How Dracula AD 1972 saw the vampire wreak havoc in swinging 1970s London

I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to On the Front Line by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable?

I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war. In Kharkiv, a literature professor told me about his rare books being burned in the stove by the Russian military. He also told me about a Ukrainian officer seeking reading recommendations the day before being killed at the front. “I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over,” writes Serhiy Zhadan. On the other hand, says Lyuba Yakimchuk, “The task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings in words.” Olga Kryaziach, whose apartment and books were also burned by the Russians, reads and writes on her iPad, taking notes for a different future.

Iya Kiva

I have started to become spatially disoriented because of the war. Once, as I was getting back to a rented apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I got there for hours. I lived in a Soviet project-style block of flats called khrushchyovka surrounded by identical buildings, and I couldn’t understand which one of those khrushchyovkaswas my home these days; I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. In another one of my rented apartments, I was always hitting my head while entering. At home, I needed to turn left after entering, but in this new space I had to turn right.

Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool.

After her first novel, Attic, was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Earth Tavern, a dive-bar-slash-rock venue frequented by hippies, bikers, and merchant marines. She wrote a question-and-answer column for Willamette Week, the local Portland alt-weekly, and covered local boxing.

But, mostly, as she struggled to make it as a fiction writer, Dunn waited tables, most notably at the Stepping Stone Cafe, a terrific Northwest Portland diner. When I stopped there last summer on a trip doing research for a biography about Dunn, it felt like it probably hadn’t changed much since she worked there in the seventies and eighties. Back then, the only day care she could afford for her young son, Eli Dapolonia, was a seat at the counter while she poured coffee and charmed customers.

18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal

No vascular calcification.

No renal calculi.

The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology.

There are few footballers that treat the ball with such intimate respect as Ivan Toney. Marcus and Luke discuss his sparkling form and Tammy Abraham’s struggles to we determine if we're 'Team Toney' or 'Team Tammy' ahead of the World Cup!

In the second half, José Mourinho steps up for examination on this week’s Take Thermometer - as do you! Because we’re finally rating your most honest takes on the England team.

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September 16 – October 30, 2022

September 10 – October 29, 2022

Peter Schjeldahl, whose exuberant prose and perceptive mind made him one of the most widely read art critics in the U.S., has died at 80.

He had been battling lung cancer, and he chronicled his experience with the disease in a memorable 2019 essay called “The Art of Dying” that appeared in the New Yorker, the publication for which he had served as head art critic since 1998.

The New Yorker confirmed Schjeldahl’s death in a tweet on Friday evening.

For the past half-century, Schjeldahl made sure to address the most important shows around New York, as well as, on occasion, ones outside the city. Reading his criticism, one got a sense for which shows truly mattered in a scene that is overcrowded with retrospectives, blockbuster exhibitions, and big solo shows.

Much of the appeal of Schjeldahl’s writing is its stylishness. Schjeldahl had gotten his start as a poet and, because of that, his writing has a different feel from most other art critics’. Often, his reviews were rid of art jargon, causing them to be legible to a larger audience, even when he was dealing with conceptual work.