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

  • ‘Natives of the Country’
    On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and the vice president of Lebanon’s Jewish Communal Council (Conseil communal israélite libanais), was abducted from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a shadowy militant Shiite network, associated with the milieu from which Hezbollah was then emerging, which called itself the Organization of […]
  • Elaine Blair on Lena Dunham, Sex, and Television
    Season 2, Episode 5 of Private Life
  • Bernie Sanders’s Utopia Lab
    Season 1, Episode 2 of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole
  • Switching On
    In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive […]
  • Work Poem
    I’m too broke to make the work Or I don’t care enough about the work To be as broke as I should let myself be To have the time to make the work I work too hard to make the work Or my indolence is too great to take that pleasure In the work that […]
  • Burning Bright, for Now
    The Amur tiger and the jaguar are among the most elusive big cats in the world. Biologists have spent years tracking them down to save them.
  • March 13, 2020
    Because the islands bright white          solid stone Reach down through shifting mud beneath the creek Except what might be seen          by radar meek Orisons sounding the meek’s due          but none Near for use          things lost in their pocks are gone Never to be regained          I lost a week Ago an action          figure’s golden beak- Shaped […]
  • The Plot to Delete Democracy
    In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
  • Making Light of a Dark Past
    La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom.
  • Mapping Mississippi White
    Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.
  • Vermeer’s Vanishing Act
    Why is it that so many smart, inquisitive writers, smitten by the elusiveness of Vermeer’s pictures, should work so hard to wrestle that elusiveness into submission?
  • Yemen: The Endless Siege
    The “Yemen Model” of American foreign policy has proved a catastrophic failure, leaving brutal proxies better armed and ordinary Yemenis less safe.
  • Unfinished Business
    Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.
  • Rebel Rebel
    George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.
  • Talk to It
    This is the chatbots’ original sin: they are programmed to deceive us.
  • Whither American Socialism?
    Since the time of Eugene V. Debs, socialists have struggled to persuade Americans that they could create a more just society.
  • Privatized Stress
    Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want to Change, a satire about the British supermarket chain Tesco, joins a spate of recent novels about people trying to survive the gig economy.
  • Out from Underground
    Fifty years after the last Weather Underground bomb exploded, former members and their children reassess the costs of the group’s violent struggle.
  • Indefensible Delights
    Wallace Shawn’s plays expose the ways in which civilized society is maintained by a violence that is everywhere denied.
  • Turning Around the Easel
    The painter Emily Mae Smith hands over her brush to a character borrowed from pop culture—a gesture with symbolic depth.
  • A City All His Own
    In his view camera pictures of New York in the late 1970s, Baldwin Lee made the photographic tradition of the city as empty stage set his own.
  • The Sheer Size of It All
    Edward Burtynsky’s photographs chronicle the gigantic scale of the scarred landscapes created by twentieth-century extractive industries.
  • Poem
    No, no, I don’t believe in my poems, Not really, but I defer to the poet in me Who belies belief with a fact that Requires no belief, to write a poem In which fire is the poetic Element, fire burning in a wood At night, the leaves falling in flames From trees, and he […]
  • The Return of Child Labor
    For years I have been haunted by a grainy video I saw in 2023, when I was interviewing poultry processing workers in Green Forest, Arkansas. In those months I spoke often with the organizer Magaly Licolli, who directs Venceremos, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the rights of poultry workers. One day we were sitting […]
  • Rachel Kushner Reads from
    Season 2, Episode 4 of Private Life
  • Jefferson, Independence, and Slavery
    Season 1, Episode 1 of Endgame
  • The Dream of AI Primacy
    The US drive to win the AI race against China now feeds a fantasy of permanent American dominance in global affairs.
  • Introducing: Endgame
    Our newest podcast, hosted by Fintan O’Toole
  • Our 1989
    On October 7, 1989, East Germany celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a military parade down Karl-Marx-Allee—an old-fashioned display of state power as protests against Communist rule spread across the country. Opponents of the regime were galled by the phalanxes of goose-stepping soldiers and columns of tanks. That same day, representatives of East Berlin’s theaters gathered […]
  • Between Earth and Sky
    Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a connoisseur of clouds. In many of his shots, the big sky of Ukraine’s fields and steppe swallows the frame. When tiny human forms emerge upward into the heavens, they come as a surprise. As they grow they become monumental, often viewed from below. This is a fairly standard technique in Soviet […]
  • The Composer
    In the Review’s October 22 issue, Matthew Aucoin surveys Philip Glass’s six-decade musical career, occasioned by the premiere of his new symphony, Lincoln, at Tanglewood this past summer. “Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form,” Aucoin writes. “And Glass did […]
  • Edwin Frank on
    Season 2, Episode 3 of Private Life
  • Ming Smith’s Ming Smiths  
    Perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for “unselfing” … is what is popularly called beauty. … I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a […]
  • The Wexford Touch
    Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe, Salzburg might be the grandest, or it certainly thinks it is; the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade is the prettiest, with Schubert played and sung amid the lovely hills of the Bregenzerwald overlooking the upper Rhine; and Bayreuth is without doubt the most grueling. Richard Wagner characteristically decreed that […]
  • A Delicate Repair
    The late Nigerian sculptor Erhabor Emokpae is perhaps best known for his bronze replica of the sixteenth-century ivory mask of Queen Idia, the kingdom of Benin’s premier iyoba, or queen mother. The year was 1977. Nigeria had attained political independence from Britain less than two decades earlier and been through a bitter civil war in […]
  • Protesting with Panache
    Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines […]
  • The Private Life of Power
    I met Karan Mahajan, the Indian-American novelist and essayist, in 2018, when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library. Karan was beginning to write The Complex, his novel that has just been released; I was finishing The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. I was drawn to Karan right away. […]
  • Boxcar to Nowhere
    American lore about hoboes has sugared over the economic and environmental forces that drove people from their homes and onto the rails and roads in the first place, as a new history lays out.
  • The Elusive Glamour of Peter and Paul
    A dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is a tantalizing portrait of the artists and their epoch, just before the catastrophe of AIDS.
  • Eradicating the ‘Fourth Branch’
    By ending the independence of federal agencies, the Supreme Court has taken another step toward the creation of an elected presidential dictatorship.
  • How Tech Rules
    One of the hallmarks of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership from control. The firm is owned by shareholders but led by managers, who answer to shareholders only indirectly. Actually, it’s weirder than that. The corporation owns itself. Shareholders merely own stock, which is a claim on the firm’s assets and earnings. Elements […]
  • Let a Hundred Websites Bloom
    The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.
  • The Art of Extraction
    A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.
  • Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Ree
    “Flesh mixed with gowns, like kneaded satin; that is the substance of flowers.” The line comes from The Voice of Things (1942), a book of prose poems by Francis Ponge in which he muses on the beauty of the commonplace—the erratic flight of butterflies, the pleasure of opening and closing doors—eager to see past an […]
  • Message in a Bottle
    Over the course of his life Jürgen Habermas sought to honor the principle that in a modern democracy the only legitimate force should be the unforced force of the better argument.
  • Small Is Beautiful
    Jonathan Buckley's books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.
  • Possessed of Alchemystic Powers
    In 1949 Ithell Colquhoun—artist, writer, and occultist—produced a manifesto, titled “The Mantic Stain,” in which she called on her readers to follow French Surrealism’s practice of “pure psychic automatism.” It was, Breton wrote, “the real working of thought. Dictation of thought, without any control exercised by reason, and beyond any preoccupation, aesthetic or moral.” “Mantic” […]
  • Paging Dr. Caligari
    It’s not vertigo exactly, more a diagonal feeling as if a giant had picked up the room and were about to spill everything, you included. And then there is the tired-as-Sisyphus feeling from drawing a load of shadows up a painted hill. A film of spirits clouds our eyes, making it impossible to watch the […]
  • Pox Britannica
    Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet found, throughout “this good Protestant kingdom” and especially in the capital city […]
  • The Virtuoso of Repetition
    In both Philip Glass’s most avant-garde and his most commercially successful works, his music seems to accompany some unheard melody while inducing a state of blissful distraction.
  • Catalytic Ghosts
    In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy them along toward […]
  • Crisis Arioso
    Write me a libretto (what is a libretto) that tracks the plummeting finch populations in a nondespairing (what is a finch way, what are the ways of finches Put an “o” before             O, what are the ways to notate the bridge That depends on what is meant by suspension The government says: Because this is […]
  • Building a Real Man
    The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew tradition has Samson, the Greek Heracles, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Irish Cú Chulainn. Every culture has its dreams of superhuman strength, often divine, certainly supernatural: Glooscap of the Mi’kmaq and […]
  • Second Chances
    My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A visit […]
  • From the Archive: “The Perils of Pauline”
    In this episode of Private Life, the actress Holland Taylor reads Renata Adler’s essay “The Perils of Pauline,” an expansive assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue. Taylor has been working on films, television, and Broadway since the 1960s. She is a nine-time Emmy nominee, winning once, in 1999, […]
  • From Fear Set Free
    Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the significance of particular things, downplaying others, and ignoring most of what bombards our senses, all so that we might be convinced, from now until bedtime, that we understand ourselves […]
  • Getting into Trouble
    Almost fifty years after the Czechoslovak human rights initiative Charter 77 was first reported in the Review’s pages, Václav Havel’s own long-lost account of his imprisonment now appears in English for the first time.
  • The Work of Math in the Age of Artificial Reproduction
    There are seven questions in pure mathematics deemed important enough by the Clay Mathematics Institute, a nonprofit foundation devoted to “furthering the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought,” that each of their solutions carries a prize of $1 million. To date only one of these “Millennium Prize Problems,” as the foundation calls them, has […]
  • A Plum Assignment
    The cover for our Fall Books Issue—a painting of ripe purple plums in a punnet, surrounded by hand-painted cover lines—was an unexpected collaboration between the Irish-born New Yorker Lena Beug, a commercials director, and the Canadian Jason Logan, who makes ink from natural pigments that he forages from rural and urban environments.  I had assigned the […]
  • Lucy Sante on Pauline Kael, Film Criticism, and Pop Culture
    In the second season premiere of Private Life, host Jarrett Earnest is joined by the writer and critic Lucy Sante to discuss Pauline Kael’s career, pop culture writing, and Sante’s writing for the Review, where she has been a frequent contributor since the 1980s. The conversation focuses on “The Perils of Pauline” (published in the […]
  • Sand Castles
    To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on 157 directors. One of these offers the following superlative assessment: “She remains (now alongside Marguerite Duras) the greatest female auteur of our cinema.” Naming the recipient of this praise shouldn’t be […]

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