Irina Dumitrescu

What have I missed out on because I’ve mistaken someone else’s fear for my own good sense?

“People can be figured out, but animals are enigmatic,” explains Susan Orlean in her captivating new book, “so the best we can do is try to understand them through the lens of people.” A collection of essays published between 1995 and 2020, On Animals introduces the reader to some magnificent beasts.

In “Lost”, the first, long chapter of Lost & Found, Kathryn Schulz describes her father’s decline and death. In the second, equally long chapter (“Found”) Schulz meets a woman and falls in love. Fortunately the woman, C., also falls in love with her. A short final chapter is dedicated to their wedding.

“When Grandmother Kristina started losing her memory,” Sasa Stanisic writes in his new book, “I started collecting memories.” An autobiographical novel about his family’s life in Bosnia and Germany, “Where You Come From” is a wry, inventive and ultimately devastating attempt to recover a personal history that war has put forever out of reach.

The best stories begin with a wound. Julie Sedivy’s story begins with the death of her father. After a series of migrations that brought Sedivy and her family from then-Czechoslovakia to Canada, her father returned home in 1992. Sedivy, distracted by work and family, did not visit him despite his repeated invitations. Now, with her father gone, Sedivy takes the measure of her loss: not only is a reunion impossible, but Sedivy’s link to her home culture has been further weakened.

Naben Ruthnum takes on diversity charades, token promotions, and the social justice facades of corporations

“Only out of ignorance can we give an opinion,” writes Sergio del Molino in Skin; “the more you know or study or experience something, the more confused and useless your point of view becomes.” This insight may explain why Skin – first published in Spanish in 2020, now translated into English by Thomas Bunstead – is such a difficult book to pin down.

There are many myths about writing. Here are three books that bust them.

LIFE IS HARD: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, by Kieran Setiya
“Through much of history, there was no clear distinction between philosophical ethics and ‘self-help,’” writes Kieran Setiya early in “Life Is Hard.” Ancient philosophers were interested in what makes a good life and a just society, and in the virtues it takes to pursue both — but these central questions of human thriving now occupy the margins of the modern academic discipline.

“Irina are you going to be in London when the queen dies?” a friend texts me from Ohio.
I have just arrived in my little room in Bloomsbury and turned on my computer when I see the message. I flip quickly to the BBC website and watch the news: men in the line of royal succession flying to Scotland to stand at the bed of their dying matriarch.

It is 9 a.m. on a Saturday, and I am sitting in a little wooden boat with my son. He is fidgety, restless with excitement, practically bouncing against the large metal bar on our laps. A bell rings, and we begin moving in a circle, slowly at first, following the swells and dips of the waves. Then we speed up. My son grabs the helm in front of us and turns it several times, swinging our boat around. We are moving backwards fast, and my stomach is turning.

A woman searches for her father – and herself – in fictional West Africa

It is hard to pin down Marie de France, though many have tried. The best-known woman poet of the Middle Ages is a chimera, pieced together centuries after she lived from stray clues in the poems that are attributed to her. In the story most often told about her today, Marie was a learned French émigré connected to the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in late-twelfth-century England.

It is the fall of my senior year and I am at a pub with the professor and a group of his students. At one point I look down and notice his hand is on my leg.
“I’m sorry, my hand is on your leg,” he says with a defiant look. “Oh wait, I’m not sorry.”
I am speechless but I give him my firmest glare. He removes his hand and never does it again. That’s that, I think then, I think so many times later.