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

• Moving Mountains
  On the morning of Monday, July 20, as the monsoon session of India’s parliament opened, tens of thousands of protesters surged down the radial streets leading to the heart of official New Delhi. Most of them were young people marching in response to a call issued by Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known climate activist, to bring […]
• Homer vs. Hollywood: Daniel Mendelsohn on Christopher Nolan’s
  In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and author of the most recent translation of Homer’s epic, discusses Christopher Nolan’s polarizing blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey.
• Fridas for Everyone
  The face that sold a million mugs returned to museums and the operatic stage this spring, as if there was a yearning to reconnect with the real Frida Kahlo.
• Out of the Rubble
  In novels written immediately after World War II, Wolfgang Koeppen mined the conscience of Germany.
• Along the Ucayali River
  Sara Flores adapts the ancient designs of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe of Peru into large, pattern-based paintings.
• The Grand Master of Abjection
  Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.
• Where the Meanings Are
  Fairfield Porter was an insider among the East Coast elite, but his own portraits of life in Southampton and Maine give the charming impression of an outsider looking in.
• Home Invasions
  In John Lanchester’s novel Look What You Made Me Do, a couple’s private language is weaponized against them.
• Explosions in the Mind
  Fusing religious subjects with unerring technique, the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán discovered a zone in oil paint that might well be called “sacred."
• A Taste of Infinity
  With his commitment to impractical and borderline impossible projects, the composer Dylan Mattingly has created a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched musical landscape.
• A Gust from Another World
  The Search for Bridey Murphy caused a sensation in 1950s America, and while its tale of reincarnation was soon discredited, it revealed a deep cultural fascination with the supernatural.
• Blueprint
  Some friends call mine a spiritual problemand when they doI become the minister of the realand go on Zillowmoving my future into various crannies of Los Angeles.When one friend calls returning homemore practical,I find myself in our yardunder a colander of stars, tastingpasta I might never make againthe way he likes it, nakedwith flake-salt and […]
• The Nightjar
  The nightjar carries it lightlyBut the world’s heavy as a lamp in a gale.I watched it move through the olives and the hush,Over rooftops, stones, and cragged hills,Unclenched as it glistens in the gloam,Indifferent, sonorous, and true. As I write, a fly has drownedIn my jar of pungent lit wax,Its carcass still dancing from its […]
• Zoom
  Waiting for a call that didn’t happen I am sitting on the back porch with Frank O’Hara (Collected) when a goldfinch lands beside my head on the porch rail, lands so neatly so instantly so whoosh with all his yellowness yellowing and all his himness packed to the brim of him that a wave of […]
• Refusing to Look Away
  In Killing Spree, the poet Jorie Graham pursues an essentially ethical impulse to find a true language for the evil in the world.
• Whose Party?
  As Democratic Socialists rack up primary victories, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party looks increasingly out of touch.
• Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
  Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.
• Language Is the Medium
  To the Editors: I read Dan Chiasson’s reflections on AI [“Think for Yourself,” NYR, June 25] with sympathy and interest, and thought the statement he issued to his students was absolutely first class. If I were still in the teaching game I would set it in front of my classes, too (with my fingers crossed […]
• Jackie Robinson’s Worst Nightmare
  To the Editors: In Andrew Katzenstein’s review of A.M. Gittlitz’s Metropolitans [NYR, June 25] he writes that Jackie Robinson was “a loyal Republican until Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.” This is an exaggeration. Robinson was a Republican-leaning independent, whose main issue was always the advancement of the cause of civil rights and full Black citizenship. […]
• ‘Take that Phony Dream and Burn It’
  Just a few weeks before Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, President Harry Truman elaborated his “Fair Deal” for the American people in his State of the Union address. “We have rejected the discredited theory that the fortunes of the Nation should be in the hands of a […]
• Close Calls
  In the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term, it showed that it is willing to constrain Trump but less willing to accept limits on its own authority.
• People Want to Be Heard
  Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She has won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Her work draws attention to the men and women forced to do the bidding of the American security state—the […]
• Life on the List
  Late one night in May 2016, Naif al-Qaysi was riding shotgun in an old Landcruiser as it barreled down an empty highway through the desert connecting Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For the past six months Naif, then thirty-three, had been the governor of Al-Bayda, a large mountainous region in central Yemen, which he was trying […]
• All of Life
  In the Review’s June 25 issue, Joe Dunthorne writes about a recent oral history of the New York School poets and poses himself a challenge: “How to analyze a poetics of irreverence and improvisation—of life experienced in a perpetual present—without stifling precisely these qualities?” His essay suggests that the poetry in the scene, by writers […]
• La Querelle des Femmes
  In 2015, I was on a panel at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design titled “Do We Need Exhibitions Just for Women?” As I remember, most of the participants agreed that we did, though some expressed concerns about ghettoization or weariness at having a conversation they’d had many times before. As the youngest participant, […]
• Secondhand Memory
  In 1954, with the ending of French colonial rule in Southeast Asia, the Geneva Accords established Laos as an independent state, led by the Royal Lao government. Five years later, however, the Pathet Lao, backed by the communist government of North Vietnam, initiated a civil war that escalated, along with the Vietnam War, until 1975. […]
• Target Practice
  In April 2024 international news sources circulated a video of a talk delivered by a senior Israeli military official during a tech conference at Tel Aviv University about a year earlier. The speaker, whose face is not shown, introduces himself only as “Colonel Yoav,” the head of data science and AI for Unit 8200, an […]
• From the Archive: “A Little Iliad” by Daniel Mendelsohn
  This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzo has performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s […]
• Gaza’s Deadly Soil
  Long before October 2023, Gaza’s people suffered international sanctions, a humiliating occupation, and periodic Israeli bombardments. Few could leave the enclave, even for medical care; the destruction of crucial infrastructure meant that clean water and electricity were intermittent; and thousands of men, women, and children were killed in periodic wars. Even peaceful protests were met […]
• Consulting the Oracle
  In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Sheila Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chat bots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God. Talking to them seemed to come naturally to Heti. For several years, she had been […]
• The DNC Against Itself
  “Democracy is a very old institution,” explains the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of the 2024 election, belatedly released in May. “And yet what keeps democracy going is the ability of those who seek to lead to look at the data and determine the source of success as well as setbacks.” The report that followed did […]
• The War of the South
  Each of Iran’s recent wars has been quick to acquire a name. On the day Israel stopped bombing Iran in June 2025, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare the conflict over and, to nobody’s surprise, place himself at the center of the story. “I would like to congratulate both Countries,” he said, “Israel […]
• ‘So-Called International Law’
  On July 13 Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court. Calling the ICC “a global tribunal staffed by unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited,” he charged the court with “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles but with statutes, compacts, […]
• Artful Weaving
  The most authentic thing about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is its densely braided narrative, but its tormented hero sounds like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies.
• Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translation
  In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay […]
• They Knew Too Much
  With Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg promised an encounter and delivered one. Disclosure Day announces a precisely scheduled disclosure but at the last moment, just as a world-changing message is about to be delivered, cuts off the mic. “Listen,” says Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, the Kansas City meteorologist who is now […]
• The Best Tape You Can Get
  I’ve been listening to Chana Joffe-Walt for a long time now on This American Life, where she often takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and education. Independently, she hosted the New York Times podcast Nice White Parents, which focused on school segregation and how progressive Brooklyn families undermined racial […]
• The Freedom to Be Woke
  In the never-ending debate about freedom of speech on college campuses, conservatives have long condemned “cancel culture,” an attitude of intolerance toward conservative ideas. They are not wrong that liberal and left-wing views predominate at many top universities, and that many students and some faculty resist exposure to ideas they oppose. And to the extent […]
• Against Slop
  “The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. […]
• Spreading Static
  In mid-February I found myself stuck for two days at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport, stranded by a winter freeze. It had been a month since Iran’s security forces massacred thousands of protesters on January 8 and 9—dates that will be central to the story of the Islamic Republic’s decline in whatever history is eventually written. In […]
• Machine Aesthetics
  The thirteen paintings in Altoon Sultan’s exhibition at Hoffman Donahue take up little of the gallery’s wall space. Hung low, with varying distances between them, the works never exceed fourteen inches on a given side. But what they show is big. Big in a literal sense—Sultan paints cropped fragments of large agricultural machines that she […]
• Baghdad: The Illusion of Peace
  Close to midnight on Tuesday, April 7, a loud explosion rattled my family’s house in a suburb of Baghdad. A column of white smoke shadowed the alleys nearby. Men murmured, milling about in the street. Policemen drove past, unsure what had landed where. Downstairs, two days before her eleventh birthday, my niece shivered in her […]
• Sodade
  The bar is no more than a narrow hall. There is barely enough space between the stools and the wall to walk through to a larger room at the back. Beyond the drawn curtains separating the spaces, two musicians are conducting a mic check before rows of mostly empty chairs. No one is paying attention […]
• From the Archive: “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street”
  Episode 20 of Private Life
• The Grain of the Note
  The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the literal fear of God. The composer Liza Lim conceived her forthcoming work Tongue of the Land, crafted for the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, around the demands of this long-forgotten […]
• ‘Extraordinarily Profitable Fiduciary Rapport’
  The old saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is, in fact, not all that old, and not really a saying. It was written by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for an advertising campaign in 2003, nearly thirty years after John Gregory Dunne traveled to Sin City and broke its now golden […]

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.
• Self-Help Influencer Nicole LePera Faces Litigation
  Millions look to Nicole LePera for advice on how to achieve contentment and maintain healthy relationships. But her own story is complicated.
• Book Review: ‘The Story of Your Life,’ by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
  In “The Story of Your Life,” Kathryn Jezer-Morton explores, without castigating, the wish to present a curated version of experience via social media.
• Book Review: ‘Etna,’ by Paul Yoon
  Paul Yoon’s deeply moving novel “Etna” explores the aftermath of war with an unconventional narrator.
• Paul Yoon’s Fierce Attachment to His Dog Inspired a New Novel
  Prompted by a fierce attachment to his own pet, Paul Yoon wrote a harrowing yet hopeful novel, set during wartime, told from a canine perspective.
• Book Review: ‘Plant Lady,’ by Minyoung Kang
  “Plant Lady,” by the Korean novelist Minyoung Kang, imagines an urban haven for women who need an escape from dangerous men.
• Book Review: ‘The Unknown,’ by Riley Sager
  In Riley Sager’s “The Unknown,” actresses on a research trip stumble into a paranormal mystery.
• Mildred Pitts Walter, Author of Books for Black Children, Dies at 103
  Teaching kindergarten in South Central Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s, she realized that her students were not represented in the books they read. So she wrote her own.
• John Esposito, Who Challenged Negative Views of Muslims, Dies at 86
  Starting out in the 1970s as a rare American expert on political Islam, he became a prolific scholar and a prominent public intellectual.
• Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘John of John’
  Douglas Stuart’s latest novel follows a profoundly isolated father and son, each grappling with long-held secrets.
• Emily Wilson’s Pan of ‘The Odyssey’ Ignites a Debate Among Classicists and Commenters
  Wilson, whose 2017 translation of Homer’s Greek classic influenced the director Christopher Nolan, panned his screenplay for the movie version in an essay for The London Review of Books.
• Book Club: Read ‘London Falling,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe, With the Book Review
  In August, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss Patrick Radden Keefe’s dazzling investigation into the death of a British teenager.
• 22 New Books to Read in August: Rachel Cusk, Riley Sager, Claudia Rankine and More
  Gripping thrillers, hockey romance, political history, an Appalachian Trail memoir and more.
• A Defense of Ma in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books
  How I went from being Team Pa to recognizing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s less charismatic, quietly heroic and equally crazy creation, Caroline Ingalls.
• Book Review: ‘The Savage Landscape,’ by Cal Flyn
  In “The Savage Landscape,” the nature writer Cal Flyn argues that wilderness is just one more man-made invention.
• Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• A Historian Considers the Yuppie
  “We live in the world we inherited from them,” the author Dylan Gottlieb says.
• Three of Summer’s Best Thrillers
  Our columnist on “The Amateur,” by Chris Bohjalian, and two other books.
• It’s ‘Game of Thrones,’ on Shakespeare’s Stage
  As the hit series keeps expanding, an ambitious stage adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s prequel saga has found a natural home at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
• Is a Novel Ever Finished? Many Writers Say No.
  After finishing his latest book, Karan Mahajan couldn’t decide which opening passage was best. Vote below for the one you prefer.
• Books That Illuminate New York’s Forgotten History
  The best-selling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray recommend gripping books that illuminate hidden chapters of the city’s past.
• The Woman Behind Emma M. Lion
  Beth Brower has been self-publishing for a decade. But her series drawn from the cheeky “journals” of a young woman in Victorian England has been a breakout.
• How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores
  Big booksellers are taking different approaches to dealing with the deluge of titles generated by artificial intelligence.
• Booker Prize 2026 Nominees: Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout and More
  Also among the 13 works up for the British literary award are the latest books from Douglas Stuart, Gwendoline Riley and Emma Cline.
• Book Review: ‘All That’s Unseen,’ by Emilee Hackney
  “All That’s Unseen,” by Emilee Hackney, an eighth-generation Appalachian, offers a portrait both loving and cleareyed of the region that formed her.
• Book Review: ‘Liberation Summer,’ by Micki McElya
  A new book by the historian Micki McElya considers how the politics of beauty both shaped and divided the women’s movement.
• Book Review: ‘Biological War,’ by Annie Jacobsen
  In a sobering new book, Annie Jacobsen considers the potentially civilization-ending impacts of biological war.
• How a Novelist of the American Past Recovered His Faith in Its Future
  Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy turns away from the pessimism of his recent novels to offer a more hopeful vision for Black history.
• How to Keep a Travel Journal
  A travel journal can be a great way to evoke specific details and memories from a trip. Here are some tips on how to lower the barrier to entry and to stay organized.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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