What is the origin of consciousness? The Hebrew Bible has a simple answer that everybody knows: it involves an apple. Of course it doesn’t involve an apple per se; apples are northern fruit that do not grow in the Levant. Figs would be more likely. The Hebrew Bible, and the Old Testaments, in no matter …
The Princess of 72nd Street is a historical novel, first published in 1979 and very much of its time, which I remember as a period of open confusion. What followed may not have been much of an improvement for many people, but it was relatively straightforward, and things have only gotten more straightforward since; today, alas, …
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by Elaine Kraf’ »
A friend whom I see every week, and with whom I always discuss what we’re reading, has been saying pretty much the same thing for over a month: she’s reading another Joe Pickett novel by C J Box. She can’t stop. I’m not surprised: a mystery set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, centered on …
On a tip from a friend, I read Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel, The Anthropologists. Savaş is a Turkish writer, educated in the United States, who writes in English. She now lives in Paris. The Anthropologists is her third novel. I thought that, before writing about it, I would read the second novel, Walking on the Ceiling. The …
Is the subtitle of this new book, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America really plausible? Even if it’s safe to assume — and I think that it is — that Jones was among the three or four most influential editors in the history of the Knopf imprint, there remains the question of just how …
Like everyone who has read Brooklyn, I was pleased to read more about the American adventures of Eilis Lacey in Colm Tóibín’s Long Island,. But when, at the end of the first part of the new novel, Eilis left Long Island for Ireland — for the duration — and bumped into her oldest friend in Enniscorthy, I …
Spinoza Who? That’s what I used to be reduced to asking myself, until a few years ago. Who was Spinoza? What did he think and write? Why is he so famous? Why don’t I know anything about him except4 a small pile of facts that don’t add up to anything? Here my answer to the …
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Freedom’s Messiah by Ian Buruma’ »
1848 was, if not the year of failed revolutions throughout Europe, the year of revolutions doomed to fail by the end of 1849. The events of that time usually make for frustrating reading — all that trouble, not to mention bloodshed, for nothing. We shake our heads in condescending pity, and, if we’re so inclined, …
To read Horace in Latin, Dante in Italian, or Racine in French is to experience something that these poets have to say that cannot be captured in translation. And it is very hard to describe this something in a language other than the poet’s. You have to be there, is what it comes down to. …
Shirley Hazzard begins her memoir, Greene on Capri (2000) with an anecdote that has become well-known, if not notorious, among people who know anything about her. “On a December morning of the late Sixties,” she writes, she was sitting by the windows in a café on the piazetta in Capri, doing a crossword puzzle. The …
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by Brigitta Olubas’ »