Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday reading on nybooks.com: What Joyce did with language in Ulysses, Claudia Rankine’s lyric examination of America, the Nazi-Soviet alliance, and Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices. Plus recommendations in art, poetry, music, and physics.   THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP It’s Still a Scandal! Adam Thirlwell Something is missing in Ulysses—which could be called romanticism, or the ideal, or the metaphysical; and its absence is the deep reason why Joyce’s early readers were so alarmed, and why it can still disturb.   ADVERTISEMENT   ‘A New Way of Writing About Race’ Nick Laird At the core of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is an “anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color.”   Monsters Together John Lukacs In the vast literature about Stalin and Hitler during World War II, little is said about their being allies for twenty-two months. That is more than an odd chapter in the history of that war, and its meaning deserves more attention than it has received.   ADVERTISEMENT   Hillary Joseph Lelyveld Clinton’s memoirs are strewn with clues to the way the odds-makers’ favorite for next president thinks about the world and our place in it. Fond as she is of proclaiming “new eras,” little in her approach reflects new thinking.   ART The Guggenheim is hosting the first solo show in a major New York museum of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian(through June 3)   ART Alice Neel’s works on paperare “spontaneous, intimate, and mordantly observant,” writes J. Hoberman (through April 18)   CELEBRATION “Music, the Civil War, and American Memory” is a conference and concert to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War(April 18)   CONVERSATION Freeman Dyson discusses his latest book, Dreams of Earth and Sky, with Dave Goldberg at the Free Library of Philadelphia (April 21)