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.
Art by Farah Al Qasimi and Chris Oh.
The New Criterion – The April 2024 issue features:
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 16, 2024):
Because we could all use a laugh.
By Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai
When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability.
With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war. Set during World War II and featuring Capt. John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier, the novel presaged, in its black humor, its outraged intelligence, its blend of tragedy and farce, and its awareness of the corrupt values that got us into Vietnam, not just Bob Dylan but the counterculture writ large.
“On Gaslighting,” by the philosophy professor Kate Abramson, explores the psychological phenomenon behind the hashtags.
ON GASLIGHTING, by Kate Abramson
Don’t be so sensitive.
You’re overreacting.
You’re imagining things.
These are things gaslighters say, writes Kate Abramson.
As she explains in “On Gaslighting,” the term originated in the 1944 film “Gaslight,” and after entering the therapeutic lexicon of the 1980s, steadily made its way into colloquial usage.
As a society we have become adept at classifying actions within interpersonal relationships using therapy-speak. From “attachment style” to “trauma-bonding,” personal judgments have become diagnoses — without the assistance of a licensed professional: Anyone with a social media account or a jokey T-shirt can get in on the action. (In 2021, the flippant phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” became a popular, snide social-media shorthand for a certain kind of capitalist feminism.)
Literary Review of Canada -April 2024: The latest issue features:
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.
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.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue features Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff’s new book, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” which sets out to show modern readers that the Elizabethan era did indeed produce its share of great women writers, and she details four of them across a range of disciplines.
In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff presents an astounding group of Elizabethan women of letters.
By Tina Brown
SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”
Using clever camera methods, a new photo book illuminates how honeybees see plants and flowers.
By William Atkins
In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me, Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford us a glimpse of the world as they perceive it: His portraits of plants are, in part, prompts for interspecies empathy at a time when bees are under attack on multiple fronts, from air pollution to pesticides.
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….
Literary Review – March 1, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Gaughin’s Midlife Crisis’; Geology vs Genesis; Japan’s War Trials; Saddam’s Blunderers and Barbara Comyns in Full…
“The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky” By Simon Shuster
As someone who has to consume quite a lot of Russian media, I can tell you that if there is one common denominator, it’s that whether we’re talking about a shouty TV news programme (less Newsnight, more a kind of geopolitical Jeremy Kyle Show), a stodgy government newspaper of record or a racy tabloid, no one has a good word for Volodymyr Zelensky.
Kubrick: An Odyssey By Robert P Kolker
There are, I have long suspected, two types of cinephiles: those who think Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a masterpiece and those who think it’s a relentless bore. Early in their new biography of the film director, Kubrick: An Odyssey, Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams make clear which camp they belong to, describing the scene in which the astronaut Frank Poole jogs around (and around and around and around) the spaceship Discovery as ‘one of the most lyrical passages in film history’.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…
The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.
In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.
By Adam Smyth
Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object.
Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book
by Brian Cummings.
By Geoff Mann
There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.
American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Married to Mr. Hardy’ – The writer’s complicated relationships with women; Southern discomfort; a bad deal on Wall Street…
Boomers Daily 