Catalog

This catalog is organized to help you explore articles on common themes through the archives of leading literary magazines (New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books). I have leveraged OpenAI to identify common topics within these archives and classified articles within these topics (see technical details for more). There are over 1400 different topics included in this draft of the catalog.

Each topic is made up of 5-10 articles from both the NYRB and LRB, and the topics are sorted by how related the articles are to one another. For example, the first set of articles are all very related to current events in Ukraine. The last set of articles covers a much wider range of articles (a book on flies, a book on Slime, etc.). I have also noted how related each article is to the general topic with asterisks. The more asterisks an article has, the less related it is to the topic as a whole.

I have also linked to topics that are most closely related, for further exploration.

The NYRB and LRB cover both fiction and non-fiction. Fiction collections have very loose themes - I would consider these as sets of interesting, complementary colletions rather than articles that speak to a common theme.

Here is an example of a topic:


Exploring the History of Rome and Beyond

  • No Barbarians Necessary
    Peter Brown
    The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 382 pp., $35.00

  • The Other Rome
    Four new books challenge the Eurocentric perspective that has left the eastern half of the empire on the margins of standard historical narratives.
    New Rome: The Empire in the East Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 432 pp., $35.00

  • They burned and looted with discrimination
    Alaric the Goth:  An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome 

  • *Kings and Kinglets
    The Selected Letters of Cassiodorus:  A Sixth-Century Sourcebook 

  • **Ravenna Between East and West
    It has been a barbarian city, a holy city, a woman’s city, and a city ruled by Romans, Huns, Goths, Greeks, and bishops.
    Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe Princeton University Press, 537 pp., $29.95

  • **A Marketplace and a Temple
    The Life and Death of Ancient Cities:  A Natural History 

  • **A Very Bad Man
    The War for Gaul:  A New Translation 

  • **The Glories of Aksum
    Recent studies of medieval Ethiopia are a timely reminder of a Christianity wider than Europe.
    Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe Palgrave MacMillan, 308 pp., $109.99

  • ***What Happened at Masada?
    We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.
    A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74 Cambridge University Press, 689 pp., $163.99; $39.99 (paper)

Related:
Exploring the Art, Science, and History of the Renaissance and Beyond
Exploring Ancient Histories: Uncovering the Aztecs, Crusaders and Egyptology
Exploring Ancient Civilizations Around the World
Exploring the Rise and Fall of Imperial Rome Through the Lives of Its Leaders
Exploring Britain's Imperial Legacy: From Revolution to Pillage to Resistance


I hope this catalog helps you explore these archives - the link to the latest catalog is below. This catalog will be updated as I collect additional sources and articles. Enjoy!

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