Times Literary Supplement (May 12, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, features Peter Thonemann on The Triumph of the West; @joemoransblog on imagination; @michaelscaines on The Motive and the Cue; @DrAliceKelly on graphic novelizations of Gatsby; @helenlpgordon on stones; @rinireg on surveillance – and more.
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (May 5, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS features Bruno Schulz – a writer from another Europe; Patrick O’Brian’s bleak vision; Vermeer – a great but flawed exhibition; extreme fandom and Derek Parfit, eccentric genius.
It’s more than a little discomfiting to read the great Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s description, in his diary from the early 1960s, of his not-quite-friend Bruno Schulz: “A tiny gnome with enormous head, appearing too scared to dare exist, he was rejected by life and slouched along its peripheries”. Written for publication two decades after Schulz was gunned down by a Nazi just outside the ghetto of his occupied native town of Drohobych in November 1942, these words cannot help but seem impious.
Literary Review – May 2023 issue: Donald Rayfield surveys the life and work of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and R W Johnson reviews the Mandela’s…
‘Osip Mandelstam: A Biography’ By Ralph Dutli
When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops.
‘Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage’ By Jonny Steinberg
Under apartheid, aspiring South African writers frequently marketed themselves to the world as committed and heroic anti-apartheid activists. The enormous success of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (fifteen million copies sold and counting) showed the way, though Paton was the real McCoy, a committed liberal who suffered for his beliefs.
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (April 28, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, featuring Abigail Green on 1848; @WeTheBrandon on the geopolitics of space; @woodsgregory on James Purdy; @JulianBaggini on food policy; @scheffer_pablo on the Passion in the Netherlands; @CamilleRalphs_ on poetry anthologies – and more
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (April 21, 2023) – This week’s issue features @tylercowen on long- vs short-termism; @ecshowalter on Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor; @NickHoldstock on Wang Xiaobo; @BenBollig on Sergio Raimondi; @islomane on noise pollution – and more.
Silicon Valley’s moral bankruptcy by Victor Davis Hanson
The Russian way of literature by Daniel J. Mahoney
China apologetics by Gordon G. Chang
Gillray: national lampooner by Myron Magnet
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (April 14, 2023) – This week’s issue features @TristramHuntVA on monuments; @nclarke14 on English caricature; @HettieJudah on Action, Gesture, Paint @_TheWhitechapel; @jntod on J. H. Prynne; @rinireg on the Trump indictment – and more.
ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (APRIL/MAY 2023):
FICTION the dip by Örvar Smárason
When my fingers started falling off, it became harder and harder to put my
From the archive: In this 1971 article from Iceland Review,
Haraldur Sigurðsson delves into the history of Icelandic cartography. Note
Individually, snowflakes are fragile, easily broken, dissolving into droplets of water at the mere touch of a finger or a breath of air, while en masse, they’re capable of wreaking havoc on the city streets and causing catastrophe when avalanching down a mountainside.
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (April 7, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, featuring the late Jane Maas on Philip Roth’s great love; David Throsby on consulting firms; an extract from The God Desire by @Baddiel; @LamornaAsh on Max Porter; @funesdamemorius on Mike Nelson; a new poem by Carl Dennis – and more.
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