The Silence of the Choir, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Europa). In this ambitious, Goncourt Prize-winning novel, seventy-two African asylum seekers arrive in a fictional town in rural Sicily after a harrowing journey, only to find themselves at the center of an ideological battle that splinters the community. Sarr moves adroitly between the viewpoints of a … Read more
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Sheldon PearcePearce has covered music for Goings On since 2020. To call T-Pain’s journey back to the center of pop culture a redemption arc might be underestimating his influence, even at his most marginalized, but in recent years the singer and rapper has become a case study in successful second impressions. Once the purveyor of … Read more
© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé … Read more
Vagabonds, by Oskar Jensen (The Experiment). Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves. Jensen delves into contemporary memoirs, trial proceedings, periodicals, and other sources to capture an “astonishingly eloquent collective.” He pays particular attention to differences … Read more
Faraway the Southern Sky, by Joseph Andras, translated from the French by Simon Leser (Verso). This brief but layered novel follows a nameless figure wandering around Paris searching for traces of Ho Chi Minh, who lived there as a young revolutionary, near the end of the First World War. Ho is glimpsed through police files, … Read more
Photograph courtesy Siren – Protectors of the Rainforest Most years, alongside a bazaar, the honoring of elders, and performances from local groups, BAM’s long-running festival DanceAfrica celebrates the mother continent by zeroing in on a country or region. This time, it’s Cameroon. The guest company was supposed to be Cie la Calebasse, a notable troupe … Read more
Lucky, by Jane Smiley (Knopf). The main character of this warmhearted novel is Jodie Rattler, a girl who, at the age of six, accompanies her uncle to a racetrack and wins a roll of forty-three two-dollar bills. That talisman propels Rattler through life, from her upbringing in a gregarious family to a successful, if ultimately … Read more
Shakespeare’s Sisters, by Ramie Targoff (Knopf). In this thoughtful study, Targoff, a literary scholar, highlights four female contemporaries of Shakespeare, women who “weren’t encouraged” and rarely received “even a shred of acclaim,” but managed to write nonetheless. Mary Sidney (the sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) produced a noteworthy translation of the Book of … Read more
Knife, by Salman Rushdie (Random House). In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half … Read more
