Innholdsfortegnelse for July 20, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Robin D. G.Kelley: The War on Black Studies Nawal Arjini: Berenice Abbott’s New York of the Future Frederic Wehrey: A Forgotten Fascist Massacre in Ethiopia Liza Batkin: ‘Prima Facie’ Litigates the Sexual Assault Trial Aida Alami: Spain’s Exploited Migrant Workers Jessica Riskin: Does ChatGPT Pass the Turing Test? Lucy Jakub: Hayao Miyazaki’s Parables of Work Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at nybooks.com/issues.…

Seated alone at the edge of the bedgrasp the finest fabric first, the shrunken sock or silk softest to touchamong laundry high & hot enough to wrestle your body in rags and towelsand undivided multicolor trappings. When you find your phantom lover’sitem in the pile, you will have to decide how to handle it. When it is an undergarment,you may grasp the heat which does not linger in silk or lace.When it is a shirt or pair of jeans, position the fabric on your skin in the absentlover’s position. Most of your armor is cotton. You may undress & lie with the itemagainst the most exposed part of your seams, a root work of threads like veins.The scent folded into the fabric may no longer be detectable to the unknowing…

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $28.00 As the title suggests—particularly once you realize that its grandiosity is unironic—The World and All That It Holds is by some distance Aleksandar Hemon’s most ambitious work, with the main action spanning thirty-five years, two disintegrating empires, World Wars I and II, and the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. The problem is that his transparent desire to paint his masterpiece results too often in a self-conscious striving for effect and an unwavering commitment to solemnity. Anybody who comes to the book without having read his earlier ones might be surprised to hear that Hemon can be a playful, funny writer. Here, such comedy as there is proves largely inadvertent. Granted, it’s not hard to…

Pink scud clouds over the bridges,Vauxhall, Lambeth, Battersea, spider-work. Black. The syllablesof water, black. Go. Stay. Met in air, met in water, and I a childof summer born far from here on a Thursday. A Thursday, you say?Far to go and full of woe. And what year was it, the housea page torn from the calendar, a foolscap boat filled with paperballast, bisecting the waves until they parted, impossible to leta single page go, and the thud when the tide hit the bank? A yearto remember. Give me your hand across the water. Once I went downwhen the tide was out and the stones ashimmer, obsidian in the moonlight,the ivy brackish and the toads dry in their den. Come outfrom the fountain, maenad made of green stone, moss-fleckedbone and your…

ELIZABETH CURRID-HALKETT THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country “This timely book belies the narrative of a nation sharply polarized across an urban-rural divide. Instead, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett shows that Americans aren’t nearly as divided by geography as the punditry and media would have us believe. Essential reading for all who care about the future of our country.”—RICHARD FLORIDA, author of The New Urban Crisis “The Overlooked Americans tears down entrenched definitions and stereotypes and builds a new image of rural America that is not hopelessly divided from urban America. Nuanced, cogent, and empathetic.”—JANE HARMAN, USC presidential scholar, former member of Congress (CA, 36) “Through data and heartfelt stories, Currid-Halkett reveals the grit and resilience of rural Americans.”—TYLER COWEN, George Mason University…

no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 23, 2022–April 23, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marcela Guerrero. Whitney Museum of American Art, 128 pp., $45.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, October 5, 2023–February 24, 2024; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, April 6–July 8, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago/DelMonico/DAP, 288 pp., $65.00 Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime an exhibition at the Americas Society, New…

Lover Man by Alston Anderson, with an afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa. McNally, 194 pp., $18.00 (paper) James Weldon Johnson was critical of dialect because it had only two stops: pathos and humor. Mark Twain may have listened to how the black people around him spoke, and the case has been made passionately that he gave his black characters credit for thinking at a time when dialect was used mostly to confirm the inferiority of black people, but even if not racist, dialect is still racialized speech. It contains the problem of having to overcome the assumption that racial distinctions will be demeaning for black people. The only character who speaks in dialect in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Civil War novel, The Fanatics (1901), is the “negro” bell ringer in the Ohio…

Vermeer an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February 10–June 4, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pieter Roelofs and Gregor J. M. Weber. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/Veurne: Hannibal, 317 pp., $65.00 Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J. M. Weber. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 165 pp., $35.00 (paper) Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine. London: Lund Humphries, 160 pp., $59.99 In an uncanny anticipation of his subsequent reception history, Johannes Vermeer made one of his first appearances in the printed record in the guise of a phoenix, the mythical bird that regenerates itself from its own ashes. The context was a poem by the printer Arnold Bon, published in 1667 to commemorate the premature death of the painter Carel Fabritius in the explosion of Delft’s gunpowder arsenal thirteen years…

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, with a foreword by Alissa Bennett and an afterword by Marc Parrott. McNally, 218 pp., $18.00 (paper) Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott by Marsha Gordon. University of California Press, 300 pp., $29.95 Lord, I have been more chased than chaste. —Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife Seemingly out of nowhere, precociously aphoristic and coolly unsentimental, the debut novel Ex-Wife appeared in 1929 to much scandalized acclaim; originally published anonymously, it brought a life-altering celebrity to its hitherto unknown author, Ursula Parrott, just thirty years old, who found herself not only controversial and an immediate best seller but, more questionably, something of a spokesperson for the “new woman” of the era—a female counterpart to her almost exact contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.…

Kerri Arsenault is a Codirector of the Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown, a Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, the Ullyot Scholar at the Science History Institute, and the author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Terrance Hayes is the author of seven books of poems. His latest collection, So to Speak, will be published this summer, along with a book of essays, Watch Your Language. Laura Marsh is the Literary Editor of The New Republic. Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large at The New York Review and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, is the author, most recently, of Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published next year. Carolina…

"A voice like no other" From the unique world of Oscar Mandel’s imagination his Gobble-Up Stories, Chi Po and the Sorcerer, and The History of Sigismund, Prince of Poland are collected in the 270 pages of Otherwise Fables ($16). In a remote corner of the world which no human being has ever seen there flourished some trees which, as no one has ever seen them, I can't describe to you, though I like to imagine them as looking like grand cabbages sitting on their trunks, why not? One day a seedling was wafted into their midst from eastern New Jersey. The seedling took root next to one of these trees, and it too flourished. First a sapling came up, and then, many years later, a pine tree mature enough at…

Chantal Montellier Translated from the French by Geoffrey Brock Paperback • $24.95 On sale July 25th Dark, smart, and indomitably cool, the 70s and 80s dystopian visions of Chantal Montellier still unsettle. Visitors to an underground mall must recreate civilization after a nuclear strike may have wiped out the rest of humanity. Newlyweds find themselves implicated in a government eugenics program. A disembodied authority reprimands a man for stepping out of view of a security camera. In this collection of three novellas—Wonder City, Shelter, and 1996—published together in English for the first time, Montellier’s blend of dark humor, gripping storytelling, and consistent focus on the perils of totalitarianism, shows her to be a master of both comics and science fiction. Social Fiction includes a Q&A between Chantal Montellier and Geoffrey…

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty. Tin House, 285 pp., $16.95 (paper) A sign flanking the Maine Turnpike near the New Hampshire border greets drivers as they file in from points south: “Maine. Welcome Home. The Way Life Should Be.” This seductive dictum, however, obscures less romantic landscapes within the borders of our state. Most of its residents live on roads where the 15.6 million tourists who visited in 2021 probably didn’t go: in communities damaged by toxic pollutants or opioids, bankrupted by government inaction, devoured by poverty, haunted by our country’s colonial past. Penobscot Nation—along with the rest of Maine’s Native population—has suffered all of the above. In June 1972 a long ribbon of litigation began to unspool that obliged the Department of Justice to sue the state…