Table of Contents - April 21, 2022 | The New York Review of Books

Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons

by Jeremy Denk

Benjamin Nathans

Bureaucrat’s Honor

Three memoirs by Trump administration officials reveal the integrity and moral discipline of the so-called deep state in the face of corruption and philistinism.

Lessons from the Edge

by Marie Yovanovitch

Here, Right Matters: An American Story

by Alexander S. Vindman

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Wendy Xu

Work

a poem

Kamran Javadizadeh

In Between States

In Solmaz Sharif’s new collection of poetry, closed doors are everywhere.

Customs

by Solmaz Sharif

John Banville

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

by Jed Perl

Peter Gizzi

Revisionary

a poem

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe

by Maureen Quilligan

Nicole Rudick

‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’

In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings.

Very Cold People

by Sarah Manguso

Geoffrey O’Brien

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

Don Carlos

an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, February 28–March 26, 2022

Ange Mlinko

Potatoes and Pomegranates

a poem

Merve Emre

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Cathy Curtis

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

edited and with an introduction by Alex Andriesse

Jackson Lears

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

by Samuel Moyn

M.W. Feldman,
Jessica Riskin

Why Biology Is Not Destiny

In The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Harden disguises her radically subjective view of biological essentialism as an objective fact.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

by Kathryn Paige Harden

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

Here Is a Body

by Basma Abdel Aziz, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright

The Queue

by Basma Abdel Aziz, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works, 2011–2021

by Alaa Abd el-Fattah, translated from the Arabic by a collective, with a foreword by Naomi Klein

The Book of Sleep

by Haytham El Wardany, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger

Michael Gorra

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

The Turning Point: 1851—A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World

by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

David Cole

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart

by Jamal Greene, with a foreword by Jill Lepore

James McAuley

A Failure of Imagination

The French left has not only abandoned its traditional constituents, it has also been unable to defend a positive vision of the multicultural society that France has become.

Issue Details

On the cover: artwork and design by Carson Ellis.