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...
The homestay program—in which students from around the world temporarily live with a family in another country—sees thousands of participants every year, and Wilson shares the work it takes to be a successful host parent. Personal...
Hassan is preoccupied during the first days of Ramadan—he falls asleep in class and sidesteps questions about why he’s not eating lunch. Things get harder at soccer practices when he leaves early, much to the consternation of his coach....
Twelve-year-old Rick Kotani is a baseball superfan who’s shocked when his favorite baseball player, David Martinez, turns down a huge contract. Japanese American Rick dreams of being a millionaire pro ball player someday, and he’s...
Rachel has spent the past 11 years of her life focusing solely on her work at Los Angeles–based streaming service FreeStream, to the detriment of her personal life. So, when she’s unceremoniously laid off, she’s sent into a tailspin....
In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft is fired from her position as governess of three young women on the charge of being overly progressive; the incident is a microcosm of her uphill struggle to affect “an end to women’s blind obedience.” She...
Watts’ elegant sophomore novel follows Lewis, who’s from Arizona, and Australian Eloise—a married couple living in New York City—on a convoluted road trip through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah. The main purpose of the trip is to...
Keira has fought and defeated powerful forces of evil in the past, but now she faces what may be the hardest battle of her life. She’s been targeted by the hired killers of the Artec corporation, which uses dead people to generate cheap...
Plunkett’s first book begins with a discussion of Frost’s interest in having Lawrance Thompson, a young acquaintance who knew the popular poet’s work well, write his official biography, which he would do, in prize-winning volumes,...
Sisters Debbi and Vicki Peterson had been honing their musical chops for years as drummer and guitarist, respectively, in Southern California rock bands before forming the classic lineup of the Bangles in the early 1980s with guitarist...
“Good golden sun, / where have you been? / We’ve been waiting in the dark, / eager for your glow again.” Relying on gentle soft rhymes, an unseen narrator poses a series of questions to the sun. “Do you think about the scary things that...
A central paradox of the modern era is that we are becoming more unhappy even though, compared with hunter-gatherers, “the comforts, safety, and ease of our existence make us the equivalent of multimillionaires.” So says von Hippel, a...
Ananda’s mother regales her with stories about how the river springs from a Himalayan glacier and is revered as a goddess. She tells her that the Ganga is “the greatest mother of all.” When Mamma falls ill, Ananda and her aunt travel to...
This gray-haired, bespectacled, very chic grandmother “kvells” over every wonderful thing about the child (a glossary defines kvelling as “bursting with pride”). They play peek-a-boo, and Grandma hugs, kisses, and cuddles the little one....
Arceneaux was the first pediatric cancer survivor and the first with a prosthetic body part to become an astronaut, part of the first all-civilian space mission in 2021. The author, who in 2022 published the adult memoir Wild Ride and...
Most characters in Besora’s latest, rendered in staccato bursts of language and emoji-like symbols, introduce themselves by their astrological signs, as with the first speaker, 17-year-old Amanda Jane Holofernes: “my zodiac sign is...
Twelve-year-old Ave lives in Mexicali, Baja California, with their dad, Rodolfo, older sister, Cruz, younger brother, Ramón, and mom, Joss. When Joss is offered a teaching position at the University of Kansas, she takes the American-born...
Puchner’s latest unfolds at first like a familiar (though stylish) literary romance. It’s summer 2004. Cece, about to marry a promising young doctor named Charlie, has arrived early at her fiance’s family lake house in Salish, Montana,...
In this gripping novel, Puerto Rican identical twins Luna and Solina Flores face immense challenges that culminate in tragedy when Solina’s body is discovered floating in a river, bearing signs of violence. Luna had sacrificed her...
The narrator of de Kretser’s seventh novel arrives as a master’s degree student in Melbourne to write a thesis on the late novels of Virginia Woolf. It’s 1986 and Big Theory is king at universities across the globe. The narrator’s...
In 1963, Danny Prescott is an ordinary 16-year-old boy in Banning, Iowa, who is unaccustomed to being noticed by the likes of Brent Arrington, a star high school football player and the “closest thing Banning had to a celebrity.” So...
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.
A number of new books recount the horror America created and then left in Afghanistan. Can anyone grasp the realities of occupation and the "war on terror" if they haven’t been on their receiving end?
When I look in the mirror, I can’t see myself. Perhaps the difficulty I experience is due to the static posture I must assume in front of the glass. If I glance away, I’m gone—like a butterfly escaping the net. I can set up mirrors to...
Walking by a flea market in Pest.Walking by its table of late Eighties Soviet chic, in pieces.Some old movies begin as a cheesy mapgone up in flames to quick-startreal people talking, in trouble, if-in-fact.True or false, the backstory...
The terrible fires in January were another reminder that urban planning in Los Angeles has long failed to protect the city from the natural disasters that repeatedly threaten the region.
The BBC series Mr Loverman, about a closeted West Indian grandfather and his family, explores the submerged emotional lives of the Windrush generation in Britain.
In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement...
On October 28, 2024, in front of a packed crowd in Madison Square Garden, Donald Trump took aim at his “enemies from within.” Accusing Kamala Harris of having “violated her oath, eradicated our sovereign border, and unleashed an army of...
For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have...
On January 7, as eighty-to-ninety-mile-per-hour winds approached Los Angeles, Emilio Sweet-Coll was visiting his family in Mexico City. His phone pinged with a notification that warned of inclement weather back home. He checked Watch...
In 1972, as a freshman at Wesleyan University, I signed up for “Introduction to Experimental Music” with the composer Alvin Lucier. It set the course of my life as a composer. This account of that year is an attempt to convey the aural...
If ever one needed evidence of the necessity for limits on executive power, President Donald Trump has now provided it. The first three weeks of his second term are Exhibit A in the case for checks and balances, separation of powers, and...
Kaitlyn Greenidge has worked as a park ranger, a phone banker, and an app designer, all while writing the essays and reviews that launched her career. She maintains a refreshingly eclectic approach to her profession, freely and boldly...
The story is so much older now, and farther away. Dracula has always been ancient, foreign, but at first he came to us: in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) he invades contemporary London, a city of telegrams, train timetables,...
Last spring I got an email from the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli asking if I had time to translate some work by a Gazan colleague of hers who was writing a book about the war. “A book?” I thought. I’d read plenty of poetry and...
“A new crackdown was clearly underway,” writes the Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup in the NYR Online, remembering the fifteen months he spent imprisoned in Xinjiang, China. “No one I spoke to knew why the police had abducted them. Each...
After seeing “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., I revisited Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). The memoir, perhaps more than any other single...
The week I became a father, two things happened. Fires engulfed the Amazon, and a man who made his living as a columnist for the largest newspaper in the country complained to a university provost that a professor had called him a bedbug...
In his movies, Frederick Wiseman, a filmmaker who resists interpretation as much as he invites it, likes to show people being given the tools to figure things out on their own.