TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (February 13, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Real Ruins?’ = Mary Beard on what gets left behind; AI’s literary triumph; A Nobel laureate’s prose falls short; The price of woke and Kissinger’s boys…
The Argentine pontiff who accepts his own fallibility By A. N. Wilson
By Mary Beard
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): The latest issue features Rea Irvin’s “Eustace Tilley” at One Hundred – The magazine celebrates its centenary.
The magazine has three golden rules: never write about writers, editors, or the magazine. On the occasion of our hundredth anniversary, we’re breaking them all. By Jill Lepore
Harold Ross founded The New Yorker as a comic weekly. A hundred years later, we’re doubling down on our commitment to the much richer publication it became. By David Remnick
New York’s biggest foreskin fans take their anti-circumcision message to the streets. By Diego Lasarte
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 8, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Stages Of Life’…
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The notes, taken after meetings with her psychiatrist, will be published in April as a book, “Notes to John.” They provide a raw account of her life, her work and her complex relationship with her daughter.
“Superbloom,” by Nicholas Carr, and “The Sirens’ Call,” by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, argue that we are ill equipped to handle the infinite scroll of the information age.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 7, 2025): The latest issue features The Prophet Business…
A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson
There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment – an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025
One hundred and fifty years after Impressionist paintings were first exhibited, it takes a certain effort to recover their original radicalism.
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.
THE LONDON MAGAZINE (February 3, 2025): The latest issue features…
Zuhri James
‘I don’t think character exists anymore’, Rachel Cusk declared in a 2018 interview. This was not the first time Cusk appeared to be announcing the atrophy of the traditional novel. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Cusk stated she was ‘certain autobiography’ was ‘increasingly the only form in all the arts’. Inversely, fiction and its conventional preoccupation with ‘making up John and Jane’, Cusk argued, was only becoming more ‘ridiculous’, ‘fake and embarrassing’. It is precisely this disregard for literary orthodoxy that runs through Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of autofictional novels – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018).
.Idra Novey
My twin brother calls from the hospital. He’s finished his blood draw and wants to know the word in Portuguese for watermelon. I recite the word for him – melancia – though my brother’s mind isn’t likely to keep hold of it. Zach can no longer keep a hold of his house keys or his phone, which he left yesterday in the bathroom sink. Before we hang up, I ask him to please wait for me in the lounge area for outpatient services, not to wander outside the hospital.
.Julia Steiner
Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease: The Paris Document – out from Fitzcarraldo Editions on 30 January – delivers captivating literary reportage on Parisian squats of the early 2010s. Feldman introduces us to people who transformed abandoned buildings into homes, shelters and hubs for artistic creation. With echoes of Agnès Varda’s work, Feldman’s prose is compassionate and honest, acknowledging her own role as an observer. She answered these questions by email about her fifteen-years-long project, begun in 2009.
LITERARY REVIEW (February 1, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Sebald’s Critical Eye’…
The Travels of Norman Lewis by John Hatt (ed) – review by Nicholas Rankin
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration By Stephan Malinowski (Translated from German by Jefferson Chase)
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History By Selena Wisnom
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History By Moudhy Al-Rashid
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (January 31, 2025): The latest issue features David Runciman on President $Trump; Versions of Hamas and Toril Mok on Vigdis Hjorth…
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (January 29, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Outsider Art’ – The life and work of John Singer Sargent; American Sex; The English country house…
MORGAN LIBRARY (January 28, 2025): Our curator Sal Robinson discusses the importance of the Bible in the history of literature in “Franz Kafka.” Few could have predicted the influence Kafka’s relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st.
This exhibition will present, for the first time in the United States, the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Kafka, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis.
Other highlights include the manuscripts of his novels Amerika and The Castle; letters and postcards addressed to his favorite sister, Ottla; his personal diaries, in which he also composed fiction, including his literary breakthrough, the 1912 story “The Judgment”; and unique items such as his drawings, the notebooks he used when studying Hebrew, and family photographs. In addition to presenting unique literary and biographical material, the exhibition examines Kafka’s afterlife, from the complex journeys of his manuscripts, to the posthumous creation of a literary icon whose very name has become an adjective, to his immense influence on the worlds of literature, theater, dance, film, and the visual arts.
Drawing on institutional holdings and private collections in the United States and Europe, the Morgan will show a selection of key works, among them Andy Warhol’s portrait of Kafka, part of his 1980 series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.
“Franz Kafka” is open to the public November 22, 2024 through April 13, 2025.
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (January 27, 2025): The latest issue features Kadir Nelson’s “Messenger” – The city’s ubiquitous winged creatures can be an unexpected source of inspiration.
The effect of the President’s executive orders was to convey an open season, in which virtually nothing—including who gets to be an American citizen—is guaranteed. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
A reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history. By M. R. O’Connor
Mazen al-Hamada fled Syria to reveal the regime’s crimes. Then, mysteriously, he went back. By Jon Lee Anderson
Boomers Daily 