Innholdsfortegnelse for July 18, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her most recent book is Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. She is writing a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov. RACHEL CUSK is the author of the Outline trilogy, among other books. Coventry, a collection of essays, will be published in August. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s fifth collection of short stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. She is also the author of a play, Pastorale. ORLANDO FIGES is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His new book, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, will be published in October. MARK FORD’s fourth collection of poetry, Enter, Fleeing, was published last year. CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received…

The Dry Heartby Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italianby Frances Frenaye.New Directions, 88 pp., $12.95 (paper) Happiness, as Suchby Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor.New Directions, 162 pp., $15.95 (paper) Family Lexiconby Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee, with an afterword by Peg Boyers.New York Review Books, 221 pp., $14.95 (paper) Natalia Ginzburg published her first novella, I Bandini, in 1934, when she was eighteen. Three years later she completed the first Italian translation of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann. Over the course of her seventy-five years—during which she also worked as an editor at the Einaudi publishing house, brought up the four of her five children who survived infancy, served as a member of Parliament, and involved herself in humanitarian…

The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guinedited by Lisa Yaszek.Library of America, 530 pp., $27.95 “Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.” This was the challenge the influential science-fiction editor John Campbell famously issued his authors in the 1940s. It was aimed at producing aliens as fully formed as the interstellar human travelers who encounter them. Isaac Asimov thought the best example was a creature named Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” a story from 1934 that preceded the dictum. But the instruction also has the feel of a riddle, and neither Campbell nor Asimov considered its most obvious answer: a woman. Three…

Great historical novels—and there aren’t many—generally don’t read as if they’re historical. You feel, reading them, that you’re inside their time and place. Their characters aren’t dressed up in period costume, eating (carefully researched) period meals; their lives are real lives, like our own, only taking place in the past. In other words, they’re true to life as we know and feel it, and their texture seems completely natural, however remote or unfamiliar the setting may be. War and Peace—the greatest of all historical novels (of all novels?)—has nothing exotic or old-timey about it: Natasha and Pierre and Andrei are of their time, of course, but their time becomes our time while we’re with them. When we get to our own day, we find a slew of historical reconstructions, a…

NOSTALGISTUDIO https://nostalgistudio.com; (718) 404-8625 LAMENT A Soviet Woman and Her True Story by Liz Mackie Based on remarkable real life events, a modern epic centers on a young Jewish woman struggling to survive the 20th century’s most pitiless decades. 9781732393110 • Paper, $25.00 695 Pages • Historical Fiction Available at Ingram Spark, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble • Author’s website: www.liz-mackie.com. FRAYED EDGE PRESS www.frayededgepress.com; (215) 727-7847 RAPE JOKES by Louise MacGregor No, rape isn’t funny—but having a sense of humor can help afterwards. “…best portrayal of the aftermath of a rape that I have ever read in a novel.”—Goodreads 9781642510102 • Paper, $14.95 207 Pages • New Adult Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, and wholesale through Ingram. NOLA ROCCO EXCUSE ME…I’M NOT DEAD YET! A Wake-Up Call…

Oblivionby Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.New Vessel, 290 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Year of the Cometby Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.New Vessel, 245 pp., $17.95 (paper) The Goose Fritzby Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.New Vessel, 319 pp., $17.95 (paper) Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness. Born in 1981, Lebedev grew up in Moscow as the Soviet Union fell apart. His three novels are coming-of-age stories in which a young narrator or hero of his age discovers hidden family histories from the Stalinist era. In Oblivion, his debut novel, which appeared in Russian in…

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Lifeby Yiyun Li.Random House, 208 pp.,$16.00 (paper) Where Reasons Endby Yiyun Li.Random House, 170 pp., $25.00 The effort of self-transformation is generally regarded as an improving journey, whatever its vicissitudes may have been. The writer Yiyun Li, who left China in 1996 as a trained scientist and set herself the task of becoming instead an American novelist, might appear to belong to that narrative of success. For an immigrant writer, the psychological problem of lost links can be meaningful terrain; likewise, the abandoned homeland can be fruitfully considered, from a safe distance. Yet creativity is no fortress, and even language—as Li has proved—is a bridge that can be burned. You can unlearn your own language as a stratagem for…

The Self-Portrait: From Schiele to Beckmannan exhibition at the Neue Galerie,New York City,February 28–June 24, 2019.Catalog of the exhibition edited by Tobias G. Natter.Prestel/Neue Galerie, 215 pp., $50.00 Ever since Giorgio Vasari wrote Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in the sixteenth century, we in the Western world have understood artworks and biographies as intertwined. This isn’t inevitable. A glance sideways geographically, or over the shoulder historically, shows that most cultures have not much cared how someone was feeling when an artist sat down to carve a particular idol or paint a certain krater. We, on the other hand, are so accustomed to using the art to illuminate the life, and the life to interpret the art, that when faced with a skeletal CV and a great…

Day is brushing the brush off my back. No. Dawn is tracing the margin of my being with unpleasant certainty. Today is a truck? It shakes this structure in which we sleep. Yes. That’s our new definition of dawn. No reason to share dawns these days with strangers. And that something so arbitrary as Sun played scheduler for so many centuries?—like Feudalism, then Welfare State. Like secrets swelling in your absence. In my new dawn you are barely a face. Inkblot eyes and mouth a simple laceration. You know how easily you appear in the corner of my vision to remind me where I am not, in the corner of what I am not to remind myself of, in the corner of my screen to furl, unfurl, tap, there, there’s…

Bosnian Chronicleby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth with Bogdan Raki?.Apollo, 432 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Bridge on the Drinaby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Lovett F. Edwards.University of Chicago Press, 318 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Woman from Sarajevoby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Joseph Hitrec.Knopf, 246 pp. (1965) The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Talesby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Joseph Hitrec.Knopf, 302 pp. (1968) The Slave Girl and Other Stories About Womenby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by John K.Cox and sixteen other translators.Central European University Press, 580 pp., $18.95 (paper) The Vizier’s Elephant: Three Novellasby Ivo Andri?, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Drenka Willen.Harcourt, Brace and World, 247 pp. (1962) The Damned Yard and Other Storiesby Ivo Andri?,…

The Nocilla Trilogyby Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3 volumes, 525 pp., $30.00 (paper) The Spanish poet and novelist Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy had its origins, the reader is informed in a note appended to Nocilla Dream (the first in the series), in the confluence of three seemingly unconnected trouvailles. The first was an article by Charlie LeDuff in The New York Times on May 18, 2004, about “the loneliest road in America,” US 50, which runs through the Nevada desert from Ely to Carson City. “There is a whorehouse, at each end,” LeDuff reports in his article, “and not much company in between.” But in a stand of cottonwoods along the highway outside Middlegate, 110 miles east of Carson City,…

Recently, at a lunch with a group of graduate students, conversation turned to American colonial history, then to John Winthrop’s 1630 speech “A Modell of Christian Charity,” associated now with an image borrowed from Jesus, “a city on a hill.” This phrase has been grossly misinterpreted, both Winthrop’s use of it and Jesus’. In any case, the students pronounced the speech capitalist, with a certainty and unanimity that, quite frankly, is inappropriate to any historical subject, and would be, even if the students, or the teachers who gave them the word, could define “capitalist.” Because I encounter variants of this conversation in such settings all over the country, I should not be heard as criticizing any particular university when I say that such certainty is not the product of good…

The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination will begin to assume a more concrete shape on the nights of June 26 and 27, when twenty candidates take the stage in Miami for the first round of debates. They qualified to participate by meeting one of two criteria before June 12: securing a minimum number of donors (at least 65,000) or registering more than one percent support in three major polls. The qualifying criteria are the same for the second round of debates in Detroit on July 30 and 31. For the third round, to be held on September 12 and 13 (in a location not yet chosen), the criteria are essentially doubled, which could winnow the field considerably. The Democratic National Committee has sanctioned twelve debates, to be held until…

ALL FESTIVAL EVENTS FREE SOME BOOKEND EVENTS CHARGE ADMISSION 2019 FESTIVAL DAY AUTHORS AND PARTICIPANTS BKBF fall lineup includes: Christopher Bonanos, Karina Sainz Borgo, Jericho Brown, Tina Chang, Amit Chaudhuri, Alexander Chee, Ted Chiang, Susan Choi, David Cullen, Edwidge Danticat, Sarah Dessen, Benjamin Dryer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ted Fox, Amitav Ghosh, Rigoberto González, Rawi Hage, Aleksandar Hemon, Mira Jacob, Marlon James, N.K. Jemisin, Ilya Kaminsky, Lucy Knisley, Laila Lalami, Sally Wen Mao, Courtney Maum, Bill McKibben, Maaza Mengiste, Mary Norris, Joyce Carol Oates, Téa Obreht, Maxim Osipov, Ben Passmore, Namwali Serpell, Rebecca Traister, Mags Visaggio, Scott Westerfeld, Meg Wolitzer, Damon Young, Nell Zink, and hundreds more. Bookend Events September 16-23 Citywide Adventure to BKBF curated Bookend events throughout the city. Literary trivia, books-to-movies screenings, performances, and more take place in…

WEBSTER’S ACROBATICS To the Editors: In his review of Peter Martin’s The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight Over the English Language [NYR, June 27], neither Christopher Benfey nor Martin apparently mentions the religiosity and racism of Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Whenever Webster could not trace an etymology for a word, he traced it to Chaldee, the language of the Babylonians, where at that time the Garden of Eden was believed to be. Whenever he traced the etymology of a Native American word that made its way into English, he traced it back to an English root. Robert Buckeye Middlebury, Vermont Christopher Benfey replies: It is true that Webster’s fanciful etymologies were dictated in part by his religious faith, which I discussed at some length in my review. He believed that all languages…