Category Archives: Books

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS – AUTUMN 2025

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB Alien“, which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 6, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jed Perl on critical thinking, Mark Lilla on the MAGA nation, Ben Lerner on his heart, Clare Bucknell on female critics in early modern England, Cora Currier on twenty-five years of the “war on terror,” Peter E. Gordon on the religion of sociology, Wyatt Mason on Guy Davenport, Josephine Quinn on St. Augustine of Africa, Geoffrey O’Brien on Kavalier and Clay at the Met, Nitin K. Ahuja on the science of death, Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin, a painting by Maira Kalman, poems by April Bernard and Amit Majmudar, and much more.


Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

Authority by Andrea Long Chu

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld

Those Passions: On Art and Politics by T.J. Clark

Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick

No Judgment by Lauren Oyler

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 17, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Artist in the making: Joyce Carol Oates on Sally Mann’s photographic craft’

Peer group

The British upper classes today By Michael Hall

Uniquely hers

A how-to book by ‘one of the greatest’ American photographers’ By Joyce Carol Oates

Master of the apocalypse

László Krasznahorkai, Nobel laureate in literature By George Szirtes

Thoroughly modern maenads

Religion, immigration, gender politics and severed heads By Mary Beard

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 23, 2025 PREVIEW

London Review of Books

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Mrs. Dalloway’s Demons

Unconditional Looking

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9

‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3

Ouvriers de luxe

Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy: Un couple explosif 
by Yvan Leclerc and Jean-Yves Mollier.
Le Livre de Poche, 224 pp., €8.40, November 2024, 978 2 253 94112 5

Fish in the Wrong Place

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World 
by Corey Ross.
Princeton, 447 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 21144 2

In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 220 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 27849 1

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 23, 2025

Home | The New York Review of Books

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jacob Weisberg on deep fake news, Elaine Blair on istoriya feminisma, Eric Foner on the underground railroad at sea, Andrew Katzenstein on Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Suzanne Schneider on Friedrich Hayek’s bastard children, Nicole Rudick on Ben Shahn’s compassion, Jay Neugeboren on the working homeless, Vicente L. Rafael on an American massacre in the Philippines, Ariel Dorfman on Pinochet’s favorite Nazi, David Cole on Trump’s summary killings in international waters, a poem by Victoria Chang, and much more.

Algorithm Nation

Fights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That’s because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality by Renée DiResta

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

Equality Without Feminism?

The Soviet Union’s ambitious program of gender equality could never be separated from its abuses of power.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe

The Big Cheese

Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 9, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Pico in Purgatory; Can cellos remember?; Britain’s Europe Problem

Pico in Purgatory

Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

Britain’s Europe Problem

From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. 

Computers that want things

For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember that existing iterations of AI can’t care. The chatbot doesn’t not care like a human not caring: it doesn’t care like a rock doesn’t care, or a glass of water. AI doesn’t want anything. But this is bound to change.

LITERARY REVIEW – OCTOBER 2025 ISSUE PREVIEW

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features….Read All About It; Goethe’s Grand Ideas; The Basquiat Boom; Ministers & Monarchs; Operation Baku…

Strong Constitution: ‘Power and the Palace: The Inside Story of the Monarchy and 10 Downing Street’ By Valentine Low

Blood, Rage & Terror: ‘The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s’ By Jason Burke

Stocks & Scares: ‘1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History’ By  Andrew Ross Sorkin

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 3, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at sixty; The case against progress; Patricial Lockwood’s bag of scraps…

Lioness of God    

The sixtieth anniversary ‘heritage’ edition of Ariel By Seamus Perry

The Puritan reflex

Thomas Pynchon’s haunted vision of history By James Marcus

A dashed clever fellow

The wisdom of Bertie Wooster By Tim Lake

Printed by herself

The precocious poetry of Charlotte Brontë By Samantha Ellis

THE PARIS REVIEW – FALL 2025

THE PARIS REVIEW : The latest issue features interviews with Maggie Nelson and Eliot Weinberger, prose by Bud Smith and Yan Lianke, poetry by Patricia Lockwood and Ishion Hutchinson, art by Martha Diamond and Talia Chetrit, a cover by Issy Wood, and more…

Eliot Weinberger on the Art of the Essay: “I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.”

Maggie Nelson on the Art of Nonfiction: “It’s important to notice when the spark of magic or curiosity is there and what snuffs it out, and being around too many writers, for me, snuffs it out.”

Prose by Anne Carson, Renny Gong, Aurora Huiza, Jordy Rosenberg, Bud Smith, and Yan Lianke.

Poetry by Roque Dalton, Ishion Hutchinson, Patricia Lockwood, Mariano Melgar, Eileen Myles, Katie Peterson, and authors unknown.

Art by Talia Chetrit, Martha Diamond, and Jamian Juliano-Villani; cover by Issy Wood.