Paul Giles

The New York Review Classics series has done much to keep canonical writers in print, having already published in smart paperback editions three lesser-known novels by Henry James: The Other House, The Outcry, and The Ivory Tower. These two new additions to the series, a selection of James’s essays ‘on writers and writing’, edited by eminent James scholar Michael Gorra, and a critical discussion of James’s The American Scene by Yale emeritus professor Peter Brooks, make further valuable contributions to the NYRB library.

Fredric Jameson, who died in September 2024 at the age of ninety, was one of the great literary and cultural critics of our time. He spent most of his academic career at Duke University in North Carolina and published two books around the time of his death: Inventions of a Present just before, The Years of Theory just after. The first is a collection of essays on the novel originally written between 1972 and 2022, mostly for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. The second is a transcript of a seminar series on French cultural thought between 1945 and the 1990s that Jameson taught at Duke in the first semester of 2021, at the age of eighty-six. These classes were recorded for posterity because they took place during the Covid era and were captured on the video technology he was using for teaching.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

Clocking in at 513 pages, Tim Winton’s new novel carries all the apparatus of a major publishing event. Juice is an ambitious work, technically very skilful, which seeks to delineate not only a dystopian prospect of the planet’s future but also an alternative, revisionist version of its historical past.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.

Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.

One striking feature of Nicholas Jose’s fine new novel is its principled versatility. Set in multiple locations – Adelaide, Washington, DC, East Timor – and introducing alternative narrative voices, Jose evokes a world of complex intersections comprising many different angles and viewpoints. As a former diplomat himself, he writes with expert knowledge of a variety of professional and personal environments. His novel ranges across the ‘loyalties and long memories’ of lives rooted in Adelaide, along with some of the city’s ‘dunderhead complacencies’, while also presenting an insider’s view of diplomatic exchanges in Washington, DC and Canberra.