Sponsored by House of Anansi

Evan Kindley
Departments on the Defensive

A new book by John Guillory explores the history of literary studies and casts a despairing eye at the future of literary criticism.

David S. Reynolds
The Remarkable Grimkes

A new multigenerational history of the abolitionist Grimke family is a sobering reminder of the complicated nature of race relations in America after the Civil War.

Natasha Wimmer
The Friction of Language

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, often makes translation one of her central themes.

Ted Reichman
A Sketchbook in Sound

Charles Stepney’s avant-garde production fused Chicago’s blues, soul, and R&B traditions with psychedelic pop.

Susan Barba
The Road to Artsakh

Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh is an atrocity in slow motion.

Free from the Archives

This past Tuesday, February 21, marked the 175th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto. In the years after the Manifesto’s release, Karl Marx was expelled from Belgium, Germany, and France, finally settling with his wife and four children in London, where, to make ends meet, he took up journalism. In the Review’s June 15, 1967, issue, Murray Kempton read a selection of the dispatches Marx and his perennial collaborator, Friedrich Engels, wrote as European correspondents for the New-York Daily Tribune. “There were no limits of time and distance to the range of his mind,” Kempton adjudges, and despairs of the twentieth-century writers and revolutionaries who purport to follow Marx’s example: “Journalism is certainly the more trivial of the two vocations which have forgotten his example of how a job of work should be done.”

Murray Kempton
K. Marx, Reporter

“The Duchess of Sutherland attacks slavery in America; and Marx notes the event as a definition of the ‘class of British philanthropy which chooses its subjects as far distant from home as possible and rather on that than on this side of the ocean.’ The definition would not, of course, be complete without a full account of the rapacities of the Staffords in Scotland since the end of the seventeenth century.”