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Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds

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A whole world can exist within a single brain. But the boundaries between one mind and the next are usually unbreachable—except in fiction. A writer’s task is to bridge the gap between their reader’s experience and the consciousness of their characters so well that the audience intimately understands the world their protagonists live in, even if that world is utterly fantastical. No matter the setting, the best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe entirely. These sites may at first feel unknowable or overtly strange, because they reflect perspectives radically unlike our own. Yet, through the intervention of fiction, we may come to recognize them, even understand them—although what feels concrete and certain to you may feel porous and surreal to someone else.This feeling of encountering another world is multifaceted. It can be an imaginary place or a glimpse of another reality. It may also simply exist in the tension between comfort and estrangement. The books on the list below dream up another world by acknowledging that fantasy is a state of mind, and even the most outlandish invention is anchored in some aspect of reality as we know it. Each pulls us out of our comfortable understanding of our surroundings, in ways both joyful and unsettling. Read any of these five titles before you go to sleep, and you’ll soon find yourself somewhere else, at least for a time.Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov Perhaps the most effervescent and elegiacal of Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire famously consists of a long poem written by John Shade, an English professor at a small fictional college, which is explicated in extensive endnotes by his new neighbor and self-proclaimed close friend Charles Kinbote, who has come to rural Appalachia from a country he calls Zembla. The poem itself conjures up hints and glimpses of a place after death, while Kinbote’s ongoing commentary builds up a rich and detailed story about an exiled king, an assassination plot, and an unknown European land. But Kinbote’s references and allusions, over time, become more and more unreliable, and the shape of the novel reminds us that what we think of the truth is at times completely dependent on whose perspective shapes our view of events. Pale Fire opens out beyond its central verse into a wider space that asks us to decide what is fantasy, what is fact, and whose reality to live within.Primeval and Other Times, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesIn a series of interwoven vignettes that roam from character to character, the fearless Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk explores how folklore, ritual, and strife shape the minds of the inhabitants of a village appropriately called Primeval, over a long period starting in 1914. Dreamlike and yet viscerally real, the book feels like what you might recall in that space between sleep and wakefulness, when people are more in touch with otherwise-hidden instincts and emotions; meanwhile, the roving from one point of view to another recalls the technique of the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The author touches on key events in 20th-century Polish history while also introducing unreal phenomena, such as archangels who watch over the village and seem truly alien. You may never know what it was really like to live in a village in Poland during the period in question, but in Tokarczuk’s skillful hands you receive something both more intimate and more fulfilling: an understanding of the life of the mind in a different time.[Read: The science fiction that came before science]Brodeck, by Philippe Claudel, translated by John CullenThe past is another country, as the famous saying goes. But novels can help us enter territories otherwise closed off to us. In Brodeck, a stranger arrives in a remote French village in the mountains, disturbing the everyday existence of its inhabitants, who have secrets to hide. Brodeck, a nature wanderer who has himself returned to the village after time away, then assembles a “report” on the clash between the world the stranger brings to the villagers and the world they try to force him to accept—a disconnect that creates a dramatic, tragic conflict between the past and the present. But Brodeck’s own experiences outside the community begin to influence the telling of the tale. As the stranger suffers from the clash of two crucially different views of reality, the report becomes an indictment and a record of human folly with political undertones. By the end, Claudel’s novel is a heartbreaking and stunning work of fiction about provincialism and secrets that I think about frequently, unable to escape the unknowable place it documents in such meticulous yet compassionate detail.The Ravicka novels, by Renee GladmanIn understated prose, Gladman’s dispatches from an imaginary city-state remake the very idea of architecture into a new concept. One of the four books in the series, Houses of Ravicka, chronicles the quest of the city comptroller to find a house that has disappeared from its set location, while an invisible house begins to appear elsewhere. Similarly, other stories set in Ravicka address odd physics, ritual, logic, and illogic in peculiar ways that nevertheless feel modern and relevant. In a sense, Gladman defamiliarizes our world to show us how it works, and her novels wrench this kind of fantastical fiction into the 21st century by referencing the mundane municipal roles often left out of other works. It’s no wonder, then, that her exploration of Ravicka has spilled into her nonfiction and visual art, because the sociological and philosophical questions she poses feel as if they require expression in other media as well.[Read: One of the best fantasy novels ever is nothing like The Lord of the Rings]Dark Matter, by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes GöranssonA work of phantasmagorical, erotic, postapocalyptic unease by one of Sweden’s most important poets, Dark Matter exists in a nightmare state that entangles nature and the pollution of human-built environments in unsettling ways. A hybrid composition of prose and poetry, the book has a tactile quality that colonizes you without mercy. “I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths,” Berg writes, the terrain fusing with the speaker’s body. “I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.” Despite the way Berg implicates the reader in what amounts to body horror, by some alchemy she ends up transforming the reader’s initial fright into feelings of febrile fascination. Berg pulls in string theory, folklore, references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and what appear to be H. R. Giger–esque flourishes, meshing them with a contaminated yet still powerful view of nature. There is no way to describe this trenchant, uncompromising view of a transformed landscape other than to continue to quote from it: “But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me.” This is the ultimate other world, created from broken pieces of our own.

Don’t Assume Eric Adams Is Going Anywhere

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By the time Eric Adams addressed reporters under a rain-soaked canopy outside Gracie Mansion yesterday morning, the biggest question about his tenure as mayor of New York seemed to be how soon it would end. Fellow Democrats started calling on him to step down even before federal prosecutors formally accused Adams of defrauding the city and doing the bidding of the Turkish government. And in recent weeks, the leaders of the nation’s largest police department and public school system had resigned from his administration amid a series of investigations.Adams, who has denied the charges and vowed to stay on, already had at least four serious challengers to his reelection bid next year. Now a much larger number of Democrats—including former Governor Andrew Cuomo—are salivating at the prospect of a special election if Adams steps down.But don’t assume he’s going anywhere.“He is not going to resign,” predicted Mitchell L. Moss, a longtime observer of New York politics who has advised, formally and informally, some of its biggest stars over the past four decades. Moss, an NYU professor, has seen the scandals that have taken down governors such as Cuomo (sexual harassment, which he denied) and Eliot Spitzer (prostitution), members of Congress like Anthony Weiner (sending explicit photos to minors), and dozens of elected officials at lower levels of government. With few exceptions, New Yorkers accused of wrongdoing have left neither quickly nor quietly. Some have stayed in office quite a while. And that was true before a New Yorker convicted of 34 felonies won the Republican nomination for president. “We’re living in a different world from the one where you would be disqualified for a divorce,” Moss said. (In 2022, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Moss to an economic-development committee, but he said he has no other ties to the mayor. “I met the guy once in a restaurant,” he told me. “That’s it.”)[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]The charges against Adams are significant, and more could be on the way; FBI agents searched his official residence yesterday morning, hours after news of the imminent indictment had come out. Prosecutors say that for the past decade, Adams has been soliciting illegal campaign donations and taking bribes from foreign businesspeople and at least one official of the Turkish government. Because he used the contributions to receive public matching funds through New York’s campaign-finance system, the government says he essentially stole $10 million from city taxpayers.New York has had more than its share of corruption and scandal, but Adams is the first sitting mayor to be indicted. (Coincidentally, one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred yesterday in Washington, D.C., for helping Donald Trump try to overturn his 2020 election defeat.) Yet the details of the 57-page indictment against Adams still pale in comparison to the government’s recent accusations against former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the FBI recovered gold bars and envelopes filled with cash in his home. Nor are the allegations as shocking as those leveled against expelled Representative George Santos of Long Island, who made up his résumé to win a seat in Congress. Moss contends that, as far as Adams’s constituents are concerned, the most damning allegation is that the mayor leaned on the fire department to approve the opening of a skyscraper housing a new Turkish consulate that had not passed a safety inspection. “That is serious,” Moss said.Democrats who have called for Adams to resign argue that the charges imperil his ability to govern the city. Moss doesn’t think so. “People care about the mayor, and they want the mayor to succeed, but the city functions no matter who the mayor is,” Moss told me. Emulating other scandal-tainted leaders, Adams will likely “double down on the job” to prove he can still lead, which could allow him to retain the support of his base of Black and Latino voters who helped him win a crowded Democratic primary, and then the mayoralty, in 2021. “They are not going to abandon him,” Moss said.Under New York City’s charter, Hochul could remove Adams as mayor, but Moss believes that possibility is inconceivable—not least because of the governor’s own deep unpopularity. “She’s not going to fire an African American mayor. No way,” he said. “She’d get defeated within an hour.”[Read: New York City’s chaos mayor]Moss predicted that Adams would even start as the favorite in next June’s primary in spite of his legal troubles. Cuomo, who is reportedly eying a run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021, is “damaged goods,” Moss said, and the four candidates who have declared their interest—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former comptroller Scott Stringer; state senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos—could struggle to unify progressive voters.Adams has said he wants a speedy trial, but the legal process could play out for months or longer. (He’s not even the highest-profile defendant that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, is currently prosecuting.) The next president will have the power to replace Williams if he or she chooses. When Trump took office in 2017, he moved quickly to oust the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara. That could happen again if Trump wins in November, Moss noted, with potential ramifications for Adams’s case. “There’s more uncertainty here than people realize.”

A Question That Demands an Answer

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Around three in the morning on September 4, a Ukrainian doctor named Olesya Vynnyk was awakened by an explosion. She was staying with her parents several miles from the center of Lviv, where the blast occurred, but it was loud enough to drive her from bed. She raced to her car with a box of tourniquets and followed emergency vehicles toward the flames, until police roadblocks prevented her from reaching the site, which was close to her own downtown apartment.A Russian Kinzhal ballistic missile, fired from a MiG-31K aircraft about 200 miles from the border with Ukraine and 700 miles from Lviv, had hit an apartment in a civilian neighborhood. The apartment was the home of the Bazylevych family: Yaroslav Bazylevych; his wife, Evgeniya; and their three daughters, Yaryna, 21, Darya, 18, and Emilia, 7. Yaroslav staggered out of the damaged building, badly injured, but struggled to return inside while emergency personnel restrained him. He had lost his entire family.Vynnyk knew the Bazylevych family through their participation in a Ukrainian scouting organization. The girls reminded her of her nieces, and she thought about how easily the missile could have destroyed her own family. During the funeral, at the Garrison Church of Peter and Paul, which all of Lviv seemed to attend, Yaroslav moved between the four open coffins as if, Vynnyk told me, he couldn’t decide which one he should stay with to say goodbye. “There is a common thought in Lviv that he died together with them.”[Read: The timekeeper of Ukraine]At the many funerals she’s attended, Vynnyk has noticed that people avoid looking each other in the eye, out of some complicated mix of feelings—guilt, fear of breaking down. “You want to talk to God more than someone standing next to you,” she said. As a former member of a volunteer medical battalion, she’s lost numerous friends to the war, including a soldier who was killed the day before we sat down together this week in New York. But the erasure of a sleeping family shocked her more than anything Russia has done since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago. “I don’t think anyone can describe this tragedy of the Bazylevych family,” Vynnyk said. “It was beyond our understanding, beyond what we can allow ourselves to feel.”Vynnyk—whom I first met in Lviv shortly after the invasion and wrote about for this magazine—works for the Ukrainian World Congress, a nonprofit focused on diaspora Ukrainians. She was in the United States this month as part of her study for a doctorate in bioethics at Loyola University Chicago, and to speak with Americans about the war. She realized that our attention had moved away, and she wanted us to know that Ukrainians are still there, still fighting for values we’re supposed to share, still confident of ultimate victory. But beneath her cheerful resilience, she seemed tired beyond physical fatigue. The war had revealed to her the best and worst in human nature. At the start of the war, she told me, Ukrainians were standing in a circle, holding hands. “They are still holding the circle, they are doing it with all their strength, they will hold it until the last one of them is left standing, but that grip is not as strong as in the first days.”We were talking on a park bench in Lower Manhattan. A few miles north, the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly was in full swing. The world’s statesmen and diplomats were clogging Midtown with their convoys of SUVs, being chauffeured between meetings and luncheons and speeches. The UN has seemed unusually feckless recently, but never more so than while I sat with Vynnyk and she told me about the Bazylevych family.President Joe Biden was in town, and in his speech to the General Assembly he asked: “Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed? I know my answer. We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away. And we will not let up on our support for Ukraine, not until Ukraine wins a just and durable peace based on the UN charter.”It was a moving speech, given by a lifelong supporter of the world body on his last occasion to deliver such an address. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Manhattan as well. He told the General Assembly that Ukraine would not accept a peace deal that surrendered pieces of his own country to Russian imperialism, and he urged Western allies to increase their support for Ukrainian resistance to aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not in town—he faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children—but in Moscow, he threatened the West with nuclear war if NATO-supplied weapons are used to strike Russian territory.But Biden’s vows and Zelensky’s pleas and Putin’s threats are just words. On the night of September 3–4, Russia fired 42 ground- and air-based missiles and drones from Russia and Russian-occupied territory at Ukraine. Ukrainian armed forces shot down most of them, but ballistic missiles travel so fast that many get through. To protect itself from those missiles, Ukraine would have to attack their points of origin, Russian bases and airfields, with long-range missiles provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. NATO’s current policy forbids Ukraine from using its weapons to hit military targets deep inside Russia—and so the Bazylevych family no longer exists.[Read: No time for funeral rites]From New York, Zelensky went to Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to lift those restrictions. The outgoing secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has indicated his support for Zelensky’s request; so has the government of Britain. But Biden has hesitated out of a fear of escalation into nuclear and world war. Putin has been blackmailing Biden and the West since the start of the invasion, first warning against the use of any NATO weapons inside Ukraine, then against certain tanks and long-range artillery, then against strikes on military positions just across the border from which Russia has been raining destruction on Kharkiv. All of those warnings turned out to be empty. This week Putin raised the stakes. Is he bluffing?That’s the question he hopes will paralyze the West. We can’t know his intent, and the consequences of guessing wrong could be catastrophic. But a lot of Russia experts think he is bluffing; after all, Putin cherishes his own survival above everything else, and he’s threatening suicide as well as mass murder. To give him the final say over every move his adversaries make is to surrender in advance. Perhaps we should ask a different question, one that Olesya Vynnyk asked me: If Ukraine is defending values we are supposed to hold dear, how can we not allow Ukraine to defend its people?

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