Sherbert Illuminated

In case you’re reading this review because you’ve recently heard of Yaa Gyasi’s bestselling novel   Homegoing   and are considering “getting around to it” but have no idea whether it’s as good as the professional, respected reviewers say it is: yes. Almost. But how is that possible? Can a debut novel by a twenty-something author that frames itself as a family saga (a well-trod structure in Western literature)  really  earn  an average rating of 4.44  on Goodreads? How can Gyasi effectively convey 250 years of slavery, racism, colonialism and human suffering in only 300 pages? Is there a point at all to reading popular books because of someone else’s recommendation? Yes.  Good characters. Maybe. The third question is the easiest to answer.  Homegoing  had been on my TBR for several months before I received a copy of it, and I had read rave reviews and seen Booktubers’ recommendations. I had loved some popular, oft-recommended books before it ( Wolf Hall  by Hilary Mantel) and disliked o

Like contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes  s eries, Victorian author Jerome K. Jerome’s dual travelogues Three Men in a Boat  and Three Men on the Bummel   are famous not for their status as high art but for the ripples they have left behind. In 1889 when it was first printed,   Three Men in a Boat   was a commercial hit among the ‘clerking classes’ which it satirized, and 11 years later he reunited his protagonists for a bicycle tour of Wilhelmine Germany. My own Penguin Classics bind-up of the two books praises them for “hilariously captur[ing] the spirit of their age.” But their Zeitgeist  is novel. They are not   The Great Gatsby .  They are not The Hate U Give . That is not to say that they are bad books. The vision of three wide-eyed Englishmen (with an optional scrappy Fox Terrier) rowing incompetently down the Thames has left an impression on the artistic psyche, even if they are not as potent as works of Dickens and Wilde. I first encountered Three Men in a Boat  

  Who wants to see everything fall apart? I do, for one, and so do lots of other people. That’s why people read thrillers, watch horror movies and attend tragedies. The appeal of these darker stories is a mixture of schadenfreude and catharsis, and the latter is especially potent in stories with relatable premises like Arzhang Luke Pezhman’s play  Gravity . Set in a British classroom during the ignition of the Large Hadron Collider,  Gravity  uses the bonds and explosive separations between its characters to illustrate chemical reactions—or is it the other way around? But despite its scientific premise,  Gravity  is no  Elective Affinities . Its tense, thoughtful plot revolves around the worst human nature has to offer: schoolchildren. The saving grace of aging instructor David Milford’s Year 10 science class is Kyle, a vulnerable “late developer” who takes an interest in physics. But to David’s dismay, Kyle is also the favorite target of Chantay, a duplicitous girl whose brother is se

 Until the beginning of this year, I did not know that Yiddish-language theater existed, much less that it had a rich and diverse history across Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th century. As someone who is involved in my own high school theater and is deeply interested in learning the history of the medium, I realized I needed to rectify that.  Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches , a collection of essays compiled by my mother’s colleague Joel Berkowitz, is the first step in an ongoing project to learn more about theater history and its intersection with society and culture. I expected a good history. I expected good insight and good translations. I did not anticipate that I would have so much fun reading or that I would respect the scholarship so deeply. Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches  is not a singular narrative, but a compilation of scholarly articles by multiple authors from across the world of Yiddish Theater. I cannot evaluate them as a historian might, but I can rec