In 1970, Grace Hoeman and Arlene Blum led six women on the first all-women’s summit of Denali. Randall’s record of this climb is a study in showing rather than telling, spanning the grueling, weekslong trek and the question of how the...
After she’s caught in a compromising situation, California teacher Jane is unceremoniously fired. She then applies for the “types of jobs that [won’t] check a record.” Fortunately, she finds one—a couple (including a popular writer of...
Daemicke links a teacher’s childhood gift of The Secret Garden to the community gardens that Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) later planted in empty lots around Detroit with the aid of young volunteers. The author characterizes her subject as...
After Emily’s parents, Morris and Rose, read a news story about how President Theodore Roosevelt spared the life of a wild bear on a hunting trip, the little girl helps her mother make a stuffed bear in his honor. Using velvet fabric,...
Twelve-year-old Erin’s mother has struggled with depression ever since Aunty Sophie, Mum’s beloved sister, passed away. Erin herself battles fairly severe OCD; her symptoms—including compulsively checking things and counting—can be...
On the first morning of the Munich Security Conference, February 14, I arrived at the press office to request an escort to enter the Bayerischer Hof, the opulent hotel that hosts this annual convening of politicians, generals, weapons...
The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.
We know who the Nazis were and what they did. In Hitler's People, the distinguished historian Richard J. Evans seeks to explain what what made them capable of doing it.
Since the rise of cable TV, corporations have sought to capture our valuable attention. But the way social media shatters our ability to focus has new implications for public discourse and politics.
In 1944 the British architecture and design writer John Gloag declared, without much fear of contradiction, that “the modern movement does not yet speak English.” Paradoxically, the revolutionary design ethos that flourished on the...
On Ocracoke I sit in the sand & smoke,Sipping an okra Coke. Only in the South,I say, missing my mouth. At least I don’t choke On the flavor, cough syrup meets candied moth.Stupefying as clustered houses on stilts,Collapsing at...
In 1877 the German classicist Adolf Michaelis had almost completed the research for his catalog of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture held in British collections. It was “irksome, mosaic-like work,” he reported—poring over the contents of...
You scrub from my throat the darkness that sticks to songstraveling at the speed of light. The songs you play are all I hear. With our morningcoffee and kitchen hours.Gone are my industrial sorrows. I am back to the blue Arabic note,the...
It is likely to be remembered as the high point of Donald Trump’s tumultuous first presidency. On May 15, 2020, joined by cabinet members, public health experts, and military officials, he announced Operation Warp Speed, a “momentous...
Two recent books recover the missing Black history of upstate New York, challenging the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.
What makes Ronnie O’Sullivan the greatest player in the history of snooker? It isn’t just statistical dominance—it lies in his style, in the difference between thinking and acting.
Each month, Mami and Tía Ana gather much-needed items and send them to relatives living in Cuba. William’s usually on the sidelines during the packing extravaganza, but one day, Mami gives him an important job: to check whether anyone in...
Thirteen-year-old Dorani Gutierrez loves her life in Miami amid a lively mix of Latin American cultures where she, as a Puerto Rican and Argentinian girl, blends in with her classmates. She’s a strong advocate for “truth and justice,”...
In addition to drawing from previously published works, the anthologists issued an open call for submissions. First-time published poets appear alongside Emily Dickinson, Nikki Grimes, Joseph Bruchac, Janet Wong, and more. The unifying...
When the Stewart family of London visits the zoo one December afternoon, Mrs. Stewart extends a tongue-in-cheek invitation to a little penguin to “come and stay with us whenever you like.” Just before supper, Einstein arrives at their...
After her best friend, Lou Merritt, dies from cancer, Lenny Bellamy feels like she’s barely hanging on. Thankfully, the babysitting gigs she picks up to pay the bills also serve as a bright distraction in her life. Lenny is one of those...
Kel takes the protection of Prince Conor very seriously. As Sword Catcher, he’s more than just a bodyguard; he’s part spy, part body double, and part confidante for the man with whom he grew up. But as he investigates the possibility of...
Starting her third year at the Arcanum Training Institute for Marvelous and Uncanny Endeavors, Ella, a 13-year-old Black girl whose great-grandfather, Jean-Michel Durand, created the institute, has a lot on her plate. Along with keeping...
Sacramento certainly has its dark side. Like every big city, it has its share of homelessness. Residents struggle to keep up with the high cost of living in California. Housing is too often unaffordable, thanks in part to an influx of...
In the village of Cosham, farming couple Jon and Margaret Turling are consumed by grief for their 12-year-old son, Willem, who died of a fever. Desperate, they seek the help of a sorcerer, Cain Caradoc, who agrees to raise their son from...
An author’s note at the book’s beginning observes that, for kids, the line between funny and not funny is meant to be constantly tested. Enter David. Written entirely in admonishments by authority figures such as parents and teachers,...
A brainy, hands-on child who saw patterns all around her, Marjorie Rice (nee Jeuck, 1923-2017) grew up fascinated by both geometry and art. As an adult, she read one of her son’s science magazines and learned that while all three- and...
Reem lives in a bustling, tightknit urban neighborhood; the young narrator adores the community’s Eid traditions, including Mama’s delicious, buttery cookies. But Reem and Mama are moving away just before Eid, and the child is crushed....
When Sage goes to check on Lucy, her fellow werewolf friend, she finds dangerous, enigmatic warlock Oren in Lucy’s Manchester, England, apartment. He’s investigating her brutal murder to determine if it’s an Upside, or human, crime, or a...
In this melancholic assemblage of more than two dozen short stories, the author examines the austere conditions of human life in the American West and the backwoods of Pennsylvania; the formidable and unforgiving nature of the terrain...
“Nothing ever happens if you don’t say yes, even if…it seems like a bad idea at the time,” writes Vilanch at the end of a meandering catalog of onscreen disasters, some so improbable that it’s amazing they made it past the cutting-room...
It is probably not fair to the British prime minister of the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain, to compare him to President Donald Trump. When he tried to appease Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain had an urgent reason: he was...
On February 25, 2025, the president of the United States of America posted a video to his socials, an AI-created vision of a postwar Gaza. To enter this Trumpian utopia you first have to pass through a large hole, like the opening of a...
Russian human rights organizations estimate that there may be as many as 10,000 political prisoners scattered across the country’s penal colonies. Last summer, Joy Neumeyer wrote to fourteen of these imprisoned dissidents, unsure whether...
What happens when power and responsibility become unmoored from each other? The political events of recent months have provided new clarity to this old question. On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged...
Who’s afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Lots of people, it turns out. In life, she was hated, and knew it. Conservatives and liberals alike pilloried her, making her name a shibboleth for feminism’s dangerous and unsexy excesses. They treated...
Meghan O’Rourke is a best-selling, award-winning poet, memoirist, and critic who also happens to be my neighbor. She is the person whose door I knock on when I want to discuss an idea for a book or rehearse the argument of an essay, or...
In the weeks since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the president and his party have embarked on a concerted campaign to unmake the American government. He has signed sixty executive orders in an effort to, among other things,...
When Elizabeth Bishop was a small child in Great Village, Nova Scotia, her mother’s family gathered in the parlor of her grandparents’ house after dinner while her grandfather read aloud from Robert Burns and the Bible. He read the...
In March 2022 a man named Tom Fitzharris brought three letters to the offices of The New York Review of Books. They were part of a cache of fifty that had been sent to him by the artist Edward Gorey in 1974 and 1975, all with illustrated...
Two men in dark coats and fedoras stand on the sidewalk, their backs to the camera. The taller man, on the left, has the posture of someone who wants to keep moving. But the shorter man grasps his companion’s arm, as if taking him aside...
Henrietta Szold devoted her life to the conviction that diaspora Jews should have a strong emotional connection to the Holy Land and to building a Jewish society in Palestine. But how useful is her ’cultural’ Zionism for Jewish Americans...
Donald Trump promised that he will make public funds available to private as well as religious schools in every state, and this is what his party wants, too. Over the past quarter-century, Republicans have assailed America’s public...
A new biography of Anthony Hecht shows that his life was as various and unexpected as his poems, which evolved from modernist pastiche to extended experiments with the dramatic monologue.