Tag Archives: Books

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 30, 2022

In Barbara Kingsolver’s New Novel, an Appalachian David Copperfield

“Demon Copperhead” reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction.

A Literary Caper Across the Dining Rooms of Belfast and New York

“The Lemon” is the satirical debut by a team of three authors writing under the pseudonym S.E. Boyd.

Emily Dickinson, at Home in Her ‘Full-Color Life’

The poet’s house museum in Amherst, Mass., gets a vibrant, historically correct makeover, underlining that she was not just a reclusive woman in white.

Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Oct 28, 2022

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This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Helen Vendler on Matthew Hollis’s biography of The Waste Land; Vernon Bogdanor on the UK’s future; Christopher Priest on Terry Pratchett; Felipe Fernández-Armesto on lying; @irinibus on the creative potential of constraints – and more.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 3, 2022

London Review of Books (LRB) – November 3, 2022:

Kissinger’s Duplicity

Charles Glass – Although World War Three had come perilously close, Martin Indyk absolves Henry Kissinger: Soviet actions were ‘yet again characterised by an ultimate timidity in the face of American resolve’. ‘Resolve’ is one way of describing the risk of nuclear Armageddon. Another is ‘recklessness’.

Wartime Objectors

Susan Pedersen – The problem with individual conscientious objection is that we are mutually dependent whether we acknowledge it or not. You may refuse to get vaccinated on grounds of conscience but will benefit from herd immunity if others do; you may refuse to pay taxes but will still get your rubbish collected; you may refuse to take up arms in war but will be protected from harm if others serve.

Droning Things

James Meek – If an innocuous merchant ship passing through the Baltic or the North Sea had a handful of ordinary, secretly armed trucks lashed to its deck, would any Nato country notice? Would the drones be detected or intercepted? If they were launched and hit their targets, could it ever be proven where they originated? As a threat to Europe, this is creative licence. But using swarms of Shahed-136s and other forms of missile to destroy a country’s energy system, on the eve of winter, is exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine.

Interviews: Author John Irving – “A Writer’s Life”

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.

Book Previews: The Review Of Politics – Fall 2022

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The Review of Politics – Fall 2022

Caleb J. BasnettAdorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal

Sara BrillAristotle on the Concept of  Shared Life

Stuart EldenThe Early Foucault

David Graber and David WingrowThe Dawn of Everything:  A New History of Humanity

Ioanna TourkochoritiFreedom 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

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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: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 16, 2022

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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