The books to look forward to in 2025

 

David Shariatmadari, The Guardian

BUON ANNO!

The Rise and Fall — and Rise? — of Close Reading

[...] But through it all, close reading remained a technique widely used by scholars and teachers, and it has become newly fashionable in recent years. Why exactly? Although the intellectual rewards it yields may seem obvious to those who have been properly initiated, it is, after all, not the only way to do interpretation. Critics from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson have appreciated and studied literature without it. What, then, has made it such a seemingly indispensable method in the past hundred years? What historical or institutional pressures were responsible for its emergence and growth? In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sketches out some possible answers to these questions. To explain why it has proved so serviceable to the discipline, he contends, we must first understand what exactly close reading is — which turns out to be more difficult than we might assume. Timothy Aubry, The Chronicle of Higher Education

buona fine anno e buon inizio anno nuovo!

How to Research Like a Dog

Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring. [...] “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” Aaron Schuster, The MIT Press

confrontarsi con Kafka, sempre. Buon Natale e Hanukkah!

Untold Lessons

It is 1970 in the northern Italian city of Biella, and a teacher has gone missing. The disappearance of Silvia seems to be linked to the death of her pupil Giovanna, a girl who was beaten at home ... John Self, The Guardian

è stata una sorpresa trovare sul Guardian - tra i libri recentemente tradotti in inglese - il romanzo di Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, che in Italia si intitola Tornare nel bosco ed è edito da Marsilio. Non lo conosco, ma l'ho cercato in versione kindle. Mi incuriosisce, così come mi incuriosisce l'autrice. Tra l'altro si svolge sulle colline e nei boschi della mia infanzia.

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

How the Ivy League Broke America

 The Six Sins of the Meritocracy

1. The system overrates intelligence.  
2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 
3. The game is rigged. 
4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.
5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 
6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.   David Brooks, The Atlantic
   

Can AI replace translators?

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial. Keza MacDonald, The Guardian

The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches. John Self, The Guardian

Alan Bennett at 90

Bennett has come to accept that “old age is a subject. You write about what you’re given. And I hadn’t expected to have anything to write about by now.” Killing Time is set in a home for the elderly. He started it a few years ago but set it aside because Allelujah! (2018), his most recent stage play, was set in a hospital elderly care ward: “I didn’t want to become the bard of geriatric medicine!” Mark Lawson, The Guardian

e poi Alan Bennett continua a parlare, parlare di tutto e tutti...

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit.

She steers us to one more Madonna with Child, the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds. “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today. 

For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored at room temperature for about seven months and maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. Mark Schapiro, Smithsonian