Times Literary Supplement (April 3, 2024): The ‘The Art Issue’ features ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ – Tom Seymour Evans: Carson McCullers’s unruly life; Violence and Climate Change; Posing for John Singer Sargent and Huckleberry Jim – Mark Twain’s escaped slave wrests control of his story…
London Review of Books (LRB) – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features Brandon Taylor – Two Years With Zola,,,
Mary Wellesley – Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Moshé Machover, James McAuley, Avital Balwit, Brian Vickers, Pat Butcher, Joe Oldaker, Arthur M. Shapiro, Penny Collier, John Potts
Mike Jay – Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep by Kenneth Miller
T.J. Clark – Poem: ‘Clapham in March’
Michael Ledger-Lomas: Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect by John SloanTroubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum by Owen Davies
Michael Hofmann – The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton
Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Illustrating Ray Bradbury’ – Michael Caines on a writer who transcended genre; Fifteen French Kings; Spy stories; Neel Mukherjee’s art and artifice; Space colonization and Andrew O’Hagan on the Cally Road….
Qui est per omnia secula benedictus are the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri’s collection of poetry and prose.
The Latin renders to “who is blessed for ever” and concludes an enigmatic, brief paragraph. First published in 1294, La Vita Nuova is a tantalizing prelude to the Florentine poet’s masterpiece, La Commedia, known today as The Divine Comedy. For centuries, readers and scholars have pored over La Vita Nuova (Italian for, literally, the new life)—convinced, as we often are, that a gifted writer’s nascent work contains the answers to longstanding mysteries.
“Building Stories,” the new exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., explores themes of architecture, construction, and design through children’s books, such as Rome Antics by David Macaulay.
I first met Rome as a student in 1968. Rome is complicated and demanding and can be overwhelming—especially if you are homesick. Eventually, the riches and surprises of the imperial city will render all attempts to keep one’s distance useless. I didn’t realize how attached I had become until a few years later.
Times Literary Supplement (March 22, 2024): The latest issue features ‘All the Lonely People’ – Charles Foster on a modern-day epidemic; Shakespeare and Bloomsbury; D.H. Lawrence, cuckhold; Marilynne Robinson’s god; Paul Theroux’s Orwell…
This week’s @TheTLS, featuring @tweedpipe on loneliness; Andrew Holter on Helen Keller; Gabriel Josipovici on Shakespeare, Bloombsbury and Beckett; @rwilliamsparis on Annie Ernaux and photography; @JollyAlice on Paul Theroux; Simone Gubler on fatphobia – and much more pic.twitter.com/nlzNR1MW0B
Paris Review Spring 2024 — The new issue features interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Notley, prose by Joy Williams and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Mary Ruefle and Jessica Laser, art by Chris Oh and Farah Al Qasimi, two covers by Nicolas Party, and more…
Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”
Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.
Poetry a special section Black poetry by William Logan Shakespeare’s words by Amit Majmudar Bachmann: the unspeakable spoken by Peter Filkins The new & the old by Katie Hartsock The answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quignard
New translations by Ryan Choi, Frederick Amrine, Patrick Whalen & Beverley Bie Brahic
Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality by Ed Broadbent, with Frances Abele, Jonathan Sas, and Luke Savage
On July 6, 1975, Ed Broadbent, then a thirty-nine-year-old member of Parliament from Oshawa, Ontario, delivered a speech at the New Democratic Party convention in Winnipeg, capping off his campaign to become just the third leader in the young party’s history. It was a tumultuous time. Across the rich world, the social democratic settlement that had been brought about by the twin catastrophes of the Great Depression and the Second World War was beginning to unravel with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the oil shock precipitated by the Arab-Israeli conflict, the beginning of industrial decline, and the emergence of persistent inflation. The year before, the NDP had suffered a significant electoral setback when, after supporting the minority Trudeau government in Parliament since 1972, it lost almost half its seats despite seeing its vote share decline by only 2.4 percent.
Motor City Meltdown – Catherine Leroux’s alternative history
The Future by Catherine Leroux; Translated by Susan Ouriou
In The Future’s reimagined history, the French never ceded Fort Détroit to the British in 1760, and the British never ceded it to the United States as part of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Instead, the community has remained proudly French Canadian for centuries. (“Never forget we were two shakes away from becomin’ American,” a current resident proclaims.) But while the Motor City was once “full of people, full of music, full of words,” it now struggles in economic ruin — ravaged by pollution, poverty, and crime. It is “a place devoid of faith or law,” with poison in the river and pictures of missing children posted everywhere.
Times Literary Supplement (March 6, 2024): The latest issue features‘Talking about their generation’ – James Campbell and Douglas Field on the Beats including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Alexandra Reza on Frantz Fanon; Miranda France on Montserrat Roig….
Boomers Daily 