Rushdie is overly drawn to low-hanging fruit in this smug collection of criticism, speeches and essays
‘His arguments tend to dissolve before your eyes’: Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian
‘His arguments tend to dissolve before your eyes’: Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian
Sun 23 May 2021 04.00 EDT
With reflections on everything from the rise of autofiction to Trump and Covid, a collection of Salman Rushdie’s 21st-century nonfiction ought to be a treasure trove, but it feels more like watching someone rooting around down the back of the sofa for loose change.
One problem is that, as a rule, these repurposed forewords, op-eds and speeches are plonked down without so much as a date, producing a kind of chronological whiplash as you yo-yo from one obsolete reference to the next. Rushdie promises they are all “thoroughly revised”, but I spotted scant evidence of that, save for a Dominic Cummings-style tweak to a 2018 piece t
Writing professor Phillip Lopate is in the midst of publishing three volumes of American essays.
From Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Jamaica Kincaid, Professor Phillip Lopate’s new anthology,
Lopate, who teaches in the writing program at the School of the Arts, gathered pieces that address sometimes critically American values or have a subtext about being American. Early American writers struggled to establish a recognizable national culture. Mid-19
th century writers no longer lacked confidence, but faced new reckonings with the oppression of Blacks and women, while the strong tradition of nature writing runs from John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard.
Machado de Assis: An Introduction to One of Brazil’s Most Celebrated Writers By George Newton | 18 December, 2020
When the topic of 19
th century writers comes up, for many, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert spring to mind; and rightly so, they all wrote influential novels and novellas, chronicles and articles that shaped their worlds and the world we live in today. However, this list is neither exhaustive nor complete.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, revered by Brazilians as one of the country’s most influential writers, remains relatively unknown outside of the Portuguese-speaking world. In my view, his work deserves a wider international audience, and after being celebrated by Susan Sontag who wrote in 2000 that Machado de Assis was “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America,” his work has attracted an increasingly international readership with new English translations published recently.