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

• ‘The Devil Himself’
  At first I am afraid to enter the library. I have arrived at the US Department of Justice website because my attention got snagged by a random post on Bluesky, or possibly X, and I want to see whether it is real. The post showed an email thread between Jeffrey Epstein and a correspondent whose […]
• For the Fossil Record
  “I took the opportunity to observe the surviving lemurs in their natural habitats—and it was love at first sight.”
• Building the Electrostate
  In the United States today, officials at all levels of government generally act as if private enterprise is the only way to provide goods and services. Yet a bastion of public ownership survives: more than a quarter of electricity customers—including the residents of Los Angeles, Omaha, San Antonio, Seattle, Jacksonville, and Tupelo, along with tens […]
• Joyce Carol Oates on True Crime, Her Improbable Life, and Joan Didion
  Episode 3 of Private Life
• The Stony Dark Within
  This is the 150th anniversary of Rilke’s birth. Or, you might say, the 99th anniversary of his death. I asked a small group of students if they knew of Rilke, the poet, if they had read Rilke. They did not. Had not. They were seventeen, eighteen years old. One immediately addressed his phone. Assessed that […]
• Trading with the Enemy
  Friday’s Supreme Court decision rebuffing President Trump’s signature foreign policy initiative—worldwide tariffs imposed pursuant to an asserted national emergency—was extraordinary in multiple respects. In its nearly 250-year history, the Court has rarely ruled against presidential assertions of emergency power. It authorized, for example, the imprisonment of war critics during World War I, and the internment […]
• Timekeepers
  Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, retaliated fiercely against whoever contested its monopoly over the country’s public image. Opponents of the regime were kidnapped, tortured, and in some cases disappeared. Artworks deemed subversive or morally corrupt were banned and censored, if not destroyed. At the 1967 São Paulo Biennial cops stormed the […]
• Home Free
  “Every writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives, so there will be friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are going to feel like they’ve been pushed under the bus.”
• The Men Who Sold the World
  Social disaster is becoming increasingly affordable. On February 12 the Trump administration rescinded the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 EPA determination that “the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases…in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” For more than sixteen years the finding had required […]
• Jason Statham Asks Nothing of Me
  And for this I’m grateful. The scene:I’m in my convalescent’s nest—a corner of the sofa.Floral pajamas, oily roots. The pain refersinto my shoulders, as they foretold. A flashof the anesthetist: This will feel cold. Your face will prickle. A male voice: She’s out. Let’s do this. Now, in the weeks betweenvisits to the theater, I […]
• The Wandering Physicist
  Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
• Sappho 27
  σὺ τοῦτ᾿ ἀλλ᾿ ὄττι τάχιστα It makes me ill to think about it too,how the people I love the mostsometimes treat me the worst. Don’t let that be you. Let’s go to their wedding, and drink their aperitifs,and nibble a few petits fours. I’ll offer a toast,then we’ll leave by the service door. Let them […]
• If These Walls Could Talk
  In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.
• A Real Live Socialist
  What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.
• The Poet’s Double
  In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor.
• As Kennedy Went
  Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning.
• ‘An Entirely New Domain of Knowledge’
  The Torah scholars who came to be called “rabbis” emerged as figures of authority after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the later exile of Jews from Judaea—and created Judaism’s founding literature.
• Road Trippers
  In a thirty-three day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States.
• Alexei Ratmansky’s Leap of Faith
  Having wrested himself from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the great choreographer has sought to remake himself and his work in Denmark.
• Paths of Resistance
  Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance?
• ‘We Think They’ll Kill Someone’
  Indigenous communities in Mexico who oppose the construction of megaprojects on their lands do so at great risk.
• Poisonous Objects
  Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.
• Evil in the West Bank
  As long as the daily horrors in the occupied territories continue and the extreme right remains in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core.
• Gaslight
  The case of Gisèle Pelicot, who for more than a decade was violated by her husband and dozens of other men, should mark the end of the regime that puts on women the responsibility for avoiding assault.
• Deeper Than They Thought
  Although Margaret Kennedy has been largely forgotten as a popular writer, in her novels she wielded the most cunning techniques of literary modernism.
• From the Archive: “Working Girls: The Brontës”
  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies […]
• Cold Plunge
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• A Bitter Winter in Ukraine
  Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.
• Contempt of Court
  Since the Trump administration began its strategy of indefinitely detaining people it has targeted for deportation, federal judges across the country and ideological spectrum have been rejecting their efforts, ordering that detainees be released or given bond hearings in more than 1,600 cases. Yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have repeatedly defied or ignored the […]
• Authoritarianism from Below
  As National Guard troops and federal officers swarmed Washington, D.C., in August, sent by President Donald Trump to confront what he declared a “crime emergency,” members of the city council expressed their outrage. Janeese Lewis George, who represents a northern ward with many immigrant residents that was immediately crawling with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) […]
• Medicaid Undone
  One year ago President Donald Trump promised to “love and cherish” Medicaid. Alas, his affection for the public insurance program was short-lived. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) he signed into law on July 4—the most sweeping health care legislation since Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA)—slashes about $1 trillion in federal […]
• Pieces of Gaza
  Until 2024, the objects on display in “Trésors sauvés de Gaza” (“Treasures Saved from Gaza”), an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris that closed last December, had been sitting in crates in Geneva for seventeen years awaiting their return to the Gaza Strip, where they were destined for a museum not yet […]
• Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick
  In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick.
• ‘Fill It with Reality’
  In 1962 Françoise Ega, a Martinican woman working odd jobs and raising five children in Marseille, stumbled upon a newspaper article about Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian woman who, “hunched over” in a favela and using “pieces of paper that [she] found in the trash,” wrote a highly acclaimed memoir, Quarto de despejo, […]
• The Writer from the Dance
  Alma Guillermoprieto has spent her nearly fifty-year career writing about America—North and South, from New York to Argentina. From her earliest essay in the Review, in 1994, about Mario Vargas Llosa’s election campaign memoir, to her most recent, in our February 12 issue, about the Trump administration’s coup in Venezuela, she has focused in particular […]
• Never Again, Once Again
  A few years ago, in the early summer of 2019, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared on its website that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” Apparently it felt that this declaration was necessary because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, […]
• American Imperialism and the End of Sovereignty
  Fintan O’Toole hosts New York Review contributors Alma Guillermoprieto and Michael Ignatieff for a wide-ranging conversation on the Trump administration’s imperial ambitions in Venezuela, Greenland, and beyond. This conversation originally aired on February 5, 2026.
• The Struggle for the Fed
  The Fed is under attack. Can it be both protected and held accountable?
• Painted Sermons
  The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality.
• Toni Plays the Dozens
  What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?
• Still Life, Hilton Head
  No, not a logon the bank that risesfrom the lagoon— an alligator!Just one shade brownerthan the pristine golf-course greenof this lawn-mown,laundered neighborhood. An alligatorjust feet away—undead, unfunnily playing possumas if an exteriordecorator had staged it therelike a polar bearrug or a chair; or as if some matronhad pinned on the moundof her bosom a jeweled, […]
• When the Chips Are Down
  President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.
• A Student of Power
  In his experiences and chronicles of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, Curzio Malaparte was a shape-shifter—pitiless, clinical, cynical, unsentimental, indifferent to morality and idealism.
• People Think
  Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free.
• Mother Trouble
  In her new memoir, Arundhati Roy tries to find the language to grapple with the shadow of her formidable, extraordinary mother.
• An American Reckoning
  Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today.
• Torn Asunder
  As Guatemala and El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.
• Lost and Forgotten
  Although his own writings are little known today, Malcolm Cowley became one of the great champions of American literature.
• Chasing Ghosts
  With its brilliant prose and unrelenting darkness and pessimism, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night towers over Chilean literature.
• Rescuing the Refugees
  After the fall of France many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.
• Call Me by Your Names
  The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon.
• Poland: Halfway to Democracy
  What do the far right’s fluctuating fortunes in Poland suggest about countries seeking an off-ramp from autocracy?
• Thin Skin
  “If I’m thin,” said skin,“it’s because I have been cut.”The hands, who wanted nothingand were incapable of choice, didn’t feelresponsible. Earsweren’t listening; neither was the voice. “If I’m thin,” said skin, “it’s becauseI have been cut.”“Not enough,” said the hermit soul,who saved its lovefor what it couldn’t see or touchwhile spirit,patient survivor of schooling without […]
• Is It Easy Being Green?
  To the Editors: Regarding Bill McKibben’s review of The Story of CO 2 Is the Story of Everything [“It’s a Gas,” NYR, January 15], and with all due respect to McKibben, I believe that his characterization of the transition to a wind and solar economy as something easily within our grasp, once the political obstacles […]
• Promo Time
  “This is what it sounds like…” Readers of a certain generation will perhaps automatically complete this phrase by saying “when doves cry.” But it isn’t doves we’re talking about. It’s magpies. Prince’s funky epic of tortured love (“Why do we scream at each other?”) forms part of the extensive pop-culture back catalog ransacked by 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: ‘Reproductive Wrongs,’ by Sarah Ruden
  In “Reproductive Wrongs,” the classicist Sarah Ruden traces efforts to exert political control over family planning back 2,000 years.
• Book Review: ‘Plastic Inc.,’ by Beth Gardiner
  A new book by the journalist Beth Gardiner argues that oil companies are upping production of the material as a safeguard against falling revenue.
• Book Review: ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye,’ by Ivana Sajko
  Ivana Sajko’s novel “Every Time We Say Goodbye” explores personal and political crises in lengthy, lyrical sentences.
• Hamnet, Hamlet and Oscar Wao: Three Lost Boys Across Time
  In the stage versions of two beloved books, the most impressive moments emerge when the productions stray from the source material.
• Book Review: ‘Muv,’ by Rachel Trethewey
  In “Muv,” the biographer Rachel Trethewey looks at the Mitford family matriarch.
• Book Review: ‘Repetition,’ by Vigdis Hjorth
  In Vigdis Hjorth’s novel “Repetition,” a writer recalls a pivotal period of transformation, sex and family crises.
• Book Review: ‘The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,’ by Kim Fu
  In “The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,” a therapist’s home turns into a nightmare manifestation of her sadness and grief.
• Book Review: ‘Field Notes From an Extinction,’ by Eoghan Walls
  “Field Notes From an Extinction,” by Eoghan Walls, follows a naturalist who wants to study birds but ends up with a much harder task.
• Book Review: ‘Now I Surrender,’ by Álvaro Enrigue
  Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, “Now I Surrender,” weaves past and present in a baroque anti-Western set in contested borderlands.
• Book Review: ‘Backstitch,’ by Marian Mitchell Donahue
  “Backstitch,” a novel by Marian Mitchell Donahue, examines the stark contrast between public talent and private troubles.
• Book Review: ‘El Paso,’ by Jazmine Ulloa
  In “El Paso,” Jazmine Ulloa paints her hometown as a microcosm for all that is good and bad about the United States.
• Book Review: ‘A Far-Flung Life,’ by M.L. Stedman
  In M.L. Stedman’s new novel, “A Far-Flung Life,” the beauty and breadth of her setting stand in counterpoint to the horrors of the human lives playing out upon it.
• The Art of Murder
  Our columnist on the month’s best new mysteries.
• The American Comedian Who Became a Funnyman in China
  Jesse Appell left everything behind to pursue a comedy career in China, where Western-style club comedy was just finding its footing.
• Christina Applegate’s New Memoir Is Furious, Funny and Profane
  Funny, furious and profane, “You With the Sad Eyes” finds the TV star facing childhood trauma and reflecting on the limits imposed by illness.
• Book Review: ‘The Disappearing Act,’ by Maria Stepanova
  In Maria Stepanova’s novel “The Disappearing Act,” an accidental stopover in a foreign town leads to personal change.
• Book Review: ‘The Violet Hour,’ by James Cahill
  James Cahill’s “The Violet Hour” contrasts the artifice of blue-chip modern art with the messy personal lives of the people who create and consume it.
• Thrilling Slasher Books for ‘Scream’ and Horror Fans
  These 13 bloodthirsty tales will keep you up at night with clever thrills and heart-pounding action.
• Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Wuthering Heights’
  Emily Brontë’s classic Gothic romance is the basis for a new movie. It’s also more bonkers than you remember.
• Book Club: Read ‘Kin,’ by Tayari Jones, With the Book Review
  In March, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss Tayari Jones’s new novel, about two motherless girls and their lifelong search for family.
• Book Review: ‘A World Appears,’ by Michael Pollan
  “A World Appears” explores what makes you you.
• 27 New Books to Read in March: Tana French, Liza Minnelli, Cat Sebastian and More
  Novels by Tana French, Yann Martel and Cat Sebastian; memoirs by Christina Applegate and Liza Minnelli; a Judy Blume biography and more.
• Picture Books and Graphic Novels for Mo Willems Fans
  Twelve recommendations for young fans of Mo Willems.
• After 50 Years in the Shadows, a Tenacious First-Time Novelist Steps Out Front
  For 50 years, Patricia Finn kept to the background and told other people’s stories. Now, in “The Golden Boy,” she’s finally telling one of her own.
• 7 New Books Our Editors Love This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Teresa de Lauretis, Coiner (and Critic) of Queer Theory, Dies at 87
  She came up with the term as the title of a 1990 conference but saw its later popularity as a little superficial.
• Rose Lesniak, Poet Who Rescued Children and Trained Dogs, Dies at 70
  A magnetic personality, she reinvented herself twice, bringing the same spirit to investigating child abuse and communing with dogs that she did to writing poetry.
• Melissa Auf der Maur, a ’90s Rock Linchpin, Is Spilling Her Stories
  The bassist and photographer who logged time in Hole and Smashing Pumpkins unpacks one of the most creative and chaotic times of her life in a new memoir.
• Book Review: ‘Fashioning the Crown,’ by Justine Picardie
  In a new book, the biographer Justine Picardie romps through a century of royal wardrobes.
• Ann Godoff, a Top Editor and Publisher of Best Sellers, Dies at 76
  Considered an “author’s publisher” at Random House and then Penguin, she cultivated the careers of dozens of celebrated novelists and nonfiction writers.
• Writers Are Being Targeted by Scams. This Reporter Knows the Feeling.
  From George Saunders to the National Book Foundation, the literary world has been besieged by fake requests. Just like me.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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