Innholdsfortegnelse for December 4, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Anthony Domestico is a contributing writer for Commonweal and the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. He teaches at Purchase College, SUNY. James Gleick’s most recent books are Time Travel and The Information. His new history of the telephone will be published next year. Michael Gorra’s books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. He recently retired from Smith. Sylvie Kandé is the author of three books of poetry, including The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos. Nancy Naomi Carlson is the author of sixteen books and the Translations Editor for On the Seawall. Her translation of Sylvie Kandé’s Gestuary will be published next spring. Dan Kaufman…

Ural Tansykbayev: 1904–1974 an exhibition at the Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty, March 18–June 1, 2025, and the Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, September 3–November 1, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Zelfira Tregulova. Tashkent: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation/Milan: Electa, 191 pp., €39.00 (paper) Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI edited by Boris Chukhovich, Davide Del Curto, and Ekaterina Golovatyuk. Tashkent: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation/Zürich: Lars Müller, 948 pp., $65.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Artbook/DAP) Recipes for Broken Hearts: Guidebook by Diana Campbell and Timur Zolotoev, with Qamoos Bukhari. Tashkent: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation/Paris: Cassi Edition, 199 pp. You’ve probably never heard of Ural Tansykbayev, but he is one of Uzbekistan’s most important twentieth-century artists. His paintings…

The fountain stammers and falls,motion-activated, playing to the crowd.The tourists are already lined up,disgorged from the buses, on their cells.Nearby, the field hasn’t been mowed:Texas thistle, Indian blanket, winecup. In the gift shop are swag and bling,children’s books and the confessions of thosewho damaged the world for a dayand wrote Now we act; now we are empires;and while you are diligently studyingour reality, we will make a new reality. But the wildflowers do not care,and Caesar Augustus, who understooda thing or two about reality,loved a garden best when it was uninhabited.That was the perfection of power,for which reason he kept a fresco in his study of two women, one of whom gathersher hair at her nape in a knotwhile the other turns away.They have met by chance, but as hesits…

Accursed would you go as far as to covetyour neighbor’s long-gone past …Melancholy this sixth sense!No the appetite for things ebbingalready leaves a vast beach for the signsand I go and turn over one by one(at the risk of losing the onyx of my fingernail)these slimy rocks where seaweed frothsSo many brackish secrets haunt the low tides!But surely the seashell I hold to my earwill only ever rustle from the expected echoof my blood flowing backTo anyone who wants to hear(mother-of-pearl’s captive)the intractable ocean voicea poem will be—always—the best conch (translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson)…

Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben, translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell. Seagull, 182 pp., $25.00 In 2004 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was scheduled to spend the spring semester as a visiting professor at NYU. On January 5 of that year, however, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new program to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors. Though EU citizens were exempted, three days later Agamben announced that “personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures,” and he refused to come to the US. In a statement first published in La Repubblica, he warned that collecting fingerprints marked a new “threshold in the control and manipulation of bodies”—what Michel Foucault had named “biopolitics.” Agamben described fingerprint collection as a perfect example of this tyranny…

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 389 pp., $30.00 Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture, and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh. Verso, 262 pp., $24.95 (paper) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. MCD, 338 pp., $30.00 It’s hard to remember—impossible, if you’re under thirty—but there was an Internet before there was a World Wide Web. Experts at their computer keyboards (phones were something else entirely) chatted and emailed and used Unix protocols called “finger” and “gopher” to probe the darkness for pearls of information. Around 1992 people started talking about an “Information Superhighway,” in part because of a national program championed by then…

Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman. Knopf, 414 pp., $38.00 “Excuse the long-winded ecstasy,” Amy Clampitt wrote to her family from a trip to Greece in 1965, “but that is why I came here, to see and exclaim.” About to turn forty-five, Clampitt had tried writing fiction, tinkering with a series of novels for decades. She’d tried travel writing, also to no avail. (Upon returning from Greece, she sent 165 pages on her peregrinations to several publishers. No one bit.) She wouldn’t make the final shift to poetry for a while yet, and it would be thirteen years before she published her first poem in The New Yorker. Yet in her letter Clampitt, one of the great late successes among American poets, identified…

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Verso, 343 pp., $19.95 (paper) Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Verso, 330 pp., $19.95 (paper) Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Verso, 341 pp., $26.95; $19.95 (paper) We have all listened to someone—a friend, an acquaintance, ourselves—go on and on and on about being in a terrible romantic relationship. These stories are fundamentally predictable, and they cause predictable reactions: horrified amusement, fascination, pity, boredom. If Only, by the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth, is a book-length account of a disastrous, drawn-out love affair. Frustration is part of the experience of reading it. I kept muttering to myself about the protagonist, Why is she putting…

An Exorcism To the Editors: Catherine Nicholson’s review of Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of ‘King Lear’ [“The Cares of State,” NYR, October 9] is fascinating, and one of the most moving reviews I’ve ever read. But one remark of Nicholson’s confuses me. Near the end of her essay, she writes that the play’s “gods are notoriously vicious or absent; it makes no promises of justice in the hereafter; in lieu of the Sermon on the Mount it gives us a suicidal pantomime on an imaginary cliff.” Yet Edgar’s speech to his blind father, Gloucester, informing him falsely that he is situated at the edge of the Cliffs of Dover (a celebrated piece of imaginative writing, in which many of us learned the meaning of the word “samphire”), succeeds…