Free Food For Millionaires,is very good

In Korean tradition, there’s a complicated emotion called han which, by general consensus, applies chiefly to women. A recently published Korean commonplace book defines it as “resentment, sorrow, sense of loss and hardship, stifled passion and love, or the frustration of the downtrodden.” A woman who manages to overcome these obstacles is said to have “resolved her han.” In 21st-century American terms, this is what Oprah would call “living your best life.”

In her accomplished and engrossing first novel, the Yale-and-Georgetown-law-educated writer Min Jin Lee tells the story of an angry young Korean-American woman, raised by status-conscious immigrant parents in Queens, who falls out with them after she graduates from Princeton. Not only does this heroine harbor han, she embodies it — her name is Casey Han.

Casey’s filial, romantic and professional struggles lie at the heart of “Free Food for Millionaires,” which unfolds in New York in the 1990s with an energetic eventfulness and a sprawling cast that call to mind the literary classics of Victorian England. Defiant and proud, Casey sorts out her life with a little help from her beautiful and docile Korean-American friend, Ella Shim, whose kindness she accepts with suspicion and resentment.

In their differing temperaments, Casey and Ella recall the seesaw sisters in “Middlemarch” or “Pride and Prejudice” — foolishly idealistic Dorothea versus sensible Celia; headstrong Lizzy Bennet versus amiable Jane. But the men in their lives aren’t as tidily classifiable as Casaubon, Chettam, Darcy or Bingley. Nor is marriage the girls’ primary goal. Like the author herself, Casey and Ella are modern women whose definition of happiness includes career satisfaction and personal fulfillment — both of which can be harder to secure than a man with a ring.

In his precociously feminist novel “Can You Forgive Her?,” Anthony Trollope (one of Casey’s favorite authors) told of a young woman who, early in the story, decides to reject the marriage proposal of a virtuous man who bores her. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot mused, “We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.” But Trollope explored the opposite side of that proposition: how does a woman come to fall in love with a man? What if she changes her mind? And what happens after that? He believed that everyone — male or female — “should endeavor to stand as well as he can in the world.”  Henry James, who, like many critics of Trollope’s era, felt mixed admiration for him, praised his “complete appreciation of the usual” and called him “one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent of writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.” This “appreciation of the usual” and unmassaged portrayal of present realities also emerge in Lee’s ambitious book.

It would be remarkable if she had simply written a long novel that was as easy to devour as a 19th-century romance — packed with tales of flouted parental expectations, fluctuating female friendships and rivalries, ephemeral (and longer-lasting) romantic hopes and losses, and high-stakes career gambles. But Lee intensifies her drama by setting it against an unfamiliar backdrop: the tightly knit social world of Korean immigrants, whose children strive to blend into their American foreground without clashing with their distinctive background. It’s a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls it off with conviction. In the first chapter of “Free Food for Millionaires,” Casey and her mild-mannered younger sister, Tina — home from M.I.T. — have returned to the family apartment in Elmhurst. While their meek mother prepares one of their favorite dishes, their taciturn father, just back from his job running a Manhattan dry-cleaning shop, slurps whiskey and glowers. Casey has been accepted at Columbia Law School, but has decided to engage in what rat-race-averse college grads throughout the world call “finding themselves.” Breaking the news at dinner, she discovers that in finding herself she will lose her parents.

“When I was your age, I sold kimbop on the streets,” Joseph Han blusters, enraged by her sense of entitlement. But Casey proves equally wrathful. “I’ve always worked hard,” she shouts back. “Do you know what it’s like for me to have to go to a school like that? To be surrounded by kids who went to Exeter and Hotchkiss, their parents belonging to country clubs?” “I’m sick of hearing how bad I am,” she adds, “when I’m not. You won the sweepstakes with kids like us. Why aren’t we good enough?” At the end of their violent argument, Joseph kicks her out of the house. A fight this brutal crosses cultural lines: its heartache is universal.

Slender and tall, and possessed of an innate sense of style as well as a pair of glistening silver wrist cuffs (which remind her of the “Wonder Woman” shows she watched on television as a child), Casey gets a low-level job at an investment bank to support herself while she plots her future. She knows she doesn’t want to crunch numbers or go to law school: she wants to sew hats, even though “in America, only eccentrics and religious women” wear them. Casey has acquired her outsize sense of personal destiny from two sources: her mentor, Sabine (an immigrant from her mother’s village in Korea who has built a successful fashion business and married a rich American), and a handful of British authors whose works she reads again and again: George Eliot, the Brontë sisters and Trollope. Their fiction, Casey notices, bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Korean fairy tales her mother used to tell her,” in which good things came to clever and virtuous women who followed the paths of “sacrifice and integrity.”

But growing up in Queens at the end of the 20th century — rather than in the British countryside in the 19th century or on the outskirts of Seoul in the aftermath of the Korean War — Casey finds she has little appetite for the “sacrifice” part of the fantasy she savored as a child: “She had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.” Her mentor reinforces the message that she must write the script for her own future.

“Every minute matters,” Sabine tells her. “All those times you turn on the television or go to the movies or shop for things you don’t need, all those times you stay at a bar sitting with some guy talking some nonsense about how pretty your Korean hair is. ... Your life matters, Casey. Every second. And by the time you’re my age — you’ll see that for every day and every last moment spent, you were making a choice.”

Refreshingly, Lee is interested not only in Casey and her friends, lovers and colleagues, but in her parents’ generation as well. While she escorts Casey and her contemporaries through their first acts and toward their second ones, she also guides Casey’s parents and friends toward third acts, showing their continuing evolution and the precariousness of their own Korean-American existence.

Trollope wrote that men and women ought to grow upward, “towards the light, as the trees do,” and Lee clearly has absorbed that lesson. But in “Free Food for Millionaires,” she imparts a lesson of her own: young and old need to accompany one another as they grow — sometimes shooting ahead, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes crossing paths. They’re different branches, but they’re part of the same tree, no matter where they’re planted.

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Little by Edward Carey is next up

Born in a little Alsatian village in 1761, Anne Marie Grosholtz—called Marie—inherits her mother’s large Roman nose, her father’s large, upturned chin, and little else. Marie’s widowed mother dies soon after taking a job as housekeeper to Doctor Curtius, a physician who makes wax models of organs and body parts. Little Marie moves to Paris with Curtius, where he opens a wax museum and trains her as his assistant. There, they sculpt first the heads of philosophes, then famous murderers, and eventually victims of the guillotine. (Those make for much more portable models, being detached from their bodies.) Marie’s fortunes rise and fall with the politics of the era: She becomes an art tutor to Louis XVI’s sister Elisabeth, then spends a stint in the Carmes Prison (where she shares a cell with the future Josephine Bonaparte). Carey (Lungdon, 2015, etc.) channels the ghosts of Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, and the Brothers Grimm to tell Marie’s tale, populating it with grotesques and horrors worthy of Madame Tussaud’s celebrated wax museum. Little drawings punctuate the text, like Boz’s cartoons in Dickens’ books; Carey’s rumination on wax recalls Dickens’ on dust. In Carey’s hands, life blurs with death, nature with artifice; his objects seem as animated as people while his people can appear as fragile and impotent as objects. Dolls, houses, carts, furniture, tailors’ dummies, and, of course, waxworks have human feelings: “I had never before considered that carriage clocks could be disapproving, nor had I supposed a candelabra might resent lighting me. I had never stepped upon a carpet that did not wish me there, nor felt the enmity of a marble mantelpiece. Nor had I come upon a gold-braided stool whose fat little feet seemed aimed at my ankles. Not before I entered this room.” Curtius “seemed made of rods, of broom handles, of great lengths.” This artful anthropomorphism (and its opposite) perfectly suits a novel about that most lifelike medium of sculpture, wax—and its most famous modeler.

A quirky, compelling story that deepens into a meditation on mortality and art 

*Starred Review* Carey, who writes for both YAs and adults, presents an immensely creative epic that follows a poor orphan's rise to become the famous Madame Tussaud. Born in 1761, and nicknamed "Little" for her petite size, Marie Grosholtz becomes the unpaid apprentice of her late mother's odd, nervous employer, Dr. Curtius. After fleeing to Paris, they join forces with a redoubtable widow and her son. Their skills with wax attract attention, leading to their unusual museum and Marie's invitation to tutor Princess Elisabeth at Versailles. At a time of rampant social disparities, the museum becomes a great equalizer: a place where royalty, poets, and notorious murderers—that is, their sculpted stand-ins—can be viewed up close, and ordinary people can participate in a lottery to be models themselves. Mingling a sense of playfulness with macabre history, Carey depicts the excesses of wealth and violence during the French Revolution through the eyes of a talented woman who lived through it and survived. The oddball characters and gothic eccentricities evoke Tim Burton's work but without any fantastical elements; the reality is sufficiently strange on its own. Carey shows how the seemingly absurd, like royal servants lodging in cupboards and artisans forced to re-create newly executed people's heads in wax, becomes shockingly routine. The unique perspective, witty narrative voice, and clever illustrations make for an irresistible read. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews. Whimsy, magic, and macabre are words often used to describe the prose and illustrations of Carey (The Iremonger Trilogy), and this work of historical fiction is no exception. Anna Maria Grosholtz, aka Little, is a fatherless servant girl in the employ of a doctor with a particular skill for molding wax. Becoming his apprentice, Little moves from body parts to human heads and acquires a talent for realistic reproductions. Her ability manifests in befriending a princess, living in the Palace of Versailles, and navigating the tumultuous French Revolution. While literally shaping the heads of history with her hands, she also transforms her artistic skill into a commercial industry. Little is better known today as Madame Tussaud. Carey's vivid language and illustrations provide levity and wit within a imaginative but morbid tale of beheadings and destitution. VERDICT A wildly creative reimagining of the work and life of an artist more associated with George Clooney than Maximilien Robespierre. Admirers of Gregory Maguire will be delighted. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/18.]—Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY Copyright 2018 Library Journal. Plunging into the macabre chaos of 18th-century Europe in this exquisite novel, Carey (Alva & Irva) conjures the life of the girl who would become Madame Tussaud. Orphaned at seven, "Little" Anne Marie Grosholz finds herself in servitude to Doctor Curtius, an emaciated recluse who fashions body parts from wax for medical research. He teaches the clever Marie his trade—which she quickly learns, as she'd already developed an early, acute awareness of physiognomy owing to her gargantuan nose and protruding chin. Curtius soon becomes renowned for his wax portrait heads, but when he and Marie must flee to Paris to avoid their creditors, finding lodgings with a tailor's widow and her son Edmond, Marie is banished to the kitchen by Edmond's jealous mother. Marie has no choice but to find allies outside the widow's household, and after a surprise royal visit to Curtius's workshop, she manages to get herself invited to Versailles to tutor King Louis XVI's sister Elizabeth. But it is 1780, and only a few years later the monarchy is overcome by the Revolution. Marie manages to make it home, but the Paris she knows implodes, and her royal associations land her in trouble. There is nothing ordinary about this book, in which everything animate and inanimate lives, breathes, and remembers. Carey, with sumptuous turns of phrase, fashions a fantastical world that churns with vitality, especially his "Little," a female Candide at once surreal and full of heart. (Oct.) Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.

When Life Gives You Lululemons by Lauren Weisberger was good

Man with a Seagull on His Head by Harriet Page.sounds good

Page’s graceful debut follows an unwitting artist’s rise to fame and provides deep introspections about loneliness and death. A seagull falls from the sky and hits Ray Eccles on the beach in Shoeburyness, England. A discombobulated Ray fixates on Jennifer Mulholland, the only witness of his accident, and subsequently covers the walls of his house with crudely drawn renditions of her face (always as he saw it right after the accident) using whatever materials he can find: food, blood, semen. His frantic work draws the attention of outsider art collectors George and Grace Zoob. They move Ray into their London apartment and attempt to involve him in their open marriage, though Ray does not reciprocate their attraction. Years later, Ray has gained significant success from obsessively producing the same image. Jennifer, now married into a sprawling Italian family, learns that she has been an unwitting muse. She travels to London to meet Ray, arriving just as Grace assaults Ray over his indifference to her. Ray flees with no memory of his time as an artist and spends years on the street with a befriended pigeon. The story concludes far in the future with a touching final moment. The novel’s charming, light tone nicely balances its powerful meditations on art and failed expectations, resulting in a moving story. (Oct.)

Famous father girl : a memoir of growing up Bernstein by Jamie Bernstein,another book i'm about to start

Chain of events : a novel by Fredrik T. Olsson ,sounds good

Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times - John Perry Barlow ...another book I want to read

The author died recently after a long series of illnesses that form a moody counterpart to the general anarchist fun of his memoir. That may be a good thing considering that the statute of limitations may not yet have run out for various of the hijinks he recounts here. The son of a prominent Wyoming rancher, Barlow was packed off to a Colorado prep school, where he met a classmate named Bob Weir, later to become renowned as a Dead’s guitarist and singer. Later, at Wesleyan, Barlow came into the orbit of Timothy Leary, who inducted him into the mysteries of LSD. These and many other confluences make for the narrative bones of a story that the author tells with zest and no small amount of self-congratulation—in part for having survived where so many others fell, such as pal Neal Cassady, who died of exposure in Mexico. “Exposure seemed right to me,” writes Barlow. “He had lived an exposed life. By then, it was beginning to feel like we all had.” A lysergic pioneer, Barlow initiated young John F. Kennedy Jr. into the cult; had the young man not died in a plane crash, as Barlow warned him it was all too easy to do, he might have changed the shape of American politics. The author was steeped in politics, renegade though he might have been; he was a friend of Sen. Alan Simpson, a sometime associate of Dick Cheney, and a confidant of Jackie Kennedy. The storyline is a bit of a mess, but so was Barlow’s life, the latter part of which was devoted to internet-related concerns. But he writes with rough grace and considerable poetic power, as when he describes a 1993 Prince concert: “the place was full of all these bridge and tunnel people who were swaying in their seats like kelp in a mild swell.”

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje what I will read next

*Starred Review* The smoke has yet to clear in war-battered 1945 London when Nathaniel, 14, and his sister, Rachel, 16, are left in the care of a man they call the Moth, about whom they know nearly nothing. Nathaniel is certain that the Moth and his curious friends, especially the former boxer known as the Darter, are criminals, and, indeed, he is soon caught up in strange and dangerous undertakings involving barges on the Thames at night and clandestine deliveries. Even Nathaniel's first sexual relationship is illicit, as the young lovers meet in empty houses, thanks to her real-estate agent brother. Evidence slowly accrues suggesting that Nathaniel and Rachel's mother, Rose, may be with British intelligence. Ondaatje's (The Cat's Table, 2011) gorgeous, spellbinding prose is precise and lustrous, witty, and tender. As the painful truth of this fractured family emerges and Rose's riveting story takes center stage, Ondaatje balances major and minor chords, sun and shadow, with masterful grace beautifully concentrated in "warlight," his term for the sparest possible illumination during the city's defensive blackouts. With vivid evocations of place, quiet suspense, exquisite psychological portraiture, and spotlighted historical eventsâ€"a legendary chess game; horrific, hidden postwar vengeance; and the mass destruction of government archivesâ€"Ondaatje's drolly charming, stealthily sorrowful tale casts subtle light on secret skirmishes and wounds sustained as war is slowly forged into peace. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A concerted publicity effort and cross-country author tour will support this stellar novel by a literary giant with a tremendous readership. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews. In 2017, Ondaatje (The English Patient, The Cat's Table) donated his personal archive, complete with his notebooks and correspondence with Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, to the University of Texas, allowing the public a glimpse into his detailed and intricate approach to narrative, language, and anatomy of his novels. Here, Ondaatje weaves writings and newspaper articles into a narrative about the complexity of family history within the long shadow of World War II. Reflecting on the gaps in his own family history and his mother's mysterious disappearance when he was a teen, Nathaniel searches for a way to better understand his mother's idiosyncrasies. Through archival recordings and interviews with the eccentric characters from his childhood, a mosaic slowly emerges that illuminates not only his mother's story but the forgotten lives buried under the history of war. VERDICT Ondaatje's prose encapsulates readers in the dreariness of London and the claustrophobic confines of Nathaniel's experience, explicating the verbosity of silence that lingers in the haunting aftermath of global war. [See Prepub Alert, 11/6/17.]â€"Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.

The death of Mrs. Westaway by Ware, Ruth another book I'm reading

Need To Know by Karen Cleveland is what I'm reading now....

*Starred Review* What would you do if you found out that your entire life, including your husband, your children, and your career, might be part of an orchestrated effort on the part of the Russian government to infiltrate the CIA? Vivian Miller, a dedicated agent within the Company, is about to face that dilemma. She has developed a system to identify Russian operatives who control sleeper agents in the U.S., those seemingly normal people who live among us in plain sight, much like the Jennings family team in the TV series The Americans. "Call me paranoid," she says, "or just call me a CIA counterintelligence analyst." While accessing the computer of a suspected Russian handler, Vivian opens a folder named "Friends," and what she finds there will change everything. Between alternating waves of panic and resolve, her patriotism and devotion are put to the test when she realizes that she has placed the Agency, her family, and herself in immediate danger. This is a compelling debut about a timely issueâ€"Russian threats to our security loom large in every news cycleâ€"from a writer with a background in CIA counterterrorism. Perfect for fans of Shari Lapena's thrillers and Chris Pavone's The Expats (2012), and for just about everyone who loves the thrill of finding themselves in a book that can't be put down.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: One of the buzziest thrillers of the season, Cleveland's debut comes with AAA-list blurbs from Louise Penny and Lee Child, among others, and with film rights sold to Universal for a Charlize Theron movie. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

LJ Reviews 2017 September #1

Counterintelligence analyst Vivian Miller discovers a secret dossier of deep-cover agents that could bring her whole life crashing down. Great bona fides for this thriller debut: the author is a veteran CIA analyst, the book has been sold to more than 20 countries, and Charlize Theron is producing and starring in the film adaptation. LJ Reviews 2017 October #1

DEBUT This pulse-hammering first novel plays fiendishly with interagency cooperation between the CIA and the FBI. CIA analyst Vivian Miller is also a mother of four, including a special-needs child. With her loving husband, she is deeply committed to the happiness and health of their nuclear family. While at work, she seeks well-hidden moles long believed to threaten American security. Vivian is startled to see her husband's photo turn up in the computer of a known Russian agent. In a flood of panic she deletes the image. When Matt learns what she has done, he is straightforward. Yep, he's been in Russia's service for 23 years. VERDICT Having worked for the FBI and CIA, debut author Cleveland peppers her book with apparently impeccable tradecraft details. Flashing back to the events that led to the couple's predicament and then onward as they act to stem the tidal wave of prosecutorial woes that await them, this suspenseful espionage tale is a rousing Act 2 to the excitement of TV's The Americans and the novels of Chris Pavone. [See Prepub Alert, 7/24/17; film rights sold to Universal Pictures; Charlize Theron will star.]â€"Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA PW Reviews 2017 October #4

Former CIA analyst Cleveland's assured if thinly plotted debut is an unusual mix of family drama and spy thriller. The narrator, CIA analyst Vivian, is part of a team in the Counterintelligence Center, Russia Division, that's searching for agents running sleeper cells in the U.S. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her four young children and doting husband. Flashbacks chart the couple's courtship, then their lives as hyperbusy young parents, delving deeply into maternal and marital love. When Vivian isn't fretting about her family, she's trying to extricate herself from a colossal treasonous mess that results from a startling discovery that she makes in the course of her research. The deep backstory may attract readers not usually drawn to espionage novels, but thriller fans who like tradecraft and action will have to look elsewhere. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company. (Jan.)

This Is What Happened by Mick Herron,what I'm reading now

At the start of this beautifully written and ingeniously plotted standalone from Herron (Nobody Walks), 26-year-old mail room employee Maggie Barnes is trying hard not to get caught late one night in her 27-story London office building. Harvey Wells, an MI5 agent, has recruited her to upload some spyware on her company’s computer network from a flash drive. Adrift in the metropolis, Maggie has zero self-esteem and only the slimmest of personal ties to anyone, so this represents her chance to do something significant. Suffice it to say that her mission goes sideways. What at first appears to be a tale of spycraft and intrigue turns out to be something quite different—a disturbing portrait of contemporary England, with its “drip-drip-drip of sour resentment” (pre- and post-Brexit) and the palpable anomie of London. Most important is the fraught relationship between the pitiable Maggie and the manipulative Harvey, a man of great anger and bitterness. This dark thriller is rife with the deadpan wit and trenchant observation that Herron’s readers relish. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.) (Jan.)

Fermor

Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

 Booklist Reviews 2018 May #1
There's a lot going on in Pessl's YA debut, but every element has a touch of weird horror that keeps it from going too far off the rails. Bee is estranged from her friends after the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Jim, the year before. The night she attempts an awkward reunion with her old friends, they narrowly escape a terrible car wreckâ€"or do they? When they awake, an eerie man tells them they're doomed to relive the same day until they can come to a consensus about which one of them will survive the crash. Ages of the same day pass, with saintly Bee trying to keep her friends from indulging their basest instincts, until brilliant Martha convinces them that they won't be able to vote on who lives until they get to the bottom of the elephant in the roomâ€"Jim's death. Although a few plot elements don't hold together under close scrutiny and the characters border on stock, this novel has ambition to spare, and teens looking for something odd, atmospheric, and twisty will likely be enthralled. Grades 9-12. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews. PW Reviews 2018 April #2

Beatrice Hartley, 19, has spent the past year distancing herself from her four best friends after the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Jim, in their senior year. With summer ending and the former friends gathering to celebrate a birthday, Bee decides to find out what they know. The reunion doesn't go as expected, and a near-fatal drunk-driving accident brings the teens into the Neverworld, a place between life and death, where they live the same day over and over again until they can agree on who gets to survive. Caught between trying to save her life and solving the mystery surrounding Jim's death, Bee discovers that everyone has a devastating secret. Bestselling adult writer Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) adeptly creates a compelling nightmare world while maintaining a foothold in realism and providing many wholly unexpected developments. She doesn't shy away from painting her characters as deeply flawed, allowing their choices in the Neverworld to show who they truly are. Thought-provoking and suspenseful, Pessl's YA debut delves into questions of whether even close friends are truly knowable. Ages 12â€"up. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (June) SLJ Reviews 2018 April

Gr 9 Upâ€"Secrets, lies, romance, death, unexpected twists and turnsâ€"this fast-paced fantasy thriller has it all. After a car accident, Beatrice Hartley and her friends from a fancy private school fall into the Neverworld Wake, a dark and disturbing version of Groundhog's Day. Day after day, Beatrice, Kipling, Whitley, Cannon, and Martha wake up on the same day, in the same place. Only one will escape the endless loop, but not until they solve the mystery of their friend Jim's death. It was ruled a suicide, but Beatrice has reason to believe there was more to her boyfriend's death than anyone suspected. Each of the characters are distinctive, with their own motivations and secrets. As they band together to investigate Jim's supposed fatal leap into the quarry, they also eye each other with distrust. Even before Jim's death and then the accident, nothing was as it seemed at Darrow-Harker School. This is a well-crafted, edge-of-your-seat story with developed characters and pacing that will keep readers hooked. Give to readers who love mysteries, thrillers, and darker fantasy. VERDICT Unpredictable, exciting, and emotionally wrenching, this is a strong purchase for medium and large collections.â€"Miranda Doyle, Lake Oswego School District, OR

We Don't Want You! For The American Monarchy Party W.I.P.

Andy Warhol:I don't want You! For The American Monarchy Party

Elesha J. Coffman. The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline is very good

Off the Charts by Ann Hulbert,is very good

quote

“I am an artist, you know. It’s my right to tell you what to think. I’m chosen. You’re not.” That is the nutshell version of a long-standing effort to wrest art away from bourgeois aesthetic concerns and onto political ones. This tug is at work in every branch of the arts. But for economy’s sake, I will keep to the words art and artist as shorthand for the range of disciplines.

Today’s arts culture—the segment of it that appeals to museum curators, faculty hiring committees, and awards panels—mimics the intellectual fray of the 1960s, itself an imitation of contests begun in the 1910s and ‘20s. From the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, through assorted utopian declarations of the 1960s, on to the hectoring of Mike Pence by the cast of “Hamiliton,” artists have been on a steady, determined march toward ideological preachment.

Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives is very good

Central Park Hunt, work in progress

David Hockney:"I Don't Want YOU!,for the American Monarchy Party

Aristocracy!

We Don't Want You! For The American Monarchy Party!

At 740 Park:We don't want you! For The American Monarchy Party!

Golden Showers Tie

'You Should Have Known,' by Jean Hanff Korelitz is very good,review by By SUSAN DOMINUS

The first half of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel about a New York therapist is less than revelatory, although that turns out to be for excellent reason. Grace Reinhart Sachs, an affluent Upper East Side mother with a thriving couples practice, frets almost generically about such privileged concerns as how much to push her son to continue with his violin lessons. She offers loving descriptions of an ideal husband — a pediatric oncologist — who somehow never gels into either a recognizable type or an intriguingly unique character. The absence of key friends and family members feels underexplained.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the reader to realize that these structural weaknesses are, in fact, intentional blurrings — vague, unsatisfying details seen from the perspective of an unreliable central character, a woman unable to look too closely at the sharp edges in her ­cashmere-cloaked life.

Grace has always been fascinated by the power of denial, but she misinterprets her preoccupation as professional, not personal. As the novel opens, she is about to publish a book, called “You Should Have Known,” exhorting women to stop constructing elaborate stories that justify the failings of the flawed men in their lives and to move on to more deserving partners. Interviewed by a writer for Vogue, Grace lays out the extent of women’s blindness in the face of romantic hope: “He could be holding up a placard that says I will take your money, make passes at your girlfriends, and leave you consistently bereft of love and support, and we’ll find a way to forget that we ever knew that. We’ll find a way to unknow that.”

It’s a given that Grace, as the happily married expert, isn’t actually a part of that “we,” but within days of uttering those words she learns that the mother of a schoolmate of Grace’s son has been murdered, and that her own husband, supposedly off at an oncology conference in Cleveland, has suddenly become unreachable. Grace experiences these two events as distressing but wholly unrelated, intelligently finding ways to unknow the significance of details whose meaning must be apparent to the reader — her husband’s cellphone, left behind; the persistent police interest in his whereabouts. It takes an accumulation of worrisome, undeniable new facts to topple the nest of comfortable illusions she has worked so hard to gather.

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Dramatic irony isn’t the only pleasure of “You Should Have Known”; Grace’s husband’s pathology is erratic enough for behavior that holds genuine surprise. But the real suspense here lies in wondering when Grace will catch up to the reader. When and how will she come to know what she should have known and at some level maybe already did?

The momentum of the novel, not to mention the writing, takes off just as Grace starts stumbling her way, arms outstretched, toward a glimpse of her husband’s true nature. Reasonably astute about the subtle class distinctions and self-justifications of the moneyed world Grace inhabits, Korelitz writes with far more originality and energy when boring down into the mechanisms of denial. That phenomenon is the terrible mystery she seems most interested in solving. “And then in a location so deep inside her that she had not known of its existence,” she writes of a moment of insight for Grace, “something heavy and metallic chose this moment to creak the tiniest bit open, with a grating of rust and the release of a new terrible thought: that everything rising around her was about to converge.”

Korelitz manages to pull off the contrivance that Grace, having written an entire book about blind spots, could be so spectacularly sabotaged by her own: The advice book is understood as the clanging of an alarm, the product of Grace’s own subconscious raging to be heard. In contrast, the novel’s resolution feels surprisingly neat and tidy for a story about the messiness of the mind. In fiction, some details, the ones that tug almost imperceptibly at the reader’s subconscious, set the stage for an unexpected but inevitable truth; others merely make too obvious what will happen next. In “You Should Have Known,” both varieties show up in the service of a story that holds the soothing promise — despite all evidence to the contrary — of a happy-enough ending.

The Ready-Made Thief by Augustus Rose is great

American Monarchy Party polo w. new logo:blonde w. MP5 L.L.Bean canvas tote(extra magazines),Lily Pulitzer shift.AMP flag label

I KNOW A SECRET by Tess Gerritsen is very good

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson,just about to start...

The New Symbol Of The American Monarchy Party

The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz review by ALICE B. LLOYD

The campus novel is overripe for a renaissance. Because it will take a satirical rendering à la Lucky Jim—or perhaps dozens of them—to expose the painfully silly social politics of campus protest culture to the clarifying light of enough readers' wry, self-aware laughter. Unsurprisingly, few have dared to go there lately what with the risks of offending P.C. mores and triggering viral outrage probably outweighing the uncertain benefits of a literary insight.

It's all the more delightful, then, that in her latest novel, The Devil and Webster, Jean Hanff Korelitz—author of Admission and You Should Have Known—breaks ground in this richest of fields. She pits the thoroughly liberal president of a thinly veiled Dartmouth, Korelitz's alma mater, against a media-savvy student protest whose inarticulate aims this president craves to validate. Naomi Roth is the beleaguered leader of fictional Webster, a staunchly progressive New England college haunted by its very white, very male history.

(The book's epigraph quotes Daniel Webster's seminal 1818 defense of Dartmouth, "It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!"—while its title takes us to the 1937 short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Daniel Webster's fictional, Faustian defense of one poor soul to a jury of the damned. Webster, in the end, kicks the devil—a smooth-talking Mr. Scratch, no match for the great orator—from the New Hampshire courthouse.)

Naomi is Webster's first female and first Jewish president, a scholar of second wave feminism—the pre-intersectional, pre-LGBTQIA wave Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem rode—and, until recently, a popular Women's Studies professor. She distinguished herself to the board as the dean of women's affairs with her skillful handling of an unprecedented PR crisis: A student enrolled as Nell, and joined an all-female feminist affinity house to boot, only to matriculate already most of the way to becoming "Neil." A decade ago, Neil's presence in women-only housing posed an existential threat to the separatist feminism Dean Roth studied in her work and fostered, at least in theory, in her classes. It was as though her diplomatic management of students' and parents' concerns over Neil proved to the trustees and presidential search committee, quite believably, that Whatever weirdness may come, we need a highly competent hippie at the helm…

But once Naomi Roth made her full ascent to the presidency and had a few good years never feeling quite at home in the president's mansion, Webster College entered a climate in which the Neil crisis would have played out quite differently. She herself would become the target of a new type of student unrest, one that does not state its vague, intersectional aims so readily. Eradicating "like two centuries of impacted racism," as one student puts it, (or an eternity of transphobia, for that matter) doesn't begin such discrete "asks" as an audience with the president, so Naomi would learn.

Korelitz's novel shines for these subtle, artful framings, balanced on contextual details a reader lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the tessellating contortions of progressive campus discourse might miss. The story's central drama might as well have been drawn from fairly fresh headlines: A popular professor in a conveniently intersectional field—African-American folklorist Nicholas Gall, in the novel, who's failed to publish and plagiarized when he has—is denied tenure for these fully legitimate reasons trustees and administrators cannot reveal publicly. The unmanageable and inarticulate protest that erupts in response labels itself "Webster Dissent" and claims the school's intractable racist legacy as its source of outrage. An encampment, students in tents, shanties, and sleeping bags, colonizes around "the Stump." It's a literal tree stump but more so a symbol (just like Dartmouth's Old Pine) of swiftly broken promises to Native Americans unfulfilled from the college's founding until the 1970s, and a central meeting place for students, whom Naomi watches from her office window. The student leading the protest—he calls himself Omar Khayal and is a Palestinian refugee—is the shining apotheosis of righteous victimhood. And he's a friend and protégé of Professor Gall's.

Naomi, and not just because of the confidentiality restrictions shielding tenure decisions, can do nothing but "open her door" to the protesters and support the compassion, if not the logic, behind their dissent. (When it becomes clear they plan to camp out well into the winter—and the spring, as it turns out—Naomi has the college provide a "warming tent with heaters, blankets" and "the kind of toilet-trailer you found at your swankier outdoor wedding." Demanding they return to their dorms is just not her way; she brings the comforts of the twenty-first century dorm to them.) "Her heart went out to the them," and she sees herself in their struggle, even though she herself knows better. "The world would never work if people refused to perform this exact alchemy, to recognize that any injustice paid to one of them was paid to every one of them, and it was the duty of those who had a voice to speak for the voiceless," she believes. Naomi's daughter, a sophomore at Webster and a mainstay at the Stump, stops talking to her—and even becomes a spokesperson for the protest movement.

This struggle of Naomi's to encourage the students' stand against injustice and yet still maintain presidential authority, represents, Korelitz has said, the strained role of a former campus radical grown up to become the power that gets protested: "In this case the story was about a confrontation between a woman who considers herself ideologically in line with her own younger self and an enigmatic student who appears to see her very differently, and who forces her to rethink who she is and what she actually believes," Korelitz told Inside Higher Ed. What happens when radicals grow up and actually occupy positions of power? That was the question the novel began to coalesce around." As an undergrad at Cornell, young Naomi Roth occupied the president's office to protest ROTC recruitment. Now that she's in charge, witnessing what children on campuses put themselves and their administrators through—this refusal to tolerate injustice anymore, the twisted expressions of which we on the right too easily ridicule, President Roth believes—stretches her love and patience for modern movement mentality. It's a modern movement mentality that's kept her daughter out in the cold for months.

A conversation between Naomi and her friend Francine, the admissions director at Webster, supplies a definitive summing up. Francine, who read all their essays, after all, observes that student protesters today don't care for the president's support. "They want to build their own constituencies. They want to represent something to their peers more than they want to gain respect from their opponents," she tells Naomi over a strained meal in student dining.

["…Omar] didn't answer emails. I did what I could, though I suppose I could have done more."
"Well…" said Francine. But she declined to make the expected noises. No! You tried so hard! "Really, what was I supposed to be doing? My door's been open for months. I've tried to get him to talk to me for months. What kind of protest declines dialogue with its opponent?"
"A modern one," Francine said dryly. "These kids are not like we were. You were," she corrected. "Interaction across the battle lines isn't what they're after. They want to build their own constituencies. They want to represent something to their peers more than they want to gain respect from their opponents."
"Or accomplish anything," Naomi said, rolling her eyes.
"Oh, they're accomplishing plenty. They're compiling influence. They're emerging from the crowd."
"Gaining 'likes.' Getting 'retweeted.'"
"That's part of it. No point denying it."
"Building their brands. Getting famous."
Francine shrugged. "Fame is power. Omar grew up powerless, remember. It's not like he's a Hollywood starlet. He has the entire Middle East to heal. Shouldn't we be helping him?"

We encounter a strange plot twist toward the end, before that a timely hate crime hoax, and even a meddlesome conservative professor emeritus on the board who leaks news of Gall's plagiarism to a right-of-center reporter (me, I imagine). All of these developments carry along the brisk action. But still my enjoyment of the The Devil and Webster was colored over by memories of Dartmouth College, unmistakably Korelitz's muse. Although she's lived in Princeton, where her husband is a professor, for decades—and other reviewers home in on whiffs of Williams (like Williams, Webster is not in the same athletic league as "the Ivies" but rivals them in U.S. News rankings, calling itself, cheekily, "The Harvard of Massachusetts")—no other New England campus strains against its demons just so:

Once a school of the richest, the WASPiest, the most loutish and most conservative of American men, and then later, after its extraordinary transition in the 1970s, the institution of choice for creative and left-leaning intellectuals of all genders and ethnic varieties. "A small school in the woods, from which, by the Grace of God, we might know His will" had been its motto in the early days, when Josiah Webster hacked his way north from King's College (later Columbia) to establish his Webster's Indian Academy beneath the towering elms. Two centuries later, with nary a Native American student in nearly that long, those words—like so much else about Webster—had been revised: "A small school in the woods, from which, by scholarship and thoughtful community, we might know the Universe."

I can't say for sure I would have enjoyed this book so much, in other words, if I weren't inescapably bound to swap in Dartmouth's Eleazar Wheelock for Josiah Webster, the Old Pine for the Stump, the former Indian mascot for… the former Indian mascot. Or to read Dartmouth's thirteenth president, Hungarian-American John G. Kemeny, for the Franco-Armenian Webster president Oksen Sarafian, whose progressive vision changed everything the moment he arrived on campus in 1966, and whose guidance Naomi desires from the depths: "She wished that Oksen Sarafian were still here to be walked around the campus, introduced to what he'd made, and to the Jewish female (feminist!) scholar who now sat at his old desk. She wondered how he'd be handling the kids out at the Stump. She wished she could ask him." Sarafian, as with the non-fictional Kemeny, admitted the first women and inaugurated the reparative Native American studies program—now, just like Dartmouth's, among the nation's finest. (When Korelitz arrived at Dartmouth in 1979, Kemeny was two years from retirement.)

Maybe it takes a woman of Dartmouth, after all, to look out on a generation of protest-crazed college students and see nothing new under the sun—and to say so, sharply but lovingly, in crisp satirical terms. There's something about four years in those rugged wilds caught (as Dartmouth still is, and "Webster" too) between the old guard that still hates to see a single frat close and the frantic, progressive march toward an amoral emptiness based, in the novel, on a what turns out to be a remorseless lie. But it takes a grown-up radical's steadiness, in Korelitz's telling, to kick the devil from the courthouse.