“As you might imagine, as professional critics and general bibliophiles [Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai] read far more than is represented on [their best-books] lists — books their colleagues reviewed, books they found by chance, books that had been teetering on their to-read piles while they attended to the demands of their jobs. Below, they talk about the wide variety of writing they enjoyed, authors who disappointed them and larger trends they noticed in the literary world.” — New York Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘We Are A Country That Has Lost Our Narrative’: What Lynn Nottage Learned In Reading, Pa. When She Was Researching ‘Sweat’
“One of the first questions we asked was, how do you describe your city? People would respond by saying: ‘Reading was … ‘ They were incredibly nostalgic for this glorious imagined past. It nearly broke my heart. I thought this is a city that cannot conceive of itself in the present or future tense. It is a microcosm of what is happening in America today. We are a country that has lost our narrative. We can’t project our future because we don’t know where we are going.” — The Guardian
Post-Modernist Architecture — As Its Buildings Age, Should They Be Saved? Or Just Replaced?
“Heading into their fourth and fifth decades, deep into midlife architectural crises, needing face-lifts, they’re now vulnerable and back again in the public eye, eliciting concern and attracting a second look — and sympathy — even from people who never liked them. But will these loved-hated structures be saved, and should they?” Joseph Giovannini considers the question. — New York Times
While AIDS Ravaged The Arts World In The 1980s, The New York Times Obituaries Euphemized
“Like most obituaries, these carried the weight of individual lives, many taken too soon. But unlike other obits, they were laced with evasions — omissions effectively erasing a person’s life, effectively erasing AIDS. … Those who lost their lives — many of them pathbreaking artists and individuals who, if still here today, would be running our museums, our publishing houses, our media companies, opera houses, and drama guilds — died before we had enough to remember them by. To trace the stories behind such obituaries is to unearth the very voices that shaped our culture, to recover what’s been lost.” — Slate
See Every Surviving Vermeer Painting, United In Google’s Virtual Museum
“The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which owns what is perhaps Vermeer’s best-known masterpiece, Girl With a Pearl Earring, has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture in Paris to build an augmented-reality app that creates a virtual museum featuring all of the artist’s works” — even The Concert, the Vermeer that was stolen in the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. — New York Times
Preserving The Literary History Of Embattled Kurdistan
A visit to the Zheen Archive Center in Sulaimani, where “two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of books, manuscripts, and papers that have survived hundreds of years of language bans and the mass destruction of property” during Saddam Hussein’s anti-Kurdish pogroms and the attacks and occupations by ISIS. — The Believer
Bloomberg Public Art Challenge Awards $1M To Jackson, Miss. For Art About Nutrition
“The funds will support the project ‘Fertile Ground: Inspiring Dialogue About Food Access,’ which aims to inform policy related to nutrition by using art as a medium to communicate the complexities of the issue in the city. Local and national artists, landscape architects, filmmakers, farmers, chefs, nutritionists, and community members will be invited to collaborate on a citywide exhibition featuring installations and performances, as well as other programming.” — Artforum
Leonard Slatkin’s Successor In Lyon: Nikolaj Znaider (Yes, He Conducts, Too)
“Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, who recently changed his artistic name, Nikolaj Znaider, back to his original and passport name, has been announced as the new Music Director of the Orchestre national de Lyon. The 43-year-old Danish [violinist and conductor] will take up the position in September 2020 for a period of four years, succeeding Leonard Slatkin, Music Director from 2011-2017.” — The Strad
James Frey Wins 2018 Bad Sex In Fiction Award
“Years after gaining notoriety for embellishing [sic] parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, the US author James Frey has a new notch in his bedpost … Seeing off competition from an all-male shortlist that included Haruki Murakami and the Man Booker prize-nominated Gerard Woodward, Frey won for his novel Katerina, a ‘“fictional retelling’ of a love affair the author started while on a hedonistic trip to France in the 1990s.” — The Guardian
How ‘Peak TV’ Is Hollowing Out TV Criticism
“Faced with a thickening glut of television, critics produce fewer negative reviews. With limitless A- and B+ programs available to overpraise, why trash a B-, let alone an F? This results in the expectation, on the part of the critics themselves, that the shows they write about must be aesthetically interesting or, at the very least, culturally urgent. Such endemic self-flattery leads, inevitably, to a weakening of their critical language.” — The Baffler