Our four-week summer issue is now online, featuring @TriciaLockwood on Marian Engel’s ‘Bear’, David Runciman on Michael Wolff’s ‘Landslide’, Colm Tóibín on Pessoa, a new essay by Lydia Davis, Andrew O’Hagan on Fergie’s Mills & Boon and a cover by @Jon_McN: https://t.co/xaTOjYd3Vr pic.twitter.com/85zYXXbrnn
— London Review of Books (@LRB) August 4, 2021
Tag Archives: Book Reviews
Outdoor Sports Books: “Remarkable Bicycle Rides”
The latest title in the bestselling Remarkable series, this is a fully illustrated collection of some of the most spectacular and life-affirming cycling trips from around the world.
There are the classic mountain climbs beloved of followers of the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, such as the climb to Alpe D’Huez in France and the Stelvio Pass in Italy. Gentler touring routes include the Hadrian’s Cycleway, which crosses from Britain’s Solway Firth to the North Sea following the line of Hadrian’s Wall.
For those wishing to push themselves to the very edge, there is the North Yungas Road, also known as El Camino de la Muerte (Death Road), in Bolivia; bike trails round some of the world’s most spectacular national parks, such as the Canyonlands National Park, and a journey through the forests and mountains of Transylvania.
About The Author
When author Colin Salter isn’t penning his incredibly successful “100” series (100 Books that Changed the World, 100 Speeches, 100 Letters, and 100 Children’s Books), he likes nothing better than taking his mountain bike out to the highlands and islands of his native Scotland. The author of Remarkable Road Trips, Colin has swapped four wheels for two in this global treat for all levels of cyclists.
Previews: Times Literary Supplement (TLS) – July 30
Previews: Times Literary Supplement – July 30, 2021
Montana Views: John Maclean’s Backstory Memoir ‘Home Waters’
John Maclean’s family was the topic of “A River Runs Through It,” the novella that became a hit film. Now, his own new book tells the backstory of the captivating drama. Jeff Glor takes a look at Maclean’s love for Montana’s great outdoors.
Books: ‘The Tiny Bee That Hovers At The Center Of The World’ – David Searcy
An ethereal meditation on longing, loss, and time, sweeping from the highways of Texas to the canals of Mars–by the acclaimed essayist and author of Shame and Wonder
David Searcy’s writing is enchanting and peculiar, obsessed with plumbing the mysteries and wonders of our everyday world, the beauty and cruelty of time, and nothing less than what he calls “the whole idea of meaning.” In The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World, he leads the reader across the landscapes of his extraordinary mind, moving from the decaying architectural wonder that is the town of Arcosanti, Arizona, to driving the vast, open Texas highway in his much-abused college VW Beetle, to the mysterious, canal-riddled Martian landscape that famed astronomer Percival Lowell first set eyes on, via his telescope, in 1894. Searcy does not come at his ideas directly, but rather digresses and meditates and analyzes until some essential truth has been illuminated–and it is in that journey that the beauty is found.
Literary Views: London Review Of Books (July29)
Book Review: ‘Pessoa – A Biography’ (NY Times)
Books: ‘Revolutionary World – Global Upheaval In The Modern Age’ (LSE)
Shakespeare: ‘Hamnet’ Author Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” one of last year’s most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596.
On this week’s podcast, O’Farrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest inspiration was to capture a sense of the young boy at its center.
“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” she says. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”
Intellicurious 