Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 2
One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point—their lives are so unlike his own. From Plutarch he learns about public virtue. It is Milton who expands his soul. Paradise Lost “moved every feeling of wonder and awe,” the monster says. As a created being, he identifies with Adam, but Satan is “the fitter emblem of my condition, for…when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”
CONTENT
Christine Smallwood
Misreading the Cues
The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure.
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
an American Public Media podcast created by Emily Hanford
Gary Shteyngart
Beyond the Pale
After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.
How the Soviet Jew Was Made
by Sasha Senderovich
Jed Perl
Going to Extremes
For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.
Matisse: The Red Studio
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 1–September 10, 2022; and SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, October 13, 2022–February 26, 2023
Matisse in the 1930s
an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, March 1–May 29, 2023; and the Musée Matisse Nice, June 23–September 24, 2023
Anahid Nersessian
Reckoning with Silence
Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems
by Dionne Brand
Adam KirschArias of Despair
What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?
The Hours
an opera by Kevin Puts, with a libretto by Greg Pierce, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 22–December 15, 2022
Caleb Crain
Sallies
a poem
Fred Kaplan
Putin’s Miscalculation
After two decades of reforming its armed forces, Russia expected a lightning victory in Ukraine, but the ill-starred invasion has revealed their deficiencies.
Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine
by Mark Galeotti
Ben FountainWhite Fright
A. M. Homes’s new novel might be a satire of American politics, but should we be mainly amused, or mainly horrified?
The Unfolding
by A.M. Homes
Marianne Boruch
ICE
a poem
Linda Greenhouse
Victimhood and Vengeance
The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy
by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, with a foreword by Jemar Tisby
Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular
by David A. Hollinger
This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism
by David Sehat
Joan Silber
Friends: A Love Story
Jean Chen Ho’s main characters like each other plenty, with all the trouble that comes with that.
Fiona and Jane
by Jean Chen Ho
Neal Ascherson
Sonnets for the State
A new book recounts the history of the Circle of Writing Chekists, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of State Security who wrote poetry as a weapon in the class struggle.
The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class That Tried to Win the Cold War
by Philip Oltermann
Alec WilkinsonIlluminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’
A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.
The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron
by Benjamin Ehrlich
Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life
by Timothy J. Jorgensen
Coco FuscoThe Other Cuba
An exhibition of Cuban art from the past decade charts the emergence of a group of artists who have broken the state’s monopoly on public discourse.
Sin Autorización: Contemporary Cuban Art
Francesca Wade
‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’
A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.
Mina Loy: Apology of Genius
by Mary Ann Caws
Ian FrazierGrim Reapers
Mega-agriculture is destroying the Corn Belt and the Central Valley, which the country’s food system depends on. Can midsize farms survive to save it?
Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
by Tom Philpott
The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm
by Sarah Vogel
Letters
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tobi Haslett
On John Edgar Wideman