Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2020-4

The last quarter of 2020, Oct-Dec.

Overlapping months, so I guess it's OK to repeat myself.

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.

TLS for Oct. 2, 2020, no. 6131:

Education (Featured cover items):

Joe Moran. What is a university now?: Why face-to-face teaching is still valuable in a digital age. (Essay)

Simon Jenkins. The new intolerance: On the rise of an authoritarian ideology ‘hostile to the rule of reason’. Review of: Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How universities made everything about race, gender, and identity – And why this harms everybody.

Self-Education:

Costica Bradatan. The fox and the hedgehog: Polymathy’s past and future. Review of: Peter Burke, The Polymath: A cultural history from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag.

Will Self. Self-regard: Some names are not ideal for vanity surfing. (Essay)

Movies:

Adam Mars-Jones. Fellini’s circus: Flashbacks, wind loops, breakthroughs: the impact and influence of 8½.

Black Lives:

Alan Forrest. A hero for our times: The ambiguous legacy of Toussaint Louverture. Review of: Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The epic life of Toussaint Louverture.

Manisha Sinha. From plantation to jail: Exploring the connection between slavery and Black mass incarceration. Review of: Jeff Forret, Williams' Gang: A notorious slave trader and his cargo of Black convicts and W. Caleb McDaniel, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A true story of slavery and restitution in America.

Edward Kamau Brathwaite. From revolt to revolution: How Caribbean slaves fought for freedom. Edited review of Michael Craton's 1983 book Testing the Chains: Resistance to slavery in the British West Indies. "The TLS archive is available free online to subscribers."

Sex, Romance, Society:

Daphne Merkin. When the bloom is off the rose: Romance in old age. Review of: Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love.

Mary Beard. Assault and flattery: The art of seduction. Review of: Clement Knox, Strange Antics: A History of Seduction.

Stephanie Burt. We are who we say we are: Finding identity and community beyond gender norms. Review of: Mark Gevisser, The Pink Line: The World's Queer Frontiers and Barry Reay, Trans America: A Counter-History.

Andrew Scull. Borrowed time: Stealing an idea about adulthood. Review of: Susanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The feminist origins of a chauvinist cliché. Coincidentally, published around the time of Gail Sheehy's recent death.

Literary Criticism:

Michael Gorra. The rules of the game: Turning criticism into a narrative act. (Essay) On reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady and the point of literary criticism. Gorra is the author of, among others, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece and the recent The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.

Covid and Culture:

Charles Powell. Sleeping sickness: Will Covid-19 transform democracies in the long term?. Review of: John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Wake Up Call: Why the pandemic has exposed the weakness of the West – and how to fix it.

Michael La Pointe. Out of touch and famous: The literature of lockdown. Review of: Ilan Stavans, editor, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from around the world on the Covid-19 pandemic -- Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, editors, Seen From Here: Writing in the Lockdown -- Denise Rose Hansen, editor, Tools for Extinction -- Zadie Smith, Intimations.

For fans of the Palliser novels, the diary of a latter-day Glencora:

Nicola Shulman. Payback time: Dispatches from a ‘very particular, narrow tribe of Britain’. Review of Sasha Swire, Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power. “To all the Cameroons for not mentioning me or barely mentioning me in their memoirs”, she writes, “– this is payback!”

An excerpt from The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book by its editor:

James Raven. LitHub, 10/01/2020: What Exactly Do We Mean By a Book?.

"A book has characters, letters and words and sometimes images. It can be read, but does it need to have a cover and a spine—and does it need to have what we think of as “pages”?" Don't think he mentions audiobooks.

Two from today's LARB:

Andru Okun. LARB, 10/01/2020: Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future". Review of: Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.

Katie Yee. LARB, 10/01/2020: The Artist or the Emperor? Cultural Appropriation and Children’s Classics.

Two from The New Yorker Oct. 5 issue:

Louis Menand. The New Yorker, 10/05/2020: How to Misread Jane Austen. "The novelist was a keen observer of her time. Now readers want to make her a mirror of our own."

Casey Cep. New Yorker, 10/05/2020: Marilynne Robinson's Essential American Stories. "The author of Housekeeping, Gilead, and, now, Jack looks to history not just for the origins of America’s, ailments but for their remedy, too.'

And, what the editor of The New Yorker is reading, in the By the Book series:

David Remnick. NYT, 10/01/2020: How Bob Dylan Turned David Remnick on to Serious Reading.

Re: Marilynne Robinson, see also: Hermione Lee. New York Review of Books, 10/22/20: Sympathy for the Devil. Review of Robinson's Jack.

Added another review of Robinson's new book at >103 featherbear:

A new B-Side from Public Books:

Nicholas Bredie. Public Books, 10/01/2020: Latife Tenkin's Berji Kristin.

Book reviews from the Oct. issue of Literary Review that caught my eye:

Jeremy Treglown. Literary Review, 10/2020: The Long Road to Leopoldstadt. Review of: Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life.

Robin Simon. Literary Review, 10/2020: He Painted It Black. Review of: Janis A. Tomlinson, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist.

Darrin M. McMahon. Literary Review, 10/2020: With a Nudge & a Wink. Review of: John Dickie, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World.

Jonathan Ree. Literary Review, 10/2020: The Poetry of Reason. Review of: Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die.

Lucy Lethbridge. Literary Review, 10/2020: The Woolworths Poltergeist. Review of: Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story from 1930s England.

Recommendations from Vox's literature critic:

Constance Grady. Vox, 10/01/2020: Existential mysteries to read over the long winter to come. "Vox’s book critic recommends books to fit your very specific mood."

PS: She doesn't restrict her recommendations to crime fiction.

The library as "sliding door."

Karen Joy Fowler. NYT, 09/29/2020: In ‘The Midnight Library,’ Books Offer Transport to Different Lives. Review of: Matt Haig, The Midnight Library.

Considering a collection of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz's daguerreotypes of slaves, a series intended to support a racist theory of black origins:

Parul Sehgal. NYT, 10/01/2020 update. The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing. An essay on To Make Their Own Way in the World: the Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis.

"To sell a book in a store involves conversation, intuition, and deliberation. It involves reading body language and movement—in short, it’s a human enterprise. Selling a book online is purely transactional: A customer may come to that book through your urging, but the complexities and, really, the beauty of that transaction are flattened. You find the book on the shelf and ship it off. The transaction is done."

Stephen Sparks. The Believer, 10/01/2020: Bookselling in the End Times…Again.

"I read Karen Russell’s story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” in a fiction workshop, and the story stayed in my consciousness long after I’d moved to other readings. In that story, a group of werewolves are brought to a school to learn how to be human women. The werewolves felt pressure from the human nuns to erase their werewolf selves; the pressure to assimilate from the overseeing class, even as it was wrapped up in metaphor, resonated with me. I had read speculative fiction before, but never stories that negotiated ideas of identity so urgently and efficiently."

Ross Showalter. Electric Lit, 10/01/2020: Writing Fantasy Lets Me Show the Whole Truth of Disability.

J.G. Frazer's The Golden Bough and Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 10/02/2020: Stories in Formaldehyde: The Strange Pleasures of Taxonomizing Plot.

An excerpt from Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, a work of criticism and autobiography by Daniel Mendelsohn, on three critics of exile: Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W.G. Sebald. Here he considers the author of The Rings of Saturn:

Daniel Mendelsohn. Paris Review, 10/01/2020: The Rings of Sebald.

Suspicious minds. A fascinating article on private investigators, in a review of two books:

Patrick Radden Keefe. The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 2020: Why Private Eyes Are Everywhere Now. Article/review of: Tyler Maroney, The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence is Shaping the World and Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World. Also mentioned, Poe's Auguste Dupin, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, Harvey Weinstein's lawyers in Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, and Eamon Javers, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.

P.S. Check out Keefe on Meek Mill's jail sentence, and what the PI's discovered.

Related article:

Phil Bronstein. Alta, 09/29/2020: Last Call for Gumshoes. "For nearly 50 years, a tight-knit group of San Francisco private eyes—intellectual, swashbuckling, anti-authority lefties—practiced their craft in the pursuit of truth and, hopefully, justice."

Maybe the book article catch of the week:

Edward Brooke-Hitching, interviewer Alison Flood. The Guardian, 10/01/2020: From cut-out confessions to cheese pages: browse the world's strangest books. I mean, "605-page Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein"??

More about the Booker Shortlist selections:

Margaret Busby, interviewer Cal Flyn. fivebooks.com, 10/02/2020: The Best Fiction of 2020: The Booker Prize Shortlist.

Diane Cook, The New Wilderness -- Tsitsi Dagarembga, This Mournable Body: A Novel -- Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King -- Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar -- Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain: A Novel -- Brandon Taylor, Real Life: A Novel.

"“Science is boring. Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications ... behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data."

Joshua Rothman. The New Yorker, Sept. 28-Oct. 5, 2020: How Does Science Really Work? Article/review of: Michael Strevens, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science.

It's true about mad scientists.

John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and oceanography; Log from the Sea of Cortez:

Anne Mathews. The American Spectator, 10/01/2020: Mavericks at Sea.

Old movies and Anna Karenina -- two reviews from LARB:

Woody Haut. LARB, 10/04/2020: An Obscure Road to Hollywood. Review of: Philippe Garnier, Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s.

Janet Fitch. LARB, 10/04/2020: Between Irritation and Oyster: On Bob Blaisdell’s “Creating Anna Karenina”.

Not a book review as such; an appreciation of one long form jazz critic by another.

Ted Gioia. City Journal, summer 2020: The True Poet of Jazz: Legendary New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett captured the magic of the music.

Some of Balliett's books in LT include: Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001 -- American Singers: Twenty-seven Portraits in Song -- Dinosaurs In the Morning: 41 Pieces on Jazz -- American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz. Many of his books seem to be collectors' items in Amazon.

On John Brown in James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, the Showtime series based on it premiering today, and Brown's role and image in American history:

William Nash. The Conversation, 10/02/2020: In ‘The Good Lord Bird,’ a new version of John Brown rides in at a crucial moment in US history.

A somewhat skeptical review of a new book on the Vikings:

Eleanor Parker. History Today, 10/2020: Wishful Thinking: The tolerant and worryingly modern Vikings. Review of: Neil Price, The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

A footnote to Tocqueville's The Ancien Regime and the Revolution:

Jeremy Jennings. The Critic, 10/2020: Fear, loathing and revolution. Review of: Jon Elster, France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime.

Two fivebooks.com lists on timely topics:

William A. Pettigrew, interviewer Benedict King. fivebooks.com, 09/30/2020: The best books on The Slave Trade. The five books are:

Olaudah Equiano, editor Brycchan Carey, The Interesting Narrative (Oxford Classics ed. available Oct. 13); "The crucial thing about this book—and this is why I’ve listed it first—is that it gives you the lived experience of enslavement and it neatly pieces together pretty much every chapter in the story of the rise and fall of slavery, and it also covers the geography of the slave trade." -- Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery -- David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas -- Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 -- Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; "This is the most readable book of my choices. I would say this book is not only the best book on the slave trade, but among the best books on the United States. I mean, the depth of insight generated by this idea of the slavery paradox in the context of America is difficult to put limits on."

Pettigrew's recently published book: Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752.

Patrick Wright, interviewer Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 10/05/2020: The best books on Global Cultural Understanding: the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize. Wright's recommendations:

Hazel Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands -- Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent -- Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power -- Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (UK title: The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture -- Tanya Talaga, All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism.

New on The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB):

Sam Bliss. LARB, 10/06/2020: The Stories Michael Shellenberger Tells Us. Review of Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Robert Zaretsky. LARB, 10/06/2020: Charisma: Now You’ve Got It, Now You Don’t. Review of: David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. "It is impossible to read Men on Horseback, David A. Bell’s masterful account of charisma in modern history, without thinking about Men in Golf Carts."

A new biography of Jacques Derrida:

Julian Baggini. Prospect, 10/04/2020: Think Jacques Derrida was a charlatan? Look again. Review of Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps.

A quick run-through of books about Donald Trump:

Carlos Lozada. The Atlantic, 10/06/2020: 150 Books Show How the Trump Era Has Warped Our Brains.

Addendum. Review of Lozada's book:

Joe Klein. NYT, 10/06/2020: Does an Intellectual History of the Trump Era Exist? It Does Now. Review of: Carlos Lozada, What Were We Thinking?: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era and Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, Trump on Trial: The Investigation, Impeachment, Acquittal and Aftermath.

New edition of the modern Icelandic classic Independent People being issued by Everyman. Here's the introduction:

John Freeman. LitHub, 10/06/2020: How Halldór Laxness Brings the Heroic to the Everyday.

Prizes updates from LitHub:

Corinne Segal. LitHub, 10/06/2020: This year’s MacArthur fellows include six literary writers..

Rasheeda Saka. LitHub, 10/06/2020: Here are the finalists for the 2020 National Book Awards.

Addendum. More on the National Book Awards:

John Williams. NYT, 10/06/2020: National Book Awards Finalists Announced. Winners to be announced in November unless the Apocalypse.

"The antics in postwar Nordic children’s books left propaganda and prudery behind. We need this madcap spirit more than ever":

Richard W. Orange. Aeon, 10/06/2020: Pippi and the Moomins.

Kafka fragments:

Nathan Goldman. The Baffler, 10/07/2020: Kafka in Pieces. Review of: Franz Kafka, translator and editor, Michael Hofmann, The Lost Writings.

An Arabic Chaucer?:

Kevin Blankinship. Public Books, 10/07/2020: Surviving Hard Times with al-Hariri. Review of: al-Hariri, translator and editor Michael Cooperson, Impostures.

"In the 11th century, an aimless grifter named Abu Zayd al-Saruji was chased out of his native city of Saruj by the Crusaders. Like Odysseus, the fictional Abu Zayd is a man of many turns: he outfoxes a judge, mimics a preacher, fakes illnesses, cross-dresses like an old woman, and above all, dazzles audiences with rhetorical wizardry. But despite his crudity and lack of varnish, Zayd also has much to say about his time and those seemingly better than he: “This era is cursed, and, as you can see, unjust. Folly is prized and reason deemed a fault; and wealth is a ghost, albeit one that haunts the only wicked.”"

Pankaj Mishra and the progressive reading of (neo)liberalism, capitalism, racism, imperialism, and historiography. Two reviews of Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire

Frank Guan. Bookforum, Sept/Oct 2020: Among the Deceivers: Pankaj Mishra’s catalogue of Anglo-American mystifications. Quite disturbing.

Damon Linker. NYT, 10/06/2020: Pankaj Mishra Challenges America’s Self-Deceptions.

"We won’t accept policemen are corrupt because the thought of anarchy is intolerable."

Richard Ingrams. The Critic, Oct 2020: A tale of two stranglers. Being a review of: Peter Thorley, Inside 10 Rillington Place.

The latest TLS, 10/09/2020, no. 6132:

Two featured biography reviews:

John Stokes. Unstoppable Stoppard: The playwright’s luck, and how he made it. Review of: Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life.

Joshua Kendall. I blame the parents: Can Donald Trump’s past explain his behaviour?. Review of: John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir and Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man. I wonder if this "In Brief" review might also have some relevance: John Root, “Mussolini is always right”: What separates ordinary mistruths from fascist lies?. Review of: Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies.

For literature foodies:

Norma Clarke. Meat is metaphor: The British culinary empire came at a cost. Review of: Nicola Humble, The Literature of Food: An introduction from 1830 to present -- Jessica Martell, Farm to Form: Modernist literature and ecologies of food in the British Empire -- Debora R. Geis, Read My Plate: the Literature of Food -- J. Michelle Coghlan, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food.

The Deep State legend:

Lawrence Douglas. Paranoid politics: The malign myth of the American ‘Deep State’. Review of: David Rohde, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the truth about America’s ‘Deep State’.

Opera, Politics, and Culture:

Larry Wolff. Vision of an aesthetic utopia: Opera as ideological phenomenon: the power, influence and reach of Wagner, Review of: Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music.

Classic fiction:

Michael Lipkin. Beyond reason: Kleist’s modern eye. Review of: Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (New translation by Michael Hofmann) and The Marquise of O--- (New translation by: Nicholas Jacob).

Derwent May. Torchbearer of the historical novel: What Balzac, Goethe and Tolstoy owe to Walter Scott. 1962 "From the Archive" review of: Georg Lukacs, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, The Historical Novel.

In this week's NB column, M.C. eulogizes Derwent May (d. Sept. 26), author of Critical Times: The history of the ‘Times Literary Supplement’. M.C. also considers the estate of A. Conan Doyle, currently feuding with Netflix over its series Enola Holmes, based on the Nancy Springer books. Also an account of the term lalochezia, "the use of swearing to alleviate stress and frustration."

Crime fiction:

Ruth Scurr. It started in the library: John Banville kicks down the distinction between literary and crime fiction in Snow. Review of: John Banville/Benjamin Black, Snow.

M. John Harrison. Murder it wrote: Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'uneven-tempered' meta-mystery. Review of: Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands.

Tyler Sage. Murder and mayhem: Exploring the crime writing of Ray Bradbury. An "In Brief" review of: Ray Bradbury, Killer Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

World War II:

Julie V. Gottlieb. Not keeping calm: British morale and other myths. Review of: Allan Allport, Britain at Bay: The epic story of the Second World War: 1938–1941 -- Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, Editors, The Spirit of the Blitz: Home intelligence and British morale: September 1940–June 1941.

Ian Buruma. Let them eat tulip bulbs: The complex aftermath of Operation Market Garden. Review of: Ingrid de Zwarte, The Hunger Winter: Fighting famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–1945.

The Library of America has collected some of Richard Hofstadter's influential works. The review brings back memories of my Columbia days, though I never had a class with him. RH is not in particularly good odor amongst some progressives regarding his "liberal consensus" condemnation of populism; Heer offers a more complex reading:

Jeet Heer. The Nation, 10/05/2020: At Liberalism’s Crossroads: The vexed legacy of Richard Hofstadter. Review of: Richard Hofstadter, editor Sean Wilentz, Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965.

I really liked The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It and The Age of Reform; not sure if the new LOA volume includes these.

"Two campuses are halting diversity efforts in relation to the White House’s recent executive order against “divisive concepts” in federally funded programs.

"In a campus memo, the University of Iowa’s interim associate vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion, Liz Tovar, said, “Let us state unequivocally that diversity, equity and inclusion remain as core values within our institution.” However, she continued, “after consulting with multiple entities, and given the seriousness of the penalties for non-compliance with the order, which include the loss of federal funding, we are recommending that all units temporarily pause for a two-week period.”

"John A. Logan College in Illinois also suspended diversity events, including a Hispanic Heritage Month talk planned for next week."

Colleen Flaherty. Inside Higher Ed., 10/07/2020: Diversity Work, Interrupted.

A new way to learn typing.

John Biggs. Gizmodo, 10/07/2020: Learn to Type by Copying Literary Masters.

My typing weakness is using thumbs on my tablet and smart phone. Wondering if it would work with this?

American poet (whose name rhymes with click) gets Nobel Prize for Literature:

Alexandra Alter and Alex Marshall. NYT, 10/08/2020: Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature.

Addenda:

"Congratulations to Louise Glück, Yale adjunct professor of English & Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence, on winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature for her “unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”"--Yale University on Twitter.

Ron Charles. WaPo, 10/08/2020: Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Louise Glück.

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 10/08/2020: Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel prize in literature.

Fiona Sampson. The Guardian, 10/08/2020: Louise Glück: where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner.

Dwight Garner. NYT, 10/08/2020: Louise Glück, a Nobel Winner Whose Poems Have Abundant Intellect and Deep Feeling.

Some lines from Louise Glück, NYT, 10/08/2020.

Maynard Solomon, author of Beethoven and Mozart: A Life d. Sept. 28, age 90:

Anthony Tommasini. NYT, 10/08/2020: Maynard Solomon, Provocative Biographer of Composers, Dies at 90.

New book on nature vs. nurture -- or, nature vs. experience:

Robin Marantz Henig. NYT, 10/08/2020: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture, What Makes Us Ourselves?. Review of: David J. Linden, Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality.

Robert L. Moore's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine is a book I've never heard of, but seems to have been quite influential.

Tracy Clark Flory. Jezebel, 10/08/2020: King, Warrior, Magician, Revisionist: The Enduring 'Masculine' Book that Romanticizes Cro-Mags.

Anyone who disses F.R. Leavis can't be all off the mark, in my opinion:

Frances Wilson. The New Yorker, 10/08/2020: The D.H. Lawrence We Forgot.

The case for reading a Medieval best-seller (by a Medieval historian though):

John Marenbon. Aeon, 10/09/2020: Why read Boethius today?

The Consolation of Philosophy

"When entering a huge library—whether its rows of books are organized under a triumphant dome, or they’re encased within some sort of vaguely Scandinavian structure that’s all glass and light, or they simply line dusty back corridors—I must confess that I’m often overwhelmed with a massive surge of anxiety."

Ed Simon. The Millions, 10/09/2020: A Fraternity of Dreamers.

In my case, the experience of exploring the graduate collection of Columbia's Butler Library for the first time was awesome in a good way -- reading beyond the emphasis on entertainment which seemed to be the purpose of my local public library. Unlike Butler's main collection, where it was easy to get lost and I felt out of place as an undergraduate, the selective graduate collection seemed manageable, as did, four years later, Yale's Cross Campus Library.

The Turn of the Screw mystique:

Neil Armstrong. BBC Culture, 10/08/2020: The endless horror of ghost story The Turn of the Screw.

Another item from BBC Culture, in this case a survey of books on the topic of change and "how to live":

Lindsay Baker. BBC Culture, 10/08/2020: Why embracing change is the key to a good life.

With references to: John Sellars, Lessons in Stoicism -- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower -- Julia Samuel, This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings.

George Orwell on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer:

Matt Johnson. Quillette, 10/08/2020: George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the ‘Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life’.

So, was "the medieval and early modern period ...“the Dark Ages” of “the female imagination"?

Mary Wellesly. New York Review of Books, 10/22/2020: Love, Ecgburg. Review of: Diane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100.

The new biography of James Beard, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard by John Birdsall, "He won the trust of readers as an 'unfussy bon vivant, as much in love with a good club sandwich as he was with veal Oscar.'"

Ligaya Mishan. NYT, 10/09/2020: A Life of James Beard Stocked With Tasty Morsels.

Adam Gopnick. The New Yorker, 10/05/2020: How James Beard Invented American Cooking. "The gourmet’s real genius wasn’t in his recipes but in his packaging. He knew how to serve up the authenticity that his audiences craved."

With >29 featherbear: in mind, an article on Donald Trump's gifts to publishing and a nation of readers:

Martin Pengelly & David Smith. The Guardian, 19/11/2020:A Very Stable Genius? No, a narcissist and a racist – a portrait of Trump from a vast library of books.

Related item:

Martin Pengelly. The Guardian, 10/10/2020: What Were We Thinking review: Carlos Lozada on why Trump books matter. Review of: Carlos Lozada, A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.

Interesting article that led me to the website Neotext, which seems to focus on popular arts:

Chloe Maveal. crimereads.com, 10/12/2020: No Adam for Eve: The Quiet History of Lesbian Pulp Fiction.

Missed this review in the New York Times by the well-known philosopher when it came out, so thanks to Arts and Letters Daily:

Daniel C. Dennett, NYT, 09/12/2020: Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory. Review of: Joseph Henrich, The Weirdist People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

Addendum. The review was scheduled to appear in the NYT Book Review Oct. 11, so the NYT online date is probably wrong. The book was published Sept. 8, based on Amazon.

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman, has a new book, Earthlings. so it's time for an interview:

David McNeill. The Guardian, 10/09/2020: Sayaka Murata: 'I acted how I thought a cute woman should act - it was horrible.'

Regarding American fiction in the context of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- "Is it really a key part of the global literary system? And is the answer to that question the same for its “serious” and its mainstream forms?" Maybe not American poetry?

Matthew Wilkens. Public Books, 10/13/2020: Is American Fiction Too Provincial?.

Nature topics:

Calvin Reid. The Millions, 10/08/2020: Panel Mania: ‘Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation.’ Excerpts from Jim Ottaviani & C.M. Butzer, Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation, based on Edmund O. Wilson, Naturalist.

Julia Zarankin. LitHub, 10/14/2020: The Accidental Hobby: On the Books That Made Me a Birder.

Zarankin is the author of Field Notes From an Unintentional Birder. Some of the bird books considered: Phoebe Snetsinger, Birding on Borrowed Time -- Olivia Gentile, Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds (biography of Snetsinger) -- Kenn Kaufman, Kingbird Kingdom -- Simon Barnes, How to be a Bad Birdwatcher -- Meera Lee Sethi, Mountainfit. I'm not a birder or birdlover -- ever see a pelican swallowing live gannet chicks? -- but I have a grudging admiration for the beauty of our feathered "friends," and searched in vain for a mention of Mark Cocker's Birds & People, one I can always recommend.

"American crime stories featuring poor people and nontraditional voices are as old as Poe’s Dupin. And now, they're finally trending."

Christopher Chambers. crimereads.com, 10/14/2020: Justice for the Invisibles: A Brief History of Nontraditional Voices in Crime Fiction.

I may go to Hell for this link; reserve the right to zap it:

Rasheeda Saka. LitHub, 10/14/2020: 48 literary social media accounts you should be following.

Still, I just joined Twitter (for sports & politics) so maybe I should dip a metaphorical toe in the cesspool.

In this week's TLS (Oct. 16, 2020; no. 6133):

Classics:

Catharine Edwards. A flatterer’s imitation: Pliny’s concealed literary enterprise. Review of: Christopher Whitton, The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose: Pliny's Epistles Quintilian in Brief.

Will Eaves. Over there: Homer, Odysseus and the nature of memory. (Essay)

Poetry:

Beverley Bie Brahic. Not objects but presences: Considering the poems and achievements of Louise Glück, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Essay)

Craig Raine. A singular poet of sex: The surprisingly modern Arthur Hugh Clough. (Essay) Still can't remember how to pronounce the Victorian poet's name. Rhymes with ... ?

Collective Biography:

Jane Robinson. Extreme rebellion: Women who weaponized words. Review of: Sarah Lonsdale, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers.

David Motatel. High minds, low politics: The lives of four revolutionary thinkers. Review of: Wolfram Eilenberger, translator, Shaun Whiteside, Time of the Magicians: The invention of modern thought, 1919–29.

City Life, Good and Bad:

Colin Grant. Down payments on coffins: Everyday ‘unhappenings’ in Brazil. Review of: Eliane Brum, translation, Diane Grosklaus, The Collector of Leftover Souls: Dispatches from Brazil. "In the most startling profile, Brum is troubled by a noise she eventually locates in the asbestos-ruined chest of T, “a skeletal man covered with a fine, almost transparent skin”, who is dying from mesothelioma. Like his fellow workers, T was lied to by the factory bosses who generously lined the walls and roof of his home with asbestos. “Even my underwear was made from asbestos bags dyed blue”, he says. “I am made of asbestos!” At first T refused the factory’s derisory compensation, and Brum is careful to record this small act of resistance."

Tristram Hunt. It’s a steal: Politics and endemic corruption. Review of: Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy -- Luke Harding, Shadow State: Murder, mayhem and Russia’s remaking of the West -- Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How dirty money is conquering the world.

Coronavirus Strategies:

Druin Burch. Psychology vs epidemiology: Examining the arguments for – and against – another lockdown. (Essay)

Revisiting Strunk and White's The Elements of Style:

Jan Mieszkowski. Public Books, 10/14/2020: E.B. White's "Plain Style" at 75.

Books about Spinoza recommended by the author of the recent Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die:

Steven Nadler, interviewed by Nigel Warburton. fivebooks.com, 10/13/2020: The best books on Spinoza.

Excerpts from the Best American Writing series, that appeared originally as Longreads longform essays:

Longreads Honored with 14 Notable Mentions in 'Best American' series. 10/14/2020

Essay/reviews of two poets from The New Yorker (the Dan Chiasson essay might be paywalled):

Anthony Lane. The New Yorker, 10/12/2020: The Heartbreak Hilarity of John Berryman's Letters. His use of a blackface persona should get him canceled today (I confess I didn't get the point when reading The Dream Songs); this article focuses on The Selected Letters of John Berryman.

Dan Chiasson. The New Yorker, 11/05/2012: The Body Artist: Louise Glück’s collected poems.

Theological politics. A conservative reviews a progressive theologian's new book:

Jason Jewell. The University Bookman, 10/11/2020: Voting the Bible. Review of: Tremper Longman III, The Bible and the Ballot: Using Scripture in Political Discussions.

Update on indie bookstores:

Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 10/15/2020: Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling.

Revisiting a classic analysis of "America":

Michael Dirda. WaPo, 10/15/2020: Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America,’ read anew in 2020, feels prophetic — and in some ways, hopeful.

Whoa! The New York Review of Books goes splash! Home page modeled after Buzzfeed News or Amazon?

"October 2020 is ‘Pick up a Trollope’ month. Bestselling children’s author and Trollope enthusiast Francesca Simon is one of nine notable fans championing the campaign, which includes a vote for the world’s favourite Trollope novel and an online read of the winning book in November."

Francesca Simon, interviewed by Sophie Roell. fivebooks.com, 10/16/2020: The Best Anthony Trollope Books.

Haven't heard from Time Magazine for a while. Here's a list compiled by heavies in the genre:

time.com, n.d.: The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.

Reviews of books on hated divas from the new New York Review of Books for November (might be paywalled):

Lynn Hunt. NYRB, 11/05/2020: Why Was She So Hated?: How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy. Review of: Will Bashor, Marie Antoinette’s World: Intrigue, Infidelity, and Adultery in Versailles -- John Hardman, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen.

Matthew Aucoin. NYRB, 11/05/2020: Sound and Fury: A collection of his lectures on music reveals the composer’s narrow-mindedness and disdain. Pierre Boulez, edited and translated from the French by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittall, Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures.

Review of two new books about the Internet (or maybe specifically social media). Somewhat belated news as is sometimes the case with NYRB -- I mean sheesh!: "the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet."

Tom Scocca. NYRB, 11/05/2020: How the Awful Stuff Won. Review of: Andrew Marantz, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation and Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.

An appreciation of Daniel Mendelsohn's new book:

James K.A. Smith. LitHub, 10/16/2020: The Delight of Daniel Mendelsohn. Review of: Daniel Mendelsohn, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.

Longform journalism honors (some of these became books):

Emily Temple. LitHub, 10/15/2020: Are these the best 10 works of journalism published in the last decade?

"The final top 10 pieces of journalism (some books, some single articles) were chosen by the faculty of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with “a group of distinguished outside judges,” and selected from a list of 122 nominations (all of which are probably worth reading)."

Aesthetics for Birds is another discovery via Arts & Letters Daily:

James Wood, interview by Becca Rothfeld (probably one of his ex-students): Aesthetics for Birds, 10/14/2020: James Wood On How Criticism Works.

"Grandstanding" explained.

Adam Szetele. LARB, 10/17/2020: The Dangers of Moral Talk: On Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke’s “Grandstanding”. Review of Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk.

Review doesn't get into the role of provocateurs posing as grandstanders to undermine various political stances. Maybe the book does.

An exhaustive (and exhausting) survey of messianism, or books about messianism:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 10/16/2020: Ten Ways to Save the World.

"There are as many messiahs as there are people; there are malicious messiahs and benevolent ones, deluded head-cases and tricky confidence men, visionaries of transcendent bliss and sputtering weirdos. What unites all of them is an observation made by Reeve that God speaks to them as 'to the hearing of the ear as a man speaks to a friend.'”

An interesting list of books cited in the essay, in no particular order: Holger Jebens, After the Cult: Perceptions of Other and Self in West New Britain -- Jacob K. Olupona, Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity -- John Strausbaugh, E: Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith -- Elvis: '68 Comeback - Special Edition -- Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (The Middle Ages Series) -- Louis S. Warren, God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America -- Husayn ibn Mansur Hallaj, Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr -- David Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History -- Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music: Sixth Edition -- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (this is really an essay; the edition cited is selling for $870 on Amazon; I'm sure it's available at a reasonable price in one of Benjamin's essay collections) -- Daniel Wojcik, Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma -- Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers -- Emily Raboteau, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora -- Greg Bottoms, Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith -- J.R. Dobbs, The Book of the SubGenius : The Sacred Teachings of J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs -- Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution -- Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition -- Samuel Heilman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson -- Idries Shah, The Sufis -- Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti -- Wes Nisker, The Essential Crazy Wisdom -- Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, The Illuminatus Trilogy -- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron.

Addendum:

Many of these are classics, though Simon >79 featherbear: appears to have left out: Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah.

The (frustrating) Sense of an Ending:

Ron Charles. WaPo, 10/19/2020: What book has the most disappointing ending? Readers have many opinions.

Wondering if Poe's short story was read by the Baudelaire of Spleen of Paris ...

Scott Peeples. crimereads.com, 10/20/2020: Edgar Allan Poe and the Rise of the Modern City. Excerpt from Scott Peeples, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City.

Read and liked Gaddis's The Recognitions, but couldn't finish JR. For a new edition, Joy Williams makes the case for it:

Joy Williams. Paris Review, 10/19/2020: William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno.

Like the article title says:

Jessica Riskin. LARB, 10/20/2020: Evolution Wars: The Saga Continues. Review of: J. Scott Turner, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It and Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us.

An eccentric approach to the lecture genre:

Andrew Schenker. LARB, 10/20/2020: Wandering Ways. Review of: Mary Cappello, Lecture.

Is Lefanu's Carmilla better than Bram Stoker's Dracula?

Annabelle Williams. Electric Literature, 10/20/2020: Carmilla Is Better Than Dracula, And Here’s Why.

On the recent translation of some (actually a lot of) short stories by Chekhov by Pevear and Volokhonsky:

Gary Saul Morson. First Things, 11/2020: Poet of Loneliness. Review of: Anton Chekhov, translators Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, Fifty-two Stories.

"There are too many people looking to allow anyone to see." On the Disneyland of Art:

Adam Gopnick. The New Yorker, 10/19/2020: In Love with the Louvre. Review of: James Gardner, The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum.

Libertarian government vs. Nature in Grafton, New Hampshire:

Amanda Gokee. LARB, 10/21/2020: When Government Disappears: On Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear”.

Oh, I left out the book's subtitle: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears).

Kind of self-referential re: this thread, but here it is:

William Germano and Kit Nicholls. LitHub, 10/21/2020: Where Do Reading Lists Come From? (And Why Do We Love Them?). Excerpt from: Germano & Nicholls, Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything.

Adding a review:

Hua Hsu. The New Yorker, 10/22/2020: A Celebration of the Syllabus.

For those obsessives who shelve in alphabetical order rather than the Library of Congress classification (which uses alphabetical order in sub-ordering, truth be told), a note on origins:

Judith Flanders. LitHub, 10/21/2020: Cheap Writing Surfaces and Medieval Bureaucracy Helped Popularize the Alphabet. Excerpt from Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.

The book was reviewed in the NYT:

Deirdre Mask. NYT, 10/20/2020: The Organization System That Changed the World? It’s Thousands of Years Old.

"A ‘90s romance novel offers a glimpse of queer possibility and illuminates the complications of writing about queer love."

Kristin Sanders. Longreads, 10/2020: The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene.

On changing images of Japan:

Michiyo Nakamoto. BBC Culture, 10/21/2020: Bushido: The book that changed Japan’s image. About: Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan. (On the occasion of its reissue in the Penguing Great Ideas series)

The best Frankfurt School book on the authoritarian aspects of trumpism?:

Charles H. Clavey. Boston Review, 10/20/2020: Donald Trump, Our Prophet of Deceit. About: Leo Lowenthal & Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (published 1949).

Some of the week's TLS content (Oct. 23, 2020), no. 6134:

Medieval & Pre-Medieval Studies:

Catherine Conybeare. Citizen of the world, but not Rome: The sacker of Rome as undocumented immigrant. Douglas Boin, Alaric the Goth: An outsider’s history of the fall of Rome.

Bruce Boucher. Crescent and cross: What are the origins of Christian architecture?. Review of Diana Darke, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic architecture shaped Europe.

James Sewry. On the rocks: A shipwreck and its far-reaching consequences. Review of: Charles Spencer, The White Ship: Conquest, anarchy and the wrecking of Henry I’s dream.

Emma J. Wells. Psaltered image: A biblio-sleuth on the trail of a martyr and his book. Review of: Christopher De Hamel, The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Beckett.

Arts:

Frances Wilson. Freudian slips: An artist who wouldn’t cultivate his inhibitions. Review of: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011

Jenny Uglow. Mystery and darkness of the wild: Recording the face of our shifting landscape. Susan Owens, Spirit of Place: Artists, writers and the British landscape.

Elizabeth Lowry. No man could stop her: The life and work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a dazzling celebrity of the European baroque. Review of the exhibition at the (UK) National Gallery.

Irina Dumitrescu. We’re all Jessica Rabbit now: Self-fashioning for the YouTube generation.

Russia:

Caryl Emerson. Saving Russia: Dostoevsky’s life and times illuminated by his great critic. Review of: Joseph Frank, editors Marina Brodskaya & Marguerite Frank, Lectures on Dostoevsky.

Andrew Kahn. More than poets: A new consideration of Russia’s literary Golden Age. Review of: Daria Khitrova, Lyric Complicity: Poetry and readers in the Golden Age of Russian literature.

Politics & Society:

Paul Collier. Snakes and ladders: Meritocracy and its critics. Review of: Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good & David Goodhart, Head Hand Heart: The struggle for dignity and status in the 21st century.

David Hutt. An attitude, not a philosophy: The nature of democratic socialism in America today. Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin, editors, We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism – American style and Garrett Griffin, Why America Needs Socialism: The argument from Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and other great thinkers

Chris Mullin. Divided they fell: Charting Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The inside story of Labour under Corbyn.

More Society, Less Politics:

Beejay Silcox. Coming clean: Mess as an emotional and cultural problem. Review of: Jennifer Howard, Clutter: An Untidy History.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Written in tears: The complexity and pain of ‘writing Iranian America’. Porochista Khakpour, Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity.

Fiction and Fictions:

Harry Strawson reviews Charlie Kaufman's debut novel Antkind (720 page novel!) -- J. Michael Lennon reviews: Don DeLillo, The Silence -- Jakob Hofmann reviews Matthew Baker's Why Visit America -- Alison Kelly reviews John Lanchester's Reality and Other Stories. And finally, D.J. Taylor's essay on the role of made-up book titles in novels (& zoom interviews?).

Ethnic heritage issues with Rebecca Roanhorse, a Native American author, an extensive longform article:

Lila Shapiro. Vulture, 10/20/2020: The Sci-Fi Author Reimagining Native History.

"In the traditions of many Native tribes, only certain people have the authority to grant others the right to tell sacred stories, and some stories are never supposed to be shared with outsiders — a measure meant, in part, to safeguard communal ideas and practices that have been assailed by hundreds of years of genocide, theft, forced assimilation, and distorted representations in the dominant culture."

Frank London Brown's Trumbull Park, a novel on white supremacy from 1959, elected to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame:

Kathleen Rooney. JSTOR Daily, 10/21/2020: How Trumbull Park Exposed the Brutal Legacy of Segregation.

The editor's introduction to Writing Politics: An Anthology, a new collection of the genre published by NYRB Classics:

David Bromwich. LitHub, 10/22/2020: A Brief History of the Political Essay.

Vivian Gornick reviews a new book on Simone de Beauvoir:

Vivian Gornick. Boston Review, 10/22/2020: The Obligation of Self-Discovery. Review of: Judith G. Coffin, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir.

Ed Simon does a review of blue:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 10/22/2020: On Obscenity and Literature.

With references to, among others: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology (Penguin Classics) -- John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Penguin Classics) -- Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing -- Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography -- D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita -- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary -- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World -- G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor -- M. Ljung, Swearing: A Cross-Cultural Linguistic Study -- Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom -- The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (in slipcase with reading glass) -- Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics) (English and French Edition).

On the biographer Hermione Lee, author of Tom Stoppard: A Life:

Anna Leszkiewicz. The New Statesman, 10/21/2020: Hermione Lee on how to write a life.

"Lee is known for her landmark biographies of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. Now, she has taken on her first living subject: Tom Stoppard."

What librarians research in their spare time:

James Hamblin. NYT, 10/20/2020: Yes, Books Were Bound in Human Skin. An Intrepid Librarian Finds the Proof. Review of: Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.

Another look at Marilynne Robinson's Jack:

Sophie Haigny. The Baffler, 10/22/2020: Sure as Fate: Uncertainty and destiny in the writings of Marilynne Robinson.

see also >6 featherbear: above

An appreciation of Toni Morrison's Beloved:

Stephanie Watts Powell. BBC/Culture, 10/22/2020: How Beloved unearthed the ghosts of a brutal past.

Examining Charles Dickens's technique in new book, The Artful Dickens:

Frances Wilson. The Guardian, 10/23/2020: The Artful Dickens by John Mullan review – how did he do it?.

Noticed that an excellent documentary on the antiquarian book trade, The Booksellers, is being made available on Amazon Prime. See IMDB. I had a short introduction to the 4th Avenue used book scene when I was in college in New York. According to the documentary, there were some 40 of these in the immediate neighborhood. One my fantasies in younger days was to run one of these dark, dusty, and quite wonderful havens. They had all pretty much gone out of business by the time I finished grad school, after real estate costs went through the roof.

The last of the 4th Avenue bookstores on its last legs:

Martin Pengelly. The Guardian, 10/24/2020: 'We cannot survive': New York's Strand bookstore appeals for help.

And the response:

Jacob Bogage. WaPo, 10/26/2020: When New York’s Strand Bookstores asked for help, 25,000 online orders flooded in.

Sean Piccoli and Elizabeth A. Harris. NYT, 10/26/2020. The Strand Calls for Help, and Book Lovers Answer.

Martin Pengelly. The Guardian, 10/27/2020: Customers rush to help New York's Strand bookstore after owner's plea.

An introduction to Agatha Christie's novels:

Tina Jordan. NYT, 10/25/2020: The Essential Agatha Christie.

On literal sisterhood:

Lily Dunn. Aeon, 10/23/2020: My Sister, My Mirror.

"Vanessa and Virginia – intimates in art, adversaries in love. Can we ever transcend the primal envy of the sisterly bond?"

Lily Dunn is the daughter of Jane Dunn, author of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy.

The dystopia of all dystopias?

Gerry Canavan. LARB, 10/27/2020: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.”

Another review, this time from NYRB:

Bill McKibben. New York Review of Books, 12/17/2020: It's Not Science Fiction.

The mystique of famous writers' possessions:

Debora Lutz. Public Books, 10/27/2020: Longing for the Writer's Space. Review of: Nicola J. Watson, The Author's Effects: On Writers' House Museums and Sheila Lemning, What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books.

The enigma of Malcolm X:

Stuart Miller. LA Times, 10/20/2020: Malcolm X’s full story will never be told. These biographies explain why. Review of: Les and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X and the earlier Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Revisionism in the history of the British Empire:

Maya Jasanoff. The New Yorker, 10/26/2020: Misremembering the British Empire. Review of: Priya Satira, Time's Monster: How History Makes History.

On the philosophical novelist Ingeborg Bachmann:

Merve Emre. New York Review of Books, 10/22/2020: The Meticulous One. Review of: Ingeborg Bachmann, translation by Philip Boehm, introduction by Rachel Kushner, Malina -- IB, translation & intro, Peter Filkins, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann -- IB, with letters from Jack Hamesh, edited & with an afterword by Hans Hans Höller, translated by Mike Mitchell, War Diary -- IB & Paul Celan, edited by Paul Badiou et al., translation Wieland Hoban, Correspondence.

D.H. Lawrence: "... to some men still the trees stand up and look around at the daylight, having woven the two ends of darkness together into visible being and presence. And soon, they will let go the two ends of darkness again, and disappear. A flower laughs once, and having had his laugh, chuckles off into seed, and is gone. Whence? Whither? Who knows, who cares? That little laugh of achieved being is all."

George Scialabba. Commonweal, 10/10/2020: D. H. Lawrence, Arch-Heretic. Review of: D.H. Lawrence, ed. Geoff Dyer, The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays.

TLS, 10/30/2020, no. 6135:

Black History:

Colin Grant. Eight pillars of caste: The architecture of racial discrimination. Review of: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Lies That Divide Us.

Meleisa Ono-George. Refusing to be cowed: How enslaved women fought back. Review of: Stella Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance.

Montaz Marché. Sharing a multiracial history: New ways of looking at great Black Britons. Review of: Gretchen H. Gerzina, editor, Britain's Black Past.

Sciences:

Barbara J. King. A primate’s progress: How humans do (and don’t) stand out from the evolutionary crowd. Review of: Gaia Vince, Transcendence: How humans evolved through fire, language, beauty and time.

Niall Ferguson. No more handshakes: The history of a pandemic, and its possible futures. Review of: Apollo's Arrow: The profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live.

Law, International & U.S.:

Lara Feigel. Rape as a war crime: Indicting an ancient evil. Review of: Christina Lamb, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women .

Lawrence Douglas. America’s shaky system: A looming constitutional crisis. Review of: Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The case for abolishing the electoral college and Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?.

Literature and Biography:

Jane Darcy. True confessions?: Why Thomas De Quincey’s revelatory writing deserves greater attention. Review of: Robert Morrison, editor, Thomas De Quincey: Selected Writings (21st century Oxford authors).

Selina Hastings. The makings of a scandal: Sybille Bedford and A Legacy. (Essay)

Beejay Silcox. Building an Other world. Review of: Susanna Clarke, Piranesi.

Laura Thompson. Mistress of reinvention: A family memoir that turned into a detective mission. Review of: Ferdinand Mount, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca.

Film:

Lucy Scholes. Art monster at work
Dualism and domesticity in Josephine Decker’s portrait of an American writer. Review of the film Shirley (On the writer Shirley Jackson).

Rather Boswellian memoir of John Ashbery:

Douglas Crase. LitHub, 10/28/2020: Driving by the Lake With John Ashbery.

"Help independent presses survive by catching up on the year’s best books."

Preety Sidhu & Jae-Yeon Yoo. Electric Literature, 10/28/2020: 20 Small Press Books from 2020 You Might Have Missed.

The literary and political scene in Kenya:

Nanjala Nyabola. Guernica, 10/27/2020: Nairobi Rising.

A longform review of a book dealing with a case of the insanity defense, by a professor of law and psychiatry:

Stephen J. Morse. LARB, 10/28/2020: What Do We Owe Each Other?: An Essay on Law and Society. Review of: Susan Vinocour, Nobody's Child: A Tragedy, a Trial, and a History of the Insanity Defense.

"Diane di Prima, the most prominent woman among the male-dominated Beat poets, who after being immersed in the bohemian swirl of Greenwich Village in the 1950s moved to the West Coast and continued to publish prolifically in a wide range of forms, died on Sunday in a San Francisco hospital. She was 86."

Neil Genzlinger. NYT, 10/28/2020: Diane di Prima, Poet of the Beat Era and Beyond, Dies at 86.

Locus: "The World Fantasy Awards winners for works published in 2019 were announced during the virtual World Fantasy 2020 (WFC) convention, held October 29 – November 1, 2020.

"The Life Achievement Awards, presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field, went to Karen Joy Fowler and Rowena Morrill."

Locus. Nov. 1, 2020: World Fantasy Award Winners.

Oxbridge settings for English crime fiction:

Paul French. crimereads.com, 11/01/2020: The "Educated" Crime Novels of Cambridge.

Paul French. crimereads.com, 06/03/2019: The Many Mysteries of Oxford.

Ed Simon looks back at conservative anti-"theory" fulminating back in the day when Anglo-American literature departments were being colonized by Europeans:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 10/29/2020: Who’s Afraid of Theory?.

LARB 11/02/2020 has reviews of political books on the occasion of the U.S. elections:

Mark Oprea. The Trumper with a Thousand Faces. Review of: John Hibbing, The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era.

Justin H. Vassallo. Reclaiming the State in Economics: “Radical Hamilton” and the Means of Statecraft. Review of: Christian Parenti, Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder.

Stephen Rohde. John Yoo Tortures History and Law to Defend Donald Trump. Review of: Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.

The November Literary Review (Nov. 2020, no. 491) is out today:

Kathryn Hughes. Hooked on a Feline. Review of: Oliver Soden, Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat and Mary Gaitskill, Lost Cat.

Dmitri Levitin. Masters of None?. Review of: Peter Burke, The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag.

Farzana Shaikh. Caught Between Allah & America. Review of: Owen Bennett-Jones, The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan -- Victoria Schofield, The Fragrance of Tears: My Friendship with Benazir Bhutto -- Declan Walsh, The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation.

Paul Broks. Changes of Mind. Review of: Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention.

Cressida Connolly. A Romantic Jigsaw. Review of: Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life.

Dan Richards. To Everest in a Biplane. Review of: Ed Caesar, The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest.

Anthony Cummins. A Brush with the Goncourts: On the brothers behind the prize. (Essay)

TLS, Nov. 6, 2020, no. 6136.

Literature:

Patrick Curry. Sacrifice or slaughter?: Roberto Calasso’s moral ambiguity. Review of: Roberto Calasso, translator Richard Dixon, The Celestial Hunter.

Charlotte Jones. Dark imaginings of the Golden Age: An anthology of experimental, anarchic short stories. Review of: Philip Hensher, editor, The Golden Age of British Short Stories, 1890-1914.

Jonathan Keates. Ruritanian rides: A parallel universe of swashbuckling and skullduggery. Review of: Nicholas Daly, Ruritania: A cultural history, from Princess of Zenda to The Princess Diaries.

Éadaoín Lynch. As no men love for long: Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon’s intimate confederacy. (Essay)

Philosophy:

Hugo Drochon. Saving Nietzsche from the Nazis: How one philosopher shaped the reputation of another. Review of: Stanley Corngold, Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, humanist, heretic.

Thomas Pink. Means to an end: Aristotle’s metaphysics of nature. Review of: Edward Feser, Aristotle's Revenge: The metaphysical foundations of physical and biological science.

British Stuff:

Rory Stewart. Lord of misrule: Boris Johnson: an amoral figure for a bleak, coarse culture. Review of: Tom Bower, Boris Johnson: The Gambler.

Stephanie Barczewski. Play up! Play up!: The English compulsion to compete. Review of: Robert Colls, This Sporting Life: Sport and liberty in England, 1760–1960.

There's also a review of a book relating to the soccer club Arsenal, if you're interested.

Miscellaneous:

Simon Jenkins. Monumental success:
Why copies of lost landmarks are better than ruins. Review of: John Darlington, Fake Heritage: Why We Rebuild Monuments.

Toby Vogel. Disintegration: How disinformation has altered the political landscape. Review of Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The secret history of disinformation and political warfare. (Buried in In Brief reviews section)

Nancy Campbell. Celebrating a Swedish modern master: A bold and radiant body of work, rediscovered. Review of Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, a documentary on Amazon Prime, about the Swedish painter.

New popular science books to take a look at:

Anne Osbourn, interviewer Caspar Henderson. fivebooks.com, 11/02/2020: The Best Science Books of 2020: The Royal Society Book Prize.

Here's the list, but the interview goes into detail: Linda Scott, The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Empowering Women -- Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender -- Gaia Vince, Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time -- Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants -- Jim Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics -- Camilla Pang, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Relationships.*

*Of the nominees, this last won the 2020 prize.

William Dalrymple's introduction to a new translation of Babur Nama for the Everyman edition:

William Dalrymple. LitHub, 11/05/2020: The First Mughal Emperor’s Towering Account of Exile, Bloody Conquest, and the Natural World. Intro to: Zahid ud-din Muhammad Babur, translator Annette Susannah Beveridge, The Babur Nama.

Introducing The Mahabharata:

Audrey Truschke. Aeon, 11/06/2020: The living Mahabharata.

A fascinating introduction to translators of current world-literature & how they got into translation:

J.R. Ramakrishnan. Electric Lit, 11/06/2020: 7 Literary Translators You Need to Know.

More translations:

Pierce Alquist. bookriot.com, 11/05/202: The Best Korean Fiction in Translation.

From Public Books' "B-Sides" series featuring overlooked books:

Elizabeth McMahon. Public Books, 11/05/2020: B-Sides: Jessica Anderson's "The Impersonators". (U.S. title: The Only Daughter).

The late Toni Morrison's personal library:

Michelle Sinclair Coleman. Galerie, 10/30/2020: Toni Morrison’s Personal Library Is Now Available to Purchase. Or maybe not?:

Galerie: "Editor’s Note (11/5/2020): A spokesperson from Brown Harris Stevens has released the following statement: “Subsequent to the printing of the article in Galerie, the demand for Ms. Morrison’s books has been overwhelming. The estate is now reevaluating how to handle the future of this important collection.”

Robert Gottlieb reviews a new book on Charles Dickens:

Robert Gottlieb. NYT, 11/06/2020: Robert Gottlieb on Dickensworld — the Great Novelist’s Grand Universe. Review of: A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

James Wood reviews a new book on religion's relationship to religious practice:

James Wood. The New Yorker, 11/02/2020: Does Knowing God Just Take Practice? Review of: T.M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real.

"If you’ve been confined at home in recent months with a saintly infant, toddler, or child, you don’t need this book. Otherwise, it might tell you something."

John Galbraith Simmons. LARB, 11/08/2020: Childhood: Sifting Facts from Fad-Driven Fancy. Review of: Richie Poulton et al., The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.

Two reviews of popular science books from the New York Times Book Review:

Yuval Noah Harrari, 11/05/2020: At Home With Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals. Review of: Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.

David Quammen. 11/03/2020: The Pandemic’s Future — and Ours. Review of: Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

Merve Emre on cultural theorist Sianne Ngai & the cunning of Capitalism:

Merve Emre. The New Yorker, 11/09/2020: Our Love Hate Relationship with Gimmicks. A survey of Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, Ugly Feelings, & Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.

Bird-watcher Karens:

John McNeill Miller. Public Books, 11/10/2020: What Birders Don't See. Review of: David Allen Sibley, What It's Like to be a Bird & Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way.

"West German witchcraft trials after World War II reveal how political rupture can fuel magical thinking. What lessons might we draw for our own age of QAnon conspiracies, anti-vaccination, and strange COVID-19 cures?"

Samuel Clowes Huneke. Boston Review, 10/29/2020: When Democracy Ails, Magic Thrives. Review of: Monica Black, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–WWII Germany.

A little book therapy from the editor of LitHub. "... my recommendation is to read a book. But I don’t mean just any book. It must be old—at least 15 years old, if not older. And, crucially, it must also be new—to you."

Emily Temple. LitHub, 11/11/2020: Want to Feel Better? Stop Reading New Books.

A classification of UK bookshop patrons:

Sam Leith. The Guardian, 11/11/2020: A review of: Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops.

TLS, 11/13/2020, no. 6137:

Books of the Year 2020. Some of these could be suggestions for Christmas shopping, but keep in mind that many of the recommenders are academics. Highlight of the TLS year for me.

Literature:

Anne Kennedy Smith. Let her be Ariadne: The brilliant, resilient Sylvia Plath behind the myth. Review of: Heather Clark, Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath -- Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes -- Carl Rollyson, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath -- Tracy Brain, editor, Sylvia Plath in Context.

Charlie Louth. Urge for the impossible: 250 years of the complex, necessary Friedrich Hölderlin. (Essay)

Joyce Carol Oates. Bolt from Belfast: The stories of an Irish exile, estranged from his native land. Review of: Brian Moore, The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories.

Jamie Fisher. Plunged into reverence: An America of partying Christians and would-be debutantes. Review of: Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays from In between. Not sure this collection of essays is properly literature, but this is how TLS categorizes it.

Eamon Duffy. In defence of Thomas More: The trouble with Hilary Mantel’s Tudor world. (Essay) The role of Thomas More in literature, not just in the Mantel trilogy. However, TLS puts this in the History category, probably because Duffy is a historian.

The In Brief section has a short review by Helen Morales of another book on the intersection of history and literature: Nicholas Jubber, Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe. "Nicholas Jubber investigates six epic tales – the Odyssey, the Kosovo Cycle, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf and Njáls saga – and the places connected to them, journeying from Greece across the Balkans to Britain, passing through Scandinavia and ending in Iceland. He is guided by three questions: how did these stories create Europe? Are they still worth reading? Can they help us to understand Europe today?"

History:

Peter Thonemann. Knossos to Cuzco via Cairo and Carthage: Why cities are like termite hills and coral reefs. Review of Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.

Tim Kirk. Finding the Führer: Belief in Hitler, then and now. Review of: Richard Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the paranoid imagination and Robert Gellately, Hitler's True Believers: How ordinary people became Nazis.

Edward N. Luttwak. Gory or glorious?: The pains and pleasure of war. Review of: Margaret Macmillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us.

Daniel A. Segal. Fortune favours the fortunate: How the West got so WEIRD. Review of: Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.

Jean Wilson. When the fountains ran with wine: The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 500 years on. Review of: Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold and Amy Licence, 1520: The Field of the Cloth of Gold. "In June 1520, Henry VIII and François I met outside the English Pale town of Guisnes for three weeks of celebrations in a temporary pleasure palace, equipped with a gatehouse, tiltyards, banqueting houses and private conference spaces – an impermanent Davos."

John Keay. Home on a mountain range: A history of High Asia’s ‘snow abode’. Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History.

Monisha Rajesh. Quilts and wire: A masterly depiction of Tibet. Review of: Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: The story of modern Tibet through the people of one town.

Also in the In Brief section, reviews of Ilhan Omar, This Is What America Looks Like: My journey from refugee to congresswoman -- Nicholas J. Saunders, Desert Insurgency: Archaeology, T. E. Lawrence, and the Arab Revolt (an archeological expedition to examine the artifacts of the Arab Revolt and Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom).

Finally an essay by Isabela Fonseca, Out for the count: Getting the vote out in Philadelphia.

Addendum. Somehow overlooked this one -- no political intent:

Michael Wolff. The last man to believe in the system: Why it will take all Biden’s pluck and luck to fix America. Review of: Evan Osnos, Joe Biden: American Dreamer.

A Virtual Tour of Jane Austen's House.

Link credit to ALA Direct newsletter.

"How did coronavirus change our reading habits? Which countries read the most this year? And what books were we reading?"

Isabel Cabrera. GlobalEnglishEditing, 11/06/2020: World Reading Habits in 2020.

Credit to ALA Direct Newsletter.

Max Weber & philosopher kings:

Corey Robin. The New Yorker, 11/12/2020: The Professor and the Politician. Review of: Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures.

"For Max Weber, only the most heroic figures could generate meaning in the world. Does his theory hold up today?"

Thoughts on the new translation of Beowulf:

Irina Dumitrescu. New York Review of Books, 12/03/2020 issue: Dudes Without Heirs. Review of: Maria Headley, translator, Beowulf.

A new meta-mystery by Anthony Horowitz (author of The Word is Murder and Magpie Murders:

Michael Dirda. WaPo, 11/11/2020: Agatha Christie fans, take note: Anthony Horowitz has a clever new twist on the classic whodunit. Review of: Anthony Horowitz, Moonflower Murders.

The research story behind a recent historical novel about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935:

Wadzanai Mhute. NYT, 11/12/2020: The ‘Detective Work’ Behind a War Novel.

"Maaza Mengiste spent years on “The Shadow King,” not only writing but also learning Italian, living in Rome and amassing an archive of historical photography that informed her book."

New York Times has a non-politician review the Obama memoir:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. NYT, 11/12/2020: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Barack Obama’s ‘A Promised Land’.

Also of interest:

Lisa Allardice, interviewer. The Guardian, 11/14/2020: Interview: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘America under Trump felt like a personal loss.'

This sounds a little dubious (a belated discovery) -- life advice from literature:

Lorenzo Zucca. Psyche, 07/27/2020: Much ado about uncertainty: how Shakespeare navigates doubt.

New biography of Adrienne Rich:

Stephanie Burt. The Atlantic, 12/2020 issue: The Many Lives of Adrienne Rich. Review of: Hilary Holladay & Nan Talese, The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography.

On Paul Celan, on the occasion of a new translation of his early poetry (to be published later this month):

Ruth Franklin. The New Yorker, 11/23/2020: How Paul Celan Reconceived Language for a Post-Holocaust World.

References Paul Celan, translator Pierre Joris, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (publ. Nov. 24, 2020) and Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition.

Addendum:

Peter E. Gordon. Boston Review, 11/23/2020. Poet of the Impossible: Paul Celan at 100.

"More than 2,500 UK university staff have called for an investigation into the "scandal" of excessive pricing of academic e-books."

Russell Hotten. BBC News, 11/14/2020: University staff urge probe into e-book pricing 'scandal'.

A short report from the Apocalypse:

Stack Commerce Team. PC Magazine, 11/16/2020: Absorb Bestselling Books in 12 Minutes or Less With This App.

Philip Lopate talks about his new anthology of American essays:

Philip Lopate, interviewed by LitHub, 11/17/2020: What Makes a Great American Essay?.

There's also a review in TLS at >62 featherbear:

Costica Bradenton. LARB, 11/15/2020: The Plot and the Argument: Philosophy as a Narrative Affair. Review of: Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy.

"Now that we’ve killed nature, humanity has become everything and humans have become nothing."

Max Norman. LARB, 11/16/2020: Fossils Waiting to Be: On Stoicism in the Anthropocene. Review of: David Farrier, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils.

>12 featherbear: More often than not, my book purchases are as a result of foot / endnotes, or from journals. Other than that, I browse bookshops, and I have almost never asked a bookseller for advice. By the time I'm in the shop, my mind is already 98% made up...

>155 featherbear: £60 minimum for an academic hardback is also madness...

>26 featherbear: '...it neatly pieces together pretty much every chapter in the story of the rise and fall of slavery, and it also covers the geography of the slave trade.'

Once again, it's slavery in early modern history that is always spoken about; Greek and Roman slavery could be anything from almost worse than New World slavery at its worst, through to what would today be regarded as almost impossible: at the highest levels in Rome, the day-to-day running of the country was mostly in the hands of Imperial Slaves - the Emperor and Senate other things to do with their lives. Also, some of the finest minds were also slaves technically.

When slavery is mentioned, why do people almost always jump straight onto the post-sixteen-century slavery bandwagon as 'the whole story'. Slavery has a much, much longer, broader, and surprising history at times.

Famous indie bookstores update in pix:

Bob Eckstein. NYT, 11/13/2020: Spare a Thought for the Indies.

In TLS Nov. 20, 2020, no. 6138:

Science and Technology:

Sadiah Qureshi. Dodos and dinosaurs: The history of extinction. Review of: David Sepkoski, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the value of diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene.

Richard Lea. Sobering odds: Is humanity close to the edge?. Review of: Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity -- David Farrier, Footprints: In search of future fossils (see also the LARB review link at >159 featherbear:) -- Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, matter, and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. As with human life, the review is brief.

J.M.W. Turner:

Susan Owens. Industrious landscapes: Turner’s intellectual curiosity and modern preoccupations. Review of: David Blayney Brown et al., Turner's Modern World. (Catalog of the Tate Britain exhibition, which is part of the review)

Paul Celan:

Mark Glanville. The man who wrote poetry after Auschwitz: Paul Celan 100 years on. Review of: Paul Celan, translator Pierre Joris, Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The collected earlier poetry: A bilingual edition -- Paul Celan, translator, Pierre Joris, Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous prose -- Jean Daive, translator Rosmarie Waldrop, Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan. See also >154 featherbear:

Literary History & Criticism:

Jan Montefiore. Oh, what an unlovely war!: How three British writers saw the conflict with the Boers. Review of: Sarah Lefanu, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War.

Margaret Drabble. Haunted city streets: A critic errant’s pursuits. Review of: Matthew Beaumont, The Walker: On finding and losing yourself in the modern city.

Katharine Craik. Uncanny Elizabethan autofiction: Two ways of understanding early modern personhood. Review of: Samuel Fallon, Paper Monsters: Persona and literary culture in Elizabethan England and Kevin Curran, editor, Renaissance Personhood: Materiality, taxonomy, process.

History:

Andrew Roberts. Best of enemies: How Hitler and Stalin mirrored each other. Review of: Laurence Rees, Hitler and Stalin: The tyrants and the Second World War.

Rebecca Fraser. Mere democracy (and other innovations): "The Mayflower," 400 years on. Review of: Francis J. Bremer, One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the beginning of English New England -- John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the contest for American liberty -- Stephen Tomkins, The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s outlaws and the invention of freedom -- Graham Taylor, The Mayflower in Britain: How an icon was made in London.

A Celebrity Criminal and Escape Artist in France. Amazing stuff:

Andrew Hussey. Great escapist: A French criminal with mythic ambitions. Review of: Rédoine Faïd, translators John Galbraith Simmons and Jocelyne Geneviève Barque, Outlaw: Author, armed and dangerous: Interviews with Jérôme Pierrat.

Fictions:

J. S. Barnes. Queer fish, no water: This year’s Goldsmiths prizewinner. Review of: M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again & Settling the World: Selected Stories. Harrison is one of Britain's premiere sf/fantasy authors.

Douglas Field. Coconut, cabbage, aloo: The anxieties and costs of ‘becoming British’ in The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon. Penguin Classics reprint of a 1968 novel about Jamaicans in London. "Set less than a decade after the Notting Hill Riots of 1958, and recounted in lyrical dialect, The Housing Lark explores what it means for West Indians to become British, and at what price."

Mia Levitin. Heart of lightness: Lost children and utopian ideals in A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba. Translated by Lisa Dillman. Barba is a noteworthy Brazilian author; the novel under review is about feral children found in a mythical South American country. Winner of the Premio Herralde in 2017.

Elnathan John. The men were so impatient: A portrait of a wild, hungry, corrupt, seductive Lagos. Review of Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City (NYRB reprint of Ekwensi's first novel, originally published 1954)

Food and Drink:

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Paradise on a plate: The vanishing world of the milchig. Review of: Ben Katchor, The Dairy Restaurant.

Henry Hitchings. Hell’s kitchens: Restaurants as discomfort zones. Vaughn Tan, The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation insights from the frontiers of food.

And finally,

From the Letters section. Regarding the classic WB cartoon What's Opera Doc?, a kind word for "Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd. Bryan, who was actually a musically trained tenor, was perfectly cast as Elmer’s Siegfried, and no one who loves Wagner or Elmer will ever forget Bryan’s lilting intonation of the line, 'O Bwunn­hilde, you’re so wovwey!'"

National Book Award winners:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 11/18/2020: Charles Yu Wins National Book Award for ‘Interior Chinatown.’

"The nonfiction prize went to Les Payne and Tamara Payne for “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X.” The crime novelist Walter Mosley received a lifetime achievement award."

New Library of America anthology (1,110 pages!):

Parul Sehgal. NYT, 11/10/2020: A Monumental and Rapturous New Anthology of Black American Poetry. Review of: Kevin Young, editor, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song.

Another review from the New York Times, for those interested in the history of material culture:

Dana Thomas. NYT, 11/10/2020: The Human Ingenuity That Gave Us Nice Threads. Review of: Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.

And the winner of the Booker Prize is:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 11/19/2020. Douglas Stuart Wins Booker Prize for ‘Shuggie Bain’.

Addendum:

James Walton. New York Review of Books, 08/20/2020: ‘A Good Year Once’. Review of Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain.

Los Angeles Review of Books takes on Dune:

Jordan S. Carroll. LARB, 11/19/2020: Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”

Daniel Immerwahr. LARB, 11/19/2020: Heresies of “Dune.”

And an oldie:

Will Collins. LARB, 09/16/2017. The Secret History of Dune.

"Oyler argues that not only should industry-adjacent professionals make more of an effort to hold the line between art and entertainment, but that publishers don’t even need to take a financial hit to do it — there is, Oyler insists, an Actually Existing Readership for literature, and if you publish, they will come."

Lauren Oyler, interviewed by Sam Jaffe Goldstein. The End of the World Review, 11/17/2020. I Feel That I Am Being Made Crazy By the Distortion; an interview with Lauren Oyler.

An interview with Claire Massud, on the occasion of her first essay collection, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays:

Claire Messud, interviewed by Madhuri Sastry. Guernica, 11/18/2020: Claire Messud: Life Among the Animals.

Books on blues legend Robert Johnson:

Greil Marcus. New York Review of Books, 12/03/2020: The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It. Review of: Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson -- Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach, and with a foreword by Elijah Wald, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson -- Mezzo and J.M. Dupont, translated from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger, Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938.

A new book on migrants' contribution to London:

Jenny Uglow. NYRB, 12/03/2020: Making London Their Own. Review of: Panikos Panayi, Migrant City: A New History of London.

More books to explore or catch up on:

Editors of the New York Times Book Review. NYT, 11/20/2020: 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Historical:

NYT, 11/20/2020: The 10 Best Books Through Time. Fine print: "Through Time"=Past 16 years.

And for a shorter list:

Paul Constant. Seattle Times, 11/19/2020: Looking for the perfect gift for the bookworm in your life? Seattle’s indie booksellers suggest these 5 titles.

Washington Post Editors and Reviewers. WaPo, 11/19/2020: The 10 best books of 2020.

Some must have prizes:

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young. ASAP Journal, 11/11/2020: On Poets and Prizes.

Via Arts and Letters Daily.

Alternatives to Hillbilly Elegy:

Lorraine Berry. Los Angeles Times, 11/19/2020: 8 books you should read instead of ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’

"... the secret protagonist of Wagnerism—as of Ross’s previous book, The Rest Is Noise (2007), on twentieth-century music—is the German writer Thomas Mann. The entire book spins out like a spider web from Mann’s blazingly ambivalent statement “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” (1933)." From:

Charlie Tyson. Hedgehog Review, Fall 2020: The Wagner Effect: The paradoxes that surround a paragon of art. Review of: Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.

The late Harold Bloom on The Left Hand of Darkness:

Harold Bloom. The New Yorker, 11/20/2020: The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Though I have written about “The Left Hand of Darkness” before, in 1987 and again in 2000, I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now, but, rather, make a fresh start on this marvellous romance."

On labyrinths in Piranesi:

Cameron Laux. BBC Culture, 11/19/2020: The mysterious appeal of a labyrinth. The labyrinth and Susanna Clarke.

One of the best travel writers has died:

Richard Lea. The Guardian, 11/20/2020: Jan Morris, historian, travel writer and trans pioneer, dies aged 94.

Jonathan Kandell. NYT, 11/20/2020: Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94.

Addendum. Travel writers remember Jan Morris:

Tim Adams. The Guardian, 11/22/20: Jan Morris: She sensed she was ‘at the very end of things’. What a life it was …

Gender and reading preferences:

Christina Thompson. American Scholar, 11/14/2020: Skewing Male: What feedback from my readers told me about them, about my book, and about me.

Saving the endangered book review:

Casey Cep. The New Yorker, 11/22/2020: The Tennessee Solution to Disappearing Book Reviews.

Progressive reading lists from JSTOR:

Wilson Sherwin. JSTOR Daily, 11/20/2020: Socialism: Foundations and Key Concepts.

Mary Zaborskis. JSTOR Daily, 11/29/2018: Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts.

Got these from:

JSTOR Daily Reading Lists.

Re-reading Mike Davis's City of Quartz (the city is LA, not Toronto, despite the essay title) on the occasion of its 30th anniversary:

David Helps. LARB, 11/22/2020: Reading Mike Davis in Toronto: Police Violence and the Global City.

The Guardian's Best of 2020 breakdown by category:

The Guardian, 11/28/2020: Best Books of 2020.

Categories:
Fiction, Children's Books, Crime & Thrillers, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Memoir & Celebrity, Politics, Ideas, Sport, Nature and Science, Poetry, Comics and Graphic Novels, Art, Food, Stocking Fillers.

In the previous thread I cited a review by Drew Gilpin Faust of the Michael Gorra study:

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.

Here's a new one from The New Yorker:

Casey Cep. The New Yorker, 11/23/2020: William Faulkner's Demons.

Using a computer program to discover the author of what might be the earliest U.S. science-fiction novel:

Paul Collins. The New Yorker, 11/28/2020: A Quest to Discover America's First Science-Fiction Writer.

On David Bromwich's view of "democratic speech:"

Sam Sackeroff. LARB, 11/27/2020: "The Way We Speak Now: On David Bromwich’s “Writing Politics”. A review of: David Bromwich, editor, Writing Politics: An Anthology.

See also: >98 featherbear:

Stuff I found interesting in the online TLS for Nov. 27, 2020, no. 6139:

Literature:

Janet Todd. Anything but free: Re-reading The Odd Women by George Gissing.

Ritchie Robertson. Witnessing the divine order of the world: Treasures of an Enlightenment master of German prose. Review of: Johann Peter Hebbel, Edited by Jan Knopf, Franz Littmann and Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann, Gesammelte Werke.

Phil Baker. Looking on the bright side of his life: A wholesome picture of the flawed artist Graham Greene. Review of: Richard Greene, Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene.

Kim Fu. Casting aspersions: Playing to type in Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Recently winner of the National Book Award. See >165 featherbear:

Wesley Stace. Just here for the birds: The adventurer naturalist behind 007. Review of: Jim Wright, The Real James Bond: A true story of identity theft, avian intrigue and Ian Fleming.

In Brief review of: Andrew Gailey, Portrait of a Muse: Frances Graham, Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite dream.

In Brief review of: Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business As Usual. "In her fascinating introduction to Business as Usual, the publisher Kate Macdonald details the writing careers of two remarkable women authors – Helen Rees (1903–70) and Anne Pedlar (1900–66) – who, under the pseudonyms Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, produced a staggering ninety-seven novels, both individually and together. And yet who has heard of them today?"

In Brief review of: John Berryman, editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, The Selected Letters of John Berryman.

This week's NB features a review of the late Jan Morris as a TLS reviewer.

Literature Periodicals:

A. E. Stallings. Found in translation: Poetry from around the world. Review of: Modern Poetry in Translation (3 issues per year, print or digital, edited by Clare Pollard).

Irina Dumitrescu. Time travelling in comfort: An invitation to take guidance from the voices of the past. Review of: Lapham's Quarterly, editor Lewis Lapham.

Culture and Arts:

Susan Owens. Cosmic spectacle: A quixotic journey through Bruegel. Review of: Toby Ferris. Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. On Pieter Bruegel's surviving oeuvre and Ferris's impressions thereof. "It is told in a loosely structured collage of observations, memories and reflections, held together by episodic accounts of journeys and viewings."

Peter Read. Giving birth to herself: Frida Kahlo’s incendiary independence. Review of: Marc Petitjean, translation Adriana Hunter, The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris.

Colin Grant. Changing places: Steve McQueen’s portraits of Black British life, from the 1960s to the 80s. Review of: Small Axe. BBC TV series, streaming in the U.S. on Amazon Prime, if I recall.

Andrew Irwin. The weight of history: A boisterous, playful treatment of a grave subject: the last years of slavery before the US Civil War. Review of: the Showtime miniseries, The Good Lord Bird (about John Brown & the Harper's Ferry Raid).

Colin Marshall. Toy stories: Japanese innovations for a world of arrested development. Review of: Matt Alt, Pure Invention: How Japan’s pop culture conquered the world.

Jay Winter. Selective memories: The politics of war memorials. Review of: Keith Lowe, Prisoners of History: What monuments to the Second World War tell us about our history and ourselves and Catherine Gilbert et al, editors, On Commemoration: Global Reflections Upon Remembering War.

Politics, Mostly British:

Fraser Nelson. Falling out over staying in: How Brexit divided the political and media elites. Review of: Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The failure of politics and the parting of friends.

Bryan Appleyard. Capturing the clicksters: High-quality opinion and analysis are no longer the preserve of print journalism. Whoda thunk it? Reviews of political opinion websites: Helen Pluckrose, editor, areomagazine.com -- Daniel Johnson, editor, thearticle.com -- Sally Chatterton, editor, unherd.com

Richard J. Evans. Breaking up is hard to do: Joining the European Union – and the messy business of leaving it. Review of: Vernon Bogdanor, Britain and Europe in a Troubled World -- Stephen Wall, Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit.

An article from earlier in this 2020 quarter I missed. The influence of James Baldwin:

Joel Rhone. Drift, 10/21/2020: Bringing It Back to Baldwin: Myth, Memoir, and America’s Racial Reckoning.

An NYRB review of the new translations of Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis:

Andrew Katzenstein. New York Review of Books, 12/17/2020: A Well-Ventilated Conscience: The digressive, playful, and irreverent Machado de Assis.

Other reviews in the previous thread at posting 85.

"By conquering young minds, the writing of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis worked to recapture a world that was swiftly ebbing away." Excerpt from Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century.

Maria Sachiko Cecire. Aeon, 11/30/2020: Empire of Fantasy.

And on the fantasy genre in general:

Mary Harrington. unherd.com, 11/26/2020: In defence of fantasy. "This much-mocked genre was once the cornerstone of our culture."

British short stories from the Victorian-Edwardian periods:

Malcolm Forbes. thearticle.com, 11/30/2020: Small is beautiful: the heyday of the short story. Review of: Philip Hensher, editor, The Golden Age of British Short Stories.

Borgesian ficciones from an East German author:

Francesca Wade. Baffler, 11/30/2020: Ruins of a Memory Palace. Review of: Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses.

Reading Robert Stone:

Bryan VanDyke. The Millions, 11/25/2020: Extinguishing the Self: On Robert Stone.

Ali Smith's cure what ails you:

Natasha Hakimi Zapata. LARB, 11/30/2020: Antidotes to Brexit, COVID-19, and Other Afflictions in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet.

2020 reading from New Yorker staff -- not limited to 2020 books:

New Yorker, 12/01/2020: The Best Books We Read in 2020.

Reading in 2020:

Joe Nutt. Quillette, 11/30/2020: Relearning How to Read in the Age of Social Media.

"A new history of pornography before it became commercial."

Cintra Wilson. NYRB, 12/17/2020: The Pleasure Crafts. Review of: Lisa Z. Sigel, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America.

"He was an author of Choctaw descent writing traditional mysteries set in Mexico. Will a new generation discover his work?"

James Sallis. crimereads.com, 12/01/2020: The Revival of Tod Downing, the Golden Age Author Fascinated by Death in Mexico.

What Elaine Castillo was reading in 2020:

Elaine Castillo. The Millions, 12/01/2020: A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo.

The 20th installment of the Public Books series An Engineer Reads a Novel:

Jenn Stroud Rossman. Public Books, 12/01/2020: "Soulful, Perhaps Even Magical" Science. Review of: Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom.

More reviews in this series: An Engineer Reads a Novel.

Donation Tuesday with a books theme:

Christopher Louis Romaguera. Electric Lit, 12/01/2020: This Holiday Season, Support These 8 Nonprofits That Hand Out Books.

"Spread joy and literacy by helping these organizations get reading material to prisoners, underprivileged children, and others."

Talking about Zola & Paris w/Jane Smiley:

Jane Smiley, interviewed by Jane Ciabattari. LitHub, 12/01/2020: Jane Smiley on Five Zola Novels About Paris.

About crime fiction novelist Stanley Ellin, whose novels I've enjoyed:

J. Kingston Pierce. crimereads.com, 12/02/2020: The Unconventional Private Eyes of Stanley Ellin.

A new biography of Thorstein Veblen:

Simon Torracinta. Boston Review, 12/02/2020: The Gadfly of American Plutocracy. Review of: Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics.

On "the complexities of the Dolly Parton brand of feminism":

Amanda Feinman. Guernica, 12/02/2020: Smoky Mountain Megaphone. Review of: Sarah Smarsh, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs.

And on the cult of Parton:

Lindsay Zoladz. Service and Devotion: The enduring songcraft of Dolly Parton. Review of the book cited above plus: Lydia R. Hamessley, Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton.

Featured articles (not paywalled) from the December 2020 issue of The Literary Review:

William Boyd. My Evening With Marilyn. Review of: Jonathan Coe, Mr. Wilder and Me (a novel).

H. Kumarasingham. The Price of Freedom. Review of: Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery.

Michael Ignatieff. When Virtue is Not Enough. Review of: Nigel Biggar, What's Wrong With Rights?.

Andrew Adonis. The Harvard Supremacy. Review of: Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?.

Joanna Kavenna. Writers on the Storm. Review of: Alice Oswald & Paul Keegan, editors, Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology.

David Anderson. The Spy Who Taught Me. Review of: John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency and David Omand, How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence.

Elizabeth Lowry. Marriage Made in Hell. Review of: Ann Pasternak Slater, The Fall of a Sparrow: Vivien Eliot’s Life & Writings. PS: US edition won't be published until Feb. 2021.

Here's a link to the Literary Review table of contents for Dec. 2020 if you're interested in any of the paywall articles: December 2020 Issue. NB: I believe the Review recycles the link, so in January you will be directed to the Jan. 2021 table of contents. Also, looks like there are a couple of other features in the TOC that aren't paywalled, e.g. crime fiction roundup.

Articles from TLS, Dec. 4, 2020, no. 6140 I found interesting:

Arts

Paul Griffiths. The next new key: Looking at Beethoven’s heroic oeuvre, 250 years on. (Essay)

Muriel Zagha. Homage to a film star mother: Sophia Loren brings new life to a classic novel. The novel is: Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar, La vie devant soi (English translation as: The Life Before Us. The film under review with Sophia Loren is The Life Ahead streaming on Netflix.

Daniel Johnson. Knights and ladies: Sex, obsession and chess. Another Netflix pic, The Queen's Gambit, is reviewed. The limited series is based on: Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit. For another review comparing book & series, see Sarah Miller. The New Yorker, The Fatal Flaw of 'The Queen's Gambit.'

Science:

Anne Nelson. How I became a guinea pig: Joining a trial for a Covid-19 vaccine in New York.

In Brief review of Stanisław Łubieński, translated by Bill Johnston, The Birds They Sang: Birds and people in life and art

Literature:

Autumn Womack. Difficult questions: Equating conversation with political action. Review of Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation.

Rachel Hadas. Lightning in a bottle: Poetic utterance as belated prophecy. Review of: Jorie Graham, Runaway.

Rohdri Lewis. Witty women: Shakespeare’s languages and the origin of his comic heroines. Review of: Melissa Emerson Walter, The Italian Novella and Shakespeare's Comic Heroines and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Shakespeare's Englishes: Against Englishness.

Joseph Farrell. George Orwell in Wonderland: Reading Gianni Rodari’s whimsical, political fantasy stories. Review of Gianni Rodari, translated by Antony Sugaar, Telephone Tales.

In Brief Review of: Jacob Edmond, Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media.

In Brief Review of: Gottfried von Strassburg, Edited and translated, with an introduction, by William T. Whobrey, Tristan & Isolde.

History & Politics:

Eric Foner. Governing in prose: Realpolitik and idealism in Obama’s first term. Review of: Barack Obama, A Promised Land.

Robert Edward Anasi. The fire last time: Looking back at a decade of riot and revolt in Los Angeles. Review of: Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.

Sarah Watling. Frontline of democracy: How American journalists took on the dictators. Nancy F. Cott, Fighting Words: The bold American journalists who brought the world home between the wars.

John Phipps. Because it’s there: A beginner’s guide to space travel. Review of: Samantha Cristoforetti, translated by Jill Foulston, Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Wearing down the giants: An unconvincing attack on medieval learning. Review of: Charles Freeman, The Awakening: A history of the Western mind AD 500–AD 1700.

David Coward. Crash tests: Was Camus’s death an accident?. Review of: Giovanni Catelli, translated by Andrew Tanzi, The Death of Camus.

Nigel Perrin. Lost in a Hall of Mirrors: Did Britain betray Jean Moulin?. Review of: Patrick Marnham, War in the Shadows: Resistance, deception and betrayal in Occupied France.

Harry Stopes. No Home to Go to: How ‘repatriation’ breaks up families. Review of: Luke de Noronha, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica.

Libby Purves. Rocking the boats: The many roles of women on transatlantic liners. Review of: Maiden Voyages: Women and the golden age of transatlantic travel.

e-Books:

NB: Premium Reads.

About an SF novel from my college days:

Brendan C. Byrne. NeoText, winter 2020?: Samuel R. Delany’s ‘Babel-17.’

Another review of the Adrienne Rich biography (see also >153 featherbear:):

Maggie Doherty. The New Yorker, 11/23/2020: The Long Awakening of Adrienne Rich. Review of: Hilary Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich.

Weird Melvillean things Paul Giamatti did on his smartphone:

Paul Elie. The New Yorker, 12/03/2020: Paul Giamatti Prefers to Read Melville. Namely, Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener.

Another review of the new Wagner book (earlier on >37 featherbear: >177 featherbear:):

Arya Roshanian. Guernica, 11/30/2020: Alex Ross: Wagner in the Twenty-First Century. Review of: Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. A few days before & placed next to the review of Dolly Parton's biography on Guernica >207 featherbear:

Bookforum on Wikipedia:

Rebecca Panovka. Bookforum, Dec./Jan./Feb. 2020-2021: No Rest for the Wiki: The free encyclopedia is one of the last vestiges of an earlier internet. Review of: Joseph Reagle & Jackie Koerner, Wikipedia 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution.

My last free articles on Bookforum for the Dec./Jan./Feb. 2020-2021 quarter:

Becca Rothfeld. All the World’s a Cage: Franz Kafka’s fictional entrapments. Review of: Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann, edited by Reiner Stach, The Lost Writings.

Michael Robbins. A Rumble Offering: Jack Reacher’s good fights. Review of the Reacher oeuvre & Lee Child and Andrew Child, The Sentinel: A Jack Reacher Novel.

Undomesticating ideas with Chuck Klosterman's stories:

Chris Butynski. The University Bookman, 11/22/2020: Properly Dangerous Ideas. Review of: Chuck Klosterman, Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction.

With a last name like "Butynski," a degree from "Faulkner University's Great Books program", and his own book published by "FDUP," not to mention the book under review, I thought this article might be a put-on, but all is real.

In conjunction with reviews >186 featherbear: of the Gorra book on Faulkner, a supplementary article on Faulkner's relationship to history:

Carl Rollyson. Hedgehog Review, Fall 2020: Faulkner as Futurist: The past is never dead because its meaning is forever changing.

From the Public Books B-series, an essay on Virginia Woolf's emotional support animal:

Debra Gettelman. Public Books, 12/03/2020: Virginia's Woolf's 'Flush'.

Speaking of obscure B-sides, here's an essay on an Italian gothic writer too minor to have been translated into English:

Lawrence Venuti. LARB, 12/04/2020: The Hyena’s Laugh: I. U. Tarchetti and the Birth of Italian Gothic.

A new book on film director Christopher Nolan:

Andrew Fedorov. LARB, 12/04/2020: The Imperialist Anxieties of Christopher Nolan. Review of: Tom Shone, The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan.

So Elena Ferrante is not about female friendship after all:

Pamela Erens. VQR, v. 96/4, winter 2020: Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante’s Blurred Lines.

So this movie Mank on Herman Mankiewicz & Citizen Kane recently premiered on Netflix. For some background, see:

Sydney Ladensohn Stern. LitHub, 12/04/2020: The Mankiewicz Brothers’ Biographer Weighs in on David Fincher’s Mank: Sydney Stern on the Beauty and Limits of Capturing Icons on Screen.

And from earlier in 2020:

Alex Harvey. LARB, 09/27/2020: “Here Lies Herm — I Mean, Joe”: On Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s “The Brothers Mankiewicz.”

Discovering or re-discovering French crime fiction author Jean Patrick Manchette:

Donald Nicholson-Smith . crimereads.com, 12/04/2020: Jean Patrick Manchette: Inside the Decades-Long Effort to Bring a Master of French Crime Fiction to American Readers.

Let's have a moment for continental (i.e. European) philosophers:

Jeremy Butman. The Believer, 12/01/2020: An Interview with Alphonso Lingis. I'm familiar with Lingis as a translator, but not his own work.

Brian Dillon. The Guardian, 11/27/2020: An Event, Perhaps by Peter Salmon review – a timely biography of Jacques Derrida. For another review of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida see also >28 featherbear: .

Another review of the Sylvia Plath biography:

Rafia Zakaria. The Baffler, 12/04/2020: Reality Bites. Review of: Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. See also >144 featherbear:

Late fees in libraries no longer sacrosanct:

Deborah Fallows. The Atlantic, 12/04/2020: Why Some Libraries Are Ending Fines. I suspect this applies to public libraries; high demand books needed for courses in academic libraries could still use certain incentives.

"A video series... about what literature can say and do."

The New Yorker, 12/04/2020: Introducing "Books for the Midnight Hour": What We Read When the World Gets Dark.

5-6 minute squibs on favorite classics, e.g. Jill Lepore on The Federalist Papers, Jonathan Lee Walton on Souls of Black Folk, Stephen Greenblatt on Hamlet.

On Derek Mahon, the Irish poet

Declan Ryan. LARB, 12/05/2020: On Derek Mahon.

(Norman) Derek Mahon, poet, born 23 November 1941; died 1 October 2020:

Sean O'Brien. The Guardian, 10/09/2020: Derek Mahon Obituary.

Neil Genzlinger. NYT, 10/02/2020: Derek Mahon, Popular Irish Poet, Is Dead at 78.

On Ann Quin, an experimental English novelist:

Becca Rothfeld. NYRB, 12/17/2020: Ann Quin’s Stalled Talkers. Review of: Ann Quin, Three.

Two reviews of: David S. Brown, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams:

Dan Chiasson. The New Yorker, 11/30/2020: What Henry Adams Understood About History's Breaking Points.

Amy S. Greenberg. NYT, 11/24/2020: The Brilliant, Bitter, Unlikable Scion of an American Political Dynasty.

The Ideas Beyond Borders Project offers articles & books on liberal Islam to Muslims:

Brian Stewart. Quillette, 12/04/2020: Enlightenment Literature as Foreign Aid.

Louise Glück Nobel Prize for Literature 2020 lecture.

Reaktion publisher's Animal series:

Verlyn Klinkenborg. New York Review of Books, 12/17/2020: A Noah's Ark of Books. Review of (among others): Robert Irwin, Camel -- Annie Potts, Chicken -- Christopher Plumb & Samuel Shaw, Zebra -- Ildiko Szabo, Kingfisher -- Amanda Rees and Charlotte Sleigh, Human (Animal)

On Albert Camus' relevance today:

Mugambi Jouet. Boston Review, 12/07/2020: Reading Camus in Time of Plague and Polarization.

On the Substack model for distribution of news and opinion:

Michael J. Socolow. The Conversation, 12/07/2020: Substack isn’t a new model for journalism – it’s a very old one.

Spengler, the pandemic, & the cycles of civilization:

Ethan Lou. Hazlitt, 11/30/2020: What A Time To Be In Decline.

TLS Dec. 11, 2020, no. 6141.

Political Biography

Stephen Lovell. Stalin up close and human: From the making of Stalin to his postwar imperial pomp. Review of: Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution and Evgeny Dobrenko, translated by Jesse M. Savage, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Hell, there ain’t no list: Will Trumpism be remembered as McCarthyism is?. Review of: Larry Tye, Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy.

In Brief review of: Edward Ball, Life of a Klansman: A family history in white supremacy.

Literature

Achy Obejas. Assimilate, then what?: Two widely different accounts of the Dominican-American experience. Review of: Julia Alvarez, Afterlife and Angie Cruz, Dominicana. Both books under review are novels.

Joanna Scutts. Novel cures: How reading about self-help can change your life. Review of: Beth Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for advice in modern literature and Philip Davis, Reading for Life.

Bart van Es. Inventing invention: The cultural history of a hazy idea. Review of: Rocío G. Sumillera, Invention: The language of English Renaissance poetics and Scarlett Baron, The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity

Andrew Hadfield. Rudely rough: Seven centuries of class’s influence on literature. Review of: Sandie Byrne, Poetry and Class.

Gregory Freidin. Caught between epigram and ode: How Mandelstam’s balancing act under Stalin ended in the Gulag. Review of: Andrew Kahn, Mandelstam's Worlds: Poetry, politics, and identity in a revolutionary age.

Tara Mc Evoy. Heaney 101: The grounded, benevolent, brilliant Irish laureate. Review of: R. F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney.

In Brief review of: Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels.

In Brief review of:Barbey d’Aurevilly, translation by Ernest Boyd, Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils).

Also reviews of fiction by Nicole Krauss, To Be a Man -- Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside -- Jude Cook, Jacob's Advice.

Miscellaneous

Shahidha Bari. An old and fishy tale: Our abiding fascination with merpeople. Review of: Vaughn Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History.

Dmitri Levitin. Talk like an Egyptian: The race to understand the Rosetta Stone. Review of: Jed Z. Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz, The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English polymath and a French polyglot discovered the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

As for The Arts, the issue includes essays on an art book by Louis Aragon on the painter Eduard Matisse, a Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Tate, and a history of London's West End (published by Oxford University Press).

On George Orwell's reputation:

Martin Tyrrell. Dublin Review of Books, 12/2020, issue 128:Two Legs Bad. Review of: John Rodden, Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legend and Legacy.

Autism & civilization:

Christine Kenneally. NYT, 12/08/2020: Does Autism Hold the Key to What Makes Humans Special?. Review of: Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention.

Another viewpoint:

Stuart Ritchie. UnHerd, 12/22/2020: Is autism a superpower?

A small publisher considers the proposed merger of Random House and Simon & Schuster:

Dennis Johnson. The Atlantic, 12/08/2020: The Bigger the Publishers, the Blander the Books.

On a related note, I spent the early hours of the morning scrolling through the NYT Globetrotting feature that lists books in translation to come out in 2020, and which is updated from time to time (most recently Sept. 8). By now it functions as a rough summary of books in translation of broad general interest that were published in 2020, though I'm sure many were omitted or overlooked; maybe the many appended comments have further items. I would imagine there are some small publishers represented.

Buy or borrow?

Ben Dolnick. New York Times Magazine, 12/08/2020: Library Books: A Small Antidote to a Life of Perpetual Dissatisfaction.

Obituary for John Le Carré:

Sarah Lyall. NYT, 12/13/2020: John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89.

Two essays from The Atlantic on Le Carré:

James Parker. The Atlantic, 12/14/2020: The Singular Achievement of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Tom McTague. The Atlantic, 12/14/2020: John le Carré Knew England’s Secrets.

And, unexpectedly, from City Journal:

Seth Barron. City Journal, 12/14/2020: The Spy Who Lingers.

"The writer, essayist, and professor Brian Dillon is a superb reader of sentences. His new book, Suppose a Sentence, is composed of essays of varying length, each focused on a single sentence from the works of 27 writers, ranging from Shakespeare to Anne Boyer."

Katie da Cunha Lewin. LARB, 12/14/2020: Reading in Slow Motion. Review of Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence.

Longform article on book thievery:

Mark Wilding. The Guardian, 12/13/2020. Tome raiders: solving the great book heist.

"When £2.5m of rare books were stolen in an audacious heist at Feltham in 2017, police wondered, what’s the story?"

Excerpt from a new book on In Search of Lost Time:

Saul Friedländer. LitHub, 12/15/2020: Who is the Narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?.

The cast list in bygone paperback crime novels:

J. Kingston Pierce. crimereads.com, 12/15/2020: The Lost Art of the "Cast of Characters" List That Opened Midcentury Mystery Novels.

"Gaddis was temperamentally conservative, a Spenglerian who saw evidence of deterioration wherever he looked."

Dustin Illingworth. The Point, 12/14/2020: Unrecognizable: William Gaddis’s American pessimism.

Side by side comparisons:

Emily Temple. LitHub, 12/15/2020" Who wore it better? US book covers vs. their UK counterparts..

TLS 12/18-25/2020 No. 6142/3:

Literature:

Annette Federico. How Boz got his fizz: Charles Dickens’s tricks, tenses, typefaces – and trains. Review of: John Mullan, The Artful Dickens: The tricks and ploys of the great novelist -- Gavin Edwards, The Case of the Initial Letter: Charles Dickens and the politics of the dual alphabet -- Tony Williams, Editor, Dickens on Railways: A great novelist’s travels by train.

Calum Mechie. Still Orwell’s England?: The writer as ‘moral litmus paper’. Review of: D. J. Taylor, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography -- Richard Bradford, Orwell: Man of Our Time -- John Rodden, Becoming George Orwell: Life and letters, legend and legacy -- Sylvia Topp, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell.

Sarah Richmond. Getting up his nose: The power and perils of autofiction. Review of: Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga. (The roman-a-clef that includes the author's ex-wife)

Henriette Korthals Altes. Double standards: What if an event happens not once, but twice?. Review of: Hervé Le Tellier, L'Anomalie. An Oulipian novel that recently won the Prix de Goncourt. Subtitle says it all regarding the premise.

Deborah Vietor-Engländer. Rescuing the red baroness: In praise of a prolific and significant Austrian writer. Review of: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Werke.

In Brief Review of: Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, editors, All the Sonnets of Shakespeare.

In Brief Review of: Mary Gaitskill, Lost Cat: A Memoir.

Sports & (Mostly) Food because Xmas:

Timothy O’ Grady. With Shorty on his side: Muhammad Ali and the man who made him. Review of: Todd D. Snyder, Bundini: Don't Believe the Hype -- Stuart Cosgrove, Cassius X: A legend in the making.

Druin Burch. Tray’s anatomy. (Essay on hospital food)

Clarissa Hyman. Is trifle sufficient for sweet?: Food snobbery and social acceptability. Pen Vogler, Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain.

Caroline Eden. Ginger nuts: A hymn to Britain’s favourite treat. Review of: Lizzie Collingham, The Biscuit: The history of a very British indulgence.

In Brief Review of: Kate Young, The Little Library Christmas. Sort of a Xmas cookbook.

Patricia Storace. First, stuff your goat: Autocrats’ appetites, and the chefs who satisfied them. Review of: Witold Szabłowski, Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot through the eyes of their cooks.

...from dictator transitioning to

Politics & History:

Barnaby Crowcroft. There wasn’t a country: Revealing the ‘inner life’ of wartime Biafra. Review of: Samuel Fury Childs Daly, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, crime, and the Nigerian Civil War.

Colin Marshall. On the brink: Why can’t the nations of East Asia get on?. Review of: Michael Booth, A journey through the bitter history and current conflicts of China, Korea and Japan.

Michael Vatikiotis. Jokowi’s journey: A former furniture-maker’s plans for Indonesian prosperity. Review of: Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the struggle to remake Indonesia.

Kieran Pender. Country on our conscience: Why Australia should apologize to the Timorese. Review of: Bernard Collaery, Oil Under Troubled Waters: Australia’s Timor Sea intrigue.

Caryl Phillips. After Windrush: The colonial migrant in Britain. (Essay)

T. G. Otte. .On the ’edgerows of experience: Ernest Bevin, Labour’s authentic working-class leader. Review of: Andrew Adonis, Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill.

Anne Chisholm. Winston, warts and all: Churchill’s heroism, prejudices and blunders. Review of: Richard Toye, Winston Churchill: A Life in the News and Steven Fielding, Bill Schwarz and Richard Toye, The Churchill Myths.

Zoe Williams. Calling a spad a spad: The strange and shadowy world of the unelected official. Review of: Peter Cardwell, The Secret Life of Special Advisers.

In Brief Review of: David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to resist it.

Why Wilkerson's caste framework doesn't fit Black Lives Matter:

Charisse Burden-Stelly. Boston Review, 12/15/2020: Caste Does Not Explain Race. Review of Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: the origins of our discontents.

Revisiting James Baldwin, & how living in Turkey changed his perspective on American exceptionalism:

Begüm Adalet. Public Books, 12/16/2020: James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere. Review of: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

In contrast, JB as celebrity:

Nancy Hass. 12/11, updated 12/17/2020: Who James Baldwin Knew.

Remembering novelist Alison Lurie:

Claire Messud. NYRB, 01/14/2021: Alison Lurie (1926–2020).

More on William Faulkner:

Brenda Wineapple. NYRB, 01/14/2021: ‘A Land Where the Dead Past Walks’. Review of: Carl Rollyson, The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 & The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 -- Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.

"Modernist, Humanist, Compromised Faulkner: His chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction."

What Barack Obama's recent memoir tells us about the legislative process:

David Webber. The Conversation, 12/21/2020: Obama book offers key insight about how laws really get made. On Barack Obama, A Promised Land

"On John Steinbeck’s bleak America":

Matt Hanson. The Baffler, 12/17/2020: Winters of Discontent.

"Two new books take aim at the moral failures of meritocracy. But we can advocate for a more just society without giving up on merit."

Agnes Callard. Boston Review, 12/21/2020: A More Perfect Meritocracy. Review of: Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice and Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

"The unexpected difficulties of modernizing Bob, Son of Battle, a beloved nineteenth-century children’s book"

Lydia Davis. The Believer, 12/01/2020: Notes on Translating a Children's Book

"A phishing scam with unclear motive or payoff is targeting authors, agents and editors big and small, baffling the publishing industry."

Elizabeth A. Harris and Nicole Perlroth. NYT, 12/21/2020: The Mystery of the Disappearing Manuscripts.

Anything by Merve Emre I want to take a look at:

Merve Emre. New Yorker, 12/21/2020: How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism.

If you're thinking of moving to New York, which borough should you choose (economics aside)? Who would be your neighbors? Maybe it can be determined by the top books checked out from the borough libraries?:

Dan Sheehan. LitHub, 12/22/2020: These are the books New Yorkers checked out from the library most this year.

Maybe something worthwhile might be found in one of these lists vs. encountering a lot of unsympathetic navel-gazers. Whose navel do I find simpatico?

The Millions, 12/01-/2020: A Year in Reading: 2020.

“'August belongs to everybody,' the actor Stephen McKinley Henderson tells us. “Everybody that’s got a mother, father, sister, brother—this speaks to you.” It’s an inspiring message, but it appears slightly at odds with Wilson’s own professed aesthetics of a theater by and for Black artists."

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. The Atlantic, 12/22/2020: The Unconscious Rebellion of August Wilson.

King Lear as Christmas reading:

Mark Labberton. The Atlantic, 12/23/2020: Why I Read King Lear Each Advent.

Literary losses:

Emily Temple. LitHub, 12/18/2020: Notable Literary Deaths in 2020.

What poetry anthologies do:

Clare Bucknell. The New Yorker, 12/22/2020: What Do We Want From Poetry in Times of Crisis?.

"Librarian networks are trying to get books in the hands of people locked away in prisons and jails":

Mai Tran. Gen, 12/23/2020: I Don’t Want Incarcerated People to Feel Cut Off From the World.

Dickens & imprisonment:

Laurence Scott. The New Yorker, 12/24/2020: Charles Dickens, the Writer Who Saw Imprisonment Everywhere.

Why people read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, then and now:

Hillary Kelly. New Yorker, 12/26/2020: 'The Age of Innocence' at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich.

Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams, has died:

Associated Press. The Guardian, 12/26/2020: Barry Lopez, award-winning Arctic Dreams author, has died aged 75.

Robert McFadden. NYT, 12/26/2020: Barry Lopez, Lyrical Writer Who Was Likened to Thoreau, Dies at 75.

From Lopez's forthcoming book, American Geography:

Barry Lopez. LitHub, 12/24/2020: Barry Lopez: An Era of Emergencies is Upon Us and We Cannot Look Away.

"I object to the desecration of what is beautiful. I object to society’s complacency.”

An appreciation of Mrs. Dalloway:

Michael Cunningham. NYT, 12/23/2020: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution.

A recent addendum from the New Yorker:

Jenny Ofill. New Yorker, 12/29/2020: A Lifetime of Lessons in 'Mrs. Dalloway.'

The correspondence of James Tiptress Jr. & Joanna Russ:

Livia Gershon. JSTOR Daily, 12/28/2020: James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ: Sci-Fi Pen Pals.

>269 featherbear: This entry just to save the Barry Lopez links... Sad to hear... I loved reading Horizon this year.

Love in the time of covid019:

Daniel Rey. Prospect, 12/31/2020: What Gabriel García Márquez knew about plagues.

The year in publishing 2020:

John Williams. NYT, 12/30/2020: How Politics, Protests and the Pandemic Shaped a Year in Books.

Pandemic problems for Parisian bookstalls:

Jon Henley. The Guardian, 12/29/2020: Through gilets jaunes, strikes and Covid, Paris's 400-year-old book stalls fight to survive.

Two more end of year guides to somewhat off the beaten track titles:

LitHub, 12/30/2020: Booksellers Recommend: The Best Under-the-Radar Books of 2020.

J.R. Ramakrishnan. Electric Literature, 12/31/2020: 7 (More) Literary Translators You Should Know. And the books they've translated.

Another end of year list (more mainstream) from the JSTOR editors:

JSTOR Daily, 12/31/2020: What We’re Reading in 2020.

"Almost every day I read a new story, listen to a new podcast, or encounter a new thread of tweets chronicling the cancerous spread of internet cults and unfounded conspiracy theories. And, almost every day, I can’t help but think of a sparsely read novel written by a dude in the back office of an Arkansas dive bar in 1985."

Brian Boyle. Slate, 12/31/2020: Masters of Atlantis Is Essential Reading for the QAnon Age. On Charles Portis: Masters of Atlantis.

The Federal Writer's Project guidebooks:

Jon Allsop. Columbia Journalism Review, 12/22/2021: The enduring lessons of a New Deal writers project.