September 21, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Playing with the Past

The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.

The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

William Dalrymple

A groundbreaking show at the Metropolitan Museum displays, among other treasures from India, works of Buddhist art that bear the mark of ancient animist cults that long preceded the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.

Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 21–November 13, 2023; and the National Museum of Korea, Seoul, December 22, 2023–April 14, 2024

Anahid Nersessian

Poems to Wake the Corpses

Joyce Mansour, the Syrian-Jewish writer whom André Breton called “the greatest poet of our time,” is the latest female member of the Surrealist circle to be reintroduced to the public.

Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour

translated from the French by Emilie Moorhouse and edited by Emilie Moorhouse and Garrett Caples

Osita Nwanevu

The Life of the Party

In his latest book, Michael Kazin argues that the Democrats have long sought to build a “moral capitalism.” Have they ever succeeded?

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

by Michael Kazin

Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality

by Lily Geismer

Colin Grant

A Reconfigured Self

Margo Jefferson takes fractured shards of memory and pieces them together imperfectly to create what she calls “cultural memoir and confessional criticism.”

Constructing a Nervous System

by Margo Jefferson

Fintan O’Toole

The Trouble with Ancestry

Two recent family histories authored by Americans connected to Europe’s terrible twentieth century by their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets

by Burkhard Bilger

Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends

by Linda Kinstler

Karan Mahajan

A Brief Efflorescence

The early Aughts were a period when New York became the center of the world both politically and musically, the city itself the subject of songs and romance.

Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001–2011

by Lizzy Goodman

Meet Me in the Bathroom

a documentary film directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace

Ben Tarnoff

Better, Faster, Stronger

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things

by John Tinnell

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris

Ben Lerner

The Rescue

a poem

Elizabeth Kolbert

Spored to Death

Fungi have caused some of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks ever documented. Will they come for us?

Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic

by Emily Monosson

Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms: Forays with Fungi Across Hemispheres

by Alison Pouliot

Eric Foner

Seeing Was Not Believing

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America

by Heather Hendershot

Pattie McCarthy

neap tide—autumn

a poem

Jed Perl

The Modern Hephaestus

David Smith was an expressionist with an all-or-nothing approach to art who reveled in the violent acts of metalworking that created new forms of permanence.

David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor

by Michael Brenson

David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965

edited by Christopher Lyon

Jacqueline Rose

The Analyst

Stuart Hall was passionately committed to understanding how social formations affected the deepest parts of the mind.

Erin Maglaque

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena

by James Hankins

Regina Marler

Unfrozen

In Ramona Ausubel’s latest novel, The Last Animal, the main characters move between poles of loss and recovery as climate grief blends into personal grief.

The Last Animal

by Ramona Ausubel

James Oakes

Ships Going Out

In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865

by Sean M. Kelley

Justin Davidson

Growing Up on Moan Street

The Naples of Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito is a hot-breathed, dragonlike city that keeps its children bound even after they escape.

The House on Via Gemito

by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky

Linda Greenhouse

Why Aren’t Cops Held to Account?

Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.

The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts

by Stephen B. Bright and James Kwak, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

by Joanna Schwartz

Lily Meyer

A Cockeyed Faith in Better Men

The strongest current running through Rachel Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds.

In the Act

by Rachel Ingalls

Mrs. Caliban

by Rachel Ingalls, with an introduction by Rivka Galchen

Binstead’s Safari

by Rachel Ingalls

No Love Lost: Selected Novellas

by Rachel Ingalls, with a foreword by Patricia Lockwood

James Quandt

Jean Eustache’s Vehement Realism

The French director Jean Eustache used his films to examine his ravaged life and relationships with merciless accuracy.

The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache

a retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City, June 23–July 13, 2023; the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, July 7–July 13, 2023; the Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, and the Los Feliz Theatre, Los Angeles, June 30–July 29, 2023; TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto, July 7–July 23, 2023; the Cinematheque, Vancouver, July 13–July 31, 2023; and SIFF Cinema Uptown, Seattle, July 14–July 23, 2023

Au travail avec Eustache (making of)

by Luc Béraud

Jean Eustache: Un amour si grand...

by Philippe Azoury

Ariel Dorfman