The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by RichaThe Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanaganrd Flanagan The world is burning and the sixth mass extinction is under way. When Anna’s finger disappears, and then a short while later her knee, she thinks curiously little of it. But then she begins to notice disappearances everywhere, and all around people refuse to see what is really happening. The Booker Prize winner’s eighth novel is a raging tale about grief and loss that asks existential questions – is prolonging death the same as living? Will we refuse to see the flames? – but which contains moments of stillness and magic, too.
Lapsed bookworm? How you can get back into the habit of reading
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Are you reluctant to curl up with a good book? Were you once an avid reader, but you’ve lost the habit? Is there always something more important to do, or more TV series to binge watch, or more social media to scroll?
You are not alone. A UK study in 2015 revealed that almost a third of the population, about 16 million people, were lapsed readers. They had not read since leaving formal education, or because their reading habits had been interrupted by illness or a major life event, such as having a child. Nearly half said that lack of time was the reason they didn’t read, or didn’t read more frequently. We can assume similar figures for Australia.
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Best of The Sunday Read 2020: From Female Rage to Michelangeloâs David
A few of our favorite and most popular episodes of the narrated article series from âThe Daily.â
A crew working on a reproduction of Michelangeloâs David in Carrara, Italy.Credit.Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan for The New York Times.
Dec. 20, 2020
For the past few months, The Sunday Read has been a fixture of the weekend feed on âThe Daily,â featuring narrated renditions of The New York Timesâs journalism.
Started in the early days of the pandemic, the series has shed light on our current moment with stories of isolation and meditations on race in America. But it has also provided moments of escapism: from long walks into forest worlds to journeys to exoplanets.
What is the equivalent of public poetry verse written at white heat after a momentous event in literary fiction?
In a blog post about the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, Egyptian critic and novelist Sayed Tonsy Mahmoud turned to literary discussions in France. He proposed the useful term romans d’urgences. These are novels of urgency, emergency and immediacy. Yet, as he suggests, a potential problem with such responsive fiction (which I extend to include the conte, or short story, as well as the novel or roman) is that it simply reacts to current affairs. There is thus the danger of ephemerality.