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

• The Enduring Promise of Moral Capitalism
  In our May 27, 2021 issue, we published Michael Kazin’s “Ending the Kennedy Romance,” a review of the first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK. Kazin begins with a question: “Why, nearly six decades after his murder, do Americans still care so much about and, for the most part, continue to think so highly […]
• The King of Little England
  In On the Genealogy of Morality Friedrich Nietzsche considers the nature of revenge. People with power, he suggests, can take a literal revenge on their enemies: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. People with little or no power, Nietzsche writes, when “denied the proper response of action, compensate for it […]
• Open Letter: A Halt to New Delhi’s Demolitions
  We, the undersigned, call for an immediate halt to the Central Vista Redevelopment Project undertaken by the Indian government, which commenced in December 2020. The designation of this scheme as an “essential service” invites fresh scrutiny of the plan. It is especially troubling that this extravagant project is moving ahead in the midst of a […]
• Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence
  In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. One of the courses was the literature of the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt was on the syllabus. In his five-page discussion of those […]
• Modi’s Folly
  At a cost of $2 billion to the national purse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is building a monument to himself in Delhi. This revamp of the Central Vista, an architecturally imposing two-mile stretch of British imagination at the heart of the Indian capital, is supposed to symbolize a new, self-sufficient India, finally out from the […]
• Crossing the ‘Pink Line’
  On May 3, 2021, we published “‘Moffie’ and Me,” Mark Gevisser’s essay about several recent South African films that address the militarist cult of homophobic masculinity in the late apartheid era. The main film under review, Moffie, takes its title from a derogatory term for a gay man used in South Africa. This was no […]
• The Paranoid Style in Adam Curtis
  Filmmaker and journalist Adam Curtis has been working at the BBC since 1980, institutionally blessed for over forty years. He’s made more than twenty films and television series that exploit his unfettered access to the BBC archives. In them, he stitches together previously shot footage to explore, in an open-ended and seductive style, historical figures […]
• Santiago de Compostela
  Light drizzle as if the Atlanticwere examining its conscienceNovember no longer pretendsRain dowsed its bonfires and sparksSantiago is Spain’s secret capitalPatrols arrive day and nightPilgrims wander its streets, exhaustedor eager, like ordinary touristsA woman sat by the cathedralShe leaned on her backpack and sobbedThe pilgrimage is overWhere will she go nowCathedrals are only stonesStones don’t […]
• Russian Metamorphoses
  Teffi was so adored in prerevolutionary Russia that a chocolate candy was named after her, with her pretty face on its brightly colored wrapper. She was a well-regarded poet and a successful dramatist, but it was the feuilletons and funny stories that Teffi wrote for newspapers and magazines that made her a star. In 1910 […]
• The Rules of the Confidence Game
  In the early thirteenth century a column of light blazed from the top of a shaykh’s head when he walked home at night. It lit up his surroundings as if it were day, astonishing all who observed him. When he led prayers, his halo filled the dark corners of the mosque, and the people lavished […]
• It
  The sky grayed and it was possible to name objects. They didn’t yet call out to me. This happened only when the sun touched their skins. Then they would do tricks. Perhaps a silverbracelet of raindropssuspended from a bonethin twig, almost a crib mobile. But now I’ve called it several things.
• A Snob’s Progress
  “I am very fond of Chips,” the London society hostess Maud Cunard declared in 1926, “and so is everyone else.” “I seem,” Chips himself remarked a few months earlier, “to be enormously popular.” Fondness and popularity are transient things, and Henry “Chips” Channon, a busy socialite and minor MP, would now be a mere footnote […]
• ‘Lost, at Sea, at Odds’
  Another language, another soul. In her first book written in Italian, In altre parole (In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein), Jhumpa Lahiri explains how she reached what to many people seemed a baffling decision: to forsake English, the language in which her four previous books had been written and published to immense critical and […]
• The Wrong Culprit
  To the Editors: In her lively, wide-ranging, and learned review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople: A Human History [NYR, March 25], Marina Warner states that “Proteus, whom Homer calls the Old Man of the Sea, savagely rapes Thetis, the sea goddess; the child of this union is Achilles.” She identifies her source for this unusual paternity […]
• Whose Liberation?
  To the Editors: In “No More Mother-Saviors,” [NYR, April 29], Sophie Pinkham begins her review of three books of Russian feminist poetry with a general discussion of how feminism has developed in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. As a sign of progress for the feminist cause in post-Communist Slavic countries, Pinkham cites the recent political […]
• Promise Miscarried
  The Life of the Mind begins in the toilet, a single-occupancy restroom at an unnamed Manhattan university: “Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail.” Expletives are pretty rare in this darkly comic first novel, and Christine Smallwood’s decision to put one into her […]
• On Alfred Hayes
  To the Editors: Vivian Gornick has written a beautiful and significant review about three novels by my father, Alfred Hayes [“Sex, Noir & Isolation,” NYR, March 25]. I am so very pleased and grateful to Gornick for her fresh insights and compelling interpretation of his work, and to The New York Review for bringing these […]
• Philosophy for Art’s Sake
  To the Editors: I am grateful to John Gray for recognizing the inordinate ambition of my book Witcraft: nothing less than to overthrow the joyless hegemony of traditional histories of philosophy [NYR, March 25]. Hegel was one of the masters of the tradition, and he spelled out the assumptions behind it two hundred years ago: […]
• See for Yourself
  To the Editors: I sincerely hope all those who have an interest in Alexander Griboedov and his play Woe from Wit will buy my translation and judge for themselves, especially since they are not given that option in a review [Gary Saul Morson, “Casting Pearls Before Repetilovs,” NYR, March 25] that stints on excerpts in […]
• More Memorials
  To the Editors: We were pleased to note the reference to Günter Demnig’s Stolperstein project in Joshua Hammer’s review of Alexander Wolff’s book Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home [NYR, April 8]. Hammer’s description of the project does not fully convey the enormity of Demnig’s work. Rather than Stolpersteine in “half […]
• Safe Passage
  To the Editors: Readers of Leo Rubinfien’s recent essay on Japanese photobooks [“‘My Eyes Are Infamously Greedy,’” NYR, February 11] might appreciate knowing that although an estimated 25,000–40,000 of the books in Manfred Heiting’s collection were destroyed by the Malibu fire of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had signed a contract to acquire […]
• Sold!
  To the Editors: It has been pointed out to me that I was mistaken when I wrote in my review of Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters [NYR, May 13] that in his lifetime the painter never sold a single picture. In fact, in 1890 Anna Boch, the painter sister of the Belgian artist […]
• Ending the Kennedy Romance
  Why, nearly six decades after his murder, do Americans still care so much about and, for the most part, continue to think so highly of John Fitzgerald Kennedy? More than 40,000 works of fiction and nonfiction have been published about his life and death, a steady stream that spiked on the fiftieth anniversary of his […]
• Don’t Get Too Comfortable
  There is a scene in Eula Biss’s new book of essays, Having and Being Had, that makes me almost howl with recognition. Her son, “J,” begins school and is given a starter pack of Pokémon trading cards by another boy. J’s desire is kindled. He finds out he can buy more cards using the money […]
• Lovesick for a God
  Śathakopan of Kurukur likely lived in the ninth century of the Common Era. He certainly spent nearly all of his life in the far southern reaches of Tamil-speaking India, which was then the domain of the Pandyan kings of Madurai and is today the southernmost part of the state of Tamilnadu. As with most early […]
• A Taxonomy of Tyrants
  How can one make sense of the alarming replication of malignant rulers in so many different countries over the past hundred years? Is it possible to include them all in one sweeping, cohesive vision, to marshal their heterogeneous manifestations inside the pages of a single book? For Gabriel García Márquez, in his novel The Autumn […]
• A Blues Surrealist
  “I like to make things,” the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill told an interviewer from the Smithsonian in 1994, a year before his death from diabetes. “It might not equate to the great American novel…but I can hold your attention for a little while.” A revealing remark: disarmingly casual in tone, yet hinting, in its […]
• The Future of Fracking
  “I do rule out banning fracking, because we need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” said Joe Biden in the presidential debate on October 22, 2020, referring to the main extraction method of the US natural gas industry, hydraulic fracturing. Climate change generally was a surprise hot topic of the […]
• Two Centuries of ‘The Guardian’
  The Guardian has never been much of a business. Its owners never got rich; in fact, they gave the newspaper away. Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words of Lord Robert Cecil), but the paper has nearly always […]
• ‘Moffie’ and Me
  On my first trip home from university, in April 1983, I borrowed my father’s Mercedes and drove from Johannesburg out to the South African Defence Force (SADF) barracks in Potchefstroom to see my best friend. J. and I were just nineteen: while he had decided to get his two years’ compulsory military service over with, […]
• See Rome and Feel Alive
  In the Review’s May 13 Art Issue, we published “Light in the Palazzo,” Ingrid Rowland’s review of The Torlonia Marbles, an exhibition in Rome of ancient sculptures long hidden from view. Since 1876 these works, a selection from some six hundred belonging to the family of Roman aristocrat Alessandro Torlonia, had been stowed away and neglected, at […]
• Marc Riboud’s Roving Lens
  In the spring of 1953, Marc Riboud left Lyon, France, for Paris. He was thirty years old. The Eiffel Tower was being repainted. Equipped with just one roll of film, Riboud climbed up the perilous spiral metal staircase and caught sight of a solitary painter. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom Riboud had recently met, had […]
• Sus Vidas al Filo de la Línea
  • Leer en inglés/to read in English. En diciembre de 2020 me dirigí hacia Sprindale, Arkansas, para encontrarme con Ángela Pacheco. Parada en el patio trasero de su casa, una pequeña estructura de pintura descascarada entre una hilera de casas dilapidadas, Pacheco me contó que tan solo unos meses antes su esposo, Plácido Leopoldo Arrue, […]
• Losing No Time
  A profound global change shapes the foreign policy of the Biden administration. From the end of World War II until the past decade, the world saw the United States as unquestionably the greatest power, with a thriving democracy and an economy envied by all. That reputation is now gone. It didn’t disappear just in the […]
• ‘Comic Terrorism Really Works’: An Interview with John Waters
  Long ago, in that distant universe that was the 1960s, John Waters, now seventy-five, burst onto the underground film scene amid a blaze of bad taste and fun. His early movies had provocative titles like Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Mondo Trasho, and Multiple Maniacs. In an era that celebrated subversion and irreverence, Waters […]
• Their Lives on the Line
  • Leer en español/to read in Spanish. In December, I drove to meet Ángela Pacheco, in Springdale, Arkansas. Standing in the backyard of her home, a small structure with peeling paint among a row of dilapidated houses, she told to me how, earlier that year, her husband, Plácido Leopoldo Arrue, had made plans to plant […]
• Fantastic Fixation in ‘Photo Brut’
  Not a photography exhibition, strictly speaking, “Photo|Brut”—currently at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City—is devoted to collages, assemblages, and modes of investigation that could be considered “photographic objects.” Nearly everything comes from the French filmmaker Bruno Decharme’s personal collection of so-called outsider artists. Decharme, a onetime assistant to Jacques Tati, rejects the […]
• What We Want When We Read
  In the April 29, 2021 issue we published Sarah Chihaya’s “All Over Desire,” a review of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, a novel full of women who “do not yearn for passionate fulfillment, and are largely unconcerned with desirability, romance, or sexual pleasure,” Chihaya writes. “They are finished both with trying to be desired and […]
• A Park Apart
  This past pandemic year, for all of spring, summer, fall, and much later into the winter than temperatures really allowed, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park was packed. In those first, frightened weeks in March and April, when it still felt strange to pass a day without an outing, I would walk a mile to the park every […]
• Kubrick’s Human Comedy
  Paul Mazursky, to whom Stanley Kubrick gave his first substantial role in Kubrick’s own first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), recalls their driving together on a mission to hit up the young director’s uncle for a loan to finance the film. “I’m gonna get the money from him no matter what—I can tell you […]
• Ancient Egypt for the Egyptians
  The Egyptian Museum in Cairo moved into its peach-colored, arcaded neoclassical building in 1902. Its collections include the five-thousand-year-old Palette of Narmer—one of the earliest examples of hieroglyphics, commemorating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt—a bust of the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaton, and the golden treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun. Its façade is inscribed […]
• See More, Think More
  Objectivity is a conundrum. At least it is in the humanities. Different people define it differently, and what one person claims is an objective opinion or interpretation another will dismiss as little more than prejudice. These debates, which have become especially strident in academic circles in recent years, fascinated the art historian Leo Steinberg, who […]
• Children’s Lib!
  In 1963 thirty-four-year-old Louise Fitzhugh was fresh off a successful exhibition of her paintings and drawings at an Upper East Side gallery when she suddenly declared her fine art career a catastrophe. She’d recently illustrated the children’s book Suzuki Beane, a charming Beatnik spin on Eloise, written by her friend and sometime lover Sandra Scoppettone, […]
• ‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’
  Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, is a Salvadoran street gang, but it was born in the US about forty years ago. Salvadorans had been coming to California since the early 1900s, a trickle of job-seekers from a tiny country that could fit into the state twenty times over. In 1979 the trickle turned into […]
• The Writer Apart
  I want to say everything—that is the purpose of this book. —Thomas Mann,Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man On August 4, 1914, German troops invaded neutral Belgium, and by day’s end Britain and Germany were at war. Three days later, in an otherwise perfunctory letter to his brother Heinrich, Thomas Mann made an uncharacteristic confession: I […]
• C.V.
  A ruthless catalog of sorrows: years in front of the screen, diplomas before jobs, and languages—all that torture—now ranged under Languages. Where are all the wasted days? The nights of walking with hands stretched out and the visions that crept over the walls? Where are the feelings of guilt and the sudden sadness faced with […]
• His Own Worst Enemy
  If ever an artist needed a degree of protection against his public, surely it is Vincent van Gogh. Reproductions of his most emblematic paintings, especially the gyrating nightscapes and the blazing series of sunflower studies made in his late years, adorn countless bedrooms, living rooms, and bathrooms all across what used to be known as […]
• Masterpieces Unmediated
  In his diary for May 6, 1997, the English essayist and playwright Alan Bennett—a trustee of the National Gallery, London, and an enthusiast of old master paintings—left an unexpectedly dyspeptic account of a visit to the Frick Collection in New York (his first in over thirty-four years). In search of somewhere to sit, he noted: […]
• ‘And You Give Yourself Away’
  Arthur O’Leary was the scion of a high-born Irish Catholic family in County Cork who, in 1773, ran into trouble with a local English magistrate, Abraham Morris. Morris either took colonialist umbrage at the impudent O’Leary—who had also been a hussar in Empress Maria’s Austro-Hungarian army—or simply coveted his prizewinning mare, which, under Great Britain’s […]
• From The History of Photography (1993)
  I. First takers, first makers.The first sip of intelligencesplits the diapered sky, already crackledwith the losses that events are. At the old treehouse one is cloggedwith sleep in any case. Dust garlands that swaylike chains of mice. And up from underthe palaver there is golden food. So let it be clean at least.The first person […]
• Planning an Aryan Paradise
  1. So horrendous were the manifold atrocities perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his followers that decades passed before scholars began to address the Nazis’ use of the visual arts in their comprehensive program for domination. This blind spot was attributable to the long-held notion that cultural aspects of the Third Reich must be ignored, because […]
• Light in the Palazzo
  In 1968 the Roman aristocrat Alessandro Torlonia, Prince of Fucino, applied for a permit to repair the roof of his family’s private museum, a nineteenth-century industrial building just outside the ancient Porta Settimiana in Trastevere that had been transformed by his great-grandfather, another Alessandro, into a sprawling seventy-seven-room venue for the family’s vast collection of […]
• A Dance to the Music of Death
  The inhabitants of the planet Tlön, in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” have a radically different understanding of the universe than we Earthlings do: “For the people of Tlön,” Borges’s imaginary historian tells us, “the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.” […]
• Return of the Nameless Man
  “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” says the narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel, The Sympathizer, by way of introduction. He’s not talking to us. The book is a political prisoner’s mea culpa, addressed to his jailer, the Commandant, who is faceless in that he’s an abstract […]
• The Self Unmoored
  Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing begins with the death of its main character. Sophie Blind wakes up in an apartment by the Hudson River, still groggy from a dream, or perhaps still dreaming, to find her lover bending over her, saying, “you’re dead Sophie.” Then she remembers: I died on a Tuesday afternoon, struck by a […]
• Why Did They Vanish?
  If you visit an even moderately old museum display on human evolution, or open anything but the latest textbooks on the subject, you’ll encounter cave-dwelling, mammoth-hunting Neanderthals who are beetle-browed, stooped, and distinctly unintelligent-looking. But over the past few years the Neanderthals of our imaginations have evolved marvelously, so that recent images closely resemble us […]
• Remembrance of Things Past
  When I was a little boy, not more than ten or eleven, I would label photographs. In our apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn—I lived there with my mother, an older sister, and my little brother—photographs were kept in boxes or in albums, in which after a while the thick paper they had been […]
• When Slaves Fled to Mexico
  There has long been a fascination with the plight of enslaved Blacks who ran away from southern slaveholders in the decades before the Civil War. Powerful autobiographies by runaways such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs immerse us in their physical pain and psychological suffering, their longing and frustration, and their sense […]
• Irreconcilable Hebron
  It was about 7 PM on May 2, 1980, when Tayseer Abu Sneineh set out from a cave hideout on the outskirts of Hebron with three other Palestinian militants. Like his comrades, Abu Sneineh, a twenty-eight-year-old math teacher, was a member of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, the leading faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The […]
• Steeltown in the Rearview
  Americans born in the two decades following World War II grew up in an atmosphere of prosperity and hope. Between 1945 and 1970, US production of goods and services quadrupled, and much of the country began to take its modern form, with highways, motels and office buildings. By 1971, virtually every American household had a […]
• Asking the Right Questions
  On April 15, 2021, we published Sheila Heti’s afterword to the newly translated 1969 novel by Clarice Lispector An Apprenticeship, which takes as its subject the “quest to love and be loved,” Heti writes. “But in order to truly love and be loved, one must first find one’s way to the most difficult thing, which […]
• Who Gets to Live ‘the Good Life’?
  These days, people who can afford to ponder the questions are asking themselves where and how they should live. There has been an uptick in upper-middle-class urbanites buying property in rural areas where Covid-19 numbers have generally been lower, and, according to a Pew Research survey, about one in five adults has moved or knows […]

New York Times Books©

• To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos
  In “Amazon Unbound,” his second book about the company, Brad Stone focuses on its singular C.E.O.
• The Best Elin Hilderbrand Books
  She’s the bard of Nantucket and the doyenne of flip-flops, outdoor showers and pink sunsets. Haven’t read her books? Start here.
• Andrew McCarthy Harbors a Secret Fantasy to Play Fagin
  “But as I’m approaching the appropriate age, my inability to carry a tune remains a stumbling block, so my dream appears unlikely to be realized.”
• The Victorian Women Who Pierced Glass Ceilings by Speaking to the Dead
  “Out of the Shadows,” by Emily Midorikawa, features six 19th-century women Spiritualists who defied gender norms to command public attention.
• 'America on Fire' Explores the Roots of Black Rebellion
  In “America on Fire,” the historian Elizabeth Hinton offers a sweeping reconsideration of the racial unrest that shook American cities in the 1960s and 70s.
• Louis Menand on ‘The Free World’
  Menand talks about his work of political and cultural history, and Phillip Lopate discusses his three anthologies of American essays.
• What Does ‘Freedom’ Really Mean?
  Sebastian Junger’s new book covers a long trek across the countryside in search of true independence.
• Katherine Barber, Who Defined Canadian English, Is Dead at 61
  As the founding editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, she turned to “trashy novels” and parliamentary debates to find Canada’s version of the language.
• That Most Enchanting Bird in the World
  In “Why Peacocks?” Sean Flynn adopts three of these amazing animals and learns to see their personality and intelligence and foibles and charms.
• The Many Blunders of the Secret Service — and the Dangers They Pose to U.S. Presidents
  Carol Leonnig’s “Zero Fail” is a thoroughly researched and devastating indictment of the United States Secret Service.
• Things To Do At Home
  This week, discover the cultural and societal impact of sneakers, practice your math skills or explore what a net zero climate might look like.
• Daniel Patrick Moynihan Was Often Right. Joe Klein on Why It Still Matters.
  How a politician who died in 2003 continues to dominate much of today’s political discussion.
• Kristen Radtke Considers Another American Epidemic: Loneliness
  The writer and artist spent nearly three years researching why so many of us feel so alone. What she found was much worse than she imagined.
• What to Do This Weekend
  Craft projects and gospel choirs.
• Visualizing Robert Frost’s Seminal Poem
  The illustrator Sergio Garcia Sanchez embarks on the road not taken.
• What Makes a Good Chinese Father? In a New Novel, It’s Complicated.
  In “My Good Son,” by Yang Huang, a Chinese father strives to offer his floundering son a better life. But is he actually being a good parent?
• New in Paperback: ‘Hamnet’ and ‘All the Way to the Tigers’
  Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
• The Air Force, Sign Language and Other Letters to the Editor
  Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.
• Masterpiece Theater: A Tale of Dueling Art Books for Kids
  “How to Be an Art Rebel,” by Ben Street, and “What Adults Don’t Know About Art,” by the School of Life, are both British imports. The similarity ends there.
• Bill Cunningham's Evening Hours
  A new book, “Bill Cunningham Was There,” highlights The Times photographer’s efforts to give back to New York City and its people.
• 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• ‘Antitrust’ by Amy Klobuchar, and ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’ by Josh Hawley
  The senators are on opposite sides of the aisle, but both speak out on the dangers of big tech in their new books. It’s weird, really, how alike they sound.
• Once Too Radical for Italy, Goliarda Sapienza Is Belatedly Getting Her Due
  Largely unrecognized during her lifetime, the 20th-century Italian actress turned writer is now considered a feminist icon. Her novel “Meeting in Positano” is being published in English for the first time.
• En Route to the Best-Seller List, Oprah Was His Co-Pilot
  Bruce D. Perry talks about what it’s like to write a book with a co-author who needs no introduction.
• A New Book Thinks Clearly and Creatively About Violence Against Women
  In “On Violence and On Violence Against Women,” Jacqueline Rose roves widely to consider sexual harassment, Harvey Weinstein, political power, contemporary fiction and more.
• New & Noteworthy, From Seth Rogen to an Elephant in Belfast
  A selection of recent titles of interest; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.
• It’s Time to Sweat It Out and Get Pumped With Alison Bechdel
  In her new graphic memoir, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” Bechdel turns to her relationship to exercise and a lifelong interest in what connects mind and body.
• Robert Slavin, Who Studied How Children Learn, Dies at 70
  He favored phonics to teach reading and grouping students with different aptitudes rather than by age or grade.
• ‘Selling the Family Jewels’: A James Joyce Landmark Is Set to Become a Hostel
  A planned overhaul of the Dublin home that was the setting for the writer’s short story “The Dead” was opposed by writers, artists, academics and heritage groups.
• ‘The Plot,’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “The Plot,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz
• ‘Mary Jane,’ by Jessica Anya Blau: An Excerpt
  An excerpt from “Mary Jane,” by Jessica Anya Blau
• Are You a Glennon or an Abby?
  Inside the relatably argumentative, highly downloadable marriage of the best-selling author Glennon Doyle and the retired soccer star Abby Wambach.
• An Island Nation With Mighty Clout
  “How Iceland Changed the World,” by Egill Bjarnason, offers a jaunty history of a small country with an outsize influence on global affairs.
• The French Count Who Turned His Home Into a Museum to Honor His Dead Son
  “Letters to Camondo,” by Edmund de Waal, is addressed to a wealthy fin-de-siècle French Jew whose elegant Parisian home is filled with priceless objets d’art — and memories of the family that once lived there.
• From Cape Cod to Martha’s Vineyard to the Caribbean, These Beach Reads Will Whisk You Into Summer
  New novels by Jennifer Weiner, Sunny Hostin and Katherine St. John
• How Napoleon Became One of History’s Most Rapacious Art Looters
  “Plunder,” by Cynthia Saltzman, recounts the French general’s vast thefts of European art and sculpture through the story of a single magnificent painting, Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana.”
• An Anti-Gang Activist, a Shooting and a Community Long Abused and Ignored
  “The Holly,” by Julian Rubinstein, explores the history of gang violence in a historically Black Denver neighborhood, and the often misguided efforts of law enforcement agencies to reduce it.
• Book Review: ‘While Justice Sleeps,’ by Stacey Abrams
  In “While Justice Sleeps,” the veteran author and voting rights activist takes on the Supreme Court, biotech and blackmail — among other topics.
• The Babysitter Knows All
  In Jessica Anya Blau’s new novel, “Mary Jane,” a 14-year-old receives an education from the family she works for — and delivers one in return.
• How Humans Gained an ‘Extra Life’
  In Steven Johnson’s latest book, he looks at what he calls “one of the greatest achievements in the history of our species,” that life spans have more than doubled since the mid-19th century.
• ‘Dedicated’ Makes the Case for Choosing Something and Sticking With It
  Pete Davis’s book grew out of a speech he gave to his Harvard Law School class about commitment, which has been viewed more than 30 million times online.
• Covid, the Musical? Jodi Picoult Is Giving It a Try.
  Working with a playwright, the best-selling author has turned the symptoms of illness into songwriting prompts for a new musical called “Breathe.”
• Oprah Winfrey, Keanu Reeves to Participate in New Book Show
  The U.S. Book Show hopes to fill the void left by BookExpo, an annual convention that attracted thousands of booksellers, librarians and publishing professionals.
• Excuse Me While I Steal Your Book Idea and Get Famous
  Jean Hanff Korelitz’s “The Plot” is an addictive Russian nesting doll of a novel where every character’s hand fits neatly into someone else’s pocket.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• Arizona State's Success Story: Model or Mirage?
  Michael Crow champions his campus as a new ideal. But does much of it simply boil down to cost control?By Steven Brint Michael Crow champions his campus as a new ideal. But does much of it simply boil down to cost control?
• The Cynicism of Selective Admissions
  Power-hungry bureaucrats don't appreciate the consequences of their influence over applicants.By Matt Feeney Power-hungry bureaucrats don't appreciate the consequences of their influence over applicants.
• The Professor of Paranoia
  Mark Crispin Miller, who is suing his colleagues, used to study conspiracy theories. Now he pushes them. By Mark Dery Mark Crispin Miller, who is suing his colleagues, used to study conspiracy theories. Now he pushes them.
• Stephen Hawking and the Billionaires
  Why did the physicist endorse the kooky ideas of the fabulously wealthy?By Charles Seife Why the physicist cozied up to the fabulously wealthy.
• In Defense of Holistic Admissions
  Despite what some critics suggest, the approach is neither scandalous nor new. And it's good for colleges.By Robert J. Massa, Bill Conley, and David Holmes Despite what some critics suggest, the approach is neither scandalous nor new. And it's good for colleges.
• The Case Against Admissions Lotteries
  The radical idea is appealing in theory but useless in practice.By Rebecca Zwick The radical idea is appealing in theory but useless in practice.
• How Students Are Furthering Academe's Corporatization
  By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to diversity problems, they are empowering administrations at the expense of the faculty.By Amna Khalid By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to diversity problems, they are empowering administrations at the expense of the faculty.
• Are Humanities Professors Moral Experts?
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