Innholdsfortegnelse for October 9, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop. Norton, 466 pp., $32.50; $21.99 (paper) Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop. Norton, 329 pp., $17.95 (paper) Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways by Jin Feng. University of Washington Press, 216 pp., $110.00; $35.00 (paper) China in Seven Banquets: A Flavourful History by Thomas David DuBois. Reaktion, 296 pp., $25.00 Every autumn in the mid-2000s, when I lived in China, my friend Scarlett Li would invite me to Shanghai to eat hairy crab. Named for the spiky fur on their legs and claws, the crabs are said to have the best flavor during the ninth month of the lunar calendar. They’re steamed and served whole, with a dip of…

Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci. Seal, 264 pp., $30.00 Many of us spend an enormous amount of time at home. Remote work persists, despite the return-to-office push. Some of us are full-time parents and caregivers, even homeschoolers. For others, home can be a place of unimaginable cosseting, with or without Tik-Tok videography. No matter its nature, home remains central to our lives. But how do we characterize what goes on there? Is the home a refuge from the ravages of capitalism or a center of its maintenance? How do those who do the physical and emotional work of the home—still largely women—experience it, and what do they deserve in return? Studies of housework tend to stay within narrow disciplinary furrows, focusing on either…

The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da. Princeton University Press, 228 pp., $29.95 “Too savage and unnatural” (Joseph Warton); “too horrid to be endured” (Samuel Johnson); “nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting” and “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage” (Charles Lamb): early Shakespeare critics found King Lear difficult to admire or even talk about. “We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it,” William Hazlitt wrote. The problem, as the nineteenth-century German scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel argued, was the extremity of the plot, which defies analogy to contemporary experience: To save in some degree the honor of human nature, Shakespeare never wishes his spectators to forget that the story takes place in a dreary and barbarous…

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 322 pp., $29.00; $20.00 (paper) Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Picador, 336 pp., $20.00 (paper) Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 255 pp., $20.00 (paper) Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses by David Scheel, with illustrations by Laurel “Yoyo” Scheel. Norton, 307 pp., $28.95; $18.99 (paper) Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster. HarperOne, 311 pp., $29.99; $18.99 (paper) Let’s start with some comparative anatomy. You and I have bones. An octopus doesn’t. It has three hearts—two for its gills—pumping coppery blue blood.…

Do Ho Suh: Walk the House an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, May 1–October 26, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva with Amie Corry. London: Tate, 191 pp., $45.00 (paper; to be distributed in the US by Abrams in November) In a single large room at Tate Modern the South Korean artist Do Ho Suh is having his first major exhibition in a British museum. It has the feel of a condensed retrospective, however, partly because he has been so faithful to his obsessions that many of the pieces specifically made for it are also elements in an ongoing series. I went with my ten-year-old daughter, and as always when seeing a museum show, the surrounding experience seeped into the general impression. We…

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust by Chris Heath. Schocken, 614 pp., $40.00 This is a strange but grimly memorable book. What makes No Road Leading Back strange is that Chris Heath, an experienced English journalist, became gripped by a drive to find and check every detail of a single Lithuanian episode in the Holocaust. That drive—he calls it “relentless”—forced him on through months and years of journeying, questioning, and research. He needed to discover what happened to the survivors of that episode, at the time and in their postwar lives. What makes the book memorable and gives it such importance is that Heath finds himself not just telling a story but telling how he…

Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare by John Lechner. Bloomsbury, 261 pp., $29.99 Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos by Candace Rondeaux. PublicAffairs, 442 pp., $32.00 The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army by Jack Margolin. Reaktion, 328 pp., $24.00 In December 2023 I received a series of alarming WhatsApp messages from a longtime colleague in Timbuktu, just north of the Niger River in central Mali. He told me that a company of Russian mercenaries had recently occupied the city. Armed men were swaggering through the streets and conducting a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Tuareg, the mostly nomadic ethnic group of which he is a member and that has waged rebellions against the government for…

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life by Graham Watson. Pegasus, 285 pp., $29.95 Charlotte Brontë, a thirty-eight-year-old “spinster” of “no rank or profession,” married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls on Thursday, June 29, 1854, at the church of St. Michael and All Angels in Haworth, where her father was the incumbent and her mother, her brother, and three of her four dead sisters were buried. Because at the eleventh hour Patrick Brontë, age seventy-seven, refused to attend the wedding of his last surviving child—hoping, by this ruse, to prevent the event from taking place—Charlotte was given away by her former teacher and employer Margaret Wooler. “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” she wrote from her honeymoon to her…

Adolescence a television series written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini In the tense opening sequence of the four-part Netflix drama Adolescence, armed police break down the door of a small row house in an unnamed northern English town. It is the home of the Miller family, and the police have come to arrest thirteen-year-old Jamie on suspicion of murder. The camera keeps us close to the experience of the terrified family—the boy who wets himself at the sight of weapons being pointed at him, the bewildered parents outraged that police officers are rifling through their possessions. As Jamie is bundled into a police van, the sound of his rapid breathing is amplified. It is a brutal scene, and we are guided toward the possibility…

Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920 by the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project, edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Nelson, with a preface by Kelsey Kauffman. New Press, 308 pp., $29.99 “Consider the plight of the incarcerated historian,” Michelle Daniel Jones writes at the start of Who Would Believe a Prisoner?, a remarkable collaborative history of the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis: no Internet access, a tiny library consisting mostly of romance novels, no ability to travel to view archival material, captors legally authorized to censor your writing and foreclose your education. For more than twenty years, Jones—a highly regarded scholar and artist who has been profiled in The New York Times and recently completed a doctorate in American studies at New York University—was confined…

Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern by Mary Beard. Princeton University Press, 376 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper) Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard. Liveright, 493 pp., $39.99; $21.99 (paper) Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars by Peter Stothard. Oxford University Press, 314 pp., $30.99; $19.95 (paper) The Aldobrandini Tazze, as they are now known, are a set of twelve shallow silver dishes on pedestals, resembling cake stands. Engraved on the interior of each dish are scenes from the career of an early Roman emperor (Julius Caesar to Domitian). In the center of each stands a silver statuette of the ruler, about the same height as the pedestal below, so that the whole resembles a spinning top about eighteen…