Innholdsfortegnelse for June 11, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE’s latest book is The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. EMILY BERRY is the Editor of The Poetry Review. She is the author of the poetry collections Stranger, Baby and Dear Boy. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s latest collection of short stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. She is also the author of a play, Pastorale. R. J.W. EVANS is a Fellow of Oriel College and Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Oxford. He is the author of Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, c. 1683–1867, among other books. PETER E. GORDON is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. His books include Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the…

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 223 pp., $26.00 What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. Picador, 194 pp., $17.00 (paper) Mitko by Garth Greenwell. Miami University Press, 96 pp. $15.00 (paper) When, in 1993, the editor in chief of Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, together with the critic Rhoda Koenig established the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, their declared goal was to expose what they saw as the deplorable ubiquity of “crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” Extracts by the shortlisted and winning novelists in the many years since might well leave a reader thinking there really is nothing harder to write about than fucking. (Without a doubt they will leave the reader rolling…

politybooks.com Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World Slavoj Zizek “An impressive feat… [Zizek] at his most powerful.” The Guardian Paper | 140 pages | 978-1-5095-4611-4 | $14.95 How Everything Can Collapse A Manual for our Times Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens “This is an important book.” Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge Paper | 250 pages | 978-1-5095-4139-3 | $19.95 Grief The Price of Love Svend Brinkmann “masterful” Leeat Granek, York University Paper | 208 pages | 978-1-5095-4124-9 | $19.95 Resolutely Black Conversations with Françoise Vergès Aimé Césaire “A ‘must’ for all who study power, diaspora, culture, identity and belonging.” Michelle Wright, Emory University Paper | 120 pages | 978-1-5095-3715-0 | $19.95 The Black Register Tendayi Sithole “Essential reading for anyone concerned about our future.” Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA…

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury, 522 pp., $35.00 Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor. Melbourne: Scribe, 294 pp., $17.95 (paper) In the eighteenth century a career with the East India Company was a throw of the dice for unattached young British men. Arriving in India wan and scurvy after a year at sea, many quickly succumbed to disease, madness, or one of the innumerable little wars that the company fought in order to embed itself on the subcontinent. The salary was hardly an incentive. In the 1720s junior clerks, or “writers,” received just £5 per year, not enough to live on in Bengal or Madras and a pittance when set against the…

Horace’s Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill. Princeton University Press, 301 pp., $45.00 Among the previously uncollected pieces in Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories is a six-pager called “How I Write My Songs.” The “I,” like many of Barthelme’s narrators, is initially anonymous; we learn his name—it turns out to be Bill B. White—only in the second-to-last sentence. The songs he writes, or that Barthelme has written for him, are country and blues-inflected numbers, vacuous yet weirdly plausible: Goin’ to get to-geth-er Goin’ to get to-geth-er If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise. White is evidently a master of his craft: “When ‘Last Night’ was first recorded, the engineer said ‘That’s a keeper’ on the first take and it was subsequently covered…

SHARE INTERNATIONAL www.share-international.org/books; (510) 883-1848 THE WORLD TEACHER FOR ALL HUMANITY by Bemjamin Creme Creme describes an extraordinary planetary event now unfolding: the public emergence of Maitreya, the World Teacher, into the everyday world. Here to help us solve our most critical global problems, Maitreya is shown to be a great Spiritual Avatar as well as a friend and brother to humanity. His wise counsel, if heeded, will inspire a brilliant new civilization. 978-90-71484-39-1 • Paper, $6.00 • 132 Pages • Spirituality Available on Amazon THE AWAKENING OF HUMANITY by Bemjamin Creme Maitreya, the World Teacher, is living among us now, largely unknown. One day soon, he will declare his true identity openly, and the world will be forever changed. In this companion volume to The World Teacher for all…

In the midst of a continual program of demolition and reconstruction, we noticed, one summer, that our city had begun to replicate, via its infrastructure, the prohibitions of the mind. There were roadworks constricting almost every major thoroughfare. Buses were regularly terminated short of their destination or treated passengers halfway through their journey to the wearying and ominous automated announcement, “This bus is on diversion.” A number of these roadworks were connected to the development of a high-speed railway line whose viability had never been proven, now a pawn of warring factions of the government. Others looked temporary and unconvincing, as though they were only props intended to convey the impression of industry—but whether they were temporary or not, they remained. Our illusion of control, fundamental to whatever fragmentary sense…

“Dying of Whiteness brilliantly demonstrates the tremendous impediment that white racism and backlash politics pose to our society’s wellbeing.”—DOROTHY ROBERTS, author of Killing the Black Body “This fierce, capacious, and startlingly intelligent defense of a whole political, social, and moral order is essential reading for our time.”—STEPHEN GREENBL AT T, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern “A work of deep scholarship and powerful storytelling.”—VICTOR SEBEST Y EN, Sunday Times (London) basicbooks.com…

Car tries rush through and announce the rain. You can hearthe shuffling of someone street sweeping in the street.The insistent men outside Stingray’s the cutoff lullof ambulance testing siren, the women. who step in the street and yellto anyone they loved once and it sounds like prelude ifScarlatti hadn’t moved to Madridwould he have moved the notes diatonically as the rain falls up a roof. ascends the scaffolding. It’s impossible to read The Streetwithout seeing Mrs. Hedges on mine. leaning from a window on the groundlevel of my building peering out under her red bandana consideringme as I lean my body over the railing and watch the men dressedblack and in gray I tell a man to stop peeing on my car and whenhe turns around. he is not surprised.…

Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse by Ethan Pollock. Oxford University Press, 343 pp., $34.95 In the parilka, the wooden steam room at the heart of every Russian banya, a stove heats a pile of stones. When the stones are red-hot, water is thrown onto them, raising billows of light steam. Reclining or standing on wooden benches, bathers sweat and whip themselves with veniki, switches of leafy twigs. When they are hot enough (or too hot), the bathers leave the parilka to cool off by plunging into rivers, ponds, barrels, or marble-tiled pools, pouring tubs of icy water over their heads, or rolling naked in the snow. In grand urban buildings, village huts, and prison barracks; on trains, ships, and submarines; wherever Russian communities…

The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,268 pp., $40.00 After almost half a century, I still dream that I am back at St. Peter’s, the Catholic boarding school in Wexford, Ireland, where I spent two years before I went to university. What is strange is how oddly comforting some of the images are. Even the dormitory, with its narrow cubicles, and the timetable, which began with morning mass and included daily rosary, with benediction before study during months that were deemed to be especially sacred, hold no terror. The diocesan priests who were our teachers seem warm, friendly presences, even though a couple of them, in reality, were great brutes. The most disturbing part of the dream is that…

‘ALMOST CERTAIN’ To the Editors: Jed Perl, in his review of the Félix Fénéon show at MoMA [NYR, May 14], speaks of how most historians who have looked at the evidence agree that it’s almost certain that Fénéon planted a bomb at the Restaurant Foyot, one that took out the eye of the writer Laurent Tailhade. Looking at the evidence and the historians’ accounts more closely, that near certainty evaporates. In the first instance, almost all historians cite the same source, Joan Ungersma Halperin’s brilliant and definitive biography of Fénéon. She, however, bases her account of Fénéon’s guilt not on any solid proofs but on a chain of hearsay (Fénéon supposedly confessed his guilt to the wife of a comrade who told the writer André Salmon who told a friend…

Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. Penguin, 251 pp., $17.00 (paper) Some good news is that Penguin is bringing greater attention to Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters with its celebration of the novel’s thirtieth anniversary, and it turns out that the book is every bit as spectacular as it was on its initial appearance. Although by the standards of both the serial-publication and the word-processor-enabled decades it’s a brief book, it is a mighty one; open it up, and a universe erupts from its modest 250 pages. The story begins innocently enough: from an unspecified distance in the future, Rio, the book’s main narrator, looks back at an afternoon outing in 1956 with her cousin Pucha to see All That Heaven Allows, playing in Cinema scope and Technicolor at Manila’s Avenue Theater. Rio is…

The Drawing Room 55 Main Street East Hampton, NY 11937 (631) 324-5016 www.drawingroom-gallery.com Mary Ellen Bartley: Return to Summer Reading May 29-June 29, 2020 catalog available online Reading Color #17, 2020 archival pigment print 18" x 13" (edition of 7) Alexandre Gallery 724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor New York, NY 10019 (212) 755-2828 alexandregallery.com Please visit the gallery's new virtual viewing room at www.alexandregallery.com to see: Visiting Artist's Studios: Pat Adams, Brett Bigbee, Lois Dodd, Tom Uttech, John Walker, Stephen Westfall. We look forward to reopening to the public, by appointment, when safe for all. Marlborough Graphics 545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 (212) 463-8634 info@marlboroughgallery.com Monday–Saturday 10AM–6PM Red Grooms Flatiron Building, 1995 Etching, soft-ground and aquatint in 5 colors on Somerset textured paper 45" x 26" Edition…

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, edited and with an introduction by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, and translated from the German by Damion Searls. New York Review Books, 137 pp., $15.95 (paper) When the young Max Weber returned home in 1883 after his third semester as a law student at the University of Heidelberg, his mother slapped him. Gone was the lanky eighteen-year-old whose sagging shoulders made him, in the words of his future wife Marianne, a “candidate for consumption.” Thanks to nights of drinking with his fraternity, Max had gained considerable weight, and he had also run up a serious debt, compelling him to trouble his father with frequent entreaties for money. Worst of all, he bore a dueling scar on his cheek. At the…

Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker. Yale University Press, 737 pp., $35.00 Emperor: it’s an arresting title. And the concept looks simple. If it means a ruler over vast lands and numerous peoples, then Charles V eminently qualifies. Through the accidents of fecund marriages and mortality among other prospective claimants, he held sway over a multitude of territories across much of Europe—from the Straits of Gibraltar and Sicily to the North Sea and the Baltic—and over American colonies newly conquered and settled. Yet things are not quite what they seem. As monarch of Spain, his richest possession, he famously signed himself “Yo el Rey”—“I the King”—and was known as Charles I. So why do we remember him as Charles V? No one could be more aware…