Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©

• From Gilead to Gay Disco: Nicholas Hytner’s ‘Dream’
  A half-century on, the majesty of Peter Brook’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream still hangs heavy over theatre in Britain. For all Nicholas Hytner’s chutzpah in confronting the primal scene of modern British theatre, his new production lacks the courage of his convictions. There’s no follow-through to the opening act’s sense of sexuality’s threat, no lingering darkness. It’s just another attempt to get down with hyper-current sexual politics, without interrogating their complexities. And no one needs another Dream populated with fairies in disco spandex and body glitter.
• Reframing the Black Model at the Musée d’Orsay
  “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” at the Musée d’Orsay, builds on this kind of archival research to recover the biographies of models of African descent in canonical French painting. While Olympia, often considered the first modern painting, plays a central role in the exhibition, its scope, as the subtitle suggests, reaches far beyond that tableau. The show chronologically traces the depiction of black figures in French painting from the revolution to the mid-twentieth century. More than a project to uncover the identities of the unnamed subjects, “Black Models” inverts how biographical research is put to use.
• ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System
  President Trump and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller appear to have purged the Department of Homeland Security of most internal opposition to their anti-immigrant policies. In doing so, that have removed even those sympathetic to the general approach taken by the White House, such as former chief of staff John Kelly and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in order to escalate the militarization of the border and expand irregular detention in more systematic and punitive ways. This kind of power struggle or purge in the early years of a camp system is typical. Once there are concentration camps, it is always probable that things will get worse.
• The Rules of the Game
  There is a growing schism in the Democratic Party between its two poles of influence in the age of social media: the younger, urban, and more left-leaning people who carry out a daily and often pestiferous political dialogue on Twitter, and the older and more traditionally liberal-to-moderate people who make up the actual backbone of the party across America. If there is a division within the party that will bring it to ruin in 2020, this is it. Both factions reflect the seriousness of the fight to define the party anew as it crawls out of the Clinton “New Democrat” era in search of some as-yet-unnamed identity. I think both more or less agree on the problems: the recent failure of American capitalism to provide the more broadly shared prosperity we once enjoyed, the crisis facing our democracy and institutions under Trump, and the depraved authoritarianism of the Republican Party. But Democrats are quite divided on the solutions.
• ‘The Compatibility of Opposites’: A Portrait of Lebanon
  As the country becomes more and more fragmented, so religion increasingly binds on the one hand, divides on the other. This dubious equation is spreading globally, but as in so many things, Lebanon is a step ahead when it comes to emerging symptoms and hopeless remedies. The Arabic word for nuance is farq saghir: small difference. Needless to say, Lebanon takes the prize for “small differences.” The stronghold of nuance and of caricature, it is the permanent fount of infinitely subtle and pointless arguments, with all concerned having a vested interest in ensuring the permanent imbalance. The Lebanese beat all records for splits, divisions, and contradictions. They are cynical and sentimental, tired and full of energy, capable of bending over backward for family and friends, incapable of uniting for the sake of the country.
• Edmund de Waal’s Venetian Tableaux
  In his book The White Road (2015), Edmund De Waal recounted his love affair with porcelain and the long, fascinating history of the material’s travels and fashioning. It was to Venice that Marco Polo brought the earliest porcelain vessel in the Western hemisphere—and De Waal chased it down here for that book. Porcelain of the purest white remains the primary material out of which he fashions his fragile, luminous vessels, the central components of his installations. To me, these vessels, as well as the square or rectangular shapes of marble and gold leaf in his work, suggest musical notation—setting up a contrapuntal dialogue with the light and the space they inhabit, providing comment or argument, yet invoking a meditative silence, a call to attentiveness.
• A Solution to the Abortion War: The Celibacy Amendment
  It would be honorable for the Republican platform to consider the following plank—a heavy piece of wood indeed. In their frequent suggestions for constitutional amendments, as if they were a corner stoplight, they might propose, on behalf of the contested unborn, a command that young men remain celibate until marriage. The Celibacy Amendment deserves the floor.
• The Impeachment Question
  Should the House Democrats proceed to impeachment despite the seeming impossibility that the Senate would vote—by the constitutionally required two-thirds majority—to convict Trump and remove him from office? That question confronted the Democrats from the start and stymies them still.
• The Art of the Possible at Havana’s Bienal
  The Cuban government, which regularly arrests artists and journalists, also expected to welcome a record-breaking 5.1 million tourists this year. Cuba’s leaders are well aware that cultural capital is one of their nation’s major assets. Rage, pain, and dissent were not only openly on view in this year's Bienal de la Habana in Cuba, but were featured and promoted with hashtags like #CubaEsCultura. In her powerful statement, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera expressed her admiration for the Bienal’s curators but explained that she was not attending because the Ministry of Culture was diverting resources to the Bienal in order to “whitewash its international image.” Her argument—that people shouldn’t travel to Cuba for the Bienal because to do so justifies the Cuban government’s human rights abuses—is one the US government has been making, in more general terms, for nearly six decades. Less than a month after the Bienal ended, the US delivered a gut punch to Cuba’s emerging entrepreneurial class, banning cruise ships and other vessels from docking in Cuban ports, and prohibiting group travel to Cuba for cultural and educational purposes.
• A Resonant Centenary for Strauss at the Vienna State Opera
  In Die Frau ohne Schatten, the conductor Thielemann finds a work fundamentally consonant with his conservative values—both in the late Romantic tonalities of Strauss’s music and in librettist Hofmannsthal’s sacral vision of marriage and child-rearing as the answer for social ills. One of the opera’s most haunting moments, at the conclusion of the first act, is when a trio of nightwatchmen is heard enjoining in ceremonious unison husbands and wives to love each other, entrusting them with the seed of new life. This tentative rite of renewal and regeneration is what the opera offered to the postwar world in 1919. Today, it has a somewhat different resonance for an Austrian republic shaken by scheming politicians involved in shady deals.
• A Muckraker’s Progress
  Seymour Hersh has been the premier American investigative reporter of the last half-century. In the late 1960s his articles helped inspire a partly successful campaign to abolish America’s arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. His 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre revealed the savagery of the Vietnam War. He provided the first comprehensive account of President Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. His disclosure in 1974 that the CIA had spied on antiwar activists prompted the creation of two congressional investigating committees. He led the effort to unearth American dirty tricks in the early 1970s against Chile’s democratic socialist president, Salvador Allende. After September 11, he warned that US intelligence was being manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and in 2004 he brought to light the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh has also been dogged by criticism, some of it legitimate. He has bullied sources, lashed out at colleagues, succumbed to hoaxes, and destroyed the reputation of at least one blameless person.
• The Neocolonial Arrogance of the Kushner Plan
  What Jared Kushner and his colleagues are saying is that the Palestinians have no justified grievances, and no legitimate rights, except the right to whatever prosperity can be achieved with Gulf money under a permanent Israeli military occupation of their land. However, the Kushner plan’s notion of throwing other people’s money at the issue will not make it go away; not when it involves the national, political, civil, and human rights of an estimated 12 million people. The Palestinian people are not about to be bought off. Whether Kushner knows it or not, the days of Lord Curzon and Lord Balfour are long gone, the colonial era is over. With the neocolonial plans they have concocted for the Palestinians, he and his Israeli allies are swimming against the tide of history.
• A Terribly Durable Myth
  The exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum in London seeks both to document and to refute the stereotype of the moneyed Jew. The subject is distressingly timely. Propelled by rising nationalism on the right and antiglobalism on the left, in the past two years anti-Semitism has come back into the headlines. Politicians and activists on all sides now implicitly endorse or even repeat accusations of Jewish greed and financial power.
• ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery
  The real moral exemplum about capitalism and the American Dream to be found in the story of Lehman Brothers is not how they lost touch with their mercantile roots, tempted by the lure of speculative wealth. It is the way in which the South’s investment in the cotton economy profoundly shaped American history from the antebellum period onward, particularly in the slave economy’s legacy of white wealth and black impoverishment, white privilege and black disenfranchisement. Within two decades of the end of the Civil War, the Lehmans had quit cotton factoring and the South, transforming themselves into a Northern finance powerhouse on Wall Street. It is that process of transformation—leaving slavery behind but banking its profits—that is the story not only of Lehman Brothers, but also of the formation of modern American capitalism.
• Bellingcat and How Open Source Reinvented Investigative Journalism
  Open Source Intelligence has enabled many forensic breakthroughs in recent years. Beginning in 2010, the open newsroom tool Storyful became a platform for collaborative investigation, laying the ground for this entirely new field of journalism. The most active and resourceful member of the original Storyful collective was the Leicester-based citizen journalist Eliot Higgins, who developed creative new methods to crack intractable cases, which he used in 2014 to found Bellingcat, an international collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists that conducts investigations using the techniques he had pioneered. 
• Africa’s Lost Kingdoms
  It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present.
• ‘Souvenirs or Landmarks’: The Photographs of Susan Meiselas
  Those of us who have experienced war—survivors, soldiers, reporters, aid workers—are haunted by what we cannot unsee. The images recur in nightmares, or distort a vista that hides a personal horror. I wince every time a new visitor extols the beauty of the hills of Rwanda—those of us who witnessed the 1994 genocide do not see neat fields and forests, but ditches of bodies with their throats cut and piles of skulls hidden in the folds of the hills. We lurch between wanting to spare others and a desperate need for them also to see the pictures in our heads. It’s not just that we can’t get rid of the ghosts, but that the pastoral scene boosts government propaganda that Rwandans live in harmony now and no longer fear the neighbors who killed their parents and grandparents. Whatever they say, we know how the past speaks—or shouts—to the present.
• Fighting for Her Life
  Andrea Dworkin did not love pornography. I don’t mean this as comic understatement of her well-publicized, steadfast opposition to it and of her attempts, with legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, to pass ordinances in numerous cities that would allow women to sue pornographers for damages. What I mean to draw attention to is that she devoted an entire book and part of another book (Woman Hating) to the close scrutiny of something she did not love or like. Of course you would hardly expect an activist fighting rape and battery to like those things: you would expect her to write about them out of a commitment to trying to stop them. But Dworkin’s involvement with pornography is a little different.
• Sierra Leone, 2000: A Case History in Successful Interventionism
  Sierra Leone was a rare case of the “Blair Doctrine” bearing fruit: an overseas military operation not for strategic or commercial interest, but for humanitarian purposes and in the name of an ethical foreign policy. Though the commander on the ground, Brigadier David Richards, never received official authorization from London for the project, within six weeks he and his men did the crucial groundwork of halting the rebel advances, restoring security to the capital, Freetown, and shoring up the Sierra Leone government and its army. A few months later, a major new UN peacekeeping deployment and a ceasefire led to the disarming of rebel groups and a swift end to a war that had lasted nearly eleven years and inflicted enormous human suffering.
• Reckless in Riyadh
  The recklessness of the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman has been abetted by the Trump administration, which has boasted of its special relationship with the young de facto ruler (his father, King Salman, is in poor health, and MBS enjoys great latitude) and has avoided criticizing him for his misadventures. Yet Democratic contenders for their party’s 2020 presidential nomination are lining up to see who can Saudi-bash the loudest. The Democrats’ outrage has been further fueled by the suspicion that behind the president’s uncritical embrace of the Saudis are his hopes for personal enrichment from the relationship—a reasonable surmise in light of the Saudi habit of booking entire floors of his Washington hotel when delegations come to town. As the de facto alliance approaches its seventy-fifth anniversary, some American policymakers and scholars are questioning whether it still makes sense for the US.
• ‘No Property in Man’: An Exchange
  To the Editors: Nicholas Guyatt’s review of my No Property in Man charges that the book isn’t really a work of history at all but, at bottom, a political polemic disguised as history, an act of projection aimed at Bernie Sanders and Guyatt’s own “younger generation of scholars.” I can only conjecture why Guyatt, a former student in my Princeton graduate seminar, felt compelled to defame my professional integrity.
• Another Forgotten Atrocity
  To the Editors: In his review of Enrico Deaglio’s A True and Terrible Affair Between Sicily and America, Frank Viviano writes that the 1890 lynching of eleven Italian-Americans in New Orleans was “the single worst mass lynching in US history.” Sadly, that grim statistic belongs to the now well-documented massacre of Mexicans living on the banks of the Rio Grande in the isolated village of Porvenir, Texas.
• Percy’s Debt to Pepys
  To the Editors: Jenny Uglow’s “Big Talkers” describes Thomas Percy as the “first collector of English Ballads.” However, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Samuel Pepys notes Pepys’s own collection of ballads, carefully curated by subject and bound into volumes to be preserved in his invaluable library and used by Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry some fifty years later.
• Query
  To the Editors: For a biography of the late American poet Amy Clampitt (1920–1994), I would be grateful to receive reminiscences, anecdotes, or details from people who knew her.
• The Value of a Cell
  To the Editors: I am not sure how your reviewer Gavin Francis took away from my book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, the idea that the mini-vaccine factories known as WI-38 cells were “donated,” as he writes, for research. The cells came from the lungs of an approximately seventeen-week fetus legally aborted in Sweden in 1962.
• One Man’s Quest for a Memorial to Sugar Land’s Bitter History
  Life in Sugar Land is sweet, particularly for the immigrants who flock to it in search of a fresh start and prosperity. Like much of the Houston metro area, it is among the most diverse, economically flourishing cities in America. Drawn to Houston’s booming energy industry, top-tier public schools, and pristine subdivisions with names like Settlers Park and Sugar Mill, my parents and their peers arrived in the 1970s and 1980s to this aspirational dream town. There was little clue at that time of the dark, subterranean past on which, quite literally, our homes and schools were built.
• Willem de Kooning: Acrobat with a Paint Brush
  In 1955, de Kooning was at one of several artistic peaks. By then, he had completely internalized his synthesis of Cubist structure, including Picasso’s Surrealist variations, with Pollock’s innovative materials and expansive scale. Soutine had shown de Kooning how to charge his refined line with a juicier, more muscular gesture. In Composition, de Kooning’s masterpiece of that year, the addition of sand or other grit to the paint creates a drag against the canvas, shifting the emphasis from the speed of the stroke to its driving force. It’s as if his hand accelerated hard in first gear in thick, rough passages and then shifted in a heartbeat to fourth, leaping ahead as the suddenly liquid paint splashed across the surface. If you’re not interested in this kind of wild ride, de Kooning isn’t for you.
• Home Is Where the Heart Is: A Return to Perry, Utah
  I could see an arm of the lake on our left, orchards mixed with houses on our right. “Gee,” I said, “I have no memory of the lake.” Then I started staring at the mountain that was sloping down into fields, only a mile from our car. A great orchard lay beneath it. The strangest feeling overcame me. It was as if a ghost had appeared outside the car. This was a place I had dreamed of my whole life and it was now coming into view. I kept staring at the mountain. “That’s the ridge I’m climbing up in the film!” I exclaimed. A large farm stand beside the road was advertising peaches and cherries. We were in Perry.
• China’s ‘Black Week-end’
  For authoritarian regimes like China’s, history is power, because their political systems are legitimized through myths. In the case of the People’s Republic, the story goes that earlier efforts to modernize China were failures and that only the Chinese Communist Party was able to bullwhip the country into the future. This is the history that every child learns in textbooks, that museums serve up in exhibitions, and that the media push in countless television dramas, news reports, and popular books. The problem for the government is that historical truth is hard to suppress.
• ‘Gone Like a Meteor’: Epitaph for the Lost Youth of the Biafran War
  The books published about the Biafran War, by memoirists on either side, are written from the perspective of those who survived, and can manage to speak of its horrors. The dead, voiceless, keep to themselves. And what of the unborn? When I remember my uncle, it is to grieve for a man whom I never knew, forty years after his death. Youth is a meteor, gone in a flash. The tragedy of the deaths of the poet Christopher Okigbo and the photojournalist Priya Ramrakha is outbalanced by the longevity of their words and pictures. They survive through what they managed to wrest from the terrible war. My uncle wasn’t as fortunate. The details of his life are vague and imprecise, amounting to no more than an hour of talk when I sit with any relative.
• ‘Nostalgia Serves No Purpose’: An Interview with Michel Barnier
  Michał Matlak: What is most likely to happen now with the Brexit negotiations? Michel Barnier: There are three options: a deal based on the agreement finalized six months ago; withdrawal without a deal; or no Brexit. It will have to be the choice of the UK. During the last three years, we have delivered what the UK wants: leaving the EU, leaving the single market, leaving the customs union [after the Irish “backstop” is resolved]. Even if we regret their decision profoundly, it is their sovereign decision and we have to respect it. But if the UK wants to leave in an orderly manner, this treaty is the only option.
• Will Spain Be the Savior of Social Democracy in Europe?
  The election campaign run by the Spanish Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez offers pointed lessons on how other center-left politicians in Europe can confront the electoral challenge of the far right—and win. Instead of imitating the right’s nationalist discourse with a diluted form of nativism and chauvinism in the hope of stemming the defection of white working-class voters, Sánchez ran as a principled progressive. He emphasized the values intrinsic to social democracy, such as equality, solidarity, and a commitment to social justice and the welfare state. And he took the fight to the hard right by portraying himself as a crucial defender of democracy against the forces of authoritarianism and separatist nationalism.
• Whitman, Melville, & Julia Ward Howe: A Tale of Three Bicentennials
  Although she wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” words that are better known around the world than anything by her contemporaries Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Howe has moved to the margins of literary history. Out of her poetry, the “Battle Hymn” is the only lyric that has outlived its author. But Howe was famous for much more than her writing. After the Civil War, she assessed and abandoned her poetic ambitions to become a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, an advocate for world peace, and a tireless worker for human rights. By the time she died, in 1910, she was far more famous in the US and internationally, and more widely and publicly mourned, than either of the two men. 

New York Times Books©

• Judith Krantz, Whose Tales of Sex and Shopping Sold Millions, Dies at 91
  She published her first novel at 50, and her heroines were invariably rich, thin, savvy, ambitious and preternaturally beautiful.
• E. Jean Carroll Accuses Trump of Sexual Assault in Her Memoir
  In her forthcoming book “What Do We Need Men For?,” the Elle advice columnist says the president assaulted her in the 1990s.
• Theater of Dreams: A Tale of Boom and Bust at the Plaza Hotel
  Reviewing Julie Satow’s “The Plaza,” Tina Brown dishes on the socialites, tycoons and charlatans who made and lost fortunes and reputations at the storied hotel.
• Kate Atkinson’s Quirky Detective, Jackson Brodie, Makes His Return
  Her latest novel, “Big Sky,” leads off Marilyn Stasio’s Crime column. Rounding out the group: a Japanese puzzle mystery and Gothic and summer resort thrillers.
• The Daughters of the Confederacy Who Turned Their Heritage to Political Ends
  “Sisters and Rebels” by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall delivers a nuanced portrait of the Lumpkin sisters, who responded to their Southern family history in powerful and public ways.
• Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now?
  Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley’s “American Moonshot.”
• Jill Lepore on the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing
  Lepore discusses several new books about the Apollo 11 mission, and Julie Satow talks about the history of the Plaza Hotel.
• For Fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, a Debut Novel of Female Psychosis
  Juliet Escoria’s “Juliet the Maniac” sees the life of a bipolar teenager in gut-wrenching fragments.
• A Presidential Candidate Assesses the Nation’s Political Ills
  Michael Bennet’s “The Land of Flickering Lights” is a call to end the partisan stalemate in Washington.
• A Year in Paris That Transformed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
  As a college student, Jacqueline Bouvier spent her junior year in Paris, and the city became one of the greatest influences in her life.
• What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues
  Popular novels, technical tomes and self-published books are pirated and sold on Amazon. That may actually be helping the company extend its grip on the book business.
• Bookstores Find Growth as ‘Anchors of Authenticity’
  Big chains once posed a threat, but independents are thriving by hosting events, adding nonbook merchandise and becoming community hubs.
• Who Gets to Sit on the Supreme Court?
  Carl Hulse’s “Confirmation Bias” recounts the recent battles to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat.
• The Week in Books
  Revisiting the moon landing ahead of its anniversary, the return of Jackson Brodie and more.
• Trump Emphatically Denies Sexual Assault Allegation by E. Jean Carroll
  President Trump said he had “no idea” who Ms. Carroll was in comments to reporters outside the White House on Saturday.
• Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent reviews in the Sunday Book Review about domestic violence, the state of conservatism in America and more.
• ‘Be More Chill’ to End Broadway Run in August
  The musical, fueled by social media love, opened in March — a tough time of year for a show with a largely student fan base.
• Five Places to Visit in Barcelona
  The author Carlos Ruiz Zafón offers a travel guide to his hometown with a darker spin on some familiar spots.
• How to Make a Relationship Last? Make It Open, Christopher Isherwood Said
  A museum show explores the British writer and the painter Don Bachardy’s partnership, which lasted through uncertainties and ecstasies for 33 years.
• A Literal Rendering of Poems That Read Like Puzzles
  The illustrator Tamara Shopsin offers her take on lines from the poetry of David Berman.
• ‘I Just Had to Do My Emotional Homework’: How a 30-Year-Old Wrote a Family Saga
  Claire Lombardo, whose debut novel “The Most Fun We Ever Had” follows a family shaken by secrets, talks about shifting from social work to fiction and how she wrote about what she doesn’t know.
• Great New Picture Books That Teach, Without Preaching
  Sometimes kids need stories about the stuff they know already: how — and why — to hold hands. How — and why — to read books. How to be a good friend.
• How to Be Good
  Can moral philosophy teach us the best way to live?
• Saving Girls From Sexual Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown
  “The White Devil’s Daughters,” by Julia Flynn Siler, recounts the story of the crusading women (and a few men) who helped rescue thousands of young Chinese slaves between the 1870s and the 1930s.
• Debut Novels Transport Readers From Paris to Singapore
  A quartet of first fiction offers a range of experiences: urban rambles, immigrant strife, wartime drama and the unraveling of a mysterious crime.
• A Novel That Explores the Silencing of Palestinian Trauma
  In his latest book, “Children of the Ghetto,” Elias Khoury explores the ways an original trauma of dislocation and death has shaped Palestinian identity.
• 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Trailblazing Editor Elaine Welteroth Has Written a Book — and It’s a Hit
  “More Than Enough,” a memoir from the “Project Runway” judge and former Teen Vogue editor in chief, debuts on the nonfiction list this week at No. 11.
• Seeking the Elixir of Life Through High School Science Class
  In “The History of Living Forever,” by Jake Wolff, a teenager’s first love affair becomes entangled with a quest for immortality.
• J.J. Abrams and Son to Write Spider-Man Comic
  The two discuss their collaboration, which introduces a new villain, Cadaverous, and how the project came to be.
• The Legacy of Slavery in Two Novels of the American South
  “In West Mills,” by De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and “The Gone Dead,” by Chanelle Benz, serve up timeless Southern stories.
• New in Paperback: ‘Cherry,’ ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• By the Book: Denise Mina
  The Scottish crime writer, whose new book is “Conviction,” is drawn to “flawed characters asking big questions and taking action. … That said, I will read, literally, anything.”
• Brooklyn Book Festival Names Mo Willems ‘Best of Brooklyn’
  The annual literary festival, which takes place in September, announced its initial roster of participating writers.
• William Loverd, Who Promoted Literary Giants, Dies at 78
  He chaperoned the works of dozens of writers at Alfred A. Knopf for almost 40 years. “Bill and Knopf,” a colleague said, “were entirely synonymous.”
• Joy Harjo Is Named U.S. Poet Laureate
  The Oklahoma-born writer, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, is the first Native American to hold the post.
• Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theorist Loses to Father of 6-Year-Old Victim Over Hoax
  A Wisconsin judge ruled that it was defamatory to publish a book that said Leonard Pozner faked his son’s death certificate.
• A Writer’s Surprisingly Healthful Breakfast Cookies
  Mona Awad, whose novel “Bunny” is out this month, shares her more interesting alternative to oatmeal.
• A Dark Comedy About Life at the Heart of the European Union
  “The Capital,” by the Austrian novelist Robert Menasse, depicts an E.U. bureaucracy rived by conflict and infighting and ripe for satire.
• A Library Thrives, Quietly, in One of Pakistan’s Gun Markets
  The Darra Adam Khel Library, less than a year old and with more than 2,500 books, offers residents a respite from the arms bazaar that dominates local life.
• New & Noteworthy Poetry From Tina Chang, Natalie Scenters-Zapico and More
  A selection of recent poetry books; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Terrorism on the High Seas
  Julie Salamon’s “An Innocent Bystander: The Killing of Leon Klinghoffer” recounts an episode that introduced Americans to terrorism long before 9/11.
• Molly O’Neill, Writer Who Explored and Celebrated Food, Is Dead at 66
  She was a keen observer of what she called the “essential tension in the American appetite,” a reflection of the country’s cultural conflicts.
• Nicholas Sparks Apologizes for Anti-Gay Comments in 2013 Emails
  Mr. Sparks apologized for comments he made in emails released as part of a lawsuit that claims he spread a rumor an ex-employee had Alzheimer’s.
• Charles Reich, Who Saw ‘The Greening of America,’ Dies at 91
  He was a Yale Law School professor when he embraced the counterculture in a 1970 book that became a best seller and brought him rock-star-level fame.
• The Art of Food
  “A Feast for the Eyes” gives readers a glimpse of how artists have used food as a medium.
• In ‘A Sand Book,’ Ariana Reines Finds Ecstasy in Chaos
  The writing in Reines’s new collection is queer and raunchy, raw and occult and vulnerable as she moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self.
• Comics That Capture the City in All Its Human and Physical Messiness
  In her Graphic Content column, Hillary Chute looks at new works from Mark Alan Stamaty and Jaime Hernandez that each grapple with urban existence.
• When Gloria Vanderbilt Reviewed ‘Harriet the Spy’
  For a brief period in the mid-1960s, the author, artist and fashion designer was a children’s book critic for The Times.
• ‘The Hunger Games’ Prequel Is in the Works
  Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy about children fighting to the death, later adapted as a series of blockbuster movies, is getting a prequel.
• Alan Brinkley, Leading Historian of 20th-Century America, Dies at 70
  A National Book Award winner, he explored the seminal political events of the last century, including the Depression and World War II.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• ‘Affirmative Action Is Not About Equality. It’s About Covering Ass.’
  Glenn Loury on race, surviving public humiliation, and why becoming the first African-American to earn tenure in the Harvard economics department was pure agony.  
• The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Postmodernism
  No other idea from the humanities had so vast, if murky, an influence.
• Putting the Political Back in Politically Correct
  Everyone is mad. Is anyone right?
• The Campus Innovation Myth
  A half-century of occasional breakthroughs — and a lot of disappointment.
• The Monograph Is Broken. Long Live the Monograph.
  Does scholarly publishing have a sustainable future?
• How Social Media Imperils Scholarship
  It plays on our vanity to reduce research to a popularity contest.  
• How Google Scrambled the Academic Mind
  Experts once structured and categorized knowledge. Now search engines do that task. The result? Anarchy.
• The Academy’s New Favorite Hate-Read
  Is Quillette an island of sanity — or reactionary conservatism for the Ph.D. set?
• Fanning the Flames While the Humanities Burn
  A debate over “privilege” threatens to overshadow the real problem.
• The Humanities Without Nostalgia
  Harking back to an era of “peak English” betrays marginalized scholars.
• Are Women Invisible to Economists? One Scholar Is Stripping Down to Make Them Look
  Victoria Bateman’s naked protests challenge what she sees as the field’s gender problem.
• Has Tenure Become an Instrument of Intimidation?
  Senior faculty members assert their power by picking on people like me.
• Academe’s Extinction Event: Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at the MLA
  Taking stock of a vanishing world.
• A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble With STEM
  E.O. Wilson on the next big thing, the gladiatorial nature of academe, and the world beyond the human senses.
• The AHA’s Mission Needs to Change
  The dire reality of the jobs crisis demands a new approach.
• Scholarly Associations Can’t Be Unions — It’s Illegal
  Professional organizations represent consensus, not force of law.
• How Not to Confront the Jobs Crisis
  Scholarly associations don’t have magic wands.
• A Moral Stain on the Profession
  As the humanities collapse, it’s time to name and shame the culprits.
• Being a Black Academic in America
  We asked African-American scholars about race, merit, and belonging. Here’s what they told us.  
• The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb
  Treating nearly 75 percent of the professoriate as disposable is not sustainable.