Category Archives: Books

Art, Arts & Literature, Books, Reviews

Art Books: ‘Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now’

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Forthcoming: Latin American Artists – Ellen Mara De Wachter

The essential survey showcasing the work of more than 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Latin America

BOOK: Latin American Artists:From 1785 to Now, Phaidon Publications – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Latin American artists have gained increasing international prominence as the art world awakens to the area’s extraordinary art scenes and histories. In an accessible A-Z format, this volume introduces key artworks by 308 artists who together demonstrate the variety and vitality of artwork being made.

BOOK: Latin American Artists:From 1785 to Now, Phaidon Publications – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Artists featured include: Allora and Calzadilla, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Francis Alÿs, Olga de Amaral, Fernando Botero, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Leonor Fini, Gego, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carmen Herrera, Graciela Iturbide, Alfredo Jaar, Frida Kahlo, Guillermo Kuitca, Wifredo Lam, Teresa Margolles, Marisol, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Zilia Sánchez, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Cecilia Vicuña, Adrián Villar Rojas and Faith Wilding.

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Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews, Stories

The New York Review Of Books – September 21, 2023

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The New York Review of Books (September 21, 2023) – The Fall Books issue features Michael Gorra on Zadie Smith, Anahid Nersessian on Joyce Mansour’s Surrealist poetry, Osita Nwanevu on the Democrats, Colin Grant on Margo Jefferson, Fintan O’Toole on fascists in the family tree, Karan Mahajan on Williamsburg rock, Ben Tarnoff on the depredations of Silicon Valley, and more…

Playing with the Past

The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.

By Michael Gorra

The Fraud by Zadie Smith; Penguin Press, 454 pp

Vibrant, Cacophonous Buddhism

A groundbreaking show at the Metropolitan Museum displays, among other treasures from India, works of Buddhist art that bear the mark of ancient animist cults that long preceded the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.

By William Dalrymple

Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 21–November 13, 2023; and the National Museum of Korea, Seoul, December 22, 2023–April 14, 2024

Catalog of the exhibition by John Guy; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 343 pp.

In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex. Phanigiri, “the snake-hooded hill,” had clearly been one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in India. All around were found spectacular fragments of sculpture, including substantial sections of elaborately carved ceremonial gateways and a torso now judged to be one of the masterworks of Buddhist art. Many of the statues had been dismantled and carefully buried in soft earth for their protection after the monastery was abandoned in the fifth century CE, and they were found in almost mint condition.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 1, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 1, 2023): The extraordinary story of the OED; Shakespeare quotations for everyday life; Benjamín Labatut’s infernal vision; histories of learning and forgetting; rules for reviewers – and much more

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – Sept 7, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – September 7, 2023: The new issue features Colm Tóibín review of ‘Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; Desperate Midwives; French Short Stories; Catastrophic Thinking and Plant Detectives…

Arruginated: James Joyce’s Errors

By Colm Tóibín

Amazon.com: Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses: 9780198864585: Slote, Sam, Mamigonian, Marc A., Turner, John: Books

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.

Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ The annotators point out, however, that it is ‘very likely that Joyce never said this’.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – August 27, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (August 27, 2023) The new issue features: James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel; The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame, and more…

James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well, and then flashes back to explore its connection to a town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

By Danez Smith

A few weeks ago, around the same time I was working on this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my fiancé. The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships.

The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame

This is a black-and-white photograph of the actress Anna May Wong. She is wearing a heavily embroidered dress and looking down, with her chin resting on one of her hands. She has blunt-cut bangs, and the rest of her hair is hidden by a giant scarf wrapped over her head.

A new biography of Anna May Wong, “Daughter of the Dragon,” is intended as a form of reclamation and subversion.


By Jennifer Szalai

It was, according to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, “one of the most racist films ever made in America.” “Old San Francisco” (1927) featured a white actor playing a Chinese villain passing as a white man (got that?) who plans to sell an innocent white girl into white slavery until he is conveniently crushed by an earthquake. Before his grisly end he is aided in his nefarious scheme by an Asian character identified only as “a flower of the Orient,” played by an ingénue named Anna May Wong.

Arts & Literature, Books, Exhibitions, History, Museums, Videos

Exhibits: Printed In 1085 – A Thousand Years Of Books At The Huntington Library

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The Huntington (August 25, 2023) – The history of printing has many missing pages. Li Wei Yang, Curator of Pacific Rim Collections, searched the library for the first documented connections between the great printing cultures of China and Europe.

Printed in 1085: The Chinese Buddhist Canon from the Song Dynasty

April 29–Dec. 4, 2023

The oldest printed book in The Huntington’s collection, the Scripture of the Great Flower Ornament of the Buddha, is on display in “Printed in 1085: The Chinese Buddhist Canon from the Song Dynasty” in the Library West Hall.

The exhibition delves into the circumstances of the book’s creation and its religious significance while broadening visitors’ understanding of Chinese textual tradition. Additional materials related to the text are on display to provide historical context.

The book is in a specially designed display case that allows Huntington visitors to have a unique experience when viewing the sacred text. Though the book was meant to be read by flipping from one page to the next, in the exhibition it is expanded in a custom case designed for maximum visibility, offering a rare opportunity to view the miraculously preserved relic and observe its unique bibliographic characteristics and exquisiteness.

More than 900 years old, the book is part of the 5,850-volume Great Canon of the Eternal Longevity of the Chongning Reign Period. Produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279) between 1080 and 1112, the accordion-style book fully unfolds to a length of 31 feet. It is one of the longest sutras, or collections of aphorisms, in the Buddhist canon and is a compendium of doctrines and ritual practices widely followed throughout East Asia.

The text presents a vision of the entire universe as consisting of elements that all interpenetrate (like mirrors reflecting in mirrors) within the body of the Cosmic Buddha. According to Li Wei Yang, curator of Pacific Rim Collections at The Huntington, it reflects the notion that “I am you, you are me; we all are Buddha.” It is not known whether the Buddha himself actually spoke the words found in the Scripture of the Great Flower Ornament.

Rather, it is likely that his followers, over centuries of adaptation and interpretation, incorporated the essence of his teachings into this and many other Buddhist works that have survived.

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

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — SEPT 2023

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The New Criterion – September 2023 issue:

The spirit of Noël Coward  by Bruce Bawer
Plato on “men” & “women”  by Joshua T. Katz
Rachmaninoff reigns  by David Dubal
The Roman custom  by James Hankins


“Archaeology”: a new poem  by Katie Hartsock

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – August 20, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 20, 2023: The issue features “never before told” narrative histories including a tale of the female botanists who surveyed the Grand Canyon in 1938, a recent biography of the 19th-century “abortionist of Fifth Avenue” and the book on this week’s cover: Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip,” which brings into focus a thriving artistic community that existed at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.

They Overcame Hazards — and Doubters — to Make Botanical History

In a black-and-white photograph from 1938, two women and four men sit in a boat looking at the camera. One woman wears a white dress and hat; the other wears slacks and a blouse. Three of the men are shirtless; two wear pith helmets.

In Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.

BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, by Melissa L. Sevigny

Let’s start this story on a sun-blistered evening in August 1938. A small band of adventurers had just concluded a 43-day journey from Utah to Nevada — although perhaps “journey” is too tame a description for a trip that had required weeks of small wooden boats tumbling down more than 600 miles of rock-strewn rivers. The goal was twofold. First, to simply survive. And then, to chart the plants building homes along the serrated walls of the Grand Canyon.

At New York’s Coenties Slip, an Artist Colony and a ‘Rebellion’

Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip” is a group biography of six visual artists and the work they created on the edge of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Aug 18, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (August 18 & 25, 2023): Theatre of war – How Susan Sontag brought Beckett to Sarajevo; Mina Loy; Madmen in the White House; Grieving for a child; Through the looking-glass again; Women artists unleashed and more…

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – August 13, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 13, 2023: The annual thrillers issue features – a tense murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship; a heist novel involving rough diamonds, crooked lawyers and masters of the double cross; and an especially creepy serial-killer novel, to name just a few.

Being Underestimated Was Her Secret Weapon

A black-and-white photograph portrays the head and shoulders of a woman with dark hair, elegantly dressed in furs.

In “Flirting With Danger,” Janet Wallach tells the story of Marguerite Harrison, who traded a life of privilege to become America’s first international female spy.

By Chloe Malle

FLIRTING WITH DANGER: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy, by Janet Wallach

Anyone complaining about a canceled Delta flight would do well to channel Marguerite Harrison. The United States’ first international female spy, Harrison crisscrossed the globe by rickshaw, propeller plane, camel, inflated goatskin raft and rail freight car and once brightly described a trans-Siberian voyage, in which she was wedged between sacks of tea and oats on the back of a troika in a blizzard, as “a rare and delightful experience.”

Chasing a World Record, They Endured Storms, Sharks and Freak Waves

There are two vintage black-and-white photos next to one another here. The one on the left portrays a man in a white T-shirt squinting past the camera; the one on the right shows a man on a boat giving himself s shave. He is shirtless and his face is covered with shaving cream.
From left: John Fairfax; Tom McCleanCredit…From left: Daily Mail/Shutterstock; Tom McClean

In “Completely Mad,” James Hansen tells the stories of two men who in 1969 vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

COMPLETELY MAD: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic, by James R. Hansen

The day before the Apollo mission landed two men on the moon, a British man named John Fairfax waded into Hollywood Beach, Fla., greeted by masses of cheering fans, having been the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Eight days later, another Briton, Tom McClean, pulled his dory up a deserted beach in Blacksod Bay, Ireland, having rowed solo across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. While Fairfax was acclaimed and feted, McClean walked to the closest pub, alone.