best of 2018
12/5/2018
The 10 Best Books of 2018 Reinvented auto-fiction from Heti and Cusk, gripping essays, wild tales of Russia and opioids, and final stories from the late master Denis Johnson.
book review
10/2/2018
War, Drugs, and Other Extremes in the Post-Post-9/11 Novel Two recent novels, Ohio and Waiting for Eden , try to keep pace with our state of permanent crisis.
lit parade
9/18/2018
The Books Most Everyone Will Be Arguing About This Fall In a special, forward-looking seasonal edition of Lit Parade.
close reads
9/17/2018
Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai Is the Best Book of the Century (for Now) The Last Samurai is a masterpiece. It’s an accident of recent history that it’s taken the culture some time to realize it.
7/11/2018
What Does Russia Look Like, Now? Putin, as bad as he is, is well within the mainstream of Russian politics. Whereas Trump is a radical fringe figure.
book review
6/14/2018
Lydia Millet Is Not Nearly As Famous As She Should Be. The novelist is ferociously untame, paying little heed to the boundaries of realism and even less to those of class.
6/8/2018
What Sy Hersh Knows An unsummarizable interview with the inimitable investigative journalist and raconteur of the American national security state.
book review
6/5/2018
Rachel Cusk’s Kudos : The Outline Trilogy Gets Its Third Masterpiece Voice and style — can they be separated? The auteurs of autofiction are all stylists and tension between style and voice is why we’ve flocked to them.
books
5/23/2018
There Were Many Philip Roths We remember the slab of liver and the sex, but Roth probably contemplated death more than any writer after Tolstoy.
remembrances
5/15/2018
Tom Wolfe’s Path to Immortality Now Wolfe is dead and one wonders what color suit he’ll be buried in, because cremation wouldn’t do.
5/4/2018
The Best Books of the Year (So Far) The Sparsholt Affair , Asymmetry , Motherhood , and more.
book review
5/2/2018
What Is Missing From Rachel Kushner’s New The Mars Room ? Besides Plot. It’s fair to want more from a novel than the sensation of nodding your head in agreement.
4/19/2018
Michelle Dean’s Sharp Tells the Origin Stories of 10 Essential Female Critics Across these portraits it’s possible to trace currents in American literary history as it unfolded between World War I and now.
books
3/9/2018
Alan Hollinghurst’s New, Deviously Anti-Sensationalist Gay-Generation-Gap Novel The way life opens up to one character in a way that it never could for his father is the novel’s real subject.
2/21/2018
Ismail Kadare’s Long Journey Out of Albania For a long time, he was the only Albanian writer you could get a hold of in English
2/7/2018
Lisa Halliday’s Tremendous New Experiment of a Novel The book is split in two. Which half is “more interesting,” a young woman’s unlikely romance or a young man’s encounter with world affairs?
books
2/2/2018
Will Zadie Smith Ever Feel Free? Her new collection of essays brings to an end a 15-year psychodrama period for her writing.
books
1/11/2018
Denis Johnson Left Us With One Final — and Terrific — Book With a new, posthumous short-story collection, the author of Jesus’ Son still haunts the culture, for good reason.
12/6/2017
The 10 Best Books of 2017 Including titles by Percival Everett, Patricia Lockwood, and Elif Batuman.
12/1/2017
The Unending Pleasures of Jenny Diski The worst thing you can say about personal essayists is that they lack a personality. It’s the opposite with Diski.
11/8/2017
How Does Susan Sontag’s Fiction Stack Up Against All Her Other Stuff? I hesitate to call these stories essential, but they are full of optional delights.
11/2/2017
How Jann Wenner Built His Boomer Empire Wenner said he started Rolling Stone to meet John Lennon; just as much, he wanted to be Lennon. He came as close as any magazine editor could.
literary life
10/25/2017
How I Became Good at Literary Parties “The best way to befriend famous people is to have no idea who they are. ”
10/23/2017
Fresh Complaint : Jeffrey Eugenides’s Short-Story SidelineThe book is most interesting for the view it affords us of Eugenides absorbing various formal and topical trends.
9/29/2017
The 15 Best Books of 2017 (So Far) Including works by Elif Batuman, J. M. Coetzee, and Joan Didion.
9/28/2017
Jennifer Egan’s Strained New World War II Novel Veering into the past, she applies a surfeit of artifice in Manhattan Beach that erases the authenticity effects she intends.
book review
9/13/2017
Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark : What Is Kafka Doing in a Most Un-Kafkaesque Novel? It’s odd to see Philip Roth marshaled, too, to shore up a novel that reads like self-help.
9/6/2017
Listening to John Ashbery His death marks a real historical threshold, the passing away of the generation of writers who turned modernism into a tradition.
9/1/2017
John le Carré’s Spook Cynicism: George Smiley, 56 Years On Le Carré has always attributed his popularity to the fact that “I was writing for a public that was hooked on Bond and wanted an antidote.”
8/8/2017
Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart Is a Knockout The book is a fractured bildungsroman, a gallery of alternate selves.
7/31/2017
Dystopian Books Are Everywhere This Year The present moment has created an ambient hunger for alternate realities.
book review
7/25/2017
In Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends , the Narrator Strives to Matter The first novel by the 26-year-old Irish writer wears its influences on its sleeve.
7/6/2017
Can You Still Write a Novel About Love? Catherine Lacey’s The Answers The marriage plot has yielded to narratives centered on trauma, friendship, and artistic fulfillment.
book review
6/27/2017
Review: Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs Engages the Post-Occupy Moment It’s a novel of ideas, small, elegant ideas about art and protest, and one of the most striking literary works to emerge from the Occupy movement.
book review
6/13/2017
Review: Francesco Pacifico’s Sharp New Novel Takes on Post-Hipster Williamsburg The Italian author’s new book does a lot of things you don’t see American novels do much of these days.
book review
6/2/2017
Review: Percival Everett’s So Much Blue Is Winding and Beguiling At age 61, Everett may have the lowest profile of any major American novelist now in his or her prime.
obits
5/26/2017
Remembering Denis Johnson The Tree of Smoke author died this week at the age of 67.
5/22/2017
What Is It About Haruki Murakami That Mesmerizes People? In his new collection, he’s up to his old tricks again. But what are they, exactly? And how do they work?
book review
5/14/2017
How Much Juice Can One Writer Squeeze Out of Male Ugliness? Joshua Ferris’s The Dinner Party is a parade of jerks who march by one by one.
5/9/2017
How Good Is Granta ’s List of the Best Young American Novelists? All hail the new Best Young Americans! They’ll never be young again.
4/25/2017
In Priestdaddy , Patricia Lockwood Goes Home to a House ‘Made for Screaming’ The memoir is part origin story, part narrative of the Twitter-poet-goddess’s time in the wilderness.
book review
4/4/2017
What Happens When Critics Grow Up, and Look Back Memoirists Daphne Merkin and Lee Siegel built their lives around books. Why?
3/28/2017
The Lives, and Fictions, of Angela Carter Open The Bloody Chamber and you know right away you’re reading a masterpiece.
obits
3/20/2017
Remembering New York Review of Books Founder Robert Silvers A magazine creates its own future by constantly setting an example for the next generation to follow, and Silvers devoted his life to it.
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