Expensive Vendor, by Nadia Bowers (Gallery). Expanded from a chunk for “This American Life,” this memoir charts the aftermath of the loss of life, from an opioid overdose, of the creator’s sister, Sasha. Written as a sequence of letters to Sasha’s unknown vendor, Bowers’s e-book presents her a technique to course of her grief and parse her relationship together with her sister. Sasha’s dependancy started from makes an attempt to suppress Tourette’s tics: she took over-the-counter sedatives first, earlier than turning to artificial opioids. Bowers recounts repeatedly inspecting Sasha’s cellphone within the hope of figuring out the one who bought her lethal medicine—a quest that she in the end acknowledges is futile. “I’ve been utilizing you. Like a repair,” she admits to the phantom vendor. “It’s exhausting to think about my life with out you. However I must attempt.”
Citizen Beast, by Martin Devecka (Johns Hopkins). Drawing on quite a lot of sources—from philosophical treatises to poems and fashionable jokes—this compact examine reveals how writers of the Roman period rendered animals, home and wild, as imperial topics. Whether or not kneeling supplicants (elephants), gladiatorial executioners (bears), agricultural laborers (oxen), or divine messengers (birds), animals have been imagined as energetic (which isn’t to say free) individuals within the creation and enlargement of the Empire, with roles that complemented these of their human counterparts, élites in addition to enslaved individuals. Whereas unearthing these depictions, Devecka argues that they fashioned “a part of a social mission that goals to degrade and subjugate human beings and different animals alike.”
