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

Katerina

Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Katerina (translated by Jeffrey M Green) is stranger still than Badenheim 1939, but ultimately no less satisfying. It opens in simple, fable-like style – “My name is Katerina, and I will soon be 80 years old” – as it tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (eastern Slav) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught suspicion of Jews – “there’s nothing easier than to hate the Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is taken in by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. Yet antisemitism, we know, does not lie down quietly. John Self, The Guardian

in questo articolo vengono recensiti tre libri di Appelfeld di recenti usciti presso Penguin, Badenheim 1939, Katerina and The Story of a Life

Tamara

In 1949, as Nabokov was working on “Lolita,” he published a short story in The New Yorker called “Tamara.” As in the novel that followed, the narrator is a middle-aged European, and the title character a young girl—fifteen, in this case—who is recalled as a formative object of desire during his adolescence. (Both stories also begin with a pointed focus on the female character’s name.) Like in “Lolita,” time and circumstance block the protagonist’s pursuit of the young girl, and the story evolves into an exploration, in part, of memory, mood, and perspective. The New Yorker

buona lettura di mezz'estate!

Keeping a diary

By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so. John Dickerson, Slate

recensione al libro di Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Faber) che racconta la storia dei diari e di come siano passati a essere semplicemente degli elenchi al diventare racconti di storie personali.

Paris ’44

This enthralling, cinematic study of the occupation and recapture of the French capital reads like an epic thriller. Andrew Martin, The Guardian

si parla di Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory di Patrick Bishop (Penguin/Viking)

Mechanical Intelligence

Before miniaturization made them all but disappear, computers were experienced as physical things. [...] But their magic had its limits because they didn’t work very well. Any illusion of spiritual embodiment was shattered when you had to clear up a jammed paper tape. If you were on a first-name basis with the mechanic who oiled the gears and adjusted the set screws, you were unlikely to attribute transcendent qualities to the machine even on the days when it worked perfectly.

But people were beginning to converse with computers without seeing them, and it turned out that even the flimsiest screen—between Dorothy the user and Oz the computer—seduced people into regarding the machine as human, or even wizardly.

ELIZA was the original chatbot, created by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Named after the reprogrammed flower girl of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Harry R. Lewi, Harvard Magazine

breve storia dell'intelligenza artificiale