Tag Archives: Literature

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – MAY 11 & 18, 2026 PREVIEW

May 4, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The cover of the May 11 18 2026 issue of The New Yorker on which a worldweary George Washington slouches at a party...

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features ‘Barry Blitt’s “Red, White, and Kinda Blue” – America’s birthday party.

Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations

Donald Trump’s aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see events that grapple with the nuanced nature of the nation’s history this July 4th. By Jelani Cobb

Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?

Amid contention, criticism, and compromise, a divided nation had to present a unified front. It came at a cost. By Jill Lepore

Barack Obama Considers His Role in the Age of Trump

The former President remains one of the most popular politicians in the country. What are his obligations to it?

Arts & Literature, Books, History, Magazines, Opinion, Reviews

LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – MAY 2026 PREVIEW

May 1, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Ritchie Robertson on Weimar * Charles Darwent on Louise Bourgeois * John Guy on the Tudors * Kirsten Tambling on dogs in art * Piers Brendon on Churchill and the crown * Saul David on AI warfare * Simon Nixon on private equity predators * Nigel Andrew on outsider animals * Zoe Guttenplan on Beatrice Warde * Maren Meinhardt on women and music * Lucy Lethbridge on swimming * Diane Purkiss on being published * Anthony Pagden on the West * Michael Reid on Lula * Anthony Teasdale on Tory leaders * Anna Reid on Vera Gedroits * Wendy Holden on Elizabeth II * Harriet Rix on trees * Emma Smith on Shakespeare’s identity * Jane Yager on Herta Müller * Sheena Joughin on Siri Hustvedt * Adam Kucharski on evidence * Keith Miller on Douglas Stuart * Natalie Perman on Jem Calder * and much, much more…

Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy By Victor Sebestyen

Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe By Katja Hoyer

The small town of Weimar is overladen with historical associations. Goethe spent more than fifty years there as an employee and friend of Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August. After the last grand duke abdicated in November 1918, the National Assembly met in Weimar to draw up a new republican constitution for Germany. Other symbolically charged venues considered were Nuremberg (home of Dürer) and Bayreuth (because of Wagner), but it was Weimar that gave its name to the period of German history from …

Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois By Marie-Laure Bernadac (Translated from French by Lauren Elkin)

Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911. She preferred the idea that her namesake was Louise Michel, ‘the red virgin of Montmartre’, an anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune. It wasn’t true, of course, but …

This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England By Nandini Das

A phrase like ‘fortress England’ seems to echo down the centuries, and turns up again in This Little World, Nandini Das’s new study of identity and belonging, cross-border migration, assimilation and estrangement in the period between 1500 and the restoration of Charles II. Das seeks to unmask the period’s most fundamental assumptions about English … read more

Arts & Literature, Fiction, Magazines, Poetry, Previews, Views

Zyzzyva Magazine —– Spring 2026 Preview

April 29, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

ZYZZYVA Magazine: The latest issue features…

Nonfiction

“Saguaro in the Sea” by Sophia Acuña: on surfing and indigeneity in Southern California, told through collage.

“Care Directive” by Sarah Matsui: a daughter’s attempt to keep her aging father in Hawaii from all sorts of calamity, but having to monitor him from the mainland.

“Triptych: A Biographer’s Sketchbook” by Carolyn Burke: “The Baroness was lively, curious, and still blond at eighty-five. She received me in a flurry of franglais, the mingling of two languages in which we would converse, and put us at ease with pink champagne, her favorite.”

Fiction

“Decoys” by Will Boast: goofing around working at the town supermarket, burning through the days till it all comes to head.

“Lilac Mud” by Anita Felicelli: A Bay Area artist in Amsterdam is approached one night by a man claiming to be a former student, leading to a crisis of identity and purpose.

“Grote geplumaceerde” by Emily Nemens: “Afterward, staring hard at her phone, which was her radio, which was the bearer of bad news, she wondered what mattered at all.”

Poetry

Kevin Cantwell, Geraldine Jorge, Jonathon Keats, Caroline Kessler, and Noelani Piters.

In Conversation

Lydia Kiesling talks to acclaimed author Karen Russell about Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, and about Russell’s “fascination with foundational myths, the things we choose to know, and the things we choose to ignore or forget.”

Art

Ian Everard

Arts & Literature, Books, History, Literature, Magazines, Reviews

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 1, 2026 PREVIEW

April 29, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A View of Her Own’….

Out of nothing

Tracey Emin’s self-fashioning By Sophie Oliver

Amateurs in name only

Women landscape painters reconsidered By Jenny Uglow

Bomb culture

Mankind has escaped nuclear war, for now By P. D. Smith

So close to the United States

Mexico’s challenge to received historical ideas By Benjamin T. Smith

Greedy for light

The bittersweet contentment of old age By Rory Waterman

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Opinion, Reviews

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 7, 2026 PREVIEW

April 29, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Who Owns The Arctic?’ by Laleh Khalili; De Kooning in Cuba by T.J. Clark; Politics on Speed by William Davies…

Who owns the Arctic?

Laleh Khalili

From the 16th century onwards, as European powers feverishly colonised the world, the possibility of a Northern Sea Route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Scandinavia to the Bering Strait, tantalised the Dutch and the British as an alternative to the southern routes to Asia and the Americas, which were dominated by Portugal and Spain. But the route only became a reality in the Soviet era, after investments in scientific, economic, industrial and military infrastructure in Siberia.

Politics on Speed

William Davies

This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave.

De Kooning in Cuba

T.J. Clark

De Kooning’s Suburb in Havana is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants to show us how hard it had to work to get precisely nowhere. Why nowhere was where it wished to get to is a question it leaves to the viewer.

Orbán’s Fall

Jan-Werner Müller

Can there be poetic justice in politics? Perhaps once in a lifetime. In 1989, a young Viktor Orbán bravely told the crowds in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square that it was time for the Russians to go home, just as protesters had demanded in 1956; almost four decades later, he was heckled on the campaign trail with the same words.

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – MAY 4, 2026 PREVIEW

April 27, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The cover of the May 4 2026 issue of The New Yorker on which people practice yoga in Central Park.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features ‘Tomer Hanuka’s “Spring Salutations” – Central Park flow.

Donald Trump’s Spring Cleaning

The exact reasons are often left vague and the successors to be determined, but people are leaving the Administration—including three Cabinet secretaries. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?

The agency, which was founded to protect the environment and human health, has cancelled safety regulations, supported coal, and stopped caring about climate change. By Elizabeth Kolbert

Donald Trump’s Economic Warfare Abroad Comes Home

From tariffs to the war with Iran, the President is blowing up the global economy.

With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos

Arts & Literature, Books, History, Magazines, Opinion, Reviews

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 14, 2026

April 23, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jed Perl on the Whitney Biennial, Fintan O’Toole on the president’s precarious sanity, Nicole Rudick on June Leaf’s unique vision, Clare Bucknell on know-it-alls, Julian Bell on Joseph Wright of Derby, Dennis Lim on low-resolution cinema, Elaine Blair on the Guerrilla Girls, Mark O’Connell on a death in London, Martin Filler on David Adjaye’s demons, Nick Laird on the complete Seamus Heaney, Rosa Lyster on the evaporating salt lakes, Susan Tallman on Manet and Morisot, poems by Paul Muldoon and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, and much more.

‘The Right Amount of Crazy’

In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality. By Fintan O’Toole

Charlatans & Bores

The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.

On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S.Q. Visser

‘The Music of What Happens’

Seamus Heaney’s complete poems, following on editions of his letters, prose, and translations, confirm the extent of his achievement.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue, with Matthew Hollis

Manet and Morisot: Game On

An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.

Manet and Morisot – an exhibition at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 29–July 5, 2026

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – APRIL 27, 2026 PREVIEW

April 20, 2026 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

The cover for the April 27 2026 issue of The New Yorker on which three people are playing a basketball game on a court.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features ‘Christoph Niemann’s “West Fourth” – One of the city’s most iconic courts.

J. D. Vance’s Bumpy Ride

It wasn’t the first time that Trump had debased someone who serves him. It wasn’t even the first time that Vance had had to downplay a blasphemy-themed A.I. image. By Amy Davidson Sorkin

When Your Digital Life Vanishes

A broken phone or corrupted drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. But sometimes data-recovery experts can summon lost files from the void. By Julian Lucas

How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon for Trump’s Cabinet

The Education Secretary ran the W.W.E. for years with her husband, Vince, an unstable man who, like her new boss, has a genius for inflaming the crowd. By Zach Helfand