BOOK BARN

#288: RED FLOWERS. Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China (Crown, 2025) is a brisk and sobering read, written with a journalist’s sharp eye for the individual story that opens up whole levels of sociological comment. In reaction to the breakup of the Communist Party in Russia, Xi Jinping began to fear that the increasing freedoms in China, themselves in reaction against the severity of the Cultural Revolution, were a pos

#287: STONER. John Williams’s novel Stoner, is about a man who, born on a farm in Missouri, discovers at college not only a love of literature but a vocation to teach. The book moves with an utterly sure-handed, unrushed solidity; it has a tragic sense that recalls the great Russian novelists, with their ability in a paragraph to strip a character down to the bone. Movies about teachers have buried us in so much candied floss on the subject that this sobriety of observati

#286. RILKE’S BOOK OF HOURS. I have complained elsewhere of the cloistral hush that pervades much of Rilke’s work, the whispering tone that never capers or puns or farts, the cumulative effect of which I can find a bit suffocating. And Anita Barrows’s and Joanne Macy’s translation of his Book of Hours has saddled it with a subtitle, Love Poems to God, which I find not only icky but a bit misleading. But maybe all this is inseparable from what Rilke is for; as with the fla