Grub Smith
He Was Black Once
It is curious to say the least that Joyce Carol Oates should try to write a book about boxing. She is a small, timid-looking professor of English at Princeton who admits to being squeamish, and also the author of novels and short stories which have been compared to Anita Brookner’s for their delicacy of feeling. Most outlandish of all, of course, she is a woman, and these are rare visitors to the rope and canvas world of Frank ‘The Animal’ Fletcher (‘ I hate to say it but it’s true, I only like it better when pain comes’) and Mike ‘Iron Man’ Tyson (‘I try to catch my opponent on the tip of his nose, because I try to punch the bone into his brain’). Hotel du Lac it is not.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate