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sansip.bsky.social
Books, etc. “Sometimes, I, too, sought expression. I know now that my gods grant me no more than allusion or mention”: Borges
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Guilty, innocent, what does it matter? (David Sipress in the New Yorker.)

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How to identify books that are poisonous – literally. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

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I thought Nussaibah Younis’s ‘Fundamentally’ was terrific. In this conversation with the Hindu, she speaks of, among other things, how she was inspired by the unlikely pairing of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth.

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Nick Harkaway, John le Carré’s son and author of ‘Karla's Choice’, selects his five best le Carré novels. Surprise: ‘A Perfect Spy’ isn’t among them. fivebooks.com/best-books/b...

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J.M. Coetzee on searching for the right word. (From: Speaking in Tongues by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos)

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"Referring to Frantz Fanon, Professor Abu Sitta suggested that the purpose of the violence went beyond its direct physical effects, as a performative display of omnipotence." From Selma Dabbagh's latest report on Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

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"One thing that never dies in my country is narratives of political struggle." Fascinating glimpses of what Iranians are reading these days and the trends in the literary market. worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/may/rea...

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Dyaus pita. Zeus pater. Jupiter. How the history of languages can point to "a shared ancestor, a unity — and a divergence — somewhere in the past". www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

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"It is intriguing that it is only in the West that we seem to have prizes for works from other cultures." Is this "openness or presumption", asks Tim Parks, in this short meditation on being the judge of a translation prize. (£) www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-feat...

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Does no-one know the difference between "diffuse" and "defuse" anymore?

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“Alexandria, the city of Alexander the Great, is one of the first great historical cities to begin partially collapsing in modern history under the effects of climate change.” english.elpais.com/climate/2025...

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Sentence appreciation post: "The tiny ponds outside the high-rise hotels prickled with slow, subversive rain." - John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy. "Prickled": unexpected yet precise. "Subversive": a surprising adjective for rain, strikes the right atmospheric note.

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Also applies to social media. (🎨: David Finch)

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The Sunday Times tries to pit men and women writers against each other in this pointless "battle-of-the-sexes" comparison of book sales in 2025 so far.

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"Hunger steals the simplest human abilities: concentration, patience, sensation, the desire to say something. Thinking becomes a luxury. Words become weights that cannot be lifted." arablit.org/2025/05/30/h...

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“No one is doing it like Martin Amis did. That the contemporary fiction landscape lacks his flavor of frenzied humor, chaotic storylines, maximalist characters, and full-throated play is a loss.” www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05...

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When you find out the bar was set, met and never surpassed 1700 years ago.

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“A culture is no better than its woods.” - WH Auden, ‘Bucolics’

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Truly a titan. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, RIP.

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Over a month ago, I had this ambitious idea of writing a review-essay on four recent books — two fiction, two non-fiction — that revolve around a similar theme. Naturally, I haven’t written a word since.

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This true? www.middleeasteye.net/trending/blu...

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Using the human anatomy to create letterforms isn’t a new technique, but it’s unusual on a book cover, I think. This one is certainly striking, though I’m not sure if it creates a cohesive whole.

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What is this, a celebration of genocide?

submitted 15 days ago • 5 comments

Readable, but too dutiful.

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

“I’ve been teaching the Odyssey for nearly four decades but I can’t remember a time when it has spoken as forcefully to my students as it does today when so many are embracing fluid identities and asserting their right to self-invention”: Daniel Mendelsohn www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/o...

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Why you should practice close reading. defector.com/close-readin...

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Oh, now the hypocritical humanitarian speaks up.

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A sad reminder of the hundreds of pieces I had saved, still languishing unread.

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“What makes the modern state a mundane horror show for Kafka is the way it combines opacity with languid indifference to the stalled lives of those it affects. You can’t predict what the decision will be and you must wait to find out.” - Regina Rini

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Banu Mushtaq “said that she does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community, that women everywhere face similar, if not the exact same problems, and those are the issues that she writes about.” - Deepa Bhasthi’s translator’s note.

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TIL the English word ‘shaman’ is likely derived from the Sanskrit ‘shramana’ (monk, ascetic). From ‘Proto’, Laura Spinney

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“In our era of the ‘corporatized university,’ the ideal of the university as an “‘inviolable refuge from [the] tyranny of [public opinion],’ ‘immune to powerful economic and political interests’ seems quaint, at best, and more than a little naive.” www.publicbooks.org/when-univers...

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Don't forget to tune in. (David Sipress in The New Yorker.)

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In the Hindu, wrote about ‘The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap’, a collection of prose pieces about Bombay/Mumbai by Adil Jussawalla. As Jerry Pinto writes in his introduction, they chart a relationship "between man and landscape, man and city, man and nightmare".

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How Microsoft’s Satya Nadella uses AI to “listen” to podcasts. Weird.

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"Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan." - Hart Crane, 'To Brooklyn Bridge'

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This book on the fate of the Roma -- originally from India -- sounds fascinating. (Also see: Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing.) observer.co.uk/culture/book...

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment