Tag Archives: Literature

Times Literary Supplement – April 18, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 16, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Plays for Today’ – On what makes Shakespeare great; Miracles of Siena; Conversations about Gaza; Cyber insecurity and a Letter from Greenland…

The New York Review Of Books – April 24, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (April 3, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Spring Books’….

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter edited by Matthew Shindell, with a foreword by Dava Sobel

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle

The London Magazine – April/May 2025 Preview

THE LONDON MAGAZINE (April 2, 2025): The latest issue takes the city as its muse:

Joshua Mehigan finds poetic inspiration at a petrol station stop, on the way back from Atlantic City

Kasra Lang and Sara Ahmad explore London and its residents who are marginalised or ignored

Paul Stephenson goes to Paris and attempts to ‘exhaust a place’ à la Georges Perec

Gráinne O’Hare’s fiction takes us to Belfast, a city scarred by the effects of generational trauma

Times Literary Supplement – April 4, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 2, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Art and Lifestyle’ – On visual culture in the era of AI…

A bad business

Recalculating the economic gains of slavery By Padraic X. Scanlan

Raging bull

Rejecting the narrative of Picasso the monster to women By Lisa Hilton

Rebirth of the modern

The future of art and artists in the era of artificial intelligence By Aaron Peck

Writer, lawyer, banker, cleaner

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s tale of four women – and many social ills By Houman Barekat

The New York Review Of Books – April 10, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 20, 2025): The latest issue features Michael Gorra on the majesty of Caspar David Friedrich, Cathleen Schine on Hanif Kureishi, Wendy Doniger on letting slip the horses of war, Adam Thirlwell on Lars von Trier, Christian Caryl on denazification, Miri Rubin on Christian supremacy, Jonathan Mingle on the phosphorous shortfall, Brenda Wineapple on the history of American social movements, Geoffrey O’Brien on Fifties Hollywood, Christopher R. Browning on Trump’s antisemitism, poems by Witold Wirpsza and Laura Kolbe, and much more.

Toffler in China

The work of the eclectic American futurist exerted a profound and unanticipated influence on China’s digital transformation since the 1980s.

Lost in the Landscape

The Met’s Caspar David Friedrich exhibition offers an introduction to an artist whose work—luminous, disturbing, serene—reveals an all-encompassing physical realm.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature – an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 8–May 11, 2025

Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age – an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, December 15, 2023–April 1, 2024

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time by Florian Illies, translated from the German by Tony Crawford

The Rise and Fall of Warhorses

You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when.

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz

Times Literary Supplement – March 21, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 19, 2025): The latest issue features ‘An extraordinary woman’ = Gisele Pelicot’s dignity before a watching world; What I learnt from Athol Fugard; Caspar David Friedrich; Stalin’s don and Hitler’s royal allies…

Times Literary Supplement – March 14, 2025 Preview

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TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 12, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Only Way Is Down’ – On hopeful pessimism; The death of a poet in war; On democracy; Did museums purchase or plunder and Crippen’s crimes…

Cold comfort farm        

Hope, despair and retreat in an unquiet age By Kieran Setiya

Taking up the cross

The crusades in the English literary imagination By David Abulafia

Not just a man’s war

The role of women in crusading history

Under the patriarchy

Sixty years of turmoil in Egypt

Literature & Ideas: The Yale Review – Spring 2025

Spring 2025 cover image

THE YALE REVIEW (March 11, 2025): The latest issue features…

Finding the Real in Photorealism

Do we want art to transform our lives?

“Channel, 2019–24”

Capturing Los Angeles in crisis by Sasha Rudensky

Instagram

Is life online real? by Jesse Damiani

Storytelling

Is narrative real? by Mona Oraby

The New York Review Of Books – February 27, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 7, 2025): The latest issue features The Prophet Business…

The Prophet Business

A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson

There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.

A Daring Departure

Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee

Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment – an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025

One hundred and fifty years after Impressionist paintings were first exhibited, it takes a certain effort to recover their original radicalism.

Rebooting the Pentagon

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff

Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.

The London Magazine – February/March 2025

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THE LONDON MAGAZINE (February 3, 2025): The latest issue features…

Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction

Zuhri James

‘I don’t think character exists anymore’, Rachel Cusk declared in a 2018 interview. This was not the first time Cusk appeared to be announcing the atrophy of the traditional novel. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Cusk stated she was ‘certain autobiography’ was ‘increasingly the only form in all the arts’. Inversely, fiction and its conventional preoccupation with ‘making up John and Jane’, Cusk argued, was only becoming more ‘ridiculous’, ‘fake and embarrassing’. It is precisely this disregard for literary orthodoxy that runs through Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of autofictional novels – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018). 

Heat Signature

.Idra Novey

My twin brother calls from the hospital. He’s finished his blood draw and wants to know the word in Portuguese for watermelon. I recite the word for him – melancia – though my brother’s mind isn’t likely to keep hold of it. Zach can no longer keep a hold of his house keys or his phone, which he left yesterday in the bathroom sink. Before we hang up, I ask him to please wait for me in the lounge area for outpatient services, not to wander outside the hospital.

Jacqueline Feldman: ‘It’s salutary to spend time around people who have arranged their lives in radical ways.’

.Julia Steiner

Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease: The Paris Document – out from Fitzcarraldo Editions on 30 January – delivers captivating literary reportage on Parisian squats of the early 2010s. Feldman introduces us to people who transformed abandoned buildings into homes, shelters and hubs for artistic creation. With echoes of Agnès Varda’s work, Feldman’s prose is compassionate and honest, acknowledging her own role as an observer. She answered these questions by email about her fifteen-years-long project, begun in 2009.