Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Shakespeare & Company: ‘The Hunchback Of Notre Dame’ Special 2022 Edition
@Shakespeare_Co Podcast, December 2, 2022: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Special Podcast! To celebrate our exclusive S&Co edition of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Adam is joined by Krista Halverson, S&Co Publishing Director, and artist @neiljgower to discuss this classic of French literature.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess.
December 2, 2022: Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni Lomax, the former director of the Camden Art Centre—the north London non-profit gallery whose funding has been cut by more than 30%. They discuss the effect of the cuts, and why the response from the visual arts community is relatively quiet compared to the uproar in the worlds of theatre and opera.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws (1927), a work from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. The painting is among a host of works moved from the war-torn country to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid for the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. Katia Denysova, the co-curator of the show, tells us about the picture, and the extraordinary journey it took from Kyiv to the Spanish capital.Art Basel in Miami Beach until 3 December.In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, until 30 April 2023.
Books: Literary Review UK Magazine – December 2022
Literary Review – December 2022/January 2023:
DIARY
JOANNA KAVENNA – Happiness is a Cold Fjord
ART
Prince of Caricatura – James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire By Tim Clayton
Artist Before a Mirror – Picasso: The Self-Portraits By Pascal Bonafoux
Oils and Water – Looking to Sea: Britain Through the Eyes of Its Artists By Lily Le Brun
LITERARY LIVES
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON I Have Wedded Fyve!The Wife of Bath: A BiographyBy Marion TurnerNORMA CLARKE Sense & InsolvencySister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the BrontësBy Devoney LooserLRRICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Yours Chastely, TomThe Hyacinth Girl: T S Eliot’s Hidden MuseBy Lyndall GordonMary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love StoryBy Mary Trevelyan & Erica Wagner
Reviews: New York Times ’10 Best Books Of 2022′
The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s standout fiction and nonfiction.
Fiction
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan
You don’t need to have read Egan’s Pulitzer-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” to jump feet first into this much-anticipated sequel. But for lovers of the 2010 book’s prematurely nostalgic New Yorkers, cerebral beauty and laser-sharp take on modernity, “The Candy House” is like coming home — albeit to dystopia. This time around, Egan’s characters are variously the creators and prisoners of a universe in which, through the wonders of technology, people can access their entire memory banks and use the contents as social media currency. The result is a glorious, hideous fun house that feels more familiar than sci-fi, all rendered with Egan’s signature inventive confidence and — perhaps most impressive of all — heart. “The Candy House” is of its moment, with all that implies.
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Checkout 19, by Claire-Louise Bennett
Bennett, a British writer who makes her home in Ireland, first leaped onto the scene with her 2015 debut novel, “Pond.” Her second book contains all of the first’s linguistic artistry and dark wit, but it is even more exhilarating. “Checkout 19,” ostensibly the story of a young woman falling in love with language in a working-class town outside London, has an unusual setting: the human mind — a brilliant, surprising, weird and very funny one. All the words one might use to describe this book — experimental, autofictional, surrealist — fail to convey the sheer pleasure of “Checkout 19.” You’ll come away dazed, delighted, reminded of just how much fun reading can be, eager to share it with people in your lives. It’s a love letter to books, and an argument for them, too.
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Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver’s powerful new novel, a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” set in contemporary Appalachia, gallops through issues including childhood poverty, opioid addiction and rural dispossession even as its larger focus remains squarely on the question of how an artist’s consciousness is formed. Like Dickens, Kingsolver is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with an abundance of charm and the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth.
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The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell
After losing her brother when she was 12, one of the narrators of Serpell’s second novel keeps coming across men who resemble him as she works through her trauma long into adulthood. She enters an intimate relationship with one of them, who’s also haunted by his past. This richly layered book explores the nature of grief, how it can stretch or compress time, reshape memories and make us dream up alternate realities. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” the narrator says. “I want to tell you how it felt.”
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Trust, by Hernan Diaz
Diaz uncovers the secrets of an American fortune in the early 20th century, detailing the dizzying rise of a New York financier and the enigmatic talents of his wife. Each of the novel’s four parts, which are told from different perspectives, redirects the narrative (and upends readers’ expectations) while paying tribute to literary titans from Henry James to Jorge Luis Borges. Whose version of events can we trust? Diaz’s spotlight on stories behind stories seeks out the dark workings behind capitalism, as well as the uncredited figures behind the so-called Great Men of history. It’s an exhilarating pursuit.
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Nonfiction
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong
Yong certainly gave himself a formidable task with this book — getting humans to step outside their “sensory bubble” and consider how nonhuman animals experience the world. But the enormous difficulty of making sense of senses we do not have is a reminder that each one of us has a purchase on only a sliver of reality. Yong is a terrific storyteller, and there are plenty of surprising animal facts to keep this book moving toward its profound conclusion: The breadth of this immense world should make us recognize how small we really are.
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Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu
In this quietly wrenching memoir, Hsu recalls starting out at Berkeley in the mid-1990s as a watchful music snob, fastidiously curating his tastes and mercilessly judging the tastes of others. Then he met Ken, a Japanese American frat boy. Their friendship was intense, but brief. Less than three years later, Ken would be killed in a carjacking. Hsu traces the course of their relationship — one that seemed improbable at first but eventually became a fixture in his life, a trellis along which both young men could stretch and grow.
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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, by Rachel Aviv
In this rich and nuanced book, Aviv writes about people in extreme mental distress, beginning with her own experience of being told she had anorexia when she was 6 years old. That personal history made her especially attuned to how stories can clarify as well as distort what a person is going through. This isn’t an anti-psychiatry book — Aviv is too aware of the specifics of any situation to succumb to anything so sweeping. What she does is hold space for empathy and uncertainty, exploring a multiplicity of stories instead of jumping at the impulse to explain them away.
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Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, by Linda Villarosa
Through case histories as well as independent reporting, Villarosa’s remarkable third book elegantly traces the effects of the legacy of slavery — and the doctrine of anti-Blackness that sprang up to philosophically justify it — on Black health: reproductive, environmental, mental and more. Beginning with a long personal history of her awakening to these structural inequalities, the journalist repositions various narratives about race and medicine — the soaring Black maternal mortality rates; the rise of heart disease and hypertension; the oft-repeated dictum that Black people reject psychological therapy — as evidence not of Black inferiority, but of racism in the health care system.
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We Don’t Know Ourselves, by Fintan O’Toole
O’Toole, a prolific essayist and critic, calls this inventive narrative “a personal history of modern Ireland” — an ambitious project, but one he pulls off with élan. Charting six decades of Irish history against his own life, O’Toole manages to both deftly illustrate a country in drastic flux, and include a sly, self-deprecating biography that infuses his sociology with humor and pathos. You’ll be educated, yes — about increasing secularism, the Celtic tiger, human rights — but you’ll also be wildly, uproariously entertained by a gifted raconteur at the height of his powers.
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Contemporary Art Shows: Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Dec 2, 2022
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS December 2, 2022 issue features Craig Raine on Lucian Freud; @NessaCarey on genetic engineering; @AnaAliciaGarza on vagrancy; @lindseyhilsum on the sacking of the Kherson Art Museum; @irinibus on gluttony; poems by @ColeHenri and Hugo Williams – and more.
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 5, 2022
Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What?
World of Women confronts the limits of selling cartoon avatars on the blockchain after the crypto bubble burst.
Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?
In his “Slough House” thrillers, the screw-ups save the day—and there’s a very fine line between comedy and catastrophe.
How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle
It began as a visionary notion—that patients could die with dignity at home. Now it’s a twenty-two-billion-dollar industry plagued by exploitation.
International Art: Apollo Magazine – December 2022
- A very proud Mary in Florence
- The fantasies of Henry Fuseli
- Art in the time of the AIDS crisis
- Can contemporary art be funny?
Plus: reframing the Fitzwilliam Museum, a brief history of mulled wine, what’s next for NFTs and, in reviews: the triumph of the Tudors, ways of seeing at the Wellcome Collection and the unfashionable art of Ruskin Spear
The fetishistic side of Henry Fuseli
You enter a troubling parallel universe in Henry Fuseli’s drawings of women: a place of exaggeration and highly sexualised imagery, where his subjects engage in role-play and the theatrical and erotic and idiosyncratic collide. It’s an inventive, private realm: not one of the drawings in the Courtauld’s fascinating exhibition was displayed in public during the artist’s life.
The Frenchman who wanted to photograph the world
In the early 20th century, Albert Kahn dispatched photographers to more than 50 countries – and the magical results can be found in the Paris museum that bears his name
Top New Art Exhibitions: ‘Anselm Kiefer – Exodus’
ANSELM KIEFER – Exodus
November 19, 2022–March 25, 2023
Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles
The large-scale paintings on view in New York and Los Angeles employ a wide range of materials including paint, terra-cotta, fabric, rope, wire, found objects, sediment of electrolysis, and metal—including copper and gold leaf. Mixing the abject and the exalted, these works are imbued with gesture, a sense of metamorphosis, and alchemical symbolism.
Kiefer’s syncretic approach to materials extends to his understanding of history, literature, and mythology as forces that inform the present. In this new body of work, he incorporates inscriptions in Hebrew from the book of Exodus, with thematic references to its narrative blended with a diversity of other sources. Full of symbolic thresholds between peoples, places, and times, the paintings are metaphysical allegories that meditate on loss and deliverance, dispossession and homecoming.
Boomers Daily 