Parul Sehgal reviews "Pessoa," the life of the writer who created dozens of alternate selves, "most complete with biographies, bodies of work, reviews and correspondence. He was awed, and a little afraid of his mind, its 'overabundance.'" https://t.co/Pz3QWzezJH
— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) July 13, 2021
Tag Archives: NY Times Book Review
Shakespeare: ‘Hamnet’ Author Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” one of last year’s most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596.
On this week’s podcast, O’Farrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest inspiration was to capture a sense of the young boy at its center.
“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” she says. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”
Reviews: Author Michael Lewis, ‘The Premonition – A Pandemic Story’ (Podcast)
In 2018, Michael Lewis published “The Fifth Risk,” which argued, in short, that the federal government was underprepared for a variety of disaster scenarios. Guess what his new book is about? Lewis visits the podcast this week to discuss “The Premonition,” which recounts the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It wasn’t just Trump,” Lewis says. “Trump made everything worse. But there had ben changes in the American government, and changes in particular at the C.D.C., that made them less and less capable of actually controlling disease and more and more like a fine academic institution that came in after the battle and tried to assess what had happened; but not equipped for actual battlefield command. The book doesn’t get to the pandemic until Page 160. The back story tells you how the story is going to play out.”
The historian Annette Gordon-Reed visits the podcast to talk about her new book, “On Juneteenth,” which combines history about slavery in Texas and Juneteenth with more personal, essayistic writing about her own family and childhood.
“This is a departure for me, but it is actually the kind of writing that I always thought that I would be doing when I was growing up, dreaming about being a writer,” Gordon-Reed says. “I’ve always been a great admirer of James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal’s essays I thought were wonderful, better than the novels, and that’s the kind of thing that I wanted to do. So it was sort of a dream come true for me to be able to take this form and talk about some things that were very important to me.”
Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal and John Williams talk about the latest in literary criticism. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books discussed by the critics this week:
“The Secret to Superhuman Strength” by Alison Bechdel
“Jackpot” by Michael Mechanic
Podcast Interviews: Peter Guralnick- Looking To Get Lost In Music & Writing
The bestselling author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll and Last Train the Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, this dazzling new book of profiles is not so much a summation as a culmination of Peter Guralnick’s remarkable work, which from the start has encompassed the full sweep of blues, gospel, country, and rock ‘n’ roll.
It covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers.
“You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us,” rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick’s earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one. And yet, for all of the encomiums that Guralnick’s books have earned for their remarkable insights and depth of feeling, Looking to Get Lost is his most personal book yet. For readers who have grown up on Guralnick’s unique vision of the vast sweep of the American musical landscape, who have imbibed his loving and lively portraits and biographies of such titanic figures as Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips, there are multiple surprises and delights here, carrying on and extending all the themes, fascinations, and passions of his groundbreaking earlier work.
New Book Review Podcast: “Utopia Avenue” And “The Biggest Bluff” (NY Times)
Daniel Mendelsohn discusses Mitchell’s career and new novel, “Utopia Avenue,” and Maria Konnikova talks about “The Biggest Bluff.”
Best Of 2019: NY Times Book Review (Podcast)
Times Critics Talk About Their Year-End Lists
Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai on the top books of 2019.
Book Review Podcasts: “Margaret Thatcher – Herself Alone” By Charles Moore (New York Times)
“I don’t think you can think about British politics or British history without thinking about her a very great deal,” Charles Moore, the authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, says of his subject on this week’s podcast. “And to some extent, you can’t think about the history of the modern West without thinking about her a very great deal.”
The third and concluding volume of Moore’s 2,700-page biography is titled “Herself Alone.”
Adrienne Brodeur visits the podcast this week to discuss her new book, “Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me.” When Brodeur was 14, her mother confided in her about an extramarital affair she was conducting. “The temptation is to view a mother like this in sort of the ‘monster mother’ perspective, and the fact is, the most important thing for me in writing this book was to present a very nuanced portrayal of both her and of our relationship,” Brodeur says.
Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter discusses the winners of this year’s National Book Awards; and Susan Dominus, A.O. Scott and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
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