Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 26 March 2015


New on nybooks.comA report from shattered eastern Ukraine, a film starring Michel Houellebecq as himself, a story of reggae and loss, the cartoons of Flannery O’Connor (born on this day in 1925), and two new nonfiction collections by Renata Adler and Edward Mendelson.


Tim Judah
The fate of two neighboring towns in eastern Ukraine, one held by rebels and one by the government, shows just how divided and bitter the region has become since fighting began almost exactly a year ago.
 
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James Lasdun
Houellebecq has the miraculous look of someone almost double his age. Etched, haggard, battered, his face seems destined to become one of the great ruins of our literary era; something to measure up to Beckett or Auden—for druidic ancientness if not quite nobility.
 
Luc Sante
We went there for the bass, and the trance state resulting from hours of dancing to riddim that stretched forever, the groove a fabric of stacked beats fractally splitting into halves of halves of halves of halves, a tree that spread its branches through the body…
 
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Barry Moser
She would say that the things that she worked on the hardest were usually her worst work. She also said that a story—or a linoleum print, if you will—has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle. Her prints certainly have muscle, and a lot of it.
 
Ian Bostridge
“Truly,” Beethoven remarked in 1827, “in Schubert there dwells a divine spark.”
 
Martin Filler
If, as Goethe posited, architecture is frozen music, then these buildings are vertical money.
 
by Renata Adler
“A provocative and elevating book that recalibrates journalistic standards, and sharpens our perception of the recent past and its influence on our even more harrowing present.” – Booklist
 
by Edward Mendelson
“These essays are rich in quotation, precise in judgment, and unified by a premise they test in detail: that literature is most invigorating when it teaches us how to live. ” – David Bromwich