David Denby

David Denby is a staff writer at the New Yorker. His most recent book is Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer.

John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring...

Letter

Podunk

29 June 2023

Michael Hofmann writes about Douglas Smith’s translation of Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life (LRB, 29 June). I kept waiting for him to refer to the first English translation of this work, but he never did. Hofmann does say that during the Khrushchev thaw, Paustovsky was very well known in the Soviet Union and ‘enjoyed some reputation, now long gone, in the West’. I can confirm...

Diary: Deaths on Camera

David Denby, 8 September 2016

On 19 July​ 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus police, pulled over Samuel DuBose, whose car was missing its front licence plate. Tensing was wearing a body camera, and when the Hamilton County district attorney released the video ten days later,...

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