August 18, 2022 Summer Issue

Mark Danner

We’re in an Emergency—Act Like It!

At a time when the threat of authoritarianism is rising, Democrats have a duty to make crystal clear to voters what is at stake in the November elections.

Alan Hollinghurst

In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.

The Kingdom of Sand

by Andrew Holleran

Jennifer Wilson

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose

by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, edited by Robert Chandler

Jed Perl

An exhibition at the Drawing Center explores the astonishing variety that the ornamental impulse has inspired across centuries and continents but never grapples with the aesthetic questions it raises.

The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present

an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, June 15–September 18, 2022

Fintan O’Toole

The Irish Lesson

If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are.

Natasha Wimmer

At the Center of the Fringe

The Mexican writer Sergio Pitol shaped Latin American letters with work that was as strange and playful as his own life.

The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas

The Journey

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Álvaro Enrigue

The Magician of Vienna

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Mario Bellatin and an afterword by Margo Glantz

Mephisto’s Waltz

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Elena Poniatowska

The Love Parade

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by G.B. Henson

Simon Callow

Shape-Shifters

In The Method Isaac Butler traces the evolution of an acting theory that was both ferociously denounced and fanatically embraced.

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Zephyr Teachout

The Boss Will See You Now

We are experiencing a major turning point in the surveillance of workers, driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)

by Elizabeth Anderson, with an introduction by Stephen Macedo

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour

by Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano

Clare Bucknell

‘So Whimsical a Head’

A new biography of Charles Lamb, the first in over a century, marks an important staging post on the writer’s road back to respectability.

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb

by Eric G. Wilson

David Cole

Egregiously Wrong: The Supreme Court’s Unprecedented Turn

In several of the term’s most controversial cases, the Court’s new majority applied originalism to disastrous effect.

Mónica de la Torre

That August

a poem

David A. Bell

Paris Transformed

Although Esther da Costa Meyer deplores the human costs of urban renewal in Paris during the Second Empire, she cannot disguise her appreciation for what was accomplished.

Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870

by Esther da Costa Meyer

Vivian Gornick

‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’

Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism

by Joanna Scutts

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

a video game written and designed by Davey Wreden and William Pugh

John Koethe

Late, Late Show

a poem

Hari Kunzru

Socialists on the Knife-Edge

From early utopian communities to the leftist resurgence today, the history of American socialism is deeper than its meager successes.

American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory

by Gary Dorrien

Jorie Graham

This Vase of Quince Branches You Sent Me

a poem

Jenny Uglow

Out of His Element

In a new selection of John James Audubon’s oceangoing writings, we sense his obsessive quest to draw every bird he saw, even though he disliked being on the water.

Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon

edited by Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King, with a foreword by Subhankar Banerjee

Christine Henneberg

The Good Mother

Jazmina Barrera and Angela Garbes consider the emotional and political fallout of pregnancy and motherhood.

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes

by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

by Angela Garbes

Ian Johnson

Hong Kong from the Inside

Four books about Hong Kong show how the city’s once-thriving culture of political engagement has been obliterated under Chinese control, though it may still retain its position as a global financial capital.

City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule

by Ho-fung Hung

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

by Karen Cheung

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

by Louisa Lim

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

by Mark L. Clifford

Cintra Wilson

Downtown Confessional

John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations.

The History of Bones

by John Lurie

Gregory Hays