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

• The Power of Andrea Dworkin’s Rage
  Dworkin would become the ur-figure of so-called anti-sex feminism, a contentious term used to characterize feminist opposition to pornography, prostitution, and S&M. Her reputation, forged through thundering speeches and legislative efforts as well as her writing, is one of stridency, man-hate, and paranoid histrionics. In her work, rage is authority; her imperious voice and dirty mouth make for a feminist literature empty of caveats and equivocation. And reading her now, beyond the anti-porn intransigence she’s both reviled and revered for, one feels a prescient apocalyptic urgency, one perfectly calibrated, it seems, to the high stakes of our time.
• #KoreaToo
  It is curious that a book not primarily focused on sexual violence has become a cultural touchstone for Korea’s version of the Me Too movement. But the local activism grouped under the American label of Me Too must be understood as a total rebellion against deeply patriarchal, Confucian structures that, in the digital era, have found cruel new forms.
• The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA
  The migrant caravan that left Honduras and headed north toward the US last October is the largest flight from drug trafficking in history. Though the phenomenon of Central American caravans isn’t new, never before have thousands of people decided to flee from criminal organizations in such numbers. It is, in a sense, the biggest anti-mafia march the world has ever seen.
• Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq
  The intelligence my colleagues and I have collected is disturbing: over the past fifteen months, hundreds of attacks linked to ISIS have taken place in areas that were supposed to have been liberated. Islamic State fighters have regrouped in the provinces of Kirkuk, Diyala, Salahaddin, and parts of Anbar—territory they know well. In towns and villages across the country’s northwest, these guerrillas are mounting ambushes against Iraqi security forces in attacks the scale of which has not been seen in years. Even in parts of Mosul itself, the northern city reconquered in 2017 by government forces after a long and costly campaign, the ominous black-and-white ISIS flag has flown again in recent months, causing panic and fear among the civilian population.
• The Fight for Justice Takes Its Toll on Ferguson Activists
  Danye Jones is one of at least five young Ferguson activists who have died since 2014. The suspicion in the activist community “speaks to the level of distrust for law enforcement in many communities in St. Louis,” said ArchCity Defenders director Blake Strode. “It speaks to what many people have experienced themselves with law enforcement, and what they believe law enforcement to be capable of.” St. Louis police have by far the highest rate of shootings in the country, with more than five per 100,000 people, and most of the victims of police shootings are black. Even black St. Louis police officers believe the St. Louis police are racist—there are two, essentially segregated police unions, one white, one black.
• A Refuge from Reality, à la Russe
  Though closely associated with Russia, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, the concept of “internal exile” is not exclusively linked to the Soviet experience and has existed at other times and places. But internal exile during the Soviet period came to mean far more than a definition of where you could and couldn’t travel. Instead, it represented something more metaphorical—about traveling within yourself or relocating mentally. It signified a sort of “retreat into the self” that allowed many people to live more happily while avoiding anything to do with politics or public life. 
• Why Is Medicine So Expensive?
  The prominence of high drug prices among current American grievances derives from three recent episodes. In 2014 Gilead Sciences brought out Sovaldi, a drug that cures hepatitis C within twelve weeks but costs $1,000 a pill, making the price of a full course of treatment $84,000. In 2015 Turing Pharmaceuticals, a new company headed by Martin Shkreli, a hedge-fund manager, acquired Daraprim, the sole treatment available in the United States for a life-threatening parasitic infection, and raised the price per tablet from $13.50 to $750. And in 2016 Mylan Pharmaceuticals, which had a stranglehold on the market for EpiPens (used to counter allergic shock), began selling them wholesale for $284 apiece, a 600 percent increase over the wholesale price in 2007, and offering them only in packages of two.
• Olmec
  The bone-crushing pain of turning into a jaguar: palpable in the shaman’s cleft head carved in basalt or jade; in his downturned squared-off open mouth; lips stretched and dilated in birthing, in a scream. Try to imagine yourself crossing from one world of pain into another, the quiet needed to summon the fury needed to […]
• Syria’s Torture Photos: Witness to Atrocity
  Caesar thought, or at least hoped, that the photographs showing Syrian torture victims would lead to the toppling of Assad. But the Caesar photographs—like countless others, including that of little Alan Kurdi lying face-down on a Turkish beach—didn’t do that because they couldn’t. Photographs cannot overthrow dictators; photographs can only bolster a political awareness that already exists, even if only among a minority. “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one,” Sontag wrote in On Photography. “What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.” 
• The Secret Streets of Brassaï & Louis Stettner
  Two retrospectives at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art demonstrate the relationship between two different but equally diligent photographers of the streets. Louis Stettner showed a compassionate tenderness toward his subjects, while Brassaï sought to create characters or archetypes out of the people he photographed. Like Brassaï, Stettner was a multi-talented artist, and during his very long career he practiced painting, sculpture, and collage as well as photography until late in life. Both outsiders, they succeeded in discovering the secrets of their chosen city, Paris. And for both photographers, the street was their teacher.
• ‘Our Bodies Were Born into Hard Labor’
  Of herself, Sarah Smarsh writes, “I was the proverbial teen pregnancy, my very existence the mark of poverty. I was in a poor girl’s lining like a penny in a purse—not worth much, according to the economy, but kept in production.”
• America’s Original Identity Politics
  We hear a great deal these days about the right’s hostility to “identity politics.” In this framing, the election of 2016 was a populist backlash of ordinary voters against an aberrant left too concerned with narrow questions about niche groups and out of touch with the troubles of Middle Americans. The good news is that it simply isn’t true that identity politics represents the end of America or of liberal democracy. Nor is it true that identity politics began on the left, or that the Klan was America’s first “identity movement.” The only thing new about “the omnipresent rhetoric of identity” is the voices that have been added to it, reshaping it in ways that alarm and affront those who used to be its sole authors. But it was always omnipresent.
• The Star of the Silken Screen
  Andy Warhol combined social and pictorial intelligence in a way not seen in this country since John Singer Sargent. In one of the most unexpected artistic transformations of the last century, he found a way to make a highly synthetic, semimechanized kind of painting feel authentic. His attitude and posture, his public persona, and his forays into filmmaking and other media were radical in the world of high art, but his aesthetic inclinations were more traditional. They harked back to, and partially bridged, two widely divergent tendencies in American art: social realism and abstraction, the Yankee peddler and the Transcendentalist.
• Giving Voice to Guadeloupe
  The law of 1946, known as the law of assimilation, initiated by the poet Aimé Césaire, transformed the island from a colony into a French Overseas Département, or “DOM.” The inhabitants of Guadeloupe have been deprived of their national identity and become domiens. I, too, am a domienne. They said we didn’t have a language. Creole, a language invented in the plantation system as a challenge to the white planters, was a dialect long forbidden at school; it took a group of brave intellectuals for a diploma of Creole Studies to gain recognition. They said we weren’t creative. We are either the descendants of African slaves or the descendants of indentured Indian laborers or the descendants of the French colonizers. Nobody believed that these three components could have fused to create an original culture.
• The Fatal Ensnaring of Dan DePew
  Sexual panic permeated the 1980s, dictating who was criminalized and who got locked up, and for what behaviors. Poking around in newspaper databases in those pre-Google days, I came across the headline “Two Men Charged in Kidnapping Plot” from 1989, a cryptic story buried in the back pages of The New York Times about two undercover cops who had offered to provide two other men with a child to star in a homemade snuff film. One of those other two men was Daniel DePew. It might be said that entrapment cases are a Rorschach test of a society’s obsessions and fears at any given time. Who and what are we most afraid of? How can we lock them up for life and convince ourselves they deserve it? Let the DePew case offer some answers.
• ‘The Pain Never Went Away’
  The problems had started in the factory where you worked. I described it in my first novel, The End of Eddy: one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk. The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Because of what they’ve done to your body, you will never have a chance to uncover the person you’ve become.
• Aretha’s Grace
  The queen’s power dwells in her silence. That’s not what one expects to learn from a film about an almighty singer whose voice created a score for several dramatic decades of American life, and who will be ever defined by the way that voice made people feel. But it’s one of many striking revelations about Aretha Franklin in a new film that stars her, a film that is extraordinary in part because of the sense in which it’s not new at all.     
• Fool Britannia
  From the ill-conceived Brexit referendum onward, Britain’s governing class has embarrassed itself. The Remain campaign was complacent, the Leave campaign brazenly mendacious, and as soon as the result was known, most of the loudest advocates for severing ties with the European Union ran away like naughty schoolboys whose cricket ball had smashed a greenhouse window. Negotiations have revealed the pitiful intellectual limitations of a succession of blustering cabinet ministers, the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition doesn’t appear to want to oppose, and the prime minister has engineered her own humiliation by starting the countdown to Brexit without a plan that could command wide support, resulting in the heaviest parliamentary defeat in history.
• The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism
  One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is its demonstration of how Europe’s most pervasive and powerful twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink’s approach is not to repeat what he considers an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the basis of historical facts and statistical data. Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases.
• Climate Signs
  At two degrees, our best-case climate scenario, melting ice sheets will still pass a point of no return, flooding NYC and dozens of other world cities. In fact, we’re on track for over four degrees of warming and an unfathomable scale of suffering by century’s end. For my part, I’m only beginning to see that the question of how to prepare our kids for the horrors to come is collateral to the problem of how to deal as adults with the damage we’ve stewarded them into. What helped me see this was a road sign—one of those LED billboards you normally spot on a highway alerting drivers to a hazard. Oddly, the sign was standing on the grass of a public park. How did that get there, I wondered.
• Among the Vitamin K ‘Anti-Vaxxers’
  Babies are at the highest risk for Vitamin-K Deficiency Bleeding in the first week of life, so the standard of care is to give the shot within an hour after birth. Many parents don’t know that the risk of VKDB is high in untreated newborns. I, like many pediatricians, see an increasing number of refusals. These parents see a vulnerability similar to the one that I see in their children, but in their minds the threats come from society. The way I see it, society is by no means benign, but it does offer vaccines and Vitamin K as safeguards against threats that come from nature.
• Men’s Lib
  Henry Miller believed in amorality when it came to sex. For him, “sexual morality” could only mean the prudery and hypocrisy and zealous oversight of his elders, which he hated. Nothing could be more foreign to Miller’s narrator than to have regret or misgivings about a sexual encounter based on a woman’s response or her circumstances. He did not see the subordination of women as one of his society’s many cruelties and stupidities.
• Farmworker Anxieties
  To the Editors: Michael Greenberg’s essay “In the Valley of Fear” captures the overwhelming sense of anxiety among many farm laborer families in California. Daily life among family members, whether traveling to work or to school, shopping, or just visiting friends, places them at risk of sudden arrest and possible deportation at the hands of federal ICE agents. At the same time, Greenberg inaccurately portrays recent trends in California agricultural production, and in the state’s farm labor market.
• Building in Berkeley
  To the Editors: In the article “California: The State of Resistance,” Michael Greenberg wrote, “I was surprised to see virtually no new construction in Berkeley.” I don’t know where he looked, but I could offer a tour of just-completed, under construction, and permits-issued residential sites, most several stories taller than what they replace. Is it enough? No, but far better than a decade ago when nothing was being built, and a clear sign of progress.
• ‘My Responsibility to History’: An Interview with Zhang Shihe
  Ian Johnson: Where does it come from, this sense of justice—your experiences in the Cultural Revolution? Zhang Shihe: Mao ordered young people to the countryside. I was sent to work on the Xi’an to Qinghai railway, with some 26,000 others. Most were broken when they came home. Today, they have children and grandchildren, but thousands died prematurely after coming back—it ruined so many people’s health. These old guys don’t want that forgotten.
• Waiting with Immigrants
  To be an immigrant in America is to wait. This goes double for the millions of immigrants who have found themselves at the sour end of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaucracy—and triple in the age of Trump. If you are an immigrant in the process of deportation proceedings, you must wait for your Master Calendar, on which a bureaucrat will assign you to a check-in date several months into the future. At this check-in, you may win several more months of anxious waiting—or disappear into a detention center, where you will wait for a one-way plane ride to a country you may no longer know.
• Rome: Where Migrants Face Eviction as Fascists Find a Home
  Across Italy, some 10,000 migrants and refugees are living in squats. In search of shelter, many have joined vulnerable Italians in occupying empty buildings. The housing crisis is not an accident. It is part of a deliberate strategy by the government to make Italy as inhospitable to migrants as possible. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has made attacking immigrants a cornerstone of his politics. At the same time, Italy has seen a resurgence of support for fascism.
• Godard’s Conflagration of Images
  In a fabulously eccentric Skype press conference held after the movie’s première at the last Cannes Film Festival, Godard remarked that “most of the films in Cannes this year and in preceding years show what is happening, but very few films are designed to show what is not happening.” The Image Book, he hoped, would show precisely that dimension—in its method if not its subject matter. Since taking the digital turn some twenty years ago, Godard’s movies have been gnarly ruminations on Europe’s cataclysmic past century, the significance of his chosen medium, and, by implication, his own mortality.
• Finding My Father’s Auschwitz File
  Auschwitz and Dachau frame the emotional structure of my life. Thinking of my father in the course of a day, I think of Auschwitz. Thinking about my mother, I think about Dachau. I still think often about their murdered children and murdered spouses. The few details I know about my parents’ day-to-day existence at Auschwitz and Dachau are drawn from the few memories my parents shared. I knew there was much I didn’t learn from them about their past, but it was not until I discovered my father’s Auschwitz file that I recognized how far from understanding their history I was.
• ‘The Joy of the Discovery’: An Interview with Jennifer Doudna
  Claudia Dreifus: I’m told you’ve had bad dreams about the downside of your genome-editing discovery. Jennifer Doudna: There’s one in particular that haunts me. I had been thinking a lot about the profound tool it is, about all of the wonderful things that it enables—cures for genetic diseases and conditions, an increased food supply. But it also brings the potential for eugenics, for state-sponsored alteration of human beings. You even can imagine creating new species of humans.
• The Striking Demands of LA Teachers
  There’s a growing sense in Los Angeles that communities are being cleaved and traditional schools underfunded by the flashiness and promised innovation of charter schools. I was surprised by the extent to which striking counselors and teachers brought up these issues of funding and privatization. The union’s demand for more school counselors has emerged more strongly than in other recent teacher strikes—because, teachers said, of the increasingly acute needs of the majority brown and working-class student population. In this sense, the strike was as much about an ideological question as a labor dispute: Who is the public being served by public education?
• Rapping with Fanon
  Rocé’s anthology album carries more than a whiff of radical chic nostalgia, which he does little to conceal when he describes the 1960s and 1970s as “an epoch of struggles, of possibility.” Yet Par les damné.e.s de la terre is an unexpectedly moving document, not only because it presents an extraordinary archive of recordings, but also because it illuminates the radical hopes that Frantz Fanon’s ideas had once inspired. It is a powerful reminder of what that world sounded like. 
• Can a Translation Be a Masterpiece, Too?
  A translation can indeed be creative and “important,” but it is the creativity of astute accommodation and damage limitation, the “importance” of allowing as much as possible of that original to happen in the translator’s culture. To imagine, however, that Henry James could ever be to the Italians what he is to us, or Giovanni Verga to us what he is to Italians, is nonsense.
• Poons v. Koons: The Art of ‘The Price of Everything’
  The quandary at the heart of The Price of Everything, the art world documentary recently acquired by HBO, is summed up in a scene with the great German artist Gerhard Richter. Gesturing to one of his own paintings, Richter explains, “It’s not good when this is the value of a house. It’s not fair. I like it, but it’s not a house.” Viewers who anticipate a filmic celebration of capitalism as a force for cultural good, or alternatively, a condemnation of commodification, will be disappointed. The Price of Everything develops no particular argument, posits no solutions, uncovers no scandals. It isn’t a polemic, it’s a portrait, and in its mix of the grotesque and the earnest, a pragmatic and recognizable one.
• Listening to Women’s Bodies
  Between hiding what we’re told is embarrassing and presenting ourselves to the world to be appraised, women’s relationships to our bodies can be complex, even brutal. As the host of Bodies podcast Allison Behringer reminds us in one episode, being a woman only comes with one instruction: “Be beautiful.” Behringer emphasizes sharing practical, constructive information. Bodies wants to help. The show demonstrates the difference between a compassionate, forward-thinking doctor and one who is just going through the motions. It empowers women to do their own research.

New York Times Books©

• The Enthusiast: In Praise of Maurice Sendak
  “I’ve read the books many times to my own children, astonished at how much is in them for my grown-up self — about that growing-up process, and about the times I grew up in, too.”
• Books News: Dan Mallory, 2 Starkly Similar Novels and the Puzzle of Plagiarism
  Readers have noticed an overlap between “The Woman in the Window,” by A.J. Finn — a pen name for Dan Mallory — and Sarah A. Denzil’s “Saving April.”
• Books of The Times: ‘How to Hide an Empire’ Shines Light on America’s Expansionist Side
  Daniel Immerwahr’s provocative and absorbing history draws attention to those islands and archipelagos too often sidelined in the national imagination.
• Further reading: Books for Broken Hearts
  Feeling like you’ve kissed too many frogs? Given up on love altogether? These books might provide some escape this Valentine’s Day.
• Nonfiction: The First Lady Who Begat Phyllis Schlafly, Nancy Reagan and Ivanka Trump?
  In Amy Greenberg’s “Lady First,” Sarah Polk — the wife of President James K. Polk — emerges as a powerful strategist who wielded her status with a velvet vengeance.
• Nonfiction: How the Parkland Shooting Led to a Generation’s Political Awakening
  In his book “Parkland,” Dave Cullen follows the survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on their quest to change gun laws and heal themselves.
• The Book Review Podcast: A Class in ‘Dreyer’s English’
  Benjamin Dreyer talks about his best-selling guide to writing, and Thomas Mallon discusses “Landfall,” his new novel about the presidential administration of George W. Bush.
• Betty Ballantine, Who Helped Introduce Paperbacks, Dies at 99
  As a publishing team, she and her husband, Ian, set out in 1939 “to change the reading habits of America,” and to a large extent they did.
• Read Books by Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Other 2020 Presidential Candidates
  Politicians’ memoirs can give insight into their values.
• Books of The Times: In ‘The Next to Die,’ a Serial Killer Targets Pairs of Best Friends
  In Hannah’s new novel, the Culver Valley police force is searching for a killer who sends homemade books to prospective victims.
• New in Paperback: ‘Directorate S,’ ‘The Friend’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• Inside the List: ‘The Unwinding of the Miracle’ Is About How to Die — and Live
  Julie Yip-Williams, diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at 37, couldn’t find a book that would help her prepare for death. So she decided to write one herself.
• Andrea Levy, Author Who Spoke for a Generation of Immigrants, Dies at 62
  Her books were praised for their witty, honest portraits of the immigrant experience, especially of those who moved to Britain from the West Indies after World War II.
• Sketchbook: The Future of Publishing, as Imagined by R.O. Blechman
  An illustrated prediction of the book world’s next big frontier.
• Children’s Books: New Fantasy Novels for Kids (and Adults) Ready to Go Beyond Harry Potter
  A shape-shifting fox in space, a sentient island, an eerily perfect town and twins who use magic to stay together: There’s abundant life in this speculative fiction.
• Fiction: A Novel About the Life and Times of the Photographer Lee Miller
  Whitney Scharer’s “The Age of Light” tells the story of the journalist and model who was often overshadowed by her lover and collaborator Man Ray.
• Ivory Tower: Is Blockchain Technology Overhyped?
  Two books by legal scholars argue that the revolutionary promise of the new database tool has been exaggerated.
• Nonfiction: Exploring Her Own Experience of Psychosis
  In “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esmé Weijun Wang unravels a long history of coming to terms with mental illness.
• From Our Archives: Revisiting George W. Bush’s Memoir “A Charge to Keep”
  Our reviewer called the 1999 book “a puzzling exercise.”
• Crime: Stalkers and Dead Wedding Guests: The Latest in Crime Novels
  Marilyn Stasio’s column covers new books from established crime-writing giants, like Jonathan Kellerman, and a newcomer, Alex Michaelides.
• Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Editors’ Choice: 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Nonfiction: How Wild Was Wild Bill Hickok? A Biographer Separates Life From Legend
  Tom Clavin’s “Wild Bill” details the life of a legendary gunfighter whose real name wasn’t even Bill.
• 52 Books for 52 Places
  Explore the cities, countries, regions and states in Travel’s “52 Places to Go in 2019” through these books.
• Arundhati Roy to Headline the 2019 PEN World Voices Festival
  Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates and others will also take part in the festival, whose theme is the narrowing gap between public and private life.
• By the Book: ‘Why Have a Large Library and Not Use It?’ Janet Malcolm: By the Book
  The journalist, whose new book is “Nobody’s Looking at You: Essays,” read indiscriminately in her youth: “Bookish children are not critics. They just like to read.”
• Dancing to Jane Austen’s Beat
  An annual celebration, this year attended by some 300 costumed revelers, is one of the regular events around the country that unite both the novelist’s hard-core fans and period dance enthusiasts.
• Tolkien’s World: An Exhibition Transports Us to Middle-earth
  J.R.R. Tolkien — the artist, the writer, the scholar — is the subject of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. The show is a comprehensive view of his alternate reality.
• Sweden Investigates Its Ambassador to China After Report of Secret Talks to Free Publisher
  The daughter of Gui Minhai, a Swedish bookseller detained in China, said the ambassador arranged a meeting with men who first offered to help, then cajoled and pressured her.
• Now Read This: Discussion Questions for ‘The Wife’
  Meg Wolitzer’s novel is our February pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”
• Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, Whose Broadside Press Gave a Voice to Black Poets
  Randall, a poet and librarian, started the press out of his home, eventually publishing the work of about 200 writers amid Detroit’s flowering Black Arts Movement.
• Nonfiction: Run-DMC, Aerosmith and the Song That Changed Everything
  In “Walk This Way,” the reporter Geoff Edgers tells the story of a crucial moment in the history of pop music.
• Anne Firor Scott, Scholar of Women’s History, Dies at 97
  Studying diaries, letters and more, she found that women, in the South and beyond, were not just passive observers of the vital events of their time.
• Fiction: In This Ingenious Satire, a Father Goes to Extremes to Protect His Son From Racism
  “We Cast a Shadow,” a first novel by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, is a hilarious and profound meditation on racial bias, and how it warps our capacity for love.
• Heidi Toffler, Unsung Force Behind Futurist Books, Dies at 89
  With her husband, Alvin Toffler, she was half of a team that produced global best-sellers, including “Future Shock.” Recognition was belated.
• Fiction: A Dark Fairy Tale of American Oddballs and Candlepin Bowling
  “Bowlaway,” Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, is a family saga, a burlesque chronicle of eccentrics and a fractured, fanciful fable.
• New & Noteworthy
  A selection of books published this week; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Books of The Times: ‘Leading Men,’ a Novel About Tennessee Williams and His Lover, Casts a Spell From the Start
  Christopher Castellani’s latest vividly reimagines the relationship between Williams and Frank Merlo, and offers intricate thoughts about the nature of fidelity, the artistic impulse and estrangement.
• Books News: A First Look at the Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Forthcoming Novel
  “The Water Dancer,” out in September, is about an enslaved man whose life is altered by a near-death experience.
• A Call to Putin, and Russian TV Changed Its Story
  The former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi describes the 2016 exchange with the Russian president in his new book.
• The Shortlist: Five Essay Collections by Women of Color
  Urgent new reading on the subjects of race and gender disparities in America.
• Newsbook: Curious About the Missing Princess? 3 Books Detail the Lives of Middle Eastern Women
  These writers describe a region where women can encounter great privilege and fierce repression at the same time.
• C.Y. Lee, ‘Flower Drum Song’ Author, Is Dead at 102
  His novel of generational and cultural conflict among Chinese immigrants became a hit Broadway musical and then a film that earned five Oscar nominations.
• Tomi Ungerer, Brash Illustrator for Young and Older, Dies at 87
  His children’s books brought a refreshing jolt to the genre, but his erotica made him an outcast in some circles.
• Books of The Times: Valeria Luiselli’s Latest Novel Is a Mold-Breaking New Classic
  In “Lost Children Archive,” an unhappily married couple set out on a road trip, with their two young children, to visit the ancestral homeland of the Apaches in Arizona.
• Nonfiction: A Grieving Woman’s Eloquent Homage to Virginia Woolf
  In “All the Lives We Ever Lived,” Katharine Smyth revisits “To the Lighthouse” for comfort and insight after the death of her father.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• He Beat the Odds. His Research Focuses on Those Who Don’t.
  Can Anthony Abraham Jack change the way elite colleges treat low-income students?
• Is Email Making Professors Stupid?
  It used to simplify crucial tasks. Now it’s strangling scholars’ ability to think.  
• How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce
  Since when is reading James Baldwin out loud in class an academic crime?
• Colleges Say More Teaching Is Better. They’re Wrong.
  Reduced teaching loads are not moving scholars away from the classroom — they’re allowing scholars to be better teachers.
• How to Make Students Better Thinkers
  Step aside and let philosophers do their job.
• This Is Higher Education’s Gilded Age
  A gulf has opened between rich, elite colleges and all the others.
• Higher Education Has Always Been Commercial
  Its embrace of pop culture, mass media, and marketing has sustained it.
• A Lesson Before Dying
  Holding hands with a student in hospice care.
• The Great Disappearing Teaching Load
  How few courses are too few?
• How the Right Learned to Loathe Higher Education
  Conservative dislike of the academy isn’t new. But it is alarming.
• On Enjoying Grad School
  A love that dare not speak its name.
• ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’
  Fifty years of coeducation at American colleges.
• Who Is a Women’s College For?
  As transgender students claim their space, traditionalists see an identity crisis.
• Why History Matters
  We need to make a persuasive case.
• Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program
  From the workshop to the food bank.
• In Defense of Diversity Statements
  They are morally necessary.
• Is This Higher Education’s Golden Age?
  Pessimism reigns. But American universities have never been stronger.
• Against Diversity Statements
  Introducing concepts of ambiguous or contested meaning into academic evaluations will turn them into political litmus tests.
• The Invisible Faculty
  By not standing up for adjuncts, tenure-track professors have undermined their own power.
• Top Reads of 2018
  Here are 10 articles that strongly connected with readers in 2018. We think they’re worth at least one more look.