Today in The New York Review of Books: Rebecca Egan McCarthy plumbs oceanic law; Gabriel Winslow-Yost watches Bi Gan’s Resurrection; and, from the archives, Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson.

Rebecca Egan McCarthy
The Scramble for the Seafloor

With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography’

If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?

Free from the Archives

Shirley Jackson was born 109 years ago today. In the Review’s October 8, 2009, issue, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about her 1962 “masterpiece of Gothic suspense,” We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Narrated by “Merricat,” an eighteen-year-old girl who is “at once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer,” in Oates’s estimation Jackson’s “tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance” passes beyond social satire and simple horror to become a “psychopathological caricature” worthy of Henry James.

Joyce Carol Oates
The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson

“The hideous arsenic deaths constitute the secret heart of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as unspecified sexual acts appear to be at the heart of The Turn of the Screw: the taboo yet irresistible subject upon which all thinking, all speech, all actions turn.”

Recently in the Review

Frances Wilson
Hearing Your Ears Pop

“Patricia Lockwood is a writer’s writer, and Will There Ever Be Another You is a bookish book, a magnificent feat of reading.… She considers Robert Graves, quotes Wordsworth, who visited the same spot in Scotland where she fell ill, jokes that William Carlos Williams had a son named Kevin, and reads Kafka’s journals. The Bible is her touchstone, lending her prose its prophetic cadences.”

Susan Tallman
The Plunderers’ Dilemma

“In amassing more things than they could reasonably use, ethnologists denied other people in other places access to meanings, histories, experiences, and ‘knowledge production’ of their own.”

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