Deborah Eisenberg
Urgent Messages from Eternity

An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

Yonatan Mendel
Israel: Life by the Sword

For fifteen months Israel’s government clung to the fantasy of “total victory” in Gaza—with considerable public support.

Blair McClendon
It’s Technicolor

Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso and Faulkner, whose name is shorthand for a whole field.

Jessica Riskin
Turtles All the Way Up

The idea that living beings have no free will might sound scientific today, but it remains as dogmatic as it has always been.

from Nineveh

a poem by
Maria Galina, translated by Ainsley Morse

at the checkpoint during the search they confiscated
an old family photograph
a powerbank
toner concealer lip gloss mascara
a block of marlboros
a ring with a seal…

Study Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady with Merve Emre

NYRSeminars presents the next installment of Merve Emre’s series “What Will She Do?,” four weekly webinar sessions discussing Henry James’s classic novel, starting March 3.

Register now!

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s March 22, 1973, issue, Michael Wood wrote about Thomas Pynchon’s third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, which “takes on his largest, fiercest apocalypse yet, the childhood of rocketry, V-2s from Peenemünde released by our death wish, the phallic fingers of God pointing down the sky, describing parabolas that mimic the rainbow, defeating gravity only to succumb to it and defeat us, world without end without world. They reverse nature, travel faster than sound, they strike and then you hear them. That is, if you are alive to hear them.”

Michael Wood
Rocketing to the Apocalypse

“The reconstruction of wartime London is meticulous, down to band-leaders and tunes, radio programs and the brand names of cough lozenges. I have no idea how Pynchon does this. Even if Pynchon were in London getting bombed in 1944, I can’t see how he could remember so much. And the reconstructions concern things that hardly make history books. There is clearly a mind at work here that forgets nothing and that can intuit huge canvasses from small details, whole cultures from a fragment of stone, an archaeological imagination, whose business is the impersonation of lost times.”

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