We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.
Animal Liberation Now
by Peter Singer.
Justice for Animals
by Martha Nussbaum.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…
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”.
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.
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
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.
Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s
Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.
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.
Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes.
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.
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.
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber
by Wendy Brown.
Boomers Daily 