Innholdsfortegnelse for August 18, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the History Department at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Clare Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her book about poetry anthologies, The Treasuries, will be published in February. Simon Callow is an English actor and director who has written about Richard Wagner, Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Charles Laughton, and Oscar Wilde. His latest book, with Derry Moore, is London’s Great Theatres. 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. Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, among other books.…

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. New York Review Books, 195 pp., $16.95 (paper) In January 1832 a New Year’s gift arrived at the home of Alexander Pushkin. The parcel had been sent by a close friend, the art collector Pavel Nashchokin, along with a note: “I am sending you your ancestor.” At the center of the gift, an inkstand, was the figure of a small Black boy with bright red lips leaning against two bales of cotton. Inside them, in lieu of the white crop, was ink (chernilo, literally “black stuff” in Russian). The substitution revealed Pushkin’s ancestor to be a man of “great foresight,” wrote Nashchokin, for else…

The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas. Deep Vellum, 401 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Journey by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Álvaro Enrigue. Deep Vellum, 167 pp., $12.95 (paper) The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Mario Bellatin and an afterword by Margo Glantz. Deep Vellum, 295 pp., $15.95 (paper) Mephisto’s Waltz by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Elena Poniatowska. Deep Vellum, 225 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Love Parade by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by G. B. Henson. Deep Vellum, 271 pp., $15.95 (paper) Sergio Pitol begins The…

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson. Yale University Press, 521 pp., $35.00 Charles Lamb often complained of not being able to think on his own. “I dare not think, lest I [should think] wrong,” he told Dorothy Wordsworth in 1805, when his sister, Mary, disappeared once more into the local madhouse. “I am like a [fool, bere]ft of her co-operation.” The death in 1834 of Coleridge, his close confidante since their schooldays, felt like the end of thinking altogether: “I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him.” He read insatiably, he explained in the London Magazine in the character of Elia, his literary alter ego, so that he didn’t have to try.…

I never read John O’Hara’s stories, but having read themNow they all seem pretty much alike. There’s a lot ofBackground and a few remarks before not very much happensAnd the story ends, and apparently things are somehow changed.I never even thought of reading them, yet now I like the wayThey sometimes sound the way I like to think life feels, full ofNuances and nothing, in which nothing’s ever heightenedOr exaggerated, and something unspoken and unrealized remains.I even like the way they’re disappointing, and the way he’s disappointedToo inside those Yale dreams he had in Pottsville, Pennsylvania—The reciprocal resentments of the stories he embodied and the ones he wrote.They’re called New Yorker stories now that no one writes them anymoreAnd no one lives the way they used to live in them,…

Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon edited by Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King, with a foreword by Subhankar Banerjee. University of Chicago Press, 334 pp., $30.00 When European commentators in the 1830s admired the brilliantly colored, life-size prints in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, they found the backgrounds almost as enthralling as the birds: forest clearings, swamps and canebrakes and waving prairie grasses—an unknown country. The land, not the sea, was Audubon’s element. Whereas “the Land Bird flits from bush to bush, runs before you, and seldom extends its flight beyond the range of your vision,” he complained that “it is very different with the Water Bird, which sweeps afar over the wide ocean, hovers above the surges, or betakes itself…

INLANDIA INSTITUTE www.inlandiainstitute.org; (951) 790-2458 LADYBUG by Nikia Chaney This is Inglewood, California, 1988. From poet, author, educator Nikia Chaney comes an experimental memoir of extreme poverty and schizophrenia, mothering, and love. 978-1955969031 • Paper, $20.00 • 200 Pages • Memoir Available on InideBound, Bookshop.org, Cellar Door Books, and Amazon. Author’s website: www.nikiachaney.com PRETEND PLUMBER An Adventure by Stephanie Barbé Hammer Meshing comical commentary on the wealthy, magic, and a young person’s awakening sexual and political identities, Pretend Plumber examines “what’s below” with humor and sincerity. 978-1955969048 • Paper, $20.00 • 228 Pages • Fiction Available on InideBound, Bookshop.org, Cellar Door Books, and Amazon. Author’s website: www.stephaniehammer.net ANVIL PRESS PUBLISHERS www.anvilpress.com; (604) 876-8710 THICK SKIN Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach For more than two…

The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, June 15–September 18, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joanna Ahlberg. Drawing Center, 242 pp., $33.00 “The Clamor of Ornament” is a summer spree of a show. It intrigues. It delights. At times it thrills. But it doesn’t ever add up. And in the end it falls apart. The curators in charge—Emily King, Margaret-Anne Logan, and Duncan Tomlin—beguile with nearly 150 works. They include sixteenth-century woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer after designs by Leonardo da Vinci, nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints, studies of the stone inlays in the Taj Mahal, drawings by the American architect Louis Sullivan, Native American weavings, and a piece of scrimshaw engraved with…

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler. Bloomsbury, 489 pp., $30.00 Fascination with actors shows no sign of abating. The public still, it seems, longs to know, as a journalist put it to Alec Guinness on his first visit to America, what makes them tick. (“I wasn’t aware that I was ticking,” Guinness replied.) What do actors wear, what do they eat, how often and in which positions do they have sex, what do they think? This insatiable curiosity perhaps betrays a residual sense of the uncanniness of these shape-shifters, these emblematic embodiers of what it is to be human. Of acting itself, though, there is less mention. One of the challenges of writing about acting is that it constantly reinvents itself, always believing that…

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Two Lines, 175 pp., $21.95 Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change by Angela Garbes. Harper Wave, 222 pp., $25.99 When I was pregnant with my first child, I rode my bicycle well into my third trimester, grateful for the weightless ease of wheels on pavement, the breeze on my face and neck. One evening a physician colleague saw me climbing onto my bike after work and admonished me, “You’ve got to give it up!” When I told my husband about her comment, he delicately suggested that maybe it was time to stop biking: “What if you lose your balance? You might fall and land on your belly.” “Why would I lose my…

Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought by Christopher Star. Johns Hopkins University Press, 306 pp., $54.95 The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. Basic Books, 279 pp., $28.00 In the mid-sixth century AD a North African writer named Verecundus sat down to compose a Latin poem. Verecundus was a good Christian, indeed a bishop. And his poem was on a good Christian subject, repentance. In its two hundred or so lines he denounces his own sinfulness, describes his sorrow and remorse, appeals to God for forgiveness, and regrets that he was ever born. Toward the close of the piece his thoughts turn to the day of judgment and the end of the world, a vast conflagration in…

We leave town on and offand off and on. The plantsseem hardier for it, as if they tooneeded space. The compulsoriness ofour uninterrupted company sucksthe air out of the room, pollutestheir habitat. As if they too sensedthe pulsations of our reluctance.Five more days pass. In that cornerof the sky, Orion is the constellationwhose pinholes I point out to Jane.Shadow prances as we walkover to a darker area of the fieldto catch the shooting stars. The sadnessof the turn the poem took takes usby surprise. We find ourselveswelling up. Verbing. We loseour grip. Once, to love the city,you had to hate it every now andagain; disappointment preordainedby expectation of returns. There’sintermittent eroticism, the eroticsof intermittence, and dead ends.Andy says he’s gone for good.Aki and Makiko head back to Japan.Neighbors leave for…

in blossom. On thekitchen table now.Taller than me.Why do I feel ashamed.In my warm vest and winter coat.In tears.Hands empty at my side. What are youfor. Standing there as if insome other country. Anotherwise. Without past or future.No logic religion sorrowthought. Whisperingsmoke signals to morninglight.Are you hearing each other. The sight of meis of a thing withtoo much heart, too much— salmon-pink blossoms brutal withrefusal ofmeaning—whyam I ashamed. Deartree,I have watchedwhere u welled up and broke skin to emerge like a disasterof beauty, yrtall arms here reach up &out differently, cut branches carefully crisscrossedin the vase to arrange u, to hold ufirm in thedesign. And the water which you draw in ateach whitecut. I struggleto stand at appropriateattention. Yr sweet acrid scentreaches menow. Something else floats in the airaround yr…