Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2020-2

I didn't expect Exploring Books 2020 would need that many postings, but it's April & writers gotta write. So Q2 of 2020. "April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot. With luck, this should get us to June.

One nice thing about the beginning of the month is new issues. From Literary Review, April 2020:

Dominic Green. Literary Review, April 2020: Here, There & Everywhere. Review of: Craig Brown, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. "One Two Three Four begins and ends with Paul McCartney counting in the band on stage at the Cavern Club in 1961. In between is a brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame."

Seamus Perry. Force of Nature. Review of: Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World. "For several nights during the Christmas season of 1806, William Wordsworth recited a very long new poem in instalments to the company gathered around the fire: his wife, Mary, his sister, Dorothy, his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson and his old friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom the poem was dedicated."

On the previous 2020 thread (#37), I had a posting regarding the to-do at the Romance Writers of America in Dec. 2019. Came across this lengthy story on it. Keywords at the top of the column: Books, Culture Wars, Identity, Long Read. Not kidding about "Long Read" -- it's slightly shorter than War and Peace. Anyway, too long for March, so it's on the April-(?) thread.

Jamie Palmer. Quilette, 03/31/2020: Romance, Race, and Retribution.

Some titles mentioned: Alyssa Cole, An Extraordinary Union -- Courtney Milan, Proof by Seduction -- Kathryn Lynn Davis, Somewhere Lies the Moon

Prizes, prizes.

The Millions, 04/01/2020: Best Translated Book Awards Names 2020 Longlists. "The 35 books on this year’s longlists represent 20 different countries and feature authors writing in 18 languages."

Another late posting from March.

Elisabeth Zerofsky. New York Times Magazine, 03/31/2020: ‘I Always Write With a Sense of Shame’. "How Édouard Louis, a working-class gay man from the provinces, became France’s latest literary sensation — and its political conscience."

From the latest issue of Bookforum:

Gerald Howard. Bookforum, April/May: Stockholm, Are You Listening?: Why Don DeLillo deserves the Nobel. Gerald Howard is an editor -- hope he isn't Don DeLillo's editor. Howard includes a snarky pass at Phillip Roth, by the way. I need to read more DeLillo (now 83), though I wasn't that enthused by Underworld. Bookforum's articles can sometimes be a little over-the-top in the appreciation department. The previous issue's paen to the critic James Wood struck me the same way.

Other books by Don DeLillo include: White Noise -- Libra -- Mao II

Greil Marcus. Trout Fishing in America: Bookforum Talks with Percival Everett. Everett's latest is Telephone: A Novel. "... the narrator is a geologist; one day, playing chess with his twelve-year-old daughter, she misses a move—and soon she is diagnosed with a disease that in a short time will destroy her mind and then her life. He can’t save her—but one day he finds a note in a shirt he’s ordered online, from New Mexico, reading “Help me” in Spanish. He places another order; another note, speaking for more than one person. He can’t save his daughter—maybe there are people somewhere he can save ..."

Luc Sante. Live Flea or Die: Michael Rips explores the mysterious world of a legendary secondhand market. Review of: Michael Rips, The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting. All about flea markets.

Alexander Chee. Sex and the Sacristy: Robert Glück’s New Narrative novel of modern love and medieval devotion. Review of: Robert Gluck, Margery Kempe.

A number of books reviewed in this issue also appear in postings in the previous thread: Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season (see earlier thread #94, #210) -- Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (see earlier thread #207) -- James McBride, Deacon King Kong: A Novel (see #118) -- Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light (#124, #134, #192).

Booker International short list:

Alex Marshall. 4/01/2020: Women Dominate Booker International Prize Shortlist. "Yoko Ogawa of Japan, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld of the Netherlands and Fernanda Melchor of Mexico are among the authors in the running for the prestigious translated literature award."

The works are:

Shokoofeh Azar (translator anonymous), The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translators, Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh, The Adventures of China Iron

Daniel Kehlmann (translator Ross Benjamin), Tyll

Fernanda Melchor (translator Sophie Hughes), Hurricane Season

Yoko Ogawa (translator Stephen Snyder), The Memory Police

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (translator Michele Hutchison), The Discomfort of Evening

Last year's winner: Jokha Alharthi (translator Marilyn Booth), Celestial Bodies

Reissue of a Korean-American novel from 1937 that sounds interesting:

Ed Park. New York Review of Books, 04/23/2020: Like No One They’d Ever Seen. Review of Younghill Kang, East Goes West, Penguin. Intro. by Alexander Chee.

"Given that The Grass Roof (Kang's first novel) and East Goes West precede Nabokov’s American debut, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1940), by nine and three years, respectively, it’s worth asking: Was Kang the first exophonic American to execute such highwire English prose? Regardless of whether he’s the right answer to this parlor game, Kang wrote a vast, unruly masterpiece that is our earliest portrait of the artist as a young Korean-American, at a time when hardly any Americans had heard of, let alone seen, a Korean."--From the review.

>4 featherbear: Thanks very much for that. Hadn't occurred to me to look around for current BTBA nominees. (Whilst I've read several of the longlisted authors I've read only one nominated book but I can't imagine another one being as powerful as Animalia.)

Selected articles from the latest issue of TLS (04/03/2020). Some articles paywalled.

Slow time and broad horizons: Our contributors find cultural things to occupy them in isolation. Mary Beard is reading Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World & Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Non-Existence. Reports from Lee Child, Margaret Drabble, and many more.

Alexander Van Telleken. The kangaroo curve: Some thoughts on the British response to coronavirus.

Graham Deseler. Emotion meets technology: How to speak the language of movies. Review of: Patrick Keating, The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood -- Robert B. Pippin, Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Thought -- Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film.

Wesley Stace. Articulate speech of the heart: The words of Van Morrison. Review of the second collection of the singer's lyrics, Van Morrison, Keep 'Er Lit.

Simon Goldhill. Blood, soil and space: Stimulating the debate about Pindar’s place in culture. Review of: Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke, Pindar, Song and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology. "Their key idea is that Pindar’s poetry is crucial in the mapping of the world, offering overlapping and different forms of representing space. They point to a physical imaginary of power: how tyrants and others order the world around the expression of their own power and centrality; how such desire for self-celebration altered the cityscape of Greek cities, both by new buildings and by reconceptualizing the relations of space within existing built environments; how rituals of celebration mark out space; how dedications, inscriptions and statues establish sites of memory (as does poetry)."

Jane Jakeman. Golden mounds: A pleasant glimpse at a brutalized land. Review of: Warwick Ball with Norman Hammond, The Archaeology of Afghanistan: From earliest times to the Timurid period, Revised and updated.

Michael Lapointe. Ridiculous, unless lit up: Garth Greenwell’s flights of freedom continue in Cleanness. Review of: Garth Greenwell, Cleanness.

Elizabeth Lowry. Shade among the light: The early novels of Thomas Hardy. Review of three volumes of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy: Desperate Remedies -- Under the Greenwood Tree -- The Woodlanders.

Teasel Muir-Harmony. A new Apollo: Looking back on the Moon landings. Review of: Norman Ferguson, Project Apollo: The moon odyssey explained -- David Whitehouse, Apollo 11: The Inside Story -- Rod Pyle, Heroes of the Space Age: Incredible stories of the famous and forgotten men and women who took humanity to the stars -- Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The impossible mission that flew us to the Moon -- Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Moonbound: Apollo 11 and the dream of spaceflight -- Oliver Morton, The Moon: A History of the Future.

P.D. Smith. Relative values: The private and public lives of Albert Einstein. Review of: Andrew Robinson, Einstein on the Run: How Britain saved the world’s greatest scientist -- Allen Esterson, David C. Cassidy and Ruth Lewin Sime, The real story of Mileva Einstein-Marić -- Michael D. Gordin, Einstein in Bohemia -- Matthew Stanley, Einstein's War: How relativity conquered nationalism and shook the world -- Daniel Kennefick, No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 eclipse that confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity

Josh Cohen. Death still driving: Beyond the Pleasure Principle at 100.

Updated "Notes on the Culture" from NYT:

Jesse Green. NYT, 02/17/2019, updated 4/01/2020: The Gay History of America’s Classic Children’s Books: From “Frog and Toad” to “Where the Wild Things Are,” many of the most enduring 20th-century titles share a secret language of queer compassion.

Forthcoming on the New York Times Sunday Book Review, 04/12/2020:

Elisabeth Egan. Oprah’s Book Club Dropped Her Novel. It Still Became a Best Seller. About the "notorious" My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

Transcript of an interview/podcast with Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko:

Min Jin Lee, with Will Schwalbe. LitHub, 04/03/2020: Min Jin Lee on ‘Loan Words’ and George Eliot’s Wisdom.

PS: If you haven't read Pachinko -- highly recommended Korean modern historical novel/soap opera novel.

Introduction to Don Winslow's oeuvre, written by a federal prosecutor, no less. I thought Power of the Dog was worth a read. Didn't know Winslow also wrote "surf-noir":

Bruce Riordan. crimereads.com, 04/03/2020: Border Stories: A Guide to the Novels of Don Winslow.

Nice feature on Public Books is its B-Sides Series. "Celebrates books that time forgot."

Recent articles:

Penny Fielding. 04/02/2020: B-Sides: Graham Greene's "Stamboul Train."

Emily Hyde. 03/02/2020: B-Sides: Dennis Williams's "Other Leopards"

Steven Biel & Lauren Kaminsky. 02/13/2020: B-Sides: Mary Borden's "The Forbidden Zone."

About the prison author John Springs:

Jennifer Gonnerman. New Yorker, 04/02/2020: A Pulp-Fiction Novelist Trapped On Rikers During the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Linked to this one via Arts & Letters Daily, so maybe it isn't paywalled.

David Quammen. New York Review of Books, 04/23/2020: The Brilliant Plodder.

Review of: Ken Thompson, Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants: A Tour of His Botanical Legacy -- Elizabeth Hennessy, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden -- Bill Jenkins, Evolution Before Darwin: Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1804–1834.

A nice monthly series featuring recommended poetry from The Millions. Here's the latest:

Nick Ripatrazone. The Millions, 04/03/2020: Must-Read Poetry: April 2020.

You should be able to pull up earlier postings via: The Millions Must Read Poetry.

Sort of a meta article on making book recommendations when isolated:

Sarah Chihaya. The Point, 03/28/2020: Making Contact.

A column on long reads from the UK conservative website Spiked:

Andrew Doyle. Spiked, 03/30/2020: Literature for the lockdown. The case for George Orwell, Edmund Spenser, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, and Stella Benson.

The current issue of Hedgehog Review (spring 2020) features monsters. The featured articles cover monster-related topics in law and the arts, but literary works surface every once in a while.

Antón Barba-Kay. Our Mindless and Our Damned. "Vampire and zombie stories are stories of a new mass folklore. But they have dreamt themselves into us for specific reasons."

Alan Jacobs. Weird Tales. "I may look like I’m escaping, but I’m really not."

Becca Rothfeld. Season of the Witch. "Today’s witches are no longer experts in the “occult.” Instead, they rush to aid the downtrodden—and to publish their potion recipes in best-selling how-to"

Vanessa Place. Monstering. "As I am, by fluke of fate and education, inter alia, a criminal defense lawyer, I know about monstrosity, if not monsters. "

Catching up on some articles from Los Angeles Review of Books:

Robert Zaretsky. 04/02/2020: A Door for You Alone: Reading Kafka’s “The Trial” in Self-Isolation.

Joseph Hogan. 04/01/2020: Wake Me for the Apocalypse: On Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society”.

Jervey Tervalon. 04/01/2020: An Entertaining Hodgepodge: On “Odd Partners”. "If the reader anticipates a particular kind of mystery story, the book will challenge expectations. The selections are remarkably diverse, featuring everything from talking dogs solving mysteries to bees that avenge a human benefactor."

John Galbraith Simmons. 04/01/2020: Sade, Too: A New Moment for a Complex Monster. "In the wake of Epstein’s 2019 indictment for sex trafficking, journalist Vicky Ward recalled how, in his mansion on 71st Street in Manhattan, the multi-millionaire, even as he drank nothing stronger than Earl Grey tea, kept on display, among more extravagant possessions, a paperback copy of Sade’s Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791)."

An older article/review from last month I overlooked:

Costica Baradatan. 03/09/2020: Always Narrating: The Making and Unmaking of Umberto Eco. Review of his On the Shoulders of Giants.

Added a link at #198 to a new book review by Stuart Whalley at the Martha Nussbaum posting in the Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2020 thread.

More "More Stay-at-Home Reading Suggestions" from the editors of LitHub:

Emily Temple, editor. LitHub, 04/03/2020: Our Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendations, Round 3.

Example:
So Kathy H. liked: Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose -- Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex -- Donna Tartt, The Secret History.

LitHub recommendation:

"I see you’re a fan of big, satisfying literary novels—maybe with a bit of history attached, maybe multigenerational, definitely with something unique to separate them from the rest of the herd, definitely populated by unforgettable characters. Another book in this category is Min Jin Lee’s wonderful Pachinko, which begins in 1920s Korea (when Sunja gets pregnant out of wedlock) but spans four generations of one family living far from home. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor"

You could also do the reverse, so if you liked Pachinko, check out one of Kathy H.'s likes.

Taking a look at the following article from LARB:

Alex Diggins. LARB, 04/03/2020: An Unnatural History of Destruction: On Iconoclasm as a Tool of War.

Much of this was about the Taliban's destruction of the two gigantic statues of the Buddha in the Binyamin valley of Afghanistan and President Trump's threat to destory Iran's cultural treasures.

The Taliban story had an association title I encountered long ago: David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Still in print, to my surprise. Here are two reviews I pulled up via Google:

Malcolm Bull. The Burlington Magazine, 02/1991: Review (PDF).

E. H. Gombrich. New York Review of Books, v. 15, 1991: The Edge of Delusion.

A reminder that Philip Roth's last novel was about a historical (1944) epidemic and its effect on a New Jersey neighborhood:

Richard Brody. New Yorker, 04/03/2020: The Eerie Familiarities of 'Nemesis,' Philip Roth's Novel of a Polio Epidemic.

Animalia recently won a small presses prize as noted on the LRB blog: And the winner is ...

Working at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Sara Martin. LitHub, 04/07/2020: Falling in Love With (and In) the Library.

An interview with Haruki Murakami:

Haruki Murakami interviewed by Mieko Kawakami. LitHub, 04/07/2020: A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself.

Problems with Amazon's self-publishing arm:

Ava Kofman, Francis Tseng, Moira Weigl. ProPublica, 04/07/2020: The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.

Link via Longreads.

A critic I like on Lewis Carroll:

Merve Emre. The Point, 04/04/2020: Into Wonderland.

Two reviews on the topic of progressivism, one conservative, one activist:

Jon Lauck. University Bookman, 04/05/2020: What Lasch Knew. Review of Ben Lerner, The Topeka School.

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio. LARB, 04/07/2020: Carceral Progressivism: On Savannah Shange’s “Progressive Dystopia”. Full title: Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco

On Haitian history and historiography:

Marlene L. Daut. Public Books, 04/07/2020: Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying. Review of: Rachel Douglas, Making the Black Jacobins: C. L. R. James and the Drama of History and Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside: Stories. The Douglas book concerns: C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.

Sophie Vershbow. Vogue, 04/03/2020: I Can’t Read a Book Right Now—And I Am Not Alone

Ha! Take a look at >31 featherbear: on concentration in reading.

Introducing Mieko Kawakami (see >29 featherbear:) to English-language readers:

Katie Kitamura. NYT, 04/07/2020: A Japanese Literary Star Joins Her Peers on Western Bookshelves. Review of: Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs.

Addendum:

Hermione Hoby. 4Columns, 04/03/2020. Review of Breasts and Eggs.

"On March 16, the French government released its list of “commerces de premières nécessité,” or essential businesses that would stay open during the national lockdown. Predictably, banks and pharmacies, supermarkets and gas stations made the cut. No less predictably, boulangeries (bakeries) and tabacs (tobacconists) also made the list." But bookstores didn't get the OK. But booksellers aren't the NRA.

Robert Zaretsky. Foreign Affairs, 04/07/2020: Are Books Essential?: France Confronts Its Priorities in Pandemic Times.

"Sasha Geffen’s debut book reveals that the history of pop music is a history of gender rebellion."

Taliah Mancini. The Nation, 04/08/2020: Pop Music Has Always Been Queer. Review of: Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans:

Clifford Thompson. The Baffler, 04/08/2020: Homage to Albert Murray.

A Library of America paperback issue (Feb. 2020) available at a bargain price. Interesting variants in subtitle of Murray's work. Library Thing subtitle is: Black Experience and American Culture. Library of America subtitle is Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy. The Library of America paperback is taken from its hardcover omnibus Collected Essays and Memoirs volume, where no subtitle is assigned.

Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist:

Katie Yee. LitHub, 04/07/2020: Here’s the international shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Finalists:

Abigail Chabitnoy, How to Dress a Fish -- Sharon Olds, Arias -- Etel Adnan, translation Sarah Riggs, Time -- Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Lima :: Limón.

"The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada’s most generous poetry award. After reading through 572 books of poetry from 14 different countries, this year’s judges have whittled the list down to these four finalists for the International category." There's a separate Canadian shortlist.

Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the original American self-isolation book:

Ron Charles, WaPo, 04/07/2020: Walden may be the most famous act of social distancing. It’s also a lesson on the importance of community.

On the topic of attention (see also >34 norabelle414:), here's (yet another) list from Casey Schwartz, author of Attention, A Love Story and Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis:

Case Schwartz. LitHub, 04/08/2020: How to Pay Attention in a Time of Crisis: A Reading List. "For All of Us Who Are (Understandably) Distracted These Days."

Authors adding diversity to crime fiction:

Elle Marr. crimereads.com, 04/08/2020: Five Great Crime Novels Bringing Multicultural Heroes and Representation to Mystery.

The novels are:

Kellye Garrett, Hollywood Homicide -- Henry Chang, Lucky -- Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny (indexed in LT under Lullaby) -- Stephen Mack Jones, August Snow -- You-Jeong Jeong, The Good Son. FYI, Elle Marr's novel is The Missing Sister (0 hits in LT). (Both of the 0 hit novels are available on Amazon. The Slimani novel is listed under The Perfect Nanny in Amazon; she has an interesting list of publications, by the way. Her Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World is scheduled for publication in mid-July.

Addendum:

A list of classic crime fiction (sans diversity, it appears):

LeRoy Panek. The American Scholar, 04/07/2020: Life and Death Entertainments: 10 Underappreciated Classic Mysteries. Too many to provide touchstones, but these seem to be the usual suspects, though with millennial readers, who knows?

On Paul Theroux's latest travel book, The Plain of Snakes:

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado. Public Books, 04/08/2020: Mexico: The Essential Neighbor. The author is "the Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn professor in the humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on Mexican literature, film, and culture and on Latin American cultural theory."

From the final issue of Roxane Gay's Gay Mag:

Terese Mailhot. Gay Mag, 04/07/2020: How to Write the Story of Your Life: Some advice from outside the white male literary canon.

Tiffany Midge. 04/06/2020: American (Indian) Dirt: Non-Native authored books about Natives have been taking up space for a very long day.

A book about the film Chinatown:

Graham Daseler. Quillette, 04/09/2020: Farewell, My Lovely. Review of: Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.

Also, a critic views Chinatown for the first time:

Graeme Virtue. The Guardian, 04/09/2020: I've Never Seen ... Chinatown. "Even in 2020, books are still being written about this stylish and unsettling noir. The latest tome – Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood – identifies it as the final burst of a particular strain of individualistic film-making about to be steamrollered by the blockbuster era. Jaws would arrive the following summer, its hungry shark heralding the arrival of a ruthless new Hollywood machine."

"'I wanted to write about the everyday and common but nonetheless undeserved experience of women around me, about the despair, exhaustion and fear that we feel for no reason other than that we’re women,' said Cho Nam-Joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982."

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 04/08/2020: The Heroine of This Korean Best Seller Is Extremely Ordinary. That’s the Point.

Originally published 2015, translation (by Jamie Chang) will be released 04/14 by Liveright.

The experience of walking around in your town's empty streets seems like something out of science fiction. Cyberpunk is an SF genre so, why not?:

Klesey D. Atherton. Slate, 04/08/2020: We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk. "It’s not just the technology, surveillance, and dystopian vibes—it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion."

Mentioned in passing: William Gibson, Neuromancer -- Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net -- Tim Maughan, Infinite Detail -- The Long 1980s: Constellations of Art, Politics, and Identities -- and (of course) the film Blade Runner.

An interview with the author of a recently published book about a family where 6 of 10 sons developed schizophrenia:

Laura Miller. Slate, 04/08/2020: Six Brothers With Schizophrenia Fascinated Researchers. A New Book Explores the Family’s Trauma. Interview with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

An excerpt from the book: Robert Kolker. 04/08/2020: The Mental Illness on Hidden Valley Road Didn’t Excuse the Abuse.

From the New York Times, also on the book in question:

Jennifer Szalai. NYT, 03/30/2020: The Suffering and Scientific Legacy of a Large Family Consumed by Schizophrenia.

Sam Dolnick. New York Times Book Review, 04/03/2020: Good Looks Ran in the Family. So Did Schizophrenia.

A list of recommended travel books from The Spectator:

William Cook. Spectator, 04/09/2020: 10 travel books to read whilst staying put.

Florida in the books of Elmore Leonard:

Craig Pittman. cimereads.com, 04/09/2020: Elmore Leonard, Florida Man. "The wild crimes and strange characters that inspired a legendary author to reinvent himself and his work in true Florida style."

Leonard began visiting Florida after buying his mother a 4 unit motel in Pompano Beach, north of Miami, in 1969. About that time, he switched from writing Westerns to crime fiction.

This is an odd criterion -- a list of contemporary books worth reading that are over 500 pages. Somehow I had the impression that most contemporary books were 500+. Most of these were the usual suspects, but I noticed a few that weren't, at least for me.

Emily Temple. LitHub, 04/09/2020: The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages.

"For my sanity, I limited this list to contemporary novels, which here I am defining as being published in the last 50 years—I figure, you’ve already made your own decisions about whether to read Middlemarch and Ulysses and The Lord of the Rings, you know? You know.

"Here are the rules: I only counted single volumes (it’s fine for them to be part of a series, but they have to meet the size requirements on their own), published in English since 1970. Writers only get one spot on the list. Page counts may vary over editions. And as ever, no list is definitive, “best” is an imaginary term, and I had to leave a lot of good books off ..."

Incidentally, I noticed that one of the titles, Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, is out of print. I ran across a copy in my local used book store. It's 1,488 pages, and my policy recently is any book of that length I only purchase if available as an e-book. As far as I know, it never came out in electronic form. Apologies to Vikram Seth -- I did enjoy his The Golden Gate, but it's short and in verse. Also, I liked Gaddis's The Recognitions -- haven't been able to get through JR.

And here's an alternative from the same site:

Lisa Brown. LitHub, 04/09/2020: Still Not Gonna Read the Classics in Quarantine? Here Are Drawings.

An introduction to "one of the great modernist chroniclers of isolation":

Matt Seidel. The Millions, 04/09/2020: The Necessary Staying Put: Beckett and Social Distancing.

From the current TLS (04/10/2020); some articles paywalled:

Helen Hayward. TLS, 04/10/2020: Worlds within a self: V. S. Naipaul and modernity. Review of Sanjay Krishnan, V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center. No hit on the Naipaul book in LT; available on Amazon.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz. The natural thing: Four distinctly different Korean novels. Review of: Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (see also >47 featherbear:) -- Kim Sagwa, B, Book, and Me -- Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho -- Elisa Shua Dusapin, Friend: A Novel From North Korea.

Robert Zaretsky. Out of a clear blue sky: Camus’s The Plague and coronavirus.

Violet Hudson. Nouveau frisson: Literature and a lifestyle ‘incompatible with life itself’. Review of: Jane Desmarais & David Weir, editors, Decadence and Literature (no copies in LT) -- Kate Hext & Alex Murray, editors, Decadence in the Age of Modernism.

Claire Kohda Hazelton. Locked in or out?: Claire Kohda Hazelton reviews the new Japanese-in-translation imprint Red Circle Minis. "Red Circle Minis is a new imprint, dedicated to Japanese novellas of around 10,000 words. Each book has been commissioned specifically for the series, to be published first in English translation (priced at £7.50), then in Japanese." 5 novellas are reviewed.

Charlotte Proudman. Breaking the silence: The difference in legal frameworks between the US and the UK when it comes to dealing with sexual harassment on campus.

Benjamin George Friedman. Books of dying: The grim plight of New York’s booksellers.

Peter Webb. The hand’s tongue: The emotional significance of artistry and writing in Islam. Review of: Sheila Blair & Jonathan Bloom, editors, By the Pen and What They Write: Writing in Islamic art and culture -- J. R. Osborn, Letters of Light: Arabic script in calligraphy, print, and digital design -- Luca Mozzati, Islamic Art.

Raphael Cormack. Move the mountain: Using Islam to talk about something else. Review of: Mohammad Salamma, Islam and the Culture of Modern Egypt: From the monarchy to the republic. "Salama looks at eight novels, short stories, plays and films, by some of the most important writers in twentieth-century Egypt ... Through these books Salama sketches the growth of a secular Islamic culture, trying to break free from the strictures of the religious establishment. ... In the narrative of Salama’s book, this was not a battle between Islam and unbelief but a battle within Islam, against different views of the future of the faith."

Maren Meinhardt. Where the dance is: Tears, sleeplessness and struggling for control. Review of: Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping -- Heather Cristle, The Crying Book.

Tom Lathan. The shoots spring up again: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim's haunting graphic novel Grass. "Grass tells the true story of Ok-Sun, a fifteen- year-old Korean girl who is trafficked into sexual slavery as a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers during the Second World War."

And more: bird watching in lockdown -- the triumph of radio -- recovering lost species -- unsuccessful bariatric surgery -- amusing correspondence about George Steiner -- the judiciary in UK and US -- the trials of Socrates and Jesus -- Eadwaerd Muybridge's murder of Harry Larkins -- Andrew Marvell a spy? -- a tale of doomed lesbian romance -- the Anglo-Dutch-American revolutions.

An economist's eclectic reading featured in the NY Times By the Book weekly feature:

Joseph E. Stiglitz interviewed (interviewer not named): NYT, 04/09/2020: The Nobel-Winning Economist Who Wants You to Read More Fiction. His best known book is probably Globalization and Its Discontents.

The LT author page is here.

Julian Peters has a "graphic novel" with "visual recreations" of famous poems. The Millions has an example, Seamus Heaney's The Given Note.

Calvin Reid. The Millions, 04/10/2020: Panel Mania: ‘Poems to See By’.

"Books, precisely because they are so demanding of our attention, might be the best antidote for the psychological toll of a socially distanced life."

Connor Goodwin. The Atlantic, 04/11/2020: The Exquisite Pain of Reading in Quarantine.

Translingual literary authors, i.e., authors who create literature in a language different from their native language, e.g. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Jhumpa Lahiri.

Piotr Florczyk. LARB, 04/10/2020: The Palimpsest of Language: On Steven G. Kellman’s “Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism.” No copies of the book under review in LT; available on Amazon. Some of Kellman's other books are cataloged on LT, e.g. The Translingual Imagination and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft.

Vox reporter Constance Grady's weekly "curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects." Some overlaps with this thread.

Constance Grady. Vox, 04/11/2020: Quarantine is giving us the opportunity to judge celebrity bookshelves. "And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects."

Indie bookstore recommendations ...

Arianna Rebolini. Buzzfeed News, 03/11/2020: 44 Amazing Book Recommendations From Our Favorite Indie Bookstores.

... maybe the last in some cases:

Arianna Rebolini. Buzzfeed News, 04/11/2020: Here Are The Indie Bookstores That Are Seeking Donations. Links to where to donate, and where to buy. Since books aren't high priority for Amazon at this time, consider ordering from one of the struggling stores.

So the writer Fran Lebowitz is "is the patron saint of staying at home and doing nothing." What better person to hear from during periods of isolation?:

Michael Schulman. New Yorker, 04/06/2020: Fran Lebowitz is Never Leaving New York. "The writer on growing old, life in quarantine, and the sadness of seeing her city shut down."

On revisiting Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity today:

Frank Bergon. Los Angeles Review of Books, 04/12/2020: Our Age of Sincere Inauthenticity.

About the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell who has a new book scheduled for publication in Sept. 2020:

Brian Phillips. The Ringer, 04/12/2020: Ringer Reads: Susanna Clarke’s Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy.

About the cartoonist Tom Gauld, who has a new collection, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories coming out this month. Lots of pictures, too:

Gal Beckerman. NYT, 04/13/2020: He Makes Physics Funny. "If “The Future Adventures of Schrödinger’s Cat” or “Pavlov’s Household” ring a bell, you may already be in the mind of Tom Gauld."

Addendum:

More excerpts from Gauld's new book: LitHub, 04/13/2020: Mr. Coccus, and Other Suggested Picture Books for Young Microbiologists.

FYI, LitHub has a giveaway contest for the new Gauld book: Today's Giveaway. 5 lucky winners!

Interview with Donna Leon, author of the Commissario Guido Brunetti crime fiction series, which is based in Venice:

crimereads.com, 04/13/2020: Donna Leon on Italian Culture, Environmentalism, and her Long-Running Series. Leon was born in New Jersey, but lives in Venice.

From the poet Kay Ryan's new prose collection, Synthesizing Gravity, a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall (To a young child):

Kay Ryan. LitHub, 04/13/2020: Kay Ryan on the Preposterous Beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Lonely Planet travel series in trouble?

Paula Hardy. The Guardian, 04/13/2020: Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future. "As the travel publisher closes its Melbourne and London offices, a guidebook writer asks what’s next for an industry in crisis."

From the NY Times Book Review editors:

NYT, 04/13/2020: A Letter From the Editors of the Book Review.

Addendum:

For responses from readers, see >148 featherbear: below.

Revisiting Blonde, a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe:

Elaine Showalter. New Yorker, 04/13/2020: Joyce Carol Oates's 'Blonde' Is the Definitive Study of American Celebrity.

Writing as the origin of Arab identity:

Barnaby Crowcroft. Claremont Review of Books, winter 2020: Older Than the Koran. Review of: Tim Makintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires.

Another translingual (see >58 featherbear:) literary author of note:

Dustin Illingworth. The Nation, 04/13/2020: One of the 20th Century’s Great Novels of Dislocation. Review of Lojze Kovačič’s Newcomers, "a sprawling WWII-set bildungsroman filled with anger, wonder, loathing, and shame."

California in crime fiction today:

Sara Sligar. crimereads.com, 04/13/2020: The New Wave of California Crime Fiction.

Sara Sligar is an academic at the University of California, author of Take Me Apart. Her recommendations: Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay -- Ivy Pochoda, These Women -- Emma Cline, The Girls -- Heather Chavez, No Bad Deed -- Rachel Howzell Hall, Land of Shadows -- Joe Ide, IQ -- Wendy Heard, The Kill Club.

Richard Pevear's preface to Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekov, a new translation by Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky:

Richard Pevear. LitHub, 04/14/2020: Life As It Really Is: Translator Richard Pevear on the Stories of Chekhov.

Another thought piece on reading in a period of social distancing:

Siri Hustvedt. LitHub, 04/13/2020: Fairy Tales and Facts: Siri Hustvedt on How We Read in a Pandemic.

LT's author page for Siri Hustvedt.

"Do conspiracy thrillers serve a valuable, humanistic function? Or are they just plain dangerous?"

Oliver Harris. crimereads.com, 04/14/2020: Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist.

Harris is the author of the spy novel A Shadow Intelligence. I was trying to link to his author page in LT, but the books attributed to him seemed a little off and there is a link to an LT disambiguation page. However, the little author mini-bio-bibliography at the end of the article helped to make sense of things: "OLIVER HARRIS was born in London in 1978. He has an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in psychoanalysis. He writes occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement."

Do travel writers read travel books? Not necessarily:

Tim Ecott. The Guardian, 04/14/2020: What travel writers are reading right now.

Political scientist & "leadership development coach" study the impact of science fiction on malleable minds:

Calvert Jones & Celia Paris. Aeon, 04/15/2020: How dystopian narratives can incite real-world radicalism.

Two reviews of Mike Davis's & Jon Wiener's Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties:

Sasha Frere-Jones. Bookforum, Apr/May 2020: Los Angeles Is Burning: A new history of ’60s radicalism on the West Coast.

Jerald Podair. LARB, 04/14/2020: The Fire and the Fizzle.

Mike Davis's author page on LT.

Jon Wiener's author page on LT.

For a profile of Mike Davis, see >125 featherbear: below.

A brief notice on the winner of the International Prize for Arab Fiction. A translation of the novel is in the works:

Aaron Robertson. LitHub, 04/14/2020: Abdelouahab Aissaoui has won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

"Algerian writer Abdelouahab Aissaoui is the first from his country to win the prize, which comes with a $50,000 purse and funding for an English translation of his book, The Spartan Court."

A long excerpt from On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear:

Lynn Casteel Harper. Longreads, 04/2020: On Vanishing. "Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone."

This week's TLS, 04/17/2020. Lots of articles on Shakespeare:

Rohdri Lewis. TLS, 04/17/2020: Shakespeare in a Divided America and Jeffrey R. Wilson, Shakespeare and Trump.

Emma Smith. Too famous to live long: Shakespeare’s sense of an ending Review of: Kathryn Harkup, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, stabbings and broken hearts and Andrew Griffin, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama (not in LT, ISBN 978-1487503482).

Katharine Craik. Infidel stuff: Poetry and swift-footed time. Review of: Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets. (no entry in LT, ISBN 978-1107170650). The Amazon blurb makes it sound interesting, but it's pretty expensive: "Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate and why? Filling a surprising gap in Shakespeare studies, this book offers a challenging new reception history of the Sonnets and explores their belated entry into the Shakespeare canon. Jane Kingsley-Smith reveals the fascinating cultural history of individual Sonnets, identifying those which were particularly influential and exploring why they rose to prominence."

Stanley Wells. Look upon the picture: Shakespearean iconography. Review of: Sally Barnden, Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance.

Brian Vickers. Infecting the teller" The failure of a mathematical approach to Shakespeare’s authorship. This is a critique of using computer programs to determine authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare, specifically the methods used by Gary Taylor in the The New Oxford Shakespeare. Authorship Companion. LT may have a copy of the text of The New Oxford Shakespeare (ISBN 978-0199591152) but the ISBN is linked to what appears to be the Pelican edition edited by Alfred Harbage. This may be the correct LT edition: http://www.librarything.com/work/14691458

Also, a review of a novel about Anne Hathaway: Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet.

A "a general immersion in unremitting savagery, rage, lusts and bodily degradation," i.e., a novel about the life of St. Paul: Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus.

A novel about the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935: Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King.

Two books on Roman literature and history: Kathleen McCarthy, I, the Poet: First-person form in Horace, Catullus and Propertius and Tom Geue, Author Unknown: The power of anonymity in ancient Rome.

A history of the Puritans in the context of both English and American history: David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History.

Why women read more (literature) than men: Helen Taylor, Why Women Read Fiction. (See also the review in last month's Literary Review in the previous thread, #98).

A magic-realism novel (untranslated) by the Colombian novelist Angela Becerra, Algún día, hoy (Some Day, Today).

Two books on philosophy. one on consciousness, which sounds a bit strange: Phillip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, the other on a short history of philosophy: Scott Soames, The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. The reviewer considers the latter to be "a book of plodding orthodoxy," perhaps because Soames has revealed some MAGA sympathies.

And quite a bit more.

So Mrs Dalloway is big on Twitter. "At a time when our most ordinary acts—shopping, taking a walk—have come to seem momentous, a matter of life or death, Clarissa’s vision of everyday shopping as a high-stakes adventure resonates in a peculiar way. We are all Mrs. Dalloway now."

Evan Kindley. New Yorker, 04/10/2020: Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to "Mrs. Dalloway"."

"For decades, four women were at the center of the mystery world. They built careers, discovered legends, and shaped a genre."

Sarah Weinman. crimereads.com, 04/16/2020: The Women Who Edited Crime Fiction.

One of the weirder interview titles regarding a new book:

Hanh Nguyen. Salon, 04/15/2020: "Why Fish Don't Exist" explores eugenics in the US, a Hawaiian murder plot, and the meaning of life. "'Invisiblia's' Lulu Miller spoke to Salon about her weird, unclassifiable book, in which chaos and heathens win."

Because cladistics! Touchstones: Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life and Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science.

The podcast "Invisibilia—Latin for invisible things—fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently."

Bryan Alexander. USA Today, 04/15/2020: Donna Kauffman, best-selling romance novelist and USA TODAY contributor, dies at 60.

Not coronavirus, by the way.

"The “undesirables” of our moment populate the pages of Sharlet’s work: the homeless, the strung out, the night shifters, and even the dead. Regardless of geography or time, Sharlet’s chosen method of information gathering is the interview: however long or short it needs to be."

L. Benjamin Rolsky. LARB, 04/15/2020: Listening to the Darkness: On Jeff Sharlet’s “This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers”. Photography and essays.

The Demogorgon of the Netflix hit Stranger Things originates in a mistranscription of marginalia in a commentary on an epic poem of Statius, and other fascinating bits:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 04/17/2020: Annotate This: On Marginalia.

Touchstones: H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books; Katherine Acheson, Early Modern English Marginalia.

Profile of literary author Ottessa Moshfegh. I've read Eileen and would like to read more -- I have a couple of her books in my TBR pile. In the previous thread (#208) she was on a list of writers who got a scolding in LARB, for being too solipsistic, if I got the gist, and the reviewer for WSJ was not a fan (I don't have access to it -- there's a link in the article to the review).

Lauren Christensen. NYT, 04/16/2020: Ottessa Moshfegh Is Only Human. "The author-provocateur’s latest novel is “a loneliness story.” Just when it was scheduled to come out, isolation became the new normal." The postponed "latest" is Death in Her Hands.

Conveniently, the article has links to reviews of her other books. Besides Eileen, NYT reviews My Year of Rest and Relaxation & the short story collection Homesick for Another World. There is also a link to a By the Book featuring her. She complains that her readers keep sending her self-help books.

Angela Haupt. WaPo, 04/16/2020: The 10 types of readers you meet during a quarantine.

"The Crying Book is a roving history, spanning a remarkable cast of grief experts showcased in wide-ranging vignettes."

Fathima Cader. Guernica, 04/14/2020: Our Grievous Work. Review of: Heather Christie, The Crying Book.

Recreational reading from my younger years, an introduction for readers born in the 21st century:

Molly Odintz. crimereads.com, 04/17/2020: The Binge-Read: 10 Iconic Crime Fiction Series of the 1960s.

"Time to read your way through the modern history of crime novels." Good grief.

"For Your Continuing Isolation Reading."

Emily Temple. LitHub, 04/17/2020: Our Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendations, Round 5.

Readers list their favs, editors come up with a suitable recommendation. This is the longest one yet; maybe a sign that people are reading more. A George Costanza nightmare.

A book that may be of interest even to non-readers like George:

Dwight Garner. NYT, 04/17/2020: ‘A Curious History of Sex’ Covers Aphrodisiacs, Bicycles, Graham Crackers and More. Review of Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex.

What academics are reading (unless you get blocked by the paywall). Via Arts & Letters Daily:

Chronicle of Higher Education, 04/14/2020: The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade.

Expanded at >100 featherbear: below.

On reading Samuel Pepys's diaries chronicling the plague in England 1665-66:

Colin Fleming. Quilette, 04/17/2020: Lessons in Death and Life from the Diaries of Samuel Pepys.

George Packer reviews books by and about Robert Stone:

George Packer. The Atlantic, May 2020: A Novelist’s Ambition to Define America.

Review of: Madison Smartt Bell, Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone -- Robert Stone, Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach (Library of America) -- Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell, The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction.

John Blaney collected children's books by literary authors. His collection was presented at an exhibition at the Grolier Club, N.Y., closed prematurely by the pandemic.

Rebecca Rego Berry. LitHub, 04/17/2020: When “Serious” Writers Write Books For Kids.

No mention of a catalog of the exhibition, so the only record of the exhibition of children's books by Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Kurt Vonnegut may be here.

Review of Lawrence Wright's The End of October from a site new to me:

Connor Goodwin. Mel, 04/12/2020: What Fiction Like 'The End of Octobert' Gets Right (And Wrong) About Pandemics. "Lawrence Wright’s new novel about a coronavirus that develops in Indonesia and spreads throughout the world couldn’t be more prescient. It’s also pandemic literature’s clear standard-bearer in terms of accuracy."

As the title says:

Katie Yee. LitHub, 04/17/2020: Here are the winners of this year’s LA Times Book Prizes.

Expanding on >94 featherbear:, here's the list of recommendations for the best scholarly books of the decade:

Amia Srinivasan, Prof. of Social & Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford: Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes. "It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization. It does so without insisting that there is nothing troubling about sex work: about the psychosexual forces that lead men to buy it, or the economic forces that compel women to sell it." Also-rans: Shatema Thredcraft, Intimate Justice -- Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire -- Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work.

Steven Salaita. Author of Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom recommends Adam Friedman, Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. "I left academe a few years ago and subsequently became a school-bus driver in Northern Virginia. Just before I started that job, I read Covert Capital. The landscape of Northern Virginia will never look the same to me again — everywhere I turn, I see Friedman’s analysis in living color."

Stefan M. Bradley, Chair & Prof., Dept. of African-American Studies, Loyola-Marymount: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. "It took the academy and the streets by storm, and forced the nation to reconsider the systems that allowed for blatant discrimination. It reflected the frustrations of so many black people, who in hair shops, churches, and community centers decried the expendability of black lives." Short-listed: Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy -- Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Prof. Bradley is author of Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League.

Merve Emre, Associate Professor of English, Oxford University: Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. "The rapturous shocks of the beautiful or the sublime, the Enlightenment’s aesthetic categories, have little purchase on art produced in an aggressive entanglement with commercial culture. What is needed is a new vocabulary to understand why we feel less intensely, less determinately, about aesthetic novelty. ... They are "ours" because Ngai gives us a language of feminist and materialist criticism to think and feel the contradictions of the present acutely. She cuts the pleasure we take from art with displeasure at the world we inhabit. She makes me look at wool socks and plush onesies with fresh appreciation and horror."

Noah Feldman, Prof. of Law, Harvard University: Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. "Ahmed’s work ... rejects standard accounts of Islam as law, as well as the distinction between "Islamic" and "Islamicate" proposed by Marshall Hodgson in his influential 1974 Venture of Islam. In their place, and after a stunning engagement with contemporary theories drawn from religious studies and anthropology, Ahmed proposes a new definition of Islam as a distinctive form of meaning-making. ... the book is, among many other things, a timely plea to reject the dual hegemony of Orientalist scholarship on the one hand and Salafi writing on the other — traditions that agree, oddly, on the primacy of the shari’a in conceptualizing and defining Islam."

Samuel Moyn. Prof. of Jurisprudence, Yale University. Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds. "As a graduate student, Pachirat posed as a migrant worker and cycled through several jobs on the "kill floor" of a slaughterhouse in Omaha — one of the few massive ones still operating on American soil. With acumen and style, Pachirat meticulously describes the layout of meat production and the stages of what he calls "de-animalization" ..."

Anastasia Berg, junior research fellow in philosophy, Cambridge University: Irad Kimhi, Thinking and Being. "Language, Kimhi argues, is neither merely a tool for expressing thoughts nor a mirror of logical relations. It is only through language that we think at all. And it is only by recognizing this that we may hope to solve the Parmenidean puzzle about how we can think of that which is not." Sounds like Heidegger translated to analytic philosophy?

Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz: Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. "... the dominant common sense asks us to divide our loyalties: Either we support racial justice or we support the environment. There can be no more important task in the world today than to upend this rotten dichotomy, to heal the manufactured rift between environmentalism and the fight for social justice. Lanham’s memoir — "a colored man’s love affair with nature" — offers us one way to begin."

David Halperin, Prof. of English, comparative literature, women’s studies, and classics at the University of Michigan: Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists. "... the issues with which Reed must deal are thorny and ponderous, the sorts of issues that typically give rise to much heavy weather in academic discourse: Orientalism, commercialism, imperialism, sexual identity and desire, and the inner life of the art world (museums, connoisseurship, the art market, institutional politics). Reed handles all of them in a responsible, thoughtful, tactful, nonreductive way. But he does not allow them to dim the charm of his offbeat tale, which stretches from mid-19th-century Paris to postwar Seattle, or to obscure the fascinating and hilariously unsystematic relations between art and sex, aesthetics and erotics, genre and gender."

McKenzie Wark, Prof. of Culture and Media, The New School: Paul B. Preciado Testo Junkie, "It takes someone of Preciado’s gifts to see the Confessions immediately as a text applicable to how transgender people write and live our lives. It is also a very contemporary book. While steeped in Foucault, it understands from the outset that most people today produce their gender and sexuality via internet porn as much as via disciplinary apparatuses or the family."

Maya Jasanoff, Professor of History, Harvard University: James Belich, Replenishing the Earth. "As a history of migration, Replenishing the Earth charted new ground in what turned out to be one of the most urgent historical and contemporary concerns of the 2010s. As a history of the "Anglo-World," it gained prophetic relevance for understanding the imagined community of the Brexiteers. But it’s as a study of the growth of megacities — their population structures, resource use, and relationship to agrarian hinterlands — that Replenishing the Earth ought most to resonate into the 2020s, by providing historical insight into an earth in the throes of catastrophic depletion." She also cites: Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman -- Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast -- Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics -- Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers -- C.A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World -- Jill Lepore, These Truths -- Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, plus better-known tomes such as Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Evicted, The New Jim Crow, and Why Nations Fail.

New book by Jonathan Israel, the great historian of the Enlightenment:

Luke Nicastro. The University Bookman, 04/19/2020: Enlightening the Masses. Review of Jonathan I. Israel, The Enlightenment That Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830.

Other books on the Enlightenment by Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 -- Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 -- Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 -- A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy.

Sian Cain. The Guardian, 04/20/20: International Booker prize postponed due to coronavirus.

"The winner of the £50,000 award for the best novel translated into English, shared equally between author and translator, was due to be announced on 19 May. But prize organisers say that the announcement of the shortlist on 2 April exposed the difficulties that readers were having getting hold of books during the lockdown.

"Only one of the shortlisted books, Japanese author Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, has sold more than 5,000 copies. Three of the books – The Discomfort of Evening by Dutch newcomer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Iran’s Shokoofeh Azar, and The Adventures of China Iron by Argentina’s Gabriela Cabezón Cámara – have sold fewer than 1,000 copies."

Something to read with your morning coffee:

Adam Gopnick. The New Yorker, 04/20/2020: The War on Coffee (aka Black No Sugar).

Books sourced in this article: Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History -- Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil's Cup -- Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug -- Antony Wild, Coffee: A Dark History. There's also a Michael Pollan audiobook, Caffeine.

I hadn't realized the Los Angeles Review of Books had so many articles about Hannah Arendt; check out the side panel. Anyway, here's the latest:

Jana V. Schmidt. LARB, 04/20/2020: De-Centering Arendt: On the First Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works.

Ever wake up feeling like you're Casaubon?

"This, I realized as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time."

Sumana Roy. LARB, 04/19/2020: The Provincial Reader.

Just finished Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound so this article merging The Anatomy Lesson with a bout of covid-19 caught my interest:

Nausicaa Renner. N+1, 04/17/2020: From Now On, I Vow Only to Read Fiction. "The only one to tell me the truth was Nathan Zuckerman."

"The Golden Age of Mystery" refers to such authors as: "Margery Allingham, GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, Dorothy L Sayers and Josephine Tey, as well as Americans who wrote in a similar style—Earl Derr Biggers, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardener, and others who slightly pre-dated the rise of the hard-boiled style." Can we add Seishi Yokomizo. author of two newly translated novels* to the list? Or does this only appeal to the provincial readers evoked in >105 featherbear:?

Paul French. crimreads.com, 04/20/2020: The King of the Golden Age Crime Novel in Japan: Seishi Yokomizo.

*The Honjin Murders, translated by Louise Heal Kawai and The Inugami Curse, Yumiko Yamazaki.

How to read Latin American short stories:

Christina Soto van der Plas. Public Books, 04/17/2020: How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog.

Examples come from: Juan Carlos Onetti, A Dream Come True -- Julio Ramón Ribeyro, The Word of the Speechless. Both translated by Katherine Silver. Note: the article gives the incorrect title: The Words of the Speechless.

See also: >112 featherbear:.

>108 featherbear: I have Public Books in my feedly, but I never get around to reading their articles though they often look interesting. That one I bookmarked though. Thanks for highlighting!

More Kolyma stories, about life in the Soviet Gulag:

Patrick Kurp. LARB, 04/20/2020: A Set of Vicious Russian Nesting Dolls: On Varlam Shalamov’s “Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories.”

The earlier collection is Kolyma Stories. Looks like some interesting articles in the LARB side panel as well.

"Attempts to remove books from libraries across the US rose almost a fifth last year, with children’s books featuring LGBTQ characters making up 80% of the most challenged books."

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 04/21/2020: LGBTQ children’s books face record calls for bans in US libraries.

Follow-up to >108 featherbear::

Fernando Sdrigotti. The Guardian, 04/22/2020: Top 10 Latin American short stories.

A documentary about "the largest purveyor of hardcore gay pornography in Los Angeles" & a daughter's love:

Jim Farber. The Guardian, 04/22/2020: Circus of Books: behind a Netflix film about a mom-and-pop gay porn shop.

As I recall, Margaret Cho did a bit on her own parents' business that was on a similar theme. Haven't seen the doc, so don't know whether she makes a guest appearance.

The latest TLS, 04/24/2020; some articles paywalled:

Isabel Hilton. TLS, 04/24/2020: Only infect: Staring closely at China. Review of: Daniel Drache, et al., One Road, Many Dreams: China’s bold plan to remake the global economy -- Bruno Macaes, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order -- Bertil Lintner, The Costliest Pearl: China’s struggle for India’s ocean.

Lawrence Douglas: Godzilla of the White House: The presidential past and future of Donald Trump. Review of: Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s testing of America -- Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s war on the world’s most powerful office -- Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the front lines of the Republican civil war and the rise of President Trump. The reviewer, a law professor at Amherst, has a book coming out in May with the rather disturbing title: Will He Go? Trump and the looming election meltdown in 2020. Related, somewhat: a rather critical review by Edward Luttwack of a new book on Trump's presumed opponent, Yesterday's Man: The case against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic.

An important exhibition of Titian's six mythological paintings at the British National Gallery is on hold due to the pandemic, though a catalog has been published. Peter Humfrey, University of St Andrews, has a review essay, Poems in paint: Titian’s great mythological series reunited – and locked down that references the exhibition and catalog Titian: Love, Desire, Death, by Mathias Wivel et al.

Reviews of two books on fake food:

*Barbara J. King: Keep burgering on: On eating flesh without killing for it. Review of: Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial flesh and the future of food.

*Daniel Matthews: Pass the creamometer!: A brief history of fake food. Review of: Benjamin R. Cohen, Pure Adulteration: Cheating on nature in the age of manufactured food.

Essay on a Victorian poet: Dinah Roe: Like a rose shut in a book: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, 150 years on.

John Cottingham. The great ditch: How religion became peripheral. Review of: Timothy Larsen, John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life -- Paul Gifford, The Plight of Western Religion: The Eclipse of the Other-Worldly (no copies in LT; available on Amazon). "Moving to our own times, it is clear that the “Scripture-saturated” culture of previous generations is well and truly defunct. Any academic referring in a lecture to such once universally familiar biblical stories as the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son will be rewarded by a sea of blank and puzzled faces. It is not just that the Christian narratives have lost their hold on today’s audiences: most millennials have simply never heard of them." Yeeks; life in the UK.

As well as articles and reviews on:

*Literature and the environment: Reviews of Elaine Sciolino, The Seine: The River That Made Paris and Lucy Jones, Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild.

*The online epidemiological simulation game Plague, Inc., "is centred on the premiss of a global pandemic. Players take on the role of a deadly disease, infecting a single host in a chosen location on the world map that forms the game’s principal interface. Infecting new hosts rewards the player with DNA points with which to evolve their virus, bacterium or other pathogen. Do you cause nausea or a nasty rash? Are you water-borne or transmitted by an insect vector? Should you invest points in drug resistance or infectivity? Whatever your approach, as the disease spreads governments start to take notice. Nations close borders and airports, or invest in medical research; they decide whether to postpone key events, such as the Olympics. Your objective is to completely wipe out the human race before humanity arrives at a cure, and difficulty levels are based on factors including how frequently the population wash their hands." Banned in China! Related article: Paul Collier, The problem of modelling: Public policy and the coronavirus.

*New novels: Michael Christie, Greenwood (sounds a bit like The Overstory) -- Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translation from the Dutch by Michelle Hutchison, The Discomfort of Evening, on the impact of an accidental death on a rural family -- Mark Kamine, Not So Fast; no copy cataloged on LT, available on Amazon (sounds a little like an updated Goodbye Columbus) -- Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa (much reviewed in the U.S.). Also, a review of The Ferrante Letters: An experiment in collective criticism by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill and Jill Richards, a highbrow bookclub discussion, given the imprimatur of a university press.

Katie Yee. LitHub, 04/21/2020: Here’s the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Here's the last of a series of interviews (and a website) I overlooked that might be worth following up:

Sarah Blake. Chicago Review of Books, 04/21/2020: How Do Poets Choose a Collection’s Final Poem?: Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Leah Huizar, Su Hwang, and Natalie Diaz answer.

Earlier interviews covered: choosing a title, choosing an opener, organizing the collection.

"... how the Atlantic history of slavery everywhere haunts the contemporary world that US power has sought to arrange and manage according to its own political and economic interests, even while the centrality of that history in the world is actively disavowed."

Crystal Parikh. LARB, 04/21/2020: Going Global: The Literature That Slavery Makes. Review of: Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. (Not cataloged in LT; available from NYU Press)

Books about living in a pandemic from the Five Books site:

Alex Chase-Levenson, interviewer Cal Flyn. Five Books, 04/22/2020: The best books on Living Through an Epidemic.

Books recommended are: Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- Nancy Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds Of The 1918 Influenza Epidemic -- Mary Shelly, The Last Man -- Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 -- Alexander Kinglake, Eothen.

Chase-Levenson is the author of the recent The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780-1860. (Not Yet Published by Cambridge University Press)

The alleviating strategy for cholera described in the interview reminds me of some of the "cures" for covid-19 promulgated on the Internet.

A related Five Books recommendation on pandemics is the one by Christian W. McMillen.

In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, here are some books recommended on the Five Books site.

Jessica Duchen, interviewer Benedict King. The best books on Beethoven.

The besties are: Oscar Sonneck, editor, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries -- this next one is unusual: Ruth Padel, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life -- Edward Dusinberre, Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet -- John Suchet, Beethoven: The Man Revealed -- Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.

Duchen is a music critic and author of 6 novels, including Ghost Variations on the rediscovery of the Schumann Violin Concerto in the 30s, and with a forthcoming novel, Immortal, about Beethoven. She has written biographies of the composers Faure and Corngold.

I recently picked up Beethoven: The Music and the Life by Lewis Lockwood, in a used bookstore I hope will survive the lockdown.

"With university classrooms and libraries shuttered because of the COVID-19 crisis, scholars are facing disruptions not only in their teaching lives but also in their ability to access research materials. In response, many academic presses have made hundreds of their titles freely accessible online." I overlooked this when it came out; better late than never -- check it out (access will obviously be temporary).

Compilers Salvador I. Ayala Camarillo and Jess Engebretson. Public Books, 04/03/2020: Public Books Database.

I still haven't succumbed to audio books so far, but here's a (philosophical?) case for them:

William Irwin. Philosophy and Literature, 10/2009 (vol. 33, no. 2): Reading Audio Books.

This was accessed via the Muse Project; don't know how long it's going to be available (see >120 featherbear:).

Epidemic literary omnibus:

Molly Odintz. LitHub, 04/24/2020: Crime Novels in the Time of Plague. "14 mysteries and thrillers set against a backdrop of epidemics, contagions, and outbreaks."

Paula Findlen. Public Books, 04/24/2020: What Would Boccaccio Say About COVID-19?.

Ute Lotz-Heumann. The Conversation, 04/24/2020: Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic. See also >95 featherbear: and >118 featherbear: above.

Corinne Segal. LitHub via Yahoo finance, 04/24/2020: The New York Public Library might quarantine books to keep COVID-19 from spreading.

Adaptation at work:

Sindya N. Bhanoo. WaPo, 04/24/2020: The little book sellers that could: How indie stores managed to take a slice of Amazon business. "The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the retail apocalypse, with Neiman Marcus, Macy’s and Gap fighting for survival. But it has also created a few openings for savvy independent retailers who are willing to up their online shopping game."

Profile of Mike Davis, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, Ecology of Fear, City of Quartz, and, most recently, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored with Jon Wiener. For reviews of the L.A. in the Sixties book, see >78 featherbear: above.

Dana Goodyear. New Yorker, 04/24/2020: Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe.

Constance Grady's weekly round-up of book-related news:

Constance Grady. Vox, 04/25/2020: If you need quick comfort, try reading a cookbook like it’s a novel.

Certainly the funniest review I've read in some time:

John Byron Kuhner. LARB, 04/26/2020: Leo Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories Will Devastate Your Children and Make You Want to Die. Review of: Leo Tolstoy, selected and translated by James Riordan, The Lion and the Puppy, and other stories for children.

Mr. Kuhner read the first story with his 2 children:

"It’s about a hungry lion in the zoo, whose keepers comb the streets for stray cats and dogs to feed him. Tolstoy recounts the lion coming for a puppy that got lost by its master: “Poor little dog. Tail between its legs, it squeezed itself into the corner of the cage as the lion came closer and closer.”

"The lion decides not to eat this puppy, and they become friends. Until we get to page two, when the puppy, now a year old, suddenly sickens and dies. So what does the lion do? “He put his paws about his cold little friend and lay grieving for a full five days. And on the sixth day the lion died.” The end.

“Daddy,” my stunned four-year-old son asked, “why did the lion die?”

“Daddy Daddy,” my daughter asked, still wondering about the now-dead lion’s lifestyle, “why did the people feed the lion puppies?”

He did not read any more stories with his kids, but read the others for the review. Gave me a new perspective on a TV series I've enjoyed, Secrets of the Zoo, on the Nat Geo Wild and Animal Planet channels.

Emily Temple. LitHub, 04/28/2020: Turns out men give up on books they don’t like way more easily than women do.

"The author of ‘True Grit’ and ‘Norwood,’ who died in February at the age of 86, was one of the great American chroniclers of the 20th-century bizarre, erasing the distinctions between normal and abnormal."

Brian Phillips. The Ringer, 04/28/2020: Charles Portis’s Celebration of the Absurd.

A pandemic article by one of my former professors of early modern literature:

Leo Braudy. LARB, 04/27/2020: “A Dreadful Plague in London Was”. On Daniel Defoe's novel, A Journal of the Plague Year.

George Orwell's complex relationship with the Left:

George Scialabba. Commonweal, 04/25/2020: The Cant-Hunter.

From a Guardian article several months ago, mostly as a reminder to myself since I haven't read much Simenon. "As a six-year reissue project of the series reaches completion, Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet explains why Simenon’s Parisian sleuth still matters, 90 years after his first case:

Graeme Macrae Burnet. The Guardian, 01/04/2020: Put that in your pipe: why the Maigret novels are still worth savouring.

Two articles on Philip Roth:

From The Atlantic, an excerpt from a memoir about a friendship with Roth:

Benjamin Taylor. The Atlantic, 04/26/2020: Philip Roth’s Terrible Gift of Intimacy. Excerpt is from Taylor's Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth.

From an old City Journal article on Roth and Newark:

Steven Malanga. City Journal, spring 2017: Philip Roth’s Newark: The city at its peak and in its decline are the novelist’s two greatest characters.

Should take a look at The Plot Against America TV series.

The May 1st issue of TLS is now available online. Some articles and features paywalled.

In >81 featherbear: above a citation/link was made to Brian Vickers' critique of computer linguistics to identify, or at least confirm or disconfirm authorship within the Shakespeare canon. The letters section has a bit of push-back from the computer school.

The theme of this issue is graphic novels:

Ka Bradley. Frightened eyes: The horror of the Khmer Rouge years. Review of: Tian Veasna, Year of the Rabbit.

Alice Kelly. Here to extract something: Detailed comics journalism about the remote Canadian Northwest Territories. Review of: Joe Sacco, Paying the Land. No copy in LT of the English language edition, though there is one edition in French. U.S. English language release will be May 12, according to Amazon. Joe Sacco's LT page.

Tom Lathan. Holes in the soul: Childhood disorientation and rootlessness. Review of: Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption.

Ella Bucknall. Back to the drawing board: Revisiting a Japanese confessional novel. Review of: Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg, The Man Without Talent.

Wendy Moore. Deadly serious comic: What we can learn from the past experience of healthcare. Review of: Jean-Noël Fabiani and Philippe Bercovici, Medicine: A Graphic History. No copies in LT; scheduled for release May 12, according to Amazon.\

Lorna Scott Fox. Childless mother of them all: Feminism and revolutionary Cuba. Review of: Tiffany A. Sippial, Celia Sanchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban and Anna Veltfort, Goodbye, My Havana: The life and times of a Gringa in revolutionary Cuba. NOTE: only the latter is a graphic novel; the biography is a standard academic tome.

Ella Braidwood. Tales of overlooked women: A personal history of gay rights. Review of: Kate Charlesworth, Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide. "In her graphic memoir Sensible Footwear: A girl’s guide, she maps that progress, from the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 to the introduction of same-sex marriage (starting in England and Wales in 2014), merging the modern lesbian and gay rights movement with her own personal history."

And finally, samples from the graphic novel by Ryan North & Albert Monteys, an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, to be published later this year.

On a related note: Matthew Bowen. The bodies eclectic: Figurative painting revived and rejuvenated. Article/review of: Lydia Yee, Cameron Foote and Candy Stobbs, editors, editors, Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium and the exhibition of the same name.

Other articles & reviews of note, unrelated to graphic novels:

Benjamin Paloff. Anatomy of a cat-killer: The work of the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal. Review of: Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats (translated by Paul Wilson) -- The Tender Barbarian: Pedagogic Texts (Translated by Jed Slast; no copies in LT, available only as an e-book) -- Why I Write?: The Early Prose from 1945 to 1952 (Modern Czech Classics). And, Jiri Pelan, translated by David Short: Bohumil Hrabal: A Full-Length Portrait (no copies on LT; available on Amazon).

Beejay Silcox. Those who leave and those who stay: Star-crossed by Covid-19. Wife in Australia, husband in Cairo, separated by the pandemic.

Jordan Sand. We share what we exhale: A short cultural history of mask-wearing. Comparing Japanese and American cultural practices regarding wearing medical masks in public.

Jonathan Clark. All bets are off: How counterfactuals change everything. Review of: Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been and Things That Didn't Happen: Writing, politics and the counterhistorical, 1678-1743. Historigraphy of contingency in history.

Plus reviews of: Karen R. Jones, Calamity: The Many Lives of Calamity Jane -- Rachael Scarborough King, Writing to the World: Letters and the origins of modern print genres (no copies in LT; available on Amazon) -- Volume 11 of Samuel Richardson's correspondence -- Judith Flanders, A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.

And much more.

Not literary, but a link to lots of interesting reading:

Aaron Gilbreath. Longreads, 04/30/2020: Japan: A Longform Reading List.

Maybe consider the articles in Gilbreath's reading list using the following:

Max Norman. Public Books, 01/08/2019: What Essays Are, and What Essayists Do. Review of Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Don't know if the book's any good, but "the making of" is quite interesting:

Mickie Meinhardt. Guernica, 04/28/2020: Maisy Card: “There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.” "The author unpacks the archival finds and emotional reckonings behind a novel that took her 12 years to write." The novel under discussion is Maisy Card's These Ghosts Are Family, on the topic of her Jamaican background.

This obituary appeared on the New York Times website less than an hour ago:

Sam Roberts. NYT, 04/30/2020: Madeline Kripke, Doyenne of Dictionaries, Is Dead at 76.

"A woman of many words, mostly unspoken, she amassed a lexicographic trove of some 20,000 books, much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment." The sister of Saul Kripke, the philosopher.

In happier news, also NYT:

Concepción de León. NYT, 04/30/2020: Joy Harjo Is Named U.S. Poet Laureate for a Second Term.

"The first Native American to hold the position, Harjo will be developing an interactive map of contemporary Native poets."

Her LT page: Joy Harjo.

For recommendations outside usual lists of commercial publication, a list of outstanding university press books:

LitHub, 05/01/2020; The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News.

On the much-reviewed new novel by Hilary Mantel, by a reviewer who is less enthusiastic. Hopefully not paywalled:

Clair Wills. New York Review of Books, 05/14/2020: Ghost Story. Review of: Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light.

"I have sympathy for readers who feel overburdened by all this “matter,” and who find it a challenge to keep hold of the thread of the narrative. But the imbalance is not because there is too much history in The Mirror and the Light, but rather because there is too little of the “real.” It is difficult to believe in Mantel’s Cromwell anymore, and hard to care about him. The man we met in Wolf Hall was a subtle, ambitious, quick-witted, and oddly mysterious creation, even if an implacable bully to his enemies. There was something airy but distinct about him.

"A thousand pages and more than ten years later, he has become, perhaps inevitably, a much more solid and predictable figure. Where once you could trick yourself into believing that you were reading about a real person, feeling his way with the help and hindrances of his desires, frailties, and limitations, it is now all too obvious that he’s a character in a book. His personality has been raised to the level of a theme, that of the commoner made good, a heroic cipher for the age."

I've read and enjoyed Ulysses more than once though maybe not as enthusiastic as Pete Buttigieg or Jeremy Corbyn; apparently some readers do not. Here we have what seems to be a progressive apologia for the novel:

Brianna Rennix. Current Affairs, 04/28/2020: The Politics and “Pretentiousness” of Reading James Joyce.

Discover something new with this list of short story collections, with personal recommendations by Buzzfeed editors:

Arianna Rebolini, et al. Buzzfeed News, 04/29/2020: 32 Short Story Collections That Will Cure Even The Worst Reading Slump.

New month (May 2020), new issue of Literary Review. Books discussed include:

Leo Robson on Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth. See also: >133 featherbear:

Lucy Lethbridge on Maria Tartar's The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters.

Anthony Cummins on Lionel Shriver's The Motion of the Body Through Space

with other reviews of Ute Frevert, translated by Adam Bresnahan, The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History -- Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power (scheduled for publication August 25 in the U.S. under title: The Habsburgs: To Rule the World).

Ed Simon. The Millions, 04/30/2020: Isolation and Literature.

Results of the Mystery Writers of America awards:

crimereads.com, 04/30/2020: Announcing the 2020 Edgar Award Winners.

I thought this interview was fascinating, even more than the book recommendations:

Henry Farrell, interviewed by Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 05/01/2020: The Best Books on the Politics of Information.

He talks about: Francis Spufford, Red Plenty -- Charles Lindblom, The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It -- Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial -- E. Glen Weyl & Eric A. Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society -- Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

Some Pulitzer Prize winners announced:

Benjamin Lee. The Guardian, 05/04/2020: Colson Whitehead and This American Life among Pulitzer 2020 winners.

Whitehead for fiction, The Nickel Boys. He's popular with the committee; he won the 2017 PP for fiction with The Underground Railroad.

Non-fiction: Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care, and, co-winner, Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

Poetry: Jericho Brown, The Tradition.

Biography: Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work.

Addendum:

Further details from the New York Times, including runners-up:

Concepción de León. NYT, 05/04/2020: Pulitzer Prizes: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists.

Readers respond to the editors of the New York Times Book Review (see >68 featherbear: above)

New York Times Book Review, 05/04/2020: ‘Books Have Literally Saved My Sanity’: Readers Respond to Our Letter to the Literary Community.

"Authors, publishing professionals and lifelong book-lovers across the world share their own experiences of reading during the pandemic."

"'Moby-Dick' is called a great American novel. Perhaps it’s the first great global novel. Melville broke through American myopia, vanishing over many horizons, rubbing shoulders with apostates, seeing civility in savages, savagery in the civilized and ruinous obedience to mad tyrants. Melville’s years on ships sowed what his biographer Newton Arvin called 'a settled hatred of external authority.'"

Carl Safina. NYT, 05/02/2020: Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed.

Which is bigger news? Sally Quinn wrote an erotic romance or who it was based on?:

Benjamin Wofford. The Washingtonian, 05/06/2020: Sally Quinn Modeled the Erotic Hero of Her 1991 Bestseller on…Anthony Fauci.

Edward Said's course on modern British literature was one of the highlights of my college experience; really charismatic fellow:

Rashid Kalidi. The Nation, 05/05/2020: The Worldly Exile: Edward Said’s life and afterlives.

An appreciation of the beat poet Michael McClure, who died May 4:

Sam Whiting. Datebook, 05/06/2020: Michael McClure, famed Beat poet who helped launch the SF Renaissance, dead at 87.

Latest TLS, 05/08/2020. Not as many articles caught my interest this week. Some articles may be paywalled.

Laura Thompson. Love in a time of war. Review of Eileen Alexander, Love in the Blitz: The greatest lost love letters of the Second World War aka (U.S.) Love in the Blitz: The Long-Lost Letters of a Brilliant Young Woman to Her Beloved on the Front, scheduled for publication in the U.S. by HarperCollins May 26. "'‘Superbly entertaining’ romantic letters, written in a time of conflict and discovered by chance."

Two articles on Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women:

E. J. Cleary. Vindicated: The ongoing relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft and her celebrated daughter. Review of: Sandine Bergès et al., editors, The Wollstonecraftian Mind (no copies in LT; available on Amazon, but mucho expensive) -- Nancy E. Johnson & Paul Keen, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (similar in availability to previous title) -- Martin Garrett, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (available on Amazon).

Eileen Hunt Botting. Journals of sorrow: Mary Shelley’s visions of contagion. From the essay: Mary Shelley, one of the most important keepers of a plague journal of a later age, is usually overlooked. Her journal is a remarkable piece of life-writing – and death-writing – on its own terms. But Shelley’s personal response to plagues – both real and metaphorical – also became the basis for her second great work of political science fiction after Frankenstein: The Last Man.

Alexander Leissle. Tapping into something: An attempt to move ASMR offline and into the gallery. Review/essay of the Stockholm exhibition, Weird Sensation Feels Good, on Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR: "there is a widely shared video on Reddit of a teenager throwing a thick sheet of ice, discus-like, onto a frozen lake. When the sheet lands, it smashes and the separate pieces slide off in multiple random directions. These gliding chunks, almost weightless, combined with the sound of scratching ice, reverberating like a shimmering cymbal caught in the wind, sends a gentle sensation from the top of my head down through to the base of my neck, like champagne bubbling over the rim of a glass."

Gary Sheffield. Smash the jewel box: Contributions to the history of the bombing war of 1939-45. Review of: Sinclair McKay, Dresden: the Fire and the Darkness -- David Price, The Crew: The story of a Lancaster bomber crew (no copies on LT; available on Amazon).

Linda Kinstler. Auschwitz, before it existed: Keeping alive memories of the horror. Review of: Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer: The True Story of the resistance hero who infiltrated Auschwitz -- Heather Dune Macadam, The Nine Hundred: The extraordinary young women of the first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz -- Dita Kraus, A Delayed Life: The true story of the Librarian of Auschwitz -- Eddy de Wind, translated by David Colmer, Last Stop Auschwitz: My story of survival from within the camp.

Frances Wilson. The broken bridge: Biography, celebrity and embarrassment. Review of: Will Brooker, Why Bowie Matters.

Ian Buruma. Poet of death: The life of a strange writer who caught the grotesqueness of war. Review of: Curzio Malaparte, translated by Stephen Twilley, Diary of a Foreigner in Paris.

Molly Guiness. Measure it in inches: A colourful history of fame and celebrity. Review of Greg Jennery, Dead Famous: An unexpected history of celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen.

Libby Purvess. Well buffed-up daughters: How young women have always been for sale. Kristen Richardson, The Season: A social history of the debutante.

Barbara J. King. Urgent corrections: How everyone is related to everybody else. Review of: Adam Rutherford, How to Argue with a Racist: History, science, race and reality. "Through companies like 23andMe and Ancestry DNA (the two “giants”), people send in their DNA to learn their origins – but to be told that you are 40 per cent British, 25 per cent German and 35 per cent Greek is pretty much meaningless precisely because of that history of migration and mixing."

Andrew Scull. Digging for holy dirt A fragmentary memoir of mental unrest. Review of: Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias. A gifted young Asian-American writer's memoir of early life under the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, then schizoaffective disorder, and for a brief period suffering from Cotard's delusion where she is convinced she is dead.

Will Self. (essay) Grubby business: Knowing your market value. Writers and money.

New book by Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain:

Mark Bauerlein. Claremont Review of Books, spring 2020: Our Bookless Future. Review of: Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.

Proust and the Squid was Wolf's "study of literacy’s role in the development of human cognition. But as she wrote the final sections, she realized the book had already become dated. The Digital Revolution had happened, and she was too buried in Sumerian scripts and Greek alphabets to notice. She felt like Rip van Winkle, she admits in her new book, Reader, Come Home, comprising nine companionable letters addressed to anybody interested in the value of reading. Here, Wolf uses the tools of neuroscience to examine what happened to reading in that transition from old print to new screens—“how the circuitry of the reading brain would be altered by the unique characteristics of the digital medium, particularly in the young.” Her focus is neither the reading mind, nor our tastes, knowledge, intelligence, or skills, but the physical organ inside our heads. Those other things are shaped by what our brains are able and disposed to do."

An appreciation of Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press:

Kevin Mims. Quillette, 05/06/2020: Barney Rosset and the Unending Struggle to Read Freely.

"During the 1950s and 1960s, Rosset turned a tiny publishing company named Grove Press into one of America’s most provocative and effective instruments of free expression. He published some of the most controversial books of the 20th century and he never apologized for anything. In 1968, his offices were firebombed by anti-Castro Cuban reserve officers in the American Air Force because he had published excerpts from Che Guevara’s diaries in Grove’s magazine, the Evergreen Review. The same year, Valerie Solanas, founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men), stalked Rosset outside Grove’s offices hoping to stab him with an ice pick when he left the building to go to lunch. When he failed to emerge, she gave up and decided to shoot Andy Warhol instead."

Another in the series of Public Book's B-Sides series, highlighting forgotten gems.

Courtney Pina Miller. Public Books, 05/07/2020: B-Sides: Louis Bromfield's Pleasant Valley.

"The book, as Bromfield describes it, offers “a personal testament written out of a lifetime by a man who believes that agriculture is the keystone of our economic structure and that the wealth, welfare, prosperity and even the future freedom of this nation are based upon the soil.” In it, he details his daily work of tending to the depleted soil, nurturing his crops, and developing bold philosophies on sustainable agriculture.

"Yet Bromfield insists that Pleasant Valley is not written for agricultural experts. Instead, the book is for “the average reader who does not know too much about the earth and what goes on in it and above it.” Written years before celebrated authors like Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver popularized agriculture writing, Pleasant Valley initiates Bromfield’s pivot away from the fictional narratives and screen adaptations he penned in the early 1920s and 1930s, and toward his lasting concentration on nonfictional prose."

What Shirley Jackson's fiction was "about":

Emily Alford. Jezebel, 05/05/2020: The Haunting of Shirley Jackson.

"In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the floors and walls are unsettlingly misaligned, leaving inhabitants never quite sure how much to trust even stable-seeming surfaces. But it’s not just the physical instability of homes that haunt Jackson’s work. In Jackson’s fiction, the real horror often lies in the manic loneliness of women so desperate for—even entrapped by the idea of—stable domesticity that they abandon their dying mothers, poison their fathers, and die by suicide rather than leave the places they’ve claimed as home."

The Guardian published an article about the "real Lord of the Flies": what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months -- When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman".

The excerpt above is from his book Humankind: A Hopeful History. For an interview with Rutger Bregman, also in The Guardian:

Jonathan Freedland. The Guardian, 05/09/2020: Rutger Bregman: 'Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate'.

Addendum:

And here's a review (also from The Guardian):

Andrew Anthony. The Guardian, 05/12/2020: Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman review – a tribute to our better nature.

An interview with Richard Ford, author of (among others) The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Didn't know he was dyslexic:

Kate Kellaway. The Guardian, 05/09/2020: Richard Ford: 'I didn't finish a book until I was 19'.

Online book coverage and print alternatives. Review/editorial on Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader and Lydia Davis, Essays One.

Bradley Babendir. The Baffler, 05/08/2020: Fine Print.

"THERE ARE NOW two dominant modes of book coverage online. The first is the bibliomemoir essay—“How X New Novel Helped Me Understand Trump” or “Reading Y Memoir Taught Me To Forgive My Dad.” A genre ostensibly engaged with the world, it seeks to better understand either the nebulous “times” or ourselves through literature. The second mode is the list. It tells us, often in blurbs under a hundred words long, which books are soon going to be—or already have been—the subject of those aforementioned essays, often at the same publications running the lists. Both the list and the bibliomemoir essay result from a utilitarian and commodified vision of what reading is—and what it is for. The lists tell you what you want, and the essays tell you what you need. The goal, presumably, is to get clicks and sells books, supporting an ailing publishing industry and occasionally cashing in on some affiliate money."

St. John's College, Md., is the one with the "Great Books" curriculum. Its president reflects on books vs. "devices":

Panos Kanelos. Hedgehog Review, spring 2020: The Book’s the Thing: What is so compelling about a book?.

And don't get him started on paperbacks.

From Deborah Fallows' blog in the Atlantic. Whither libraries in or "after" the pandemic:

Deborah Fallows. The Atlantic, 05/12/2020: The post-pandemic future of libraries.

Go-to Shakespeare pundit Stephen Greenblatt on the plague in the Bard's time: "In Shakespeare, epidemic disease is present for the most part as a steady, low-level undertone..."

Stephen Greenblatt. New Yorker, 05/06/2020: What Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague.

Prizes -- lists and talk:

The Millions, 05/11/2020: Best Translated Book Awards Names 2020 Finalists.

Michael Cuby. Vogue, 05/09/2020: The Pulitzer Prize Is Getting More Diverse. Dana Canedy Is One Reason Why.

Speaking of lists, here's the weekly list of articles on literature (with commentary) from Longreads:

Dana Snitzky. Longreads, 05/12/2020 (? -- can't find a date): This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!".

Two more reviews of Fernanda Melchor's novel Hurricane Season, originally published in 2017; the English translation was issued this year:

David Kurnick. Public Books, 05/11/2020: Books and Abandonment.

Will Noah. Baffler, 05/11/2020: The Part About the Crimes.

Two articles on black poetry:

Samantha Pinto. Public Books, 05/05/2020: Black Poetry After Beyoncé.

Interview with the recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry:

Ashia Ajani. Them, 05/08/2020: Poet Jericho Brown on His Life-Changing Pulitzer Prize Win.

Learning about the Silk Road; fascinating reading (and viewing) list:

NYT, 05/11/2020: Follow the Silk Road, Book by Book.

Learn about a superstar audiobook narrator:

Susan Dominus. NYT, 05/13/2020: The Voice of God. (And Knausgaard, Whitman, Machiavelli … ).

Edoardo "Ballerini could be considered the Vladimir Horowitz of his cohort, famous within his profession — among devout audiobook listeners and the ever-expanding industry itself — as a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books. Some listeners will buy whatever he narrates, which might help explain why a collection of Albert Camus essays from the mid-20th century suddenly found itself on the audiobook best-seller list last year. "

Recommendation for a fantasy novel:

Samantha Shannon. The Guardian, 05/13/2020: I wish more people would read ... Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng.

"The elevator pitch can be difficult for any book, but perhaps even more so for fantasy novels. It’s a significant challenge to boil down strange new worlds and intricate magic systems into an attention-grabbing sentence or two.

"But allow me to present the best elevator pitch for a fantasy novel I’ve ever heard: Victorian missionaries endeavour to convert fairies to Christianity. A stroke of pure brilliance."

Two body image novels from East Asia:

Jennifer Schaffer. The Baffler, 05/13/2020: A Pretty Penny.

"Two new novels set in contemporary East Asia—Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami and If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha, two perfect titles if I’ve ever seen them—explore questions of beauty, money, power, and self-possession with an electrifyingly brutal calculus. Both are debut novels of a kind: it is Cha’s first book, and Kawakami’s first full-length work translated into English. Bucking the exhausting trend of novels centered on characters void of desire, these are novels about hunger and want, approached with a bluntness rarely attempted in contemporary fiction set in Western cities. (There are, of course, exceptions; it makes sense that Nell Zink, whose novels teem with ugly emotions, heterosexual manipulation, and vivid bodily imagery, loved If I Had Your Face.)"

Environmental fiction keeps coming. This caught my eye because of the recent Lord of the Flies posting >158 aspirit::

Ron Charles. WaPo, 05/12/2020: Lydia Millet’s ‘A Children’s Bible’ is a blistering classic.

"I swear on a stack of copies that A Children's Bible's a blistering little classic: “Lord of the Flies” for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet."

I think he liked it.

An introduction and appreciation of Samuel Johnson, perhaps best known from his biography by James Boswell. I picked up a similar edition of the book under review at a used bookshop recently; looks rather intimidating.

Algis Valiunis. Claremont Review of Books, spring 2020: The Mind of the Moralist:
Samuel Johnson, first among equals. Review of Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press in the somewhat misleading series title 21st Century Oxford Authors).

"True crime" not so true:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 05/13/2020: French serial-killer expert admits serial lies, including murder of imaginary wife.

"Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about murderers have sold millions, says he invented much of his experience, including training with FBI."

Isaac Asimov -- #YouToo? "Despite Calling Himself a Feminist the Author of the Foundation Stories Was a Serial Harasser":

Jay Gabler. LitHub, 05/14/2020: What to Make of Isaac Asimov, Sci-Fi Giant and Dirty Old Man?.

On Robert Brandom's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Crispin Sartwell. LARB, 05/14/2020: Systems of Philosophy: On Robert Brandom’s “A Spirit of Trust.”

"A Spirit of Trust amounts to a comprehensive, coherent, original philosophical system extending across philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of history, ethics, and even political philosophy. Brandom’s engagement with these areas is maximally ambitious. Despite its rather staid tone, the book displays the swashbuckling speculation and hermeneutical ingenuity of the best continental philosophy together with the rigor of the best analytic work."

Brandom, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, is probably best known for Making It Explicit.

Featured in this week's (May 15) TLS. Strong on philosophy reviews in this issue.

Joyce Carol Oates. My therapy animal and me: Identity and companionship in isolation (Essay).

Tim Crane. Computers don’t give a damn: The improbability of genuine thinking machines. Review of: Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment.

Not featured, so might be paywalled -- all philosophy reviews or essays:

Kathleen Stock. In the face of death: Reality and hurting other people. Review of: Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political.

Kathryn Hughes. In the inbetween: Things being made, unmade and remade. Review of Lydia Pyne, Genuine Fakes: How How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff.

Rachel Fraser. Scents and sensibility: Investigating how we smell. Review of: A. S. Barwich, Smellosophy: What the nose tells the mind. (To be published by Harvard University Press July 14)

Nikhil Krishnan. Gift to humanity: The life-work of Isaiah Berlin, the non-philosophers’ philosopher. Review of: Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (no copies held in LT, available in various forms on Amazon) -- Joshua L. Cherniss, & Stephen B. Smith, editors, The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin -- Henry Hardy, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure.

Clare Carlisle And Yitzhak Y. Melamed. God-intoxicated man: On Spinoza: the philosopher who questioned the existence of the world. Essay on Spinoza's Ethics.

That's it for philosophy. Many articles on literature that look interesting:

Andrew Hadfield. The silence brake: The Elizabethan in danger of becoming a minority interest. Review of: George Teskey, Spenserian Moments and Donald Stump, Spenser's Heavenly Elizabeth: Providential History in The Faerie Queene.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann. Soul’s bold heights: Early modern nature writing. Review of Todd Andrew Borlik, editor, Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology.

Ellen Jones. Voice, body and soul: Scandal, decadence and female sexuality in María Luisa Mendoza's almost-forgotten novel De Ausencia. A review of the Mexican author's 1974 novel, recently reissued.

Gerald Mangan. A Scotland no more, still in us: Re-reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scottish masterpiece Sunset Song.

Also, a review of a novel set in 1982 Barcelona, based on real events. A prostitute strangled by a length of film celluloid tape by a murderer who remembers doing it but not why. Juan Marsé, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, The Snares of Memory. An essay on Daniel Defoes' Journal of the Plague Year.

Not many history books, but Joanne M. Ferraro reviews Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds, Out of Italy and Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance aka The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, comparing the different trends in historiography between the Annales writer in 1974 and a 21st century historian's take.

Other noteworthy articles:

Oliver Bullough. Returns to the well: Random tales about the petrochemical industry. Review of: Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted democracy, rogue state Russia, and the richest, most destructive industry on earth. The reviewer considers it to be a disorganized mess, though it won praise in the U.S.

On the other hand, one of the In Brief notices calls attention to Zoltan Nikolić's Atlas of Unusual Borders: Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities, which sounds fascinating.

Another In Brief: A memoir by the country singer Allison Moorer (sister of Shelby Lynne), Blood: A Memoir who also released an album with the same title. The TLS citation switches the author with the title. Perhaps the virus is having an effect on the TLS proofreaders. The review's citation for Smellosophy cited above leaves off the last words of the subtitle, and there is a grammatical howler in the review of Renaissance books.

Also, in the Arts Section, reviews of Bob Dylan's latest album & a recent film on trans people. For me, the most interesting was Dan O'Brien Lost and found, anguish and grace: Encounters and engagements with a compelling book about the film Three Christs, based on Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. The book is non-fiction,"The book’s premiss couldn’t be more promising: the author, a social psychologist studying systems of belief, arranges to gather “from the overcrowded back wards of custodial mental hospitals” three paranoid schizophrenics, all of whom claim to be Christ, for weekly meetings in a small room in Ward D-23 at Ypsilanti State Hospital, where they will endeavour to hash out their basic – or “primitive”, as the doctor deems it – disagreement."

Bird books:

Jenny Odell. The Atlantic, June 2020 issue: Why Birds Do What They Do.

"The more humans understand about their behavior, the more inaccessible their world seems."

Books cited: David Allen Sibley, Sibley Birds of the West and What It's Like to be a Bird -- Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think and The Genius of Birds.

Cataloging an overlooked shelf of books in my collection, I came across my copy of Endgame. Fortuitously, an article about same turns up in LARB:

Robert Zaretsky. LARB, 05/15/2020: “Ah the Old Questions, the Old Answers”: Losing to Win in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”.

Interesting hook: writers quizzed on influential book recommended by a teacher:

Joumana Khatib. NYT, 05/08/2020: What Is the Best Book a Teacher Ever Recommended to You?.

"Those of us who are readers often owe a lot to our teachers. To mark the end of Teacher Appreciation Week, we thought we’d take a moment to reflect on the most influential books we picked up thanks to a teacher who slipped a book into our hands, assigned a particular novel or reached out with a thoughtful recommendation."

Graphics novels, illustrations, & books:

Calvin Reid. The Millions, 05/15/2020: Panel Mania: ‘Cuisine Chinoise’. (with an excerpt)

"A rising star in China, cartoonist Zao Dao makes her North American debut with Cuisine Chinoise: Cuisine Chinoise: Tales of Food and Life (scheduled for publication June 23 2020), a delightful collection of food-themed short stories inspired by Chinese folklore and filled with monsters, demons, unusual heroes, and sumptuous dishes created with unlikely—and sometimes disgusting—magical ingredients."

Emily Temple. LitHub, 05/04/2020: 20 Artists’ Visions of Alice in Wonderland From the Last 155 Years.

Reading and coping with an uncertain future as the U.S. begins to come out of lockdown:

David L. Ulin. LA Times, 05/14/2020: Against consolation: Reading dark materials in COVID-19 quarantine.

Eva Holland. LitHub, 05/15/2020: When it Comes to Coronavirus, What Does ‘After’ Mean?.

Rebecca Solnit. LitHub, 04/23/2020: Rebecca Solnit: On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends.

A short introduction to the philosopher Hilary Putnam from the TLS "Footnotes to Plato" series:

Sarah Sawyer. TLS, no date (but on this week's TLS page): Hilary Putnam: Minds, brains, machines.

Also from this week's TLS NB column, this quote from Charlotte Brontë regarding Pride and Prejudice:

"So let’s try out novelist on novelist. “I got the book. And what did I find? A portrait of … a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen … ” The critic was Charlotte Brontë (writing to G. H. Lewes, companion of George Eliot) and the book was Pride and Prejudice."

The classicist Mary Beard on lecturing online, from her Don's Life series:

Mary Beard. TLS, (no date): How to give an online lecture.

An interesting sports book review I overlooked from earlier in the month.

Hua Hsu. The New Yorker, 05/03/2020: Demystifying the Golden State Warriors. Review of: Ethan Strauss, The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty.

I'm sort of in Hsu's camp on this one: "One revelation of life without sports is that I miss the games less than I thought I would—there are only so many ways for a team to win or lose. What I actually miss is all the ambient, extracurricular stuff that fills the rest of the calendar: the wheeling and dealing, the rumors and speculation, the storytelling that gives shape to struggle." Actually, I miss the talk about the rumors and speculation -- don't really care about the rumors and speculation as such.

The appeal of right wing icon Michel Houellebecq to the progressive left:

Martin Gelin. Boston Review, 05/14/2020: The Prophet of the Far Right. Review of Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin.

"Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?"

The Great Gatsby and the American myth:

Matt Hanson. The Baffler, 05/18/2020: Gatsbys of Our Time. Review of Greil Marcus, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby. (No copies in LT at the moment but available on Amazon)

The shortlist for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize:

Richard Evans, interviewed by Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 05/18/2020: The Best History Books: the 2020 Wolfson Prize shortlist.

In this case, FiveBooks has 6 books listed: Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper -- David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans -- Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life -- John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths -- Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution -- Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire.

Evans is one of the judges, and the author of Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 & The Third Reich at War.

The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, introduced by Katharine Grant:

Katharine Grant, interviewed by Cal Flyn. fivebooks.com, 05/15/2020: The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist.

As with the Wolfson Prize for non-fiction history cited above, we have 6 books listed. Unlike the non-fiction, the titles for the novels may not be clear regarding subject matter, so a bit of info. needs to be tacked on:

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land. About the painter Edward Hopper & his wife, Josephine.

Isabella Hammad, The Parisian. No copies in LT at this point; available via Amazon & other sources. The Five Books description is a little vague -- "set during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, in the years before the Second World War" -- so here's a backup quote from Amazon copy, "debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence."

James Meek. To Calais, In Ordinary Time. "Set in the 14th century, as the Black Death stalks the land ..."

Joseph O'Connor. Shadowplay. "... another account of a real-life relationship, this time between Bram Stoker of Dracula fame, and the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry."

Tim Pears, The Redeemed: The West Country Trilogy. "The plot of The Redeemed concerns the reuniting, or not, of the star-crossed, would-be lovers Leo Sercombe and Lottie Prideaux. The book opens in 1916 with Leo, now a boy-seaman on the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary—shortly to be plunged into the Battle of Jutland—and Lottie at home in quiet Devon, following the local vet and absorbing the knowledge that will, eventually, lead to her training as a vet. Their paths are not smooth." Can be read as a stand alone, but it's the concluding volume of a trilogy.

Grant is the author of Sedition: A Novel.

A new non-fiction World War II (European theater) by Anthony Beevor. Reviewer is Max Hastings, whose Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945 impressed me.

Max Hastings. New York Review of Books, 05/26/2020: Botch on the Rhine. Review of Anthony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II.

"Beevor enjoys a further advantage: almost all the veterans of the First Airborne are now dead. Thus it is no longer necessary in Britain to try to sustain the myth that it was an elite formation, all of whose men fought like tigers; some did, but others ran away. When John Keegan avowed this disagreeable reality in print back in 1994, the former commander of the Fourth Airborne Brigade at Arnhem, the formidable pocket-sized General Sir John Hackett, sprang at the historian’s throat. A severely mauled Keegan observed to me at the time that he would never write about Arnhem again as long as Hackett was alive. It was unacceptable to Hackett’s generation to face uncomfortable truths about its own battlefield limitations. And media sentimentality always swings behind supposed “war heroes” at the expense of scholarly critics."

Some recent New Yorker book reviews:

Brooke Jarvis. New Yorker, 05/25/2020: Where Do Eels Come From?. Review of: Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (English translation available May 26). "People caught eels in brooks, rivers, lakes, the sea. They also caught them, inexplicably, in ponds that dried out and refilled each year, and that had no access to other bodies of water. They couldn’t help but notice that the creatures seemed to have no ovaries, no testicles, no eggs, no milt. That they were never observed to mate. That they sometimes seemed to issue from the earth itself." Sushi will never be the same.

Naomi Fry. New Yorker, 05/19/2020: Susanna Moore's Memoir of Trauma and Transformation. Review of Susanna Moore, Miss Aluminum.

Nicholas Lemann. New Yorker, 05/25/2020: Is Capitalism Racist?. "A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history." Review of: Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

For 2 cents: When writer scratches back of other writer with fulsome praise on book jacket or cover. What is ...

Emily Temple. LitHub, 05/15/2020: On the origin of the word “blurb.”

The latest TLS, 05/22/2020. Some articles paywalled. If interested: TLS page at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ with link to the contents page of the current issue.

Hirsh Sawhney. Respect New Haven. Perambulating around New Haven CT with his dog, with praise for Mayor Justin Elicker & swipes at Yale University (subtitle is "Governing During the Pandemic). Peculiar choice for a TLS essay; cited only because I live on the opposite side of town. Also, I don't recall Cutler's being on the current site of the Apple store. Haven't heard the podcast, which may be accessed through the same issue.

Lauren Casell. Tuning the cosmic radio: Star-gazing and mathematics. Review of: Alexander Boxer, A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science.

I'm not sure if this is the implied theme of the issue, but I did notice a number of essays and books reviewed on the subject of literary feuds:

Geoffrey Wheatcroft. The ghetto and the mansion: The battle between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. Review of: Nicholas Bucola, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr, and the debate over race in America.

Peter Baehr. Defending HUAC: Rebecca West and her American critics (Essay). I've dipped into Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; wasn't aware of West's political background.

Douglas Field. Bones of contention: The most notorious quarrel in African American literary history. Review of: Yuval Taylor, Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal and Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Genevieve West, Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick.

More literature, some occasional friction but certainly not feuds:

Michael Hofmann. A little salt in the brain: Robert Lowell, in print and in life. Review of: Saskia Hamilton, editor, The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and their circle and Saskia Hamilton, editor The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973. I believe this covers the period when Lowell, who was bipolar, abruptly left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood while he was visiting lecturer at Oxford and Hardwick was in New York with their daughter.

Scott Sherman. Keep on, don’t check out: The survivor of the race beat. Review of: Darryl Pinckney, Busted in New York and Other Essays. Associaton item: Darryl Pinckney is the editor of The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick.

Dennis Zhou. Citizen of Boston: The novels of Jean Stafford. Review of Jean Stafford's Library of America edition of Complete Novels: Boston Adventure. The Mountain Lion. The Catherine Wheel, edited by Kathryn Davis.

Arin Keeble. Crossed wires: The brilliant, neglected oeuvre of the boundlessly innovative Percival Everett. Review of Percival Everett, Telephone: A Novel. "... he recently revealed that three different versions of the novel have been shipped to retailers, reviewers and prize committees – with no indication of which version is which." The conscientious reviewer has read all 3: "the wrenching story of a middle-aged couple dealing with the sudden onset of their adolescent daughter’s degenerative illness. But it is also a campus novel and a Trump-era, borderland thriller, and these unlikely modulations cohere in compelling fashion."

Also, reviews of a new novel by Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road, a new short story collection by Richard Ford, Sorry For Your Trouble, and a critical and rather expensive-sounding book by Megen de Bruin-Molé, Gothic Remixed: Monster mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-century culture.

Plus 3 non-fiction books on the macabre: Bruce Goldfarb, 18 Tiny Deaths: The untold story of Frances Glessner Lee and the invention of modern forensics, Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four true stories of women, crime, and obsession, and Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, patriarchy, and the fear of female power.

And a book about an influential German band during the 70's and after:

Jane Yager. Gesamtkunstwerk: The band who heralded the digital future. Review of: Uwe Schütte, Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany.

Finally, 2 books on food and culture:

Clem Cecil. Culinary straw into gold: A nation’s resourcefulness in the kitchen. Review of: Darra Goldstein, Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore.

Judith Hawley. Killing for coffee: The villains behind a hot drink. Review of: Augustine Sedgwick, Coffeeland: A History. (Also reviewed in the New Yorker, >103 featherbear:)

A review essay on the Turkish writer Kaya Genç's new book. The Lion and the Nightingale "begins and ends on New Year’s Eve, encompassing the bittersweet political and cultural dramas that ensued and changed history in the year 2017 in the Turkish Republic.":

Matt A. Hanson. The Millions, 05/22/2020: A Nightingale in the Lion’s Den.

Ted Hodgkinson, chair of the judging panel for the 2020 International Booker Prize, talks about the nominees:

Ted Hodgkinson, interview by Cal Flyn. fivebooks.com, 05/22/2020: The Best Fiction in Translation: The 2020 International Booker Prize.

Despite the website's name, the translation shortlist has 6 nominees:

Shokoofeh Azar, translator "Anonymous." The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Why anonymity. Hodgkinson: "I can only really speculate, but I believe they still live in Iran and there are some aspects to the book which are critical of the violence of the revolution. This is a book that doesn’t pull any punches from representing that flashpoint in Iranian history with real exactitude. Certainly, there’s nothing been said publicly by the translator. So we just have to respect that."

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translators, Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre, The Adventures of China Iron. "This is a novel that very deliberately echoes and subverts a foundational text of Argentina: a gaucho epic called Martín Fierro, ... Things which are very monolithically masculine in the original, in this novel are multiple, feminine or queer."

Daniel Kehlmann, translator Ross Benjamin. Tyll. "Set in Germany at the start of the Thirty Years War, it’s a novel that reanimates a figure from German mythology called Tyll who is a trickster, mischief-maker, puckish, impish character who is really a lord of chaos."

Fernanda Melchor, translator Sophie Hughes. Hurricane Season. This book has been much reviewed, but a note on the translation: " Translator Hughes "takes the incandescent spirit, this very controlled rage that the novel is wrestling with, and translates it in a way that mirrors that torrential flow, bringing with it all different kinds of Englishes with it."

Yōko Ogawa, translator Stephen Snyder. The Memory Police. "We were really struck by the fact that this book was originally written by Ogawa in 1994 and has only just now been translated and published in English. Despite being written decades ago, it really couldn’t feel more contemporary."

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translator Michele Hutchison. The Discomfort of Evening. "One of the central dynamics in the book – it’s quite early in the book, so I don’t think this is a spoiler – is that the young girl’s brother dies quite abruptly, and the night before he dies she says a little prayer to God – in the way that children sometimes do – to take away her brother instead of her rabbit. The next day he dies. The rest of the book she’s dealing with pangs of guilt, the feeling that she has caused his death. This is a secret she doesn’t share at all with anyone. It’s just this internalized guilt that she feels."

Nebula Award Winners:

Julie Muncy. Gizmodo, 05/31/2020: Here Are the Winners of the 2020 Nebula Awards.

Contents page for TLS issue for 5/29/2020.

Theme of the issue is children's literature. (Or at least UK children's literature). Several reviews and essays I won't bother to list, though there is an "archive" review from the late 80's by Marina Warner on "Adult worries about the meanings of children’s tales."

Note also an associated item review of: Christopher Pelling, Herodotus and the Question Why. "Children ask why and so does Herodotus." Also related: a roundup review by A.S.G. Edwards of three books on Thomas Malory, author of Morte D'Arthur.

Several reviews of books on Eastern Europe or by authors from Eastern Europe: Kapka Kassabova, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace -- Peter Reddaway, The Dissidents: A memoir of working with the resistance in Russia, 1960–1990 -- János Székely, Temptation -- Magda Szabó, Katalin Street and Abigail -- Kornel Filipowicz, The Memoir of an Anti-Hero -- Boris Savinkov, Pale Horse: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia.

Adam Foulds, Emerges What I Am: How It Feels To Be Alone: Review of: David Vincent, A History of Solitude and Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion.

Some miscellaneous reviews of: Laura Wright, Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic Study of British House Names -- Deirdre Mask, The Address Book: What street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power -- Liao Liwu, Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square massacre -- Joshua Hammer, The Falcoln Thief: A true tale of adventure, treachery, and the hunt for the perfect bird, "tales from the global falcon trade."

An essay on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway by Elizabeth Winkler: Through the smudged pane: Pandemic consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway.

TLS Features page.

A new book about God:

Ed Simon. Los Angeles Review of Books, 05/31/2020: Burying Nobodaddy: What Is “God” Even Supposed to Mean?. Review of: Philip C. Almond, God: A New Biography.

A review of Lydia Davis's new essay collection from Australia:

James Ley. Sydney Review of Books, 05/22/2020: The Writers’ Writer’s Writing. Review of: Lydia Davis, Essays.

Via: Arts & Letters Daily.

Portrait of the Asian-American author of The Woman Warrior, and her last work:

Hua Hsu. New Yorker, 06/01/2020: Maxine Hong Kingston's Genre-Defying Life and Work.

Winners of the Best Translated Books Awards:

The Millions, 05/29/2020: And the Winners of the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards Are…

The winners: Daša Drndić, author, Celia Hawkesworth, translator from Croatian for EEG (fiction) and Etel Adnan, author, Etel Adnan, author, Sarah Riggs, translator from French, Time (poetry).

No copies of Time in LT, but available from Amazon.

Catching up with new postings on the fivebooks.com site:

Karen Harvey, interviewer Benedict King. fivebooks.com, 05/29/2020: The best books on The Body. Title of the article is misleading. The works cited focus on changes in ideas about the body in the 18th century. That said, the books sound interesting.

Hannah Scoda, interviewer Benedict King. No date, but 05/2020: The best books on The Middle Ages.

Peter Wiseman, interviewer Sophie Roell, 06/01/2020: The best books on Augustus. For a good introduction, he recommends Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture.

“Crime fiction is the most popular book genre in the U.S., maybe on the planet, and crime novelists need to understand that what they do has a gigantic effect on the way people think,” Mr. Narvaez said. “So as a crime novelist, you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I validating a fascist point of view? Am I doing anything to help?’ We need more stories that deal with the causes and the consequences of crime.”

John Fram. NYT, 06/04/2020: How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality.

Charles Dickens and the police:

Olivia Rutigliano. crimereads.com, 06/09/2020: On Charles Dickens' Devious, Hypocritical "Nice Guy" Cop. On Mr. Bucket in Bleak House.

Book workers protest:

Corinne Segal. LitHub, 06/08/2020: Book workers are striking today in a day of solidarity against racist violence and discrimination.

Concepción de León and Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 06/08/2020: #PublishingPaidMe and a Day of Action Reveal an Industry Reckoning. Publisher advances affected by race?

Donna Tartt was the audiobook voice of Mattie Ross of True Grit; here are her memories of the author, Charles Portis, who passed away earlier this year:

Donna Tartt. NYT, 06/09/2020: Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis.

TLS, 06/05/2020:

Elizabeth Lowry. TLS, 06/05/2020: Listening for the echo: Re-reading A Passage to India. Essay.

Regina Rini. The language of the unheard: What happens when Hobbesian logic takes over discourse about protest – and why we should resist it. Essay. Thinking about violence and protests.

Ira Bashkow. 06/05/2020: Lines of thought: Franz Boas: the man who opened up anthropology in America. Review of: Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity: A story of race, sex, gender and the discovery of culture.

Colin Grant. 06/05/2020: Slave driver, the table is turn: Jamaica, its brutal history and extraordinary cultural capital. Review of: Orlando Patterson, The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the postcolonial predicament.

Jonathan Sperber. 06/05/2020: How to face your past: Lessons from Germany for the United States of America. Review of Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans. The case for reparations?

Ritchie Robertson. 06/05/2020: Pick your teams: Eighteenth-century political thought, catalogued. Review of Jonathan Israel, The Enlightenment That Failed: Ideas, revolution, and democratic defeat, 1748-1830. Sort of an appendix to Israel's earlier (and massive) books on the Enlightenment.

Sarah Lonsdale. 06/05/2020: The never-ending story: Battles for, and within, the women’s rights movement. Review of: Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

Literature: Reviews of Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman -- Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body -- Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8 ("an account of how a contaminated patch of Iowa came to be colonized by a drove of former battery hens.") -- John Carey, A Little History of Poetry

Along with reviews of: Justin E. H. Smith, Irrationality: A history of the dark side of reason -- Cyntoia Brown-Long with Bethany Mauger, Free Cyntoia: My search for redemption in the American prison system -- Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the making of Continental philosophy -- Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A study in Christian doctrine and metaphysics -- Julian Sayarer, Fifty Miles Wide: Cycling through Israel and Palestine.

DIY from a new site:

Jason Whittaker. Psyche, 06/03/2020: How to plan your novel.

Reopening issues for libraries:

Kameel Stanley. USA Today, 06/11/2020: Libraries are needed more than ever. But many aren't sure how to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, the Internet Emergency Library to close soon:

Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 06/11/2020: Internet Archive Will End Its Program for Free E-Books.

Reading and cultural change:

Constance Grady. Vox, 06/11/2020: Do the soaring sales of anti-racism books signal a true cultural shift?.

Jessa Crispin. The Guardian, 06/11/2020: You can't defeat racism with 'reading lists'. Take it from a feminist - we tried this.

Reading and the smartphone:

Christopher Schaberg. Public Books, 06/17/2020: Toward a cellular humanities.

TLS 06/19/2020. Focus is on the literature of travel:

Liza Dalby. Haunted Hearts and Wayside Bones. Reviews of: Meredith McKinney, Translator, Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese travel writing from the Manyōshū to Bashō.

Edward Platt. Lots of rum and no fuss: Reading classic travel books during lockdown. Essay.

Darran Anderson. Apocalypse now: It’s the end of the world as we know it. Review of: Mark O’Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A personal journey to the end of the world and back and Edward Platt (see above), The Great Flood: Travels Through a Sodden Landscape.

On the topic of apocalypse, by the way, the TLS issue has an interesting essay by Robert Irwin, One night, in Jerusalem jail: Re-reading The Andromeda Strain.

Caroline Eden. Eggs, gowns and vodka: Stories of packing by adventurous experts. Review of: Ed Stafford, Expeditions Unpacked: What the great explorers took into the unknown.

Two reviews on children's literature:

Seth Lehrer. Costumes for our present: How every age rewrites the old into the new. Review of: Maria Tartar, The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 tales of mothers and daughters -- Bruno Vincent, Fairy Tales for Millennials: 12 problematic stories retold for the modern world -- Martin Shaw, Courting the Wild Twin -- Sam George and Bill Hughes, editors, In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, wolves and wild children -- Charlotte Artese, editor, Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories -- Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century.

Janet Garton. The mill at the bottom of the sea: A new translation of Norwegian tales. Review of: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, translator Tiina Nunnally, The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe.

Other reviews or essays of interest:

Audrey Borowski. The long struggle: How Jews achieved equality. Review of David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A history across five centuries.

Harry Sidebottom. Fire from innermost depths: How the ancients experienced plague. Essay.

TLS 06/12/2020 no. 6115>. Belated notice. Any specific theme not detected.

David Bromwich. Constitutions and charisma: Democracy and the rise of the strongman. Review of: Yan Xuetong, Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers -- Bruce Ackerman, Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law -- Amos Barshad, No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins manipulate the world -- Michael Peele, The Fabulists: The world’s new rulers, their myths and the struggle against them -- Frank Dikotter, How to be a Dictator: The cult of personality in the twentieth century -- David Runciman, Where Power Stops: The making and unmaking of presidents and prime ministers. Very disturbing review essay.

Andrew Roberts. Two French heroes: A passionate defence of the Great Man view of history. Review of: Patrice Gueniffey, translation Steven Rendall, Napoleon and DeGaulle: Heroes and history (no copies in LT, though LT does have the original French edition; Harvard University Press publisher of the translation).

Brendan Simms. Real first world war: A monumental account of the Napoleonic Wars. Review of: Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. TLS also has an archive review by H.A.L. Fisher of Le soldat impérial by Jean Morvan about the soldiers in Napoleon's army.

Jen Manion. Gender was theirs for making: The complicated world of centuries-old relationships. Review of Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History.

Clare Carlisle. One will becoming two: Relations with God and child. Review of: Natalie Carnes, Motherhood: A Confession. "While other mother-authors ask how to reconcile maternity with their identity as artists and feminists, Carnes finds that being a parent is “a meditation on the strange claim that to save your life you must lose it, and in losing it, you find it”."

Margaret Willes. The magic money tree: The true costs of great gardens. Review of: Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden.

Peter Mandler. The modern ancient: When classics mattered. Review of: Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939. How popular movements abandoned the model of democracy and representative government of the ancients.

Arts and letters:

D.J. Taylor. Let’s go living in the past: The era of cape-flaunting virtuoso wiggling. Review of: Mike Barnes, A New Day Yesterday: UK progressive rock & the 1970s.

Also a short review of Charles Farley, Soul of the Man: Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Norma Clarke. Mrs Hazard and Peter Puff: The forces behind eighteenth-century theatre. Review of: Berta Joncus, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster -- Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity -- Jean I. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, performance and the eighteenth century stage (The latter two not in LT; publisher of both is Cambridge University Press).

Faye Hammill. Tradition and some talents: Exploring the breadth of literature. Review of: Edwin Frank, Editor, The Red Thread: Twenty years of NYRB Classics: A selection and Peter Mack, Reading Old Books: Writing With Traditions.

Jonathan Gibbs. Through the crack in the wall: The esoteric, essential Maigret. Ostensibly a review of Georges Simenon, translation Roz Schwartz, Maigret and Monsieur Charles: The Last Maigret (no copies in LT but one should turn up one of these days) -- it's actually a review essay of Simenon's oeuvre. I was unaware that Penguin has recently completed translation of all 75 Maigret novels, and is in the process of translating other works by Simenon.

Another crime novelist reviewed. who appears to be quite a bit different from Simenon:

Natasha Cooper. Crushed by kindness: Horror and revulsion in C’est la vie and A Long Way Off by Pascal Garnier. Review of recent translations of Garnier's novels: C'est la Vie translated by Jane Aitken (not in LT, publisher is Gallic) and A Long Way Off translated by Emily Boyce.

NYT obituary for Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 1964-2020:

Raphael Minder. NYT, 06/20/2020: Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Author of ‘The Shadow of the Wind,’ Dies at 55.

Occasionally we run across reader reviews in LT, Goodreads, and Amazon about use of Anglo-Saxon diction. One author responds:

Amy Poeppel. LitHub, 06/22/2020: I Can’t Believe Readers Are Still Getting Upset Over F*cking Swearing.

Searching for & finding white privilege in the publishing gateways:

Rafia Zakaria. The Baffler, 06/19/2020: The Allies of Whiteness.

Regarding the National Book Critics Circle background:

National Book Critics Circle Board, 06/18/2020: A Statement From the National Book Critics Circle.

Kayla Kibee. 06/17/2020: Things Are Not Going Well Over at the National Book Critics Circle.

"In a sweeping new history of Western philosophy, Jürgen Habermas narrates the progress of humanity through the unfolding of public reason. Missing from that story are the systems of violence and dispossession whose legacies are all too visible today."

Brandon Bloch. Boston Review, 06/18/2020: The Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Review of: Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too a History of Philosophy).

A review of 2 books questioning democracy not written by neo-nazis:

John Owen Havard. Public Books, 06/22/2020: Democracy, More or Less. Review of: Jason Brennan, Against Democracy and Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

Black owned bookstores struggling, but in this case, not primarily because of the pandemic:

Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 06/23/2020: Overwhelmed With Orders, Some Black-Owned Bookstores Ask for Patience.

The romance genre and race:

Constance Grady. The Highlight by Vox, 06/24/2020: Bad romance. "Romance was one of the sexiest and most lucrative genres in publishing, and it had an ugly secret. Then its writers started speaking up."

"A group of publishing companies filed a scathing copyright lawsuit earlier this month over the IA’s controversial attempt to open an “Emergency Library” during the coronavirus pandemic. Ever since, confusion about the scope of the lawsuit and its potential impact on the IA as a whole has stoked fears of a crackdown on the IA’s many projects, including its gargantuan archive of the historical internet."

Aja Romano. Vox, 06/23/2020: A lawsuit is threatening the Internet Archive — but it’s not as dire as you may have heard.

Whitney Kimball. Gizmodo, 06/24/2020: The Endangered Internet Archive Is Full of Treasures.

Some links to the J.K. Rowling gender flap:

Jim Waterson. The Guardian, 06/22/2020: Authors quit JK Rowling agency over transgender rights.

Douglas Murray. Spectator, 06/19/2020: A solution to the JK Rowling trans row.

Ellie Harrison. The Independent, 06/17/2020: JK Rowling: Hachette UK book staff told they are not allowed to boycott author over trans row.

Vanessa Thorpe. The Guardian, 06/14/2020: JK Rowling: from magic to the heart of a Twitter storm.

Ryan Schocket. Buzzfeed, 06/13/2020: 16 Celebrities Who Have Spoken Out Against J.K. Rowling Following Her Anti-Trans Remarks.

Libby Brooks. The Guardian, 06/12/2020: JK Rowling row hints at generational rift on transgender rights.

Aja Romano. Vox, 06/11/2020: Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us.

Sam Greenhill. The Daily Mail, 06/15/2020: JK Rowling and the publisher's staff revolt: Workers at publishing house Hachette threaten to down tools on her new children's book because of her 'transphobic' views.

Gabrielle Belllot. LitHub, 06/10/2020: How JK Rowling Betrayed the World She Created.

Amber Jamieson. Buzzfeed News, 06/10/2020: J.K. Rowling Followed Up Her Anti-Trans Tweets With A Full Anti-Trans Essay.

J.K. Rowling. jkrowling.com/opinion, 06/10/2020: J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues.

Colin Wright. Quilette, 06/07/2020: JK Rowling is Right—Sex Is Real and It Is Not a “Spectrum”.

Katelyn Burns. Vox, 12/19/2019: J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture.

Jeff O'Neal. Bookriot, 01/10/2012: J.K. Rowling, Nobel Laureate.

TLS 06/26/2020.

Always worth checking out the TLS annual summer and winter reading lists:

Holiday in the living room: What our writers will be reading this summer.

Notable book reviews and articles:

Alan Sked. The Fortinbras effect: How a dynasty survived. Review of Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power. "Courses on the history of the Habsburg monarchy are no longer fashionable in British universities."

Jessica Stern. Redpill factories: A troubling visit to online places of radicalization. Review of: Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists. "The United Nations Security Council Counter-terrorism Committee recently alerted member states that extreme right-wing terrorism has increased in both frequency and lethality. There has, it said, been a 320 per cent increase in the number of attacks from this constituency in the past five years."

Tanya Gold. Viewer, she married him: Rewatching musical theatre in lockdown. A celebration of the film The Sound of Music by a restaurant critic of The Spectator.

Bee Wilson. But is it food?: The world of cheap produce and its consequences. Review of:
Sébastien Rioux, The Social Cost of Cheap Food: Labour and the political economy of food distribution in Britain 1830–1914 -- Tim Lang, Feeding Britain: Our food problems and how to fix them -- Martín Caparrós, Hunger: The Oldest Problem. "If you want to make a roomful of people argue with each other, one of the fastest ways is to express any kind of opinion about “cheap food”. To some, it is perfectly obvious that cheap food is an evil that results in underpaid farmers, degraded land and tortured animals. To others, it is equally obvious that cheap food is the great safeguard that stands between poor people and hunger."

Rebecca Watts. White geraniums in the dusk: The greatest poet of human sympathy after Wordsworth. Review of: Julia Copus, editor Charlotte Mew: Selected Poetry and Prose.

Mika Ross-Southall. Forever young: Loss of innocence in Ana Mariá Matute's The Island. Review of: Ana Mariá Matutes The Island. "Matute’s brilliant, devastating book was first published as Primera memoria in Spain in 1959; it originally appeared in English as Awakening (1963), and now Laura Lonsdale’s new translation should earn its author, who died in 2014 and has been somewhat neglected outside her home country, the overdue attention of the English-speaking world."

Dennis Duncan. The granite and the rainbow: In praise of the obituary art form. Review of: Nicholas Barker, At First, All Went Well ... & Other Brief Lives. "At First All Went Well… pulls together half a century’s worth of Barker’s pieces, some from the Independent, most from The Book Collector. Taken together, these pieces represent more than simply an anthology of individual lives. Barker paints a picture, an accidental sociology, of the book world in the twentieth century, its dealers and collectors, publishers, printers and scholars."

Annette Federico. Blessed little room: Re-reading David Copperfield. Essay. Teaching and reading David Copperfield in lockdown.

Raymond Tallis. Wired to care: Does neurobiology really explain everything?. Review of Patricia Churchland, Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition. "... the first few pages of her book are taken up by a nuanced account of her own complex, self-critical, response to seeing a prisoner of Dené (a group within Canada’s First Nations) origin being transported in chains, connecting his present plight with the appalling history of the mistreatment of his people. She seems unaware that this story undermines her endeavour to swallow up moral discourse into evolutionary biology. It seems unlikely that neural circuits would be the kind of things that sit in abstract, principle-based judgement on the abstract, principle-based judgements of other neural circuits as Churchland does with respect to her own judgements."

Finally, two books on jihadists:

Lydia Wilson. Yearning for Caliphate: A bird's eye view of the evolution of global jihad. Review of: Thomas Hegghammer, The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the rise of global jihad. "Thomas Hegghammer’s thoroughly researched biography complicates the versions of Azzam claimed by both moderates and radicals, while exploring just how he became “all things to all jihadists”, a seemingly impossible position. At the same time, Hegghammer gives the broader context of the development of global Islamism, from which Azzam emerged and to which he contributed more than any of his contemporaries."

Mardean Isaac. The story-telling jihadi: The life and thought of an Islamist martyr. Review of: Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Incitement: Anwar al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad. "Anwar al-Awlaki was one of the foremost prophets of modern global terrorism. Born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents in 1971, the preacher went from being a prominent Muslim-American voice condemning 9/11 to a member of al-Qaeda’s Arabian Peninsula branch in Yemen, where in 2011 he became the first American citizen to be targeted and killed by a US drone strike. Awlaki pioneered a radical interpretation of Islamic ideology that transcended organizational confines. His skill in translating and communicating it to a Western audience inspired many of the most infamous recent acts of jihadist terrorism in the West, some of which Awlaki himself directly helped to plan."

Revisiting Kim Stanley Robinson's California trilogy, to be reissued in one volume, Three Californias: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge, "portraits of life not so distant from America's present, inviting readers to consider how we might reconcile our country’s cruel past with collective imagination of a brighter future."

Dayton Martindale. Boston Review, 06/26/2020: Imagining American Utopia.

Interesting perspective on racism from a black author outside the U.S.:

Kurt Barling, interviewer: Nigel Warburton. Five Books, no date: The Best Books on Racism.

Barling, author of The 'R' Word, discusses: Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Steve Jones, The Language of Genes, Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity.

Unfortunately, the Five Books site doesn't appear to have a list/discussion on Reconstruction, but here's a recent one on the American Civil War:

Drew Gilpin Faust, interviewer Eve Gerber. Five Books, 06/22/2020: The Best Books on the American Civil War.

Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, recommends and discusses: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth Samet, editor: The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Locus Awards (for science fiction & fantasy):

LitHub, 06/29/2020: Beam me up: here are the Locus Awards winners!.

A visit to the Cloister's Unicorn Tapestries leads into a personal reminiscence on dark childhood reading:

Amanda Parrish Morgan. Guernica, 06/30/2020: The Bloody Unicorn: Reading frightening stories with my children in turbulent times.

The On Our Nightstands feature of Public Books for June 2020:

Public Books, 06/30/2020: On Our Nightstands: June 2020.

Two items from Quillette before I leave June 2020:

Dario Maestripieri. 06/27/2020: Interpreting Italo Svevo—When Literary Orthodoxy Misses The Mark.

Jordan Alexander Hill. 06/12/2020: The Libertarian History of Science Fiction.

Paris Review has an excerpt from the book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form.

Sianne Ngai. Paris Review, 06/25/2020: The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas.