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

  • A Delicate Repair
    The late Nigerian sculptor Erhabor Emokpae is perhaps best known for his bronze replica of the sixteenth-century ivory mask of Queen Idia, the kingdom of Benin’s premier iyoba, or queen mother. The year was 1977. Nigeria had attained political independence from Britain less than two decades earlier and been through a bitter civil war in […]
  • Protesting with Panache
    Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines […]
  • The Private Life of Power
    I met Karan Mahajan, the Indian-American novelist and essayist, in 2018, when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library. Karan was beginning to write The Complex, his novel that has just been released; I was finishing The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. I was drawn to Karan right away. […]
  • Eradicating the ‘Fourth Branch’
    By ending the independence of federal agencies, the Supreme Court has taken another step toward the creation of an elected presidential dictatorship.
  • Let a Hundred Websites Bloom
    The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
  • The Elusive Glamour of Peter and Paul
    A dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is a tantalizing portrait of the artists and their epoch, just before the catastrophe of AIDS.
  • Boxcar to Nowhere
    American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.
  • Second Chances
    My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A visit […]
  • Building a Real Man
    The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew tradition has Samson, the Greek Heracles, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Irish Cú Chulainn. Every culture has its dreams of superhuman strength, often divine, certainly supernatural: Glooscap of the Mi’kmaq and […]
  • Crisis Arioso
    Write me a libretto (what is a libretto) that tracks the plummeting finch populations in a nondespairing (what is a finch way, what are the ways of finches Put an “o” before             O, what are the ways to notate the bridge That depends on what is meant by suspension The government says: Because this is […]
  • Catalytic Ghosts
    In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy them along toward […]
  • The Virtuoso of Repetition
    In both Philip Glass’s most avant-garde and his most commercially successful works, his music seems to accompany some unheard melody while inducing a state of blissful distraction.
  • Pox Britannica
    Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet found, throughout “this good Protestant kingdom” and especially in the capital city […]
  • Paging Dr. Caligari
    It’s not vertigo exactly, more a diagonal feeling as if a giant had picked up the room and were about to spill everything, you included. And then there is the tired-as-Sisyphus feeling from drawing a load of shadows up a painted hill. A film of spirits clouds our eyes, making it impossible to watch the […]
  • Possessed of Alchemystic Powers
    In 1949 Ithell Colquhoun—artist, writer, and occultist—produced a manifesto, titled “The Mantic Stain,” in which she called on her readers to follow French Surrealism’s practice of “pure psychic automatism.” It was, Breton wrote, “the real working of thought. Dictation of thought, without any control exercised by reason, and beyond any preoccupation, aesthetic or moral.” “Mantic” […]
  • Small Is Beautiful
    Jonathan Buckley's books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.
  • Message in a Bottle
    Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
  • Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Ree
    “Flesh mixed with gowns, like kneaded satin; that is the substance of flowers.” The line comes from The Voice of Things (1942), a book of prose poems by Francis Ponge in which he muses on the beauty of the commonplace—the erratic flight of butterflies, the pleasure of opening and closing doors—eager to see past an […]
  • The Art of Extraction
    A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.
  • How Tech Rules
    One of the hallmarks of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership from control. The firm is owned by shareholders but led by managers, who answer to shareholders only indirectly. Actually, it’s weirder than that. The corporation owns itself. Shareholders merely own stock, which is a claim on the firm’s assets and earnings. Elements […]
  • From the Archive: “The Perils of Pauline”
    In this episode of Private Life, the actress Holland Taylor reads Renata Adler’s essay “The Perils of Pauline,” an expansive assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue. Taylor has been working on films, television, and Broadway since the 1960s. She is a nine-time Emmy nominee, winning once, in 1999, […]
  • From Fear Set Free
    Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the significance of particular things, downplaying others, and ignoring most of what bombards our senses, all so that we might be convinced, from now until bedtime, that we understand ourselves […]
  • Getting into Trouble
    Almost fifty years after the Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77 was first reported in the Review’s pages, Václav Havel’s own long-lost account of his imprisonment now appears in English for the first time.
  • The Work of Math in the Age of Artificial Reproduction
    There are seven questions in pure mathematics deemed important enough by the Clay Mathematics Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to “furthering the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought,” that each of their solutions carries a prize of $1 million. To date only one of these “Millennium Prize Problems,” as the foundation calls them, has […]
  • A Plum Assignment
    The cover for our Fall Books Issue—a painting of ripe purple plums in a punnet, surrounded by hand-painted cover lines—was an unexpected collaboration between the Irish-born New Yorker Lena Beug, a commercials director, and the Canadian Jason Logan, who makes ink from natural pigments that he forages from rural and urban environments.  I had assigned the […]
  • Lucy Sante on Pauline Kael, Film Criticism, and Pop Culture
    In the second season premiere of Private Life, host Jarrett Earnest is joined by the writer and critic Lucy Sante to discuss Pauline Kael’s career, pop culture writing, and Sante’s writing for the Review, where she has been a frequent contributor since the 1980s. The conversation focuses on “The Perils of Pauline” (published in the […]
  • Sand Castles
    To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on 157 directors. One of these offers the following superlative assessment: “She remains (now alongside Marguerite Duras) the greatest female auteur of our cinema.” Naming the recipient of this praise shouldn’t be […]
  • ‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’
    In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks […]
  • Nothing Stays Buried
    Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
  • War Games
    My father brought books to the basement. During the air raids we read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, and ate feasts my mother made with dry goods and powdered milk: rice pudding, “béchamel” spaghetti, in one large aluminum pot over a small gas burner, sandwiches of […]
  • Sad-Maxxing
    Ashton Politanoff's new novel tells the story of sad dads and washed-up jocks vying for a phantom ideal of masculinity.
  • ‘I Taste Ashes in the Wind’
    Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the “Apokalypse-Blindheit”—“apocalypse blindness”—that had begun […]
  • Tujunga
    As blood is brought where infection is So was I brought to Los Angeles Toting only my REI membership card And University of California ID “Access the inaccessible” My headlamp quibbled But I didn’t need its LEDs To see them, the coyotes, Rip the heads from Griffin’s chickens In broad daylight when I’d let them […]
  • ‘Writing on One Table’
    Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
  • Fleshing It Out
    The artist Gladys Nilsson is one of our great watercolorists, and also one of our great mannerists. Mannerist in the sense that she distorts human proportions to stay true both to some private vision and to that very public fact of life, bodily strangeness. On the left side of her tall and hectic watercolor Caught […]
  • The Road to ‘Bent’
    Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single performance. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) devastatingly dramatized the […]
  • Mother Country
    When I was nine, I helped my father build a life-size replica of the intelligence officer Jim Thompson’s Bangkok living room in our home. We listened to “Mother Country” and “Chantilly Lace” while cutting teak down to size and staining it to make Jim’s gridded wall panels and the raised thresholds he used to block […]
  • Can Resistance Be Copied?
    From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense, synchronized, and persistent—dwarfed older, briefer moments […]
  • Dudamel’s New York Dream
    The concert orchestra is an American specialty. Theodore Thomas, whose touring Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, was the first world-class New World symphonic ensemble, preached, “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera.” Thomas performed Beethoven in cities large and small, coast to coast, north to south. In 1891 he became the […]
  • Flow Chart of Paris
    Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but of […]
  • The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa
    When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the most adventuresome in the Latin […]
  • Posterity Avenged Him
    In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.
  • De Kooning Draws a Picture
    Willem de Kooning's works on paper document his efforts to find ways of retaining both image and abstraction, depth and flatness.
  • The Slave’s Power
    Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive of slavery produced by those who built and benefited from it.
  • Devils in America
    Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991), written […]
  • Doing Business with the Devil
    Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1 might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, […]
  • Comics Relief
    In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in […]
  • In Billy’s Band
    Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969, bickering like siblings as they created some of the songs that would find immortality on the albums Let It Be and Abbey Road—one of the most magical involves the underappreciated musician Billy […]
  • ‘I Wish You Love’
    On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her […]
  • Subject Relations
    We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme—something different and, often, a little risky or uncomfortable. Our final guest, Anna Silman, interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider several years ago. Back then, when Twitter was still called Twitter, it was possible for a […]
  • ‘Society Gumbo’
    In 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “in Sausalito people live on anything that floats.” Those midcentury houseboat dwellers were the antecedents of Marin County’s “anchor-outs,” people who live on the anchorage in Richardson Bay and therefore, as Piper French writes in her review of Joe Kloc’s Lost at Sea in our September 24 […]
  • An Exception in World Affairs
    Ratko Mladić’s death last week at eighty-three in The Hague—where he was serving a life sentence for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995—is a reminder that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the […]

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