Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; this summer, for example, alongside many debut novels and NYRB reissues, we found an Italian chapbook of cat-themed poems from the eighties and a semiepistolary critique of psychiatry whose letters are addressed “Dear Neoliberalism.” While combing through these galleys for good ideas or good writing, I sometimes save passages I like. Here are a few I found in July and August.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor Read More

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

Kevin Hartnett’s The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI (Quanta Books) tells the story of Lean, a proof assistant program. Here, an extract from a series of work messages from an ebullient but erratic expert in “perfectoid spaces”: 

Kevin Buzzard: This is going to be so much fun
Kevin Buzzard: Lean is made for this sort of stuff
Kevin Buzzard: Mario, this is what real maths looks like
…
Kevin Buzzard: it is a million miles from anything that has ever been formalized
Kevin Buzzard: and it will be easy to formalize
Kevin Buzzard: Lean is a big puzzle game
Kevin Buzzard: and we will be able to make some really cool levels for this game
…
Kevin Buzzard: the type is the level, the term is the solution
Kevin Buzzard: All the old levels are boring

 

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

An excerpt from Maïa Hruska’s Kafkaesque: From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature (Ecco), translated from the French by Sam Taylor:

Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’

From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions), translated from the Chinese by Tony Hao:

A few years ago, I wrote a poem titled ‘Production Floor #2’, which was inspired by my time in Sino-Nokia. The first stanza of the poem reads:

The assembly lines are its arms
The computer screens are its eyes
My brain its engine, running day and night Light bulbs the sun, beneath which we dream in exhaustion
Oh, my production floor
This place is not my home
My home is three thousand li away

And so it was, in the dazzling metropolis of Shenzhen, that I experienced many firsts in my life: my first time getting trapped on an illegal bus; my first time cutting open a finger with a blade on an overnight shift; my first time washing under a tap after an evening shift in winter; my first time waking up from a wet dream in pain, not knowing what at happened; my first time picking wild lychees and mangoes in the woods by the factory campus with coworkers … My life was unfathomably enriched in the big city. My teenage years were like those wild lychees, growing larger and redder as the weather got warmer. I was oblivious to the time silently slipping away from me.

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Opera Fever (Wave Books), a new poetry collection by Chelsey Minnis:

What should be said in poems. .
A bubbly ambivalence. . .
Or a mirror seen through bullet holes?

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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (Archipelago), translated from the French by Alyson Waters, an encounter in a hospital for schizophrenics:

The comment led to a silence. Everyone was trying to imagine the dark street, unknown, with weird things occurring there. The guy near the door pushed the light timer and the central globe lit up, first with a red glimmer, then a sickly glow. It was an energy-saving lamp and, for thousands of hours, it had been saving its energy and diffusing a light for the dying and sustainable development. When we were in this bedroom, Breton and I, we generally preferred the slightly brighter light from the two streetlamps in the courtyard.

“No point staying in the dark,” commented the guy, as if to excuse himself for having modified the lighting.

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