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

• Aleksei Navalny, Ready to Run Again in Russia
  Though not yet restored to full health, Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny is recovering in Germany from the poisoning that almost killed him and is preparing to return to Russia to continue his fight for democracy. As he shared on Instagram last week, with a photo of himself in a tracksuit, he was about to […]
• The Renewable Energy Rebels
  Lockport, New York—On a cold evening in November last year (when we still held such large gatherings), more than two hundred people crowded into a fire department meeting hall in rural Gasport, New York, to listen to a man named Charlie Fendt speak about the dangers of solar power. An emergency management consultant from Rochester, […]
• The Mystery of the Missing Viola
  “Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupin.—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” A couple of years ago, my wife discovered that some pieces of jewelry were missing from a box in her closet. They had belonged to her grandmother, and were a gift from her mother. My wife filed a police report. […]
• On Race and Property in the South
  On November 19, 2020, we published Shirley Elizabeth Thompson’s “Georgia On My Mind,” the author’s reflection on her hometown of Atlanta—of growing up amid gentrification, white flight, integration, and other lingering effects of segregation—while she watched the state’s critical election returns. The Biden-Harris win in Georgia, along with those in Michigan and Pennsylvania, was crucial […]
• ‘This Planet is Our Spaceship’: An Interview with Cauleen Smith
  In September, the Whitney reopened “Mutualities,” the first New York solo show of multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith, with the addition of five of her “In the Wake” banners from the museum’s collection. These works—colorful, blood-spattered fabric updates on medieval-style heraldry—were originally included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and they now hang from the ceiling on […]
• An Island at the Crossroads
  Okinawa, the largest island in a subtropical archipelago south of Japan known as the Ryukyus, is seventy miles long and seven miles wide. At its northern tip is Cape Hedo, where the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea converge. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Ryukyu Kingdom was at the center of […]
• A Well-Ventilated Conscience
  About halfway through the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the eponymous narrator complains, “the main problem with this book is you, the reader.” His style of narration, he suspects, has exasperated even those who have made it this far: You’re in a hurry to get old, […]
• The Right to Belong
  If all the stateless people on earth were to form a nation, its population would exceed that of Sweden, Greece, Azerbaijan, or New York City—possibly by a large margin. Some 10 million people worldwide lack citizenship, according to the United Nations, which makes them exceptionally difficult to count. Those not recognized by any state tend […]
• ‘The Splendour and the Sting’
  The name Charlotte Mew glimmers between fame and obscurity, and has now for over a century. She was born in 1869 in London and had exactly one book of poetry to her name when she died by her own hand in 1928. This book, The Farmer’s Bride (1916), sold moderately well and was critically acclaimed […]
• A Noah’s Ark of Books
  For the past seventeen years, Reaktion Books has been publishing a series of volumes under the general rubric “Animal”—attractive duodecimos in uniform paperback editions, printed in color on heavy stock.1 There are ninety-eight of them so far, from Albatross to Zebra, by way of Bedbug, Leech, and Swan. I first came across the series in […]
• The Body in Swooping Close-Up
  The half-stripped woman picked out against the dark in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia is viewed from above, yet as I stand before this yard-high canvas, she seems to bear down on me. Light, here, is weight: the gleam on shoulder, knee, breasts, arm, and neck presses on my eye and there is no distance from the […]
• The Meaning of Home
  In March 2019 Bryan Washington published Lot, a book of short stories set in Houston that created, in brilliant, fragmentary form, the portrait of a person, of a family, and of a large and shifting community. Its Houston was not that of elite institutions and oil-and-gas affluence, but of immigrant communities from Mexico, the Caribbean, […]
• The Plushbottoms of Teton County
  Every year around the holidays my wife and I used to watch a feature-length cartoon called Yogi’s First Christmas. We had recorded it on a video cassette from its original broadcast and we fast-forwarded through the commercials, which seemed to get dumber as they aged, though the cartoon itself held up pretty well. The cast […]
• Europe’s Most Terrible Years
  On August 30, 1939, Franciszek Honiok, a Pole living in the village of Hohenlieben in what was then the German province of Silesia, was picked up off the street by the Gestapo. He was held in solitary confinement until the following day when he was taken to Gleiwitz, near the Polish border. That evening, on […]
• The Oldest Forest
  In periods of collapse, we’re compelled to do things differently as old ways become untenable. We’ve entered the planetary-tantrum phase of climate change, and fossil fuels cannot be abandoned soon enough. Many people have sworn off disposable plastics and meat, but these are just the first and easiest abnegations: soon, even growing food in the […]
• Korea’s Tireless Patriot and Revolutionary
  Not all liberations are complete. For the Korean peninsula, the end of World War II brought freedom from Japan’s colonial rule, but it also sliced the territory in two, a division made permanent by the subsequent Korean War. This was no Korean’s postcolonial dream: the North, under Soviet backing, went to Kim Il-sung, who’d gained […]
• Winter Journey
  Well, it was just as I thought, the path all but obliterated— We had moved then from the first to the second stage, from the dream to the proposition. And look— here is the line between, resembling this line from which our words emerge: moonlight breaks through. Shadows on the snow cast by pine trees. […]
• Ann Quin’s Stalled Talkers
  The novels of the English experimentalist Ann Quin are not like most: although she was loosely affiliated with a movement of pioneering British writers in the 1960s, among them B.S. Johnson and J.G. Ballard, she remains singular in her aversion to the usual strictures of structure. Her books careen wildly among verb tenses and perspectives. […]
• Designing Women
  The daughter lives in a large stone house on an island off the coast of Brittany, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think of her as a princess in a tower. It’s the second half of the eighteenth century, before the Revolution. Her mother has commissioned a portrait of her, to be sent to a […]
• What Matters in Music?
  Richard Taruskin must surely be our most ferociously adversarial writer on music. He has read everything, he argues with everyone, he sets out his views with rhetorical flair, and he has been at the forefront of some of the great musical controversies of our day. He took center stage in the debate around the early […]
• Mouse in the Grocery
  There are no bacon strips this morning so a mouse ponders a pound of sugar. A mouse wants what a mouse wants, salt-cured pork instead of soluble carbs. A mouse is like a heart: it sleeps in winter; it knows uncertain love; it appears to have no gender. Now this mouse regards a woman sprinkling […]
• Object Lessons
  At CalArts in the 1970s I once had a seminar with the poet and maverick art critic David Antin. The dean introduced him at the first class. “So David, we haven’t seen you in a while. What have you been up to?” Antin shot back, “Waiting for minimalism to die.” We’re still waiting. Has there […]
• The Pleasure Crafts
  The Age of Sail meant long and lonely days for whalers and seamen, but it was not without its consolations. Out on the high seas, despite cramped and filthy conditions, rampant scurvy, omnipresent rats, and the threat of tar-and-feathering, a skilled sailor left to his own devices might have occasion to carve out a fine […]
• Remembering Boulez
  To the Editors: As a surviving relic of the “dictature de Boulez” in my student days, I found Matthew Aucoin’s review of Pierre Boulez’s Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures [NYR, November 5] gratifying to read, coming as it does from one of the most respected of today’s composers. In 1959 the French musical […]
• It’s Not Science Fiction
  The prolific science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is at heart an optimist, opens his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, with a long set piece as bleak as it is plausible. Somewhere in a small city on the Gangetic Plain in Uttar Pradesh during the summer of 2025, Frank, a young American working […]
• In Uganda, Another Museveni Crackdown
  When the popular Ugandan singer and opposition politician Bobi Wine was arrested last week, his nation erupted. A huge crowd had gathered in Luuka, just east of the capital Kampala, to hear him speak, when security forces suddenly began firing not only tear gas canisters but also live bullets into the crowd and beating away […]
• The Battle Over Scalia’s Legacy
  The three deeply conservative justices whom Donald Trump named to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—profess adherence to the judicial philosophy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Their appointments all but ensure not only a conservative majority on the Court for years to come but also the transmutation of Scalia’s jurisprudence—based […]
• Death on the Via Dolorosa
  On an unusually warm Saturday morning in late May, Eyad al-Hallaq stepped out of his family’s apartment in Wadi al-Joz, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and walked quickly toward the Old City. It was 6 AM, and al-Hallaq, thirty-one years old and autistic, was excited to finally return to the Elwyn El Quds Special […]
• An Awful and Beautiful Light
  A peculiar aspect of Joan Didion’s nonfiction is that a significant portion of it reads like fiction. Or, more specifically, it has the metaphorical power of great fiction. While younger generations may read her as a window into the mythic 1960s or September 11, it’s impossible not to see, too, how Didion’s examination of racial […]
• The Powerful Reticence of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
  Often, these days, when I’m in a museum or gallery, I find the artwork on offer surrounded by large helpings of didactic wall text telling me how to see what I’m seeing. At the time of the 2019 Venice Biennale, for example, the Palazzo Grassi hosted a Luc Tuymans exhibition in which painting after painting […]
• Holding the Fraudster-in-Chief to Account
  On November 20, 2020, we published “The Case for Prosecuting Trump” by former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori. Without minimizing the political hurdles, Khardori makes persuasive arguments for why we must end “the absence of any accountability” for an administration that “has viewed itself as above the law.” Khardori left the Justice Department, where he investigated financial […]
• The Case for Prosecuting Trump
  When Donald J. Trump leaves office, he will, like many con artists before him, leave behind a huge mess for others to clean up. The pandemic that his administration allowed to spread throughout the country poses a monumental public health challenge for the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris; there […]
• What Did the Democrats Win?
  The minority repeatedly thwarting the will of the majority is intolerable and untenable.
• Georgia On My Mind
  It’s 3:30 AM Friday after Election Day, and I keep nodding off in my phone’s harsh glare, my finger hovering over the refresh button. Screw Pennsylvania and Arizona. Same for Texas—my home of the last twenty years has already let me down with its perennial but ever-postponed promise of turning purple. Now, it’s all about […]
• Can Liberals Win in a Conservative Court?
  President Trump is on his way out the door, even if he goes kicking and screaming. The Biden-Harris administration will have its hands full picking up the pieces. Trump has left the federal government a kind of environmental disaster area, desperately in need of a massive cleanup. No president in US history has done more […]
• An Archaeology of Resistance
  The tale of Scheherazade is one of the cruelest stories about beauty and the vitality of artistic expression. It tells of the relationship between the artist and authority, suggesting that the creative act itself is an act of resistance; it conveys the message that there can be no authentic artistic act without personal risk. Although […]
• On the Far Right and Policing in America
  On November 12, 2020, we published Ali Winston’s “New York’s Finest?”—a report on the New York Police Department’s brutal response to recent protests against police violence, the force’s widespread support for Trump’s reelection, public safety concerns amid the pandemic, and the continuing pursuit of police accountability. Winston’s first piece for us was about the far-right […]
• The Presidential Transition Meets Murphy’s Law
  Trump’s absurd insistence that he “WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” is easy enough to ignore. What is harder to ignore is what his appointee who runs the General Services Administration (GSA) is doing. By statute, the GSA’s administrator has responsibility for ascertaining “the apparent successful candidates for the office of President and Vice President.” […]
• New York’s Finest?
  As 2020’s chaotic presidential election was called last weekend, New York City erupted in a cacophony of joy at Donald Trump’s defeat. America’s largest city endured a grim nadir earlier in the year, with the Covid-19 pandemic killing tens of thousands of New Yorkers and crippling its tourism- and service industry–dependent economy. That damage came […]
• Criminalizing a Constitutional Right
  National discussions of abortion—of any services that might end a pregnancy, make contraception available, or provide other means of regulating one’s capacity to bear children—usually focus on the Supreme Court. But for many Americans, Roe v. Wade might as well have been overturned already. Whether RBG or ACB, five conservative justices or six, many American […]
• The Sense of an Ending
  The Silence is full of voices, a work of talky minimalism whose characters are all troubled by the absence of sound. Five of them, three men and two women: a string quintet, and with the youngest, a high school physics teacher, as a decidedly insistent cello. Noise, chatter, the smother of static, the wearing hum […]
• The Dream of Pure Expression
  Although I have not visited the graveyard in the French town of Sète that is the subject of Paul Valéry’s extraordinary poem “Le Cimetière Marin” (“The Cemetery by the Sea”), I know of a counterpart at the opposite end of the Côte d’Azur, on the Italian border, in Menton. Both cemeteries perch above the Mediterranean, […]
• Cartographers of Stone and Air
  The English writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, who died from Covid-19 in April at the age of eighty-five, dedicated more than forty years of his life to an intensive study of the region that many conceive as Ireland’s heart. Connemara is a small district on the country’s west coast, home to 32,000 people, mostly native […]
• An Undisappearing Act
  There were three people at the funeral of Mary Ellen Meredith when she died at the age of forty, in 1861: two women servants and an acquaintance of her second husband, the poet and novelist George Meredith. No one else came. Not her father, the comic writer Thomas Love Peacock, then in his seventies, nor […]
• In the Soup
  Each human culture has its own origin myths. The Telefol, a mountain people of New Guinea, relate that in the beginning there was a mother called Afek, who had four children: a long-beaked echidna (an egg-laying mammal), a ground cuscus (a cat-sized marsupial), a rat, and a human. The echidna’s eyes were irritated by hearth-smoke, […]
• Making London Their Own
  In Britain, as in the rest of Europe and the US, the Black Lives Matter movement and the severe effects of Covid-19 on Black, Asian, and other ethnic communities have sharply awoken many of us to the nation’s historic institutional racism. A report by Public Health England published in June found that nonwhite Britons had […]
• The Sirens
  First Saturday of the month and unlike the Greeks,sometime ancient cynics of beautyand warning, these sirens at least test the level of dog agony in town. Faint howls. Loud howls.Indifferent howls for the hell of it—surely mutt boredomin alley and yard, new octaves of ache, a high heaven’s blast though now it’s not just ordinary […]
• They Were Hungarians
  To the Editors: Diarmaid MacCulloch’s review of John Anthony McGuckin’s history of the Eastern Orthodox Church [“The Vitality of Orthodoxy,” NYR, July 2] is a concise treasure trove of intriguing detail and insight, but it cries out for one small amplification. When explaining “the respectful attitude of Orthodoxy toward authority,” Professor MacCulloch appropriately points to […]
• A Proper Burial
  To the Editors: In his review of Megan Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives [NYR, November 5], Mike Jay quotes me and summarizes my opinion about a book at the Houghton Library, Harvard, which is bound in human skin. Its owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, had skinned the body of an indigent female patient under his care, and turned […]
• The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It
  There’s an old blues metaphor. You know, Robert Johnson found his sound at the crossroad when he made a deal with the devil. It seems to me that the country is at a crossroad, whether we are going to continue to invest and double down on the ugliness of our racist commitments, or [we’ll] finally […]
• Getting Away With Murder
  Criminal law and its enforcement are notoriously hypocritical. It is bad enough that, as Anatole France wrote in 1894, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” But now, more than a century later, even the […]
• Life, Death, and the Levys
  Salonica, the historic city on the Aegean Sea (now called Thessaloniki), was at the turn of the twentieth century probably as close to paradise as a European Jew was likely to get. The salon cultures of Berlin, Vienna, or Paris may have been more glittering, but there Jews sat uneasily on the edges of elite […]
• ‘Something Resembling Normal Life’
  “Whenever I go to North Korea,” Immanuel Kim told an interviewer in 2017, “I see people reading.” In the metro, in elevators, in buses and restaurants. But what were they reading, in a state unrivaled in the harshness of its censorship? As a graduate student at the University of California at Riverside studying Korean literature, […]
• Suffering, Unfaltering Manet
  During a visit to the eighty-five-year-old Claude Monet in the summer of 1926, Florence Gimpel, the wife of the Parisian art dealer René Gimpel, asked her host if he had known Édouard Manet. “Yes, he was a great friend, a great friend,” was the response. Monet told Gimpel that on April 29, 1883, he had […]
• J.M.W. Turner, Radical Critic of the Anthropocene
  Who knew that the postmodern Armageddon would feel quite so peaceful? On a bright autumn morning, as the pandemic’s second wave rolls in, the streets of Westminster are quieter than on a Sunday dawn. Here, the British state and its offshoots—the public bodies, the think tanks, the charities—normally throng and hum. But the state and […]
• The Power Brokers
  In the spring of 1870 Congress was in the process of debating the Indian Appropriations Bill. While the bill’s main purpose was to renew or enhance funding for Native peoples and communities, it contained a rider that finally formally ended what is known as the treaty period of federal Indian policy: no longer would Indian […]
• Dudes Without Heirs
  Translations of Beowulf are often judged by their first word. “Hwæt,” that enigmatic monosyllable, became a stately “behold” or “lo” in older versions of the epic. Modern poets have used their choice here as a calling card, announcing their intentions with more or less boldness. They have transformed “hwæt” into a firm “listen,” a laid-back […]
• Songs of Loss and Reinvention
  There are two stories that humans have, since the first civilizations, been telling ourselves about migration. One is about the curse of wandering, the loss of Paradise when expelled from one’s birthplace. The other recounts how, in order to create anything new, we must break away from our suffocating places of origin and set out […]
• Bolivia’s Tarnished Savior
  Flying over the Andes in the dead of night, you know you’ve reached Bolivia because towns and villages become visible: neat crosshatches of light, every street illuminated. The terminal at El Alto International Airport may not have the best design or the most punctilious construction standards, but in the freezing predawn of this high plateau—the […]
• How Trump Won
  With Donald Trump’s electoral loss, the great evasion begins. To put an era of horror and recrimination behind, and embrace a restoration of business as usual, is an inevitable temptation. After the celebration and self-congratulation end, there may be a few fixes to hem in a future leader as openly corrupt as Trump—but not to […]
• Canción
  They called him Canción because he used to be a butcher. Not because he was a musician. Not because he was a singer (he couldn’t even sing). But because when he got out of jail in Puerto Barrios, where he’d been sent for holding up a gas station, he worked for a time in Doña […]
• How Trump Lost
  The roots of Donald Trump’s reelection defeat can be traced to the early summer of 2016, when he made a fateful bargain with his own party. In June of that year, House Speaker Paul Ryan—who had pointedly refused to endorse Trump even after he became the de facto Republican nominee—finally caved. Or that’s the way […]
• Framing Life in a Conflict Zone
  On November 6, 2020, we published Jehad al-Saftawi’s photo-essay “The Gaza I Grew Up In,” an adaptation from his book My Gaza: A City in Photographs, which is forthcoming from McSweeney’s. Today, the twenty-nine-year-old photojournalist lives with his wife, Lara, in California, where they have sought asylum, but his work here dates from his years […]
• The Gaza I Grew Up In
  My name is Jehad al-Saftawi. I am a photographer and journalist. For years, I clung to the idea of fleeing my country for the Western world. There is no free press in Gaza. Most of the news channels cater to political parties that use violence to silence opposition. I come from a place overflowing with […]
• News From Elsewhere
  Europe Across Europe, rates of coronavirus infection have been rising steeply, prompting a wave of restrictions and lockdowns. In the UK, a full national lockdown was resumed on Thursday for the first time in months; the day before had seen the country’s second-highest number of daily cases, and nearly five hundred deaths. Prime Minister Boris […]
• Fall Films to Stream
  Nationtime, streaming now on KinoMarquee, by the independent director William Greaves (1926–2014), is a double rediscovery. The movie is a newly excavated and restored artifact documenting a largely forgotten event in American history, the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, in mid-March 1972. Called by Gary’s mayor, Richard Hatcher, one of the first […]
• Democracy’s Afterlife
  It is an infallible law that if Seamus Heaney is the Irish poet of choice, things are looking up, but if W.B. Yeats is in the air, they look ominous. Joe Biden at the National Democratic Convention in August created great expectations with Heaney’s “once in a lifetime/…longed-for tidal wave/Of justice.” But there is no […]
• Illegal Milk
  I had no idea what we were doing was illegal. I was six at the time. And not well-versed in the milk pasteurization laws of Prince Edward Island. And yet, there I was. With my grandfather and father. Three generations. Bandits all. Breaking the law. My grandfather, for background, was born on his family’s farm […]

New York Times Books©

• Times Critics’ Top Books of 2020
  The Times’s staff critics give their choices of the best fiction and nonfiction works of the year.
• Times Critics Discuss 2020 in Books, From ‘Pandemic Blur’ to Favorite Discoveries
  The Times’s staff critics talk with one another about the reading they did in 2020, on and off the job.
• One Whodunit Nests Inside Another in ‘Moonflower Murders’
  Anthony Horowitz’s new meta-mystery features possible clues to a murder inside an Agatha Christie-like novel.
• Homeira Qaderi Wants Her Son to Know Her, So She Wrote a Book
  When the Taliban halted education for girls, this young activist fought to find her voice as a writer. Now she’s using it to make herself heard.
• Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House
  These books will help us feel a little bit better about being stuck inside.
• Talking About the 10 Best Books of 2020
  On a special episode of the podcast, taped live, editors from The New York Times Book Review discuss this year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction.
• Books to Read and Reread
  In excerpts from a new collection, the former Times critic explores some of her favorite books, now with reimagined covers.
• Alison Lurie, Tart-Voiced Novelist of Manners, Dies at 94
  Ms. Lurie wrote about academics and intellectuals, straying spouses, snobs and artists, in novels of close observation and sharp prose.
• Miguel Algarín, Force Behind Nuyorican Cafe, Dies at 79
  His Lower East Side performance space has been an incubator for poets, playwrights and other artists, many of them not initially embraced by the mainstream.
• 11 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The Times.
• Dolly Parton Likes to Read by the Fire in Her Pajamas
  “Especially on a rainy day off … sitting in a comfy chair.”
• Coffee-Table Books to Give (and Get) This Season
  Bridging the literary and aesthetic worlds, some of the year’s best large-scale, illustrated hardcovers offer immersion and escape — right from your living room.
• Poem: The Body Electric
  A poem with a breath that moves from the intimate to the vast, from solitude to community.
• Meet Chloe Gong, One of the Year’s Youngest Best-Selling Authors
  The 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania student got her start as an obsessive, book-a-day reader of young adult fiction.
• Stacey Abrams has written 8 romance novels. Now her fellow authors are raising money for Georgia Democrats.
• J.R.R. Tolkien House Comes on the Market
  Literary fans and celebrities who starred in Tolkien films start a crowdfunding campaign to preserve the house.
• The Best Children’s Books of 2020
  The most notable picture, middle grade and young adult books of the year, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.
• A Skeptical Heroine, Unconvinced by Religion, Romance or Psychoanalysis
  Susan Taubes’s newly reissued novel “Divorcing” introduces an untethered and remarkably modern protagonist.
• ‘Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to her Son,’ by Homeira Qaderi: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to her Son,” by Homeira Qaderi
• ‘Black Futures,’ by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Black Futures,” by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
• How to Pretend You’re in Tokyo
  That Tokyo trip will have to wait for the millions of people who canceled flights and hotel bookings. But there are ways to bring you closer to this sometimes impenetrable, always fascinating, city.
• The Rich, Literary Life of the Creator of America’s Favorite Girl Spy
  “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” a biography by Leslie Brody of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of “Harriet the Spy,” reveals a writer who had much in common with her indelible characters.
• ‘Ordesa’ Is a Meditation on Yearning, Solitude and Family
  In Manuel Vilas’s novel, a writer takes stock of his past and the changing face of Spain.
• It’s the End of Humanity. Maybe It’s for the Best.
  In “Dissipatio H.G.,” by Guido Morselli, every human in the world vanishes. Except one.
• New & Noteworthy, From Cheese to Player Two
  A selection of recent books of interest; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• Why Can’t Women Be Serial Killers, Too?
  In Chelsea G. Summers’s “A Certain Hunger,” a psychopathic food critic literally consumes the men she targets.
• In America, Is Power in the Hands of Too Many ‘Mediocre’ Men?
  In her new book, Ijeoma Oluo traces the history of white American manhood from Buffalo Bill to contemporary football to show how violence and opportunism have helped white men maintain a grip on power.
• A Warlord’s Memoir Is Surprisingly Modern and Charming, When It’s Not Gruesome
  “The Babur Nama” is the autobiography of the polymathic founder of the Mughal dynasty.
• Book Review: ‘Black Futures,’ by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
  In “Black Futures,” Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham compile a nonlinear, multimedia compendium to inspire readers of all races to fight for racial justice.
• Things To Do At Home
  This week, listen to the music of Billie Holiday, attend a fashion workshop or get your tarot cards read.
• Malgré l’affaire Matzneff, le milieu littéraire reste muré dans l’entre-soi
  Le scandale autour de l’écrivain pédophile a levé le voile sur l’hermétisme du monde de l’édition en France, où les prix s’attribuent souvent entre amis.
• Pedophile Scandal Can’t Crack the Closed Circles of Literary France
  The scandal surrounding the writer Gabriel Matzneff was not limited to his pedophilia. It also opened a window on the entrenched and clubby nature of many of France’s elite institutions.
• Her Antenna Is Tuned to the Quietest Voices
  Yu Miri won a National Book Award for “Tokyo Ueno Station,” a novel whose main character is the ghost of a homeless construction worker.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• We Deserve Better From Our Public Intellectuals
  On Kate Manne's new book, incels, and the perils of public philosophy.
• The Moral Contortions of the New University
  Intellectual curiosity has been replaced by pro forma attention to representation.
• Academe's Disturbing Indifference to Racism
  College presidents are more concerned with reputation management than racial justice.
• A Reason to Be Skeptical of ‘College for All’
  Academic champions of such plans will benefit from them. But will students?
• The Right-Wing Medievalist Who Refused the Loyalty Oath
  On Ernst Kantorowicz, academic freedom, and “the secret university.”
• Where Academic Freedom Ends
  Modeling professorial speech rights on the First Amendment is destructive — and wrong.
• 'Wagner Was the Original Canceled Artist'
  Alex Ross on the controversial composer and his own "ghost identity" as an academic.
• The Faux Righteousness of Test-Optional Admissions
  Colleges pretend it's an honorable sacrifice. Not exactly.
• 'Changing How We Write Is Not Going to Solve the Hiring Crisis'
  Rita Felski on enjoyment, criticism, attachment, and the future of literary studies.
• What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education
  If the Democrat wins, he will have to govern by executive order, much as his predecessor did.