Volume 68, Number 1 (2021-01-14)

Louise Glück

The Poet and the Reader: Nobel Lecture 2020

Brenda Wineapple

‘A Land Where the Dead Past Walks’

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934

by Carl Rollyson

The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962

by Carl Rollyson

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

by Michael Gorra

Jackson Lears

Orthodoxy of the Elites

In Anne Applebaum’s book, democracy, free markets, and meritocracy all get the aerial view.

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum

Susan Tallman

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting

by Robert Storr, with a chronology compiled by Amanda Renshaw

Philip Guston

by Musa Mayer

Philip Guston Now

Catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and three other museums in 2022–2024, by Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin, with essays by Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a chronology by Jennifer Roberts and Harry Cooper

Poor Richard

by Philip Guston, with an afterword by Harry Cooper

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971

an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020

Claire Messud

Alison Lurie (1926–2020)

The late novelist and critic was a brilliant deflator of pretension and a compassionate friend.

Stephen Greenblatt

A Wisewoman in Stratford

Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare’s wife and son.

Hamnet

by Maggie O’Farrell

Jenny Uglow

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

Planting the World: Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany

by Jordan Goodman

J. Hoberman

Revenge of the Has-Been

Mank is no documentary but a semifactual yarn that burnishes the legend of the showboat, nasty wit, and habitual roisterer who wrote Citizen Kane.

Mank

a film written by Jack Fincher and directed by David Fincher

The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

Geoffrey O’Brien

Hitler in Antarctica

A historian of the Third Reich traces the processes by which history is not simply distorted but replaced by a fantastic parallel version.

The Hitler Conspiracies

by Richard J. Evans

Gavin Francis

Changing Psychiatry’s Mind

Two books investigate the science and pseudoscience of diagnosing mental illness.

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

by Anne Harrington

This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A Journey into the Heartland of Psychiatry

by Nathan Filer

Ishion Hutchinson

Overwinter

a poem

Cass R. Sunstein

Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble

Robert Shiller argues for the power of stories in shaping economics.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

by Robert J. Shiller

Lynn Emanuel

Hello

a poem

Adam Kirsch

The People’s Novel

Peter Weiss makes a passionate case that for the poor, communism offered access to spiritual and intellectual realms from which they had historically been excluded.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1

by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and a glossary by Robert Cohen

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2

by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Scott, with an afterword by Jürgen Schutte

Diane Ravitch

The Dark History of School Choice

How an argument for segregated schools became a rallying cry for privatizing public education.

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

by Katherine Stewart

Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement

by Steve Suitts

Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy

by Derek W. Black

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

Deadly Myths

Magic, reality, and violence against women in Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season.’

Hurricane Season

by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes

James Romm

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74

by Steve Mason

Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth

by Jodi Magness

Gillian White