Category Archives: Books

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: Literary Review Magazine – October 2023

October 6, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

Becoming James Bond By Nicholas Shakespeare

Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’.

The Road to Giverny

Monet The Restless Vision /anglais: WULLSCHLAGER JACKIE: 9780241188309: Amazon.com: Books

Monet: The Restless Vision By Jackie Wullschläger

You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Oct 6, 2023

October 4, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Times Literary Supplement (October 6, 2023): The new issue features War Stories – A review of the Iliad; Frances Sputford’s ‘Other America’; In Chaucer’s Shadow; The devil and ChatGPTand Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’…

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – October 1, 2023

September 29, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 1, 2023): This week’s issue features the biography “Larry McMurtry: A Life”….

Larry McMurtry, a Critter of the American West Who Rejected Its Mythos

This black-and-white photo of the novelist Larry McMurtry shows him from a slight angle, seated and looking pensive. He wears heavy glasses and has one hand braced against his mouth and chin; his other arm is bent over his head and the sleeves of his white button-down shirt are rolled up past his elbows.

Tracy Daugherty’s new biography is the first comprehensive account of the prolific novelist who brought us “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and more.

By Dwight Garner

LARRY McMURTRY: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty

When the art critic Dave Hickey learned that Tracy Daugherty was writing a biography of his friend Larry McMurtry (all three men are Texans), he said to Daugherty: “Knowing Larry, it’s going to be a real episodic book.” Episodic this biography is. It’s also vastly entertaining.

McMurtry, the prolific author of “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove,” was a demythologizer of the American West who appeared to live in several registers at once.

The Miracle and Madness of Science That Changed the World

The polymath John von Neumann, center, chatting with students at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947. Von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project is a focus of Benjamín Labatut’s novel “The Maniac.”

Benjamín Labatut’s novel “The Maniac” examines the dawn of the nuclear age and the brilliant, sometimes troubled minds behind it.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 29, 2023

September 28, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Times Literary Supplement (September 29, 2023): The new issue features The First Folio at 400; how disease shaped global history; novels of queer experience; what Britain laughs at; literary thefts and coincidences – and much more…

Germ of an idea

How disease has shaped global history

By Adam Rutherford

Scientists often make poor historians. Their shortcomings in describing and analysing the past include a failure to shed the whiggish stories that academic history moved away from decades ago. Straight lines are still drawn between Great Men and the impact of their brilliant insights on our view of reality. They also sometimes fail to treat the material of history with the seriousness they bring to their own discipline. Simple questions that are drummed into schoolchildren are frequently ignored in analysing documentary evidence: who wrote this, why, and for whom? The result is context-lite narrative that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Our Shakespeare, rise

A copy of the First Folio at Christie's, London, 2016

Works to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio

By Peter Holland

Next year, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will reopen after a three-year closure for a large-scale renovation of its building, which dates from 1932. The centrepiece of the new Shakespeare Exhibition Hall, will be, as the press release puts it, something “that only the Folger could produce: all 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare that were collected by Henry and Emily Folger”. The Folger holds slightly more than a third of all extant copies of the book and now eighty of them will be on permanent show in a “20-foot long visible vault”, while two more will be open in cases as part of an “interactive” visitor experience. Peering into the vault says much about the Folgers’ appetite for cornering the market in Folios but, since nearly all copies differ in some respects, it did make some kind of sense to buy many of them.

Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews, Stories

The New York Review Of Books – October 19, 2023

September 28, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The New York Review of Books (October19, 2023) – The latest issue features with Gary Younge on the Black soldiers who fought for freedom at home and abroad, David Shulman on the road to a second Nakba, Jenny Uglow on the exuberant Gwen John, Suzy Hansen on America’s endless and remote wars, Kim Phillips-Fein on plundering private equity, Natalie Angier on milk, Megan O’Grady on Lucy Lippard, Adam Kirsch on the prophetic Kieślowski, Philip Clark on the lines Chuck Berry crossed, Susan Neiman on Germany’s historical memory, poems by Arthur Sze, Jessica Laser, and Jules Laforgue, and much more.

‘We Return Fighting’

By Gary Younge

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.

The Voyage Out

Cathleen Schine

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it.

Arts & Literature, Books, Essays, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Los Angeles Review Of Books – Autumn 2023

September 26, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

LA Review of Books (Autumn 2023) – The latest issue features The Funny Thing About Misogyny; The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories and Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World…

The Funny Thing About Misogyny

By Katie Kadue

THE FUNNY THING about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not a very good joke—a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!”

The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories

By Scott R. MacKenzie

Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by CARL WENNERLIND

WATER FALLS FROM the sky, literally. It is the most abundant chemical compound on Earth, and yet many people buy it in plastic bottles. Nestlé and other corporations source water cheaply and add labels that depict something other than heavy-industry and fossil-fuel derivatives, as though you’re drinking straight from a pristine spring. By bottling this natural resource and selling it as a commodity, Nestlé creates a form of scarcity.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – October 5, 2023

September 25, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

London Review of Books (LRB) – October 5, 2023: The new issue features Animal Ethics; Orca Life – We may understand less about orcas than they do about us, and Why Weber? – Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science.

Let them eat oysters

By Lorna Finlayson

We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.

Animal Liberation Now
by Peter Singer.

Justice for Animals
by Martha Nussbaum.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – Sept 24, 2023

September 22, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 24, 2023): The latest issue features Walter Isaacson’s buzzy Elon Musk biography, which has already rocketed to No. 1 on the best-seller list. Also, gorgeous historical novels from Lauren Groff and Daniel Mason; a remarkable new book about road ecology; the translation of a beloved, best-selling Japanese novel; “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s investigation into the online underworld of conspiracies and misinformation; and Stephen King’s latest, “Holly,” to name just a few.

Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.

This impressionistic illustration, composed of black ink and brushstrokes with accents of yellow and pink, shows Elon Musk’s face close-up. He is gazing at the viewer, his square jaw and high forehead immediately recognizable.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.

By Jennifer Szalai

At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”

Lauren Groff’s Latest Is a Lonely Novel of Hunger and Survival

A color illustration of a girl wearing a torn blue coat and boots with a bag strapped around her back, looking back toward a coastal settlement as she enters the woods, covered in snowfall.

“The Vaster Wilds” follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.

By Fiona Mozley

Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.

Arts & Literature, Books, Previews, Reviews, Videos

Books: The Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist Revealed

Video September 21, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The Booker Prize (September 20, 2023) – The shortlist has been announced! It features six books by authors never previously shortlisted, including two debuts.

The Shortlist

The Bee Sting

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

By Paul Murray

Western Lane

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash

By Chetna Maroo

Prophet Song

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

By Paul Lynch

This Other Eden

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

By Paul Harding

If I Survive You

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques

By Jonathan Escoffery

Study for Obedience

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator

By Sarah Bernstein

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 22, 2023

September 21, 2023 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…

The X files

ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan

When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.

Travels with his aunts

The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity

By Mary Beard

JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown

In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.