Times Literary Supplement (May 19, 2023) – Portrait of a Marriage: The Mandelas; The Return of Inflation; Doing Justice to John Rawls; The Greatest Italian Novel and Heaney’s translations.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 19, 2023
Tag Archives: Literary Magazines
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 22, 2023
How Philipp Plein Became the King of Low-Brow High Fashion
The maximalist designer has positioned himself as an underdog hero of the common man, who is successful despite the falsity and the snobbery of the élites.
By Naomi Fry
Earth League International Hunts the Hunters
A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.
By Tad Friend
How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst
Lucy Easthope, who has worked on major emergencies since 9/11, says that small interventions can make a significant difference.
By Sam Knight
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 12, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (May 12, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, features Peter Thonemann on The Triumph of the West; @joemoransblog on imagination; @michaelscaines on The Motive and the Cue; @DrAliceKelly on graphic novelizations of Gatsby; @helenlpgordon on stones; @rinireg on surveillance – and more.
Preview: London Review Of Books — May 18, 2023
Julian Bell at the Rijksmuseum
In London, I had taken A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal for a dependable rest point on strolls around the National Gallery. In Amsterdam, relocated to join 27 other Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, its strangeness re-emerged. This canvas, executed towards the end of Vermeer’s relatively brief career (some four years, perhaps, before he died aged 43 in 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 15, 2023
Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter
Collaborating on his memoir, “Spare,” meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids.
The Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body
For more than a decade, two “recovering” anthropologists have brought documentary closer to the human experience. Now they’ve made the camera part of our flesh and blood.
The Critics
- Books – Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of RespectabilityWe revere the man and revile the strategy, but King knew what he was doing.By Kelefa Sanneh
- Books – Briefly Noted“Nothing Stays Put,” “Still Life with Bones,” “Stealing,” and “Hit Parade of Tears.”
- Books – BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic WarsBen Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media.By Nathan Heller
- Musical Events – Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville OrchestraTeddy Abrams, the ensemble’s music director, has created a work about Mammoth Cave—and staged the piece inside its reverberating walls.By Alex Ross
The New York Review Of Books – May 25, 2023
Bewitched by Goethe
In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.
Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson
A strange time to publish—strange time to publish anything—a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte.
Saving Lives and Making a Killing
A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.
For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug by Nathan Vardi
A research scientist for Pharmacyclics, Sunnyvale, California, 2013. In For Blood and Money, Nathan Vardi writes that when Pharmacyclics—which developed ibrutinib, a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia—was bought by the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie in 2015 for $21 billion, ‘the deal…set the new high-water mark for success in the biotechnology industry.’
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 5, 2023
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (May 5, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS features Bruno Schulz – a writer from another Europe; Patrick O’Brian’s bleak vision; Vermeer – a great but flawed exhibition; extreme fandom and Derek Parfit, eccentric genius.
Man of Margins
How Bruno Schulz found freedom on the periphery of life By Boris Dralyuk
It’s more than a little discomfiting to read the great Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s description, in his diary from the early 1960s, of his not-quite-friend Bruno Schulz: “A tiny gnome with enormous head, appearing too scared to dare exist, he was rejected by life and slouched along its peripheries”. Written for publication two decades after Schulz was gunned down by a Nazi just outside the ghetto of his occupied native town of Drohobych in November 1942, these words cannot help but seem impious.
Literary Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Spring 2023
Fiction
- The Mysteries of the Universe by Anna Badkhen:
“I see now what this is about. I’m a professor and author in America, she’s in a war zone: to her, I’m rich and happy. How is she supposed to know about the cancer, the medical debt, Ksyusha’s student loans? So, I try to deflect.” - Encyclopedia of Botany by Jane Marchant:
A daughter’s closely observed catalog of the flora around her Bay Area home, and of her family’s complex history of identity. - Glint of Sport by Angie Sijun Lou:
“I don’t know if this story is true. You can’t divide truth from kitsch in this place…” - Eulogy by William Hawkins:
In the wake of a funeral, a dead father’s legacy hangs over his surviving adult sons as they trudge into the lukewarm waters of the lake by the family pier. - The Eye by Elodie Saint-Louis:
“When Theo spoke, she thought, you could see all of these places on his body. Vyros, Hymettus, Loutro, Parnitha. The land was in him. It was the river running out of his mouth. The words that bumped into each other gently but never spilled over, petering out into a gentle sway.” - Plus more fiction by Perry Janes, David Hayden (there be strange happenings in a dilapidated insurance building in Chicago), and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace.
Nonfiction
- Jane Marchant on the flora around her Bay Area home—and her family’s complex history of identity.
Poetry
- Jason Allen-Paisant, Dan Alter, Allison Benis White, Ricardo Cázares, E.G. Cunningham, Peter LaBerge, Joyce Mansour, Maria Zoccola
Art
- Sofia Bonati
Books: Literary Review Magazine – May 2023
Literary Review – May 2023 issue: Donald Rayfield surveys the life and work of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and R W Johnson reviews the Mandela’s…
The Poet & the Tyrant
‘Osip Mandelstam: A Biography’ By Ralph Dutli
When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops.
Heroism & Homicide
‘Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage’ By Jonny Steinberg
Under apartheid, aspiring South African writers frequently marketed themselves to the world as committed and heroic anti-apartheid activists. The enormous success of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (fifteen million copies sold and counting) showed the way, though Paton was the real McCoy, a committed liberal who suffered for his beliefs.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 8, 2023
Can Charles Keep Quiet as King?
As Prince of Wales, Charles was always ready with an opinion. Now, with his coronation at hand, his job is to have none.
“My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is,” Charles once said, adding, “I must find one.”Photo illustration by Alma Haser for The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty
Barry Blitt’s “Room at the Top”
The artist discusses being young and adrift in London, and gives King Charles tips for painting with watercolors.
New Yorker covers don’t always reflect current events, but some staged proceedings, both anachronistic and immemorial, can be catnip for cartoonists and commentators alike. King Charles III automatically acceded to the throne when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, died on September 8, 2022. Charles, the longest-serving heir apparent in Britain’s history, spent seven decades preparing for the role of monarch. He became the next in line to reign over the United Kingdom at three years old, when Elizabeth became queen, in 1952.
Boomers Daily 