LITERARY REVIEW – JULY 2025
Category Archives: Books
THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW – SUMMER 2025 PREVIEW
Corporate America’s Ideological Tilt: An Introduction
Rosolino A. Candela, Caleb S. Fuller
Beyond Interest: What May Motivate DEI
Douglas J. Den Uyl
Philosophy, Law and Culture of Liberal Democracy and the Authoritarian Challenge
By Suri Ratnapala
Reviewed by Paul Dragos Aligica
Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician
By James M. Bradley
Reviewed by Garion Frankel
Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word
By Michael Sonenscher
Reviewed by Richard M. Salsman
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY – JULY 2025 PREVIEW
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY (June 26, 2025): The latest issue features Writing with Light – The 2025 Puterbaugh Lecture, by Guadalupe Nettel
Gaza Voices
Introduction: Eyes of the Pen, Voices of the Cameraby Yousef Khanfar
Writing on War’s Edgeby Yousri Alghoul
They Call It Displacement—In Reality, It’s Hell (This Is My Story)by Nour Abo-Rokb
This Is What I Haveby Shrouq Mohammed Doghmosh
Nun and War (She and War)by Kifah Salama Al-Ghseen
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Ghost by Basem Nabres
Ringtones of My Mobile Phoneby Omar Hammash
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – JUNE 27, 2025 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (June 25, 2025): In this week’s TLS , If all Russian writers are supposed to have come out of Gogol’s Overcoat, then “all American literature”, according to Ernest Hemingway, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. James Marcus reviews Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page biography of Twain – the Great American Novel seems fated to be twinned with the Great American Door-Stopper.
Inventing a history
How Stalin shaped the Soviet collective memory By Bryan Karetnyk
‘A dear little genius’
Mark Twain and the making of an American literary revolution By James Marcus
Triumph at Camp David, disaster in Iran
Jimmy Carter’s abrasive foreign policy adviser and rival to Henry Kissinger By Edward N. Luttwak
THE PARIS REVIEW – SUMMER 2025 LITERARY PREVIEW
THE PARIS REVIEW (June 24, 2025):
Fanny Howe on the Art of Poetry: “If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”
Marie NDiaye on the Art of Fiction: “Oh, no! Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.”
Prose by Anuk Arudpragasam, Tom Crewe, GauZ’, Zans Brady Krohn, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Will Alexander, John Berryman, Yongyu Chen, Eugene Ostashevsky, Ricardo Reis, and Nell Wright.
Art by Anne Collier, Celia Paul, and Alessandro Teoldi; cover by Tyler Mitchell.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 22, 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘Which One of These is the Real Sam Alman?
When the New York Avant-Garde Started a Revolution
In “Everything Is Now,” J. Hoberman recreates the theater, film and music scenes that helped fuel the cultural storm of the ’60s.
The Book Cover Trend You’re Seeing Everywhere
Take a genteel painting, maybe featuring a swooning woman. Add iridescent neon type for a shock to the system. And thank (or blame) Ottessa Moshfegh for getting there early.
On the Silk Road, Traces of Once Bustling Intercontinental Trade
A new book of photographs captures the landscapes, buildings and faces along the route that once conveyed untold wealth between Europe and China.
REVIEWS: BEST SCIENCE BOOKS OF 2025 (NATURE)
NATURE MAGAZINE (June 20, 2025): The best books in science in 2025
The Infrastructure Book
Sybil Derrible Prometheus (2025)
In 1995, a massive heatwave in Chicago, Illinois, took at least 739 lives. The city authorities assumed that a lack of air conditioning was responsible for most deaths, but an investigation attributed them mainly to social isolation. As Chicago-based engineer Sybil Derrible notes in his penetrating analysis of urban infrastructure: “Technology comes and goes, but infrastructure stays because infrastructure is all about people.” Surveying 16 large cities globally, he investigates water, transport, energy and telecommunications networks.
Free Creations of the Human Mind
Diana Kormos Buchwald & Michael D. Gordin Oxford Univ. Press (2025)
Of the physics Nobel prizes awarded since 2000, “no fewer than seven … stem directly from Einstein’s work in 1905 and 1915”, point out historians of science Diana Buchwald and Michael Gordin. Their brief, appealing book discusses the general theory of relativity and quantum theory, but is preoccupied mainly with Albert Einstein’s life, personality and philosophy, especially his complex relationship with war — including the design of the atomic bomb — and pacifism.
Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact
Keith Cooper Reaktion (2025)
Astronomers observed the first confirmed exoplanet in 1992. Some 5,900 are now known, in about 4,500 planetary systems, with around 1,000 containing several planets, according to NASA. No life has been detected yet, showing just “how rare our planet Earth still is” and how “the imagination imbued within science fiction can only carry us so far”, notes science journalist Keith Cooper. His engaging book, based on interviews with writers and researchers, examines what science fiction has got right and wrong, and what science can learn from it.
Yearning for Immortality
Rune Nyord Univ. Chicago Press (2025)
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS – SUMMER 2025
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (June 19, 2025): The latest issue of LARB features ‘Submission’ – all new essays, interviews, short fiction, poetry, and art reexamining the complex conditions of power (or a lack thereof).
Emmeline Clein finds pockets of faith in feminist writer Shulamith Firestone’s ostensibly airless spaces;
Jack Lubin examines the relationship between rap and supervised release;
Charley Burlock interrogates the myths surrounding wildfires, grief, and California’s supposed “gasoline trees”;
Cory Bradshaw describes the art and agony involved in making amateur porn;
Nathan Crompton and Andrew Witt discuss the documentary form and photographing Los Angeles
Become a member for all of that and more—including essays and features by Alexander Chee, Elizabeth Rush, and Tal Rosenberg; interviews with Samual Rutter and Abdulrazak Gurnah;
Plus, an excerpt from Yvan Algabé’s Misery of Love; fiction by Erin Taylor, Devin Thomas O’Shea, and A. Cerisse Cohen
Poetry by Farnoosh Fathi, Paula Bohince, John James, Caitlyn Klum, Sawako Nakayasu, and Harryette Mullen;
And art by Carla Williams and Talia Chetrit.
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 26, 2025 PREVIEW
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (June 18, 2025): The latest issue features Joan Didion on the couch; Ocean Vuong’s Failure; The Best-Paid Woman in NYC and Olga Turner Tokarczuk and the mycological turn….
The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barss
The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the Other 99 per Cent by Conor Niland
The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay by Christopher Clarey
The Roger Federer Effect: Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf
Searching for Novak: The Man behind the Enigma by Mark Hodgkinson
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – JUNE 20, 2025 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (June 18, 2025): In this week’s TLS, Mary Beard and Margaret Drabble are not quite getting away from it all this summer. For our summer books selection, they have picked a brace of biographies of Labour prime ministers past and present. Along with Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent translation of the Odyssey, our Classics editor chooses Alan Johnson’s biography of Harold Wilson, her mother’s favourite politician. By Martin Ivens
Summer books 2025
Twenty-four TLS writers share their summer reading
Young and damned
Three teen-centric novels arrive at a time of national soul-searching
Boomers Daily 