CBS Sunday Morning – Author John Irving has mined his personal history and obsessions as the starting point for such acclaimed works of fiction as “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules.” Now 80, he has published his first novel in seven years, “The Last Chairlift,” a tale of sexual politics and ghosts. He talks with correspondent Rita Braver about inspiration, Charles Dickens, and acceptance.
Tag Archives: Books
Book Previews: The Review Of Politics – Fall 2022


The Review of Politics – Fall 2022
Caleb J. Basnett, Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal
Sara Brill, Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life
Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault
David Graber and David Wingrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Ioanna Tourkochoriti, Freedom of Expression: The Revolutionary Roots of American and French Legal Thought
The Review of Politics publishes high-quality original research that advances scholarly debates in all areas of political theory. We welcome manuscripts on the history of political thought, analytical political theory, canonical political thought, contemporary political thought, comparative political thought, critical theory, or literature and political thought.
Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 23, 2022

Cormac McCarthy’s New Novel: Two Lives, Two Ways of Seeing
The New York Times – In “The Passenger,” a pair of siblings contend with the world’s enigmas and their own demons. The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time.
Ken Burns Wishes More People Would Call Willa Cather a Great American Novelist
“What about ‘O Pioneers!’ or ‘My Ántonia’?” asks the documentarian and author of the forthcoming photo book “Our America.” “For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word ‘American.’”
Paul Newman’s Humanity and Star Power
When the actor appeared in the movie version of “Nobody’s Fool,” Richard Russo saw another side of him.
Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Oct 21, 2022
This week’s issue of the TLS, featuring @George_Berridge , Claire Lowdon and Edmund Gordon on new books by Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver and George Saunders, respectively; Gabriel Josipovici on Cézanne; @15thcgossipgirl on Chaucer’s innocence; @rinireg on hatred – and more.
Times Literary Supplement – TLS Website

Perspectives: Harper’s Magazine – November 2022

In the Running
The trials of an almost candidate – In January 2019, when I found myself sitting across from Mindy Myers in a cramped D.C. coffee shop, the new resistance was riding high. A diverse lot of Democrats had just taken control of the House of Representatives, positioning themselves to curtail Donald Trump’s devastating abuse of the presidency…
Some Like It Hot
Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society
Books: Literary Review Of Canada – November 2022
The November issue is now live featuring David Marks Shribman on John Honderich, Sandra Martin on Cary Fagan’s latest, Rosemary Counter on writing and motherhood, Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph on journeys home, and a cover by David Parkins.
Literary Review of Canada Website
Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 16, 2022
The Genre-Shattering Fictions of Alan Moore
With his first story collection, “Illuminations,” the British writer and comic-book titan works his subversive power on a smaller scale.
| There’s more, of course, including Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s powerful novel in stories, “Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions”; Maggie Haberman’s “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”; Buzz Bissinger’s “The Mosquito Bowl,” about a game played on Guadalcanal between two Marine regiments in 1944; and Amal El-Mohtar’s latest science fiction and fantasy column. |
| Don’t miss the latest entry in our “Read Your Way Around the World” series, which will whisk you to the brightly hued streets of Reykjavík, or our excerpts from Bob Dylan’s new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” (In 1971, 45 years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Book Review opined, rather tartly, that “Dylan is not a literary figure. Literature comes in books, and Dylan does not intend his most important work to be read.”) |
Cover for @nytimesbooks Junot Diaz’s review of Alan Moore’s new story collection “Illuminations”.
The New York Times Book Review
Preview: New York Review Of Books – Nov 3, 2022

Gored in the Afternoon
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.
Reform or Abolish?
American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano
Then What Happened?
Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1,001 Nights translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paulo Lemos Horta
The Limits of Press Power
To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?
The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn S. Olmsted
The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II by Alexander G. Lovelace
‘We Know What That’s Like’
The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.
No Bears a film written and directed by Jafar Panahi
A Prisoner of His Own Restraint
Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder
The Illusion of the First Person
A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Shakespeare & Company: Author William Boyd On His Book ‘The Romantic’
Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Oct 14, 2022
This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Rosemary Righter and @peterfrankopan on Xi Jinping; @LaurenElkin on Annie Ernaux; @pottmeister on John le Carré; @MirandaFrance1 on Clarice Lispector; @Lordoflongitude on measurement – and more.
