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

• The Story the Media Missed in Afghanistan
  Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American press has focused on the fates of three groups that are of special interest to Western readers. One is the many thousands of Afghans who had worked with the US government and military or other Western organizations and were desperate to leave. In addition to dramatic reports […]
• Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine
  On a Sunday in the summer of 1970, we were all herded up to the little church in Cúil Aodha for Mass. We were city kids sent to this small and remote village in County Cork to learn Irish from the native speakers. Their little chapel was gray, pebble-dashed, with no steeple, more like a […]
• Sisi’s New Cairo: Pharaonic Ambition in Ferro-Concrete
  I have the sense, on many days, that my city is at war with itself. Not in the visibly armed meaning of battle, but an insidious crusade of ideology and will. Such is President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s plan to make over Egypt’s capital, a neo-pharaonic campaign so ludicrous it would be dismissible if it didn’t […]
• In His Father’s Footsteps
  On October 1, 2021, we published Raja Shehadeh’s essay “The Nakba, Father’s Papers, and Jaffa Revisited.” Expanded from an address the Palestinian lawyer and writer recently gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, it touched on many of the themes and preoccupations that have animated Shehadeh’s books—among them, Strangers in the House (2001), Palestinian Walks […]
• The Future Is Electric
  If you’re looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity’s three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment […]
• ‘I Work and I Remember’
  Lawrence Joseph is a lawyer-poet (since 2003 a law professor at St. John’s University), a Catholic poet, a metropolitan-and-other-hyphenates poet. He was born in Detroit in 1948, his grandparents Lebanese and Syrian Catholics who arrived in the first wave of Arab immigration to the city, his Detroit-born father inheriting the family grocery store but having […]
• ‘This Obstinate Little Man’
  “A tiny, thick-set little man with white hair—a Pickwickian cherub.” This was Richard Crossman’s first impression in 1946 of David Ben-Gurion. As head of the Jewish Agency, the executive branch of the Zionist Organization, Ben-Gurion appeared before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry assessing the situation in Palestine after World War II. Crossman, a member of […]
• The Double Bookkeeper
  “The trouble with the police force,” said Arthur Gerard, the private eye in Strangers on a Train, “is that it has a single-track mind. This case, like many others, took a double-track mind. Simply couldn’t have been solved without a double-track mind.” Writing, for Patricia Highsmith, also took a double-track mind, and she accordingly kept […]
• Rousseau & Slavery
  To the Editors: In his review of Tyler Stovall’s White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea [NYR, September 23], David A. Bell wrongly states that “Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not mention European colonies in his abstract condemnation of slavery in The Social Contract.” In fact, when Rousseau proposed that a healthy population and birth rate […]
• Claw & Order
  Every fall in the state of Maryland, where I live, hunters bearing rifles, shotguns, handguns, longbows, crossbows, and other sanctioned culling devices kill about 80,000 white-tailed deer. That “harvest” puts a significant dent in the average statewide deer population of 200,000-plus, but because a doe generally gives birth to twins or even triplets each year, […]
• Colors in Conversation
  In our all-or-nothing culture, creative work is too often either apotheosized or ignored. You’re a rock star or you’re nothing. The public has little appetite for nuance. This makes it difficult to write about the achievement of Joan Mitchell, who was born in 1925, grew up in an affluent and literary Chicago household, and was […]
• Let the Decision Stand
  Almost thirty years ago, in 1992, the Supreme Court appeared poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision declaring that women have a constitutional right to have an abortion. Since 1985 the Reagan administration had been urging the Court to reverse Roe, and the George H.W. Bush administration had continued the campaign. Reagan had […]
• For the Growers and the Grocers
  On my walk around the reservoir I was thinking, it won’t get any easier, but the ease in my body as I thought this thought, on the first day of the last month of a long, constricted year,      breathing the sweet spice of the dead wet leaves, and grasses, some standing, some matted in a […]
• Portrait of the Robot as a Young Woman
  Kazuo Ishiguro was a social worker before he was a novelist. Between 1979 and 1982, he worked at West London Cyrenians, a charity that provided support and accommodations to the homeless. While there he applied, rather on a whim, to a new creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating a year […]
• Out of Savannastan
  In 1863 the biologist T.H. Huxley proposed an African origin for humanity. Known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his ferocious defense of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, he had been struck by the distribution in Africa of our nearest living relatives, the common chimpanzee and the gorilla. (The latter had first been described by Europeans just sixteen years […]
• The Wages of Virtue
  About two thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice, just as Elizabeth Bennet has begun to conquer her bias against the arrogant Mr. Darcy, and even to like him rather a lot, disaster strikes. A letter from her sister Jane informs Elizabeth of their foolish sister Lydia’s ruin. She has run off with the […]
• At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France
              No tourists.Water turning a mill wheel,            serving nothing but artifice.             I am a servantto order and erotic love.            Soon to be             yours.You take a picture            of me by a trellis,             both of us failingat the vernacular style.            In the Temple of the God             of Love, a nakedboy clutches an arrow.            Once, in the manicured             pasture, they reclinedholding shepherds’ crooks,            noble women […]
• Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards
  In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou Hospital No. 8 in Wuhan. Dressed in an all-white infectious disease suit, the only equipment he carried was a small box of acupuncture needles. Liu is the author of […]
• Egypt: Lost Possibilities
  I intended this essay, successively, to coincide with various recent events: the death of a president, the launch of a book, the anniversary of a revolution. That I failed to deliver on each of those occasions was the result of something of a blind spot: it was impossible, then as now, to write about Egypt […]
• Writing the Other America
  At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was introduced at her wedding reception by her elegant mother-in-law, Catherine. Speaking to one of the guests, Catherine said, “This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing.” It was true, if […]
• A Halo of Nostalgia
  In December 1905 Richard Strauss’s opera Salome—blasphemous and obscene in its libretto, fiercely dissonant in its music—had its scandalous premiere in Dresden, and Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe) was first performed in Vienna. Salome offered the shock of the modern in biblical dress (and undress)—it was banned from the Metropolitan Opera […]
• ‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’
  “Among Finnish peoples,” I read with close attention at age eleven in the impressively weighty Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, magic made its influence felt throughout all aspects of material and intellectual life…. Their popular poetry remains thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of Shamanistic magic. The Kalevala is thus in the first place a magic poem. […]
• Not to Be
  In the middle of a gusty October three years ago, The New York Times published an obituary under the headline “Sue Hubbell, Who Wrote of Bees and Self-Reliance, Dies at 83.” The story is charming and noble in equal measure, the account of a woman who started over in the middle of her life after […]
• Not So Great Britain
  In a single stroke, the new security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States offended France, disrespected the European Union, raised nonproliferation concerns, and painted a target on Australia’s back for China. For Britain, though, it offered to reinforce its tenuous “special relationship” with the US, helping it to piggyback on America’s […]
• Unknown Sources of Lift
  In the last few years The New York Review has published Ben Lerner in almost all his modes: poetry, a prose that hovers between poetry and fiction, and criticism. He is best known as a novelist—The Topeka School, his latest, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, and his first two novels came […]
• Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’
  At a press conference in Tokyo in July 1966, a Japanese jazz critic asked John Coltrane what he would like to be in ten years. “I would like to be a saint,” he replied. Coltrane, who died the following July of liver cancer, at forty, reportedly laughed when he said this; but among his followers, […]
• A Canon for the American Prisoner
  In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old. I am now twenty years into a sentence of […]
• Calling Grandma
  When I was seven, Syd was my best friend. Hers was the first number I memorized when I learned to use a telephone. She would answer, a little curious and with a Brooklyn air of “Who the hell is this?”, which gingered up as soon as she heard me say “Hi, Grandma.” I’d call every […]
• Human Diagnostics
  In the September 23, 2021, issue of the magazine, Gavin Francis considers three books about the ways we’re in thrall to digital technologies, and how they’re affecting our mental health. In his review, Francis writes that during the pandemic, our devices have been “both boon and curse, strengthening opportunities to connect even as they can […]
• The Nakba, Father’s Papers, and Jaffa Revisited
  This summer, I walked the lovely stretch of seaside along the coast road south from Tel Aviv to Jaffa. The ancient port city came into view for me on the hill ahead. In Arabic, we call it the bride of the sea. I remembered how my mother enjoyed smoking a cigarette only when sitting in […]
• What Does the Microbiome Do?
  We live life with companions. Some, like parents, are present from our moment of birth; others are met at school or work and become friends or spouses. These companions influence our behavior and emotions, and so contribute to our physical and mental health. But as Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show in Gut Feelings, we […]
• Nature’s Evolving Tastes
  “The wholesale murders going [on] now in Paris are heartrending.” Charles Darwin received this news in a letter from the paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, dated May 28, 1871, the final day of a week known since as the Semaine sanglante. Two months earlier, socialist revolutionaries in the French National Guard had seized the capital and declared […]
• ‘All One’s Capacities’
  In 1994, shortly after her husband’s death, the Australian-born novelist Shirley Hazzard was quoted in The New York Times as saying that their three-decade marriage had really been a ménage à trois. For anyone who’d been paying attention, this can hardly have come as a surprise. The three principals are all represented in the jacket […]
• Wits’ End
  English Men of Letters, launched in 1878 by Macmillan, was a series of popular biographies of the greatest names in English literature. Its volumes—the lives of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth—were fixtures of the Victorian classroom and public library, delivering verdicts about writers’ achievements and personalities that shaped the imaginations of a generation of readers. Leslie […]
• Anything Can Happen
  I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows what Don Quixote is about. —Keith Dewhurst, author of the play Don Quixote (1982) Miguel de Cervantes concluded The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha in 1605 with a phrase in Italian from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: “Forse altro […]
• ‘The Lucky Ones’
  My maternal grandparents were people who had suffered. Even in my earliest memories, their faces are deeply lined, their hair sparse. My grandfather, a tall man, was perpetually stooped, his chest sunken; my grandmother’s knuckles were swollen with arthritis. Each wore a full set of dentures. Their expressions brightened when they looked at me, their […]
• Are the Kids All Right?
  In 1972, when Jonathan Franzen was thirteen, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that parents in his town were worried: high school kids in Webster Groves were spending too much time at church. The reason was Fellowship, a rapidly growing Christian youth group, and its edgy leader, Bob Mutton—a youth pastor with a “tormented Jesus” look […]
• What Is the N.E.D.’s Mission?
  To the Editors: We were very surprised to read the inaccurate and misleading description of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in “Ortega in His Labyrinth” by Stephen Kinzer [NYR, September 23]. NED is an independent and bipartisan grant-making organization that has worked since 1984 to strengthen democratic processes around the world by providing support […]
• The Storyteller
  He told friends his first novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t; he said he was “at home” in Vienna before he’d ever gone there; he claimed, falsely, to have directed a play by Harold Pinter during his student days at Freiburg; he said he was a photojournalist for an American magazine, which […]
• Country House Equality
  To the Editors: Bursting with superiority, Linda Colley regretfully concedes that “images of dead aristocrats and their gilded houses and collections can still possess an appeal” [“How British Is It?,” NYR, September 23]. I was forcefully reminded of a visit I made some years ago with an American feminist friend to Knole House in Kent, […]
• They Ask Me
  why the newflawless birdswired to perfectionwhose beauty song flight lifthover settle youcannot tell fromthose not coming back are not thesame, whosefeathertips shineas if in the old sunlight, whosespeckled wingsmottle further withperfect shadow-speckle, whose necks havethe sweet up/downjerk of worry, whosethroat is made to throb so slightlyas was the casewhen song wasexpelled why do they not […]
• Carousel
  All you have been and allyou have experienced has happened to me.I travel from my future to your past to losemy origins. What’s the beginning?Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camelthat went through. One hump or two?The answers to my questions are beyond mebut I only ask questions with answers I can […]
• The More Fraught the Better
  What is the nature of the relationship between music and words, whether in opera, song, or any other art form that brings them together? Are they lovers, business partners, rival siblings, mortal enemies? Does one matter more than the other, and if one dominates, is the other thereby weakened or undermined? Opera’s oldest adage on […]
• ‘Who Designs Your Race?’
  In 1925 the Mexican philosopher, writer, and former education minister José Vasconcelos published an essay that was as consequential as it was absurd. “La raza cósmica” (“The Cosmic Race”) was an esoteric meditation on the future of civilization, which helped shape the way race is viewed in Latin America to this day. Its premise is […]
• The CCP’s Culture of Fear
  Roughly two thousand years ago, the arrival in China of Buddhism from India brought major changes not only to China’s belief systems but to many aspects of its daily life. Buddhism’s approach on the whole was gentle, and indigenous Chinese versions of it eventually flourished. Zen was a Chinese invention. Then, beginning about two hundred […]
• Hollywood’s Master Builder
  Revisions of the modern architectural canon have been going on for almost as long as modern architecture itself. But our perceptions of what constitutes excellence in the building art and who should get credit for it have shifted considerably of late. Beginning in the 1970s there was a move away from the standard definition of […]
• In the Fire
  The Egyptian writer, doctor, and agitator Nawal El Saadawi passed away in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the age of eighty-nine. Despite decades of threats, lawsuits, censorship, and disregard, she had never been able to leave permanently a city that was, she wrote, the nightmare of being hunted down, besieged, imprisoned, the pulsations of […]
• The Human Costs of AI
  In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging technologists developing artificial intelligence systems to “research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.” To that end, they wrote, “We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems […]
• A Mind in Pain
  The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is now best known for two works: the Gothic novel Uncle Silas and Carmilla, the first great tale of a female vampire. Of his other writings, the one most often encountered is an 1871 story called “Green Tea.” Like several other Le Fanu stories, it is taken from […]
• A Poet’s-Eye View
  Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite (2019) unfolds in two of the most memorable domestic spaces in recent cinema: the Kim family’s squalid apartment, on a Seoul street prone to fumigation and floods, and the tech entrepreneur Nathan Park’s sleek modernist mansion, which the grifting Kims infiltrate. In a delirious twist halfway through the movie, Bong […]
• Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy
  In the spring and summer of 2021 the Metropolitan Museum in New York and several museums in Europe confirmed that they will send back to Nigeria some of the many bronzes looted by British forces from Benin City in 1897. Museums and official bodies in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and France are now taking […]
• Another Immigration Purgatory for Children
  Victoria was seventeen when, in 2014, she made the journey alone to the US: escaping gangs in her native El Salvador, crossing the Rio Grande on foot, and being placed in immigration detention in Texas. She endured more than a month there and another in an immigration shelter where she learned a bit of English, […]
• Emissary from a Watery Future
  In the October 7, 2021, issue of The New York Review, Nathaniel Rich reviews They Called Us River Rats, Macon Fry’s account of life in the batture, a colony of houses on stilts abutting the Mississippi River, on the far side of New Orleans’s levees. A longtime resident of the Big Easy himself, Rich writes […]
• The New Abortion Vigilantism
  Recently the US Supreme Court temporarily let stand Texas’s antiabortion law, SB 8, which rewards any person a minimum of $10,000 for suing abortion providers or those who aid or abet the performance of an abortion after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant. The first bounty-seeker, a felon […]

New York Times Books©

• ‘The End of Bias’ Says There’s Hope for Meaningful Change
  In her new book, Jessica Nordell examines ways to overcome unexamined stereotypes and the harm they cause.
• Questlove Looks at 50 Years of Modern Music — and Modern History
  In “Music Is History,” the Roots’ frontman tells a story of America that begins in 1971, the year he was born.
• Writing About a Past Injustice Helped Her See What Has and Hasn’t Changed
  Nadifa Mohamed is a Booker Prize finalist for her novel “The Fortune Men,” a story about a false accusation and the tragedy that resulted.
• This Novel Nods to Virginia Woolf While Staring Down Modern Class Lines
  In “The Days of Afrekete,” by Asali Solomon, a woman hosting a dinner party for her soon-to-be-disgraced husband spends time remembering a woman she loved in college.
• Thomas Mallon on the Career of Jonathan Franzen
  Mallon talks about Franzen’s “Crossroads,” and Joshua Ferris discusses “A Calling for Charlie Barnes.”
• How Karina Yan Glaser, Young-Adult Novelist, Spends Her Sundays
  Karina Yan Glaser’s home in Harlem is full of children, books, plants and animals (just the way she likes it).
• For Tiphanie Yanique, Black Love Comes With Baggage
  In “Monster in the Middle,” parents beget children who inherit their pain, their care and their madness.
• Jerry Pinkney, Acclaimed Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 81
  Adept at reimagining classic tales, he often made sure that his books included Black characters and themes.
• Classic Crime Novels That Still Thrill Today
  Here’s how we reviewed now-famous mysteries by the likes of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett and more.
• 125 Years of Book Review Covers
  What did the Book Review look like in 1896, in 1916, in 1962? Scroll down to see what it looked like — and how it changed — through the decades.
• Essay: Should We Have War Crime Trials?
  Fifty years ago, the Times reporter Neil Sheehan took a hard look at America’s conduct in Vietnam.
• When William Faulkner and Langston Hughes Wrote Children’s Books
  You might think that celebrated adult authors writing for kids is a new trend. It isn’t.
• Review: ‘The Complete Stories,’ by Flannery O’Connor
  This collection — which appeared seven years after the Southern Gothic writer’s death in 1964 — was reviewed by Alfred Kazin.
• Review: ‘The Lost World,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle
  Dinosaurs in the 20th century? In 1912, Sherlock Holmes’s creator invented the template that Michael Crichton would follow almost eight decades later.
• Review: ‘Song of Solomon,’ by Toni Morrison
  In the deep, sprawling 1977 story of Milkman Dead, the reviewer Reynolds Price found evidence for “the possibility of transcendence within human life.”
• Review: ‘The Bell Jar,’ by Sylvia Plath
  To our reviewer, the poet’s novel was “the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell.”
• Review: ‘Ulysses,’ by James Joyce
  Our reviewer called “Ulysses” the “most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20th century.” That doesn’t mean he liked it.
• Review: ‘The Liars’ Club,’ by Mary Karr
  The Times would later call this 1995 memoir of a hardscrabble Texas childhood “one of the best books ever written about growing up in America.”
• Review: ‘The Golden Notebook,’ by Doris Lessing
  In 1962, our reviewer described this radically feminist novel — now considered Lessing’s most influential work — as “a coruscating literary event.”
• Review: ‘Color,’ by Countee Cullen
  In 1925, the Book Review raved about the “sensitive” love poems and “piercing” satire from a young star of the Harlem Renaissance.
• ‘We Begin Today the Publication of a Supplement Which Contains Reviews of the New Books’
  The New York Times Book Review first appeared on Oct. 10, 1896, but its roots can be traced back to its very first issue of The Times on Sept. 18, 1851.
• ‘Weather’
  In 2020, as Covid-19 raged and protests swept the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, Claudia Rankine wrote this poem for the Book Review.
• Review: ‘The Jeweler’s Eye,’ by William F. Buckley Jr.
  Mario Puzo, who reviewed this collection of the conservative thinker's essays, found himself charmed despite the politics.
• Review: ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ by Elizabeth Gilbert
  Reeling from a divorce, a writer sought solace in Italy, India and Indonesia. There, she found peace — and plenty of material for a blockbuster memoir.
• Peeved, Irritated and Annoyed: Early Letters to the Editor
  The Book Review’s letters page — the internet message board of its day — was filled with lively, opinionated missives from readers and authors.
• Interview: Isabel Allende
  The Chilean novelist was living in exile when her first novel was published in 1985. “In a way, I feel that I am working for my country, even if I don’t live there,” she told us.
• Review: ‘White Teeth,’ by Zadie Smith
  A satirical, multigenerational family saga set during the waning of the colonial British Empire, this 2000 debut established its author as a prodigy of the novel form.
• Review: ‘Sister Carrie,’ by Theodore Dreiser
  The novel’s headline-making candor and explicitness led the Book Review to assure its readers, “It is a book one can very well get along without reading.”
• Review: ‘Wolf Hall,’ by Hilary Mantel
  This fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s scheming aide Thomas Cromwell — the first volume in a trilogy — won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.
• Review: ‘The Age of Innocence,’ by Edith Wharton
  This tale of Gilded Age New York City became, in 1921, the first novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
• Review: ‘The Road,’ by Cormac McCarthy
  In 2006, our reviewer correctly predicted that this father-son tale would eclipse the popularity of McCarthy’s 1992 hit, “All the Pretty Horses.”
• Review: ‘The Woman Warrior,’ by Maxine Hong Kingston
  This brilliant 1976 memoir evokes the author’s Chinese immigrant family and summons the ghosts who haunt it.
• Review: ‘Nausea,’ by Jean-Paul Sartre
  Vladimir Nabokov wondered in 1949 whether the French existentialist’s novel was even worth translating.
• Review: ‘O Pioneers!’ by Willa Cather
  In 1913, The Times declared Cather’s “novel without a hero” to be “American in the best sense of the word.”
• Interview: Gore Vidal
  Diane Johnson chatted with the confident writer in 1977, asking him to explain what made him a self-proclaimed “authority” on all things literary.
• Interview: Ralph Ellison
  “It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel,” Ellison told us when “Invisible Man” was published in 1952. “That’s not true.”
• Review: Books About Babe Ruth
  In 1974, Roger Angell celebrated four new biographies of the Bambino.
• Review: ‘Persepolis,’ by Marjane Satrapi
  A memoir and a history of Iran’s turbulent 20th-century politics, one comic strip frame at a time.
• Review: ‘Between the World and Me,’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  This 2015 homage to James Baldwin identified racism at the heart of the American dream.
• Review: ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ by Amy Tan
  In this 1989 novel, a young woman comes to understand her place in a Chinese family — and in the world — through visits with her aging aunts.
• Interview: Colson Whitehead
  “I am working in the African American literary tradition,” the novelist told us in 2001. “That’s my aim and what I see as my mission.”
• Review: ‘The Makioka Sisters,’ by Junichiro Tanizaki
  A classic Japanese novel echoes Jane Austen, with instructive contrasts.
• The First New York Times Book Review Best-Seller List
  The best-seller lists as we know them today have their roots in the Aug. 9, 1942, issue — but the Book Review has been tracking sales for much longer than that.
• Interview: Sandra Cisneros
  When her short-story collection “Woman Hollering Creek” was published in 1991, the author opened up about her dream car, writing poetry and her parents.
• Review: ‘The Street,’ by Ann Petry
  This classic story of a single mother’s struggle against poverty, published in 1946, would become the first novel by a Black woman to sell a million copies.
• Essay: ‘The Second Shelf’
  From covers to marketing to awards, why do novels by women get different treatment than books by male authors? In 2012, Meg Wolitzer took on the elephant in the library.
• Review: ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ by Dale Carnegie
  The blockbuster forerunner of today’s self-help guides was both sensible and superficial, according to The Times’s reviewer in 1937.
• Review: ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ by Jane Jacobs
  This 1961 masterwork offered new, vibrant ways to think about how city neighborhoods ought to look.
• Interview: Eudora Welty
  “Really, don’t people know the first thing about the South?” Welty asked The Times in 1970, when her novel “Losing Battles” was published.
• Review: ‘The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book’
  When Toklas — Gertrude Stein’s partner — published this cookbook, it was reviewed by Rex Stout, the creator of the food-loving detective Nero Wolfe.
• Review: ‘Hannibal,’ by Thomas Harris
  Eleven years after “The Silence of the Lambs,” Hannibal Lecter returned. Stephen King called him “the great fictional monster of our time.”
• Review: ‘Roots,’ by Alex Haley
  James Baldwin, reviewing this headline-making novel in 1976, called it “a study of … how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one.”
• Poem: The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
  Wendell Berry makes a case for going at it your own way: “I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my/inheritance and destiny, so be it.”
• Dave Grohl Has Some Writing Advice You Need to Hear
  While he was working on his No. 1 best seller, “The Storyteller,” the iconic rocker found the common ground between music and books.
• The Albums That Transport You
  Take a trip.

The Chronicle of Higher Education©

• Ending Legacy Admissions Won't End Inequity
  Getting rid of them would do almost nothing to improve socioeconomic diversity.By Catharine B. Hill Getting rid of them would do almost nothing to improve socioeconomic diversity.
• The Prophet of Academic Doom
  Robert Nisbet predicted the managerialism that has brought universities low. But he also saw a way out.By Ethan Schrum Robert Nisbet predicted the managerialism that has brought universities low. But he also saw a way out.
• Yale Law's Bullying, Coercive Diversity Leaders
  How not to do equity work. By Andrew Koppelman How not to do equity work.
• Why I Quit
  My university’s choices undermined the very lessons I was trained to teach.By Cornelia Lambert My university’s choices undermined the very lessons I was trained to teach.
• The Way We Classify Colleges Is All Wrong
  It's time to do away with obsolete categories like 'R1.'By Michael M. Crow and Jeffrey J. Selingo It's time to do away with obsolete categories like "R1."
• Abolish Legacy Admissions Now
  Hereditary advantage has no place in higher ed.By Ronald J. Daniels Hereditary advantage has no place in higher ed.
• The Future of Community Colleges
  How an oft-neglected sector can make itself essential in a post-pandemic world.By Liz McMillen How an oft-neglected sector can make itself essential in a post-pandemic world.
• Indoctrination Sessions Have No Place in the Academy
  For educators, nothing is self evident; for "trainers," everything is.By Elizabeth Corey and Jeffrey Polet For educators, nothing is self evident; for "trainers," everything is.
• What Critics of Economics Get Wrong
  Bashing the field is commonplace — but few are doing it for the right reasons.By Diane Coyle Bashing the field is commonplace, but few are doing it for the right reasons.
• In Defense of Disinterested Knowledge
  When we judge scholarship only as politics, something crucial is lost.By Justin Sider When we judge scholarship only as politics, something crucial is lost.