Sponsored by WNET

Zhenya Bruno
Russian Decency

In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts.

Mark Lilla
The Tower and the Sewer

Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution.

People Walk Around

a poem by
Frederick Seidel

People walk around
With people in their head.
What some lovely person did.
What some lovely person said.
Heartthrob in the head.

I float to 86th Street with you in my heart.
I’m a pigeon cooing to a crumb of bread,
Except I’m kind of floating instead…

Lucy Scholes
Entwined for Life

For decades, the painter Dorothy Hepworth and her partner Patricia Preece carried out an elaborate artistic deception.

Free from the Archives

From April to June 1989, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, as well as in dozens of cities across China, to protest recent reforms by the Chinese government. Thirty-five years ago, Jonathan Mirsky was there as the popular occupation of the square was violently suppressed by Deng Xiaoping’s government, resulting in the massacre of hundreds to thousands of protesters; the true death toll is still not known.

Twenty-five years later, he wrote about his experience of the protests—though he was there in his capacity as a reporter, the police knocked out five of his teeth and fractured his arm—and of the fallout in Chinese politics and society: though the suppression was brutal, he believed the memory of the uprising still provoked fear among the ruling elite.

Jonathan Mirsky
Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were

“Tiananmen has remained the Communist Party’s most destructive and revealing dilemma.”

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305