Times Literary Supplement (November 3, 2023): The new issue features Rock Hudson and the art of docudrama; Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm continued; Wife to Mr. Orwell; Whitman’s war diaries; Britain passes the chaos test and more…
Literary Review – November 2023: The new issue features Sex, Satire & Revolution; The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century; Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago – The Britannias: An Island Quest; and more…
The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century
By Kassia St Clair
Cost, not a lack of courage, ensured that the entry field for the 1907 Peking to Paris car race was small. A massive two-thousand-franc deposit (equivalent to a professor’s annual salary) kept all but five of the aspiring contestants out of the race. That exclusion, as Kassia St Clair demonstrates in her captivating history of one of the most challenging endurance trials in the history of motoring, was precisely what the organisers intended.
The Britannias: An Island Quest
By Alice Albinia
In July 2023 Orkney Islands Council voted to explore alternative governmental arrangements for the archipelago. One option proposed by the council leader was for it to become a self-governing territory of Norway, the kingdom which lost control of Orkney to Scotland in 1468. The episode – in reality, a smart political stunt in a row over the Scottish government’s transport policy – attracted extraordinary international attention. In the UK press, it was treated with an uneven mixture of constitutional soul-searching and patronising amusement at the Passport to Pimlico-styleantics of the Orcadians.
The Drift Magazine – Fall 2023 Issue – Essays on dissidents, ecoterrorists, and mermaids; an interview with Veronica Gago, Dispatches on the future of the Supreme Court; also fiction, poetry, reviews and more…
Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild.
At 4 p.m. on August 8th, Shaun Saribay’s family begged him to get in their car and leave the town of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The wind was howling, and large clouds of smoke were approaching from the dry hills above the neighborhood. But Saribay—a tattooist, a contractor, and a landlord, who goes by the nickname Buge—told his family that he was staying to guard their house, which had been in the family for generations. “This thing just gonna pass that way, downwind,” Saribay said. At 4:05 p.m., one of his daughters texted from the car, “Daddy please be safe.”
The Hamas massacre, the assaults on Gaza, and what comes after.
The only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully and to know that you will fail.
On the evening of Wednesday, October 18th, with the entire Middle East in a state of mourning and outrage, I took a taxi to the information offices of the Israel Defense Forces, a heavily guarded compound in northwest Tel Aviv. Like many reporters, I’d accepted an invitation to see video evidence of the worst massacre of Jews in generations, certainly in the history of Israel—Hamas’s rampage through Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and other communities near the Gaza Strip, extending to an outdoor electronic-music festival, Nova. At last count, the attack throughout what Israelis call Otef Aza—“the Gaza envelope”—had claimed some fourteen hundred lives; thousands were wounded, and around two hundred and twenty people had been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. Hamas gave the operation a name, the Al-Aqsa Flood.
Fiction
“Thinking Ahead” by Joan Silber:
“How does a person behave when he knows he’s dying? There’s a myth that people go off and do what they’ve always wanted to do—sail to Spain, buy a horse, eat at the world’s most famous restaurant. ‘They never do that,’ my mother said, ‘that I’ve seen. They don’t even remember why they wanted to do it.”
“Seabreeze” by Korey Lewis:
Jojo and Jaz wait for The Defendant to pick them up from their mother’s place and take them to Seabreeze. “If Disney is where dreams come true, then Seabreeze is where they give up.”
“Eau de Nil” by Chloe Wilson:
“It was a website called Geriatrix. On it were women my age, in various states of undress. I saw breasts droopier and flatter than mine, necks that were crêpier, bellies that bulged and hung. But what really struck me was how happy they looked.”
“Country Furnishings” by Earle McCartney:
The equilibrium in a tetchy blue-collar workshop gets jostled with the arrival of Frank Wonderwood—future son-in-law of the business’s new co-owner and future woodworking graduate from Del Tech.
Poetry
Karen Leona Anderson, Stuart Dybek, Johanna Carissa Fernandez, Mike Good, Cleo Qian, Sarah Lynn Rogers, Joel M. Toledo
Nonfiction
Laura M. Furlan her birth parents, identity, and butterflies. Adam Foulds on the home-turned-museum of one of England’s greatest architects, Sir John Soane. Sam McPhee on the singular fascination hands have on his attention. Jessica Francis Kane on her lifelong affinity with the fascinating James Boswell. And Devon Brody’s “Beth”: “I’m glad to be with only Beth and her long hair that meets the hair on my arms, and the hair on her arms that meets the hair on my arms.”
In Conversation:
Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo delves with Justin Torres into Torres’s career and his new novel, Blackouts, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Art
Wangari Mathenge
Times Literary Supplement (October27, 2023): The new issue features ‘Tomorrow becomes today’ – J.G. Ballard’s prescient vision; Revolutionary Paris; The modern novel; Germany from the ashes and Oh, what a lovely war!….
The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos
Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”
Our accelerating rates of extraction come with immense ecological and social consequences.
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an incident, back in May, when a fourteen-year-old boy who’d eaten a biscuit at the restaurant began to hallucinate and had to be taken to the hospital. Without Spruce Pine, though, the global economy might well unravel.
Times Literary Supplement (October20, 2023): The new issue features ‘Rocket Man’ – North Korea’s dictator is no joke; A snapshot of Teju Cole; Daniel Dennett’s evolution; Monet’s muses; John le Carré undercover, and more…
Boomers Daily 