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Our April 6 issue—the Spring Books Issue—is online now, with James Fenton on the English garden, Frances Wilson on Kafka’s diaries, Christopher de Bellaigue on Erdoğan’s disastrous misrule, Martin Filler on Adolf Loos’s minimalism, Christine Smallwood on Bret Easton Ellis’s worst fear, Anahid Nersessian on desire and poetry, Darryl Pinckney on Tsitsi Dangarembga, Alejandro Chacoff on Clarice Lispector’s crônicas, Gary Saul Morson on Chekhov’s restraint, poems by Andrea Cohen, Oleh Kotsarev, and Zuyi Zhao, and much more.

Frances Wilson
Descriptions of a Struggle

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

Eric Foner
A Regional Reign of Terror

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

Phillip Lopate
Drowned Worlds

In Nineteen Reservoirs, her study of New York City’s upstate water supply, Lucy Sante explores how a more or less effaced past continues to haunt the march of progress.

James Fenton
Here’s Looking at Yew

In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.

Christopher de Bellaigue
Erdoğan in the Ruins

The failure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to prepare for and respond to Turkey’s devastating earthquake is the crowning abomination of his long misrule.

More to read at nybooks.com

Scott Stern
The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

Free from the Archives

Julius Caesar was assassinated 2,066 years ago yesterday. In the Review’s December 18, 2008, issue, Mary Beard wrote about the many myths and legends that circulate alongside the history and biography of Rome’s dictator perpetuo.

Mary Beard
Cruising with Caesar

“He may now be the most famous Roman that ever lived (beating his indirect descendant, the emperor Nero, in a close race)…. But despite this familiarity—or perhaps because of it—there remains enormous debate not just about the details of his career, but about the big picture too.”