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Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. (April 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)

Robert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books, early 1980s

From its first issue in 1963, Robert Silvers was either co-editor with Barbara Epstein or, after her death in 2006, editor of The New York Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

Mixed-Up Kids

Paul Auster

4 3 2 1

by Paul Auster
In its sheer expansiveness 4 3 2 1, which is more than twice the length of any book that Paul Auster has published, is unlike anything he has written. Yet it is also commodious enough to encompass everything else he has written. Several times Auster writes playfully of the book of life, and 4 3 2 1 is close to a Book of Auster, studded with allusions to previous novels.

Joan Didion in the Deep South

Joan Didion, Los Angeles, May 1987

“The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan.” This has been the idea of many people who have come to New Orleans. It was the idea of the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who in 1684 set out to establish …

NYR DAILY

The Creatures Within

Arthur Kern: Dance on Trigger, 1984

I found the sculptures of Arthur Kern, now at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, startling not because I had never seen anything like them before—but the opposite. The sense of recognition was immediate and visceral. I was certain I had seen these images before, in some other time, somewhere very far away from here.

An Amazon Without Certainty

Antonio Bolivar as Karamakate and Jan Bijvoet as Theo in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, 2015

It’s a story as old as Alexander von Humboldt: white explorer treks into the Amazon, becomes lost and disoriented, paints face with mud, eats beetles, and has visions of galaxies and exotic reptiles, before finally achieving enlightenment—or total madness. But Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty.

Remnants of New Orleans

Richard Sexton: Ruin of a leper colony hospital, Caño del Oro, near Cartagena, Colombia, 2010

“While it actually resembles no other city upon the face of the earth,” wrote Lafcadio Hearn of New Orleans, “it owns suggestions of towns in Italy, and in Spain, of cities in England and in Germany, of seaports in the Mediterranean, and of seaports in the tropics.” There’s no better illustration of this than the photographs of Richard Sexton.

NYR CALENDAR

The 9th Annual Cassidy Park Cook-Off/BBQ

This annual cook-off is an excellent opportunity to visit Bogalusa, “The Magic City,” a town founded in 1906 by the Goodyears of Buffalo, New York, in a pine forest on the Mississippi border eighty minutes north of New Orleans.