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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest
Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence won the 2022 BIO Plutarch Award. (March 2024)
‘Diabolical Fame’
Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.
Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
by Roger Lewis
March 21, 2024 issue
Across the Moominverse
Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature.
Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words
by Boel Westin, translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella
January 18, 2024 issue
Descriptions of a Struggle
Kafka's diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.
The Diaries
by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
April 6, 2023 issue
Very Free and Indirect
The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.
All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything
by Claire Harman
February 23, 2023 issue
Agatha Christie’s Nightmares
Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.
Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman
by Lucy Worsley
October 20, 2022 issue
Meet the Parents
In Claudia Durastanti's autofictional novel about growing up with deaf parents, she is more at ease with her family's unknowability than her own.
Strangers I Know
by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris
June 23, 2022 issue
‘Invitations to Dig Deeper’
At a time when pleasure was considered suspect by politically engaged socialists, Orwell wrote about roses.
Orwell’s Roses
by Rebecca Solnit
February 24, 2022 issue
The Double Bookkeeper
A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995
edited by Anna von Planta and with an afterword by Joan Schenkar
Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith
by Richard Bradford
November 4, 2021 issue
A Family Romance
While Sybille Bedford's books were autobiographical, her life was novelistic.
Sybille Bedford: A Life
by Selina Hastings
February 25, 2021 issue
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