I’m overwriting. I’ve just reread Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” and its prose, lurid and yet somehow plodding, has worked its way into my mind. But what an important novel it was ...

She asked what had happened to him, and he told her that he’d awoken in a pile of black garbage bags out in the jungle and had found ... and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend ...