December 21, 2023 Holiday Issue

Susan Tallman

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

William Kentridge: Prints and Posters 1974–1990

compiled by Warren Siebrits

Words: A Collation

by William Kentridge

William Kentridge

catalog of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, by Stephen Clingman

William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows

catalog of an exhibition at the Broad, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, organized by Ed Schad

Ursula Lindsey

Inspired by the disgrace and silencing of an African novelist half a century ago, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men both satirizes and embraces an overwrought belief in literature.

The Most Secret Memory of Men

by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud

David Shulman

A Bitter Season in the West Bank

The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.

Christopher Benfey

A Leaf or Two from Whitman

The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.

The Lights

by Ben Lerner

The Auburn Conference

by Tom Piazza

Neal Ascherson

Becoming European

Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands traces the development of his passionate identification with Europe and the continent’s unsteady experiments with unity.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

by Timothy Garton Ash

Lindsay Turner

The Forest/Wanting a Child

a poem

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

Porn: An Oral History

by Polly Barton

Rebecca Giggs

The Lost World

Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.

Prehistoric Planet

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds

by Thomas Halliday

Kathryn Hughes

Jane Austen Gets Dressed

Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.

Jane Austen’s Wardrobe

by Hilary Davidson

Mark O’Connell

Shooting Werner Herzog

The director’s memoir, packed with unlikely incident, suggests that Herzog has always been his own greatest creation.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All

by Werner Herzog, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

Linda Greenhouse

An Unhealthy Definition of Rights

For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government’s power to protect public health.

Constitutional Contagion: Covid, the Courts, and Public Health

by Wendy E. Parmet

Colm Tóibín

In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

Antagony

by Luis Goytisolo, translated from the Spanish by Brendan Riley, with a prologue by Ignacio Echevarría

Sherrilyn Ifill

How America Ends and Begins Again

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew.

Greg Delanty

To Our Indolent Cancer

a poem

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

The Mysteries

by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht and Bill Watterson

Samanth Subramanian

The Weight of One Story

The speakers in Bushra al-Maqtari’s oral history of Yemen’s civil war each narrate only a single incident: the violent death of a family member or friend.

What Have You Left Behind?: Voices from a Forgotten War

by Bushra al-Maqtari, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain

Adam Shatz

Ever-New Sound Worlds

Henry Threadgill’s memoir is a spirited account of his lifelong search for imaginative musical improvisation and new systems of composition.

Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music

by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards

Francisco Hernández,
Guillermo Manning

Two Poems

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II

by James A.W. Heffernan

Julian Bell

The Emptied Cosmos

Bringing readers on a walking tour of Rome’s churches, Gabriel Pihas argues in a new book that for over a millennium, nature was God’s chief display board.

Nature and Imagination in Ancient and Early Modern Roman Art

by Gabriel Pihas

Robert Darnton

The Dream of a Universal Library

Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame?

Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All

by Peter Baldwin

Ange Mlinko

Patterns of Uprooting

On opposite sides of the world—Poland and Uruguay—the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki share a close attention to their own languages.

Time Without Keys

by Ida Vitale, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Pollack

To the Letter

by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal

John Banville

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

by John Gray

Colin B. Bailey

A New Language of Modern Art

An ambitious exhibition of the work of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas demonstrates their affinities and their shared ambition to revolutionize painting.

Manet/Degas

an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 28–July 23, 2023; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 24, 2023–January 7, 2024

Issue Details

Cover art
Sophia Martineck: Behind the Scenes, 2023
Series art
Dan Walsh: Black and White, 2017