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

• Second Hand News
  Partway through David Adjmi’s new narrative play, Stereophonic, five musicians and singers, assembled behind a recording studio’s glass window, workshop their new material live on stage. They start and stop, allowing the flame of their artistry to die out and reignite as they try out ideas. Awash in Jiyoun Chang’s immaculate lighting design, the band […]
• In the Heart of Bahia
  For Americans trying to understand Brazilian history, it may help to think of Brazil’s North as akin to the American South and the Brazilian South as resembling our North. It was in Brazil’s coastal Northeast, more than a century before Jamestown, that the Portuguese established their first permanent settlements. In colonial times a plantation-based monoculture […]
• Meloni’s Cultural Revolution
  For months now an enormous excavating machine has been drilling deep into central Rome beneath Piazza Venezia, at the foot of the looming Victor Emmanuel II National Monument—a white marble pile of steps and columns that is probably the closest we will ever get to experiencing the grandeur of ancient Rome. Also known as the […]
• Visible and Invisible Worlds
  While our brains do not simply mirror our surroundings, animals—nonhuman and human—are exquisitely embedded, suspended, in nature’s energies.
• No Comfort
  As we encounter Shakespeare’s tragedies it becomes terrifyingly clear that we are not in a moral universe of comeuppances and rewarded virtues.
• Daily Verses: 16
  Today I feel on my tongue the bitternessof being. I feel the anguish enterthrough my feet. The day grows thinas a thread. Already the light is sticky porridge.All the pigs scream. The pigs? The pigsof din and racket, the machines stalkingthe streets, our overheated masters.It triumphs over the weary shellsof my eyelids, the itch of […]
• Mexico’s Politics of Bitterness
  On the eve of Mexico’s presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador maintains a high approval rating. But his constitutional chicanery and disregard for the law have undermined democracy, and his divisive rhetoric has polarized the country.
• The Workings of the Spirit
  A new history of Christianity traces a thousand-year history of its transformation from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity.
• Fanon the Universalist
  Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism.
• Neglecting Beckett
  James Marsh’s biopic Dance First runs into some predictable problems in adapting the life of a writer, especially one as recognizable as Samuel Beckett.
• Let There Be Light
  The new installation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s refurbished European Paintings galleries brings masterpieces of the collection into exhilarating juxtaposition with one another.
• The Best Time of His Life
  Vinson Cunningham’s novel Great Expectations is nominally about the experiences of an Obama campaign staffer but is really a glimpse into the formation of a critical mind.
• Best in Show
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• Georgia Erupts
  I’ve visited Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, several times over the past few years. It’s a likable place, with rich cultural offerings, fine food and wine, and hospitable people. This March, however, the city seemed gripped by a sense of unease. Everyone I spoke to on my visit—politicians, civil society activists, and […]
• Why Not Memes?
  The first essay by Lauren Michele Jackson that I ever read was published in the summer of 2020, a week or so into the protests following the death of George Floyd. Many media outlets and English departments had published an “anti-racist reading list” or “anti-racist syllabus,” and a swarm of more or less identical essays on the […]
• Is Israel Committing Genocide?
  I have been engaged for six decades in the human rights movement, which has endeavored to restore peace by enforcing International Humanitarian Law. Can the law bring a measure of justice to the victims of Israel’s and Hamas’s violence?
• A View from Cairo
  In February satellite photographs of a new militarized buffer zone along Egypt’s border with Gaza circulated online. The Egyptian government was silent about the matter for a few days, then said that the area was being prepared so that aid trucks could enter the besieged Palestinian territory through the Rafah border crossing. Unnamed Egyptian officials also told NPR and […]
• Reading, Reading, Reading
  Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker’s review of a recent translation of The Wall, a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: “Why write? Why describe your life for others? Why do anything at all?” […]
• UCLA: Whose Violence?
  Around 10:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 2, a handful of volunteer attorneys stood on a small lawn sandwiched between two jails, waiting for protesters arrested within UCLA’s Palestine solidarity encampment to be released from custody. One of the lawyers made a noise of disbelief and held their phone out to show the others […]
• Inside Uber’s Political Machine
  In 2016, near the end of his second term as president, Barack Obama was asked what he planned to do on returning to civilian life. He gave a one-word reply: “Uber.” The joke suggested two changes that had occurred during his presidency. First, Uber had become a verb; the idea of “ubering” was commonplace. Second, […]
• In Harvard Yard
  When students set up the tents at Harvard on April 24, I was standing with the police on the steps of the building that houses the president’s office. The NYPD had already made its first round of arrests at Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment, and two days earlier faculty and students had been arrested trying to […]
• Death and Detention on the Texas Border 
  It began as a small group: a few dozen travelers drifting towards the border, full of fear and hope, united in the belief that they could change their fates. Well-wishers along the route gathered to bid them good luck, to pray for them, to remind them that they were on a righteous path. The group’s […]
• More Real Than Life
  What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around online. In it, he observed that as the publicly accessible Internet gets more hostile, besieged by “the ads, the tracking, the […]
• Dancing on the Page
  “How do I capture what happened—and what moved me—during a performance that most of my readers will never have a chance to see?”
• Triumphs of Skepticism
  Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.
• The Whistleblower We Deserve
  The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.
• Translation Without Angels
  I was given an idea of the good and I was taken quickly from the same idea, though at first it was as simple as a tree I saw the ground, conserving summer, populate with geese, some deer, the pachysandra. The good was what I had without myself. When I describe it now, the whole […]
• ‘A Long-Tongue Saga’
  The novel Divine Days by Leon Forrest, reissued after three decades, is over a thousand pages that elicit from the reader every emotion from awe to exasperation.
• Self-Portrait of the US as Conjoined Twins
  It was there since the beginning:                                                            the white rope, eye splice                                         uniting us                                                            between two bodies                                   we were sewn                                             together                                                            tethered                                                            by a single                                                            fratricidal heart                                              one tree                                              we split                                                         in                                                            two                                                            I dreamed rebellion                    (to pare the pair of us)                                                            our parallel lives                                                            a double-barreled shotgun   I had to free myself from you   me […]
• Supersize That?
  New supertall skyscrapers planned for Manhattan will reduce the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the scale of souvenir tchotchkes. With the current glut of unoccupied office space, they may be the last of their kind.
• ‘Give Me Joy’
  Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology.
• Big Germany, What Now?
  The post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans, is asking which way Germany—the most powerful country in the European Union—will go.
• Perpetual Expectation
  The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.
• The Woman in the Well
  In Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a dissatisfied Italian everywoman starts keeping a diary, and eventually her own thoughts become too much to bear.
• Transatlantic Flights
  The collected poems of Denise Levertov and Anne Stevenson suggest what a poet can gain by expatriation, in both directions between England and the United States.
• Safe Havens
  The UK’s ”second empire” of tax-free jurisdictions around the world persists despite the overwhelming evidence that it enables corruption, drains public budgets, and exacerbates inequality.
• Ecstasy’s Odyssey
  When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to "a low-calorie martini."
• How Bondage Built the Church
  Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance.
• Dr. B
  Jill Biden is a barrier-breaking national figure. What are we to make of the wholesome, at times bland story she tells about herself?
• The Immunity Con
  On April 25 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. United States, on whether a former president enjoys immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. The Court did not need to accept the case; it could easily have passed on former President Donald Trump’s extraordinary claims of blanket immunity and allowed […]
• Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism
  A method of judicial interpretation that looks only to the original meaning of legal texts risks producing a Constitution and laws that no one would want.
• Storm Over Columbia
  On December 24, 2023, the NYR Online published an essay by Nadia Abu El-Haj about the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech at Columbia University and Barnard College, where she holds the Ann Whitney Olin professorship in the anthropology department and codirects the Center for Palestine Studies. “Since the start of the latest Israel–Palestine war,” she wrote, […]
• Haiti on the Precipice
  On Thursday Ariel Henry formally resigned as prime minister of Haiti. Few were grateful for his service. Over thirty-two months, the longest premiership since 1987, Henry presided over a country where life grew steadily worse. For the past five years armed groups had terrorized the capital, Port-au-Prince; in January they intensified their assault. On February […]
• Photographing a Lost New York
  In the fall of 1966, when I was twenty-four, I returned to New York. I was finally completing the journey home I had begun when I left New Orleans in the winter of 1964. My friend, the sculptor Mark di Suvero, lived in a building on the corner of Fulton and Front Streets; I looked […]
• Migrant Workers in Their Own Land
  At the start of last October over 200,000 Palestinians worked in Israel. Mostly they labored in construction and, to a lesser extent, in agriculture: leaving their homes in the morning, showing their work permits at checkpoints, building houses and roads, harvesting fruit and vegetables, then returning in the evening. At least 150,000 were from the […]
• A Curious Temperament
  “I don’t have any programmatic agenda for art, merely a hope to cut through received patterns of thought.”
• The Company She Keeps
  In 1988 Vaslav Nijinsky visited the dancer and choreographer Molissa Fenley in her New York City studio. He had been dead for nearly forty years—longer than Fenley had been alive. But as she worked on a wrenching, thirty-five-minute solo called State of Darkness, set to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), she couldn’t shake […]
• In Gaza’s Hospitals
  I was born in the spring of 1999 in the village of Khuza’a, east of the city of Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip. My family comes from a village called Salama, near Jaffa on the Palestinian coast, from which they were displaced by Zionist forces in 1948. Khuza’a was a place of green fields […]
• Catching the Moment
  John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?
• Israel: The Way Out
  If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some unpleasant though obvious facts.
• Nature’s Rival
  Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.
• Wanting for Nothing
  Seen from a certain perspective, Constance Debré’s recent trilogy of novels—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Nom (Name)—looks ready-made to appeal to audiences hungry for autobiographical tales of female self-emancipation. The books are based on events from Debré’s own life, the facts of which are as follows: born into an illustrious French family, Debré grew up […]
• ‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’
  The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of Black artistic practices and styles.
• The Passion of Martha Graham
  The job of the biographer who sets out to write about a great artist lies in part in resolving the tug-of-war between the life and the work. The two are intimately connected, but a body of work is never fully explained by the experiences, psychology, love affairs, or cultural setting of the person who created […]
• Clamoring for Life
  Though exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in Gabriel García Márquez's work, only in his last novel, Until August, is a woman the uncontested protagonist on her own journey of self-discovery.
• How American Eyes Got Modern
  The mid-century ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.
• What’s in a Face?
  Two recent books of photographs by David Serry and Robert Stothard suggest there is no truth to the notion of a “Jewish race" with any unifying physical characteristics.
• Flight Across the Heather
  pace out the terrain bait the line with herring plant kale talk about the weather separate rumor from intelligence phrase against the pulse * bog has suffered damage the drained sites prone to scrub invasion slow the water flow raise the water table rewet cracked peat brash crushing stump flipping ground smoothing * who cares […]
• Voicemail from the Impaled
  after Ebecho Muslimova The branch grows into my vaginaand exits my mouth.Like sellers of fine carpets, leaves unfoldtheir new colors at my lips.The lovers walk the scrawny pathto visit at their assigned hours.The one who is meanest is the one I most love.He brings me a fish full of needles.I am happy to providefor everyone […]
• Burning Up
  Reading John Vaillant's Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell's The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we're no longer thinking straight.
• The Must-Also-Haves
  In Nicole Eisenman's paintings and sculptures, a system’s impending demise may reveal itself in feverish hilarity.

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.
• What Romance Book Should You Read Next?
  Looking for an escapist love story? Here are 2023’s sexiest, swooniest reads.
• What Book Should You Read Next?
  Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.
• Queen of the Book Club
  Sitting down for lunch with Reese Witherspoon, whose book picks have become a force in the publishing industry.
• Reese Witherspoon’s Literary Empire
  When her career hit a wall, the Oscar-winning actor built a ladder made of books — for herself, and for others.
• Book Review: ‘Mood Swings,’ by Frankie Barnet
  In Frankie Barnet’s novel, “Mood Swings,” two young women work to craft meaningful lives as society collapses around them.
• Book Review: ‘Wait,’ by Gabriella Burnham
  In “Wait,” Gabriella Burnham examines island life from a fresh angle.
• Why Did the First Space Shuttle Disaster Happen?
  Adam Higginbotham discusses his new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.”
• Alta, Irreverent Feminist Poet and Small-Press Pioneer, Dies at 81
  She wrote lusty work about her life. She also started what may have been America’s first feminist press, Shameless Hussy, in her garage.
• Book Review: ‘Night Stories: Folktales From Latin America,’ by Liniers, and ‘Plain Jane and the Mermaid,’ by Vera Brosgol
  A comics collection’s sibling narrators and a graphic novel’s hapless heroine change their stories as they go along.
• PEN America’s Literary Gala Goes Forward After a Season of Protest
  The free-expression group has been engulfed by debate over its response to the Gaza war that forced the cancellation of its literary awards and annual festival.
• 6 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• Overlooked No More: Bill Hosokawa, Journalist Who Chronicled Japanese American History
  He fought prejudice and incarceration during World War II to lead a successful career, becoming one of the first editors of color at a metropolitan newspaper.
• In the Corporate World, Woke Is the Rage but Greed Is Still King
  Three new books chronicle businesses where executive self-enrichment at the expense of workers — and sometimes the law — prevails.
• Interview: Kara Walker on Her Collaboration With Jamaica Kincaid
  Audiobooks have let the artist “stay invested in stories while working with my hands.” Her new project: illustrating Jamaica Kincaid’s “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children.”
• A Leading Free Expression Group Is Roiled by Dissent Over Gaza
  As it cancels events amid criticism of its response to the Israel-Hamas war, PEN America faces questions about when an organization devoted to free speech for all should take sides.
• Book Review: ‘Massacre in the Clouds,’ by Kim A. Wagner
  In a new book, the historian Kim A. Wagner investigates the slaughter by U.S. troops of nearly 1,000 people in the Philippines in 1906 — an atrocity long overlooked in this country.
• Book Review: ‘Henry Henry,’ by Allen Bratton
  Allen Bratton’s novel transforms the rise of Henry V into a contemporary story about a brash gay man grappling with abuse and guilt.
• Book Review: ‘Our Kindred Creatures,’ by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
  “Our Kindred Creatures” details the rise, and contradictions, of the animal welfare movement.
• Alice Munro, a Literary Alchemist Who Made Great Fiction From Humble Lives
  The Nobel Prize-winning author specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope, spanning decades with intimacy and precision.
• Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92
  Her stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes.
• Book Review: ‘The Race to the Future,’ by Kassia St. Clair
  In “The Race to the Future,” Kassia St. Clair chronicles the 8,000-mile caper that helped change the landscape forever.
• Finding Beauty in the Chaos, and God in Cherry Blossoms
  Tracing his path from homelessness to proud parenthood, the writer Carvell Wallace recounts a lifetime of joy and pain in his intimate memoir.
• Book Review: ‘Chasing Hope,’ by Nicholas D. Kristof
  In “Chasing Hope,” the veteran Times journalist remembers the highs and lows of his storied career.
• Book Review: ‘Morning After the Revolution,’ by Nellie Bowles
  In “Morning After the Revolution,” an attack on progressive activism, the journalist Nellie Bowles relies more on sarcasm than argument or ideas.
• Book Review: ‘Skies of Thunder,’ by Caroline Alexander
  In the riveting “Skies of Thunder,” Caroline Alexander considers what it took to get supplies to Allied ground troops in China.
• Book Review: ‘Late Admissions,’ by Glenn C. Loury
  The professor and social commentator Glenn Loury opens up about his vices in a candid new memoir.
• Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad?
  A new book, “The Light Eaters,” looks at how plants sense the world and the agency they have in their own lives.
• Book Review: ‘Challenger,’ by Adam Higginbotham
  As recounted in Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger,” the 1986 tragedy that riveted a nation was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error.
• Book Review: ‘Fat Leonard,’ by Craig Whitlock
  In “Fat Leonard,” Craig Whitlock investigates one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. military history.
• Book Review: ‘Chop Fry Watch Learn,’ by Michelle T. King
  As Michelle T. King demonstrates in this moving and ambitious biography, Fu Pei-mei was far more than “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”
• Book Review: ‘All Fours,’ by Miranda July
  An anxious artist’s road trip stops short for a torrid affair at a tired motel. In “All Fours,” the desire for change is familiar. How to satisfy it isn’t.
• Book Review: ‘We Were the Universe,’ by Kimberly King Parsons
  In Kimberly King Parsons’s witty, profane novel, “We Were the Universe,” a young mother seeks to salve a profound loss.
• Book Review: ‘Rebel Girl,’ by Kathleen Hanna
  In her intimate memoir, “Rebel Girl,” the punk-rock heroine Kathleen Hanna recalls a life of trauma, triumph and riot grrrl rebellion.
• On Mother’s Day, Here Are 2 Novels That Get Babies Right
  Barbara Kingsolver’s debut, and a bad seed’s beginnings.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• What Every Student Needs to Read Now
  In the wake of the protests, 22 scholars recommend books to make sense of this moment. Animation by The Chronicle; iStock // for full bleed half split - figure's parent container shouldn't calc max-height // and should be set to 100% instead - querySelector === baseClassName let parent = document.querySelector('figure.FullBleedFigureHalfSplit').parentElement parent.style.maxHeight = "100%" In the wake of the protests, 22 scholars recommend books to make sense of this moment.