New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books, often referred to as NYREV or NYRB, is a bi-monthly magazine that features articles covering literature, culture, economics, science, and contemporary issues. Based in New York City, it was founded on the belief that discussing significant books is a crucial part of literary life. Esquire magazine has praised it as "the top literary-intellectual publication in the English language." Additionally, in 1970, writer Tom Wolfe characterized it as "the main theoretical platform for Radical Chic."

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“Here Comes Trouble” | Leanne Shapton

1 week ago | nybooks.com | Leanne Shapton

This issue of the art newsletter comes from GoldenEye, the resort on Oracabessa Bay, Jamaica, that was built around the villa where Ian Fleming wrote most of his James Bond novels. For twenty years Goldeneye has hired me to do their hand-painted signage and graphics; this time I brought my daughter and worked on closing the Spring Books issue by the lagoon. The days alternated between sunny skies and downpours, and the water, orchids, and trees shimmered in the humidity.
The Weight of Their Art | Lucy Scholes

1 week ago | nybooks.com | Lucy Scholes

In the spring of 1942, the thirty-four-year-old artist and designer Tirzah Garwood resolved to start her memoirs. An accomplished wood engraver, illustrator, and maker of patterned papers, she had already produced an impressive body of creative work, but this was the first time she’d attempted a book.
The Return | Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Yasmine Seale

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Yasmine Seale |Yassin al-Haj Saleh

1. My darling Sammour,After years of silence, I began writing you a letter last October. I gave it the title “Guardian of Hope,” since your absence is bound up with my sense of hope, both personal and public, slowly eroding for the last eleven years. But I stopped after a few lines, for there was nothing I could tell you about the situation. You are the situation. What could someone who has no part in your absence tell you about yourself?
The Apathetic Court | Duncan Hosie

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Duncan Hosie

James Broadnax spends nearly all his time alone, locked in a concrete cell in a remote corner of eastern Texas. When he was twenty, a nearly all-white jury sentenced Broadnax, who is black, to death for murdering two white people. He is now thirty-six, having spent the past decade and a half awaiting his execution in near-constant isolation. Prison rules promise him two hours of recreation on most days, but guards routinely withhold even that reprieve.
Satire and Sensitivity | Zakiya Dalila Harris, Merve Emre

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Zakiya Harris

What happens when editors become the subject of satire? Zakiya Dalila Harris, who began her career as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative fiction whose protagonist, Nella, is the only black girl, or OBG, to work as an assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint—until one day she notices a colleague she hadn’t before.
Continental Drift | Caitlin L. Chandler, Dahlia Krutkovich

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Dahlia Krutkovich |Caitlin L Chandler

On March 6, 2025, the NYR Online published Caitlin L. Chandler’s dispatch from an uneasy Munich Security Conference. The MSC began during the cold war as an annual summit for West German military brass and their NATO counterparts to coordinate against the Soviet threat. Since then, Chandler notes, it has become known as “Davos with guns,” a convention for CEOs, politicians, defense contractors, policy wonks, and consulting firms to celebrate the transatlantic alliance.
Poisoning the Family Tree | Francine Prose

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Francine Prose

It must be hard to find the appropriate tone in which to tell a family horror story that goes back generations—a problem compounded when an ancestor was not the innocent victim of that horror but one of its perpetrators, or at least a willfully obtuse collaborator. One doesn’t want to sound reflexively judgmental or apologetic, secretly proud of one’s criminal DNA, or resentful of the burden levied by the sins of the dead.
Academic Freedom in Peril | David Cole

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | David Cole

For much of the last fifty years, academic freedom has been, you might say, academic. Its central principle—that politicians have no authority to censor the teaching, research, and writing of professors in the nation’s universities—was so well accepted that it was rarely even tested. No more. Academic freedom today is under attack in ways the country has not seen since the cold war. Yet at the very moment it is most needed, universities seem reluctant to defend it.
An Unsentimental Education | Merve Emre

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below.
Circling the Good | Peter Singer

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Peter Singer

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Was he right? Some skeptics might question whether there even is such a thing as “the moral universe.” What we call morality, they may say, is nothing more than the subjective judgments of people in various times and places.