Top Book News provided by The New York Review of Books©

• A Bitter Winter in Ukraine
  Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.
• Contempt of Court
  Since the Trump administration began its strategy of indefinitely detaining people it has targeted for deportation, federal judges across the country and ideological spectrum have been rejecting their efforts, ordering that detainees be released or given bond hearings in more than 1,600 cases. Yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly defied or ignored the […]
• Authoritarianism from Below
  As National Guard troops and federal officers swarmed Washington, D.C., in August, sent by President Donald Trump to confront what he declared a “crime emergency,” members of the city council expressed their outrage. Janeese Lewis George, who represents a northern ward with many immigrant residents that was immediately crawling with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) […]
• Medicaid Undone
  One year ago President Donald Trump promised to “love and cherish” Medicaid. Alas, his affection for the public insurance program was short-lived. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) he signed into law on July 4—the most sweeping health care legislation since Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA)—slashes about $1 trillion in federal […]
• Pieces of Gaza
  Until 2024, the objects on display in “Trésors sauvés de Gaza” (“Treasures Saved from Gaza”), an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris that closed last December, had been sitting in crates in Geneva for seventeen years awaiting their return to the Gaza Strip, where they were destined for a museum not yet […]
• Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick
  In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick.
• ‘Fill It with Reality’
  In 1962 Françoise Ega, a Martinican woman working odd jobs and raising five children in Marseille, stumbled upon a newspaper article about Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian woman who, “hunched over” in a favela and using “pieces of paper that [she] found in the trash,” wrote a highly acclaimed memoir, Quarto de despejo, […]
• The Writer from the Dance
  Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her nearly fifty-year career writing about America—North and South, from New York to Argentina. From her earliest essay in the Review, in 1994, about Mario Vargas Llosa’s election campaign memoir, to her most recent, in our February 12 issue, about the Trump administration’s coup in Venezuela, she has focused in particular […]
• Never Again, Once Again
  A few years ago, in the early summer of 2019, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared on its website that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” Apparently it felt that this declaration was necessary because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, […]
• American Imperialism and the End of Sovereignty
  Fintan O’Toole hosts New York Review contributors Alma Guillermoprieto and Michael Ignatieff for a wide-ranging conversation on the Trump administration’s imperial ambitions in Venezuela, Greenland, and beyond. This conversation originally aired on February 5, 2026.
• When the Chips Are Down
  President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.
• Mother Trouble
  In her new memoir, Arundhati Roy tries to find the language to grapple with the shadow of her formidable, extraordinary mother.
• A Student of Power
  In his experiences and chronicles of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, Curzio Malaparte was a shape-shifter—pitiless, clinical, cynical, unsentimental, indifferent to morality and idealism.
• People Think
  Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.
• Thin Skin
  “If I’m thin,” said skin,“it’s because I have been cut.”The hands, who wanted nothingand were incapable of choice, didn’t feelresponsible. Earsweren’t listening; neither was the voice. “If I’m thin,” said skin, “it’s becauseI have been cut.”“Not enough,” said the hermit soul,who saved its lovefor what it couldn’t see or touchwhile spirit,patient survivor of schooling without […]
• Poland: Halfway to Democracy
  What do the far right’s fluctuating fortunes in Poland suggest about countries seeking an off-ramp from autocracy?
• Call Me by Your Names
  The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon.
• Rescuing the Refugees
  After the fall of France many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.
• Chasing Ghosts
  With its brilliant prose and unrelenting darkness and pessimism, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night towers over Chilean literature.
• Lost and Forgotten
  Although his own writings are little known today, Malcolm Cowley became one of the great champions of American literature.
• Torn Asunder
  As Guatemala and El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.
• An American Reckoning
  Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today.
• Toni Plays the Dozens
  What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?
• Painted Sermons
  The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality.
• The Struggle for the Fed
  The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?
• Still Life, Hilton Head
  No, not a logon the bank that risesfrom the lagoon— an alligator!Just one shade brownerthan the pristine golf-course greenof this lawn-mown,laundered neighborhood. An alligatorjust feet away—undead, unfunnily playing possumas if an exteriordecorator had staged it therelike a polar bearrug or a chair; or as if some matronhad pinned on the moundof her bosom a jeweled, […]
• Is It Easy Being Green?
  To the Editors: Regarding Bill McKibben’s review of The Story of CO 2 Is the Story of Everything [“It’s a Gas,” NYR, January 15], and with all due respect to McKibben, I believe that his characterization of the transition to a wind and solar economy as something easily within our grasp, once the political obstacles […]
• Promo Time
  “This is what it sounds like…” Readers of a certain generation will perhaps automatically complete this phrase by saying “when doves cry.” But it isn’t doves we’re talking about. It’s magpies. Prince’s funky epic of tortured love (“Why do we scream at each other?”) forms part of the extensive pop-culture back catalog ransacked by the […]
• My Elsewheres
  I’m a Black American woman who was formed in the twentieth century, amid the cold war and racial segregation that was entrenched even in the Bay Area. But how I think, the way I write, and where my imagination has taken me owe everything to places outside the United States. I call them my “elsewheres.” […]
• Sparkle and Status
  “Biography is a wonderful way into the past, because it’s life as experienced, day to day, subtly influenced by what is happening in politics or the movement of ideas.”
• Fifteen Below Zero
  Driving to St. Paul from the airport you pass under Fort Snelling, an enormous limestone structure from the early nineteenth century. In November 1862, following the bloody conclusion of the US–Dakota War, 1,700 people from the Dakota tribe were forced to march to Fort Snelling and kept in a concentration camp on the river flats […]
• The Crime of Witness
  Renée Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.
• Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams
  In 1945, as the spring air of the Japanese countryside poured in through the unfinished roof of their house, twelve-year-old Yoko Ono and her little brother, Keisuke, scions of the fabulously powerful Yasuda family, stared into the blue sky and starved. Their money was worthless, and their rural neighbors had little pity for the city […]
• The Politics of Raw Power
  On Wednesday a group of Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis pinned a man to the ground and, while he was immobilized, blasted pepper spray into his face at point-blank range. On Thursday the House of Representatives, with the necessary support of seven Democrats, passed a government spending bill that appropriated $10 billion to Immigrations and […]
• Darfur’s Endless War
  As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province, self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend their homes.
• Is the Constitution ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’?
  The difficulty of amending the Constitution does not mean that it is a flawed and outdated relic of a distant past.
• Two Odes by Ricardo Reis
  42/I [1923–1924] Seated securely on the solid pillar            Of the verses in which I remain,I have no fear of the endless future influx            Of times and oblivion;For the mind, when it steadfastly sees in itself            The reflections of the world,Becomes malleable clay, and it is the world            That creates art, not the mind.Just as the external instant engraves its […]
• Whose Hemisphere?
  The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.
• All That Glitters
  The science of gemstones has always been intertwined with their value as luxury items.
• Trump’s Attack on Philanthropy
  Universities, law firms, and news media have already been targeted by the administration. As the Justice Department pushes to investigate the Open Society Foundations, it seems that philanthropies that support critical voices may be next.
• Epic Ambitions
  A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.
• Wars of Religion
  It is a problem of organization, angelsIn their syndicates look down, elitesHave always looked down on us, she said,But if everyone refuses to dieSimultaneously, a kind of general strikeThen they will have no choiceBut to come to the table, she said, strikingHer fists on the table, which caused our drinksWhich were also candlesTo spill. It […]
• Bang the Drumstick Slowly
  About 26 billion chickens occupy Earth, but apart from the lucky ones in backyards, most are condemned to the hellscape that is industrial farming.
• Liberalism’s Pianist
  Can Igor Levit restore classical music’s claim to cultural and political authority, or is it irrevocably lost?
• Rolling with the Economic Tides
  Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel follows the lifespan of one barge, from bunkhouse to floating prison to barracks and back, as it traces the shadowy outer limits of the maritime economy.
• Teacher’s Pet
  Jane DeLynn’s autobiographical novel In Thrall recounts a same-sex affair between a teenager and her closeted English teacher in the early 1960s, a time when exposure could be more traumatic than exploitation.
• Things Fall Apart
  Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers chronicles how one prosperous German Jewish family struggled to answer the question: When is it time to leave?
• The Undefined Gothic
  At the turn of the twentieth century, a Gothic fever swept Europe as artists searched for meaning in a lost age.
• Childhood
  I did die. Dying was a venetian blind, all parts working together but not in the same direction.Like a succulent, an aloe leaf—break it and it heals.I died like boxes in a storage locker—no hurry to open.Died like a myth—the watermonster leapt out, snatched me from myself. There was a honed instrument—there was a small […]
• Bangladesh’s Stalled Student Revolution
  The young radicals who ousted the country’s authoritarian prime minister have so far failed to implement the democratic reforms they promised. Will elections in February correct their course?
• Neigh!
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• A More Pliant Chavista
  President Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.

New York Times Books©

• Martin Amis: An Appreciation
  Our critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son.
• Book Review: ‘NB by J.C.,’ by James Campbell
  “NB by J.C.” collects the variegated musings of James Campbell in the Times Literary Supplement.
• In ‘Fires in the Dark,’ Kay Redfield Jamison Turns to Healers
  In “Fires in the Dark,” Jamison, known for her expertise on manic depression, delves into the quest to heal. Her new book, she says, is a “love song to psychotherapy.”
• The Detective Novel ‘Whose Body?,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers, Turns 100
  Dorothy L. Sayers dealt with emotional and financial instability by writing “Whose Body?,” the first of many to star the detective Lord Peter Wimsey.
• Book Review: ‘Dom Casmurro,’ by Machado de Assis
  “Dom Casmurro,” by Machado de Assis, teaches us to read — and reread — with precise detail and masterly obfuscation.
• Book Review: ‘The Late Americans,’ by Brandon Taylor
  Brandon Taylor’s novel circulates among Iowa City residents, some privileged, some not, but all aware that their possibilities are contracting.
• Martin Amis’s Best Books: A Guide
  The acclaimed British novelist was also an essayist, memoirist and critic of the first rank.
• The Best Romance Novels of 2024 (So Far)
  Looking for an escapist love story? Here are 2024’s sexiest, swooniest reads.
• What Book Should You Read Next?
  Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.
• Fania Fénelon, 74; Memoirs Described Auschwitz Singing
  In “Playing for Time,” she recounted how singing in an all-female orchestra while in a concentration camp saved her from death.
• Anna Akhmatova, Leading Soviet Poet, Is Dead
  She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge.
• Book Review: ‘So Old, So Young,’ by Grant Ginder
  The milestones of an undergrad friend group give shape and color to Grant Ginder’s latest novel, “So Old, So Young.”
• Learning German from a 1970s Language Book
  How hard-boiled language lessons from Adrienne, the motorcycle-riding author of a series of 1970s language books, turned a homebody into an explorer.
• Book Review: ‘Why I Am Not an Atheist,’ by Christopher Beha
  In “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” Christopher Beha makes the case for faith.
• Book Review: ‘Rebel English Academy,’ by Mohammed Hanif
  Mohammed Hanif’s “Rebel English Academy” follows three characters in the politically fraught Pakistan of the late 1970s.
• Book Review: ‘On Morrison,’ by Namwali Serpell
  A new study by the novelist and scholar Namwali Serpell subjects the Nobel laureate’s work to rigorous inspection — with thrilling results.
• Book Review: ‘Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Color,’ by Mark Haddon
  In “Leaving Home,” the writer and illustrator Mark Haddon recasts a painful childhood in kaleidoscopic color.
• ‘A Hymn to Life’ Review: Gisèle Pelicot’s Memoir Is a Powerfully Written Feminist Manifesto
  With matter-of-fact precision, “A Hymn to Life” powerfully chronicles the shock of discovering her husband’s sex crimes, and the rallying cry that followed.
• Book Review: ‘Evil Genius,’ by Claire Oshetsky
  A young telephone company operator finds herself in the dark underbelly of the Me Decade in Claire Oshetsky’s “Evil Genius.”
• Roy Medvedev, Soviet Era Historian and Dissident, Is Dead at 100
  His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions, Communist repressions and censorship, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia.
• Book Review: ‘The Last Kings of Hollywood,’ by Paul Fischer
  A new book shows how the decline of the studios and the fresh wind of the 1960s allowed them to turn personal visions into critical and popular success.
• Julia Quinn, Author of the ‘Bridgerton’ Novels, Reflects on the Series
  Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the author appeared on the Book Review podcast to speak about her books and the Netflix phenomenon they sparked.
• Jacob Elordi, Heathcliff and the Controversy Over ‘Wuthering Heights’
  The character’s racial identity is at the heart of accusations that the film’s casting is “whitewashing.” But what does the original novel really say?
• Two New Reboots of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’
  Two new reboots of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic give the March sisters’ story a darker and more contemporary spin.
• Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• PEN America Names New Leadership After Gaza Fallout
  After a 16-month search, the free speech group has chosen two longtime employees, Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, as co-chief executives.
• Book Review: ‘End of Days,’ by Chris Jennings
  In “End of Days,” Chris Jennings recounts how a collision between apocalyptic Christianity and federal overreach led to a deadly standoff in Idaho.
• Turkish Nobel Novelist Orhan Pamuk Gets the Netflix Series He Wanted
  After publishing more than 20 books and winning a Nobel Prize, the Turkish author fought to bring a celebrated novel to the screen — on his own terms.
• Book Review: ‘Emilio Pucci,’ by Terence Ward and Idanna Pucci
  In “Emilio Pucci,” the subject’s niece and her husband explore the early life of the Italian designer who dressed the jet set.
• The Book Jackets Were Ready. Then Charlie Kirk Was Shot.
  What’s a publisher to do when a novel hews close to the news cycle?
• Book Review: ‘The Blood Countess,’ by Shelley Puhak
  A new book by Shelley Puhak dismantles the legend of Hungary’s infamous “blood countess,” separating fact from myth.
• Book Review: ‘Murder Bimbo,’ by Rebecca Novack
  Rebecca Novack’s novel, “Murder Bimbo,” is a devious and outrageously entertaining satire that skewers America’s surreal political landscape.
• Book Review: ‘The Boundless Deep,’ by Richard Holmes
  In “The Boundless Deep,” Richard Holmes explores the forces that formed the young Alfred Tennyson.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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