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

• ‘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 […]
• 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.
• An Ecosystem of Her Own
  Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.
• The Village Photographer
  Madeleine de Sinéty sloughed off her aristocratic upbringing and spent her life capturing small-town life in Brittany and Maine.
• 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.
• 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.
• ‘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.
• Unraveling Medical Mysteries
  Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
• Cherchez les Femmes
  A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
• 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.
• 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?
• Data & Dames
  In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
• 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- […]
• 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 […]
• 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.
• ‘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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Qusra Under Siege
  Another Palestinian village in the West Bank has been attacked by Israeli settlers. The lack of response by the army and police reveals how deeply corrupted they are by the colonialist agenda.
• Itching for a Fight
  I don’t understand why people talk to Isaac Chotiner. His reputation as the best interviewer-assassin at work today—maybe ever—precedes him. I suspect that each guest thinks he will be the one to finally best Chotiner. And he makes good use of this hubris. He calmly and respectfully dismantles the tendentious arguments people make about everything […]
• ‘Every Tiny Molecule of Ash’
  On a muggy morning in late July, when tens of thousands of protesters thronged to central New Delhi to head toward parliament, they seemed to already have a sense that their march might be historic. Most were students and young graduates, many of whom had traveled from towns hundreds of miles away to attend their […]
• ‘You’ll Never Catch Him!’
  Paul Julian just wanted everyone to get out of the way. Maneuvering down the narrow hallways on the Warner Brothers studio lot while carrying a very long, freshly painted background, the artist (who had worked as a WPA muralist before his animation gig) would emit a car horn–esque “beep-beep” to warn his colleagues of his […]
• Expatriate Dreams
  “It was out of estisal that some Iranians chose war,” writes Nahid Siamdoust in the NYR Online. Estisal, which, loosely translated from Persian, means “having no options” or a state of helplessness, is also, she contends, what has made some Iranians vulnerable to the disinformation being spread by both state and private media—a perhaps more […]
• The Center of All Creation
  I first learned of Ossabaw Island from Musa Mayer’s Night Studio (1988), a memoir of her life as Philip Guston’s daughter. At the time I was writing a short story about Guston and had grown fixated on his wife, Musa McKim, who’d given up painting for poetry. McKim’s time at Ossabaw in 1974 was one […]
• The Cruel and the Frail
  “What is happening in the world today,” Thomas Merton wrote to Czesław Miłosz in 1959, responding to the latter’s book The Captive Mind, “is a wholesale collapse of man’s capacity to love.” Merton did not believe in the cold war’s strident moral opposition between the free and unfree worlds. Whether in the West or in […]
• ‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’
  “I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete sentence, one that echoes a line from the famous mid-century primer See Spot Run. Spot was a dog. Might Rex be one, too? In a sense, he is: a […]
• The Other Donald
  A dispatch from the Art Editor
• Life in the Fortress
  I first read Fortress Besieged as a teenager, when the novel, originally published in 1947 and out of print for decades, became a bestseller in China after it was adapted into a TV series in 1990. The book was so popular that its characters quickly became, in the public imagination, types—in fact, archetypes—as though a […]
• The Return of the Teen Crime Panic
  In the early hours of Sunday, August 3, 2025, Edward Coristine, a nineteen-year-old computer programmer who had achieved notoriety as an employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, was walking a friend back to her car near U Street in Washington, D.C., when they crossed paths with a group of teenagers. According to prosecutors, […]
• ‘The Voodoo Thing’
  One afternoon around 1990, as a teenager working my after-school job in an optometrist’s basement office, I was listening to a local college radio station when the DJ, needing a break, decided to play the entire B-side of a record. I had never heard anything like it. Sludgy grooves, wails of unidentifiable wind instruments, and […]
• ‘I Don’t Want Dead Art’
  When the artifacts of an artist’s life are collected as an archive, they change from river to reservoir, their ideas no longer circulating in the artist’s mind but left for others to navigate. Orienting oneself in the archive of a performance artist can be especially fraught because it consists of the ephemera around a performance […]
• Braving the Labyrinth
  Geoffrey O’Brien is one of those writers who can write about anything: opera, British postwar film, crime fiction, the Third Reich, Grant Wood, Patti Smith, Duke Ellington, Seinfeld. Yet these subjects are often united by a kind of nostalgia—one prompted by pop culture artifacts. His essay from our August 20, 2026, issue, “A Gust from Another […]
• Ghosts of Amrum
  The story of Amrum—a German movie about the last days and immediate aftermath of World War II as experienced by a twelve-year-old boy on the isolated North Sea island from which the film takes its title—is both familiar and exotic. Drawn from the autobiographical writings of the actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm, most familiar for […]
• Socrates’ Turf
  The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she’s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a thrill hearing her examine ordinary life from unexpected angles. And I love to disagree with […]
• Insincerity Case
  I often like John Early’s work. I love John Early’s taste. I came to one of my favorite movies, the bracing, pensive 1990 Canadian docudrama Strangers in Good Company, after he hosted a screening of it at New York’s Metrograph in 2021. On both TV and film, he’s regularly cast as frustrated and venal divas […]
• From the Horse’s Mouth
  “Punwise, I didn’t feel too reined in on BoJack. If I was champing at the bit to use a joke somewhere, I could usually find a place to trot it out!”
• What Does a Puta Want?
  In 1984, the year before Brazil transitioned from a military dictatorship to a tenuous democracy, a young woman named Gabriela Leite attended a national meeting for sex workers held by a progressive ministry of the Catholic Church. There she shocked those assembled by taking the microphone and unabashedly calling herself a prostitute. As she recalled […]
• ‘The Silent Art’
  Kate Millett would never be more active or more in demand than she was in 1972. Two summers earlier, her debut book had made her a household name. Begun as her thesis for a literature Ph.D., Sexual Politics swelled into a wide-ranging examination of sex as a terrain of political contest and patriarchy as a […]

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.
• The Best Romance Novels of 2024 (So Far)
  Looking for an escapist love story? Here are 2024’s sexiest, swooniest reads.
• What Book Should You Read Next?
  Finding a book you’ll love can be daunting. Let us help.
• The Local: Fall Kickoff
  A book influencer shares her most anticipated fall reads. Plus, things to do this weekend that don’t involve curling up with a book.
• Book Review: ‘Dressing the Queen,’ by Kate Strasdin
  In a new book, the fashion historian Kate Strasdin looks at the makers who designed the monarch’s sartorial persona.
• How to End a Relationship Thoughtfully
  If you’re tempted to ghost someone, try a “connected goodbye” instead.
• Jay Maisel, Photographer of Miles Davis and Much More, Dies at 95
  His moody portrait became the album cover for “Kind of Blue.” Mr. Maisel lived and worked in an old bank that he bought for $102,000 and sold for $55 million.
• Book Review: ‘Mind vs. Machine: The Chess Match That Changed the World,’ by Maurice Ashley and Steve Sheinkin
  A new book takes kids whose phones can beat grandmasters back to a 1997 nail-biter.
• Books Our Editors Loved This Week
  Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times.
• ‘Garry Starr’ Review: Half-Man, Half-Penguin, Full-Frontal
  Damien Warren-Smith takes (nearly) everything off to play a flightless bird whose natural habitat might be in your very own lap.
• Carolyn Forché on Her Favorite Books and New Poetry Collection, ‘Otherwhere’
  “I haven’t finished it yet,” she says of the 20-volume gift from her husband. A new book, “Otherwhere,” collects 50 years of her poetry.
• Book Review: ‘Mock Heart,’ by Jill Bialosky
  The new and selected poems in Jill Bialosky’s “Mock Heart” show her steadily circling desire and domesticity.
• The Perfect Books for Classic Rom-Com Fans
  The author Julie Olivia recommends novels that capture classic rom-com vibes.
• Book Review: ‘Call It Evil,’ by Susan Neiman
  In a new book, Susan Neiman argues that by defining evil in terms of individual monstrousness we fail to perceive its widespread hold on our culture.
• Sara Bareilles Confronted Grief, and Found Herself
  Her new album, “Good Grief,” mourns friends including her Broadway co-star Gavin Creel. She’s also adapting the Meg Wolitzer novel “The Interestings” into a musical.
• Book Review: ‘Is This It,’ by Steven Hyden
  Steven Hyden considers the cultural shifts of the past 25 years in a new book about the band.
• Books to Match Your Mood
  MJ Franklin of The New York Times Book Review recommends books based on your mood.
• Book Review: ‘The Pirate Queen,’ by Ariel Lawhon
  In a new novel, the author Ariel Lawhon revives a 16th-century sea captain previously pushed to the margins.
• Book Review: ‘Money to Burn,’ by William D. Cohan
  In “Money to Burn,” William D. Cohan charts the rise and fall of the Wall Street billionaire Leon Black.
• Emily St. John Mandel’s Latest Protagonist Has Haunted Eyes and a Strong Jaw
  The author describes the main character of her new novel, “Exit Party,” to a forensic sketch artist.
• ‘Yellowface’ Author R.F. Kuang’s 5 Favorite Places in Taipei
  The experiences Ms. Kuang had during a summer spent studying Mandarin in the Taiwanese capital helped her shape her newest novel, “Taipei Story.”
• 29 Nonfiction Books Coming This Fall
  Memoirs, biographies, true crime, history and more.
• 35 Novels Coming This Fall
  New fiction from Marlon James, Barbara Kingsolver, John Green, John Grisham and much more.
• Thanks to ‘Practical Magic,’ Alice Hoffman Is Sticking With Witches
  The author behind the cult-classic movie is back with a new series about the power of female friendship — and witches.
• Book Review: ‘Taipei Story,’ by R.F. Kuang
  “Taipei Story,” R.F. Kuang’s seventh book in eight years, is about an American student in Taiwan.
• Edward Field, Bohemian New York Poet, Dies at 102
  His colloquial language, emotionality and gay topics brought him widespread praise, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and other literary honors.
• Book Review: ‘Living With Freddie,’ by Anna Heyward
  In “Living With Freddie,” Anna Heyward recalls the pet who taught her “to be human.”
• Book Review: ‘Switzy,’ by Emma Cline
  In an impressive change of pace, Emma Cline’s new novel gets inside the head of a stoic businessman with dementia.
• Book Review: ‘Tower Hill,’ by Alan Taylor
  In “Tower Hill,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Alan Taylor pulls apart the twisted logic of a Virginia slave owner and his descendants.
• Robin Morgan, Voice of Radical Feminism, Dies at 85
  She edited the landmark 1970 anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” led Ms. magazine and helped build the institutions of the modern feminist movement.
• Authors Wrangle With Publishers Over $1.5 Billion Anthropic A.I. Settlement
  The tech giant must pay $3,000 per pirated book that it used to train its chatbot. Many authors fear they could lose funds to others in the book business.
• Book Review: ‘All the Presidents’ Wars,’ by Peter Bergen
  In “All the Presidents’ Wars,” the journalist Peter Bergen traces the many missteps of U.S. military action in the Middle East.
• Harlan Coben’s New Book Is a Tough-Talking Writing Guide
  Even a very successful thriller writer fights self-doubt. His new tough-talking writing guide doubles as a memoir that explains why, and how to beat it.
• Book Review: ‘The Living Realm,’ by Jordan Tannahill
  In “The Living Realm,” an expat in Germany is visited by phantoms.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

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