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

• 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 […]
• An Uncertain Triumphalism
  America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of national unity and inventiveness in the anxious aftermath of civil war and recession.
• Is the Artist Present?
  By transforming her own old paintings into new works of art, Eliza Douglas raises questions about sincerity and cynicism.
• The Eyes Have It
  Carol Rama’s abstractions from the late 1960s conjure burned, brutalized bodies.
• The Judeo-Bolshevist Target
  Popular memory in the West tends to separate the Holocaust from the German war against the Soviet Union, but for the Nazi regime they were two faces of the same undertaking.
• Compromised Values
  Joe Manchin’s memoir reveals that the West Virginian Senator worshipped “work” at the expense of supporting his party’s efforts to help working people.
• The New Ellis Island
  A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.
• Song of Our Cells
  Though a mystery to Darwin in his lifetime, the constant mutation of our genes is what allows for life’s magnificent diversity.
• The Late Bohemian
  Rosemary Tonks emulated French Symbolist poets before converting to Christianity and renouncing all her own works.
• On the Precipice
  Critics who call André Breton’s Nadja a novel miss its most innovative aspects.
• Climate and Punishment
  Vigil finds George Saunders returning to the theme of his first novel, grief—this time not for a person but for a planet.
• Hungary: The Flood
  Peter Magyar’s landslide electoral victory in April made clear that after sixteen years, Hungarians were tired of Viktor Orbán.
• Space Oddity
  Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.
• When India Reinvented Prints
  Two forceful exhibitions have shown how Indian artists and presses met the cultural upheaval of the nineteenth century with lithographic prints that rendered Hindu gods more approachable and helped to galvanize national identity.
• Fashion Forward
  Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold prime gallery space to the fashion industry?
• Tornado
  I know less and less about who I am. Touching down, I lifta nail, a plank, take an entireyard and dress up like I’m going to spend the night dancing. Painting the townwhere I invented stillness by holding my breath. The way somecircle the drain before recognizingthey’re water. Even this river. This river reminds me […]
• [Maybe more often than most…]
  Maybe more often than most she buys mirrors.The pseudo-Biedermeier at the flea market—over its workaday planking a veneer of nicer wood. Nested chevronswhose tips center the breastbone.She breathes and the crosshairs lose her, re-hone.Her will to seek glass—viz., the tiny Carnegie-toy branch library she writes in.Its transparent saffron books floating through the Tiffany wall.Breton imagined […]
• Wonder & Disillusion
  The naturalist George Forster was fascinated by plants and animals, but he was also driven by a passionate belief in the rights of all people regardless of race, gender, or social status.
• Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O’Hara, and Dreams
  Episode 19 of Private Life
• Broken Promises in Cuban Miami
  Donald Trump has reversed the government’s longstanding benevolence toward Cuban asylum seekers, even as his administration exacerbates the crisis they fled.
• The Unraveling of Afghan Asylum
  Afees Monsef has a grave magnetism that makes him easy to find, even in a crowd.1 We first met in the spring of 2025, at a gathering in the basement of the Hazrati Abu Bakr Siddique mosque in Flushing, two years after he and his family of eight crossed the US–Mexico border fleeing persecution by […]
• Spare Me the Hedgehoggery
  “I’m not fond of efforts to see ourselves reflected in places where we aren’t: better, I think, to let the past be the past in all its irreducible bloody-minded weirdness.”
• Resistance Choirs
  For centuries the Lenape people had hunting grounds and fishing camps in an area they called Penadnic, in the rocky hills of upper Manhattan. Wrested away from its original inhabitants by Dutch and British settlers following the infamous “sale” of the island to the Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit in 1626, the land passed through […]
• Through the Looking Glass
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• Safety Is When There’s No One Dying
  The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund is based in the Blue Building, a medical center across from the American University of Beirut, in the city’s Hamra district. Many of the children whose care it sponsors have come to Lebanon from Gaza, mostly by way of Egypt, after an intensive vetting process involving the Israeli state […]
• From the Archive: “Chronicles of Love and Loss” by Helen Vendler
  Episode 18 of Private Life
• ‘An Eternal Indoors’
  It is a persistent wonder of the Internet that so much can, at times, be built from so little. A simple doorway opens to a vast labyrinth, assembled by the seemingly infinite labors of the obsessed and anonymous. The foundation of Backrooms, the new film by Kane Parsons—which has made him, at twenty years old, […]
• Figuring
  In the “At the Galleries” column from our June 25, 2026, issue, Lovia Gyarkye writes about an exhibition of work by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Yiadom-Boakye is most known for painting solitary, serene figures that nonetheless possess, as Gyarkye writes, “a sly, even conspiratorial edge.” The […]
• Variations on Broken Eggs
  In April 1951 Randall Jarrell sent a short poem titled “A War” to his friend Robert Lowell: There set out, slowly, for a Different World,At four, on winter mornings, different legs…You can’t break eggs without making an omelette—That’s what they tell the eggs. The poem is unnervingly odd, with its disjointed second line that evokes, […]
• No One
       
• Eve Babitz’s Letters from
  Episode 17 of Private Life
• Dead Lands
  In the mid-1990s, among the various unrelated jobs I took up, there was one that involved teaching video-making workshops to schoolchildren. One such workshop was to take place at an all-girls elementary school in the old city of Jerusalem. The number of attendees was set at twenty. A couple of weeks before our sessions were […]
• Putting the Lake to Work
  In November 2022, the Great Salt Lake dropped to a record-low water level. That winter, dust blew off newly exposed patches of the lakebed, clouding the Salt Lake Valley for days at a time. Its particles were contaminated with byproducts of decades’ worth of human activities—including mining and smelting—that had both leached from nearby tailings […]

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.
• Shahrnush Parsipur, Iranian Writer Imprisoned for Her Novels, Dies at 80
  Her best-known work, “Women Without Men,” was longlisted for the International Booker Prize this year.
• Book Review: ‘It Will Come Back to You,’ by Sigrid Nunez
  Her first collection of short fiction, “It Will Come Back to You,” is threaded with erudition but never pretentious.
• Sizzling, Sexy Age-Gap Romance Novels
  The best-selling author Rachel Lynn Solomon recommends forbidden love stories full of fiery desire, shifting power dynamics and so-wrong-it’s-right drama.
• Book Review: ‘Aging Out,’ by Lucy Schiller
  From assisted living to elder activism and her own experience as a caregiver, Lucy Schiller investigates aging’s myriad challenges in her first book.
• Book Review: ‘Catch the Devil,’ by Pamela Colloff
  In “Catch the Devil,” Pamela Colloff vividly tells the true story of the con man who traded on other prisoners’ “confessions” for clemency.
• Golden Age Mysteries: A Starter Pack
  Interested in these classic novels, but not sure where to start? Let our expert guide you.
• Book Review: ‘Every Inch a Lady,’ by Audrey Smaltz
  In “Every Inch a Lady,” Audrey Smaltz shares her incredible story — if not her inimitable voice.
• Our Insatiable Appetite for Stories About Cannibalism
  Why do the characters in so many new novels insist upon eating each other?
• Book Review: ‘Fixer Chao,’ by Han Ong
  Han Ong’s barbed, irreverent portrait of identity, class envy and flimflam deception in turn-of-the-21st-century Manhattan still resonates.
• Historian Kerri K. Greenidge and Her Book ‘The Grimkes’ Come Under Fire
  Kerri K. Greenidge appeared to lose her professorship at Tufts University after scholars began scrutinizing her 2022 book, “The Grimkes,” which is no longer listed on its publisher’s website.
• Hershel Parker, Melville Scholar of Ahab-Like Obsessiveness, Dies at 90
  The author of an exhaustive two-volume biography, he was “fanatical about his approach to scholarship and infatuated with Melville,” a colleague said.
• Dinaw Mengestu Resigns as PEN America President After Israel Article
  The novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who was elected seven months ago, said the article “continues this approach toward defending some rights while not defending others.”
• This Author Says You Shouldn’t Be Intimidated by ‘The Odyssey’
  First, a primer from the author of “Circe,” Madeline Miller. Then, A.O. Scott on all the genres inside the 3,000-year-old poem.
• Book Review: ‘A Vast Horizon,’ by Anna Thomasson
  A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired.
• 10 Kids’ Books for Fans of the Magic Tree House Series
  Ten recommendations for fans of Mary Pope Osborne’s time-travel chapter book series.
• From A.I. to the Deep State, Michel Foucault Foresaw It All
  One hundred years after his birth, the French philosopher remains hugely influential, both revered and reviled for ideas that eerily anticipated our day.
• Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times
• Too Many Books?
  Mendel Uminer faced a crisis when his landlord objected to the 10,000 volumes in his New York studio apartment.
• Alice Oseman on the End of ‘Heartstopper’ and Her Favorite Books
  While the Y.A. graphic novel phenomenon wraps up with a sixth volume and a Netflix movie, Alice Oseman mostly reads fiction about adults now.
• Homer’s Epic ‘Odyssey’ Has Something for Every Reader, From Sci-Fi to Romantasy
  The world’s most famous epic has something for every reader.
• Which Version of the ‘Odyssey’ Should You Read?
  Homer’s “Odyssey” has been translated into English countless times, with versions ranging from contemporary and accessible to highly poetic. A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review, breaks down three translations and explains which one might be right for you.
• Historical Fiction Books That Will Transport You to the 1960s
  The best-selling author Kerri Maher recommends books that transport readers to the decade of space travel, counterculture and tumultuous societal change.
• A New ‘Little House’ Broadens and Updates the Prairie
  A Netflix adaptation of the beloved tale empowers Ma and adds new Black and Native characters to challenge prejudices. The creators know criticism is coming.
• Book Review: ‘A Table for Fortune,’ by William T. Vollmann
  William T. Vollmann’s fascinating, wildly ambitious text interweaves a family saga with a history of the American war machine since Vietnam.
• Hachette Book Group Employees Vote to Unionize
  Workers at a major publishing house have established what organizers are calling the largest union in trade book publishing history.
• Book Review: ‘City of Fortune,’ by Mason B. Williams
  A new book by the historian Mason B. Williams chronicles the dubious effects of school, housing and police reforms by local politicians on the right.
• Book Review: ‘You Won’t Get Free of It,’ by Rachel Aviv
  Rachel Aviv’s essay collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows the breadth and complexity of matrilineal relationships.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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