Tag Archives: Poetry

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 26, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (May 26, 2023) – Alan Jenkins on Martin Amis, Young Russian fascists, The Rossettis at Tate Britain, Writers at the Hay Festival, Seamus Perry on ‘Byron’s Voice’.

Taking life sentence by sentence

Martin Amis, a talent for our time By Alan Jenkins

Martin Amis, 1995

In the Foreword to The War Against Cliché: Essays and reviews 1971-2000, a career-spanning collection of his journalism (literary and other), Martin Amis recalled how, when they started out in the early 1970s, he and his friends and colleagues touchingly assumed that literary criticism was as essential to civilization as literature itself was. Furthermore, “the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment” was that, in the debate between the Two Cultures, Art vs Science, “Art seemed to be winning”.

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — June 2023

The New Criterion – June 2023 issue:

The diversity myth  by Peter Thiel
Emperor of chaos  by Gary Saul Morson
Pfitzner & the conservative artist  by Adam Kirsch
Vermeer in Amsterdam  by Benjamin Riley


New poems  by Dylan Carpenter, Karl Kirchwey & John Barr

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 19, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (May 19, 2023) – Portrait of a Marriage: The Mandelas; The Return of Inflation; Doing Justice to John Rawls; The Greatest Italian Novel and Heaney’s translations.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 12, 2023

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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.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 5, 2023

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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.

 Man of Margins

How Bruno Schulz found freedom on the periphery of life By Boris Dralyuk

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 Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Spring 2023

ZYZZYVA Magazine Spring 2023:

Fiction

  • The Mysteries of the Universe by Anna Badkhen:
    “I see now what this is about. I’m a professor and author in America, she’s in a war zone: to her, I’m rich and happy. How is she supposed to know about the cancer, the medical debt, Ksyusha’s student loans? So, I try to deflect.”
  • Encyclopedia of Botany by Jane Marchant:
    A daughter’s closely observed catalog of the flora around her Bay Area home, and of her family’s complex history of identity.
  • Glint of Sport by Angie Sijun Lou:
    “I don’t know if this story is true. You can’t divide truth from kitsch in this place…”
  • Eulogy by William Hawkins:
    In the wake of a funeral, a dead father’s legacy hangs over his surviving adult sons as they trudge into the lukewarm waters of the lake by the family pier.
  • The Eye by Elodie Saint-Louis:
    “When Theo spoke, she thought, you could see all of these places on his body. Vyros, Hymettus, Loutro, Parnitha. The land was in him. It was the river running out of his mouth. The words that bumped into each other gently but never spilled over, petering out into a gentle sway.”
  • Plus more fiction by Perry Janes, David Hayden (there be strange happenings in a dilapidated insurance building in Chicago), and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace.

Nonfiction

  • Jane Marchant on the flora around her Bay Area home—and her family’s complex history of identity.

Poetry

  • Jason Allen-Paisant, Dan Alter, Allison Benis White, Ricardo Cázares, E.G. Cunningham, Peter LaBerge, Joyce Mansour, Maria Zoccola

Art

  • Sofia Bonati

Books: Literary Review Magazine – May 2023

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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…

The Poet & the Tyrant

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.

Heroism & Homicide

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.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – April 28, 2023

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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

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – April 21, 2023

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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.