BOOK BARN

#288: AT THE SILVER RIVER’S EDGE. In her book Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy gives us a moving and finely observed account of a love affair, from start—”Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head”—to finish (the last verse is called “Over.”) It’s not a novel-in-verse: there are no background shots, no addresses, no names of restaurants. The whole is rendered instead in emotional detail: the startlement of intense pleasure, the sudden alertness to color and weather,

#289: THE NUMBERS THAT CAN NEVER BE COUNTED. Still another fine example of a book which snuck up on me from behind and jumped into my hands: A Hundred Movements for a Fan, poems by Paul Claudel. In the nineteenth century, a new enthusiasm in France for Japanese culture led to the discovery and collection of that country’s beautifully painted paper fans: every lady had to have one. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (who in his spare time edited a magazine extolling the new luxury

#288: RED FLOWERS. Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, 2025) is a brisk and sobering read, written with a journalist’s sharp eye for the individual story that opens up whole levels of sociological comment. In reaction to the breakup of the Communist Party in Russia, Xi Jinping began to fear that the increasing freedoms in China, themselves in reaction against the severity of the Cultural Revolution, were a pos