Oh no, things have really gone too far.
03.03.2026 02:45
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Oh no, things have really gone too far.
"American and Israeli thuggery": hard-hitting editorial in the Hindu.
Just when you thought the state of the world couldn’t get worse, U2 has gone and released a new set of protest songs.
brb, need to look up the meaning of the word “preemptive”.
"It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth...brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice." Revisiting Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
www.bookforum.com/print/3203/c...
“The more I learned about Cleopatra, the more I realised we know nothing at all,” writes Saara El-Arifi.
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...
'Are you afraid of war?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I fear that life will continue the same afterwards.’
The people of Iran brace themselves.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...
Coleman Barks, RIP.
Worth reading this 2017 piece by Rozina Ali on the erasure of Islam from the poetry of Rumi. (Possible paywall.)
www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
They say podcasts are responsible for the decline in non-fiction sales. In my case, if I hear an interesting podcast, I seek out books on the subject to understand it better. When will I actually read those books? Ah, that’s a different question.
“It exists because it is (paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way.” Francis Spufford makes a case for fantasy fiction.
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...
Thanks, historians.
Mieko Kawakami: “Editors gambling on another dozen feminine and quirky titles will lead to disaster. For Japanese literature to continue to attract readers beyond this current boom, the editors have to look beyond the tyranny of cute and cozy.”
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
"Traditionally, the exploration novel is seen as the domain of white men, and I wanted to subvert the tropes of that genre to examine how exploration and cartography can be tools of imperialism." Deepa Anappara on 'The Last of Earth'.
Vivian Gornick: “Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional ‘I.’ The first become novelists, the second memoirists.”
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
“Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth – all of it was there.” Georgi Gospodinov on first reading Borges.
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...
Trust the Wall Street Journal to come up with an appreciative review of this book.
"In Toni Morrison’s eyes, the sacred function of the story is to find a form to hold what the mind can scarcely bear (or, as the censorship bears out, what society can scarcely admit)," writes Parul Sehgal.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/m...
Susan George, RIP. Her work encompassed "the brutality and contradictions of capitalism, the negative impact of corporate greed, the capture of democratic institutions by oligarchs and the ecological price we pay for continuing within the same economic system."
www.tni.org/en/article/s...
At the start of a novel that begins with an 1860s colonial Himalayan expedition, I came across the line: “the bearers were spooked”. Checked etymology: the verb is an Americanism from the late 19th century. Not wrong, but borderline anachronistic. This is why I can't read books.
Haven’t listened to Lucinda Williams in a while; her new album of songs that she hopes “hearken back to an earlier era of 1960s protest music” sounds great.
www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...
By Joseph Fasano.
It's ridiculous that in his book on the power of storytelling, John Yorke squeezes in references to "Corybnite Labour", likening it to "China’s Cultural Revolution, the Russian pogroms and the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s".
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...
"What we’re doing when we run book reviews is building a network of thought that can carry forward for many years."
(Via the Literary Saloon.)
www.poynter.org/business-wor...
"It is closing time in the gardens of the West." Michael Dirda channels Cyril Connolly's 1949 comment in his paean to the Washington Post’s Book World.
www.the-tls.com/politics-soc...
Talk of being Orwellian: the Gabon government's media regulator is called the High Authority for Communication.
www.africanews.com/2026/02/18/s...
I like how so many upcoming works of fiction in translation have simple one-word titles (‘Hooked’, ‘Collapse’) and then suddenly you’re hit by ‘Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun’ and ‘The Past Pursues Us Like Detectives, Debt Collectors, Thieves’.
Such a lovely cover. (The book sounds good, too.)
I will!
