Morris’s lesser-known pieces and be set to live music, in what Jacobson describes as an “unusually small, intimate theater” for seeing dance.  

An overnight trip to the Irish Pub in Atlantic City, anytime: The Review’s Pulitzer Prize–winning contributor, friend, and Atlantic City expert Joshua Cohen writes in: “The Irish Pub, in Atlantic City, is the best bar I’ve ever slept at. But really, you can use their rooms for anything. At fifty dollars a night, the only thing cheaper is the beach, which is down the block.” 

It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture.

As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building “a new Britain” forged in the “white heat” of a “scientific revolution.” And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output. This is an observation rather than a criticism. In many respects, his growing disillusionment with the quality of new buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Modern Buildings in London finds Nairn at the peak of his powers; it is a book studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham. Not unlike D. H. Lawrence in his essays and travel books, Nairn’s sentences appear almost to jump-start, as if landing halfway through, punchy opinions falling instantly in quick-fire lines shorn of any unnecessary preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there is rage here, much of it directed toward the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork in the Clive Street neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I am too angry to write much about it,” before going on to argue that the old streets by comparison had “ten times more understanding of how people live and behave.”