Sweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters Anna’s life: she starts to hear voices. Ned is distant — he’d not wanted to go through with the pregnancy anyway — and Anna is left alone to ponder this phenomenon. She watches a lot of horror movies, she spends her nights on Wikipedia. All the time, she’s beset by a “torrent of sound and image”, a “stream of convolved murmurings”. During this period, Ned becomes increasingly remote — he’s unfaithful, and his interest in entering Alaskan politics grows. Then one day, the voices stop. Anna takes Lena, their daughter, and abandons Ned. They travel the country, evading Ned’s attempts to reach them, and eventually wind up living in a motel atop a cliff in Maine, some two hours’ drive from Portland. There, Anna and Lena (now six) get to know Don, the motel’s proprietor, and his other guests, each of whom has also heard voices. “If I had been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five,” she writes, “some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know […]

“Thousand shades of grey”. Picture from James Rebanks’s hugely popular Twitter feed, @herdyshepherd1. “When English people dream of a rural arcadia, they usually dream of our landscape,” writes James Rebanks in The Shepherd’s View, just published as an attractive, colorful hardback by Flatiron Books. His latest account of farm life in the Lake District is a photo-filled follow-up to the New York Times best-seller The Shepherd’s Life, and every bit as funny, as plainspoken, as gripping, and as suddenly, unexpectedly moving. Rebanks, who combines the poetic eye of Wordsworth with a distinctly English wit (and an iPhone camera), turns the material of his everyday existence as a shepherd into a powerful chronicle of twenty-first century rural life. With understated affection and deadpan humor, he describes both his neighbors and his dogs (guess whom he favors), as well as the ins and outs of livestock shows (“They need to be stylish with good lines and curves. Think shapely, like Beyoncé”). Before his appearance at the House of SpeakEasy on November 1, we spoke about bookishness, Ernest Hemingway, and the sheep that’ll probably outlive us all. Name: James Rebanks Age: 42 Where are you from? Matterdale, Cumbria, England. What is your occupation? Shepherd and writer. Title of most recent work: The […]

Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” provides the epigraphs for each of the short chapters in McCann’s title story, and an oblique way in to understanding its philosophical intricacies. Its haiku-like fragments dictate the reader’s focus in ways that are continually refreshing and unexpected: “The river is moving,” he writes; “The blackbird must be flying.” “When the blackbird flew out of sight / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” In the same way that Stevens’s blackbird is often just glimpsed, the tiniest of details in the vastness of nature, so McCann draws attention to the poetic detail at the edge of the frame, the impulse or act that might hold the key to explaining a significant event. The event in question is the apparently random murder of an 82-year-old judge yards from his home on the Upper East Side. The story, suspended between the judge’s interior life and the geometry of his murder, captured obliquely […]

J. Michael Straczynski is a screenwriter, television polymath, comic book writer, and novelist, and one of four speakers at our next Seriously Entertaining show, This Is Not the End, on September 20. Prolific doesn’t really cover his output. Indeed, the 34 writing credits on his IMDb page only hint at the extraordinary range and volume of his work, which includes the vast majority of Babylon 5‘s 110 episodes (he created the show), the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Changeling (for which he was nominated for a BAFTA), zombie-apocalypse epic World War Z, seven instalments of Murder She Wrote, and, alongside co-creators the Wachowskis, the entirety of last year’s Sense8, one of Netflix’s most ambitious and successful original productions. Ahead of September’s show, we spoke to Joe about getting drunk with Nixon, the length of the working day, and why Peter O’Toole would be the ideal candidate to record his collected works. Name: J. Michael Straczynski. My friends call me Joe. People who don’t like me also call me Joe. I find this vaguely disquieting. Age: Physically: 62. Intellectually: mid-30s. Emotionally: a very shy 12. (There won’t be any girls reading this, will there?) Where are you from? Technically I was born in Paterson, NJ, but my father was a notorious deadbeat […]