Category Archives: Arts & Literature

The New York Times Book Review – Sept 17, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 17, 2023): The new issue features An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy, New Thrillers, Appalachian Literature, The Good Virus, and more…

An Illustrated Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy

In its first half-century, Ms. magazine upended norms, disrupted the print world and made trouble. It was a start.

By Anna Holmes

50 YEARS OF MS.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, edited by Katherine Spillar and the editors of Ms.


I had my first conscious interaction with Ms. magazine as a small child when I read — or rather, had read to me — a story-poem called “Black Is Brown Is Tan.”

Part of the magazine’s delightful kids’ section, “Black Is Brown Is Tan” is about a mixed-race family not unlike my own who go about their daily routines like any other Americans. Though I was young, I remember the illustrations, by Emily Arnold McCully, with acute clarity: the rosy cheeks of the white dad, the short Afro and hoop earrings of the Black mom, and, perhaps most important, the sense of safety and warmth that permeated every page. In our house, where my mother was careful about the messaging of the media and toys we consumed, the “Stories for Free Children” section was always welcome. As for the magazine they appeared in? Well, it was canon.

A Rich, Capacious Family Saga, Bookended by Tragedy

In this photograph, an apartment building sits in the fore, with the destruction of the Grenfell Tower fire visible in the background.

In Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” a woman who immigrated to Britain for marriage must decide whether or not to return to her country of origin after her husband dies.

By Tiphanie Yanique

A HOUSE FOR ALICE, by Diana Evans


Houses in Diana Evans’s new novel, “A House for Alice,” are a metaphor for family. They’re filled with rooms for sleeping, lovemaking, fighting; contain corridors that lead to areas of welcome and comfort; shelter spaces that hold secrets. And like a house, a family can be burned to nothing and rebuilt anew.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (September 15, 2023): A Unesco conference and archeological summit in Saudi Arabia are the latest examples of the country’s increasing focus on culture as part of the so-called Vision 2030 programme.

We look at Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented and lavishly funded focus on contemporary and ancient culture and how that relates to ongoing concerns about artistic freedom and human rights abuses in the kingdom. Alia Al-Senussi, a cultural strategist, and senior advisor at Art Basel and to the Saudi Ministry of Culture, joins host Ben Luke to discuss the contemporary art scene, and Melissa Gronlund, a reporter on the Middle East for The Art Newspaper, tells us about the push to reveal hitherto underexplored Saudi heritage.

The Sierra Leone-born, London-based artist and poet Julianknxx this week unveiled a new project at London’s Barbican Centre, Chorus in Rememory of Flight. The multi-screen installation features performers and choirs from the African diaspora who Julianknxx met on a 4,000-mile trip around European cities with colonial histories, from Lisbon via Marseille, Rotterdam and Berlin to London. We talk to him about this epic endeavour. And this episode’s Work of the Week is among the greatest works on paper ever made: Michelangelo’s studies in red chalk for the Libyan Sibyl, one of the most distinctive figures on his Sistine Chapel ceiling. The drawing features in Michelangelo and Beyond at the Albertina in Vienna and one of its curators, Constanze Malissa, tells us more about it.

Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? by Rebecca Anne Proctor, with Alia Al-Senussi, published 30 November, Lund Humphries, £19.99.

Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London, and online on WePresent, until 11 February 2024; Julianknxx is in A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, Tate Modern, until 14 January 2024.

Michelangelo and Beyond, Albertina, Vienna, 15 September-14 January 2024.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 15, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.

A worldlier class of flapper

The Divorcee (1930); Ursula Parrott; The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s

By Lillian Crawford

Democrat or revolutionary?

A demonstration in support of Allende, Santiago, 1971

Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup

By David Gallagher

Views: ‘Midnight Movers’ – French-American Painter Jules De Balincourt’s Art

Pace Gallery (September 14, 2023) – From his studio in Brooklyn, New York, Jules de Balincourt discusses his new suite of paintings on view as part of “Midnight Movers,” his debut exhibition with our gallery in New York and his first solo show in the city in a decade.

Working spontaneously, de Balincourt develops his expressive paintings through an improvisational approach that borders on abstraction. In this new interview, the artist dissects his process and the ways that he explores the natural world, globalization, technology, and psychology in his works.

To learn more about this exhibition, visit: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitio…

To learn more about Jules de Balincourt, visit: https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/j…

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023

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Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023: The new issue includes the winner and runners-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, selected by Ruth Awad, and a Food-themed folio, with poetry by sam saxInga Lea Schmidt, and Holly Zhou; fiction by Rebecca AckermannElvis Bego, and Douglas Silver; nonfiction by Katie Culligan and Erica N. Cardwell; and much more. Luminous Gender Vessel, a folio guest-edited by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Melissa Faliveno, features work by Krys Malcolm BelcKB BrookinsAlexis Pauline GumbsCatherine Kim, and many others. The cover art is by Joanna Anos.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Sept 21, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – September 21, 2023: The new issue features John Lanchester on statistics, William Davies on Weber, nihilism and universities @dlbirch1 on hate mail, Ferdinand Mount on Henry III Clair Wills on Shirley Hazzard and a cover by Alexander Gorlizki.

Get a rabbit

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic  of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10): Ghosh, Arunabh: 9780691179476:  Amazon.com: Books

By John Lanchester

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10) by Arunabh Ghosh

At a dinner​ with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, is fascinating for two reasons. First, because it shows a sly, subtle, worldly humour – a rare glimpse of the sort of thing Chinese Communist Party leaders say in private. Second, because it’s true. A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.

Stay away from politics

By William Davies

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.

Classical: Cellist Camille Thomas Plays Chopin

Deutsche Grammophon – DG (September 13, 2023) – Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas plays on the Franchomme’s mythical cello – the Stradivarius Feuermann.

Chopin: No. 4 in E Minor, Largo Arr. for Cello and Piano by A. Franchomme / Adapted by Camille Thomas Listen to ‘The Chopin Project’ : https://camillethomas.lnk.to/TheChopi…

A journey in three chapters to discover Chopin’s life through the sound of the cello. The most ambitious project of the The Chopin’s sonata for cello and piano was dedicated to his friend Auguste-Joseph Franchomme. Franchomme transcribed the Chopin’s piano pieces for cello after knowing Chopin found no objection to this.

PIANO Julien Brocal

VIDEO DIRECTOR Olivier Saint-Yves

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Sept 13, 2023

Country Life Magazine – September 13, 2023: The new issue features the more outlandish and risqué techniques plants have developed to spread their seed, a magical garden restoration at Aldourie Castle in Inverness-shire, the origins of Spetchley Park, Worcestershire, and more…

Fifty shades of green

John Wright investigates some of the more outlandish and risqué techniques plants have developed to spread their seed

A Scottish fairy tale

George Plumptre is spellbound by a magical garden restoration at Aldourie Castle in Inverness-shire

An architectural accident

In the first of two articles, John Goodall explores the origins of Spetchley Park, Worcestershire

Views: Artisans Of Bavaria

Monocle Films (September 11, 2023) – Bavaria’s rich manufacturing heritage shows that there is more to the region than the Alps, sausages and beer. Monocle Films takes a tour behind the scenes of renowned art materials manufacturers Faber-Castell, Gmund Papier mill and Theresienthal glassmakers to explore how traditional ways of making have endured thanks to a legacy of familial entrepreneurship.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Sept 18, 2023

R. Kikuo Johnsons “Bodega Cat”

The New Yorker – September 18, 2023 issue: The new issue features R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Bodega Cat”, where the the artist discusses pivotal moments and his relationship to pets.

Ross Douthat’s Theories of Persuasion

Ross Douthat photographed by Adam Pape.

At a time of distrust and polarization, the conservative Times columnist seeks to bridge the worlds of the Christian right and the secular left.

By Isaac Chotiner

This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, wrote a piece about liberal America’s least favorite Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Douthat argued in his New York Times column that an unwillingness to debate Kennedy—who has claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, that 5G networks are part of a mass-surveillance system, and that covid was designed to spare Jewish and Chinese people—was an insufficient response to voters who are increasingly distrustful of the establishment. 

What Kate DiCamillo Understands About Children

Painting of Kate DiCamillo.

Her books for young readers have sold more than forty-four million copies. They are full of yearning, loneliness, ambivalence, and worry.

By Casey Cep

Three winters in a row, Kate DiCamillo went into the hospital, never sure if she would come home and always a little scared to do so. One of those winters, when she was four years old and the air outside was even colder than the metal frames of the oxygen tents she’d grown accustomed to having above her bed, her father came to see her. He was wearing a long black overcoat, which made him look like a magician. “I brought you a gift,” he said, pulling something from his pocket as if from a top hat.