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Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer review – gloriously innovative [16 Jan 2020|07:30am]

Space quest, climate polemic and literary experiment collide in a challenging and visionary epic

A genuinely innovative artwork requires time to fulfil its effect. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is one such work – bewildering, perplexing, original – and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands. The opening third poses as a quest narrative, a fantastical variant of the classic western: three battle-scarred gunslingers set out across an ecologically ravaged landscape in pursuit of an enemy. Our heroes are Grayson, a black woman and sole survivor of a disastrously failed mission to explore deep space; Chen, an indentured worker bound in perpetuity to an invasive corporation known only as the Company; and Moss, whose name was once Sarah, now a complex, composite organism who has been partially absorbed into the structure of the worlds they move through. The enemy they seek to defeat is the Company itself, and more specifically its agent, a deranged Dr Moreau-type biologist named Charlie X. The three are helped along their journey by Charlie’s failed experiments: the blue fox, the duck with the broken wing, the leviathan called Botch, a hive-mind of salamanders.

This kind of formal innovation is pure catnip, an indication that as a mode of expression the novel is still vigorous

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The Syrian Revolution by Yasser Munif review – an early phase of a third world war? [16 Jan 2020|08:58am]

The murderous conflict in Syria is simplified by both right and left. This account deals with the short period of hope, when the people threw off their chains

It is happening again. Over the last year protest movements – some of them deep and broad enough that we might dare to call them revolutions – have once more been shaking the Middle East and North Africa, ending decades-long dictatorships in Sudan and Algeria, forcing the prime ministers of Lebanon and Iraq to resign. And yet the war brought to Syria by the last wave of revolutionary upheaval – the Arab spring that began in 2011 and by 2014 had turned to something worse than winter – has not ended. It continues to be fought not only with bullets and bombs but, in a parallel battle for narrative control, with words.

In the discourses of American thinktanks and much of the mainstream media, tropes flatten the war into a conflict between, as the Syrian-American scholar Yasser Munif puts it, “western civilisation and the Islamic State’s barbarism” on one front, and between the shining freedoms of the democratic west and the dark tyrannies of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers on another. Meanwhile the more Manichaean precincts of the left prefer to imagine the war as a single fight between a brave anticolonialist holdout and Islamist terrorists in league with the west. Anyone who disagrees is rewarded with a depressingly predictable slew of smears: “interventionist”, “pro-imperialist”, “regime change advocate” and so on.

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TS Eliot prize-winner Roger Robinson: ‘I want these poems to help people to practise empathy’ [16 Jan 2020|11:22am]

From a lament for the victims of Grenfell Tower to snapshots of Windrush arrivals … activist, musician and poet Roger Robinson discusses the inspiration behind his prize‑winning collection

“Since I was 19 I’ve been living in England and thinking I’d go home, but there was a point, around six years go, when I realised I’m here now: I’m black British.” So says Roger Robinson, who this week won the TS Eliot prize for A Portable Paradise, a poetry collection born of this realisation.

Furious laments for the victims of Grenfell Tower are followed by a crisp snapshot of idealistic young Jamaicans disembarking from the Empire Windrush in 1948, and a didactic sequence about the legacy of slavery today. A moody evocation of riot brewing on the south London streets sits alongside a love song to the National Health Service, which saved the life of his own prematurely born son.

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A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende review – a sweeping historical saga [16 Jan 2020|12:00pm]
Allende’s novel spans generations and countries as it follows a real-life doctor from the Spanish civil war to the fall of Pinochet

Isabel Allende’s 23rd book begins in the furnace of the Spanish civil war, where trainee doctor Victor Dalmau is holding a human heart between his hands, and ends more than 50 years later in a Chile recovering from the fall of Pinochet. Through that huge span, we follow Victor and his wife, Roser, as they flee across continents and witness the decades-long fallout from Franco’s rise to power.

Given that Allende has set herself the task of covering half a century in a relatively short book, it isn’t surprising that dialogue is minimal. Most of the story is told in episodic narration, or even summary. An omniscient narrator sees into the minds not only of Victor and Roser, but of many people who brush past along the way, sometimes revisiting them, sometimes leaving them behind in the political riptides. This kind of narration is extraordinarily difficult. Characters are a lot like gym weights; it’s much easier to hug them close than it is to hold them further away. Allende’s style is impressively Olympian and the payoff is remarkable: a huge overview of generations, decades and countries.

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Anthony Bourdain's final book to be published this year [16 Jan 2020|01:02pm]

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, which the late chef and television host was working on when he died, is due out in October

The final book by renowned chef, travel writer and television host Anthony Bourdain will be published in October, more than two years after he killed himself.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, an illustrated collection of Bourdain’s reflections on his favourite places to visit and dine around the world, has been finished by his longtime assistant Laurie Woolever and will be published on 13 October. Alongside Bourdain’s tips on “what to eat … and, in some cases, what to avoid”, the book will also contain writing by members of his family and friends.

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Missouri could jail librarians for lending 'age-inappropriate' books [16 Jan 2020|01:03pm]

Bill would allow parents to decide whether children should have access to controversial books, with heavy penalties if libraries disobey

A Missouri bill intended to bar libraries in the US state from stocking “age-inappropriate sexual material” for children has been described by critics as “a shockingly transparent attempt to legalise book banning” that could land librarians who refuse to comply with it in jail.

Under the parental oversight of public libraries bill, which has been proposed by Missouri Republican Ben Baker, panels of parents would be elected to evaluate whether books are appropriate for children. Public hearings would then be held by the boards to ask for suggestions of potentially inappropriate books, with public libraries that allow minors access to such titles to have their funding stripped. Librarians who refuse to comply could be fined and imprisoned for up to one year.

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Tickbox by David Boyle review – thinking inside the box [16 Jan 2020|02:00pm]

From call centres to management consultancy to government, decision-making is being dehumanised. We need to take a stand against the culture of targets

Automation in the modern world is usually thought of as done by robots or creepily intelligent software, but it is also the way, as this feistily interesting book argues, that bureaucracies composed of human beings increasingly operate. Officials are required to follow recipes (or algorithms) of sorting people into discrete categories and pursuing strictly defined courses of action with no allowance for ambiguity or complexity. They are condemned, if you will, to think inside the box.

This is what David Boyle, an economist and former policy wonk for the Liberal Democrats, refers to simply as “tickbox”: what more usually is called “tickbox culture” or, in US English, “checkbox culture”. For him it covers not only the targets and key performance indicators of official bureaucracy, but phenomena such as pervasive employee surveillance, the culture war over “identity politics”, the rise of management consultancy, the fact that you can never get a simple resolution to your problem from a call centre, and why the trains don’t work. Boyle himself instigated the celebrated “passenger strike” on Southern rail in 2017, convincing most of a trainload of passengers to refuse to show their tickets at Brighton. In an optimistic conclusion, he even claims that Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an enemy of “tickbox”, while exhorting his readers: “Refuse to categorise yourself on feedback or monitoring forms.”

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JRR Tolkien's son Christopher dies aged 95 [16 Jan 2020|07:14pm]

Youngest son of Lord of the Rings author was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father’s work

Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien, has died aged 95, the Tolkien Society has announced. The society, which promotes the life and works of the celebrated writer, released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news.

The statement said: “Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95. The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family.”

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