What will we be reading next year?

 

Five biggest trends from the London book fair. [...]

1. Celebrity-authored fiction is on the up
2. Books about Ukraine are in demand
3. Greek myths rumble on
4. Women’s stories are getting darker
5. Self-help books are taking on new relevance. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

e anche:

Top 10 books about gardening
Going beyond how-to guides, these books encompass fiction, history, poetry and ecology to show how gardens can be places of liberation as well as beauty. Lulah Ellender, The Guardian

 

Seek and Hide

In Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking), the legal scholar Amy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought. She argues that although the right to privacy may have been a 19th-century innovation, privacy sensibilities have since the nation’s beginnings served as a durable counterweight to the hallowed principles of free speech, free expression, and the right to know. Sarah E. Igo, The Atlantic

un articolo molto interessante. Forse non adatto a Pasqua, auguri a tutti, comunque!

What Comes After Meritocracy?

The system of educational selection based on standardized testing to identify the intellectually talented is now under withering attack, and it is in the process of failing. The projects to replace it with more representative systems are appealing but ultimately inadequate for addressing the range of problems the country faces. Fortunately, it is possible to identify an approach that is adequate to our condition. That approach focuses on selection in line with the civic ideals elite colleges already profess but do not fully engage. Steven Brint, Chronicle of Higher Education

un articolo interessante sul declino della meritocrazia e su quali criteri affidare la selezione degli studenti.
Inoltre, i piaceri dei romanzoni...

The unique pleasures delivered in long books are unforgettable enough that every reader will likely have his own catalog, and some instances are quite famous. One pleasure arises when a forgotten minor character returns unexpectedly to divert the plot, years after his role seemed at an end. (It happens memorably in different volumes of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, as in The Black Sheep, when the belligerent brother, Philippe, returns to foil the new bully menacing our hero.)

Another occurs when a protagonist absorbs an antagonist’s understanding of an event long after its reality seemed fixed, revising our conception of what has transpired. Mark Greif, The Atlantic

 

 

Balene

Le balene mi hanno sempre affascinato. Allora prendiamoci un break da guerra e brutte notizie e seguiamo questo curioso viaggio di una madre e un figlio per le vie delle balene. Il libro di cui si parla è Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales (Virago), di Doreen Cunningham.

Cunningham adroitly sidesteps much of the male-dominated narratives about whales and whaling, and clearly takes inspiration more from Inuit mythology than from Herman Melville. She and her son make for an unconventionally heroic pair, travelling by
plane, train, bus and boat, and incurring disapproving looks and small humiliations in their quest to spot grey whales. Initially it seems that nothing fits, including lifejackets, and at times the landscape seems irredeemably hostile (even cacti appear to give them the finger). Whale mothers and their calves, meanwhile, surface and dive alongside the pair, and Cunningham movingly describes their bonds of cooperation, which find pointed echoes and contrasts in her travelling companions and personal relationships. Her sensuous descriptions of grey whales and humpbacks provide some of the book’s richest passages; she looks at the whales and then looks at her son, looking at whales, which look back. Edward Posnett, The Guardian

Spie e dintorni

According to popular lore, a woman spy known only as Agent 355 helped George Washington win the American Revolution, serving as a key member of the Manhattan-Long Island intelligence network later dubbed the Culper Spy Ring. Bill Bleyer Smithsonian Magazine

sempre sul Smithsonian Magazine, un altro articolo interessante su una normalissima coppia del New Mexico che rubò un De Kooning per metterselo in soggiorno.

She was a retired speech pathologist, and he was a retired music teacher. For all intents and purposes, Rita and Jerry Alter were a totally normal couple living in the New Mexico suburbs—except for one thing. They had a stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million hanging behind their bedroom door.

The couple’s purported double lives as high-stakes art thieves has made headlines ever since their prized painting was identified as a missing de Kooning in 2017. Jane Recker, Smithsonian Magazine

infine, per chi ama John Le Carré, come me, è in arrivo il suo epistolario: 

A collection of letters by the late novelist John le Carré is to be published later this year. A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 spans almost eight decades, from the author’s childhood in wartime Britain to just days before his death in 2020. It contains letters to le Carré’s family and friends as well as to high-profile fans such as Hugh Laurie, Ralph Fiennes, Stephen Fry, Alec Guinness and Tom Stoppard. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

 

Il triste declino delle discipline umanistiche

Indeed, Russian culture itself has become a target. Russian artists who lived long before the birth of Putin, or the creation of the Soviet secret police that trained him, have been cancelled. In Italy, writer Paolo Nori’s lectures on Dostoevsky were “postponed.” “This is to avoid any controversy,” explained the email he received, “especially internally, during a time of strong tensions.” Nori responded: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous. . . . Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy, but also being a dead Russian. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable.” After a backlash, the university reversed its decision.

But numerous cancellations have not been reversed. Gary Saul Morson, First Things

io credo che continuare a studiare la letteratura russa, così come tutte le letterature, sia un modo di combattere i dispotismi. E' questo che dico ai miei studenti. Dobbiamo rivendicare il ruolo fondamentale delle materie umanistiche nella formazione di cittadini pensanti e pacifici. Invece le cose stanno andando diversamente, purtroppo, come si vede da questo articolo:

Hiring in the humanities last peaked in 2007-2008, when the MLA’s jobs report recorded 3,506 openings across English and other languages. By 2019-2020, that number had fallen to 1,411. Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post Magazine

Books Against Bombs

During Covid, Ukraine’s population bought books, thanks to a government vaccine initiative. Now there is no time to read, they can still be useful... Katerina Sergatskova, The Guardian

tristissimo.... ma poetico. Ho sempre amato molto poco il turismo e quindi ho letto con interesse questo articolo intitolato "The Big Idea: Is Tourismo Bad for Us?"

If Covid’s impact ameliorates as hoped, it will be replaced by a new virus – wanderlust. Millennials, according to one survey, would rather travel than have sex – and not only because they’re probably doing the latter wrong. [...] But the value of tourism, like sex, depends on how you do it. Cruise ships generate 21,000 gallons of sewage per day per vessel, much of it ending up in the sea. In 2019, transport-related emissions from tourism were responsible for 5% of human-made global carbon dioxide emissions, according to UNWTO. Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

 

 

Elizabeth Strout e Elena Ferrante

 

Dear Elena Ferrante,
Thank you for all of your work. I am a huge fan, and I have read all your books, and by reading them I was able to take new risks with my own work. So thank you for that as well. 

Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your kind words about In the Margins. I really loved your novels Amy and Isabelle, The Burgess Boys, and naturally the amazing Olive Kitteridge.
But, I must tell you, I value your opinion of In the Margins especially because of your novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, or, to be precise, because of the fleeting but memorable relationship between Lucy and the writer Sarah Payne. The Guardian

interessante scambio epistolare tra due grandi scrittrici, Elena Ferrante ed Elizabeth Strout. 

Inoltre: Yiyun Li, scrittrice dall'inconsueto cv (è immunologa as well), discute del neologismo, da lei creato, "beforemath", parlando dello scrittore Jon McGregor.

Yiyun Li: I love reading dictionaries, getting to know words beyond their everyday usage: etymologies, definitions that have gone obsolete, meanings that have been added over the years.

Last year, as I was rereading McGregor’s entire body of work, I looked up aftermath and was surprised to find that it’s derived from aftermowth, which refers to the second crop of grass that grows after the first has been mown or harvested. Instantly my interest was piqued, as we don’t tend to talk about beforemath—we don’t even have it as a word. As I thought through how McGregor approaches dramatic and tragic events in fiction, it became clear to me that some of his books focus on the beforemath, and others approach aftermath at a slanted angle. The New York Review

Ezra Pound e Joseph Brodsky

To be buried here is a signal honor, and no one can deny Pound’s influence on twentieth-century poetry. But this is a case in which the very condition of the two gravestones indicates a moral and artistic hierarchy. Pound, with his obsession with the strong man of action and manly virtù, now represents the authoritarian vision, lately manifested by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose political and economic shadow continues its ascent over Europe. Contrarily, Brodsky, the dissident Russian, concerned with universalism and the personal life of the individual, represents a Europe of sovereign, mutually respectful nations, and the rule of law over arbitrary fiat. Here in this Venetian cemetery, two iconic forces stand a few feet apart from each other. Here are the two paths that Europe can tread. May it choose the right one. Robert D. Kaplan, New Criterion

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, to be published in April by Random House. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Mi sembrava doveroso, questa settimana, partecipare in qualche modo al dramma dell'invasione dell'Ucraina da parte della Russia. Ho scelto questo bell'articolo che contrappone due poeti sepolti accanto a Venezia, due visioni del mondo opposte.

Blurbs

Blurbs. Few parts of the publishing process cause more anxiety for writers. As a blurb requester, it’s stressful and a bit pathetic to beg for praise from writers you may have never met. As a potential blurber, the number of requests can be overwhelming and blurbing is always time consuming. Hell writers have been complaining about blurbs since the dawn of, well, blurbs. Lincoln Michel, Counter Craft

Segue una disamina sui blurbs (a proposito, come si traduce in italiano?)

E una bella recensione di un libro che sembra interessante. Chi l'avrebbe mai detto che Stalin fosse un lettore vorace? Il libro è, Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library (Yale UP).

Stalin was a voracious reader, who set himself a daily quota of between 300 and 500 pages. When he died of a stroke in his library in 1953, the desk and tables that surrounded him were piled high with books, many of them heavily marked with his handwriting in the margins. [...] During his life he amassed a personal library estimated at about 20,000 books ... Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian