THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 10, 2023): The new issue features Zadie Smith’s very Dickensian new novel, “The Fraud,” In nonfiction, the extremely different romantic lives of George Orwell and George Eliot are reviewed, and a biography of the con man who paved the way for all those “Nigerian prince” email scams.
Zadie Smith Makes 1860s London Feel Alive, and Recognizable
Her new novel, “The Fraud,” is based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial, but it keeps one eye focused clearly on today’s political populism.
By Karan Mahajan
All over the dorm in California glinted pale-orange and tabasco-red and steel-blue copies of Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” with their hard white bright lettering. The year was 2001, and “White Teeth” had been assigned as incoming reading for my freshman dorm. I remember loving the sprawling, rude, funny, slapdash narration, the magical way in which Smith brought it all together in the figure of a genetically engineered mouse.
Lauren Groff’s Latest Is a Lonely Novel of Hunger and Survival
“The Vaster Wilds” follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.
By Fiona Mozley
Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.
Deutsche Grammophon – DG
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