Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©
- Risk, Originality, CommitmentOnce, when explaining—that is to say, justifying—my interest in Andrea Dworkin to a receptive acquaintance, I began by insisting on Dworkin’s literariness. It seemed a less perilous way to recuperate her in their esteem than her politics. Literariness can be curious, ahistorical, a supple cover for all kinds of quirks, under which the unseemly or […]
- DrenchedThe February art newsletter, written while we worked on the first two issues of the year, comes to you from across the high Sierras, amid the historic rainfall and flooding in California. I flew to San Francisco when the January 19 issue was published and we began piecing the February 9 issue together. The coastal […]
- The Lore of the RingsOne September day in 1914, a young J.R.R. Tolkien, in his final undergraduate year at Oxford, came across an Old English advent poem called “Christ A.” Part of it reads, “Éalá Éarendel engla beorhtast/ofer middangeard monnum sended,” which he later rendered: “Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men!” Safe in his aunt’s […]
- Beauty and UtilityIn the Review’s December 22, 2022, issue, architecture critic Martin Filler wrote about the “undulating lines, swirling excesses, and propulsive forms” that characterized the turn-of-the-century movement Art Nouveau. Admiring its “vulgar and on occasion blatantly sexy” qualities, he argued that “this novel aesthetic caught on so completely because it presented modernism garbed in the raiment […]
- Putin’s MiscalculationThe most stunning geopolitical surprise of the past year is how poorly the Russian military has been fighting in Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022, everyone—including the US intelligence analysts who had predicted it—assumed that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv would fall within a few weeks or even days and be […]
- White FrightPoor Big Guy. When we meet him at the start of A.M. Homes’s novel The Unfolding, his candidate for president has just lost, his alcoholic wife seems to hate him, and his sweet, doting daughter is starting to suspect he’s a jerk. It’s election night, 2008, and he’s at the bar of the Biltmore Hotel […]
- The Other CubaUpon entering “Sin Autorización” (Without Authorization), an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, one encountered a large free-standing wall covered with screenshots of Facebook messages in Spanish railing against Cuban authorities, calling for more protests, and demanding freedom for political prisoners: “HAVANA IS IN THE STREET, EVERYONE HIT THE STREET”; “Today is a beautiful day […]
- Friends: A Love StoryVirginia Woolf famously complained that there were too few novels about women’s “relationships” with other women. Her point, which has its own chapter in A Room of One’s Own (1929), is that plots involving women have, “almost without exception,” hung on their ties to men. She imagines taking a new novel off the shelf at […]
- Victimhood and VengeanceWe tend to think of Christian nationalism, the political ideology based on the belief that the country’s authentic identity lies in its Christian roots and in the perpetuation of Christian privilege, as having burst upon the scene to accompany and facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. But as Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry explain in […]
- Sonnets for the StateWilliam Shakespeare’s best-remembered sonnet compared someone to a summer’s day. The poet Johannes Becher, once East Germany’s minister of culture, compared the essence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to a sonnet. According to Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle, he “believed that sonnets structurally mirrored the Marxist view of historical progress,” the materialist version […]
- Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’In 1918 the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal began writing down his dreams. Some were brief—“I attend a diplomatic soiree and as I am leaving my pants fall down”; “Thieves break in. And I said to them: do not kill me, and they took out a revolver but later it turns out it was […]
- Going to ExtremesOver the years I’ve had conversations with friends, often artists, who tell me they much prefer Bonnard to Matisse and Braque to Picasso. For them it’s Bonnard, not Matisse, who understands the poetry of the everyday. And it’s Braque, not Picasso, who gives Cubism a lyric power. Their feeling is that Bonnard and Braque were […]
- ‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’Between 1949 and 1953 Mina Loy was a well-known character around the Bowery, a ghostly figure in white face powder and a wine-red dressing gown, prowling the streets and poking into trash cans for detritus to squirrel away in her single room in a communal household on Stanton Street. Her poetry was out of print […]
- Reckoning with SilenceDionne Brand is well represented by Nomenclature, a collection of eight volumes of her poetry accompanied by an important new work. Beginning with Primitive Offensive (1982) and ending with Ossuaries (2010), the book confirms that Brand has always been a meticulous but dynamic stylist for whom form is motivated by the desire to take “history’s […]
- Grim ReapersWe are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping […]
- SalliesIn the afternoon four black-throated bluesTossed themselves up from the pavement at nothing.At the rain. And having made a surgeon take backHis stitches early, I lifted my phoneBeyond the shelter of my unsteady umbrellaAnd tapped at their cursive capital Gs.Suddenly I felt ashamed. You could seeI had nothing better to do. I stopped. Four in […]
- ICESo the road welcomed the ice. And the ice lay down.Water the bulk of everyblood cell already. Solidarity, sister! When spring comeswe take notice afterwinter’s long fierce sloppy drives through winter.Spring is a forgiveness,a forgetfulness. That old saw—60 percent of us soakedor drunk silly with water? I mean, water!friend for life.At a phone in a public booth […]
- Arias of DespairThe Hours began as a novel by Michael Cunningham in 1998, then found a wider audience as a movie directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002. Now Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce have adapted it as an opera, which premiered at the Met in November to unusually high interest. Opera has been in the adaptation game […]
- Beyond the PaleHow the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich is a scholarly work, but it also presents urgent perspectives for any post-Soviet Jewish American who has ever entertained the question What made my parents the way they are? What accounts for their dark view of the world, their elevated sense of humor and irony, and, […]
- On John Edgar WidemanTo the Editors: In “A Dream of a Great Burning” [NYR, December 22, 2022], Tobi Haslett’s long look at the writing career of John Edgar Wideman, there is much to value. From the jump, Haslett frames Wideman true: “a black intellectual—full of grandeur and agony, rage and poise.” Yet in some fundamental way Haslett misses […]
- Duck, Duck, GoosefishTo the Editors: Rebecca Giggs, in her delightful review of Sandra Steingraber’s The Sea Trilogy, a new edition of Rachel Carson’s beloved books [NYR, December 22, 2022], has reminded me of an old friend, Lophius. A marine inhabitant of the US East Coast, from where Carson drew her inspiration, Lophius is Lophius americanus (its Latin […]
- Out of Sight, Out of MindIt was Christmas week, New York City was facing off against a dangerous winter storm, and the mayor was nowhere to be found. The fact that this sentence could have been written in 2010 for Mayor Michael Bloomberg as it is being written about Mayor Eric Adams at the start of 2023 points to a […]
- Misreading the CuesOne night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point—their lives are so unlike his own. […]
- The Grassroots of ‘Roe’A few days before Thanksgiving in 1968 my mother, Beatrice Kornbluh, a labor lawyer and member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), took time away from her job and three daughters to address her newly elected representative to the New York State Assembly, Franz Leichter. “Dear Franz,” she wrote, “Enclosed is an abortion repeal […]
- Man About the HouseDemocrats could be forgiven for experiencing some schadenfreude during Kevin McCarthy’s chaotic, protracted election as Speaker of the House, but in an essay from the January 19, 2023, issue of the Review, Alexander Burns argues that relying on Republican dysfunction is not a sound electoral strategy, especially when the structure of the Senate so strongly […]
- A New Flame for Black FireI got a real break in 1963. I’d been living in New York for a year and had just moved from a rooming house on St. Mark’s Place to an apartment on East Sixth Street, across from Tompkins Square Park. I paid eight dollars a week at the rooming house and sixty a month for […]
- Behind the MaskButterflies recur in Meret Oppenheim’s art: the many-eyed face at the top of her 1969 assemblage of painted canvas and carved wood, Hm-hm, its “nose” a shaped piece of bark; the tiny wings flitting at the edge of her ink and gouache drawing, Self-Portrait and Curriculum Vitae since the Year 60,000 BC (1966), the cross-section […]
- Reconstructing UkraineIt is not well understood how heavily the shadow of the violent breakup of Yugoslavia hangs over Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and his allies frequently cite the case of Kosovo, which was once Serbia’s southern province and declared independence in 2008, as a precedent for Russia’s recognition—and subsequent annexation—of Crimea in 2014 and parts of eastern […]
- A Great Variety of SelvesLate one night toward the end of September 1927, wavering between consciousness and sleep, Virginia Woolf came up with an idea for a book: to sketch, “like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends.” The next morning, she recorded the thought in her diary. “It might be a most amusing book. The […]
- ‘A Trusted Guide’In “When Diversity Matters,” from the Review’s January 19 issue, Sherrilyn Ifill analyzes the affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court this term—Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College—and the distinct place of oral arguments, as opposed to written briefs, in […]
- ‘Endless Organic Growth’The face is a mask, vaguely leonine, narrowing from its enormous eyes to a snout of flared nostrils and a small mouth, twisted into what might be a grimace or a grin. The contours of the nose branch up into a network of wrinkles around the eyes, then extend out into fiddlehead ferns sprouting from […]
- Mysterious Displays of WillNadine Hwang led a dauntless life. What she did over the course of the twentieth century makes her sound like a superheroic projection from the twenty-first: a queer, Chinese fighter pilot and lawyer with a sword-dancing act who spoke at least four languages and survived a concentration camp, then ran away to Venezuela with the […]
- Making the Senate Work for DemocratsIn December 2008, as he prepared to assume the presidency, Barack Obama shared a provocative observation with Nancy Pelosi about the American system of government. The United States Senate, Obama told her, had in some ways “outlived its purpose.” In Obama’s reckoning, the Senate had altogether too much clout and too often served to diminish […]
- Feinting SpellsIn 1936 Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, drew a flowchart of recent art developments to accompany “Cubism and Abstract Art,” one of the museum’s defining exhibitions. Printed on the catalog cover and styled with the look of empirical rigor, the diagram outlines a complex and seemingly inexorable momentum from figuration, at […]
- Alphabet PoliticsLast summer a group of scholars announced that they had cracked Linear Elamite, a Bronze Age script used in the trading cities of Elam in the highlands of southern Iran, through which Central Asian tin, a crucial ingredient in bronze, was transported north to the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.1 First identified by archaeologists […]
- The Encyclopedia of the DanceIn A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagined “what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister.” She concluded that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half […]
- Dress RehearsalTo understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan […]
- FlakesIn March 2021, as the New York winter refused to quit and tiny husks spread across my skin, plastering first my elbows, then my upper arms, underarms, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, and shins, I booked a room at a cheap hotel in Nassau for a week. I was in the Bahamas nominally to renew my US […]
- Kilowatt HourI didn’t pin it as grief at first, the feelingof imagining placing myselfin the path of that truck, but of courseit was grief, grief for myselfin the future—not being arounddown the road to feel it, I had to startfeeling it now, I had to make sure I would not leave the world with my feelingsunfinished, […]
- Luminariafor Grace Schulman Once you gave them to the children: those stems of pallid moons from your seaside garden, and they stood there exultant with their chandeliers of Hosts turning this way and that, their elbows and knees stiff like moments in a dance, moving to the shuffle of tiny drumheads in an orchestra of […]
- Fear and Oil in UgandaIn 2018 Jealousy Mugisha drew up a list of ten goals for his family over the next ten years. He wanted to rear goats and pigs on his farm in Uganda’s Buliisa district, a rural region bordering Lake Albert. He hoped to send his children to a good school. At the same time plans for […]
- Ukraine’s VolunteersIt was dark and getting colder. The four-wheel drive was slipping and straining as we tried to yank the van out of a muddy field. We had already lightened it by unloading hundreds of loaves of bread, detergent, toilet paper, tampons, soap, and a generator, when suddenly we heard a low roar approaching. Then, over […]
- Living Outside of TimeHaving won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer. A literary scholar as well as a novelist—or, […]
- The Faces of Victor Serge“Yesterday, the gigantic rocks of Montserrat glowing red in the distance…”; “four days ago, I was looking at the great glow outspread in the night sky over Berlin…”; “the vast deserted square, bathed in a strange, extremely pale blue dawn glow…”; “a great red glow from the tumultuous squares…”; “the Popo puts me in mind […]
- RemaindersIn the introduction to her now classic Pleasure of Ruins (1953), the British writer Rose Macaulay conceives multiple reasons for the complex pleasure we take in decay, from the imaginary reconstruction of a ruin to the “masochistic joy” in common destruction. Nearly seventy years later the American literary critic Susan Stewart, in The Ruins Lesson, […]
- Carlotta’s BrooklynThe title of James Hannaham’s new novel is at once a potential deterrent to fainthearted readers and a bold declaration of its author’s unwavering fidelity to his heroine’s forceful voice, her highly energized inner life. If Carlotta Mercedes—a Black and Colombian trans woman—could turn her personal history into “a Lifetime TV miniseries event,” Didn’t Nobody […]
- The InstrumentalistDuring the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious—actorly, even. As […]
Once, when explaining—that is to say, justifying—my interest in Andrea Dworkin to a receptive acquaintance, I began by insisting on Dworkin’s literariness. It seemed a less perilous way to recuperate her in their esteem than her politics. Literariness can be curious, ahistorical, a supple cover for all kinds of quirks, under which the unseemly or […]
The February art newsletter, written while we worked on the first two issues of the year, comes to you from across the high Sierras, amid the historic rainfall and flooding in California. I flew to San Francisco when the January 19 issue was published and we began piecing the February 9 issue together. The coastal […]
One September day in 1914, a young J.R.R. Tolkien, in his final undergraduate year at Oxford, came across an Old English advent poem called “Christ A.” Part of it reads, “Éalá Éarendel engla beorhtast/ofer middangeard monnum sended,” which he later rendered: “Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men!” Safe in his aunt’s […]
In the Review’s December 22, 2022, issue, architecture critic Martin Filler wrote about the “undulating lines, swirling excesses, and propulsive forms” that characterized the turn-of-the-century movement Art Nouveau. Admiring its “vulgar and on occasion blatantly sexy” qualities, he argued that “this novel aesthetic caught on so completely because it presented modernism garbed in the raiment […]
The most stunning geopolitical surprise of the past year is how poorly the Russian military has been fighting in Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022, everyone—including the US intelligence analysts who had predicted it—assumed that Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv would fall within a few weeks or even days and be […]
Poor Big Guy. When we meet him at the start of A.M. Homes’s novel The Unfolding, his candidate for president has just lost, his alcoholic wife seems to hate him, and his sweet, doting daughter is starting to suspect he’s a jerk. It’s election night, 2008, and he’s at the bar of the Biltmore Hotel […]
Upon entering “Sin Autorización” (Without Authorization), an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, one encountered a large free-standing wall covered with screenshots of Facebook messages in Spanish railing against Cuban authorities, calling for more protests, and demanding freedom for political prisoners: “HAVANA IS IN THE STREET, EVERYONE HIT THE STREET”; “Today is a beautiful day […]
Virginia Woolf famously complained that there were too few novels about women’s “relationships” with other women. Her point, which has its own chapter in A Room of One’s Own (1929), is that plots involving women have, “almost without exception,” hung on their ties to men. She imagines taking a new novel off the shelf at […]
We tend to think of Christian nationalism, the political ideology based on the belief that the country’s authentic identity lies in its Christian roots and in the perpetuation of Christian privilege, as having burst upon the scene to accompany and facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. But as Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry explain in […]
William Shakespeare’s best-remembered sonnet compared someone to a summer’s day. The poet Johannes Becher, once East Germany’s minister of culture, compared the essence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to a sonnet. According to Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle, he “believed that sonnets structurally mirrored the Marxist view of historical progress,” the materialist version […]
In 1918 the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal began writing down his dreams. Some were brief—“I attend a diplomatic soiree and as I am leaving my pants fall down”; “Thieves break in. And I said to them: do not kill me, and they took out a revolver but later it turns out it was […]
Over the years I’ve had conversations with friends, often artists, who tell me they much prefer Bonnard to Matisse and Braque to Picasso. For them it’s Bonnard, not Matisse, who understands the poetry of the everyday. And it’s Braque, not Picasso, who gives Cubism a lyric power. Their feeling is that Bonnard and Braque were […]
Between 1949 and 1953 Mina Loy was a well-known character around the Bowery, a ghostly figure in white face powder and a wine-red dressing gown, prowling the streets and poking into trash cans for detritus to squirrel away in her single room in a communal household on Stanton Street. Her poetry was out of print […]
Dionne Brand is well represented by Nomenclature, a collection of eight volumes of her poetry accompanied by an important new work. Beginning with Primitive Offensive (1982) and ending with Ossuaries (2010), the book confirms that Brand has always been a meticulous but dynamic stylist for whom form is motivated by the desire to take “history’s […]
We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping […]
In the afternoon four black-throated bluesTossed themselves up from the pavement at nothing.At the rain. And having made a surgeon take backHis stitches early, I lifted my phoneBeyond the shelter of my unsteady umbrellaAnd tapped at their cursive capital Gs.Suddenly I felt ashamed. You could seeI had nothing better to do. I stopped. Four in […]
So the road welcomed the ice. And the ice lay down.Water the bulk of everyblood cell already. Solidarity, sister! When spring comeswe take notice afterwinter’s long fierce sloppy drives through winter.Spring is a forgiveness,a forgetfulness. That old saw—60 percent of us soakedor drunk silly with water? I mean, water!friend for life.At a phone in a public booth […]
The Hours began as a novel by Michael Cunningham in 1998, then found a wider audience as a movie directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002. Now Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce have adapted it as an opera, which premiered at the Met in November to unusually high interest. Opera has been in the adaptation game […]
How the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich is a scholarly work, but it also presents urgent perspectives for any post-Soviet Jewish American who has ever entertained the question What made my parents the way they are? What accounts for their dark view of the world, their elevated sense of humor and irony, and, […]
To the Editors: In “A Dream of a Great Burning” [NYR, December 22, 2022], Tobi Haslett’s long look at the writing career of John Edgar Wideman, there is much to value. From the jump, Haslett frames Wideman true: “a black intellectual—full of grandeur and agony, rage and poise.” Yet in some fundamental way Haslett misses […]
To the Editors: Rebecca Giggs, in her delightful review of Sandra Steingraber’s The Sea Trilogy, a new edition of Rachel Carson’s beloved books [NYR, December 22, 2022], has reminded me of an old friend, Lophius. A marine inhabitant of the US East Coast, from where Carson drew her inspiration, Lophius is Lophius americanus (its Latin […]
It was Christmas week, New York City was facing off against a dangerous winter storm, and the mayor was nowhere to be found. The fact that this sentence could have been written in 2010 for Mayor Michael Bloomberg as it is being written about Mayor Eric Adams at the start of 2023 points to a […]
One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point—their lives are so unlike his own. […]
A few days before Thanksgiving in 1968 my mother, Beatrice Kornbluh, a labor lawyer and member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), took time away from her job and three daughters to address her newly elected representative to the New York State Assembly, Franz Leichter. “Dear Franz,” she wrote, “Enclosed is an abortion repeal […]
Democrats could be forgiven for experiencing some schadenfreude during Kevin McCarthy’s chaotic, protracted election as Speaker of the House, but in an essay from the January 19, 2023, issue of the Review, Alexander Burns argues that relying on Republican dysfunction is not a sound electoral strategy, especially when the structure of the Senate so strongly […]
I got a real break in 1963. I’d been living in New York for a year and had just moved from a rooming house on St. Mark’s Place to an apartment on East Sixth Street, across from Tompkins Square Park. I paid eight dollars a week at the rooming house and sixty a month for […]
Butterflies recur in Meret Oppenheim’s art: the many-eyed face at the top of her 1969 assemblage of painted canvas and carved wood, Hm-hm, its “nose” a shaped piece of bark; the tiny wings flitting at the edge of her ink and gouache drawing, Self-Portrait and Curriculum Vitae since the Year 60,000 BC (1966), the cross-section […]
It is not well understood how heavily the shadow of the violent breakup of Yugoslavia hangs over Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and his allies frequently cite the case of Kosovo, which was once Serbia’s southern province and declared independence in 2008, as a precedent for Russia’s recognition—and subsequent annexation—of Crimea in 2014 and parts of eastern […]
Late one night toward the end of September 1927, wavering between consciousness and sleep, Virginia Woolf came up with an idea for a book: to sketch, “like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends.” The next morning, she recorded the thought in her diary. “It might be a most amusing book. The […]
In “When Diversity Matters,” from the Review’s January 19 issue, Sherrilyn Ifill analyzes the affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court this term—Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College—and the distinct place of oral arguments, as opposed to written briefs, in […]
The face is a mask, vaguely leonine, narrowing from its enormous eyes to a snout of flared nostrils and a small mouth, twisted into what might be a grimace or a grin. The contours of the nose branch up into a network of wrinkles around the eyes, then extend out into fiddlehead ferns sprouting from […]
Nadine Hwang led a dauntless life. What she did over the course of the twentieth century makes her sound like a superheroic projection from the twenty-first: a queer, Chinese fighter pilot and lawyer with a sword-dancing act who spoke at least four languages and survived a concentration camp, then ran away to Venezuela with the […]
In December 2008, as he prepared to assume the presidency, Barack Obama shared a provocative observation with Nancy Pelosi about the American system of government. The United States Senate, Obama told her, had in some ways “outlived its purpose.” In Obama’s reckoning, the Senate had altogether too much clout and too often served to diminish […]
In 1936 Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, drew a flowchart of recent art developments to accompany “Cubism and Abstract Art,” one of the museum’s defining exhibitions. Printed on the catalog cover and styled with the look of empirical rigor, the diagram outlines a complex and seemingly inexorable momentum from figuration, at […]
Last summer a group of scholars announced that they had cracked Linear Elamite, a Bronze Age script used in the trading cities of Elam in the highlands of southern Iran, through which Central Asian tin, a crucial ingredient in bronze, was transported north to the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.1 First identified by archaeologists […]
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagined “what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister.” She concluded that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half […]
To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan […]
In March 2021, as the New York winter refused to quit and tiny husks spread across my skin, plastering first my elbows, then my upper arms, underarms, eyebrows, eyelids, nostrils, and shins, I booked a room at a cheap hotel in Nassau for a week. I was in the Bahamas nominally to renew my US […]
I didn’t pin it as grief at first, the feelingof imagining placing myselfin the path of that truck, but of courseit was grief, grief for myselfin the future—not being arounddown the road to feel it, I had to startfeeling it now, I had to make sure I would not leave the world with my feelingsunfinished, […]
for Grace Schulman Once you gave them to the children: those stems of pallid moons from your seaside garden, and they stood there exultant with their chandeliers of Hosts turning this way and that, their elbows and knees stiff like moments in a dance, moving to the shuffle of tiny drumheads in an orchestra of […]
In 2018 Jealousy Mugisha drew up a list of ten goals for his family over the next ten years. He wanted to rear goats and pigs on his farm in Uganda’s Buliisa district, a rural region bordering Lake Albert. He hoped to send his children to a good school. At the same time plans for […]
It was dark and getting colder. The four-wheel drive was slipping and straining as we tried to yank the van out of a muddy field. We had already lightened it by unloading hundreds of loaves of bread, detergent, toilet paper, tampons, soap, and a generator, when suddenly we heard a low roar approaching. Then, over […]
Having won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer. A literary scholar as well as a novelist—or, […]
“Yesterday, the gigantic rocks of Montserrat glowing red in the distance…”; “four days ago, I was looking at the great glow outspread in the night sky over Berlin…”; “the vast deserted square, bathed in a strange, extremely pale blue dawn glow…”; “a great red glow from the tumultuous squares…”; “the Popo puts me in mind […]
In the introduction to her now classic Pleasure of Ruins (1953), the British writer Rose Macaulay conceives multiple reasons for the complex pleasure we take in decay, from the imaginary reconstruction of a ruin to the “masochistic joy” in common destruction. Nearly seventy years later the American literary critic Susan Stewart, in The Ruins Lesson, […]
The title of James Hannaham’s new novel is at once a potential deterrent to fainthearted readers and a bold declaration of its author’s unwavering fidelity to his heroine’s forceful voice, her highly energized inner life. If Carlotta Mercedes—a Black and Colombian trans woman—could turn her personal history into “a Lifetime TV miniseries event,” Didn’t Nobody […]
During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious—actorly, even. As […]
New York Times Books©
- It Took Nearly 30 Years. Is America Ready for Ben Okri’s Novels?The acclaimed Nigerian British writer is resonating with American readers in a moment of national crisis. “Maybe nations go through a time when they just can’t hear certain kinds of voices,” he said.
- Book Review: ‘Love, Pamela,’ by Pamela AndersonHer second memoir — about her small-town coming-of-age, her multiple traumas and Hollywood escapades — is an attempt to set the record straight.
- Book Review: ‘Against the World,’ by Tara ZahraIn “Against the World,” the historian Tara Zahra examines the promise of liberal internationalism in its early days — and the resentments and suffering it continues to incite.
- Review: ‘The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America,’ by Philip BumpWith “The Aftermath,” Philip Bump marshals a sea of statistics to debunk myths about that big, self-involved and endlessly discussed postwar generation.
- Salman Rushdie Has a New Book, and a Message: ‘Words Are the Only Victors’Nearly six months after he was brutally attacked, Rushdie is recovering and releasing a new novel, with the literary world rallying to his side.
- Patricia Engel’s Enduring Friendships Always Include Books“It touches me when people ask me to read a book because it’s special to them,” says the fiction writer, whose new book is the story collection “The Faraway World.” “It’s like being granted permission to peek inside their soul.”
- Elin Hilderbrand’s Fans Take NantucketThis month, hundreds of Elin Hilderbrand’s fans flocked to her freezing cold island to dance, shop, do yoga and drink espresso martinis with their favorite author. Why?
- R.F. Kuang Is Curious About Something …The author of “Babel” likes to raise questions that bother her — ones she hopes will bother her readers too.
- Paul Theroux’s Boston Reading ListPaul Theroux, the quintessential travel writer, has also enshrined his Massachusetts roots in his writing. Here are his recommendations for those who come to visit.
- Move Over, Pablo Neruda. Young Chileans Have a New Favorite Poet.Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for literature, was long considered staid. A new generation is reclaiming her as an anti-establishment icon.
- Book Review: ‘The Faraway World,’ by Patricia EngelThe characters in “The Faraway World” seek connection in a disconnected world. Patricia Engel provides it in her own clever way.
- Book Review: ’The Sense of Wonder,’ ‘Vintage Contemporaries,’ ‘All the Beauty in the World’“The Sense of Wonder,” “Vintage Contemporaries” and “All the Beauty in the World” take on the many dramas of Gotham.
- Book Review: Children’s Picture Books About Knitting, Sewing and WeavingA boy embroiders the moon, a girl makes coats for canines and a knitted-cape crusader saves the day.
- 9 New Books We Recommend This WeekSuggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
- New Romance Books to Cozy Up WithThese romance novels brim with coziness and cupcake bakeries.
- Paul La Farge, Inventive Novelist, Is Dead at 52He played with history and narrative techniques whether writing about 19th-century France or H.P. Lovecraft.
- Newly Published, From Bottled Wishes to Norman MailerA selection of recently published books.
- Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90Witty and contrarian, he was the longtime editor and later publisher of The Nation and wrote an acclaimed book about the Hollywood blacklisting era.
- Book Review: ‘After Sappho,’ by Selby Wynn Schwartz“After Sappho,” Selby Wynn Schwartz’s debut novel, considers the lives of women artists and intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century.
- Review: ‘Children of the State’ by Jeff Hobbs“Children of the State” immerses the author Jeff Hobbs in the world of three American institutions. What he discovers is an open question.
- Book Review: ‘This Other Eden,’ by Paul HardingIn his latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding reimagines the history of a small mixed-race community’s devastating eviction from their homes.
- Book Review: ‘The Chinese Groove,’ by Kathryn Ma.In Kathryn Ma’s new novel, “The Chinese Groove,” an overly optimistic Chinese man migrates to America to find connection and success. It doesn’t go as planned.
- Book Review: ‘Pirate Enlightenment: Or the Real Libertalia,’ by David GraeberIn his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.
- Book Review: ‘The Birthday Party,’ by Lauren MauvignierLaurent Mauvignier’s “The Birthday Party” is a thriller with an intense focus on its characters’ interior worlds.
- Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, 85, Dies; Taught Americans How to Cook Chinese FoodShe was committed to codifying traditional Chinese cooking techniques when most Americans thought of Chinese food as dishes like chop suey and chow mein.
- ‘Room’ Will Be Staged on Broadway, Starring Adrienne WarrenEmma Donoghue adapted the show from her best-selling 2010 novel; she also wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film.
- Review: “Cobalt Red” by Siddarth KaraSiddharth Kara’s “Cobalt Red” takes a deep dive into the horrors of mining the valuable mineral — and the many who benefit from others’ suffering.
- Book Review: ‘The Guest Lecture,’ by Martin RikerMartin Riker’s novel “The Guest Lecture” details a tortured night inside the head of a young economist.
- Marion Meade, Biographer Behind Dorothy Parker Revival, Dies at 88Her 1988 book put an Algonquin wit back in circulation. She also wrote about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the suffragist Victoria Woodhull and Woody Allen.
- Paul Harding Captures the Quiet Side of CalamityIt took the author a decade, and some luck, to publish his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Tinkers.” He’s back with another devastating tale, “This Other Eden.”
- Book Review: ‘Black and Female,’ by Tsitsi DangarembgaThe essays in “Black and Female” recount the Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker’s life in the context of colonialism and its aftermaths.
The acclaimed Nigerian British writer is resonating with American readers in a moment of national crisis. “Maybe nations go through a time when they just can’t hear certain kinds of voices,” he said.
Her second memoir — about her small-town coming-of-age, her multiple traumas and Hollywood escapades — is an attempt to set the record straight.
In “Against the World,” the historian Tara Zahra examines the promise of liberal internationalism in its early days — and the resentments and suffering it continues to incite.
With “The Aftermath,” Philip Bump marshals a sea of statistics to debunk myths about that big, self-involved and endlessly discussed postwar generation.
Nearly six months after he was brutally attacked, Rushdie is recovering and releasing a new novel, with the literary world rallying to his side.
“It touches me when people ask me to read a book because it’s special to them,” says the fiction writer, whose new book is the story collection “The Faraway World.” “It’s like being granted permission to peek inside their soul.”
This month, hundreds of Elin Hilderbrand’s fans flocked to her freezing cold island to dance, shop, do yoga and drink espresso martinis with their favorite author. Why?
The author of “Babel” likes to raise questions that bother her — ones she hopes will bother her readers too.
Paul Theroux, the quintessential travel writer, has also enshrined his Massachusetts roots in his writing. Here are his recommendations for those who come to visit.
Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for literature, was long considered staid. A new generation is reclaiming her as an anti-establishment icon.
The characters in “The Faraway World” seek connection in a disconnected world. Patricia Engel provides it in her own clever way.
“The Sense of Wonder,” “Vintage Contemporaries” and “All the Beauty in the World” take on the many dramas of Gotham.
A boy embroiders the moon, a girl makes coats for canines and a knitted-cape crusader saves the day.
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
These romance novels brim with coziness and cupcake bakeries.
He played with history and narrative techniques whether writing about 19th-century France or H.P. Lovecraft.
A selection of recently published books.
Witty and contrarian, he was the longtime editor and later publisher of The Nation and wrote an acclaimed book about the Hollywood blacklisting era.
“After Sappho,” Selby Wynn Schwartz’s debut novel, considers the lives of women artists and intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century.
“Children of the State” immerses the author Jeff Hobbs in the world of three American institutions. What he discovers is an open question.
In his latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding reimagines the history of a small mixed-race community’s devastating eviction from their homes.
In Kathryn Ma’s new novel, “The Chinese Groove,” an overly optimistic Chinese man migrates to America to find connection and success. It doesn’t go as planned.
In his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.
Laurent Mauvignier’s “The Birthday Party” is a thriller with an intense focus on its characters’ interior worlds.
She was committed to codifying traditional Chinese cooking techniques when most Americans thought of Chinese food as dishes like chop suey and chow mein.
Emma Donoghue adapted the show from her best-selling 2010 novel; she also wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film.
Siddharth Kara’s “Cobalt Red” takes a deep dive into the horrors of mining the valuable mineral — and the many who benefit from others’ suffering.
Martin Riker’s novel “The Guest Lecture” details a tortured night inside the head of a young economist.
Her 1988 book put an Algonquin wit back in circulation. She also wrote about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the suffragist Victoria Woodhull and Woody Allen.
It took the author a decade, and some luck, to publish his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Tinkers.” He’s back with another devastating tale, “This Other Eden.”
The essays in “Black and Female” recount the Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker’s life in the context of colonialism and its aftermaths.
The Chronicle of Higher Education©
- 'Is This Armageddon?'The demographic cliff is nearing. Adjuncts like me are the first to suffer.By Angela B. Fulk
Joan Wong for the Chronicle
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The demographic cliff is nearing. Adjuncts like me are the first to suffer.
The demographic cliff is nearing. Adjuncts like me are the first to suffer.By Angela B. Fulk
Joan Wong for the Chronicle
// for full bleed half split - figure's parent container shouldn't calc max-height
// and should be set to 100% instead - querySelector === baseClassName
let parent = document.querySelector('figure.FullBleedFigureHalfSplit').parentElement
parent.style.maxHeight = "100%"
The demographic cliff is nearing. Adjuncts like me are the first to suffer.