Emmanuel Carrère’s new book, Yoga, has been the subject of gossipy debate about its veracity, but it is seductively open about its own anxiety as a work of fiction.
Johannes Vermeer, one of the most intimate and quiet of artists, who is celebrated for the silence and light of his paintings, has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser.
Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J.M. Weber
Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan
In his new history of the index, Dennis Duncan traces its evolution through the constantly changing character of reading itself.
In 1941 an ambitious Philadelphia pediatrician, the wonderfully named Waldo Emerson Nelson, became the editor of America’s leading textbook of pediatrics. For the next half-century the compilation of successive editions of this large volume advanced his career, consumed his weekends, and encroached heavily on his domestic life.
By Steve Coll
The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left by Hassan Abbas
Hassan Abbas’s book surveys the second Islamic Emirate’s ideology and leading personalities and probes its internal tensions.
Nearly two years after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, the UN refers to the regime only as “the de facto authorities,” to avoid any hint of formal recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government. By any name, the Taliban today control Afghanistan’s territory, as well as federal ministries and local administrations. They also preside over a nation in severe crisis. Food insecurity haunts at least half of the population; a country shattered by more than four decades of war again faces the shadow of famine.
In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.
Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson
A strange time to publish—strange time to publish anything—a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte.
A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.
For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug by Nathan Vardi
A research scientist for Pharmacyclics, Sunnyvale, California, 2013. In For Blood and Money, Nathan Vardi writes that when Pharmacyclics—which developed ibrutinib, a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia—was bought by the pharmaceutical giant AbbVie in 2015 for $21 billion, ‘the deal…set the new high-water mark for success in the biotechnology industry.’
An exhibition of the Algerian painter’s work liberates it from the political symbolism of late colonialism.
In November 1947 a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya, described variously as Kabyle, Berber, Muslim, and Arab, exhibited her gouaches and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimé Maeght. Yves Chataigneau, the French governor of Algeria, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Paris Mosque, were the sponsors of the exhibition, and the opening attracted some of the most influential cultural figures of postwar Paris: the writers Albert Camus, François Mauriac, and André Breton; the painters Henri Matisse and Georges Braque; the designer Christian “Bebè” Bérard.
For generations, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints of Roman views defined the popular image of the Eternal City. A profusion of new exhibitions and publications shows why he still speaks to us.
Also in the issue: Jacqueline Rose on C. P. Taylor’s final play, Colin B. Bailey on the Impressionists’ decorations, Wendy Doniger on Bengali tales from the mangrove forests, Christopher Benfey on the Black American potters of the nineteenth century, Jed Perl on high-tech high art, poems by Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Mosab Abu Toha, and Cyrus Console, and much more.
Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai‘i One Summer, Other Writings edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Maxine Hong Kingston’s best work has a timeless quality, fresh, beautiful, horrifying, bursting with myth and fantasy and nagging reality.
The BBC: A Century on Air by David Hendy
This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922–2022 by Simon J. Potter
World War II was the BBC’s finest hour, but its history since then reflects the corporation’s gradual loss of primacy in British life.
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx
Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration by Laura J. Martin
Two recent books show that the concept of ecological restoration is a fuzzy one: even practitioners rarely agree on what is being restored, or to what end.
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries
By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.
What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage.
The Diaries
by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.
Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?
Mussolini’s Daughter
The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”
It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
The British Conservative Party was once one of the great popular political movements of Europe. What happened?
Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over by Samuel Earle
Boris Johnson: The Rise and Fall of a Troublemaker at Number 10 by Andrew Gimson
Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid by Matt Hancock with Isabel Oakeshott
The Fall of Boris Johnson: The Full Story by Sebastian Payne
Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale
The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952–79 by Matthew Engel
The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron by Christopher Tugendhat
The New York Review of Books February 23, 2023 issue:
In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.
Edward Hopper’s New York an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023
Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.
The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.
All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman
The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.
A poem by Emily Berry
It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.
Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.
Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay
The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell
Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.
Breaking History: A White House Memoir by Jared Kushner
The October 6 issue is online now, with Bill McKibben on the climate refugee crisis, Hermione Lee on Joseph Roth’s violently mixed feelings, Linda Greenhouse on Justice Breyer’s most powerful dissent, Jerome Groopman on diabetes, Leslie T. Chang on narrative nonfiction in China, Ange Mlinko on H.D., David S. Reynolds on séances in the Lincoln White House, Verlyn Klinkenborg on the Beach Boys’ moment in the sun, Erin Maglaque on the pope’s astronomer, Mark Danner on the long, slow Trump coup, a poem by Vona Groarke, and much more.
Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.
Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth – by Benjamin von Brackel, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World – by Gaia Vince
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism – by Harsha Walia
Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth – by Keiron Pim
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