Zoe Hu
IN STORIES ABOUT INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, space usually wins out over time. The accounting of minutes and hours is too petty, too human, for the vast distance between one star and another; some genres just won’t accommodate the clockface. This is true of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which mad astronauts prove incapable of distinguishing between past and present, as well the Swedish poem and film Aniara, about a spaceship destined for a future of endless drift—which is to say, no future at all. Few places are as interminable as outer space, which urgently raises the question of where one is while rendering the 
Airplane food is a subject of little glory, normally fodder for comedy routines and small talk. But acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights takes it, and the other small indignities of travel, as a matter of deep philosophical importance. Flights, which was translated into English by Jennifer Croft, focuses on the mundane ways we express our humanity while we’re en route somewhere, and, fittingly, includes long paragraphs on travel-sized shampoo, redeye layovers, and hotel pay-per-view pornography. Tokarczuk’s approach is precise: every detail, from flight times to the labels on travel toiletries, is accounted for.