At the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Tallis reviews Hallucinations, a new book by Oliver Sacks that defines “sensational consciousness.”
Visionary
Tuesday New Release Day: Coetzee; Li; Enriquez; Hoffman; Hogan; Puchner; Shepard
Out this week: The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li; Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez; Running by Cara Hoffman; The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan; Last Day On Earth by Eric Puchner; and The World to Come by Jim Shepard. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Dyer on Unusual Histories
Ahead of the forthcoming release of Zona, Geoff Dyer rounds up five unusual histories for The Browser.
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Salvador Dalí Illustrates the Western Canon
Few people know about Salvador Dalí's illustrations for famous works of the Western canon, including Don Quixote, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and even The Bible.
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A Giant Otter
Depending on your perspective, this is either the best or the worst pairing of speaker to content there is: Benedict Cumberbatch reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis for the BBC. As always with Cumberbatch, the reading is a nice complement to our own Elizabeth Minkel on Sherlock.
The Virtues of Boring
Mark O’Connell’s recent essay in these pages discussed how long, challenging novels can hold you captive (in both the good and bad senses of that phrase). Now, in the Times, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott come to the defense of “the slow and the boring” in film, responding Dan Kois’s Times Magazine piece confessing he’s “suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables.”
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Summer Book Sale
New York Review Books is having a Summer Sale, featuring heavily discounted works by Mavis Gallant (who we’ve reviewed and whose books appear in several of our articles), Balzac and many others. There’s even a Bird Lovers’ collection, for anyone wanting to read all about falcons and something called a goshawk.
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