Tag Archives: Literature

Arts, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2, 2026 PREVIEW

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Donald Trump stands next to a trash can labeled Vote Here.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features Barry Blitt’s “Polling Place” – An election strategy.

The Republicans’ Remarkably Bad Midterm Campaigns

Things were going poorly even before Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ran the most offensive ad of the year. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Charles Kushner and the MAGA Ambassador’s Playbook

Since taking up his post in Paris, Kushner has become known for lobbing provocations onto France’s domestic scene at sensitive moments. As he put it, “Nobody has the courage to say what I say.” By Lauren Collins

The State Officials Defending the Midterms from the President

Donald Trump has tried to purge voter rolls nationwide. Deidre Henderson, the Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, is among the chief election officers standing in his way. By Barton Gellman

How Jim Morrison Surmounted Tragedy and Skied Down Everest

The mountaineer and his partner, Hilaree Nelson, planned a first-ever descent. After her death, he pushed on. By Nick Paumgarten

Arts, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 26, 2026 PREVIEW

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The Knicks lean in for a huddle break at the beginning of a new season.

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features Mark Ulriksen’s “Make It Two” – Game on.

The Danger of Getting Too Close to a Source

Richard Darman was my source in the Reagan and Bush Administrations—and my best friend. By Bob Woodward

Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made

They power our phones, cars, dishwashers—and the A.I. systems that prop up the economy. They’re also at the heart of fierce geopolitical rivalry. By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The New Age of Reading

Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand. By Nathan Heller

Facing the Death Penalty

The cases of Christa Pike and Nidal Hasan show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one. By Amy Davidson Sorkin

Books, Criticism, Essays, Intellicurean.com, Storytelling

OUR COMING RHAPSODE

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Intellicurean Essays on Intellicurious

Everyone is mourning the death of reading. Plato, Nietzsche and Ray Bradbury would have asked a different question: not how much we read, but what we keep.

Our Coming Rhapsode — a performer made of light and drifting paper holds a crowd in an ancient theater at night, while at the edge an old woman passes a small lit lamp into a girl’s hands
A voice made of writing, and a lamp passed by hand, painted for the essay.

Why we’re pointing you there

James Marriott’s new book, The New Dark Ages, warns that a post-literate future will look like the pre-literate past, and the review of it in The American Scholar reaches for the reading public’s favorite consolation: Bradbury’s book people on the railroad tracks. Intellicurean looks at that campfire again and notices what its admirers tend to forget. The men around it are book burners, who saved literature by learning it by heart. From there the essay follows the thread to Nietzsche’s contempt for an age of readers and the suspicion that it produced his Last Man, to a young Athenian with a speech hidden under his cloak, and to Plato’s rhapsode, the performer who held a crowd like a magnet and kept an eye on his fee. That is the figure a new voice made entirely of writing now stands to become.

What we liked most is that the essay fights fair. It gives the new voice its best case, a Socrates with time for everyone, before it answers, and it concedes the critic’s strongest point instead of scoring off him. It is also, plainly, a statement of what Intellicurean is for: essays made in conversation with a machine, checked against the page, and written to be carried away rather than scrolled past. How it ends, we’ll leave to the essay.

A chain of iron rings hangs from a glowing black lodestone; its last ring turns into an old woman’s hand, passing a small lit clay lamp into a child’s cupped hands below
The last ring becomes a hand, painted for the essay.

Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

Arts & Literature, Books, Literature, Magazines, Poetry, Reviews

POETRY LONDON MAGAZINE – AUTUMN 2026 PREVIEW

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POETRY LONDON MAGAZINE: The latest issue features new work from Liz Berry, Hannah Lowe, Ahren Warner, and Maura Dooley. We also have prose by Joey Connolly, an interview between Clara–Læïla Laudette and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and reviews of Helen Mort, Dean Browne, Karen Solie, and Jorie Graham.

Rooms Flooded with Light

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha explains that her poems—written over a decade from a position of relative safety in the US—did not target a specific reader, but rather reflect an evolving, non-linear attempt to communicate across a broad and complex readership profoundly shaped by ongoing trauma and genocide.

Under Pressure

In her new collection Killing Spree, poet Jorie Graham evokes the dual-headed Roman deity Janus to confront a precarious present by looking back at an out-of-reach past while facing a distressing, violent future.

‘it been really interesting is good to talk face to face isn’t it’

Blown Rose and Dialect Press sum up some small press publishing. By Julia Bird, Mike Sims, Juliette Morton

Arts & Literature, Magazines, Opinion, Politics

GUERNICA MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2026

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GUERNICA MAGAZINE: The latest issue features striking artwork alongside fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews that explore how human understanding takes shape through sensation, memory, and intuition—ranging from Liane Strauss’s inquiry into AI and Emily Dickinson’s poetry to Mirza Waheed’s Kashmiri childhood recollections, Georgi Gospodinov’s poignant tale of progressive hearing loss, Marcelle Shehwaro’s visceral reflections on surviving Aleppo’s airstrikes, previously unpublished letters by Robert Frost, Nattiya Nadaham’s dance-rooted personal essay on Tamil resistance, and evocative poetry by Melissa Studdard and Arman Salem.

How Do We Know? AI and I read “I felt a Funeral – in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson (Part II)

“What do you want from a poem? Do you go to poems for facts and information, or do you seek out poems because they express singular observations in unpredictable language, stir the imagination, open up possibilities?” By Liane Strauss

Willows, Cucumbers and Sunflowers

“It’s the way of the world, new in place of the old, but still, all those trees and plants and vegetables and flowers, so good and lush and kind somehow.” By Mirza Waheed

Airstrikes

“If you can, choose a building surrounded by taller ones. The logic is that your neighbors would be bombed before you.”By Marcelle Shehwaro

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4

“And you mustn’t forget to include Kay in your all-round felicitations; for you don’t need to take my word for it, you can find internal evidence in the book itself that but for her there would have been no seventh book.” By Robert Frost

Arts & Literature, Books, History, Literature, Magazines, Reviews

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 16, 2026

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TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The Glory of the Garden’ – Jonathan Bate’s cultural history….

A Nobel for new forms

Anne Carson’s juggling act By Tristram Fane Saunders

Bowers of bliss

The story of gardens and their cultural significance By David E. Cooper

Appalachian variations

Buried dreams of a small-town prodigy By Beejay Silcox

Myth and man

A flawed but brilliant poet ‘dealt a cruel hand by fate’ By Gabriel Josipovici

Arts & Literature, Books, History, Magazines, Opinion, Reviews

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 5, 2026

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THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Sue Halpern on fascist dorks, Colm Tóibín on La Bola Negra, Kathryn Hughes on George Sand, Jeffrey Toobin on the fall of the Voting Rights Act, Colin Thubron on saving the great cats, Nicolas Niarchos on America’s disastrous Yemen policy, Julian Gewirtz on AI supremacists, Susan Tallman on the elusive Vermeer, James Gleick on the duplicitous chatbots, Adam Thirlwell on Wallace Shawn’s genius, poems by David Plante, Claire DeVoogd, and Shane McCrae, and much more.

The Plot to Delete Democracy

In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán

Making Light of a Dark Past

La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom.

La Bola Negra a film directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

Rebel Rebel

George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson

Mapping Mississippi White

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Opinion, Reviews

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 22, 2026 PREVIEW

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LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features  Fredric the Great by Toril Moi; Trump’s Consigliere by Deborah Friedell; Prediction Markets by Geoff Mann; Prynne’s People by Iain Sinclair; and Theibaud’s Sweet Tooth by Paul Keegan….

Fredric the Great

Toril Moi

Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.

A.I., Criticism, Essays, Intellicurean.com, Literature

PERCHANCE TO FORGET

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Intellicurean Essays· on Intellicurious

You wake the morning after a long dinner with an old friend, and the exact words are gone. What remains is the turn of it, the first draft of a story you may tell for years. Something chose what to keep while you slept. A new essay asks what happens to the minds that never get that night.

Perchance to Forget: a candlelit stone chamber at night. A young man in black sits on the edge of an unslept four-poster bed, pressing smooth a wax tablet as small gold shapes, a lute, a feather, a letter, a dancing couple, a face, drift up from it and dissolve. A faded armored ghost stands in a doorway at left; at right, through an arch, an empty, perfectly made bed lies under cold blue-white threads of light.
A prince wipes the table of his memory; across the hall, a bed no one sleeps in. Made for the essay.

Why we’re pointing you there

Sleep, on one leading account, is when the brain lets most of the day go, and the selection is where stories begin. Michael Cummins follows the people who could not make that trade. Borges’s Funes remembers every leaf of every tree and cannot think, because “to think is to forget a difference.” Solomon Shereshevsky, the real-life mnemonist Alexander Luria studied for almost thirty years, wrote down what he wanted to forget, burned the slips, and still saw the words. Nietzsche held that without forgetting it is impossible to live at all, and slept badly. Oliver Sacks’s amnesiac patients kept nothing, and one of them invented a new world every few minutes, while Sacks’s own journals, it turns out, confess inventions of his own.

Then the machine. A language model, the essay argues, has two memories, and they are opposites: a vast library that forgot almost every particular, and a conversation it holds entire and keeps none of. What it lacks is the night between them. When engineers try to make a model unlearn, the forgotten knowledge comes back, just as the words came back to Shereshevsky through the fire. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, and it asks one question: what would it mean for a machine to sleep?

A dark 1920s room at night. A man in shirtsleeves kneels at an open iron stove, feeding slips of paper into the fire. From the smoke, a stream of pale slips pours out across the room toward a cold blue-white window, where fine threads of light catch them and stitch them into a tiled lattice across the ceiling.
Burning the paper, and what survives the fire. Made for the essay.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

Arts, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 19, 2026 PREVIEW

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The cover for the October 19 2026 issue of The New Yorker which features a person wearing a colorful patterned sweater...

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features Malika Favre’s “Sweater Weather” – Comfortable patterns.

Donald Trump After the Midterms

If the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage. By David Remnick

We’re Learning to Live with Waymos. It’s Going Weird

A view from the back seat. By Molly Fischer

Kash Patel’s Slap Shot

The F.B.I. director’s hockey team, the Dons, faced their rivals in a beer league. With rogue slap shots and hovering security agents, Patel was in the zone—or, at least, next to it. By Richie McGinniss

My Education on the Border of the Syrian War

In the last Turkish town on the road to Aleppo, jihadis and spies mixed with reporters trying to prove themselves. By Ben Taub