Giants of the Trade in the Penny Press!

One of the most curiously reassuring aspects of reading the latest dispatches from the book-chat world in the Penny Press is the recurrence of gigantically talented figures. In a self-described “post-literate” age when alleged intellectuals and professed readers can say “TL;DR” about a 200-word tweet, it’s comforting to know that not only are people still reading books but they’re still reading about books – including pieces by a satisfying roster of heavyweights. 

A signature joy of the New York Review of Books has always been the high likelihood of encountering just such a roster in almost every issue. I was reminded of that all over again when I opened the latest issue. There’s Daryl Pinckney writing about Joan Didion, Colm Toibin reviewing John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, Laura Marsh writing about John le Carré’s posthumous novel Silverview and the long career that preceded it, the great biographer Hermione Lee reviewing Michael Ignatief’s insufferable On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (she didn’t find it insufferable, but it sure-as-shootin’ is, even so), and Joyce Carol Oates writing about Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho in its new English-language translation by Margaret Jull Costa. 

Probably the highlight of the issue for me was a long piece by the great Peter Brown, a round-up of many different new releases on Late Antiquity. I’ve read everything that Brown has published, and it’s always a delight to read him in the Penny Press. And the fact that a random issue of the NYRB can feature him as just one powerhouse name among a dozen only adds to the magic.

I’ve likewise read everything Michael Tomasky’s written, and his political essay in this latest issue is a pitch-perfect combination of sharp insight and controlled writing, even though his subject is the imminent demise of the US government:

It’s hard to know how many elected Republicans really believe that Trump was the rightful 2020 winner or that voter fraud is a rampant problem in America. It’s shocking to see Trump’s associates openly flouting the subpoenas issued by the Select Committee to the Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and to think that we’ve reached a point at which a committee of Congress may issue subpoenas to a few of its own members – that that those members, too, will disobey the body in which they serve. And it’s next to impossible to believe that Republicans writing bills like the one in Arizona, which shifted authority to defend election-related lawsuits from the secretary of state (currently a Democrat) to the attorney general (currently a Republican), really think they are behaving democratically. Their actions speak quite clearly.

Of course, even the NYRB can have fallow issues, and probably one or two are headed my way in 2022. But even so, this was a fantastic start to the year – a Table of Contents fit to put a spring in the step of any editor on the planet.