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Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

December 5, 2024

Current Issue

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As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

book review new york

Playing for Time

book review new york

‘A Woman Who Wins’

The Father-Daughter Dance

October 17, 2024 issue

Speaking the Unspeakable

book review new york

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

book review new york

‘Deviations and Catastrophes’

The characters in Kathleen Alcott’s stories struggle with whether to let their attachment to the past derail them in the present.

book review new york

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

John le Carré (1931–2020)

Back from the Cold

November 23, 2017 issue

Which John le Carré?

October 13, 2016 issue

The Deadly Art of Double Deception

May 7, 2015 issue

Double-Cross in the Congo

April 12, 2007 issue

The Devil’s Playground

July 19, 2001 issue

May 20, 1999 issue

Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

The Czech Wager

January 22, 1981 issue

The Tragedy of Central Europe

April 26, 1984 issue

The Novel and Europe

July 19, 1984 issue

‘Man Thinks, God Laughs’

June 13, 1985 issue

The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon

December 19, 1991 issue

You’re Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

September 21, 1995 issue

The Killing Spree

December 5, 2024 issue

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

Alice Munro’s Retreat

In the years after she chose to stay with her husband despite learning that he had abused her daughter Andrea, Alice Munro’s stories came to reveal more than she might have known.

Pie-Dish Beetle Pursues Longer Life

November 21, 2024 issue

Toward a New Realism

Rachel Cusk’s latest experiment with the novel seems too influenced by a style of abstraction she deployed more successfully in her Outline trilogy.

‘The Kingdom of Ends’

Though he began writing near the end of the twentieth century, the poet Reginald Shepherd remained an unapologetic modernist who believed firmly in the autonomy of art.

A Mind Cast Out

The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.

Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

The latest releases from New York Review Books

Distant Ruptures

All in Line

Saul Steinberg

The Picture Not Taken

Benjamin Swett

Granny Cloud

Farnoosh Fathi

Waiting for the Fear

Seeing Further

Esther Kinsky

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