Rhapsody: A Manifesto by Alice Oswald review – a history of the spoken word, from Homer to Ted Hughes (opens The Guardian)
A twisting, beguiling investigation into the art of poetry that ends in a call to arms on behalf of the natural world
Reviews
The headline, standfirst and reviewer from each outlet, linked to the full review there and to the book's page here.
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Book Review: ‘Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives’ and ‘Beautiful Distance,’ by Nao-Cola Yamazaki (opens The New York Times)
Two slim novels by Nao-Cola Yamazaki show that romance can often be pretty unromantic.
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Book Review: ‘The Only Thing There Is to Want,’ by Sarah Hepola (opens The New York Times)
Sarah Hepola’s new memoir picks up where “Blackout” left off: with the story of three passionate, doomed affairs in her 30s and 40s.
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The Long Cloud by Hector MacKenzie review – there’s only so much depth to a himbo (opens The Guardian)
This wry debut novel about a male model’s inner life, written in lowercase fragments, has tender insights but isn’t as profound as it aims to be
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The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson audiobook review – a Caribbean child’s-eye view of 60s Bradford (opens The Guardian)
The author captures the comedy and cruelty in this tenderly written coming-of-age tale
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Book Review: ‘This Cursed Beautiful Land,’ by Evan Gershkovich (opens The New York Times)
In “This Cursed Beautiful Land,” the journalist Evan Gershkovich explores what he learned while imprisoned in the country his parents fled.
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How Tech Rules (opens New York Review of Books)
One of the hallmarks of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership from control. The firm is owned by shareholders but led by managers, who answer to shareholders only indirectly. Actually, it’s weirder than that. The corporation owns itself. Shareholders merely own stock, which is a…
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The Elusive Glamour of Peter and Paul (opens New York Review of Books)
A dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is a tantalizing portrait of the artists and their epoch, just before the catastrophe of AIDS.
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Boxcar to Nowhere (opens New York Review of Books)
American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.
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Second Chances (opens New York Review of Books)
My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A…
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Building a Real Man (opens New York Review of Books)
The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew tradition has Samson, the Greek Heracles, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Irish Cú Chulainn. Every culture has its dreams of superhuman strength…
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Message in a Bottle (opens New York Review of Books)
Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
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Small Is Beautiful (opens New York Review of Books)
Jonathan Buckley's books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.
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Possessed of Alchemystic Powers (opens New York Review of Books)
In 1949 Ithell Colquhoun—artist, writer, and occultist—produced a manifesto, titled “The Mantic Stain,” in which she called on her readers to follow French Surrealism’s practice of “pure psychic automatism.” It was, Breton wrote, “the real working of thought. Dictation of thought, without any…
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Pox Britannica (opens New York Review of Books)
Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet…
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Let a Hundred Websites Bloom (opens New York Review of Books)
The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
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Catalytic Ghosts (opens New York Review of Books)
In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy…
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Book Review: ‘How Bright the Path Grows,’ by Marcia Chatelain (opens The New York Times)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Marcia Chatelain revisits the 1963 March on Washington, placing overlooked Black women at the center of the story.
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Dodge City by Patrick deWitt review – a wild draft-dodging road trip (opens The Guardian)
This tale of a 60s college dropout driving across the US to avoid being sent to Vietnam is committed to both readerly pleasure and literary artifice
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Book Review: ‘The Bed Trick,’ by Izabella Scott (opens The New York Times)
“The Bed Trick” details an extraordinary sexual deception case involving a “bamboozling plot,” “two implausible stories” and a world where no one behaves reasonably.
