Partners Josie and Derek are no strangers to the many manifestations of grief: Derek suffered a childhood weighed down by the death of the older brother he never got to meet, while Josie inherited from her grandmother the gift of spirit...
Films are rarely made in response to film critics, so it is unlikely that Bi Gan’s wildly ambitious new film was inspired Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema.” In any case, Bi was six years old, living in Kaili, China, when...
One of the first things I thought of when I heard that Frank Gehry had died was a line from Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A reporter visits the title character’s former business manager, Mr. Bernstein, to interview him...
Since 1779 photosynthesis has been the standard-issue explanation for the continuation of life on earth: plants absorb sunlight, which fuels their metabolism, and create oxygen as waste. This is such basic, grade-school science that it...
Why do all journalists in early 20th-century New York get to party with the Fitzgeralds? Morris Markey squired Zelda to the scandalous Midnight Frolic in Mariah Fredericks’ The Girl in the Green Dress (2025), and now Freddie Archer,...
This first entry in a new series opens with Violet encountering Miller one summer night—he’s taking a walk, and she looks out her bedroom window and spots him in the moonlight. Wealthy Violet, a self-described nerd, becomes a friend and...
Jean Detrez, the narrator of Belgian author Toussaint’s novel (in Polizzotti’s translation from French), has a lot on his mind. When the novel begins, it’s 2016—specifically, the time around the Brexit vote on June 23. Jean’s marriage to...
After Lizzie Wells loses her husband, the professor of British literature finds the structure she needs to begin living the rest of her life in Victorian mourning customs. She goes on a “widow shopping spree for black clothes.” She puts...
Morgan has been a nomad all her adult life, haunted by past failures and seeking new places to escape them by taking landscaping jobs around the country. But being followed by the ghost of Zach, a one-time hookup, is a new experience...
At her best friend’s wedding to an actual knight in shining armor (the couple featured in Her Knight at the Museum , 2024), art museum employee Rose Novak finds herself wishing she had her own “old-fashioned gentleman” to love...
A doctor friend invites Jack to help with an autopsy in Essex Falls, New York, deep in the Adirondacks. Looking on the trip as a mini vacation for himself and his wife, he accepts. The corpse had until recently been a healthy man who...
Betsy Pauly was an animal lover who liked nothing more than to help stray creatures: “If there was a cat or dog that appeared to be on its own, she would round it up and get it rehabbed, get it socialized, and then have it adopted.” When...
Journalist and critic Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books , makes his book debut with an engaging biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886-1973), founder and publisher of the influential journal the Little Review . Born into a...
This epistolary piece begins with the dream of motherhood as a snoozing woman envisions her future with ruminative anticipation. Flash forward slightly, and Calatzis’ illustrations follow a racially and culturally diverse group of...
Captain Celestino in “A Vision of Plants” is a man about whom the neighbors tell hushed, fearful stories: “He cut off a dwarf’s head. He hacked a woman in two. Over in the Congo he set fire to an elephant.…He keeps skulls in chests and...
He may be famous and successful and wealthy and a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize laureate, but everybody hates Aubrey Moon, the writer, socialite, and Great Man who plans to spend $30,000 to entertain 250 guests at the 75th birthday party he’s...
Talia Zargari loves math, writing, and drawing. She uses her codebook—filled with her observations, deductions, and artwork on quad-ruled pages—to decipher and navigate the unspoken rules of middle school. Talia is happy to still be best...
Matalina “Mattie” Redgrave, an introverted freelance writer, is forced to quarantine for 14 days in an Aotearoa, New Zealand, hotel during the height of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. However, Mattie, calling herself “M,” has fun...
Actually, Kate, who’s married to DCI Tom Mallory, has two, possibly three murders to solve: two in the present, the other from the 14th century. An archeological dig has discovered a woman so well-preserved that the searchers can tell...
When the author was 8 years old, she developed bleeding in her brain stem that required surgery. Though the surgery was successful, she was left partially paralyzed on her left side; she had to re-learn how to walk and talk with therapy...
Aria Nguyen is barely staying afloat, balancing college classes in Washington, D.C., with caring for her ailing Aunt Thu and managing the mounting medical bills. As the anniversary of her mother’s disappearance approaches, Aria receives...
Cassidy has always known that someday she’ll help run Silver Stallion Ranch, just like generations of Sterlings before her. Wilder Nash is a Hollywood heartthrob who’s trying to break out of commercials and high school prom-coms. Being...
The book opens as middling fashion reporter Irene Bigelow watches her old friend Felicity Wild suffer through her arraignment. The charges allege that while working as a professional escort, Felicity manipulated two clients into naming...
Most of us grumbled through the latest federal government shutdown, vexed by airport delays, minimally staffed national parks, and shuttered local offices. But the forty-three-day disruption in federal service hit hard for hundreds of...
I arrived in New York City from Madison, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1977, driving a U-Haul truck containing all my worldly possessions. My girlfriend, Gretchen, had preceded me by several months and rented a third-floor, $150-per-month...
In December 2019, three months before the pandemic, I was standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn when I recognized a prominent older film critic also waiting for the train. I had been reading his work for many years, so I decided I...
“For those people who feel that they haven’t accomplished enough yet—which is to say, almost all of us!—Amy Clampitt’s life provides an allegory of persistence rewarded.”
As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious...
Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats constructed the foundations of postwar Italian politics, in which what looked like one-party rule was in fact a complex interaction between the left and the right.
Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.
As my recent diagnosis shows, tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide—and America is hardly immune.
Willow oaks melting into sidewalks,propagating grass with daylong jokes,or, listen, the American holly alivewith robins flitting quicksilver throughperpetual shadow as gray foxes set offthe rainstick music of pine needles,repeating Civil...
The tiny baby flails at my chest.The tiny nails, they tearme up, they shred me to pieces.Nothing will ever be the same.In the cold March windare pink blossoms suspended,yellow blossoms white blossomsand snow all hung, suspended, the...
Today in a beam of sunthe baby’s eyelashes had gold in themand closed down on his cheek.Then clouds then sleet:April is fickle and all the worldis blowing, full of change.The baby holds my breast in his hand.The baby holds a goldfinch in...
The baby has a stuffed rattle shaped like a fox.It curls around itself, closing its eyes,while his soft voicecomes from very far away.Outside the March rain freezes.It’s not patience you see on my facebut knowledge of a kind of timein...
The Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays is relentlessly rude and crude, but also bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable.
The current crusade against trans people imperils not just their rights but the survival of the legal doctrine built to protect all women from discrimination.
The world, Georgi Gospodinov seems to say in his novel Death and the Gardener, will always remain split into two parts: before and after the catastrophe of losing a parent.
The idea of the West survived a once-shared civilization as a code for its fractious heirs. A new book suggests its enduring constants have been a fear of Russia and of internal decay.
To the Editors: David Cole’s generally excellent article “Umpires No More” [NYR, August 21] is flawed only in its treatment of Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), which held that schools in Maryland’s Montgomery County must, in Cole’s words,...