In love with the hotel

The second winner of the Women’s prize for nonfiction will be unveiled next month. Alongside books of memoir, science and biography, this year’s shortlist features two titles in which hotels are the main character: The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet and Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska.

Nonfiction aside, hotels have long been compelling settings for dramas of all kinds: novels (Hotel du Lac, A Gentleman in Moscow), TV (The White Lotus, Fawlty Towers) and film (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Lost in Translation) make use, too. 

Eclipse of Peace

On May 28, 585 B.C., a rare celestial event turned a battlefield into a place of peace. As the armies of King Alyattes II of Lydia and King Cyaxares of the Medes prepared for yet another clash, the midday sun suddenly vanished. Day became night. This unexpected darkness—now known as the Eclipse of Peace—stunned both sides and brought an abrupt halt to the war. Abdul Moeed, Greek Reporter

The Life and Death of the Book Review

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. [...] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics, instead taking their lead from celebrities like Oprah, or online influencers. The authoritative middlebrow cultural figures who once instructed Americans on what to read from perches at the Saturday Review and the New Yorker no longer exist (Adam Gopnik does not dictate American reading habits). The very idea of such cultural authority is widely dismissed as elitist. David A. Bell, Liberties

 

Gin and Secrets

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, concentrates on the lasting damage that the Cambridge spies inflicted by providing Stalin with crucial information about the Western allies’ strategy and priorities (as well as the development of the atom bomb) when it was becoming evident Germany was losing the war. Richerd Norton-Taylor, Literary Review

spie, Russia e Gran Bretagna: recensione a: Antonia Senior, The Soviet Network. Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire (Hodder & Stoughton). 

 

Who Gets Guggenheims?

In recent years, the number of awards has stabilized to roughly 170 to 200 fellowships per year. The Guggenheim awards fellowships that fall into four broad categories: the creative arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Since the 1950s, the foundation has gradually increased its share of funding to the creative arts, with the largest reduction coming from fellowships in the natural sciences. Dominique J. Bake, Christopher T. Bennett, Public Books

un articolo lungo e interessante che mette in evidenza anche la diminuzione dei premi assegnati alle Humanities. 

Thinking in the Margins

During our time together, I never saw Oliver annotating a book, and he never spoke about the habit; I don’t think he gave it a second thought. This was just the kind of reader he was: He would spontaneously jot down his reactions, his inner thoughts, in the margins—left, right, bottom, top—or on the endpapers or title pages, often using colored felt pens (red, green, purple, blue), sometimes switching colors on the same page. Oliver’s annotated books began piling up in tower after tower on the floor; ultimately, I found around 500 of them. I felt like I had uncovered a beautiful secret; I knew that I must be the first person (other than Oliver himself) to be reading these long-forgotten thoughts and ideas. Sometimes a book was filled with annotations, cover to cover, and sometimes just a few lines prompted him to take pen to page. To my delight, the public and scholars will be able to discover, decipher, and interpret these “secrets,” too: The New York Public Library now holds Oliver’s annotated books as a complement to its extensive Oliver Sacks archive, acquired in 2024. Bill Hayes, The American Scholar

in questo bell'articolo il partner di Oliver Sacks parla dell'abitudine di Sacks di annotare i libri a margine.

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’” Paul Elie, New Republic

On Satire

For as long as there has been satire there has been an effort to explain what exactly it is. A vast critical literature chews over matters of definition and classification. But the task has never fallen only to critics and theorists. [...]

For Dan Sperrin in State of Ridicule, the basic definition of satire is unambiguous: satire is political. It “offers interpretations of power,” though its point is never merely interpretive. It wants to intercede in matters of state and government, sometimes in support of the existing regime and frequently in opposition to it. For hundreds of years English satire has been consumed with recurring subjects and problems: the legitimacy of rule, the succession of dynasties, the ambition of prime ministers, the administration of government. Aaron Matz, The New York Review 

il libro di cui si parla è: State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature, di Dan Sperrin (Princeton University Press)

 

The Last Drop

How much of your life is spent waiting for the last drops of syrup, olive oil, or even bodywash to drip from a container? This routine test of patience is owed entirely to complex fluid dynamics. But thanks to physicists at Brown University, people no longer have to guess how long it may take to finally empty that bottle of ketchup—provided you are well-versed in the right math. Andrew Paul, Popular Science

in effetti, io ci sto sempre attenta, a consumare fino all'ultima goccia... 

A Very Cold Winter

A Very Cold Winter, by Fausta Cialente, translated from the Italian by Julia Nelsen (Transit). This novel, the first of the undersung writer’s books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space “divided up with curtains and partitions.” Though they share tight quarters, the family members—siblings, cousins, in-laws—are all preoccupied by disparate fixations. An omniscient narrator roves through the characters’ perspectives, illuminating their individual desires—to become an actor and a writer, to marry and to move out. Trapped “in the middle of a barren, frozen plain, without horizons,” a reality for which winter is not solely to blame, the family contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war. The New Yorker