Sponsored by University of Nebraska Press

Ursula Lindsey
Rape and Resistance in Egypt

A new book recounts the heroics of activists who organized to protect women from sexual violence during the Egyptian revolution and to assert their right to participate in the country’s political life.

Andrew Butterfield
A ‘Magic Mirror’ of Venice

The first-ever exhibition outside Italy of the works of Vittore Carpaccio is a bracing introduction to the artist who best captured the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of early-sixteenth-century Venice.

Self-Portrait

a poem by 
Alan Felsenthal

In the ailanthus tree I saw myself
wafting between branches and their
unfallen flowers. I balanced
in the air, perfecting a kind of nonchalance…

Zadie Smith
The Instrumentalist

At the heart of Tár, Todd Field’s new film, is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

Free from the Archives

In our most recent issue, Ursula Lindsey reviews a new history of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the work done by feminist groups to organize and protect female protesters at demonstrations. In the Review’s October 10, 2019, issue, Lindsey read a book by the journalist Peter Hessler that told the story of the revolution through the lives of three Egyptian men: Rifaat, an Arabic teacher and “grumpy patriot who likes to use his lesson plans to vent his frustration”; Manu, a translator and “independent and reticent gay man who, after suffering assaults from lovers and persecution from the police, finally seeks asylum in Germany”; and Sayyid, “the resourceful garbage collector in Hessler’s upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek.”

Ursula Lindsey
Egypt: Between Order and Chaos

“An inefficient, opaque, and arbitrary bureaucracy creates opportunities for widespread corruption. Those with power act with impunity, appropriating for themselves the country’s resources behind closed doors. Ordinary Egyptians are forced to skirt the law just to get things done, making them complicit and vulnerable; if they actually challenge the status quo, they face overwhelming state violence.”