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

• 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
       
• 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 […]
• Planet UFC
  For decades it has been White House tradition to invite Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a ceremonial exchange of a bowl of shamrocks, symbolizing Irish-American friendship. But two months into Donald Trump’s return in 2025, a very different figure was marking the holiday with a very different kind of […]
• The Moviegoer
  “When we keep saying cinema is dead or dying, we lose sight of what we have actually lost and what might still be possible, even as so much about the art form continues to change.”
• Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry
  Episode 16 of Private Life
• The Archbishop’s Library
  In an article for Wired in 1999, William Gibson idly mentions a coffee shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. It sounds like a typical Turkish cafe, except for the fact that it’s been open “twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, literally for centuries.” Gibson does not linger on the subject. As […]
• Cloudbusting in California
  Just over twenty years ago, in April 2006, British media gave generous space to film and photographs of a sled hauled over a vast expanse of snow by a team of six huskies. The man driving the sled, dressed in expensive Arctic gear, was David Cameron, who had been elected leader of the Conservative opposition […]
• Songs of Liberation
  In 1960 the writer Bessie Head—yet to publish the novels that would make her a leading figure in South African and Batswana literature—interviewed a young Cape Town pianist named Adolf Johannes Brand, who went by Dollar Brand. In her manuscript, which never appeared in print but resurfaced in 1995, she called him “a most surprising […]
• The Innocents Abroad
  “One of my guiding principles as a white American writing about the US is that it’s important to include yourself in your analysis, to acknowledge your own complicity or at least involvement in the country’s history or power.”
• If I Were Chuck Schumer
  With about four months still to go until the midterm elections, the Trump administration remains largely unchecked by Congress in its exercises and abuses of power—recently, the president has attempted to deal himself and his cronies billions in taxpayer dollars in a “settlement” with the IRS, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is floating a plan to remove […]
• When the Rents Were Low
  An oral history of the New York School Poets suggests how its successive cohorts have changed over the years.
• A Different Country Came to Them
  Until Greece annexed Salonica in 1912, it had long been a city where ‘all peoples’ used to pass. How did its Jews come to be eliminated and their history erased?
• Unmaking the Middle East
  In two recent books the scholar and commentator Fawaz Gerges asks why the region remains a bastion of authoritarian government, prone to conflict and instability, instead of becoming an economic success story.
• Nowhere to Hide
  The languid melodies of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas look simple and spare on the page, but they are exacting, even merciless for singers.
• Paper Trail
  The investigation into the origin of papyrus fragments that the owners of Hobby Lobby purchased from an Oxford scholar underscores papyrology’s long history of shady deals and ulterior motives.
• Think for Yourself
  One of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the short cuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing.
• Summer House
  There was a full shelf of Simenon and a coral sculpture that looked a bit like barbed wire in the family room. I moved the flowered cushions off the bed and put the percolator with the bubbled glass knob out on the counter. There were candles to tint the feelings. You had to do what […]
• The Immortals
  When I was old I became close to my death. He slept next to me snoring like a freight train, his bony elbows digging into my ribs; once he left a filament of saliva on my wrist. We ate together, equally voracious: he snatched a strand of clam linguine from my open mouth. Evenings we […]
• Beirut and Beyond
  The idea of home—in a city, in one’s body, in a corpus of visual art—runs through a new show of inventive work by the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland.
• Shades of Solace
  In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new paintings, mourners find clarity through communion—a departure for an artist known for her masterful portraits of solitude.
• ‘We Did Our Best!’
  Metaphors of parenting have defined our understanding of AI, but lately the parent-child relationship between creator and machine is becoming reversed.
• Call My Agent
  With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.
• Labour’s Love Lost
  With Keir Starmer’s and his party’s future in doubt after local elections in May, there is a paucity of talent among his rivals.
• Visiting Privileges
  Harriet Clark’s debut novel is a fable-like story of growing up in the fallout of a family’s radical dreams.
• ‘Metsochism’
  A new history of the Mets tries to turn the pain of losing into the struggle of class politics.
• Their Own Private Genesis
  What If Augustine’s idea of original sin was wrong? Testimony from the Inquisition reveals freethinkers using their sexual experience to dispute the reign of shame and otherwise critique Church doctrine.
• The Siren Song of Illness
  In writing The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann struggled to free himself from his artistic preoccupation with sickness and death.
• Image Crazy
  In the decades before the Civil War, innovations in printmaking and photography created a “rage for pictures” that transformed American visual culture.
• Reassembling Bakhtin
  Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.
• Don’t Call It a Rebellion
  To the Editors: In “Indiana’s Indiana Jones” [NYR, May 28],” Nina Siegal calls Crazy Horse “the famous Lakota leader of a rebellion against the US military.” The Lakota were (and are) a sovereign nation. In 1876 Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and other Lakota were not in rebellion but at war with the US for invading […]
• Who’s Paying for Lunch?
  To the Editors: In his review of my May 2025 book Our Dollar, Your Problem [“The Struggle for the Fed,” NYR, February 26], Trevor Jackson takes little interest in engaging with the book’s core thesis that the absolute dominance of the US dollar is being undermined by weaponization of US economic power against enemies and […]
• Confessions of a Fair-Weather Knicks Fan
  Game 5: Alone in the Gym Game 4: Peace That Passeth Understanding Game 3: King Midas in Reverse Game 2: Oh My Gosh Game 1: He Did and We Did Game Zero Game 5: Alone in the Gym In order to defy the odds, to prove themselves masters of the impossible, the Knicks very gently […]
• Minority Opinion: The End of Voting Rights and the Future of Elections
  New York Review contributors David Cole, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Pamela Karlan come together for a wide-ranging conversation on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s death blow to the Voting Rights Act.
• 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 […]

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: ‘The Emergency Playbook,’ by Amy Edelman and Chris Begley
  “The Emergency Playbook” is a disaster preparation guide that emphasizes community rather than lone-hero fantasies.
• Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75
  He joined the magazine’s staff at 23. Among the subjects of his profiles were the magician Ricky Jay and a pre-politics Donald Trump.
• With ‘Girls Like Girls,’ Hayley Kiyoko Turns Her Teenage Pain Into Art
  The once-closeted star has reinvented her song “Girls Like Girls” as a best-selling Y.A. novel and a new theatrical film. It wasn’t easy.
• A Tenacious Lifeguard Still Swims Against the Tide
  Janet Fash was always outspoken when it came to keeping beachgoers safe. She lays it all out in her feisty new memoir.
• Danny McBride Thinks Men Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Movies
  The writer and actor, known for his profane comedic antiheroes, likes to find universal truths in human flaws.
• Book Review: ‘The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,’ by Cory Doctorow
  In “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” the renowned tech critic Cory Doctorow tries to find a good way to coexist with artificial intelligence.
• James Bradley, Co-Author of ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ Dies at 72
  His best-selling book celebrated the servicemen in the stirring photograph of the U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima. One, it was long believed, was his father.
• David Thomson Loves the Movies but Not What They Have Done to America
  How the film writer David Thomson found himself in a lover’s quarrel with cinema — and America.
• Jon Klassen on Ghosts in Children’s Stories
  Ghosts in stories for children are a blank canvas. You can show your audience a ghost and, if you play it right, almost just leave it at that.
• Jean Houston, ‘Midwife of Souls’ Who Advised Hillary Clinton, Dies at 89
  The author of books like “The Possible Human,” she held workshops that drew on mythology, psychology and the experiential ethos of Esalen. But she refused to be called a guru.
• Danny Simmons, Painter and Activist From a Creative Family, Dies at 72
  The older brother of the music mogul Russell Simmons and the rapper Joseph Simmons, he made his own way as an artistic and entrepreneurial force in Brooklyn.
• Book Review: ‘Regime Change,’ by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
  In “Regime Change,” two New York Times journalists offer a riveting chronicle of the weird fusion of reality and show business in the White House.
• Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Gary Shteyngart, a Russian-Born Author, Tours Thomas Jefferson’s Home With His Son
  I emigrated from the Soviet Union decades ago, and recently toured Thomas Jefferson’s home with my American-born history-buff son.
• Robert Thurman, Leading Expert on Tibetan Buddhism and Uma Thurman’s Father, Dies at 84
  A former monk who was also Uma Thurman’s father, he made sure Buddhism retained its intellectual and spiritual rigor as it spread through the West.
• Carlo Ginzburg, Who Told the History of the Obscure, Dies at 87
  In books like “The Cheese and the Worms,” he helped push beyond the story of great events and leaders, entering the minds and hearts of peasants.
• Gregory Williams, Academic With an Uncommon Perspective on Race, Dies at 81
  As a child, he discovered that his father — and therefore he and his siblings — had been passing for white. For the rest of his life, he identified as Black.
• Best-Selling Memoirist Sues Classmate Who Said She Used Her Story
  Amy Griffin contended that she was defamed when a former classmate accused her in a lawsuit of appropriating parts of her story of being sexually abused for “The Tell.”
• Call It a ‘Book-cation’ or a ‘Readaway,’ Literary Travel Is Having a Moment
  Resort book clubs, tour companies, hotel libraries and a growing number of literary festivals are offering readers new ways to indulge their interests.
• The ‘Paddington’ Musical Will Come to Broadway Next Spring
  The show, which revisits the story of a marmalade-loving bear, plans to open next April at the Hirschfeld Theater in New York.
• Book Review: ‘The Frenzy,’ by Joyce Carol Oates
  The stories in her new collection deal in jagged emergencies and in wounds both physical and psychic.
• Book Review: ‘Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body,’ by Erin Maglaque
  In “Presence,” the historian Erin Maglaque pieces together the fragments of early modern womanhood.
• Book Review: ‘Ghost-Eye,’ by Amitav Ghosh
  Fascinating if overstuffed, Amitav Ghosh’s “Ghost-Eye” connects the mystifying case of a girl in Calcutta to the global climate crisis.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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