Tag Archives: Paperback Books

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – March 17, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 16, 2024): 

22 of the Funniest Novels Since ‘Catch-22’

Catch-22 eBook by Joseph Heller, Christopher Buckley | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

Because we could all use a laugh.

By Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability.

With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war. Set during World War II and featuring Capt. John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier, the novel presaged, in its black humor, its outraged intelligence, its blend of tragedy and farce, and its awareness of the corrupt values that got us into Vietnam, not just Bob Dylan but the counterculture writ large.

You’re Not Being Gaslit, Says a New Book. (Or Are You?)

“On Gaslighting,” by the philosophy professor Kate Abramson, explores the psychological phenomenon behind the hashtags.

A still from a black-and-white movie portrays a couple in Victorian dress. The man, in a dark suit, looks down disdainfully at a woman in a gown and pompadour as she gazes into the distance.

By Dodai Stewart

ON GASLIGHTING, by Kate Abramson

Don’t be so sensitive.

You’re overreacting.

You’re imagining things.

These are things gaslighters say, writes Kate Abramson.

As she explains in “On Gaslighting,” the term originated in the 1944 film “Gaslight,” and after entering the therapeutic lexicon of the 1980s, steadily made its way into colloquial usage.

As a society we have become adept at classifying actions within interpersonal relationships using therapy-speak. From “attachment style” to “trauma-bonding,” personal judgments have become diagnoses — without the assistance of a licensed professional: Anyone with a social media account or a jokey T-shirt can get in on the action. (In 2021, the flippant phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” became a popular, snide social-media shorthand for a certain kind of capitalist feminism.)

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – March 10, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue features Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff’s new book, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” which sets out to show modern readers that the Elizabethan era did indeed produce its share of great women writers, and she details four of them across a range of disciplines. 

Some of the Best Bards Were Women

A round portrait is composed from the quadrants of four different medieval women’s faces.

In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff presents an astounding group of Elizabethan women of letters.

By Tina Brown

SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff

Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”

A Bee’s-Eye View of the World

A photo of a flower with stamen and pistils that appear to glow yellow, purple and orange in UV light.

Using clever camera methods, a new photo book illuminates how honeybees see plants and flowers.

By William Atkins

In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me, Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford us a glimpse of the world as they perceive it: His portraits of plants are, in part, prompts for interspecies empathy at a time when bees are under attack on multiple fronts, from air pollution to pesticides.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – March 3, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…

Kate DiCamillo Says ‘Paying Attention Is a Way to Love the World’

Credit…Rebecca Clarke

The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.

How to Speak New York

In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – February 25, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 23, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Dawn of Woman’ – Lucy Sante recounts the trials and joys of her gender transition in a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name”…

Lucy Sante Is the Same Writer She Has Always Been

Lucy Sante poses for a portrait in the basement office of her home in Kingston, N.Y. She’s surrounded by shelves packed with books. There’s an open laptop on her desk.

In her memoir “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition in her late 60s

The Affair That Split New York High Society

A black-and-white photograph portrays a New York City street scene. Horse-drawn vehicles, men in boaters and derbies, and women in long dresses and hats walk in front of a statue of George Washington.

In “Strong Passions,” the historian Barbara Weisberg tells the story of an explosive, lurid 1860s case that still resonates today.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – February 18, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 16, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Philip Gefter’s sizzling, “unapologetically obsessive” new book, “Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” Our critic Alexandra Jacobs calls it “a shot glass filled with one work that, alongside contemporaneous books like Richard Yates’s novel ‘Revolutionary Road’ and Betty Friedan’s polemic ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ showed how the ‘cartoon versions of marriage’ long served up by American popular culture always came with a secret side of bitters.”

Filming ‘Virginia Woolf,’ the Battles Weren’t Just Onscreen

A black and white photograph of the actors Richard Burton, left, and Elizabeth Taylor, at right, staring at each other with a very bright light occupying the middle distance behind them. The image is cropped and repeated to resemble a strip of film.

With Burton and Taylor as stars and a writer and director feuding, adapting the scabrous play wasn’t easy. “Cocktails With George and Martha” pours out the details.

‘Neighbors’ Opens the Door to a Literary Career Cut Short

An illustration is made up of three panels showing, from left: The red silhouette of a walking woman, who is slowly fading away; a partially open dormitory door with a red pennant on its front and a shadow creeping on the floor from inside; and a close-up of a Black hand on a brown background.

A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings.

By Alexandra Jacobs

Writer, Mother, Ex-Wife: Leslie Jamison Is a Self in ‘Splinters’

In her powerful new memoir, the author examines a life composed of conflicting identities — and fierce, contradictory desires.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – February 11, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 9, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Armed And Dangerous’ – Two new books – “One Nation Under Guns”, by Dominic Erdozain, and “What We’ve Become”, by Jonathan M. Metzl – examine America’s gun culture and its costs…

An America Where Guns Do the Talking

This illustration depicts a handgun in medium blue, drawn so that its middle section forms the outlines of the United States, beneath a jagged diagonal swath of red against a pale blue background.

Two new books consider how the country’s obsession with firearms has become an existential threat.

By Rachel Louise Snyder

ONE NATION UNDER GUNS: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain

WHAT WE’VE BECOME: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl

Last year, a friend from Brunei visited me in the United States. She is American but was raised in Sudan and has lived in Cambodia and Scotland, among other places. We were talking about the rise in anxiety among teenagers in America when another friend texted me; her daughter had just arrived home from school, where she’d spent the afternoon in lockdown. “Of course your kids have anxiety,” my Brunei friend said. “They’re being raised in a war zone.”

A Scottish Coming-of-Age Story, With a Supernatural Twist

In this illustration, a young woman stands in the middle of vast farmland filled with rolling hills, cows and a little farmhouse. In the distance, a black train billowing smoke rolls by.

In Margot Livesey’s new novel, “The Road From Belhaven,” a 19th-century farm girl’s life and maturity are complicated by her uncontrollable visions of accident and disaster.

By Daisy Lafarge

Lizzie Craig has a gift: She sees “pictures” of events before they take place. It happens first when she’s 10, with a vision in which her grandfather’s scythe slips from a whetstone and injures his leg. It’s the tail end of the 19th century in Fife, rural Scotland, where Lizzie is brought up by her grandparents on Belhaven Farm. Her pictures, more often than not, are premonitions of accidents and disasters: a hurt leg, a wheel coming off a cart, a tree hit by lightning. They tend to arrive “a few weeks before the accident,” giving Lizzie time to prepare, and sometimes, intervene accordingly.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – January 28, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 26, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ukraine’s Leading Man’ – In “The Showman”, Simon Shuster makes the case that Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as an entertainer helps him on the world stage…

Volodymyr Zelensky’s Greatest Performance

A photograph of reporters in a conference hall gathered around a long desk, listening to Zelensky addressing them from a flat panel TV at the end of the desk. Some of them are wielding boom mics and large cameras. Others are typing at the desk.

In “The Showman,” the journalist Simon Shuster trails the entertainer-turned-wartime president as he rallies the world for support.

By David Kortava

THE SHOWMAN: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, by Simon Shuster

Nine months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, the Time magazine correspondent Simon Shuster caught a ride on a presidential train that few, if any, journalists had seen from the inside. In a private carriage, with the blinds drawn, Volodymyr Zelensky was fueling up on coffee during a trip to the frontline. He’d been reading about Winston Churchill, but with Shuster he’d sooner discuss another key World War II figure: Charlie Chaplin.

“He used the weapon of information during the Second World War to fight against fascism,” Zelensky said. “There were these people, these artists, who helped society. And their influence was often stronger than artillery.”

Mightier — and Meaner — Than the Sword

Emily Cockayne’s “Penning Poison,” a history of anonymous letters, reveals the ways we’ve been torturing one another, verbally, for centuries.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of San Francisco

Two books — “The Longest Minute,” by Matthew J. Davenport, and “Portal,” by John King — examine the City by the Bay’s resiliency from very different angles.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – January 21, 2024

Leave a comment

Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 19, 2024): The latest issue features the excitement over advance copy reviews of a January novel, Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!” …“You’ve got to read this,” one editor said. “One of the most electric novels I’ve read in a long while,” another said. This kind of thing — everyone thrilled by the same book — is unusual at the TBR, and explains why “Martyr!,” about a grieving young man’s search for meaning, graces our cover this week.

A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life

This colorful illustration features a large red bird and a horse’s head and neck, both adorned with Farsi letters, as well as a skyward-bound airplane and a black-hooded figure with many faces holding a torch in one hand and a sword in the other. These details are laid over a backdrop of blue-green mountains and yellow sky.

In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.

Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewed by By Junot Díaz

Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent first novel, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a “bad” immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, a self-pitying malcontent. But above all else Cyrus is sad; profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

  • “Knife,” by Salman Rushdie
  • “James,” by Percival Everett
  • “The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link
  • “Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar
  • “The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson
  • “The Hunter,” by Tana French
  • “Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange
  • “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez
  • “Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison
  • “Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver
  • “Funny Story,” by Emily Henry
  • “Table for Two,” by Amor Towles
  • “Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley
  • “One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford
  • “The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul
Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – January 14, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 12, 2024): The latest issue features ‘What Happens When Writers Embrace Artificial Intelligence as Their Muse? by A.O. Scott…

Literature Under the Spell of A.I.

This image shows the nine female muses of Greek myth as miniature figures in shades of blue against a pale blue background. The muses are holding hands and encircling an enlarged return key of the sort that appears on a laptop keyboard.

What happens when writers embrace artificial intelligence as their muse?

By A.O. Scott

The robots of literature and movies usually present either an existential danger or an erotic frisson. Those who don’t follow in the melancholy footsteps of Frankenstein’s misunderstood monster march in line with the murderous HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” unless they echo the siren songs of sexualized androids like the ones played by Sean Young in “Blade Runner” and Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina.”

We fantasize that A.I. programs will seduce us or wipe us out, enslave us or make us feel unsure of our own humanity. Trained by such narratives, whether we find them in “Terminator” movies or in novels by Nobel laureates, we brace ourselves for a future populated by all kinds of smart, possibly sentient machines that will disrupt our most cherished notions of what it means to be human.

A Clash of Civilizations Brought to Life

In this close-up, black-and-white portrait, Álvaro Enrigue’s hair is windblown and he is holding his jacket’s collar up, obscuring part of his face.

For Álvaro Enrigue, a novelist fascinated with historical detail, the first meeting of the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors is the obsession of a lifetime. He brings it to life in “You Dreamed of Empires.”

By Benjamin P. Russell

The Aug. 13, 2021 edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Álvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course.

The 54-year-old Enrigue, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas changed the trajectory of global commerce, urbanism, industry and much else besides. Modernity itself, he argues, was born in the moment the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, first looked each other in the eye in 1519, a clash of empires that set in motion the city’s capture two years later.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – January 7, 2024

Leave a comment
Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 5): The latest issue features ‘Read This And Learn’ – For decades, Juan Rulfo’s novel, “Pedro Páramo,” has cast an uncanny spell on writers. A new translation may bring it broader appeal.

A Masterpiece That Inspired Gabriel García Márquez to Write His Own

A black-and-white photograph of a man resting his chin on his hand over a small wooden table. An Aztec skull sits next to his face.

For decades, Juan Rulfo’s novel, “Pedro Páramo,” has cast an uncanny spell on writers. A new translation may bring it broader appeal.

By Valeria Luiselli

Readers of Latin American literature may have heard one of the many versions of this story:

It is 1961 and Gabriel García Márquez has just arrived in Mexico City, penniless but full of literary ambition, trying desperately to work on a new novel. One day, he is sitting in the legendary Café La Habana, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were said to have plotted the Cuban Revolution. Julio Cortázar walks in, carrying a copy of Juan Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Páramo.” With a swift gesture, as if he’s dealing cards, Cortázar throws the book on García Márquez’s table. “Tenga, pa que aprenda,” he says. “Read this and learn.”

Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin: An Unlikely, Unwavering Friendship

A pair of black-and-white historical photographs show Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin, holding a violin.

These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.

By Joshua Barone

Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.