Banshee Literary Journal – Spring/Summer 2023:
Issue 15 features poetry from @el_fodongo, Elizabeth McGeown, @JamieOHallo108, @MNSghost, @AnneTannam, @hmorganvl, @crownofpetals, @dogwithoutlegs, @yopopodawn and Derek JG Williams.
Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain
Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer but the unaffordability of housing in East London. Let’s go to Croydon! For want of anywhere else.
Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and a quest for redemption. In the Philippines, a deeply Catholic country, the story has a satisfying narrative arc.
Literary Review – April 2023 issue: The April issue of Literary Review is out now! In this month’s cover article, Kirsten Tambling looks at how Shakespeare’s Juliet has been reinterpreted and received through the ages.
Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine – In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers … to leane over’.
Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown
The New York Times Book Review – April 2, 2023:
“Birnam Wood,” by the Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, is a fast-moving ecological novel and a generational cri de coeur.
Edinburgh calls to readers, its pearl-grey skies urging them to curl up with a book. Maggie O’Farrell, the author of “Hamnet,” suggests reading that best reflects her city.
Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai‘i One Summer, Other Writings edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Maxine Hong Kingston’s best work has a timeless quality, fresh, beautiful, horrifying, bursting with myth and fantasy and nagging reality.
The BBC: A Century on Air by David Hendy
This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922–2022 by Simon J. Potter
World War II was the BBC’s finest hour, but its history since then reflects the corporation’s gradual loss of primacy in British life.
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx
Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration by Laura J. Martin
Two recent books show that the concept of ecological restoration is a fuzzy one: even practitioners rarely agree on what is being restored, or to what end.
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (March 31, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS features @Skye_Cleary on the Good Life; @David_Goodhart on the Tories post-Brexit; @PeterKGeoghegan on the UK’s finances; @DrCLaoutaris on Shakespeare’s lodger; @KatyaTaylor on L. M. Montgomery; @MirandaFrance1 on Javier Marías’s final novel – and more.
LitHub (March 28, 2023): Literary Hub is very pleased to reveal the cover for Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s new novel The Pole, which will be published by Liveright this September. Here’s more about the book from the publisher:
Exacting yet maddeningly unpredictable, J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, “extravagantly white-haired” Polish pianist who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into the world of the journeyman performer. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband’s summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though, it seems, only on her terms. The power struggle between them intensifies—Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Wittold, trying to force into life his dream of love?
The Dublin Literary Award is presented annually for a novel written or translated into English. Books are nominated for the award by invited public libraries in cities throughout the world, making the award unique in its coverage of international fiction.
“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/
The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023:
Her new story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” offers elegiac scenes from a marriage plus a grab bag of curious fables.
There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we’re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it’s Margaret Atwood.
Michael Lesy’s book of historical photographs and found text offers a singular portrait of American life.
Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.
The first installment of an essay series on American literature and faith.
I am a child of the church. In an early memory, I am 6 years old, half-asleep in the back of my grandparents’ station wagon on the way home from a revival…
Boomers Daily 