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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3h

#booksky for #philosophy 📚💙

Obituary: John R. Searle, Philosopher Who Wrestled with AI, Dies at 93. His blunt debating and imaginative theorizing about artificial intelligence and the human mind made him a leading scholar. But sexual-harassment allegations ended his career.

archive.is/8bTa8

Mind, Language and Society
Philosophy in the Real World by John R. Searle.

Disillusionment with psychology is leading more and more people to formal philosophy for clues about how to think about life.

But most of us who try to grapple with concepts such as reality, truth, common sense, consciousness, and society lack the rigorous training to discuss them with any confidence.

John Searle brings these notions down from their abstract heights to the terra firma of real-world understanding, so that those with no knowledge of philosophy can understand how these principles play out in our everyday lives.

The author stresses that there is a real world out there to deal with, and condemns the belief that the reality of our world is dependent on our perception of it.

Mind: A Brief Introduction by John R. Searle.

"The philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects," writes John Searle, "in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false." One of the world's most eminent thinkers, Searle dismantles these theories as he presents a vividly written, comprehensive introduction to the mind. He begins with a look at the twelve problems of philosophy of mind--which he calls "Descartes and Other Disasters"--problems which he returns to throughout the volume, as he illuminates such topics as materialism, consciousness, the mind-body problem, intentionality, mental causation, free will, and the self. The book offers a refreshingly direct and engaging introduction to one of the most intriguing areas of philosophy.

The philosopher John R. Searle in 1992. He was best known for formulating a thought experiment to disprove that a computer program could achieve consciousness. Photo credit: Steve Pyke/Getty Images

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 5h

#booksky for #womenwriters 📚💙

Obituary: Ruth Weiss, Who Chronicled Apartheid After Fleeing the Nazis, Dies at 101. Her life and work were shaped by confronting injustice in South Africa and Germany.

archive.is/dUiaT

Ruth Weiss in 2004. Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, called her "the most humane woman I have ever met." Photo credit: Wilfried Hiegemann, via Wikipedia Commons.

A Path Through Hard Grass: A Journalist's Memories of Exile and Apartheid by Ruth Weiss.

A child of a Jewish family fleeing Nazi-Germany and settling in apartheid South Africa in the 1930s, Ruth Weiss' journalistic career starts in Johannesburg of the 1950s.

In 1968 banned from her home country, and then also from Rhodesia for her critical investigative journalism, she starts reporting from Lusaka, London and Cologne on virtually all issues which affect the newly independent African countries.

Peasants and national leaders in southern Africa - Ruth Weiss met them all, traveling through Africa at a time when it was neither usual for a woman to do so, nor to report for economic media as she did.

Her writing gained her the friendship of diverse and interesting people.

In this book she offers us glimpses into some of her many long-nurtured friendships, with Kenneth Kaunda or Nadine Gordimer and many others.

Her life-long quest for tolerance and understanding of different cultures shines through the many personalized stories which her astute eye and pen reveals in this book.

As she put it, one never sheds the cultural vest donned at birth, but this should never stop one learning about and accepting other cultures.

Ms. Weiss in 1998. She spent much of the 1990s living on the Isle of Wight in England, where she wrote novels, children’s books and nonfiction. Credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 5h

#booksky for #feminism #nonfiction #womenwriters 📚💙

Obituary: Susan Griffin, an influential poet, playwright & prolific feminist author, has died aged 82. She pioneered creative nonfiction, with Woman and Nature, linking violence against women to the ravaging of the environment.

archive.is/liK5w

In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin explores the identification of women with the earth—both as sustenance for humanity and as victim of male rage. Starting from Plato's fateful division of the world into spirit and matter, her analysis of how patriarchal Western philosophy and religion have used language and science to bolster their power over both women and nature is brilliant and persuasive, coming alive in poetic prose.
Griffin draws on an astonishing range of sources—from timbering manuals to medical texts to Scripture and classical literature—in showing how destructive has been the impulse to disembody the human soul, and how the long separated might once more be rejoined. Poet Adrienne Rich calls Woman and Nature "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have merged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness—a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision. ...The book has the impact of a great film or a fresco; yet it is intimately personal, touching to the quick of woman's experience."

Written by one of America's most innovative and articulate feminists, this book illustrates how childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspirations, and public personae all assume undeniable roles in the causes and effects of war.

Ms. Griffin in 2015. She won an Emmy Award in 1975 for Voices, a play about the experiences of five woman that was presented on public television. Credit: Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty Images.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky for #literaryfiction #LászlóKrasznahorkai #booklovers 📚💙

Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a press to publish Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai. The Irish novelist discovered the Hungarian writer 20 years ago, & was excited by the pyrotechnics of a rule-breaking storyteller.

bit.ly/493ToL9

‘Thoughtful, almost shy’ … the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, pictured in Madrid in 2018. Photograph: Carlos Álvarez/Getty Images.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky highly recommended for #biographies #literaryfiction #NeglectedWriters #womenwriters 📚💙

Link to Bookshop USA to buy the biographies of novelist Elizabeth Harrower.

bookshop.org/a/102959/978...

&

bookshop.org/a/102959/978...

Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower by Helen Trinca.

The full story of an Australian literary enigma
Why did Elizabeth Harrower - one of Australia's most important postwar authors - stop writing at the height of her powers?

After publishing four books that earned the admiration of Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard and Christina Stead, Harrower published no more novels. She faded from the literary landscape, until being rediscovered decades later to international acclaim.

In Looking for Elizabeth, Helen Trinca unravels this mystery. Exploring the personal and artistic forces that shaped Harrower's writing, she draws a sensitive portrait of a wounded 'divorced child' and the legacy of abandonment she carried throughout her life. She probes the contradictions of a woman who wielded extraordinary insight into others' lives but guarded her own fiercely. And she vividly brings to life the literary circles of this fascinating era in Australian culture.

Based on interviews with Harrower and full access to her archive, Looking for Elizabeth is the first full biography of this significant figure in Australian letters.

'A masterful deep dive into the enigmatic life of a writer who stunned, and then stopped. This is a monumental addition to Australian literary biography that's destined to become a classic.' -Nikki Gemmell

Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower by Susan Wyndham.

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Description

Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of the most intense, original and highly regarded psychological fiction of the twentieth century.

Then she abruptly stopped writing in the 1970s and became one of the most puzzling mysteries of Australian literature.

Why didn't she continue?

Harrower gave elusive answers to friends and interviewers, and only since her death in 2020 has a deeper search been possible.

When Harrower's four novels were brought back into print between 2012 and 2014, followed by a novel she had withdrawn from her publisher in 1971 and a collection of her short stories, a renaissance of admiration followed.

In this engrossing biography, Susan Wyndham grapples with the questions that remained unanswered, the dynamics of Harrower's circles of famous friends and her remarkable books and their timeless dissections of the human heart.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky highly recommended for #biographies #literaryfiction #NeglectedWriters #womenwriters 📚💙

Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of Australia’s best novels then disappeared for decades. Even she wasn’t sure why. A new biography unravels one of Australia’s great literary mysteries.

bit.ly/3L916tn

Novelist Elizabeth Harrower in 1961. The author worked on her novel The Watch Tower and short stories at her Neutral Bay flat. Photograph: Jill Crossley

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky highly recommended for #biographies #womenwriters 📚💙

Elizabeth Harrower is one of the great literary, psychological novelists of the 20th century, yet her incredible body of fiction remains unfairly neglected. Two new biographies set out to do her justice.

Two reviews
archive.is/h8RSg

Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower by Susan Wyndham.

Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of the most intense, original and highly regarded psychological fiction of the twentieth century.

Then she abruptly stopped writing in the 1970s and became one of the most puzzling mysteries of Australian literature.

Why didn't she continue?

Harrower gave elusive answers to friends and interviewers, and only since her death in 2020 has a deeper search been possible.

When Harrower's four novels were brought back into print between 2012 and 2014, followed by a novel she had withdrawn from her publisher in 1971 and a collection of her short stories, a renaissance of admiration followed.

In this engrossing biography, Susan Wyndham grapples with the questions that remained unanswered, the dynamics of Harrower's circles of famous friends and her remarkable books and their timeless dissections of the human heart.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky for #shortstories #womenwriters #Woolf
📚💙

* “It’s like a piece of dark chocolate. Here is something delightful and, in itself, very enjoyable, very accomplished and really surprising.”

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky for #shortstories #womenwriters #Woolf
📚💙

A lost work by Virginia Woolf, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, will be published for the first time, showing her in a startling new light. Prof. Seshagiri, the editor of the collection, hopes it enchants a wider audience*:
wapo.st/4hhf6gY

The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, edited by Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri. Princeton University Press, 2025.

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson.

A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 1d

#booksky for #booklovers 📚💙

A terrific selection of 12 Must-Read Books of October 2025 recommended by Chicago Review of Books

chireviewofbooks.com/2025/10/01/1...

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Reposted by bobbygw

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 2d

Congratulations to Keidrick Roy, whose book American Dark Age is a Finalist for the @yale.edu Gilder Lehrman Center's Frederick Douglass Book Prize! This is a prestigious award for global studies of slavery and the opposition to it.

See the full list and learn more about the book: hubs.ly/Q03MBMJn0

American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism by Keidrick Roy

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Reposted by bobbygw

Adrian Oțoiu @adrian-otoiu.bsky.social · 3d

Just learned that the Czech writer Ivan Klíma died. I read several of his books, from "Love and Garbage" to "My Golden Trades" & I loved his mix of realism and uncompromising critique of communism, his melancholic meditation and sweet irony.

Here's a collage-homage I made for him earlier this year:

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky highly recommended for #literaryfiction #LászlóKrasznahorkai #booklovers 📚💙

Madness and Civilization: On the very strange fictions of László Krasznahorkai.

archive.is/IJDJB

Krasznahorkai’s translator describes his work as “a slow lava-flow of narrative.” Photograph by Renate von Mangoldt.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#literaryfiction 📚💙 #LászlóKrasznahorkai

Two great essays on László Krasznahorkai by James Wood.

László Krasznahorkai & Europe’s Perilous Reality. The swirling sentences of the Nobel laureate’s fiction overlay small-town politics with an uneasy sense of impending apocalypse.

archive.is/GbZFb

László Krasznahorkai, Nobel prize winner. Photograph by Franco Origlia / Getty.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#protest #NoKings #

Video: Timothy Snyder, brilliant historian, re No Kings protest march on 18 October, when millions of Americans are expected to gather in thousands of places to protest the countless ways our current administration is attacking our freedoms.

open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#movies #DianeKeaton

Obituary: Diane Keaton, acclaimed comic actress and star of Annie Hall, and First Wives Club, Dies at 79.

Archive link to NY Times article
archive.is/hc4Aa

Diane Keaton at a Ralph Lauren fashion show in 2022. One review of her breakthrough movie, "Annie Hall," called her "the consummate actress of our generation." Credit: Amy Sussman/Getty Images.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky for #IvanKlíma #memoirs #literaryfiction 📚💙

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Ivan Klíma, Czech Novelist Who Chafed Under Totalitarian Regimes, Dies at 94.
A writer, dissident, teacher, critic, he was the author of more than 40 books.

The New York Times
archive.is/nPsUm

Ivan Klima, Czech novelist and playwright, in 2013. “That life can be snapped like a piece of string — that was my daily lesson as a child,” he said. Credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.

In the face of Europe's rising nationalism and intolerance, this timely anthology by Czech writers addresses a key issue for today. The courage of Czech writers is legendary. During the Cold War they kept their nation's conscience alive by clandestine publishing while imprisoned as "dissidents" or collecting garbage, washing windows or selling fish as "non-persons," and then they took the lead in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that overthrew communism.

Ivan Klíma has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game. In his novel, No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present.

Ivan Klima has been called a "Czech genius" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In these stories spanning his long career from the 1960s to the present, he gives us a gallery of people searching, in love, for escape: factory girls on their day off and assembly-line workers lost in Walter-Mittyesque fantasies; a young woman on a honeymoon with the man she did not marry; a divorce-court judge whose mistress cannot understand his affection for the routines of his marriage; a young wife who falls into a passionate affair with an elderly bookbinder crippled by war.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky for #IvanKlíma #shortstories #memoirs #literaryfiction 📚💙

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Ivan Klíma, Czech award-winning novelist, playwright, and Holocaust survivor, banned by a communist regime, has died aged 94.

The Guardian
www.ourdailyread.com/2025/10/ivan...

As editor and author, Ivan Klíma helped the Prague Spring bloom. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

More than a memoir, My Crazy Century explores the ways in which the epoch and its dominating totalitarian ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of Klíma's generation.

Klíma's story begins in the 1930s, in the Terezin concentration camp outside of Prague, where he was forced to spend almost four years of his childhood. He reveals how the postwar atmosphere supported and encouraged the spread of Communist principles over the next few decades and how an informal movement to change the system developed inside the Party. These political events form the backdrop to Klíma's personal experiences, with the arrest and trial of his father; the early revolt of young writers against socialist realism; his first literary successes; and his travels to the free part of Europe, which strengthened his awareness of living as part of a colossal lie.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky recommended for #literaryfiction 📚💙

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Obituary: Ivan Klíma, acclaimed writer who took on totalitarianism, dies at 94.

Translated into many languages, the Czech author & dissident survived the Holocaust & challenged Czechoslovakia's communist regime.

Washington Post
wapo.st/4h2qwVA

Ivan Klíma in 2014. Credit: Michal Dolezal/CTK via AP

Love and Garbage, a novel by Ivan Klíma. From an internationally acclaimed Czech writer comes a shrewd, humane, and poignant novel, set in Prague before the Velvet Revolution, whose perceptions about love, conscience, and betrayal cut to the bone of life in both totalitarian and democratic societies. "A chilling story from the underground." - The New York Times.

Judge on Trial, a novel by Ivan Klíma. Part thriller, part domestic tragedy, at once political and intensely personal, Ivan Kilma's epically scaled new novel is an inquest into the compromises that turned even the best citizens of Czechoslovakia into accomplices of its late totalitarian regime. "A great novel which transmits in detail the special qualities of life in a nightmare." - Independent

"These are the best Czech short stories since the days of Karel Čapek." - London's Financial Times

"An extremely likeable personality, decent, humorous and engagingly down-to-earth." - New York Times Book Review

"Seven autobiographical tales, one for each morning of the week ... alternately grimly funny, shocking, or absurd." - Times Literary Supplement

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky for #literaryfiction #booklovers 🖋️📚💙

In Brandon Taylor’s new novel, Minor Black Figures, an emerging painter explores what it means to create and experience art in an increasingly political world.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/b...

Collage of portrait photo of Brandon Taylor with the cover of his novel Minor Black Figures. Riverhead Books | 387 pp. | $29.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky excellent for #literaryfiction #essays #memoirs #ModernClassics 📚💙

The Essential Vladimir Nabokov. Essay by Molly Young, creator of www.nytimes.com/column/read-.... Clever & dexterous, his writing delights in puzzles, puns & lepidoptera (& there’s so much more than Lolita).

bit.ly/4mTgOGh

Nabokov books recommended by Molly Young.

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky highly recommended for #nonfiction #socialmedia #disinformation #TechBros 📚💙

Essay-review: Algorithm Nation by Jacob Weisberg.
Fights about digital filtering tools are increasing. That’s because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion & mass culture.

archive.is/4RY1v

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 3d

#booksky for #music #biography #RocknRoll #culturalstudies #booklovers 📚💙

Interview: Greil Marcus on Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, his classic nonfiction book, now in its 50th anniversary edition.

link.latimes.com/view/65206ff...

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music by Greil Marcus, 50th Anniversary Edition.

Mystery Train author Greil Marcus. Photo credit: Ida Lodemel Tvedt

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bobbygw @bobbygw.bsky.social · 4d

#booksky for #bonkbusters #womenwriters 📚💙

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Appreciation: Jilly Cooper, who has died aged 88, never claimed to be a serious novelist, yet few writers chronicled Britain’s ruling classes with such energy, mockery & appetite. By Gerry Brakus, creative editor, New Statesman.

archive.is/9cI3D

Bestselling novelist Jilly Cooper at home in Gloucestershire in 2016. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

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