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      2 Books to Make You Love Karaoke, or at Least Respect It

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      In a memoir and a novel, the characters deal with grief by singing in front of strangers.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesDear readers,Let’s get one thing out of the way: I have zero interest in making you do karaoke. Like most enthusiasts (or so I assume), I don’t want to force anyone into sacramental public humiliation, nor do I want to watch from the stage while you silently ponder what kind of repressed loser is driven to sing White Town to a room full of drunk people who wandered in from an advertising convention at the Javits Center. On a Monday night.I don’t know when my entire personality became Someone Who Does Karaoke, and by extension Someone Oddly Defensive. But as exhibitionism goes, it’s pretty harmless — and as therapy goes, pretty cheap. More than this, something magical can happen when a roomful of strangers comes together to (voluntarily) do something that has nothing to do with their real life, for no reason other than the joy of singing.—Sadie“Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke,” by Rob SheffieldNonfiction, 2013Candice Watson via PangoBooks“To enter into that karaoke mind-set, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune,” Sheffield writes in this, the “Walden” of karaoke memoirs. “The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means ‘empty hand.’ They’re both ‘empty’ arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind — only your courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cover Art for ‘Harry Potter’ Sold at Auction for $1.92 Million

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      The watercolor was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore. He was paid $650.The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”Mr. Taylor was working at a children’s bookstore when he submitted sample drawings of wizards and dragons for the publisher in London to review, he said in a 2022 podcast interview. When he was selected, he said, “I was over the moon.”The cover was Mr. Taylor’s first professional assignment. And, at the time, “J.K. Rowling was as unknown as I was,” he wrote in his blog, referring to the novel’s British author.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a 1933 Book About Jews in Magic Was Rescued From Oblivion

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      Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.” It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammann and published in Berlin in 1933.He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983 after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”Hatch earned two graduate degrees in physics but ultimately left the field because his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science.Russel Daniels for The New York Times“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can You Name the Locations in These Classic Novels?

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      A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. With the summer travel season in mind, this week’s quiz highlights five classic 20th-century novels that are set in locations that were, still are or have become popular vacation destinations over the years. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading. More

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      2 Novels Set Over Very Memorable Days

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      A dinner party at the other woman’s house; the evening before a jail sentence.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesDear readers,With apologies to Stephen Hawking, anyone who’s ever experienced a root canal or a first kiss knows something about the relativity of time. Who hasn’t felt entire weeks go by like flashcards, or wondered why certain situations (a bad date, a flight delay) seem to open up wormhole portals to eternity?C’est la vie, of course, unless you are some type of time-lord wizard. But novelists are wizards, or at least magicians, and one of their favorite tricks is to fit whole narrative worlds inside a single day, book-shaped ships squeezed into bottles.The day itself doesn’t have to be noteworthy or even nominally eventful, which is often the point; think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, preparing to host her umpteenth plummy soirée, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, whose big score in the gulag is getting an extra bread crust and two bowls of gruel. But watch what a smart writer can do with the neat little nesting dolls of diversion and digression, plot and memory.The authors in this week’s newsletter take bigger swings, in that the days they build their stories around are so obviously the kind you would circle in red on a calendar. Plot machinery, though, still takes a second seat to character, observation and style. Because the best magic trick, the one that makes sleepless nights and long empty afternoons disappear, doesn’t rest on clever conceits; it just has to be a really good read.— LeahWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Interview With the Poet Frederick Seidel, the Author of “So What”

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      Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).There isn’t one. The true answer is in a comfortable chair.What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?I’ve learned everything and not very much. Not recently, but when I began writing poetry the two poets who taught and influenced me the most were Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell. In the case of Pound, the incomprehensible music of it, the reach and the size of the ambition, and the way the poetry finds moments of great simplicity and sweetness. In the case of Lowell, so many different things I learned and imitated from him. And otherwise it’s been many poets, everybody. What books are on your night stand?I like that — “night stand” — old-fashioned. Right now: Yukio Mishima’s book “Patriotism,” a silly piece of work; “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz”; the essays of Frank Kermode. Around as well are “Voyage in the Dark,” by Jean Rhys, and Joseph Roth’s novel “Flight Without End.” “The Little Auto,” a children’s book by Lois Lenski. “The Rest Is Noise,” by Alex Ross, and Louis Menand’s “The Free World.” “Skyfaring,” by Mark Vanhoenacker — I have a thing about speed, about flying, motorcycles, Formula 1, but especially motorcycles. I’ve written a lot of poems that I suppose are unusual for including motorcycles in them, with the emphasis on Italian ones, and a particular joy in the beauty and vast speed of them. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bologna near the Ducati factory, which made a racing motorcycle for me.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?I must have as a boy. I remember very much enjoying Maurice Girodias’s banned books in Paris that included Henry Miller and other distinguished authors. Girodias was himself a naughty delight. He printed the unprintable.What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?I suppose Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” My favorite of his novels, a work of genius. I’m not a big reader-laugher.The last book that made you furious?“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz” made me furious, the thought of his tragic life. The first poems are marvelous, and how much trouble there is with the enormous rest of the book. Such a gifted man, and so terrible a life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Recognize This Film (and Book) From a Movie Still?

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      Can you identify a book title just by looking at a photo from its film adaptation? (Or maybe if you had just a little hint?) That’s the challenge in this week’s installment of Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations. More

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      Fauci Speaks His Mind on Trump’s Rages and Their ‘Complicated’ Relationship

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      In a new book, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts a career advising seven presidents. The chapter about Donald J. Trump is titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.”Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cellphone to President Donald J. Trump screaming at him in an expletive-laden rant. He had incurred the president’s wrath by remarking that the vaccines under development might not provide long-lasting immunity.That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the brunt of the president’s rage,” Dr. Fauci writes in his forthcoming autobiography.Dr. Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Mr. Trump. But in the book, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he writes with candor about their relationship, which he describes as “complicated.”In a chapter entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Dr. Fauci described how Mr. Trump repeatedly told him he “loved” him while at the same time excoriating him with tirades flecked with four-letter words.“The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Dr. Fauci wrote. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive.)“I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More