In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.
Romeo + Juliet – a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square, New York City, October 24, 2024–February 16, 2025
Fredric Jameson on the Art of Criticism: “Ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself.”
Hanif Kureishi on the Art of Fiction: “When I was in hospital in Rome, having the experience of being a paralyzed man nearly dead, my only excitement was in the thought that I could write some of this shit down.”
Gerald Murnane on the Art of Fiction: “A fatal question—what are people reading these days? Never mind what people are reading these days. What should I be writing about is the fundamental question.”
Prose by Dan Bevacqua, Caoilinn Hughes, Silas Jones, Alec Niedenthal, Adania Shibli, and Abdulah Sidran.
Poetry by Sargon Boulus, Egill Skallagrímsson, Rachel Mannheimer, Simone White, and Hua Xi.
Art by Ann Craven, Ala Ebtekar, and Josh Smith; cover by Seth Becker.
July’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.
In Alderton’s brisk, witty novel, a 35-year-old struggling comedian in London tries to make sense of a recent breakup at the same moment when the majority of his friends seem to be pairing off for life. Cue snappy dialogue, awkward first dates and a memorable quest for a new home; toss clichéd gender roles, the traditional marriage plot and a ho-hum happily ever after. Not only does Alderton cement herself as a latter-day Nora Ephron, she also puts her own mark on the classic romantic comedy form. There are no second fiddles in “Good Material”; every character sings. And there is a deeper message, revealed in a surprise twist, having to do with independence, adventure and charting your own course. Read our review.
It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in spades in “James.” The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim (or, as he clarifies, James). From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick — a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all while also emerging as a work of exquisite originality in its own right. Read our review.
Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A., while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but. As Akbar nudges Cyrus closer to uncovering a secret in his family’s past, he turns his protagonist’s quest for meaning — involving a road trip to New York and a revelatory encounter in the Brooklyn Museum — into an indelible affirmation of life, rife with inventive beauty, vivid characters and surprising twists of plot. Read our review.
History has long been Enrigue’s playground, and his latest novel takes readers to 16th-century Tenochtitlan, or what is now Mexico City. Hernán Cortés and his men have arrived at Moctezuma’s palace for a diplomatic — if tense and comically imbalanced — meeting of cultures and empires. In this telling, it’s Moctezuma’s people who have the upper hand, though the emperor himself is inconveniently prone to hallucinogenic reveries and domestic threats. The carnage here is devilishly brazen, the humor ample and bone-dry. Read our review.
Debreczeni, 39 when he was deported from his native Hungary to what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz,” would later memorialize the experience in a book that defies easy classification. First published in 1950, “Cold Crematorium” is a masterpiece of clinical, mordant observation. In a cattle car he watches a fellow deportee whose hand retains the gestures of a chain-smoker; newly arrived at Auschwitz, he encounters the lousy barroom piano player he avoided back home. This is more than gallows humor; it’s a stubborn fight to stay human and place the unimaginable in the context of the known. Look elsewhere for platitudes — Debreczeni witnessed, and reported, the best and worst of mankind and showed it to us to use as we will. Read our review.
Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents a timely analysis of the situation at America’s southern border, placing the blame for today’s screaming headlines, detainee camps and unaccompanied minors firmly on post-Cold War U.S. policy. His kaleidoscopic narrative moves between the Central American insurgencies that flooded this country with refugees, and the shifting and frequently incoherent policies that worsened the fallout. We meet morally pragmatic domestic politicians, a tireless activist who’s moved from El Salvador to Chicago, Los Angeles teenagers ensnared in gang pipelines. None of it is simple; all of it has a terrible cost. Blitzer handles his vast topic with assurance and grace, never losing sight of the human element behind the global crisis. Read our review.
When the veteran literary and cultural critic came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 66, she described in an email to her loved ones the devastating realization that her “parallel life” — the one presented to her by a “gender-swapping” app that showed her how she would have looked as a girl and then a woman at various junctures in her life — had passed her by. “Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.” As she reflects on her upbringing as the “only child of isolated immigrants,” her early adulthood in 1970s New York and her career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself, Sante fearlessly documents a transformation both internal and external, one that is also a kind of homecoming. Read our review.
This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. “It is no exaggeration,” Boot writes, “to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.” Read our review.
In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait that blends generations of scholarship with the firsthand accounts of European seafarers as well as the oral traditions of Indigenous Pacific islanders. The story begins in Britain as the last embers of the Enlightenment are going out, a time when curiosity and empathy gave way to imperial ambition and moral zeal. Between tales of adventure on the open ocean, complex depictions of Polynesian culture and colorful scenes of a subarctic frost littered with animal life, Sides expertly probes the causes of Cook’s growing anger and violence as the journey wears on and the explorer reckons with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Read our review.
The scholar of Palestinian history talks about what has and has not surprised him about the world‘s response to Israel‘s assault on Gaza.
Under the Spanish Volcano
A recent exhibition at the Prado showcased artists engaging with the ferment and conflict of turn-of-the-century Spain.
‘The Look of Shame’
The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.
In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.
“A Veil of Silence: Women and Sound in Renaissance Italy” by Julia Rombough
Granta Magazine (November 7, 2024): The “China” issue feautures At a time when China has become a unifying spectre of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta seeks to bring the country’s literary culture into focus.
Featuring fiction by Yu Hua, Zou Jingzhi, Yan Lianke, Jianan Qian, Shuang Xuetao, Mo Yan, Zhang Yueran, Ban Yu, Yang Zhihan and Wang Zhanhei.
Essays by Xiao Hai and Han Zhang, as well as a conversation between Wu Qi and Granta.
Photography from Feng Li, Haohui Liu and collaborators Li Jie and Zhang Jungang.
And poetry from Huang Fan, Lan Lan, Hu Xudong and Zheng Xiaoqiong.
The New York Review of Books (October 31, 2024)– The latest issue featuresCoco 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 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.
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
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
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 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
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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