Tag: New York Review of Books

‘All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End’ By Charles Johnson: The Humor of Politics

by Charlie Barton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Charles Johnson’s collection of comics, All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson (280 pages; New York Review Comics), is an especially provocative yet conscious-raising read in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Spanning his entire career as a cartoonist—starting decades before his novel Middle Passage won the 1991 National Book Award—the collection focuses mainly on his most prolific era during the 1960s and 1970s, when his work explored black radicalism and the racism that birthed it. The comic strip may seem unfit for such weighty matters, but in the hands of Johnson—novelist, philosopher, […]

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Beyond the Macabre: ‘Henri Duchemin and His Shadows’ by Emmanuel Bove

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Posted on by editor

French author Emmanuel Bove wrote novels and short stories that combined the psychological insight of Fyodor Dostoevsky with Edgar Allan Poe’s penchant for the macabre. His fiction shed a light on young men dangling precariously above disaster, men whose neurotic impulses frequently led to their ruin. Born in 1898, Bove’s own life proved as strange and fortuitous as that of his downtrodden characters. The author spent many of his earliest years living in abject poverty until his father’s second marriage introduced him to a world of wealth and privilege. The outbreak of World War I once again dashed the family […]

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Words Are Not Enough: David Shields’ ‘How Literature Saved My Life’

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Posted on by editor

David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life looks like a book. It has 224 pages, printed with ink forming words, and words forming paragraphs that form chapters. Knopf will publish it February 5 and those who dare read this uncategorizable form of non-fiction will speed eagerly through it—although a few readers might rip out pages in anguish. Shields’ new work wants desperately to believe in books. It posits, after all, that books contain therapeutic, even life-saving properties. But where on the bookshelf do you put a book that doesn’t trust words? Within these highly literary pages, Shields undermines words using the only tool he has: words. […]

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