RGB, Jenny Core (2014)

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This week: Modern Jamaica, historic Berlin, and artsy Bushwick.

Fiction: A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James (Riverhead): Through more than a dozen voices, an assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976 is portrayed as the inevitable climax of a country shaken by gangs, poverty, and corruption. The book examines Jamaica’s violent past through three decades in the form of a fictional oral history that draws together individuals, families, political parties, and even ghosts. CE

Nonfiction: Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries, by Rory MacLean (St. Martin’s Press): Berlin has long been an explosive, capricious, and, occasionally, an exemplary center of culture. MacLean explains the history of Berlin over the past 500 years through the lives of twenty figures—both well known and ordinary—who shaped the artistic, literary, architectural, and political legacies of the city. Among those featured are: the dictators who dreamed of controlling Europe, Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Scottish mercenary who fought in the Thirty Years’ War, a member of the Communist Party who helped to build the Wall, and an American spy in the Cold War.—RH

Poetry: Dick Allen, featured poet: Poetry Daily celebrates Dick Allen, who has published seven poetry collections, received National Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, and has been appointed the Connecticut State Poet Laureate, among other things.  Allen’s book This Shadowy Place won The New Criterion Poetry Prize in 2013.  DY

 Art: “Exchange Rates: The Bushwick International Expo” (October 23—October 26) and Beat Nite 11 (October 24): This week, art is in the outer boroughs. Exchange Rates is an exposition of artworks and art galleries in which curators and artists local to Bushwick, Brooklyn, will share exhibition spaces and collaborate with creative peers from other US cities and abroad. On Friday, Exchange Rates will pair up with Beat Nite. Now in its eleventh iteration, Norte Maar's Beat Nite is an evening gallery crawl featuring a special selection of the neighborhood's alternative art spaces. Meet some TNC editors and Young Friends while you’re there.  JP

Music: Brahms the Master (Tuesday, October 21): Brahms's symphonies and concerti need no introduction. But the composer also stands out as perhaps the greatest master of chamber music among the Romantics. He contributed enduring works for a variety of common instrumentations, and even invented a combination of his own (in the immortal Horn Trio) along the way. On Tuesday, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents a snapshot of Brahms's chamber works at Alice Tully Hall, including the A-minor clarinet trio and the taut, passionate D-minor Sonata for Violin and Piano. ECS

Other: Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, by Adam Kirsch (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014): Adam Kirsch is one of our most percipient (and also most prolific) literary critics. His latest collection Rocket and Lightship, drawn from The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, City Journal, and other publications, shows Kirsch at the top of his form. He ranges widely and authoritatively over vast swaths of literary and intellectual endeavor.  The book includes scintillating essays on Darwinian theory, Francis Fukuyama, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, and the unreadable darling of academic Marxists, Slavoj Žižek. His essay on Žižek, aptly titled “The Deadly Jester,” is itself deadly and is easily worth the price of the book, as is his canny, sympathetic, but ultimately damning essay on Hannah Arendt, “Beware of Pity.”  “Too much of life,” he concludes, “and too many kinds of people, are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy,” which is what makes her brilliant, philosophically cosmopolitan philosophy so superficial. —RK

From the archive: Retreats into fantasy, by David Pryce-Jones: On historical misunderstandings between Islam and the West.

From our latest issue: God’s artist paints a single picture, by Sarah Ruden: Considering the beauty of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions.

 

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