Reviews and News:
Step aside Tom Wolfe. When Cormac McCarthy is not writing novels, he likes to study the unconscious and language at the Santa Fe Institute: “We don’t know what the unconscious is or where it is or how it got there—wherever there might be. Recent animal brain studies showing outsized cerebellums in some pretty smart species are suggestive. That facts about the world are in themselves capable of shaping the brain is slowly becoming accepted. Does the unconscious only get these facts from us, or does it have the same access to our sensorium that we have? You can do whatever you like with the us and the our and the we. I did. At some point the mind must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that. So what are we saying here? That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing. Yes.”
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Czeslaw Milosz’s lonely life.
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Lenin on a train: “On 9 April 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin left Zurich by train with 32 other Bolsheviks bound for Russia. It was, says Catherine Merridale, ‘a journey that changed the world’.”
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In Case You Missed It:
Who is the biggest publisher of foreign fiction translated into English? Amazon.
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Was Nabokov more interested in beauty than people?
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In 2011, Daniel Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father audited his course on the Odyssey. Then the two travelled to Greece: “‘Journey of Odysseus’ was an ‘educational’ cruise, and my father, although contemptuous of anything that struck him as being a needless luxury, was a great believer in education. And so, a few weeks later, in June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the cruise, which lasted ten days, one for each year of Odysseus’ long journey.”
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In The Times Literary Supplement, Brian Vickers reviews two new complete works of Shakespeare—one by Oxford and one by Norton—and finds the American publication far superior to the British.
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Interview: Sam Leith talks to Dennis Duncan about the joy of indexes.
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Classic Essay: Carle C. Zimmerman, “Evolution, Individualism, and the End of the Family”
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