Tag Archives: The New York Review of Books

Books: New York Review Of Books – Dec 22, 2022

December 22, 2022 issue cover

The New York Review of Books – December 22, 2022:

‘Competitive Consumption’

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art displays the extravagant Tudor taste for jewels, artworks, tapestries, and other finery.

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 10, 2022–January 8, 2023; the Cleveland Museum of Art, February 26–May 14, 2023; and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, June 24–September 24, 2023

Writing the Furies

The essayist Judith Thurman has made a career of profiling complicated, often unstoppable women.

A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman

The Sea, the Sea

Rachel Carson’s ocean books reveal an author profoundly engaged with the problem of how to convey ecological knowledge—and how to decenter human life.

The Sea Trilogy: Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber

Books: New York Review Of Books – Dec 8, 2022

December 8, 2022 issue cover

The New York Review of Books – December 8, 2022:

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff


Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan


A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz


Preview: New York Review Of Books – Nov 3, 2022

November 3, 2022 issue cover

Gored in the Afternoon

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer

Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.

Reform or Abolish?

American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.

We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano

Then What Happened?

Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1,001 Nights translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paulo Lemos Horta

The Limits of Press Power

To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn S. Olmsted

The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II by Alexander G. Lovelace

‘We Know What That’s Like’

The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.

No Bears a film written and directed by Jafar Panahi

A Prisoner of His Own Restraint

Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?

Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder

The Illusion of the First Person

A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

Covers: New York Review Of Books – Oct 20, 2022

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The Two Elizabeths

The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.


Last Poem

A poem by Emily Berry


‘She Captured All Before Her’

Darryl Pinckney

It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.


Silences and Scars

Jenny Uglow

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


Lucky Guy

Joshua Cohen

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

Covers: New York Review Of Books – October 6, 2022

New York Review October 6, 2022 cover

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.

Where Will We Live?

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

Poet of the Dispossessed

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

Cover: New York Review Of Books – Sept 22, 2022

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Outdoing Reality

The absurd incursions of the real into the intelligent life of the imagination are central to the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s fiction.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai

Xanadu’s Architect

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect by Victoria Kastner, with photography by Alexander Vertikoff

Julia Morgan: The Road to San Simeon: Visionary Architect of the California Renaissance by Gordon L. Fuglie, Jeffrey Tilman, Karen McNeill, Johanna Kahn, Elizabeth McMillian, Kirby William Brown, and Victoria Kastner

Cover: New York Review Of Books – August 18, 2022

August 18, 2022 issue cover

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


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

Previews: The New York Review Of Books – May 26

Geoffrey O’Brien – Schemes Gone Awry

Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière, now in the Library of America, have a fluency that goes beyond meter and rhyme to encompass textures of speech and movements of thought.

Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations


Fintan O’TooleOur Hypocrisy on War Crimes

The US’s history of moral evasiveness around wartime atrocities undermines the very institution that might eventually bring Putin and his subordinates to justice: the International Criminal Court.

Preview: New York Review Of Books – May 12, 2022


May 12, 2022 issue cover

Painting Herself

From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists.

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits

by Jennifer Higgie

The Self-Portrait

by Natalie Rudd