August 29, 2025 Bookmarks Objects of Art and Virtue By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics): ‘We specialize in porcelain and bronzes and small objects—you know the kind of thing.’ ‘Objets d’art et de vertu,’ she murmured, with a delightful accent. ‘Exactly.’ Humphrey bent towards her admiringly to refill her glass with the hock he had chosen as being particularly appropriate to the occasion. That this exquisite creature should have been exposed to the contaminating presence of the dealers, for the sake of some trifling little Victorian flower book, hardly bore thinking of and filled him with horror. A book sale was certainly no place for a woman; had it been a sale of pictures or porcelain, fetching the sort of inflated prices that made headline news, or an evening sale—perhaps being televised—to which a woman could be escorted after being suitably wined and dined—that might have been another matter altogether. Read More
August 27, 2025 First Person Salt Statues By Mariana Enríquez Photograph by Mariana Enriquez. Carhué Cemetery Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009 The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march. I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake. Read More
August 26, 2025 First Person Kevin Brazil By Kevin Brazil Image generated with ChatGPT Image generator. I’ve never liked my name: Kevin Brazil. I don’t hate it; that would be going too far, and besides, if I really did hate my name, I would have changed it by now, as I still vividly remember discovering you could, when I was fifteen, from a boy in school who said he had always hated his name, Martin Young, and was planning to change it as soon as he turned eighteen, the legal age at which you can change your name in Ireland, which is where I am from. I wonder if he ever did. When I say I don’t like my name, I mean that it doesn’t appeal to me. Aesthetically, visually, acoustically. There are too many consonants, which make it pointy, sharp, angular. I don’t like the sounds of the letters v and z. To me, they are the sounds of threats, buzzing insects, or high-speed cars—va-va-vroom!—and I find moving at fast speeds scary, not exhilarating. I disliked all these things long before I learned that in countries outside Ireland—France and Germany, in particular—the name Kevin is the object of a unique mockery for being a name given to working-class, banlieue-inhabiting, former East German white-trash boys whose equally trashy mothers, probably called Cindy or Chantelle, were influenced by American popular culture in the nineties, specifically the Home Alone movies starring Macaulay Culkin. There are entire books published in France about the shame that comes with being called Kevin. German even has a word for the stigma associated with my name: Kevinismus. Read More
August 25, 2025 Dispatch A Snake Hunt in God’s Country By Jake Maynard All photos courtesy of the author. The middle of nowhere, a hole-in-the-wall, flyover counties—even the U.S. Census Bureau defines rurality as a type of absence: “all areas not classified as urban.” An anarchist friend recently told me that a place is only called rural if people don’t give a shit about it. (You’ll never hear Aspen or the Napa Valley described as “rural.”) Much of my life as a writer is spent seeking a better definition, one more devoted to fullness than negation, which is what sent me recently to a rattlesnake hunt, which was also a craft fair, gun sale, horseshoe tournament, and chicken BBQ designed to raise funds for the volunteer fire department of the unincorporated village of Cross Fork, Pennsylvania, near where I grew up. For the nonhunter, like myself, the snake hunt is more pageant than sport. Eastern timber rattlesnakes—distant, misunderstood, definitely not a metaphor—are rounded up in the mountains and brought down so that people can safely look at them. After the weekend, the snakes are released unharmed. To view them, or so I’ve assumed, is to reset one’s sense of wonder, to deepen one’s sense of what, exactly, is so often flown over. It’s also a great excuse for day drinking. Cross Fork lies in Potter County (motto: GOD’S COUNTRY) in North Central Pennsylvania, hemmed in on all sides by state forest, which covers almost half the county and much of the counties to the south and west. In late June the foliage in the folded hills is many shades of green—Kelly, pine, pickle, kelp, even the green of nuclear ooze. My wife, Noelle, and I took the drive from Pittsburgh on shoestring roads, the temperature dropping. We passed the turn for my hometown, a little to the west, and kept going. Read More
August 22, 2025 First Person The Taste of Pencils By Kate Colby Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Photograph by Christopher Michel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. I remember the taste of Mr. Bubble. I know the flavor of Milk-Bones. While I’ve forgotten so many details of my life and days, even if they’re implicit in my brain, it seems to me I’ve never forgotten a taste. In sixth grade I discovered a pleasurable combination of shrill taste and buzzing sensation (shrill and buzzing both technically characterizing sound, the faculty of whose perception seems to warrant extra adjectives) in the three-way interaction between a particular kind of metal, my braces, and tongue. The crimped metal band holding a pencil’s eraser (the unpainted silver kind, not the gold or Dixon Ticonderoga green) produced the effect, and since I spent a good deal of time at that age sitting at a desk, I savored the phenomenon frequently and without anyone noticing, because it’s socially acceptable—even a teacher-approved sign of concentration—to have a pencil in one’s mouth. The taste in my memory of early adolescence is an indescribable metallic sensation and the attendant flavors of a pencil—cedar, No. 2 graphite, rubber eraser. The metal band is called a ferrule. In looking it up I found countless websites dedicated to pencils and their appreciation, even names for different effects produced by sharpening them, e.g., “collar creep,” which is that annoying thing where the wood extends to the vertex of the sharpened tip on one side. Read More
August 21, 2025 Diaries Horseshoe Crab Diary By Grace Byron Photograph by Grace Byron. July 6, 2024 My obsession with horseshoe crabs started small. D. and I went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on a bird walk. The two women next to us turned out to work at an independent competitor to the massive plushie company Squishmallow, and I listened to them talk about the qualities of superior felt as D. watched an egret scarf down an eel across the marsh. Both of us grew up in the Midwest, but it’s D. who loves birding and camping. I enjoy nature as much as the next woman, but I love the feeling of returning to a solid bed surrounded by four sturdy walls. It wasn’t until we walked back to the nature center, stocked with stuffed animals both real and fake, that I came alive. Eagles, hummingbirds, owls, and mice, all lined up in glass cages and offered as stuffies, intended for kids below the age of ten. I idly wound up a small, plastic horseshoe crab and watched it race along the linoleum. Then we turned the corner into a boardroom and discovered a small exhibit on the crabs, a series of nightscape photographs depicting hordes of the ancient critters scampering under streetlights on the beach. The four-hundred-million-year-old hard-shell survivors mating, spawning, and molting on the beach at night under the streetlights, unbothered by the dawn of new technology. The strange, spiderlike crabs looked uncanny, with shells like the backs of stingrays. Their barnacles and the years of life they’d spent living underwater, chowing down on tiny fish and algae, lent them a gray-green hue. Like Paleozoic monsters, alien crustaceans knocked out of time and space. They inspired the same fear and delight that walking in the woods once did when I was a child: the fear and delight of discovery. Read More