Innholdsfortegnelse for May 25, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Joan Acocella is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new collection of essays, Book Reports, will be published in February. Edward Ball is the author of six books, including his most recent, Life of a Klansman, and Slaves in the Family, which won the National Book Award. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year. Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is an inaugural winner of the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. Ama Codjoe’s book of poems Bluest Nude was published last year. Willa Glickman is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. Jerome Groopman is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a staff…

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum. Basic Books, 305 pp., $30.00 On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger. Little, Brown, 335 pp., $17.99 (paper) On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union by Daisy Pitkin. Algonquin, 272 pp., $27.95; $16.99 (paper) Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. Haymarket, 174 pp., $45.00; $17.95 (paper) One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America by Saru Jayaraman. New Press, 203 pp., $24.99 At the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the giant wooden front doors swing open to reveal the company’s sprawling, multilevel temple to itself. The space, which contains a…

Conversations with Goethe: In the Last Years of His Life by Johann Peter Eckermann, translated from the German by Allan Blunden, with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. Penguin, 694 pp., $21.00 (paper) We can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice; produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke; sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it. What can we not do? Tell Sophocles (“What a wonder is man”) the news. Maria Callas? Elvis Presley? Freddie Mercury? Vera Lynn? Vera Imago? Straight up? With a twist? Genetically enhanced? Coming right up. Nothing is real and—pace John Lennon—everything to get hung…

Long ago, I find the house with one blazing window and sneak up to peek in: there are my parents in each other’s arms naked in the rumpled bed, mouths locked, eyes radiant like the glass. I put my ear to the sash to listen but the pane thrums and the cat Jupiter comes padding: Am I a sparrow? A grasshopper? I shrink back into parched shrubbery. So long ago! All the streets are dark, the houses identical, in the sky ragged clouds race, and huge flocks, wings creaking like oars, migrate to the safety of the mind.…

ARCHITECTURE Shifting Sands Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China’s Contemporary Borderlands Xiaoxuan Lu “Shifting Sands pushes the boundaries of landscape studies in the most productive and exciting ways.” —Jeffrey Hou, University of Washington, and coeditor of Messy Urbanism August 15, 2023. 7 × 10 in. 280 pp. University of Texas Press 978-1-4773-2755-5 Hardcover, $50.00 BIOGRAPHY My Last Eight Thousand Days An American Male in His Seventies Lee Gutkind As founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and architect of the genre, Lee Gutkind played a crucial role in establishing literary, narrative nonfiction as a genre. In My Last Eight Thousand Days, Gutkind turns his notepad and tape recorder inward, using his skills as an immersion journalist to perform a deep dive on himself. Here, he offers a memoir of his life as…

She Said a film directed by Maria Schrader Women Talking a film written and directed by Sarah Polley I May Destroy You a BBC One/HBO series written and directed by Michaela Coel 1. In the mid-Aughts, advocacy groups for sexual assault survivors began to publish guidelines for journalists covering sexual violence. “Reporting Sexual Assault: A Guide for Journalists,” produced by the Michigan Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, came out online in 2004. “Reporting on Rape and Sexual Violence,” a forty-page media “toolkit,” was issued by the Chicago Task Force on Violence Against Girls and Young Women in 2012. In 2013 the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault published “Reporting on Sexual Violence: A Guide for Journalists.” “Use the Right Words: Media Reporting on Sexual Violence in Canada,” a fifty-four-page guide…

You are leaving with all these poems. You are leaving. An over-the-shoulder bag is over your shoulder. And the river is leaving. It is making its unwavering way to no longer being a river. It is moving among façades that are neither moving nor moved. They are repeating like stanzas in a serial poem where one of the lines is constant. You have covered your face with glasses. Your face is in back of your glasses and the beautiful façades are in front of them. This says you are leaving. What an artificial word is beautiful, how moving it is in its awkwardness, in its etymological reflection of violence and occupation. Ours is a city that used to exist fully, for it was populated by shades and reflections like Facebook.…

Seven Steeples by Sara Baume. Mariner, 181 pp., $27.99; $18.99 (paper) Are novelists required to like humans? It’s fair to say, on the evidence of her published writing, that Sara Baume is not a people person. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), tells the story of Ray, a self-proclaimed misfit who goes on the run in rural Ireland with One Eye, his adopted dog. Ray was bullied as a schoolboy—“I didn’t really believe I was of the same species” as other children, he says—and his father cruelly neglected him. Now, at fifty-seven, he finds a kindred spirit in hairy, malodorous One Eye, who is prone to aggression. Men step out of the way when Ray passes on the street. Supermarket cashiers take a bathroom break when they see…

Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias, translated from the Spanish by David Unger, with a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa and an introduction by Gerald Martin. Penguin, 282 pp., $18.00 (paper) Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and…

The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore. Knopf, 172 pp., $27.00 “Let them eat grass,” said Andrew Myrick, a trader who owned several stores on the Dakota reservations in Minnesota. He was referring to the hungry warriors desperate for the food promised them by the federal government.* It was the summer of 1862, the second year of the Civil War. The Dakota were starving, their children dying. The winter had been harsh, the corn crop devastated, game was scarce, and the Dakota hadn’t yet received their annual annuity payment from Washington. And until they did, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent on the reservation, Thomas Galbraith, wouldn’t open the warehouses, even though they were well stocked with corn and pork. In early August, after a group of angry warriors raided one…

Walking alone in a forest, I came upon a deer—this was not a vision. It faced me, on its four thin legs, unmoved as a cave painting brushed by light. I made myself still. I spoke to it, softly. I can’t remember what I said. The deer regarded me as a god would, eased by my astonishment. Then, slowly, I moved closer, and the deer did not run. By now, you know it was love I walked toward, not the deer, but what hung in the space between us. I know it was love because, as I held my breath, the deer took a few steps toward me before bounding into the camouflage of branches and leaves.…

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay by Zachary Lazar. Catapult, 237 pp., $26.00; $16.95 (paper) “I have always had two ideas: that one day I would have to write about my father’s story, and that if I ever did so I would never be able to write another thing again.” This sentence appears near the beginning of Zachary Lazar’s 2009 memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and is then elaborated further. “What story could compare with his? The question was a more specific case of a larger dilemma: What could I ever do that would not seem trivial compared to what he went through?” Lazar’s father was killed when the writer was six years old, shot by two hit men in a parking garage in Phoenix, Arizona, soon…

Naipaul & Africa To the Editors: Howard French criticizes V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River [“Naipaul’s Unreal Africa,” NYR, December 22, 2022] for its “essentialization” of Africa, which he claims is “deeply rooted [in] racist fantasies of the Western past.” He also alleges that Salim, the novel’s prejudiced narrator, is a “fictional voice for Naipaul’s sensibilities.” Such judgments are the regrettable consequence of French’s inattention to the novel’s use of irony. Because he focuses exclusively on the content of A Bend in the River, French misses the crucial fact that Salim is an unreliable narrator whose moral and practical failings are cruelly exposed in the concluding chapters. Put another way: the novel begins with Salim making disparaging remarks about Africans; it ends with him being rescued from…