Love and sex in the age of apps

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are lamenting the paltry state of the dating market.

“It’s just shit out there,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out there’s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s even the point in trying.”

“That so fits with my experience … dating is very bleak at the moment,” Lord laughs, when we sit down in an east London cafe. “Something’s got to give!” The 30-year-old writer has built a career out of observing the intracacies and intimacies of modern dating. Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è: The Project, Annie Lord (Harvill)

On the Mark

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous. Steven Poole, The Guardian

recensione di: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic 

What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

Mel Brooks at 100

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” [...]

He is the son of immigrants who fought the Nazis and ultimately triumphed in every area of showbusiness. He is the American dream made flesh. Brooks might not live to be 2,000, but 100 years looked equally implausible when he served in the 78th Infantry division. When asked the secret to a long life after a screening of Blazing Saddles I attended in London years ago, this icon of American entertainment offered some sage advice he has evidently lived by: “Don’t die.” Darren Richman, The Guardian 

auguri, Mel Brooks, avanti fino a 120 anni! 

70 brilliant books for the summer

 

 

 

The Guardian 

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Reiko Hiroyama lives on Ishigaki, a subtropical island in Japan. One morning, she went out to comb the beach near her house. Beachcombing conjures up a leisurely world of sand dollars and Daiquiris, but Hiroyama’s practice was actually about bringing in the trash. Over the years, she’d retrieved flip-flops, jerricans, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, fishing nets, and a seemingly endless array of bottles—jugs, flasks, milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles, detergent bottles, baby bottles, motor-oil bottles. Yet that day a turquoise glass bottle caught her eye. Its neck was sticking out of the sand. There was a scroll-like object inside. “The sunlight shining on it gave it a strong presence,” Hiroyama recalled. “It seemed to say, ‘I’m here!’ ”

The cap was so thoroughly rusted that she couldn’t twist it off, so she decided to break the bottle open on a rock. “My heart was pounding,” she said. She extracted the scroll: a sheet of white paper covered in cursive handwriting. Hiroyama’s spirits sank when she realized that the letter was written in French. Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

Open to interpretation

The International Booker prize for translated fiction went to Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. Emma Loffhagen spoke to the pair, who will share the £50,000 prize, about Taiwanese politics, LGBTQ+ rights and more.

The International Booker rewards exceptional works of translation. But for this novel, translation takes centre stage in more ways than one: the work is presented as a translation of a rediscovered text, and one of the main characters is a Taiwanese interpreter. In today’s Bookmarks, we look at why translators and interpreters make fascinating protagonists, and why the singular roles they play in fiction reflect the value of their work in the real world.

There is a long tradition of novels featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists. In Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, published in 2001, Gen Watanabe bridges communication between captors and captives in a hostage crisis. Ricardo, the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2006 novel The Bad Girl, is an interpreter for Unesco. More recently, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer?, and, indeed, Taiwan Travelogue, have translators or interpreters at the centre of the action.

aggiungo Marias, Un cuore così bianco, uno dei miei scrittori e dei miei libri preferiti. 

a proposito di traduzione, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn (Canongate), recensito da Steven Pool, The Guardian 

The 100 best novels

Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

 

nell'elenco dei 100 romanzi più belli del Guardian di quest'anno compare, come al solito Il gattopardo (The Leopard), al 46 posto. L'unico altro romanzo italiano presente è Le città invisibili di Calvino (qui non sono d'accordo). The Guardian

Nuclear Fiction

When Leslie Schover ’74 was a girl, she remembers, her father returned from a business trip with a lump of green glass—sand melted by an atomic test. “You can’t keep this because it’s radioactive,” he told her. Schover’s dad helped make nuclear isotopes for the Manhattan Project, and she partly grew up in Oak Ridge, the secret city in Tennessee where the project was located.

Her family stories were often woven around WWII-related intrigue. 

The novel she’s based on those memories, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak, began germinating decades later when it was revealed that two of her father’s colleagues at Oak Ridge had actually been Soviet spies. “Did my dad know either one of them?” she says she wondered. “How indignant he would have been that they were spies!” Erik Ness, Brown Alumni Magazine

il libro di cui si parla è pubblicato da She Writes Press, una casa editrice interessante che si definisce ibrida, non tradizionale ma neanche self-publishing. Pubblica solo testi di donne. Nella foto: il padre e la sorella di Leslie Schover, nel 1946. 

Un ricordo di Sonny Rollins

 

 

 

Sonny Rollins nello strepitoso bis al concerto a Milano del 2 novembre 2009 al Dal Verme. Grandissimo! 

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