Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

‘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

Michael Gorra

The Sense of an Ending

On Don DeLillo’s late style.

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

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

Marianne Boruch

The Sirens

a poem

December 3, 2020 issue

Sophie Pinkham

‘Something Resembling Normal Life’

Paek Nam-nyong’s ‘Friend’ tells ordinary stories of love and divorce in 1980s North Korea.

December 3, 2020 issue

Claire Messud

The Dream of Pure Expression

A new translation of Paul Valéry’s poems also includes rousing extracts from his extraordinary notebooks.

December 3, 2020 issue

Colin Thubron

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

December 3, 2020 issue

Hermione Lee

An Undisappearing Act

Diane Johnson’s restitutionary biography brings George Meredith’s first wife out of his shadow.

December 3, 2020 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Dudes Without Heirs

Maria Headley translates ‘Beowulf,’ a story in which women make the world, and men make their legends by destroying it.

December 3, 2020 issue

Eduardo Halfon

Canción

In Guatemala City, the shadows of the past weigh heavily on the living.

November 9, 2020

Pardis Parker

Illegal Milk

There I was. With my grandfather and father. Three generations. Bandits all. Breaking the law.

November 4, 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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