December 19, 2024

The New York Review of Books Magazine

Where the world's leading authors, scientists, educators, artists, and political leaders turn when they wish to engage in a spirited debate on literature, politics, art, and ideas.

The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
The New York Review of Books
nybooks.com Astra Taylor: Shawn Fain for President! Paisley Currah: The Anti-Trans Blueprint Dahlia Krutkovich: The Threat to Pro-Palestine Speech Rozina Ali: How the Democrats Abandoned Muslim Voters Joshua Craze: Great-Power Politics in Africa Edit
The New York Review of Books Magazine4 min read
Contributors
Joanna Biggs is Deputy Editor of The Yale Review and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was published last year. Michael Chabon lives and works in Berkeley, California, and Brooklin, Maine. David Cole is the Hono
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min read
The Occupation of Looking
Is Art History? by Svetlana Alpers. Hunters Point, 359 pp., $40.00 The peasants in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance refuse to behave. Decked out in jaunty colors and upbeat codpieces, they lift their doughy limbs and clod-shaped shoes in
The New York Review of Books Magazine16 min read
Circling the Drain
It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions
The New York Review of Books Magazine7 min read
The Midnight World
From time to time when I was a boy, growing up in Maryland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I would be sent to spend the weekend with my father’s parents down in Washington. They lived in the Seville, a grim new apartment house at 11th and N Street
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
Hallelujah!
Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King. Doubleday, 335 pp., $32.00 Across the English-speaking world, thousands of people are looking forward to Handel’s Messiah at Christmas—booking tickets, r
The New York Review of Books Magazine14 min read
The Cuttlefish’s Play
Playground by Richard Powers. Norton, 381 pp., $29.99 On a long coastal walk to find a picnic spot, two children and their parents fill pillowcases with plastic trash: a bracelet charm, a bath duckie, a half-buried five-gallon jug. The family’s quest
The New York Review of Books Magazine12 min read
Making Germany Hate Again
Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants by Jacob Kushner. Grand Central, 315 pp., $30.00 On September 1—the eighty-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II—Germans went to the polls in
The New York Review of Books Magazine10 min read
Intimate Theatricality
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love an exhibition at the Broad, Los Angeles, May 25–September 29, 2024; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025; Hayward Gallery, London, February 11–May 5, 2025; and Les Abattoirs, Musee–Fr
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
The Barrens
North Atlantic wind triesto tear the roof off the hill,throws all the sea’s abrasives at it, but the tuckamore grew upin this house, body shapedby the timeless occupation of a back bent low, handsin the dirt, workingat the fasteners. It’s hard to thi
The New York Review of Books Magazine10 min read
Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one
The New York Review of Books Magazine11 min read
The Shoals of Prose
My Poetics by Maureen N. McLane. University of Chicago Press, 268 pp., $99.00; $22.50 (paper) Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry by Terrance Hayes. Penguin, 214 pp., $20.00 (paper) The great defenses
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Reports From The Slaughterhouse
Fear Factories: Arguments About Innocent Creatures and Merciless People by Matthew Scully. Arezzo, 302 pp., $18.99 (paper) Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat. Yale University Press, 312 pp., $
The New York Review of Books Magazine16 min read
The Architect Who Unified America
Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University by Jay Wickersham, Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo. Monacelli, 331 pp., $84.95 Rare are the architects whose works permanently alter our perceptions of how str
The New York Review of Books Magazine14 min read
You Only Live Twice
Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips. Yale University Press, 218 pp., $28.00 Shakespeare in Bloomsbury by Marjorie Garber. Yale University Press, 392 pp., $35.00 Early in Second Chances, his collaboration with
The New York Review of Books Magazine9 min read
Gender-Affirming Care & the Courts
The pseudonymous Ryan Roe is a sixteen-year-old who was designated female at birth but has long identified as a boy. In his early years he was vocal and outgoing, but as he approached puberty in fifth grade he became depressed, anxious, and withdrawn
The New York Review of Books Magazine11 min read
A Very Quiet Symphony
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. Catapult, 162 pp., $24.00 Not long ago, a friend was visiting from out of town. On her last evening in New York, we still had catching up to do, so we met early for dinner to cram in every update we could. We
The New York Review of Books Magazine1 min read
Snow Elegy
Wild petunias slowly goblind and a starched nurseraces to your bed to findyour quick hawk gazefixed on a blue mahoe branch scraping the louvre glass,its cellophane sound blursa gesture of recoil or beckonthat transmits the gingerlily’s rage and the c
The New York Review of Books Magazine16 min read
Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi
The historian Rashid Khalidi has, for many years, been a preeminent Arab-American intellectual and among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the aftermath of the armed incursion by Hamas an
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
Look Who’s Talking
The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved by Steven Mithen. Basic Books, 534 pp., $36.00 By any standard we human beings are unusual creatures. Just for a start, our bizarre upright locomotion is reflected
The New York Review of Books Magazine17 min read
As You Like It
Choose Love a film written by Josann McGibbon and directed by Stuart McDonald Her Story a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow. Sam Barlow, $9.99 Telling Lies a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow and cowritten by Amelia Gray. Anna
The New York Review of Books Magazine17 min read
Tangled Justice
Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy by Alex Mar. Penguin Press, 368 pp., $28.00 When you find yourself living in a cell for more than twenty-three years because you killed a man, and you recently filed a clemency petition looking fo
The New York Review of Books Magazine14 min read
‘Insouciant Pagan Journal’
Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review by Holly A. Baggett. Northern Illinois University Press, 296 pp., $36.95 Running a small literary magazine is a tough job. It’s hard to make the numbers add up, and as much as
The New York Review of Books Magazine15 min read
The Import of Exports
No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers by Robert Lighthizer. Broadside, 364 pp., $32.00 Chaos Under Heaven: America, China, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century by Josh Rogin. Mariner, 372 pp., $18.99
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
Centers On The Margins
Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past by Omer Bartov. Yale University Press, 376 pp., $30.00 Who could find Buczacz—also written Butschatsch, or Buchach in transliteration from Cyrillic—on a map?1 The nondescript town in w
The New York Review of Books Magazine13 min read
Hopping Across the Line
Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon. Viking, 367 pp., $32.00 In 2018 I paid smugglers to sneak me across the border between Guatemala and Mexico. I was researching my first book and following in the
The New York Review of Books Magazine17 min read
Irresistible Iris
“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” wonders Daniel Deronda, watching Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table. The face of Iris Murdoch, as it appears on the books that have shaped her afterlife, inspires the same question. Here she is with her squa
The New York Review of Books Magazine2 min read
Letters
To the Editors: Linda Greenhouse, in her review of Jessica Pishko’s book on American sheriffs [“Are Sheriffs Above the Law?,” NYR, October 3], alleges that California’s 2011 realignment law was “a disastrous experiment” because inmate-on-inmate jail

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