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 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.
by Baylina Pu
September 27, 2026
In the cave beneath the waterfall, / he takes off his shirt and runs / straight into the jets of hard mineral / water funneling down the rock, / all dark except for his shining back / twisted with muscle. He throws water at me / and I scream, droplets spattering / my plastic poncho. This is the same boy / who, across…
by Mo Diggs
September 25, 2026
Nostalgia for the indie rock of the 2000s has not abated. There are more indie sleaze retro dance parties in New York City than there are Duane Reade pharmacies. There does not seem to be as much fondness for the alternative comedy boom of that decade. Comedy doesn’t hold up to hagiography as well. It’s…
September 23, 2026
The difficulty with writing a book as beloved as Pachinko is that following it is almost impossible. With her new novel, American Hagwon (2026), Min Jin Lee has done her best. The underlying strength of this third installment in a planned quartet about the Korean diaspora is Lee’s ambition. While the novel’s core theme is…
by Tyson Duffy
September 19, 2026
“It should not be so goddamn hard,” my old man shrieked, “to communicate — !” Fall of 1993. I was 14 years old and the two of us were no longer simpatico. My father had blown his top, overnight gone from a complacent, kindly, eminently decent and beloved schoolteacher to an animal boiling with rage….