Tag Archives: Literary Magazines

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 31, 2023

A series of images of the Earth inside a microwave getting redder with each year.
“Recipe for Disaster,” by Christoph Niemann.

The New Yorker – July 31, 2023 issue: The ‘rich and famous’ above the law, a small-town newspaper lands ‘Big Stories’, how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world, and more…

How Alex Spiro Keeps the Rich and Famous Above the Law

Alex Spiro stands holding a folder under one arm and points at something out of the frame.

With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

From the issue of July 31, 2023

In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.

How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World

Larry Gagosian stands in front of art by Richard Prince.

The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.

By Patrick Radden Keefe

It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water. 

Preview: London Review Of Books — July 27, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – July 27, 2023 issue:

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille

James Lasdun

Poem: ‘A False Awakening’

John Burnside

Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Deborah Friedell

Short Cuts: Radiant Ambiguity

James Butler

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – July 21, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (July 21, 2023) – Moral catastrophe – The great inflation in Germany in 1923 and the Hitler putsch; Pioneer’s in Women’s Sport; Colson Whitehead’s Harlem; Dangerous children; Dating The Tempest and Shakespreare’s tutor….

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 24, 2023

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The New Yorker – July 24, 2023 issue: Emily Nussbaum on the Nashville underground, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Gretchen Whitmer, Anthony Lane on “Mission: Impossible,” and more.

Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville

A man in a cowboy had stands amid a group of women in cowgirl hats at NashVegas.

Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.

By Emily Nussbaum

On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.

How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold

Gretchen Whitmer photographed by Paola Kudacki.

The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – July 7, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (July 7, 2023): The national religion – NHS at seventy-five; The history of female combatants from ancient times to the present; The temptation for Romantic writers to tip into over-familiarity, and more…

You’re over-sharing, Mr Hazlitt

Portrait of William Hazlitt by William Bewick, 1825

The temptation for Romantic writers to tip into over-familiarity

By Corin Throsby

Authorship and Romantic readers by Lindsey Eckert

In times of uncertainty, hardship or illness, re-reading a favourite novel can be a source of immense comfort. Even when we read something new, elements of familiarity – in plot, character and theme – can make us feel that the words have sprung from our subconscious. Familiarity connects us to our past and gives a sense of belonging to a community of readers. It can turn fictional characters into friends, make authors feel like confidants and render imagined settings as reassuring as a childhood home.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – July 2023

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Literary Review – July 2023 Issue: Brushes with the Dutch Golden Age; @LauraCummingArt’s ‘Thunderclap’ – a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death’; Bismarck’s Great Gamble; Eden by Thames – The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London…

Conspiracy Theory of Everything

Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World: Amazon.co.uk: James Ball:  9781785902147: Books

The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World By James Ball

Back in the mists of time, great idealism surrounded social media. There was a sense that global interconnection would shift us into a more egalitarian and democratic age. How time makes fools of us all. 

Blast from the Past

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death By Laura Cumming

As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walking to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, especially, Pieter de Hooch. 

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – July 10, 2023

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The New Yorker – July 10 & 17, 2023 issue:

On Killing Charles Dickens

A man with a top hat hovering over London.

I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel. When I finally started “The Fraud,” one principle was clear: no Dickens.
By Zadie Smith

For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself. First for Rome, then Boston, and then my beloved New York, where I stayed ten years. When friends asked why I’d left the country, I’d sometimes answer with a joke: Because I don’t want to write a historical novel. Perhaps it was an in-joke: only other English novelists really understood what I meant by it. And there were other, more obvious reasons.

The Tyranny of the Tale

Scheherazade behind a colonnade of pens.

We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative frame is also a cage?

By Parul Sehgal

After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. That’s to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade’s arms?

The New York Review Of Books – July 20, 2023

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The New York Review of Books – July 20, 2023 issue: The Fiction Issue features Adam Thirlwell on Emmanuel Carrère, Carolina Miranda on contemporary Caribbean art, Darryl Pinckney on a new reissue of a classic of American vernacular literature, Fintan O’Toole on Mike Pence’s pallid pomp, Daniel Mendelsohn on Bob Gottlieb, and more.

The Trouble with Truth

Emmanuel Carrère

Adam Thirlwell

Emmanuel Carrère’s new book, Yoga, has been the subject of gossipy debate about its veracity, but it is seductively open about its own anxiety as a work of fiction.

Life Made Light

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Johannes Vermeer, one of the most intimate and quiet of artists, who is celebrated for the silence and light of his paintings, has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser.

Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J.M. Weber

Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – June 30, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (June 30, 2023): Evelyn Waugh’s failed marriage and spiritual crisis; The police on trial; Grotesque, unbelievable murder; Lorrie Moore’s road trip; Levity in death and more….