Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Andrew Katzenstein

A Well-Ventilated Conscience

The digressive, playful, and irreverent Machado de Assis.

December 17, 2020 issue

James Walton

‘A Good Year Once’

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize–winning ‘Shuggie Bain’ is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence.

August 20, 2020 issue

Ariel Dorfman

Songs of Loss and Reinvention

Learning from the knowledge migrants and exiles have accumulated across the centuries.

December 3, 2020 issue

Ruth Margalit

Women Not at Home

Ronit Matalon’s Israeli novels follow immigrant families much like her own.

November 5, 2020 issue

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Marilynne Robinson; illustration by Hope Gangloff

Hermione Lee

Sympathy for the Devil

There is a profound issue of freedom at the core of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Can we change our lives?

October 22, 2020 issue

Merve Emre

The Meticulous One

Her novels cast a pitiless light on the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.

October 22, 2020 issue

Elaine Blair

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

September 24, 2020 issue

The Latest

Christopher Benfey

The Mystery of the Missing Viola

A parable of the prodigal player whose instrument was lost and now is found.

December 1, 2020

Alan Hollinghurst

The Meaning of Home

On Bryan Washington’s intimate portraits of queer life in ever-mutating multiethnic Houston.

December 17, 2020 issue

Louise Glück

Winter Journey

a poem

December 17, 2020 issue

Ange Mlinko

‘The Splendour and the Sting’

The passionate voices and formal experiments of two poets who should no longer be neglected.

December 17, 2020 issue

Bill McKibben

It’s Not Science Fiction

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.

December 17, 2020 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

A Noah’s Ark of Books

Reaktion’s colorful ‘Animal’ series tries to capture the richness of biological life on Earth.

December 17, 2020 issue

Becca Rothfeld

Ann Quin's Stalled Talkers

Through her unstable trinities, the experimental English novelist found a new language for consciousness.

December 17, 2020 issue

Henri Cole

Mouse in the Grocery

a poem

December 17, 2020 issue

Hilton Als

An Awful and Beautiful Light

Joan Didion and the granite of the specific.

December 17, 2020 issue

Dubravka Ugresic

An Archaeology of Resistance

An army of unqualified historians is toiling today, erasing antifascist history and legitimizing revisionist versions.

November 16, 2020

The latest releases from New York Review Books

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Blackballed

Darryl Pinckney

Divorcing

Susan Taubes

Writing Politics

edited by David Bromwich

J R

William Gaddis

Richard Howard Loves Henry James

Richard Howard

The Last Libertines

Benedetta Craveri

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