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

• Novels of the Future
  “Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire,” writes Aaron Matz, quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, in a review of Dan Sperrin’s State of Ridicule from our March 26, 2026, issue. Unfortunately, literary political satire has been in a long period of decline—and not just because it has been supplanted […]
• The Aging Class
  Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.
• A Devotee of Deception
  In Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea, an elderly writer looks back across a life in which he has always sought distance and control rather than passion.
• Heaven’s Elegist
  Alfred Tennyson's poetry addressed the central anxiety of his day: how to live in a world where scientific discoveries were slowly replacing religious faith.
• Psalm 121
  From the prohibition against representation    that binds the globe in images.From that blue sea from which like whips    my help will cometo mend me nameless to this rock the world    that I may see you,my Lord. Who once misfit the eye    as mere prosperity,the glare that causes objects. Who once    set us in the deepa password, lock and mercenary. Who […]
• World of His Fathers
  Nicholas Lemann’s Returning traces his Louisiana family’s gradual distancing across generations from its Jewish faith and his own efforts to reembrace it.
• ‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’
  In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.
• Lot’s Wife
  I always get confused.I think it’s Lot’sturning back that turnedher to salt. A wholepillar of it. I always thinkhe’s an Orpheus of sorts,though Orpheus wasgorgeous and a knockouton his lute. But Lot?There’s not a wholelot we can say in his favor.I have to think his wife had a name other thanLot’s wife, that shemight have […]
• Living Through the Civil War
  George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.
• The Throwaway Planet
  Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.
• The Painter’s Shadow World
  Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.
• Friendship 7
  Museum Visit: Friendship 7; a collage by Lucy Sante
• ‘To Share Is Our Duty’
  Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that “communication is health.”
• Misjudgment at Nuremberg
  In James Vanderbilt’s film Nuremberg, about the trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the questioning of Russell Crowe’s all too charming Hermann Göring becomes a moment of invented high drama.
• Blood in the Game
  For two novels that address the escalating violence, rampant corruption, and class resentment poisoning our society, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach are also surprisingly funny.
• Reimagining the Future of Ireland
  Two writers from different parts and traditions of the island argue with each other and themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of Irish unification.
• Why ‘The West’?: An Exchange
  To the Editors: In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West [NYR, December 18, 2025], Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of liberal democracy. Most troubling are these: that historic Russia is a largely passive entity against which “the West” defines itself; that Ukraine—a country fighting for its existence […]
• Gini Alhadeff Reads from André Breton’s ‘Nadja’
  In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris. Click the […]
• Timid Europe
  On Sunday, March 22, three weeks into the US–Israeli war in Iran, Donald Trump received an unlikely pledge of support. The previous Friday he had taken to Truth Social to lambast his fellow NATO members, calling them “COWARDS” for refusing to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blocked with threats […]
• Born in the USA
  For the Supreme Court to accept the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, it would have to repudiate the Constitution, its own precedents, and the long-standing position of all three branches of the US government.
• ‘Tell Me Your Worst’ 
  The Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck told her models to stay silent and look away from her while she worked. She would not tolerate conversation or a returned gaze. As a result her paintings show the many ways art can present a person indirectly: in profile, eyes closed, staring off in the distance or looking askance, […]
• Indecorous Decorations
  Around the year 1400 a young woman in Central Europe was given a saddle made of bone, likely for her wedding day. As she rode from her parents’ home to that of her new husband, she sat upon carved scenes of lovers embracing and men banging drums or clutching their belts. In France, at about […]
• Syphoning Morale
  Soon after the outbreak of war in Iran, as America was blitzing the country from a distance with a fusillade of bombs and missiles, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth exulted that we were “punching them while they’re down.” In those early days a US submarine sunk an Iranian naval vessel thousands of miles from the […]
• From the Rooftops of Tehran
  We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.
• Mark Polizzotti on André Breton, Translation, and Surrealism
  In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Polizzotti gives insight into the […]
• The Neocons’ Revenge?
  Since Donald Trump’s improbable first win in 2016, pundits have passed countless hours trying to understand how his rise, and the populist movement that powered it, have changed American conservatism. If Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party was, famously, a three-legged stool consisting of social traditionalists, free-market champions, and foreign interventionists, Trump’s MAGA coalition has swelled its […]
• Bottling the World Economy
  Amid the destruction of the US–Israeli war against Iran, much of the world’s attention has fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes. In normal times ships traversing the Strait—which runs between Oman and the United Arab Emirates on one […]
• The Gaza Doctrine
  On Friday, March 13, nearly two weeks into the Lebanese front of “Operation Roaring Lion,” Israeli forces bombed Burj Qalaouiyah, a village in the country’s south. The strike destroyed a health care center, killing twelve doctors, paramedics, nurses, and patients; The New York Times reported that “only one severely injured worker survived.” Among the victims, […]
• Spirit in the Sky
  What do Italian astronomers, cloistered nuns, levitating saints, and the “sexy dreams” of desert church fathers have in common? In the pages of the Review, they’re all the domain of the critic and scholar Erin Maglaque. Maglaque is a student of archival texts, often written by women, that challenge conventional secular and religious interpretations of […]
• Elegy for Rafah
  Since the beginning of the year, my phone has been a window through which I watch the Rafah crossing from my bedroom in Paris three thousand kilometers away. Every piece of news about it awakes something in me that neither the cold of this city nor the long distance can quiet. After nine months in […]
• Rigging the Vote: Trump’s Threats to Elections
  Sue Halpern hosts the attorney and voting rights expert Marc Elias for a wide-ranging conversation on threats to American voting rights, including gerrymandering, ballot seizures, and the SAVE Act. This conversation originally aired on March 12, 2026.
• Shenzhen Express
  In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.
• Crowds and Lovers
  In his novel G., John Berger shifts between the revolutionary possibilities of mass demonstrations and of erotic encounters, ultimately writing a historical novel about the present.
• Rivals of the Landscape
  The more we learn about J.M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.
• Dantès’s Inferno
  When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.
• Possessing the Painful Parts
  Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.
• In Defense of Algebra
  The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.
• Who Built France?
  A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.
• ‘Not Insane!’
  The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.
• Ondine
  To speak freely, I could never land on anything worth talking about    but from the moment they shut me up, I’ve been full of things to say.It’s not that the mind is tricking itself but that the mind itself is a trick    played on silence by the body. You might imagine a cool black pond completely devoid […]
• The Tennissance
  Two young tennis stars have revived the sport by embodying the sort of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Nadal and Federer so fascinating.
• The Marbles & the Muses
  A.E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.
• Mother Daughter Sister Wife
  A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.
• A Man-Made Disaster
  There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.
• Interminable Ignorance
  Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?
• The Possibility of Humor
  In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.
• Deciphering Dame Muriel
  In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.
• Richard Hell Reads from
  Episode 6 of Private Life
• Lebanon’s Negations
  Since Monday, March 2, Israel’s armed forces have launched daily airstrikes on Lebanon. Begun after Hezbollah fired a small volley of rockets into Israel in response to the killing of Ali Khamenei (causing no casualties), the Israeli strikes have so far killed more than nine hundred people and displaced more than a million out of […]
• Charade Night
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• ‘Like a Gossamer Sheet’
  “The first time I experienced life on the West Bank, staying over in Palestinian homes, a whole new horizon opened up for me. I entered into that life, its personal friendships, its language, its ravishing landscapes, and its evident suffering. All of it felt meaningful and real.”
• Of Fire and Rain
  Rain I One balmy winter day in 1991, during the first Gulf War, I was sitting by the window in my classroom watching the clear blue sky above Ahvaz, the city in Iran’s southwest where I grew up. The teacher was working through a physics problem on the blackboard when, on the horizon, I noticed […]
• Longing for My Tehran
  Since the outbreak of the current war between Israel and Iran—much like during the previous one last summer—I have been sought after for interviews by foreign media. An Iranian-born pro-Palestinian Israeli political activist is, it seems, a highly desirable commodity. Some want me to explain the Israeli position, others the Iranian one, still others to […]
• Since
  Brianna knew her husband would claim the pregnancy was an act of God. Their marriage was falling apart. She was fed up with his infidelity and with managing their kids and home on her own. The couple had recently separated when she realized her period was late. Deciding to get the abortion was easy. Beyond […]
• Signifying Absolutely Nothing
  Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a performance of horrific military strength that betrays a stark political weakness.
• A Bitter Education
  In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.
• Richard Hell on
  In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.   Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Richard Hell is a writer and […]
• The Docteur Is In
  In January 1960 Brussels hosted a “Round Table” conference of Congolese and European leaders to negotiate the future of the Belgian Congo. Anticolonial resistance had surged across Africa over the previous decade; in the Congo the antagonism had reached its peak in 1959 after colonial authorities killed dozens—possibly hundreds—of protesters in the infamous Léopoldville riots. […]
• The New War on Speech
  Partway through his second inaugural address on January 20, Donald Trump started listing the executive orders he planned to sign that day. Among others, he said he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” designate “cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” put an end to the Green New Deal, start a full “overhaul of […]
• Iran Transformed
  On February 28 Israeli warplanes assassinated Ali Khamenei, Iran’s leader, by dropping thirty bombs on his compound in Tehran. It was the opening salvo of the US and Israel’s joint war of choice. Within a day missile attacks and aircraft sorties had done grave damage across the country: in southern Iran airstrikes hit a girls […]
• En Pointe 
  “I’m struck by ballet’s ability to create something extraordinarily beautiful out of something so difficult and so taxing on the brain and body.”
• The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War
  In January, during a lengthy New York Times interview with President Donald Trump, one of the paper’s reporters asked him whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage.” Yes, he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s […]

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.
• How Scientifically Accurate Is ‘Project Hail Mary’? Experts Weigh In
  Based on hard science fiction, a genre that prioritizes scientific accuracy, the blockbuster gets a lot right but misses a few things, experts say.
• The Month’s Best New Thriller Books
  Our columnist on the month’s best new releases.
• Book Review: ‘True Color,’ by Kory Stamper
  The lexicographer Kory Stamper’s “True Color” is a sneakily insightful philosophical treatise on what it means to define anything at all.
• 23 Books We Are Looking Forward to This Spring
  The Book Review editors discuss fiction and nonfiction that caught their eye. Plus, Ada Limón on the power of poetry.
• What to Know About ‘The Testaments,’ a Sequel to Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
  “The Testaments” focuses on a younger generation coming of age inside Gilead, the religious regime first imagined in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian thriller.
• Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’ Shows Us Why the Novel Will Never Die
  With “Transcription,” the writer makes a case for the vitality of the form.
• Book Review: ‘Judgy Bunny and the Terrible Beach,’ by Scott Rothman, and ‘Bartleby,’ by Matt Phelan
  Matt Phelan’s bear cub named Bartleby and Scott Rothman’s judgy bunny aren’t wicked or misbehaved. Like our reviewer, they simply prefer not to.
• Books Our Editors Loved This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Meet the ‘Literary King of Tulsa’ (Before He Moves to Seattle)
  In his free time, Jeff Martin mobilized best-selling authors to travel to sold-out events in his hometown. He will soon expand his horizons.
• Terry Tempest Williams on Thoreau, Erdrich and Other Favorite Writers
  She vividly recalls what the novel, and others like it, meant to her mother. Her own new book is “The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary.”
• Great Chapter Books for Beginning Readers
  Here are some of our staff’s favorites, for ages 4 to 8.
• Book Review: ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ by Beverly Gage
  In anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, a Pulitzer winner visited 300 sites to see how history is displayed and, sometimes, erased.
• 10 Short Books for Spring
  These single-serving satires, family dramas and romances can be read cover-to-cover in one sun-dappled afternoon.
• 16 Strangers, One 304-Page Novel and a Weekend of Reading Aloud
  What happens when you shrink down a book club to two days and take turns narrating the story? Welcome to Page Break.
• International Booker Prize Shortlist: 6 Novels With ‘Burning Humanity’
  Books by Marie NDiaye, Daniel Kehlmann and Rene Karabash are among the shortlisted titles for the major award for fiction translated into English.
• Book Review: ‘Son of Nobody,’ by Yann Martel
  Yann Martel’s “Son of Nobody” joins many recent books that reimagine the classics, but offers a Nabokovian twist.
• Book Review: ‘A Good Person,’ by Kirsten King
  The sloppy, solipsistic narrator of Kirsten King’s novel, “A Good Person,” casts a witchy spell on a guy who dumped her. Hours later, he’s been stabbed to death.
• Book Review: ‘The Witch,’ by Marie NDiaye
  Part horror, part fable, the latest novel by Marie NDiaye to be translated into English is an exacting portrait of domestic entrapment and psychological turmoil.
• Symphony Space to Undergo a $45 Million Makeover
  The Upper West Side performing arts venue will take its programming across the city while its doors close for a 15-month overhaul.
• Book Review: ‘The Confessions of Samuel Pepys,’ by Guy de la Bédoyère
  Samuel Pepys’s journals are an invaluable record of British history. A new book reconsiders his infamous sexual exploits.
• In a New Memoir, Arsenio Hall Recalls His High-Flying Years as a Talk-Show Host
  Eddie Murphy, Snoop Dogg and Bill Clinton (naturally) show up in his gossipy new memoir. He isn’t very sentimental.
• 29 New Books to Read in April: Emma Straub, Patrick Radden Keefe, TJ Klune and More
  Novels by Emma Straub, Ben Lerner and TJ Klune; nonfiction by Patrick Radden Keefe and Lena Dunham; a road trip history of the United States; and more.
• Doctors Believed Woody Brown Would Never Understand Language. He’s Publishing a Novel.
  Doctors believed that Woody Brown would never be able to speak or process language. He went to graduate school and is publishing his debut novel.
• ‘The Wild Party’ Is a Vivacious Play That Started as a Scandalous Poem
  One hundred years after it was banned for its depiction of hedonism, the rhythmic, jazz-soaked poetry of Joseph Moncure March continues to find new life.
• Book Review: ‘Transcription,’ by Ben Lerner
  In “Transcription,” Ben Lerner considers a famous father, a loyal protégé and a distant son, bound by devotion and separated by miscommunication.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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