Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn

Long Island returns Eilis, now in her 40s, to Ireland in the 1970s and the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago. While most of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the small town in County Wexford where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set, it opens in Long Island. It is here that Eilis has settled with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a knock at the door changes everything. [...] ‘Long Island is the first novel I’ve written in which no one dies’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Long Island is published by Picador.

Gaslighting

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.” (What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”) The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?” Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Diaries of Franz Kafka

This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries: an account of a trip to the theatre might be followed by a story draft, a gnomic half-sentence, the description of a prostitute, time spent watching a ski-jumping competition, relationship problems, dreams of a writing career in Berlin, a list of mistakes made by Napoleon in the Russian campaign, thoughts on the size of a fellow train traveller’s trouser bulge. The muddled presentation of all these elements, contextualised by thorough notes, gives the sense of Kafka not just as “the representative genius of the modern age”, as Benjamin describes him, but also a youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration, venting his frustrations and following his interests. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us. Chris Power, The Guardian

Diaries by Franz Kafka is published by Penguin Classics

Harlem on My Mind

In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition dedicated to the vibrant history of Harlem—the institution’s first attempt at displaying and interpreting African American culture. “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” came to life at the tail end of the civil rights movement and on the cusp of Black Power. [...]

Instead, “Harlem on My Mind” represented Harlem via floor-to-ceiling photomurals, archival ephemera, and street soundscapes alongside interpretive text. It was the cutting edge of immersive exhibition design; the Met had never put on an exhibition like it before (and hasn’t since). Yet from the perspective of many Black artists, critics, academics, and organizers, the show was woefully retrograde. Despite concerns raised by community representatives during the exhibition’s development, the Met had reduced the culture of Harlem to an object of sociological, or even ethnographic, inquiry. Black people were once again the subjects, rather than the authors of their representation. [...]

Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism.  Rachel Hunter Himes, The Nation

la mostra "The Harlem Renaissance" è al Met fino al 28 giugno

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

Crosswords

Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.

No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college.[...] 

Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?

These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

The Riddle of the Sphinx è pubblicato da HarperOne.

The Last Caravaggio

In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for affray and assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives. Michael Prodger, New Statesman

“The Last Caravaggio” shows at the National Gallery, London WC2, from 18 April to 21 July 2024

OLIVETTI

A magical typewriter brings healing, reconnection, and new friends to a hurting family. Olivetti, a silent but fully conscious typewriter, has been there since the beginning, living with parents Felix and Beatrice and their children, Ezra, Adalyn, Ernest, and Arlo, a “copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink.” Olivetti, who even took part in Felix’s proposal to Beatrice, watched playfulness and creativity grow as the children arrived, and he faithfully remembers every single word the people have typed. Then, longing to communicate, he watched the family suffer through Everything That Happened. Which is exactly what seventh grader Ernest is still trying to forget. Kirkus

una storia per ragazzini delle elementari che sembra molto carina

Romantasy, AI and Palestinian voices

Palestine, artificial intelligence and romantasy were high on the agenda at this week’s London book fair.

Future publishing priorities also included sustainability, neurodivergent protagonists and new retellings of Greek mythology. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

me ne starò alla larga...