Volume 69, Issue 1 (2022-01-13)

Fara Dabhoiwala

Apotheosis Now

What does it mean when men are worshiped, willingly or not, as gods?

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

by Anna Della Subin

Susan Tallman

What has Jasper Johns done for us lately? As two exhibitions show, pretty much what he did for us in the first place: continually disrupt the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022

James McAuley

Who Does Éric Zemmour Speak For?

The far-right French presidential candidate offers a crude exaggeration of what many in France believe but few dare to admit.

Anahid Nersessian

Love for Sale

Eva Illouz’s The End of Love presents a world starkly divided between male and female, straight and gay, sex and love, dignity and humiliation.

The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations

by Eva Illouz

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

a film written and directed by Joel Coen

E. Tammy Kim

Return Flights

Two hundred thousand South Korean children have been adopted since the Korean War. Adoptee memoirs, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption

by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, translated from the Swedish by Hanna Strömberg, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, and Richey Wyver

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

by Jenny Heijun Wills

All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

Geoffrey O’Brien

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

Eurydice

an opera by Matthew Aucoin, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 23–December 16, 2021

The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera

by Matthew Aucoin

Cyrus Console

Laxness

a poem

Anne Enright

Dubliners

Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction.

Sean Wilentz

The Paradox of the American Revolution

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overemphasize the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution

by Woody Holton

American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850

by Alan Taylor

Rivka Galchen

Wonderful Warnings

The three girls in Kate DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale trilogy assemble their own stories out of the scraps of tales they gather from their surroundings, making something new out of them.

Raymie Nightingale

by Kate DiCamillo

Louisiana’s Way Home

by Kate DiCamillo

Beverly, Right Here

by Kate DiCamillo

Andrew Martin

Castle’s Kingdom

James Castle’s drawings and constructions seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe of art-making and do not easily yield their meanings.

James Castle: Memory Palace

by John Beardsley

Caroline Fraser

From Hell and Back

A harrowing, suppressed memoir by Gertrude Beasley and a revisionist western by Robin McLean add up to a savage indictment of regional misogyny.

My First Thirty Years

by Gertrude Beasley, with a foreword by Nina Bennett

Pity the Beast

by Robin McLean

Maya C. Popa

Turkey Vultures

a poem

Dan Rockmore

Prove It!

A recent book surveys different styles that can be used to prove a single theorem—a mathematical version of musical variations on a theme, inspired by the Oulipo writer Raymond Queneau.

99 Variations on a Proof

by Philip Ording

Ian Frazier

‘Part of Why We Survived’

A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy

by Kliph Nesteroff

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy

by Kliph Nesteroff

Nathan Whitlock

Misbehaving Like Adults

The people in Helen Garner’s books are defined by their interactions with others; life is communal, even for those who wish it were not so.

Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I, 1978–1987

by Helen Garner

One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries Volume II, 1987–1995

by Helen Garner

Fintan O’Toole

‘Arum Arum Araaaaaagh’

Boris Johnson’s clownishness has become both mortifyingly infantile and, for those who have to live in the pandemic-stricken country he governs, quite scary.

Gary Saul Morson

Falling in Love with Terror

Boris Savinkov practiced the two most prestigious Russian occupations in the early twentieth century: terrorism and novel writing.

To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks

by Vladimir Alexandrov

Pale Horse: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

by Boris Savinkov, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz and with an introduction by Otto Boele

Jacqueline Rose

An Endless Seeing

Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held in more or less steady contempt.

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

by Robert Zaretsky

David Wengrow,
Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange

Issue Details

On the cover: Mamma Andersson, Headless Man in Jacket, 2015. © Mamma Andersson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and David Zwirner. Photo by Mark Blower.

New York Review January 13, 2022 issue cover