THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 15, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Making Art and Selling Out’ = In Danny Senna’s fleet, funny novel “Colored Television”, a struggling writer in a mixed-race family is seduced by the taste of luxury….
The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the “challenges and triumphs” of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, “Lovely One.”
James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.”
James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923, grew up in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York, and spent most of his adult years in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Although he is perhaps less widely known than the fellow New York School poets with whom he is associated, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, he published six full-length books of poetry during his lifetime—beginning with Freely Espousing, published by Doubleday and Paris Review Editions in 1969—as well as two novels, and a third written in collaboration with Ashbery. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Morning of the Poem (1980). Mental illness plagued him intermittently, and there were times when his life threatened to veer out of control, but friends repeatedly rallied around him, and the years before his death in 1991 were happy and productive.
Javier Cercas on the Art of Fiction: “Hell, to me, is a literary party.”
Prose by Josephine Baker, Caleb Crain, Marlene Morgan, Morgan Thomas, and Fumio Yamamoto.
Poetry by Hannah Arendt, Matt Broaddus, Sara Gilmore, Benjamin Krusling, Mark Leidner, James Richardson, and Margaret Ross.
Art by Ayé Aton and Ron Veasey, and cover by Sterling Ruby.
Mary Robison on the Art of Fiction: “The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”
Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.”
Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.
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.
Not every workplace features a guillotine. At a book conservation lab tucked beneath the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the office guillotine might as well be a water cooler ora file cabinet for all that it fazes the staff. “We have a lot of violent equipment,” said Mindell Dubansky, who heads the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation.
Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 5, 2024): The latest issue features Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie,” published 50 years ago. The Book Review editors weren’t sure what to do with it, so they handed it to their mystery columnist, Newgate Callendar. He called it “brilliant” but conceded, “Maybe, strictly speaking, it is not a mystery.” Still, he added, “That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers.”
“Carrie” was published in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains its enduring appeal.
By Margaret Atwood
Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon.
“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.
As “Carrie” turns 50, George R.R. Martin, Sissy Spacek, Tom Hanks, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others recall the powerful impact the writer’s work has had on their lives.
Tom Hanks
Actor, “The Green Mile”
In the late ’70s the image of Carrie covered in blood at the high school dance was already part of the national narrative — in a fun way. Struggling to afford the rent and the diapers while navigating those first years of a creative journey in the big city, I had not seen the movie nor read the book. Then a copy of “The Stand” was being gobbled up by our gang — read in a fever pitch on every subway ride and first thing in the morning. Once done, the copy was passed along to the next pair of eyes and promptly devoured.
“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.
By Jessamine Chan
THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht
The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra
Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.
Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.
Paris Review Spring 2024 — The new issue features interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Notley, prose by Joy Williams and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Mary Ruefle and Jessica Laser, art by Chris Oh and Farah Al Qasimi, two covers by Nicolas Party, and more…
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.
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.
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.)
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue featuresRenaissance 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.
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