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

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

otm

the first thing i ever read by her was her lady bird review for the baffler and it gets that movie so spectacularly wrong and is so steeped in her own deathless high school resentments that it’s almost impressive

then she defended dan savage for the outline, which just confirmed for me that she’s a bad take machine that can’t write

a reliably great feature of the LRB continues to be the following kind of semi-digression within a review (from this): "… their family friend John S. Clarke, an ILP MP not very happily in the late 1920s, a pretty terrible political poet, but also a lion-tamer (he’d joined the circus at 17) who cured Lenin’s dog when he was in Russia as a delegate at the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920"

which is not not to the point but

a bad take machine that can’t write

I feel like there’s still a great Tolentino takedown out there waiting to be written. That one tried so hard but barely left a scratch, so I’m not too surprised Tolentino could be magnanimous about it.

This was a 2nd best thing where the writer becomes a sort of mediator between two writers who disagree.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/jenny-turner/nothing-natural

i have a lot of time for jenny turner (who i used to know a little years ago, she was books editor at city limits)

Jenny Turner is quietly great. Always read her.

Thanks for the Tom Crewe essay on the Aids crisis. Fantastic piece.

The Nicholas Leman piece on the state of journalism in NYRB this week has some interesting perspective on how the golden age of news was a unique confluence of economic and technological trends and how newspapers underestimated the threat of the internet platform/aggregators.

feel like I've read that story before

the tolentino take down is good imo. even though i don't particularly warm to oyler while reading it and have enjoyed things by tolentino that i've read

Yeah, I've liked ust everything I've read by her, though didn't finish the recent piece on TikTok (note to self: must.extend. my interests. na) Wrote this on current What Are You Reading:
I just read a book first published in 2019, by an actual youngperson! Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror---Reflections on Self Delusion. At thirty, she looks back to her Canadian-Filipina origins, with prodigious parents who got religion in Toronto, and vaulted to a megachurch lifestyle complex, which the author and her friends referred to as "The Repentagon," somewhere in the "fathomless sprawl" of Houston---which had no zoning laws, so it was near a teen club dedicated to the music and memory of DJ Screw---and as a young and restless, yet well-schooled teen, she found the szzyrup experience compatible with her ideal of eternity---later sought in the desert, while doing psychotrophics---which might have something to do with her attraction to the writings of Simone Weil, the Christian mystic who escaped to WWII London yet starved herself to death in solidarity with the victims of Hitler (since this book came out, JT's New Yorker archive has incl. illuminating, disturbing examination of what had seemed to me something of a mystery trend: millenials posting "just kill me now, blow me away," in ecstatic context).
Back to life: her storytelling essays may have been strengthened by actual journalism, which she first practiced while going back to her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle. She immediately recognizes and sharpens her view of shady nuances, while meeting people close and closer to the center of the recent furor.
Also rides the rapids through tunnel of mirrors, "The 'I' in Internet," seeking to make sense of some involvements, to get perspective on others that make all too much sense, or seem to (Russian nested doll tendencies of some psychedelic and even weed experiences, splitting difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness, may also apply). And she works hard to make the money required for the good food and exercise (esp. a mostly female-inhabited hivetivity known as the barre, which might have come from an unholy collaboration of Ballard and Atwood) required to make the money for
Oh well, she's got a good acerbic sense of humor about all this. Also a lot of good stuff about her favorite children's books, and discussions of seemingly familiar voices---Weil, Plath, Ferrante, several others--while pointing out things I hadn't thought of and didn't know about them.
The only section I have doubts about is "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams," mainly because Trump upstages everybody.

I'm too cheap to subscribe to anything, and lazy enough to stick to the local library's latest print WSJ (weekend Wall St. Journal). Usually a few titles and quotes to note, avoiding easily-spotted Murdochy reviewers (also I'm taking a break from reading anything about WWII, which saves a lot of time).

Murdochy (etc.) key phrase: "identity politics," which never means anybody to the Right.

feel like I've read that story before

It's not a new narrative, but he adds some interesting color.

seem to be an issue behind, but enjoyed Alexander Zevin’s combative response to Collini’s review of his book on The Economist.

As an adept of ‘voice’, Collini delights in the conceit that the Economist speaks as if from On High. What it is saying hardly matters. ‘If you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times,’ he urges us. ‘If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world ... read the Economist.’ A sillier flourish is hard to imagine. The Times was telling us what was happening in the world as it toasted Hillary’s Clinton’s cruise to the presidency? The Guardian was telling us what was wrong with the world when it cheered New Labour and adored Obama? Was the Economist telling its readers what was going to happen when it hailed the invasion of Iraq as the dawn of a new world order as wonderful as America’s forging of the Free World in the time of Acheson? Or when it had no glimmering of the financial meltdown of 2008?

I like Collini but Zevin is spot on with that

tbf i can imagine sillier flourishes

Yeah, and he could have said worse about all those three---but I sure wouldn't want any of my (music) reviews judged by where they appeared---although some reviewers do seem proudly to ingest and exude the surrounding airs and disgraces---and maybe I have too, without getting called on it---?

that “impossible to imagine x” formula in its various formats is always so rubbish. literally that’s what imagination is capable of.

anyway i was as much approving of its slightly overmuscular combativeness as its sentiment tho also the sentiment is correct and the flourish was also i maintain silly as it often is.