The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat was in her mid-twenties when she met Roberto Rossellini. She had already published four novels and played a small role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972); now she was about to...
Little received his first camera from his father when he was 9 years old. With that serendipitous gift, he embarked on an impressive career as a photojournalist that spanned 40 years. He largely worked for Time, Incorporated and was...
Following an injuryas a competitive runner during his senior year of high school, Tao learned about the field of physical therapy and found it to be a “profound, eye-opening experience.” By 2020, he’d taken the most difficult, but...
The month our office spent working on the November 21 and December 5 issues was marked by the strange New York weather—a drought, temperatures in the seventies—and the anxious drama of the election. During the weekend between issues, I...
This year marks the centenary of the birth of James Baldwin, an essayist and novelist whose reputation seems only to grow by the year. “Long before terms like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘non-binary’ entered our common parlance, Baldwin...
In “The Contagion,” the Dreiyer family’s annual road trip includes a stop at a bed-and-breakfast—that’s where 7-year-old Sylvia peeks into a trunk of dolls, one of which, she swears, moves on its own. Decades later, when looking for...
Daniel Morrison is a man at rock bottom dealing with a terrible job, divorce, and drug addiction. He’s late for work after another fight with his soon to be ex-wife Judy when he gets a call from his bully of a boss. The pressure is too...
Sadyk is born in the mountains of Azerbaijan, and on the very day he begins his tumultuous life, he loses his mother. He’s raised by his father, Nadzhaf, who sells muskmelons grown on the village’s collective farm, and his Aunt Medina....
Thirteen-year-olds Eowyn Becker and Jules Marrigan became best friends during their first Wisconsin camp summer. Over the years, though, their friendship has developed cracks. Talented Eowyn suffers from severe stage fright, desperately...
Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, presents his essays in three parts, chronologically ordered. The text, he notes, is a working example of “descriptive criticism, as practiced by such critics as Clement Greenberg,...
A couple of dramatic prologues and some early exposition bring readers up to speed about the mysteries and players of Hemlock Falls. Winnie Wednesday, Erica Thursday, and Jay Friday have formed a clue-gathering trio collectively known as...
American yacht designer Cassandra Brenner has spent five years in Singapore working for the family business, Ocean House, on her most extravagant project ever, building the superyacht Red Dragon . Cass is also involved in unspecified...
Lady Georgiana Rannoch is cousin to David (King Edward VIII to you), sister to a duke, and wife of Darcy O’Mara, a spy for Great Britain. Happy to leave her exciting past behind and devote herself to doting on her adorable infant son,...
These inquisitive strands of commonalities form the basis for Gervais’ eclectic bilingual word book, a hodgepodge of animals, vehicles, everyday items, and natural phenomena. Each spread opens to a catalog of things—faithfully rendered...
Forret, whose previous books examined various aspects of American slavery, here focuses on the emancipation by British authorities of enslaved people after the ships carrying them—the Comet , Encomium , Enterprise , and Hermosa —were...
In what is in many ways a bookend to 1Q84 , Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Pulse ), and coming-of-age story. His protagonist and narrator, as the novel opens, is a...
August Hodges may be a football star, but he’s happy to stay behind the scenes when it comes to Sugar Blitz, the cupcake shop he runs with Donovan Dell and Nicholas Connors, his best friends and fellow football players. But when he’s...
Familiarity with She Rides Shotgun (2017), Harper’s Edgar Award–winning debut about gang warfare in California’s Inland Empire, is not necessary to follow this sequel. What is necessary is a strong stomach for graphic violence and toxic...
It is easy to think of electric vehicles, green energy, and other advanced technology as surefire ways to save the planet, but award-winning journalist Beiser, author of The World in a Grain , advises us to look at the issues more deeply...
Working under the cover of media investor, Falk is supposed to help Russian opposition journalists come up with stories damaging to the Kremlin. His latest success is with blogger Anton Basmanny, an openly gay provocateur known for his...
Clever wordplay immediately elevates Smith’s story beyond mere moralizing about the value of a growth mindset: “Habit” is the name of a tropical island, home to the eponymous creature, a large, rabbitlike being who prefers the...
The first book in this seven-volume novel series introduced readers to Tara Selter, a bookseller who has mysteriously been forced to relive November 18th over and over. In that book, Tara chronicled her sometimes desperate efforts to...
Almost like the cycles of grief, Donald Trump’s reelection has provoked shock, outrage, despondency, exhaustion, and despair. And for good reason. Trump’s first term was a four-year disaster, culminating in his effort to foment a riot to...
Dahlia Krutkovich • Omer Bartov • Catherine Coleman Flowers • Joshua Craze Dahlia Krutkovich Bad-faith accusations of antisemitism on American campuses are not new, but they have exploded with new force in the last year. One example:...
On January 30, 2023, a forty-eight-year-old Mexican man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea made his way into the Sonoran desert a few miles east of Nogales, Arizona, where the thirty-foot-high metal beams of the border wall abruptly drop into...
Joel Shapiro’s art always seems to be asking questions. Is this large bronze figure collapsing or being uplifted? Does it say “Yes” or “No”? Or “Oh no”? And is it in fact a human figure? Why are those bright blue, pink, and yellow boards...
Yuri Slezkine • Wesley Lowery • Carolina A. Miranda • Nitin K. Ahuja • Susan Neiman Yuri Slezkine In 1827 Samuel Pickwick, Esq., and three members of his club arrived in Eatanswill to witness an election. The Pickwickians had no sooner...
In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.
whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefieddeath, it was here to stay, it actuallyhad nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to berevelation, longed to be part ofnature making itswhistling sounds above,...
The story of two Jewish trading families during the last decades of the Regency of Algiers is skewed by being told through the perspectives of only European and American actors.
In the early nineteenth century, the idea of species extinction was an alien concept. That changed after an expedition to Iceland in search of the last of the great auks.
I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.Eight, allergic to dust,asthmatic, stigmaticwith mystery rashes,balanced tiptoe on a stackof peat briquetteswound in butcher’s twine,fingers smutty fromSuttons Premium Polish Coal.In that bungalowshadowed by...
The Supreme Court’s deference to FDR during World War II resulted in unjustifiable ethical breaches, but its new code of conduct has not resolved the question of when a justice should be disqualified from a case.
In July, two months after Alice Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed not only that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for several years starting when she was nine but that when confronted with this truth sixteen...
Astra Taylor • Michael Greenberg • Coco Fusco • Verlyn Klinkenborg • Thomas Powers • Anne Enright Astra Taylor On election night, before Harris’s loss set in, some exit polls showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. Many...
In mid-October I arrived in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, to canvass voters for the Kamala Harris campaign. The fall colors were in riot: it was a magnificent display of the kind I hadn’t seen in years. Against the cloudless sky the reds...
Paisley Currah • Trevor Jackson • Kim Phillips-Fein • Ian Frazier • Adam Gaffney • Madeleine Schwartz Paisley Currah This is what Donald Trump could do to transgender people during his second presidency: discharge all trans service...
In 2023 the Gulf states supplied around 30 percent of the world’s crude oil imports. They all own sizable National Oil Companies (NOCs); Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest oil firm. And it is not just a matter of oil: they are also...
Christine Henneberg • John Washington • Suzanne Schneider • Aryeh Neier • E. Tammy Kim • Andrew O’Hagan Christine Henneberg After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my...
It’s no wonder those who lived under the Third Reich suffered ceaseless nightmares. What of our dreams today, under the totalitarianism of the online algorithm?
Rozina Ali • Christopher Benfey • Quinn Slobodian • Walter M. Shaub Jr. • Bridget Read • Jon Allsop Rozina Ali “Why would you place your faith in somebody who instituted a so-called Muslim...
Ben Tarnoff • Zephyr Teachout • Bill McKibben • Michael Hofmann • Linda Greenhouse • Garry Wills Ben Tarnoff Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating people who are paid to think about politics. His appeal has been...