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Book Review: Jess Walter's 'So Far Gone' sets a redemption story in fractured, modern America

Book Review: Jess Walter's 'So Far Gone' sets a redemption story in fractured, modern America

When the history of the United States in 2025 is written, perhaps one of the best things that will be said is: 'Well, it made for some great art.'
Consider 'So Far Gone,' the new novel by Jess Walter. Set in present day America, it opens with two kids wearing backpacks knocking on a cabin door. 'What are you fine young capitalists selling?' asks Rhys Kinnick, before realizing the kids are his grandchildren. They carry with them a note from Kinnick's daughter, describing dad as a 'recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of Spokane.'
It's a great hook that draws you in and doesn't really let up for the next 256 pages. We learn why Kinnick pulled a Thoreau and went to the woods seven years ago (Hint: It has a lot to do with the intolerance exhibited by no small percentage of Americans and embodied by a certain occupant of the White House), as well as the whereabouts of Kinnick's daughter, Bethany, and why her messy marriage to a guy named Shane led to Kinnick's grandchildren being dropped off at his cabin.
In a neat narrative gimmick, the chapters are entitled 'What Happened to ___' and fill in the main strokes of each character's backstory, as well as what happens to them in the present timeline. Told with an omniscient third-person sense of humor, the book's themes are nonetheless serious. On the demise of journalism in the chapter 'What Happened to Lucy,' one of Kinnick's old flames and colleagues at the Spokesman-Review: She 'hated that reporters were expected to constantly post on social media… before knowing what their stories even meant.' Or Kinnick's thoughts as he holds a .22 Glock given to him just in case by a retired police officer who is helping him get his grandkids back from the local militia: 'The shiver that went through his arm! The power!… The weight of this gun was the exact weight of his anger and his fear and his sense of displacement… That's where its incredible balance lay.'
As Kinnick links up with various characters and drives across the Northwest in search of his daughter and grandchildren, the plot unfolds quickly. Most readers won't need more than a day or two to reach the final page, which satisfies the Thoreau quote Walter uses in the story's preface: 'Not till we are lost… 'till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.'
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Oasis returns after 16-year hiatus to a U.K. crowd
Oasis returns after 16-year hiatus to a U.K. crowd

Global News

time41 minutes ago

  • Global News

Oasis returns after 16-year hiatus to a U.K. crowd

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Ozzy Osbourne says farewell to live performance with a hometown show for 40,000 fans
Ozzy Osbourne says farewell to live performance with a hometown show for 40,000 fans

Toronto Sun

time2 hours ago

  • Toronto Sun

Ozzy Osbourne says farewell to live performance with a hometown show for 40,000 fans

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Paris couture week opens with Cardi B holding a live crow at Schiaparelli's spectacle
Paris couture week opens with Cardi B holding a live crow at Schiaparelli's spectacle

Winnipeg Free Press

time3 hours ago

  • Winnipeg Free Press

Paris couture week opens with Cardi B holding a live crow at Schiaparelli's spectacle

PARIS (AP) — Paris couture week opened not with sequins or red carpet pageantry, but with a black-feathered omen. Cardi B, wrapped in a custom Schiaparelli gown of graphic fringe, stood beneath the gilded columns of the Petit Palais, holding a live crow on her arm. The bird squawked, glared, and nearly lunged — setting the tone for a show that soared straight into the surreal. It was a fitting image for Schiaparelli. Elsa Schiaparelli, the house's founder, built her legend in the 1930s by weaving the unexpected —l obster dresses, shoe hats, and, yes, animals — into the heart of high fashion. That legacy pulsed through Daniel Roseberry's Fall 2025 collection, a spectacle in pure black and white, staged as if the city itself had been drained of color, leaving only stark contrast and raw emotion. Inside, the mood was cinematic — sharp tailoring, sweeping gowns, hints of disco sheen flickering like film across the runway. But if the house has been criticized in the past for relying on extreme corsetry and body manipulation, this season marked a shift. Roseberry, perhaps heeding the critics, abandoned his signature corset silhouette. In its place: a freer, more elastic exploration of the body, echoing Schiaparelli's own restless spirit. Roseberry said the collection was inspired by the moment in 1940, when Elsa Schiaparelli fled Nazi-occupied Paris for New York — a period 'when life and art was on the precipice: to the sunset of elegance, and to the end of the world as we knew it.' Here, that tension was alive in every look: archival codes reimagined, but with a restless push toward the future. Dresses undulated like car bodies, hips arced in impossibly engineered shapes, ribbons from antique Lyon couture fluttered as kinetic sculptures. Yet the show was more than spectacle. This was couture at its most essential — an ideas factory for the entire fashion industry, unfettered by trends. 'Chanel was interested in how clothes could be of practical use to women; Elsa was interested in what fashion could be,' Roseberry added. It is this what-if energy, the transformation of memory, myth, and sheer technique into something never seen before, that keeps couture vital, even as the world rushes toward AI and disposable fast fashion. The setting only heightened the effect. The Petit Palais is currently home to an exhibit on Charles Worth, the 19th-century Englishman who invented haute couture by bringing artistry and handcraft to Paris. The symmetry was irresistible: in these halls, Schiaparelli's past collided with fashion's future, reminding all why couture matters: not as museum piece, but as living laboratory for risk, reinvention, and radical beauty. A decade after its relaunch, Schiaparelli has found commercial traction and become a fixture on the world's red carpets, a rare feat in today's luxury market. But above all, the brand's power lies in its ability to surprise. On opening day, as Cardi B's crow threatened to take flight, Schiaparelli proved that in Paris, fashion's most potent magic is still the unexpected.

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