Cathleen Schine | The New York Review of Books

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

Antiquities

by Cynthia Ozick

April 8, 2021 issue

It Had to Be Her

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both.

Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler

by Cate Haste

January 16, 2020 issue

Dana Schutz: God 6, 106 x 72 inches, 2013. For more on Schutz’s work, see Sanford Schwartz’s essay on pages 37–38 of this issue.

Heaven Can’t Wait

Giacomo Sartori’s outrageously charming novel ‘I Am God’

I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall

April 18, 2019 issue

Gary Shteyngart; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Bonfire of the Bathroom Vanities

Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Lake Success’

Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

January 17, 2019 issue

Comic Noir

Paul Goldberg’s ‘The Château’ is the perfect summer beach book for those of us too agonized by the world as it is to escape into a summer beach book.

The Château

by Paul Goldberg

The Yid

by Paul Goldberg

August 16, 2018 issue

Zero Mostel, Lee Meredith, and Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, 1967

So Funny You Could Plotz

Jewish Comedy: A Serious History

by Jeremy Dauber

Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone)

by Devorah Baum

March 8, 2018 issue

Roxane Gay, Charleston, Illinois, July 2014

Unruly and Unerring

Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

by Roxane Gay

August 17, 2017 issue

Elif Batuman, Koç University, Istanbul, May 2011

The Wisdom of the Yard

The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

April 6, 2017 issue

‘Dreaming in the Sun,’ Portofino, Italy, circa 1936; photograph by Herbert List

No Love Without Delusion

Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

February 9, 2017 issue

Weiner!

A film about imperfection in all its human glory

Weiner

a documentary film directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg

July 14, 2016 issue

Sigmund Freud in his consulting room, Vienna, 1937

‘Enthralling & Enraging’

A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer

My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

June 9, 2016 issue

Mary Gaitskill at the Brooklyn Book Festival, September 2010

A Girl, a Horse, a Trap

The Mare

by Mary Gaitskill

November 5, 2015 issue

Atticus Lish, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, November 2014

‘A Beautiful, Mournful Novel’

Atticus Lish’s ‘Preparation for the Next Life’

Preparation for the Next Life

by Atticus Lish

February 5, 2015 issue

A Triumph of Love

Lila

by Marilynne Robinson

October 23, 2014 issue

In the Dark of the Museum

The Alaskan brown bear rises up as tall as a brownstone and claws the bright wintery diorama sky; the vultures and hyenas and jackals hunch and squirm hideously in the light of their glass case. But all around them is darkness. The rooms that hold the Museum of Natural History’s famous dioramas are vast and dimly lit.

September 27, 2014