Category Archives: Literature

The New York Review Of Books – November 21, 2024

Image

The New York Review of Books (October 31, 2024) The latest issue features Coco Fusco on yearning to breathe free, Elaine Blair on Rachel Cusk, Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s predations, Ruth Bernard Yeazell on John Singer Sargent, Michelle Nijhuis on the disasters wrought by remaking nature for human ends, Clair Wills on Janet Frame, Andrew Raftery on the Declaration of Independence, Rozina Ali on evangelical missionaries in Afghanistan and Iraq, A.S. Hamrah on the Trump biopic, Tim Parks on Nathaniel Hawthorne, poems by John Kinsella and Emily Berry, and much more.

The Crime of Human Movement

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.

Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States by Ana Raquel Minian

Life in the Ruins

Two new books consider the delusion of the human quest to be free from the constraints of nature.

The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown

Iran Exposed

The Islamic Republic’s sordid proxy war with the West may now be leaving it open to an all-out attack as Israel attempts to eliminate its enemies throughout the region.

The New York Review Of Books – October 17, 2024

The New York Review of Books (September 26, 2024)The latest issue features:

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe edited by Nicholas Seager and J.A. Downie

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris

The New York Review Of Books – October 3, 2024

Table of Contents - October 3, 2024 | The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books (September 12, 2024)The latest issue features:

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger

The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti

Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries edited by Sarah Gristwood

The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich/I Am Me an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, June 6–September 9, 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025

Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Fall 2024

Paris Review Fall'24

Paris Review Summer 2024 (September 10, 2024) — The new issue features:

Not Enough about Frank: A Visit with James Schuyler

Peter Schjeldahl

undefined
From left, Frank O’Hara, John Button, Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur, ca. 1960. © Estate of John Button, courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.”

James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923, grew up in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York, and spent most of his adult years in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Although he is perhaps less widely known than the fellow New York School poets with whom he is associated, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, he published six full-length books of poetry during his lifetime—beginning with Freely Espousing, published by Doubleday and Paris Review Editions in 1969—as well as two novels, and a third written in collaboration with Ashbery. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Morning of the Poem (1980). Mental illness plagued him intermittently, and there were times when his life threatened to veer out of control, but friends repeatedly rallied around him, and the years before his death in 1991 were happy and productive. 

Javier Cercas on the Art of Fiction: “Hell, to me, is a literary party.”

Prose by Josephine Baker, Caleb Crain, Marlene Morgan, Morgan Thomas, and Fumio Yamamoto.

Poetry by Hannah Arendt, Matt Broaddus, Sara Gilmore, Benjamin Krusling, Mark Leidner, James Richardson, and Margaret Ross.

Art by Ayé Aton and Ron Veasey, and cover by Sterling Ruby.

The New York Review Of Books – September 19, 2024

The New York Review of Books (August 30, 2024)The latest issue features:

The Secret Agent

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line – An exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 17–September 29, 2024

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle by Jonathan Crary

The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935 by Sjeng Scheijen

The Most Conservative Branch

Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism by Stephen Breyer

In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

The New York Review Of Books – July 18, 2024

Image

The New York Review of Books (June 27, 2024)The latest issue features:

Reimagining the Ordinary

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

By Michael Gorra

Jean Hélion: La Prose du monde – an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, March 22–August 18, 2024


A Story of His Own

In James, Percival Everett’s smart, funny, brutal retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett takes readers deeper into the capricious yet certain violence of American slavery, giving the characters a life that seems to lift off the page.

James by Percival Everett

The Watercolorist

The short fiction of Ángel Bonomini possesses a lightness that sets him apart from contemporaries like Borges and Cortázar.

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman

Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Summer 2024

The Paris Review No. 248, Summer 2024

Paris Review Summer 2024 — The new issue features:

Mary Robison on the Art of Fiction: “The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”

Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.”

Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.

Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”

Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”

Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.

Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.

Art by Farah Al Qasimi and Chris Oh.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The New York Review Of Books – June 20, 2024

Image

The New York Review of Books (June 9, 2024)The latest issue features:

Livelier Than the Living

In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.

A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup

Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England

Black Atlantics

The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei

Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Spring 2024

The Paris Review No. 247, Spring 2024—Subscriber Cover

Paris Review Spring 2024 — The new issue features interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Notley, prose by Joy Williams and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Mary Ruefle and Jessica Laser, art by Chris Oh and Farah Al Qasimi, two covers by Nicolas Party, and more…

Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”

Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”

Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.

Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.

Art by Farah Al Qasimi and Chris Oh.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The New York Review Of Books – February 22, 2024

Image

The New York Review of Books (February 6, 2024) The latest issue features:

The Case for Disqualification

The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World by Ulinka Rublack

The Forest Eaters

In 2017, the Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum moved from São Paulo to a small city in the Amazon. Her new book vividly uncovers how the rainforest is illegally seized and destroyed.

Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World by Eliane Brum, translated from the Portuguese by Diane Whitty