September 1, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles What’s the Takeaway?: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner is Mike Emmons, who solved nineteen out of twenty riddles. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Mike! Below, the solutions. Read More
September 1, 2016 Our Correspondents Dating History By Wei Tchou How a book about Chinatown made me remember my first New York date. Mott Street at night. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve spent much of the summer totally captivated by Tong Wars, Scott Seligman’s comprehensive account of Manhattan’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century. The book narrates the half century of history that followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which made it illegal for Chinese, known at the time as “Celestials,” to immigrate and become naturalized American citizens. Those who traveled to New York from the American West (the New York Herald described them as an “army of almond-eyed exiles”) often found jobs as laundry workers and, according to Seligman, not a few of them spent their evenings gambling illegally in low-lit basements or nursing serious opium addictions. In Tammany Hall–era Manhattan, Chinatown covered the area between Mott Street, Pell Street, and the Bowery. The neighborhood was the site of violent battles between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs, gangs that fought each other using everything from hatchets to bombs. Doyers Street, the dramatic alley off Pell Street, saw so much violence that it became known as the Bloody Angle. (“More people have died violently at Bloody Angle,” the Times reported in 1994, “than at any other intersection in America.”) Read More
September 1, 2016 Arts & Culture Beauty Marks By Emma Garman On Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Morris. A photograph of Jane Morris by John Robert Parsons, 1868. “Defining British Art,” part of this summer’s 250th anniversary sale at London auctioneer Christie’s, included two lots by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Ligeia Siren (1873), a nude of an unknown model, and Portrait of Jane Morris, bust-length (ca. 1870), a chalk drawing of the legendary Pre-Raphaelite muse—née Jane Burden and known as Janey to her friends—who, despite being married to trailblazing designer William Morris for thirty-seven years, was the love of Rossetti’s life. Only the second work sold (for the tidy sum of £602,500), from which we might infer that Janey’s strange beauty, more than a century after her death, entices at least as much as Rossetti’s signature. A few years ago, his chalk drawing of Janey as Proserpine, goddess of spring and empress of Hades, sold at Sotheby’s for nearly £3.3 million—double the presale estimate. Rossetti would be gratified indeed. Proserpine, which he reworked in at least eight versions, was his favorite creation, the fullest realization of an artistic drive fueled, above all, by his passion for Janey. A. S. Byatt, in pondering Rossetti’s painterly addiction to Janey in her new book, Peacock and Vine: Fortuny and Morris in Life and at Work, also sees this particular image as the culmination of Rossetti’s entwined artistic and erotic fixations. Byatt, however, is disquieted by it. “There is something appalling,” she writes, “in looking at a whole series of Rossetti’s images, more and more obsessive yet essentially all the same, brooding, dangerous, sexually greedy, too much. The best, and therefore the worst, is Proserpine.” Read More
September 1, 2016 On the Shelf The Final Jane Austen Rewrite, and Other News By Jonathon Sturgeon Still from Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. It may surprise you that literary history could frown upon Seth Grahame-Smith, the “mash-up novelist” famous for his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Grahame-Smith is now being sued by Hachette, his publisher, for breach of contract. Alison Flood explains the case at the Guardian: “The complaint says the Grahame-Smith delivered the second manuscript in June 2016, but alleges that the work was ‘not original to Smith, but instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work,’ that it ‘materially varies from the 80,000–100,000 word limit’ agreed on, and that it ‘is not comparable in style and quality to Smith’s wholly original best seller Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.’ ” Maybe this will put an end to Jane Austen rewrites not penned by Whit Stillman. Read More
August 31, 2016 From the Archive The Book of Sediments By Madeline DeFrees Madeline DeFrees’s poem “The Book of Sediments” appeared in our Fall 1983 issue. Her last collection, Spectral Waves, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2006; DeFrees passed away last year. Read More
August 31, 2016 Our Correspondents I Was Somebody Else By Lucy Sante Its authorship mistakenly attributed to its copy editor and issued in a single edition of five hundred by a suburban publisher of quickie romances, the posthumous memoirs of the celebrated French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1933) must count among the more obscure byways of literary marginalia. Having faked his death in 1891 to escape mounting debts and increasingly credible threats of violence from rival traders in the Gulf of Aden, Rimbaud lay low for more than four decades. While his former friends and colleagues were elevating his poetic works and mysterious youth into a cult, he kept his distance. He stayed busy, variously occupied as a beachcomber on the Côte d’Azur, a croupier at Monte Carlo, a phony “fakir” in a traveling carnival, a roving photographer with donkey on the Belgian coast, a promoter of spurious miracle sites in the Borinage, and finally twenty years as “Beauraind,” an intermittently successful music-hall ventriloquist. Read More