Table of Contents
Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
Jonathan Mirsky, How He Sees It Now 
Sanford Schwartz, Enchanted & Ominous
Peter Doig an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, February 5–April 27, 2008; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, May 21–September 14, 2008; and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, October 9, 2008–January 11, 2009.
Thomas Powers, Iran: The Threat
Russell Baker, Not So Dangerous Liaisons
My Three Fathers: And the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother, Susan Mary Alsop by William S. Patten
Zadie Smith, F. Kafka, Everyman
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley
Darryl Pinckney, Obama & the Black Church
Hilary Mantel, From 'Wolf Hall'
Jonathan Freedland, Falling Hawks
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, with an afterword by Christopher Hitchens
The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis
Stephen Greenblatt, In the Night Kitchen
Macbeth a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Rupert Goold
Macbeth an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Adrian Noble
Mary Beard, Isn't It Funny?
Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt
Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 by John R. Clarke
Michael Massing, Embedded in Iraq
Claire Messud, Blood Relations
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Madison Smartt Bell, A Hidden Haitian World
Massacre River by René Philoctète, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, with a preface by Edwidge Danticat and an introduction by Lyonel Trouillot
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
Street of Lost Footsteps by Lyonel Trouillot, translated from the French and with an introduction by Linda Coverdale
Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
Anthologie secrète by Carl Brouard
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the French by Harriet de Onìs
Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Bicentenaire by Lyonel Trouillot
Thérèse en mille morceaux by Lyonel Trouillot
Linda Colley, A Tale of Two Empires
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 by J.H. Elliott
Per Petterson, From 'To Siberia'
Deborah Eisenberg, The Genius of Péter Nádas
Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Péter Nádas, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein
Janos Kis, Adam Michnik, After Five Years
Perry Link, Jeremy Waldron, What to do About Hate Speech?
Letters
Edward Albee, Paul Auster, et al. Please Release the Chinese Writers in Prison!
D. A. Pratt, Freeman Dyson, The Brief Life of a Molecule
Marc Aronson, Robert Darnton, Google Without Pix
Celina Fox, Combat in the North Gallery
Marina Warner, Rapunzel, Parsley & Pregnancy
Jean Mallinson, Ingrid D. Rowland, Who Embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry?
The Editors, Corrections
Contributors
Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.
Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, which won the Wolfson History Prize for 2008. (August 2009)
Madison Smartt Bell is Professor of English and Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College. His new book, Devil’s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, is forthcoming in November. (October 2009)
Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. (July 2008)
Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.
Jonathan Freedland is an editorial-page columnist for The Guardian. In 2008, he was awarded the David Watt Prize for Journalism.
(May 2009)
Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. (November 2009)
Janos Kis, who teaches philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, was a leading member of the Hungarian democratic opposition to the Communist regime and co-founder and first chairman of Hungary's liberal party. His latest book is Politics as a Moral Problem, which will be published in November. (July 2008)
Hilary Mantel is the author of nine novels, including Beyond Black. Her new novel, Wolf Hall, will be published in the US this month. (November 2009)
Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.
Claire Messud's most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. Her earlier novels include When the World Was Steady.
(December 2009)
Adam Michnik is Editor in Chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. He spent six years in prisons in Communist Poland. In 1989, he participated in the Round Table agreements that led to establishing the first non-Communist government in the Soviet bloc. (September 2008)
Jonathan Mirsky is a historian and journalist specializing in Chinese affairs. In 2002 he was the first I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Journalism School.
(August 2009)
Per Petterson is the author of five novels, including Out Stealing Horses. The excerpt in this issue is drawn from To Siberia, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October. (July 2008)
Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.
Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.
Sanford Schwartz is the author of Christen Købke and William Nicholson. (November 2009)
Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, most recently On Beauty, and the editor of the short-story anthology The Book of Other People.
