November 2, 2023 60th Anniversary Issue

Pankaj Mishra

When the Barbarians Take Over

Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.

February 1933: The Winter of Literature

by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles

Lucy Sante

Rhapsodies in Bop

A recent exhibition at the Morgan showed how thoroughly at home the poet Blaise Cendrars was among visual artists.

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything

an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, May 26–September 24, 2023

Fintan O’Toole

Defying Tribalism

In her new polemic, the philosopher Susan Neiman charges her fellow leftists with intellectual betrayal and calls for a return to universal ideals of justice and humanity.

Left Is Not Woke

by Susan Neiman

Ishion Hutchinson

Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

Lies and Sorcery

by Elsa Morante, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee

Andrea Cohen

‘Europe Whole and Free’

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe looked forward to finally being whole, free, and at peace. Is that vision coming closer or receding?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Up All Night

Harald Voetmann’s protagonists live in the distant past, but are prototypically modern: men of science who are intent on outrunning our primal nightmare.

Awake

by Harald Voetmann, translated from the Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen

Sublunar

by Harald Voetmann, translated from the Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen

Frederick Seidel

Mozart the Modernist

In his new biography, Patrick Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.

Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

by Patrick Mackie

Namwali Serpell

‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

Anne Carson

Picasso’s Transformations

Pablo Picasso reconceived everything he touched, but fifty years after his death his transformative art has been eclipsed by Andy Warhol’s art of appropriation and replication.

Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 14, 2023–January 14, 2024

Picasso in Fontainebleau

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, October 8, 2023–February 17, 2024

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby

an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, June 2–September 24, 2023

Picasso and the Spanish Classics

an exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York City, November 2, 2023–February 4, 2024

Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than One

an exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, New York City, May 10–July 30, 2023

Looking at Picasso

by Pepe Karmel

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

by Hugh Eakin

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Marilynne Robinson

Dismantling Iowa

American higher education is premised on liberal ideals, intended to make young people independent thinkers and capable citizens. What’s happening in Iowa undermines that legacy.

Catherine Nicholson

Theater for a New Audience

From the beginning, the First Folio helped to fashion Shakespeare’s work into a canon of vernacular drama.

Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book

by Emma Smith

Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare

by Chris Laoutaris

Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade

by Ben Higgins

Sue Halpern

The Bull’s-Eye on Your Thoughts

Today digital privacy exists only at the discretion of the companies that mediate our online engagement. But what happens when those companies, an employer, school administrators, or the government have access to our neural data?

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

by Nita A. Farahany

Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry

by Daniel Barron

Stacy Schiff

‘Hallucinatory Spitballs’

Arthur Miller wrote that The Crucible should not pass as a true story. Why has the play become ubiquitous in American high schools? What have we done with the actual greatest witch hunt in American history?

Michael Gorra

Who Are These People?

In The Pole, J. M. Coetzee returns to the novelist’s ethical and aesthetic imperative: to attempt to understand others for whom we may not, at first, feel much sympathy.

The Pole

by J.M. Coetzee

Susan Faludi

‘Hag of Misery’

The midwife and abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime

by Nicholas L. Syrett

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

by Jennifer Wright

Martin Filler

The Neotraditionalist

The architect Robert A. M. Stern is America’s most vociferous and successful exponent of a Classicism that would be considered anachronistic in much of the rest of the world.

Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture

by Robert A.M. Stern with Leopoldo Villardi

Howard W. French

China’s Foreclosed Possibilities

China’s political and economic development since Mao’s death in 1976 has been widely misunderstood, which makes it hard to assess where the country might be headed under Xi Jinping.

China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

by Frank Dikötter

Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

by Julian Gewirtz

Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise

by Susan L. Shirk

“Avec toi au pouvoir, je suis tranquille” [“With you in charge, I am at ease”]: Hua Guofeng (1921–2008)

by Stéphane Malsagne

Alma Guillermoprieto,
Esther Allen

Ghosts of Aracataca

In a series of early short stories and novellas based on his childhood memories, Gabriel García Márquez found the style, voice, and sense of place that culminate in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Mark Danner

The Grievance Artist

If Trump has a genius, it is his ability to shape, often out of his own self-made follies and recklessness and crimes, a narrative that relentlessly reaffirms his grim story of an us-versus-them America.

Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

by Miles Taylor

American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

by David Rothkopf

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021

by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible

by Luke Mogelson

Ingrid D. Rowland

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome

by James Grantham Turner

Hermione Lee

A Wider Devotion

George Eliot’s latest biographer sees her novels as making felt the human need for commitment, not just to intimate others but to a task in life and to the larger world.

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life

by Clare Carlisle

Martha C. Nussbaum

Where the Orcas Swim

The death that humans inflict on whales today has little to do with demand for meat or blubber. We may think of whaling as a bygone practice, but it is ongoing, pervasive, and implicates us all.

Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling

by Ryan Tucker Jones

Superpod: Saving the Endangered Orcas of the Pacific Northwest

by Nora Nickum

Sonic Sea

a documentary film written by Mark Monroe and directed by Michelle Dougherty and Daniel Hinerfeld

We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility

by Michael J. Moore