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Susan Neiman
Fanon the Universalist

Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism.

Ruth Margalit
The Best Time of His Life

Vinson Cunningham’s novel Great Expectations is nominally about the experiences of an Obama campaign staffer but is really a glimpse into the formation of a critical mind.

Hannah Gold
Second Hand News

In David Adjmi’s new play, a fictional Seventies rock band struggles with life and art.

Daily Verses: 16

a poem by
Marigloria Palma,
translated by Carina del Valle Schorske

Today I feel on my tongue the bitterness
of being. I feel the anguish enter
through my feet. The day grows thin
as a thread. Already the light
is sticky porridge.
All the pigs scream. The pigs? The pigs
of din and racket, the machines stalking
the streets, our overheated masters…

Aryeh Neier
Is Israel Committing Genocide?

I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?

Free from the Archives

Alice Munro died last week, aged ninety-two. The writer of nearly two hundred published short stories, usually set in rural Canada and narrated by women, she ranged across gothic, romantic, domestic, tragic, and comedic subjects. Her work was first reviewed in our pages in 1980 by Thomas R. Edwards, who singled out her “strong sense of how place and local circumstance can shape and interpret lives.”

Munro’s talent for acute realism and flights of startling beauty was engaged nine more times in the Review: by Robert Towers, Ann Hulbert, John Banville, Lorrie Moore, Al Alvarez, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Cathleen Schine, and, a year and a half after Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hermione Lee, who praised her “exceptionally thorough and dedicated mining of the same ingredients, which endlessly come up rich and fresh, seem never to be used up, and however artfully shaped, feel ‘real.’”

Hermione Lee
Alice Munro’s Magic

“She is loyal to truth, getting the detail precisely right in every phrase and word, so that people, habits, objects, scenes, and places that are lost and gone in the real world remain alive on her pages…. She is loyal, also, to her chosen form, masterfully working and reworking it all her life, so that no one in the world now would say, ‘Why didn’t Alice Munro ever write a novel?’ or ‘Why would a short-story writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?’”

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