Sponsored by Yale University Press

Tim Flannery
Ready to Rumble

A new book by the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer details the gifts and destruction brought by volcanoes, and the sublimity and terror experienced in their presence.

Lynn Hunt
A New Force Set Loose

A new history of pre-1789 France by Robert Darnton examines the emergence of a “revolutionary temper” produced by salacious and scandal-mongering newsletters, pamphlets, songs, and even gossip and graffiti. But did it really bring down the ancien régime?

Jé Wilson
Ducks in the Drawing Room

The disorienting vitality of Barbara Comyns’s novels is one reason they tend to be forgotten and revived every few decades.

after Mechthild of Magdeburg

a poem by 
Camille Ralphs

O gush of bushfire, O quintuple denim sea, sun pressing
like a button on us all,
O moon mirabilis, unmirrorable mirrorball, O, you,
most bottomless of wholes…

David A. Bell
In My Mother’s Archive

Researching my mother’s friendships with Truman Capote and Elizabeth Bishop, her love affair with Dylan Thomas, and her own writing career, I discovered that she had led a courageous early life.

Adam Hanieh
‘Every Molecule of Hydrocarbon Will Come Out’

Gulf States are increasingly shaping global climate policy, even as they plan to accelerate fossil fuel production.

NYRSeminars:
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Join Daniel Mendelsohn as he leads a seminar on W. G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, which follows the footsteps of a nameless narrator as he takes a long and erratic walking tour of Suffolk—a journey that becomes a vehicle for ruminating on history and literature, the passage of time, and cultural decay.

Four weekly sessions beginning March 6. Purchase your membership here!

Free from the Archives

In the magazine’s March 6, 1966, issue, nine years after Malcolm Lowry’s death, Denis Donoghue took the occasion of a review of Lowry’s recently published Selected Letters to also assess Under the Volcano, which had been published in 1947. The letters, after all, “spill over into the fiction; if whole paragraphs sound familiar, the explanation is easy, you have already read them in Under the Volcano.”

Denis Donoghue
Ultra Writer

“This is Lowry’s world, where the line between fact and fiction is impossible to find, the air is heavy with the memory of Faustus, Dante, Lazarus, Melville, Ishmael, Mexico, and mescal, and what hurts the eye is the smoke of hell.”

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