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☆ John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Michael T. Kaufman | Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday. His death was confirmed by Rachel Wallach, who works in communications at Johns Hopkins University, where Mr. Barth was an emeritus professor of English and creative writing. She said she did not have further details. Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

Persons: John Barth, “ Giles, ”, Rachel Wallach, Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov Organizations: Johns Hopkins University

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.

Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, ”, Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine

☆ A Kurdish Turkish Writer on the Tensions Between Politics and Art
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The momentous Turkish presidential election, whose second round will take place on Sunday, has more than just geopolitical consequences; it is a watershed for culture as well. For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are only the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art. Born outside Ankara in 1965, where his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but went into exile in Britain after a police assault. He has written five novels, including the prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” newly out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.

☆ A Human Wrote This Book Review. A.I. Wrote the Book.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The first novel was probably Murasaki Shikibu’s ‘Tale of Genji,’ written in the 11th century. The last one that mattered, closing a millennium’s loop, was probably Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth,’ published in 2000. What’s come since has been the death rattle, and remixes of that death rattle.”Those weren’t, you might have guessed, words from Siri. Samuel Richardson, in the 18th century, wondered if the novel had said what it had to say. The fire has been stirred under these questions thanks to the sudden arrival of sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbots, notably ChatGPT.

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