Archive - March 29, 2023

Is True Love Possible? Readers Are Turning to This 1990s Novel for Answers. March 29, 2023 in News Katherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app. “It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Ms. Champagne, 35, who lives in Queens and works at a start-up. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Ms. Champagne recalled. César Acevedo, a bartender in Brooklyn, bought “Mating” within 24 hours of seeing a tweet posted in December by John Phipps, the fiction editor of the literary magazine The Fence. In the tweet, Mr. Phipps said he was . . .

God, President Kennedy, and Me by Tina Martin (Tonga 1969-71) A version of this appears in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth, 2011. I remember what I was doing on November 22, 1963 even before I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Praying. Not just because I was chairman of Religious Emphasis Week at Columbia High School but because there was a beauty contest that night and, if it were God’s will, I was willing to win it. So I kept checking in with God, letting Him know that He was on my mind, and I sure hoped I was on His. I didn’t want Him to fix the contest. That wouldn’t be fair. I just wanted Him to help me do justice to whatever God-given beauty I might have so that I could honor the Future Teachers of America Club I was representing and serve as . . .