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New & Noteworthy

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By Bret Stephens

Dec. 26, 2017

New this week:

THE GRAPHIC CANON OF CRIME AND MYSTERY, VOLUME 1 Edited by Russ Kick. (Seven Stories Press, $29.95.) From Poe to Kafka to Dostoyevsky, all the masters are here, in these short, graphic renderings of the darkest, most foreboding writing of all time. With different artists and illustrators taking on each tale, there are many revelations. TIME OF GRATITUDE By Gennady Aygi. (New Directions, $16.95.) This collection of poetry and verse-infused prose from the celebrated Russian and Chuvash poet bows to the writers and artists who kept him creatively inspired during the Soviet era. YOU & ME & WHY WE ARE IN LOVE By Aurelia Alcaïs. (Penguin, $15.) Love comes in many flavors and Alcaïs, a French actress and illustrator, tries to capture many of them in her basic but sweet portraits of variations like “inquiring love,” “qualified love” and “modern love.” THE THREE MUSKETEERS By Alexandre Dumas. (Pegasus Books, $26.95.) The classic French epic in a new translation by Lawrence Ellsworth brings freshness to the story of d’Artagnan and his pals. THE RUIN OF KASCH By Roberto Calasso. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) Calasso’s nearly four-decade project, eclectic and erudite, to tell the intellectual history of the modern world began with this first book in the series, about the French Revolution and so much more, translated anew into English.

& Noteworthy

In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.

“No book did more to steel me as an anti-Trump conservative writer than NOT I, the historian Joachim Fest’s devastating memoir of his coming of age in the Third Reich. Fest’s father, Johannes, was the quintessential ‘good German’ — an educated Prussian Catholic with a rightward political bent — who nevertheless refused to bend a knee (or raise a salute) to Hitler. The result was the loss of his job, social ostracism and penury. Fest, who died in 2006, captured his father’s struggles to preserve the family’s moral integrity and political decency in the face of a regime determined to strip it of both. At one point, in 1936, Fest’s mother pleads with Johannes to join the Nazi Party, despite his hatred of it, just to save her and their children from further hardship. Characterizing his mother’s argument, Fest writes, ‘Untruth has always been the weapon of the little people against the powerful.’ Johannes’s unforgettable rejoinder: ‘We are not little people. Not when it comes to such questions!’ Words to live by for anyone living in politically dark times.”

— Bret Stephens, columnist