Literary Review of Canada -March 2024: The latest issue features:
The Storm of Progress: Climate Change, AI, and the Roots of Our Dangerous Ethical Myopia by Wade Rowland
The Compassionate Imagination: How the Arts Are Central to a Functioning Democracy by Max Wyman
Literary Review – February 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience’;
By STUART JEFFRIES
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience By Lyndsey Stonebridge
When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise.
By Norma Clarke
Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses By Paula Byrne
The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense and began with the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd, rested to a large extent on the heroines he created. One young reader wrote to him of Tess, ‘I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.’ Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’
By James Butler
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
by Vincent Bevins.
The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession
by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello.
Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author
by Sophus Helle.
Times Literary Supplement (January 31 2024): The latest issue features ‘Back to Nature’ – The counterculture begins with Thoreau; Enlightenment dimmed; The secret state and the IRA; Homosexuality in early modern Europe and A family haunting….
Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Rich Are Always With Us’ – Ferdinand Mount on taming the plutocrats; Empire’s balance sheet; Who is Charles III?; Silvia Townsend Warner’s revival and ChatGPT goes to college…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 19, 2024): The latest issue features the excitement over advance copy reviews of a January novel, Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!” …“You’ve got to read this,” one editor said. “One of the most electric novels I’ve read in a long while,” another said. This kind of thing — everyone thrilled by the same book — is unusual at the TBR, and explains why “Martyr!,” about a grieving young man’s search for meaning, graces our cover this week.
In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar
Reviewed by By Junot Díaz
Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:
The New Criterion – The February 2024 issue features:
What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton
Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence by Cécile Fabre
On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
by Lucasta Miller.
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse
by Anahid Nersessian.
Looking back to September 1820, when things had gone badly wrong but not yet so grotesquely as to be visibly beyond repair, we can see how few and how poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused.
A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution
by Anna Reid.
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
Boomers Daily 