Category Archives: Literature

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 2, 2022

Celeste Ng’s Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality

“Our Missing Hearts” explores a fictional world where Chinese Americans are spurned and books are recycled into toilet paper.

What’s the Key to Understanding Donald J. Trump? Start With Queens.

“Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman’s biography of the former president, argues that it’s essential to grasp New York’s steamy, histrionic folkways.

A Nobelist’s New Novel, Rife With Pestilence and Writerly Tricks

Set on an imaginary island at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, “Nights of Plague,” by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, is a chronicle of an epidemic, a murder mystery and a winking literary game.

Books: Literary Review Of Canada – October 2022

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The Bear and the Beaver – Eight games, one goal – Robert Lewis

Sentence Structure – Views from the inside – Amy Reiswig

Me, My Shelf, and I – An account of empty boxes – Mark Kingwell

An Uncertain Royal Path – Three Windsor women and the future of the monarchy – Patricia Treble

The last Queen of Canada? – What comes next for Canada and the Crown – John Fraser

Books: Kirkus Reviews – September 15, 2022 Issue

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An Athlete and Activist Shares His Story With Kids

Here is the truly amazing thing that few people besides Tommie Smith remember about his gold medal–winning 200-meter run in the 1968 Olympics: He broke the world record in just under 20 seconds on one good leg.

‘The Rushdie Affair,’ Back in the News

As we were editing our Sept. 15 issue in mid-August, news broke that author Salman Rushdie had been attacked at a lecture in western New York state. The story sent shock waves through the literary community—a stark reminder that violence can lurk in the corners of literary debate. Rushdie is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction and is most celebrated for his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, a kaleidoscopic epic of Indian life after independence that won the Booker Prize as well as two subsequent honors, the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008.

Covers: New York Review Of Books – October 6, 2022

New York Review October 6, 2022 cover

The October 6 issue is online now, with Bill McKibben on the climate refugee crisis, Hermione Lee on Joseph Roth’s violently mixed feelings, Linda Greenhouse on Justice Breyer’s most powerful dissent, Jerome Groopman on diabetes, Leslie T. Chang on narrative nonfiction in China, Ange Mlinko on H.D., David S. Reynolds on séances in the Lincoln White House, Verlyn Klinkenborg on the Beach Boys’ moment in the sun, Erin Maglaque on the pope’s astronomer, Mark Danner on the long, slow Trump coup, a poem by Vona Groarke, and much more.

Where Will We Live?

Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.

Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth – by Benjamin von Brackel, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World – by Gaia Vince

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism – by Harsha Walia

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth – by Keiron Pim