August 17, 2023 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Whack-a-Rat

The rats of Paris have presented their human neighbors with centuries of complex problems, and now face a controversial future.

Les Rats de Paris: Une brève histoire de l’infamie (1800–1939) [The Rats of Paris: A Brief History of Infamy (1800–1939)]

by Hécate Vergopoulos

Les Rats sont entrés dans Paris [The Rats Have Entered Paris]

by Olivier Thomas

Andrew O’Hagan

Scorpion Party

Succession dispenses with the toys and horses of the media mogul family and goes straight to the “carnival of mind-fuck.”

Succession

an HBO television series created by Jesse Armstrong

Succession—Season One: The Complete Scripts

by Jesse Armstrong

Succession—Season Two: The Complete Scripts

by Jesse Armstrong

Succession—Season Three: The Complete Scripts

by Jesse Armstrong

Succession—Season Four: The Complete Scripts

by Jesse Armstrong

A.E. Stallings

American Carnage

Jeffrey Toobin’s book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

by Jeffrey Toobin

Julian Bell

Opulence and Humility

An exhibition devoted to Saint Francis forms a doorway between artistic tradition and the wider terrain of spirituality.

Clare Bucknell

The Uphill Battles of the Porter Sisters

Jane and Maria Porter wrote wildly successful historical novels that were cribbed by Walter Scott, but they never found financial security and only now have received their first biography.

Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës

by Devoney Looser

Michelle Nijhuis

By extending the history of the continent to the distant time when humans were, at best, bit players in its marvelous ecosystems, Dan Flores’s Wild New World reminds us that modern North Americans still walk in the footsteps of our fellow animals.

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

by Dan Flores

The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism, 1850–1920

by Andrea L. Smalley with Henry M. Reeves

Ed Park

Deprivation Exercises

Ágota Kristóf fled her native Hungary just after the uprising of 1956 and spent the rest of her life in Switzerland, writing in French. But “all my books are about Hungary,” she said a dozen years before her death.

The Illiterate

by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Nina Bogin, with an introduction by Helen Oyeyemi and an afterword by Gabriel Josipovici

The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie: Three Novels

by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, and Marc Romano

Collected Plays

by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Bart Smet

Peter Gizzi

I’m Good to Ghost

a poem

Gary Younge

Arriving Without Belonging

Colin Grant’s new memoir explores the unfulfilled promises made to his migrant parents, and the limits of understanding between generations.

I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be: A Memoir in Eight Lives

by Colin Grant

Ange Mlinko

Wonder Cabinets of the Mind

Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk is an encyclopedic poem that captures the immense experience of working, and being, at the Met.

Information Desk: An Epic

by Robyn Schiff

Ursula Lindsey

Lebanon’s Chernobyl

Lamia Ziadé’s illustrated book about the 2020 port explosion in Beirut is a personal, impassioned account of a crime committed against the Lebanese people.

My Port of Beirut

by Lamia Ziadé, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

Larry Wolff

The Ambivalences of ‘Don Giovanni’

Opera’s most famous libertine, who embodies freedom not only from social and political constraints but from sexuality, religion, and morality itself, has always been a disturbing figure.

Don Giovanni

an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Ivo van Hove, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, May 5–June 2, 2023

Don Giovanni Captured: Performance, Media, Myth

by Richard Will

Adom Getachew

Africa, the Center of History

In Born in Blackness, Howard French works to counteract the “symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africa’s contributions to the contemporary world.

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

James Gleick

Nothing to See Here

For centuries the study of optics and the use of invisibility in science fiction have developed side by side, each inspiring the other.

Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen

by Gregory J. Gbur

Transparency: The Material History of an Idea

by Daniel Jütte

Joanna Biggs

Acts of Accompaniment

In Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza collects everything that might be needed to bring her younger sister’s murderer to trial. As the older sister’s quest recedes, Liliana’s world comes alive.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Laurence H. Tribe

Constrain the Court—Without Crippling It

Critics of the Supreme Court think it has lost its claim to legitimacy. But proposals for reforming it must strike a balance with preserving its power and independence, which remain essential to our constitutional system.

Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences

by Joan Biskupic

The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America

by Michael Waldman

Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. the American People

by Jamin B. Raskin

The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic

by Stephen Vladeck

Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court—and How We Can Fix It

by Aaron Tang