| | | A master of self-promotion: letters reveal how Philip Roth 'hustled' for prizes | | by Dalya Alberge Aug 29, 2021 | | Correspondence found in archives shows how ‘pushy’ novelist used ‘collusion, networking and back-scratching’ to win literary awards As one of America’s foremost novelists, Philip Roth was awarded nearly every literary accolade, including a Pulitzer prize. It might be assumed that his work spoke for itself in securing these plaudits, but previously unpublished letters reveal he was, in fact, a master of self-promotion, networking and mutual back-scratching. Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who studied the correspondence while writing a book about Roth, was surprised by how pushy the author was and by his wheeler-dealing with friends and colleagues from the worlds of publishing, literary criticism and academia. “It’s something one would never get from reading his highly autobiographical descriptions of the writer’s lonely life,” he said. Continue reading... | | | | | Halsey: If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power review – a muscular pop statement | | by Kitty Empire Aug 29, 2021 | | (Capitol)
The singer-songwriter contemplates new motherhood on this intriguing fourth album American singer-songwriter Halsey’s excellently titled fourth album comes accompanied by a film, unavailable to view at the time of writing. Trailers suggest a Game of Thrones-meets-French Revolution-themed goth rock opera about the Madonna-whore complex. The album’s 13 tracks don’t quite live up to that billing, but there is no denying that Halsey, who recently gave birth, wants to make a muscular and epic statement. Otherwise, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails would be a very odd choice for midwives to a pop superstar’s emotional album about love, pregnancy and female sexuality. Continue reading... | | | | | China vs America: A Warning by Oliver Letwin review – an uneasy truce… or Armageddon | | by Andrew Anthony Aug 29, 2021 | | In this elegant study, the former Conservative minister warns that the US must rethink its relationship with China and embrace a peaceful rivalry That China is an economic superpower rivalling, if not surpassing, the US is not a secret. Political scientists have been debating the implications of that fact for most of this century, and there’s little consensus. What’s clear is that under President Xi Jinping China has been more forthright about its global economic ambitions, not least with the vast and much touted belt and road project. But it has also begun to flex its political and military muscles more openly in its extended neighbourhood. Continue reading... | | | | | The Nest review – Jude Law excels in thriller of 1980s excess | | by Wendy Ide Aug 29, 2021 | | Jude Law is terrific as a devious City trader who moves his family from New York to a spooky Surrey mansion in this richly atmospheric drama Jude Law’s glittering and insincere salesman’s smile has rarely been better used than in Sean Durkin’s prickly domestic drama The Nest. As brash British City boy Rory, he blasts the full force of his skin-deep charm, arms outstretched, as he welcomes his American family to the 17th-century Surrey mansion he has leased for a year “with the option to buy”. Having unilaterally decided to relocate them all from a comfortable life in New York back to the UK to take advantage of the imminent deregulation of the 1980s financial market, Rory is fully invested in the move to this crumbling pile. The ostentatious, impractical house, with its jutting turrets and the vacant Valium gaze of its windows, is a core part of the oversize identity that Rory is crafting for himself. It’s not a home, it’s a waymarker on a social climb, a capricious trophy wife of a building. No wonder, then, that the mansion starts to feel as malign, in its way, as The Shining’s Overlook hotel. As he already demonstrated with his accomplished feature debut, Martha Marcy May Marlene, writer and director Durkin is supremely accomplished when it comes to subtly modulated tonal shifts. With the introduction of a discordant note in the upmarket restaurant jazz that constitutes the film’s sly score (plaudits to Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry for creating music that sounds both impeccably tasteful and witheringly sarcastic), there’s the hint of an imbalance that undermines the family’s foundations in their new home. A mid-shot that catches the face of Rory’s wife, Allison (Fargo’s Carrie Coon), as she chews over the bitter realisation that her husband has lied to her, lowers the temperature in the scenes that follow by several degrees. The use of the unsympathetic architecture of the building is particularly effective. A shot of a child’s toy dragged along a brick parapet creates a lurch of foreboding. The corridors of the house soak up light like blotting paper; shadows eat away at the edge of the frame and the sunny enthusiasm in Rory’s 10-year-old son, Ben, gradually dims. Continue reading... | | | | | Paloma Faith: 'If anyone can do it, it's me' | | by Eva Wiseman Aug 29, 2021 | | Despite the balancing act – home schooling, a second baby, a fifth album and a nationwide tour – Paloma Faith always comes out fighting… and full of stories Here’s a nice little exclusive for you,” Paloma Faith leans into my voice recorder generously, grinning, “and you’ll like this because it’s about lactation!” We are huddled outside a café on a day that promised sun but delivered rain, and she pulls her jacket around her a bit tighter – on the back, in big letters it reads: IT’S ALL BOLLOCKS. So, she says, a week ago she put a post on Instagram about her second baby’s aversion to breastfeeding, and minutes later got a call. “‘Don’t bin the milk!’ they said. Six months of milk, I’d been pumping since my baby was born, and a lactation consultant called and told me she’d pick it up, give it to a new mother who couldn’t breastfeed and was beside herself with worry. It was all marked, dated, so I put it in a freezer bag stuffed with ice packs and sent it off.” Does the woman know… “That it’s pop star milk? Nope!” Continue reading... | | | | | Being a Human review – two go mad in the stone age | | by Alex Preston Aug 29, 2021 | | Charles Foster’s search for the meaning of human life leads him and his son to become hedgehog-eating hunter-gatherers in a Derbyshire wood Charles Foster’s previous book, Being a Beast, is one of the oddest things I’ve read. In it, the author, a barrister, professor of law, part-time judge and former vet, attempts to live as a series of animals, often in the company of his charming and heavily dyslexic eight-year-old son, Tom. We see Foster eating worms and burrowing into the earth as a badger, swimming naked as an otter, foraging in bins as a fox. Now Foster is back with a follow-up, Being a Human, which acknowledges the charges of eccentricity and even insanity that were levelled at the last book. Foster’s new work continues the project of its predecessor, although this time, rather than seeking to understand the brains and bodies of animals, his question is closer to home: what does it mean to be human? He begins with a contentious argument: far from being a story of progress, the history of humanity is one of disenchantment and loss, one where we have severed our links with other species and the natural world more broadly and in which we live meagre, circumscribed lives. “Few of us have any idea what sort of creatures we are,” he says and embarks on a quest to find out. Continue reading... | | | | | The big picture: the black body redefined | | by Tim Adams Aug 29, 2021 | | Pioneering young black photographer Dana Scruggs’s celebration of movement and form The headline act at this summer’s photography festival in Arles is an exhibition devoted to the young black photographers who are – literally – changing the face (and bodies) of fashion photography. The New Black Vanguard features the work of Tyler Mitchell, the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover, and Dana Scruggs, who achieved the same extraordinarily overdue milestone at Rolling Stone, when she photographed the rapper Travis Scott in 2019. Scruggs, born in Chicago and based in New York, started out photographing vintage clothes and furniture for her own Etsy store a decade ago. In 2016, frustrated by the continuing lack of diversity in advertising and fashion, she crowdfunded the launch of her own magazine, SCRUGGS, to showcase her distinctive ways of expressing light and movement, focusing on the black male body. “There’s a fearfulness of black men in American society and globally,” Scruggs said. “I wanted to change the narrative.” Continue reading... | | | | | | | Amanda Peet: the actor-turned-writer behind Netflix's witty campus drama The Chair | | by Vanessa Thorpe Aug 28, 2021 | | From teen therapy to creative force behind cancel culture drama What is the best way to deal with critical customer feedback? Well, Joan, a veteran academic at the fictional Pembroke College, an almost-Ivy League American university, knows exactly what to do with it. She quietly puts a match to reams of negative student evaluations of her work. It is an amusing, angry scene that takes place inside her grim, cellar-like university study and occurs somewhere towards the middle of new six-part television drama The Chair. But it is also a moment that sits right at the show’s emotional core. Joan is clearly doing wrong, but her diminished status as an ageing, overlooked lecturer makes her a sympathetic figure. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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