Category Sách & Tri thức

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Bread of Angels: A Memoir, by Patti Smith review – a wild ride with the poet of punk

Smith’s incantatory voice shines through in this surprisingly revelatory follow up to Just Kids and M Train

The post-pandemic flood of artist memoirs continues, but Patti Smith stands apart. The poet who wrote punk into existence before pivoting to pop stardom then ghosting fans to raise a family has, in the 21st century, leaned into literature and music with such vitality it has become hard to say which medium suits her better. It hardly matters. At 78 years old, Smith lives and breathes both.

Her latest memoir follows the tightly focused coming-of-age story Just Kids, published to great acclaim in 2010, and 2015’s more ruminative M Train. Bread of Angels splits the difference to create a more conventional autobiography. It could be described as Just Kids’ prequel and sequel, moving from Smith’s hardscrabble childhood to the near-present, where a striking twist takes the narrative back to her literal conception. It’s one of a number of revelations about an artist whose story would otherwise seem, by now, well-chiseled into the tablets of rock history.

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Could urban farming feed the world?

From back gardens to hi-tech hydroponics, the future of food doesn’t have to be rural

In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted 2.2 acres of wheat on waste ground in New York’s Battery Park, near the recently completed World Trade Center. The towers soared over a golden field, as if dropped into Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting Christina’s World. Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation was a challenge to what she called a “powerful paradox”: the absurdity of hunger in a wealthy world.

The global population in 1982 was 4.6 billion. By 2050, it will be more than double that, and the prospect of feeding everyone looks uncertain. Food insecurity already affects 2.3 billion people. Covid-19 and extreme weather have revealed the fragility of the food system. Denes was called a prophet for drawing attention to ecological breakdown decades before widespread public awareness. But perhaps she was prophetic, too, in foreseeing how we would feed ourselves. By 2050, more than two-thirds of us will live in cities. Could urban farming feed 10 billion?

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‘Ambition is a punishing sphere for women’: author Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation

What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy

Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.

The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”

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In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger review – a sexy celebration of romantic fiction

From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desire

Eva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet” novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.”

From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight”. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Judith Butler’s theories of gender are buttressed by a deft analysis of Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish hero of the Rutshire chronicles by the late, great Jilly Cooper.

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Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen review – a hypnotic tale of the sea cow’s extinction

This hit debut from Finland is intensely readable, but could have delved more deeply into the links between human progress and environmental destruction

In November 1741 Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist, and curious man”, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigas, nine feet long and soon to be known as Steller’s sea cow. Having made it through the winter, largely by eating the sea cows, the following August Steller and the remaining survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. Within 30 years, Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.

Having described these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom are touched in some way by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There is Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, in search of a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there’s Hilda Olson, a scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in the reconstruction of birds’ eggs, who is tasked with preparing a sea cow’s relics for exhibition.

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Review: We Fell Apart by E. Lockhart – Spoilers

We Fell Apart by E. Lockhart is a story about Matilda Klein whose boyfriend just dumped her and has no one to go after suddenly receive an email. Smell something…? ✨Join 250+ readers community and get book reviews, release updates, and bookish news. ✨ 🚫No BS. No Spam. Only Love for Books “The invitation arrives […]

‘I’m never surprised when I read about a woman murdering a man’: Helen Garner on her Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries

Her first book outraged Australian critics – but now she’s scooped the UK’s top nonfiction prize. She talks about female anger, becoming cool at 82 – and why winning made her feel like a stunned mullet

When Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on Tuesday night, the 82-year-old Australian author was 16,000km away in Melbourne, watching the ceremony on a live stream at home on what was for her Wednesday morning. When the big moment came, she heard “the winner is …” – and then the feed froze. “We were going, ‘Oh God!’ Running around. We didn’t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.” Congratulations immediately rushed in, which is how she knew she’d won the £50,000 (A$100,000) prize for How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her astoundingly frank diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.

Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. “I’m a stunned mullet,” she says, sitting in her study, wrapped in a lilac shawl and with glasses on a cord around her neck. “I didn’t think I had a chance.” She has absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: “I think I’m in shock.”

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Wings by Paul McCartney review – a brilliant story of post-Beatles revival

A compelling oral history traces the rise one of the most successful bands of the 70s from the ashes of a creative breakup

The Beatles learned how to be Beatles together. From 1963 to 1970, the group’s four members experienced an entirely new kind of fame, while leaning on each other to get through it. After splitting up, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to be an ex-Beatle? This one had to be confronted alone.

The heaviest burdens of expectation fell on the group’s main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also suffering from the emotional shock of an acrimonious personal split. Both of them leaned on their wives. As John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde art projects, Paul and Linda McCartney retreated with their children to their ramshackle Scottish farm, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep and tinkered with new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As she said later: “The whole thing started because Paul had nobody to play with. More than anything he wanted a friend near him.” The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received savage reviews, deepening his crisis of confidence.

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