by The Editors
January 27, 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that…
by Nina Deval
October 17, 2026
In the cloud of rumors and allegations engulfing him, I discerned the outline of a kindred spirit. The stern language of the university’s sexual harassment report, the annual email from the campus women’s group warning about the dangerous criminal law professor . . . I confess all this only intrigued me. No one offered concrete…
by Adam Pearson
October 16, 2026
At the tail end of summer, Dwight Garner accomplished what few legacy media critics have since the days of Michiko Kakutani: he wrote a review that helped sell a book. A literary novel of more than 600 pages, no less. It was a conservative first printing. At 37,000 copies, Riverhead Books was not expecting a…
by Max Bolen
October 14, 2026
“Heteronormativity is just so broken,” declares Alex (Glori Dei Filippone), a Gender Studies master’s student at Columbia, in the opening minutes of Floating Carousel, a new indie dramedy that made its New York debut last month. Alex then suggests that her dinner host, a Doctor of Entomology, may not be able to completely follow her…
October 9, 2026
There’s a certain wistfulness that permeates the disposition of millennials and Generation X regarding the overly digitized world of today. Gen Z used to scoff at the nostalgia-afflicted millennial superiority complex by way of “Only ’90s Kids Remember This” internet memes of the 2010s, yet that same nostalgia affliction has caught up to Gen Z…
by Eric Bies
October 6, 2026
The title of Guillermo Stitch’s last novel was Lake of Urine. His latest is The Coast of Everything. Clearly the man is a fan of geography. But, then, as a novelist why shouldn’t he be? Bodies of water persist as some of our richest, most versatile metaphors, and if memorable, imaginative storytelling banks on any…
October 3, 2026
This was the last year Henry would kill the pig. Henry told me so herself, standing on the porch, looking left from the door to the field. It was the first thing any of the Laurensons said that afternoon, after they turned up 40 minutes late. They always talked about it that way, “the pig,”…
by Martin Dolan
October 2, 2026
This ambivalence stands in marked contrast to some of the earliest Covid novels — like Lucy by the Sea and Day and The Vulnerables — which have what feels like an obligatory positivity to them, a conviction that the bleak, anti-social nature of pandemic life nonetheless proved something universal and affirming about humanity’s heart and…
by Sam Jennings
October 1, 2026
No beating around the bush here, since the film itself doesn’t: Na Hong-jin’s Hope is extraordinary. Is it also ridiculous, bloated, and a bit overlong? Sure, yes, who cares. Is it trolling its audience with its last-act alien shenanigans? Possibly, though a sequel is (hopefully, eventually) on the way. Is it given to dangling important…
September 30, 2026
In The Frenchmen, her new chronicle of postwar French philosophy, New York Times Book Review senior editor Emily Eakin has done something truly impressive, arranging some of the most brilliant but bilious figures of late-20th-century continental thought into a narrative that is lively and informative, never pretentious and never dull.