The New York Review of Books – August 18, 2022

Mark Danner: We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!

At a time when the threat of authoritarianism is rising, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in the November elections.

Alan Hollinghurst: In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.

The Kingdom of Sand by by Andrew Holleran

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Jennifer Wilson: The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose

by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, edited by Robert Chandler