New York Review of Books

Omar G. Encarnación
The Revolt of Empty Spain

A nonpartisan movement to bring attention to the depopulation of Spain’s countryside has begun to shape national politics.

Jenny Uglow
Out of His Element

In a new selection of John James Audubon’s oceangoing writings, we sense his obsessive quest to draw every bird he saw, even though he disliked being on the water.

Rachel Eisendrath
I Killed a Man Back There

If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production?

Alan Hollinghurst
In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.

Sophie Pinkham
Trade Exceptions

In Brittney Griner, the Putin administration may have found the perfect hostage to leverage into a high-profile prisoner swap.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s November 28, 1996, issue, Raymond Carr told the story of two children in rural Spain who, in 1931, saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, and inspired more than a million pilgrims to journey to their village. Carr gives a history of the Catholic Church in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain, as it responded “to the threats being posed by modernism and liberalism,” in order to answer the question of how pious “seers” became so popular—and how they were ultimately rejected by the church.

Raymond Carr
Homage from Catalonia

“Rural visionaries at their local shrines have flourished in Spain and inspired intense devotion. But they are amateur theologians, and without guidance from the Church hierarchy they may slide into error. They must be controlled, domesticated, institutionalized. Without official backing they wither away. This was to be the tragic fate of the Ezkioga seers.”