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

• Gulliver’s Warning
  Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.
• To Break the Siege
  When a ship sends out a Mayday signal, nearby vessels have a duty to come to its aid. This is a core tenet of maritime law. But on Monday, May 18, when a group of about fifty boats in international waters started radioing out their distress calls, nobody responded. Cyprus, the country nearest and thus […]
• Subverting the Nude
  In 1970, after living abroad for over seven years, the New York painter Joan Semmel returned to the city, rented a loft in Soho, and, within months, substantially remade herself as an artist. It was as if she had picked up a different passport on her flight home. As an abstract expressionist in the 1950s […]
• Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, Her Legacy, and Unsent Letters
  In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast […]
• The Education of Pope Leo XIV
  Father Bob Prevost, today known to the world as Pope Leo XIV, says that when he first arrived in Peru as an Augustinian missionary in 1985, thirty years old and three years a priest, he was naïve. “It was all very natural to me,” he recently told his biographer Elise Ann Allen, to see the […]
• The Future of Abortion Rights
  In March the NYR Online published Amy Littlefield’s sweeping overview of the shifts in abortion access since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization effectively outlawed the procedure in more than a dozen states. Many of these changes have been driven by the expansion of telehealth services that dispense Mifepristone and […]
• Art for Our Sakes
  I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned […]
• Mighty Real
  Tracey Emin’s art has often tackled taboo subjects, including rape, abortion, and sexual abuse, but her multifarious works are always bracingly antitherapeutic.
• Damming the Big Ocean
  Edward Fishman's Chokepoints explains how the US came to rely on its economic arsenal, but stops short of a complete assessment of the unreliable tactic and its often devastating consequences.
• Navalny’s Unfinished Work
  In his posthumous memoir, Alexei Navalny’s utopian vision of “the Beautiful Russia of the Future” remains strangely detached from history.
• The Fairy-Tale Hour
  An exhibition of Paul Klee’s late works focuses on his depictions of the atmosphere of violence and intimidation in Germany after the Nazis came to power.
• Enter Man
  Makenna Goodman’s new novel, Helen of Nowhere, offers up an exhilarating myth for men who need to be shuffled offstage.
• Our Climate’s Wild Card
  Methane's part in the climate crisis remains largely overlooked, even though it is responsible for 30 percent of all global warming to date, and despite the fact that it's still possible to purge it from our skies.
• The Other in the Mirror
  In Mathias Énard’s many novels, encounters between cultures can lead to transformation—and peril.
• Tunnel of Love
  The Met’s new Tristan und Isolde was a vocal triumph for Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres, but Yuval Sharon’s staging only fitfully captured the essence of Wagner’s masterpiece.
• Dreams of Our Nation
  Historians must not cede the study of how Americans understand their cacophonous nation to advocates of “patriotic” history.
• Not in Your Genome
  Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.
• Hitler’s End
  After the fall of Berlin the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he was dead.
• Voices in Rome
  in rain. A blur, like another language isa mix of colorthat runs and spills. I do not look downbut across into tops of giant treeswhere birds come backyear after year with straw in their beaks. Is that permission, a premonition?To talk so pointedlyin rain’s bedraggled and dogged is to remember what it isto walk soaked […]
• On the Road
  Hu Anyan’s memoir about delivering packages in Beijing is disarmingly direct about the human cost of modern logistics.
• Restoring Notre-Dame
  To the Editors: David A. Bell in his review of the exhibition “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” at the Bard Graduate Center [NYR, April 23] writes, “The amazingly rapid reconstruction project [of Notre-Dame, Paris] came to a conclusion in December 2024.” However, walking around the building reveals a vast and active construction site, the cathedral bristling with […]
• Call for Documents
  For a study of the French mystic-philosopher-militant Simone Weil (1909–1943) and the response to her work, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who might offer new documentation. Of particular value are unpublished recollections, memos, and other records addressing the appreciation of her by Elizabeth Hardwick and other editors at The New York Review. Benjamin Braude […]
• Rare or Not?
  To the Editors: Catherine Nicholson has written a wonderful account of Beloved Son Felix [“A Most Particular Life,” NYR, March 26], evidently a wonderful book, which I look forward to reading in full. But as a kind of autobiography it is not quite such a rare undertaking in the Renaissance as she implies. There is […]
• Was Chiang a Fascist?
  To the Editors: Orville Schell’s whitewashing of Chiang Kai-shek, as though he was merely a well-meaning patriot whose character flaws “were sadly amplified by chaotic circumstances largely beyond his control” [“China’s Leader Manqué,” NYR, March 26], demands a response. Lloyd Eastman is by no means the only serious historian who has accused Chiang of fascism. […]
• Trump v. Trump
  Call it “the art of the self-deal.” You sue yourself, announce a hasty “settlement” when the judge questions whether you are engaged in collusion (with yourself), and direct the creation of a fund consisting of nearly $1.8 billion to be doled out to your allies by a hand-selected commission—all without judicial or congressional approval. Acting […]
• From the Archive: ‘Radiant, Angry Caravaggio’
  In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above […]
• The Best Philosophers
  Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, who works with ceramics, has spent decades tapping unlikely sources for wisdom.
• Human Stamps
  The young artist Emily Kraus is preoccupied with the question of whether machines can be surrogates for an artist’s unconscious.
• Bolloré’s Way
  Even in a country that has made a pastime of its declamatory public letters, this one seems to stand out. It’s not every day that a list of signatories includes such unlikely comrades as Virginie Despentes—the punk feminist author of King Kong Theory, the Vernon Subutex series and, most recently, Dear Dick Head—and Bernard-Henri Lévy, […]
• Made in the USA
  Pete Hegseth is the product of an essentially American ethos—which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.
• Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
  As President Trump’s erratic negotiations with Iran drag on and oil prices continue to rise, the United States’ ostensible ethical justification for the war—regime change—has largely disappeared from mainstream coverage. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christopher de Bellaigue argues that the US and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has mostly succeeded in strengthening the Islamic […]
• Opera in Ragged Times
  During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also found the time to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—the first time a president […]
• Empires of Flow Control
  In September 1507 the Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque sailed his small fleet to a point off the coast of Hormuz Island, in the narrow bottleneck that provides access to the Persian Gulf. Negotiations between the Portuguese and the independent Kingdom of Hormuz broke down quickly, and the small tributary state of Persia sent hundreds […]
• Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and
  In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives […]
• The Work of Feeling
  In Love, two women fight until they understand their fighting as a pretense to touch. The fighting is a kind of intimacy, an annual rite of slapping, biting, and hair-pulling that eventually gives way to a “realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” The epiphany that they are […]
• ‘I Couldn’t Have Done It Without You’
  “Most memoirists Botox out their own imperfections, but celebrity ghostwriters tend to do the full facelift.”
• Counting Heads
  Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination transformed the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness into the revered martyr of the people’s cause.
• ‘Facing the Past’
  Ben Lerner’s dazzling new novel, Transcription, plays variations on the conflicts and bonds that are felt among three generations.
• Mommie Dearest
  In Liza Minnelli’s riveting memoir, the ghost of Judy Garland is felt on every page.
• Whither the Nerd-Bully?
  Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valley’s young founders rebelled against—and, in so rebelling, became.
• The Peepers
  Easter morning Hungry to gainon quiet and nightand cold and rain we pixelatewe complicateour veins are antifreeze our throats are bubblegumour forestssocialist no liege, no CEOwe give awayour loamy, pitchy songs they say what they meanstay, staythe winter’s over we made them from decaythe understoryordered us some food thanks understorythanks salamandersthanks paramecia God set the […]
• Don’t Call It Entertainment
  In Everthing Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde's attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.
• The Sage of Washington
  Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.
• Indiana’s Indiana Jones
  FBI agents who raided an Indiana farm in 2014 were astonished to find some 42,000 artifacts and bones looted by an amateur archaeologist.
• Living
  It was hard for us, the way you diedevery day, slowly and then all at once,just as such things are said to happen.Spring came, so soon it almost seemedyou could’ve waited, but I know, I know,you couldn’t wait. My head was full of namesof flowers, and I kept picking stonesout of the earth as if […]
• Against Nostalgia
  In their poems and essays, Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson transcend Scottish sentimentalism and find new points of entry into their shared past.
• What Happened in Vegas
  An impulsive trip to America’s “idiot Disneyland” thrust John Gregory Dunne among characters who, like him, sought distraction from their private miseries.
• A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth
  Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.
• Scarred in Hong Kong
  Recent fiction by Hong Kong writers explores life in a society traumatized by ever-tightening Chinese national security laws that suppress political discussion and artistic freedom.
• Pop & Pleasure & Freedom
  In his decades of writing about pop music, Jon Savage came to understand its liberatory power.
• Iran’s New Winter
  The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.
• The Second ‘Redemption’
  The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais deals a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, using reasoning that Congress rejected more than forty years ago. 

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: ‘What Came West,’ by Josh Weil
  Josh Weil’s new novel follows an autistic trapper on an odyssey during the California gold rush.
• Book Review: ‘Stolen Revolution,’ by Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin
  In a quietly devastating new book, two journalists chart the protest movements fighting for change inside the country.
• Book Review: ‘Land,’ by Maggie O’Farrell
  Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule.
• Book Review: ‘The Fire Agent,’ by David Baerwald
  “The Fire Agent,” by David Baerwald, is a historical novel that spans two continents and world wars.
• Book Review: ‘The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom’
  A collection of Harold Bloom’s letters details the working life of one of America’s most influential intellects.
• 9 Comic Books and Graphic Novels to Celebrate Pride Month
  Historical chronicles and flights of fancy, all with L.G.B.T.Q. protagonists, arrive starting in June.
• 28 New Books to Read in June: Ann Patchett, Maggie O’Farrell, Daniel Kraus and More
  Novels by Ann Patchett, Maggie O’Farrell and Dave Eggers; memoirs by Jill Biden and Laverne Cox; sci-fi adventures by a Pulitzer Prize winner; and more.
• Book Review: ‘1873,’ by Liaquat Ahamed
  In “1873,” the historian and financier Liaquat Ahamed traces the political consequences of booming markets that left a lot of people behind.
• Joana Avillez Revisits Her Waterfront Childhood
  Joana Avillez took six years to illustrate a new edition of Joseph Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor,” which captures the salty New York neighborhood of her youth.
• Book Review: ‘Whistler,’ by Ann Patchett
  In “Whistler,” a surprise encounter at the Met changes the course of their lives.
• Book Review: ‘Rabbit, Fox, Tar,’ by P.C. Verrone
  In “Rabbit, Fox, Tar,” a white neighborhood’s local election is complicated when a mysterious, dark-skinned woman suddenly appears in town.
• The Month’s Best New Mystery Novels
  Our critic on four terrific new mysteries.
• Book Review: ‘Girl’s Girl,’ by Sonia Feldman
  In Sonia Feldman’s novel, “Girl’s Girl,” the delicate balance of a Gen Z friend group is unsettled over one Ohio summer.
• Book Review: ‘Sublimation,’ by Isabel J. Kim
  In her book “Sublimation,” Isabel J. Kim reimagines the dilemmas of immigration through a science fiction story about scheming clones.
• Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Transcription,’ by Ben Lerner
  Lerner’s new novel is a cerebral exploration of technology, family, truth and existence.
• Book Club: Read ‘Yesteryear,’ by Caro Claire Burke, With the Book Review
  In June, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss a novel about a tradwife who wakes up in 1855, living the pioneer life she has been performing online.
• Book Review: ‘View From the East Wing,’ by Jill Biden
  Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, “View From the East Wing” largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood.
• Book Review: ‘Found Sound,’ by Meg Wolitzer and Charlie Panek, and ‘Stream,’ by Aida Salazar
  Meg Wolitzer and Charlie Panek’s “Found Sound” and Aida Salazar’s “Stream” send their protagonists on a listening (and healing) tour of real life.
• Books Our Editors Loved This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Why Garry Trudeau Finally O.K.’d a Biography
  Back at the Yale library that holds his archive, the low-key creator of “Doonesbury” reunites with the journalist who pieced together his life story.
• Veronica Roth on Her Favorite Books and Her New Novel, ‘Seek the Traitor’s Son’
  “I love a clever puppet master,” says the author of the Divergent series and the new “Seek the Traitor’s Son.” Her favorite hero? Antigone.
• The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
  Memoirs, histories, true crime, investigations and much more.
• The Novels Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
  New fiction from Maggie O’Farrell, Ann Patchett, Colson Whitehead, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and much more.
• David Henderson, Innovative Poet and Hendrix Biographer, Dies at 83
  Part of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, he went on to reclaim a leading musician of the psychedelic era as a distinctly African American artist.
• Book Review: ‘Stalin’s Apostles,’ by Antonia Senior
  A new book by Antonia Senior chronicles the careers of five men who betrayed their country — with devastating results.
• New Romance Books for Summer
  Our critic on three standout May books.
• Poetry Review: ‘Killing Spree,’ by Jorie Graham
  In “Killing Spree,” Jorie Graham confronts a world living through apocalyptic times.
• Why Is TikTok in This Book from 2006?
  For decades, publishers have swapped out cultural references in new editions of books to appeal to younger readers. Fans aren’t always thrilled.
• Robert Daley, Multifaceted Author of ‘Prince of the City,’ Dies at 96
  He wrote 31 books, often drawing on his experiences as a pro football publicist, a foreign correspondent and a gun-toting spokesman for the N.Y.P.D.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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