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

  • 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 […]
  • 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 […]
  • 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 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.
  • 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 […]
  • 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 […]
  • 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” […]
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Art of Extraction
    A group exhibition explores humans’ ubiquitous but varied habit of plundering their environments for raw materials and more.
  • 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 […]
  • 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 […]
  • 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 […]
  • ‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’
    In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP). As Christopher Alessandrini writes in our October 8 issue, the island—which West had inherited from her patrician parents—was “a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks […]
  • Mother Country
    When I was nine, I helped my father build a life-size replica of the intelligence officer Jim Thompson’s Bangkok living room in our home. We listened to “Mother Country” and “Chantilly Lace” while cutting teak down to size and staining it to make Jim’s gridded wall panels and the raised thresholds he used to block […]
  • Fleshing It Out
    The artist Gladys Nilsson is one of our great watercolorists, and also one of our great mannerists. Mannerist in the sense that she distorts human proportions to stay true both to some private vision and to that very public fact of life, bodily strangeness. On the left side of her tall and hectic watercolor Caught […]
  • The Road to ‘Bent’
    Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single performance. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) devastatingly dramatized the […]
  • Can Resistance Be Copied?
    From 2010 to 2020, more people crowded onto the streets around the world to protest than at any other time in known history. Starting with what is often called the Arab Spring and ending with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the demonstrations—dense, synchronized, and persistent—dwarfed older, briefer moments […]
  • Dudamel’s New York Dream
    The concert orchestra is an American specialty. Theodore Thomas, whose touring Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, was the first world-class New World symphonic ensemble, preached, “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera.” Thomas performed Beethoven in cities large and small, coast to coast, north to south. In 1891 he became the […]
  • Flow Chart of Paris
    Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but of […]
  • Posterity Avenged Him
    In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.
  • Nothing Stays Buried
    Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
  • War Games
    My father brought books to the basement. During the air raids we read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, and ate feasts my mother made with dry goods and powdered milk: rice pudding, “béchamel” spaghetti, in one large aluminum pot over a small gas burner, sandwiches of […]
  • Sad-Maxxing
    Ashton Politanoff's new novel tells the story of sad dads and washed-up jocks vying for a phantom ideal of masculinity.
  • ‘I Taste Ashes in the Wind’
    Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the “Apokalypse-Blindheit”—“apocalypse blindness”—that had begun […]
  • Tujunga
    As blood is brought where infection is So was I brought to Los Angeles Toting only my REI membership card And University of California ID “Access the inaccessible” My headlamp quibbled But I didn’t need its LEDs To see them, the coyotes, Rip the heads from Griffin’s chickens In broad daylight when I’d let them […]
  • De Kooning Draws a Picture
    Willem de Kooning's works on paper document his efforts to find ways of retaining both image and abstraction, depth and flatness.
  • The Slave’s Power
    Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive of slavery produced by those who built and benefited from it.
  • The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa
    When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the most adventuresome in the Latin […]
  • ‘Writing on One Table’
    Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
  • Devils in America
    Toward the end of his biography of Roy Cohn, written with his wife, Susan Goldmark, Kai Bird quotes the editor and publisher Jason Epstein: “In a way, he’s not real, he has no substance.” On the other hand, a note to the list of characters for Tony Kushner’s landmark drama Angels in America (1991), written […]
  • Doing Business with the Devil
    Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1 might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, […]
  • Comics Relief
    In late August, Coyote vs. Acme, a feature-length treatment of the eponymous coyote’s eternally thwarted efforts to eat the Road Runner, finally opened in theaters, years after the artless CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery determined never to release it. “Coyote vs. Acme takes a lesson from the darkness of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Lucas Adams writes in […]
  • In Billy’s Band
    Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969, bickering like siblings as they created some of the songs that would find immortality on the albums Let It Be and Abbey Road—one of the most magical involves the underappreciated musician Billy […]
  • ‘I Wish You Love’
    On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her […]
  • Subject Relations
    We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme—something different and, often, a little risky or uncomfortable. Our final guest, Anna Silman, interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider several years ago. Back then, when Twitter was still called Twitter, it was possible for a […]
  • ‘Society Gumbo’
    In 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “in Sausalito people live on anything that floats.” Those midcentury houseboat dwellers were the antecedents of Marin County’s “anchor-outs,” people who live on the anchorage in Richardson Bay and therefore, as Piper French writes in her review of Joe Kloc’s Lost at Sea in our September 24 […]
  • An Exception in World Affairs
    Ratko Mladić’s death last week at eighty-three in The Hague—where he was serving a life sentence for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995—is a reminder that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the […]
  • Upstate
    How far do you have to go before the state turns up? Verily, verily along the river and back to the plots of native shrubs and vines by these hills or mountains. While duties are confused with tariffs for the safety of a bowling ball, the world spins on thin ice. It being harder, the […]
  • Farinelli
    The beauty of that voice is paradoxical, slicing the flesh into a sound of ghostly fire beyond relinquishment. It is the dying fall, the little death that passes into tremors of the air, a tender blade, corporeal; steeped in an alchemy of milk and opiates of wine drunk with the sacrifice of such white humors. […]
  • Venezuela Under the Rubble
    This summer’s earthquakes exposed the hollow core of the country’s new, Trump-instated government, leaving ordinary citizens all but alone in recovering from catastrophe.
  • When Luther Vandross’s Father Puts a Dollar Under His Son’s Pillow
    When our kids were young, I thought I was going to be as good a parent to them as my parents had not been to me—maybe exactly as good. On the radio, as I drive, a father is putting a sign of kindness under his boy’s sleeping head, I am on a dirt road, I […]
  • Chills of the Unsaid
    In its skewering of London’s literary egos, Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House takes a step away from her previous parent-dominated novels, but it too is told by a middle-aged woman struggling to come to terms with her childhood and adolescence.
  • Wishing It So
    As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.
  • ‘A Fury of Dark Energies’
    A biography of Peter Matthiessen captures his antithetical actions and character while never losing sight of his ardent attentiveness to the natural world.
  • September…October… November…
    And then having been surgically put to a robotic knife. The body’s fate objectified in an online medical chart. Your Exam Images Click Here to View Your Images. Duodenal tubular adenoma. Impression: no evidence of recurrent or metastatic disease. Coronal and sagittal reconstructions were performed. This fluid collection is noted immediately adjacent to the pancreatico- […]
  • Data & Dames
    In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
  • Looking Class
    Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
  • And Yet It Warms
    A new edition of a manual that helps federal judges understand scientific subjects included a chapter on climate change that was withdrawn after attacks by denialists.
  • Is Morality Universal?
    In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
  • Cherchez les Femmes
    A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
  • Unraveling Medical Mysteries
    Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
  • ‘The Jealousy Comes from Nowhere’
    For actors in The Winter’s Tale, the fractured marriage at the center of the play is a barometer of relationships in our own time.
  • Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay
    Joe Kloc’s portrait of a group of outsiders living on boats in Marin County provides a record of a community many wish would quietly disappear.
  • Where Hatred Lies
    A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic.
  • The Village Photographer
    Madeleine de Sinéty sloughed off her aristocratic upbringing and spent her life capturing small-town life in Brittany and Maine.
  • An Ecosystem of Her Own
    Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.
  • The Dartmouth Exception
    Among its peers in the Ivy League, Dartmouth was perfectly positioned to resist Trump’s attack on higher education. It chose not to.

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