Books

… Anecdotal Evidence: `Culture Is Not Neglected Amid Such Prosperity'. I, too, have had a brush with grisly. Around the corner from the house where I spent my first eight years was the house where Gary Heidnik imprisoned several women he had kidnapped. Interestingly, Heidnik grew up in Cleveland.

Alcohol. Promiscuity. LSD. All three are said to inspire creative minds. And if Sarah Dunant’s well-researched new novel, Blood and Beauty, is credible, we can add a new one, syphilis, to the list. (Wait, what?) Related posts: Inside the Hive-Mind of the Class of 2013 For the Class of 2013, salsa has always outsold ketchup.... Not Just the Mind’s Eye A new Tumblr, The Composites, takes descriptions of characters from... Keep An Open Mind About It From the annals of Wikipedia: would you rather have Witzelsucht...

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Was a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin. Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes. Petrushevskaya’s previous collection published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s 2009 best books list. Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review: This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: “A Murky Fate”; “Hallelujah, Family!”; “My Little One”; and “A Happy Ending.” But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better. In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.” “The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.” For the rest of the review, go here.

This is What Happy Looks Like. Jennifer E. Smith. 2013. Little, Brown. 404 pages.This is the third novel I've read by Jennifer E. Smith. I've also reviewed The Comeback Season and The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. I loved them both in very different ways. She is definitely an author I'd recommend to fans of Elizabeth Scott, Sarah Dessen, and Deb Caletti.It starts when Ellie receives an email from a stranger. It's obviously a case of mistaken identity--this G is asking her to take Wilbur for a walk. Not wanting Wilbur to suffer, she replies back and discovers...that he's a PIG and G is a kindred spirit. A true friendship grows between E and G. They both have secrets they're keeping from one another: Ellie's secret isn't hers exclusively, so it makes sense that she wouldn't share it with just anyone. G's secret is that he is Graham Larkin, movie star. He purposefully suggests Ellie's hometown in Maine as a shooting location for his new movie, he's truly hoping to have a magical summer with the woman he can't stop thinking about. But Ellie has reasons--good reasons--not to want attention from the media.I LOVED the beginning of this one. The email exchanges were great. I enjoyed the rest of the novel as well. It wasn't quite love, love, love for me. I did enjoy both characters, and I thought there were a few scenes in this one that worked really well. But for me, it didn't have as many magical moments as The Statistical Probability of Love At First Sight. It's a good romance. I'm definitely glad I read it! © 2013 Becky Laney of Becky's Book ReviewsIf you're reading this on a site (other than Becky's Book Reviews or Becky's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.

… 1p Book Review: Murphy by Samuel Beckett — The Dabbler. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The marginalized Alexander Pope | OUPblog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who also sends along The dire offences of Alexander Pope | OUPblog.

The Human Figure, John Vanderpoel (F, 20s, tight curls, mustard yellow peacoat, black purse w white spots, L train) http://bit.ly/11I8CQ3

May 21, 2013 Fisherman's House on a Lake near NurembergC.1496Albrecht Dürer21 May 1471 - 6 April 1528 _______________________ Argument with Myself Mike Jay reviews Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves. Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. (....) For the long remainder of his life Henry was blandly unaware of his own story. He would readily volunteer that he had ‘a lot of trouble remembering things’; if pressed, he might speculate that ‘I have possibly had an operation or something.’ His short span of consciousness led to repetitive behaviour – making the same observation repeatedly, or mechanically eating two lunches in a row – but his conversation was characterised by a gentle wit and quizzical, punning exchanges that seemed to test every statement for possible meanings. (When Corkin commented on Henry’s love of crosswords by dubbing him ‘the puzzle king’, he responded: ‘I’m puzzling!’) He had occasional episodes of frustration, anger or panic, but was usually good-natured and accepting of the scene around him. In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time’, though Corkin also wonders whether his lack of anxiety and emotional churn might have been related to the partial loss of his amygdala....(more) _______________________ Conrad Felixmüller _______________________ The U.S. as a party-state Adam KotskoAn und für sich ... Interpreting the party-state phenomenon through liberal democratic norms, the “totalitarian” analysis decides that since something like civil society or the private sphere no longer has the desired autonomy, we can only conclude that the state, as the only other available center of power, is over-dominant. This is a profound misreading of the situation, however, as Foucault points out in Birth of Biopolitics. The problem in party-states is not that the formal state structures are too strong, but that they’re too weak to restrain the party-movement that instrumentalizes them....(more) _______________________ Corruption StudyStudy of Changing SocietiesVolume 1'6 _______________________ Men above the World (Epitaph for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht)1919Conrad Felixmüller (21 May 1897 - 24 March 1977) _______________________ Singin

    Bernard Waber, author of classic picture books like Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, The House on East 88th Street, and Ira Sleeps Over, has died at age 91.  His 33 books have sold over 1.75 million copies.  Filed under: Authors

Haruki Murakami has signed a deal for the English translation of “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” which sold over a million copies in just over a week when it was released in Japan last month. A selection from a collection of rare early printed books and manuscripts will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in June, despite protest from scholars that the collection should remain intact. Newcastle Productions has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary on the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, based on his diaries. A new company called Script Lit turns unproduced screenplays into e-books. “What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, ‘If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.’” Greil Marcus’s commencement address at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Motoko Rich on how “Lean In” has quickly gone from book title to meme. A Tumblr devoted to documenting the books found on Brooklyn stoops. ...read more