The last days of a long youth, a time when everything comes to a crisis
WRITERS & LOVERS
by Lily King
Atlantic Monthly Press March 2020
Casey Peabody has ended up back in Massachusetts after a devastating love affair. Her mother has just died and she is knocked sideways by grief and loneliness, moving between the restaurant where she waitresses for the Harvard elite and the rented shed she calls home. Her one constant is the novel she has been writing for six years, but at thirty-one she is in debt and directionless, and feels too old to be that way—it’s strange, not to be the youngest kind of adult anymore.
And then, one evening, she meets Silas. He is kind, handsome, interested. But only a few weeks later, Oscar walks into her restaurant, his two boys in tow. He is older, grieving the loss of his wife, and wrapped up in his own creativity. Suddenly Casey finds herself at one corner of a love triangle, stuck between two very different relationships that promise two very different futures.
LILY KING is the author of the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014 and winner of the Kirkus Prize. She lives with her husband and children in Maine.
Every year, glossy magazines describe the winning cultures of innovative companies. Smiling employees raise gleaming new products like runners raising the Olympic torch. Leaders reveal their secrets. And then, so often, those companies crash and burn. Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, finds answers in the science of phase transitions. The Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the essence of phase transitions with the phrase “more is different.” The collective behaviors of liquids and solids—water flows, ice shatters—are more than the sum of their parts. They are something new: phases of matter. Bahcall shows why the collective behaviors of teams and companies are something new: phases of organization. Small changes in structure can transform teams from nurturing breakthroughs to inhibiting them, just like small changes in temperature can transform flowing water to rigid ice. Structure can matter more than culture. Drawing on examples from Aristotle to Star Wars, from Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs, Bahcall distills these ideas into practical rules that creatives, entrepreneurs, and managers can use to innovate faster and better. Along the way, readers will learn what James Bond and Lipitor have in common; why traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways; and how these ideas and rules underlie the most consistently innovative organization in the world. 
Children are not an issue for Andrea. She has a job that is OK. For many years she has been in a relationship with Georg which is OK. And every year they have a nice holiday in Jesolo. As far as the future is concerned, Andrea doesn’t want to commit herself, but Georg would like a foundation for a life together. There seems to be no way out of this dilemma. Upon returning from a holiday together everything changes – Andrea is pregnant. Torn either way, Andrea decides to keep the child – and in doing so makes one compromise after the other: she takes out a loan although she never wanted to borrow money from the bank; she moves into the house of her parents-in-law although she never wanted to live under one roof with them. Andrea is showered with advice and forced into a maternal role she never saw as hers and cannot identify with.