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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

Sigrid Nunez

The Lady Vanishes

The narrator of María Gainza’s new novel tracks a forger in the counterfeit art world of Buenos Aires as part of an effort to authenticate herself.

July 21, 2022 issue

Namwali Serpell

‘She’s Capital!’

The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain?

July 21, 2022 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue

Colin Grant

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana.

July 21, 2022 issue

Gordon F. Sander

Memory Wars in Latvia

In Riga, the invasion of Ukraine has revived controversies over Soviet-era monuments and anxieties about Russian expansionism.

July 21, 2022 issue

Rumaan Alam

Diary of an Adducer

Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is faithful to the experience of growing up; whether we want fiction to depict reality accurately is a separate matter.

July 21, 2022 issue

Daniel Immerwahr

Wielding Wheat

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

July 21, 2022 issue

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

July 21, 2022 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Forest’s-Eye View

Two new books investigate the ways in which deforestation affects climate change, and climate change affects forests.

July 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

July 21, 2022 issue

Sarah Blackwood

Spiritual Exercises

In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness.

July 21, 2022 issue

Helon Habila

Crude Reality

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction.

July 21, 2022 issue

Miranda Seymour

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

July 21, 2022 issue

Aaron Matz

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

Three Boxes Three Ways; illustration by Joy Walker

“When you see a hippopotamus not being there, are you also seeing a whale and a lion and a zebra not being there? Is every room full of all the things that aren’t in it?”

— FT: Apropos of Nothing

July 21, 2022

Current Issue

On Abortion

Christine Henneberg

Aspirations

As an abortion provider, what I give my patients is not just a procedure but the space to make their own decisions about their bodies.

May 5, 2022

Robert L. Tsai and Mary Ziegler

The New Abortion Vigilantism

The abortion bounty law is novel and thus far unique to Texas, but similar civil enforcement regimes have a much darker history.

September 23, 2021

Jill Filipovic, an interview with Rebecca Gomperts

Choice by Mail

With Roe v. Wade under threat, abortion rights in the US are facing their greatest challenge yet. Enter the Dutch doctor who has opened a new front with safe medication on demand.

January 11, 2022

Sue Halpern

How Republicans Became Anti-Choice

These days, the litmus test for Republican politicians and judges is opposition to abortion. This was not always the case.

November 8, 2018 issue

NYR Online

Christopher Benfey

Shaggy Allies

It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog.

June 29, 2022

Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller

Crimes Against Humanity

The precondition for making it with anyone in David Cronenberg’s cinema is making it new.

June 28, 2022

Liza Batkin

Ruling by Fear

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices paint a dark portrait of society, danger lurking in every shadow, to justify overturning a New York gun control law.

June 25, 2022

Free from the Archives

Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan: Jefferson’s Concubine

“Only a man as driven and ingenious as Jefferson could have reworked slavery into the form it took at Monticello. But human beings are not drive gears, and human institutions are not steam engines. Slavery within Jefferson’s domains could be modified and freed of some of its constraints. It remained slavery.”

New Poems

Shane McCrae

The White People in My Blood

July 21, 2022 issue

Jennifer Grotz

Marseille

July 21, 2022 issue

Ben Lerner

Meridian Response

July 21, 2022 issue

Brief Encounters

Laura Kolbe, interviewed by Lauren Kane

One Mind Humming

“In my practice I seek to have it both ways: to respect patients and my own mind enough to believe that we can meet in the open field of conversation with our mutual intuitions, experiences, and bodies of knowledge.”

July 2, 2022