Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

New on nybooks.com: The victory of Penelope Fitzgerald, three new books about American education, the big question of Cubism, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, Robert Mapplethorpe’s mentor, and the eerie, spidery art of Alfred Kubin.

Taking a Wrench to Reality Julian Bell The Met’s exhibition Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection is absorbing and provoking as well as notable historically.   ADVERTISEMENT   Why Is American Teaching So Bad? Jonathan Zimmerman The entire conception of “accountability” is an insult to the intelligence of American teachers, taking little account of the demanding intellectual activity—both the command of knowledge and ways to show it—that good teaching involves.   The Victory of Penelope Fitzgerald Alan Hollinghurst She published her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, when she was fifty-eight; her first novel appeared when she was sixty. She was, as she said, “an old writer who had never been a young one.”   ADVERTISEMENT   The Opera Stalin Hated Geoffrey O’Brien Described as a “towering tragedy,” Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is equally a grotesque vaudeville, and Graham Vick’s intensely inventive production (revived for the first time in fourteen years) pays due attention to the grotesque component.   Falling for Photography Martin Filler A new biography of Sam Wagstaff gives us a closer look at the prescient curator, all-purpose tastemaker, and pioneering collector of photography who launched Robert Mapplethorpe’s career.   The Shadow World of Alfred Kubin Christopher Benfey Kubin’s work, according to Ernst Jünger, was a key that opened the secret spaces of history.