July 21, 2022 Fiction Issue

Colin Grant

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana.

The Murderer

by Roy Heath

Deborah Eisenberg

Condemned to Life

The austerely drawn world of Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men provides a richly allusive consideration of human life.

I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, with an afterword by Sophie Mackintosh

Robert Kuttner

Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle

Rumaan Alam

Diary of an Adducer

Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is faithful to the experience of growing up; whether we want fiction to depict reality accurately is a separate matter.

Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

James Romm

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

Assyria: Palace Art of Ancient Iraq

an exhibition at the Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, California, October 2, 2019–September 5, 2022

Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World

an exhibition at the Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, California, April 6–August 8, 2022

King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great

by Matt Waters

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings

by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

Guerre [War]

by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, edited by Pascal Fouché and with a foreword by François Gibault

Déshonneur et patrie: retour sur l’affaire Céline [Dishonor and Country: A Review of the Céline Affair]

by Philippe Roussin

Peut-on dissocier l’oeuvre de l’auteur? [Can the Work Be Dissociated from the Author?]

by Gisèle Sapiro

Aaron Matz

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

by Amitav Ghosh

Literature for a Changing Planet

by Martin Puchner

The Nature of Tomorrow: A History of the Environmental Future

by Michael Rawson

Ben Lerner

Meridian Response

a poem

Daniel Immerwahr

Wielding Wheat

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World

by Scott Reynolds Nelson

Miranda Seymour

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

Jean Stafford: Complete Novels

edited by Kathryn Davis

Jean Stafford: Complete Short Stories and Other Writings

edited by Kathryn Davis

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Forest’s-Eye View

Two new books investigate the ways in which deforestation affects climate change, and climate change affects forests.

Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

by John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy

The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

by Ben Rawlence

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

Silence Is a Sense

by Layla AlAmmar

Planet of Clay

by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

Ever Since I Did Not Die

by Ramy Al-Asheq, translated from the Arabic by Isis Nusair and edited by Levi Thompson

The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

Sarah Blackwood

Spiritual Exercises

In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

by Alison Bechdel, with coloring by Holly Rae Taylor

Jennifer Grotz

Marseille

a poem

Gordon F. Sander

Memory Wars in Latvia

In Riga, the invasion of Ukraine has revived controversies over Soviet-era monuments and anxieties about Russian expansionism.

Helon Habila

Crude Reality

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction.

How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

Apropos of Nothing

Nonbeing belongs to that category of concepts that seem self-evident and self-explanatory, but have been objects of deepest perplexity for philosophers.

Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There Is Not

by Stephen Mumford

Nothing: A Philosophical History

by Roy Sorensen

Shane McCrae

The White People in My Blood

a poem

Sigrid Nunez

The Lady Vanishes

The narrator of María Gainza’s new novel tracks a forger in the counterfeit art world of Buenos Aires as part of an effort to authenticate herself.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

by María Gainza, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead

Namwali Serpell

‘She’s Capital!’

The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain?

Letters

Anthony Apesos,
Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Who Was First?

Issue Details

On the cover: Geoff McFetridge, Writing as the String of the Yo-Yo, 2022.