Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — October 2023
Category Archives: Books
The new conservative dilemma a symposium
Fiction: The 2023 National Book Awards Longlist
2023 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction – National Book Foundation
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House
Aaliyah Bilal, Temple Folk
Simon & Schuster
Eliot Duncan, Ponyboy
W. W. Norton & Company
Paul Harding, This Other Eden
W. W. Norton & Company
Tania James, Loot
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Mona Susan Power, A Council of Dolls
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers
Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time
Henry Holt and Company / Macmillan Publishers
Justin Torres, Blackouts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
LaToya Watkins, Holler, Child
Tiny Reparations Books / Penguin Random House
The New York Times Book Review – Sept 17, 2023
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 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.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 15, 2023
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
Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s
Democrat or revolutionary?
Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023
The New York Review Of Books – October 5, 2023
Mother Russia
In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.
Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing.
Ukraine’s New Normal
Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.
On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, the Half an Hour café, where I wrote for a couple of days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, has also just reopened.
Preview: London Review Of Books – Sept 21, 2023
Get a rabbit
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
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber
by Wendy Brown.
Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Fall 2023
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The New York Times Book Review – Sept 10, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 10, 2023): The new issue features Zadie Smith’s very Dickensian new novel, “The Fraud,” In nonfiction, the extremely different romantic lives of George Orwell and George Eliot are reviewed, and a biography of the con man who paved the way for all those “Nigerian prince” email scams.
Zadie Smith Makes 1860s London Feel Alive, and Recognizable
Her new novel, “The Fraud,” is based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial, but it keeps one eye focused clearly on today’s political populism.
By Karan Mahajan
All over the dorm in California glinted pale-orange and tabasco-red and steel-blue copies of Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” with their hard white bright lettering. The year was 2001, and “White Teeth” had been assigned as incoming reading for my freshman dorm. I remember loving the sprawling, rude, funny, slapdash narration, the magical way in which Smith brought it all together in the figure of a genetically engineered mouse.
Lauren Groff’s Latest Is a Lonely Novel of Hunger and Survival
“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/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 8, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (September 8, 2023): The new issue features Modern conspiracy theories, China’s Platonic republic, Jonathan Raban’s last days, Sebastian Faulks’s Neanderthal, the English country house, and more….
Boomers Daily 