The New York Review of Books (October19, 2023) – The latest issue features with Gary Younge on the Black soldiers who fought for freedom at home and abroad, David Shulman on the road to a second Nakba, Jenny Uglow on the exuberant Gwen John, Suzy Hansen on America’s endless and remote wars, Kim Phillips-Fein on plundering private equity, Natalie Angier on milk, Megan O’Grady on Lucy Lippard, Adam Kirsch on the prophetic Kieślowski, Philip Clark on the lines Chuck Berry crossed, Susan Neiman on Germany’s historical memory, poems by Arthur Sze, Jessica Laser, and Jules Laforgue, and much more.

‘We Return Fighting’

By Gary Younge

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont

The ambivalence many Black soldiers felt toward the United States during World War II was matched only by the ambivalence the United States demonstrated toward the principles on which the war was fought.

The Voyage Out

Cathleen Schine

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho is populated by the notable lesbians who helped modernism blossom.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it.