Innholdsfortegnelse for August 15, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Christopher Benfey is a writer and critic based in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, a family memoir. Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems is With My Back to the World. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech. 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. Susan Faludi is the author of Backlash and, most recently, the memoir In the Darkroom. Colin Grant’s latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. He is the Director of WritersMosaic, an online magazine for new writing and a division of the Royal Literary Fund. Vona…

(Available at Amazon) A Literary Gem! “Lizzie is a literary gem that deserves every one of its five stars and more. In this biographical novel, the author, a psychoanalyst, has written a masterfully crafted and profoundly immersive and exceptionally authentic portrayal of the enigmatic Lizzie Borden, offering readers a captivating journey into her life. This book’s commitment to authenticity while acknowledging its fictional nature is what sets it apart. Drawing from numerous sources, including court records, previous biographies, and his novelist’s sensibility, the author has painstakingly pieced together Lizzie Borden’s story. The result is a narrative that feels both compelling and genuine, even as it delves into the realm of fiction The choice to tell Lizzie’s story from her point of view is a stroke of brilliance. It allows readers…

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. Norton, 230 pp., $26.95; $17.99 (paper; to be published in September) Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs. Princeton University Press, 450 pp., $39.95; $24.95 (paper) Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things by Cody Marrs. Oxford University Press, 148 pp., $97.00 Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by Jennifer L. Fleissner. University of Chicago Press, 480 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville, edited by Jeffrey Insko. Norton, 673 pp., $12.87 (paper) In literature as in life, significant birthdays are occasions for both celebration and reassessment. Herman Melville’s two hundredth birthday happened to just precede the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.…

Nyad a film directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi Find a Way: The Inspiring Story of One Woman’s Pursuit of a Lifelong Dream by Diana Nyad. Vintage, 308 pp., $19.00 (paper) During her thousands of hours of training and her marathon open-water crossings, the American swimmer Diana Nyad sang songs in her head. She did this to help pace her strokes, monitor distance, and pass the time while “trapped in the solitary confinement of that protracted monotony.” By Nyad’s count, 210 repetitions of “Ticket to Ride” meant seven hours; a thousand repetitions of “Imagine” meant nine hours and forty-five minutes. A Spotify playlist of ninety-some songs—compiled in 2013 after her successful swim from Cuba to Key West at the age of sixty-four—totals five hours and seventeen minutes. (Listening…

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, April 20–August 11, 2024; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 12, 2024–January 5, 2025; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 8–June 1, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale. Art Institute of Chicago, 255 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good,” and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on centuryold surrealist tricks (jarring juxtaposition, biomorphic distortion, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices—something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a…

And then underneath the black strip on the canvas isa small light. I used to think the black strip was the actual painting. Now I think it’s what the black stripis covering. The covering is impossible. No matter how wide the strip is, light shines through. Somevistas just do. Barnett Newman threw most of his paintings away. Because he thought they weren’tgood enough. Most critics didn’t like his work. Most writers want to be loved by light. The same lightwe try to cover. So writing is regretful to do and also not to do. I always chose language’s black stretcherover everything else. Language has morals. Time does too. Writing is like pressing grief from the inside andthe outside at once. So that you end up touching your own fingers. Newman’s…

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, May 5–July 16, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Andrew Bolton. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 434 pp., $70.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) On entering “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Met last year, I was at first reduced to nouns and adjectives. I was overcome with description. An ensemble of an overdress and underdress for Chanel Autumn/Winter 2002–2003. The overdress, in a dark gray cashmere knit, is as formally cinched as a suit jacket. The underdress is made from a lighter gray silk satin with ivory, beige, and gray silk tulle and embroidered with iridescent gold, pink, gray, black, and white bugle beads and sequins. The reason for this sequence…

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Gregg Hecimovich, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Ecco, 412 pp., $40.00 In 2002 a newly published and soon-to-be best-selling novel made frontpage headlines—and no wonder. Acerbic and witty, nuanced and astute, The Bondwoman’s Narrative by “Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina,” was evidently the first novel by a Black woman to provide a chronicle of slavery from the inside. Years earlier the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had learned of the existence of this remarkable manuscript, written in longhand and undated, from his friend Dorothy Porter Wesley, a well-known Howard University librarian and bibliophile. She had purchased it from a book dealer in 1951 but was too…

The majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history, secures the monumental historic disgrace of the John Roberts Court. Since last winter, the Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by effectively shielding Donald Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Court has protected a political candidate in this way. Far more ominously, in March the Court in Trump v. Anderson openly nullified the section of the Fourteenth Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding federal or state office, discarding basic lessons about threats to American democracy dating back to the Civil War. Now, in Trump v. United States, handed down on the last day of its 2023–2024 term, the Court…

running lines. He tries out emphasisas if dropping stones in a rockpool(I sink. I sink. I sink.) and plays alongwith a smoky grin or countermanding fist. Imagine him walking his soliloquyover the bar of the man-made poolpast cue-card, prompter, stage markand off, quite simply, off into the wings. Just ripples of applause, he thinks,nothing to rise from pit or stallsto come at him pinpricked in footlights,bearing down on his exit. Tomorrow, for the matinee,he plans to say the odd word twice,see if anyone shifts in their velvet seat,if anybody past the shoreline blinks.…

GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP www.greenleafbookgroup.com; (512) 891-6100 THE SUMMER BETWEEN by Robert Raasch Set in New York City’s vibrant Greenwich Village in 1978, The Summer Between is the bittersweet, unsparingly honest coming-of-age saga of Andrew Jackson Pollock. 9798886452204 • Hardcover, $28.00 • 328 Pages • Fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Bookshop.org. Author’s Website: robertraasch.com WHERE LOVE LIES A Novel by Raz Tal Schenirer Liam is everything Ella never knew she needed. And the spark between them? Magnetic. Undeniable. Dangerous. But Liam is hiding a secret that could ruin them both. 979-8886451535 • Paper, $16.95 • 296 pages • Women’s fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Bookshop.org. Author’s website: www.raztalschenirer.com BETTER TO CRY NOW Shaping the Flow of a Gay Black Man by Geoffrey Newman Geoffrey’s insightful…