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

• The Marvel of Comics, If Not of Movies
  In the August 19, 2021 issue of the magazine, we published “Marvel’s Ringmaster,” J. Hoberman’s review of three books on Stan Lee, the comics writer and editor who was instrumental in creating Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and dozens of other characters. Hoberman charts the rise and fall of Lee and explores how he made himself, […]
• William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary
  At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest (Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance), a woman named Ellen explains to the visitor, William Guest, that he cannot stay in this perfect place of clean air, meaningful work, and satisfying leisure. Not because of any fictional science of time […]
• Poised and Precarious
  The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read. The intimacy both enlists and unsettles; So died in December of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-eight. Although youth isn’t generally an advantage for fiction writers (except […]
• Requiem for a Heavyweight
  Nine years ago, mid-August, I was riding in a small open boat in the Quirimbas Archipelago, just off the coast of Mozambique. We were looking for whales. After running across the turquoise shoals to a deeper channel, the boat slowed and the pilot idled the motor. I remember thinking how odd it seemed to expect […]
• A Visionary Psychopath
  Sultan Selim I, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520, deposed his father and murdered two of his brothers. He executed so many of his officials that he inspired a curse still heard in Turkey today: “I wish for you a vizierate under Selim.” On the rare occasions when he was in his […]
• The Eternal Colony
  Who governs Sicily? Does it matter? With a population of five million (similar to Scotland’s, larger than Croatia’s), this island of 10,000 square miles lying off the toe of Italy’s boot has a special autonomy within the Italian state: it has its own regional parliament and makes its own laws in such areas as agriculture, […]
• The Burden of ‘Yes’
  One day Zeus and Hera were quarreling. They called Tiresias and asked him which of the two, man or woman, got the most pleasure from sex. Tiresias answered that if the pleasure were divided into ten parts, the woman enjoyed nine and the man only one. —Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony The […]
• The Fourth Woman
  When Nathalie Léger was around nine years old, her father’s mistress moved into the house next door. One afternoon, Léger hid in the hedge that separated the two yards and watched a photography session between them turn into sexual foreplay. In Exposition, she recounts the transformation in one long sentence, with commas, like little wounds, […]
• Waiting to Deflate
  We delight in the folly of others. As Charles Mackay wrote in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “Is it a dull or uninstructive picture to see a whole people shaking suddenly off the trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision, refusing obstinately to believe that it is not real, […]
• ‘A Searing Bolt of Turquoise’
  This spring I taught a course at Mount Holyoke on Emily Dickinson. We spent a week on her riddle poems, and I asked the students to try to guess the answer to this one: A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel— A Resonance of Emerald A Rush of Cochineal— And every Blossom on the […]
• Where Are You Really From?
  Lear stands on the heath railing, drenched by a deluge. In Bleak House the solemn “drip, drip, drip” of the Lincolnshire rain keeps time with the regularity of a metronome. Bathsheba’s ill-fated marriage to the caddish Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd is met with a violent cloudburst of “liquid spines.” A mizzling, […]
• Hand (Giotto)
  Over here the circle theme continuesWithout a clock, uncountable And unmarked despite a pouring sound,Despite slight lesions in the rock. A hand is waving, silently, from underCover of cloud we said was blanketing The sky, and so, indeed, the sky is blankBut for a reverie of reach and touch; The ancient, fingered dark.The word I […]
• The Vindication of Sanora Babb
  In the summer of 1938 Sanora Babb, an aspiring, talented, and determined young writer, joined the volunteer staff at camps in California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys run by the Farm Services Administration, which housed thousands of destitute farmers displaced by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Babb had a singular empathy for the “Okies,” since she […]
• Knowing How
  When Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s problematic cousin, wrote of taking stock of his own “mental furniture,” he meant assessing the background experiences and assumptions that informed his thought—the objects we barely see but instinctively accommodate as we move around the metaphorical room. Galton’s scientific star has dimmed since his death in 1911 (fathering eugenics has […]
• Slavery vs. White Supremacy
  To the Editors: I write to thank Sean Wilentz for his generous, learned review of my The First Reconstruction and Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done [NYR, July 1]. I write not to challenge his assessment, but to pose a question. Wilentz’s review alludes to the current dystopian moment shaped by Donald Trump’s white nationalism […]
• The Elusive Wit of the Mahatma
  To the Editors: While I very much enjoyed reading Fara Dabhoiwala’s “Imperial Delusions” [NYR, July 1], I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at his description of Gandhi as “only a peasant” (in contrast to an All Souls’ don who purported to teach him history during his visit to Oxford in 1931). Gandhi held a […]
• A Warning Ignored
  1. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a twenty-one-year-old African-American, was pulled over in Los Angeles while driving his mother’s Buick, then arrested after failing a sobriety test. In the argument that followed, Frye was struck by the officers as residents began hurling objects at them. Six days of civil unrest that became known as […]
• The Color Line
  W.E.B. Du Bois carried himself as if he were “the Negro race.” Throughout his very long life—ninety-five years—his personal successes and victories were the successes and victories of all African-Americans. The problems he encountered as a Black man were the problems of Black people the world over. This way of thinking started early. His childhood […]
• Marooned!
  History is replete with tales of polar explorations that devolved into ordeals of unimaginable suffering. In May 1845 Sir John Franklin, a veteran British sea captain, set sail from England with 128 crewmen on two naval vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to find the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Two months later, whalers encountered […]
• Nor Gloom of Night
  Ellinor, the protagonist of the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, is a thirty-five-year-old former journalist working as a publicist in Oslo for a three-person agency founded by her mentor, Dag, who has just committed suicide. Ellinor is depressed herself, but her depression, abetted by the short, dark days of an […]
• How Can We Neutralize the Militias?
  As the House impeachment managers proved, Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to act violently not just in the days leading up to the siege of the Capitol on January 6 but for weeks, months, even years preceding it. Republican partisanship prevented the Senate from convicting him of “inciting violence against the Government of the United […]
• Marvel’s Ringmaster
  In the universe of superheroism, hyperbole is the coin of the realm. “The Galactus Trilogy,” a much admired comic book saga published by Marvel in 1966 and taking up three issues of The Fantastic Four, is a not untypical tale of superlatives multiplied and obliteration avoided, emblazoned with the warning “If This Be Doomsday!” The […]
• ‘No One Thinks in Esperanto’
  The letters below are drawn from How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), a collection of the advice columns that Wisława Szymborska wrote anonymously in the Polish journal Życie literackie (Literary Life) from 1960 to 1981.* It was a time, Szymborska later told the interviewer Teresa Walas, when poets were exalted in Poland: “Let’s […]
• George R. Stewart’s Perfect ‘Storm’
  Storm is the second-strangest book ever written about a storm. The strangest, which has never been published in its entirety, is a memoir by the self-taught artist Henry Darger. At approximately 5,000 pages, The History of My Life was one of the shortest things Darger ever wrote (his first novel, The Story of the Vivian […]
• What the US Could Learn About College Admissions from the USSR
  Many of us who grew up in the USSR, as my husband and I did, were inevitably shaped by the worship of knowledge among the Soviet intelligentsia. It was a value that—if any could in that society—transcended politics and official ideology. But in a more practical way, education was also the only ticket to upward […]
• Found in Translation
  On July 12, 2021, we published “When I Lived in French,” an essay by David Hoon Kim. As the title implies, it is a memoir of the writer’s time in France. But it’s also a series of reflections on identity, belonging, and language—the account of a young Korean-American’s becoming himself through his adopted tongue. If […]
• Tokyo Street Theater
  “The culture shock of defeat is my archetypal image,” the photographer Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012) once said. “No matter where I go, I carry the shadow of war.” And Daido Moriyama (born in 1938), whom Tomatsu mentored, declared: “I wanted to go to the end of photography.” The two artists, relatively close in age, began their […]
• Syrians Die in Western Media Darkness
  Last April, Akram Bathiesh, a middle-aged Syrian refugee, died of a heart attack in Denmark, shortly after being told by the authorities that his asylum status had been revoked and he had a month to leave. The Danish government has been reexamining the status of five hundred refugees from Syria, and Bathiesh was among the […]
• Dredging Up the Ever-Living Past
  In the Review’s July 1, 2021, issue, Imani Perry reviewed Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry, a new collection of interviews with the celebrated playwright edited by Mollie Godfrey, and took the opportunity to consider the life of a great American artist whose body of work remains largely unread. Drawing from the years of research that culminated […]
• The Magnificence of the Medicis
  In sixteenth-century Florence, as republican government yielded to rule by the once-exiled Medici clan, a verse of Virgil’s Aeneid began to attain new relevance. In Book Six of that poem, Aeneas is instructed to pluck a golden bough to serve as his passport to the underworld; his guide assures him that “after the first [branch] […]
• Merrick Garland’s Moderation to Excess
  When prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office indicted the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, there was an unusual wrinkle. Most of the allegations in the indictment concerned a federal tax fraud scheme. That, in turn, raised a question: Nearly half a year into Joe Biden’s term and some four months […]
• When I Lived in French
  A year or so before I left Paris, and France, for good, in 2004, I was on my way home after an evening at a friend’s place in the Belleville neighborhood. As I approached the moving walkway in the long subway tunnel connecting Châtelet–Pont au Change to the RER train platforms at Châtelet–Les Halles, I […]
• Ramblin’ Man
  In the July 1, 2021 issue of the magazine, Robert Macfarlane reviews three new books on navigation, both human and animal. The piece expands into a meditation on the value of wayfinding, which Macfarlane describes as “an ethic,” rather than simply the ability to get from points A to B. Wayfinding requires “collaboration and cooperation […]
• New York, Anew
  XUE YANG LIU Cellist with Sonophonix, Private Tutor, Composer “As a performer, we can play and put our sorrow or sadness and all the emotions into playing music for people. As a composer, it was difficult to be inspired or create right away. When you were watching the world falling apart, and people were dying, […]
• A Miniaturist Goes Large
  The first thing you see when you walk into “Extraordinary Realities,” Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s major retrospective at the Morgan Library, is an Indian Devata dancer, gently resting her knee on the shoulder of Aphrodite. Cast in bronze, nearly life-sized, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020) is Sikander’s first sculpture, and her two women only have eyes for […]
• Surprising Consensus at the Supreme Court
  The Supreme Court term that ended July 1 marked the first for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and as a result was the first in which conservatives had a decisive 6–3 majority. Many liberals had braced themselves for the worst, expecting that with the addition of a third Trump-appointed justice, Chief Justice John Roberts would no […]
• Oh, Mood of Alabama
  On June 25, 2021, we published an article by Elizabeth Spiers analyzing the politics behind the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent meeting, at which the SBC narrowly avoided a takeover by ultraconservative hardliners. Spiers, who’s spent many years in the New York mediasphere, grew up Baptist in Alabama and has deep family ties there. She returned […]

New York Times Books©

• A World War II Spy Didn’t Live to Tell Her Tale. Her Great-Great-Niece Will.
  In her book, “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” Rebecca Donner examines the life of Mildred Harnack, part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany.
• Alexandra Kleeman Finds Reality All Too Surreal
  Her latest novel, “Something New Under the Sun,” imagines a highly imaginable California so ravaged by drought and wildfires that only the rich can afford to survive.
• Erik Larson Has a Scary Story He’d Like You to Hear
  After years writing nonfiction, he is now the author of a made-up tale about ghost-hunting that will only be sold as an audiobook.
• 11 New Books Coming in August
  Buzzy new novels from Alexandra Kleeman, Leila Slimani and Stephen King, Billie Jean King’s memoir and plenty more.
• Booker Prize Longlist Is Unveiled
  Rachel Cusk’s “Second Place,” Richard Powers’s “Bewilderment” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” are among the 13 novels nominated for one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.
• Echoes of a Fairy Tale in a Devastating Novel
  Omar El Akkad talks about “What Strange Paradise,” and Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang talk about Facebook and “An Ugly Truth.”
• Think Sustainability Is Simple? This Sheep Farmer Would Like a Word.
  Can farmers make money without wrecking the land? That’s the complex question James Rebanks tries to answer in his new book, “Pastoral Song.”
• A Brief History of Summer Reading
  We rarely talk about spring books or winter reading. What is it about summer that inspired a whole genre of its own?
• Cults, College Dropouts and the Art of Control in Two New Story Collections
  Alix Ohlin’s “We Want What We Want” and Genevieve Plunkett’s “Prepare Her” explore desire and alienation.
• Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80
  A Florentine by birth, he was a polymath as an author and publisher (Kafka, Vedic philosophy, Greek mythology) who reached a wide international readership.
• What to Do This Weekend
  Set your intention for August.
• New in Paperback: ‘Antkind’ and ‘Looking for Miss America’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• Poetry and Politics, HIPAA and Other Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Repression, Obsession, Murder
  Need a distraction? Three prickly, skin-crawling new thrillers will have you on the edge of your seat.
• The Pleasure of Falling Asleep With a Book on Your Face
  Maybe you should just surrender to the sweet slumber.
• Legends Remade: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
  “The World Gives Way,” “The Chosen and the Beautiful” and “Sword Stone Table” borrow from familiar stories but offer surprising readings.
• Eve L. Ewing Adds a Dash of Black Girl Magic to STEM-Based Learning
  In “Maya and the Robot,” a shy brainiac finds, fixes and brings to life an artificially intelligent robot named Ralph.
• An Homage to Black Boyhood From the Creator of Tristan Strong
  Kwame Mbalia and 16 author friends, including Jason Reynolds, Varian Johnson, Tochi Onyebuchi, Dean Atta and Jerry Craft, make an anthology.
• Floyd Cooper, Illustrator of Black Life for Children, Dies at 65
  He sought to revive and recount chapters of African American history that he felt weren’t taught enough in classrooms.
• 11 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Graphic Novelists Who Show Us What Loneliness Means
  In her latest Graphic Content column, Hillary Chute looks at new books from Kristen Radtke and Lizzy Stewart, as well as a first graphic novel from Anne Carson.
• Everything Old Is New Again and Other Best-Selling Wisdom
  A look at this week’s popular novels reminds us that good writing runs in families, wet T-shirts attract attention and you can’t hide from your past.
• Poem: Letter to a Bridge Made of Rope
  In this poem, as in life, what is missed is not what matters most, but how we might be awed by what we notice.
• Phillip Lopate Is No Fan of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’
  “Holden Caulfield irritated me massively.”
• The Imaginary Summer
  Expectation vs. reality.
• This Novel Revisits a Power Broker Who Trod Lightly and Left a Big Footprint
  Andrew Haswell Green accomplished a lot in 19th-century New York, but he was an enigma even in his own time. In “The Great Mistake,” Jonathan Lee imagines his way into Green’s mind.
• Onstage, the Pen Is Usually Duller Than the Sword
  Plays about writers, including “Mr. Fullerton,” a new potboiler probing Edith Wharton’s love life, too often undermine the real brilliance of their subjects.
• Side by Side With Sondheim: Alan Cumming Reviews a New Book About ‘Sunday in the Park’
  In “Putting It Together,” James Lapine recounts how he and Stephen Sondheim created the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical.
• New & Noteworthy, From Horse Girls to an E.R. Doctor’s View of Covid
  A selection of recent titles of note; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Sunday in the Trenches With George
  James Lapine’s book shows how he and Stephen Sondheim invested two years of work to burnish their musical from an avant-garde near-disaster to a mainstream classic.
• Book Review: ‘Afterparties,’ by Anthony Veasna So
  In “Afterparties,” Anthony Veasna So, who died at 28 last year, reimagines California’s Central Valley through the lives of its Cambodian immigrants.
• Finding the ‘Believers’ Who Will Remake a Damaged Earth
  In a travelogue, Lisa Wells searches for communities and individuals committed to healing the damage of climate change.
• What We Learned From Mena Suvari’s Book on the ‘Dark Part’ of Her Life
  In her new memoir, the “American Beauty” and “American Pie” actor opens up about years of sexual abuse and drug addiction, as well as an “eerie” moment with Kevin Spacey.
• The Mystery of My Obsession With Agatha Christie
  People were dying all around me. So why was I escaping into tales of murder?
• A New John Oliver Killens Novel Arrives, Three Decades After His Death
  Killens’s posthumously released novel, “The Minister Primarily,” is a searing and satirical look at race in America.
• Ha Jin Considers the Cost of Freedom in ‘A Song Everlasting’
  Jin’s new novel follows a Beijing opera singer who flees to the United States after he gets in trouble with the Chinese state.
• Sally Miller Gearhart, Lesbian Separatist and Activist, Dies at 90
  She fought anti-gay policies alongside Harvey Milk, wrote influential books, including science fiction, and founded a women-only refuge in the woods.
• The Extraordinary History (and Likely Busy Future) of Quarantine
  “Until Proven Safe,” by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, is about the lifesaving measure that has also been abused for political purposes over the centuries.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• Let’s Not Return to Normal When the ‘New Normal’ Finally Arrives
  The pandemic has revealed higher education’s shortcomings.By Morton O. Schapiro The pandemic has revealed higher education’s shortcomings.
• I Love the Public Humanities, But ...
  Instituted incautiously, they can threaten faculty speech and encourage cash-chasing.By Feisal G. Mohamed Instituted incautiously, they can threaten faculty speech and encourage cash-chasing.
• The Colleges That Prospered During the Pandemic
  A common theme unites Arizona State, Central Florida, Kennesaw State, and others that have thrived.By Phil Hill A common theme unites Arizona State, Central Florida, Kennesaw State, and others that have thrived.
• The Pandemic Hit Female Academics Hardest
  What are colleges going to do about it?By Liz McMillen Women, who were already disproportionately burdened, have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. How should institutions of higher learning respond?
• Full Metal Racket
  The glory of the generals and the expertise of the professors converge — for the worse. By Matthew Carey Salyer The glory of the generals and the expertise of the professors converge — for the worse.
• Magical Thinking on Positive Psychology
  The field's founder can't see past his own hype. By Jesse Singal The field's founder can't see past his own hype.
• The Pernicious Fantasy of the Nikole Hannah-Jones Saga
  Her success is not a collective victory for Black academics.By Jason England Her success is not a collective victory for Black academics.
• Classic Books or Diverse Books?
  That's a false binary.By Roosevelt Montás That's a false binary.
• The Culture War Has Come for Higher Ed
  Now is the time for academic leaders to fight.By Brendan Cantwell Now is the time for academic leaders to fight.
• An Unconvincing Argument for the Liberal Arts
  We say we prepare students for undefined futures. Are they better for it?By Timothy Burke We say we prepare students for undefined futures. Are they better for it?