Wednesday, May 03, 2006

I love the way

the TLS has reorganized its website; they put up an appealing selection of the new issue's stuff every Thursday, available without a subscription, only they seem to be outrageously on top of things & it's often all there by Wednesday, I can never resist looking even though I feel I'm cheating & that I should save it for the next day.

Lots of good stuff this week, in any case: Benjamin Markovits calls Philip Roth's new book "more novella than novel"; a great piece by Peter Parker on the evolution of biography (oh, this is the stuff I love; it's a review of a bunch of the volumes edited by Richard Holmes for this new short biography series, Defoe on Jonathan Wild and Johnson's Life of Savage and Godwin's Wollstonecraft etc., these little books are very attractive and I highly recommend them especially if you're not already familiar with these eighteenth-century English biographies; and he also praises a volume that I definitely need to get, Javier Marias's Written Lives); and best of all, Joyce Carol Oates on Norah Vincent's year as a man (I am curious to read Self-Made Man, I tend not to read that kind of new non-fiction mostly just because I don't want it quite enough to buy it & yet those new books are difficult to get from libraries, they are always checked out immediately by people more anxious to read them than I; but this one really does sound interesting, worth a look).

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