Category Archives: Literature

Books, Literature, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Jan 8, 2023

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Photograph by Howard Sochurek

The New York Times Book Review (January 8, 2023):

When Freedom Meant the Freedom to Oppress Others

Jefferson Cowie’s powerful and sobering new history, “Freedom’s Dominion,” traces the close association between the rhetoric of liberty in an Alabama county and the politics of white supremacy.

Two Days of Terror in Washington, D.C.

“American Caliph,” by Shahan Mufti, recounts the complex story of a largely forgotten episode from 1977, when an armed Muslim group held dozens of people hostage.

The Power of a Good Narrative, in Your Ear or Otherwise

From Bloomsbury to the Billboard Hot 100, these audiobooks will hook you based on story alone.

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Books: The New York Times Book Review – Dec 18, 2022

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The New York Times Book Review (December 18, 2022) –

John le Carré: The Spy Novelist Who (Mostly) Kept Quiet

“A Private Spy,” a collection of the British writer’s letters, offers glimpses of unguarded moments and ruffled feathers.

John le Carré’s Letters Show the Author at His Witty, Erudite and Pugilistic Best

“A Private Spy,” a collection of correspondence spanning much of his life, offers a fresh look at his brilliance — and his contradictions

Haruki Murakami Has Never Found Writing Painful

In a new memoir, “Novelist as a Vocation,” the Japanese writer reflects on his craft and his career.

Books, Literature, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Dec 4, 2022

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The New York Times Book Review - December 4, 2022 | Magazine PDF

@nytimesbooks – December 4, 2022 issue:

Books to Give This Season

CREDITROZALINA BURKOVA

Whether you’re looking for thrillers or romances, historical fiction or travel books, let us help.

How a Good Book Became the ‘Richest’ of Holiday Gifts

As Christmas came to be celebrated in the home, choosing the right volume was a way to show intimate understanding of the person opening the package.

How Well Do You Know the New York City of the Beats?

Here are five questions to test your knowledge of the Beat Generation in the Big Apple.

Wheels, Waves and Wings

Books about exploring the world by bike, by car, by boat or by plane, passport in hand.

Books, Literature, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Nov 27, 2022

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Illustration by Eleanor Taylor

New York Times Book Review – November 27, 2022:

A Life of Shirley Hazzard, Sublime Chronicler of Affairs of the Heart

A new biography by Brigitta Olubas is the first to examine the life of the Australian novelist celebrated for her refined poetic fiction and acute moral vision.

Big ‘Pippin’: The Harmony and Dissonance of an American Classic

Elysa Gardner’s “Magic to Do” goes backstage at Bob Fosse and Stephen Schwartz’s 1972 musical about a lost prince.

Read Your Way Through Mexico City

Juan Villoro, who spent over two decades perfecting one book about Mexico City, recommends reading on the city he loves. “Mexico is too complex,” a visitor said. “It needs to be read.”

Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: Literary Review Of Canada – December 2022

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December 2022 | Literary Review of Canada

Literary Review of Canada – December 2022:

Books, Literature, Newspapers, Reviews

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Nov 20, 2022

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New York Times Book Review – November 20, 2022:

A New Biography of George Balanchine, Ballet’s Colossus

“Mr. B,” by Jennifer Homans, explores the life of the Russian-born choreographer, as well as the beauty and pains of his art.

What Books Does Haruki Murakami Find Disappointing? His Own.

“The books I try not to pick up, and don’t want to read, are ones I wrote myself and published in the past,” says the Japanese writer, whose new book is “Novelist as a Vocation.” “Though it does make me want to do better with my next work.”

How We’ve Come to Genuflect to the ‘Free Market’

Jacob Soll’s ambitious history takes us from Cicero to Milton Friedman, but is hobbled by questionable assertions.

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Books: New York Review Of Books – Dec 8, 2022

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December 8, 2022 issue cover

The New York Review of Books – December 8, 2022:

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz

Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews, Stories

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 16, 2022

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The Genre-Shattering Fictions of Alan Moore

With his first story collection, “Illuminations,” the British writer and comic-book titan works his subversive power on a smaller scale.

There’s more, of course, including Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s powerful novel in stories, “Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions”; Maggie Haberman’s “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”; Buzz Bissinger’s “The Mosquito Bowl,” about a game played on Guadalcanal between two Marine regiments in 1944; and Amal El-Mohtar’s latest science fiction and fantasy column.
Don’t miss the latest entry in our “Read Your Way Around the World” series, which will whisk you to the brightly hued streets of Reykjavík, or our excerpts from Bob Dylan’s new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” (In 1971, 45 years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Book Review opined, rather tartly, that “Dylan is not a literary figure. Literature comes in books, and Dylan does not intend his most important work to be read.”)

Cover for @nytimesbooks Junot Diaz’s review of Alan Moore’s new story collection “Illuminations”.

The New York Times Book Review

Books, Literature, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews, Stories

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 9, 2022

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The New York Times Book Review October 9 2022

Sex, Violence and Ecstasy: Leonard Cohen’s Early Fiction

A posthumous release of the songwriter’s unseen novel and stories from the 1950s reveals his nascent fascination with human frailty.

The Global Might of the Tiny Chip

Silicon chips power everything from cars and toys to phones and nukes. “Chip War,” by Chris Miller, recounts the rise of the chip industry and the outsize geopolitical implications of its ascendancy.

Ignoramuses Are Gaining Ground, Andy Borowitz Warns

In his new book, the satirist and comedian traces the rise of ill-equipped politicians and considers how to thwart them.

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Books, Literature, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

New Books: ‘What To Read’ The New York Times (Oct 5)

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Oct. 5, 2022

IN A TIME OF PANTHERS: Early Photographs, by Jeffrey Henson Scales. (SPQR Editions, $49.95.) Scales, a photography editor at The Times, has dug up intimate images taken of Black Panther members and protests during the late 1960s to share a “time capsule” that has taken on new urgency for the author and for our country at large.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: Body Politics, edited by Lotte Johnson and Chris Bayley. (Yale University, $50.) This collection gathers six decades of work from the late experimental artist, including paintings, multimedia installations and films, to shed new light on Schneemann’s ideas about the body, war and more.

IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC, by Ekow Eshun. (MIT, $39.95.) In this exciting, wide-ranging collection, Eshun presents speculative art and imagery from the African diaspora with a focus on folklore and Afrofuturism and explores works such as the paintings of Kara Walker and Chris Ofili and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

FIELD OF PLAY: 60 Years of NFL Photography, by Steve Cassady and Michael Zagaris. (Abrams, $80.) Zagaris’s images — covering 42 Super Bowls, 49 seasons with the San Francisco 49ers and more — provide glimpses into moments of tension, pain and intensity over 60 years of N.F.L. history.