New York Review of Books

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Our February 23 issue is online now, with Christopher Benfey on Edward Hopper’s city, Vanessa Barbara on Brazil’s shameless far-right, Hermione Lee on the Rothschild women, Andrew Butterfield on the grandeur of Carpaccio, Larry Rohter on Mario Vargas Llosa, Tim Flannery on Australia’s curious mammals, Ursula Lindsey on the feminist resistance in Egypt, Marina Warner on medieval marvels, Timothy Garton Ash on Ukraine’s future, poems by Farnoosh Fathi and Michael Hofmann, and much more.

Christopher Benfey
Buildings Come to Life

In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.

Vanessa Barbara
Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

Frances Wilson
Very Free and Indirect

The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.

Tim Flannery
Monotreme Dreams

Australia’s egg-laying monotremes and pouch-carrying marsupials may seem to be outliers, but they’re as well suited to their environment as any other mammal.

More to read at nybooks.com

Daphne Merkin
The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

Jonathan Mingle
No Smoke, No Fire

Despite the gas lobby’s best efforts, Americans are waking up to the health impacts of gas stoves. There’s no going back.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s latest issue, Christopher Benfey looks at Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York City and finds that “what Hopper discovered was that when the people are gone, the buildings come to life.” For our June 19, 2014, issue, Benfey went to Washington, D.C., for a major exhibition at the National Gallery of work by Hopper’s disciple and fellow conservative Andrew Wyeth. Benfey deemed the show “an aesthetic revelation” with “signs that the tacit embargo on scholarly attention to Wyeth is being lifted,” and found that, in stark paintings like Wind from the Sea (1947) and Groundhog Day (1959), the absence of people was an “evocation” of their ghostly presence.

Christopher Benfey
Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’

“Looking around at so many stark, color-starved, threadbare, wintry paintings, one has the impression that it’s always Groundhog Day in Wyeth’s world, with spring in doubt.”