Innholdsfortegnelse for March 25, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

TASH AW’s most recent novel, We, the Survivors, was published in 2019. His family memoir, Strangers on a Pier, will be published in the fall. DAN CHIASSON’s fifth book of poetry, The Math Campers, was just published. He teaches at Wellesley. TISHANI DOSHI’s most recent book is a novel, Small Days and Nights. Her fourth collection of poems, A God at the Door, will be published in the UK in April and in the US in August. BORIS DRALYUK is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the cotranslator, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and a translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Maxim Osipov, and others. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s latest collection of short stories is Your Duck…

No breakout leads—a prisoner of rerunson local stations high up on the dial:a stray recurring role, a guest appearanceon Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files. Her second act? Pure dullsville in Van Nuys.Chablis with ice. A Chevy dealershipgone belly up. Her paunchy husband’s lies:a broken marriage. Then a broken hip. None of that matters, if you ever catch hersinging “How High the Moon”—silvery, misty—on that one show… She isn’t any match forthe stainless Julie London or June Christy, but through her gauzy voice, as through a sieve,spare notes of heaven reach you from afar.For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe:Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.…

Great Man, now that you are dead, allow me to squeeze your hand. The sage bushes in Umbria are heavy with bees, so I’m killing them with hypnosis. I am a mere woman—inferior lettuce—but I understand swoon aka mirabilia. I fill this cup with nectar and offer it to soothe your Vesuvian wounds. I share your love of baths and classification and sure, if we had to point to a god in the sky, why not call him Thunderbolt? I too believe sewers are the great architectural invention. I do all my searching on roads. It has been two thousand years so we can forgive some of your assertions. The sea mouse who helps whales find their way by parting the brows above their eyes. The one-eyed humans and Sciopods…

A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Crown, 751 pp., $45.00 Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign had the atmosphere of a social movement. In his memoir A Promised Land, the forty-fourth president of the United States says he found inspiration in the early suffragists, labor organizers, Gandhi, Lech Wałesa, and the African National Congress; in the civil rights movement of Dr. King, John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer; and in the values of Ann Dunham, his mother, an anthropologist. The radical expectations of many followed President Obama to Washington, supported by the assumption that his being black was in itself an expression of profound change. Obama observes that his political education had “inoculated” him against “revolutionary formulas.” He came to public service through community activism. After university, he worked as an…

Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts by Alexander Griboedov, translated from the Russian by Betsy Hulick. Columbia University Press, 152 pp., $30.00; $14.95 (paper) The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar by Yuri Tynianov, translated from the Russian by Susan Causey and edited by Vera Tsareva-Brauner. London: Look MultiMedia, 420 pp., $25.00 (paper) The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar by Yury Tynyanov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush. Columbia University Press, 599 pp., $40.00; $19.95 (paper; to be published in April) When Alexander Pushkin read the manuscript of Alexander Griboedov’s verse comedy Woe from Wit, he realized at once that it would be a major Russian classic and that many of its lines would become proverbs. He was right: scholars have calculated that Russians quote this…

Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan Ree. Yale University Press, 746 pp., $37.50 Jonathan Ree introduces his unconventional history of philosophy in the English-speaking world from 1601 to 1950 with a declaration: Today’s philosophers may like to think of themselves as the culmination of a purposeful tradition going back two and a half millennia, but the record suggests something different: their predecessors were, for the most part, making their way along unmapped forest paths, with various combinations of ingenuity, frustration, anxiety, improvisation, frivolity and braggadocio. Instead of seeing their works as candidates for inclusion in some ultimate compendium of knowledge, we might do better to treat them as individual works of art forming a tradition as intricate and unpredictable as, say, Yoruba sculpture, Chinese poetry or the…

“An adventure-filled, continent-spanning travelogue…. By carefully peeling back layers of history to find shimmering hummingbirds hidden within, Dunn has created essential reading to understand human obsession—past and present—with these remarkable creatures.”—JONATHAN C. SLAGHT, author of Owls of the Eastern Ice “Dunn takes readers on a wondrous globe-trotting pilgrimage to seek out hummingbirds as their populations are threatened…. Dunn’s vivid prose, balanced with just the right amount of detail, will captivate birders and non-birders alike.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “Glittering gems of the Americas and nowhere else on Earth, hummingbirds lure Jon Dunn from Alaska to Chile in this whizzing travelogue of hummer natural history.”— DAN FLORES, author of CoyoteAmerica basicbooks.com…

They had a better class of insult at Catholic boys’ prep schools in the 1950s. During his first semester at Archmere Academy in Delaware, where Latin was a big thing, Joe Biden was given a nickname: Joe Impedimenta. The word referred to his speech impediment, the stutter that meant, as he recalled, “I talked like Morse code.” But it also signifies in Latin the baggage encumbering an army’s progress over rough terrain. As president, Joe Impedimenta needs to move fast. It seems obvious, however, that he will be held back by a formidable hindrance. His baggage is an impossible ideal, a desire for bipartisan unity that cannot be fulfilled. Yet he can and must leave it behind him and learn to travel light. Biden has long returned to a phrase…

Merpeople: A Human History by Vaughn Scribner. Reaktion, 318 pp., $27.50 In l819 the French inventor Cagniard de La Tour gave the name sirène to the alarm he had devised to help evacuate factories and mines in case of accident—in those days all too frequent. The siren, or mermaid, came to his mind as a portent, a signal of danger, although it might seem a contradiction, since the sirens’ song was fatal to mortals: in the famous scene in the Odyssey, Odysseus ties himself to the ship’s mast to hear it, and orders his men to plug their ears with wax and ignore him when he pleads to be set free to join the singers on the shore. Homer does not describe these irresistible singers’ appearance—only their flowery meadow, which…

In Love by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by Frederic Raphael. New York Review Books, 130 pp., $14.00 (paper) My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by David Thomson. New York Review Books, 131 pp., $14.95 (paper) The End of Me by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by Paul Bailey. New York Review Books, 178 pp., $15.95 (paper) Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back Guilty of dust and sin.—George Herbert Over a period of some fifty-odd years Alfred Hayes worked as a reporter, a screenwriter, a novelist, and a poet. When he died in 1985 he left behind seven novels, three volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, and at least a dozen screenplays. During the past decade New York…

Please order books by using the contact information listed under each press’s name, or visit your local bookstore or online retailer. DENNIS HAUPT behindthelastgate.com LURAY Fun, intellectual rationality at its weirdest by Dennis Haupt Enjoy a mysterious science-fiction story challenging the reader and asking difficult questions that will keep you awake at night. 9783969560037 • eBook, $6.00 • 474 Pages • Science Fiction Available on Amazon, Booktopia, and Kobo. TWELVE WINTERS PRESS www.twelvewinters.com THE ARTIST SPOKE by Ted Morrissey “Delightfully literary….An inventive, reflective story about cultural phenomena and personal connections to literature.” —Kirkus Reviews 978-1733194921 • Hardcover, $29.00 • 188 Pages • Literary Fiction Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and Left Bank Books. Author’s website: www.tedmorrissey.com DODDS AMALGAMATED thecolindodds.com MS. NEVER by Colin Dodds She cancels continents and…

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 370 pp., $30.00 The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally. London: Penguin, 129 pp., ?8.99 (paper) By the time Tove Ditlevsen committed suicide in 1976, she was one of Denmark’s most popular and acclaimed writers. In the fifty-eight years of her life, she’d had two children and custody of a third, and four husbands. She’d soared out of poverty, and all told, she’d published about thirty books—primarily collections of poetry but also novels, memoirs, stories, and children’s books. She’d written magazine pieces, too, and, of all things, an advice column. The information readily available about her in English is oddly sketchy,…

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Penguin Press, 195 pp., $24.00 The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Penguin Press, 196 pp., $24.00; $16.00 (paper) “The Return,” the title story of a collection of Roberto Bolano’s short fiction published in English in 2010, can be read, in light of the author’s prolific and variable posthumous output, as an ambiguous parable about losing control of one’s selfhood (authorial or otherwise) in death. In a tone that hovers between abject horror and bemused disbelief, the narrator describes what happens to both his body and, for lack of a better word, his soul after his sudden death from a heart attack in a Paris nightclub. “The first…

Don’t thinkyou have to speakof the snow, branchesbent, weaklimbs brokenor of what you hear.Everything is realin the mind, the radiowaves on frequenciesthat leave the leavesundisturbed, and the snow,general in the northand now across the continent.The storm has erasedevery mark yesterdayyou made on the road,the path, the plowopening a wayby burying everything else.It was easiestto be on foot,to choose Velcroover lace-up and avoidthe struggle of the snowshoe strap.How else gobut with sharpmetal teeth,a soft step.The super bloodwolf moon is therewe heard on the newsyet there’s nothingwe can seebut cloud and mist.Yet the moon.Deer on the unplowed pathfat tires of trucksand on the shorelooking west, then norththe snowed plainyou know to bea lake became the moonsoft whipped into white hillocksby the night’s long wind Don’t thinkyou have to speakabout the countrythat windthis…

The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. Knopf, 195 pp., $25.95 “Maybe fear is the only emotion with which the soul wrestles constantly,” Dima Wannous writes in her second novel, The Frightened Ones, the first to be published in English. “It is dazzlingly innovative and multifarious, reinventing itself at every turn.” Suleima, a contemporary Syrian woman of about forty, is contemplating why her boyfriend, Naseem, has chosen to use a pseudonym for his books. His decision, she realizes, points to the sharpest fear of all, and one she shares: the fear of fear itself. It is “the deep current beneath my life,” Suleima reveals. “Fear of fear never leaves you.” The Frightened Ones is told through a pair of accounts. The first is Suleima’s…

INTEGRATION VS. ‘CHOICE’ To the Editors: In her insightful review essay “The Dark History of School Choice” [NYR, January 14], Diane Ravitch alludes to southern states in the 1950s and 1960s that “enacted voucher and tuition tax credit plans to subsidize white families fleeing integrating public schools.” Having been in a favorable position to witness the carnage, I write to amplify Ravitch’s insights at ground level. In 1970 I became “field supervisor in secondary English” for the practice teaching of Miles College seniors. (Miles is a historically Black college in Fairfield, Alabama; my students were Black, I am not.) The high school districts we visited, north and west of Birmingham, were under court mandate to integrate enrollment. Up to half of their white students would transfer into formerly all-Black schools,…