Sponsored by Poetry Foundation

Francine Prose
Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

Jesse McCarthy
Return to My Native Land

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten novel Such Sweet Thunder is a modernist masterpiece and a tribute to a lost black world of Kansas City.

Benjamin Nathans
The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

Philip Clark
All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

Erin Maglaque
Vexed by Sex

“Augustine understood that sex is precisely all that exceeds human control. How did Adam and Eve have sex in the garden—what was it like? He imagined the primal scene. In Paradise, he reasoned, it was all quite orderly: the first man and woman could control desire with the will; their bodies were perfectly ruled. No deviant temptations. Nothing involuntary like arousal, a blush, a gasp of pleasure, or ejaculation. Was this sex at all?”

Free from the Archives

Today is probably Samuel Beckett’s 119th birthday (while he and his mother both claimed he was born on Good Friday, April 13, his birth certificate was dated May 13). In the Review’s April 30, 2009, issue, J.M. Coetzee wrote about Beckett’s life and the first volume of his letters, covering the 1930s, when the young artist was approaching a “breakthrough in [his] aesthetic Bildung.”

J. M. Coetzee
The Making of Samuel Beckett

“[In a letter, Beckett] describes language as a veil that the modern writer needs to tear apart if he wants to reach what lies beyond, even if what lies beyond may only be silence and nothingness. In this respect writers have lagged behind painters and musicians (he points to Beethoven and the silences in his scores). Gertrude Stein, with her minimalist verbal style, has the right idea, whereas Joyce is moving in quite the wrong direction, toward ‘an apotheosis of the word.’”

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