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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

Darryl Pinckney

‘She Captured All Before Her’

It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.

October 20, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Two Elizabeths

The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.

October 20, 2022 issue

Janique Vigier

His Dreaminess Had Will

In the last three years of his life, the elusive New York artist Ray Johnson picked up what he called a “new career as a photographer.” His late pictures were a final message, prank, secret, or gift.

September 26, 2022

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

David Shulman

Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms

The idiosyncratic wisdom of the Tirukkural’s poetry is about aliveness, perhaps the most elusive of human goals.

October 6, 2022 issue

Ange Mlinko

Timeless Correspondences

The great salutary effect of reading H.D.’s novels and memoirs— many brought out late in life or posthumously— is to restore her to her era.

October 6, 2022 issue

NYR Online

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

Hilton Als

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

September 23, 2022

Jerry Brown

On the Downbeat

Joan Didion was gentle in person, and quiet-spoken, but ferocious in her honesty.

September 22, 2022

Jamieson Webster

A Child Is Being Aborted

Psychoanalysis helped me make sense of my desire to have a child. It also exposes the fantasies at the root of the fear of abortion.

September 21, 2022

Jerome Groopman

Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It

Advances in our knowledge of the causes of diabetes, and in our ability to treat the disease, have long been hampered by racial prejudice and exorbitant drug prices.

October 6, 2022 issue

Linda Greenhouse

A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent

Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved case has proved prophetic about the decision’s consequences for racial integration in public schools.

October 6, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue

Mark Danner

The Slow-Motion Coup

What has Donald Trump taken from our democracy?

October 6, 2022 issue

Bill McKibben

Where Will We Live?

Three books on the movement, of both humans and wildlife, spurred by climate change illustrate the magnitude of the challenge before us.

October 6, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Remembering Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, illustration by Leanne Shapton

Hilary Mantel

From ‘Wolf Hall’

July 17, 2008 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Perils of Antoinette

January 11, 2007 issue

Hilary Mantel

Not ‘Everybody’s Dear Jane’

February 5, 1998 issue

Hilary Mantel

The War Against Women

April 30, 2009 issue

Hilary Mantel

Revelations for the West

September 21, 2006 issue

Hilary Mantel

England, Whose England?

November 23, 1989 issue

Joseph Roth; illustration by Yann Kebbi

“He was a self-driven émigré who constantly liquidated and recreated his past and his identity, and who drank himself to death at the age of forty-four, crying out on his deathbed, ‘I have to get out of here!’”

— Hermione Lee: Poet of the Dispossessed

October 6, 2022

Current Issue

New Poems

Vona Groarke

Passage

October 6, 2022 issue

Wendy Xu

Little Emperor of Solstice

September 22, 2022 issue

Geoffrey Nutter

Toy Apple Beauty

September 22, 2022 issue

Among the Animals

Michelle Nijhuis

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

June 23, 2016 issue

Liuty, a male tiger whose name, according to John Vaillant in The Tiger, is ‘an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-blooded, and bold,’ at a Siberian wildlife rehabilitation center run by the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov

Tim Flannery

Tigers, Humans, and Snails

Whether birdsong at dawn or just a weed in a sidewalk, nature is all around us. Yet all too frequently we only appreciate it when it’s out of reach.

February 10, 2011 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

Do jellyfish have minds?

April 24, 2014 issue

Free from the Archives

Hilton Als: The Good-bye Girl

“Keaton’s signature characters are women who do not know who their ‘I’ is but nevertheless ‘more or less’ rush to the podium, hiding to be seen.”

Brief Encounters

Laurence H. Tribe, interviewed by Daniel Drake

“Ever Freer to Speak My Mind”

“The right’s political program has the effect of making ours a less democratic, less inclusive, less gender-neutral, more homophobic, more misogynistic, more authoritarian, and more corporate-friendly and wealth-empowering polity.”

September 24, 2022

Eric Foner, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

Light Under a Bushel

“We can’t accept the principle that the way to judge a course of study is by how much money you will make. It’s important to study history if you want to be an intelligent citizen in a democracy.”

September 17, 2022