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

Sonny Boy

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino is published by Century

Bookselling Out

My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said the bookseller. The woman laughed and left. [...]

Bookstores are struggling. We might say The Bookshop is the story of a rise and fall. Friss offers a bleak analysis in his final pages, explaining how the vaunted indie comeback of the last few years depends on misleading data from the ABA. According to the U.S. Census, “between 2012 and 2021, the number of bookstores dropped by 34 percent.”  Dan Sinykin, The Baffler

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss (Viking).

The Jazz Singer

Il primo film sonoro – prodotto dalla stessa Warner e proiettato per la prima volta il 27 ottobre 1927 – fu Il cantante di jazz (The Jazz Singer) nel quale, oltre a varie canzoni, si udivano una frase rivolta al pubblico dal protagonista e un breve dialogo tra questi e la madre. Il protagonista, interpretato da Al Johnson, è un ragazzo ebreo che non vuole cantare in sinagoga, come hanno fatto tutti i maschi di famiglia prima di lui, perché ama il jazz. Nel film canta però Kol Nidre, in una versione molto commovente. A proposito del Kippur appena trascorso.

7 ottobre, un anno dal pogrom

This is a story of two political cultures. One of them shapes the attitudes that dominate political discussion in American colleges. The other culture persists among a broad and reasonably well-informed public outside colleges and their government and philanthropic tributaries. When, in the academic year 2023-24, the two cultures faced each other with expressions of mutual dismay, the moment had been coming for a long time. On October 7, 2023, scores of Hamas fighters broke through the boundaries of Gaza, killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 others: the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. Within hours, 34 student groups at Harvard University had circulated a public letter affirming that “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” (The word “unfolding” covered the violence of the past, the present, and the future.) “Today’s events,” the letter went on to say, “did not occur in a vacuum,” and it added: “The apartheid regime [of Israel] is the only one to blame.” The signers concluded by urging solidarity with the Palestinian suffering which was sure to follow once the Israeli retaliation in Gaza had commenced.

What shocked many people about the student letter was its heartlessness. Even as the bodies were being counted, the signers told us not to blame the killers but to redirect our gaze, and fix all responsibility on Israel. The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rebecca Watson: ‘What are siblings: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies?

The author of I Will Crash, about an estranged brother and sister, looks at other books on difficult sibling relationships, from authors including Sally Rooney and Julia Armfield. Rebecca Watson, The Guardian

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson is published by Faber.

The 2024 Booker prize shortlist

Among the shortlisted women are “real heavyweight writers” who are “perhaps undersung” in terms of the “massive commercial success that they should have had”, added Collins, pointing to British writer Samantha Harvey and her fifth novel Orbital; Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, shortlisted for Held; and Australian novelist Charlotte Wood, chosen for Stone Yard Devotional.

Shortlisted alongside them are American writer Rachel Kushner with Creation Lake and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted and lone debut novelist to feature with The Safekeep. Completing this year’s shortlist is Percival Everett with James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The Guardian

Tell me everything

“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections. Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, un elenco dei libri di narrativa e saggistica in uscita quest'autunno

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

For Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translating together extended naturally from their relationship as husband and wife. Now, it is their life’s work.

The first time Pevear, 81, and Volokhonsky, 78, translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.
“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said. “Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.”

Since that first translation published in 1990 — it was “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s immense final novel — Pevear and Volokhonsky have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year. Their work includes classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov, as well as lesser-known books and works by contemporary writers like the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. In their reach, the couple are making vast swaths of Russia’s written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation. Instagram New York Times

Science meets art in Brown engineering course

Using the scientific principles behind fluid mechanics, students in a School of Engineering course produced stunning imagery brought to life via high-speed photography.

Conducting the experiment as part of Engineering 0350: Art Fluid Engineering, the students’ goal was to capture stunning imagery, using high-speed photography, of the different ways liquids can splash. The end product is meant to show how the work of scientists and engineers, and the fundamental laws and principles they rely on, can also be applied to artistic creation. News from Brown