Issue 9 is here!
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
The Modern Barbarians at the Gate
The problem is not whether to receive the expanded sense evidence, but how to do so with some authenticity and accuracy. To some extent, the issue is one of how “perception” of what is factual can be expanded by technology in such a way as to alter the perception of “reality.”
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.