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1938, Auden wrote about how easy it is to turn away from other people’s suffering, how easily daily life can distract from catastrophe.
“poetry makes nothing happen,”
“sequestered in its hate,” and “Intellectual disgrace/ stares from every human face, / And the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.”
the possibility of beginning a new life in the New World, of reinventing oneself, tabula rasa.
immersion in this “moronic inferno” and the more pristine realm of the self.
Bellow’s heroes are first-class “noticers” who often feel overwhelmed by the “muchness” of the world and who wonder if their personal woes somehow hold a tiny mirror to the “big-scale insanities of the twentieth century.”
Participants have included well-known authors like Richard Price, George Plimpton, Annie Proulx, and Christopher Hitchens and scores of people from every background imaginable—
Camus’s narrator Dr. Rieux believes that “the habit of despair is worse than despair itself”
“what we learn in time of pestilence” is “that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
Roz Chast’s
He recalls he grew up with wanderlust in his DNA.
Chatwin clearly felt an affinity with these solitary adventurers who left civilization behind for the outer limits of the world. Indeed his own life was animated by the fiercely held belief he shared with the Sherpas of Tibet, who are “compulsive travelers” and who mark their tracks with cairns and prayer flags, “reminding you that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.”
its mapping of a landscape that was as much a place in the writer’s imagination as a set of coordinates on the globe—these qualities helped expand the boundaries of travel writing and revitalize the genre.
Edwidge Danticat
Gary Shteyngart, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marlon James, Dinaw Mengestu, Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Téa Obreht, Colum McCann, and Yaa Gyasi.
razzle-dazzle
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
Tristram Shandy
Deborah Eisenberg’s
It’s a world not unlike our own, haunted by a sense of loss and dislocation—a world, to use words written by Eliot in an essay about Ulysses, that presented an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” while thirsting for redemption and renewal.
Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin belonged to what Ellis describes as “the greatest generation of political talent in American history,”
they remain men of their day, limited by the mores of their times and their own biases and shortcomings. Looking back at their lives and
history is an interactive process—“an ongoing conversation betwee...
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Washington’s address was eerily clairvoyant about the perils the young nation might one day confront.
Being invisible is a metaphor for being black in America: for being ignored, persecuted, demeaned, subjected to different standards of justice, and labeled with crude racial stereotypes.
blindfolded, in a boxing ring.
creates an indelible portrait of two women who are best friends and bitter rivals, cheerleaders of each other’s literary ambitions and envious competitors for recognition.
sharp elbows and sharper tongue.
The books are powered by those soldiers’ own candor and eloquence, and they show the fallout that the decision to invade Iraq and the war’s “ruinous beginnings” would have on a group of soldiers who, by various twists of fate, found themselves stationed in a hot spot on the edge of Baghdad.
“the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting,”
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who promoted the apocalyptic notion that only violence could change history.
Dexter Filkins’s book The Forever War—based on his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times—delineates life in these combat zones with uncommon eloquence and insight. It’s a harrowing and urgent book that combines a reporter’s legwork with a tactile, novelistic understanding of the human sorrow and unbearableness of war. It gives us indelible snapshots of the young American soldiers who fought there and the Iraqis who knew they would have to go on living there long after the Americans had left. Filkins describes the momentary hope, when hundreds of Iraqis, dressed in
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mythical Hydra: cut off one head and two more quickly sprout.
the meretricious trinkets of success and evanescent riches.
Hobbesian world of “endless labour, ceaseless brutality & pointless violence”
savoir faire
When it snowed, one writer observed, “girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”
He “offers no wisdom, only empathy.”
The sections about Sinatra’s work with Nelson Riddle eloquently illuminate their collaboration, each man pushing “the other to heights neither could achieve individually,” while the book as a whole attests to Sinatra’s perfectionism and devotion to detail—not just his own phrasing and control of rhythm and tempo, but also his thoughtful choice of songs to sustain the mood of a given album, his selection of musicians to work with on individual tracks, and the last-minute adjustments he made to arrangements and orchestrations.
“Whatever else has been said about me is unimportant: when I sing, I believe, I’m honest.”
the consensual hallucination that was the matrix”—and the monumental impact
It’s an observation that echoes Kierkegaard’s definition of “the unhappiest man” as someone incapable of living in the present, dwelling instead in past memory or future hope.
self-interested, manipulative, duplicitous.
Vladimir Nabokov once observed that “a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” The
And she explains why the leaves at the top of a tree are smaller than those below, allowing “sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches.”
a vituperative old woman who carried “an honest-to-God hacksaw”
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life was a testament to the power of one man to bend the arc of history toward justice.
the human craving for recognition—the “desire to lead the parade”—must be put in the service of justice, of fighting for the less fortunate.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York,” “Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California”).
Reinhold Niebuhr,
