Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Arts & Literature, Books, Previews, Reviews, Videos

Books: The Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist Revealed

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The Booker Prize (September 20, 2023) – The shortlist has been announced! It features six books by authors never previously shortlisted, including two debuts.

The Shortlist

The Bee Sting

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

By Paul Murray

Western Lane

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash

By Chetna Maroo

Prophet Song

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

By Paul Lynch

This Other Eden

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

By Paul Harding

If I Survive You

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques

By Jonathan Escoffery

Study for Obedience

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator

By Sarah Bernstein

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 22, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…

The X files

Elon Musk, 2020

ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan

When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.

Travels with his aunts

Peter Brown

The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity

By Mary Beard

JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown

In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.

Arts & Literature, Books, Culture, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — October 2023

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The New Criterion – October 2023 issue:

The new conservative dilemma  a symposium

Today’s conservative dilemma  by James Piereson
Can conservatives still win  by Victor Davis Hanson
Conservatism reconfigured  by Daniel McCarthy
The promise of populism  by Margot Cleveland

New poems  by Daniel Brown, Sophie Cabot Black & W. S. Di Piero

Arts & Literature, Awards, Books, Fiction, Reviews

Fiction: The 2023 National Book Awards Longlist

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2023 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction - National Book Foundation

2023 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction – National Book Foundation

National Book Foundation (September 15, 2023) – The ten titles on the list were chosen from four hundred and ninety-six submissions by publishers. Three authors on the longlist, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Justin Torres, have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation. The full list is below.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Aaliyah Bilal, Temple Folk
Simon & Schuster

Eliot Duncan, Ponyboy
W. W. Norton & Company

Paul Harding, This Other Eden
W. W. Norton & Company

Tania James, Loot
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Mona Susan Power, A Council of Dolls
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers

Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time
Henry Holt and Company / Macmillan Publishers

Justin Torres, Blackouts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

LaToya Watkins, Holler, Child
Tiny Reparations Books / Penguin Random House

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 15, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.

A worldlier class of flapper

The Divorcee (1930); Ursula Parrott; The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s

By Lillian Crawford

Democrat or revolutionary?

A demonstration in support of Allende, Santiago, 1971

Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup

By David Gallagher

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Poetry, Previews, Reviews

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023

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Kenyon Review – Autumn 2023: The new issue includes the winner and runners-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, selected by Ruth Awad, and a Food-themed folio, with poetry by sam sax, Inga Lea Schmidt, and Holly Zhou; fiction by Rebecca Ackermann, Elvis Bego, and Douglas Silver; nonfiction by Katie Culligan and Erica N. Cardwell; and much more. Luminous Gender Vessel, a folio guest-edited by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Melissa Faliveno, features work by Krys Malcolm Belc, KB Brookins, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Catherine Kim, and many others. The cover art is by Joanna Anos.

Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews, Stories

The New York Review Of Books – October 5, 2023

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The New York Review of Books (October 5, 2023) – The new issue features Jennifer Wilson on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s unsettlingly funny tales of domestic un-bliss, Tim Judah on the new normal in Ukraine, Daniel M. Lavery on Jacques Pépin, E. Tammy Kim on the 1941 Disney animators’ strike, Christopher Benfey on John Constable, Bill McKibben on a planet smothered in asphalt, Lynn Hunt on the revolutions of 1848, Noah Feldman on the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc, A.E. Stallings on Simonides, poems by Devin Johnston and Claire DeVoogd, and much more.

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

Jennifer Wilson

Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

Some months ago I was having dinner with a writer from Moscow. I told him I was thinking of reviewing a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped, a Bollywood-inspired novella that pays homage to the Soviets’ love of Indian cinema. “Don’t do it,” he—a friend of hers—warned me. “If she doesn’t like what you write, she will turn you into a character in one of her stories—the stupid girl in New York who doesn’t know anything.” Being a longtime admirer of Petrushevskaya, I wasn’t too worried: realism is not her thing.

Ukraine’s New Normal

Market Square, Lviv, Ukraine

Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.

Tim Judah

On August 8 I went to the Jellyfish Museum in Kyiv. During my previous visits to the city, it had been closed because of the war. Now it has reopened. In the gloom the fantastical creatures drifted about in their tanks while couples, friends, and families drifted about happily looking at them. In Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border, the Half an Hour café, where I wrote for a couple of days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, has also just reopened.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books – Sept 21, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – September 21, 2023: The new issue features John Lanchester on statistics, William Davies on Weber, nihilism and universities @dlbirch1 on hate mail, Ferdinand Mount on Henry III Clair Wills on Shirley Hazzard and a cover by Alexander Gorlizki.

Get a rabbit

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10): Ghosh, Arunabh: 9780691179476: Amazon.com: Books

By John Lanchester

Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Histories of Economic Life, 10) by Arunabh Ghosh

At a dinner​ with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, is fascinating for two reasons. First, because it shows a sly, subtle, worldly humour – a rare glimpse of the sort of thing Chinese Communist Party leaders say in private. Second, because it’s true. A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.

Stay away from politics

By William Davies

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.

Books, Journals, Literature, Previews, Reviews, Stories

Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Fall 2023

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Paris Review Fall 2023 — The new issue features Robert Glück on the Art of Fiction: “When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them, I’d reply, ‘First, break my heart.’”; Lynn Nottage on the Art of Theater: “I embrace the fact that I write plays that are popular. Audiences make their own decisions.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept 8, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (September 8, 2023): The new issue features Modern conspiracy theories, China’s Platonic republic, Jonathan Raban’s last days, Sebastian Faulks’s Neanderthal, the English country house, and more….