March 23, 2023 issue

Sue Halpern

Private Eyes

The surveillance economy has all but eliminated Americans’ ability to be “let alone.”

The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age

by Danielle Keats Citron

Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy

by Amy Gajda

Clare Bucknell

Cannibals and Guillotines

Far from a straightforward propagandist, the caricaturist James Gillray preferred pleasing, or irritating, many different kinds of customers.

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire

by Tim Clayton

John J. Lennon

Peddling Darkness

True crime stories, like Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel, make for suspenseful reading. But do they exploit the criminal, and deepen a thirst for punishment?

Scoundrel: The True Story of the Murderer Who Charmed His Way to Fame and Freedom

by Sarah Weinman

Frederick Seidel

The Friction of Language

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, often makes translation one of her central themes.

Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

Jesse Nathan

Departments on the Defensive

A new book by John Guillory explores the history of literary studies and casts a despairing eye at the future of literary criticism.

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study

by John Guillory

Gordon F. Sander

Finland’s Turn to the West

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has abruptly ended the Finns’ reservations about joining NATO.

Michael Gorra

Having the Last Word

The sketches in Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures are as close as she ever came to the autobiography she wouldn’t or couldn’t write.

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

by Janet Malcolm, with an introduction by Ian Frazier and an afterword by Anne Malcolm

David S. Reynolds

The Remarkable Grimkes

A new multigenerational history of the abolitionist Grimke family is a sobering reminder of the complicated nature of race relations in America after the Civil War.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

by Kerri K. Greenidge

Kathryn Hughes

A Complicated Reformer

Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from progressive parents to Benito Mussolini.

The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori

by Cristina De Stefano, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti

Gavin Francis

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering

by Scott A. Small

A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

by Lewis Hyde

Rachel Nolan

The discovery of a Bible led a Peruvian man on a decades-long process of conversion, leading him and his disciples to a settlement in the West Bank, where they became caught up in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.

The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land

by Graciela Mochkofsky, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

Michael Dirda

‘Devilish Agencies at Work’

Walter de la Mare, a poet and writer of weird tales, once counted T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene among his admirers, and now his ghost stories persist with an underground influence.

Strangers and Pilgrims: Tales by Walter de la Mare

with an introduction by Mark Valentine

Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales

by Walter de la Mare, with an introduction by Greg Buzwell

Reading Walter de la Mare

edited by William Wootten

Thomas Rogers