April 6, 2023 issue

James Fenton

Here’s Looking at Yew

In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.

English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Frances Wilson

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

The Diaries

by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin

Christopher de Bellaigue

Erdogan in the Ruins

The failure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to prepare for and respond to Turkey’s devastating earthquake is the crowning abomination of his long misrule.

Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria

by Gönül Tol

Martin Filler

The Architect of Subtraction

Adolf Loos’s radical designs pared down architecture to its most basic elements.

Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials

by Adolf Loos, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

Essays on Adolf Loos

by Christopher Long

The Looshaus

by Christopher Long

Adolf Loos: Works and Projects

by Ralf Bock, with photographs by Philippe Ruault

The Private Adolf Loos

by Claire Beck Loos, translated from the German by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, and edited by Carrie Paterson

Adolf Loos: The Last Houses

by Christopher Long

Adolf Loos on Trial

by Christopher Long

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Christine Smallwood

The Exorcist

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.

The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

Anahid Nersessian

The Couple Form

Two new poetry collections embrace the potential of traditional forms and of breaking away from them.

Couplets: A Love Story

by Maggie Millner

A Queen in Bucks County

by Kay Gabriel

Amy Knight

Putin’s Folly

A year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is mired in a seemingly endless military conflict. Is Putin the master tactician underestimating his adversary?

Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival

by Luke Harding

Darryl Pinckney

Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels and essays are marked by her struggle against gender hierarchies and the legacies of colonialism.

Black and Female

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Book of Not

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This Mournable Body

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Anna Della Subin

A Body That’s Divine

A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who ate, probably drank, got mistaken for an ordinary man, and was likely circumcised.

God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Andrea Cohen

Purchase

a poem

Orville Schell

Appeasement at the Cineplex

Unable to resist China’s huge market, Hollywood has proven willing to alter its films to avoid offending Beijing.

Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy

by Erich Schwartzel

Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market

by Ying Zhu

Alejandro Chacoff

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Oleh Kotsarev,
Tatiana Retivov

An Airplane or a Helicopter

a poem

Phillip Lopate

Drowned Worlds

In Nineteen Reservoirs, her study of New York City’s upstate water supply, Lucy Sante explores how a more or less effaced past continues to haunt the march of progress.

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City

by Lucy Sante, with photographs by Tim Davis

Ingrid D. Rowland

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World

by Michael Frank, with illustrations by Maira Kalman

Ed Park

Becoming Enid Coleslaw

In each dense and delirious issue of Eightball, Daniel Clowes was driven to perfectionism, ricocheting like mad from story to story and foretelling some of the comic medium’s possible futures.

The Complete Eightball: Issues 1–18

by Daniel Clowes

Susan Neiman

Longing for Reconciliation

The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.

Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

by Jerry Z. Muller

Zuyi Zhao

The Garden Between Days

a poem

Gary Saul Morson

The Master of Toska

Janet Malcolm called Chekhov’s work “a kind of exercise in withholding.” A new book traces the development of his mastery to two crucial years.

Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius: 1886–1887

by Bob Blaisdell

Eric Foner

A Regional Reign of Terror

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham

Karan Mahajan