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

• In the Review Archives: 2005–2009
  To celebrate the Review’s fifty-fifth anniversary in 2018, we have been going back into our archives year by year. In this week’s newsletter: John Leonard on Joan Didion, John Updike on van Gogh’s letters, Zadie Smith on speaking in tongues, and a broad range of perspectives on the 2008 election. We also remember founding editor Barbara Epstein. “She possessed one of the greatest minds I’ve ever encountered,” Luc Sante writes, “and she gave all of it to other people’s work.”
• Prodigal Fathers
  In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, Colm Tóibín sketches the lives of three men who talked their memories into their sons’ memories, and so helped father twentieth-century Irish literature.
• Beastly: The Bad Women of ‘The Favourite’
  Many recent women-centered films overcompensate, succumbing to lukewarm tokenism, portentous plots, neutered sexuality, and pulled punches both literal (no catfights) and figurative (no misandry). They manage to skirt the usual stereotypes of cattiness, victimhood, hysteria, sluttiness, and so on, but they miss all the depth and contradiction of genuine vice. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite dispenses with this bind altogether. I have never seen a film like it: a story about three bad women—bad in very different, very interesting ways—whose badness both makes and breaks the relationships between them.
• A Cure for Metaphor-Blindness
  One way of seeing, in Wittgenstein’s formulation, is what we might call accurate seeing. This is how the blind man sees after Jesus touches his eyes for a second time, and he sees “every man clearly.” The other way of seeing is more like seeing men as trees walking. Wittgenstein calls this metaphorical way of seeing “seeing as.” He tells us, for example, that he “may well try to see” the letter F “as a gallows.” “Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something?” Wittgenstein wonders. He suggests that this condition might be called  “aspect-blindness” and compares it to “the lack of a ‘musical ear.’”
• Damn It All
  “I think hell’s a fable,” the famous professor proclaimed—a surprising declaration not only because it was made in the late sixteenth century, when very few people would have dared to say such a thing, but also because he was at that moment in conversation with a devil to whom he was offering to sell his soul. The professor in question was Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan tragedy. Bored with his mastery of philosophy, medicine, and law, Faustus longs for forbidden knowledge. “Where are you damned?” he asks Mephastophilis, the devil whom he has conjured up. “In hell,” comes the prompt reply, but Faustus remains skeptical: “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” The devil’s answer is quietly devastating: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
• ‘Evil Has Been Trivialized’: A Final Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman
  Bauman: In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik committed two mass murders: one targeting the government and contingent civilian population, the other against the inmates of a summer camp. He explained his crimes in advance in an electronically published manifesto sounding the alarm against Islam and feminism joining forces in “creating a European cultural suicide.” What strikes a thoughtful reader is the total absence of a logical link between the cause and effect: Islam, feminism on one side, and the random victims of mass murder on the other. We are being quietly adjusted to this logic-defying, indeed mind-boggling, state of affairs. Breivik is anything but an exceptional, one-off blunder of nature, or a solitary monster.
• The Ravishing Art of Alchi
  I visited Alchi in 2004. A caretaker monk unlocked for us the eleventh-century carved doorway to the Dukhang, every inch of which is painted with Buddhas, Buddhas-to-Be, gods, goddesses, demons, hungry ghosts, imps, flying nymphs, other celestial beings, royal hunters and patrons, monks, Yogi magicians, and many hallucinatory figures that seem to have floated up from the stuff of our dreams. The monk was bored and impatient; after some thirty minutes, he shooed us away. But I was left, then as now, after spending some weeks with Peter van Ham’s book, with a sense of a dizzying proliferation of vital beings mobbing my eyes. In all of South Asian art, there is nothing quite like these densely painted murals.
• Two Roads for the New French Right
  Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for disseminating them are being established. Journalists have treated as a mere vanity project Steve Bannon’s efforts to bring European populist parties and thinkers together under the umbrella of what he calls The Movement. But his instincts, as in American politics, are in tune with the times. In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern.
• The View from 35,000 Feet
  The travel I witness is often forced: exodus, the tribulation of exile, flight from violence or famine. I have spent my life documenting the world’s iniquities, and my own panopticon of brokenness comprises genocide and mass starvation, loved ones I have lost to war, friends’ children who died of preventable diseases. For nearly each elegant vignette I read in Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, my world seemed to proffer an evil twin, until the looking glass of the novel became akin to a funhouse mirror: the book smoothed away much of the wretchedness I know.
• A New Moral Imagination on Immigration
  Our job is to tell the truth about immigration instead of cowering before falsehoods. As long as we accept the Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration and try to merely gain small victories against a harsh, restrictionist policy, we will lose—politically, economically, and, most importantly, morally. Instead, we must disperse the fog of lies and scapegoating and make clear that a sensible, humane system of immigration laws is best for everyone.
• In the Valley of Fear
  Measured by yearly production, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the highest-value stretches of farmland in the country, and is dominated by large growers who preside over a labor force of migrant workers in a way that has not changed much since Carey McWilliams described it in his 1939 book, Factories in the Fields. The Fresno-based writer Mark Arax likens it to a Central American country. “It’s the poorest part of California,” he told me. “There’s almost no middle class. To find its equivalent in the United States you’d have to go to Appalachia or the borderlands of Texas.”
• Penelope Mortimer: A Writing Life
  The story of British novelist Penelope Mortimer is, in part, the all too familiar tale of a woman writer plagued by her readership’s inability to separate the life from the art. This situation was made all the more complicated because Penelope drew so very heavily on her lived experience when it came to the fiction she put down on the page. As debates around this issue still rage today, despite the fact that Penelope’s books languish for the most part out of print, there’s no better time for readers to discover both the fascinating story of her life, and her once highly acclaimed writing.
• ‘Oceania,’ Art of the Islands
  “Oceania” is not the historical, ethnographic show that Western museum-goers might expect. At the entrance a shimmering wave of blue material cascades from the ceiling. Titled Kiko Moana, this flowing wave uses ancient techniques of weaving, embroidery, layering, and cutting, but it’s a contemporary work in polyethylene and cotton, created by four Maori women from the Mata Aho Collective in New Zealand who have also compiled an online archive of stories about the supernatural spirits of the waters. Old and new technologies meet.
• My Father’s Art
  It is my experience that most people in the arts feel a kind of comfort in lacking worldly success. They fight for it, and suffer over it, but it is so much safer not to have it—safer from envy, judgment, exposure; from the dangers attendant on superseding parents or companions—that, either through the work itself or by way of fumbling encounters with the world, they ensure it won’t happen. But this doesn’t seem true of my father. I think he naïvely, to the end, possibly through arrogance, expected the work to be its own ambassador. It had once been enough.
• The Prophet of Envy
  René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the last of that race of Titans who dominated the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their grand, synthetic theories about history, society, psychology, and aesthetics. That race has since given way to a more cautious breed of “researchers” who prefer to look at things up close, to see their fine grain rather than their larger patterns. Yet the times certainly seem to attest to the enduring relevance of Girard’s thought to our social and political realities. Not only are his ideas about mimetic desire and human violence as far-reaching as Marx’s theories of political economy or Freud’s claims about the Oedipus complex, but the explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably “Girardian” in its behavior.
• Sing, Goddess
  The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker’s unsentimental and beautiful new novel, tells the story of the Iliad as experienced by women captives, from inside the Greek camp overlooking the walls of the besieged city of Troy. They are the Greek heroes’ prizes, taken from conquered outlying towns and villages to be prostitutes, domestic workers, and, on occasion, wives.
• The Impersonator
  The major surprise of Jeremy Thorpe’s trial in 1979 for conspiracy to murder was his decision not to take the stand—it seems that his counsel, alert to his client’s histrionic tendencies, foresaw the dangers of Oscar Wilde–like showing-off and self-incrimination. No witnesses were called for the defense, and the narrative of events concerning Thorpe was entirely established by the prosecution: his affair, as a young MP in the early 1960s, with a stable hand and model named Norman Scott; Scott’s repeated attempts to go public with the story (all firmly smothered by the police as well as the press); and the subsequent conspiracy to murder Scott, who had become a threat not only to Thorpe but to the Liberal Party of which he was by then the leader. The defense’s case consisted simply of discrediting the prosecution’s witnesses.
• The Nuclear Option
  To the Editors: In your article “A Very Grim Forecast” about global warming you state that vast quantities of renewable technology have been deployed in China and India. However, you fail to mention that the “vast fleet” of new Chinese electric buses will be powered by electricity generated by nuclear power plants.
• A True Pogonophile
  To the Editors: I am surely not the only reader who will rush to correct this sentence by Ruth Bernard Yeazell: “Julia Margaret Cameron remains alone among [Kathryn] Hughes’s women in her ‘pogonophilia,’ but she wasn’t living with her bearded subjects.”
• What Men Want
  To the Editors: I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Male Trouble” on the plane, flanked by men in their thirties and forties watching Spider-Man and similar action fare. Hochschild’s article recognizes but does not ultimately come to grips with the impact of losing the physical connection to work found, as she describes, in coal mines, assembly lines, oil rigs, and steel mills.
• How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right
  President Trump is no mere entertainer or buffoon, as many want to believe. Instead, he is carefully, skillfully, and consistently speaking directly to his hardline nationalist supporters in their exact language, making their tropes and memes his own. We have been insufficiently attentive to how carefully crafted and targeted Trump’s new right discourse and politics are, how they deliberately encourage and mobilize extremists, and normalize them as a crucial political constituency. We tend to say that Trump is “dog-whistling” to white nationalists and supremacists; but it is far more serious than that. President Trump is enabling extremist violence through what sociologists refer to as “scripted violence.”
• The Bills of The Great War
  To the Editors: Christopher Browning writes that “the Dawes and Young Plans [were] aimed at ensuring that our ‘free-loading’ former allies could pay back their war loans.” I always understood these successive plans (1924 and 1929, respectively) as designed to scale down the reparations burden imposed on Germany by the Versailles treaty, which ended World War I. Our former allies may have found repayment of war loans burdensome, considering especially the deflationary monetary policies they followed in the interwar era; but nowhere have I read that they sought to shirk their obligations, as Browning’s statement implies.
• Is Literary Glory Worth Chasing?
  Is writing worth it? Does it make any sense at all to pursue literary glory? Are the writers we praise really the best anyway? In 1824, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi decided to take on the subject in a thirty-page essay, of kinds. In fact, he puts his reflections somewhat playfully in the mouth of Giuseppe Parini, perhaps the finest Italian poet of the eighteenth century, a man from a poor family who spent all his life seeking financial and political protection in the homes of the aristocracy. What follows here is nothing more than a brief summary of what he says. Judge for yourself how much of this rings true today.
• What Cold War Liberalism Can Teach Us Today
  Liberalism is in crisis, we’re told, assailed on left and right by rising populists and authoritarians. The center cannot hold, they say. But if liberal democracy itself is under threat of collapse because of this weakened center, why are the great defenders of the “open society” such as Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Popper, and Raymond Aron so little invoked?
• Justifying Diversity
  No one working in or around a US university can think of assembling a class, a set of interviewees for a job, a special issue of a journal, or a scholarly panel without making sure it is suitably “diverse.” Not only admissions officers but students, faculty, and administrators share a commitment to diversity. Even some conservatives have appropriated the concept, calling for ideological diversity at universities to ensure that their own voices are heard. Yet in the courts, diversity is being subjected to a withering attack, one that most informed observers expect to be fatal now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has been replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
• India’s Dangerous New Curriculum
  Since last year, students at the Saifee School in Rajasthan have been using new textbooks published by the government, which is run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that dominates India’s parliament and state legislatures. The new textbooks promote the BJP’s political program and ideology. They argue for the veracity of Vedic myths, glorify ancient and medieval Hindu rulers, recast the independence movement as a violent battle led largely by Hindu chauvinists, demand loyalty to the state, and praise the policies of the BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi.
• New York City’s New Nightlife Mayor
  This year, Ariel Palitz was appointed as the senior executive director of New York City’s Office of Nightlife, the city’s first. In New York, the idea was championed by a city councilman who saw some of his favorite bars and smaller music venues close, and others receiving little help when threatened by rising rents or trouble complying with city codes. Palitz describes herself as a liaison between the city agencies, nightlife businesses, owners, residents, employees, patrons, and entertainers. Her colleagues call her the night mayor.
• Anna Atkins & Photography’s Blue Beginnings
  In 1843, Anna Atkins, daughter of the prominent British scientist John George Children, began work on her book of photograms (the full edition of which would include over 400 prints) documenting specimens of British algae, what is now considered the first book to be fully illustrated with photography and the first use of photography for scientific documentation. Two exhibitions at the New York Public Library’s Schwarzman Building, “Blue Prints” and “Anna Atkins Refracted,” celebrate this astonishing historical achievement, as well as the legacy of Atkins’s work for contemporary artists.
• The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam
  Like today’s China, the Qing Dynasty that ruled for nearly three centuries from 1644 was a multi-ethnic empire but the underlying assumption was that the state should determine orthodoxy and heterodoxy. For those who assimilated, the state was generous. But for those whose beliefs didn’t fit the mold, magnanimity turned to suppression. It would be tempting to say that this is typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But its approach to Muslim presence in China is part of an older, deeper problem.
• Saboteur in Chief
  Americans tend to think they have the best system of government in the world. Yet from the outside, one aspect of it seems insane. Most functioning democracies have a permanent civil service that is legally obliged to be politically neutral. It takes orders from elected politicians but is protected from subversion by protocols of parliamentary accountability and the difficulty of firing its members. In the US, there is of course a vast permanent public service of two million employees. But the top layers of each department and institution are made up of four thousand presidential appointees. Not only is there no continuity of management, but chaos is easy to create. All an incoming president needs to do is appoint people to these agencies who should not be allowed anywhere near them—or indeed appoint no one at all. There is in the US system an opportunity to abuse power by simply declining to use it.
• That Formal Feeling
  In a recent thread about sonnets on Twitter, the poet and critic Dana Levin remarked that traditional forms “have resurged.” She added, “Why is that? Is it the way it can hold all our screaming?” When we feel helpless, do metrical forms offer the illusion of control? Or are we drawn to tradition itself, because it’s familiar, and therefore comforting?
• On Being a Jew-ish Schoolboy
  There was a sketch performed by the comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe many years ago, in which Jonathan Miller (still with us, thankfully) said that he wasn’t a Jew, but that he was “Jew-ish.” That got a laugh in the 1960s; a shocked laugh, perhaps, but that was what was aimed for. Whether it would get a laugh these days, I am not sure. Every single Jew I know, and I know plenty, observant or not, confesses nowadays to being suddenly very aware of their Jewishness, and alive to the potential reaction it can provoke. If someone like me, with only the haziest notion of what the Torah or the Talmud are, can be a target for anti-Semitic abuse, I wonder at how much hatred is out there, waiting to boil over again.
• Breaking Through the House Ceiling
  On November 28, the Democratic Caucus, including all the newly elected members, will gather for a closed-door meeting to select nominees for the senior leadership positions. The nominees will then go to a floor vote on January 3, the first day of Congress’s next session. These elections will be the first opportunity for new members to assert themselves. Many of the newly elected women campaigned on promises of change, different voices, and fresh leadership, and some were explicit in their opposition to Nancy Pelosi.
• The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life
  Modern psychopharmacology goes hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnostic system that has, over time, been redefined to rely on medicating symptoms away rather than looking at the structure of the mind and its complex permutations in order to work with a patient in a deeply engaged way over the long haul. Modern psychiatry is hailed as a scientific success story, and drug companies have profited from the fact that talking therapies are often thought to take too long, their results frequently dismissed as unverifiable. I question, though, whether we should demand verified results when it comes to our mental life: Do you believe someone who promises you happiness in a pill?
• Music Without a Destination
  No matter the form his music takes—from sparkling, quicksilver piano pieces to grand orchestral essays—there is across Debussy’s entire oeuvre an extraordinary unity of texture. Its essential quality is a spacious beauty, a lushness without thickness, which his biographer Stephen Walsh intelligently ascribes in part to Debussy’s preference for whole tones. Music whose basic interval is the whole tone—an interval of two half-steps, that is, two piano keys—is inherently spacious; there is more room for light to filter through. In Walsh’s words, “whole-tone harmony...lacks that onward push that we associate with tonal music.” This is another essential quality of Debussy’s music: late-Romantic harmonies that tend, in Wagner’s hands, to strain sweatily toward a climax are transformed through Debussy’s alchemy into mysterious floating oases, worth luxuriating in for their own sake.
• The Prophets, Angels, & Churches of ‘Armenia!’
  The exclamation mark following the word “Armenia” in the exhibition’s title—curator Helen Evans’s idea—was meant to convey her surprise that Armenian art and culture aren’t studied more or better known. The objects on display range from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries and represent the different regions Armenians inhabited. Armenia was one of the first states to adopt the Christian religion—as early as AD 301—and its history has been defined both by this, its status as an outpost of Eastern Orthodox religion surrounded by Muslim neighbors, and by its role in establishing trade routes from China and India to Western Europe, and from Egypt and the Holy Land to Russia.
• Not in Our Grandchildren’s Lifetime
  It takes a century for a pinyon forest to return to what it was before a fire. The Jemez are mostly pine trees, not pinyons or cedars, and within the pine forest are ponderosa pines, which grow straight as an arrow, often have diameters of over three feet, and tower far into the sky. They make beautiful burnt corpses. The smaller pines are a lot less interesting, either alive or dead—when they look like matchsticks blown down by a hurricane.
• Opioid Nation
  The opioid epidemic is usually seen as a supply problem. If we can interdict the supply of prescription opioids, the thinking goes, we can stanch the epidemic. But that is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, this is no longer mainly an epidemic of prescription drugs but of street drugs. And second, it creates an onerous obstacle for doctors and outpatients who require pain treatment.
• Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller
  Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, are inextricably entwined. By Nigel Farage. By Cambridge Analytica. By Steve Bannon. By the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, who has been identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The same questions that dog the US election dog ours, too. There is one vital difference on this between the US and the UK. America has the Mueller investigation.
• The Other Constitutions
  In a law review article published over forty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan argued that state constitutions are a “font of individual liberties” and that their protections, in matters like search and seizures and the right to a jury trial, often extend beyond the protections of federal law. In 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law, Jeffrey Sutton, a well-respected judge who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, endorses Brennan’s thesis and provides four examples in which state constitutional protections were or are more robust than federal ones. These examples demonstrate that the law may be best served if proponents of a new or expanded right give priority to a claim based on their state constitution, and that state judiciaries can set an example for the federal judiciary.
• Our Concentration Camps: An Open Letter
  This generation will be remembered for having allowed concentration camps for children to be built in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is happening here and now, but not in our names.
• In the Review Archives: 2000–2004
  To celebrate the Review’s fifty-fifth anniversary in 2018, we have been going back into our archives year by year. Today we go back to the turn of the millennium, with Tatyana Tolstaya on Russia’s new president, Tony Judt on the future of Israel, James McPherson on enduring Civil War fantasies, William Nordhaus on what war in Iraq would cost, and Marcia Angell on the deceptions of the pharmaceutical industry.
• Decolonizing Commemoration: New War Art
  Official betrayal was epitomized in Britain by the Victory Parade of July 19, 1919. Lutyens, whose Cenotaph in London was the saluting point, may have sought to embrace all the Empire faithful, but Colonial Office officials deemed it “impolitic to bring coloured detachments to participate in the peace processions.” Indians were among the 15,000 soldiers and sailors on parade, but West Indians and Nigerians were not. Today, a wave of work by artists and historians is challenging World War I’s monochrome image, raising profound questions about the selectiveness of remembrance and how those who have been willfully erased can best be restored to memory.
• How Brexit Broke Up Britain
  There is overwhelming evidence that the English people who voted for Brexit do not, on the whole, care about the United Kingdom and in particular that part of it called Northern Ireland. Asked whether “the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit, fully 83 percent of Leave voters and 73 percent of Conservative voters in England agree that it is. So, while the people who voted for Brexit are waving goodbye to the United Kingdom, Theresa May—with, in this, the support of Corbyn’s Labour—has vowed to “always fight to strengthen and sustain this precious, precious Union.” Brexit cannot be properly articulated because it has made a sacred cause of fighting for the very thing Brexit voters don’t care about.
• ‘I’m not the Resistance, I’m a reporter’: An Interview with April Ryan
  Claudia Dreifus: If your predecessor as the dean of the White House press corps, the late Helen Thomas, could come down from journalism heaven, what do you think she’d tell you? April Ryan: “Keep doing what you’re doing.” She’d be the first person banging on the door for answers. She had the doors closed quite a bit on her, though it never stopped her. But people in power were afraid of her. She wielded real power. Like her, I’m not looking for approval. I’m looking to do my job.
• An Artist’s Menagerie
  This seal belongs to the Brooklyn Zoo. She barks like a dog and even looks a bit like a dog. She also looks like an old man—Winston Churchill, specifically—and depending on her expression, like another, more contemporary politician who will remain nameless. She is a fantastic swimmer. She catches small fish and the children love to watch. Altogether, she seems content enough with her life, if a bit pensive.

New York Times Books©

• Books of The Times: A Memoir That Might Inspire You to Break a Sweat
  Peter Sagal, the host of “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR, writes about the rigors and rewards of his life as a runner in “The Incomplete Book of Running.”
• The Best Poetry of 2018
  The Book Review’s poetry columnist, David Orr, picks 10 collections worth your attention.
• Times Critics’ Top Books of 2018
  The Times’s staff critics give their choices of the best fiction and nonfiction works of the year.
• Books News: A New Book About Mussolini Is Provoking a Debate Over His Legacy
  Antonio Scurati, the author of “M,” sees his book as an anti-fascist history lesson disguised as a novel. Others disagree.
• The 10 Best Books of 2018
  The editors of The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.
• Nonfiction: Isabel Wilkerson on Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ and the Great Migration
  The former first lady’s long-awaited new memoir recounts with insight, candor and wit her family’s trajectory from the Jim Crow South to Chicago’s South Side and her own improbable journey from there to the White House.
• The Book Review Podcast: Immaturity in American Politics
  Alan Wolfe discusses “The Politics of Petulance,” and Nadja Spiegelman talks about two books by Lucia Berlin.
• Further Reading: Do You Love ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’? Then Read These Books.
  Whether you want to dip into a novel that evokes Midge Maisel’s New York City or pick up a sparkling history of 1950s comedy, we’ve got some recommendations for you.
• Poetry: From an Iconoclast and an Icon, Poems of Personal and Public Transformation
  In “Evolution,” Eileen Myles makes us reconsider the nature of experience and imagination.
• New & Noteworthy
  A selection of books published this week; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Front Burner: The English Christmas Decoded
  Nigel Slater’s newest tome is a guidebook to the winter season, with recipes for mincemeat and flavored spirits, and history and lore.
• Newsbook: President Trump Seeks New Chief of Staff. 3 Books Show Why His Next Pick Matters.
  From Nixon’s White House to Obama’s, these books highlight presidential right-hand men and their outsize power.
• David Sedaris’s Back Pages, Before ‘SantaLand’ Made Him a Star
  The writer’s archive, which has just been bought by Yale, includes his voluminous diaries and other private handmade books.
• Books News: John le Carré’s Next Novel to Land in 2019
  “Agent Running in the Field” will feature a 26-year-old character navigating political turmoil in present-day London.
• Essay: Suddenly, Poets Are More Willing to Address Public Concerns. The Poet Laureate Explores Why, and How.
  Tracy K. Smith, the United States poet laureate, looks at the ways poetry has dealt with the shifting political landscapes of the past two decades.
• Essay: ‘Change Your Life,’ the Poet Says, and a Rural Idyll Offers a Tantalizing Choice
  A Brooklyn novelist’s annual trip to the Chilean countryside fuels daydreams of permanently moving. But peace and quiet can be so, well, exasperating.
• Times Insider: What Goes Into Our End-of-Year Books Lists
  By the end of a typical year, hundreds of thousands of books in various styles, genres and subject areas are published. These three lists are meant to help you make sense of it all.
• Books News: Crown Publisher and Editor of Michelle Obama’s Memoir Is Leaving
  Molly Stern will be replaced by David Drake. Gillian Blake will leave Henry Holt for Crown. The changes reflect a cyclical shift in the industry.
• After Dispute, ‘Mockingbird’ Blends Novel’s Spirit and Sorkin’s Voice Onstage
  Harper Lee’s estate objected to elements of Aaron Sorkin’s early stage adaptation. Now it arrives on Broadway with concessions from both sides.
• Nonfiction: The Real-Life Heroine Who Inspired a Character on ‘Boardwalk Empire’
  With “Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster,” Stephen L. Carter celebrates his extraordinary grandmother.
• Nonfiction: A Fresh Look at How Poets Evolve Over the Course of a Career
  In “We Begin in Gladness,” the poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher considers poets from W.S. Merwin to francine j. harris, in light of changes in their language and their influence on one another.
• Nonfiction: Colm Toibin on the Fathers of Geniuses
  “Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know” recounts the lives of the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce — and the chaos they created.
• P.M. Forni, Who Argued for ‘Choosing Civility,’ Dies at 67
  In two books he wrote about rudeness and how to avoid it. He also started a program to encourage the practice of good manners.
• Children’s Books: Picture Books That Celebrate a Grandparent’s Selfless Love
  There’s nothing like the bond between grandparent and grandchild. New books by Tomie dePaola, Cecilia Ruiz and more show it in many forms.
• Sketchbook | Tribute: Edward Carey Illustrates a Homage to Charles Dickens
  A nod to the classic English bildungsroman “Great Expectations,” first serialized in December 1860.
• The Shortlist: Shrewd Short Stories That Merge the Hopeless and the Hopeful
  Four collections, in settings that range from Glasgow to an island in the Pacific Northwest, sketch troubled lives and a yearning for better times.
• Nonfiction: Two Leading Intellectuals Analyze What Ails America
  Alan Wolfe’s “The Politics of Petulance” and Lawrence Lessig’s “America, Compromised” offer differing diagnoses of the condition of the country.
• Nonfiction: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court Supreme
  Richard Brookhiser’s “John Marshall” looks at the accomplishments of the legendary chief justice and draws lessons for today.
• Fiction: A Timely Dystopian Thriller With Sexual Assault and Political Corruption at Its Core
  “Those Who Knew,” a new novel by Idra Novey, takes place on an unnamed island, but in a world beset by problems unnervingly like our own.
• New in Paperback: ‘Afterglow (a dog memoir),’ ‘The Odyssey’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• Fiction: A Parable About Good, Evil and the Inevitable
  A.L. Kennedy’s novella “The Little Snake” conjures the story of a young girl’s friendship with a strangely powerful creature and how it will shape her life.
• Inside the List: The Paper Published a Holiday Books Guide in 1851 — and Every Year Since
  It turns out that people have liked to give books as gifts for a long time. Here’s a peek at how tastes have changed over the years.
• Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Fiction: ‘Love Is Blind,’ but Lust Isn’t
  In William Boyd’s novel of desire and deceit, a hunky Scottish piano tuner falls for a sexy Russian soprano.
• Books News: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Next Short Story Will Be an Audible Original
  The best-selling writer of “Prep,” “Eligible” and other novels edited “Atomic Marriage” with audio in mind.
• Nonfiction: Books About Losing Faith That Will Give You Hope
  In “Interior States,” Megan O’Gieblyn reconsiders her evangelical upbringing, and in “What if This Were Enough?” Heather Havrilesky renounces the “enforced cheer” of American culture.
• Editors’ Choice: 11 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Books of The Times: Revelations and Reckonings in a Sex Scandal From Long Before #MeToo
  In “Bringing Down the Colonel,” Patricia Miller unearths the 19th-century case of Madeline Pollard, who sued a five-term House representative for breach of promise to marry.
• Newsbook: 3 Books About George H.W. Bush’s Legacy
  The elder Bush died on Friday, and the public is now reckoning with his legacy.
• The Art of Reading: The Way We Read
  Donald and Patricia Oresman’s 550-piece art collection was auctioned recently. Every piece had one thing in common: People were reading in them.
• Nonfiction: Was Saul Bellow a Man or a Jerk? Both, a Monumental Biography Concludes
  The second and final volume of Zachary Leader’s “The Life of Saul Bellow” is a portrait of a writer struggling to contend with the consequences of fame.
• Books of The Times: ‘The Barefoot Woman’ Keeps a Mother’s Memory Alive
  Scholastique Mukasonga’s newly translated memoir is about the impact of the Rwandan genocide, during which 37 of her family members were killed.
• Nonfiction: A Scholar of Religion Confronts Her Own Grief
  In her memoir, “Why Religion?,” Elaine Pagels tells the story of her own deep loss and her search for answers in faith and spirituality.
• The Best Baking Cookbooks of 2018
  Life is hard enough. Baking doesn’t have to be. Our three favorite books inspire but don’t intimidate.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• The Expensive Superficiality of M.F.A. Programs
  They exist to train aspiring artists in how to sound sophisticated — not how to create art.
• Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
  Why we should stop tolerating their dishonesty.
• Should Studying Literature Be Fun?
  “No” is too often the answer, as scholars signal their professionalism.
• How Affirmative Action Really Works
  Understanding it is crucial, especially now that it’s in existential peril.
• How Professors Ceded Their Authority
  Education and moral purpose have parted ways.
• ‘Why Does This Sentence Feel Like a Bullet in My Gut?’
  Reading for self-knowledge is not fashionable in the academy, but it’s exactly what our students need.
• The Problem Is Bad Interdisciplinarity
  A response to my critics.
• ‘The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril’
  Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined.
• Why We Love to Hate English Professors
  They think they’re the center of the university. They’re not.
• The Real Cause of the Humanities’ Woes
  A response to Michael Clune.
• Who Will Defend the University?
  The academy has nurtured many partisan causes, but there seem to be few partisans of the academy itself left.
• An Underground Sensation Arrives
  The three-decade publication saga of a revered manuscript.
• Your Turn: Tell Us Which Books Are Most Influential
  We asked scholars to send us their selections. Now we invite you to weigh in with agreements, disagreements, and nominations of your own.
• What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?
  Scholars from across the academy give us their picks.
• How Colleges Make Themselves Easy Targets
  Shutting down speech bolsters the university’s opponents.
• The Bizarro World of Literary Studies
  The field has never reckoned with its own mistakes.
• When Argument Becomes Bloodsport
  Philosophy is mired in wanton pugilism.
• The Godfather of Gay Studies
  Nearing his 90s, Martin Duberman argues that the movement for equality has faltered.
• The Interdisciplinary Delusion
  Saving disciplines is the only way to save ourselves.
• What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means
  Is it proof of shoddy scholarly standards, antipathy against academe, or something else entirely?