Innholdsfortegnelse for May 8, 2017 i The New Yorker

Lauren Collins (“Can the Center Hold?,” p. 20) is the author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language,” which was published in September. Andrew Marantz (“The Best Medicine,” p. 28) has been contributing to the magazine since 2011. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 72), the magazine’s art critic, is the author of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker.” Yiyun Li (Fiction, p. 54) has written several books, including the novel “Kinder Than Solitude.” Her memoir, “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” came out this year. Garth Greenwell (Books, p. 62) is the author of the novel “What Belongs to You,” which was published last year. Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 15), a staff writer, is a professor of…

New York City Ballet In week two of the “Here/Now” festival, the company unveils its newest creation by Alexei Ratmansky, a ballet entitled “Odessa” and set to music by the Russian contemporary composer Leonid Desyatnikov. The score—a driving tapestry of tangos and folk music—was originally written for a film by Alexander Zeldovich based on Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Tales,” set in an Odessa ghetto. (Desyatnikov is also the composer of the music for Ratmansky’s “Russian Seasons,” which is being revived this season.) • May 3 at 7:30: “In Creases,” “The Dreamers,” “New Blood,” and “Everywhere We Go.” • May 4 at 7: “Jeu de Cartes,” “After the Rain” pas de deux, “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” and “Odessa.” • May 5 at 8 and May 9 at 7:30: “Neverwhere,” “Mothership,” “Spectral…

PATRICIA LIMERICK, well-known historian of the American West, gave a talk at the community center in the town of Burns, Oregon, one evening not long ago with her heart slightly in her throat. Limerick belongs to the small category of historians who are occasionally recognized on the street, and she gives talks all the time. What made this one different was that Burns is the county seat of Harney County, home of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the site, last year, of a sixweek takeover by armed protesters, who demanded that the federal government return the land—though to whom was not exactly clear. One of the occupiers was killed in the standoff. Limerick knew that her audience, about seventyfive county residents, included both supporters and opponents of the protest. The…

HOURS AFTER Donald Trump’s Inauguration, a post appeared on the official White House petitions page, demanding that he release his tax returns. In only a few days, it gathered more signatures than any previous White House petition. The success of the Women’s March had shown that themed protests could both mobilize huge numbers of people and hit a nerve with the President. On Easter weekend, roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people protested in two hundred cities, calling for him to release his tax returns and sell his businesses. On Capitol Hill, protesters chanted “Impeach Forty-five!” In West Palm Beach, a motorcade ferrying him from the Trump International Golf Club to Mar-a-Lago had to take a circuitous route to avoid demonstrators. The White House does all it can to keep…

SINCE IT WAS published in France, in 2014, “The End of Eddy,” Édouard Louis’s slim début novel, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies. Much of the extraordinary interest in the book has centered on its depiction of Hallencourt, a village of about fourteen hundred people in Picardy, in the north of France, not far from the sea. Hallencourt’s occasional beauty—fruit trees in gardens, explosions of color in the autumn woods—does little, in Louis’s telling, to alleviate the human suffering that takes place there. A postindustrial decline has shuttered most of the region’s factories, and jobs are scarce and hard. Children in the village leave school early; women have children young; one in five adults has difficulty reading and writing. Alcoholism is rampant and violence casual. The village overwhelmingly…

REWIND “THIS IS A hard story to tell.” So writes Joan Didion near the start of her 1984 novel, “Democracy,” a book that’s narrated by a character named Joan Didion, who describes the difficulty of devising a whole fiction in the fragmented modern world. Like a number of her contemporaries or near-contemporaries— Julian Barnes and Renata Adler among them—Didion is ultimately challenging the writer’s empirical “I,” a subject that Susan Sontag tackled in an essay published in this magazine, in 1973: Inevitably, disestablishing the “author” brings about a redefinition of “writing.” . . . All pre-modern literature evolves from the classical conception of writing as an impersonal, self-sufficient, freestanding achievement. Modern literature projects a quite different idea: the romantic conception of writing as a medium in which a singular personality…

RACISM AND BARBECUE I read with interest Lauren Collins’s article about the racist barbecue baron Maurice Bessinger, and his family’s handling of his legacy (“Secrets in the Sauce,” April 24th). Collins writes that “barbecue might be America’s most political food,” citing the social and civic role of barbecue feasts in American history. Barbecue has also been used as a metaphor for the lynching of black bodies, and was a social and civic ritual of white supremacy. In 1916, the black teen-ager Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco, Texas. Afterward, his body was mutilated and burned. The murder was a public spectacle—a party, even, with white women and children in attendance—and professional photographers took pictures, which they sold as souvenir postcards. One of these postcards, which survives, has a handwritten…

LATELY, THE DINING room at the Morgan Library & Museum has been offering a lunch menu inspired by one of its exhibits, of treasures from the National Museum of Sweden: cucumber-elderflower aquavit sparkler, brown-butter cod cake, lingonberry cobbler. The restaurant has not been offering a menu inspired by another of its exhibits, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,” about the life and work of Emily Dickinson. Visiting the other day, Terence Davies, the British filmmaker, agreed that this was just as well. “It would be very sparse,” he said. “None of this ‘knitted by nuns in Nepal’ business.” Davies directed “A Quiet Passion,” the new film about Dickinson, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Starring Cynthia Nixon, the movie starts out looking like a conventional bio-pic before turning into a…

BY LATE AFTERNOON, the smell from the Case Farms chicken plant in Canton, Ohio, is like a pungent fog, drifting over a highway lined with dollar stores and auto-parts shops. When the stink is at its ripest, it means that the day’s hundred and eighty thousand chickens have been slaughtered, drained of blood, stripped of feathers, and carved into pieces—and it’s time for workers like Osiel López Pérez to clean up. On April 7, 2015, Osiel put on bulky rubber boots and a white hard hat, and trained a pressurized hose on the plant’s stainless-steel machines, blasting off the leftover grease, meat, and blood A Guatemalan immigrant, Osiel was just weeks past his seventeenth birthday, too young by law to work in a factory. A year earlier, after gang members…

THERE’S A CASE to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the later twentieth century. Just glance at the “chronology” section of “A Grace Paley Reader” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a welcome new collection of her short stories, nonfiction, and poems, edited by Kevin Bowen and Paley’s daughter, Nora. 1961: Leads her Greenwich Village PTA in protests against atomic testing, founds the Women Strike for Peace, pickets the draft board, receives a Guggenheim Fellowship 1966: Jailed for civil disobedience on Armed Forces Day, starts teaching at Sarah Lawrence. 1969: Travels to North Vietnam to bring home U.S. prisoners of war, wins an O. Henry…

THE THEATRE OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Arlington The Irish playwright Enda Walsh wrote and directs this Orwellian tale of a man monitoring a young woman in the waiting room of a tower. (St. Ann’s Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718- 254-8779. In previews.) Can You Forgive Her? In Gina Gionfriddo’s play, directed by Peter Du- Bois, Amber Tamblyn plays a woman afflicted by financial and romantic problems who finds refuge with an engaged couple on Halloween. (Vineyard, 108 E. 15th St. 212-353-0303. Previews begin May 4.) Derren Brown: Secret Brown, an Olivier-winning British performer known for his feats of mind-reading and audience manipulation, presents an evening of “psychological illusion.” (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.) Ernest Shackleton Loves Me In this new musical by Joe DiPietro,…

IT TOOK THE Big Book forty-five minutes to make it down to Hollywood from Calabasas, riding shotgun in a Honda Accord. By 9:30 a.m., it was reclining poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel amid the memory of guests and carousers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Montgomery Clift, and Errol Flynn, who, legend has it, made bathtub gin in the hotel’s barbershop. Such ghosts, and the squiggly David Hockney mural at the bottom of the pool, and the ashy traces, among the palms, of a party the night before, seemed to call for a round of Bloody Marys. But not today, pal. The Big Book is the founding testament and manifesto of Alcoholics Anonymous, written for the most part (anonymously) by the organization’s co-founder Bill Wilson, a.k.a. Bill W., and this version, by…

ON A RECENT drizzly Wednesday afternoon, Jimmy Webb, the seventy- year-old Grammy-winning songwriter of “Up, Up and Away,” “Mac- Arthur Park,” “Wichita Lineman,” and many other wistful hits of the AM-FM era, visited Carnegie Hall with his wife, Laura Savini. Webb wore a spiffy gray suit and a paisley tie; his short gray hair was softly unruly. He and Savini left their umbrellas in the Maestro Suite (Steinway upright piano; portraits of Bernstein and Toscanini) and headed to the main stage, Stern Auditorium. There, this week, artists including Judy Collins, Art Garfunkel, Toby Keith, and Hanson (yes, that Hanson), will perform Webb’s songs, in a fund-raiser for Alzheimer’s research, presented by City Winery. Michael Douglas, Webb’s former roommate, will host. In the seventies, Webb explained, “Mikey and Jann Wenner and…

IN 2009, ON THE “Late Show with David Letterman,” the comedian Kumail Nanjiani walked onstage, wearing a boxy black suit and a cordless mike, to do a standup set. The band played a few bars of “Born in the U.S.A.,” an allusion, presumably, to the fact that he wasn’t. The first anecdote of Nanjiani’s set fell flat. He stood stiffly, swallowing hard, his hands clasped tightly in front of his chest. Then he told a joke about theme-park attractions with excessively convoluted backstories. “It’s like a story line to a porn movie,” he said. “I really don’t care what all your professions are. I’m just here for the ride.” It wasn’t the cleverest punch line in Nanjiani’s act, but it received a big laugh and a ten-second applause break. He…

A GIRL, NO OLDER than ten, accosted Bella and Peter as they left the restaurant famous for its Peking duck. Adrian, Peter’s boyfriend, was lagging behind, practicing his Mandarin one last time before the end of their trip. “Buy a rose,” the girl said to Peter in English. “For your girlfriend.” “Thank you, my dear,” Peter said, “but she’s not my girlfriend.” The girl did not understand English. She prompted him again with the memorized line. “Quiet,” Bella said in Mandarin. “He’s not my boyfriend.” “How can it be, sister? He’s handsome. And you’re pretty.” “Sister? I’m old enough to be your aunt.” “Then tell my uncle to buy a rose for you,” the girl said, gesturing toward the cardboard sign she wore like a bib. “10 RMB,” it said,…

Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Crown). This withering account of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign draws on interviews conducted with staffers as the race unfolded. Robby Mook, who ran the operation, is portrayed as being obsessed with analytics and demographics, to the exclusion of the traditional politics of persuasion. Regional directors, begging for resources, are told that their states won’t matter, and everyone waits for the next headline about e-mails. The candidate herself, largely out of view, emerges mostly to spread blame: “In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message for her.” The book’s perspective yields a great deal of backroom color, but its insights are limited, which is partly the point: the Clinton campaign never had a clear picture…