Volume 68, Number 19 (2021-12-02)

Neal Ascherson

Grand Illusion

Armed with only a Ouija board, two British officers attempted an eccentric and devious escape from a Turkish prisoner of war camp.

The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

by Margalit Fox

Raja Shehadeh

What Does Israel Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?

The Israeli government smears human rights organizations—like Al Haq, the one I founded—rather than attempting to end the violations they bring to light.

Elaine Blair

Quick Words, Long View

Like many of her narrators, Lydia Davis is a taxonomist of daily life.

Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles

by Lydia Davis

Colm Tóibín

Father & Son

a poem

Jarrett Earnest

Landscapes of the Imagination

Jesse Murry’s abstract seascapes enabled him to explore the inner world of the mind while infusing his art with his life as a gay Black man.

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human

by Melanie Challenger

Ange Mlinko

Bard of New Jersey

There’s tremendous showmanship in August Kleinzahler’s language, the power to leap from dainty diction to grotesque vocabulary within the space of a single line.

Snow Approaching on the Hudson

by August Kleinzahler

Jake Bernstein

Loopholes for Kleptocrats

The term “tax haven” may conjure images of Caribbean islands and palm trees, but two recent books make the case that the world’s leading tax haven is America.

American Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History

by Casey Michel

The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions

by Chuck Collins

Rae Armantrout

On Melancholy

a poem

Lauren Groff

Herring-Gray Skies

Dorthe Nors’s characters are materially comfortable yet spiritually lonely.

Karate Chop

by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

So Much for That Winter

by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra

Wild Swims

by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra

J.H. Elliott

Mastering the Glyphs

New histories of the conquest of Mexico look to Nahuatl-language sources for a fresh perspective on Aztec society.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

The Aztecs: Lost Civilizations

by Frances F. Berdan

Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest

by Fernando Cervantes

Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing

by Gordon Whittaker

Miranda Seymour

Our Trojan Moment

Pat Barker’s trilogy-in-progress is the most recent attempt to give a powerful voice to Homer’s silenced women.

The Women of Troy

by Pat Barker

Sarah A. Seo

Reimagining the Public Defender

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice

by Jonathan Rapping

Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America

by Sara Mayeux

Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court

by Matthew Clair

Rae Armantrout

Lapse

a poem

Christopher Benfey

Exile on Main Street

A new book argues that Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology helped overturn old notions of the virtuous New England village as the prototype of American life.

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town

by Jason Stacy

David Motadel

Nazis on the Run

Many perpetrators of the Holocaust escaped justice. Should Germany prosecute as accessories to murder the elderly few who remain alive?

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive

by Philippe Sands

Fritz Bauer: The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial

by Ronen Steinke, translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe, with a foreword by Andreas Vosskuhle

Rosa Lyster

Family Liturgies

Gwendoline Riley’s language is economical, her style cool—yet the emotional pitch of her latest novel, My Phantoms, is almost intolerably high.

My Phantoms

by Gwendoline Riley

Kevin Young

‘And I One of Them’

Nancy Cunard’s relationship with the jazz musician Henry Crowder helped inspire her years of civil rights activism. Her romance wasn’t just with him, but with Blackness.