内容摘要：In time, you will notice a callus develop on the exposed, diagonal wound. A similar callus will form on the buried end of the cutting, and roots will grow from it as well as from the buried nodes.

In time, you will notice a callus develop on the exposed, diagonal wound. A similar callus will form on the buried end of the cutting, and roots will grow from it as well as from the buried nodes.

A woman meets a man half her age at a sleek Manhattan restaurant for lunch. Is he her lover or her son? If the former, then you might expect her to wield the power, like the character of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” Mike Nichols’ 1967 film about a young man who has an affair with one of his parents’ friends. If the latter, then you might expect the young man, Xavier, to wield the power because youth outshines age and parents, for the most part, are willing to go to almost any length to make their kids happy.In her latest novel, “Audition,”

exploits all the tension and ambiguity inherent in that opening scene to craft a short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along. Or, to quote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”“Audition” features an unnamed female narrator, an actor of some renown, in rehearsals for a difficult new play. When she is not on stage, she lives a quiet life in the West Village with her art historian husband, Tomas. Halfway through the novel, everything changes. The relationships between her, Xavier and Tomas are turned upside down in head-spinning fashion like the figure/ground illusion known as Rubin’s vase. Look at the picture one way, and it is a container for flowers; look at it another way, and it is the silhouettes of two heads facing each other.

Kitamura’s two previous novels also featured unnamed female protagonists whose work was bound up with interpretation: in “Intimacies,” a female interpreter at the Hague, and in “A Separation,” a translator. In this book she evokes a stylish city built out of glass, a sort of Mastercard ad where people have personal assistants and nibble on charcuterie trays in tastefully furnished apartments.In this facsimile of New York, which does not include disheveled people sleeping on the street or garbage spilling out of trash cans, Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread. Reality is unstable; nothing is as it seems.

The cleverly constructed plot ends with the narrator wrestling with big, abstract ideas including the possibility that a family is nothing more than a “shared delusion, a mutual construction,” a group of actors performing their parts.

Keith Urban’s 12th studio album and Kathryn Hahn starring in the “WandaVision” spinoff “Agatha All Along” are some of the new television, films, music and games“I think in this political space, unfortunately, that is quite unlikely,” she said. “Problems that have been differently named — algorithmic discrimination or algorithmic bias on the one hand, and ideological bias on the other —- will be regrettably seen us as two different problems.”

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A global human rights watchdog on Wednesday urged the United States and other governments to bolster their support for people seeking democratic change in Venezuela and to hold President Nicolás Maduro accountable for the crackdown on dissent he intensified after the country’s presidential election last year.Human Rights Watch specifically called on the U.S. to

and members of state security forces. HRW also called for sanctions on ruling party-loyal armed groups linked to the widespread rights violations that followed the July 28 vote that Maduro claims to have won despite credible evidence to the contrary.At the same time, the organization recommended the U.S. rescind an executive order President Donald Trump signed in February imposing