Issue 9 is here!

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Athenaeum Review publishes essays, reviews, and podcasts by leading scholars in the arts and humanities.

Against Linear History

To be modern is to privilege the present over the past.David Hawkes · Issue 7 ·

Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune

Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.Benjamin Shull · Issue 7 ·

Christoph Büchel Superstar

The crude outlines of the Fondazione Prada exhibition form a critique of socially responsible capital, the benevolent art world, and the charity complex, too.Pierre d’Alancaisez ·

The Art of Conversation and the Revival of the Humanities

Montaigne’s comparative method encourages a complex mixture of appreciation of the many ways human beings live their lives, modesty about one’s dispositions and accomplishments, and the free but unpresumptuous exercise of individual judgment about the whole.Benjamin Storey · Issue 8 ·

Joel Barlow’s Eccentric American Vision

Barlow believed that “Science and republican progress, coupled with religion and the growing humanity of man, portended the millennium, which he believed would take place on earth before the second coming of God.” Ed Simon · Issue 8 ·

How the Bible and Paradise Lost Explain Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce Derangement Syndrome

Like Kelce and Swift, Adam and Eve were singular in their fields (they literally had no other competition) and, materially speaking, as well off as any human beings could ever hope to be.Daniel Ross Goodman ·

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Honor Levy, My First Book. Penguin Press, 224pp., $27 cloth.

Jordan Castro, The Novelist: A Novel. Soft Skull Press, 208pp., $17 paper.

Percival Everett, James: A Novel. Doubleday, 320pp., $28 cloth.