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

• Seeing Through the Lightness
  Equanimity once defined Brice Marden’s art—optical balance so solid it felt inevitable. In a current survey, maintaining it feels more like a feat, something grabbed in motion.
• ‘Quest Without End’
  The Scottish journalist Cal Flyn travels the world in search of the feelings that wild and abandoned places evoke.
• Reverence for All of It
  Benedict de Spinoza’s ideas about the interchangeability of God and nature made him a heretic in seventeenth-century Europe. But would it be correct to call him an atheist today?
• Masters of Their Craft
  For 150 years Paris was the research hub, testing ground, and production center for modern painting and sculpture.
• Why I Go to the Movies Alone
  I like James Bond movies because you Can hear punches land before they land. The punch line reads: Today an oddity, Tomorrow a standard. The material I appropriate is available to anyone Who cares to use it. The fact that The material has been observed By persons other than me defines Its desires and threats […]
• Our Lady of Beverly, TX
  I dreamt we were like two wax birds, dreamt we were a modest kitchen painted in red gas or pink formaldehyde, dreamt you were a convex shape that could contain all of Rome or the one-light town where you were born, a western sunset painted on a wooden cross, my palms outstretched to reveal the […]
• The Executioner’s Song
  Pamela Colloff's To Catch the Devil is as much the tale of a notorious jailhouse informant who put an innocent man on death row as it is the story of the officials and institutions that encouraged his lies.
• Nightmares of History
  The Newer World completes Sebastian Barry’s trilogy of novels about Americans caught up in the violence of the nineteenth century.
• Interview with a Bandit
  Many Nigerians have turned to violence after years of suffering under widespread government corruption.
• The Tightrope Walker
  How did Trump manage to turn a failed coup d’état into a story of his own martyrdom?
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Change
  In the films and fiction of Jane Schoenbrun, the boundary between reality and fantasy is porous, alluring, and must be carefully patrolled.
• The Cost of Monetizing Everything
  Behavioral economists prided themselves on bringing rational thinking to public policy, but behind their “nudges” for optimizing consumer behavior was a big corporate push.
• Arthur Schomburg’s Legacy
  The Schomburg Center in Harlem is marking its centennial by celebrating the man whose library grew into one of the world’s great collections of black history and literature.
• Collateral Damage
  In the documentary film NAZA, Israeli soldiers speak candidly about their remorse at participating in the war in Gaza.
• Home and Away
  In her novels Fausta Cialente, an Italian émigré who spent much of her life in Egypt, wrote about rootless women and girls addicted to flight.
• From the Archive: “The Patient Is Always Right”
  Season 2, Episode 8
• The Ecstasy of Ken Russell
  “It was a ‘theater,’” the philosopher, historian, and Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau wrote of the reported demonic possession that swept early modern France, and “the show was staged in Loudun for almost ten years.” Following an outbreak of plague in 1632, the nuns of the Ursuline convent in Loudun—a town already traumatized by previous […]
• The Texture of Reality
  Season 1, Episode 5 of Endgame
• The Blue Wave—III
  Christopher Hooks • Francisco Cantú • Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana Lone Star Pastoral Christopher Hooks In January the state of Texas will experience a changeover in political power practically on the scale of a color revolution. Before the November election the question had been whether the Democrat James Talarico might win the Senate […]
• The Blue Wave—II
  Rozina Ali • Olivia Paschal • Lily Geismer • David Treuer ‘Are You for America?’ Rozina Ali In the fiery lead-up to the midterm election in Michigan, mailers arrived at voters’ homes bearing the gray-toned images of a woman in a burqa and Abdul El-Sayed’s face. The leaflet, sent by a Republican-aligned super PAC, warned […]
• Now What?
  Since 2019 Joseph O’Neill has been writing essays for the Review exhorting the Democratic Party to play offense in the face of what was beginning to seem like an aversion to winning. So in November 2024, in the bewildering days after Donald Trump’s reelection, I wrote to O’Neill in search of a diagnosis of the […]
• The Blue Wave—I
  David Cole • Sue Halpern • Mark O’Connell • Quinn Slobodian The People’s Referendum David Cole Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, I spoke at a local Washington, D.C., bookstore on civil liberties and the rule of law. DOGE was taking a wrecking ball to federal agencies, Trump had pardoned everyone involved in the […]
• The Next Generation
  The American left has won a historic election by successfully linking the affordability crisis to Republican corruption, and the whole Democratic Party must now learn from their example.
• Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis, and Biography
  Season 2, Episode 7 of Private Life
• Trump, Hitler, and Democracy’s Trip Wire
  The fourth episode of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole welcomes the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, whose most recent essay for the Review, “Surely Not?,” considers how an actual “Manchurian candidate” in the White House would never dare to be as radical and widely destructive as Donald Trump has in fact been. Acknowledging the risks and limitations […]
• Oysters High and Low
  Chincoteagues, Willapoints, Blue Points, Olympias, Portugaises, and Whitestaples. Oysters sizzled in butter, simmered in cream, boiled in their own juices, baked with breadcrumbs, broiled over rock salt, roasted whole, thrown on grills, chopped into soups, mashed into bisques, fried with eggs, stuffed into turkeys, and served raw on the half shell over beds of shaved […]
• Are There No Limits to Religious Freedom?
  Does a Catholic school have a constitutional right to demand state funds for its pre-K program while refusing to admit four-year-olds whose parents are gay or transgender, when the state requires all recipients of such funding not to exclude children on that basis? You might think the answer would obviously be no. And for most […]
• Serbia’s Graduation Day
  I was wrong. Until October 25, when Serbia’s students won an extraordinary victory in an early general election, I thought they had little chance of bringing down Aleksandar Vučić, their country’s authoritarian leader. For the last two years I had followed as the students created a leaderless movement and selected candidates for an electoral list […]
• One Nation Under the Prosperity Gospel
  As the grandson of a Pentecostal preacher, I can quote each of the thirty-five verses of Exodus 32, in which the recently liberated Hebrew peoples, fed up waiting for Moses to descend from Mount Sinai with divine orders, ask his brother, Aaron, to make them new gods. After beckoning them all to give up their […]
• Here Be Monsters
  I’d been noticing monsters everywhere. It was 2025 and President Donald Trump had been calling immigrants “monsters.” His opponents hurled the term right back at him. Monsters appeared at the movies, from Sinners to Frankenstein, and on the radio, from Lady Gaga’s “The Beast” to the chart-topping songs from KPop Demon Hunters. My three-year-old daughter […]
• ‘A Doubt That Takes Easily’
  This fall a literary scandal has erupted in France around a debut novel with a dramatic title—C’était ça ou mourir (“It Was Either That or Die”)—by the Haitian-Québécois author Thélyson Orélien. Orélien’s account of a Haitian migrant’s odyssey across South and North America made it onto the best-seller list and secured nominations for all the […]
• Olana Interrupted
  The sublime landscapes that inspired Frederic Edwin Church are refracted through climate change in Winter in the Summer House, an installation by the British American artist Ellen Harvey.
• The Many Views of Yvonne Jacquette
  Her frequent ascents in airplanes and helicopters, and to the tops of skyscrapers, granted the painter an unusual and rich perspective.
• Biden’s Choice
  As Israel’s assault on Gaza grew worse and worse, Joe Biden and his advisers acted as though they had no option but to offer their unconditional support. Why couldn’t they see the destruction they were enabling?
• Multiplying Selves
  In How It Works Out, a couple reappears in alternate realities—as celebrities, parents, cannibals, pets and insects—in search of the best of possible worlds.
• One Battle After Another
  Two new histories of the Red Brigades explain how terrorism took hold in the wealthiest parts of Italy in the 1970s.
• Hull House on the Hudson
  Mary K. Simkhovitch, the founder of Greenwich House, believed in the radical idea that housing should be made as livable for the working class as it was for the middle class.
• Me Too in the Middle Ages
  A forensic study of a rape survivor from 1473 Dijon reveals a legal process surprisingly accepting of imperfect victims and contradictory testimony.
• Big Money, Small Races
  Since Citizens United, super PACs have poured billions of dollars into elections. A new book argues that outside money has its biggest impact in local races, where voters know the least.
• Urban Legend
  Tally Brown, New York reintroduces an “underground star” to the city whose stages, clubs, and bathhouses have been largely forgotten.
• Evolution of a Cynic
  JD Vance’s new memoir attempts to sidestep the vice-president’s ambitions with a shallow recounting of his conversion to Catholicism.
• ‘Reality Has Proved Treacherous’
  A new novel recounts Penelope Fitzgerald’s strange sojourn in Mexico in the early 1950s, when her matter-of-fact despair was just coming into view.
• Deer Woman in the Dining Room
                      antlers bud blood-pink     twelve points rise with woman pain                     always the escaped                     smell of iron and shame             I stain serve sore at table in apron whites              pour wine                     fork meat diners         finger silver knives around this heartbeat                     centerpiece                     of one’s own rack thorned and tender the curious read my roses there                     a dozen              tines hardened […]
• Picture This
  Throughout the history of print, illustrators have helped visualize writer’s stories, and at times became storytellers themselves.
• The Flood of Life
  Our desire to control a river’s course always conflicts with a river’s determination to shape its own.
• From the Archive: “The Loves of Lena Dunham”
  Season 2, Episode 6 of Private Life
• Nose in a Book
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• Very Bernie
  In the fall of 2015 I attended a workshop at our children’s elementary school that warned of the dangers of Snapchat, the social media platform popular, in those days, with tweens and teens. Adults feared that “snaps,” or disappearing posts, would be an opportunity for peer pressure, bullying, and harassment. But a seventy-four-year-old presidential candidate […]
• America’s Second Gilded Age
  Season 1, Episode 3 of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole
• Trump’s Blob
  In mid-March Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s senior director for counterterrorism, took the stage at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. The think tank has served as the inner sanctum of the foreign policy establishment for more than a century: the place where a bipartisan collection of diplomats and strategists planned much of […]
• A Collective Reminiscing
  Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a small body of art and writing celebrated in Asian American culture for its embrace of difficulty. Her best-known project, the experimental text Dictee (1982), contains an unpredictable mix of forms—catechism, letter, biography, schoolbook—and images ranging from anatomy charts and Paleolithic […]
• Ripped Off
  Among the bodybuilders Gavin Francis discusses in his essay from the October 22 issue of the Review, the most surprising is surely Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, who keeps in a drawer (along with his stash of pornographic postcards) a chart measuring his progress with “Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser,” a real device invented by the man […]
• Back to the Future
  Can Andy Burhnam’s vision of economic recovery in the hinterlands keep the UK together?
• The Renters Take Providence
  On September 9 the incumbent mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Brett Smiley, lost his reelection bid to a twenty-seven-year-old democratic socialist named David Morales. It was the first time an incumbent mayor failed to win his party’s primary in the city’s history, and the latest in a wave of progressive victories over establishment Democrats that […]
• ‘Natives of the Country’
  On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and the vice president of Lebanon’s Jewish Communal Council (Conseil communal israélite libanais), was abducted from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a shadowy militant Shiite network, associated with the milieu from which Hezbollah was then emerging, which called itself the Organization of […]
• Elaine Blair on Lena Dunham, Sex, and Television
  Season 2, Episode 5 of Private Life
• Bernie Sanders’s Utopia Lab
  Season 1, Episode 2 of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole
• Switching On
  In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive […]
• The Sheer Size of It All
  Edward Burtynsky’s photographs chronicle the gigantic scale of the scarred landscapes created by twentieth-century extractive industries.
• The Plot to Delete Democracy
  In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
• Unfinished Business
  Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.
• Turning Around the Easel
  The painter Emily Mae Smith hands over her brush to a character borrowed from pop culture—a gesture with symbolic depth.
• A City All His Own
  In his view camera pictures of New York in the late 1970s, Baldwin Lee made the photographic tradition of the city as empty stage set his own.
• Out from Underground
  Fifty years after the last Weather Underground bomb exploded, former members and their children reassess the costs of the group’s violent struggle.
• Privatized Stress
  Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want to Change, a satire about the British supermarket chain Tesco, joins a spate of recent novels about people trying to survive the gig economy.
• Whither American Socialism?
  Since the time of Eugene V. Debs, socialists have struggled to persuade Americans that they could create a more just society.
• Talk to It
  This is the chatbots’ original sin: they are programmed to deceive us.
• Burning Bright, for Now
  The Amur tiger and the jaguar are among the most elusive big cats in the world. Biologists have spent years tracking them down to save them.
• Rebel Rebel
  George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.
• Poem
  No, no, I don’t believe in my poems, Not really, but I defer to the poet in me Who belies belief with a fact that Requires no belief, to write a poem In which fire is the poetic Element, fire burning in a wood At night, the leaves falling in flames From trees, and he […]
• Yemen: The Endless Siege
  The “Yemen Model” of American foreign policy has proved a catastrophic failure, leaving brutal proxies better armed and ordinary Yemenis less safe.
• Vermeer’s Vanishing Act
  Why is it that so many smart, inquisitive writers, smitten by the elusiveness of Vermeer’s pictures, should work so hard to wrestle that elusiveness into submission?
• Mapping Mississippi White
  Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.
• Making Light of a Dark Past
  La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom.
• Indefensible Delights
  Wallace Shawn’s plays expose the ways in which civilized society is maintained by a violence that is everywhere denied.
• March 13, 2020
  Because the islands bright white          solid stone Reach down through shifting mud beneath the creek Except what might be seen          by radar meek Orisons sounding the meek’s due          but none Near for use          things lost in their pocks are gone Never to be regained          I lost a week Ago an action          figure’s golden beak- Shaped […]
• Work Poem
  I’m too broke to make the work Or I don’t care enough about the work To be as broke as I should let myself be To have the time to make the work I work too hard to make the work Or my indolence is too great to take that pleasure In the work that […]

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.
• Book Review: ‘Promise Me, America,’ by Joe Biden
  The former president’s new memoir trumpets his achievements while justifying his decision to run for a second term and his embrace of Israel’s war in Gaza.
• The 2026 New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books
  Take a peek at this year’s winners.
• Moody, Chilling New Thrillers
  Our columnist on three excellent new books.
• Book Review: ‘The Key Biscayne Affair,’ by Xita Rubert
  The narrator of “The Key Biscayne Affair,” by the Spanish novelist Xita Rubert, is still traumatized by what happened to her decades ago, on her father’s watch.
• Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• W.N.B.A. Star Caitlin Clark on Her New Book for Kids
  “She doesn’t let other people tell her what she can or can’t do,” says the W.N.B.A. star, who just published an inspirational book for kids.
• Book Review: ‘The First House,’ by Avni Doshi
  “The First House” follows a woman trying to understand why her life went awry.
• Writer Michel Houellebecq Investigated Over Anti-Muslim Remarks
  His comments in a 2022 interview have drawn accusations of incitement to violence and racial hatred — accusations that his lawyers reject.
• Book Review: ‘The Absent Woman,’ by Eve Sneider
  The first biography of the formidable journalist draws on her archives to expose the complex — and contradictory — human being behind the legend.
• 4 New Poetry Books to Bring You the World
  In their newest collections, Fady Joudah, Melissa Range, Maya C. Popa and Daljit Nagra survey the world and plumb the soul.
• Who Is David Walliams, the UK Entertainer Accused of Sexual Misconduct?
  The British entertainer rose to fame with the television show “Little Britain” and has published over 40 children’s books.
• What BlackBerries and Horseshoes Reveal About Our Presidents
  The photographer Peter Adams visited 15 presidential libraries, chronicling individual objects that offered insights about the men who have sat in the White House.
• Book Review: ‘Don’t Stop Snowing,’ by Gabriel Bump
  “Don’t Stop Snowing,” by Gabriel Bump, follows a young man through a winter of self-doubt, ruptured relationships and recovery.
• Book Review: ‘Rome’s Age of Revolution,’ by Tim Whitmarsh
  In “Rome’s Age of Revolution,” Tim Whitmarsh argues that movements advanced by Augustus and Paul the Apostle, far from being at odds, were two sides of the same imperial coin.
• Book Review: ‘The Intangibles,’ by Nick Paumgarten
  In “The Intangibles,” the journalist Nick Paumgarten traces his long love of hockey from childhood to the beer leagues.
• Gary Fisketjon Has Died. He Edited Ellis, Tartt, McInerney and McCarthy.
  A champion of slow, methodical editing and long working relationships with writers, he was regarded as one of the best of his generation. He was 72.
• M. John Harrison’s ‘The End of Everything’ Wins Booker Prize
  M. John Harrison’s dystopian tale “The End of Everything” beat out higher profile books by Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart.
• Book Review: ‘Department of Fate,’ by Rachel Maddow
  In “Department of Fate,” the MS NOW pundit Rachel Maddow shows how federal prosecution turned into a political tool.
• Book Review: ‘Murder in Paris ’68,’ by Edward Chisholm
  In “Murder in Paris ’68,” Edward Chisholm unspools the seedy murder of Alain Delon’s bodyguard with panache and hard-boiled charm.
• Book Review: ‘Secrets,’ by Bob Woodward
  In a new memoir, the veteran investigative reporter gets personal, tallying scoops he missed along with those he ferreted out of politicians and officials.
• Book Review: ‘The Telephone,’ by James Gleick
  James Gleick’s latest book is an encyclopedic homage to the technology that dominated life, romantic and otherwise, in the last century.
• Book Review: ‘No Such Thing as Monday,’ by Sian Hughes
  The novelist Siân Hughes smartly excavates one woman’s messy past and midlife crash-out in “No Such Thing as Monday.”
• Book Review: ‘Look at Me,’ by Dustin Hoffman
  “Look at Me,” his long-awaited memoir, is an entertaining, if incomplete, reminder of how wrong he turned out to be.
• Dorinda Medley: ‘Housewives’ Alumna, D.J., Mayonnaise Defender
  The reality TV star keeps busy with new shows and a new book, but she makes time for shopping the RealReal, decorating her manor and “crone-like things.”
• Book Review: ‘The Savage Mind,’ by David Treuer
  David Treuer’s new book is a letter to his children about the savage history of our national character.
• Illeana Douglas Looks Back on Hollywood’s Biggest ‘Cat Fight’
  After publishing a book about the 1939 classic “The Women,” the actress and writer talks about her film career and her role in #MeToo.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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