What Just Happened

A dazzling collection of essays in diary form on the personal, political, and cultural fronts of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the award-winning book critic and best-selling author of the Charles Lenox mystery series.

In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: as California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened. In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: at home in L.A., listening to records, doing his best to read, and keeping virtual connections with friends whose experiences--working in the E.R., quarantining with a brand-new romantic partner--provide parallel timelines of the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he delves into the obsessions that have kept him a little less fixated on the news: the history of the atom, Terrace House on Netflix, Kierkegaard. With light-footed humor and unwavering humanity, What Just Happened offers a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times. Here is a work of empathy and insight, at once of the moment and timeless--a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.