London Review of Books
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Three Collections in Two Volumes by August Kleinzahler
Be stunned by Kleinzahler’s poetry in the far ports of your body.
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The Rumpus Interview with Nina Stibbe
Author Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism.
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Eliot to the Internet
Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other…
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A Cookbook Feud Boils Over
The Amazon reviews, and the threads leading from them, are now the length of a book, and while the contest might seem overblown—more evidence of too much boring talk about food—Kennedy is far more than just a writer of cook…
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Public Libraries Serve the Public
Public libraries should not be run like businesses, argues Linda Holt over at the London Review of Books. They serve as a critical resource for a variety of marginalized populations: …libraries became far more than an intellectual version of the mythical…
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Title Written Later
Over at the London Review of Books, Robert Hanks meditates on procrastination: Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms. It’s franker to say that I put things off because…
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Repeat the Past, Break the Future
A god does not intervene. A mortal dies. Things happen repeatedly, then suddenly they differ. That rhythm of action, which combines repetition with asymmetry, is the rhythm of Homeric narrative and of the Homeric style. And it is designed to…
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Learning While Teaching
I went to university in 1964, a different era, when very few of us, around 5 per cent of the population, had the chance. We were undoubtedly a lucky generation. Now, many many more of us, young and older, are…
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A Century of Dylan Thomas
“Dylan is very emotional but like a good Welshman also very suspicious. Thus when he has expressed himself very warmly, in fact exposed himself, he will suddenly react violently towards a self-sneering cynicism.” Dylan Thomas would have turned 100 a…
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(Not Really) Pleased To Meet You
The narrative of the encounter between James Joyce and Marcel Proust gets another tile added to its mosaic. Over at the London Review of Books blog, Ben Jackson reports on the legendary meeting as told by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife…
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Elevator Protocol
Elevators, that common denominator of human anxiety, have a long history. David Trotter reviews Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard: That’s what elevator protocol is for. Or so we might gather from the very large number of scenes set…
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LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women.…