Innholdsfortegnelse for March 9, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Clare Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her book about the social history of poetry anthologies, The Treasuries, was published in February. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of several collections of essays, including Classics for Pleasure and Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. Gavin Francis is a primary care physician in Edinburgh. His book about Sir Thomas Browne, The Opium of Time, will be published in May, and Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence will be published in September. Michael Gorra is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, among other books. He teaches at Smith. Sue…

Scoundrel: The True Story of the Murderer Who Charmed His Way to Fame and Freedom by Sarah Weinman. Ecco, 447 pp., $28.99; $17.99 (paper) In 2001, at twenty-four, after spending much of my adolescence and young adulthood as a drug dealer, I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street. I was convicted and sentenced to twentyeight years to life. I learned how to write in Attica, in a creative-writing workshop. I learned to live with what I did, on the page. In 2018, after I had been transferred to Sing Sing, I received a letter from a producer of a true crime show on the cable network HLN. I knew of the producer’s work—she’d created a website called prisonwriters.com—and I figured she had my best interests in mind.…

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory. University of Chicago Press, 407 pp., $105.00; $29.00 (paper) Academic literary criticism, as we know it today, is only about a hundred years old. The discipline likes to claim ancient antecedents (anthologies of literary criticism and theory frequently start with Plato), but if we’re talking about writing that resembles what contemporary English professors still produce en masse—closely argued interpretations of literary texts in modern languages, aimed at a specialized scholarly audience—it’s difficult to find much that fits the description before the third decade of the twentieth century. Academic criticism can thus be regarded as an innovation of the 1920s, like the lie detector, water skiing, the timed traffic light, and the bread slicer. The academic study of literature,…

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge. Liveright, 404 pp., $32.50 Nineteenth-century America teemed with social reformers like the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who called the Constitution “an agreement with Hell” because of its compromises on slavery. But none were like the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke. What made them unique was that they had been raised in a South Carolina slaveholding family but became famous for denouncing slavery and defying conventional gender roles. Their parents, the rice planter John Faucheraud Grimke and Polly Smith Grimke (the daughter of a wealthy slave trader), owned hundreds of Black men, women, and children. The pious Sarah and Angelina, witnessing the suffering of their family’s bondspeople, grew morally outraged at the injustice of slavery and…

Alexandre291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002(212) 755-2828; alexandregallery.com Pat Adams: Large PaintingsMarch 9–April 22, 2023 LewAllen GalleriesRailyard Arts District1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 988-3250contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com Legendary Italian-American artist Enrico Donati (1909–2008) was championed early on by André Breton for his Surrealism and later by Betty Parsons for his Abstract Expressionist work. Museum of Northwest Art121 South First Street, P.O. Box 969, La Conner, WA 98257(360) 466-4446 x111; www.monamuseum.org;stefanoc@museumofnwart.org; Daily 10AM–5PM Geppetto’s Children: Italo Scanga at Pilchuck Glass School February 18–May 14, 2023 For the 50th anniversary of Pilchuck Glass School, a survey of in introducing major contemporary artists to glass at Pilchuck. In conjunction with Permanent Immigrant: Italo Scanga in the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Collec tion. Matthew Kangas, guest curator. Marlborough Gallery545 West 25th…

The translator Anthony Kerrigan compared Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte—all “ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even foulmouthed.” However provocative and disturbing, Cela’s novels are also flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous, lodging like knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of “uglyism,” of “nothingism.” But he has the knack, to quote another critic, Américo Castro, of deploying those “nothings and lacks” to construct beauty. The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters…

When I get to heavenThe thing I know I’ll hearIs the hissing of the treesOn a heavenly day in Central Park,Trees in a breeze seen from aboveOn fire with green fireworksOf sunlight messing with their hair. When I’m up there in heaven looking downI’ll see the treetops of the treesWrithing like spaghetti on the boilAnd Central Park praying on its kneesTo me up here.Old age turns me into a lobster in boiling waterScreaming for help silently. On the East Side, down one-way Fifth Avenue,On the West Side, up Central Park West,The police cars warbleAnd the fire engines toot.A swan is eating a giraffeAnd the other way around.It’s the New York sound. Since when did anyone ask the lobsterHow it felt about the water getting warmer?The warming water is supposed to…

The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land by Graciela Mochkofsky, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Knopf, 269 pp., $30.00 In 1944 Segundo Eloy Villanueva, the smart, stuttering seventeen-year-old son of a farmer in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes, learned that his father, Álvaro, had been murdered. Álvaro, riding a horse to a neighboring town to do some business, was shot by a neighbor whom he had recently reproached for allowing cattle to run riot in the family’s potato field. The neighbor also shot the man accompanying Álvaro. The police quickly found the bodies, led, some of the neighbors believed, by a five-centavo piece, the “coin of magic” that someone had left in the mouth of one of the corpses. The magic worked, or…

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani. New Directions, 219 pp., $16.95 (paper) We first glimpse Hiruko, the protagonist of Yoko Tawada’s novel Scattered All Over the Earth, on a Danish television program about people whose countries no longer exist. She came to Denmark as a student, intending to stay for a year, but shortly before she was meant to go home her country—an unnamed archipelago located vaguely between China and Polynesia—disappeared. She speaks about this clearly and eloquently. Everyone understands what she says. But the language she’s speaking has never been heard before. “Tell me,” the host asks, “what is this language you’re speaking so fluently?” In Tawada’s curiously placid future world, no one is surprised that Hiruko can communicate in…

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm, with an introduction by Ian Frazier and an afterword by Anne Malcolm. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 155 pp., $26.00 Janet Malcolm made her reputation writing about people who didn’t know when to shut up. Most of us like to talk about ourselves, and given the faintest encouragement will say enough to wind up looking like fools when our words appear on the page. The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson told her about his many achievements, his sex life included, and then sued her for defamation when he discovered what her New Yorker reporting (republished in 1984 as In the Freud Ar chives) had made of him, claiming he’d been misquoted. He trusted her; he thought he’d found a sympathetic listener. He hadn’t.…

Strangers and Pilgrims: Tales by Walter de la Mare with an introduction by Mark Valentine. Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus, 2 volumes, 592 pp., £80.00 Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales by Walter de la Mare, with an introduction by Greg Buzwell. London: British Library, 350 pp., $13.95 (paper) Reading Walter de la Mare edited by William Wootten. London: Faber, 320 pp., £14.99 (paper) If the name Walter de la Mare elicits any recognition at all, it’s probably because your tenth-grade English class used an ancient textbook that reprinted “The Listeners,” an eerie, tantalizing poem that begins, “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,/Knocking on the moonlit door.” You might even have been given—by an elderly relative, no doubt—a copy of de la Mare’s most famous book of children’s poems, Peacock Pie.…

A Tip of the Hat To the Editors: Susan Tallman, in her review of “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” [NYR, January 19], makes reference to William Harnett and the late entry of American trompe l’oeil painting in the nineteenth century. I would like Tallman to make note of a painting in the American collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the eighteenth-century artist Charles Willson Peale: Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I) (1795). The painting is eighty-nine inches high by thirty-nine inches wide, almost life-size. The 1995 edition of Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections describes the painting: On an unusually large canvas, he made one of his rare full-length portraits, showing two of his sons on an enclosed spiral staircase.…