Baum on Books

What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing, Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention.

What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review, Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing Michael

101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya should be required reading for all Peace Corps volunteers and administrators once the 60-year-old federal agency resumes activity — it shut down because of COVID. Meanwhile, the book should also be recommended reading for everyone for what it says about an increasingly important and volatile region of the world.

Nemesis by Philip Roth, published in 2010, eight years before he died, has got to be one of the most subtly instructive elegiac novels written about a widespread raging disease. In this case, polio.

It’s not every day that a 95-year-old-man comes out with an engaging memoir that looks back 80 years to trace the start of a successful theatrical career and a rewarding personal life as a gay man.

Prize-winning fiction writer, journalist, and witty, celebrated British bad boy of novels and cultural criticism Martin Amis, 71 now, and a resident of Brooklyn and East Hampton, has just come out with Inside Story. It’s a big autobiographical “compendium” he calls “A Novel” and at other times “life writing” and “a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours.” He says it’s fine if his 538-page book is read in “fitful bursts, with “plenty of skipping and postponing and doubling back,” along with “whatever [we’re] drinking.” That’s good because the book begins with a chatty, familial “preludial” section set in 2016 about being ready to write such a book, and it ends with a digressive “afterthought” on Masada and the Dead Sea, and then an “addendum” about the English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard who was the second wife of Amis’s father, Sir Kingsley Amis, one of England’s Angry Young Men who took the literary world by storm in the `50s. A sprawling, intensely felt, often self-denigrating series of reflections, recollections, anecdotes and musings, Inside Story should be taken in stride, Amis advises, and not always at face value. Some names have been changed, though not those of the two dead friends whom the book lovingly and heartbreakingly eulogizes: Amis’s best friend Christopher Hitchens, known as “Hitch,” whom Amis met when they both worked at the London political and cultural magazine, New Statesman, and Saul Bellow, twice his age, who was godfather to…

Here are two books that offer unique voices on surviving Nazi occupied Europe and have several key plot points in common. Both feature women as the main characters and neither is Jewish. Both works also explore the immigrant experience in the U.S. after the war. But that’s where the similarities end.

Seventy-one-year-old Lucinda Watson, the granddaughter of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and the fourth child of six of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. who ran IBM from 1952-1971, calls her debut collection of poetry The Favorite because, she says, she WAS her father’s favorite, “the pretty one” of five daughters. But in the title poem, “The Favorite” she intimates that although she was “the one chosen to travel /on long trips and / to sleep in his room,/ while everyone else stayed home,” the relationship was fraught with fear and unhappiness. The 24-line free-verse poem segues at line seven into a dark theme that defines many of the poems in this confessional memoir: “Once, my mother dressed me up / like the woman he was sleeping with.” A loaded line that suggests the psychological abuse Watson endured from both parents. And in “Seeing Lake Tahoe” her recollection moves from remembering the brilliance of the “electric blue of the lake and sharp bright harshness of the sun” to seeing in her mind’s eye “My husband’s hand” fondling another woman.” Lurches like this, overt and subtle, inform most of the poetry here. The lines resonate for what they say about Lucinda Watson’s privileged childhood in Greenwich with her dysfunctional family, and her loneliness, even as the page facing the poem “The Favorite” shows a slightly out-of-focus smiling young girl posed in a riding outfit. Elsewhere, Watson writes that she loved horses but knew thatTHEY knew she was afraid of them. And her lack…

The screenwriter who penned "Psycho" is quoted as saying that when we watch or read scary stuff we don’t think about the real things that are frightening us. We allow ourselves to be “frightened by fantasy and that’s not only more bearable” than dealing with unbearable reality — it may also help us cope better with crises, be more resilient when preparing for tough times.

What literary text could seem further from reality these days than Beowulf — that approximately 1,500-year-old Anglo Saxon verse epic about a Scandinavian hero fighting monsters that’s known mainly by English majors and then, mostly in translation! Yet here are two new Beowulfs, different translations and genres, out this past August, that in their separate imaginative ways have something to say to our troubled times.