It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Continuous casting process for the production of hollow ingot using an improved direct chill casting equipment having a molding system comprising a hollow mold and a movable platform, wherein at least one core and a pipe for introducing outer air are provided, said core being made from a refractory material unwettable with a molten metal and having a convergent taper at the side and an air runner for introducing outer air, which is packed with an air-permeable material, at the bottom, and said pipe for introducing outer air extending upwards from the air runner and passing through the core. The continuous casting process comprises continuously pouring a molten metal into a space surrounded with the hollow mold and the core of the above equipment; cooling the molten metal only at the side wall of the hollow mold without cooling at the side of the core; thereby solidifying the molten metal to form an ingot having a hollow, wherein the interface of the frozen metal and the liquid metal is present at the position around the core; and continuously lowering the ingot thus formed while introducing spontaneously outer air into the hollow part via the pipe for introducing outer air and the air runner of the core.

Regarding the Pain of Others

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Here is a book that I would never have read outside this assignment. Yet, reading it has been a delightful and informative experience. Homer's Iliad tells the tragedy of the ancient Greek soldier Achilles in the Trojan War. In this book, Vietnam veterans have narrated their own tragedies. Twenty-two years after the last US ground combat battalion was withdrawn, more than 250 000 Vietnam combat veterans currently meet the full DSM-IV criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Achilles in Vietnam compares and contrasts two wars separated by 27 centuries. Dr Shay is a Boston-area psychiatrist who works with Vietnam combat veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic. He is also on the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine. His purpose in writing this book is "to put before the public an understanding of the specific nature of catastrophic war experiences that not only cause lifelong disabling psychiatric

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

This thesis explores how Anglophone literature debated the rise of modern international law since the late nineteenth century, including the founding of the United Nations and the 1948 declaration of human rights. While international law has its origins in the early modern period, it was largely at the turn of the century, with the Berlin Conference, that it began taking shape as a colonial and then a postcolonial, global ethics. In this thesis, I lay claim to literature’s capacity to legislate by examining instances where Anglophone novelists—including Joseph Conrad, Bryher, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—work through the promises and problems of international jurisprudence. More than a mere reflection of international law’s evolving theory and practice, the literature I treat registers the law’s presumptions and first principles while interrogating its capacity to follow through with its declarations. In spreading the law’s claims while also submitting them to the scrutiny of close reading, these novels are both advocates of and at times stubborn liabilities for international law’s normative worlds. Collectively, these Anglophone novelists scrutinize international law’s ability to shape the ways we come to know ourselves and one another as rights-bearing individuals, international actors, advocates, and activists. Recent work in the humanities has begun to address the ways in which international law is a set of interlocked narratives that claim

For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017)

This article looks at two novels exploring the pains and gains of the immigrant experience. Both By the Sea and The Inheritance of Loss feature protagonists struggling to build their lives anew in a foreign land. I discuss them in relation to some of the key trends in postcolonial studies, arguing that Gurnah’s and Desai’s texts provide a necessary “re-grounding” to some of the more romanticizing tendencies in writing on diaspora and dislocation. I also consider how they might be seen in relation to ongoing debates about globalization, suggesting both provide timely reminders that celebrations of “fluidity and flow” are often only applicable to a privileged few. By attending to the material realities of bodies, both individual and collective, and to specific geo-political spaces, both Gurnah and Desai shift our readerly focus from the indeterminacies of “globalization” to the actualities of “glocalization”.

Travel and/as Travail: Diasporic Dislocations in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

"The Disorder of Things offers a reading of the Somali novelist through the prism of the French philosopher. The book argues that the preoccupations that have remained central throughout Farah's forty year career, including political autocracy, female infibulation, border conflicts, international aid and development, civil war, transnational migration and the Horn of Africa's place in a so-called 'axis of evil,' can be mapped onto some key concerns in Foucault's writing, most notably Foucault's theoretical turn from 'disciplinary' to 'biopolitical' power." -- Back cover.

The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian approach to the work of Nuruddin Farah

Posing, exposing, opposing: accounting for contested (corpo)realities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a yellow sun

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brex...

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination, agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

In this article I argue that a rereading of “The Vietnam Project” allows us to explore the varied functions of what has been dubbed “war-porn” in relation to global image consumption then (with respect to Vietnam) and now (with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan). From renewed interest in depictions of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians to acknowledging swipes at the Bush and Blair administrations in Diary of a Bad Year, recent Coetzee scholarship has been enlivened by debates clustered around the most recent wounding of the American body politic: 9/11. By analysing an earlier piece, which is preoccupied with a conflict for which the wound emerged as the defining trope, I consider the prophetic power of “The Vietnam Project”. I argue that it makes for compelling reading owing to issues such as wounding, trauma, war, its mediatisation, and the associated discourses that continue to haunt the American popular and political imagination.

John Masterson

Papers

Travel and/as Travail: Diasporic Dislocations in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian approach to the work of Nuruddin Farah

Posing, exposing, opposing: accounting for contested (corpo)realities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a yellow sun

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination, agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

“I speak with the Voice of Things to Come”: Reading “The Vietnam Project” Today