Charting Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian journey By Roy Foster
Writing novels by AI – and committee By Gordon Fraser
Our contributors choose their favourites
Simone Weil’s ethical life class By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
The Poems of Seamus Heaney By Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)
A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene.
The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry.
Double Theme: “The Culture of Place” and “A Cultural Revolution on the Right”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Extinction rebellion’ – How Tennyson speaks to our fears.
The troubled history of US-China relations By Katie Stallard
Iris Murdoch’s unseen poetry, transcribed for the first time By Miles Leeson
Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory By Angela Leighton
Tales of the uncanny from a master of ambiguity By Joyce Carol Oates
107 Days by Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.
The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty by Natasha Wheatley
How States Die: Membership and Survival in the International System by Douglas Lemke
World War I set the stage a century ago for new ways of thinking about where states come from and what happens when they disappear.
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB “Alien“, which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”
THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features…
Great genes by David Dubal
A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.
Authority by Andrea Long Chu
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld
Those Passions: On Art and Politics by T.J. Clark
Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick
No Judgment by Lauren Oyler
The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field
Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.
Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Artist in the making: Joyce Carol Oates on Sally Mann’s photographic craft’
The British upper classes today By Michael Hall
A how-to book by ‘one of the greatest’ American photographers’ By Joyce Carol Oates
László Krasznahorkai, Nobel laureate in literature By George Szirtes
Religion, immigration, gender politics and severed heads By Mary Beard
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Mrs. Dalloway’s Demons
The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9
‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3
Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2
Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3
Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy: Un couple explosif
by Yvan Leclerc and Jean-Yves Mollier.
Le Livre de Poche, 224 pp., €8.40, November 2024, 978 2 253 94112 5
Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World
by Corey Ross.
Princeton, 447 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 21144 2
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 220 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 27849 1
Boomers Daily 