Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Julian Bell is a painter based in Lewes, England. His book Natural Light: The Art of Adam Elsheimer and the Dawn of Modern Science was published in June. Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. His books include Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Poverty, by America, which was published in March. Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer and professor. He lives in New York and teaches at Hofstra. His latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, was published in January. James Gleick’s most recent books are Time Travel and The Information. He is working on a history of the telephone. Anjum Hasan’s latest novel is History’s Angel. She is the author of five previous…

for Sophie Fluid of the rags of the magical dead;last vice of the gentle sober; a good cryin September rain; holy ghost condensingalong an imitation wet black bough;what kind of mostly water is this?Probably you could dissolvea stolen diamond in it; probably folda pint of yogurt down into the holeand later draw out a bright gold chain;negative metabolic; zero calorific;dark matter phosphorescence;blood of the lamb but unindicted;tastes of like, maybe? yeah; tastes ofyou can’t prove it … and anywayI’m a tonally distant person now.I’m a totally different person.…

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin, translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella. Minnesota University Press, 523 pp., $29.95 (to be published in the US in March) Scandinoir was born in November 1939, when the Soviet Army invaded Finland and the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson wrote a story in which a mother and child find themselves in a wood: “Once upon a time a Moomintroll was walking with his mother through a very strange forest.” When the story was published in 1945 as Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen (The Moomins and the Great Flood), this opening was revised so that the creatures are no longer walking, and the events begin in darkness: It must have been late in the afternoon one day at the end of…

for Kaveh As a fire axe waits in its little shop windowAs a tongue returns raw to the lozengeIt’s not your fault you’re like this, but you areAs consternation at the departure gateAs drinking water to find it creamyAs the linseed head of an ant might contain a social code in playAs suffering comes home from work with the same names as yesterdayAs you forget to tasteAs you borrow a sigh from the same cubic meters of airAs a too-slow handshake might signal sarcasmIt’s not who you are but who you are and can’t undoAs you shit in a room without waterAs you cry in a room without lightWe send our loveWe send an invoice attached as requestedAs if everything were intended for you…

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Simon and Schuster, 670 pp., $35.00 To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. One of the many tragedies of this arrangement is that the people it makes miserable can nonetheless become its most loyal defenders. An extreme example from recent years is the incel phenomenon, whereby men who feel excluded from conventional masculinity develop a violent attachment to it. Nerd culture as a whole often exhibits the same dynamic. The nerd is not the opposite of the jock but a different iteration of the same…

politybooks.com A Life in the American Century Joseph S. Nye Jr. “Through the insightful eyes of Joe Nye, we see the triumphs and challenges of our times unfold.” Walter Isaacson, chair of CNN and editor of Time Cloth | $29.95 Trouble with Gender Sex Facts, Gender Fictions Alex Byrne “Everyone with opinions, or questions, about matters of sex and gender should read this book.” Janet Radcliffe Richards, University of Oxford Cloth | $29.95 The Kindertransport What Really Happened Andrea Hammel “An impressively well researched account that is at once fascinating and deeply moving.” James Bulgin, Imperial War Museums Paper | $22.95 How to Inhabit the Earth Bruno Latour “the most creative intellectual of our generation” Richard Sennett Paper | $16.95 In the Name of Sharks François Sarano “a brilliant and…

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Said on Opera EDWARD W. SAID Edited by Wouter Capitain. Foreword by Peter Sellars. “These essays on major works in the opera repertoire are provocative and penetrating. They are eloquent testimony to Edward W. Said’s understanding of how music, both written and performed, intersects with politics, history, and literature. Said’s interpretive imagination and his conviction that music is a vital dimension of history and culture will captivate musicians, scholars, students, and all operagoers.” —Leon Botstein, conductor, editor of the Musical Quarterly, and president of Bard College Scenes of Attention Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses D. GRAHAM BURNETT and JUSTIN E. H. SMITH, EDS. “These vivid and varied essays are a much-needed antidote to the flattened attention of the click economy … This timely collection broadens and deepens…

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press, 333 pp., $29.95 Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and…

Air Raid by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, with an afterword by W.G. Sebald. Seagull, 138 pp., $21.00; $10.50 (paper) The German novelistic tradition, like the Spanish, begins with a picaresque novel of memorable brutality. Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669) opens with an army marching into a village, raping, torturing, and massacring its inhabitants, and burning it down. The one hidden survivor is the novel’s narrator: twelve-year-old Simplicissimus, who has looked on stunned as his family and world are annihilated, his baptism into a world of war. As a young teenager, Grimmelshausen himself was kidnapped by Croatian or Hessian soldiers, experiencing the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) at close range (and partly as a soldier). Midtwentieth-century German writers like Bertolt Brecht and Günter Grass returned obsessively to Grimmelshausen…