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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Posts Tagged: London Review of Books
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.
...moreEliot 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 writers of the words he deployed in his poems. Mark Ford gets granular at the […]
...moreA 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 books. The London Review of Books takes a closer look at a recent feud between […]
...morePublic 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 sweet shops of childhood. At school, libraries had occasionally provided refuge from the ruthless popularity […]
...moreTitle 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 much of the time I’m frightened and sad (too frightened and sad for procrastination to […]
...moreRepeat 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 hold you in its spell as much as the rhythm of a line: the beat […]
...moreLearning 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 studying for degrees – between 35 and 40 per cent. I approve wholly of this […]
...moreA 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 couple of weeks ago. Over at the London Review of Books, Seamus Perry looks at […]
...more(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 Vera.
...moreElevator 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 in lifts in movies from the 1930s onwards. The vast majority of these scenes involve […]
...moreLRB 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. The London Review of Books is, by VIDA’s reckoning, one of the worst offenders: only about 25% […]
...more“A ‘Fuck You’ to Women Everywhere”
I can imagine complaining along these lines in an editorial meeting at a British publishing house, and being sighed at: “Yes, of course the 1960s cover is beautiful – I love it – but Waterstones and Tesco won’t stock it.” At the London Review of Books‘ blog, Fatema Ahmed takes a critical look at the cover of a […]
...moreDid You Just Eat Breakfast?
This one time in the 19th century, some guys were hanging out in a store when a shotgun accidently went off, wounding one Alex St Martin in the stomach, exposing his breakfast and his digestive system. While the part about the breakfast is completely upsetting, the uncovering of the human digestive anatomy was actually both […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Good things happen when people who grow up listening to Thriller become poets. There’s going to be a new Bukowski exhibit down Southern California way, including his “annotated racing forms” that will teach you his system for playing the horses. Jason Pinter takes on the idea that men don’t read. “I guess in this world, […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Blog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it. Eggers on Salinger. Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via) “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!” Jacket Copy has fun with illustrators’ pictures of their favorite literary figures and characters. “If […]
...moreThe Irresistible Illusion
Rory Stewart’s LRB article “the Irresistible Illusion,” analyzes the language current Western leaders use when speaking about Afghanistan. Then he compares it to similar speeches made by others since 1868. Spoiler: Nothing new has been said in over 140 years. If anything, according to Stewart, our rhetoric has gotten worse.
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