Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

You're all wrong.

Except that PA on film would be entertaining. In a way. But PA on film already exists - 'The quality of the Russian cinema in the 2000s attained a nadir unprecedented since the death of Protazanov', etc.

This is interesting on a day when people are making silly comparisons with Meghan Markle

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

xp Wood and Eagleton are the worst IMO, insufferably self-satisfied. PA is that too of, course, but he has the heft to bring it off, somehow.

The 3 best writers in the LRB.

hah each to their own!

penman in the lrb -- tho perhaps not the best penman -- is better than all three :) and ditto patricia lockwood (tho i know pinefox doesn't like her and she does a very different kind of writing)

eagleton's self-satisfaction isn't really the problem, it's that they routinely let him comment in passing on matters pop cultural, which he is always then incredibly wrong about. i also find his misdirectons on theorists he disapproves of extremely iffy. he is to his credit an admirably lucid writer tho (it's just that his lucidity is sometimes used for iffy ends)

the problem with wood is as chairman alph says that he's more or less the *only* routine voice they have on film (notes-to-self run-off is a good mode! tho i do it better)

penman sucks ass imo

though admittedly i haven't read a word he's written since his racist prince essay

yes in general he doesn't in fact

(i still haven't read that essay tho)

idk if i can bring myself to value any other ideas or sentences by someone who wrote something that bad

a piece that was wildly celebrated by fans of his writing incidentally. not for me i guess!

well i can't strip 40 years of reading him out of my own critical dna so i'm starting at the wrong end for persuading you

42, jesus

actually brad yr lovely piece on 80s van morrison -- the one that finally gave me a landing point to get VM and like him rather than just be puzzled and alienated by everyone's veneration -- was very penmanish to me (and i'm not saying this just to troll you -- or not entirely anyway: it worked on me the same way his piece on MOR-era scott walker did (but that was in the wire not the lrb)

oh thank you! i totally take that as a compliment bc it's very obvious penman is talented, even though i also don't like that scott walker piece lol

Re: film in the LRB - David Thomson sometimes gets to write a review of a movie star biog there, and even late, self-regarding and p lazy Thomson is better than Michael Wood imho - DT still has insightful things to say about acting and old school Hollywood, and his recentish piece about 'Vertigo after Weinstein' seemed like a noble attempt at a self-critique for past reviewing sins and sexism.

Actually, I think it would do Penman good to write about films more and music less.

some of my sensitivity about penman may be that our approaches to artist catalogues are very similar but he doesn't go far enough and feels he has to maintain some kind of bullshit evenhanded critical distance, which leads to a lot of the bad ideas that prevail through the prince piece even before the racist stuff starts

Bennett on Larkin

sorry: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n06/alan-bennett/alas!-deceived

I don't think I have ever read a better critic, of anything, than Michael Wood.

Wood, like most people, reveres Empson, and would say Empson is (much) better, and that would be a fair suggestion.

Anderson is a model for non-literary English prose.

Terry Eagleton has probably influenced me more than any other writer.

Overall, aside from writers of actual literature, those three have influenced me more than anyone as a writer, insofar as I am a writer.

actually in answer to the archives query, and if empson is being suggested (as he should be), he did write a little for the LRB before his death in 1984: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/william-empson

i have looked these up and read them all at some point: i don't now remember if they're his best work or otherwise tho

paul foot's LRB pieces are generally worth digging out also: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had

(this just popped up on my twitter feed, i s why i thought of it)

Re: Empson - that's surely too small a selection

I think I satisfied a lot of my English literature turn with a reading of Colin Burrow archive.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/colin-burrow

For Getman Lit J.P.Stern was good.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/j.p.-stern

And Michael Wood is good in Latin American lit. I re-read an excellent piece on Juan Carlos Onetti (whose short stories have recently been translated into English)

thanks for the Burrow tip. This review of William Boyd's Bond book is a delight

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/colin-burrow/semi-colons-are-for-the-weak

Any interesting writers on politics? I was thinking of making my way through Patrick Cockburn but idk...Anyone more interesting on the middle East?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/patrick-cockburn

Also was thinking of any pieces on the Balkans and how the LRB might have covered it?

I really liked Mark Mazower's book on the Balkans and I've found the couple of bits of his I've read in the LRB interesting: https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=mark+mazower

Thanks!

Must go through the Anne Carson archive:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/anne-carson

The Oyler piece on Jia Tolentino this week. Yikes. They've finally found a writer who makes John Lanchester look graceful.

she's TERRIBLE

so is tolentino though so i enjoyed the carnage

*leave Britney alone voice* leave Jia alone!

It’s a terrible hit job though! Very meagre carnage.

listen i did not know i would enjoy a writer i can't stand going after another writer i can't stand so much, it's embarrassing for everyone and i'm here for it. plus i think a few of the sentences see tolentino's work clearly, hard as they are to read lol

oyler of course has never graduated from high school emotionally so the piece also feels awfully petty about how many friends jia has, it's just... amazing, i love it

I only just discovered that the New York Review of Books was a publishing house too. A whole rang eof their books just appeared in my local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop last week. Have some interesting titles in there too. They have about 50 titles spread over the 2 sides and shelves on a table in the shop.

nyrb is a ridiculously great publishing house, i think there's a thread devoted to that too

https://www.nyrb.com/
found the website for them.
There is some great stuff there. May need to go back and have a more thorough look through what they have in locally. See a couple of titles I'd really like while looking through the titles there and probably a lot more if I found out what they actually were beyond the title.

first pick from the NYRB list: Oakley Hall's "Warlock"

or their reprint of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"

here's the thread on the publishing house: NYRB Publishing

i was ready for a jia takedown but there were so many words and so few hits

have to say jia herself (who i like, such little as i've seen) was impressively gracious abt this review on twitter: "i was due a takedown and this one is often perceptive" being the gist of her response

imo being gracious is a great way of making people who hate you even madder

yes tweeting out a negative review to her many fans v gracious

don’t read your reviews

i couldn't get through the oyler piece but did like that, for some reason, the headline they chose was "ha ha! ha ha!"

Obviously loved the Oyler piece - just insane levels of hate that Tolentino surely didn't understand. Or more likely she did, but she knows social media (as Oyler points out)...still weird to show a level of grace that simply isn't human after such a tearing down. But that was her reaction to that piece.

I don't know who either of these people is - but I did read this and it wasn't utterly dreadful:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/lauren-oyler/excessive-weeping