Oscar Wilde is now wecome at the British Library

Better late than never? Probably not. One hundred and thirty years after they expelled him, the British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s readers’ pass, allowing him entry to the library once again.

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‘A Pale View of Hills’ - Kazuo Ishiguro

There has been a film made of this novel and I decided to check out Ishiguro’s first novel before seeing the film. Etsuko is a Japanese woman living in England. One of her daughters has committed suicide.

The story moves back to 1952 when Etsuko lived in Nagasaki, a city still recovering from the horrific bombing that ended World War 2. That summer Etsuko was expecting her first child with her husband Jiro and she forms a friendship with Sachiko, a woman with a young daughter. Sachiko was living in poverty in a rundown house nearby although she says she comes from a wealthy family. She is neglectful of her daughter who appears to have some emotional issues. Etsuko offers to help but Sachiko insists she has everything under control. It’s a good story about motherhood and guilt with a surprise ending that I read twice because I was not sure I understood what had happened.

The Painted Lady

The snow—a heavy blanket smothering roofs, roads, onion fields, pasture. But Vic’s main concern is the roofs. He’s brought along a twenty-three-year-old Junior to save his bad back a little pain by shoveling off those of his rentals before they collapse under all that weight. But first, a pit stop on the way.

The call came, unexpected, that morning. This opportunity from the sister, Inga, one-half inheritor of her family’s Canadian timber fortune. Is Vic still available? Does he still have the plow? They’d almost forgotten about the house altogether. Turned out the bank didn’t foreclose on their place after all. Left to sit for nearly a decade, she and her brother still own it: the Painted Lady. The one just up past Sooner’s Orchard. Remember? Of course he does.

Junior rubs a porthole in the window and watches the orchards pass. The apple trees collect into gnarled, black cages on the hills. Even with chains on the truck’s tires, the driving is slow, the road yet to be sufficiently plowed and salted.

“Are you even listening,” Vic says to him. “I’m trying to teach you. Something important that’ll supplement your interests. Keep your dreams afloat in desperate times. The customer doesn’t buy your work. They buy you. You need to sell them. These people are rich. Crazy. The best kind.”

“I thought they only called about a plow,” says Junior, his breath pulsing across the frozen window.

Vic lowers his head to peer through the slot of visibility provided by the muttering dashboard defroster. “Never mind the plow. That’s just getting your foot in the door,” he says, and begins an outline of the work he’s done for these people: the Olsen twins—Inga and Otto. Mythical people Junior has only heard rumors of.

“Carpentry, painting, yard work, gardening—you name it. Didn’t matter,” he continues. “Back then I was willing to do anything for a buck. Between your mother selling her vegetables and me painting houses, we could barely make our rehab loan payments. There was this urgency. They had me to work from the outside in. But disappeared before I could get to the inside part. Vanished. Still paid the down payment on my first rental property, though. Hell, they paid for your diapers. If you play your cards right, they’ll pay for yours, too. Maybe another fixer-upper. Just wait. Soon enough you’ll care plenty about expenses. These people really are crazy with money—when you can catch them . . .”

Through the porthole, Junior watches the apple trees drop away into seamless white horse pasture, the top rung of the fence riding above the snow alongside the road, bobbing and snaking with an unevenness accentuated by the flatness of the snow, his father talking still. Talking, talking, as always—trying to drag back to earth any daydream of a thought. Until an incomprehensible sound issues from Junior’s mouth.

“Don’t interrupt,” Vic says.

“But the Sooner’s barn—” says Junior.

“This is important—”

“Collapsed,” continues Junior. “Completely gone. I hope Sooner managed to save the horses—”

“We’re almost there and I’m trying to teach you something—” But then Vic sees it, too. Or worse, yet, doesn’t. Sooner’s barn. Where it should be—where it isn’t—has been replaced by a small mound of snow porcupined with jagged boards. Now he makes an incomprehensible sound himself, a clipped window of worry slamming shut.

“See,” says Junior.

“I do,” says Vic, already turning back to the wheel. “I’m sure Sooner put those horses up somewhere.”

“Sooner doesn’t even put up the dogs,” says Junior.

“Never mind about the horses, never mind about the dogs,” says Vic, and blinkers the turn signal. “We’re here. Look alive.” And with a mechanical whir, he engages the plow.

About half a mile off, the Painted Lady burns yellow against the snow. Vic works his way along the driveway whose bounds he must guess at with small bites from the plow. Swath after swath, he crushes the snow into berms, the distant farmhouse lurching higher with every bite into a sheer cliff of tri-colored peaks, a spectacle toward which they need to crane their necks. The detail truly something to admire. Its variety of shingle shapes—tears, spear-tips, hearts. Each painted a different color. Ornate molding, still somehow well-defined, as if milled yesterday. Even after all these years. The intricacy of trim, especially. Accentuated by Vic’s brushwork. The way it snakes the yellow body with clashing colors of viridian and midnight blues, regal purples. Each shot through with one another. In conversation with the Victorian yellow. Each nook and turret, the balusters and façades.

“It’s called a Painted Lady,” Vic says, shifting the truck into park.

“You’ve told me that a thousand times,” Junior replies.

Vic opens his mouth to say something about how the boy should be more grateful. That Vic didn’t need to plow these people out, didn’t need their money. Not only was he doing Junior a favor, he was sacrificing a good man. He couldn’t justify paying Junior the kind of money these people could. Didn’t Junior realize? Wasn’t he mature enough now? He thought they’d grow past this indifference once he returned home from Costa Rica. If only he thought for just one second.

Read more: Literary Hub

From Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti. Copyright © 2025 by Harris Lahti.

PITY THE NATION

 PITY THE NATION

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2007

(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

   And whose shepherds mislead them

 Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

            Whose sages are silenced

  And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

 Pity the nation that raises not its voice

          Except to praise conquerers

       And acclaim the bully as hero

          And aims to rule the world

              By force and by torture

          Pity the nation that knows

        No other language but its own

      And no other culture but its own

 Pity the nation whose breath is money

 And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

      Pity the nation oh pity the people

        who allow their rights to erode

   and their freedoms to be washed away

               My country, tears of thee

                   Sweet land of liberty!

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Wrong Hands

Time And Again - A Short Story by Breece D'J Pancake

Mr. Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died. When Mr. Weeks doesn’t call, I write everybody I know about my boy. Some of my letters always come back, and the folks who write back say nobody knows where he got off to. I can’t help but think he might come home at night when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light burn and go on out the door.

The cold air is the same, and the snow pellets my cap, sifts under my collar. I hear my hogs come grunting from their shed, thinking I have come to feed them. I ought to feed them better than that awful slop, but I can’t until I know my boy is safe. I told him not to go and look, that the hogs just squeal because I never kill them. They always squeal when they are happy, but he went and looked. Then he ran off someplace.

I brush the snow from my road plow’s windshield and climb in. The vinyl seats are cold, but I like them. They are smooth and easy cleaned. The lug wrench is where it has always been beside my seat. I heft it, put it back, I start the salt spreader, lower my shear, and head out to clean the mountain road.

The snow piles in a wall against the berm. No cars move. They are stranded at the side, and as I plow past them, a line falls in behind me, but they always drop back. They don’t know how long it takes the salt to work. They are common fools. They rush around in such weather and end up dead. They never sit still and wait for the salt to work.

I think I am getting too old to do this anymore. I wish I could rest and watch my hogs get old and die. When the last one is close to dying, I will feed him his best meal and leave the gate open. But that will most likely not happen, because I know this stretch of Route 60 from Ansted to Gauley, and I do a good job. Mr. Weeks always brags on what a good job I do, and when I meet the other truck plowing the uphill side of this road, I will honk. That will be Mr. Weeks coming up from Gauley. I think how I never met Mr. Weeks in my life but in a snowplow. Sometimes I look out to Sewel Mountain and see snow coming, then I call Mr. Weeks. But we are not friends. We don’t come around each other at all. I don’t even know if he’s got family.

I pass the rest stop at Hawks Nest, and a new batch of fools line up behind me, but pretty soon I am alone again. As I plow down the grade toward Chimney Corners, my lights are the only ones on the road, and the snow takes up the yellow spinning of my dome light and the white curves of my headlights. I smile at the pretties they make, but I am tired and wish I was home. I worry about the hogs. I should have given them more slop, but when the first one dies, the others will eat him quick enough.

I make the big turn at Chimney Corners and see a hitchhiker standing there. His front is clean, and he looks half frozen, so I stop to let him in.

He says, “Hey, thank you, Mister.”

“How far you going?”

“Charleston.”

“You got family there?” I say.

“Yessir.”

“I only go to Gauley Bridge, then I turn around.”

“That’s fine,” he says. He is a polite boy.

The fools pack up behind me, and my low gears whine away from them. Let them fall off the mountain for all I care.

“This is not good weather to be on the road” I say.

“Sure ain’t, but a fellow’s got to get home.”

“Why didn’t you take a bus?”

“Aw, buses stink,” he says. My boy always talked like that.

“where you been?”

“Roanoke. Worked all year for a man. He give me Christmastime and a piece of change.”

“He sounds like a good man.”

“You bet. He’s got this farm outside of town — horses —  you ain’t seen such horses. He’s gonna let me work the horses next year.”

“I have a farm, but I only have some hogs left.”

“Hogs is good business,” he says.

I look at him. “You ever see a hog die?” I look back at the road snow.

“Sure.”

“Hogs die hard. I seen people die in the war easier than a hog at a butchering.”

“Never noticed. We shot and stuck them pretty quick. They do right smart jerking around, but they’re dead by then”

“Maybe.”

“What can you do with a hog if you don’t butcher him? Sell him?”

“My hogs are old hogs. Not good for anything. I just been letting them die. I make my money on this piece of road every winter. Don’t need much.”

He says, “Ain’t got any kids?”

“My boy run off when my wife died. But that was considerable time ago.”

He is quiet a long time. Where the road is patched, I work my shear up, and go slower to let more salt hit behind. In my mirror, I see the lights of cars sneaking up behind me.

Then of a sudden the hitchhiker says, “What’s your boy do now?”

“He was learning a mason’s trade when he run off.”

“Makes good money.”         

“I don’t know. He was only a hod carrier then.”

He whistles. “I done that two weeks this summer. I never been so sore.”

“It’s hard work,” I say. I think, this boy has good muscles if he can carry hod.

I see the lights of Mr. Weeks’s snowplow coming toward us. I gear into first. I am not in a hurry. “Scrunch down,” I say. “I’d get in trouble for picking you up.”

The boy hunkers in the seat, and the lights from Mr. Weeks’s snowplow shine into my cab. I wave into the lights, not seeing Mr. Weeks, and we honk when we pass. Now I move closer to center. I want to do a good job and get all the snow, but when the line of cars behind Mr. Weeks comes toward me, I get fidgety. I don’t want to cause any accidents. The boy sits up and starts talking again, and it makes me jittery.

“I was kinda scared about coming through Fayette County,” he says.

“Uh-huh,” I say. I try not to brush any cars.

“Damn, but a lot of hitchhikers gets killed up here.”

A man lays on his horn as he goes past, but I have to get what Mr. Weeks left, and I am always too close to center.

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Obscure Words

 I have never used any of these words. Have you?

agroof: face downward

amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle

benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries

bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting

callipygian: having shapely buttocks

charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline

clishmaclaver: gossip

Read many more: Futility Closet

The Centre Cannot Hold….

In recent days I find my mind turning to this poem. I finally understand what Yeats was talking about.

THE SECOND COMING - William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Octavia Butler - Parable Of The Talents

 

Sleep - an excerpt

The girls were sleeping—they had fought so hard over whose turn it was to take the top bunk that in the end they were both in the bottom, sleeping head to foot. Margaret went in to check on them. Helen was turtled under the blankets. Jo was the opposite—legs bare, her arms thrown one way and her hair the other.

She had spent half an hour tidying the apartment; it was so small it never took much longer. She could disinfect the whole place with half a packet of Clorox wipes if she wanted to and sometimes did. There were two small white bedrooms with airshaft views and a sunny living room with five feet of kitchen against one wall and a couch against the other. Between them was a pinkish rug with a pattern so faded it was only a rumor, darker patches that could as well have been stains or shadows as design.

The apartment had been renovated for roommates in their twenties, not mothers and children. So there was no hall closet for a vacuum cleaner, no bathtub, and a stove so doll-size it was basically decorative.

The rooms did not reward close inspection. Gaps under the windowsills and behind the radiators bulged creamily with the insulation she’d sprayed from a can to keep out the drafts and the mice. But she liked living with the girls in those white boxes, how snug it felt. Shipshape, she sometimes let herself think.

What was it about watching her children sleep that made Margaret feel so safe? It was like she was both the mother keeping watch and a third girl in the bed, like she was standing guard over herself too. Helen shifted under the covers. She had brought Margaret running with the cry of “Mommy!” but it was only a dream. She was murmuring now. Margaret couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of a complaint. When the girls were sleeping at their father’s, did they know to call out “Daddy” in the night? No, Margaret knew they didn’t, knew it was always Margaret they first shouted for, whether she was there to answer or not. She battened down the pain, watched until the child settled back to quiet.

She had to get some work done. She dimmed the hallway light to the agreed-upon dimness, took her laptop back to the couch, and began reading. Dear editor, please consider. Dear editor, the time has come to. Dear Margaret, I never wanted to have to tell this story. Dear sirs.

Someone shrieked. Outside the open window Thursday night went past, the sound like blue buffetings of fresh air. She wished she could be out there too, going somewhere, with the night air lifting up her skirt. She felt antsy in a way that was almost hormonal, a teenage itch. She couldn’t make out what people were saying, but it didn’t matter, she got the gist. Someone was slagging someone else, someone was telling an outraged story, someone was discussing the logistics of the night. Distance abstracted the language from the units of its content, turned it into tone and meter and nothing else. She was surprised how much she could understand without understanding a word.

Once, she’d heard a man speaking, his voice abnormally deep and loud—stentorian, she thought. It was an Elizabeth kind of word, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head for a moment, clearer than the man outside. He wasn’t talking to anyone else, you could tell. She thought, at first, a madman. Each phrase seemed to draw up the next, a dissonance that built and built and hung there, suspended, until he spoke again, answering. That was when she realized, no—an actor. He was reciting. She’d been folding laundry; she stopped and listened. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” she wished. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance—” Nope, she couldn’t make it out. Yet she was moved by the voice without knowing what it said.

She submitted to her inbox, opened another email, read the pitch: “I decided I finally had to share what happened to me because what ensued was a textbook case of the everyday violence women experience in places like offices and literary events. It speaks to the traumatizing effects of toxic male power . . .” She skimmed the submission. Lord, it was long; it just kept going. She skipped to the end, to the call to action: We can no longer, the cost of silence, the head in the sand, the blind eye. “We must not continue to be complicit in the violence lest we let the perpetrators win.”

It had been a few months since the Harvey Weinstein news had broken. She was the only senior editor on staff who was also a woman, so as long as the news cycle lasted, it was her job to tell all the variations on the story, to find new ones in ever more nuanced and disturbing iterations. She edited essays about predators at school, at work, on sidewalks and subways, at concerts and grocery stores, reassessments of desire, reassessments of consent. She believed, of course, in the importance of telling these stories. But she didn’t experience the full shock and outrage that others seemed to feel. She wasn’t surprised—that was the trouble. If anything, she was relieved.

Of course the men were wrong. But they were wrong in a tidy way. These were not the kinds of transgressions that proved that underneath the guise of human love and caregiving was a roiling pit of filthy horror. That other people were so shocked—it comforted her. The hidden truth was coming out, and one thing it revealed was that the world was not as sick as Margaret had feared, that in fact it was full of still-innocent people. The bad news had broken, and it was not quite as bad as she had always thought it would be.

*

She didn’t want Jo and Helen to know about Harvey Weinstein. Not yet. But if she was going to have to pick an introductory predator, a sort of textbook example, he was a good choice. In a perverted way, she liked to look at pictures of him. He was so big and lumpy, with that bulbous nose and medievally pitted skin. What had he had, the pox? It was reassuring how much he looked like an actual monster, an A-list demon. His awfulness was so predictable, so easy to imagine, it didn’t frighten her. How could she prepare her children for the awfulness that couldn’t be imagined? How could she prepare them without ruining their lives? Ezra, their father, wouldn’t help. He had no experience of such things; she was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

She knew she couldn’t tell anyone about this sense of relief. Recently, in her cubicle, she had turned to the young editorial assistant next to her and said that it was just not possible for her to read the word survivor without hearing that song by Destiny’s Child. The woman had covered her mouth and said, “Oh my god. Margaret.”

Or maybe she was just tired. The stories that she edited seemed too neatly packaged. And that was her fault, of course. She was the one who made sure they had all the right components, that they were different enough to keep readers interested but not so different that they weren’t recognizably the same thing. It made her think of the cardboard and clear-plastic containers the girls’ toys came in—Happy Hour Predatory Ken Doll, with fashions and accessories. If the story departed too far from the standard, it wouldn’t be relevant. It might not even be believable.

Above all the stories had to have a villain, and it had to be obvious that everyone would be better off if they were revealed and punished. But in real life it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes the right thing to do was not to make a fuss—if you could be certain that they wouldn’t do it again, if you could be certain that you’d been the only one damaged.

She looked back at the submission. Was this a new angle on the story? Did it make her see things differently? Was she interested in this person’s trauma? No—she wasn’t. And there was that awful phrase: lest we let. By speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we. How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it—that confident plural voice? “I’m really sorry to say we’re going to pass on this essay, but thank you

so much for giving us the chance to consider it,” she typed out. She copied the rejection and sent it back to all the day’s Dear Margarets. The apartment in the light of the one last lamp was no longer white but blue with shadow. Outside the crowds went by, the words Where to? Where to? like the song of some small darting bird. But now she didn’t want to join them—she liked that they were out there and she was in here and no one else could get inside.

In the morning, the street noise would be different. In the morning, it was always children shouting, and they always sounded just like Helen and Jo. The girls would be sitting at the table, eating breakfast or coloring, and at the same time they would be crying out for Margaret on the sidewalk. You would think you knew your child’s voice, that you could never mistake some stranger for that sound. But that wasn’t how it was. Every crying child sounded just like her own. She would have to stare hard at the girls, she would have to touch them or ask them something so they would lift their heads and look at her, to keep herself from running to the window. When they were with their father, it was so much worse. All day she heard them and could not go to them.

On Saturday she would see Duncan, the man she’d been dating. On Sunday she would take the children to the Natural History Museum with Ezra. But first one more day of work and camp. She had signed up the girls for the cheapest option in the neighborhood, which still cost many thousands of dollars, and as a result they were spending the summer in T-shirts that came down to their knees in a stuffy classroom at the nearby Catholic high school, throwing water balloons at the playground for an hour each afternoon. Was it better or worse than her own childhood summers, lying on the lawn? Better. It was better than that.

Read More: Literary Hub

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

By Mary Oliver


On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind-
the other half having flown back to Bohemia-

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

-from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

The Rembrandt by Edith Wharton

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture–a Rembrandt!” 

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”  

“Well”–she smiled–“that, of course, depends on you.”

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Via Things Magazine

Three Days In June -Anne Tyler

I am always eager to read a new Anne Tyler novel and luckily for me she produces one every few years. She has an unerring sense of character, place and family that draws the reader in. Her often eccentric characters encounter crises that are the same bumps that many of us encounter on the rocky road of life. Marriages are often uneasy and sometimes dissolve but the partners are good people.

At just 176 pages “Three Days In June” is a short novel about Gail Baines, a woman who is getting ready for the marriage of her only daughter, Debbie. She has suddenly been thrown off balance. Her daughter’s in-laws-to-be are paying for the wedding and Gail is feeling left out of the loop. She is a teacher and receives the news that the promotion she was next in line for would be going to another candidate and she is told that she lacks the necessary people skills for the position. Her ex-husband, Max, arrives at her door expecting to stay with her for a few days - and he brings a stray cat with him! Gail’s day is not going well. The marriage stirs up uncomfortable memories for Gail and Max and when Debbie shares a secret they’d rather not hear it is the icing on the cake. 

Tyler has been writing for six decades and her critics say her novels are all similar. They are and that’s because she writes about what she knows and what we know. “Three Days In June” is a touchingly human story that has a familiar feel that I find very comfortable. 

Breaking And Entering - Joy Williams

'The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.'

Years ago I read Joy Williams’ book, The Florida Keys: A History & Guide because I wanted to visit the Keys. It was a unique travel guide, witty and charming. I never made it to the Keys but when I saw a recommendation for Breaking and Entering, Williams’ 3rd novel written in 1988, I remembered the guidebook and decided to give this one a go. It’s about Liberty and Willie, a young, unemployed couple, who break into Florida Keys properties when the owners are away. They have a home of their own but enjoy the superior amenities of these properties for awhile and leave before the owners return. Liberty is unable to have children of her own but has a big white rescue dog and two neglected neighbourhood children that she has befriended. She is depressed. Liberty and Willie have been together since they were teenagers but lately she finds him drifting away.

This is a story about America’s dark side. There is a black cloud hanging over it. Will they get caught breaking and entering? Will they be victims of the gun violence that is pervasive in Florida? This is not a feelgood book - it starts on a whimsical note and gets much bleaker - but it is well written and captures a world that I hope I never have to live in. 

Los Angeles, Indiana | Jesse Barron

“When he died last year, Gary Indiana was writing a novel called Remission. The title could refer to the cancer Gary was suffering from as he composed it, but as with most things Gary wrote, the word had multiple meanings and echoes. Gary intended Remission to be similar, on the surface, to the books in his great ‘American crime’ trilogy, at least in the sense that the story would revolve around a real, high-profile case.

The case had started in 2017. That summer, a man died of a meth overdose at an apartment in West Hollywood. The tenant of the apartment, Ed Buck, was a retired businessman turned political activist. The man who died, Gemmel Moore, was a twenty-six-year-old doing sex work. Buck was white, Moore black. The coroner ruled Moore’s death an accident, but a year later, a second man died of an overdose in Buck’s living room, and nine months after that, a third man called the police from a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, saying Buck had just given him a too-high shot of meth. Finally, the police arrested Buck, charging him with the two prior deaths, and a judge gave him thirty years. For obvious reasons, this received significant coverage in the media.”

Read more: Granta