Innholdsfortegnelse for June 9, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

GINIA BELLAFANTE is a columnist at The New York Times who has written extensively about inequality, culture, and urbanism. SARAH CHIHAYA is the author of the forthcoming Bibliophilia and a coauthor of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. ANNE ENRIGHT is a Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She has published seven novels, including, most recently, Actress. MARK FORD’s fourth book of poems, Enter, Fleeing, was published in 2018. SUE HALPERN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury. CHRISTINE HENNEBERG…

It doesn’t fall it gathers the doctor explainedThat’s just what people named it when I took offThe bandage blinded by the unblocked lightAt first I panicked brightness falls from the airThe lens that you were born with flexes but darkensFilm noir betrayals Niagara none can wellBehold with eyes what underneath him liesThe new lens rigid plastic but clear the fogCondenses to fall as tree-drip to feed the SequoiasYosemite they say means killer a MiwokWord one group called another the EuropeanMilitias in the Gold Rush killed all the groupsIshi in Berkeley was called the Last of his PeopleIt wasn’t one people he was a mix it wasn’tHis name he explained clearly he had no nameWith no one to call him by a name Bob saysThe way that poetry works is John…

Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman by Susanne Schattenberg, translated from the German by John Heath. I. B. Tauris, 484 pp., $40.00 Soviet party leaders tend to get the biographies they deserve. Stephen Kotkin’s unfolding trilogy about Stalin is almost superhuman in scope and ambition. William Taubman’s volumes about Khrushchev and Gorbachev are vivid, buoyant, and dramatic. Susanne Schattenberg’s new biography of Brezh nev is almost as bland as its subject. According to Schattenberg, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoe, Ukraine, into a family that was neither entirely working class nor petty bourgeois. In school, “he did not join in with the usual harassment of Jewish pupils, but did nothing to defend them either.” During the revolution and the civil war, “not only was he not an enthusiastic Bolshevik,…

The sunflowers have gone to seed.A squirrel made off with the head of oneHolding it square in his little paws, like a sandwich.The laying hen won’t lay, though she looksUp to the job. The moon went from small to half to full.Popular opinion about the future turned sour again.The gourds had swelled, and plump were the hazel shells.The sun stayed hot, and shone and shone,And burned up some of the mountains. The moon went full and it turned blue.Relations with the neighbors went south again.When the leaves fall you can see straight into the kitchen,You can see me, if something goes wrong with the dinner,Stamping my feet like a child. The light’s gone wan and thin as an egg white.The ink stain on the sofa fades of its own volition.The…

Aspirations In the windowless clinic where I work, the back hallway is lined with a row of small, square rooms. Inside each room is a desk, a computer screen, a box of tissues, two chairs, and little else. This is where the clinic counselors meet with patients who have come in for their abortions. In those small rooms, most of the day’s work is completed without me. The counselors have a set of questions they’re required to go through with each patient, but often the conversation goes off script. A woman starts talking about her life: a fight with her partner, her younger kid’s asthma, her sister’s wedding next week, her mother’s alcoholism. All of it is relevant, if it feels relevant to her; the counselor affirms this with an…

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou. Penguin Press, 403 pp., $28.00 “Envy,” the psychologist Peter van Sommers writes, “concerns what you would like to have but don’t possess,” whereas jealousy “concerns what you have and do not wish to lose.” Elaine Hsieh Chou’s hilarious and harrowing debut novel, Disorientation, is set in a place saturated with both emotions, where envy and jealousy shift and interact in ways that are hard to parse: the contemporary American university. When we first meet her, in a scene of archival intrigue that nods to the opening of A. S. Byatt’s classic academic satire-romance Possession, Ingrid Yang is definitely “not doing well.” She is at the start of the eighth and final year of her Ph.D. in East Asian studies at Barnes University, a fictional but…

To the Editors: Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin did not like my book. Or rather, they did not like a book called The Genetic Lottery by an author named “Kathryn Paige Harden,” but their review [NYR, April 21] so badly distorts my arguments that I have the curious impression that Feldman and Riskin somehow got their hands on another book entirely, an evil doppelganger to mine. Therapists, parents, and the unhappily married would recognize the feeling I had upon reading their review the first time: it’s both vexing and bewildering when someone is spoiling for a fight about something you never said. As a longtime reader of The New York Review of Books, I am surprised and disappointed that this review was published in such an esteemed outlet. Yes, “we…

The Cabinet by Un-su Kim, translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. Angry Robot, 299 pp., $15.99 (paper) The Plotters by Un-su Kim, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell. Anchor, 292 pp., $16.95 (paper) Un-su Kim’s The Cabinet begins with an account of the peculiar fate of Ludger Sylbaris, one of those historical misfits whose story appears in compendia of strange-but-true curiosities, popular accounts of natural disasters, and travel guide sidebars. A native of Martinique, Sylbaris was imprisoned in the city of Saint-Pierre when Mount Pelee erupted on May 8, 1902. It was the deadliest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, with a death toll unlikely to be matched in the future of human civilization. Saint-Pierre, typically called the “Paris of the Caribbean” in such accounts, sloped from…

KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING kdp.amazon.com; 1 (888) 280-4331 SHIRAZ DIARIES & JALLAD A Novel On Contemporary Iran by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi “One of the most imaginative literary works on Iran, highly recommended”—New York University Literature Professor, Peter Chelkowski 979-8405130477 • Hardcover, $20.00 • 334 Pages • Fiction Available on Amazon. Author’s website: www.kavehafrasiabi.com MEDUSA BOOKS THE AGE OF HYSTERIA A Novel of Romantic Psychiatry by Lizzi Wolf Paris, France. 1885. A young woman diagnosed with hysteria is committed to the Salpetrière asylum to be treated with the controversial new method of mesmerism. 979-8444566343 • Paper, $12.00 • 262 Pages • Literary/Historical Available on Amazon. Author’s website: www.lizziwolf.com IGUANA BOOKS, TORONTO iguanabooks.ca; (416) 214-0183 THE GREAT CYPRUS THINK TANK by Larry Lockridge Second of four standalone yet interrelated satirical novels, The Enigma…