 Philomel Books; Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Photo by Elena Seibert); Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (Erin Schaff/The New York Times/Pool/AP); Crown Forum | By Washington standards, Maskgate was a brief scandal, a stink you could barely smell through a KN95. It started on Tuesday when NPR's Nina Totenberg reported that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose health makes covid-19 particularly dangerous, had to work remotely because Justice Neil Gorsuch refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask. But on Wednesday, Sotomayor and Roberts issued statements saying they had not asked Gorsuch to wear a mask (story). NPR stood by its story, and Totenberg doubled down on her claim, while trying to get back to the more important point: "What is incontrovertible is that all the justices have at once started wearing masks — except Gorsuch." The repercussions of this controversy were nil, aside from the usual calls to "Defund NPR" from folks who take Fox News intravenously. But the discussion also drew attention to Gorsuch's 2019 book, "A Republic, If You Can Keep It." This collection of essays, judicial opinions and speeches showcases the judge's devotion to cordial behavior. "Self-governance turns on our treating each other as equals — as persons, with the courtesy and respect each person deserves — even when we vigorously disagree," Gorsuch writes. "Without civility, the bonds of friendship in our communities dissolve." But apparently, donning a mask around a colleague justifiably afraid of contracting a deadly disease is too grave an inconvenience for the Sage of Civility. Especially if he wasn't explicitly asked. If only Gorsuch had read Sotomayor's new picture book, "Just Help" (ages 4-8 and 54). In a brief preface, Sotomayor remembers her mother, a nurse who "lived a life of service." She's the inspiration for the character of Mami, who begins each morning by asking little Sonia, "How will you help today?" In bright illustrations by Angela Dominguez, we see Sonia assembling care packages for soldiers overseas, while her angelic classmates pitch in around town. Gabriela cleans up litter in the playground, Jasper donates toys to the hospital, and Kunal pushes a senior in a wheelchair to the voting booth. (Watch out, Kunal: GOP lawmakers are onto your scheme!) At the end of the story, Sonia drifts off to sleep considering how everyone's good deeds "knit together a community that was safer, cleaner, wiser, healthier, and kinder." If Gorsuch doesn't want to read Sotomayor's new picture book, he could listen to actress Kerry Washington, who narrates the audio version of "Just Help." It might remind him that at his confirmation hearing he said, "People want to be remembered for the kindness they showed other people." Conspiracy theorists, take note: Sotomayor's previous children's book was called "Just Ask!"  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Photo by Manny Jefferson/Knopf); (Offline image courtesy of Crooked Media) | Last year witnessed some particularly vicious battles on social media, and one of the most acrimonious conflicts took place between two immensely talented novelists from Nigeria. Akwaeke Emezi, who identifies as nonbinary, said that their former writing teacher, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was transphobic. Adichie posted a response titled "It's Obscene," which said that her former student was manipulative and dishonest. The Twitter warriors took sides with the usual results – more heat, less light. This week, Adichie talked about that experience on Offline, a podcast hosted by Jon Favreau. It's a long, searching conversation that explores the pernicious effects of social media, the death of nuance and the rigid enforcement of ideological purity. I was particularly struck by Adichie's comments about young writers. She laments that all too often she finds herself talking with students who respond to a novel by saying, "Well, there's a character who said the n-word," or "There's a character who's a misogynist." Such pointing and litmus-testing, she says, have become what passes for literary criticism among a certain set. "You're not reading with any kind of complexity." That worries her. "I think the literary arts that will be produced in the U.S. in the next 10 to 15 years — unless something changes — will be awful," she says. "The characters will be terrible mouth-pieces because what's happening now is people are afraid. I really think that people are afraid of not just writing about certain subjects but how they write about it. Art has to be able to go to a place that's messy, a place that's uncomfortable. You have to be able to write characters who are [jerks] in all kinds of ways, and not have that become something that explains you, the writer." If a certain kind of orthodoxy rules, we'll lose something essential, Adichie says. "Literature is the last thing that we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are" (listen).  (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) | Arthur is 45 years old, but through all that time he's maintained the bright face of an 8-year-old. Next month, the TV show's final season will pull back the curtain and show us an adult version of Arthur. Part of me is worried it'll be like "The Picture of Dorian Aardvark." Marc Brown created the earnest insectivore during an anxious period of his life. Garland Junior College, where he'd recently been hired, suddenly closed down. He didn't know what he'd do next. But then his son asked him for a bedtime story, and Brown heard an aardvark talking. The first book, "Arthur's Nose," appeared in 1976. That led to a series that would eventually grow to more than 100 picture books that have sold 65 million copies in the U.S. (Unconfirmed reports suggest this has been more lucrative than teaching at Garland Junior College.) Surprisingly, nobody put Arthur on TV for a long time. Brown published more than 20 books in the series before a producer for WGBH in Boston spotted him giving a reading at a library. She thought a cartoon version of Arthur might work. Her prediction was right on the nose: "Arthur" became the longest-running animated children's series in television history. (My daughters and I watched it for several of those years.) To mark the show's 25th anniversary, Brown has just released a sweet book of ethical admonitions called "Believe in Yourself: What We Learned from Arthur" (ages 4 to 8). Drawing from the books and the TV series, it's full of colorful illustrations and solid advice about being a supportive friend and taking responsibility for your actions. Brief comments on fighting racism, celebrating gay relationships and watching out for misinformation online demonstrate how intentionally "Arthur" has evolved over the years. In an appendix for adults, Brown offers special praise for his high school art teacher. One day, she drove him to an interview at the Cleveland Institute of Art; he left with an offer for a full scholarship. "Teachers are my heroes," Brown writes. "Every day they are quietly helping to shape the next generation of citizens and leaders."  Glenn Youngkin giving his address after being sworn in as Virginia's 74th governor on the front steps of the State Capitol on Jan. 15, 2022 in Richmond, Va. (Photo by John McDonnell/The Washington Post) | Virginia's new governor, Glenn Youngkin, celebrated Martin Luther King weekend with a particularly cynical performance of equality theater: He signed an executive order banning "inherently divisive concepts, like Critical Race Theory." His declaration does nothing to quell divisiveness, of course. It was composed only to indulge a segment of fragile White voters and set traps for history, social studies and English teachers trying to analyze America's past and present. After a campaign saved by demonizing Toni Morrison's "Beloved," the governor's order was not a surprise, but it still felt disappointing to read his anti-intellectual chant against critical race theory. For many conservatives, CRT is like "the Black Man" who haunts the forest in "The Scarlet Letter." It's an embodiment of evil elastic enough to contain an abundance of white terrors and unify the community of saints in fervent righteousness. Over the past year, voters have been told repeatedly that books used in public schools are teaching White students to hate America and feel guilty for crimes committed in previous centuries. It's Orwellian to hear politicians champion their purely factual approach to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement while promulgating a divisive fantasy about what happened in Washington just a year ago. Despite the hysteria spewed across America by the Manhattan Institute (story), CRT isn't actually taught in K-12 schools. But let's not bother with that point anymore; it was never heard over the racist dog whistles anyhow. How about noting, instead, that scholars working under the broad rubric of CRT can help us see the way white supremacy is inscribed in school reading lists, curricula, disciplinary measures, testing standards, real estate-based funding arrangements and more? That's of no concern to Virginia's incurious governor. With numbing repetition, his first executive order condemns "divisive concepts" more than a dozen times, as though the study of how racism persists were more alarming than the persistence of racism itself. "Our children deserve far better from their education than to be told what to think," Youngkin tells us to think. Armed with this massive straw-man argument, the Superintendent of Public Instruction has been charged to comb through "all guidelines, websites, best practices, and other materials produced by the Department of Education to identify those that promote or endorse divisive or inherently racist concepts." Teachers: Start bleaching your assignments now because if little Johnny feels triggered by a "divisive concept" in your classroom, his mommy will come for you.  Poster featuring Issy Wood's "The down payment" (2021) accompanying Ottessa Moshfegh's "My New Novel" (New York: Picture Books | Gagosian, 2021) | The writer Emma Cline has launched a bespoke imprint called Picture Books. But don't let that name fool you; these are for adult readers. Each book — designed by Peter Mendelsund and produced by the international art gallery Gagosian — pairs a story with a large poster that comes folded into the front cover. In a statement announcing the imprint, Cline said she wanted to create "a space for a new kind of dialogue between art and fiction." With their plain covers and stamped titles, the first two books look like elegantly bound yearbooks from a small prep school. But that restrained design leaves the stage clear for the visual artists to make an impression. The first book contains "My New Novel," by Ottessa Moshfegh, and a poster by the London-based artist Issy Wood (details). If you know Moshfegh's mordant book "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" (review), you'll recognize Jerome Littlefield, the comically repellant protagonist of "My New Novel." Suffering from crippling writer's block, he places an ad on Craigslist for someone to listen to him. Wood's painting shows Jerome Littlefield weeping piteously with chipmunks on his shoulders. The second volume is, to my mind, a more substantive creation. It's a reprint of Percival Everett's 2001 novella, "Grand Canyon, Inc." with a poster by New York-based artist Richard Prince (details). It's wonderful to have this zany satire back in print (review). Everett's story describes the antics of a big-game hunter named Rhino Tanner who takes the Grand Canyon off the government's hands and turns it into an amusement park. "This canyon was but a scar of nature," Tanner tells tourists, but now "it belongs to all of us!" Prince's poster is a majestic photo of sandstone buttes in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Everett is a terrific writer — see the award news below — and at just $40, this edition of "Grand Canyon, Inc." feels like a very reasonable collector's item. Future volumes from Picture Books will include stories by Mary Gaitskill and Elif Batuman.  Finalists for the NBCC Nonfiction Prize: "Orwell's Roses," by Rebecca Solnit (Viking); "The Least of Us," by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury); "The Family Roe," by Joshua Prager (Norton); "Empire of Pain," by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday); "How the Word Is Passed," by Clint Smith (Little, Brown). | Last night the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of more than 600 editors and reviewers (including me), announced the winners of several special honors: - Percival Everett won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. "Everett isn't just brilliant," said NBCC judge Jacob Appel, "he is brilliant over and over and over again, novel after novel, story after story, each successively more original and thought-provoking."
- Cave Canem Foundation won the inaugural Toni Morrison Achievement award. Appel said, "Cave Canem has become both the premier body for cultivating and promoting Black poetic voices and has left a truly indelible mark on the broader literary landscape."
- Merve Emre won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for her essay in the New Yorker on Leonora Carrington's 1974 novel "The Hearing Trumpet."
The NBCC also announced 30 finalists for its annual awards in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry (full list). The winners will be announced during a free virtual ceremony on March 17. The nonfiction finalists are pictured above. The fiction finalists are listed below:  (Little, Brown Spark) | I have no facility for finance, but I'm fascinated by it. I claim to get the Wall Street Journal for the paper's erudite cultural coverage, but it's actually for the financial commentary. (Shhhh.) Several years ago in the Journal, I discovered Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University who ran against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. (Spoiler alert: He did not win.) This week, I read a provocative new book by Kotlikoff called, "Money Magic: An Economist's Secrets to More Money, Less Risk, and a Better Life." I know, I know: If you had a nickel for every one of these money management books, you could afford to hire a money manager. But Kotlikoff's book is worth checking out. He's smart but self-deprecating, quick to pull back when he finds himself wandering into the weeds of Monte Carlo simulations and replacement-rate calculations. His chapters cover subjects like paying for college (Don't borrow!), filing for divorce (Be fair!) and choosing where to live (Hi, Mom!). He offers clear economic advice and humorous anecdotes from his own life. He's particularly impassioned about the financial danger facing most of us: living far longer than we imagine we will. For anyone thinking about early retirement, he shouts, "Don't!" and warns about the bedeviling complexity of Social Security. (Seriously, don't apply for benefits until you read this book or get professional help — not from the Social Security office. Mistakes could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime.) Best of all, Kotlikoff enjoys playing the financial-advice iconoclast, e.g. "Cashing out your retirement-account assets to pay off your mortgage can be a big winner." – Really? "Most 'experts' are wrong most of the time," he writes, "But not to worry — they'll charge you either way." He insists that the stock market is far riskier than the mutual fund industry leads us to believe. And yet he advises retirees to "invest more heavily in stocks the older they get," which is the exact opposite of what popular lifecycle funds do with our retirement savings. This material is solely for informational purposes. Reading involves risk and possible loss of time. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.  Anne Schwartz; Kokila; Henry Holt; Quill Tree | More literary awards and honors this week: - The Jane Addams Children's Book Awards, sponsored by the Jane Addams Peace Association, celebrate books "that effectively engage children in thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equity for all people." The winner in the younger children category is "Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress," written by Alicia D. Williams and illustrated by April Harrison (backstory). The winner in the older children category is "How to Find What You're Not Looking For," by Veera Hiranandani.
- The Walter awards, sponsored by We Need Diverse Books, recognize outstanding children's literature that reflects the values of author Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014). This year's winner for Teen Readers is "Firekeeper's Daughter," by Angeline Boulley (video interview). The Younger Readers winner is "Red, White, and Whole," by Rajani LaRocca, which was also one of The Washington Post's top 10 children's books of 2021 (full list).
 © 2022 Poetry in America | At the Dupont Circle Metro Station in Washington, a vertiginous escalator carries passengers deep underground through a massive granite cylinder. Near the top, carved into the curved wall, appear these words in a single line so long you have to turn to read them all: Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young;
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad . . . That haunting passage comes from the end of a poem by Walt Whitman called "The Wound-Dresser," and those "dreams' projections" recall his experience tending grievously injured soldiers during the Civil War. "Poetry in America," which returns to PBS for a third season this weekend, begins with an episode focused on "The Wound-Dresser." It's a poem that shatters all romantic visions of war. With commentary by historian Drew Faust, writer-physician Abraham Verghese and others, this is a deeply moving and revealing production. The actor David Strathairn reads Whitman's words with tremendous sympathy, while archival photos and illustrations display the war's physical trauma, enabled by the innovative weaponry of the era. Elisa New, the series creator and narrator, says, "Like most in 1861, Whitman was ready to beat the drums of war. But his exposure to the wounded and dying changed him and changed his understanding of his nation." With all the talk these days about America's next civil war, this episode couldn't be more timely — or sobering. "Poetry in America" also offers online courses in partnership with Harvard University and Arizona State University. Future episodes this season will explore poems by Richard Blanco, Sharon Olds, Evie Shockley and others (more information).  Tin House | Bianca Stone teaches poetry at the Ruth Stone House, an arts foundation on her late grandmother's property in Vermont. Her new book, "What Is Otherwise Infinite," contains poems that bounce off ordinary moments to attain something extraordinary. As she says at the opening of one poem, "Get down on your knees and be thunderstruck with language." Set Designer Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design,
unpaid, in the Poconos
where I would be forever traumatized
by the overpopulation of deer,
growths on their bodies and bald patches,
limping and scarred from being hit by cars,
and the one the crew called "jawbone"
that kept coming around
because its jawbone was hanging off, unusable, from its head
while the body wasted away
and I brought out mashed potatoes
that it lapped up with a long tongue. We had to fire the creepy sound guy
who was clearly on drugs
and I found a big plastic gallon of Dewer's
in the Airbnb cupboard
and a guitar
and got drunk alone on the deck of the cabin
amazed no one would join me.
I woke in the middle of the night
for my usual routine of self-hatred
until I realized how excruciating it all was
and instead wrote down on the set schedule
"remember how good it feels to be good to yourself"
carrying it around with me ever since.
Hoping I will. Excerpted from "What Is Otherwise Infinite," by Bianca Stone. Published with permission of Tin House. Copyright (c) 2022 by Bianca Stone.  Dawn, Madeline and Ron Charles with their watercolor masterpieces. (Ron Charles/The Washington Post) | This week, the winter gloom lifted for a few days when our younger daughter came home for a short visit. But with the pandemic keeping us out of restaurants and the weather locking us indoors, Dawn and I didn't have much entertainment to offer a worldly New Yorker. One night, having run through all our usual parlor games — Bananagrams, Pun Intended, Taboo — we turned to a series of online classes called "Let's Make Art." With encouraging instruction from artist Sarah Cray, the three of us painted pomegranates. Family means never having to ask, "Why pomegranates?" Meanwhile, send any questions or comments about our book coverage to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week's issue here. And if you know friends who might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them and remind them it's free! To subscribe, click here.
Interested in advertising in our bookish newsletter? Contact Michael King at michael.king@washpost.com. |
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