“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/
Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Spring 2023
Tag Archives: Literature
Literary Arts: The London Magazine – April/May 2023
Manet, Mandarins and Me
Chloë Ashby
My husband doesn’t enjoy peeling oranges. He doesn’t like the little white webs of pith or the way the juice trickles between his fingers and soaks and stains the skin. He’s not a fan of pips. The citrus-sweet taste he could take or leave. If I had to choose between him and my favourite fruit, I like to think I’d stick with him.
The Uses of Beauty
Hugh Dunkerley
When Clare wakes, the car is moving along a wide valley between fields of grazing cattle. She shifts in her seat, her side sweaty where her brother Robbie has been leaning against her. The last thing she remembers is crossing into Austria at a high pass, a young border guard peering in at them through the drizzle. Now the sun is out, and the tarmac is steaming in the heat. At a junction, her father slows down. ‘This is it,’ he says, turning the car. They pass through a village, all whitewashed houses with large overhanging roofs. In the deserted square is a small inn, Der Jäger painted across one wall in beautiful gothic script. Next to the lettering is a twenty-foot-high figure of a hunter in Tyrolean leather trousers and green hat, striding across a mountain side. Clare notices that he has the same jaw as John Travolta in Grease.
The New York Review Of Books – April 6, 2023
Here’s Looking at Yew
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries
By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.
What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage.
Descriptions of a Struggle
The Diaries
by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.
Literary Preview: The Paris Review – Spring 2023
Camus’s New York Diary, 1946
March 1946. Albert Camus has just spent two weeks at sea on the SS Oregon, a cargo ship transporting passengers from Le Havre to New York City. He’s made several friends during this transatlantic passage.
The Blk Mind Is a Continuous Mind
In his poem “After Avery R. Young,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown writes, “The blk mind / Is a continuous mind.” These lines emerge for me as a guiding principle—as a mantra, even—when I consider the work of Black poetry in America, which insists upon the centrality of Black lives to the human story, and offers the terms of memory, music, conscience, and imagination that serve to counteract the many erasures and distortions riddling the prevailing narrative of Black life in this country.
Season of Grapes
As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.
The New York Review Of Books – March 23, 2023
Fascism’s Poster Girl
Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?
Mussolini’s Daughter
The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
Read a Sample
Bigger, Deeper, and More ‘Fucked Up’
When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”
It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
Bloody Panico
The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened?
Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over by Samuel Earle
Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10 by Andrew Gimson
Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid by Matt Hancock with Isabel Oakeshott
The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story by Sebastian Payne
Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale
The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952–79 by Matthew Engel
The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron by Christopher Tugendhat
Culture & Politics: The Drift – February 28, 2023
The Drift Magazine – February 28, 2023 Issue – We called it heterosexual oppression. Like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch.
Electric Bodies | Medical Technology Takes Over
Through a growing focus on healthcare monitoring in recent years, Apple has positioned its wearables as essential accessories for the technophile and the casual hypochondriac alike.
Like so many other predictions of collapse, exaggerated. Methylphenidate for Miriam. Two executives showed up for a meeting dressed as Woody and Buzz Lightyear. A source of revolutionary Marxist critiques, an outright conservative, a peddler of flimsy conspiracy theories. Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing. I am not going to apologize for the empire, for our history. Bravissima! Stealth, he kept no socials. She had martini-glass tits. In this city every boy is an isotope. Enter among the truly civilized peoples. Cruising for difference. The body of a bear, the nose of an elephant, the paws of a tiger, the tail of an ox, and needle-like hairs. Wainscoting for an all-knowing liberalism. How can a narrow regional tabloid claim itself The World? The surrealist didn’t prescribe life-sized butter ears. Spend how you want the sixtyish years you have left of your life.
Words Exchanged | Italophone Somalia, Then and Now
“Italian language teaching is back in Somalia!” the Italian embassy in Somalia tweeted in late September 2021, announcing a new program at the Somali National University that would reintroduce the language of the country’s former colonizer.
The New York Review Of Books – February 23, 2023
The New York Review of Books February 23, 2023 issue:
Buildings Come to Life
In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.
Edward Hopper’s New York an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023
Brazil at the Crossroads
Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.
Very Free and Indirect
The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.
All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman
Reviews: The Best Books From Top 35 Lists In 2022
The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List
Literary Hub (December 19, 2022) – From 35 lists and from 29 publications (yes, there are even more lists out there, but we’re all going to die some day), tallying a total of 887 books. 84 books were highlighted on 4 or more lists, and those are collated those for you here, in descending order of frequency.
14 lists:
Hernan Diaz, Trust
An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception. Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth–all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Penguin Random House
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs.
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats.
12 lists:
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
Namwali Serpell, The Furrows
11 lists:
Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
10 lists:
Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch
Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir
Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts
Books: The New York Times Book Review – Dec 18, 2022
The New York Times Book Review (December 18, 2022) –
John le Carré: The Spy Novelist Who (Mostly) Kept Quiet
“A Private Spy,” a collection of the British writer’s letters, offers glimpses of unguarded moments and ruffled feathers.
John le Carré’s Letters Show the Author at His Witty, Erudite and Pugilistic Best
“A Private Spy,” a collection of correspondence spanning much of his life, offers a fresh look at his brilliance — and his contradictions
Haruki Murakami Has Never Found Writing Painful
In a new memoir, “Novelist as a Vocation,” the Japanese writer reflects on his craft and his career.
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 19, 2022
Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard
The actress and writer recalls working with French cinema’s enfant terrible.
The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer
Such a device could help address climate change and food scarcity, or break the Internet. Will the U.S. or China get there first?
The Promise and the Politics of Rewilding India
Ecologists are trying to undo environmental damage in rain forests, deserts, and cities. Can their efforts succeed even as Narendra Modi pushes for rapid development?
Boomers Daily 