Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2020-3-2

3rd quarter of 2020. Overlooked items from the previous quarter will be added here.

Starting with an article with an ambiguous provenance. New Yorker double issue for July 6 & July 13 has this one online dated July 29:

Leo Robson. The Unruly Genius of Joyce Carol Oates. "In an era that fetishizes form, Oates has become America’s preëminent fiction writer by doing everything you’re not supposed to do."

"Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, but something quite distinctive and instructive. ... Charles Péguy, a thinker who today is little known beyond specialist circles concerned with fin-de-siècle French politics and culture."

Jay Tolson. Hedgehog Review, Summer 2020: The Amodernist. Review of: Mattew W. Maguire, Carnal Spirit: The Revolutions of Charles Péguy.

Another overlooked article from the previous quarter. Lots of illustrations, appropriately.

Calvin Reid. 06/26/2020: Panel Mania: ‘Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics’. Review of: Tom Scioli, Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics.

The Way We Live Now re: "acceptable" female/male characters. "What makes a person good? We can create a profile using social media and essays published in popular magazines. First and foremost, a good person possesses a deep understanding of power structures and her relative place in them. She has a sense of humor that never “punches down.” She doesn’t subtweet, buy stuff on Amazon, or fly on too many planes. She has children in order to fend off narcissism—a bad quality—and develop a stake in the future of planet Earth, but she would never presume to judge another woman’s choice. And though she occasionally makes mistakes—cheats on her boyfriend, offends her friends after drinking too much, doesn’t call her mom very often—she admits them. A good person is not perfect (she has read enough not to fall for that trap), but she is self-aware. If she ever has to ask, as the title of the popular subreddit goes, “Am I the Asshole?” and she receives an answer in the affirmative, she accepts it willingly and humbly, employing a template response, provided by her therapist, to convey how she’ll do better next time. Though she could rest on her morals, a good person is always trying to do better—not in a capitalist, life-hacking way, but in terms of acknowledging and improving the lives of others. She makes sure to let others know they should do the same."

Lauren Oyler. Bookforum, summer 2020: For Goodness’ Sake: The self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction.

Another ethical/critical article inspired by social media, in this case, #minimalism:

Alex Weintraub. Public Books, 07/01/2020: Minimal Success. Review of Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less.

Another review of Chayka's book from this month's Literary Review:

James Delbourgo. Literary Review, 07/01/2020: Gardens of emptiness. Review of Chayka's book and Shirley M. Mueller, Inside the Head of a Collector: Neuropsychological Forces at Play.

Orwell and the police:

Priya Satiya. Slate, 06/30/2020: What’s Really Orwellian About Our Global Black Lives Matter Moment.

Exploring the crime fiction of P.D. James:

Neil Nyren. crimereads.com, 07/02/2020: P.D. James: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics.

This week's TLS, 07/03/2020.

Featured articles. Noteworthy that none of the featured articles is a book review this week:

Luke Brown. Emasculated: The problem of men writing about sex. Essay. Might be an interesting comparison with >4 featherbear:

Antonio Melichi. The sound of blood rushing: Exploring the experimental science of isolation. Essay.

Anne Hardy. Nature’s warning: Covid-19 and the lessons of history. Essay.

Jane Darcy. Promiscuous throng: The ‘indecent’ manner of sea-bathing in the nineteenth century. Essay.

Not featured, might be paywalled:

Dennis Duncan. An upwelling of stuff: How book dealers are reacting to the challenges of the age. Review of D.W. Young's documentary, The Booksellers.

Vilma de Gasperin. Hungry for the gold-dung donkey: Calvino’s colourful tapestry of human destinies. Review of reissues: Italo Calvino, translation George Martin, Italian Folktales and, translation Ann Goldstein, The Baron in the Trees.

Caroline Moorehead. Writing the unthought: Female life in early twentieth-century Italy. Review of: Sibilla Aleramo (pseud. of Marta Felicina Facci), translation Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, A Woman. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, as Edith Wharton in America was writing The House of Mirth, and Lady Gregory in Ireland was founding the Abbey Theatre, in Italy a young woman called Marta Felicina Faccio produced what became known as the first feminist Italian novel. Una donna, published under the pseudonym of Sibilla Aleramo, which would remain her writing name, was an immediate, scandalous, success, and was soon widely translated. ...
Only it was not really a novel at all."

Steven E. Ascheim. Imperfect but perfectly human: Recuperating the reputation of a controversial, contested thinker. Review of: Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent.

Becca Rothfeld. Poisoned solidarity: Slicing through our flabbiest orthodoxies. Review of: JoAnn Wypijewski, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life.

Plus, review of 2 books about the pop music Pet Shop Boys -- Curtis Sittenfield, Rodham -- David Carpenter, Henry III, 1207-1258: The rise to power and personal rule -- Robert Bartlett, Blood Royal: Dynastic politics in medieval Europe -- David Cannadine, editor, Westminster Abbey: A Church in History -- and much more.

Another review of Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by frequent Millions reviewer Ed Simon, this time in LARB:

Ed Simon. Los Angeles Review of Books, 07/13/2020: What Was Christendom?.

A review of Zachary D. Carster, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, focusing on Keynes' critique of capitalism:

Jonathan Kirshner. Boston Review, 07/13/2020: The Keynesian Revolution.

"In an insidious way, we understand ourselves as relentlessly pragmatic, realist, or empiricist, when in fact we mediate our naive experiences of life through the lens of theory. Modernity needs to be revealed to us, because it so successfully hides its true character, insulating itself against revision and correction." From the review:

Matt Dinan. Hedgehog Review, summer 2020: Mind the Gap. Review of: Pierre Manent, translation by Ralph C. Hancock, Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason

The case for "insider" satire of society:

Adam O'Fallon Price. The Millions, 07/13/2020: Writing Sideways: Edith Wharton, the Postmodernists, and Social Satire. Comparing Wharton's The House of Mirth with Dickens, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc.

The latest TLS. July 10,2020, no. 6119.

The theme of the issue is sports, but not that big a fan, so what I found interesting:

Clare Pettit. Storm clouds coming: How we began to think planetarily. Review of: Sarah Dry (no joke!), The Waters of the World: The story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere – and made the planet whole.

Stephen Kotkin. Still standing: How Vladimir Putin maintains his support. Review of: Catherine Belton, Putin's People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West -- Joshua Yaffa, Between Two Fires: Truth, ambition and compromise in Putin’s Russia -- Dmitri Trenin, Russia. And on a related note:

Beejay Sicox. Trolling for lunch: How truth was destroyed by pleasant young professionals. Review of: Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (about Russia's Internet Research Agency) -- Rory MacLean, Pravda Ha Ha: True travels to the end of Europe.

Megan Marz. Haunted mansions: An Oulipian approach to investigating the memoir form. Review of Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House.

J. Michael Lennon. Crafted confession: Re-reading Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy.

Min Wild. Romance versus realism: The origins of the novel. Review of: Scott Black, Without the Novel: Romance and the history of prose fiction -- Hilary Havens, Revising the Eighteen-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print -- Melissa L. Ganz, Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment -- Amelia Dale, The Printed Reader: Gender, quixotism and textual bodies in eighteenth-century Britain -- Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the early realist novel -- Daniel Defoe, editor Manushag Powell, Captain Singleton -- Laurence Sterne, editor Judith Hawley, Tristram Shandy (new Norton Critical Edition) -- Jane Porter, Edited by Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich, Thaddeus of Warsaw. The fruit of many an English lit. Ph.D. thesis, I suspect.

With regard to the sports writing: Reviews of: James Montague, 1312: Among the Ultras – a journey with the world’s most extreme fans and 3 books on cricket in South Africa. Essays on the ESPN Michael Jordan doc, The Last Dance -- the Tour de France of 1998 -- Jewish boxers -- the Olympics in Japanese cultural history.

Also a nice exhibition catalog of a probably postponed exhibition: Martina Droth and Paul Messier, editors, Bill Brandt/Henry Moore.

The latest TLS, July 17. 2020. no. 6120:

Geoff Dyer. Ranging across Texas: On first looking into Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. (Essay)

N. J. Enfield. Believe what you like: How we fit the facts around our prejudices. Review of: Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday: The science of who we trust and what we believe -- Mikael M. Klitman, Knowledge Resistance: How we avoid insight from others -- Timothy R. Levine, Duped: Truth-default theory and the social science of lying and deception -- Linsey McGoey, The Unknowers: How strategic ignorance rules the world.

Andrew Irwin. Introducing the band: David Mitchell’s multiverse in Utopia Avenue.

Carol J. Oja. Segregating a great singer: Marian Anderson and the Daughters of the American Revolution. (Essay)

Lauren Elkin. Wilder than the wind: Re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

Elizabeth Lowry. Precision and revision: Essays on the craft of writing. Review of: Lydia Davis, Essays One. Just finished Davis's translation of Madame Bovary; "precision" is on the mark; inspired me to take up her translation of Swann's Way. Her Proust doesn't sound at all like her Flaubert, by the way.

Lauro Martines. Son of a bastard: A new life of Machiavelli. Review of: Alexander Lee, Machiavelli: His Life and Times.

Emily Kenway. Inhuman service: Life and death in a Chinese factory. Review of: Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Ngai Pun, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the lives of China’s workers.

Rest of this issue seems to be filled out by essays and reviews, several too British in slant for my taste: James Bond's address -- British honors and long vacations -- Scottish nationalism and 18th century radicalism. As well as reviews of essays by Gabriel Josipovici and Leslie Jamison -- reviews of graphic novels by Matthew Dooley & Steven Appleby -- Emma Donoghue's new novel The Pull of the Stars, about 3 women dealing with the 1918 Spanish flu in Dublin -- an excerpt from a study of Beethoven.

Two lists:

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, LitHub, 07/21/2020: On the Biggest Collection of Fantasy Tales Since WWII: A Preview of the Big Book of Modern Fantasy. Complete table of contents. 896 pages, by the way.

Addendum. The Vandermeer's introduction to their new collection: Electric Lit, 07/16/2020: How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century.

Emily Temple. LitHub, 07/23/2020: What 100 Writers Have Been Reading During Quarantine: From Anita Brookner to Kierkegaard. Sort of an aggregator of current reading.

Recently read Camus' The Plague, so this interview was of interest to me:

Sean Illing interviewing Robert Zaretsky. Vox, 07/22/2020: What Camus’s The Plague can teach us about the Covid-19 pandemic: A conversation about solidarity and revolt in Camus’s famous novel,

TLS for the week July 24, 2020, no. 6121. Classics and ancient history are the theme.

Mary Beard. How to be an emperor: Re-reading Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World.

Peter Thonemann. Flabby in body and mind: Have the Thebans had a bad press?. Review of: Paul Cartledge, Thebes: the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

Harry Strawson. Familiar tales, fresh tapestries: The uses and abuses of ancient myths today. Review of: Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: the Subversive Power of Ancient Myths.

Johanna Hanink. Not all Classicists: Worrying gaps in well-meaning maps. Review of: The Postclassicism Collective, Postclassicisms.

Rebecca Langlands. Put in his place: An elegant portrait of the entitled Pliny the Younger. Review of Roy K. Gibson, Man of High Empire: The Life of Pliny the Younger.

Other topics.

Science:

Patricia Fara. Beyond the double helix: Rosalind Franklin’s work on viruses. (Essay)

Publishing:

Imogen Russell Williams. ‘The chance to write really bad sci-fi’: Inequality in British publishing. (Essay)

Will Self. Hot metal, cold reality: The decline of newspapers, and of the planet. (Essay)

Literature:

Frances Wilson. Mongoose, Mandrake, Dobbin and Kitty:
What literary couples can and cannot tell us about marriage. Review of: Janine Littel,Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing and Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages.

Jules Smith. Frankly and fiercely: A doughty champion of the avant-garde. Review of: Marjorie Perloff, edited by David Jonathan Bayot, Circling the Canon: The selected book reviews of Marjorie Perloff (2 v.)

Joe Moran. Master craftsmen: The abiding mystery of why people write. Review of: Nicholas Delbanco, Why Writing Matters.

Jade French. Under the cover of dullness: How lesbian writing smuggled itself past the censors.Review of: Hannah Roche, The Outside Thing.

Hitler's Germany:

Wendy Lower & Jonathan Petropoulos, A Nazi love story: Inner portraits of Hitler’s ‘true believers’. Review of: David Maxwell, Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” and Philippe Sands, The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive.

Mary Fulbrook. Refusing to bend: How a forgotten German group tried to save the Jews. Review of: Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A story of rescue and resistance in Nazi Germany.

Somewhat related: Adam Mars Jones' lengthy review of Billy Wilder's film A Foreign Affair set in the aftermath of World War II.

Epic poetry read and translated in the 21st century:

Talya Zax. NYT, 07/23/2020: Looking at Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes.

About the Persian poet Hafez:

Nilo Fabrizy. Guernica, 07/16/2020: Between the Lines: Seeking solace in the work of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Hafez.

At some point, "Defund the Police" would look into crime fiction, so here's something in the vanguard:

Aya de León. Electric Lit, 07/17/2020: Crime Fiction Is Complicit in Police Violence—But It’s Not Too Late to Change.

The latest TLS, 07/31/2020, no. 6122:

Celebrity men, non-celebrity women, in history:

Jane Kershaw. Ladies who launch: The lives of Viking women. Review of: Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Valkyrie: the Women of the Viking World.

Lesley Downer. An awfully bad adventure: The unusual life of a nineteenth-century Japanese woman. Review of: Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A woman’s life in nineteenth-century Japan. "At the heart of Stanley’s book is the extraordinary and terrible story of Tsuneno, whose life went against the grain not only of what was expected of women in her day but also of what we assume life was like for women at that time."

Sudhir Hazareesingh. Great men, great myths: The complex relationship between charisma and celebrity. Review of: David Bell, Men on Horseback: The power of charisma in the age of revolution. Another review recently posted on The Point, Charismatic Models: David Bell’s Men on Horseback.

Environment:

Bill McKibben. The end of the world as we know it: Covid-19 and climate change. Essay.

Gabrielle Walker. Everyone-everywhere mission: Michael Moore’s ‘doomism’. Review of Moore's documentary Planet of the Humans.

Travel:

Elizabeth Dearnley. Common ground?: The wonders of walking. Review of: Jinny Reddy, Wanderland: A search for magic in the landscape and Torbjørn Ekelund, In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature.

Sara Hudston. Stay out of my lanes: The limited right to roam. Review of: Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us. Impediments to wandering in the UK.

Andrew Irwin. Expanded horizons: How travel is vital to philosophy. Review of: Emily Thomas. The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers abroad.

Oliver Balch. Infectious madness: The rush to create ‘little spaces of escape, delight and fear'. Review of: Alastair Bonnett, The Age of Islands: In search of new and disappearing islands.

Social studies:

Mary Kate Hurley. Main Street, USA: A wide-eyed history of the world’s most famous theme park. Review of: Richard Snow, Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the invention of the amusement park that changed the world.

Alice Bloch. The cost of fun: Partying with the super-rich. Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and beauty in the global party circuit.

Lit Crit:

Daisy Hildyard. ‘The unled lives crowding us now’: A novel account of our alternative existences. Review of: Andrew H. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. "... a series of studies of works which have created or drawn attention to unled lives."

Lindsay Duguid. Flummery and trumpery: Our fascination with writers’ houses, real and imagined. Review of: Nicola J. Watson, The Author's Effects: On writer’s house museums -- Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, editors, Lives of Houses -- Christina Hardyment, Novel Houses: Twenty famous fictional dwellings.

With regard to Miller's On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives cited in the TLS roundup above, here's a book about wanting to be Shakespeare. In TLS, Daisy Hildyard cites the story by Borges about a writer who elects to merge his identity with Shakespeare that Blank uses as the opener of his review.

Daniel Blank. Los Angeles Review of Books, 07/28/2020: In Search of Shakespeare’s Mind. Review of: Scott Newstok, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.

Science fiction awards:

Julie Muncy. Gizmodo/iO9, 08/01/2020: Here Are the 2020 Hugo Award Winners.

Librarians call it "weeding;" the word "culling" is a little too bloody for me:

Stephanie Merry. WaPo, 08/01/2020: Readers have many opinions on how to cull your book collection — and also why you never should.

An addendum on collecting, hoarding, & dumping books & other things:

Becca Rothfeld. Hedgehog Review, summer 2020: To Have and To Hold: Arguing with Marie Kondo. "A testimonial from one satisfied client reads, “Your course taught me to see what I really need and what I don’t. So I got a divorce.”"

I have a second home in Mammoth Lakes, Ca, in a very sparsely habited area of the eastern sierras. Every summer they have a library book sale. 99.9 % of it is unreadable pablum. However, I did pick up a British first edition of Mani by Patrick Fermor for two dollars. I wondered what rubbish they were keeping while tossing out this gem. The likely answer was that no one had checked it out.

"I decided to take on a year-long experiment of reading only women authors. My energy to read—and especially to be an engaged, opinionated reader—was dwindling. I wanted to find inspiration and understanding in the voices of other women. It was reductive, I knew, to imagine other women were the solution, but at the same time I craved reductive thinking. I just wanted things to be simple, and to work."

Amelia Granger. 08/07/2020: My First Year as a Mother, I Only Read Women Authors. Here’s What I Learned.

(Rapid) thoughts on: Rivka Galchen, Little Labors -- Lisa Taddeo, Three Women -- Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation -- Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life -- Janee Dunn, Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids -- Phillipa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read -- Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends -- Elif Batuman, The Idiot -- Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister the Serial Killer -- Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love -- Esme Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias -- Michelle Tea, Against Memoir -- Rachel Cusk, Coventry: Essays -- Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror.

Whew! Doesn't sound like a year of rest and relaxation to me.

In the earlier quarter, I don't recall posting the Flannery O'Connor article from the New Yorker. The article seems to have had some negative repercussions, which this quarter's Commonweal article addresses:

Paul Elie. New Yorker, 06/15/2020: How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor: She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Commonweal, 08/03/2020: The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor?: It Never Should Have Happened.

PS: Just picked this one up from LitHub:

Maggie Levantovskaya. LitHub, 08/06/2020: On Flannery O’Connor’s Chronic Illness… and Chronic Racism.

And another one from Quillette:

Charlotte Allen. Quillette, 08/17/2020: Flannery O’Connor and the Ideological War on Literature.

On the noir/pulp fiction novelist Jim Thompson:

Susanna Lee. The Conversation, 08/06/2020: Jim Thompson is the perfect novelist for our crazed times.

Public Books monthly "B-Sides" column, that spotlights overlooked books from the past:

Brenna M. Casey. Public Books, 08/06/2020: B-Sides: Carmen Laforet's "Nada."

The latest TLS, Aug. 7, 2020, no. 6123. No particular theme this week.

New books on arts:

Rebecca Liu. A law unto herself: The legacy of Olivia de Havilland, a star of the Hollywood golden age. Review of: Victoria Amador, Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant.

Patrick Mccaughey. A manifestation of an idea: Sol LeWitt, an artist who was at once representative and exceptional. Review of: Lary Bloom, Sol Lewitt: A Life of Ideas.

Noo Sara-Wiwa. Showing at the Rialto: Changing cinematic trends from Nigeria to Senegal. Review of: Odile Goerg, Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in colonial West Africa.

Ben Eastham. Huh? Wow!: A tour round the imaginary museum. An excerpt from Eastham's new book, The Imaginary Museum: A personal tour of contemporary art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements.

History book reviews:

Richard Overy. Following lunatics: The fantasies of Mussolini and Hitler. Review of: Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-45 -- Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the first global conflict was fought and won -- John Gooch, Mussolini's War: Fascist Italy from triumph to collapse 1935–1943 -- Daniel Todman, Britain's War: A new world 1942–1947.

Krishan Kumar. ‘Thank God for Bolt’: A lively and opinionated account of an official visit. Review of: Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, The China Journals: Ideology and intrigue in the 1960s.

Pierre Fuller. Lessons for today from the Song dynasty: Confucian how-to manuals. Review of: Pierre-Étienne Will, Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A descriptive and critical bibliography.

A collection of book reviews:

Margaret Drabble. Dangerous edge of things: Eclectic essays full of curiosity and unexpected connections. Review of Jenny Diski, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?.

Politics and Biography:

Richard Davenport-Hines. Fellows pro and con: Anthony Blunt and the British Academy. Cancel culture back in the day. Review of: David Cannadine, A Question of Retribution?: The British Academy and the matter of Anthony Blunt.

Africa:

Mia Couto. A message from the pangolins: Mozambique’s medicine men and the coronavirus.

Adam Hochschild. From rubber to cobalt: The cursed wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Review of: Robert Harms, Land of Tears: The exploration and exploitation of equatorial Africa.

Kieran Pender. With no visible means of support: The unexpected success of Somaliland. Review of: Sarah G. Phillips, When There Was No Aid: War and peace in Somaliland.

Chigozie Obioma. Necessary laughter: Religiosity and the prominence of the ‘Nigerian God’. Review of: Elnathan John, Be(Com)ing Nigerian.

Fiction:

Ben Masters. A ghost, a gift, ha ha: How to write like Ali Smith. Review of Smith's Summer.

Since the new book by Isabel Wilkerson uses the concept of caste to analyze black-white race relations in the U.S., the New Yorker review by a writer familiar with Indian caste and politics makes for an interesting read:

Sunil Khilnani. New Yorker, 08/07/2020: Isabel Wilkerson's World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste. Review of Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents.

What we've all been waiting for:

Jonny Diamond. 08/07/2020: Complete your pandemic aesthetic with this bookcase that converts into a coffin.

If you go to a book signing, a suggestion:

Amitava Kumar. NYT, 08/07/2020: Authors Distill Their Writing Advice to Just a Few Words.

"To a large extent, the history of the American hard-boiled detective is the history of obstacles, both subtle and not-so-subtle, to the American women’s movement."

Susanna Lee. Crimereads, 08/11/2020: The World of Robert B. Parker's Spenser and the Birth of the 1970's Private Detective.

Excerpted from Lee's Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-boiled History, (Johns Hopkins University Press, just so you know).

Gender studies takes on "empowerment" and the "tomboy" trope.

Lisa Selin Davis. LitHub, 08/11/2020: The Racist History of Celebrating the American Tomboy, or, The Endless Privileges Accorded to White Girls. Excerpt from Davis's Tomboy: the Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to be Different. Published by Hachette.

"... what gets obscured in the judgments we toss off. "

Andrew Koenig. LARB, 08/10/2020: Gimme More: On Sianne Ngai’s “Theory of the Gimmick.” Critical theory at work and play.

Two recent book reviews from the upcoming September 2020 issue of The Atlantic:

Merve Emre. Elena Ferrante’s Master Class on Deceit: Her latest novel frames lying as a creative act. Review of Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults.

Drew Gilpin Faust. What to Do About William Faulkner. "A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it." Review of: Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War.

A reading of Stanley Fish's writings on free speech and Milton's Areopagitica:

Blake Smith. Tablet, 07/21/2020: Stanley Fish and the Argument Against Free Speech. "Is the liberal search for truth missing a sense of the common good, and a historically informed understanding of the violence of words?" The key text by Fish would be There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing Too.

The current issue of TLS came out online Wed., August 14, 2020, no. 6124:

Featured book review:

James Campbell. ‘I am an American’: Ralph Ellison’s pursuit of visibility. Review of: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Connor, editors. Ellison wrote a LOT of letters, the published "selection" is 1,060 p.

The arts section considers some books on popular music, plus one on fashion:

Russell Davies. Strange times: The sui generis Dave Brubeck. Review of: Philip Clark, Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time.

Sarah Hill. Nostalgia’s not what it used to be: The place of a pop group in a line of English artistic expression. Review of: Mark Doyle, The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached.

Rosalind Jana. Subversive sexuality at work: Staging ‘capitalism’s dream worlds’. Review of Elspeth H. Brown, Work!: A Queer History of Modeling.

Books on Austro-German culture in press, literature, and science in 20th century Europe:

Ritchie Robertson. Greed and unbridled sexuality: A study of the press coverage of four causes célèbres. Review of: T.S. Cord, Lovable Crooks and Loathsome Jews: Antisemitism in German and Austrian crime writing before the World Wars.

James J. Conway. Night waves: Lyricism from the Nazi era. Review of a translation of Friedo Lampe's At the Edge of the Night (translator Simon Beattie), "This lean book, the pick of Lampe’s slim bibliography, was originally published in late 1933, and joins Hans Fallada’s works (some of which Lampe edited) in the slender canon of Nazi-era books that have merited later rediscovery."

Osman Durrani. Changing faith: Contradictions and prejudices in interwar Berlin. Review of: Marc David Baer, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The life and times of Hugo Marcus.

Gregory Radick. Breeding back to former glory: The role of eugenics in Nazi Germany. Review of: Amir Teicher, Social Mendelism: Genetics and the politics of race in Germany, 1900–1948.

Two novels by Southeast Asian authors:

Tanjil Rashid. Beneath the busy skies: Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon brings the bombing of Laos, and Laotian history since, out of the shadows.

Stephanie Sy-Quia. A demi-monde, amen: B-movie grannies and sliding doors in How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Two Books on Bisexuality:

Victoria Carroll. Beyond the binary: Two attempts to confound gender and sexuality. Review of: Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On being both, beyond, and in-between and Michael Amherst, Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On truth, bisexuality and desire.

Observations (Essays) on the American scene:

Tiphanie Yanique. Learning experiences: The Black Lives Matter protests in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ian Loader. To reduce the harm: On defunding the police.

Women in espionage; a dizzying article:

Katherine Voyls. Public books, 08/12/2020: The Spy Who Read Me. Review/essay of: Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept and Amaryllis Fox, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA.

The section on Pound as a translator is fascinating; the second part on evaluating his role in 20th century literature is more problematic. Pound's conspiracy theories seem to be in a certain American tradition, anticipating QAnon.

J.L. Wall. University Bookman, 08/09/2020: Stuck with Pound. Review of: Ezra Pound, edited by Timothy Billings, Cathay: A Critical Edition and Daniel Swift, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound.

The "Reclaim Her Name" project aims to republish classic works of literature by women who published under pseudonyms, but under their "real," i.e., given (maiden) names. "Many have applauded this initiative. No. Stop applauding. Stop applauding now.":

Olivia Rutigliano. LitHub, The #ReclaimHerName initiative ignores the authorial choices of the writers it represents.

Library of Congress Cataloging used to enter novels and poems under the author's "real" name. After much lobbying by reference librarians, LCC policy followed the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules in the 70's and determined entry by the form of name found on the title page, so cataloging of Middlemarch was re-done to enter under Eliot, George rather than Evans, Marianne. Among catalog librarians, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as workflows to update catalog cards had to be planned and carried out. What to do with books published under the aegis of Reclaim Her Name?

Addendum from TLS (online omits date/issue unfortunately):

Catherine Taylor. TLS: The story of a new name: Why the ‘Reclaim Her Name’ project, republishing female authors without their pen names, misunderstands pseudonymity and anonymity.

NYT article focusing on indigenous authors in genre fiction:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 08/14/2020: ‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi.

Featured authors: Cherie Dimaline. Empire of Wild -- Tommy Orange, There There -- Darcie Little Badger. Elatsoe -- Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians -- Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun (forthcoming in October).

Revisiting classic French fiction:

Bob Blaisdell. LARB, 08/14/2020: Rapt Rereadings. Review of Viv Groskop, Au Revoir Tristesse.

Groskop is the author of: The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature.

#Black Lives Matter and Shakespeare:

Arsh Dhillon, Phillip Michalak, Bernadette Looney, Sonia Kangaju, and Charles Onesti. LitHub, 08/14/2020: Black Lives Matter in the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing: Five Perspectives on Race and Shakespeare in 2020.

On self-reflexivity in recent fiction using Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan as examples:

Katy Waldman. New Yorker, 08/19/2020: Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?

Rhetorical question is my guess. Here we are!: "One can fairly connect Rooney (and Dolan) to the young-adult (Y.A.) genre, whose business is less often growth than the slow-motion coronation of a reader surrogate. Even the yearnings that shape how these books measure success are adolescent. Characters say that they care about love or justice; what they really seem to care about is external validation."

Novels under discussion: Dolan's Exciting Times; Rooney's Normal People & Conversations with Friends.

Two books on Wyatt Earp ("brave, courageous, and true") by a reviewer who knows his Earp:

Allen Barra. LARB, 08/19/2020: Wyatt Earp Does Not Rest in Peace.

Barra's Thumbs-Up: John Boessenecker, Ride the Devil’s Herd: Wyatt Earp’s Epic Battle Against the West’s Biggest Outlaw Gang.

Barra's Thumbs-Down: Tom Clavin, Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell

A review of a new literary style guide that becomes a fun bibliographic essay by Ed Simon. Strunk and White, and Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" -- Thumbs-Down:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 08/19/2020: Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style.

The book reviewed is: Ward Farnsworth, Farnsworth's Classical English Style.

How does this one relate to Classical English Style?:

Suzanne Conklin Akbari. LitHub, 08/14/2020: Can the Essay Still Surprise Us?: Suzanne Conklin Akbari Rethinks a Eurocentric Tradition.

Two reviews of Time of the Magicians, a new book on 4 important figures in 20th century intellectual history:

Jonathan Rée. The Guardian, 08/13/2020: Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger review – philosophy's great decade?.

Jennifer Szalai. NYT, 08/14/2020: How Wittgenstein and Other Thinkers Dealt With a Decade of Crisis.

Are the origins of pulp horror in racism? The case of H.P. Lovecraft:

Aja Romano. Vox, 08/18/2020: Lovecraftian horror — and the racism at its core — explained.

Addendum:

Interesting list introducing diversity in horror fiction:

Silvia Moreno. buzzfeed news, 08/18/2020: 10 Scary Books Every Horror Lover Needs To Read ... i.e., scary books by contemporary authors from around the world. "Cannibals in Argentina, man-eating shape-shifters in India, vampires in Ontario, and more."

On a more benign note, there's Tolstoy:

Emily VanDerWerff. Vox, 08/19/2020: War and Peace — folks, it’s good.

There he goes again. Reviews of Reaganland, Rick Perlstein's concluding volume of his trilogy on the rise of the right-wing in the U.S.

John S. Gardner. The Guardian, 08/14/2020: Reaganland review: Rick Perlstein on Carter's fall and the rise of the right.

Evan Thomas. NYT, 08/18/2020: How Ronald Reagan Triumphed.

The latest TLS is a double issue (no new issue next week): 08/21/2020, no. 6125/6.

COVID-19:

Alexander Van Tulleken. Viral revivals: Considering two responses to the pandemic. Review of: Richard Horton, The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again and Debora Mackenzie, COVID-19: The pandemic that never should have happened, and how to stop the next one. "... Mackenzie uses the example of myxomatosis, introduced to Australia to control the rabbit population, to remind us that selection is a two-way process. The standard story is that myxomatosis became milder, allowing the rabbits to once again flourish. In fact, the disease killed 95 per cent of Australian rabbits, with the resistant survivors regenerating a population able to ward off the disease, which remained as dangerous as ever. In 2017 it emerged that the virus had adapted to the more resilient rabbit hosts, becoming even more lethal."

Fans of Master and Commander -- book and/or movie -- might find this to be of interest:

John B. Hattendorf. Life on the lower deck: Finding the real Jack Tar. Review of: Stephen Taylor, Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail.

Not sure if it's been canceled yet, but a last-minute reading:

Desirée Baptiste. Raft of opposition: Re-reading Huckleberry Finn.

On Pushkin:

Stephanie Sandler. Fleet of foot: The fluidity and range of Alexander Pushkin. Review of: Alexander Pushkin, translator Antony Wood, Selected Poetry (Penguin Classics edition, forthcoming publ. date Aug. 23) and Pushkin, translator D.M. Thomas, Ruslan and Ludmila.

On Hurricane Katrina:

Peter Coates. Taken at the flood: Hurricane Katrina, fifteen years on. Review of: Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A history, 1915–2015.

A number of reviews of Middle Eastern fiction:

Iran. Azadeh Moaveni on novels about the 1979 Iran revolution. Children of the revolution: The tropes and horrors of 1979 fiction.

Egypt. Amir-Hussein Radjy reviews Tawfiq al-Hakim's The Return of the Spirit (translator William Maynard Hutchins), a 1933 novel that had great significance for Arab nationalism -- the review itself is a rather contentious critique of the author of the new foreword, Alaa Al-Aswany. I suspect some Egyptian intellectual in-fighting going on here. Meanwhile, Beejay Silcox reviews reissued translations of Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi's novels.

On Syria, Diana Darke reviews Dima Wannous' The Frightened Ones, "family life under fifty years of the Assad regime."

Non-Fiction. There's also an In Brief on Marc David Baer's Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide. The title proper is not to be taken literally.

I'm not interested in books on soccer, Japanese comedy, and cricket so those reviews are skipped. Not particularly interested in beverages, but Jeff Koehler's review of Sarah Besky, Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea may be worth a skim.

Review of Martin Amis's new novel, Inside Story:

Sinead O'Shea. The Millions, 08/28/2020: Fiction Is Freedom: On Martin Amis.

In case you didn't read Dickens's David Copperfield, the new movie won't function as a trot:

Marissa Martinelli. Slate, 08/28/2020: How Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield Differs From Charles Dickens’ Novel. "The new movie adaptation gives some characters happier endings and makes others disappear."

A lengthy review of a new history of Latin America, Marie Arana's Silver, Sword, and Stone:

Enrique Krauze. 08/26/2020: The History of Latin America is Not a Monolithic Story.

Circumstance and psychology in Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal and the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom:

Chris R. Morgan. Lapham's Quarterly, 08/24/2020: The Art of Upsetting People: Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade, patron saints of extremism.

On the English language translator of Elena Ferrante (who apparently learned Italian from night classes in New York):

Joumana Khatib. NYT, 08/21/2020: Reading Elena Ferrante in English? You’re Also Reading Ann Goldstein.

Excerpt from a new book on Knausgård's My Struggle:

Kim Adrian. Public Books, 08/19/2020: Dear Knausgård.

Popularizer of the psychology of self-development in the 70's has died:

Tina Jordan and Amisha Padnani. NYT, 08/25/2020: Gail Sheehy’s Books Helped Readers Define Their Lives.

Book burning through the ages:

Timothy W. Ryback. Literary Review, 09/02/2020: Bonfires of Reason. Review of: Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack.

TLS for Sept. 4, 2020, no. 6127.

A TLS review not in the Sept. 4 issue but on the TLS page:

Sam Leith. Pitiless transactions: Ayn Rand’s philosophy might be questionable – but what about her prose?. Review of the Folio Society's edition of Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.

Reviews or articles from the Sept. issue I bookmarked:

Music:

Ian Thomsen. Saving David Bowie: Reflections of a pioneering German musician-composer. Review of: Edgar Froese, Force Majeure: Tangerine Dream - the autobiography.

History reviews:

Margaret Meserve. Shame praise: How Europeans viewed the Turks. Review of: Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western political thought, 1450–1750.

Lesley Chamberlain. Lenin in the library: The role of the British Museum in the Russian Revolution. Review of: Robert Henderson, The Spark that Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the politics that changed the world.

Robert Vinen. Grateful to Gorbachev: Personal chemistry and the fall of Soviet communism. Review of: Archie Brown, The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and the end of the Cold War. This: "Reagan’s world view – rooted in science fiction, B movie fantasy and, apparently, a literal belief in biblical Armageddon – made him receptive to the prospect of dramatic change in ways that a more subtle politician might not have been."

Mark Burman. Silvered wings:" Myths and muddling through in Britain’s air war. Review of 3 books on Spitfires and 1 about the Lancaster bomber. Seen the Spitfire sequences in the Dunkirk movie? The summary of the Lancaster book is hair-raising.

Poetry and politics:

Amelia Glaser. ‘America is a poem in our eyes:’ Walt Whitman, universal poet. Review of: Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.

Books and publishing:

Hal Jensen. Is the best yet to come?: Creative potential in the relationship between the book and digital platforms Review of: Jordan Alexander Stein, When Novels Were Books and Tom Mole, The Secret Life of Books.

Kathryn Sutherland. Circulate before publishing: Nineteenth-century authors’ multifaceted strategies. Michelle Levy, Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain. "Levy aims to redress a misconception: that by the late eighteenth century the semi-public circulation of works in handwritten form had been ousted by print." If only they had Facebook in the 19th century.

D.J. Taylor. Books that got away: The various reasons why a manuscript remains unpublished. (Essay)

The NB column has an interesting section on Theodore Roosevelt: A descriptive bibliography by Heather G. Cole

Sociology and Politics:

Julia Bueno. Born too soon: Prematurity’s humane science. Review of: Sarah DiGregorio, Early: An intimate history of premature birth and what it teaches us about being human.

Frank Trentmann. How not to be an alien: The official history of the United Kingdom, according to the Home Office. (Essay) The British naturalization manual -- like the U.S., the Brits. need to revise their conventional history. Interesting & not paywalled.

Daniel Johnson. A love letter to Berlin: Why we fancy a Rheinland model. Cause they're rule-driven, of course. Sounds like Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One: Lessons: Lessons for America from 1979. Review of: John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Society. Interesting that the author of the essay on the British naturalization manual is a naturalized German. Potentially another example of "Shame Praise" described in the History reviews.

Jane Robinson. Out in the cold: The wasteful exclusion of women from roles in the global economy. Review of: Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A history of working motherhood in modern Britain and Linda Scott, The Double X Economy: the Epic Potential of Empowering Women.

Travel:

Oliver Balch. City of hidden abundance: An exercise in exhuming the past and probing the lost. Review of Taran Khan, Shadow City: a Woman walks Kabul.

The physiological impact of bookstores. Is this the secret of Amazon's success?:

Mike Vago. Gizmodo, 08/02/2020. Do bookstores make you poop? The Japanese have a theory. Or maybe reading on the toilet creates an association with some people when in the presence of books and magazines (explored in the column).

The economy, publishing, and fact-checking:

Emma Copley Eisenberg. Esquire, 08/26/2020: Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing. Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It?.

On the current state of Western religion:

Peter Harrison. LARB, 09/02/2020: Enchanting Disenchantment. Review of: Alex Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. On the same date, LARB published an essay by Alex Ryrie, The Cross and the Swastika.

Although the first half of this article is about the publishing process for English language versions of Murakami, Karashima does get around to dealing with translation as such (as a linguistic process) in the second half.

David Karashima. LitHub, 09/02/2020: Inside the Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel. Focus is on the translation process of Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . The article is an excerpt from Karashima's Who We're Reading When We Read Murakami.

Reinhart Koselleck (d. 2006) was a German philosopher of history who does not have many of his writings available in English. One of the few translations is his Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, a collection of essays translated and edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann in 2018. Aeon has posted Hoffmann's introduction to Koselleck's work that may be of interest.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Aeon, 09/01/2020: Repetition and Rupture. Reminds me of a professor I once had many years ago.

A couple of interesting lists that came up recently:

Emily Temple. LitHub, 09/09/2020: 11 Great Books You Probably Haven’t Read (But Should). Ignore the implied "ought" & see if there's something worth exploring. "The Literary Hub Staff Recommends Their Undersung Favorites."

E. Foley and B. Coates. The Guardian, 09/09/2020: Top 10 goddesses in fiction. Part of the authors' publicity campaign for their book ​You Goddess! Lessons in Being Legendary from Awesome Immortals.

Latest TLS, 09/11/2020, no. 6128. Really very few reviews, essays, or notices that caught my interest this week.

The new Martin Amis book (Inside Story) does not sound like one of his better efforts.

The review essay on 2 new books on Donald Trump and the election (and featured on the issue's online version) is by the "Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of News Corp", so I suspect it's pretty Establishment.

Two books on old guard poets by old guard reviewers, one on Robert Conquest by Lachlan Mackinnon, and one on Philip Larkin by Clive James.

A review of a new book on William James that sounds like a self-help manual: John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Four longer reviews worth bookmarking:

Eric Foner. His own man: John F. Kennedy’s path to the White House. Review of: Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of age in the American century, 1917–1956. Foner is the doyen of Reconstruction historians, so the following (harrowing) review echoes some of the post-Reconstruction nightmares the U.S. is trying to come to terms with, but in South Africa:

Damon Galgut. Murder as a way of life: The story of a terrible crime and its confused aftermath. Review of: Andrew Harding, These Are Not Gentle People: Two dead men. Forty suspects. The trial that broke a small South African town. (To be published in the U.S. in October 2020)

Imogen Russell Williams. Dumas père and Bumblebear: On Black and Asian British authors who deserve to be much better known. This review essay TLS categorizes as on Children's Literature.

An omnibus review of books on Northern Ireland:

Richard English. Alternative Ulsters: Ways of looking at the Troubles after half a century. Review of: Malachi O’Doherty, Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the struggle for change in Northern Ireland -- Gearóid Ó Faoleán, A Broad Church: The Provisional IRA in the Republic of Ireland 1969–1980 -- Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland 3 v.: 1. Colonialism – The shackles of the state and hereditary animosities -- 2. Control – The Second Protestant Ascendancy and the Irish State -- 3. Consociation and Confederation – From antagonism to accommodation?

Daisy Ashford wrote a memorable comic novel, The Young Visiters, at the age of nine. It's still in print. This is from the Public Books B-sides feature, spotlighting less well known works from the past.

Caleb Crain. Public Books, 09/10/2020: B-Sides: Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters.

Two (now 3)* reviews of Alex Ross's new book on Richard Wagner, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music:

Peter Conrad. The Guardian, 09/06/2020: Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross – review.

Olivia Giovetti. LitHub, 09/10/2020: Our Idea of Wagner Tells Us More About Ourselves Than About Him.

Excerpt from the book from The New Yorker (may be locked to non-subscribers by now):

Alex Ross. The New Yorker, 08/24/2020: How Wagner Shaped Hollywood.

*Addendum:

Tim Riley. LARB, 09/15/2020: The Gigantor of Art.

Two takes on War and Peace, the isolation reading par excellance:

John Maher. LitHub, 09/11/2020: Why I Walked Away From War and Peace… Forever.

Richard Hughes Gibson. Hedgehog Review, 09/02/2020: Tortoises and Tigers: The Pleasures of a Long Read {Read because you enjoy it, not to seek parallels to the present}.

Another list, World Literature Department:

Aruni Kashyap. 09/10/2020: 15 Modern Indian Classics in Translation. "Instead of books written in colonial English, try these works that originated in one of India's 22 other languages."

Two from crimereads on mild-mannered crime fiction authors:

Neil Nyren. crimereads, 09/11/2020: Alexander McCall Smith: A Crime Reader Guide to the Classics. "Exploring the vast, big-hearted world of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency—and a truly prolific career."

Olivia Rutigliano. crimereads, 09/11/2020: Eleanor Roosevelt's Son Authored Twenty Mysteries in Which His Mother Solves Murders. Elliott Roosevelt is his name. "The presidential mystery series you never knew you needed."

If you've ever visited The Strand, mecca of reviewers' copies and one of the last surviving second-hand bookshops in NY, this might be of interest:

Brendan O'Connor. The Baffler, 09/11/2020: Hanging by a Strand. "Worker dissent brews at an iconic New York bookstore."

Living after and living with the dead:

Jason M. Wirth. LARB, 09/11/2020: So Close and Yet So Far. Review of: Hans Ruin, Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness.

How should secular liberals relate to right wing evangelicals?"

Peter Capretto. LARB, 09/12/2020: Nobody Cares: The Trap of Empathizing with the Religious Right. Review of: John W. Compton, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors.

Two views on Sigrid Nunez's new novel, What Are You Going Through?:

Naomi Elis. Electric Literature, 09/11/2020: Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through” Asks What We Owe to Other People.

Merve Emre. The New Yorker, 09/07/2020: The Injustices of Aging. "The women in Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel confront the indignities of their declining years."

Ross Chambers' Loiterature inspires an essay on the topic by Amir Ahmadi Arian with such exemplars as The Decameron and The Arabian Nights

Amir Ahmadi Arian. Electric Literature, 09/03/2020: It’s Time for the Slow, Aimless Novel to Get Its Due. The title of the essay is misleading, since his two examples most readers would not consider to be novels. Chambers' original example of the genre is Tristram Shandy, by the way.

Political novels that still resonate:

John Williams, NYT, 09/11/2020: Stories of Then That Still Hold Up Now.

Margaret Atwood recommends: Klaus Mann, Mephisto.

Héctor Tobar recomends: Miguel Ángel Asturias, El Señor Presidente.

Thomas Mallon recommends: Gore Vidal, 1876.

Brenda Wineapple recommends: Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.

A list of books about doomed love. The twist: the author of the list is a poet, and most of the recommendations are poetry collections:

Eleanor Boudreau. Electric Literature, 09/14/2020: 10 Books about Doomed Love.

One of the weirder essays from crimereads.com. "The peculiar marginalia of Lt. Gen. Coote Synge-Hutchinson."

Curtis Evans. 09/14/2020: 19th century reading habits come to light via delightful comments scrawled in the margins of a crime novel.

Two recent translations of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are reviewed:

Lorna Scott Fox. The Baffler, 09/14/2020: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave.

PS: translation #1 by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson; #2 by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux.

Another review of the two translations:

Tal Goldfajn. LARB, 09/22/2020: “The Greatest Defect of This Book Is You, Reader”: On Two Translations of Machado de Assis’s “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”.

In defense of Thomas Pynchon's unpopular Vineland:

Peter Coviello. Boston Review, 09/11/2020: The Novel and the Secret Police.

A big fan of Agatha Christie but not a big fan of Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10; still, this review makes her latest sound interesting:

Maureen Corrigan. WaPo, 09/07/2020: Ruth Ware’s ingenious ‘One by One’ pays homage to Agatha Christie’s 'And Then There Were None’.

Booker Prize shortlist:

Emily Temple. LitHub, 09/15/2020: The Booker Prize shortlist includes four debut novels and zero novels by Hilary Mantel.

Alex Marshall. NYT, 09/15/2020: Debut Novelists and Women Dominate Booker Prize Shortlist.

Addendum: more from Alex Marshall on the nuts and bolts of judging the Bookers: How to Judge the Booker Prize in a Pandemic. "Five judges, each with 162 books to read, are determining one of the world’s best-known literary awards in an unusual year."

Learn about cryptocurrency:

David Birch, interviewer Bernard King. FiveBooks, 09/14/2020: The best books on Cryptocurrency.

University of Chicago English Department announcement for 2020/2021:

Faculty Statement (July 2020). "For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods."

Books, babies, & inappropriate metaphors:

Ayden Leroux. LitHub, 09/15/2020: In Case You Need Reminding, a Book is Not a Baby.

e-Books, publishers, and libraries:

Jennie Rothschild; anonymous interviewer. 09/06/2020, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Hold On, eBooks Cost HOW Much? The Inconvenient Truth About Library eCollections.

Addendum. With all the money publishers accumulate from renting e-books to libraries (resulting in layoffs, shorter hours, and long queues), they are able to afford ...

Alison Flood. Story of ‘bloodthirsty unicorns’ brings debut author record publishing deal. "Annabel Steadman’s fantasy series Skandar and the Unicorn Thief has won a seven-figure book contract, with film rights also sold to Sony Pictures."

Books & sentimental ties:

Seth Greenland. LitHub, 09/15/2020: In a Family of Readers, Packing Up My Late Father’s Library Was Hardest of All. (Excerpt from: A Kingdom of Tender Colors: A Memoir of Comedy, Survival, and Love.

Grumbling about literature reviewing from The Critic:

"Secret Author." The Critic, 09/2020: Who let the dons out?. "Leave literary reviews to reviewers rather than score-settling academics."

"Secret Author." The Critic, 04/2020: Who holds the power? "Literary reputations are made and broken by a self-appointed clique of bien pensant liberal intellectuals."

Scribble, scribble, Mr. Baxter:

Mike Harvkey. The Millions, 09/14/2020: Writing, Always Writing: On Charles Baxter, Craft, and Aging. On the occasion of the writing teacher's new novel, The Sun Collective.

A critique of "the natural:"

Mark Trecka. LARB, 09/16/2020: The Nature Scam. Review of: Alan Levinovitz, Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.

New books in this week's TLS, Sept. 18, 2020, no. 6129:

Music:

Ramachandra Guha. Giving the West the best: The great exponent of Indian classical music who never dumbed down his art. Review of: Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The life and music of Ravi Shankar.

Aida Amoako. A distinct lack of harmony: Music and morality. Review of: William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts. On “the perils of tethering personhood to music”.

Natural history and Civilization:

Andrew Harvey. Deep like the rivers: Our changing relationship with ancient watercourses. Review of: Laurence C. Smith, Rivers of Power: How a natural force raised kingdoms, destroyed civilizations, and shapes our world. Karl Wittfogel redux?

Arabic language studies:

Robert Irwin. Catching hares in the desert: The manifold obstacles to mastering Arabic. Review of: Robert Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe, 1505-1624).

Mingyuan Hu. Civilité, not laïcité: The reception of Arabic in France today. Review of: Jack Lang, La langue arabe: trésor de France.

U.S. Politics and Economics:

Anne Nelson. The rich and the rest: ‘The dark side of meritocracy’ in America today. Review of: David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark money and the science of deception -- Christopher Leonard, Kochland: The secret history of Koch industries and corporate power in America -- Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes: Lessons in the pursuit of excellence -- Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of the Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

What next? For those who didn't like the last episode of Lost:

John Barton. The suite hereafter: Airy appointments, apocalyptic waiting rooms and post-mortem punishments. Review of: Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife.

Academic Life and the Jews:

Krishan Kumar. Exit, Pole: A celebrated intellectual’s mistreatment in his own country. Review of: Izabela Wagner, Bauman: A Biography. (Zygmunt Bauman's best known book was: Modernity and the Holocaust. TLS also has an excerpt from one of Bauman's contributions: An edited review by Zygmunt Bauman of In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An essay on Max Weber’s protestant ethic thesis by Gordon Marshall and Max Weber by Frank Parkin, first published on July 2, 1982).

Tom Sperlinger. Platform alterations: Is there a crisis of antisemitism in higher education?. Review of: Kenneth S. Stern, The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine campus debate.

Brief takes on Bibliography:

Reviews of: Martin Latham, The Bookseller's Tale and Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible.

Mountaineering and Modernity:

Alan Mcnee. Social climbers: How mountaineering became a leisure activity. Review of: Cities, Mountains, and Being Modern in Fin-de-Siecle England and Germany.

and finally, on an historical example of anti-science in a brief review of Mario Livio, Galileo and the Science Deniers.

Thanks for this. Enjoying reading the articles.

You're welcome.

Finished his absorbing Kansas City Lightning this year. Looks like his life of Charlie Parker will go unfinished.

Sam Roberts. NYT, 09/16/2020: Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74.

Addendum. Another obituary:

Ethan Iverson. NPR, 09/16/2020: Stanley Crouch, Towering Jazz Critic, Dead At 74.

Iggy Pop on Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

E.J. Hutchinson. The University Bookman, 09/13/2020: Caesar Still Lives.

An obituary for another Black author:

Jon Tattrie. CBC News, 09/16/2020: The extraordinary inner world of Charles R. Saunders, father of Black 'sword and soul'.

The axes of fiction in graph form:

Lincoln Michel. LitHub, 09/17/2020: Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate.

Celebrating the late Randall Kenan:

Marco Roth. N+1, 09/01/2020: On Randall Kenan, 1963–2020.

Omari Weekes & Elias Rodriques. LitHub, 09/16/2020: A Close Reading of Randall Kenan, Who Paid Rare Attention to Black Complexity.

LARB interviews SF writer Robert Silverberg:

Robert Silverberg, interviewer Rob Latham. LARB, 09/18/2020: Man in the Maze: A Conversation with Robert Silverberg.

Latham also wrote about Silverberg in 2019:

Robert Latham. LARB, 03/23/2019: Temporal Turmoil: The Time Travel Stories of Robert Silverberg.

A list of essay collections to explore:

Caryl Page. LitHub, 09/18/2020: Moving Through Books and Books That Move Us.

"Lately I’ve been reveling in the heat of nonfiction that provokes engagement, either via the physical experience of reading a piece or as the outcome of having read it. I’m interested in essays that motivate, transform, or rouse. The following books ask us to collaborate with them in more than ordinary ways. Some require a reader to shift the way they orient a text, others include interviews, images, or artwork that inspire further interactions with a place or community. Many of these collections incorporate ekphrastic, somatic, or documentary techniques. Some shift our experience of time by asking us to traffic in new orders, tempos, or formats."

Norton has just published The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.

Review: Parul Sehgal. NYT, 09/15/2020: A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde.

From editor Roxane Gay's introduction:

Roxane Gay. Paris Review, 09/17/2020: The Legacy of Audre Lorde.

The biography of Marvel Comics illustrator Jack Kirby -- in comic book (ahem, graphic novel) form:

Ed Park. NYT, 09/17/2020: Revisiting the ‘Violent Ballets’ of Jack Kirby. Review of: Tom Scioli, Jack Kirby: the Epic Life of the King of Comics.

The Millions has an excerpt from the book under review:

Calvin Reid. The Millions, 06/26/2020: Panel Mania: ‘Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics’.

Rare books stolen from a London warehouse recovered in Romania.

Archie Bland. The Guardian, 09/18/2020: Rare books stolen in London heist found under floor in Romania.

National Book Award longlist:

John Williams. NYT, 09/18/2020: National Book Awards Names 2020 Nominees.

"Fiction contenders include Brit Bennett, the author of “The Vanishing Half”; Randall Kenan, a beloved writer who died in August; and Douglas Stuart, a debut novelist who is also a Booker Prize finalist."

Looks like I overlooked the winner of the International Booker Prize in late August:

Alex Marshall. NYT, 08/26/2020: Dark Portrait of a Childhood Wins International Booker Prize.

"The Discomfort of Evening, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, was a best seller in the Netherlands and left critics in Britain shaken but impressed."

Having just viewed the documentary Jimi Hendrix, this review caught my interest:

James Parker. The Atlantic, 09/18/2020: How Jimi Hendrix’s London Years Changed Music. Review of: Philip Norman, Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix.

Profile of Madeline MacIntosh, head of Penguin Random House, and how the publishing house prepared for the pandemic:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 09/19/2020: Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers.

Two more author obituaries:

Robert D. McFadden. NYT, 09/18/2020: Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81. "He chronicled Stalin’s tyrannies and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he was an enthusiastic admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev."

Steven Kurutz. NYT, 09/18/2020: Winston Groom, Author of ‘Forrest Gump,’ Dies at 77. "He wrote the 1986 novel that inspired the Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks. Another book was a finalist for a Pulitzer." (Conversations with the Enemy (1983) was a non-fiction Pulitzer finalist)

On the recent revival of interest in the SF fiction of Octavia Butler:

Rebecca Onion. Slate, 09/19/2020: Turning to Octavia Butler’s Apocalypse Fiction Right Now.

A list of books about RBG:

Barbara VanDenburgh. USA Today, 09/18/2020: 'I Dissent': Six books to read right now about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

See also (going back aways):

Dahlia Lithwick. The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2019: The Irony of Modern Feminism’s Obsession With Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Emily Temple. LitHub, 09/21/2020: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on how Vladimir Nabokov influenced her writing.

Well, I liked the fast food at Woolworth's:

Michael Friedrich. The Baffler, 09/21/2020: One Man’s Trash. Review of: Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America and Luke Geddes, Heart of Junk.

No one (today) has Woloson's Crap in LT, but she does have 2 other books in LT that reflect her scholarly interests: Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America and In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression.

An excerpt from her new book: LitHub, 09/21/2020: The Long Golden Age of Useless, American Crap.

Cass Sunstein reviewing a biography of Stan Lee. Beat that!:

Cass R. Sunstein. LARB, 09/21/2020: Marvelous Belief. Review of: Liel Leibovitz, Stan Lee: A Life in Comics.

"In terms of cultural impact, was Lee the most important writer of the last 60 years? You could make the argument."

On asexuality:

Kirin McCrory: Electric Literature, 09/21/2020: Why Aren’t There More Books About Asexuals?. Review of: Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

An excerpt from Peter Brooks' Balzac's Lives:

Peter Brooks. LitHub, 09/23/2020: What Is So Special About Balzac’s Thousands of Characters?.

It's Wednesday afternoon here on the East Coast, so here's this week's TLS, Sept. 25, 2020, no. 6130:

On old crime fiction authors, plus new crime fiction:

Laura Thompson. Taken at the flood: How Agatha Christie moved with her times. (Essay)

Rohan Maitzen. Murder, morals and motives: P. D. James at 100. (Essay)

Michael Carlson. Shadows of the future: The conclusion to Ragnar Jónasson's form-bending crime trilogy. Review of: Ragnar Jónasson, translator, Victoria Cribb, The Mist. The trilogy features Icelandic detective Hulda Hermannsdóttiragnar, the two earlier novels are The Island (2019) and The Darkness; the trilogy is Hidden Iceland.

The People's Republic's Control Issues:

Isabel Hilton. Silenced majority: Lights out for Hong Kong. Review of: Joshua Wong with Jason Y. Ng, Unfree Speech: The threat to global democracy and why we must act, now -- Antony Dapiran, City On Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong -- Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.

Nick Holdstock. Terror and territory: China’s treatment of Uighur culture and identity. Review of: Sean Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s internal campaign against a Muslim minority.

Yvonne Yevan Yu. Books under review: Searching Hong Kong for ‘Dangerous Reading’. (Essay)

Eurocentric themes:

Alastair Hamilton. Faithful portraits?: European views of Muhammad. Review of: John V. Tolan, Faces of Muhammad: Western perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to today.

Gerald Maclean. Echoes of empire: The case against a Eurocentric view of modern history. Review of: Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow: The Ottoman sultan who shaped the modern world.

Literature Miscellaneous:

Muireann Maguire. Variously unhappy: A lot of lesser-known Chekhov. Review of: Anton Chekhov, translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Fifty-Two Stories.

Dinah Birch. To hell and goodness: Marilynne Robinson’s wandering, loyal souls in Jack. Review of: Marilynne Robinson, Jack: A Novel.

Fashion:

Nicola Shulman. The looks of love: Fashion and its fickle friendships. Review of: André Leon Talley, The Chiffon Trenches.

Brief Takes:

A history of oak, sacred almost everywhere it grows. Short review of: James Canton, The Oak Papers.

Other items that did not catch my interest include: a review of a Swedish family history novel which the reviewer liked but who succeeded at making it seem dull -- biography of a ghostbuster in post-World War I Britain -- books on obscure Cold War spies in Britain -- the new commentator for the NB column on the Booker Prize (see also the letters to the editor about former NB columnist J.B.)

A list of obscure British & American crime fiction authors & a representative novel of each. Their works might turn up in second hand bookstores. Haven't looked it up, but it would be interesting to know if any one of these is missing in Barzun and Taylor's Catalogue of Crime:

Martin Edwards. crimereads.com, 09/23/2020: Ten Golden Age Detective Novelists Who Deserve to be Better Known.

A rollcall of pre-diversity authors:

Virgil Markham -- Marie Belloc Lowndes -- Clifford Witting -- C.H.B. Kitchin -- Rupert Penny -- Milward Kennedy -- H.C. Bailey -- C. Daly King -- Elisabeth Sanxay Holding -- Henry Wade.

Only Henry Wade rings an attenuated bell with me. By the way, Golden Age is the period between the two World Wars.

The Dewey Decimal system, as most catalogers know, is a classification system replete with the Western-centric prejudices of the day. While it has been revised for a more diverse clientele, it may still have some of the lingering effects of its originator. News from Canada:

Winston Szeto. CBC news, 09/16/2020: B.C. First Nations council is moving to Indigenous-developed library system. "Dewey decimal classification represents colonial worldview, says Carrier Sekani Tribal Council archivist."

Harold Evans, newspaperman, former head of Random House, author of The American Century and other books, has died:

Robert D. McFadden. NYT, 09/21/2020: Harold Evans, Crusading Newspaperman With a Second Act, Dies at 92.

Addendum. Evans' publisher parties.

Jacob Bernstein. NYT, 09/28/2020: Harry Evans, Potentate of Print, Was Also a Social Butterfly.

On biographies of Lincoln:

Adam Gopnick. The New Yorker, 09/21/2020: Why We Keep Reinventing Lincoln.

Eileen was my introduction to Ottessa Moshfegh; here's an article from a different perspective -- the toilet seat -- on its unusual protagonist -- plus Philip Roth's Letting Go -- haven't read that one -- seen from the same throne:

Jessica Gross. LitHub, 09/24/2020: A Brief (But Not Too) History of Literary Constipation.

The Age of Innocence and the American century:

Cameron Laux. bbc.com/culture, 09/23/2020: The Age of Innocence: How a US classic defined its era.

The New York Times Bestseller Lists (the Making of):

"Best-Sellers Lists Staff." NYT, 09/23/2020: A Lot of Data and a Little Singing: How The Times’s Best-Seller List Comes Together.

Two from crimereads:

Keith Roysdon. crimereads.com, 09/24/2020: A Brief History of the Juvenile Mysteries You Checked Out of the Library Eight at a Time. Sorry, my local library didn't shelve these; this garbage would ruin young minds. They did stock science-fiction though; Sputnik era.

Phililp K. Zimmerman. crimereads.com, 09/24/2020: The Philosopher and the Detectives: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Enduring Passion for Hard-Boiled Fiction. "Wittgenstein spent his life investigating the mysteries of language. His inspiration came from pulp magazines."

A celebration of Ornette Coleman incorporated into a review of a new biography:

Kathelin Gray. LARB, 09/24/2020: Sound Territory: The Genius of Ornette Coleman. Review of: Maria Golia, Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure.

Two new items from Public Books:

Max Holleran. Public Books, 09/24/2020: The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street at 100.

Kim Stanley Robinson, John Plotz (interviewer): The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works.

A list of novels intended to create discomfort, by the author of Sensation Machines:

Adam Wilson. Electric Literature, 09/24/2020: 7 Satirical Novels About Social Upheaval. I've never heard of Mark Doten's Trump Sky Alpha, but the image of "our current president as he floats over America in an “ultraluxury zeppelin”, dropping nukes left and right" has a certain metaphorical zing.

The relevance today of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

Anna Vodicka. Electric Literature, 09/24/2020: The Year the Bridges Failed.

An excerpt from Scott Berkun's How Design Makes the World:

Scott Berkun. Longreads, 09/2020: The Powerful Decide. "What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power."

Western philosophy's underlying racism:

Avram Alpert. Aeon, 09/24/2020: Philosophy’s systemic racism.

This is more than a review of Orlando Patterson's new book, The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, it is a survey of the sociologist, novelist, and Jamaican government adviser's thought and career, and some of the dilemmas of postcolonialism:

Adom Getachew. The Nation, 09/21/2020: The Promise of Freedom: Orlando Patterson’s modern world.

Getting to know Shakespeare's sonnets:

Scott Newstock interviewed by Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 09/23/2020: The best books on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The new memoir by David Chang -- watched a couple of his shows on Netflix:

Elisabeth Egan. NYT Book Review, 09/24/2020: David Chang’s Memoir, ‘Eat a Peach,’ Provides Food for Thought.

On reading J.K Rowling's new book, Troubled Blood, with her unorthodox opinions on trans in the background:

Alyssa Rosenberg. WaPo, 09/24/2020: There has never been a better time to read J.K. Rowling’s books.

Constance Grady. Vox, 09/23/2020: Troubled Blood sees J.K. Rowling at the mercy of all her worst impulses.

I got into the Cormoran Strike series from watching the TV version on Showtime cable. Read and enjoyed all the other ones, of which Troubled Blood is the latest, though starting out I don't think I realized they were by JKR. She writes the Strike series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith; don't know if the name has any significance. The previous one, Lethal White, I liked quite a bit. Found the Harry Potter series to be quite readable, but since it wasn't part of my childhood, I don't have the same feelings as younger generations.

Recently finished The Three Body Problem; will probably read the rest of the trilogy, though not high priority -- some disappointing news about author Liu Cixin:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 09/25/2020: Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments. "Five US senators have written to question plans to adapt The Three-Body Problem after its author voiced support for China’s mass internments in Xinjiang."

Last year's New Yorker article:

Jiayang Fan. The New Yorker, 06/17/2020: Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds.

The art critic Leo Steinberg's essays have been published posthumously; the latest is reviewed in Spectator:

Eric Gibson. Spectator, 09/21/2020: The eyes have it. Review of Leo Steinberg, editor Sheila Schwartz, Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays.

I believe the only Steinberg I've read is Other Criteria, which was very good, but the book under review is in his wheelhouse.

A list of modern Iranian fiction writers to consider:

Niloufar Talebi. LitHub, 09/25/2020: 35 Essential Works of Fiction by Iranian Writers.

On Ali Smith's seasons quartet:

Jean Huets. The Millions, 09/25/2020: The Light and the Dark: On Ali Smith’s ‘Summer’.

On diversity in romance novels:

Rachelle Hampton. Slate, 09/25/2020: One Romance Novelist’s Fight for Diverse Love Stories.

Concerns about Audible from an author's perspective:

Cory Doctorow. Publishers Weekly, 9/18/2010: We Need to Talk About Audible

fivebooks.com's latest is on Shakespeare's sonnets:

Scott Newstock, interviewed by Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 09/23/2020: The best books on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The Helen Vendler book I'm aware of; I guess Stephen Booth is no longer go-to. Interested to see a new edition of the sonnets has come out that includes not just the standard 154 but all the sonnets in the plays: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare edited by Paul Edmundson and Stanley Wells. Newstock's recommendations also include collections of two poets responding, challenging, or rewriting the sonnets.

On the occasion of what would be Eileen Chang's 100th bday:

James Jiang. Sydney Review of Books, 09/29/2020: Love and Desolation: Remembering Eileen Chang.

Her introduction to U.S. English speakers was probably the New York Review Books Classics collections, Love in a Fallen City or Naked Earth.

About the creation of Jack Reacher of the popular thriller series:

Heather Martin. crimereads.com, 09/29/2020: The Evolution of Jack Reacher.

Martin is the author of: The Reacher Guy: A Biography of Lee Child.

Isabel Allende is on Oprah's radar, it seems.

Elena Nicolaou. O, the Oprah Magazine, 09/22/2020: Isabel Allende Opens Up About the Real People Who Inspired Her Epic Novels.

An interesting list from Electric Lit:

Matt Sandler. Electric Lit, 09/29/2020: 7 Books About Slavery and Abolition by Black 19th-Century Writers.

Sandler is the author of the recent The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery, and the list is heavily weighted toward poetry, but it turns up a Library of America title I wasn't aware of: American Anti-Slavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation.

The TLS issue for Oct. 2 is available online this afternoon of Sept. 30; will hold off until I start a new thread tomorrow for Oct-Dec 2020.

"Crickets everywhere!":

Michael Dirda. WaPo, 09/30/2020: When book storage is limited, people get desperate. Don’t make the mistakes I did.

Chinese alternatives to social and political equality:

Chang Che. LARB, 09/30/2020: Can Hierarchies Be Rescued? Review of: Daniel A. Bell, Wang Pei, Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World and Tongdong Bai, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case.

So, we're in Banned Books Week, Sept. 27-Oct. 3; the culture wars continue:

Banned and Challenged Books Website of the ALA Office of Intellectual freedom, 09/27/2020 (my best guess): Top 10 Banned Books of 2019 and Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019.

Ron Charles. WaPo, 09/28/2020: For Banned Books Week, I read the country’s 10 most challenged books. The gay penguins did not corrupt me.