Plus: Abortion Now; Satire; Radical Prophetesses; Khirbet Khizeh; Hamnet; the Oscars
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Pankaj Mishra mourns the severing of India and Iran’s historic ties; Amy Littlefield investigates how people are getting abortions after Dobbs; Aaron Matz honors satirists; Erin Maglaque studies the radical prophetesses of early modern England; Nathan Thrall revives a lost classic of Hebrew literature that dared to portray the violence of the Nakba; and, from the archives, Stephen Greenblatt on the historical Hamnet as well as a wealth of Oscar movie reviews. In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy. The telehealth network circumventing abortion bans has given people new choices—even as they contend with new forms of uncertainty. A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice. A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un unfiltered knowledge of God. The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed. Free from the ArchivesIt’s Oscar night in America. For the ninety-eighth year in a row, the silver screen’s shiniest stars are assembling in the city of angels to celebrate the year in cinema. Among the most-nominated films this year is Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, which tells the story of the death of Shakespeare’s son and the subsequent writing of Hamlet. In the Review’s October 21, 2004, issue, Stephen Greenblatt took on the historical facts of the Shakespeare family’s tragedy, endeavoring “to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” And below Greenblatt’s history, we’ve collected five essays from the last year about some of tonight’s nominees: Nawal Arjini on Marty Supreme, Jonathan Lethem on One Battle After Another, Beatrice Loayza on The Secret Agent, Kevin Power on KPop Demon Hunters, and Miranda Seymour on Frankenstein. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare must have received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. Whether in London or on tour with his company he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from his family in Stratford, but at some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time the father reached Stratford the boy—whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, 1596, Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.”
The Review Goes to the Oscars Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s new film, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost. Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch. In The Secret Agent, his sad, riotous new feature, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho at once archives a vanished world and mythologizes it. At the center of KPop Demon Hunters is a fantasy of unmediated connection between fans and idols, a frictionless vision of the perfected market. Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein—adapted once again into a movie, this one directed by Guillermo del Toro—from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel. New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. You are receiving this message because you signed up
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