Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2024): The latest issue features Freud’s Discontents – George Prochnik on the father of psychology; A great novel on the American Frontier; Death becomes them – The mourning rituals of the Victorians; Cover-up – An atrocity committed by US troops in the Philippines….
In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.
A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup
Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way by Louis Chude-Sokei
The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei
The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei
Times Literary Supplement (June 5, 2024): The latest issue features Reading the Raj – E.M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’, Way-Out Philosophy, Michelangelo at the British Museum…
By Rachel Nolan
How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution
by Elizabeth Dore.
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne and Rahul Bery.
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
Times Literary Supplement (May 29, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Kafka’s Century’ – Karen Leeder, Becca Rothfeld, Gabriel Josipovici, Michael Hofmann et al…; Colm Toibin returns to Brooklyn; India under Modi; A Jim Crow insane asylum and Literary cricket…
The New Criterion – The June 2024 issue features:
On combating anti-Semitism & anti-Americanism.
On White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman.
On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty.
On the town’s history & architecture.
Times Literary Supplement (May 22, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Other Europe’ – Defining a Continent; An English Country Garden; The church of Peter Ackroyd and Zombie apocalypse…
Times Literary Supplement (May 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The future of sex?’ – Dating apps, virtual encounters and polyamory; An American Life; Ripley’s new game; Gurus and primal screams ….
Times Literary Supplement (May 8 2024): The latest issue features ‘Reverie and revolution’ – Ian Penman on Surrealism; Crime fiction gets political; Scorsese’s English masters, women pianists and more….
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