Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2026-01 Jan-March
This is a continuation of the topic Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2025-04 Oct-Dec.
This topic was continued by Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2026-02 April-June.
Talk Book talk
Join LibraryThing to post.
1featherbear
Note: updates to websites from most recent to least
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Indexes
Jan >2 featherbear:
Feb >46 featherbear:
Mar >106 featherbear:
Deaths
Scott Adams >32 featherbear:
Coleman Barks >152 featherbear:
Alfredo Bryce Echenique >142 featherbear:
Erich von Däniken >29 featherbear:
Len Deighton >138 featherbear:
Paula Doress-Worters >136 featherbear:
Paul Ehrlich >137 featherbear:
Ann Godoff >101 featherbear:
Jürgen Habermas >134 featherbear:
Edward Hoagland >97 featherbear:
Daniel Walker Howe >30 featherbear:
X. J. Kennedy >60 featherbear:
Wahlid Khalidi >129 featherbear:
Tracy Kidder >149 featherbear:
Alexander Kluge >153 featherbear:
Rose Lesniak >102 featherbear:
Suzannah Lessard >76 featherbear:
António Lobo Antunes >123 featherbear:
Myra MacPherson >72 featherbear:
Roy Medvedev >90 featherbear:
Cees Nooteboom >86 featherbear:
Eric Overmyer >154 featherbear:
Michael Parenti >73 featherbear:
António Lobo Antunes >123 featherbear:
James Sallis >61 featherbear:
Peter Schneider >130 featherbear:
Michael Schumacher >23 featherbear:
Susan Sheehan >95 featherbear:
Dan Simmons >103 featherbear:
Michael Silverblatt >93 featherbear:
Hudson Talbott >83 featherbear:
Calvin Tomkins >145 featherbear:
Robert Trivers >151 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Indexes
Jan >2 featherbear:
Feb >46 featherbear:
Mar >106 featherbear:
Deaths
Scott Adams >32 featherbear:
Coleman Barks >152 featherbear:
Alfredo Bryce Echenique >142 featherbear:
Erich von Däniken >29 featherbear:
Len Deighton >138 featherbear:
Paula Doress-Worters >136 featherbear:
Paul Ehrlich >137 featherbear:
Ann Godoff >101 featherbear:
Jürgen Habermas >134 featherbear:
Edward Hoagland >97 featherbear:
Daniel Walker Howe >30 featherbear:
X. J. Kennedy >60 featherbear:
Wahlid Khalidi >129 featherbear:
Tracy Kidder >149 featherbear:
Alexander Kluge >153 featherbear:
Rose Lesniak >102 featherbear:
Suzannah Lessard >76 featherbear:
António Lobo Antunes >123 featherbear:
Myra MacPherson >72 featherbear:
Roy Medvedev >90 featherbear:
Cees Nooteboom >86 featherbear:
Eric Overmyer >154 featherbear:
Michael Parenti >73 featherbear:
António Lobo Antunes >123 featherbear:
James Sallis >61 featherbear:
Peter Schneider >130 featherbear:
Michael Schumacher >23 featherbear:
Susan Sheehan >95 featherbear:
Dan Simmons >103 featherbear:
Michael Silverblatt >93 featherbear:
Hudson Talbott >83 featherbear:
Calvin Tomkins >145 featherbear:
Robert Trivers >151 featherbear:
2featherbear
January 2026 Index
Aeon >20 featherbear:
airmailnews >22 featherbear:
American Scholar >38 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >10 featherbear:
Atlantic >5 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) >16 featherbear:
Dirt >31 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >11 featherbear:
Guardian >4 featherbear:
Househousemagazine >41 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >17 featherbear:
LARB >15 featherbear:
LitHub >18 featherbear:
New Yorker >13 featherbear:
NYRB Online >3 featherbear:
NYT >14 featherbear:
Orion >51 featherbear:
The Philosophers' Magazine >19 featherbear:
Pittsburgh Review of Books (PRoB) >9 featherbear:
Public Books >33 featherbear:
Quillette >12 featherbear:
Reactor >34 featherbear:
Salmagundi >25 featherbear:
The Times of London >43 featherbear:
TLS Jan 09: >26 featherbear: -- Jan 23: >39 featherbear:
UnHerd >27 featherbear:
Vogue >40 featherbear:
Vulture >24 featherbear:
WaPo >6 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >35 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >44 featherbear:
Wondercabinet >21 featherbear:
Yale Review >8 featherbear:
Aeon >20 featherbear:
airmailnews >22 featherbear:
American Scholar >38 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >10 featherbear:
Atlantic >5 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) >16 featherbear:
Dirt >31 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >11 featherbear:
Guardian >4 featherbear:
Househousemagazine >41 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >17 featherbear:
LARB >15 featherbear:
LitHub >18 featherbear:
New Yorker >13 featherbear:
NYRB Online >3 featherbear:
NYT >14 featherbear:
Orion >51 featherbear:
The Philosophers' Magazine >19 featherbear:
Pittsburgh Review of Books (PRoB) >9 featherbear:
Public Books >33 featherbear:
Quillette >12 featherbear:
Reactor >34 featherbear:
Salmagundi >25 featherbear:
The Times of London >43 featherbear:
TLS Jan 09: >26 featherbear: -- Jan 23: >39 featherbear:
UnHerd >27 featherbear:
Vogue >40 featherbear:
Vulture >24 featherbear:
WaPo >6 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >35 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >44 featherbear:
Wondercabinet >21 featherbear:
Yale Review >8 featherbear:
3featherbear
NYRB Online January 15 2026
Literature
Kevin Power. All the Sad Unliterary Men. Review of: Flesh / David Szalay.
Yiyun Li. A Talent for Living. (Essay: "In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.")
Michael Dirda. Panoply of the Weird. Review of: Collected Speculative Works: An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848–1854); The Diamond Lens and Others (1855–1858); What Was It? and Others (1858–1864) / Fitz-James O’Brien, selected and with an introduction by John P. Irish (Dublin: Swan River Press, 3 volumes, 699 pp.)
Arts
Andrew Katzenstein. Bamfordtown. Review of: Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere / Maria Bamford -- You Are (a Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-Up Comedy / (audiobook) Maria Bamford -- Hogbook and Lazer Eyes / Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy.
Jeremy Denk. Satie’s Spell. Review of: Erik Satie Three Piece Suite / Ian Penman.
Religion
Robert P. Baird. God of the Gaps. Review of: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious / Ross Douthat.
Science & Technology
Bill McKibben. It’s a Gas. Review of: The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World / Peter Brannen.
Clair Wills. Blood Work. (Essay: "A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.")
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Susan Tallmann. The Empire Gives Back. Review of: Who Owns Beauty? / Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, translated from the French by Andrew Brown -- Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting / Dan Hicks.
Helen Epstein. Uganda’s Two Tyrants. Review of: A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda / Derek R. Peterson -- Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State / Mahmood Mamdani.
Nicholas Guyatt. The Most Rancorous Line. Review of: Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation / Edward G. Gray.
Christopher de Bellaigue. Hype and Fraud in India. (Article: "Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.")
Marilynne Robinson. At What Cost? (Article: "New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.")
Selected Online Only Articles (from Dec 2025)
Suzanne Schneider. 12/21/2025: L’Affaire Carlson. "Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it."
Linda Kinstler. 12/20/2025: ‘Minimum Victory.’ "Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future."
Atul Dev. 12/19/2025: ‘They Killed Our People.’ "More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested."
Nawal Arjini. 12/18/2025: East Side Story. "Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost."
Gabriel Winslow-Yost. 12/13/2025: ‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography.’ "If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?"
Martin Filler. 12/12/2025: The Liberator. "At a moment when American architecture was caught between an exhausted Modernism and a callow Postmodernism, Frank Gehry showed the way forward."
Rebecca Egan McCarthy. 12/10/2025: The Scramble for the Seafloor. "With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all."
Christopher Bosso. 12/09/2025: ‘Want in the Midst of Abundance.’ "Food banks were meant to be America’s safety net of last resort. As further SNAP cuts loom, how much weight can they bear?"
Literature
Kevin Power. All the Sad Unliterary Men. Review of: Flesh / David Szalay.
Yiyun Li. A Talent for Living. (Essay: "In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.")
Michael Dirda. Panoply of the Weird. Review of: Collected Speculative Works: An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848–1854); The Diamond Lens and Others (1855–1858); What Was It? and Others (1858–1864) / Fitz-James O’Brien, selected and with an introduction by John P. Irish (Dublin: Swan River Press, 3 volumes, 699 pp.)
Arts
Andrew Katzenstein. Bamfordtown. Review of: Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere / Maria Bamford -- You Are (a Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-Up Comedy / (audiobook) Maria Bamford -- Hogbook and Lazer Eyes / Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy.
Jeremy Denk. Satie’s Spell. Review of: Erik Satie Three Piece Suite / Ian Penman.
Religion
Robert P. Baird. God of the Gaps. Review of: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious / Ross Douthat.
Science & Technology
Bill McKibben. It’s a Gas. Review of: The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World / Peter Brannen.
Clair Wills. Blood Work. (Essay: "A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.")
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Susan Tallmann. The Empire Gives Back. Review of: Who Owns Beauty? / Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, translated from the French by Andrew Brown -- Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting / Dan Hicks.
Helen Epstein. Uganda’s Two Tyrants. Review of: A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda / Derek R. Peterson -- Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State / Mahmood Mamdani.
Nicholas Guyatt. The Most Rancorous Line. Review of: Mason-Dixon: Crucible of the Nation / Edward G. Gray.
Christopher de Bellaigue. Hype and Fraud in India. (Article: "Narendra Modi is pursuing his vision of “developed India” through distorted claims of progress, stolen elections, and anti-Muslim policies.")
Marilynne Robinson. At What Cost? (Article: "New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, plans to absorb individual costs into the collective life of the city, but whether that will be enough is an open question.")
Selected Online Only Articles (from Dec 2025)
Suzanne Schneider. 12/21/2025: L’Affaire Carlson. "Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it."
Linda Kinstler. 12/20/2025: ‘Minimum Victory.’ "Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future."
Atul Dev. 12/19/2025: ‘They Killed Our People.’ "More than a century after white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas, murdered hundreds of black sharecroppers in 1919, the massacre’s memory remains contested."
Nawal Arjini. 12/18/2025: East Side Story. "Josh Safdie’s new film, starring Timothée Chalamet, is both a character study of monomania and a moving fable of how the American century of table tennis was lost."
Gabriel Winslow-Yost. 12/13/2025: ‘The Ancient and Long-Forgotten Language of Cinematography.’ "If the movies are dead, why does Bi Gan’s Resurrection feel so alive?"
Martin Filler. 12/12/2025: The Liberator. "At a moment when American architecture was caught between an exhausted Modernism and a callow Postmodernism, Frank Gehry showed the way forward."
Rebecca Egan McCarthy. 12/10/2025: The Scramble for the Seafloor. "With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all."
Christopher Bosso. 12/09/2025: ‘Want in the Midst of Abundance.’ "Food banks were meant to be America’s safety net of last resort. As further SNAP cuts loom, how much weight can they bear?"
4featherbear
Guardian January 2026
Nosheen Iqbal. 01/31/2026: Fatima Bhutto on her abusive relationship: ‘I thought it could never happen to me.’ Interview regarding: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto
Emma Loffhagen. 01/30/2026: Jack Kerouac’s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned. "The draft – one of the Beat Generation’s defining artefacts – will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie’s in March."
Susan Choi. 01/30/2026: The Books in My Life (fiction): ‘For so long I associated Dickens with unbearable Christmas TV specials.’
John Self. 01/30/2026: The best recent translated fiction – review roundup: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; The Old Fire / Elisa Shua Dusapin; The Roof Beneath Their Feet / Geetanjali Shree; Berlin Shuffle / Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz.
Lara Feigel. 01/29/2026: A lever comedy for our conspiracy theory age. Review of Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Simon Critchley. 01/28/2026: The making of a modern saint. Review of: David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod.
Caleb Klaces. 01/28/2026: A visceral tale of cyclical violence. Review of: The Puma / David Wiles (Swift).
Keiran Goddard. 01/27/2026: Bearing witness to the war in Gaza. Review of forthcoming Glyph: A Novel / Ali Smith (UK publisher Hamish Hamilton; US: Pantheon). "This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction."
Tiffany Watt Smith. 01/27/2026: The Korean bestseller about platonic partnership. Review of: Two Women Living Together / Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png.
Olivia Laing. 01/26/2026: A bizarre story of sexual duplicity. Review of: The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial / Izabella Scott (forthcoming Sept 2026; Guardian has Atlantic; Amazon has FSG Originals).
Keshava Guha. 01/26/2026. Survival in a climate-ravaged Kolkata. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief / Megha Majumdar.
Madeleine Gray, interviewer Rebecca Liu. 01/25/2026: Green Dot author Madeleine Gray: ‘Chosen family is big in the queer community.’ On her forthcoming Chosen family.
Natasha Walter. 01/23/2026: Why women still have to fight for their children. Review of: Custody: The Secret History of Mothers / Lara Feigel (William Collins).
Melissa Harrison. 01/23/2026: A dazzling puzzle-box of a debut. Review of: May We Feed the King / Rebecca Perry (Granta).
Ali Smith. 01/23/2026: Ali Smith: ‘Henry James had me running down the garden path shouting out loud’ (The Books In My Life). "The Scottish author on a masterclass from Toni Morrison, the brilliance of Simone de Beauvoir and the trim novel by Tove Jansson containing everything that really matters."
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. 01/22/2026: A Devil Wears Prada-style tale of ambition. Review of: Workhorse: A Novel / Caroline Palmer.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 01/22/2026: Are we losing the battle for free speech? Review of: On Censorship / Ai Weiwei (forthcoming Thames & Hudson).
Beejay Silcox. 01/21/2026: Will a world-wrecking oil tycoon repent? Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Alice Speri. 01/20/2026: ‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities. "Fears over the future of humanities spread amid layoffs and restructurings at scores of public and private universities."
Anthony Cummins. 01/20/2026: A fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era. Review of: Cameo / Rob Doyle (W&N).
Alex Clark. 01/19/2026: This final novel is a slippery affair. Review of: Departure(s): a novel / Julian Barnes.
John Self. 01/19/2026: Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!.
Kathryn Hughes. 01/19/2026: Less soaring avian self-help than a parroting of tired cliches. parroting? Review of: Be More Bird: Life Lessons from a Hawk / Candida Meyrick (William Collins).
Erin Somers. 01/18/2026: Polyamory, regrets and revenge: changing the story on infidelity. "From Lily Allen to Raven Leilani’s Luster, a new generation is re-writing the script around love and cheating, argues the author of The Ten Year Affair."
Sophie Caron. 01/17/2026: ‘There is a moment of clarity that life would be better without alcohol’: what we can learn from addiction memoirs.
Amy Fleming, interviewer. 01/17/2026: ‘Read this and you will be happier’: experts pick the self-help books that really work.
Tom Phillips. 01/16/2026: Brazil’s Bolsonaro finds novel way to reduce 27-year sentence: reading books. "Former president convicted for coup plot to take advantage of law that knocks four days off jail term for each book read."
Kelly Burke. 01/16/2026: Call this social cohesion? The six-day war of words that laid waste to the 2026 Adelaide writers’ festival
Joanna Quinn. 01/16/2026: Friends, lovers or something in between? Review of: Chosen Family / Madeleine Gray.
Laura Wilson. 01/16/2026: The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup.
Robert P. Baird. 01/15/2026: The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age.
Sophie McBain. 01/15/2026: ’How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America.
Lauren Gould. 01/14/2026: How to read more: 12 book-ish things to help clear your to-read list.
Priya Elan. 01/14/2026: The follow-up to I’m Glad My Mom Died. Review of: Half His Age / Jennette McCurdy.
Fiona Sturges. 01/14/2026: A powerful portrait of loss and violence. Review of: The Flower Bearers / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Tiffany Watt Smith. 01/13/2026: Inside the uncanny world of AI relationships. Review of: Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships / James Muldoon.
Raymond Tallis. 01/12/2026: Has modern neuroscience proved Freud right? Review of: The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing / Mark Solms (US publisher: Pegasus; UK: W&N)
AK Blakemore. 01/12/2026: A madcap journey to the limits of philosophy. Review of: Seven / Joanna Kavenna.
Joanna Kavenna. 01/10/2026: Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present. "From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?"
Sana Goyal. 01/09/2026: A tender tale of love beyond borders. Review of: Belgrave Road / Manish Chauhan. "This poignant debut about two strangers who fall in love offers a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain."
Lisa Tuttle. 01/09/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup.
Katy Hessel. 01/07/2026: ‘For a moment, only that story matters’: my plan to reignite the all-consuming love of books. "Reading for pleasure rates are shockingly low in young people. So we should all get behind a new drive to turn them into avid readers. Why not start with books about art?"
Kathryn Bromwich. 01/07/2026: Are Russia’s forests the key to its identity? Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Tim Clare. 01/06/2026: A brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life. Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game UK subtitle: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game / C. Thi Nguyen. (US/UK publisher: Penguin)
Martin Pengelly. 01/05/2026: ‘There’s this whole other story’: inside the fight to end slavery in the Americas. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Charlie English. 01/05/2026: Why the ‘Trump doctrine’ is no aberration. Review of: Made in America: the Dark History that Led to Donald Trump / Edward Stourton (Torva).
Dina Nayeri. 01/05/2026: The midlife adultery story our generation deserves. Review of: The Ten Year Affair: A Novel / Erin Somers.
Patrick Charnley. 01/04/2026: When a heart attack left me in a coma, my hallucinations inspired a novel – and a new life. Regarding: This, My Second Life / Patrick Charnley.
Rebecca Wait. 01/02/2026: A superb debut from a 22-year-old author. Review of: Blank Canvas / Grace Murray.
Jennifer Lee Tsai. 01/02/2026: The best recent poetry – review roundup: The Bonfire Party / Sean O’Brien (Picador); Plastic: a poem by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door / Michelle Penn (Shearsman); Jonah and Me / John F Deane (Carcanet); Intimate Architecture / Tess Jolly (Blue Diode).
Dina Nayeri. 01/01/2026: The extraordinary story of an Iranian icon. Review of: Googoosh: A Sinful Voice / Googoosh with Tara Dehlavi.
Nosheen Iqbal. 01/31/2026: Fatima Bhutto on her abusive relationship: ‘I thought it could never happen to me.’ Interview regarding: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto
Emma Loffhagen. 01/30/2026: Jack Kerouac’s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned. "The draft – one of the Beat Generation’s defining artefacts – will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie’s in March."
Susan Choi. 01/30/2026: The Books in My Life (fiction): ‘For so long I associated Dickens with unbearable Christmas TV specials.’
John Self. 01/30/2026: The best recent translated fiction – review roundup: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; The Old Fire / Elisa Shua Dusapin; The Roof Beneath Their Feet / Geetanjali Shree; Berlin Shuffle / Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz.
Lara Feigel. 01/29/2026: A lever comedy for our conspiracy theory age. Review of Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Simon Critchley. 01/28/2026: The making of a modern saint. Review of: David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod.
Caleb Klaces. 01/28/2026: A visceral tale of cyclical violence. Review of: The Puma / David Wiles (Swift).
Keiran Goddard. 01/27/2026: Bearing witness to the war in Gaza. Review of forthcoming Glyph: A Novel / Ali Smith (UK publisher Hamish Hamilton; US: Pantheon). "This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction."
Tiffany Watt Smith. 01/27/2026: The Korean bestseller about platonic partnership. Review of: Two Women Living Together / Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png.
Olivia Laing. 01/26/2026: A bizarre story of sexual duplicity. Review of: The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial / Izabella Scott (forthcoming Sept 2026; Guardian has Atlantic; Amazon has FSG Originals).
Keshava Guha. 01/26/2026. Survival in a climate-ravaged Kolkata. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief / Megha Majumdar.
Madeleine Gray, interviewer Rebecca Liu. 01/25/2026: Green Dot author Madeleine Gray: ‘Chosen family is big in the queer community.’ On her forthcoming Chosen family.
Natasha Walter. 01/23/2026: Why women still have to fight for their children. Review of: Custody: The Secret History of Mothers / Lara Feigel (William Collins).
Melissa Harrison. 01/23/2026: A dazzling puzzle-box of a debut. Review of: May We Feed the King / Rebecca Perry (Granta).
Ali Smith. 01/23/2026: Ali Smith: ‘Henry James had me running down the garden path shouting out loud’ (The Books In My Life). "The Scottish author on a masterclass from Toni Morrison, the brilliance of Simone de Beauvoir and the trim novel by Tove Jansson containing everything that really matters."
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. 01/22/2026: A Devil Wears Prada-style tale of ambition. Review of: Workhorse: A Novel / Caroline Palmer.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 01/22/2026: Are we losing the battle for free speech? Review of: On Censorship / Ai Weiwei (forthcoming Thames & Hudson).
Beejay Silcox. 01/21/2026: Will a world-wrecking oil tycoon repent? Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Alice Speri. 01/20/2026: ‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities. "Fears over the future of humanities spread amid layoffs and restructurings at scores of public and private universities."
Anthony Cummins. 01/20/2026: A fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era. Review of: Cameo / Rob Doyle (W&N).
Alex Clark. 01/19/2026: This final novel is a slippery affair. Review of: Departure(s): a novel / Julian Barnes.
John Self. 01/19/2026: Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!.
Kathryn Hughes. 01/19/2026: Less soaring avian self-help than a parroting of tired cliches. parroting? Review of: Be More Bird: Life Lessons from a Hawk / Candida Meyrick (William Collins).
Erin Somers. 01/18/2026: Polyamory, regrets and revenge: changing the story on infidelity. "From Lily Allen to Raven Leilani’s Luster, a new generation is re-writing the script around love and cheating, argues the author of The Ten Year Affair."
Sophie Caron. 01/17/2026: ‘There is a moment of clarity that life would be better without alcohol’: what we can learn from addiction memoirs.
Amy Fleming, interviewer. 01/17/2026: ‘Read this and you will be happier’: experts pick the self-help books that really work.
Tom Phillips. 01/16/2026: Brazil’s Bolsonaro finds novel way to reduce 27-year sentence: reading books. "Former president convicted for coup plot to take advantage of law that knocks four days off jail term for each book read."
Kelly Burke. 01/16/2026: Call this social cohesion? The six-day war of words that laid waste to the 2026 Adelaide writers’ festival
Joanna Quinn. 01/16/2026: Friends, lovers or something in between? Review of: Chosen Family / Madeleine Gray.
Laura Wilson. 01/16/2026: The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup.
Robert P. Baird. 01/15/2026: The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age.
Sophie McBain. 01/15/2026: ’How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America.
Lauren Gould. 01/14/2026: How to read more: 12 book-ish things to help clear your to-read list.
Priya Elan. 01/14/2026: The follow-up to I’m Glad My Mom Died. Review of: Half His Age / Jennette McCurdy.
Fiona Sturges. 01/14/2026: A powerful portrait of loss and violence. Review of: The Flower Bearers / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Tiffany Watt Smith. 01/13/2026: Inside the uncanny world of AI relationships. Review of: Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships / James Muldoon.
Raymond Tallis. 01/12/2026: Has modern neuroscience proved Freud right? Review of: The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing / Mark Solms (US publisher: Pegasus; UK: W&N)
AK Blakemore. 01/12/2026: A madcap journey to the limits of philosophy. Review of: Seven / Joanna Kavenna.
Joanna Kavenna. 01/10/2026: Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present. "From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?"
Sana Goyal. 01/09/2026: A tender tale of love beyond borders. Review of: Belgrave Road / Manish Chauhan. "This poignant debut about two strangers who fall in love offers a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain."
Lisa Tuttle. 01/09/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup.
Katy Hessel. 01/07/2026: ‘For a moment, only that story matters’: my plan to reignite the all-consuming love of books. "Reading for pleasure rates are shockingly low in young people. So we should all get behind a new drive to turn them into avid readers. Why not start with books about art?"
Kathryn Bromwich. 01/07/2026: Are Russia’s forests the key to its identity? Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Tim Clare. 01/06/2026: A brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life. Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game UK subtitle: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game / C. Thi Nguyen. (US/UK publisher: Penguin)
Martin Pengelly. 01/05/2026: ‘There’s this whole other story’: inside the fight to end slavery in the Americas. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Charlie English. 01/05/2026: Why the ‘Trump doctrine’ is no aberration. Review of: Made in America: the Dark History that Led to Donald Trump / Edward Stourton (Torva).
Dina Nayeri. 01/05/2026: The midlife adultery story our generation deserves. Review of: The Ten Year Affair: A Novel / Erin Somers.
Patrick Charnley. 01/04/2026: When a heart attack left me in a coma, my hallucinations inspired a novel – and a new life. Regarding: This, My Second Life / Patrick Charnley.
Rebecca Wait. 01/02/2026: A superb debut from a 22-year-old author. Review of: Blank Canvas / Grace Murray.
Jennifer Lee Tsai. 01/02/2026: The best recent poetry – review roundup: The Bonfire Party / Sean O’Brien (Picador); Plastic: a poem by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door / Michelle Penn (Shearsman); Jonah and Me / John F Deane (Carcanet); Intimate Architecture / Tess Jolly (Blue Diode).
Dina Nayeri. 01/01/2026: The extraordinary story of an Iranian icon. Review of: Googoosh: A Sinful Voice / Googoosh with Tara Dehlavi.
5featherbear
Atlantic January 2026
Lily Meyer. 01/29/2026: What Does Life After Ambition Actually Look Like? Review of: Life After Ambition: A "Good Enough" Memoir / Amil Niazi.
Sophie Gilbert. 01/27/2026: Half His Age Isn’t At All What It Seems. Review of: Half of His Age / Jennette McCurdy.
James Parker. 01/27/2026: The Marathon Moby-Dick Reading Is a Radical Act. Anchor link: Moby Dick / Herman Melville.
Gal Beckerman. 01/27/2026: Josh Shapiro Takes a Gamble on His Faith. Review of: Where We Keep the Light: stories from a life of service / Josh Shapiro.
Julius Taranto. 01/27/2026: George Saunders Brings Morality Back to Fiction. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Sarah Weinman. 01/26/2026: The Worst Thing About the Black Dahlia Case. Review of: Black Dahlia - Murder, Monsters, And Madness In Midcentury Hollywood / William J Mann.
Ali Breland. 01/23/2026: Teenagers Are Pushing Himmler’s Favorite Myth. "If you are older than 25, you probably haven’t heard of “Agartha.”"
Adrienne LaFrance. 01/22/2026: George Saunders Has a New Mantra. Regarding: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Ruth Madievsky. 01/21/2026: A Novel About the Costs of Family Secrets. Review of: The White Hot: A Novel / Quiara Alegría Hudes.
Bonnie Tsui. 01/20/2026: The Writer’s Secret Weapon. "Exercise acts as an extra twist to open the tap of creativity."
Toluse Olorunnipa. 01/18/2026: A New Memoir Blasts Kamala Harris for Being Offensive, Ideologically Obsessed. Regarding: Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service / Josh Shapiro.
Julia Fisher. 01/17/2026: My Students Write Their Papers Backwards"My job is to help them move beyond their assumptions, in literature and everything else."
Sophie Gilbert. 01/16/2026: The Unspeakable, Enabled. Regarding: Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny / Kate Manne.
Jake Lundberg. 01/15/2026: ‘To Begin the World Over Again.’ "Common Sense was a provocation in 1776. Maybe it’s the provocation we need now."
Sophia Stewart. 01/15/2026: She Shook Up the Literary World, Then Renounced It. Review of: A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature / Adam Morgan.
Faith Hill. 01/13/2026: A Romance That Actually Takes Sex Seriously. "Heated Rivalry* understands how relationships develop through physicality." (*by Rachel Reid)
Adam Kirsch. 01/13/2026: Texas Sends Plato Back to His Cave. "Even in ancient Greece, people worried about philosophy’s subversive effect on tender minds."
Gideon Leek. 01/13/2026: The Unhappy Literary Families of the Internet Age. Regarding: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Adam Begley. 01/13/2026: Julian Barnes Says Goodbye to the Novel. Review of: Departure(s): A Novel / Julian Barnes.
Gal Beckerman. 01/10/2026: The 17th-Century Philosopher Who Helps Explain Stephen Miller. "The Trump adviser’s assertions about the “real world” reflect a deep misunderstanding of Thomas Hobbes’s dog-eat-dog worldview."
John Kaag. 01/08/2026: What the Second Law of Thermodynamics Reveals About Being Human. Review of: The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
Kenneth Turan. 01/07/2026: I Lost My Library in a Fire. "The question before me was whether to begin collecting all over again."
Laurent Dubois. 01/06/2026: The New History of Fighting Slavery. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Erin Somers. 01/06/2026: Six Books You Can Get Lost In. "These novels highlight the power—both good and bad—of unchecked fantasizing."
Rachel Vorona Cote. 01/05/2026: Why Authors Can’t Let Go of Greek Myths. "The fascination with these stories reflects an existential interest in what in life is inevitable, and what we can control."
Paul Farhi. 01/03/2026: Trump Books Aren’t Selling Anymore. "A decade into the Trump era, readers who were once hungry to learn about the man seem to have had their fill."
Adam Kirsch. 01/02/2026: shared link: Reading Is a Vice. "Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive."
Eric Bulson. 01/02/2026: What Dante Is Trying to Tell Us. "A colloquial translation of Paradiso might make people actually read it."
Robert Rubsam. 01/01/2026: A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read. "The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff."
Lily Meyer. 01/29/2026: What Does Life After Ambition Actually Look Like? Review of: Life After Ambition: A "Good Enough" Memoir / Amil Niazi.
Sophie Gilbert. 01/27/2026: Half His Age Isn’t At All What It Seems. Review of: Half of His Age / Jennette McCurdy.
James Parker. 01/27/2026: The Marathon Moby-Dick Reading Is a Radical Act. Anchor link: Moby Dick / Herman Melville.
Gal Beckerman. 01/27/2026: Josh Shapiro Takes a Gamble on His Faith. Review of: Where We Keep the Light: stories from a life of service / Josh Shapiro.
Julius Taranto. 01/27/2026: George Saunders Brings Morality Back to Fiction. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Sarah Weinman. 01/26/2026: The Worst Thing About the Black Dahlia Case. Review of: Black Dahlia - Murder, Monsters, And Madness In Midcentury Hollywood / William J Mann.
Ali Breland. 01/23/2026: Teenagers Are Pushing Himmler’s Favorite Myth. "If you are older than 25, you probably haven’t heard of “Agartha.”"
Adrienne LaFrance. 01/22/2026: George Saunders Has a New Mantra. Regarding: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Ruth Madievsky. 01/21/2026: A Novel About the Costs of Family Secrets. Review of: The White Hot: A Novel / Quiara Alegría Hudes.
Bonnie Tsui. 01/20/2026: The Writer’s Secret Weapon. "Exercise acts as an extra twist to open the tap of creativity."
Toluse Olorunnipa. 01/18/2026: A New Memoir Blasts Kamala Harris for Being Offensive, Ideologically Obsessed. Regarding: Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service / Josh Shapiro.
Julia Fisher. 01/17/2026: My Students Write Their Papers Backwards"My job is to help them move beyond their assumptions, in literature and everything else."
Sophie Gilbert. 01/16/2026: The Unspeakable, Enabled. Regarding: Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny / Kate Manne.
Jake Lundberg. 01/15/2026: ‘To Begin the World Over Again.’ "Common Sense was a provocation in 1776. Maybe it’s the provocation we need now."
Sophia Stewart. 01/15/2026: She Shook Up the Literary World, Then Renounced It. Review of: A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature / Adam Morgan.
Faith Hill. 01/13/2026: A Romance That Actually Takes Sex Seriously. "Heated Rivalry* understands how relationships develop through physicality." (*by Rachel Reid)
Adam Kirsch. 01/13/2026: Texas Sends Plato Back to His Cave. "Even in ancient Greece, people worried about philosophy’s subversive effect on tender minds."
Gideon Leek. 01/13/2026: The Unhappy Literary Families of the Internet Age. Regarding: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Adam Begley. 01/13/2026: Julian Barnes Says Goodbye to the Novel. Review of: Departure(s): A Novel / Julian Barnes.
Gal Beckerman. 01/10/2026: The 17th-Century Philosopher Who Helps Explain Stephen Miller. "The Trump adviser’s assertions about the “real world” reflect a deep misunderstanding of Thomas Hobbes’s dog-eat-dog worldview."
John Kaag. 01/08/2026: What the Second Law of Thermodynamics Reveals About Being Human. Review of: The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
Kenneth Turan. 01/07/2026: I Lost My Library in a Fire. "The question before me was whether to begin collecting all over again."
Laurent Dubois. 01/06/2026: The New History of Fighting Slavery. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Erin Somers. 01/06/2026: Six Books You Can Get Lost In. "These novels highlight the power—both good and bad—of unchecked fantasizing."
Rachel Vorona Cote. 01/05/2026: Why Authors Can’t Let Go of Greek Myths. "The fascination with these stories reflects an existential interest in what in life is inevitable, and what we can control."
Paul Farhi. 01/03/2026: Trump Books Aren’t Selling Anymore. "A decade into the Trump era, readers who were once hungry to learn about the man seem to have had their fill."
Adam Kirsch. 01/02/2026: shared link: Reading Is a Vice. "Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive."
Eric Bulson. 01/02/2026: What Dante Is Trying to Tell Us. "A colloquial translation of Paradiso might make people actually read it."
Robert Rubsam. 01/01/2026: A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read. "The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff."
6featherbear
Washington Post (WaPo) January 2026
Carl Hoffman. 01/30/2026: A historian corrects the record about the mysteries of Easter Island. Review of: Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/29/2026: ‘Empire of Madness’ calls for ‘the end of psychiatry.’ Review of: Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone / Khameer Kidia.
Theodoric Meyer. 01/28/2026: John Kennedy’s book achieves a rare distinction for a senator: It’s selling. Regarding: How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will / John Kennedy.
Ron Charles. 01/28/2026: ‘Every Exit Brings You Home’ is a work of magic. Review of: Every Exit Brings You Home: a novel / Naeem Murr.
Jennifer Reese. 01/28/2026: Belle Burden’s divorce memoir is a hypnotic nail-biter. Review of: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage / Belle Burden.
Frances Stead Sellers. 01/27/2026: Josh Shapiro’s memoir is heavy on inspiration, light on political substance. Review of: Where We Keep the Light: Stories From a Life of Service / Josh Shapiro with Emily Jane Fox.
Travis M. Andrews. 01/26/2026: Don Winslow is soft-spoken. His fiction smashes you in the teeth.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/24/2026: Jennette McCurdy is back to provoke readers with ‘Half His Age.’ Review of: Half His Age: A Novel / Jennette McCurdy.
Brandon Tensley. 01/23/2026: Harry Reid practiced politics as a bare-knuckle sport. Review of: The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight / Jon Ralston.
Dennis Drabelle. 01/23/2026: ‘Black Dahlia’ suggests a possible solution to the storied 1947 murder. Review of: Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood / William J. Mann.
Diana Abu-Jaber. 01/22/2026: In ‘How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,’ two sisters hatch a risky plan. Review of: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder / Nina McConigley.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/22/2026: Tucker Carlson went from moderate to fanatic — and took conservative media with him. Review of: Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Clare McHugh. 01/22/2026: With Albert Einstein out of reach, the Nazis went after his family. Review of: The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini, and a True Story of Murder / Thomas Harding.
Leigh Haber. 01/21/2026: Marrying Salman Rushdie was a dream. Then reality flooded in. Review of: The Flower Bearers / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Ron Charles. 01/21/2026: George Saunders returns to a world full of ghosts. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Mark Athitakis. 01/20/2026: What’s behind our love-hate relationship with football? Review of: Football / Chuck Klosterman.
Joan Frank. 01/19/2026: ‘Crux’ is a ferocious, poetic look at two teens drawn to danger. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Clare McHugh. 01/18/2026: Julian Barnes’s final novel is about Julian Barnes. Review of: Departure(s) / Julian Barnes.
Hamilton Caine. 01/17/2026: A groundbreaking writer finds a novel way to air her grievances. Review of: One Aladdin Two Lamps / Jeanette Winterson.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/17/2026: These ‘attention activists’ are here to help you put down your phone. Regarding: Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement / The Friends of Attention.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/16/2026: What the trees know about Russian history. Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Ron Charles. 01/16/2026: Hallelujah! ‘Lost Lambs’ is the comic novel we need right now. Review of: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Michael S. Roth. 01/15/2026: How universities can fight back against Trump. Review of: University: A Reckoning / Lee C. Bollinger (W.W. Norton)
Samuel Ashworth. 01/13/2026: Today’s writers are too chummy. They should start brawling again. "If we want to save literary culture, we need to return to the age of literary feuds."
Porter Shreve. 01/13/2026: ‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ was worth the very long wait. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/13/2026: Is ‘Woman Down’ Colleen Hoover’s most revealing novel? Review of: Woman Down: A Novel / Colleen Hoover.
Jenny Singer. 01/10/2026: No view or cozy nook? An ambiance video can zhuzh up your reading time. "zhuzh up"?
Michael Dirda. 01/09/2026: The literary legend who made Ayn Rand and Dr. Seuss household names. Review of: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman.
Jacob Brogan. 01/09/2026: This adaptation of ‘Moby-Dick’ just flounders. Review of: Call Me Ishmaelle / Xiaolu Guo.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/08/2026: A philosopher’s case for living playfully without keeping score. Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game / C. Thi Nguyen.
Laurie Hertzel. 01/07/2026: The perfect little book to get you through winter’s doldrums. Review of: Winter: The Story of a Season / Val McDermid.
Nicolás Rivero. 01/03/2025: What fictional worlds can teach us about the reality of climate change.
Rachel Vorona Corte. 1/03/2025: A woman’s life among black bears taught her a lot about being human. Review of: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival / Trina Moyles.
Book World Staff. 01/02/2026: A look back at some worthy books from 2025. "A history of the Wall Street crash of 1929, a biography of Joan Crawford, a memoir by Cameron Crowe and more."
Becca Rothfeld. 01/01/2026: ‘Homeschooled’ recalls a formidable mother and a vexed education. Review of: Homeschooled: A Memoir / Stefan Merrill Block.
Adriana Trigiani. 01/01/2026: Anita Loos was more than just ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.’ "The author and screenwriter, whose famous novel recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, produced many other works worth celebrating." Anchor link: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / Anita Loos.
Carl Hoffman. 01/30/2026: A historian corrects the record about the mysteries of Easter Island. Review of: Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/29/2026: ‘Empire of Madness’ calls for ‘the end of psychiatry.’ Review of: Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone / Khameer Kidia.
Theodoric Meyer. 01/28/2026: John Kennedy’s book achieves a rare distinction for a senator: It’s selling. Regarding: How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will / John Kennedy.
Ron Charles. 01/28/2026: ‘Every Exit Brings You Home’ is a work of magic. Review of: Every Exit Brings You Home: a novel / Naeem Murr.
Jennifer Reese. 01/28/2026: Belle Burden’s divorce memoir is a hypnotic nail-biter. Review of: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage / Belle Burden.
Frances Stead Sellers. 01/27/2026: Josh Shapiro’s memoir is heavy on inspiration, light on political substance. Review of: Where We Keep the Light: Stories From a Life of Service / Josh Shapiro with Emily Jane Fox.
Travis M. Andrews. 01/26/2026: Don Winslow is soft-spoken. His fiction smashes you in the teeth.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/24/2026: Jennette McCurdy is back to provoke readers with ‘Half His Age.’ Review of: Half His Age: A Novel / Jennette McCurdy.
Brandon Tensley. 01/23/2026: Harry Reid practiced politics as a bare-knuckle sport. Review of: The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight / Jon Ralston.
Dennis Drabelle. 01/23/2026: ‘Black Dahlia’ suggests a possible solution to the storied 1947 murder. Review of: Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood / William J. Mann.
Diana Abu-Jaber. 01/22/2026: In ‘How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder,’ two sisters hatch a risky plan. Review of: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder / Nina McConigley.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/22/2026: Tucker Carlson went from moderate to fanatic — and took conservative media with him. Review of: Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Clare McHugh. 01/22/2026: With Albert Einstein out of reach, the Nazis went after his family. Review of: The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini, and a True Story of Murder / Thomas Harding.
Leigh Haber. 01/21/2026: Marrying Salman Rushdie was a dream. Then reality flooded in. Review of: The Flower Bearers / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Ron Charles. 01/21/2026: George Saunders returns to a world full of ghosts. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Mark Athitakis. 01/20/2026: What’s behind our love-hate relationship with football? Review of: Football / Chuck Klosterman.
Joan Frank. 01/19/2026: ‘Crux’ is a ferocious, poetic look at two teens drawn to danger. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Clare McHugh. 01/18/2026: Julian Barnes’s final novel is about Julian Barnes. Review of: Departure(s) / Julian Barnes.
Hamilton Caine. 01/17/2026: A groundbreaking writer finds a novel way to air her grievances. Review of: One Aladdin Two Lamps / Jeanette Winterson.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/17/2026: These ‘attention activists’ are here to help you put down your phone. Regarding: Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement / The Friends of Attention.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/16/2026: What the trees know about Russian history. Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Ron Charles. 01/16/2026: Hallelujah! ‘Lost Lambs’ is the comic novel we need right now. Review of: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
Michael S. Roth. 01/15/2026: How universities can fight back against Trump. Review of: University: A Reckoning / Lee C. Bollinger (W.W. Norton)
Samuel Ashworth. 01/13/2026: Today’s writers are too chummy. They should start brawling again. "If we want to save literary culture, we need to return to the age of literary feuds."
Porter Shreve. 01/13/2026: ‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ was worth the very long wait. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Sophia Nguyen. 01/13/2026: Is ‘Woman Down’ Colleen Hoover’s most revealing novel? Review of: Woman Down: A Novel / Colleen Hoover.
Jenny Singer. 01/10/2026: No view or cozy nook? An ambiance video can zhuzh up your reading time. "zhuzh up"?
Michael Dirda. 01/09/2026: The literary legend who made Ayn Rand and Dr. Seuss household names. Review of: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman.
Jacob Brogan. 01/09/2026: This adaptation of ‘Moby-Dick’ just flounders. Review of: Call Me Ishmaelle / Xiaolu Guo.
Becca Rothfeld. 01/08/2026: A philosopher’s case for living playfully without keeping score. Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game / C. Thi Nguyen.
Laurie Hertzel. 01/07/2026: The perfect little book to get you through winter’s doldrums. Review of: Winter: The Story of a Season / Val McDermid.
Nicolás Rivero. 01/03/2025: What fictional worlds can teach us about the reality of climate change.
Rachel Vorona Corte. 1/03/2025: A woman’s life among black bears taught her a lot about being human. Review of: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival / Trina Moyles.
Book World Staff. 01/02/2026: A look back at some worthy books from 2025. "A history of the Wall Street crash of 1929, a biography of Joan Crawford, a memoir by Cameron Crowe and more."
Becca Rothfeld. 01/01/2026: ‘Homeschooled’ recalls a formidable mother and a vexed education. Review of: Homeschooled: A Memoir / Stefan Merrill Block.
Adriana Trigiani. 01/01/2026: Anita Loos was more than just ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.’ "The author and screenwriter, whose famous novel recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, produced many other works worth celebrating." Anchor link: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / Anita Loos.
7featherbear
Overlooked from 2025 (or earlier!), plus additional 2025 retrospectives
Adam Garfinkel. Hedgehog Review, autumn 2025: Entwinings: Literature and History, Fathers and Sons, Writers and Readers.
New Yorker, 12/31/2025: Reading for the New Year. "The first installment in a series of recommendations by New Yorker writers."
Chris Power. Guardian, 12/31/2025: How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. Review of: The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain / Morten Høi Jensen. Anchor link: The Magic Mountain / Thomas Mann.
Kevin Canfield. PRoB, 12/31/2025: The Editor Who Discovered America. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature / Gerald Howard.
Max Callimanopulos. PRoB, 12/30/2025: Every Part Strengthens a Part. "Max Callimanopulos reviews and reflects on James Salter’s “Light Years” for its fiftieth anniversary."
PRoB Staff. PRoB, 12/30/2025: The Ten Most Read Stories of 2025. "A roundup of the most read stories from the Pittsburgh Review of Books’ first four months."
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, interviewer Tuva Kahrs. fivebooks.com, 12/30/2025: The Best China Books of 2025. "From books exploring questions of identity and belonging in contemporary China to a charming memoir by a delivery driver, it's been an extraordinary year for books about China in English argues Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at UC Irvine and specialist in modern Chinese history. Here, he talks us through some of his favourite China books published in 2025."
James Geary. Atlantic, 12/26/2025: Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence.
Sam Kahn. Persuasion, 12/19/2025: How The New Yorker Became Irrelevant: On the decline of America's premier magazine.
Editors. Yale Review, 12/16/2025: Our Favorite Cultural Artifacts of 2025.
James Folta. LitHub, 12/15/2025: Amazon put an AI book explainer into Kindle so you can be even more easily distracted from your book.
Elisa Gonzalez. Yale Review, 12/15/2025: Searching for Seamus Heaney: What I found when I resolved to read him.
Christoph Irmscher. Washington Monthly, 12/11/2025: The Kalven Trap. Review of: Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in Higher Education / Brian Soucek (University of Chicago Press).
Noah Berlatsky. Washington Monthly, 12/10/2025: The Scandal About Scandals. Review of: Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era / Brandon Rottinghaus.
Editors. Yale Review, 12/09/2025: Our Most-Read Poems of 2025.
Jared Marcel Pollen. Liberties, December 2025: Kafka Inc.
Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder. Sydney Review of Books, 12/04/2025: Where Have All the Pithiatics Gone? "Reviewing Jacques Lacan’s early writings, Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder pull back the curtain on French psychiatry in the early twentieth century – a medical milieu that would prove pivotal for Lacan’s understanding of psychosis." Regarding First Writings / Jacques Lacan; translator Russell Grigg.
Anne Mathews. American Scholar, 12/01/2025: The Minotaur’s Muses: The romantic cruelty of a brilliant artist. Review of: Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life / Sue Roe.
Ian Bogost. Atlantic, 09/14/2021: Ebooks Are an Abomination.
Adam Garfinkel. Hedgehog Review, autumn 2025: Entwinings: Literature and History, Fathers and Sons, Writers and Readers.
New Yorker, 12/31/2025: Reading for the New Year. "The first installment in a series of recommendations by New Yorker writers."
Chris Power. Guardian, 12/31/2025: How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. Review of: The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain / Morten Høi Jensen. Anchor link: The Magic Mountain / Thomas Mann.
Kevin Canfield. PRoB, 12/31/2025: The Editor Who Discovered America. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature / Gerald Howard.
Max Callimanopulos. PRoB, 12/30/2025: Every Part Strengthens a Part. "Max Callimanopulos reviews and reflects on James Salter’s “Light Years” for its fiftieth anniversary."
PRoB Staff. PRoB, 12/30/2025: The Ten Most Read Stories of 2025. "A roundup of the most read stories from the Pittsburgh Review of Books’ first four months."
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, interviewer Tuva Kahrs. fivebooks.com, 12/30/2025: The Best China Books of 2025. "From books exploring questions of identity and belonging in contemporary China to a charming memoir by a delivery driver, it's been an extraordinary year for books about China in English argues Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at UC Irvine and specialist in modern Chinese history. Here, he talks us through some of his favourite China books published in 2025."
James Geary. Atlantic, 12/26/2025: Aphoristic Intelligence Beats Artificial Intelligence.
Sam Kahn. Persuasion, 12/19/2025: How The New Yorker Became Irrelevant: On the decline of America's premier magazine.
Editors. Yale Review, 12/16/2025: Our Favorite Cultural Artifacts of 2025.
James Folta. LitHub, 12/15/2025: Amazon put an AI book explainer into Kindle so you can be even more easily distracted from your book.
Elisa Gonzalez. Yale Review, 12/15/2025: Searching for Seamus Heaney: What I found when I resolved to read him.
Christoph Irmscher. Washington Monthly, 12/11/2025: The Kalven Trap. Review of: Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in Higher Education / Brian Soucek (University of Chicago Press).
Noah Berlatsky. Washington Monthly, 12/10/2025: The Scandal About Scandals. Review of: Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era / Brandon Rottinghaus.
Editors. Yale Review, 12/09/2025: Our Most-Read Poems of 2025.
Jared Marcel Pollen. Liberties, December 2025: Kafka Inc.
Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder. Sydney Review of Books, 12/04/2025: Where Have All the Pithiatics Gone? "Reviewing Jacques Lacan’s early writings, Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder pull back the curtain on French psychiatry in the early twentieth century – a medical milieu that would prove pivotal for Lacan’s understanding of psychosis." Regarding First Writings / Jacques Lacan; translator Russell Grigg.
Anne Mathews. American Scholar, 12/01/2025: The Minotaur’s Muses: The romantic cruelty of a brilliant artist. Review of: Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life / Sue Roe.
Ian Bogost. Atlantic, 09/14/2021: Ebooks Are an Abomination.
8featherbear
Editors. Yale Review, 01/02/2026: Our Most-Read Prose of 2025.
9featherbear
Pittsburgh Review of Books (PRoB) January 2026
Nathan Pensky. 01/30/2026: Competing Natures in Jonathan Miles’s Eradication. Review of: Eradication: A Fable / Jonathan Miles. “Is nature whatever happens to occur in the world, or is it a reality known through human perception and constructed by human intervention, and thus susceptible to the many prejudices found therein?”
Ed Simon. 01/30/2026: Embrace the Woo. “There is unfortunately scant consideration of the occult methods of reading, at least in a literary critical sense. My claim is only partially as a joke.”
Jason Kapcala. 01/30/2026: Renée Nicholson’s Five Landscapes in “Feverdream.” Review of: Feverdream / Renee K. Nicholson (Redhawk).
Curtis Dozier. 01/29/2026: Confronting the Past. “For those of us accustomed to associate Greco-Roman antiquity with sophisticated philosophy and artistic beauty, violent and hateful actors taking inspiration from the ancient world strikes a deeply incongruous note that might be laughable—if the consequences of that admiration were not so disturbing.” Excerpt from: The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate / Curtis Dozier.
Kristofer Collins. 01/29/2026: Blood on the Bricks: Reflections on Jan Beatty’s Mad River Thirty Years On. Regarding: Mad River (Pitt Poetry Series) / Jan Beatty.
Dallas Brister. 01/28/2026: Alice Wong’s Intimacy of Disability. Review of: Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire / Alice Wong.
Pasquale Toscano. 01/28/2026: A Useless Art Is Very Hard to Master. Regarding: My Love Is Water / Rob Macaisa Colgate
Daniyal Mueenuddin, interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 01/27/2026: Living Close to the Serpent. Regarding: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Patrick Thomas Henry. 01/26/2026: Bright Lights in the Steel City: On Geoff Peck’s City of Clans. Anchor link: City of Clans / Geoff Peck.
Robert Isenberg. 01/23/2026: Last Ride: A British Cyclist Documents America at the Precipice. Review of: A Ride Across America: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Through the Small Towns and Big Issues of the USA / Simon Parker.
Anderson Tepper. 01/22/2026: A Guide to Contemporary African Memoirs. "Patrice Nganang, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Patrick Chamoiseau."
Nardi Reeder Campion. 01/22/2026: The Female Christ. Excerpt from: Mother Ann Lee: Morning Star of the Shakers / Nardi Reeder Campion (Brandeis University Press reissue of Ann the Word, originally 1976)
PRoB class. 01/22/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of January 2026.
Andrew Burstein. 01/21/2026: Jefferson Seen and Unseen. Excerpt from: Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History / Andrew Burstein.
James Livingston. 01/19/2026: Socialism and/or Barbarism? Review of: Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism / Wolfgang Streeck -- Making Capital Democratic: A Reconstruction of State, Credit, and Finance / Robert Hockett.
Elizabeth Joy Levinson. 01/16/2026: A Poetry of What We’re Losing. Review of: The Place That Is Coming to Us / J.D. Smith (Broadstone Books).
Peter Ormerod. 01/16/2026: David Bowie, Occultist. Excerpt from: David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod.
PRoB class. 01/15/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of January 2026. "A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week."
Louis R. Franzini. 01/15/2026: How The Onion Reinvented Satire. Review of: Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire / Christine Wenc. "how a deliberately fake newspaper anticipated today’s media landscape, influencing journalistic form, audience skepticism, and the boundaries of political humor."
Jacinta Kerketta, interviewer Matt Reeck. 01/14/2026: Jacinta Kerketta on Loving Like a Tree. "An interview with Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerketta on language, love, resistance, and writing against the violences of caste, extraction, and the nation."
Jacinta Kerketta. 01/14/2026: New Translations of Jacinta Kerketta. "If we listened to what Adivasi culture teaches us about love, we would learn not only how to love each other but how to love all living beings in nature.”
Harry Tanner. 01/13/2026: The Queer Thing about Sin. Excerpt from: The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love / Harry Tanner. “I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march… we need answers.”
Brian Duff. 01/13/2026: It’s not (just) about the Tteokbokki. "“Baek Se-hee’s ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki’ and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.”
Willy Maley. 01/12/2026: Living Precariously. Reading the obituary of critic John Carey.
CE MacKenzie. 01/08/2026: My Unfathomable Year with Karl Ove Knausgård.
Aakanksha Agarwal. 01/08/2026: Climate Dystopia with a Beating Heart. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief: a novel / Megha Majumdar.
Nicole Yurcaba. 01/07/2026: She Was No Poor Dame. Review of: Bright I Burn: A Novel / Molly Aitken.
Amanda Anderson. 01/06/2026: Framing the Humanities. "“The sense that work in the humanities is subjective or ungrounded in relation to the sciences occludes the more fundamental distinctions between the two forms of research.” Excerpt from: Humanities Theory (Literature and Politics) / Amanda Anderson & Simon During (Oxford University Press).
Todd Shy. 01/06/2026: Like Kings Deposed. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Leanne Ogasawara. 01/02/2026: A Love Letter to Found Family in Japan. Review of: Palaver: a novel / Bryan Washington.
Beatrice Marovich. 01/01/2026: The Present is Thicker Than Ever. “Something happened to the future, around 2020. The future is always a fiction, but in 2020 it became a big story that was more difficult to tell.”
Nathan Pensky. 01/30/2026: Competing Natures in Jonathan Miles’s Eradication. Review of: Eradication: A Fable / Jonathan Miles. “Is nature whatever happens to occur in the world, or is it a reality known through human perception and constructed by human intervention, and thus susceptible to the many prejudices found therein?”
Ed Simon. 01/30/2026: Embrace the Woo. “There is unfortunately scant consideration of the occult methods of reading, at least in a literary critical sense. My claim is only partially as a joke.”
Jason Kapcala. 01/30/2026: Renée Nicholson’s Five Landscapes in “Feverdream.” Review of: Feverdream / Renee K. Nicholson (Redhawk).
Curtis Dozier. 01/29/2026: Confronting the Past. “For those of us accustomed to associate Greco-Roman antiquity with sophisticated philosophy and artistic beauty, violent and hateful actors taking inspiration from the ancient world strikes a deeply incongruous note that might be laughable—if the consequences of that admiration were not so disturbing.” Excerpt from: The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate / Curtis Dozier.
Kristofer Collins. 01/29/2026: Blood on the Bricks: Reflections on Jan Beatty’s Mad River Thirty Years On. Regarding: Mad River (Pitt Poetry Series) / Jan Beatty.
Dallas Brister. 01/28/2026: Alice Wong’s Intimacy of Disability. Review of: Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire / Alice Wong.
Pasquale Toscano. 01/28/2026: A Useless Art Is Very Hard to Master. Regarding: My Love Is Water / Rob Macaisa Colgate
Daniyal Mueenuddin, interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 01/27/2026: Living Close to the Serpent. Regarding: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Patrick Thomas Henry. 01/26/2026: Bright Lights in the Steel City: On Geoff Peck’s City of Clans. Anchor link: City of Clans / Geoff Peck.
Robert Isenberg. 01/23/2026: Last Ride: A British Cyclist Documents America at the Precipice. Review of: A Ride Across America: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Through the Small Towns and Big Issues of the USA / Simon Parker.
Anderson Tepper. 01/22/2026: A Guide to Contemporary African Memoirs. "Patrice Nganang, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Patrick Chamoiseau."
Nardi Reeder Campion. 01/22/2026: The Female Christ. Excerpt from: Mother Ann Lee: Morning Star of the Shakers / Nardi Reeder Campion (Brandeis University Press reissue of Ann the Word, originally 1976)
PRoB class. 01/22/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of January 2026.
Andrew Burstein. 01/21/2026: Jefferson Seen and Unseen. Excerpt from: Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History / Andrew Burstein.
James Livingston. 01/19/2026: Socialism and/or Barbarism? Review of: Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism / Wolfgang Streeck -- Making Capital Democratic: A Reconstruction of State, Credit, and Finance / Robert Hockett.
Elizabeth Joy Levinson. 01/16/2026: A Poetry of What We’re Losing. Review of: The Place That Is Coming to Us / J.D. Smith (Broadstone Books).
Peter Ormerod. 01/16/2026: David Bowie, Occultist. Excerpt from: David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod.
PRoB class. 01/15/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of January 2026. "A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week."
Louis R. Franzini. 01/15/2026: How The Onion Reinvented Satire. Review of: Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire / Christine Wenc. "how a deliberately fake newspaper anticipated today’s media landscape, influencing journalistic form, audience skepticism, and the boundaries of political humor."
Jacinta Kerketta, interviewer Matt Reeck. 01/14/2026: Jacinta Kerketta on Loving Like a Tree. "An interview with Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerketta on language, love, resistance, and writing against the violences of caste, extraction, and the nation."
Jacinta Kerketta. 01/14/2026: New Translations of Jacinta Kerketta. "If we listened to what Adivasi culture teaches us about love, we would learn not only how to love each other but how to love all living beings in nature.”
Harry Tanner. 01/13/2026: The Queer Thing about Sin. Excerpt from: The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love / Harry Tanner. “I keep returning to that question: how and why did ancient societies turn against their queer citizens? With the world as it is, and with homophobia on the march… we need answers.”
Brian Duff. 01/13/2026: It’s not (just) about the Tteokbokki. "“Baek Se-hee’s ‘I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki’ and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.”
Willy Maley. 01/12/2026: Living Precariously. Reading the obituary of critic John Carey.
CE MacKenzie. 01/08/2026: My Unfathomable Year with Karl Ove Knausgård.
Aakanksha Agarwal. 01/08/2026: Climate Dystopia with a Beating Heart. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief: a novel / Megha Majumdar.
Nicole Yurcaba. 01/07/2026: She Was No Poor Dame. Review of: Bright I Burn: A Novel / Molly Aitken.
Amanda Anderson. 01/06/2026: Framing the Humanities. "“The sense that work in the humanities is subjective or ungrounded in relation to the sciences occludes the more fundamental distinctions between the two forms of research.” Excerpt from: Humanities Theory (Literature and Politics) / Amanda Anderson & Simon During (Oxford University Press).
Todd Shy. 01/06/2026: Like Kings Deposed. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Leanne Ogasawara. 01/02/2026: A Love Letter to Found Family in Japan. Review of: Palaver: a novel / Bryan Washington.
Beatrice Marovich. 01/01/2026: The Present is Thicker Than Ever. “Something happened to the future, around 2020. The future is always a fiction, but in 2020 it became a big story that was more difficult to tell.”
10featherbear
Asian Review of Books January 2026
Stuart Lloyd. 01/30/2026: “The Illustrated History of the Jodhpur Flying Club” by Peter Vacher. Review of: The Illustrated History of the Jodhpur Flying Club / Peter Vacher (Grub Street Publishing).
Jonathan Han. 01/28/2026: “Simple Heart” by Cho Haejin. Review of: Simple Heart: a novel / Cho Haejin; translator Jamie Chang (Other Press).
Peter Gordon. 01/27/2026: “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850” edited by Laurel O Peterson and Holly Shaffer. Review of: Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 / edited by Laurel O Peterson and Holly Shaffer.
Jane Wallace. 01/26/2026: “The Hour of the Wolf” by Fatima Bhutto. Review of: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto (Scribner forthcoming).
Maximillian Morch. 01/24/2026: “Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands” by Wen-Chin Chang. Review of: Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants During the Cold War / Wen-Chin Chang (Harvard University Press).
David Chaffetz. 01/23/2026: “Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar” by Rishi Rajpopat. Review of: Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar / Rishi Rajpopat (Harvard University Press).
Soni Wadhwa. 01/21/2026: “The Worlds of Jain Art: 17th to 21st Centuries”, edited by Phyllis Granoff and Nandita Punj. Review of: The Worlds of Jain Art: 17th to 21st Centuries / edited by Phyllis Granoff and Nandita Punj (In the journal Marg June-Sept 2025).
Elizabeth Lawrence. 01/20/2026: “The Wall Dancers” by Yi-Ling Liu. Review of: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet / Yi-Ling Liu.
Kabir Deb. 01/18/2026: “Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments” by Eric Chopra. Review of: Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments / Eric Chopra (Speaking Tiger).
Melanie Ho. 01/17/2026: “Oxford Soju Club” by Jinwoo Park. Review of: Oxford Soju Club / Jinwoo Park.
Francis P. Sempa. 01/16/2026: “McNamara at War: A New History” by Philip Taubman and William Taubman. Review of: McNamara at War: A New History / Philip Taubman and William Taubman.
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 01/14/2026: “Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria” by Kay Enokido. Review of: Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria / Kay Enokido (Bold Story Press).
Melanie Ho. 01/13/2026: “Salt Upon the Water” by Lyn Dickens. Review of: Salt Upon the Water / Lyn Dickens (Wakefield Press).
Peter Gordon. 01/11/2026: “The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past” by Sowmiya Ashok. Review of: The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past / Sowmiya Ashok.
Vikram Zutshi. 01/10/2026: “The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection” by Jake Adelstein. Review of: The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection / Jake Adelstein.
Kalpana Mohan. 01/09/2026: “Darkness and Other Stories” by Razia Sajjad Zaheer. Review of: Darkness and Other Stories / Razia Sajjad Zaheer; Saba Mahmood Bashir (trans) (Zubaan).
James Herndon. 01/07/2026: “Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000” by Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Joel Mokyr. Review of: Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 / Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Joel Mokyr.
Sankha Mari. 01/06/2026: “Our Madhopur Home” by Tripurari Sharan. Review of: Our Madhopur Home / Tripurari Sharan Arunava Sinha (translator) (Simon & Schuster India).
Peter Gordon. 01/04/2026: “Islamic China: An Asian History” by Rian Thum. Review of: Islamic China: An Asian History / Rian Thum.
Francis P. Sempa. 01/03/2026: Review of: Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army / Ramachandran Menon (ISEAS).
Melanie Ho. 01/02/2026: “My Grandfather, the Master Detective” by Masateru Konishi. Review of: My Grandfather, the Master Detective / Masateru Konishi.
Stuart Lloyd. 01/30/2026: “The Illustrated History of the Jodhpur Flying Club” by Peter Vacher. Review of: The Illustrated History of the Jodhpur Flying Club / Peter Vacher (Grub Street Publishing).
Jonathan Han. 01/28/2026: “Simple Heart” by Cho Haejin. Review of: Simple Heart: a novel / Cho Haejin; translator Jamie Chang (Other Press).
Peter Gordon. 01/27/2026: “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850” edited by Laurel O Peterson and Holly Shaffer. Review of: Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 / edited by Laurel O Peterson and Holly Shaffer.
Jane Wallace. 01/26/2026: “The Hour of the Wolf” by Fatima Bhutto. Review of: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto (Scribner forthcoming).
Maximillian Morch. 01/24/2026: “Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands” by Wen-Chin Chang. Review of: Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants During the Cold War / Wen-Chin Chang (Harvard University Press).
David Chaffetz. 01/23/2026: “Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar” by Rishi Rajpopat. Review of: Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar / Rishi Rajpopat (Harvard University Press).
Soni Wadhwa. 01/21/2026: “The Worlds of Jain Art: 17th to 21st Centuries”, edited by Phyllis Granoff and Nandita Punj. Review of: The Worlds of Jain Art: 17th to 21st Centuries / edited by Phyllis Granoff and Nandita Punj (In the journal Marg June-Sept 2025).
Elizabeth Lawrence. 01/20/2026: “The Wall Dancers” by Yi-Ling Liu. Review of: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet / Yi-Ling Liu.
Kabir Deb. 01/18/2026: “Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments” by Eric Chopra. Review of: Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments / Eric Chopra (Speaking Tiger).
Melanie Ho. 01/17/2026: “Oxford Soju Club” by Jinwoo Park. Review of: Oxford Soju Club / Jinwoo Park.
Francis P. Sempa. 01/16/2026: “McNamara at War: A New History” by Philip Taubman and William Taubman. Review of: McNamara at War: A New History / Philip Taubman and William Taubman.
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 01/14/2026: “Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria” by Kay Enokido. Review of: Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria / Kay Enokido (Bold Story Press).
Melanie Ho. 01/13/2026: “Salt Upon the Water” by Lyn Dickens. Review of: Salt Upon the Water / Lyn Dickens (Wakefield Press).
Peter Gordon. 01/11/2026: “The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past” by Sowmiya Ashok. Review of: The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past / Sowmiya Ashok.
Vikram Zutshi. 01/10/2026: “The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection” by Jake Adelstein. Review of: The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection / Jake Adelstein.
Kalpana Mohan. 01/09/2026: “Darkness and Other Stories” by Razia Sajjad Zaheer. Review of: Darkness and Other Stories / Razia Sajjad Zaheer; Saba Mahmood Bashir (trans) (Zubaan).
James Herndon. 01/07/2026: “Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000” by Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Joel Mokyr. Review of: Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 / Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Joel Mokyr.
Sankha Mari. 01/06/2026: “Our Madhopur Home” by Tripurari Sharan. Review of: Our Madhopur Home / Tripurari Sharan Arunava Sinha (translator) (Simon & Schuster India).
Peter Gordon. 01/04/2026: “Islamic China: An Asian History” by Rian Thum. Review of: Islamic China: An Asian History / Rian Thum.
Francis P. Sempa. 01/03/2026: Review of: Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army / Ramachandran Menon (ISEAS).
Melanie Ho. 01/02/2026: “My Grandfather, the Master Detective” by Masateru Konishi. Review of: My Grandfather, the Master Detective / Masateru Konishi.
11featherbear
fivebooks.com January 2026
Andrew Holgate, interviewer Benedict King. 01/28/2026: The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2026 Duff Cooper Prize:
Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World / Tim Bouverie -- A Scandal in Königsberg / Christopher Clark -- The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes -- John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs / Ian Leslie -- Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe / Adam Weymouth.
Virginia Feito, interviewer Cal Flynn. 01/27/2026: Historical Novels Set in the Victorian Era:
Fingersmith / Sarah Waters -- Alias Grace / Margaret Atwood -- McGlue: a novella / Ottessa Moshfegh -- Rawblood / Catriona Ward -- Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys.
Christopher Paolini, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 01/23/2026: The Best Epic Fantasy Novels:
The Worm Ouroboros / Eric Rücker Eddison -- The Gormenghast Novels / Mervyn Peake -- The Earthsea Cycle / Ursula LeGuin -- Dune / Frank Herbert -- The Lord of the Rings / J R R Tolkien.
Maya Jaggi, interviewer Sophie Roell. 01/15/2026: The Best Central and East European Novels.
James Riordon, interviewer Sophie Roell. 01/09/2026: The best books on Gravity.
Eugen Bacon (interviewer not identified). 01/02/2026: Afrofuturist Books.
Andrew Holgate, interviewer Benedict King. 01/28/2026: The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2026 Duff Cooper Prize:
Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World / Tim Bouverie -- A Scandal in Königsberg / Christopher Clark -- The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes -- John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs / Ian Leslie -- Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe / Adam Weymouth.
Virginia Feito, interviewer Cal Flynn. 01/27/2026: Historical Novels Set in the Victorian Era:
Fingersmith / Sarah Waters -- Alias Grace / Margaret Atwood -- McGlue: a novella / Ottessa Moshfegh -- Rawblood / Catriona Ward -- Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys.
Christopher Paolini, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 01/23/2026: The Best Epic Fantasy Novels:
The Worm Ouroboros / Eric Rücker Eddison -- The Gormenghast Novels / Mervyn Peake -- The Earthsea Cycle / Ursula LeGuin -- Dune / Frank Herbert -- The Lord of the Rings / J R R Tolkien.
Maya Jaggi, interviewer Sophie Roell. 01/15/2026: The Best Central and East European Novels.
James Riordon, interviewer Sophie Roell. 01/09/2026: The best books on Gravity.
Eugen Bacon (interviewer not identified). 01/02/2026: Afrofuturist Books.
12featherbear
Quillette January 2026
Claire Lehmann. 01/16/2026: The Women of January 6th. Review of: The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging / Noelle Cook.
Ron Capshaw. 01/02/2025: Precipice of Collapse: Two new books about America’s justice system paint a bleak picture of a deeply divided country. Review of: Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department / Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis -- The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw in My Time at the Bureau / Nicole Parker.
Claire Lehmann. 01/16/2026: The Women of January 6th. Review of: The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging / Noelle Cook.
Ron Capshaw. 01/02/2025: Precipice of Collapse: Two new books about America’s justice system paint a bleak picture of a deeply divided country. Review of: Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department / Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis -- The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw in My Time at the Bureau / Nicole Parker.
13featherbear
New Yorker January 2026
Hermione Hoby. 01/26/2026: “Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It? Anchor link: Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace.
Jason Zengerle. 01/24/2026: Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade. Excerpt from: Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Colton Valentine. 01/24/2026: The Country That Made Its Own Canon. "When Sweden named its national treasures, the list was condemned as blinkered and dated. But it was also a chance to see the country anew."
Joshua Rothman. 01/23/2026: How Do You Write About the Inexplicable? "In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels, old mysteries reassert themselves."
Hannah Gold. 01/21/2026: A Début Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth. Review of: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
New Yorker writers. 01/21/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Four.
Rebecca Mead. 01/19/2026: What Makes a Good Mother? Regarding: The Child, The Family And The Outside World (Classics in Child Development) / D.W. Winnicott -- A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering / Elinor Cleghorn -- Motherdom: Breaking Free of Bad Science and Good Mother Myths / Alex Bollen -- Life After Ambition: A "Good Enough" Memoir / Amil Niazi -- Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace / Ayelet Waldman -- One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate / Ej Dickson.
New Yorker writers. 01/14/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Three.
Katy Waldman. 01/12/2026: How to Recover from Caring Too Much. Review of: Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back / Ingrid Clayton -- Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You / Meg Josephson, with reference to: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving / Pete Walker & Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other / Sherry Turkle.
Lauren Boersma Harris. 01/09/2026: The Gospel According to Emily Henry. "How the best-selling author of “People We Meet on Vacation” channelled her love of rom-coms—and her religious upbringing—into a new kind of romance novel."
Joshua Rothman. 01/09/2026: Is Life a Game? Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game / C. Thi Nguyen.
Rivka Galchen. 01/07/2026: The Perils of Killing the Already Dead. Review of: Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World / John Blair.
Recommendations from New Yorker writers. 01/07/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Two. Including Death Comes For the Archbishop & Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History.
S.C. Cornell. 01/05/2026: How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex. Review of: Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime / Sarah Weinman.
Michael Walters. 01/03/2025: Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud.
Hermione Hoby. 01/26/2026: “Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It? Anchor link: Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace.
Jason Zengerle. 01/24/2026: Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade. Excerpt from: Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Colton Valentine. 01/24/2026: The Country That Made Its Own Canon. "When Sweden named its national treasures, the list was condemned as blinkered and dated. But it was also a chance to see the country anew."
Joshua Rothman. 01/23/2026: How Do You Write About the Inexplicable? "In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels, old mysteries reassert themselves."
Hannah Gold. 01/21/2026: A Début Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth. Review of: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash.
New Yorker writers. 01/21/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Four.
Rebecca Mead. 01/19/2026: What Makes a Good Mother? Regarding: The Child, The Family And The Outside World (Classics in Child Development) / D.W. Winnicott -- A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering / Elinor Cleghorn -- Motherdom: Breaking Free of Bad Science and Good Mother Myths / Alex Bollen -- Life After Ambition: A "Good Enough" Memoir / Amil Niazi -- Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace / Ayelet Waldman -- One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate / Ej Dickson.
New Yorker writers. 01/14/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Three.
Katy Waldman. 01/12/2026: How to Recover from Caring Too Much. Review of: Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back / Ingrid Clayton -- Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You / Meg Josephson, with reference to: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving / Pete Walker & Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other / Sherry Turkle.
Lauren Boersma Harris. 01/09/2026: The Gospel According to Emily Henry. "How the best-selling author of “People We Meet on Vacation” channelled her love of rom-coms—and her religious upbringing—into a new kind of romance novel."
Joshua Rothman. 01/09/2026: Is Life a Game? Review of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game / C. Thi Nguyen.
Rivka Galchen. 01/07/2026: The Perils of Killing the Already Dead. Review of: Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World / John Blair.
Recommendations from New Yorker writers. 01/07/2026: Reading for the New Year: Part Two. Including Death Comes For the Archbishop & Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History.
S.C. Cornell. 01/05/2026: How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex. Review of: Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime / Sarah Weinman.
Michael Walters. 01/03/2025: Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud.
14featherbear
NYT (New York Times) January 2026
Teddy Wayne. 01/31/2026: If ‘Misery’ Was About Boy Bands, and Had a Happy Ending. Review of: Superfan: A Novel / Jenny Tinghui Zhang.
Claire Cain Miller. 01/30/2026: Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age. "Boys’ reading struggles are not inevitable, research suggests, and addressing the deficit could improve outcomes in school and beyond."
Joshua Hammer. 01/30/2026: The Key to Understanding Russia Lies Deep in Its Forests. Review of: THE OAK AND THE LARCH: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Dana Goldstein. 01/29/2026: She Fought a Book Ban. She May Never Teach Again. "Summer Boismier, a high school English teacher in Oklahoma, lost her teaching license after she protested a book ban. Now she is fighting to return to the classroom."
Jennifer Szalai. 01/28/2026: The Longing to Matter Is No Laughing Matter. Review of: THE MATTERING INSTINCT: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- MATTERING: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose / Jennifer Breheny Wallace.
Joshua Hammer. 01/27/2026: A Definitive History of the Mysteries of Easter Island. Review of: ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Jennifer Burns. 01/27/2026: How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America? Review of: HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Alexandra Alter. 01/27/2026: Did Don DeLillo Invent the Racy Hockey Novel? Regarding: Amazons: an intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League / Cleo Birdwell aka Don DeLillo.
David Greenberg. 01/27/2026: The Battle That Raged Under the Vietnam War. Review of: UNTIL THE LAST GUN IS SILENT: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul / Matthew F. Delmont.
Dwight Garner. 01/26/2026: George Saunders Serves a Heavy Helping of Virtue in a New Novel. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/25/2026: Is a Novel Her Revenge? Or Does She Have Worse in Mind? Review of: Discipline: A Novel / Larissa Pham.
Alida Becker. 01/24/2026: Splendid New Historical Fiction. "Our critic on four excellent new novels."
Janie Chang. 01/23/2026: Immersive Historical Fiction Full of Rule Breakers and Rebels. "Here are eight historical novels that do a beautiful job of immersing readers in a bygone era, in large part via well-crafted characters who push against the conventions of their time."
Glynnis MacNicol. 01/22/2026: The Writer Who Defined 1920s Paris? It Wasn’t Hemingway. Review of: THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII / Mark Braude. (um, Janet Flanner)
Olivia Waite. 01/21/2026: A Stunning Romance Novel Suffused With Yearning. Review of: The Everlasting / Alix E. Harrow.
Jennifer Szalai. 01/21/2026: How a 1984 Subway Shooting Foretold the Rise of Vigilante Violence. Review of: FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson -- FIVE BULLETS: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Elliot Williams.
David Segal. 01/20/2026: The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left Is Back. Regarding the forthcoming books: Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Elliot Williams -- Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson.
Joumana Khatib. 01/20/2026: Leaving Home Can Be Both Thrilling and Lonely. That’s the Point. Review of: Tangerinn : a novel / Emanuela Anechoum; translated by Lucy Rand.
Sadie Stein. 01/20/2026: This Dark Little Novel Should Be Wes Anderson’s Next Movie. Review of: The Infamous Gilberts: A Novel / Angela Tomaski.
Nicolás Medina Mora. 01/20/2026: This Novel About a Sister’s Grief Skips the Five Stages. Review of: EATING ASHES / Brenda Navarro; translated by Megan McDowell.
Danyel Smith. 01/20/2026: There’s More to Her Story Than Salman Rushdie. Review of: THE FLOWER BEARERS / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Maya Singer. 01/20/2026: 2 Women, 4 Cats and 1 Home in a Best-Selling Korean Memoir. Review of: TWO WOMEN LIVING TOGETHER / Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo.
Dwight Garner. 01/19/2026: A Briny Englishman (and Booker Prize Winner) Says Farewell. Review of: Departure(s): a novel / Julian Barnes.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/18/2026: He Put Dr. Seuss, Ayn Rand and ‘Ulysses’ on Your Bookshelves. Review of: NOTHING RANDOM: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman.
Brittany Newell. 01/18/2026: She Knows It’s Wrong, but She’s Still Hot for Teacher. Review of: Half His Age: A Novel / Jennette McCurdy.
Alexandra Alter. 01/18/2026: Jennette McCurdy Wants to See You Squirm. "The author of the memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died” hopes her debut novel, about a teen’s sexual relationship with her teacher, will make readers uncomfortable."
Jonathan Russell Clark. 01/17/2026: One Thousand and One Nights, and One Tumultuous Year. Review of: ONE ALADDIN TWO LAMPS / Jeanette Winterson.
Bret Anthony Johnston. 01/17/2026: A Rowdy, Electric Novel About Rock Climbing — and Friendship. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Peter S. Goodman. 01/16/2026: The Dirty Truth About Your Clean-Energy Car. Review of: THE ELEMENTS OF POWER: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth / Nicolas Niarchos.
Lauren Hilgers. 01/15/2026: A Blockbuster Memoirist Returns to China, and the Mother Who Shaped Her. Review of: FLY, WILD SWANS: My Mother, Myself and China / Jung Chang.
William Giraldi. 01/14/2026: A Retelling of ‘Moby-Dick,’ With a Young Woman at Its Center. Review of: CALL ME ISHMAELLE / Xiaolu Guo.
Ben Libman. 01/14/2026: Why Does This Teenager Hate His Mother So Much? Review of: THE SUMMER MY MOTHER HAD GREEN EYES / Tatiana Tibuleac; translated by Monica Cure.
Catie Edmonson. 01/13/2026: How a G.O.P. Senator Quietly Became a Best-Selling Author. Regarding: How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will / John Kennedy. "Senator John Kennedy, a garrulous rank-and-file Republican from Louisiana, has struck a nerve with a new book that provides an insider account of Congress and its dysfunction."
Adam Dalva. 01/13/2026: The Essential Karl Ove Knausgaard. "The Norwegian writer is known for his sprawling, brutally candid autofiction and speculative epics. Here’s where to start."
Randy Boyagoda. 01/13/2026: Karl Ove Knausgaard Crafts a Deal With the Devil. Review of: THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT / Karl Ove Knausgaard; translated by Martin Aitken.
John Maher. 01/13/2026: If the Royal Tenenbaums Were Middle-Class and Likable, They’d Be This Madcap Family. Review of: LOST LAMBS / Madeline Cash.
Jennifer Szalai. 01/13/2026: Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore. Profile of C. Thi Nguyen, author of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.
Kevin Carey. 01/13/2026: The Lie That Elite Colleges, and a Nation, Wanted to Believe. Review of: MIRACLE CHILDREN: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises / Katie Benner and Erica L. Green.
Dwight Garner. 01/12/2026: Have Some Spare Time? Why Not Build a Medieval War Machine? Review of: CATAPULT: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon / Jim Paul.
Neil MacFarquhar. 01/12/2026: Marxists and Mullahs Fought Together Once Before. What Happened? Review of: THE REVOLUTIONISTS: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Greg Lukianoff. 01/12/2026: If You Can’t Teach Plato in a Philosophy Class, What Can You Teach?
Sarah Mervosh. 01/11/2026: How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best. "Since 2013, Mississippi has skyrocketed on national tests, while blue states lag. What is it doing right?"
Alex Kuczynski. 01/11/2026: Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Review of: STRANGERS: A Memoir of Marriage / Belle Burden.
Alexis Soloski. 01/11/2026: Her Gilded Marriage Imploded. Now, She’s Ready to Tell All. Profile of Belle Burden (see directly above)
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/11/2026: She’s Mad at Everything, but Not as Mad as the Dog Possessing Her Nephew. Review of: THE HITCH / Sara Levine.
Mark Lilla. 01/10/2026: Can American Children Point to America on a Map? Review of: THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy / James Traub. "In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all."
Idra Novey. 01/10/2026: Two Sisters Reunite — One Mute, the Other Struggling for Words. Review of: THE OLD FIRE: a novel / Elisa Shua Dusapin; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
David Marchese. NYT Magazine, 01/10/2026: The Interview: George Saunders Is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard).
Alejandro Chacoff. 01/09/2026: For These Three, the Age of Empire Never Quite Ended. Review of: THREE STORIES OF FORGETTING / Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; translated by Alison Entrekin.
Leonard Carlisle. 01/09/2026: These Picture Books Are Ready for Their Close-Up. "Pioneered by Edward Steichen, Lewis W. Hine and Tana Hoban, photographically illustrated “concept” books have never had a more potentially receptive audience."
Ben Sisario. 01/09/2026: Tom Verlaine Was a Mystery. His Archives Reveal More of His Story. "The Television frontman died in 2023, leaving behind boxes of music and notebooks that are now headed to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts."
Caroline Palmer. 01/09/2026: She Built a Beauty Empire. Then She Crashed and Burned. Review of: Sheer: a novel / Vanessa Lawrence.
Jennifer Schuessler. 01/09/2026: The Many Lives of a Radical Founder. "Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” published 250 years ago this week, ignited the drive for American independence. That was hardly the end of his strange and winding story."
Alan Blinder. 01/07/2026: shared link: Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato. "The university is reviewing courses under new rules restricting teaching about race and gender. Administrators told a philosophy professor to cut some lessons on Plato to comply."
T Magazine of NYT, 01/07/2026: Our Favorite Home Libraries. "From Connecticut to Cairo, reading spots that will seem like paradise to book- and design-lovers alike."
Alex Vadukul. 01/07/2026: In Rome, They Call Him ‘Maestro.’ Profile of Abel Ferrara, regarding Scene: a memoir / Abel Ferrara.
Kevin Peraino. 01/06/2026: Why the British Were Afraid of Winning World War II. Review of: ADVANCE BRITANNIA: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 / Alan Allport.
Alexander Nazaryan. 01/06/2026: The Lowly Clerk Who Tried to Bring Down the K.G.B. Review of: THE SPY IN THE ARCHIVE: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB / Gordon Corera.
Alex Preston. 01/06/2026: This Blockbuster French Novel Asks: Can Art Compromise With Fascism? Review of: WATCHING OVER HER / Jean-Baptiste Andrea; translated by Frank Wynne (Simon & Schuster).
John Freeman Gill. 01/06/2026: He Built Some of New York’s Finest Spaces. His Life Was Far Messier. Review of: THE ARCHITECT OF NEW YORK: a novel / Javier Moro; translated by Peter J. Hearn.
Dwight Garner. 01/05/2026: What if Chekhov Had Lived in Pakistan? Review of: THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/04/2026: A Doctor Looks to His Past to Explain ‘Why We Drink Too Much. Review of: WHY WE DRINK TOO MUCH: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture / Charles Knowles.
Elon Green. 01/02/2026: He Was Fascinated by the School Nazi. He Ended Up Dead. Review of: AMERICAN REICH: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate / Eric Lichtblau.
Teddy Wayne. 01/31/2026: If ‘Misery’ Was About Boy Bands, and Had a Happy Ending. Review of: Superfan: A Novel / Jenny Tinghui Zhang.
Claire Cain Miller. 01/30/2026: Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age. "Boys’ reading struggles are not inevitable, research suggests, and addressing the deficit could improve outcomes in school and beyond."
Joshua Hammer. 01/30/2026: The Key to Understanding Russia Lies Deep in Its Forests. Review of: THE OAK AND THE LARCH: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Dana Goldstein. 01/29/2026: She Fought a Book Ban. She May Never Teach Again. "Summer Boismier, a high school English teacher in Oklahoma, lost her teaching license after she protested a book ban. Now she is fighting to return to the classroom."
Jennifer Szalai. 01/28/2026: The Longing to Matter Is No Laughing Matter. Review of: THE MATTERING INSTINCT: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- MATTERING: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose / Jennifer Breheny Wallace.
Joshua Hammer. 01/27/2026: A Definitive History of the Mysteries of Easter Island. Review of: ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Jennifer Burns. 01/27/2026: How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America? Review of: HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind / Jason Zengerle.
Alexandra Alter. 01/27/2026: Did Don DeLillo Invent the Racy Hockey Novel? Regarding: Amazons: an intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League / Cleo Birdwell aka Don DeLillo.
David Greenberg. 01/27/2026: The Battle That Raged Under the Vietnam War. Review of: UNTIL THE LAST GUN IS SILENT: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul / Matthew F. Delmont.
Dwight Garner. 01/26/2026: George Saunders Serves a Heavy Helping of Virtue in a New Novel. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/25/2026: Is a Novel Her Revenge? Or Does She Have Worse in Mind? Review of: Discipline: A Novel / Larissa Pham.
Alida Becker. 01/24/2026: Splendid New Historical Fiction. "Our critic on four excellent new novels."
Janie Chang. 01/23/2026: Immersive Historical Fiction Full of Rule Breakers and Rebels. "Here are eight historical novels that do a beautiful job of immersing readers in a bygone era, in large part via well-crafted characters who push against the conventions of their time."
Glynnis MacNicol. 01/22/2026: The Writer Who Defined 1920s Paris? It Wasn’t Hemingway. Review of: THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII / Mark Braude. (um, Janet Flanner)
Olivia Waite. 01/21/2026: A Stunning Romance Novel Suffused With Yearning. Review of: The Everlasting / Alix E. Harrow.
Jennifer Szalai. 01/21/2026: How a 1984 Subway Shooting Foretold the Rise of Vigilante Violence. Review of: FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson -- FIVE BULLETS: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Elliot Williams.
David Segal. 01/20/2026: The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left Is Back. Regarding the forthcoming books: Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Elliot Williams -- Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson.
Joumana Khatib. 01/20/2026: Leaving Home Can Be Both Thrilling and Lonely. That’s the Point. Review of: Tangerinn : a novel / Emanuela Anechoum; translated by Lucy Rand.
Sadie Stein. 01/20/2026: This Dark Little Novel Should Be Wes Anderson’s Next Movie. Review of: The Infamous Gilberts: A Novel / Angela Tomaski.
Nicolás Medina Mora. 01/20/2026: This Novel About a Sister’s Grief Skips the Five Stages. Review of: EATING ASHES / Brenda Navarro; translated by Megan McDowell.
Danyel Smith. 01/20/2026: There’s More to Her Story Than Salman Rushdie. Review of: THE FLOWER BEARERS / Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Maya Singer. 01/20/2026: 2 Women, 4 Cats and 1 Home in a Best-Selling Korean Memoir. Review of: TWO WOMEN LIVING TOGETHER / Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo.
Dwight Garner. 01/19/2026: A Briny Englishman (and Booker Prize Winner) Says Farewell. Review of: Departure(s): a novel / Julian Barnes.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/18/2026: He Put Dr. Seuss, Ayn Rand and ‘Ulysses’ on Your Bookshelves. Review of: NOTHING RANDOM: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman.
Brittany Newell. 01/18/2026: She Knows It’s Wrong, but She’s Still Hot for Teacher. Review of: Half His Age: A Novel / Jennette McCurdy.
Alexandra Alter. 01/18/2026: Jennette McCurdy Wants to See You Squirm. "The author of the memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died” hopes her debut novel, about a teen’s sexual relationship with her teacher, will make readers uncomfortable."
Jonathan Russell Clark. 01/17/2026: One Thousand and One Nights, and One Tumultuous Year. Review of: ONE ALADDIN TWO LAMPS / Jeanette Winterson.
Bret Anthony Johnston. 01/17/2026: A Rowdy, Electric Novel About Rock Climbing — and Friendship. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Peter S. Goodman. 01/16/2026: The Dirty Truth About Your Clean-Energy Car. Review of: THE ELEMENTS OF POWER: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth / Nicolas Niarchos.
Lauren Hilgers. 01/15/2026: A Blockbuster Memoirist Returns to China, and the Mother Who Shaped Her. Review of: FLY, WILD SWANS: My Mother, Myself and China / Jung Chang.
William Giraldi. 01/14/2026: A Retelling of ‘Moby-Dick,’ With a Young Woman at Its Center. Review of: CALL ME ISHMAELLE / Xiaolu Guo.
Ben Libman. 01/14/2026: Why Does This Teenager Hate His Mother So Much? Review of: THE SUMMER MY MOTHER HAD GREEN EYES / Tatiana Tibuleac; translated by Monica Cure.
Catie Edmonson. 01/13/2026: How a G.O.P. Senator Quietly Became a Best-Selling Author. Regarding: How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will / John Kennedy. "Senator John Kennedy, a garrulous rank-and-file Republican from Louisiana, has struck a nerve with a new book that provides an insider account of Congress and its dysfunction."
Adam Dalva. 01/13/2026: The Essential Karl Ove Knausgaard. "The Norwegian writer is known for his sprawling, brutally candid autofiction and speculative epics. Here’s where to start."
Randy Boyagoda. 01/13/2026: Karl Ove Knausgaard Crafts a Deal With the Devil. Review of: THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT / Karl Ove Knausgaard; translated by Martin Aitken.
John Maher. 01/13/2026: If the Royal Tenenbaums Were Middle-Class and Likable, They’d Be This Madcap Family. Review of: LOST LAMBS / Madeline Cash.
Jennifer Szalai. 01/13/2026: Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore. Profile of C. Thi Nguyen, author of: The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.
Kevin Carey. 01/13/2026: The Lie That Elite Colleges, and a Nation, Wanted to Believe. Review of: MIRACLE CHILDREN: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises / Katie Benner and Erica L. Green.
Dwight Garner. 01/12/2026: Have Some Spare Time? Why Not Build a Medieval War Machine? Review of: CATAPULT: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon / Jim Paul.
Neil MacFarquhar. 01/12/2026: Marxists and Mullahs Fought Together Once Before. What Happened? Review of: THE REVOLUTIONISTS: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Greg Lukianoff. 01/12/2026: If You Can’t Teach Plato in a Philosophy Class, What Can You Teach?
Sarah Mervosh. 01/11/2026: How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best. "Since 2013, Mississippi has skyrocketed on national tests, while blue states lag. What is it doing right?"
Alex Kuczynski. 01/11/2026: Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Review of: STRANGERS: A Memoir of Marriage / Belle Burden.
Alexis Soloski. 01/11/2026: Her Gilded Marriage Imploded. Now, She’s Ready to Tell All. Profile of Belle Burden (see directly above)
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/11/2026: She’s Mad at Everything, but Not as Mad as the Dog Possessing Her Nephew. Review of: THE HITCH / Sara Levine.
Mark Lilla. 01/10/2026: Can American Children Point to America on a Map? Review of: THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy / James Traub. "In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all."
Idra Novey. 01/10/2026: Two Sisters Reunite — One Mute, the Other Struggling for Words. Review of: THE OLD FIRE: a novel / Elisa Shua Dusapin; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
David Marchese. NYT Magazine, 01/10/2026: The Interview: George Saunders Is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard).
Alejandro Chacoff. 01/09/2026: For These Three, the Age of Empire Never Quite Ended. Review of: THREE STORIES OF FORGETTING / Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; translated by Alison Entrekin.
Leonard Carlisle. 01/09/2026: These Picture Books Are Ready for Their Close-Up. "Pioneered by Edward Steichen, Lewis W. Hine and Tana Hoban, photographically illustrated “concept” books have never had a more potentially receptive audience."
Ben Sisario. 01/09/2026: Tom Verlaine Was a Mystery. His Archives Reveal More of His Story. "The Television frontman died in 2023, leaving behind boxes of music and notebooks that are now headed to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts."
Caroline Palmer. 01/09/2026: She Built a Beauty Empire. Then She Crashed and Burned. Review of: Sheer: a novel / Vanessa Lawrence.
Jennifer Schuessler. 01/09/2026: The Many Lives of a Radical Founder. "Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” published 250 years ago this week, ignited the drive for American independence. That was hardly the end of his strange and winding story."
Alan Blinder. 01/07/2026: shared link: Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato. "The university is reviewing courses under new rules restricting teaching about race and gender. Administrators told a philosophy professor to cut some lessons on Plato to comply."
T Magazine of NYT, 01/07/2026: Our Favorite Home Libraries. "From Connecticut to Cairo, reading spots that will seem like paradise to book- and design-lovers alike."
Alex Vadukul. 01/07/2026: In Rome, They Call Him ‘Maestro.’ Profile of Abel Ferrara, regarding Scene: a memoir / Abel Ferrara.
Kevin Peraino. 01/06/2026: Why the British Were Afraid of Winning World War II. Review of: ADVANCE BRITANNIA: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 / Alan Allport.
Alexander Nazaryan. 01/06/2026: The Lowly Clerk Who Tried to Bring Down the K.G.B. Review of: THE SPY IN THE ARCHIVE: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB / Gordon Corera.
Alex Preston. 01/06/2026: This Blockbuster French Novel Asks: Can Art Compromise With Fascism? Review of: WATCHING OVER HER / Jean-Baptiste Andrea; translated by Frank Wynne (Simon & Schuster).
John Freeman Gill. 01/06/2026: He Built Some of New York’s Finest Spaces. His Life Was Far Messier. Review of: THE ARCHITECT OF NEW YORK: a novel / Javier Moro; translated by Peter J. Hearn.
Dwight Garner. 01/05/2026: What if Chekhov Had Lived in Pakistan? Review of: THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Alexandra Jacobs. 01/04/2026: A Doctor Looks to His Past to Explain ‘Why We Drink Too Much. Review of: WHY WE DRINK TOO MUCH: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture / Charles Knowles.
Elon Green. 01/02/2026: He Was Fascinated by the School Nazi. He Ended Up Dead. Review of: AMERICAN REICH: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate / Eric Lichtblau.
15featherbear
LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books) January 2026
Paul Finkelman. 01/31/2026: Biography of a Corrupted Court. Review of: Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights / Lisa Graves.
Jon Christensen. 01/30/2026: Have Democrats Learned Anything? Review of: The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight / Jon Ralston.
Michael O'Donnell. 01/29/2026: A Slave Empire. Review of: The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas / Brooke N. Newman.
Alexandra Verini. 01/28/2026: Sister Acts: Why Nuns Are Showing Up Everywhere. Including: Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life / Ana Garriga & Carmen Urbita.
Kazuo Robinson. 01/27/2026: An Uneasy Polemic. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Devon Halliday. 01/27/2026: Life as It Should Be. Review of: Escape!: a novel / Stephen Fishbach.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, interviewer Leila Nadir. 01/24/2026: Tricksters and the Spirit World. Regarding: We Survived the Night / Julian Brave NoiseCat.
M.D. Usher. 01/24/2026: Ascetic Ghosts in the Machine. Review of: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity / Paul Kingsnorth.
Afra Wang. 01/22/2026: Learn to Love Engineers. Review of: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future / Dan Wang -- I Deliver Parcels in Beijing / Hu Anyan. Translated by Jack Hargreaves.
Grace Linden. 01/20/2026: Haunted by Silence. Review of: The Old Fire / Elisa Shua Dusapin. Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (S&S/Summit Books)
Aran Ward Sell. 01/19/2026: The Kingdom in His Head. "reconsiders the legacy and complex overlapping ‘failures’ of Mervyn Peake’s final novel, ‘Titus Alone.’
Dean Rader. 01/19/2026: What Vallejo Do You Want? Review of: The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems / César Vallejo. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Gideon Jacobs. 01/18/2026: MAGA as Fan Fiction.
Sophie Poole. 01/17/2026: Daddy Reissues. "Dinah Brooke’s 1971 debut novel ‘Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady,’ newly reissued, explores a young woman’s journey to realizing that ‘we should give up the charade’ of ‘heterosexual relationships and the bourgeois family structure.’"
Joshua Bodwell. 01/16/2026: And I Never Looked Back. "Tracing the California lineage of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its passionate founder, John Martin."
Almah LaVon. 01/15/2026: Mushrooms Are Not a Metaphor. Interview w/the author of: Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival / Maria Pinto
Michael Barron. 01/15/2026: Not Exactly a Thesis. Review of: What Remains / Brais Lamela. Translated by Jacob Rogers.
Nyuol Lueth Tong. 01/14/2026: The Long Breath of the World. "On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us."
Marissa Grunes. 01/13/2026: Science on Ice. Review of: Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future / Neil Shubin.
Kurt Caswell. 01/13/2026: A Guide to Living in and with Nature. Review of: Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World / M. D. Usher (Princeton University Press).
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué. 01/12/2026: Toward a Feminism Without Gender. Review of: The Lesbian Body / Monique Wittig. Translated by David Le Vay -- Across the Acheron / Monique Wittig. Translated by David Le Vay and Margaret Crosland.
John Knych. 01/12/2026: Dangerous, Decadent Depths. Review of: The Works of Vermin / Hiron Ennes.
Irene Katz Connelly. 01/10/2026: Made for Strength. Review of: I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness / Irene Solà. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem -- The Wax Child / Olga Ravn. Translated by Martin Aitken.
Gayle Feldman. 01/09/2026: In Memory of William Faulkner This Business Will Be Closed From 2:00 to 2:15 P.M. Today. Excerpt from: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman (Publisher: Random House).
Gregg Mitman. 01/08/2026: The Toxic Landscapes of War. Review of: Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare / Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons.
Kim Adams. 01/06/2026: The Globalization of US Healthcare. Review of: The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare / Eram Alam.
Eric Gudas. 01/05/2026: Outward Signs of Inner Mysteries. "Eric Gudas on the work and afterlife of the misunderstood photographer Diane Arbus."
Miyo McGinn. 01/05/2026: Energy from Heaven, Not from Hell. Review of: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization / Bill McKibben.
Chelsea Davis. 01/04/2026: Flesh Under Pressure. Review of: Near Flesh: stories / Katherine Dunn.
Tim Riley. 01/03/2026: Almost Candid. Review of: The Uncool: a memoir / Cameron Crowe.
Paul Finkelman. 01/31/2026: Biography of a Corrupted Court. Review of: Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights / Lisa Graves.
Jon Christensen. 01/30/2026: Have Democrats Learned Anything? Review of: The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight / Jon Ralston.
Michael O'Donnell. 01/29/2026: A Slave Empire. Review of: The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas / Brooke N. Newman.
Alexandra Verini. 01/28/2026: Sister Acts: Why Nuns Are Showing Up Everywhere. Including: Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life / Ana Garriga & Carmen Urbita.
Kazuo Robinson. 01/27/2026: An Uneasy Polemic. Review of: Vigil: a novel / George Saunders.
Devon Halliday. 01/27/2026: Life as It Should Be. Review of: Escape!: a novel / Stephen Fishbach.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, interviewer Leila Nadir. 01/24/2026: Tricksters and the Spirit World. Regarding: We Survived the Night / Julian Brave NoiseCat.
M.D. Usher. 01/24/2026: Ascetic Ghosts in the Machine. Review of: Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity / Paul Kingsnorth.
Afra Wang. 01/22/2026: Learn to Love Engineers. Review of: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future / Dan Wang -- I Deliver Parcels in Beijing / Hu Anyan. Translated by Jack Hargreaves.
Grace Linden. 01/20/2026: Haunted by Silence. Review of: The Old Fire / Elisa Shua Dusapin. Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (S&S/Summit Books)
Aran Ward Sell. 01/19/2026: The Kingdom in His Head. "reconsiders the legacy and complex overlapping ‘failures’ of Mervyn Peake’s final novel, ‘Titus Alone.’
Dean Rader. 01/19/2026: What Vallejo Do You Want? Review of: The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems / César Vallejo. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Gideon Jacobs. 01/18/2026: MAGA as Fan Fiction.
Sophie Poole. 01/17/2026: Daddy Reissues. "Dinah Brooke’s 1971 debut novel ‘Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady,’ newly reissued, explores a young woman’s journey to realizing that ‘we should give up the charade’ of ‘heterosexual relationships and the bourgeois family structure.’"
Joshua Bodwell. 01/16/2026: And I Never Looked Back. "Tracing the California lineage of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its passionate founder, John Martin."
Almah LaVon. 01/15/2026: Mushrooms Are Not a Metaphor. Interview w/the author of: Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival / Maria Pinto
Michael Barron. 01/15/2026: Not Exactly a Thesis. Review of: What Remains / Brais Lamela. Translated by Jacob Rogers.
Nyuol Lueth Tong. 01/14/2026: The Long Breath of the World. "On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us."
Marissa Grunes. 01/13/2026: Science on Ice. Review of: Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future / Neil Shubin.
Kurt Caswell. 01/13/2026: A Guide to Living in and with Nature. Review of: Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World / M. D. Usher (Princeton University Press).
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué. 01/12/2026: Toward a Feminism Without Gender. Review of: The Lesbian Body / Monique Wittig. Translated by David Le Vay -- Across the Acheron / Monique Wittig. Translated by David Le Vay and Margaret Crosland.
John Knych. 01/12/2026: Dangerous, Decadent Depths. Review of: The Works of Vermin / Hiron Ennes.
Irene Katz Connelly. 01/10/2026: Made for Strength. Review of: I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness / Irene Solà. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem -- The Wax Child / Olga Ravn. Translated by Martin Aitken.
Gayle Feldman. 01/09/2026: In Memory of William Faulkner This Business Will Be Closed From 2:00 to 2:15 P.M. Today. Excerpt from: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman (Publisher: Random House).
Gregg Mitman. 01/08/2026: The Toxic Landscapes of War. Review of: Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare / Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons.
Kim Adams. 01/06/2026: The Globalization of US Healthcare. Review of: The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare / Eram Alam.
Eric Gudas. 01/05/2026: Outward Signs of Inner Mysteries. "Eric Gudas on the work and afterlife of the misunderstood photographer Diane Arbus."
Miyo McGinn. 01/05/2026: Energy from Heaven, Not from Hell. Review of: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization / Bill McKibben.
Chelsea Davis. 01/04/2026: Flesh Under Pressure. Review of: Near Flesh: stories / Katherine Dunn.
Tim Riley. 01/03/2026: Almost Candid. Review of: The Uncool: a memoir / Cameron Crowe.
16featherbear
The Critic (UK) January 2026
Jeremy Black. 01/03/2026: Murders for January: Crime fiction for cold months.
Jeremy Black. 01/03/2026: Murders for January: Crime fiction for cold months.
17featherbear
JStOR Daily January 2026
Livia Gershon 01/29/2026: A History of Existential Anxiety. "From medieval theology to modern philosophy, dread has long been a guide for living ethically."
Livia Gershon. 01/01/2026: Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed. "Medieval European elites inherited the classical concept of friendship as something possible only for men. Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe beg to differ."
Livia Gershon 01/29/2026: A History of Existential Anxiety. "From medieval theology to modern philosophy, dread has long been a guide for living ethically."
Livia Gershon. 01/01/2026: Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed. "Medieval European elites inherited the classical concept of friendship as something possible only for men. Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe beg to differ."
18featherbear
LitHub January 2026
Devin Thomas O'Shea. 01/29/2026: Thomas Pynchon Has Been Warning Us About American Fascism the Whole Time.
Thao Thai. 01/28/2026: Portals, Vehicles, and Vessels: How Folklore Holds the Weight of Cultures in Flux. "Thao Thai Discusses the Power and Creative Use of Mythology with Anna Kovatcheva, Alice Evelyn Yang, Ryan Collett and Sarah Hall."
James Folta. 01/27/2026: “Everything We Do Matters.” Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books is a Hub For Anti-ICE Resistance.
Val McDermid. 01/27/2026: Ice and Inspiration: An Ode to Writing in Winter From Val McDermid. Excerpt from: Winter: the story of a season / Val McDermid.
Ed Simon. 01/21/2026: Inside the Long History of Technologically Assisted Writing.
Asha Dore. 01/16/2026: On Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Anti-Memoir” The Chronology of Water. Anchor link: The Chronology of Water: a memoir / Lidia Yuknavtich.
Madeleine Dunnigan. 01/16/2026: Containment and Freedom: In Praise of the Boarding School Novel. "Madeleine Dunnigan on the Joys of Channeling Teenage Angst In Her Fiction."
Jason Burke. 01/16/2026: The Rise of Carlos the Jackal, the Most Feared Terrorist of the 1970s. Excerpt from: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Diana Arterian. 01/15/2026: The Annotated Nightstand: What Daniyal Mueenuddin Is Reading Now, and Next. Big Lauren Groff fan - who knew?
Eve McDonald. 01/15/2026: How the Phoenicians Laid the Foundations For Modern Commerce and Civilization. Excerpt from: Carthage: A New History / Eve MacDonald.
Ed Simon. 01/14/2026: The Work Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs.
Eric Olson. 01/14/2026: Is Artistic Ego a Faustian Bargain? Karl Ove Knausgaard on Plot, Narcissism, and His New Novel. The new novel is: The School of Night: A Novel / Karl Ove Knausgaard; translator Martin Aitken.
Brittany Allen. 01/12/2026: Texas A&M is banning Plato, citing his “gender ideology.”
Gayle Feldman. 01/12/2026: Truman Capote, Bennett Cerf, and the Making of In Cold Blood. Excerpt from: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman; anchor link: In Cold Blood / Truman Capote.
Maris Kreizman. 01/08/2026: Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing. Review of: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life / Kate McKean -- Take It from Me: An Agent's Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch / Alia Hanna Habib.
Brittany Allen. 01/05/2026: In 2025, most Americans read fewer than four books.
Brittany Allen. 01/05/2026: Harlequin France is firing its human translators and replacing them with—welp, you guessed it.
Elspeth Wilson. 01/05/2026: The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random.
Literary Hub, 01/05/2026: Notable Literary Deaths in 2025: An Incomplete List of the Writers, Editors, and Great Literary Minds We Lost This Year.
Devin Thomas O'Shea. 01/29/2026: Thomas Pynchon Has Been Warning Us About American Fascism the Whole Time.
Thao Thai. 01/28/2026: Portals, Vehicles, and Vessels: How Folklore Holds the Weight of Cultures in Flux. "Thao Thai Discusses the Power and Creative Use of Mythology with Anna Kovatcheva, Alice Evelyn Yang, Ryan Collett and Sarah Hall."
James Folta. 01/27/2026: “Everything We Do Matters.” Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books is a Hub For Anti-ICE Resistance.
Val McDermid. 01/27/2026: Ice and Inspiration: An Ode to Writing in Winter From Val McDermid. Excerpt from: Winter: the story of a season / Val McDermid.
Ed Simon. 01/21/2026: Inside the Long History of Technologically Assisted Writing.
Asha Dore. 01/16/2026: On Lidia Yuknavitch’s “Anti-Memoir” The Chronology of Water. Anchor link: The Chronology of Water: a memoir / Lidia Yuknavtich.
Madeleine Dunnigan. 01/16/2026: Containment and Freedom: In Praise of the Boarding School Novel. "Madeleine Dunnigan on the Joys of Channeling Teenage Angst In Her Fiction."
Jason Burke. 01/16/2026: The Rise of Carlos the Jackal, the Most Feared Terrorist of the 1970s. Excerpt from: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Diana Arterian. 01/15/2026: The Annotated Nightstand: What Daniyal Mueenuddin Is Reading Now, and Next. Big Lauren Groff fan - who knew?
Eve McDonald. 01/15/2026: How the Phoenicians Laid the Foundations For Modern Commerce and Civilization. Excerpt from: Carthage: A New History / Eve MacDonald.
Ed Simon. 01/14/2026: The Work Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs.
Eric Olson. 01/14/2026: Is Artistic Ego a Faustian Bargain? Karl Ove Knausgaard on Plot, Narcissism, and His New Novel. The new novel is: The School of Night: A Novel / Karl Ove Knausgaard; translator Martin Aitken.
Brittany Allen. 01/12/2026: Texas A&M is banning Plato, citing his “gender ideology.”
Gayle Feldman. 01/12/2026: Truman Capote, Bennett Cerf, and the Making of In Cold Blood. Excerpt from: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built / Gayle Feldman; anchor link: In Cold Blood / Truman Capote.
Maris Kreizman. 01/08/2026: Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing. Review of: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life / Kate McKean -- Take It from Me: An Agent's Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch / Alia Hanna Habib.
Brittany Allen. 01/05/2026: In 2025, most Americans read fewer than four books.
Brittany Allen. 01/05/2026: Harlequin France is firing its human translators and replacing them with—welp, you guessed it.
Elspeth Wilson. 01/05/2026: The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random.
Literary Hub, 01/05/2026: Notable Literary Deaths in 2025: An Incomplete List of the Writers, Editors, and Great Literary Minds We Lost This Year.
19featherbear
Oliver Traldi. The Philosophers' Magazine, 01/01/2026: Beneath the Surface of Straussianism. (Leo Strauss that is)
20featherbear
Aeon January 2026
Emily Thomas. 01/16/2026: The shape of time. "In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant – with profound implications for how we experience the world."
Rory O'Sullivan. 01/08/2026: The tragedy of Trần Đức Thảo. "How the persecuted Vietnamese philosopher became one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser."
Cat Lambert. 01/05/2026: The erotic poems of Bilitis: A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work.
Emily Thomas. 01/16/2026: The shape of time. "In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant – with profound implications for how we experience the world."
Rory O'Sullivan. 01/08/2026: The tragedy of Trần Đức Thảo. "How the persecuted Vietnamese philosopher became one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser."
Cat Lambert. 01/05/2026: The erotic poems of Bilitis: A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work.
21featherbear
Laurence Weschler. Wondercabinet, 01/01/2026: January 1, 2026 : Wondercab Mini (103A). "In the wake of Rachel Aviv’s recent piece in the NYer, revisiting the question of Oliver Sacks’s narrative reliability."
22featherbear
airmailnews Dec 2025-Jan 2026
David Margolis. issue 338, 01/03/2026: The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part II. "Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller’s Marilyn: A Biography sold more copies than anything Mailer ever wrote. He also believed it cost him a Nobel Prize."
David Margolis. issue 337, 12/27/2025: The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part I. "How the unlikely, tumultuous partnership of Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller produced the true-crime masterpiece The Executioner’s Song.
David Margolis. issue 338, 01/03/2026: The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part II. "Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller’s Marilyn: A Biography sold more copies than anything Mailer ever wrote. He also believed it cost him a Nobel Prize."
David Margolis. issue 337, 12/27/2025: The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part I. "How the unlikely, tumultuous partnership of Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller produced the true-crime masterpiece The Executioner’s Song.
23featherbear
Michael Schumacher, 1950-2025
Associated Press. Guardian, 01/05/2026: Michael Schumacher, author of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton biographies, dies aged 75.
Michael Schumacher's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/schumachermichael-1
Associated Press. Guardian, 01/05/2026: Michael Schumacher, author of Francis Ford Coppola and Eric Clapton biographies, dies aged 75.
Michael Schumacher's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/schumachermichael-1
24featherbear
Lila Shapiro. Vulture, 01/07/2026: Gluttons for Punishment. "Justin McDaniel has developed a cult following for getting his students to read — as long as they follow his rules."
25featherbear
Jennifer Delton. Salmagundi, #228-229, fall 2025-winter 2026), What Now, Humanist?* Review of: Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech / Brian Merchant -- The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI / Karen Ham (Penguin).
26featherbear
TLS January 9, 2026|No. 6396
Featured
Mary Beard. 12/30/2025 (from the TLS landing page): Self-righteousness for beginners.
Ian Sansom. The notebook fallacy: Why stylish stationery won't change your life. (Essay)
Ferdinand Mount. As unalike as ever: Turner is on our banknotes, Constable in our hearts. Review of: 1. the exhibition & catalog Turner and Constable: Rivals and originals / Amy Concannon, editor, exhibition Tate Britain, London, until April 12, 2026 -- 2. Constable’s Year: An artist in changing seasons / Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson).
Alessandro Gallenzi. ‘One day, they’ll find me out’: How the young Dylan Thomas repeatedly stole from others. (Essay)
Marie Darrieussecq. Mother was always right: A love-hate relationship recalled by France’s ‘greatest living writer.’ Review of: Kolkhoze / Emmanuel Carrère.
Literature
Tom Cook. Following the golden thread: A critic with ‘an almost devout passion for good poems.’ Review of: Inhabit the Poem: Last essays / Helen Vender (Library of America).
Dominic Leonard. Bad poetry, stilted drama?: In defence of the libretto and the librettist. Review of: Weep, Shudder, Die: On opera and poetry / Dana Gioia -- Poetry as Enchantment: And other essays / Dana Gioia.
Pragya Agarwal. Shelter and storm: A novelist remembers her mother. Review of: Mother Mary Comes to Me / Arundhati Roy.
Lucy Thynne. Nerd’s-eye view: Zadie Smith’s plea to ignore the internet. Review of: Dead and Alive: Essays / Zadie Smith.
Patricia Craig. Dublin made her: A writer who upholds ‘human decency.’ Review of: Attention: Writing on life, art and the world / Anne Enright.
James Cahill. Tongue-tied: A mother and son are reunited in Tokyo. Review of: Palaver: a novel / Bryan Washington.
Tim Parks. Absurd person singular: A dark tale of a marital stand-off. Review of: The Cat / Georges Simenon; translated by Ros Schwartz.
Dinah Birch. Making stories happen: An authoritative, questioning, ‘final’ not-quite-novel. Review of: Departure(s) / Julian Barnes.
Nina Allan. Angels and dragons: A quest for a lost board game – and a philosophical inquiry. Review of: Seven, Or, How to play a game without rules / Joanna Kavenna (Faber; US pub date July 2026).
Lindsay Duguid. Child out of time: After a brain injury, a young man must learn anew. Review of: This, My Second Life / Patrick Charnley.
Michael LaPointe. Beyond the hills: Adventures through an inner landscape. Review of: Landscape with Landscape / Gerald Murnane.
George Cochrane. The way they wring their hands: A gangster’s son is lured back to his family. Review of: The Dead Don’t Bleed: a novel / Neil Rollinson.
In Brief Review of: Good, Occasionally Rhyming: A celebration of the Shipping Forecast in poetry and prose / Rob Stepney and Kathy Clugston, editors (August).
In Brief Review of: Poetry’s Nature: Four lectures / Susan Stewart.
In Brief Review of: A High Calling Or, Where do you get your ideas from? / John Greening (Renard Press).
Religion
Graeme Richardson. After the deluge: The evolution of two Old Testament tales. Review of: Noah and the Flood in Western Thought / Philip C. Almond -- The Book of Job in Wonderland: Making (non)sense of Job’s mediators / Ryan M. Armstrong
Arts
Paul Griffiths. Taste and see: A composer’s idiosyncratic guide to Western classical music. Review of: Music’s Odyssey: An invitation to western classical music / Robin Holloway (Allen Lane).
Graham Daseler. Microscope of time: A film technique that makes ordinary movements seem lyrical. Review of: Downtime: The twentieth century in slow motion / Mark Goble (Columbia University Press).
Norma Clarke. At the centre of the canvas: How and why women fall through history’s gaps. Review of: Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The entwined lives of two great eighteenth-century women artists / Franny Moyle.
Philosophy
Bryan W. Van Norden. No mirror image: A flawed comparative study of eastern and western philosophies. Review of: The Self in the West and East Asia: Being or becoming / Jin Li.
Science & Technology
Snezana Lawrence. Do the math: A practical guide to the ‘algebraic art.’ Review of: The Mending of Broken Bones: A modern guide to classical algebra / Paul Lockhart.
Joanna Kavenna. Battle for the soul of the web: Three assessments of the online world. Review of: This Is for Everyone / Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt -- Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it / Cory Doctorow -- How to Save the Internet: The threat to global connection in the age of AI and political conflict / Nick Clegg.
Michael W. Thomas. Othello and Ovaltineys: The development of our relationship with radio. Review of: Listen In: How radio changed the home / Beaty Rubens -- Shakespeare on the Radio: A century of BBC plays / Andrea Smith.
In Brief Review of: Intraterrestrials: Discovering the strangest life on Earth / Karen G. Lloyd.
In Brief Review of: A Calorie Is a Calorie: The inescapable science that controls our body weight / Keith Frayn (Piatkus).
History, Politics & Science, & Culture
Jerry Toner. Rebel Voices: Antiquity’s worker and trade associations. Review of: Strike: Labor, unions, and resistance in the Roman Empire / Sarah E. Bond.
Matthew Fox. The same old story: Two accounts of Rome that show the influence of Livy. Review of: A Short History of Ancient Rome / Pascal Hughes -- The Shortest History of Ancient Rome / Ross King.
Evan Mawdsley. In deep water: The German war on Allied convoys. Review of: Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War / Roger Moorhouse (William Collins) -- Battle of the Arctic: The maritime epic of World War Two / Hugh Sebag-Montefiore.
Georgina Paul. Dreamers vs the Stasi: Examining the last days of a young man who died in custody. Review of: Generation GDR: Truth, freedom and one man’s last journey / Peter Wensierski; translated by Jamie Bulloch.
J.S. Tennant. Leaving Cuba: Reportage and fiction about a troubled island. Review of: The Hidden Island / Abraham Jiménez Enoa; translated by Lily Meyer -- False War: a novel / Carlos Manuel Álvarez; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Charles Glass. Imperial graveyard: The sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it. Review of: To Lose a War: The fall and rise of the Taliban / Jon Lee Anderson -- The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A people’s history of Afghanistan / Lyle Doucet.
Lindsey Hilsum. Letter from Liangzhu: How China’s history informs its future. (Essay)
Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Preparing for empire: A liberal thinker about the American century. Review of: Walter Lippmann: An intellectual biography / Tom Arnold-Forster.
Gregory Woods. Sobbing for Nixon: A New York conservative’s writing life. Review of: The Very Heart of It: New York diaries, 1983–94 / Thomas Mallon (Knopf).
Ben Hutchinson. Holly Golightly at home: Why do we like what we like? Review of: Wie es euch gefällt: Eine Geschichte des Geschmacks / Ulrich Raulff.
Philip Zelikow. Continent in crisis: Can Europe recover its dynamism? Review of: Can Europe Survive?: The story of a continent in a fractured world / David Marsh.
Alexander Leissle. Vanishing act: Losing friends and country. Review of: Things That Disappear: Reflections and memories / Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Kurt Beals.
In Brief Review of: The Traitors Circle: The rebels against the Nazis and the spy who betrayed them / Jonathan Freedland.
In Brief Review of: Arminda Aberastury’s Theory and Technique of Child Analysis / Edited by Jill Savege Scharff and Lea Sofer de Setton (Karnac).
In Brief Review of: The Power of Parting: Finding peace and freedom through family estrangement / Eamon Dolan.
Food, Drink, & Recreation
Francesca Tiana. Slice of life: The evolution of pizza. Review of: The History of Pizza / Luca Cesari; translated by Zachary Nowak.
Maria Golia. Tomato-crazy: A portrait of Egypt through one of its staple foods. Review of: Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian culinary history of the tomato / Any Gaul.
Pablo Scheffer. Silver darlings: An ‘infectiously enthusiastic’ history of herring. Review of: Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the king of fishes / Graeme Rigby (Hurst).
In Brief Review of: Injury Time: Football in a state of emergency / David Goldblatt.
Miscellaneous
Letters to the Editor: Jane Austen and George Eliot. "Jane Austen and George Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Quantum 2.0, etc."
M.C. NB Sticky wickets. "Trouble Down Under, Poetic pamphleteers, Eric Ravilious and friends."
Featured
Mary Beard. 12/30/2025 (from the TLS landing page): Self-righteousness for beginners.
Ian Sansom. The notebook fallacy: Why stylish stationery won't change your life. (Essay)
Ferdinand Mount. As unalike as ever: Turner is on our banknotes, Constable in our hearts. Review of: 1. the exhibition & catalog Turner and Constable: Rivals and originals / Amy Concannon, editor, exhibition Tate Britain, London, until April 12, 2026 -- 2. Constable’s Year: An artist in changing seasons / Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson).
Alessandro Gallenzi. ‘One day, they’ll find me out’: How the young Dylan Thomas repeatedly stole from others. (Essay)
Marie Darrieussecq. Mother was always right: A love-hate relationship recalled by France’s ‘greatest living writer.’ Review of: Kolkhoze / Emmanuel Carrère.
Literature
Tom Cook. Following the golden thread: A critic with ‘an almost devout passion for good poems.’ Review of: Inhabit the Poem: Last essays / Helen Vender (Library of America).
Dominic Leonard. Bad poetry, stilted drama?: In defence of the libretto and the librettist. Review of: Weep, Shudder, Die: On opera and poetry / Dana Gioia -- Poetry as Enchantment: And other essays / Dana Gioia.
Pragya Agarwal. Shelter and storm: A novelist remembers her mother. Review of: Mother Mary Comes to Me / Arundhati Roy.
Lucy Thynne. Nerd’s-eye view: Zadie Smith’s plea to ignore the internet. Review of: Dead and Alive: Essays / Zadie Smith.
Patricia Craig. Dublin made her: A writer who upholds ‘human decency.’ Review of: Attention: Writing on life, art and the world / Anne Enright.
James Cahill. Tongue-tied: A mother and son are reunited in Tokyo. Review of: Palaver: a novel / Bryan Washington.
Tim Parks. Absurd person singular: A dark tale of a marital stand-off. Review of: The Cat / Georges Simenon; translated by Ros Schwartz.
Dinah Birch. Making stories happen: An authoritative, questioning, ‘final’ not-quite-novel. Review of: Departure(s) / Julian Barnes.
Nina Allan. Angels and dragons: A quest for a lost board game – and a philosophical inquiry. Review of: Seven, Or, How to play a game without rules / Joanna Kavenna (Faber; US pub date July 2026).
Lindsay Duguid. Child out of time: After a brain injury, a young man must learn anew. Review of: This, My Second Life / Patrick Charnley.
Michael LaPointe. Beyond the hills: Adventures through an inner landscape. Review of: Landscape with Landscape / Gerald Murnane.
George Cochrane. The way they wring their hands: A gangster’s son is lured back to his family. Review of: The Dead Don’t Bleed: a novel / Neil Rollinson.
In Brief Review of: Good, Occasionally Rhyming: A celebration of the Shipping Forecast in poetry and prose / Rob Stepney and Kathy Clugston, editors (August).
In Brief Review of: Poetry’s Nature: Four lectures / Susan Stewart.
In Brief Review of: A High Calling Or, Where do you get your ideas from? / John Greening (Renard Press).
Religion
Graeme Richardson. After the deluge: The evolution of two Old Testament tales. Review of: Noah and the Flood in Western Thought / Philip C. Almond -- The Book of Job in Wonderland: Making (non)sense of Job’s mediators / Ryan M. Armstrong
Arts
Paul Griffiths. Taste and see: A composer’s idiosyncratic guide to Western classical music. Review of: Music’s Odyssey: An invitation to western classical music / Robin Holloway (Allen Lane).
Graham Daseler. Microscope of time: A film technique that makes ordinary movements seem lyrical. Review of: Downtime: The twentieth century in slow motion / Mark Goble (Columbia University Press).
Norma Clarke. At the centre of the canvas: How and why women fall through history’s gaps. Review of: Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The entwined lives of two great eighteenth-century women artists / Franny Moyle.
Philosophy
Bryan W. Van Norden. No mirror image: A flawed comparative study of eastern and western philosophies. Review of: The Self in the West and East Asia: Being or becoming / Jin Li.
Science & Technology
Snezana Lawrence. Do the math: A practical guide to the ‘algebraic art.’ Review of: The Mending of Broken Bones: A modern guide to classical algebra / Paul Lockhart.
Joanna Kavenna. Battle for the soul of the web: Three assessments of the online world. Review of: This Is for Everyone / Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt -- Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it / Cory Doctorow -- How to Save the Internet: The threat to global connection in the age of AI and political conflict / Nick Clegg.
Michael W. Thomas. Othello and Ovaltineys: The development of our relationship with radio. Review of: Listen In: How radio changed the home / Beaty Rubens -- Shakespeare on the Radio: A century of BBC plays / Andrea Smith.
In Brief Review of: Intraterrestrials: Discovering the strangest life on Earth / Karen G. Lloyd.
In Brief Review of: A Calorie Is a Calorie: The inescapable science that controls our body weight / Keith Frayn (Piatkus).
History, Politics & Science, & Culture
Jerry Toner. Rebel Voices: Antiquity’s worker and trade associations. Review of: Strike: Labor, unions, and resistance in the Roman Empire / Sarah E. Bond.
Matthew Fox. The same old story: Two accounts of Rome that show the influence of Livy. Review of: A Short History of Ancient Rome / Pascal Hughes -- The Shortest History of Ancient Rome / Ross King.
Evan Mawdsley. In deep water: The German war on Allied convoys. Review of: Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War / Roger Moorhouse (William Collins) -- Battle of the Arctic: The maritime epic of World War Two / Hugh Sebag-Montefiore.
Georgina Paul. Dreamers vs the Stasi: Examining the last days of a young man who died in custody. Review of: Generation GDR: Truth, freedom and one man’s last journey / Peter Wensierski; translated by Jamie Bulloch.
J.S. Tennant. Leaving Cuba: Reportage and fiction about a troubled island. Review of: The Hidden Island / Abraham Jiménez Enoa; translated by Lily Meyer -- False War: a novel / Carlos Manuel Álvarez; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Charles Glass. Imperial graveyard: The sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it. Review of: To Lose a War: The fall and rise of the Taliban / Jon Lee Anderson -- The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A people’s history of Afghanistan / Lyle Doucet.
Lindsey Hilsum. Letter from Liangzhu: How China’s history informs its future. (Essay)
Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Preparing for empire: A liberal thinker about the American century. Review of: Walter Lippmann: An intellectual biography / Tom Arnold-Forster.
Gregory Woods. Sobbing for Nixon: A New York conservative’s writing life. Review of: The Very Heart of It: New York diaries, 1983–94 / Thomas Mallon (Knopf).
Ben Hutchinson. Holly Golightly at home: Why do we like what we like? Review of: Wie es euch gefällt: Eine Geschichte des Geschmacks / Ulrich Raulff.
Philip Zelikow. Continent in crisis: Can Europe recover its dynamism? Review of: Can Europe Survive?: The story of a continent in a fractured world / David Marsh.
Alexander Leissle. Vanishing act: Losing friends and country. Review of: Things That Disappear: Reflections and memories / Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Kurt Beals.
In Brief Review of: The Traitors Circle: The rebels against the Nazis and the spy who betrayed them / Jonathan Freedland.
In Brief Review of: Arminda Aberastury’s Theory and Technique of Child Analysis / Edited by Jill Savege Scharff and Lea Sofer de Setton (Karnac).
In Brief Review of: The Power of Parting: Finding peace and freedom through family estrangement / Eamon Dolan.
Food, Drink, & Recreation
Francesca Tiana. Slice of life: The evolution of pizza. Review of: The History of Pizza / Luca Cesari; translated by Zachary Nowak.
Maria Golia. Tomato-crazy: A portrait of Egypt through one of its staple foods. Review of: Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian culinary history of the tomato / Any Gaul.
Pablo Scheffer. Silver darlings: An ‘infectiously enthusiastic’ history of herring. Review of: Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the king of fishes / Graeme Rigby (Hurst).
In Brief Review of: Injury Time: Football in a state of emergency / David Goldblatt.
Miscellaneous
Letters to the Editor: Jane Austen and George Eliot. "Jane Austen and George Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Quantum 2.0, etc."
M.C. NB Sticky wickets. "Trouble Down Under, Poetic pamphleteers, Eric Ravilious and friends."
27featherbear
UnHerd January 2026
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert. 01/27/2026: Philip Roth’s coldhearted betrayals: His loved ones were merely raw material.
Nicholas Carr. 01/07/2026: How Big Tech killed literary culture: The philistines are in charge now.
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert. 01/27/2026: Philip Roth’s coldhearted betrayals: His loved ones were merely raw material.
Nicholas Carr. 01/07/2026: How Big Tech killed literary culture: The philistines are in charge now.
28featherbear
January 2026 Updates 01-10
Aeon Jan 08: Trần Đức Thảo as philosopher of colonization -- Jan 05: Bilitis fakery >20 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 10: cryptocurrency & the Japanese connection -- Jan 09: Razia Sajjad Zaheer short stories in translation -- Jan 07: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 -- Jan 06: Our Madhopur Home -- Jan 04: Islamic China -- Jan 03: Kirpa Ram Vij & the origin of the Singapore Armed Forces -- Jan 02: Konishi's My Grandfather Master Detective >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 10: Stephen Miller misreads Thomas Hobbes -- Jan 08: Rebecca Goldstein's Mattering Instinct & the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics -- Jan 07: losing a personal library -- Jan 06: history of ending slavery in the Americas; half dozen bks to get lost in -- Jan 05: writers cling to the Greek myths -- Jan 02: reading is a vice; a new translation of Dante -- Jan 01: Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here >5 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Jan 03: January crime fiction >16 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 09: gravity books! -- Jan 02: Afrofuturist SF >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 10: novelists who predicted our present -- Jan 09: Belgrave Road love story; best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror -- Jan 07: Russian forests -- Jan 06: C Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 05: The Great Resistance; Made in America: what led to Trump; Erin Somers's Ten Year Affair -- Jan 04: second life after heart attack novel -- Jan 02: Grace Murray's Blank Canvas; best recent poetry -- Jan 01: Iranian singer Googoosh's memoir >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 10: witches -- Jan 09: Bennett Cerf -- Jan 08: sniper stuff -- Jan 06: how immigrant physicians have propped up the American medical system -- Jan 05: Diane Arbus; Bill McKibben advocates solar energy -- Jan 04: posthumous Katherine Dunn stories -- Jan 03: Cameron Crowe memoir >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 08: 2 books on how publishing works today -- Jan 05: Americans read less than 4 books in 2025; AI translations in Harlequin France; reading at random; literary deaths of 2025 >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 09: Profile of Emily Henry, author of People We Meet On Vacation -- C. Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 07: vampires!; recommendations from New Yorker writers -- Jan 05: sex & consent -- Jan 03: literary fraud >13 featherbear:
NYRB Jan 15: >3 featherbear:
NYT Jan 10: kids today; two sisters novel; George Saunders interview -- Jan 09: 3 novellas by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; pioneering picture books; Tom Verlaine archive to NYPL for Performing Arts; beauty mogul novel; importance of Tom Paine's Common Sense -- Jan 07: T Magazine presents snazzy home libraries -- Jan 06: Architect of New York (novel); blockbuster French novel (Watching Over Her); spy in the archive of the KGB; Advance Britannica -- Jan 05: This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 04: tips for cutting down on alcohol -- Jan 02: SoCal Neo-nazi >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 08: a year w/Karl Ove Knausgård; Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief -- Jan 07: Molly Aitken's historical novel on Alice Kyteler -- Jan 06: framing the humanities; This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 02 -- Jan 02: Bryan Washington's Palaver -- Jan 01: essay on the present >9 featherbear:
Quillette >Jan 02: 2 books on the US Justice Dept >12 featherbear:
TLS Jan 09 >26 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 10: zhuzh up your reading w/tech -- Jan 09: Bennett Cerf bio; feminist Moby Dick bombs -- Jan 08: C. Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 07: Val McDermid on the season of winter -- Jan 03: fictional works that teach about climate change; black bears memoir -- Jan 02: looking back at 2025 -- Jan 01: Homeschooling; Anita Loos >6 featherbear:
Yale Review Jan 02: most read prose of the Yale Review 2025 >8 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
New websites:
airmailnews >22 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >17 featherbear:
The Philosophers' Magazine >19 featherbear:
Salmagundi >25 featherbear:
UnHerd >27 featherbear:
Vulture >24 featherbear:
wondercabinet >21 featherbear:
Aeon Jan 08: Trần Đức Thảo as philosopher of colonization -- Jan 05: Bilitis fakery >20 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 10: cryptocurrency & the Japanese connection -- Jan 09: Razia Sajjad Zaheer short stories in translation -- Jan 07: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 -- Jan 06: Our Madhopur Home -- Jan 04: Islamic China -- Jan 03: Kirpa Ram Vij & the origin of the Singapore Armed Forces -- Jan 02: Konishi's My Grandfather Master Detective >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 10: Stephen Miller misreads Thomas Hobbes -- Jan 08: Rebecca Goldstein's Mattering Instinct & the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics -- Jan 07: losing a personal library -- Jan 06: history of ending slavery in the Americas; half dozen bks to get lost in -- Jan 05: writers cling to the Greek myths -- Jan 02: reading is a vice; a new translation of Dante -- Jan 01: Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here >5 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Jan 03: January crime fiction >16 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 09: gravity books! -- Jan 02: Afrofuturist SF >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 10: novelists who predicted our present -- Jan 09: Belgrave Road love story; best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror -- Jan 07: Russian forests -- Jan 06: C Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 05: The Great Resistance; Made in America: what led to Trump; Erin Somers's Ten Year Affair -- Jan 04: second life after heart attack novel -- Jan 02: Grace Murray's Blank Canvas; best recent poetry -- Jan 01: Iranian singer Googoosh's memoir >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 10: witches -- Jan 09: Bennett Cerf -- Jan 08: sniper stuff -- Jan 06: how immigrant physicians have propped up the American medical system -- Jan 05: Diane Arbus; Bill McKibben advocates solar energy -- Jan 04: posthumous Katherine Dunn stories -- Jan 03: Cameron Crowe memoir >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 08: 2 books on how publishing works today -- Jan 05: Americans read less than 4 books in 2025; AI translations in Harlequin France; reading at random; literary deaths of 2025 >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 09: Profile of Emily Henry, author of People We Meet On Vacation -- C. Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 07: vampires!; recommendations from New Yorker writers -- Jan 05: sex & consent -- Jan 03: literary fraud >13 featherbear:
NYRB Jan 15: >3 featherbear:
NYT Jan 10: kids today; two sisters novel; George Saunders interview -- Jan 09: 3 novellas by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; pioneering picture books; Tom Verlaine archive to NYPL for Performing Arts; beauty mogul novel; importance of Tom Paine's Common Sense -- Jan 07: T Magazine presents snazzy home libraries -- Jan 06: Architect of New York (novel); blockbuster French novel (Watching Over Her); spy in the archive of the KGB; Advance Britannica -- Jan 05: This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 04: tips for cutting down on alcohol -- Jan 02: SoCal Neo-nazi >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 08: a year w/Karl Ove Knausgård; Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief -- Jan 07: Molly Aitken's historical novel on Alice Kyteler -- Jan 06: framing the humanities; This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 02 -- Jan 02: Bryan Washington's Palaver -- Jan 01: essay on the present >9 featherbear:
Quillette >Jan 02: 2 books on the US Justice Dept >12 featherbear:
TLS Jan 09 >26 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 10: zhuzh up your reading w/tech -- Jan 09: Bennett Cerf bio; feminist Moby Dick bombs -- Jan 08: C. Thi Nguyen's The Score -- Jan 07: Val McDermid on the season of winter -- Jan 03: fictional works that teach about climate change; black bears memoir -- Jan 02: looking back at 2025 -- Jan 01: Homeschooling; Anita Loos >6 featherbear:
Yale Review Jan 02: most read prose of the Yale Review 2025 >8 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
New websites:
airmailnews >22 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >17 featherbear:
The Philosophers' Magazine >19 featherbear:
Salmagundi >25 featherbear:
UnHerd >27 featherbear:
Vulture >24 featherbear:
wondercabinet >21 featherbear:
29featherbear
Erich von Däniken, 1935–2026
Mike Peed. 01/11/2026: Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90. "His 1968 book, “Chariots of the Gods,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but one critic called it a “warped parody of reasoning.”
Erich von Däniken LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/danikenerichvon
Mike Peed. 01/11/2026: Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90. "His 1968 book, “Chariots of the Gods,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but one critic called it a “warped parody of reasoning.”
Erich von Däniken LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/danikenerichvon
30featherbear
Daniel Walker Howe, 1937-2026
Alex Traub. 01/11/2026: Daniel Walker Howe, Historian of Antebellum America, Dies at 88. "He saw the origins of modern America in the years between 1815 and 1848, when revolutions in technology and media transformed a nation of isolated farms."
"Daniel Walker Howe, an American historian who sought to dethrone President Andrew Jackson as the singular defining figure of his era of American history, arguing instead for the central importance of technological advance, the women’s rights movement and the long-defunct Whig Party, died on Dec. 25 at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 88.
Daniel Walker Howe's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/howedanielwalker
Alex Traub. 01/11/2026: Daniel Walker Howe, Historian of Antebellum America, Dies at 88. "He saw the origins of modern America in the years between 1815 and 1848, when revolutions in technology and media transformed a nation of isolated farms."
"Daniel Walker Howe, an American historian who sought to dethrone President Andrew Jackson as the singular defining figure of his era of American history, arguing instead for the central importance of technological advance, the women’s rights movement and the long-defunct Whig Party, died on Dec. 25 at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 88.
Daniel Walker Howe's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/howedanielwalker
31featherbear
Dirt January 2026
Greta Rainbow. 01/13/2026: Byron Johnson: Are longevity bros the great literary figures of our time? Regarding: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash & tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson & forthcoming books.
Tyler Watamanuk. 01/09/2026: How should a book stack be?
Greta Rainbow. 01/13/2026: Byron Johnson: Are longevity bros the great literary figures of our time? Regarding: Lost Lambs / Madeline Cash & tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson & forthcoming books.
Tyler Watamanuk. 01/09/2026: How should a book stack be?
32featherbear
Scott Adams, 1957-2026
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, Creator of the Satirical ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68. "His chronicles of a corporate cubicle dweller was widely distributed until racist comments on his podcast led newspapers to cut their ties with him."
"Scott Adams, whose experience as a bank and phone company middle manager gave him the material to create the comic strip “Dilbert,” a daily satire of corporate life that became a sensation but was dropped by more than 1,000 newspapers after he made racist comments on his podcast in 2023, died on Tuesday at his home in Pleasanton, Calif., in the Bay Area. He was 68.
"For more than 30 years, “Dilbert” chronicled the absurdities of the high-tech workplace and skewered management. The title character was a frustrated engineer working from a cubicle at a high-tech company whose intelligent, anthropomorphic pet, Dogbert, dreamed of world domination. Other characters included Dilbert’s co-workers, Alice, Asok and Wally; the hapless Pointy-Haired Boss; and Catbert, the fire-red-colored cat and evil head of human relations.
"At its peak, “Dilbert” was syndicated to about 2,000 newspapers internationally, placing it in the realm of other popular syndicated strips like “Peanuts,” “Doonesbury” and “Garfield.” Mr. Adams also published numerous “Dilbert” collections and wrote business books, including “The Dilbert Principle,” which posits that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.”
"Dilbert himself was the star of a $30 million advertising campaign for Office Depot in 1997.
"The success of “Dilbert” gave Mr. Adams a platform to comment on a wide range of topics on his blog and podcast. Some of his views drew intense criticism. On his blog in 2006, he questioned whether the figure of six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust was accurate or a big number “that someone pulled out of his ass.” Five years later, also on his blog, he wrote that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. Its just easier this way for everyone.”
"Over the years, Mr. Adams made remarks about women and Jews that brought him negative attention outside the silo of beloved cartoonist. He used his podcast, “Real Coffee With Scott Adams,” to offer free-flowing commentary on the news, a platform that led to the comic strip’s downfall. In February 2023, he was discussing a new Rasmussen Reports poll that found that only 53 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white,” a phrase that has been promoted by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
"“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to the poll — that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said on the podcast episode. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”
"In the podcast, he also said that he had previously identified as Black “because I like to be on the winning team,” and that he had sought to help the Black community. But after reading about the Rasmussen poll, he said, he would “re-identify as white.”
"He said his support for Mr. Trump in 2016 proved costly.
“When I decided that I would throw away my entire social life to back Trump and when I eventually threw away my entire career — which even before I was canceled, my licensing business and book sales went to almost nothing — because I was supporting Trump,” he said on his podcast in October 2025. “I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life. I sacrificed my career. I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health. And I did that because I believed it was worth it.”
Harrison Smith. WaPo, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator who poked fun at bad bosses, dies at 68.
Maya Yang. Guardian, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and conservative commentator, dies aged 68.
Nitish Pawa. Slate, 01/14/2026: Scott Adams’ Life and Death Is a Cautionary Tale for the MAGA Age. "While generations of fans may have loved Dilbert, its creator devolved into something unrecognizable as he embraced the MAGA era."
Scott Adams LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/adamsscott-1
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, Creator of the Satirical ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68. "His chronicles of a corporate cubicle dweller was widely distributed until racist comments on his podcast led newspapers to cut their ties with him."
"Scott Adams, whose experience as a bank and phone company middle manager gave him the material to create the comic strip “Dilbert,” a daily satire of corporate life that became a sensation but was dropped by more than 1,000 newspapers after he made racist comments on his podcast in 2023, died on Tuesday at his home in Pleasanton, Calif., in the Bay Area. He was 68.
"For more than 30 years, “Dilbert” chronicled the absurdities of the high-tech workplace and skewered management. The title character was a frustrated engineer working from a cubicle at a high-tech company whose intelligent, anthropomorphic pet, Dogbert, dreamed of world domination. Other characters included Dilbert’s co-workers, Alice, Asok and Wally; the hapless Pointy-Haired Boss; and Catbert, the fire-red-colored cat and evil head of human relations.
"At its peak, “Dilbert” was syndicated to about 2,000 newspapers internationally, placing it in the realm of other popular syndicated strips like “Peanuts,” “Doonesbury” and “Garfield.” Mr. Adams also published numerous “Dilbert” collections and wrote business books, including “The Dilbert Principle,” which posits that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.”
"Dilbert himself was the star of a $30 million advertising campaign for Office Depot in 1997.
"The success of “Dilbert” gave Mr. Adams a platform to comment on a wide range of topics on his blog and podcast. Some of his views drew intense criticism. On his blog in 2006, he questioned whether the figure of six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust was accurate or a big number “that someone pulled out of his ass.” Five years later, also on his blog, he wrote that “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. Its just easier this way for everyone.”
"Over the years, Mr. Adams made remarks about women and Jews that brought him negative attention outside the silo of beloved cartoonist. He used his podcast, “Real Coffee With Scott Adams,” to offer free-flowing commentary on the news, a platform that led to the comic strip’s downfall. In February 2023, he was discussing a new Rasmussen Reports poll that found that only 53 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white,” a phrase that has been promoted by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
"“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to the poll — that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said on the podcast episode. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”
"In the podcast, he also said that he had previously identified as Black “because I like to be on the winning team,” and that he had sought to help the Black community. But after reading about the Rasmussen poll, he said, he would “re-identify as white.”
"He said his support for Mr. Trump in 2016 proved costly.
“When I decided that I would throw away my entire social life to back Trump and when I eventually threw away my entire career — which even before I was canceled, my licensing business and book sales went to almost nothing — because I was supporting Trump,” he said on his podcast in October 2025. “I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life. I sacrificed my career. I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health. And I did that because I believed it was worth it.”
Harrison Smith. WaPo, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator who poked fun at bad bosses, dies at 68.
Maya Yang. Guardian, 01/13/2026: Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and conservative commentator, dies aged 68.
Nitish Pawa. Slate, 01/14/2026: Scott Adams’ Life and Death Is a Cautionary Tale for the MAGA Age. "While generations of fans may have loved Dilbert, its creator devolved into something unrecognizable as he embraced the MAGA era."
Scott Adams LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/adamsscott-1
33featherbear
Public Books January 2026
Jaye Chen. 01/27/2026: Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict.” Review of: Discomania / Jennifer Gibbons -- The Pepsi Cola Addict / June-Alison Gibbons.
Mona El-Ghobashy. 01/22/2026: This Too Is Gaza. Review of: On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza: Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed / Mohammed Omer Almoghayer.
Matthew Schratz. 01/21/2026: B-Sides: Lydia Millet’s “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.” Regarding: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart / Lydia Millet.
Aditi Rao. 01/15/2026: Against Babel: Or, How to Talk to Strangers. Review of: Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism / Jennifer Scappettone (Columbia University Press) -- Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global / Laura Spinney.
Laure Astourian. 01/14/2026: At the Edge of Erasure: An Interview with Anouche Kunth, Historian of Exile. Regarding: Au bord de l'effacement: Sur les pas d'exilés arméniens dans l'entre-deux-guerres / Anouche Kunth (Editions La Découverte).
Jaye Chen. 01/27/2026: Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict.” Review of: Discomania / Jennifer Gibbons -- The Pepsi Cola Addict / June-Alison Gibbons.
Mona El-Ghobashy. 01/22/2026: This Too Is Gaza. Review of: On the Pleasures of Living in Gaza: Remembering a Way of Life Now Destroyed / Mohammed Omer Almoghayer.
Matthew Schratz. 01/21/2026: B-Sides: Lydia Millet’s “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.” Regarding: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart / Lydia Millet.
Aditi Rao. 01/15/2026: Against Babel: Or, How to Talk to Strangers. Review of: Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism / Jennifer Scappettone (Columbia University Press) -- Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global / Laura Spinney.
Laure Astourian. 01/14/2026: At the Edge of Erasure: An Interview with Anouche Kunth, Historian of Exile. Regarding: Au bord de l'effacement: Sur les pas d'exilés arméniens dans l'entre-deux-guerres / Anouche Kunth (Editions La Découverte).
34featherbear
Matthew Byrd. Reactor, 01/15/2026: From King Arthur to Corpsicles: The Evolution of the Cryosleep Trope.
35featherbear
Washington Monthly January 2026
David Austin Walsh. 01/29/2026: The Unraveling Right. Review of: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right / Laura K. Field.
Richard D. Kahlenberg. 01/15/2026: Inside the Fight to Revive American Civics. Review of: The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy / James Traub.
Garrett Epps. 01/14/2026: Amnesty Transactional. Review of: The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History / Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash.
Michael Javen Fortner. 01/01/2026: How New York City Got Safe. Review of: Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop / Peter Moskos (Oxford University Press).
David Austin Walsh. 01/29/2026: The Unraveling Right. Review of: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right / Laura K. Field.
Richard D. Kahlenberg. 01/15/2026: Inside the Fight to Revive American Civics. Review of: The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy / James Traub.
Garrett Epps. 01/14/2026: Amnesty Transactional. Review of: The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History / Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash.
Michael Javen Fortner. 01/01/2026: How New York City Got Safe. Review of: Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop / Peter Moskos (Oxford University Press).
36featherbear
Jonathan Wells. bbc culture, 01/17/2026: 'Hullo, hillo, holla': The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello.'
37featherbear
January 2026 11-17 updates
Aeon Jan 16: the linear shape of time in the 19th century >20 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 17: Oxford Soju Club -- Jan 16: McNamara at war -- Jan 14: escape from Manchuria -- Jan 13: historical novel about 19th century Australia -- Jan 11: the politics of India's past >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 17: student writing -- Jan 16: misogyny -- Jan 15: Jake Lundberg on Thomas Paine's Common Sense; Margaret C. Anderson bio -- Jan 13: Heated Rivalry (the book); Texas takes it to Plato; Lost Lambs of the Internet; Julian Barnes's Departure(s) >5 featherbear:
Dirt Jan 13: longevity bros -- Jan 09: proper bookstacks >31 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 15: best Central & East European novels >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 17: addiction memoirs; self-help books that get a thumbs up -- Jan 15: Adam Tooze; George Saunders -- Jan 14: how to read more; new Jennette McCurdy novel; Rachel Eliza Griffiths memoir -- Jan 13: AI "relationships" -- Jan 12: Freud & neuroscience; Joanna Kavenna's Seven >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 17: reissue of Love Life of a Cheltenham lady -- Jan 16: interview with John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow Press -- Jan 15: interview with Maria Pinto on her book regarding wild mushrooms & climate futures -- Jan 14: On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us -- Jan 13: Polar Regions; What the ancients can teach us about cultivating a sustainable world -- Jan 12: feminism w/out gender in 2 novels by Monique Wittig; works of vermin >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 16: Lydia Yuknavitch's Anti-Memoir; boarding school novels; excerpt from the new terrorist book here focusing on Carlos the Jackal -- Jan 15: what Daniyal Mueenuddin is reading; excerpt from a new history of Carthage focusing on the role of the Phoenicians -- Jan 14: Ed Simon on writers' second jobs; profile of Karl Ove Knausgaard & The School of Night -- Jan 12: no Plato at Texas A&M; excerpt from Gayle Feldman's Bennett Cerf bio regarding the publication of In Cold Blood >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 14: reading for the new year pt 3 -- Jan 12: books on recovering from caring too much & PTSD >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 17: Jeanette Winterson's riff on 1001 Nights; rock climbing novel -- Jan 16: the lithium supply chain -- Jan 15: Jung Chang's sequel to Wild Swans -- Jan 14: Call Me Ishmaelle; The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes -- Jan 13: GOP senator becomes best-selling author; what Karl Ove Knausgaard to read; new book by Karl Ove Knausgaard; Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs; C. Thi Nguyen's game theories; faking educational achievement -- Jan 12: building a catapult; revolutions gone wrong; teaching Plato under fire -- Jan 11: Mississippi literacy; Belle Burden's memoir plus a profile; Sarah Levine's The Hitch >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 16: J.D. Smith's new poetry collection; excerpt from David Bowie bio -- Jan 15: what PRoB is reading the 3rd week of January --The Onion -- Jan 14: Jacinta Kerketta interview & translations -- Jan 13: Harry Tanner excerpt on changes in Western cultural attitudes toward homosexuality; death & Tteokbokki -- Jan 12: death of critic John Carey >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 15: 2 books on languages & communication -- Jan 14: Armenians & exile >33 featherbear:
Quillette Jan 16: women conspiracists >12 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 17: Jeanette Winterson's 1001 Nights rant; attention span book -- Jan 16: Russian forests; Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs -- Jan 15: Lee Bollinger on the University -- Jan 13: Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives; Colleen Hoover's Woman Down >6 featherbear:
January updates 01-10 >28 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
bbc culture >36 featherbear:
Dirt >31 featherbear:
Public Books >33 featherbear:
Reactor >34 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >35 featherbear:
Aeon Jan 16: the linear shape of time in the 19th century >20 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 17: Oxford Soju Club -- Jan 16: McNamara at war -- Jan 14: escape from Manchuria -- Jan 13: historical novel about 19th century Australia -- Jan 11: the politics of India's past >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 17: student writing -- Jan 16: misogyny -- Jan 15: Jake Lundberg on Thomas Paine's Common Sense; Margaret C. Anderson bio -- Jan 13: Heated Rivalry (the book); Texas takes it to Plato; Lost Lambs of the Internet; Julian Barnes's Departure(s) >5 featherbear:
Dirt Jan 13: longevity bros -- Jan 09: proper bookstacks >31 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 15: best Central & East European novels >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 17: addiction memoirs; self-help books that get a thumbs up -- Jan 15: Adam Tooze; George Saunders -- Jan 14: how to read more; new Jennette McCurdy novel; Rachel Eliza Griffiths memoir -- Jan 13: AI "relationships" -- Jan 12: Freud & neuroscience; Joanna Kavenna's Seven >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 17: reissue of Love Life of a Cheltenham lady -- Jan 16: interview with John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow Press -- Jan 15: interview with Maria Pinto on her book regarding wild mushrooms & climate futures -- Jan 14: On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us -- Jan 13: Polar Regions; What the ancients can teach us about cultivating a sustainable world -- Jan 12: feminism w/out gender in 2 novels by Monique Wittig; works of vermin >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 16: Lydia Yuknavitch's Anti-Memoir; boarding school novels; excerpt from the new terrorist book here focusing on Carlos the Jackal -- Jan 15: what Daniyal Mueenuddin is reading; excerpt from a new history of Carthage focusing on the role of the Phoenicians -- Jan 14: Ed Simon on writers' second jobs; profile of Karl Ove Knausgaard & The School of Night -- Jan 12: no Plato at Texas A&M; excerpt from Gayle Feldman's Bennett Cerf bio regarding the publication of In Cold Blood >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 14: reading for the new year pt 3 -- Jan 12: books on recovering from caring too much & PTSD >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 17: Jeanette Winterson's riff on 1001 Nights; rock climbing novel -- Jan 16: the lithium supply chain -- Jan 15: Jung Chang's sequel to Wild Swans -- Jan 14: Call Me Ishmaelle; The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes -- Jan 13: GOP senator becomes best-selling author; what Karl Ove Knausgaard to read; new book by Karl Ove Knausgaard; Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs; C. Thi Nguyen's game theories; faking educational achievement -- Jan 12: building a catapult; revolutions gone wrong; teaching Plato under fire -- Jan 11: Mississippi literacy; Belle Burden's memoir plus a profile; Sarah Levine's The Hitch >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 16: J.D. Smith's new poetry collection; excerpt from David Bowie bio -- Jan 15: what PRoB is reading the 3rd week of January --The Onion -- Jan 14: Jacinta Kerketta interview & translations -- Jan 13: Harry Tanner excerpt on changes in Western cultural attitudes toward homosexuality; death & Tteokbokki -- Jan 12: death of critic John Carey >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 15: 2 books on languages & communication -- Jan 14: Armenians & exile >33 featherbear:
Quillette Jan 16: women conspiracists >12 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 17: Jeanette Winterson's 1001 Nights rant; attention span book -- Jan 16: Russian forests; Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs -- Jan 15: Lee Bollinger on the University -- Jan 13: Daniyal Mueenuddin's This Is Where the Serpent Lives; Colleen Hoover's Woman Down >6 featherbear:
January updates 01-10 >28 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
bbc culture >36 featherbear:
Dirt >31 featherbear:
Public Books >33 featherbear:
Reactor >34 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >35 featherbear:
38featherbear
American Scholar January 2026
Robert Zaretsky. 01/29/2026: The Popper Principle: Did Plato really espouse ideas that led eventually to totalitarianism?
Alice Vernon. 01/15/2026: Scientists in Dreamland. Review of: Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind / Michelle Carr.
Robert Zaretsky. 01/29/2026: The Popper Principle: Did Plato really espouse ideas that led eventually to totalitarianism?
Alice Vernon. 01/15/2026: Scientists in Dreamland. Review of: Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind / Michelle Carr.
39featherbear
TLS January 23, 2026|No. 6397
Featured
Mary Beard. 01/21/2025: The fame of Fano? From the TLS current issue landing page
Tristram Fane Saunders. Anon and on: The forward march of British poetry. Review of: A History of England in 25 Poems / Catherine Clarke -- Rhyme and Reason: A short history of poetry and people (for people who don’t usually read poetry) / Mark Forsyth -- Endless Present: Selected articles, reviews and dispatches, 2010–23 / Rory Waterman (Shoestring Press) -- The Privatisation of Poetry / Andy Croft (Broken Sleep Books) -- Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British poetry in the 21st century / Andrew Duncan (Shearsman).
Alan Jenkins. Fathoms deep: The thrill of marine archaeology. Review of: The Great Museum of the Sea: A human history of shipwrecks / James P. Delgado.
Leah Hazard. First class delivery?: A history of childbirth and a defence of the C-section. Review of: Born: The untold history of childbirth / Lucy Inglis -- Thread: A Caesarean story of myth, magic and medicine / Hannah Marsh (Leap).
Maria C. Scott. Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’: Newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse. (Essay)
Literature & Bibliography
Edmund Gordon. Horseplay: Ghosts and protest in Ali Smith’s latest jeu d’esprit. Review of: Glyph / Ali Smith.
Henriette Korthals Altes. Life lived on the surface: Simone de Beauvoir’s novel of a mental breakdown. Review of: The Image of Her / Simone de Beauvoir; translated by Lauren Elkin.
Boris Dralyuk. Chaos in fourteen lines: An anthology of sonnets past and present. Review of: Scanty Plot of Ground: A book of sonnets / Paul Muldoon, editor.
Declan Ryan. The sense of an ending: John Burnside settles accounts in his final poetry collection. Review of: The Empire of Forgetting / John Burnside.
Houman Barekat. Beauty on a grand scale: A young man plots to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. Review of: Your Life Without Me / James Meek (Canongate).
Toby Lichtig. The gutter life: Bar-room politics and rising resentment in 1930s Berlin. Review of: Berlin Shuffle / Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm.
Kate McLoughlin. Beyond restoration: A novel of Georgia’s squandered potential. Review of: The Lack of Light / Nino Haratischwili; translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (HarperVia).
Alice Jolly. Enjoy it while you can: An ‘exceptional’ debut of deprivation and addiction. Review of: Keshed / Stu Hennigan (Ortac).
Peter McDonald. The exasperated spirit: T. S. Eliot’s wartime correspondence. Review of: The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 10: 1942–1944 / Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, editors.
Julian Evans. Inheriting Norman Lewis’s library: ‘The books are a witness to his sweat and application.’ (Essay)
In Brief Review of: The Queen of Swords / Jazmina Barrera; translated by Christina MacSweeney (the eventful life of Elena Garro, mother, poet, playwright, novelist, muse and revolutionary & also former wife of Octavio Paz).
In Brief Review of: This Writing Business: A memoir / Susan Elkin (The Book Guild).
In Brief Review of: The Stepdaughter / Caroline Blackwood (a Virago reissue; originally 1976).
In Brief Review of: A State of Siege / Janet Frame (Fitzcarraldo reissue from 1964).
Arts
Simon Goldhill. On the world stage: How Athenian drama conquered a civilization. Review of: The Performance Reception of Greek Tragedy in Ancient Theatres / Sebastiana Nervegna (Cambridge University Press).
John-Paul Stonard. Emissaries between ages: Tom Stoppard’s meditation on art, culture and memory. Review of Tom Stoppard's India Ink, Hampstead Theatre, until February 7.
Rod Mengham. Subversive interventions: Freud’s domestic life, reinvented and restaged. Review of Housekeeper: An Exhibition by Cathie Pilkington, Freud Museum London, until March 1.
Larry Wolff. Singing to make you weep: Bellini’s swansong and its place in his oeuvre. Review of Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani, Metropolitan Opera, New York -- Bellini (Composers Across Cultures) / Fabrizio Della Seta; translated by James Chater (Oxford University Press).
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay. Playing in the dollhouse: Family and acting the part in Joachim Trier’s new film. Review of the film Sentimental Value.
Catherine Coldstream. Funeral blues: A study of grief and its relationship to music. Review of: While the Music Lasts: A memoir of music, grief and joy / Emily MacGregor.
Philosophy
Regina Rini. A morality all your own: Kant and external law. (Essay)
Science, Technology, Medicine
Peter Coates. Gas guzzlers: The good and bad news about CO2. Review of: The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World UK subtitle: A planetary experiment / Peter Brannen (US publisher: Ecco; UK: Allen Lane).
Megan Marz. Caught in the net: A personal and cultural history of online life. Review of: Searches: Selfhood in the digital age / Vauhini Vara.
James Cook. John’s not mad: An engaging and affecting portrait of Tourette syndrome. Review of: I Swear: My life with Tourette’s / John Davidson (Doubleday, although the cover on Amazon sports the Penguin logo).
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Nigel Spivey. Taking the plunge: Taking the plunge. Review of: The Diver of Paestum: Youth, eros, and the sea in Ancient Greece / Tonio Hölscher.
Tim Whitmarsh. Fugitive reading: Has Greco-Roman culture been unjustly elevated by a white elite? Review of: Classicism & Other Phobias / Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
Kojo Koram. Crucible of empire: The Caribbean and racialized capitalism. Review of: Empire Without End: A new history of Britain and the Caribbean / Imaobong D. Umoren.
Pratinav Anil. Beyond a balance sheet: What the reparations debate misses. Review of: Reparations: Slavery and the tyranny of imaginary guilt / Nigel Biggar -- The Big Payback: The case for reparations for slavery and how they would work / Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder.
Sujit Sivasundaram. Where the wind blows: A history of commercial and cultural exchange. Review of: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the seas of China / Barry Cunliffe.
Richard Vinen. Anarchist of the right: The personal and political in the work of a social historian. Review of: Pages Ressuscitées / Philippe Ariès; edited by Guillaume Gros (Cerf).
Anna Parker. Peasants into revolutionaries: Agrarian discontent after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Review of: The Last Peasant War: Violence and revolution in twentieth-century Eastern Europe / Jakub S. Beneš.
Rory S. MacLean. In glory and defeat: A history of the Czech capital. Review of: Prague: The heart of Europe / Cynthia Paces.
Karl Whitney. Excursions into the past: Folklore meets family history on a trip up the A1. Review of: The North Road UK has subtitle: A journey through time, place and memory / Rob Cowen (Hutchinson Heinemann).
Frances Wilson. A madcap time: Jessica Mitford: English aristocrat to American activist. Review of: Troublemaker: The fierce, unruly life of Jessica Mitford / Carla Kaplan.
Philip Blom. Diminishing returns: Why fertility rates are collapsing around the world. Review of: The Anti-Catastrophe League: The pioneers and visionaries on a quest to save the world / Tom Ough -- After the Spike: The risks of global depopulation and the case for people / David Spears and Michael Geruso -- The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why our species is on the edge of extinction / Henry Gee.
Richard Norton-Taylor. Warming up for a fight: The Arctic as a battleground for the superpowers. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, spies, and the struggle for power in a melting Arctic / Kenneth R. Rosen.
Brett Christophers. People’s budget: The fraught relationship between taxation and democracy. Review of: The Second Estate: How the tax code made an American aristocracy / Ray Madoff -- The Price of Democracy: The revolutionary power of taxation in American history / Vanessa S. Williamson.
In Brief Review of: Love's Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love / Stephen Grosz.
In Brief Review of: Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen / Ugo Palheta; translated by David Broder.
In Brief Review of: Radical Antiquity: Free love Zoroastrians, farming pirates, and ancient uprisings / Christopher B. Zeichmann.
In Brief Review of: Eleanor: A 200-mile walk in search of England’s lost queen / Alice Loxton.
Featured
Mary Beard. 01/21/2025: The fame of Fano? From the TLS current issue landing page
Tristram Fane Saunders. Anon and on: The forward march of British poetry. Review of: A History of England in 25 Poems / Catherine Clarke -- Rhyme and Reason: A short history of poetry and people (for people who don’t usually read poetry) / Mark Forsyth -- Endless Present: Selected articles, reviews and dispatches, 2010–23 / Rory Waterman (Shoestring Press) -- The Privatisation of Poetry / Andy Croft (Broken Sleep Books) -- Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British poetry in the 21st century / Andrew Duncan (Shearsman).
Alan Jenkins. Fathoms deep: The thrill of marine archaeology. Review of: The Great Museum of the Sea: A human history of shipwrecks / James P. Delgado.
Leah Hazard. First class delivery?: A history of childbirth and a defence of the C-section. Review of: Born: The untold history of childbirth / Lucy Inglis -- Thread: A Caesarean story of myth, magic and medicine / Hannah Marsh (Leap).
Maria C. Scott. Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’: Newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse. (Essay)
Literature & Bibliography
Edmund Gordon. Horseplay: Ghosts and protest in Ali Smith’s latest jeu d’esprit. Review of: Glyph / Ali Smith.
Henriette Korthals Altes. Life lived on the surface: Simone de Beauvoir’s novel of a mental breakdown. Review of: The Image of Her / Simone de Beauvoir; translated by Lauren Elkin.
Boris Dralyuk. Chaos in fourteen lines: An anthology of sonnets past and present. Review of: Scanty Plot of Ground: A book of sonnets / Paul Muldoon, editor.
Declan Ryan. The sense of an ending: John Burnside settles accounts in his final poetry collection. Review of: The Empire of Forgetting / John Burnside.
Houman Barekat. Beauty on a grand scale: A young man plots to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. Review of: Your Life Without Me / James Meek (Canongate).
Toby Lichtig. The gutter life: Bar-room politics and rising resentment in 1930s Berlin. Review of: Berlin Shuffle / Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz; translated by Philip Boehm.
Kate McLoughlin. Beyond restoration: A novel of Georgia’s squandered potential. Review of: The Lack of Light / Nino Haratischwili; translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (HarperVia).
Alice Jolly. Enjoy it while you can: An ‘exceptional’ debut of deprivation and addiction. Review of: Keshed / Stu Hennigan (Ortac).
Peter McDonald. The exasperated spirit: T. S. Eliot’s wartime correspondence. Review of: The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 10: 1942–1944 / Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, editors.
Julian Evans. Inheriting Norman Lewis’s library: ‘The books are a witness to his sweat and application.’ (Essay)
In Brief Review of: The Queen of Swords / Jazmina Barrera; translated by Christina MacSweeney (the eventful life of Elena Garro, mother, poet, playwright, novelist, muse and revolutionary & also former wife of Octavio Paz).
In Brief Review of: This Writing Business: A memoir / Susan Elkin (The Book Guild).
In Brief Review of: The Stepdaughter / Caroline Blackwood (a Virago reissue; originally 1976).
In Brief Review of: A State of Siege / Janet Frame (Fitzcarraldo reissue from 1964).
Arts
Simon Goldhill. On the world stage: How Athenian drama conquered a civilization. Review of: The Performance Reception of Greek Tragedy in Ancient Theatres / Sebastiana Nervegna (Cambridge University Press).
John-Paul Stonard. Emissaries between ages: Tom Stoppard’s meditation on art, culture and memory. Review of Tom Stoppard's India Ink, Hampstead Theatre, until February 7.
Rod Mengham. Subversive interventions: Freud’s domestic life, reinvented and restaged. Review of Housekeeper: An Exhibition by Cathie Pilkington, Freud Museum London, until March 1.
Larry Wolff. Singing to make you weep: Bellini’s swansong and its place in his oeuvre. Review of Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani, Metropolitan Opera, New York -- Bellini (Composers Across Cultures) / Fabrizio Della Seta; translated by James Chater (Oxford University Press).
Oonagh Devitt Tremblay. Playing in the dollhouse: Family and acting the part in Joachim Trier’s new film. Review of the film Sentimental Value.
Catherine Coldstream. Funeral blues: A study of grief and its relationship to music. Review of: While the Music Lasts: A memoir of music, grief and joy / Emily MacGregor.
Philosophy
Regina Rini. A morality all your own: Kant and external law. (Essay)
Science, Technology, Medicine
Peter Coates. Gas guzzlers: The good and bad news about CO2. Review of: The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World UK subtitle: A planetary experiment / Peter Brannen (US publisher: Ecco; UK: Allen Lane).
Megan Marz. Caught in the net: A personal and cultural history of online life. Review of: Searches: Selfhood in the digital age / Vauhini Vara.
James Cook. John’s not mad: An engaging and affecting portrait of Tourette syndrome. Review of: I Swear: My life with Tourette’s / John Davidson (Doubleday, although the cover on Amazon sports the Penguin logo).
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Nigel Spivey. Taking the plunge: Taking the plunge. Review of: The Diver of Paestum: Youth, eros, and the sea in Ancient Greece / Tonio Hölscher.
Tim Whitmarsh. Fugitive reading: Has Greco-Roman culture been unjustly elevated by a white elite? Review of: Classicism & Other Phobias / Dan-el Padilla Peralta.
Kojo Koram. Crucible of empire: The Caribbean and racialized capitalism. Review of: Empire Without End: A new history of Britain and the Caribbean / Imaobong D. Umoren.
Pratinav Anil. Beyond a balance sheet: What the reparations debate misses. Review of: Reparations: Slavery and the tyranny of imaginary guilt / Nigel Biggar -- The Big Payback: The case for reparations for slavery and how they would work / Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder.
Sujit Sivasundaram. Where the wind blows: A history of commercial and cultural exchange. Review of: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the seas of China / Barry Cunliffe.
Richard Vinen. Anarchist of the right: The personal and political in the work of a social historian. Review of: Pages Ressuscitées / Philippe Ariès; edited by Guillaume Gros (Cerf).
Anna Parker. Peasants into revolutionaries: Agrarian discontent after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Review of: The Last Peasant War: Violence and revolution in twentieth-century Eastern Europe / Jakub S. Beneš.
Rory S. MacLean. In glory and defeat: A history of the Czech capital. Review of: Prague: The heart of Europe / Cynthia Paces.
Karl Whitney. Excursions into the past: Folklore meets family history on a trip up the A1. Review of: The North Road UK has subtitle: A journey through time, place and memory / Rob Cowen (Hutchinson Heinemann).
Frances Wilson. A madcap time: Jessica Mitford: English aristocrat to American activist. Review of: Troublemaker: The fierce, unruly life of Jessica Mitford / Carla Kaplan.
Philip Blom. Diminishing returns: Why fertility rates are collapsing around the world. Review of: The Anti-Catastrophe League: The pioneers and visionaries on a quest to save the world / Tom Ough -- After the Spike: The risks of global depopulation and the case for people / David Spears and Michael Geruso -- The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why our species is on the edge of extinction / Henry Gee.
Richard Norton-Taylor. Warming up for a fight: The Arctic as a battleground for the superpowers. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, spies, and the struggle for power in a melting Arctic / Kenneth R. Rosen.
Brett Christophers. People’s budget: The fraught relationship between taxation and democracy. Review of: The Second Estate: How the tax code made an American aristocracy / Ray Madoff -- The Price of Democracy: The revolutionary power of taxation in American history / Vanessa S. Williamson.
In Brief Review of: Love's Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love / Stephen Grosz.
In Brief Review of: Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen / Ugo Palheta; translated by David Broder.
In Brief Review of: Radical Antiquity: Free love Zoroastrians, farming pirates, and ancient uprisings / Christopher B. Zeichmann.
In Brief Review of: Eleanor: A 200-mile walk in search of England’s lost queen / Alice Loxton.
40featherbear
Upasna Barath. Vogue, 01/22/2026: What Reading Wuthering Heights Taught Me About My Parents’ Marriage.
41featherbear
Oscar Dorr. HouseHouseMagazine, fall/winter 2025: Everybody Wants to be Thomas Bernhard.
42featherbear
January 2026 18-24 updates
Asian Review of Books Jan 24: migration & trade between China's Yunnan Province & Myanmar's Kachin and Shan States -- Jan 23: a problem in Sanskrit grammar -- Jan 21: Jain art -- Jan 20: rise & fall of a Chinese internet gay networking app -- Jan 18: Delhi's monuments >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 23: what is Agartha? -- Jan 22: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 21: The White Hot, a family secrets novel -- Jan 20: exercise benefits for writers -- Jan 18: Kamala Harris in a forthcoming Josh Shapiro book >5 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 23: best fantasy epics >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 23: mothers & the custody of children; medieval king; the books in the life of Ali Smith -- Jan 22: Caroline Palmer's Workhorse; Ai Weiwei's On Censorship -- Jan 21: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 20: humanities unprofitable at universities; autofiction by Rob Doyle -- Jan 19: Julian Barnes's Departure(s); Julian Barnes's best books; hawk story -- Jan 18: Erin Sommers on polyamory >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 24: interview of Julian Brave Noisecat regarding We Survived the Night; Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine -- Jan 22: 2 books on Chinese tech -- Jan 20: "two sisters must find a way to communicate without words." -- Jan 19: Revisiting Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone; César Vallejo’s ‘The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems -- Jan 18: MAGA fan fiction >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 21: Ed Simon on human creativity & tech assistance >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 24: excerpt from book about Tucker Carlson; a new Swedish national canon -- Jan 23: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels -- Jan 21: Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs; New Yorker writer recommendations #4 -- Jan 19: Rebecca Mead on numerous motherhood books >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 4: 4 new historical novels -- Jan 23: 8 recent historical novels -- Jan 22: Janet Flanner in wartime Paris -- Jan 21: "Our columnist read “The Everlasting” too late to put it on her Best of 2025 list. She’s sorry!"; Jennifer Szalai review of the 2 Bernie Goetz books -- Jan 20: 2 forthcoming books on Bernie Goetz the subway shooter; Moroccan family immigrates to Italy (a novel); Angela Tomaski's Infamous Gilberts (a 1st novel); Mexican migrants in Spain (a novel); Rachel Eliza Griffiths (wife of Salman Rushdie) memoir; 2 Korean women living together -- Jan 19: Julian Barnes's last novel -- Jan 18: Bennett Cerf bio; review of Jennette McCurdy's new novel & a profile of the author >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 23: Simon Parker bikes across the US -- Jan 22: African memoirs survey; excerpt from a 1976 bio of a Shaker Mother Ann Lee; what PRoBers are reading 4th week of Jan 2026 -- Jan 21: excerpt from Andrew Burstein's Jefferson bio -- Jan 19: socialism or capitalism >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 22: lost Gaza -- Jan 21: revisiting Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart >33 featherbear:
TLS January 23 2026 >39 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 23: changing the rules of the Senate w/Harry Reid; the Black Dahlia murder -- Jan 22: post-colonial murder novel; the rise of pundit Tucker Carlson; the Einstein Vendetta -- Jan 21: marrying Salman Rushdie; George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 20: Chuck Klosterman on football -- Jan 19: Crux a novel -- Jan 18: Julian Barnes departs >6 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
January 01-10 updates >28 featherbear:
January 11-18 updates >37 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
American Scholar >38 featherbear:
Househousemagazine >41 featherbear:
Vogue >40 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 24: migration & trade between China's Yunnan Province & Myanmar's Kachin and Shan States -- Jan 23: a problem in Sanskrit grammar -- Jan 21: Jain art -- Jan 20: rise & fall of a Chinese internet gay networking app -- Jan 18: Delhi's monuments >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 23: what is Agartha? -- Jan 22: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 21: The White Hot, a family secrets novel -- Jan 20: exercise benefits for writers -- Jan 18: Kamala Harris in a forthcoming Josh Shapiro book >5 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 23: best fantasy epics >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 23: mothers & the custody of children; medieval king; the books in the life of Ali Smith -- Jan 22: Caroline Palmer's Workhorse; Ai Weiwei's On Censorship -- Jan 21: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 20: humanities unprofitable at universities; autofiction by Rob Doyle -- Jan 19: Julian Barnes's Departure(s); Julian Barnes's best books; hawk story -- Jan 18: Erin Sommers on polyamory >4 featherbear:
LARB Jan 24: interview of Julian Brave Noisecat regarding We Survived the Night; Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine -- Jan 22: 2 books on Chinese tech -- Jan 20: "two sisters must find a way to communicate without words." -- Jan 19: Revisiting Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone; César Vallejo’s ‘The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems -- Jan 18: MAGA fan fiction >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 21: Ed Simon on human creativity & tech assistance >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 24: excerpt from book about Tucker Carlson; a new Swedish national canon -- Jan 23: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels -- Jan 21: Madeline Cash's Lost Lambs; New Yorker writer recommendations #4 -- Jan 19: Rebecca Mead on numerous motherhood books >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 4: 4 new historical novels -- Jan 23: 8 recent historical novels -- Jan 22: Janet Flanner in wartime Paris -- Jan 21: "Our columnist read “The Everlasting” too late to put it on her Best of 2025 list. She’s sorry!"; Jennifer Szalai review of the 2 Bernie Goetz books -- Jan 20: 2 forthcoming books on Bernie Goetz the subway shooter; Moroccan family immigrates to Italy (a novel); Angela Tomaski's Infamous Gilberts (a 1st novel); Mexican migrants in Spain (a novel); Rachel Eliza Griffiths (wife of Salman Rushdie) memoir; 2 Korean women living together -- Jan 19: Julian Barnes's last novel -- Jan 18: Bennett Cerf bio; review of Jennette McCurdy's new novel & a profile of the author >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 23: Simon Parker bikes across the US -- Jan 22: African memoirs survey; excerpt from a 1976 bio of a Shaker Mother Ann Lee; what PRoBers are reading 4th week of Jan 2026 -- Jan 21: excerpt from Andrew Burstein's Jefferson bio -- Jan 19: socialism or capitalism >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 22: lost Gaza -- Jan 21: revisiting Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart >33 featherbear:
TLS January 23 2026 >39 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 23: changing the rules of the Senate w/Harry Reid; the Black Dahlia murder -- Jan 22: post-colonial murder novel; the rise of pundit Tucker Carlson; the Einstein Vendetta -- Jan 21: marrying Salman Rushdie; George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 20: Chuck Klosterman on football -- Jan 19: Crux a novel -- Jan 18: Julian Barnes departs >6 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
January 01-10 updates >28 featherbear:
January 11-18 updates >37 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
American Scholar >38 featherbear:
Househousemagazine >41 featherbear:
Vogue >40 featherbear:
43featherbear
Francesca Angelini. The Times of London, 01/27/2026: The novelist who took on the Italian mafia — and lived to tell the tale. Review of: A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul / Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus).
45featherbear
January 2026 25-31 updates
Asian Review of Books Jan 28: novel of Korean child's abandonment -- Jan 27: East India Company art collections -- Jan 26: Fatima Bhutto memoir >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 29: Life after ambition -- Jan 27: Jennette McCurdy's Half His Age; marathon Moby Dick reading; Gov Josh Shapiro memoir; George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 26: new Black Dahlia book >5 featherbear:
Comics Journal >57 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 28: Duff Cooper nominees for best 2025 non-fiction -- Jan 27: best historical novels set in the Victorian period >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 31: Fatima Bhutto abuse memoir -- Jan 30: On the Road manuscript auction; Susan Choi on the fiction in her life; best recent translated fiction -- Jan 29: Lost Lambs -- Jan 28: David Bowie bio; David Wiles's The Puma -- Jan 27: Ali Smith's Glyph; 2 Korean women living together -- Jan 26: sex & deception; "survival in climate ravaged Kolkota" novel -- Jan 25: interview of Madeleine Gray regarding forthcoming Chosen Family >4 featherbear:
JStOR Daily Jan 29: existential anxiety >17 featherbear:
LARB Jan 31: the Roberts Supreme Court -- Jan 30: Harry Reid in the Senate -- Jan 29: England's slave empire -- Jan 28: are nuns having a moment? -- Jan 27: George Saunders's Vigil; reality TV novel >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 28: folklore & the weight of cultures in flux --Jan 27: 2 ice-themed articles >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 26: Infinite Jest anniversary >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 31: Superfan K-Pop novel -- Jan 30: why boys lag in reading; forests in Russian history -- Jan 29: fighting book bans in Oklahoma -- Jan 28: 2 books on "mattering" -- Jan 27: Easter Island; Tucker Carlson; Don DeLillo the real author of Amazons; Until the Last Gun Is Fired -- Jan 26: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 25: artist vs professor: Discipline >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 30: competing "natures" in Eradication by Jonathan Miles; Ed Simon on occult methods of reading; Renee Nicholson's Fever Dream poetry collection -- Jan 29: Jan Beatty's Mad River poetry collection 30 yrs on; excerpt from Curtis Dozier's White Pedestal -- Jan 28: 2 reviews touching on disability: on Alice Wong's essay collection Disability Intimacy & a meditation/review on/of My Love Is Water -- Jan 27: interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin regarding This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 26: Geoff Peck's novel about Pittsburgh in 2009 >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 27: 2 sisters' novels about the disco age >33 featherbear:
UnHerd Jan 27: Philip Roth's betrayals >27 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 30: Easter Island -- Jan 29: the end(s) of psychiatry -- Jan 28: Senator's best-seller; Naem Murr's Every Exit Brings You Home; Belle Burden divorce memoir -- Jan 27: Josh Shapiro bio -- Jan 26: Don Winslow profile >6 featherbear:
Washington Monthly Jan 31: the unraveling Right >35 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
January 01-10 updates >28 featherbear:
January 11-17 updates >37 featherbear:
January 18-24 updates >42 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Orion >51 featherbear:
The Times of London >43 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >44 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Jan 28: novel of Korean child's abandonment -- Jan 27: East India Company art collections -- Jan 26: Fatima Bhutto memoir >10 featherbear:
Atlantic Jan 29: Life after ambition -- Jan 27: Jennette McCurdy's Half His Age; marathon Moby Dick reading; Gov Josh Shapiro memoir; George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 26: new Black Dahlia book >5 featherbear:
Comics Journal >57 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Jan 28: Duff Cooper nominees for best 2025 non-fiction -- Jan 27: best historical novels set in the Victorian period >11 featherbear:
Guardian Jan 31: Fatima Bhutto abuse memoir -- Jan 30: On the Road manuscript auction; Susan Choi on the fiction in her life; best recent translated fiction -- Jan 29: Lost Lambs -- Jan 28: David Bowie bio; David Wiles's The Puma -- Jan 27: Ali Smith's Glyph; 2 Korean women living together -- Jan 26: sex & deception; "survival in climate ravaged Kolkota" novel -- Jan 25: interview of Madeleine Gray regarding forthcoming Chosen Family >4 featherbear:
JStOR Daily Jan 29: existential anxiety >17 featherbear:
LARB Jan 31: the Roberts Supreme Court -- Jan 30: Harry Reid in the Senate -- Jan 29: England's slave empire -- Jan 28: are nuns having a moment? -- Jan 27: George Saunders's Vigil; reality TV novel >15 featherbear:
LitHub Jan 28: folklore & the weight of cultures in flux --Jan 27: 2 ice-themed articles >18 featherbear:
New Yorker Jan 26: Infinite Jest anniversary >13 featherbear:
NYT Jan 31: Superfan K-Pop novel -- Jan 30: why boys lag in reading; forests in Russian history -- Jan 29: fighting book bans in Oklahoma -- Jan 28: 2 books on "mattering" -- Jan 27: Easter Island; Tucker Carlson; Don DeLillo the real author of Amazons; Until the Last Gun Is Fired -- Jan 26: George Saunders's Vigil -- Jan 25: artist vs professor: Discipline >14 featherbear:
PRoB Jan 30: competing "natures" in Eradication by Jonathan Miles; Ed Simon on occult methods of reading; Renee Nicholson's Fever Dream poetry collection -- Jan 29: Jan Beatty's Mad River poetry collection 30 yrs on; excerpt from Curtis Dozier's White Pedestal -- Jan 28: 2 reviews touching on disability: on Alice Wong's essay collection Disability Intimacy & a meditation/review on/of My Love Is Water -- Jan 27: interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin regarding This Is Where the Serpent Lives -- Jan 26: Geoff Peck's novel about Pittsburgh in 2009 >9 featherbear:
Public Books Jan 27: 2 sisters' novels about the disco age >33 featherbear:
UnHerd Jan 27: Philip Roth's betrayals >27 featherbear:
WaPo Jan 30: Easter Island -- Jan 29: the end(s) of psychiatry -- Jan 28: Senator's best-seller; Naem Murr's Every Exit Brings You Home; Belle Burden divorce memoir -- Jan 27: Josh Shapiro bio -- Jan 26: Don Winslow profile >6 featherbear:
Washington Monthly Jan 31: the unraveling Right >35 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
January 01-10 updates >28 featherbear:
January 11-17 updates >37 featherbear:
January 18-24 updates >42 featherbear:
Overlooked from 2025 >7 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Orion >51 featherbear:
The Times of London >43 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >44 featherbear:
46featherbear
February Index
Aeon >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >47 featherbear:
Atlantic >53 featherbear:
bbc culture >63 featherbear:
Boston Review >84 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books >80 featherbear:
Columbia Journalism Review 98
The Critic (UK) >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >78 featherbear:
Guardian >50 featherbear:
Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains >85 featherbear:
LARB >52 featherbear:
Literary Review >55 featherbear:
LitHub >64 featherbear:
Miami New Times >88 featherbear:
MIT Press Reader >69 featherbear:
New Criterion >65 featherbear:
New Yorker >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 12: >59 featherbear:
NYT (New York Times) >48 featherbear:
Paris Review >79 featherbear:
PRoB >62 featherbear:
Public Books >87 featherbear:
The Public Domain Review >74 featherbear:
TLS ((London) Times Literary Supplement) Feb 6 >67 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >96 featherbear:
University of Chicago Press Journals >99 featherbear:
WaPo (Washington Post) >49 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >56 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
February 01-07 updates >75 featherbear:
Aeon >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >47 featherbear:
Atlantic >53 featherbear:
bbc culture >63 featherbear:
Boston Review >84 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books >80 featherbear:
Columbia Journalism Review 98
The Critic (UK) >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >78 featherbear:
Guardian >50 featherbear:
Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains >85 featherbear:
LARB >52 featherbear:
Literary Review >55 featherbear:
LitHub >64 featherbear:
Miami New Times >88 featherbear:
MIT Press Reader >69 featherbear:
New Criterion >65 featherbear:
New Yorker >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 12: >59 featherbear:
NYT (New York Times) >48 featherbear:
Paris Review >79 featherbear:
PRoB >62 featherbear:
Public Books >87 featherbear:
The Public Domain Review >74 featherbear:
TLS ((London) Times Literary Supplement) Feb 6 >67 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >96 featherbear:
University of Chicago Press Journals >99 featherbear:
WaPo (Washington Post) >49 featherbear:
Washington Monthly >56 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
February 01-07 updates >75 featherbear:
47featherbear
Asian Review of Books February 2026
Jonathan Han. 02/28/2026: “The Yellow Metaphor: Poems from Assam” by Jiban Narah. Review of: The Yellow Metaphor: Poems from Assam / Jiban Narah; translated from the Assamese by Anindita Kar (Penguin Eight).
Vikram Zutshi. 02/27/2026: “Rebel English Academy” by Mohammed Hanif. Review of: Rebel English Academy / Mohammed Hanif.
Mahitosh Gopal. 02/25/2026: “Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China” by Barry Cunliffe. Review of: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China / Barry Cunliffe.
Sonia Wadhwa. 02/24/2026: “Delay: A Comics Anthology”, edited by Charis Loke and Paolo Chikiamco. Review of: Delay: A Comics Anthology / edited by Charis Loke and Paolo Chikiamco (Difference Engine).
Maximillian Morch. 02/23/2026: “Moonlight Saga” by Arupa Patangia Kalita. Review of: Moonlight Saga / Arupa Kalita Patangia, Ranjita Biswas (trans) (Speaking Tiger).
David Chaffetz. 02/21/2026: “Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: a History” by Craig Perry. Review of: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: a History / Craig Perry.
Angus Stewart. 02/20/2026: “City Like Water” by Dorothy Tse. Review of: City Like Water / Dorothy Tse; Natascha Bruce (trans) (Graywolf).
Maximillian Morch. 02/18/2026: “In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck” by Akhilesh Upadhyay. Review of: In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck / Akhilesh Upadhyay (Vintage Books).
Jonathan Han. 02/17/2026: “The Hell of That Star” by Kim Hyesoon. Review of: The Hell of That Star / Kim Hyesoon; Cindy Juyoung Ok (trans) (poetry collection; Wesleyan University Press).
Sumana Roy. 02/16/2026: Excerpt from “The Man Who Made Plants Write” by Sumana Roy. Introduction to: The Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sumana Roy (trans, intro).
Francis P. Sempa. 02/14/2026: “The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell” by Gautam Hazarika. Review of: The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell / Gautam Hazarika.
Thảo Tô. 02/13/2026: “The Waiter” by Kwan Ann Tan. Review of: The Waiter (The Emma Press Novels) / Kwan Ann Tan.
Peter Gordon. 02/10/2026: “The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire” by Mustafa Aksakal. Review of: The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire / Mustafa Aksakal.
Stephen Mercado. 02/09/2026: “Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Most Controversial World War II General” by Peter Mauch. Review of: Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Most Controversial World War II General / Peter Mauch (forthcoming Harvard University Press).
Alex Smith. 02/07/2026: “Breakneck” by Dan Wang. Review of: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future / Dan Wang.
Rick Henry. 02/04/2026: “Scorpions” by Yumiko Kurahashi. Review of: Scorpions / Yumiko Kurahashi, Michael Day (trans).
Rosie Milne. 02/03/2026: “Floodlines” by Saleem Haddad. Review of: Floodlines / Saleem Haddad.
Vikram Zutshi. 02/01/2026: “Borneo: The History of an Enigma” by Olivier Hein. Review of: Borneo: The History of an Enigma / Olivier Hein (Hurst).
Jonathan Han. 02/28/2026: “The Yellow Metaphor: Poems from Assam” by Jiban Narah. Review of: The Yellow Metaphor: Poems from Assam / Jiban Narah; translated from the Assamese by Anindita Kar (Penguin Eight).
Vikram Zutshi. 02/27/2026: “Rebel English Academy” by Mohammed Hanif. Review of: Rebel English Academy / Mohammed Hanif.
Mahitosh Gopal. 02/25/2026: “Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China” by Barry Cunliffe. Review of: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China / Barry Cunliffe.
Sonia Wadhwa. 02/24/2026: “Delay: A Comics Anthology”, edited by Charis Loke and Paolo Chikiamco. Review of: Delay: A Comics Anthology / edited by Charis Loke and Paolo Chikiamco (Difference Engine).
Maximillian Morch. 02/23/2026: “Moonlight Saga” by Arupa Patangia Kalita. Review of: Moonlight Saga / Arupa Kalita Patangia, Ranjita Biswas (trans) (Speaking Tiger).
David Chaffetz. 02/21/2026: “Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: a History” by Craig Perry. Review of: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: a History / Craig Perry.
Angus Stewart. 02/20/2026: “City Like Water” by Dorothy Tse. Review of: City Like Water / Dorothy Tse; Natascha Bruce (trans) (Graywolf).
Maximillian Morch. 02/18/2026: “In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck” by Akhilesh Upadhyay. Review of: In the Margins of Empires: A History of the Chicken’s Neck / Akhilesh Upadhyay (Vintage Books).
Jonathan Han. 02/17/2026: “The Hell of That Star” by Kim Hyesoon. Review of: The Hell of That Star / Kim Hyesoon; Cindy Juyoung Ok (trans) (poetry collection; Wesleyan University Press).
Sumana Roy. 02/16/2026: Excerpt from “The Man Who Made Plants Write” by Sumana Roy. Introduction to: The Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sumana Roy (trans, intro).
Francis P. Sempa. 02/14/2026: “The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell” by Gautam Hazarika. Review of: The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II: Surrender, Loyalty, Betrayal and Hell / Gautam Hazarika.
Thảo Tô. 02/13/2026: “The Waiter” by Kwan Ann Tan. Review of: The Waiter (The Emma Press Novels) / Kwan Ann Tan.
Peter Gordon. 02/10/2026: “The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire” by Mustafa Aksakal. Review of: The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire / Mustafa Aksakal.
Stephen Mercado. 02/09/2026: “Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Most Controversial World War II General” by Peter Mauch. Review of: Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Most Controversial World War II General / Peter Mauch (forthcoming Harvard University Press).
Alex Smith. 02/07/2026: “Breakneck” by Dan Wang. Review of: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future / Dan Wang.
Rick Henry. 02/04/2026: “Scorpions” by Yumiko Kurahashi. Review of: Scorpions / Yumiko Kurahashi, Michael Day (trans).
Rosie Milne. 02/03/2026: “Floodlines” by Saleem Haddad. Review of: Floodlines / Saleem Haddad.
Vikram Zutshi. 02/01/2026: “Borneo: The History of an Enigma” by Olivier Hein. Review of: Borneo: The History of an Enigma / Olivier Hein (Hurst).
48featherbear
NYT (New York Times) February 2026
Jay McInerny. 02/28/2026: In This Immersive Art-World Novel, There’s a Body Count. Review of: THE VIOLET HOUR: a novel / James Cahill (Pegasus Books).
John Self. 02/28/2026: Fed Up With Her Country, a Writer Finds New Life in Another. Review of: THE DISAPPEARING ACT / Maria Stepanova; translated by Sasha Dugdale.
David Eagleman. 02/27/2026: Michael Pollan Wants to Know Where Consciousness Comes From. Review of: A WORLD APPEARS: A Journey Into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Melena Ryzick. 02/26/2026: Melissa Auf der Maur, a ’90s Rock Linchpin, Is Spilling Her Stories. Regarding the forthcoming (March 17): Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A '90s Rock Memoir / Melissa Auf der Maur.
Eva Wolchover. 02/26/2026: Shorts in Public? Off With His Crown! Review of: FASHIONING THE CROWN: A Story of Power, Conflict, and Couture / Justine Picardie.
Jennifer Szalai. 02/25/2026: These Women Journalists Changed Their Field. Their Lives Make Great Copy. Review of: STARRY AND RESTLESS: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World / Julia Cooke.
Alex Marshall. 02/24/2026: International Booker Prize Nominees: 13 Books to Get You Talking. "Novels by Daniel Kehlmann, Olga Ravn and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among the 13 titles nominated for the renowned award for fiction translated into English."
Michael Greenberg. 02/24/2026: Mario Vargas Llosa’s Swan Song Is an Ode to Peruvian Music. Review of: I GIVE YOU MY SILENCE / Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Adam Nagourney. 02/24/2026: Safaris, Jets, Dyslexia, Divorce: Gavin Newsom’s Memoir Has It All. Review of: Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom. "The new book by the California governor and undeclared presidential hopeful depicts a man shaped as much by hardship and struggle as privilege."
Jennifer Weiner. 02/24/2026: In Anna Quindlen’s Latest Novel, Hardship Is Relative. Review of: MORE THAN ENOUGH: a novel / Anna Quindlen
Gary J. Bass. 02/24/2026: One Thing Japan, America and the Soviets Did Together? Help Mao Win. Review of: RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity / Frank Dikötter. "the historian Frank Dikötter shows that Communism’s rise in China was an unlikely, violent event with a lot of outside help."
Julia Scheeres. 02/23/2026: Did Her White Father Marry Her Black Mother for Love, or for Research? Review of: THE MIXED MARRIAGE PROJECT: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family / Dorothy Roberts.
Joumana Khatb. 02/23/2026: A Wake for The Washington Post’s Books Section. "Literary and cultural denizens of the nation’s capital gathered on Saturday to eulogize The Post’s scuppered Book World supplement."
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/22/2026: Sex, Secrets and Neglect Fuel Lauren Groff’s New Book. Review of: BRAWLER: Stories / Lauren Groff.
Joumana Khatib. 02/22/2026: Is There Anything Lisa Rinna Won’t Say? Profile of the author regarding the forthcoming (Feb 24): You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It / Lisa Rinna.
Eliza Minot. 02/21/2026: A Stolen Passport, a Girl on the Run. What Is She Hiding From? Review of: Saoirse: A Novel / Charleen Hurtubise.
Jean Hanff Korelitz. 02/20/2026: In This Novel, It’s the Student Who Shapes the Teacher’s Life. Review of: The Optimists: A Novel / Brian Platzer.
Parul Sehgal. New York Times Magazine, 02/20/2026: Toni Morrison Was a Master of the Unthinkable: What made her one of our greatest — and most dangerous — novelists was her belief that stories could contain what our minds couldn’t confront.
Alex Marshall. 02/20/2026: How a New Yorker Put Poetry on the London Underground. "Judith Chernaik’s idea to feature verse in subway cars has transformed the morning commutes of millions worldwide."
Radhika Jones. 02/19/2026: ‘Kin’ Is a Lush, Beautiful Novel About the Family We Make. Review of: Kin: a novel / Tayari Jones.
Elisabeth Egan. 02/19/2026: For Tayari Jones, All Roads and All Novels Lead to Atlanta. Profile of Tayari Jones, w/reference to the new: Kin: A Novel & An American Marriage: A Novel.
Marie Lu. 02/19/2026: Urban Fantasy Novels That Imbue the Real World With Magic. Like it because she lists Ninth House.
Nick Summers. 02/18/2026: Want to Put a Price Tag on Nature? Ask an Economist. Regarding: It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems / Nick Chater and George Loewenstein (Basic Venture) -- BLOOD AND TREASURE: The Economics of Conflict From the Vikings to the Modern Era / Duncan Weldon -- ON NATURAL CAPITAL: The Value of the World Around Us / Partha Dasgupta.
NYT obituaries. 02/17/2025. 2 reprints of obits of notable literary figures for Women's History Month: Fania Fénelon, 74; Memoirs Described Auschwitz Singing. "In “Playing for Time,” she recounted how singing in an all-female orchestra while in a concentration camp saved her from death (1983) -- Anna Akhmatova, Leading Soviet Poet, Is Dead. "She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge." (1966)
Erin Somers. 02/17/2026: For These Millennials, College Was a Party. Then Came Real Life. Review of: SO OLD, SO YOUNG / Grant Ginder.
Michael Gorra. 02/17/2026: The Gallows Humor in This Novel Can Be Quite Literal. Review of: REBEL ENGLISH ACADEMY / Mohammed Hanif.
Mary Bergan. 02/17/2026: I Dumped Duolingo for a German Teacher in a Biker Jacket. "How hard-boiled language lessons from Adrienne, the motorcycle-riding author of a series of 1970s language books, turned a homebody into an explorer."
Timothy Egan. 02/17/2026: What Is the Argument for Believing in God? Review of: WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Wesley Morris. 02/16/2026: Toni Morrison, Literary Saint? This Book Shows You What Really Makes Her Great. Review of: ON MORRISON / Namwali Serpell.
Jeanette Winterson. 02/16/2026: From a Best-Selling Novelist, a Memoir Drawn in Blood and Whimsy. Review of: LEAVING HOME: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/15/2026: In Court, Gisèle Pelicot Refused to Be a Victim. A New Memoir Explains Why. Review of: A HYMN TO LIFE: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Hamilton Cain. 02/15/2026: In 1970s San Francisco, a Groovy Tale of Sex and Menace. Review of: Evil Genius: A Novel / Claire Oshetsky.
Caryn James. 02/14/2026: How Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg Transformed Hollywood. "A new book shows how the decline of the studios and the fresh wind of the 1960s allowed them to turn personal visions into critical and popular success." Review of: THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Rory Evans. Wirecutter, 02/13/2026: Reading a Kindle at Bedtime Finally Ended My Decades of Insomnia. "Sleep - tablets."
Meghan O’Gieblyn. 02/12/2026: Ruby Ridge Was a Mess. Did It Foretell Our Modern World? Review of: END OF DAYS: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America / Chris Jennings.
Ben Hubbard. 02/12/2026: Nobel Novelist Orhan Pamuk Finally Gets the Netflix Series He Wanted. The novel being adapted is: The Museum of Innocence.
Jennifer Szalai. 02/11/2026: History’s Most Prolific Female Killer, or a Victim of Disinformation? Review of: THE BLOOD COUNTESS: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster / Shelley Puhak.
Catherine Nicholson. 02/11/2026: A Tragedy, and the Poetic Masterpiece it Inspired. Review of: THE BOUNDLESS DEEP: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes.
Marisa Meltzer. 02/11/2026: A Book as Colorful — and Disorienting — as a Trippy Pucci Print. Review of: EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon / Terence Ward and Idanna Pucci.
Elizabeth A. Harris. 02/11/2026: The Book Jackets Were Ready. Then Charlie Kirk Was Shot. "What’s a publisher to do when a novel hews close to the news cycle?"
Joumana Khatib. 02/11/2026: ‘I’m a 32-Year-Old Sex Worker Who Just Killed a Politician.’ Review of: MURDER BIMBO: a novel / Rebecca Novack.
Catherine Pearson. 02/10/2026: What’s the Secret to Happiness? These Researchers Have a Theory. Regarding: How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most / Sonja Lyubomirsky & Harry Reis.
Helen Goh, interviewer Julia Moskin. 02/10/2026: Baking for Your Valentine? This Psychologist Would Like a Word. "Helen Goh, the British baker and therapist, thinks romantic treats can be tricky. She advises tailoring them to the length of your relationship." Regarding: Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes / Helen Goh.
Siddhartha Deb. 02/09/2026: In This Novel, a Mythical River Returns to an India in Crisis. Review of: SARASWATI / Gurnaik Johal.
Brent Staples. 02/09/2026: How Vietnam Inflamed the Civil Rights Movement. Review of: THE WAR WITHIN A WAR: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home / Wil Haygood.
Dwight Garner. 02/09/2026: The Intimate, Luminous Poems Found in Iris Murdoch’s Attic. "The formidable novelist and philosopher, who died in 1999, thought her poetry was mediocre. It’s not."
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/08/2026: In This Sour Satire, Liberals Open a Door, Not Always Their Hearts, to Migrants. Review of: A Better Life: A Novel / Lionel Shriver.
Alexandra Alter. 02/08/2026: Haruki Murakami Isn’t Afraid of the Dark. "The author, who brought Japanese literature into the global mainstream, grapples with aging and his place in the world of letters."
Michael Pollan, interviewer David Marchese. NYT Magazine, 02/07/2026: Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change. On the occasion of Pollan's latest, the forthcoming A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.
Matt Bell. 02/07/2026: 5 Weeks Alone on an Island, With a Rifle and a License to Kill. Review of: ERADICATION: A Fable / Jonathan Miles.
Jami Attenberg. 02/07/2026: Meet the Rubinsteins. They’re Messy, but They’re Mensches. Review of: THIS IS NOT ABOUT US / Allegra Goodman.
Elizabeth A. Harris. 02/06/2026: shared link: So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket. "The mass market paperback, light in the hand and on the wallet, once filled airport bookstores and supermarket media aisles. You may never buy a new one again."
Veronica Chambers. 02/05/2026: The Essential Toni Morrison.
Rylee Kirk & Mark Walker. 02/05/2026: C.I.A. World Factbook Ends Publication After 6 Decades. "The Factbook, a version of which dates to 1962, provided facts, figures, maps and more to generations of economists, professors, journalists and others."
Tas Tobey. 02/05/2026: An Exhilarating, Drug-Fueled, True-Crime Thriller. Review of: A KILLING IN CANNABIS: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed / Scott Eden.
Cristina Rivera Garza, interviewer Scott Heller. 02/05/2026: Cristina Rivera Garza: ‘I Write Vertically, but I Read Horizontally.’ "“I love to fall asleep with a book nearby,” says the “Autobiography of Cotton” author. “Dreaming and reading merge in beautiful, uncompromising ways.”
Jennifer Szalai. 02/04/2026: A Loving Biography of the Photographer Who Made Poetry With His Pictures. Review of: EVERYTHING IS PHOTOGRAPH: A Life of André Kertész / Patricia Albers.
A.O. Scott. 02/04/2026: Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time? "Catherine and Heathcliff are returning to the screen, but their passion burns brightest in a handful of sentences from Emily Brontë’s novel."
Alexander Nazaryan. 02/04/2026: A Bernie Bro Writes a Fawning Biography of His Hero. Review of: BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place / Dan Chiasson (Knopf).
Sylvia Brownrigg. 02/04/2026: An Engrossing Memoir Asks: Is Telling the Truth a Betrayal? Review of: THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies / Francesca Fontana (Steerforth).
Elissa Gabbert. 02/04/2026: He Died at 49. His Collected Poems Rank With the Best of the 20th Century. "Larry Levis’s work, gathered in the expansive new book “Swirl & Vortex,” was equally concerned with the soul and the void."
Joumana Khatib. 02/03/2026: For This College Friend Group, Midlife Has Entered the Chat. Review of: Clutch: A Novel / Emily Nemans.
Tommy Orange. 02/03/2026: A Girl Is Dead, and a Community Mourns. Or Does It?. Review of: Good People: A Novel / Patmeena Sabit.
Jonathan Russell Clark. 02/03/2026: Help! It’s the First Trump Presidency and This Poet’s Life Is Spiraling. Review of: The Copywriter: a novel / David Poppick.
Dwight Garner. 02/02/2026: Is Football Doomed? Chuck Klosterman Thinks So. Review of: FOOTBALL / Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press).
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/01/2026: Book Smart and Sexually Liberated, but She Still Can’t Make Up Her Mind. Review of: THE END OF ROMANCE: a novel / Lily Meyer.
Lauren Rosenhall. 02/01/2026: With New Memoir, Newsom Wants Americans to Know He Struggled Growing Up. Regarding the forthcoming Feb 24 Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom (Penguin Press).
Jay McInerny. 02/28/2026: In This Immersive Art-World Novel, There’s a Body Count. Review of: THE VIOLET HOUR: a novel / James Cahill (Pegasus Books).
John Self. 02/28/2026: Fed Up With Her Country, a Writer Finds New Life in Another. Review of: THE DISAPPEARING ACT / Maria Stepanova; translated by Sasha Dugdale.
David Eagleman. 02/27/2026: Michael Pollan Wants to Know Where Consciousness Comes From. Review of: A WORLD APPEARS: A Journey Into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Melena Ryzick. 02/26/2026: Melissa Auf der Maur, a ’90s Rock Linchpin, Is Spilling Her Stories. Regarding the forthcoming (March 17): Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A '90s Rock Memoir / Melissa Auf der Maur.
Eva Wolchover. 02/26/2026: Shorts in Public? Off With His Crown! Review of: FASHIONING THE CROWN: A Story of Power, Conflict, and Couture / Justine Picardie.
Jennifer Szalai. 02/25/2026: These Women Journalists Changed Their Field. Their Lives Make Great Copy. Review of: STARRY AND RESTLESS: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World / Julia Cooke.
Alex Marshall. 02/24/2026: International Booker Prize Nominees: 13 Books to Get You Talking. "Novels by Daniel Kehlmann, Olga Ravn and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among the 13 titles nominated for the renowned award for fiction translated into English."
Michael Greenberg. 02/24/2026: Mario Vargas Llosa’s Swan Song Is an Ode to Peruvian Music. Review of: I GIVE YOU MY SILENCE / Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Adam Nagourney. 02/24/2026: Safaris, Jets, Dyslexia, Divorce: Gavin Newsom’s Memoir Has It All. Review of: Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom. "The new book by the California governor and undeclared presidential hopeful depicts a man shaped as much by hardship and struggle as privilege."
Jennifer Weiner. 02/24/2026: In Anna Quindlen’s Latest Novel, Hardship Is Relative. Review of: MORE THAN ENOUGH: a novel / Anna Quindlen
Gary J. Bass. 02/24/2026: One Thing Japan, America and the Soviets Did Together? Help Mao Win. Review of: RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity / Frank Dikötter. "the historian Frank Dikötter shows that Communism’s rise in China was an unlikely, violent event with a lot of outside help."
Julia Scheeres. 02/23/2026: Did Her White Father Marry Her Black Mother for Love, or for Research? Review of: THE MIXED MARRIAGE PROJECT: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family / Dorothy Roberts.
Joumana Khatb. 02/23/2026: A Wake for The Washington Post’s Books Section. "Literary and cultural denizens of the nation’s capital gathered on Saturday to eulogize The Post’s scuppered Book World supplement."
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/22/2026: Sex, Secrets and Neglect Fuel Lauren Groff’s New Book. Review of: BRAWLER: Stories / Lauren Groff.
Joumana Khatib. 02/22/2026: Is There Anything Lisa Rinna Won’t Say? Profile of the author regarding the forthcoming (Feb 24): You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It / Lisa Rinna.
Eliza Minot. 02/21/2026: A Stolen Passport, a Girl on the Run. What Is She Hiding From? Review of: Saoirse: A Novel / Charleen Hurtubise.
Jean Hanff Korelitz. 02/20/2026: In This Novel, It’s the Student Who Shapes the Teacher’s Life. Review of: The Optimists: A Novel / Brian Platzer.
Parul Sehgal. New York Times Magazine, 02/20/2026: Toni Morrison Was a Master of the Unthinkable: What made her one of our greatest — and most dangerous — novelists was her belief that stories could contain what our minds couldn’t confront.
Alex Marshall. 02/20/2026: How a New Yorker Put Poetry on the London Underground. "Judith Chernaik’s idea to feature verse in subway cars has transformed the morning commutes of millions worldwide."
Radhika Jones. 02/19/2026: ‘Kin’ Is a Lush, Beautiful Novel About the Family We Make. Review of: Kin: a novel / Tayari Jones.
Elisabeth Egan. 02/19/2026: For Tayari Jones, All Roads and All Novels Lead to Atlanta. Profile of Tayari Jones, w/reference to the new: Kin: A Novel & An American Marriage: A Novel.
Marie Lu. 02/19/2026: Urban Fantasy Novels That Imbue the Real World With Magic. Like it because she lists Ninth House.
Nick Summers. 02/18/2026: Want to Put a Price Tag on Nature? Ask an Economist. Regarding: It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems / Nick Chater and George Loewenstein (Basic Venture) -- BLOOD AND TREASURE: The Economics of Conflict From the Vikings to the Modern Era / Duncan Weldon -- ON NATURAL CAPITAL: The Value of the World Around Us / Partha Dasgupta.
NYT obituaries. 02/17/2025. 2 reprints of obits of notable literary figures for Women's History Month: Fania Fénelon, 74; Memoirs Described Auschwitz Singing. "In “Playing for Time,” she recounted how singing in an all-female orchestra while in a concentration camp saved her from death (1983) -- Anna Akhmatova, Leading Soviet Poet, Is Dead. "She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge." (1966)
Erin Somers. 02/17/2026: For These Millennials, College Was a Party. Then Came Real Life. Review of: SO OLD, SO YOUNG / Grant Ginder.
Michael Gorra. 02/17/2026: The Gallows Humor in This Novel Can Be Quite Literal. Review of: REBEL ENGLISH ACADEMY / Mohammed Hanif.
Mary Bergan. 02/17/2026: I Dumped Duolingo for a German Teacher in a Biker Jacket. "How hard-boiled language lessons from Adrienne, the motorcycle-riding author of a series of 1970s language books, turned a homebody into an explorer."
Timothy Egan. 02/17/2026: What Is the Argument for Believing in God? Review of: WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Wesley Morris. 02/16/2026: Toni Morrison, Literary Saint? This Book Shows You What Really Makes Her Great. Review of: ON MORRISON / Namwali Serpell.
Jeanette Winterson. 02/16/2026: From a Best-Selling Novelist, a Memoir Drawn in Blood and Whimsy. Review of: LEAVING HOME: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/15/2026: In Court, Gisèle Pelicot Refused to Be a Victim. A New Memoir Explains Why. Review of: A HYMN TO LIFE: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Hamilton Cain. 02/15/2026: In 1970s San Francisco, a Groovy Tale of Sex and Menace. Review of: Evil Genius: A Novel / Claire Oshetsky.
Caryn James. 02/14/2026: How Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg Transformed Hollywood. "A new book shows how the decline of the studios and the fresh wind of the 1960s allowed them to turn personal visions into critical and popular success." Review of: THE LAST KINGS OF HOLLYWOOD: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Rory Evans. Wirecutter, 02/13/2026: Reading a Kindle at Bedtime Finally Ended My Decades of Insomnia. "Sleep - tablets."
Meghan O’Gieblyn. 02/12/2026: Ruby Ridge Was a Mess. Did It Foretell Our Modern World? Review of: END OF DAYS: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America / Chris Jennings.
Ben Hubbard. 02/12/2026: Nobel Novelist Orhan Pamuk Finally Gets the Netflix Series He Wanted. The novel being adapted is: The Museum of Innocence.
Jennifer Szalai. 02/11/2026: History’s Most Prolific Female Killer, or a Victim of Disinformation? Review of: THE BLOOD COUNTESS: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster / Shelley Puhak.
Catherine Nicholson. 02/11/2026: A Tragedy, and the Poetic Masterpiece it Inspired. Review of: THE BOUNDLESS DEEP: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes.
Marisa Meltzer. 02/11/2026: A Book as Colorful — and Disorienting — as a Trippy Pucci Print. Review of: EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon / Terence Ward and Idanna Pucci.
Elizabeth A. Harris. 02/11/2026: The Book Jackets Were Ready. Then Charlie Kirk Was Shot. "What’s a publisher to do when a novel hews close to the news cycle?"
Joumana Khatib. 02/11/2026: ‘I’m a 32-Year-Old Sex Worker Who Just Killed a Politician.’ Review of: MURDER BIMBO: a novel / Rebecca Novack.
Catherine Pearson. 02/10/2026: What’s the Secret to Happiness? These Researchers Have a Theory. Regarding: How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most / Sonja Lyubomirsky & Harry Reis.
Helen Goh, interviewer Julia Moskin. 02/10/2026: Baking for Your Valentine? This Psychologist Would Like a Word. "Helen Goh, the British baker and therapist, thinks romantic treats can be tricky. She advises tailoring them to the length of your relationship." Regarding: Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes / Helen Goh.
Siddhartha Deb. 02/09/2026: In This Novel, a Mythical River Returns to an India in Crisis. Review of: SARASWATI / Gurnaik Johal.
Brent Staples. 02/09/2026: How Vietnam Inflamed the Civil Rights Movement. Review of: THE WAR WITHIN A WAR: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home / Wil Haygood.
Dwight Garner. 02/09/2026: The Intimate, Luminous Poems Found in Iris Murdoch’s Attic. "The formidable novelist and philosopher, who died in 1999, thought her poetry was mediocre. It’s not."
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/08/2026: In This Sour Satire, Liberals Open a Door, Not Always Their Hearts, to Migrants. Review of: A Better Life: A Novel / Lionel Shriver.
Alexandra Alter. 02/08/2026: Haruki Murakami Isn’t Afraid of the Dark. "The author, who brought Japanese literature into the global mainstream, grapples with aging and his place in the world of letters."
Michael Pollan, interviewer David Marchese. NYT Magazine, 02/07/2026: Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change. On the occasion of Pollan's latest, the forthcoming A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.
Matt Bell. 02/07/2026: 5 Weeks Alone on an Island, With a Rifle and a License to Kill. Review of: ERADICATION: A Fable / Jonathan Miles.
Jami Attenberg. 02/07/2026: Meet the Rubinsteins. They’re Messy, but They’re Mensches. Review of: THIS IS NOT ABOUT US / Allegra Goodman.
Elizabeth A. Harris. 02/06/2026: shared link: So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket. "The mass market paperback, light in the hand and on the wallet, once filled airport bookstores and supermarket media aisles. You may never buy a new one again."
Veronica Chambers. 02/05/2026: The Essential Toni Morrison.
Rylee Kirk & Mark Walker. 02/05/2026: C.I.A. World Factbook Ends Publication After 6 Decades. "The Factbook, a version of which dates to 1962, provided facts, figures, maps and more to generations of economists, professors, journalists and others."
Tas Tobey. 02/05/2026: An Exhilarating, Drug-Fueled, True-Crime Thriller. Review of: A KILLING IN CANNABIS: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed / Scott Eden.
Cristina Rivera Garza, interviewer Scott Heller. 02/05/2026: Cristina Rivera Garza: ‘I Write Vertically, but I Read Horizontally.’ "“I love to fall asleep with a book nearby,” says the “Autobiography of Cotton” author. “Dreaming and reading merge in beautiful, uncompromising ways.”
Jennifer Szalai. 02/04/2026: A Loving Biography of the Photographer Who Made Poetry With His Pictures. Review of: EVERYTHING IS PHOTOGRAPH: A Life of André Kertész / Patricia Albers.
A.O. Scott. 02/04/2026: Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time? "Catherine and Heathcliff are returning to the screen, but their passion burns brightest in a handful of sentences from Emily Brontë’s novel."
Alexander Nazaryan. 02/04/2026: A Bernie Bro Writes a Fawning Biography of His Hero. Review of: BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place / Dan Chiasson (Knopf).
Sylvia Brownrigg. 02/04/2026: An Engrossing Memoir Asks: Is Telling the Truth a Betrayal? Review of: THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies / Francesca Fontana (Steerforth).
Elissa Gabbert. 02/04/2026: He Died at 49. His Collected Poems Rank With the Best of the 20th Century. "Larry Levis’s work, gathered in the expansive new book “Swirl & Vortex,” was equally concerned with the soul and the void."
Joumana Khatib. 02/03/2026: For This College Friend Group, Midlife Has Entered the Chat. Review of: Clutch: A Novel / Emily Nemans.
Tommy Orange. 02/03/2026: A Girl Is Dead, and a Community Mourns. Or Does It?. Review of: Good People: A Novel / Patmeena Sabit.
Jonathan Russell Clark. 02/03/2026: Help! It’s the First Trump Presidency and This Poet’s Life Is Spiraling. Review of: The Copywriter: a novel / David Poppick.
Dwight Garner. 02/02/2026: Is Football Doomed? Chuck Klosterman Thinks So. Review of: FOOTBALL / Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press).
Alexandra Jacobs. 02/01/2026: Book Smart and Sexually Liberated, but She Still Can’t Make Up Her Mind. Review of: THE END OF ROMANCE: a novel / Lily Meyer.
Lauren Rosenhall. 02/01/2026: With New Memoir, Newsom Wants Americans to Know He Struggled Growing Up. Regarding the forthcoming Feb 24 Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom (Penguin Press).
49featherbear
WaPo (Washington Post) February 2026
Malcolm Forbes. 02/22/2026: ‘White River Crossing’ is historical fiction at its most thrilling. Review of: White River Crossing / Ian McGuire
Alex Shepherd. 02/20/2026: ‘Everybody Loses’ tallies the steep costs of sports gambling. Review of: Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling / Danny Funt. "Danny Funt’s book makes clear that addiction is just one of the many problems in the new age of legalized betting."
Matthew F. Belmont. 02/19/2026: Eugene Robinson’s family story reflects radical American optimism. Review of: Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America / Eugene Robinson.
Michael Bobelian. 02/18/2026: Bernie Goetz and his place in the history of vigilante justice. Review of: Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson -- Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Heather Ann Thompson.
Monica Hesse. 02/17/2026: Gisèle Pelicot bravely went public as a rape victim. But her life collapsed. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot; translated from French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Laurie Hertzel. 02/16/2026: ‘Leaving Home’ turns a troubled childhood into a gripping memoir. Review of: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Nathan Smith. 02/13/2026: ‘Super Nintendo’ is the history of a company committed to fun. "Keza MacDonald offers acute and entertaining analysis of “Super Mario Bros.,” “Donkey Kong” and other enduring classics." Review of: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play / Keza MacDonald.
Wendy Smith. 02/12/2026: How the 1970s remade Hollywood. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg ― and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Kat Trigarszky. 02/12/2026: 5 new works of historical fiction feature painful secrets.
Andrew Doyle. 02/08/2026: Another ludicrous canceling of a name from the past. "Shaming the dead is an asinine culture warriors’ pastime. Now it’s the great diarist Samuel Pepys’s turn."
Clare McHugh. 02/08/2026: Allegra Goodman returns to her rootsReview of: This Is Not About Us / Allegra Goodman.
Michelle Singletary. 02/07/2026: Rep. James Clyburn’s ‘First Eight’ warns about today’s war on Black wealth. Regarding: The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation / Jim Clyburn. Interestingly, the article's citation of the Clyburn book is a link to Sophia Nguyen's November review; Nguyen's position was eliminated as part of the WaPo purge.
Caroline E. Janney. 02/06/2026: Lincoln as you’ve never known him. Regarding: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln / Matthew Pinsker.
Matthew Lynn. 02/06/2026: The flaw at the heart of this Murdoch narrative. Regarding: Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family — and the World / Gabriel Sherman
Judith Newman. 02/06/2026: Forget ‘The Vagina Monologues.’ Now it’s all about menopause. Review of: The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause / Lidia Yuknavitch.
Reanna Cruz. 02/05/2026: Bad Bunny conquered the world, but he wants to save Puerto Rico. Review of: P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance / Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Duke University Press).
Andrew Sandoval, interviewer Geoff Edgers. 02/05/2026: The ultimate Kinks fan book came at a significant cost. "Andrew Sandoval explains why he and co-author Doug Hinman are publishing an expanded history of the great British band, investing $100,000 in the project."
Ron Charles. 02/04/2026: ‘Eradication’ is an instant classic. Review of: Eradication: a fable / Jonathan Miles.
David Kirby. 02/04/2026: At 84, Bob Dylan may be producing something more valuable than hits. Review of: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace / Robert Polito.
Nora Krug. 02/01/2026: David Foster Wallace, my fateful correspondent. "On the 30th anniversary of “Infinite Jest,” a former assistant to his editor looks back on a complicated mind and relationship."
Malcolm Forbes. 02/22/2026: ‘White River Crossing’ is historical fiction at its most thrilling. Review of: White River Crossing / Ian McGuire
Alex Shepherd. 02/20/2026: ‘Everybody Loses’ tallies the steep costs of sports gambling. Review of: Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling / Danny Funt. "Danny Funt’s book makes clear that addiction is just one of the many problems in the new age of legalized betting."
Matthew F. Belmont. 02/19/2026: Eugene Robinson’s family story reflects radical American optimism. Review of: Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America / Eugene Robinson.
Michael Bobelian. 02/18/2026: Bernie Goetz and his place in the history of vigilante justice. Review of: Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage / Heather Ann Thompson -- Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation / Heather Ann Thompson.
Monica Hesse. 02/17/2026: Gisèle Pelicot bravely went public as a rape victim. But her life collapsed. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot; translated from French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Laurie Hertzel. 02/16/2026: ‘Leaving Home’ turns a troubled childhood into a gripping memoir. Review of: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Nathan Smith. 02/13/2026: ‘Super Nintendo’ is the history of a company committed to fun. "Keza MacDonald offers acute and entertaining analysis of “Super Mario Bros.,” “Donkey Kong” and other enduring classics." Review of: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play / Keza MacDonald.
Wendy Smith. 02/12/2026: How the 1970s remade Hollywood. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg ― and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Kat Trigarszky. 02/12/2026: 5 new works of historical fiction feature painful secrets.
Andrew Doyle. 02/08/2026: Another ludicrous canceling of a name from the past. "Shaming the dead is an asinine culture warriors’ pastime. Now it’s the great diarist Samuel Pepys’s turn."
Clare McHugh. 02/08/2026: Allegra Goodman returns to her rootsReview of: This Is Not About Us / Allegra Goodman.
Michelle Singletary. 02/07/2026: Rep. James Clyburn’s ‘First Eight’ warns about today’s war on Black wealth. Regarding: The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation / Jim Clyburn. Interestingly, the article's citation of the Clyburn book is a link to Sophia Nguyen's November review; Nguyen's position was eliminated as part of the WaPo purge.
Caroline E. Janney. 02/06/2026: Lincoln as you’ve never known him. Regarding: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln / Matthew Pinsker.
Matthew Lynn. 02/06/2026: The flaw at the heart of this Murdoch narrative. Regarding: Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family — and the World / Gabriel Sherman
Judith Newman. 02/06/2026: Forget ‘The Vagina Monologues.’ Now it’s all about menopause. Review of: The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause / Lidia Yuknavitch.
Reanna Cruz. 02/05/2026: Bad Bunny conquered the world, but he wants to save Puerto Rico. Review of: P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance / Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (Duke University Press).
Andrew Sandoval, interviewer Geoff Edgers. 02/05/2026: The ultimate Kinks fan book came at a significant cost. "Andrew Sandoval explains why he and co-author Doug Hinman are publishing an expanded history of the great British band, investing $100,000 in the project."
Ron Charles. 02/04/2026: ‘Eradication’ is an instant classic. Review of: Eradication: a fable / Jonathan Miles.
David Kirby. 02/04/2026: At 84, Bob Dylan may be producing something more valuable than hits. Review of: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace / Robert Polito.
Nora Krug. 02/01/2026: David Foster Wallace, my fateful correspondent. "On the 30th anniversary of “Infinite Jest,” a former assistant to his editor looks back on a complicated mind and relationship."
50featherbear
Guardian February 2026
Asako Yuzuki, interviewer Lisa Allardice. 02/28/2026: Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman.’ The author of Butter on baking muffins & her forthcoming Hooked / Asako Yuzuki.
Rachel Aspden. 02/27/2026: The secret history of Britain’s woodlands. Review of: Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain / Luke Barley.
Saara El-Arifi. 02/27/2026: Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra? "The Egyptian queen has fascinated me from childhood, but following the archives led only to ancient gossip and Roman propaganda. Fiction was the way to liberate her from misogynist myth." Justifying her new novel: Cleopatra: A Novel / Saara El-Arifi.
Tim Clare. 02/26/2026: A GP’s guide to mental health. Review of: The Unfragile Mind: Making Sense of Mental Health / Gavin Francis (Wellcome Collection).
Martin Pengelly. 02/25/2026: ‘A partisan and politician’: Abraham Lincoln and the art of the deal. Regarding: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln / Matthew Pinsker.
Fiona Sturges. 02/25/2026: A true ‘Misery’ memoir. Review of: Homeschooled: a memoir / Stefan Merrill Block.
Houman Barekat. 02/25/2026: How to make it in crypto. Review of: My Bags Are Big / Tibor Fischer (Salt).
Julie Myerson. 02/24/2026: The ordeals of having a difficult mother. Review of: Suckerfish / Ashani Lewis (Dialogue).
AK Blakemore. 02/24/2026: A dazzling wartime fantasy. Review of: Nonesuch: A Novel / Francis Spufford.
Ella Creamer. 02/24/2026: Witches, Nazi collaborators and banned books: International Booker prize announces 2026 longlist. "Thirteen books make this year’s longlist for translated fiction, which awards a first prize of £50,000."
David Smith. 02/24/2026: ‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback. "The so-called ‘pocket book’ sold in supermarkets is being phased out across the US, the latest sign of an ongoing shift in how people are choosing to read."
Catherine Tayler. 02/23/2026: Surreal doppelganger story. Review of: As If: A Novel / Isabel Waidner (US publisher: FSG Original; UK: Hamish Hamilton).
Gaby Hinsliff. 02/23/2026: Could we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump? Review of: Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Civilian Rule / Hélène Landemore (US publisher: Thesis; UK: Allen Lane).
Francis Spufford. 02/22/2026: Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy.
Lucy Foulkes. 02/22/2026: Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness? With "Further Reading."
James Smart. 02/20/2026: Are they fantasists or psychopaths? Review of: I’ll Be the Monster / Sean Gilbert (Duckworth). "The dark past of a seemingly perfect couple is gradually revealed in this observant debut of obsession and control."
Georgi Gospodinov. 02/202/2026: Georgi Gospodinov: ‘Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom.’ The Books In My Life: "The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann."
Michael Pollan. 02/19/2026: Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness? Excerpt from: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Azada Raha. 02/19/2026: The secret Afghan women’s book club defying the Taliban to read Orwell. "Banned from education, a clandestine reading circle meets every week to pore over novels by Abbas Maroufi, Zoya Pirzad and Ernest Hemingway."
Houman Barekat. 02/19/2026: A storytelling handbook in dire need of an edit. Review of: Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story / John Yorke.
Sana Goyal. 02/19/2026: Into Tibet’s ‘Forbidden Kingdom.’ Review of: The Last of Earth: A Novel / Deepa Anappara.
Laila Lamani. 02/18/2026: A landmark appraisal of the great novelist’s work. Review of: On Morrison / Namwali Serpell.
Anna Aslanyan. 02/18/2026: A poetic exploration of Russian guilt. Review of: The Disappearing Act / Maria Stepanova; translator Sasha Dugdale.
Madeleine Schwartz. 02/17/2026: ‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story? Regarding: Houris - Prix Goncourt 2024 (French Edition) / Kamel Daoud (Gallimard).
Lara Feigel. 02/17/2026: Reimagining Andrea Dworkin. Review of: Our Better Natures / Sophie Ward. "Three women, two real and one fictional, seek social justice in an ambitious novel that explores power in 1970s America."
Emma Brockes. 02/16 (17?)/2026: A unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Alex Clark. 02/16/2026: More heartache than Hamnet?: Maggie O’Farrell’s best books – ranked! (Hamnet ranked #1)
Diego Menjíbar Reynés. 02/16/2026: ‘The goal has been to demystify’: how a colonial Nairobi library was restored and given back to the people. "Once a whites-only enclave, the grand McMillan Memorial library is one of three in the Kenyan capital that have been transformed for the community."
Edward Posnett. 02/16/2026: A kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Patrick Gale. 02/16/2026: About a boy: A charming child’s-eye view of rural Ireland. Review of: Frogs for Watchdogs / Seán Farrell.
Namwali Serpell. 02/15/2026: ‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think. "The Beloved author’s refusal to conform made her a hero to many – and the only black female writer to have won a Nobel prize in literature." Excerpt from: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell, published by Chatto & Windus.
Lisa Tuttle. 02/13/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup. "Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward; Pagans by James Alistair Henry; Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo; Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman; A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang."
Lucy Atkins. 02/13/2026: Addictive mystery caters to modern attention spans. Review of: Good People: A Novel / Patmeena Sabit.
Alexis Petridis. 02/12/2026: From Brontë to Ballard, Orwell to Okri: the best songs inspired by literature – ranked! "As Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights gets a boost from a new film adaptation, we survey the surprising, seditious and sensual ways in which prose has influenced pop."
Steven Poole. 02/12/2026: A joyful celebration of the gaming giant. Review of: Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun / Keza MacDonald.
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 02/12/2026: Drag fabulousness in war-torn Beirut. Review of: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) / Rabih Alameddine.
Andrew Gregory. 02/11/2026: Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study finds.
Kathryn Hughes. 02/11/2026: How Berliners defied their Nazi masters. Review of: Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Martin Pengelly. 02/10/2026: The eye-opening story of Black soldiers in Vietnam. Review of: The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home / Wil Haygood.
Xan Brooks. 02/10/2026: Angel of destruction haunts a domestic drama. Review of: Your Life Without Me / James Meek (Canongate).
Christer Pretley. 02/10/2026: A panoramic account of the fight to end slavery. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Amrit Dhillon. 02/09/2026: Most Indians don’t read for pleasure – so why does the country have 100 literature festivals? "With their carnival atmosphere, music and Bollywood stars, books often take a back seat. But that doesn’t mean writers and their works won’t make a lasting impression."
Christobel Kent. 02/09/2026: A seductive drama of art and rivalry. Review of: Female, Nude / Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (Tinder).
Michael Pollan, interviewer David Shariatmadari. 02/08/2026: ‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness. Regarding: A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Michelle Zauner. 02/07/2026: Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30. Anchor to Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola. 02/06/2026: The best recent poetry – review roundup. Afterburn by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus); Into the Hush by Arthur Sze; Unsafe by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Bloomsbury); Only Sing by John Berryman; Lamping Wild Rabbits by Simon Maddrell; Dream Latitudes by Alia Kobuszko.
Jo Hamya. 02/06/2026: A perfect fairytale for our times. Review of: Helen of Nowhere / Makenna Goodman.
Neil Bartlett. 02/06/2026: Sex and teenage secrets. Jean: A Novel / Madeleine Dunnigan.
Alex Clark. 02/05/2026: Blistering memoir of a loveless childhood. Review of: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Hanif Kureishi. 02/05/2026: From one hostile environment to another. Review of: The Colour of Home: Growing Up in 1970s Britain / Sajid Javid (Abacus).
Robin McKie. 02/04/2026: Are we on the verge of creating synthetic life? Review of: On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence / Adrian Woolfson (Bloomsbury).
Astrid Goldsmith. 02/04/2026: Tantrums, rancid meatloaf and family silver stuffed into underpants: the delicate art of the Holocaust comedy. "Making light of one of the darkest horrors of the 20th century is a risky business – but a new generation is taking ownership of family histories by making space for human foibles, says an award-winning graphic novelist."
Emma Loffhagen. 02/03/2026: Marwan Barghouti, ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, to publish book from prison. Regarding: Unbroken: In Pursuit of Freedom for Palestine / Marwan Barghouti.
Jonathan Portes. 02/03/2026: The Spirit Level author takes stock: A whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive policy fails to take account of a central conundrum. Review of: The Good Society: And How We Make It / Kate Pickett (Bodley Head)
Clare Clark. 02/03/2026: Colonial greed drives a doomed hunt for gold. Review of: White River Crossing: A Novel / Ian McGuire.
David Barnett. 02/02/2026: Neil Gaiman claims sexual assault allegations are result of ‘smear campaign.’
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 02/02/2026: A sure-fire Booker contender. Review of: Rebel English Academy / Mohammed Hanif.
Jo Glanville. 02/01/2026: Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents’ dementia.
Asako Yuzuki, interviewer Lisa Allardice. 02/28/2026: Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman.’ The author of Butter on baking muffins & her forthcoming Hooked / Asako Yuzuki.
Rachel Aspden. 02/27/2026: The secret history of Britain’s woodlands. Review of: Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain / Luke Barley.
Saara El-Arifi. 02/27/2026: Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra? "The Egyptian queen has fascinated me from childhood, but following the archives led only to ancient gossip and Roman propaganda. Fiction was the way to liberate her from misogynist myth." Justifying her new novel: Cleopatra: A Novel / Saara El-Arifi.
Tim Clare. 02/26/2026: A GP’s guide to mental health. Review of: The Unfragile Mind: Making Sense of Mental Health / Gavin Francis (Wellcome Collection).
Martin Pengelly. 02/25/2026: ‘A partisan and politician’: Abraham Lincoln and the art of the deal. Regarding: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln / Matthew Pinsker.
Fiona Sturges. 02/25/2026: A true ‘Misery’ memoir. Review of: Homeschooled: a memoir / Stefan Merrill Block.
Houman Barekat. 02/25/2026: How to make it in crypto. Review of: My Bags Are Big / Tibor Fischer (Salt).
Julie Myerson. 02/24/2026: The ordeals of having a difficult mother. Review of: Suckerfish / Ashani Lewis (Dialogue).
AK Blakemore. 02/24/2026: A dazzling wartime fantasy. Review of: Nonesuch: A Novel / Francis Spufford.
Ella Creamer. 02/24/2026: Witches, Nazi collaborators and banned books: International Booker prize announces 2026 longlist. "Thirteen books make this year’s longlist for translated fiction, which awards a first prize of £50,000."
David Smith. 02/24/2026: ‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback. "The so-called ‘pocket book’ sold in supermarkets is being phased out across the US, the latest sign of an ongoing shift in how people are choosing to read."
Catherine Tayler. 02/23/2026: Surreal doppelganger story. Review of: As If: A Novel / Isabel Waidner (US publisher: FSG Original; UK: Hamish Hamilton).
Gaby Hinsliff. 02/23/2026: Could we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump? Review of: Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Civilian Rule / Hélène Landemore (US publisher: Thesis; UK: Allen Lane).
Francis Spufford. 02/22/2026: Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy.
Lucy Foulkes. 02/22/2026: Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness? With "Further Reading."
James Smart. 02/20/2026: Are they fantasists or psychopaths? Review of: I’ll Be the Monster / Sean Gilbert (Duckworth). "The dark past of a seemingly perfect couple is gradually revealed in this observant debut of obsession and control."
Georgi Gospodinov. 02/202/2026: Georgi Gospodinov: ‘Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom.’ The Books In My Life: "The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann."
Michael Pollan. 02/19/2026: Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness? Excerpt from: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Azada Raha. 02/19/2026: The secret Afghan women’s book club defying the Taliban to read Orwell. "Banned from education, a clandestine reading circle meets every week to pore over novels by Abbas Maroufi, Zoya Pirzad and Ernest Hemingway."
Houman Barekat. 02/19/2026: A storytelling handbook in dire need of an edit. Review of: Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story / John Yorke.
Sana Goyal. 02/19/2026: Into Tibet’s ‘Forbidden Kingdom.’ Review of: The Last of Earth: A Novel / Deepa Anappara.
Laila Lamani. 02/18/2026: A landmark appraisal of the great novelist’s work. Review of: On Morrison / Namwali Serpell.
Anna Aslanyan. 02/18/2026: A poetic exploration of Russian guilt. Review of: The Disappearing Act / Maria Stepanova; translator Sasha Dugdale.
Madeleine Schwartz. 02/17/2026: ‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story? Regarding: Houris - Prix Goncourt 2024 (French Edition) / Kamel Daoud (Gallimard).
Lara Feigel. 02/17/2026: Reimagining Andrea Dworkin. Review of: Our Better Natures / Sophie Ward. "Three women, two real and one fictional, seek social justice in an ambitious novel that explores power in 1970s America."
Emma Brockes. 02/16 (17?)/2026: A unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Alex Clark. 02/16/2026: More heartache than Hamnet?: Maggie O’Farrell’s best books – ranked! (Hamnet ranked #1)
Diego Menjíbar Reynés. 02/16/2026: ‘The goal has been to demystify’: how a colonial Nairobi library was restored and given back to the people. "Once a whites-only enclave, the grand McMillan Memorial library is one of three in the Kenyan capital that have been transformed for the community."
Edward Posnett. 02/16/2026: A kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Patrick Gale. 02/16/2026: About a boy: A charming child’s-eye view of rural Ireland. Review of: Frogs for Watchdogs / Seán Farrell.
Namwali Serpell. 02/15/2026: ‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think. "The Beloved author’s refusal to conform made her a hero to many – and the only black female writer to have won a Nobel prize in literature." Excerpt from: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell, published by Chatto & Windus.
Lisa Tuttle. 02/13/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup. "Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward; Pagans by James Alistair Henry; Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo; Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman; A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang."
Lucy Atkins. 02/13/2026: Addictive mystery caters to modern attention spans. Review of: Good People: A Novel / Patmeena Sabit.
Alexis Petridis. 02/12/2026: From Brontë to Ballard, Orwell to Okri: the best songs inspired by literature – ranked! "As Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights gets a boost from a new film adaptation, we survey the surprising, seditious and sensual ways in which prose has influenced pop."
Steven Poole. 02/12/2026: A joyful celebration of the gaming giant. Review of: Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun / Keza MacDonald.
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 02/12/2026: Drag fabulousness in war-torn Beirut. Review of: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) / Rabih Alameddine.
Andrew Gregory. 02/11/2026: Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study finds.
Kathryn Hughes. 02/11/2026: How Berliners defied their Nazi masters. Review of: Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Martin Pengelly. 02/10/2026: The eye-opening story of Black soldiers in Vietnam. Review of: The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home / Wil Haygood.
Xan Brooks. 02/10/2026: Angel of destruction haunts a domestic drama. Review of: Your Life Without Me / James Meek (Canongate).
Christer Pretley. 02/10/2026: A panoramic account of the fight to end slavery. Review of: The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas / Carrie Gibson.
Amrit Dhillon. 02/09/2026: Most Indians don’t read for pleasure – so why does the country have 100 literature festivals? "With their carnival atmosphere, music and Bollywood stars, books often take a back seat. But that doesn’t mean writers and their works won’t make a lasting impression."
Christobel Kent. 02/09/2026: A seductive drama of art and rivalry. Review of: Female, Nude / Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (Tinder).
Michael Pollan, interviewer David Shariatmadari. 02/08/2026: ‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness. Regarding: A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Michelle Zauner. 02/07/2026: Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30. Anchor to Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola. 02/06/2026: The best recent poetry – review roundup. Afterburn by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus); Into the Hush by Arthur Sze; Unsafe by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Bloomsbury); Only Sing by John Berryman; Lamping Wild Rabbits by Simon Maddrell; Dream Latitudes by Alia Kobuszko.
Jo Hamya. 02/06/2026: A perfect fairytale for our times. Review of: Helen of Nowhere / Makenna Goodman.
Neil Bartlett. 02/06/2026: Sex and teenage secrets. Jean: A Novel / Madeleine Dunnigan.
Alex Clark. 02/05/2026: Blistering memoir of a loveless childhood. Review of: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon.
Hanif Kureishi. 02/05/2026: From one hostile environment to another. Review of: The Colour of Home: Growing Up in 1970s Britain / Sajid Javid (Abacus).
Robin McKie. 02/04/2026: Are we on the verge of creating synthetic life? Review of: On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence / Adrian Woolfson (Bloomsbury).
Astrid Goldsmith. 02/04/2026: Tantrums, rancid meatloaf and family silver stuffed into underpants: the delicate art of the Holocaust comedy. "Making light of one of the darkest horrors of the 20th century is a risky business – but a new generation is taking ownership of family histories by making space for human foibles, says an award-winning graphic novelist."
Emma Loffhagen. 02/03/2026: Marwan Barghouti, ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, to publish book from prison. Regarding: Unbroken: In Pursuit of Freedom for Palestine / Marwan Barghouti.
Jonathan Portes. 02/03/2026: The Spirit Level author takes stock: A whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive policy fails to take account of a central conundrum. Review of: The Good Society: And How We Make It / Kate Pickett (Bodley Head)
Clare Clark. 02/03/2026: Colonial greed drives a doomed hunt for gold. Review of: White River Crossing: A Novel / Ian McGuire.
David Barnett. 02/02/2026: Neil Gaiman claims sexual assault allegations are result of ‘smear campaign.’
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 02/02/2026: A sure-fire Booker contender. Review of: Rebel English Academy / Mohammed Hanif.
Jo Glanville. 02/01/2026: Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents’ dementia.
51featherbear
Nick Neely. Orion, 01/28/2026: Living Like Woodchucks: Thoughts on Dillard, Thoreau, and animal admiration.
52featherbear
LARB February 2026
Nicholas Carr. 02/28/2026: Can the Internet Be Saved? Review of: This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web / Tim Berners-Lee.
Anthony Curtis Adler. 02/26/2026: Davos Mann. "A new book on ‘The Magic Mountain’ grapples with the contradictions of history." Review of: The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” / Morten Høi Jensen.
Calvin Gimpelevich. 02/25/2026: Sweating It Out: The history of experiencing life as a sweaty body in steamy queer spaces.
Colin Marshall. 02/24/2026: Après Bowie, le déluge. Review of: Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowie / Paul Morley -- David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod -- Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie / Alexander Larman.
Tim Hirschel-Burns. 02/24/2026: Assaults and Batteries: Nicolas Niarchos digs up the hidden costs behind your rechargeables. Review of: The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth / Nicolas Niarchos.
Andy Hageman. 02/23/2024: A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half.’ "Typescript drafts on view in the newly opened archive reframe the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman." Touchstone: The Dark Half / Stephen King.
Mark Ellis. 02/21/2026: Sustaining the Rule of Law. Review of: Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights / Jessica Greenberg. "a compelling, though at times jargon-ridden, analysis of the history of the European Court of Human Rights."
Sarah Brouillette. 02/20/2026: The Artist Is Present (Online). Review of: Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture / Sophie Bishop. "Sophie Bishop’s new book tracks the pressures artists face to conform their ‘brands’ to the demands of the algorithmic boss."
Jack Jacobs. 02/19/2026: You Say You Want a Revolution. Review of: Revolutions: A New History / Donald Sassoon -- Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys that Changed the World / Simon Hall.
Tracy Fernandez Rysavy. 02/19/2026: A Fiction of Global Terror. Review of: Gothic Precarity: Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction / Timothy Rideout (University of Wales Press).
Henry Clements. 02/17/2026: God and the Unconscious. Review of: Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Kiarostami, Corbin, Lacan / Joan Copjec.
Kaya Genç. 02/17/2026: Sex in the City: Istanbul 1923. Review of: One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories by Anonymous Authors. Translated by Burcu Karahan.
Melissa Chan. 02/16/2026: Opera (and Comics) Against Fascism. Review of: Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis / Dave Maass and Patrick Lay. "Exploring how the graphic novel ‘Death Strikes’ intersects with the modernist opera ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis,’ a work composed by Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust."
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 02/16/2026: Social Mobility and Stagnation: How the university entrance exam and residency permits structure life for in China. Review of: The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China / Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau -- Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China / Samantha A. Vortherms.
Georgie Carr. 02/15/2026: The End of Cinema? Review of: Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025 / A. S. Hamrah -- Last Week in End Times Cinema / A. S. Hamrah.
Emanuele Lugli. 02/13/2026: How to See Like a 17th-Century Friar. Review of: The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture / Susanna Berger.
Jeff Hewitt. 02/12/2026: A Cyberpunk Blueprint for Hollywood’s AI Dreams. "Revisiting Pat Cadigan’s 1991 novel “Synners” in light of dystopian developments in Los Angeles."
Christian Kriticos. 02/12/2026: Really Classical Figures. Review of: Clowns in the Burying Ground: The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy (Studies in the Grateful Dead) / Christopher K. Coffman (Duke University Press).
Paul Kreitman. 02/11/2026: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Columbia. Review of: Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival / Chris Horton -- Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle / Ching Kwan Lee.
Cory Oldweiler. 02/10/2026: Until the Next Grave Is Dug. Review of: White Nights / Urszula Honek. Translated by Kate Webster.
Arleen Ionescu. 02/09/2026: The Crisis at the Heart of Modernity. Review of: Modernism: A Literature in Crisis / Terry Eagleton.
Jered Mabaquiao. 02/07/2026: What Comes First, the House or the Haunting? Review of: Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora / Kristy Park Kulski (editor).
Rosalie Moffett. 02/07/2026: A Clearing in the Mind’s Petrified Forest. Review of: Monk Fruit / Edward Salem.
Ankhi Mukherjee. 02/06/2026: Incredible Prophecies, Sick Truths. "Oedipal iterations, from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy."
Rachel Gerry. 02/05/2026: A Void Filled with Possibilities. Review of: An Infinite Sadness / Antônio Xerxenesky. Translated by Daniel Hahn (Charco Press).
Pria Anand. 02/03/2026: The End of Psychiatry (Kind Of). Review of: Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone / Khameer Kidia.
Jerry Stahl. 02/03/2026: Loners and Assassins. Review of: Chagos Archipelago: a novel / Tom Lutz.
Rebecca Ruth Gould. 02/02/2026: Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual Today. Regarding the reissue of: Representations of the Intellectual / Edward Said (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Nicholas Carr. 02/28/2026: Can the Internet Be Saved? Review of: This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web / Tim Berners-Lee.
Anthony Curtis Adler. 02/26/2026: Davos Mann. "A new book on ‘The Magic Mountain’ grapples with the contradictions of history." Review of: The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” / Morten Høi Jensen.
Calvin Gimpelevich. 02/25/2026: Sweating It Out: The history of experiencing life as a sweaty body in steamy queer spaces.
Colin Marshall. 02/24/2026: Après Bowie, le déluge. Review of: Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowie / Paul Morley -- David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God / Peter Ormerod -- Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie / Alexander Larman.
Tim Hirschel-Burns. 02/24/2026: Assaults and Batteries: Nicolas Niarchos digs up the hidden costs behind your rechargeables. Review of: The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth / Nicolas Niarchos.
Andy Hageman. 02/23/2024: A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half.’ "Typescript drafts on view in the newly opened archive reframe the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman." Touchstone: The Dark Half / Stephen King.
Mark Ellis. 02/21/2026: Sustaining the Rule of Law. Review of: Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights / Jessica Greenberg. "a compelling, though at times jargon-ridden, analysis of the history of the European Court of Human Rights."
Sarah Brouillette. 02/20/2026: The Artist Is Present (Online). Review of: Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture / Sophie Bishop. "Sophie Bishop’s new book tracks the pressures artists face to conform their ‘brands’ to the demands of the algorithmic boss."
Jack Jacobs. 02/19/2026: You Say You Want a Revolution. Review of: Revolutions: A New History / Donald Sassoon -- Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys that Changed the World / Simon Hall.
Tracy Fernandez Rysavy. 02/19/2026: A Fiction of Global Terror. Review of: Gothic Precarity: Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction / Timothy Rideout (University of Wales Press).
Henry Clements. 02/17/2026: God and the Unconscious. Review of: Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Kiarostami, Corbin, Lacan / Joan Copjec.
Kaya Genç. 02/17/2026: Sex in the City: Istanbul 1923. Review of: One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories by Anonymous Authors. Translated by Burcu Karahan.
Melissa Chan. 02/16/2026: Opera (and Comics) Against Fascism. Review of: Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis / Dave Maass and Patrick Lay. "Exploring how the graphic novel ‘Death Strikes’ intersects with the modernist opera ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis,’ a work composed by Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust."
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 02/16/2026: Social Mobility and Stagnation: How the university entrance exam and residency permits structure life for in China. Review of: The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China / Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau -- Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China / Samantha A. Vortherms.
Georgie Carr. 02/15/2026: The End of Cinema? Review of: Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025 / A. S. Hamrah -- Last Week in End Times Cinema / A. S. Hamrah.
Emanuele Lugli. 02/13/2026: How to See Like a 17th-Century Friar. Review of: The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture / Susanna Berger.
Jeff Hewitt. 02/12/2026: A Cyberpunk Blueprint for Hollywood’s AI Dreams. "Revisiting Pat Cadigan’s 1991 novel “Synners” in light of dystopian developments in Los Angeles."
Christian Kriticos. 02/12/2026: Really Classical Figures. Review of: Clowns in the Burying Ground: The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy (Studies in the Grateful Dead) / Christopher K. Coffman (Duke University Press).
Paul Kreitman. 02/11/2026: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Columbia. Review of: Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival / Chris Horton -- Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle / Ching Kwan Lee.
Cory Oldweiler. 02/10/2026: Until the Next Grave Is Dug. Review of: White Nights / Urszula Honek. Translated by Kate Webster.
Arleen Ionescu. 02/09/2026: The Crisis at the Heart of Modernity. Review of: Modernism: A Literature in Crisis / Terry Eagleton.
Jered Mabaquiao. 02/07/2026: What Comes First, the House or the Haunting? Review of: Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora / Kristy Park Kulski (editor).
Rosalie Moffett. 02/07/2026: A Clearing in the Mind’s Petrified Forest. Review of: Monk Fruit / Edward Salem.
Ankhi Mukherjee. 02/06/2026: Incredible Prophecies, Sick Truths. "Oedipal iterations, from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy."
Rachel Gerry. 02/05/2026: A Void Filled with Possibilities. Review of: An Infinite Sadness / Antônio Xerxenesky. Translated by Daniel Hahn (Charco Press).
Pria Anand. 02/03/2026: The End of Psychiatry (Kind Of). Review of: Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone / Khameer Kidia.
Jerry Stahl. 02/03/2026: Loners and Assassins. Review of: Chagos Archipelago: a novel / Tom Lutz.
Rebecca Ruth Gould. 02/02/2026: Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual Today. Regarding the reissue of: Representations of the Intellectual / Edward Said (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
53featherbear
Atlantic February 2026
Lily Meyer. 02/26/2026: When Did Literature Get Less Dirty?: A puritan strain is manifesting in realist novels as a marked absence of straight sex.
Casey Schwartz. 02/26/2026: The Women Who Wanted to Be 'Hell on Wheels, or Dead.' Review of: The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII / Mark Braude -- Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World / Julia Cooke.
Deb Olin Unferth. 02/25/2026: Nine Books to Reset Your View of the World. "Each of these titles will widen your perspective, offering you original insight and vision."
Charles Finch. 02/24/2026: Michael Pollan Punctures the AI Bubble. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Helen Lewis. 02/24/2026: Gavin Newsom’s Father Issues. Regarding: Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom. "The California governor’s new memoir is dominated by a parent’s emotional distance."
John Williams. 02/20/2026: The Washington Post’s Leaders Missed the Point. "The editor of the recently scrapped Book World believes in serving subscribers, not data."
Sophie Gilbert. 02/20/2026: An Extraordinary Account of a Dangerous Marriage. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot (Author), Natasha Lehrer (Translator), Ruth Diver (Translator).
John Williams. 02/20/2026: The Washington Post’s Books Section Worked: Why the editor of the scuttled review pages believes that the paper’s subscribers know better than its leaders.
Jack Lundberg. 02/19/2026: Does Writing Have to Be Hard?: American writing instruction has always involved some level of torture. What happens when technology makes it easy? (Time-Travel Thursdays!)
Rob Wolfe. 02/19/2026: Why Nudge Policies Failed: A new book buries the Obama-era idea that small shifts in personal behavior can greatly improve the world. Regarding: It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems / George Loewenstein and Nick Chater (Basic Venture).
Judith Shulevitz. 02/17/2026: The Ghosts of Toni Morrison. Review of: On Morrison / Namwali Serpell & much more.
Gal Beckerman. 02/16/2026: America Needs ‘Self-Evident’ Truths. Review of: Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity / Omri Boehm.
Josef Joffe. 02/14/2026: The Clash of Civilizations Was an Inside Job. "Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turns 30 this year."
Hillary Kelly. 02/13/2026: Matt Lauer’s Accuser Complicates Her Story. "Brooke Nevils’s memoir is also a reckoning with many misconceptions about #MeToo narratives." Regarding: Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe / Brooke Neville.
Robert F. Worth. 02/13/2026: Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake. Regarding the author of: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. "The influential author derides secularism and the modern world. Conservatives—including the vice president—are joining him on a march back to the Middle Ages." Seems to have influenced recent issues of The Critic (UK).
Tyler Austin Harper. 02/12/2026: The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities. Regarding The multi-billion Mellon Foundation.
Michael O'Donnell. 02/10/2026: What Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola Got Right. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
James Parker. 02/10/2026: The Poet Laureate of Madness: Why Alfred, Lord Tennyson feels so modern. Review of: The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes.
Adelle Waldman. 02/10/2026: The Novel as Extended Op-Ed. Review of: A Better Life: A Novel / Lionel Shriver.
Drew Gilpin Faust. 02/08/2026: Deadlier Than Gettysburg: How the cruelty of the Confederacy’s prison camps gave rise to the rules of war. Review of: A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War / W. Fitzhugh Brundage.
Karan Mahajan. 02/06/2026: The Moral Cost of Living in an Unequal Society. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Boris Kachka. 02/06/2026: Reading Is a Practice, Not a Chore. "Try an attitude shift that doesn’t force you to choose between setting strict reading goals and giving up altogether."
Adam Kirsch. 02/06/2026. shared link: What Happens When Books Aren’t News. "In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation."
David A. Graham. 02/05/2026: shared link: America Is Losing the Facts That Hold It Together. Regarding the closing of the CIA World Factbook.
Julie Beck. 02/02/2026: A Survivor Contestant’s Empathetic Reality TV Novel. Review of: Escape!: A Novel / Stephen Fischbach.
Walt Hunter. 02/02/2026: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. "College kids aren’t reading novels—but that’s because not enough teachers are asking them to."
Lily Meyer. 02/26/2026: When Did Literature Get Less Dirty?: A puritan strain is manifesting in realist novels as a marked absence of straight sex.
Casey Schwartz. 02/26/2026: The Women Who Wanted to Be 'Hell on Wheels, or Dead.' Review of: The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII / Mark Braude -- Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World / Julia Cooke.
Deb Olin Unferth. 02/25/2026: Nine Books to Reset Your View of the World. "Each of these titles will widen your perspective, offering you original insight and vision."
Charles Finch. 02/24/2026: Michael Pollan Punctures the AI Bubble. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Helen Lewis. 02/24/2026: Gavin Newsom’s Father Issues. Regarding: Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery / Gavin Newsom. "The California governor’s new memoir is dominated by a parent’s emotional distance."
John Williams. 02/20/2026: The Washington Post’s Leaders Missed the Point. "The editor of the recently scrapped Book World believes in serving subscribers, not data."
Sophie Gilbert. 02/20/2026: An Extraordinary Account of a Dangerous Marriage. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot (Author), Natasha Lehrer (Translator), Ruth Diver (Translator).
John Williams. 02/20/2026: The Washington Post’s Books Section Worked: Why the editor of the scuttled review pages believes that the paper’s subscribers know better than its leaders.
Jack Lundberg. 02/19/2026: Does Writing Have to Be Hard?: American writing instruction has always involved some level of torture. What happens when technology makes it easy? (Time-Travel Thursdays!)
Rob Wolfe. 02/19/2026: Why Nudge Policies Failed: A new book buries the Obama-era idea that small shifts in personal behavior can greatly improve the world. Regarding: It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems / George Loewenstein and Nick Chater (Basic Venture).
Judith Shulevitz. 02/17/2026: The Ghosts of Toni Morrison. Review of: On Morrison / Namwali Serpell & much more.
Gal Beckerman. 02/16/2026: America Needs ‘Self-Evident’ Truths. Review of: Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity / Omri Boehm.
Josef Joffe. 02/14/2026: The Clash of Civilizations Was an Inside Job. "Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turns 30 this year."
Hillary Kelly. 02/13/2026: Matt Lauer’s Accuser Complicates Her Story. "Brooke Nevils’s memoir is also a reckoning with many misconceptions about #MeToo narratives." Regarding: Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe / Brooke Neville.
Robert F. Worth. 02/13/2026: Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment Was a Mistake. Regarding the author of: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. "The influential author derides secularism and the modern world. Conservatives—including the vice president—are joining him on a march back to the Middle Ages." Seems to have influenced recent issues of The Critic (UK).
Tyler Austin Harper. 02/12/2026: The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities. Regarding The multi-billion Mellon Foundation.
Michael O'Donnell. 02/10/2026: What Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola Got Right. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
James Parker. 02/10/2026: The Poet Laureate of Madness: Why Alfred, Lord Tennyson feels so modern. Review of: The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief / Richard Holmes.
Adelle Waldman. 02/10/2026: The Novel as Extended Op-Ed. Review of: A Better Life: A Novel / Lionel Shriver.
Drew Gilpin Faust. 02/08/2026: Deadlier Than Gettysburg: How the cruelty of the Confederacy’s prison camps gave rise to the rules of war. Review of: A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War / W. Fitzhugh Brundage.
Karan Mahajan. 02/06/2026: The Moral Cost of Living in an Unequal Society. Review of: This Is Where the Serpent Lives / Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Boris Kachka. 02/06/2026: Reading Is a Practice, Not a Chore. "Try an attitude shift that doesn’t force you to choose between setting strict reading goals and giving up altogether."
Adam Kirsch. 02/06/2026. shared link: What Happens When Books Aren’t News. "In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation."
David A. Graham. 02/05/2026: shared link: America Is Losing the Facts That Hold It Together. Regarding the closing of the CIA World Factbook.
Julie Beck. 02/02/2026: A Survivor Contestant’s Empathetic Reality TV Novel. Review of: Escape!: A Novel / Stephen Fischbach.
Walt Hunter. 02/02/2026: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. "College kids aren’t reading novels—but that’s because not enough teachers are asking them to."
54featherbear
New Yorker February 2026
Radhika Jones. 02/26/2026: The Timeless Provocations of “Wuthering Heights” (the Novel). "A great fuss surrounds Emerald Fennell’s anachronistic adaptation, but Emily Brontë’s ruthless text will always have the last word." Touchstone: Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte.
Geraldo Cadava. 02/26/2026: The Hidden History of Native American Enslavement. Review of the literature.
Michael Pollan. 02/25/2026: How Michael Pollan Expanded His Consciousness. "The writer discusses a few of the works that influenced his new book, “A World Appears.”
Mary Norris. 02/26/2026: Finishing School: The Moby-Dick Club. Daily Moby Dick T-shirts.
Lillian Fishman. 02/25/2026: What Makes an Object Sexy?. Regarding: Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink, and Deviant Desire / Anastasiia Fedorova.
Shayla Love. 02/25/2026: When Do We Become Adults, Really?. "Scientists define the stages of life in biological, societal, and chronological terms—but none of them quite capture what it’s like to grow up." Not a book review, but seems book-related.
Anahid Nersessian. 02/23/2026: What Walter Benjamin Knew. Review of: Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Jewish Lives) / Peter Gordon.
Casey Cep. 02/20/2026: The Unlikely Success of a Strange Alabama Bookstore. "Jake Reiss only sells signed books, and mostly at publishers’ prices. It shouldn’t work, but it has."
Rachel Monroe. 02/18/2026: When Sexual Exploitation Is Fundamental to Police Corruption. Regarding: Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom / Rick Tulsky.
Lauren Groff. 02/18/2026: Lauren Groff on Masters of Short Fiction. Interestingly, she leaves off Alice Munro.
Sam Knight. 02/16/2026: What the Royal Family’s Links to Slavery Mean in the Age of Epstein. Regarding: The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas / Brooke N. Newman.
Christopher Beha. 02/14/2026: Losing Faith in Atheism. Excerpt from: WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Becca Rothfeld. 02/10/2026: The Death of Book World. "What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers."
Alexandra Schwartz. 02/09/2026: The Race to Give Every Child a Toy. Review of: Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America / Michael Kimmel.
Joshua Rothman. 02/06/2026: Is Good Taste a Trap?: The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in. With reference to Bella Burden's memoir, Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, Helen DeWitt's The English Understand Wool etc.
Dan Piepenbring. 02/04/2026: The Good Old Days of Sports Gambling. Regarding: Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk / Billy Walters -- The Bookie: Inside the High-Stakes World of Sports Betting—A Legendary Bookmaker's Tale of Gangsters, Celebrities, and the Art of the Game (New Yorker subtitle: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode) / Art Manteris w/Matt Birkbeck.
Katy Waldman. 02/02/2026: The Perennial Predicament of the Artist with an Office Job. Review of: The Copywriter: a novel / Daniel Poppick.
Thomas Meaney. 02/02/2026: Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism. Review of: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Doreen St. Félix. 02/01/2026: Why Jackie Robinson Testified Against Paul Robeson. Regarding: Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America / Howard Bryant.
Radhika Jones. 02/26/2026: The Timeless Provocations of “Wuthering Heights” (the Novel). "A great fuss surrounds Emerald Fennell’s anachronistic adaptation, but Emily Brontë’s ruthless text will always have the last word." Touchstone: Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte.
Geraldo Cadava. 02/26/2026: The Hidden History of Native American Enslavement. Review of the literature.
Michael Pollan. 02/25/2026: How Michael Pollan Expanded His Consciousness. "The writer discusses a few of the works that influenced his new book, “A World Appears.”
Mary Norris. 02/26/2026: Finishing School: The Moby-Dick Club. Daily Moby Dick T-shirts.
Lillian Fishman. 02/25/2026: What Makes an Object Sexy?. Regarding: Second Skin: Inside the Worlds of Fetish, Kink, and Deviant Desire / Anastasiia Fedorova.
Shayla Love. 02/25/2026: When Do We Become Adults, Really?. "Scientists define the stages of life in biological, societal, and chronological terms—but none of them quite capture what it’s like to grow up." Not a book review, but seems book-related.
Anahid Nersessian. 02/23/2026: What Walter Benjamin Knew. Review of: Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Jewish Lives) / Peter Gordon.
Casey Cep. 02/20/2026: The Unlikely Success of a Strange Alabama Bookstore. "Jake Reiss only sells signed books, and mostly at publishers’ prices. It shouldn’t work, but it has."
Rachel Monroe. 02/18/2026: When Sexual Exploitation Is Fundamental to Police Corruption. Regarding: Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom / Rick Tulsky.
Lauren Groff. 02/18/2026: Lauren Groff on Masters of Short Fiction. Interestingly, she leaves off Alice Munro.
Sam Knight. 02/16/2026: What the Royal Family’s Links to Slavery Mean in the Age of Epstein. Regarding: The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas / Brooke N. Newman.
Christopher Beha. 02/14/2026: Losing Faith in Atheism. Excerpt from: WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Becca Rothfeld. 02/10/2026: The Death of Book World. "What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers."
Alexandra Schwartz. 02/09/2026: The Race to Give Every Child a Toy. Review of: Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America / Michael Kimmel.
Joshua Rothman. 02/06/2026: Is Good Taste a Trap?: The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in. With reference to Bella Burden's memoir, Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, Helen DeWitt's The English Understand Wool etc.
Dan Piepenbring. 02/04/2026: The Good Old Days of Sports Gambling. Regarding: Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk / Billy Walters -- The Bookie: Inside the High-Stakes World of Sports Betting—A Legendary Bookmaker's Tale of Gangsters, Celebrities, and the Art of the Game (New Yorker subtitle: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode) / Art Manteris w/Matt Birkbeck.
Katy Waldman. 02/02/2026: The Perennial Predicament of the Artist with an Office Job. Review of: The Copywriter: a novel / Daniel Poppick.
Thomas Meaney. 02/02/2026: Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism. Review of: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s / Jason Burke.
Doreen St. Félix. 02/01/2026: Why Jackie Robinson Testified Against Paul Robeson. Regarding: Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America / Howard Bryant.
55featherbear
Literary Review February 2026 (UK monthly)
Richard Bourke. Passage to a Better World. Review of: The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin / Dan Edelstein -- Revolutions: A New History / David Sassoon.
Piers Brendon. The Kremlin’s Long Reach. Review of: The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy / Josh Ireland.
Norma Clarke. Arts & Graft. Review of: Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London / Jacqueline Riding (Profile).
Peter Davidson. High-Builded Clouds. Review of: Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons / Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson).
Philippe Marlière. Normal Circumstances? Review of: Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe / Victor Mallet (Hurst).
Lucasta Miller. Life, Work & Adoration. Review of: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (UK: Doubleday; forthcoming June 23 2026 US: WW Norton).
Munro Price. On Track to Slaughter. Review of: The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès / Sergio Luzzatto.
Richard Bourke. Passage to a Better World. Review of: The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin / Dan Edelstein -- Revolutions: A New History / David Sassoon.
Piers Brendon. The Kremlin’s Long Reach. Review of: The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy / Josh Ireland.
Norma Clarke. Arts & Graft. Review of: Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London / Jacqueline Riding (Profile).
Peter Davidson. High-Builded Clouds. Review of: Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons / Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson).
Philippe Marlière. Normal Circumstances? Review of: Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe / Victor Mallet (Hurst).
Lucasta Miller. Life, Work & Adoration. Review of: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (UK: Doubleday; forthcoming June 23 2026 US: WW Norton).
Munro Price. On Track to Slaughter. Review of: The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès / Sergio Luzzatto.
56featherbear
Washington Monthly February 2026
Christoph Irmscher. 02/02/2026: Before the Revolution. Review of: Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician / Dan Chiasson.
Christoph Irmscher. 02/02/2026: Before the Revolution. Review of: Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician / Dan Chiasson.
57featherbear
Comics Journal
Frank M. Young. 01/29/2026: The Complete C Comics. Review of: The Complete C Comics / Joe Brainard (w/multiple collaborators) (New York Review Comics).
Frank M. Young. 01/29/2026: The Complete C Comics. Review of: The Complete C Comics / Joe Brainard (w/multiple collaborators) (New York Review Comics).
59featherbear
NYRB Online February 12 2026
Literature
Hermione Lee. Epic Ambitions. Review of: Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife / Francesca Wade.
Regina Marler. Teacher's Pet. Review of: In Thrall / Jane DeLynn, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín.
Adam Kirsch. Things Fall Apart. Review of: Effingers / Gabriele Tergit, translated from the German by Sophie Duvernoy.
Arts
Nathan Fields. Liberalism’s Pianist. Review of: House Concert / Igor Levit and Florian Zinnecker, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside -- Beethoven in the Bunker: musicians under the Nazi regime / Fred Brouwers, translated from the Dutch by Eileen J. Stevens.
Beatrice Radden Keefe. The Undefined Gothic. Review of: Gothic Modern, an exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, October 4, 2024–January 26, 2025; the National Museum, Oslo, February 28–June 15, 2025; and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, September 19, 2025–January 11, 2026. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Juliet Simpson and Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff
Science & Technology
Ian Frazier. Bang the Drumstick Slowly. Review of: Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them / Tove Danovich -- Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens / Philip Levy (University of Virginia Press) -- Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement / Gina G. Warren.
Jenny Uglow. All That Glitters. Review of: Cartier, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, April 12–November 16, 2025 -- Cartier / edited by Helen Molesworth and Rachel Garrahan -- Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution / Michael Bycroft (University of Chicago Press).
History, Politics, Society & Culture
Laurence H. Tribe. Is the Constitution ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’? Review of: We the People: A History of the US Constitution / Jill Lepore.
Vanessa Ogle. Rolling with the Economic Tides. Review of: Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge / Ian Kumekawa.
Jérôme Tubiana. Darfur’s Endless War. (Article: "As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province, self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend their homes.")
Cyrus Naji. Bangladesh’s Stalled Student Revolution. (Article: "The young radicals who ousted the country’s authoritarian prime minister have so far failed to implement the democratic reforms they promised. Will elections in February correct their course?")
Alma Guillermoprieto. A More Pliant Chavista. (Article: "President Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.")
Fintan O'Toole. Whose Hemisphere? (Article: "The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.")
Aryeh Neier and Gara LaMarche. Trump’s Attack on Philanthropy. (Article: "Universities, law firms, and news media have already been targeted by the administration. As the Justice Department pushes to investigate the Open Society Foundations, it seems that philanthropies that support critical voices may be next.")
Online Only Selections
Anika Banister. 01/25/2026: Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams. "For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world."
Joseph O’Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake. 01/24/2026: The Politics of Raw Power. “The Republican Party, animated by fantasies of crushing liberals and minorities once and for all, is fundamentally devoted to achieving one-party rule.”
Amish Raj Mulmi. 01/17/2026: Nepal’s Republic of Amnesia. "After overthrowing the government last fall, can Nepal’s youth movement address the inequities that have burdened the country since its founding?"
Walker Mimms. 01/14/2026: Dead Ringers. "The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past."
William Neuman. 01/15/2026: Machado Agonistes. Machado Agonistes. "The Venezuelan opposition leader courted US military intervention—but she did not get what she bargained for."
Edwin Frank. 01/06/2026: Our Moments. "The sentences in Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World are acts of attention, as uncertain and unstable as life itself. "
Literature
Hermione Lee. Epic Ambitions. Review of: Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife / Francesca Wade.
Regina Marler. Teacher's Pet. Review of: In Thrall / Jane DeLynn, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín.
Adam Kirsch. Things Fall Apart. Review of: Effingers / Gabriele Tergit, translated from the German by Sophie Duvernoy.
Arts
Nathan Fields. Liberalism’s Pianist. Review of: House Concert / Igor Levit and Florian Zinnecker, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside -- Beethoven in the Bunker: musicians under the Nazi regime / Fred Brouwers, translated from the Dutch by Eileen J. Stevens.
Beatrice Radden Keefe. The Undefined Gothic. Review of: Gothic Modern, an exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, October 4, 2024–January 26, 2025; the National Museum, Oslo, February 28–June 15, 2025; and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, September 19, 2025–January 11, 2026. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Juliet Simpson and Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff
Science & Technology
Ian Frazier. Bang the Drumstick Slowly. Review of: Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them / Tove Danovich -- Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens / Philip Levy (University of Virginia Press) -- Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement / Gina G. Warren.
Jenny Uglow. All That Glitters. Review of: Cartier, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, April 12–November 16, 2025 -- Cartier / edited by Helen Molesworth and Rachel Garrahan -- Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution / Michael Bycroft (University of Chicago Press).
History, Politics, Society & Culture
Laurence H. Tribe. Is the Constitution ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’? Review of: We the People: A History of the US Constitution / Jill Lepore.
Vanessa Ogle. Rolling with the Economic Tides. Review of: Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge / Ian Kumekawa.
Jérôme Tubiana. Darfur’s Endless War. (Article: "As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province, self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend their homes.")
Cyrus Naji. Bangladesh’s Stalled Student Revolution. (Article: "The young radicals who ousted the country’s authoritarian prime minister have so far failed to implement the democratic reforms they promised. Will elections in February correct their course?")
Alma Guillermoprieto. A More Pliant Chavista. (Article: "President Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.")
Fintan O'Toole. Whose Hemisphere? (Article: "The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.")
Aryeh Neier and Gara LaMarche. Trump’s Attack on Philanthropy. (Article: "Universities, law firms, and news media have already been targeted by the administration. As the Justice Department pushes to investigate the Open Society Foundations, it seems that philanthropies that support critical voices may be next.")
Online Only Selections
Anika Banister. 01/25/2026: Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams. "For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world."
Joseph O’Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake. 01/24/2026: The Politics of Raw Power. “The Republican Party, animated by fantasies of crushing liberals and minorities once and for all, is fundamentally devoted to achieving one-party rule.”
Amish Raj Mulmi. 01/17/2026: Nepal’s Republic of Amnesia. "After overthrowing the government last fall, can Nepal’s youth movement address the inequities that have burdened the country since its founding?"
Walker Mimms. 01/14/2026: Dead Ringers. "The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past."
William Neuman. 01/15/2026: Machado Agonistes. Machado Agonistes. "The Venezuelan opposition leader courted US military intervention—but she did not get what she bargained for."
Edwin Frank. 01/06/2026: Our Moments. "The sentences in Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World are acts of attention, as uncertain and unstable as life itself. "
60featherbear
X.J. Kennedy, 1929-2026
Rebecca Chace. NYT, 02/01/2026: X.J. Kennedy, a Poet of Wit Who Clung to Rhyme and Meter, Dies at 96. "Spurning the free verse of many of his contemporaries, he held to an older tradition. He also wrote spirited poems for children."
"X.J. Kennedy, the avuncular and prolific American poet who remained loyal to rhyme and meter throughout his long career, died on Sunday at his home in Peabody, Mass. He was 96.
"Mr. Kennedy’s star rose in the poetry world with his first book, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which won the 1961 Lamont Poetry Prize (now the James Laughlin Award).
"Mr. Kennedy was the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1962-64, a flexion point in contemporary American poetry. The tradition of “formal” poetry made popular by Robert Frost, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur, among others, fell out of favor as poets of the 1950s and ’60s broke tradition with free verse, a more confessional style that dismissed rhyme and meter as artificial and outmoded.
"“American poetry had entered another romantic phase, like a late adolescence,” the editors of “Rebel Angels,” an anthology of so-called New Formalist poetry published in 1996, scornfully declared. They were speaking for the next generation of poets who would rediscover the poetic structures that the free verse movement had rejected. Poets often like to change direction, but Mr. Kennedy remained committed to the intrinsic value of the ballad, ode, elegy and sonnet.
"In the early 1970s, when many poetry journals were rejecting “made” poems that incorporated traditional structures, Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Dorothy Kennedy, started an influential poetry journal, “Counter/Measures,” which championed the New Formalist movement.
"Despite or perhaps because of the strength of his convictions, Mr. Kennedy believed that whatever forms they chose, all poets were engaged in the same enterprise — to make sense of the world as they found it. He openly admired many of the free verse and Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg ...
"Joseph Charles Kennedy — he added the “X” to his name to distinguish himself from the unrelated Kennedy clan patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy — was born on Aug. 21, 1929, in Dover, N.J.
"In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Kennedy published in multiple genres, including children’s books, in which he displayed an intuitive understanding of a child’s exuberance and musicality.
“Kids are a wonderful audience,” he said in “Taking Measure: The Poetry and Prose of X.J. Kennedy” (2003), by Bernard E. Morris. “They don’t care if you’re an old curmudgeon who writes in meter and rhyme. They rather like it, in fact, if the poem’s got a nice bouncy beat.”
"In 1982, Mr. Kennedy and his wife published a popular anthology for children that is now a classic: “Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry.” Their collaboration continued with “The Bedford Reader,” a highly successful anthology of texts for college writing courses. Mr. Kennedy also created one of the most popular and enduring college writing textbooks, “An Introduction to Poetry” (1966), in a series, coedited by Dana Gioia, that expanded to include fiction and drama and that remains in print."
X.J. Kennedy's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/kennedyxj
obit index >1 featherbear:
Rebecca Chace. NYT, 02/01/2026: X.J. Kennedy, a Poet of Wit Who Clung to Rhyme and Meter, Dies at 96. "Spurning the free verse of many of his contemporaries, he held to an older tradition. He also wrote spirited poems for children."
"X.J. Kennedy, the avuncular and prolific American poet who remained loyal to rhyme and meter throughout his long career, died on Sunday at his home in Peabody, Mass. He was 96.
"Mr. Kennedy’s star rose in the poetry world with his first book, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which won the 1961 Lamont Poetry Prize (now the James Laughlin Award).
"Mr. Kennedy was the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1962-64, a flexion point in contemporary American poetry. The tradition of “formal” poetry made popular by Robert Frost, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur, among others, fell out of favor as poets of the 1950s and ’60s broke tradition with free verse, a more confessional style that dismissed rhyme and meter as artificial and outmoded.
"“American poetry had entered another romantic phase, like a late adolescence,” the editors of “Rebel Angels,” an anthology of so-called New Formalist poetry published in 1996, scornfully declared. They were speaking for the next generation of poets who would rediscover the poetic structures that the free verse movement had rejected. Poets often like to change direction, but Mr. Kennedy remained committed to the intrinsic value of the ballad, ode, elegy and sonnet.
"In the early 1970s, when many poetry journals were rejecting “made” poems that incorporated traditional structures, Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Dorothy Kennedy, started an influential poetry journal, “Counter/Measures,” which championed the New Formalist movement.
"Despite or perhaps because of the strength of his convictions, Mr. Kennedy believed that whatever forms they chose, all poets were engaged in the same enterprise — to make sense of the world as they found it. He openly admired many of the free verse and Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg ...
"Joseph Charles Kennedy — he added the “X” to his name to distinguish himself from the unrelated Kennedy clan patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy — was born on Aug. 21, 1929, in Dover, N.J.
"In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Kennedy published in multiple genres, including children’s books, in which he displayed an intuitive understanding of a child’s exuberance and musicality.
“Kids are a wonderful audience,” he said in “Taking Measure: The Poetry and Prose of X.J. Kennedy” (2003), by Bernard E. Morris. “They don’t care if you’re an old curmudgeon who writes in meter and rhyme. They rather like it, in fact, if the poem’s got a nice bouncy beat.”
"In 1982, Mr. Kennedy and his wife published a popular anthology for children that is now a classic: “Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry.” Their collaboration continued with “The Bedford Reader,” a highly successful anthology of texts for college writing courses. Mr. Kennedy also created one of the most popular and enduring college writing textbooks, “An Introduction to Poetry” (1966), in a series, coedited by Dana Gioia, that expanded to include fiction and drama and that remains in print."
X.J. Kennedy's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/kennedyxj
obit index >1 featherbear:
61featherbear
James Sallis, 1944-2026
Alex Traub. NYT, 02/01/2026: James Sallis, 81, Dies; Novelist Whose ‘Drive’ Became a Hit Movie. "A storyteller of modern America’s underbelly with a literary, ruminative style, he inspired a Ryan Gosling movie and earned critical acclaim."
"James Sallis, a novelist who had the detectives and sheriffs of his stories investigate not merely crime but also the nature of memory and the possibility of self-knowledge, died on Tuesday. He was 81.
"Mr. Sallis’s work relied on the genre conventions of potboilers, yet the old-fashioned term “man of letters” was often used to capture his eclecticism and sophistication. In addition to his 18 novels, he also translated a novel from the French; wrote a biography; helped run a British sci-fi magazine; edited an anthology on jazz guitar; churned out criticism, poetry and short stories; and played banjo in a three-piece band.
"His fictional settings were as varied as New Orleans, Los Angeles and the rural South, and his protagonists included a Black private eye teaching French literature on the side as well as a young white women who escaped a yearslong kidnapping.
"As the novelist and critic Catherine Texier wrote in The New York Times in 1994, “James Sallis writes in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, albeit via Albert Camus.”
"Mr. Sallis first became known for his six-novel series on Lew Griffin, a New Orleans P.I. In a 2001 Times article, Mr. Sallis described him as “a failed private detective, failed husband and father, a Black man trying to live in the white man’s world where rules keep changing and the rug always gets pulled out from under.”
James Sallis's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/sallisjames
obit index >1 featherbear:
Alex Traub. NYT, 02/01/2026: James Sallis, 81, Dies; Novelist Whose ‘Drive’ Became a Hit Movie. "A storyteller of modern America’s underbelly with a literary, ruminative style, he inspired a Ryan Gosling movie and earned critical acclaim."
"James Sallis, a novelist who had the detectives and sheriffs of his stories investigate not merely crime but also the nature of memory and the possibility of self-knowledge, died on Tuesday. He was 81.
"Mr. Sallis’s work relied on the genre conventions of potboilers, yet the old-fashioned term “man of letters” was often used to capture his eclecticism and sophistication. In addition to his 18 novels, he also translated a novel from the French; wrote a biography; helped run a British sci-fi magazine; edited an anthology on jazz guitar; churned out criticism, poetry and short stories; and played banjo in a three-piece band.
"His fictional settings were as varied as New Orleans, Los Angeles and the rural South, and his protagonists included a Black private eye teaching French literature on the side as well as a young white women who escaped a yearslong kidnapping.
"As the novelist and critic Catherine Texier wrote in The New York Times in 1994, “James Sallis writes in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, albeit via Albert Camus.”
"Mr. Sallis first became known for his six-novel series on Lew Griffin, a New Orleans P.I. In a 2001 Times article, Mr. Sallis described him as “a failed private detective, failed husband and father, a Black man trying to live in the white man’s world where rules keep changing and the rug always gets pulled out from under.”
James Sallis's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/sallisjames
obit index >1 featherbear:
62featherbear
PRoB (Pittsburgh Review of Books) Feb 2026
PRoB Staff. 02/27/2026: Reading for Black History Month: PRoB Staff recommend books for Black History Month.
Andrew Krivak. 02/27/2026: Mule Boy. Excerpt from: Mule Boy / Andrew Krivak. “I could still see the boy of thirteen on that morning of the first day of the year 1929, and I could tell them, if they wanted me to, what his life was like growing up in the mining patch outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, with his mother in the small house they rented from the company…”
Stephen Wittek. 02/27/2026: Caliban’s Nipples: An exploration of Fuseli’s Shakespeare illustrations reveals how race, desire, colonial anxiety, and personal obsession converge in eighteenth-century visual culture.
Namwali Serpell, interviewer Jordan Snowden. 02/26/2026: Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison. "The risk of monumentality is that it can transform a writer into a symbol. The prose becomes marble. ‘On Morrison’ refuses the marble. Instead, Serpell returns to the sentences.”
PRoB Class. 02/26/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of February 2026. ""What We're Reading" articles feature a curated selection of links to recent publications that have been discussed in the Pittsburgh Review of Books' Public Humanities Course in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University."
Rebecca Moon Ruark. 02/25/2026: Finding Love Between the Lines of Loss in Eric LeMay’s “The First 649 Days.” Review of (forthcoming April 14): The First 649 Days: Essays and Other Acts of Love / Eric LeMay (Kent State University Press).
Vicente Luis Mora and Rahul Bery. 02/25/2026: A Writer Talks to His Translator. "Spanish novelist Vincente Luis Mora talks to his translator Rahul Bery about experimentation, Medieval and Renaissance poetry, and the strange allure of setting a fiction in nineteenth-century Prussia." On the occasion of the forthcoming (March 2026) Centroeuropa / Vincente Luis Mora (Bellevue Literary Press).
Samuele F.S. Pardini. 02/24/2026: Black Studies/Cultural Politics. Review of: Renewing Black Intellectual History. The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought / Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren.
Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren (with Samuele F.S. Pardini). 02/24/2026: Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren in Conversation. "“One of you is a political scientist and the other a literary critic. What do you think that each of you brought to the book from your own perspective and, once things overlapped, made it the book that it is?”
Renée Nicholson. 02/23/2026: How De La Soul Changed Hip-Hop—and Why We Almost Forgot. Review of: Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made / Austin McCoy.
Umberto Grassi. 02/23/2026: Sister Maria Teresa Garzi’s Confession. Excerpt from: What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy / Umberto Grassi (Harvard University Press). “Her inner convictions were more certain than the theological knowledge flaunted by her male guide, but as she shared her views with her fellow sisters, their response became less indulgent.”
Shanzeh Afzal. 02/20/2026: The Extractive Frontier of the Green Future. Review of: Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism /Thea Riofranco. “If climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means?”
PRoB Class. 02/20/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of February 2026. "The "What We're Reading" articles feature a curated selection of links to recent publications that have been discussed in the Pittsburgh Review of Books' Public Humanities Course in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University."
Doug McLeod. 02/19/2026: August Wilson’s American Century. "Laurence Glasco’s August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art explores how the playwright transformed his observations of Pittsburgh’s Hill District into a powerful dramatic chronicle of 20th-century Black life, showing Wilson’s four identities as outsider, warrior, race man and poet."
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi. 02/18/2026: Adapting Dr. Zhivago: From banned Soviet novel to global blockbuster, Zhivago reveals the politics of adaptation. Anchor link to the book: Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternack.
Mason Stockstill. 02/18/2026: Is a Novel Alive? "The ways which we would say a great novel is alive are myriad: its characters strike us not as imagined but as real, breathing humans; its settings are painted so well as to have personalities; its many meanings and interpretations change when humans and cultures change, too.”
Rahul Bhattacharya. 02/17/2026: Arrival. “The beginning of spring was in the mauve and orange flowers where none were a week ago. Here and there great sal trees rose into the sky, and here and there, sure as fall and spring go hand in hand, their large yellowing leaves wavered towards the earth.” Excerpt from: Railsong: a novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Curtis Dozier. 02/16/2026: Why the Right Isn’t Really Banning Plato. “If Plato has been foundational to Western thought, it’s because so many of his ideas justify those aspects of ‘Western Civilization’ that the right doesn’t talk about explicitly but that, historically, have contributed the most to the domination of the rest of the world by ‘the West.'”
Ed Simon. 02/13/2026: Meditations in an Apocalypse. “We are stalked by four horsemen, and their names are pandemic, authoritarianism, technocracy, and climate change. Their children are war, meaninglessness, and collapse.” Excerpt from: Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling / Ed Simon.
Lauren D. Woods, interviewer Dev Murphy. 02/12/2026: Lauren D. Woods on Imagination, Curiosity & Escape. Regarding: The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (Autumn House Press Fiction Prize) / Lauren D. Woods.
PRoB Class. 02/12/2026: What We’re Reading the Second Week of February 2026.
Tripp Fuller. 02/12/2026: Cheap Grace in a Red Hat, Stealing Bonhoeffer’s Fire
Anna Badkhen. 02/11/2026: Additional Health Implications. Excerpt from the forthcoming: To See Beyond: essays / Anna Badkhen (Bellevue Literary Press).
Donna Dzurilla. 02/11/2026: Poet Joseph Bathanti’s East Liberty. East Liberty: A Novel / Joseph Bathanti & much more.
Mélanie Lamotte. 02/11/2026: Sex and Race in the Early French Empire. Excerpt from: By Flesh and Toil: How Race, Sex, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire / Mélanie Lamotte.
David Silverman. 02/10/2026: A Memorial by the Chosen to the Damned. Excerpt from: The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States / David J. Silverman.
Eric Lehman. 02/09/2026: Walden and Resilient Microcultures. “Others in the 21st century have turned to Thoreau as an antidote to the unsatisfied and unsatisfying promises of global society. If Thoreau had to push away the news of the world every day, we keep it in our pockets.”
Geoff Peck, interviewer Ed Simon. 02/09/2026: Geoff Peck at White Whale on Masculinity, Protest, and Pittsburgh. Regarding: City of Clans / Geoff Peck.
Calvin Duncan & Sophie Cull, interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 02/06/2026: Talking about Justice with Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull. Regarding: The Jailhouse Lawyer / Calvin Duncan w/Sophie Cull.
PRoB Class. 02/05/2026: What We’re Reading the First Week of February 2026.
Ron Charles. 02/05/2026: I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done. "“After 20 years at The Washington Post, I’m suddenly on my own — and still writing about books.”
Elias Fox. 02/05/2026: A Needle-Point, a Pattern of Shade. “All of this is why I like Stuart Hall. His thinking with and about the field of cultural studies indicates an understanding of how tension… is not only inevitable to the academy but necessary.”
Andrew Seth Meyer. 02/04/2026: Lords and Masters in Qi and Lu. Excerpt from: To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor / Andrew Seth Meyer.
James Livingston. 02/04/2026: What We Talk About When We Talk About Capitalism. Review of: Capitalism: A Global History / Sven Beckert.
Christopher Briem; interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 02/03/2026: Christopher Briem on a Pittsburgh Beyond Steel. "In “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation,” Christopher Briem argues that Pittsburgh’s transformation was neither sudden nor inevitable—and that the city’s most persistent problem may be its refusal to let go of steel as destiny."
Jeanne-Marie Jackson. 02/03/2026: The Anticolonial Thought of J. E. Casely Hayford . Excerpt from: The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa / Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Princeton University Press).
PRoB Staff. 02/27/2026: Reading for Black History Month: PRoB Staff recommend books for Black History Month.
Andrew Krivak. 02/27/2026: Mule Boy. Excerpt from: Mule Boy / Andrew Krivak. “I could still see the boy of thirteen on that morning of the first day of the year 1929, and I could tell them, if they wanted me to, what his life was like growing up in the mining patch outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, with his mother in the small house they rented from the company…”
Stephen Wittek. 02/27/2026: Caliban’s Nipples: An exploration of Fuseli’s Shakespeare illustrations reveals how race, desire, colonial anxiety, and personal obsession converge in eighteenth-century visual culture.
Namwali Serpell, interviewer Jordan Snowden. 02/26/2026: Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison. "The risk of monumentality is that it can transform a writer into a symbol. The prose becomes marble. ‘On Morrison’ refuses the marble. Instead, Serpell returns to the sentences.”
PRoB Class. 02/26/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of February 2026. ""What We're Reading" articles feature a curated selection of links to recent publications that have been discussed in the Pittsburgh Review of Books' Public Humanities Course in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University."
Rebecca Moon Ruark. 02/25/2026: Finding Love Between the Lines of Loss in Eric LeMay’s “The First 649 Days.” Review of (forthcoming April 14): The First 649 Days: Essays and Other Acts of Love / Eric LeMay (Kent State University Press).
Vicente Luis Mora and Rahul Bery. 02/25/2026: A Writer Talks to His Translator. "Spanish novelist Vincente Luis Mora talks to his translator Rahul Bery about experimentation, Medieval and Renaissance poetry, and the strange allure of setting a fiction in nineteenth-century Prussia." On the occasion of the forthcoming (March 2026) Centroeuropa / Vincente Luis Mora (Bellevue Literary Press).
Samuele F.S. Pardini. 02/24/2026: Black Studies/Cultural Politics. Review of: Renewing Black Intellectual History. The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought / Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren.
Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren (with Samuele F.S. Pardini). 02/24/2026: Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren in Conversation. "“One of you is a political scientist and the other a literary critic. What do you think that each of you brought to the book from your own perspective and, once things overlapped, made it the book that it is?”
Renée Nicholson. 02/23/2026: How De La Soul Changed Hip-Hop—and Why We Almost Forgot. Review of: Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made / Austin McCoy.
Umberto Grassi. 02/23/2026: Sister Maria Teresa Garzi’s Confession. Excerpt from: What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy / Umberto Grassi (Harvard University Press). “Her inner convictions were more certain than the theological knowledge flaunted by her male guide, but as she shared her views with her fellow sisters, their response became less indulgent.”
Shanzeh Afzal. 02/20/2026: The Extractive Frontier of the Green Future. Review of: Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism /Thea Riofranco. “If climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means?”
PRoB Class. 02/20/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of February 2026. "The "What We're Reading" articles feature a curated selection of links to recent publications that have been discussed in the Pittsburgh Review of Books' Public Humanities Course in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University."
Doug McLeod. 02/19/2026: August Wilson’s American Century. "Laurence Glasco’s August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art explores how the playwright transformed his observations of Pittsburgh’s Hill District into a powerful dramatic chronicle of 20th-century Black life, showing Wilson’s four identities as outsider, warrior, race man and poet."
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi. 02/18/2026: Adapting Dr. Zhivago: From banned Soviet novel to global blockbuster, Zhivago reveals the politics of adaptation. Anchor link to the book: Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternack.
Mason Stockstill. 02/18/2026: Is a Novel Alive? "The ways which we would say a great novel is alive are myriad: its characters strike us not as imagined but as real, breathing humans; its settings are painted so well as to have personalities; its many meanings and interpretations change when humans and cultures change, too.”
Rahul Bhattacharya. 02/17/2026: Arrival. “The beginning of spring was in the mauve and orange flowers where none were a week ago. Here and there great sal trees rose into the sky, and here and there, sure as fall and spring go hand in hand, their large yellowing leaves wavered towards the earth.” Excerpt from: Railsong: a novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Curtis Dozier. 02/16/2026: Why the Right Isn’t Really Banning Plato. “If Plato has been foundational to Western thought, it’s because so many of his ideas justify those aspects of ‘Western Civilization’ that the right doesn’t talk about explicitly but that, historically, have contributed the most to the domination of the rest of the world by ‘the West.'”
Ed Simon. 02/13/2026: Meditations in an Apocalypse. “We are stalked by four horsemen, and their names are pandemic, authoritarianism, technocracy, and climate change. Their children are war, meaninglessness, and collapse.” Excerpt from: Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling / Ed Simon.
Lauren D. Woods, interviewer Dev Murphy. 02/12/2026: Lauren D. Woods on Imagination, Curiosity & Escape. Regarding: The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (Autumn House Press Fiction Prize) / Lauren D. Woods.
PRoB Class. 02/12/2026: What We’re Reading the Second Week of February 2026.
Tripp Fuller. 02/12/2026: Cheap Grace in a Red Hat, Stealing Bonhoeffer’s Fire
Anna Badkhen. 02/11/2026: Additional Health Implications. Excerpt from the forthcoming: To See Beyond: essays / Anna Badkhen (Bellevue Literary Press).
Donna Dzurilla. 02/11/2026: Poet Joseph Bathanti’s East Liberty. East Liberty: A Novel / Joseph Bathanti & much more.
Mélanie Lamotte. 02/11/2026: Sex and Race in the Early French Empire. Excerpt from: By Flesh and Toil: How Race, Sex, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire / Mélanie Lamotte.
David Silverman. 02/10/2026: A Memorial by the Chosen to the Damned. Excerpt from: The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States / David J. Silverman.
Eric Lehman. 02/09/2026: Walden and Resilient Microcultures. “Others in the 21st century have turned to Thoreau as an antidote to the unsatisfied and unsatisfying promises of global society. If Thoreau had to push away the news of the world every day, we keep it in our pockets.”
Geoff Peck, interviewer Ed Simon. 02/09/2026: Geoff Peck at White Whale on Masculinity, Protest, and Pittsburgh. Regarding: City of Clans / Geoff Peck.
Calvin Duncan & Sophie Cull, interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 02/06/2026: Talking about Justice with Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull. Regarding: The Jailhouse Lawyer / Calvin Duncan w/Sophie Cull.
PRoB Class. 02/05/2026: What We’re Reading the First Week of February 2026.
Ron Charles. 02/05/2026: I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done. "“After 20 years at The Washington Post, I’m suddenly on my own — and still writing about books.”
Elias Fox. 02/05/2026: A Needle-Point, a Pattern of Shade. “All of this is why I like Stuart Hall. His thinking with and about the field of cultural studies indicates an understanding of how tension… is not only inevitable to the academy but necessary.”
Andrew Seth Meyer. 02/04/2026: Lords and Masters in Qi and Lu. Excerpt from: To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor / Andrew Seth Meyer.
James Livingston. 02/04/2026: What We Talk About When We Talk About Capitalism. Review of: Capitalism: A Global History / Sven Beckert.
Christopher Briem; interviewer Aakanksha Agarwal. 02/03/2026: Christopher Briem on a Pittsburgh Beyond Steel. "In “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation,” Christopher Briem argues that Pittsburgh’s transformation was neither sudden nor inevitable—and that the city’s most persistent problem may be its refusal to let go of steel as destiny."
Jeanne-Marie Jackson. 02/03/2026: The Anticolonial Thought of J. E. Casely Hayford . Excerpt from: The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford’s West Africa / Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Princeton University Press).
63featherbear
Molly Gorman. bbc culture, 02/03/2026: 'It still has the ability to shock': Why 'masterpiece' Wuthering Heights is so misunderstood. Regarding: Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte & the ensuing films.
64featherbear
LitHub February 2026 updates
Julia Scheeres. 02/25/2026: Why I Don’t Regret the “Pornographic” Scene That Got My Book Banned. Regarding: Jesus Land: a memoir / Julia Scheeres.
Tayari Jones. 02/24/2026: Tayari Jones Still Needs To Read Anna Karenina: The Author of Kin Takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire.
Darcy Steinke. 02/24/2026: Darcey Steinke on the History (and Mystery) of Migraines. Excerpt from: This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith / Darcey Steinke.
Sayantani DasGupta. 02/24/2026: How Do We Keep Writing When They are Killing Poets? "Sayantani DasGupta Writers on Creating in a Time of Dread."
Eric Olson. 02/23/2026: “You Just Do Language.” Lauren Groff on Craft, Reading, and Her New Collection.
Eunsong Kim. 02/23/2026: On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare.
EJ Dickson. 02/23/2026: In Praise of Problematic Women: A Reading List of “Bad” Mothers.
Maris Kreizman. 02/19/2026: What Do You Do When the Biggest Platforms For Readers Are Kind of Evil?
Mark Haddon. 02/19/2026: On the Unlikely Origin of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Mark Haddon Recalls the Creative Process Behind His Stylistically Innovative Novel. Excerpt from: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon; anchor link to: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel / Mark Haddon.
Lydia Millet. 02/19/2026: What Happens When Your Books (Don’t) Get Banned?.
Anne Fadiman, interviewer Diana Arterian. 02/19/2026: The Annotated Nightstand: What Anne Fadiman is Reading Now, and Next.
Kimberley Kinder. 02/18/2026: Whose Journey? On the Travel Writing of Displacement: Kimberley Kinder Considers the Blind Spots and Biases of Traditional Travel Narratives. Excerpt from: Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement / Kimberley Kinder (University of Minnesota Press).
Jess deCourcy Hinds. 02/13/2026: Have You Ever Tried Going on a Blind Date With a Book? "Jess deCourcy Hinds Offers 13 Ways of Looking at the Book World’s Latest Phenomenon."
Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav. 02/13/2026: Translating Holocaust Literature in Times of Genocide. Intro to: In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union / edited by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav.
Aron Solomon. 02/12/2026: When Presidents Slowly Fall: What Fiction Gets Right About the 25th Amendment.
Keza MacDonald. 02/11/2026: The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time. Excerpt from: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play / Keza MacDonald.
Kenan Orhan. 02/10/2026: Between Two Istanbuls: Telling Stories of a Place That No Longer Exists. "Kenan Orhan Explores the Intersection of Memory, Identity and Self-Imposed Exile."
Salvatore Scibona. 02/11/2026: A Saga in Miniature: On Halldór Laxness’s A Parish Chronicle. Introduction to a new translation of: A Parish Chronicle / Halldór Laxness; Philip Roughton (Translator).
Gerald Howard. 02/10/2026: In Praise of One of America’s All-Time Great Book Sections (RIP): Gerald Howard on the Washington Post Book World and the Further Enshittification of All Things.
Ed Simon. 02/10/2026: Why Does Contemporary Fascism Fetishize the Classics?
Evie Schockley. 02/09/2026. A Timeless Take on Autobiography: Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Schockley's foreword to: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name / Audre Lorde.
Maggie O'Farrell, interviewer Sasha Han. 02/06/2026: Maggie O’Farrell on Grief, Her History with Shakespeare, and Adapting Her Novel to the Screen. Regarding: Hamnet / Maggie O'Farrell.
Nancy Reddy. 02/06/2026: Nancy Reddy on Researching Beyond the Archives, or, Reading Sideways.
Gioia Woods. 02/06/2026: The Radical Power of a Bookstore: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights. Excerpt from: City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore / Gioia Woods.
Brittany Allen. 02/04/2026: The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.
Katherine Hollander. 02/04/2026: How Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin Pioneered a New Way of Creating: Katherine Hollander on Intellectual, Political and Artistic Collaboration Among the Exiled Mitarbeiter. Excerpt from: Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 / Katherine Hollander (Methuen Drama).
Katherine Kelaidis. 02/04/2026: On Russia’s New Official Dictionary and the Language of Authoritarianism.
Danie Poppick. 02/04/2026: Office Culture Follows Us Everywhere: Six Books About Work.
Toni Morrison. 02/03/2026: Toni Morrison on What Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction Reveals About Race in America.
Julia Scheeres. 02/25/2026: Why I Don’t Regret the “Pornographic” Scene That Got My Book Banned. Regarding: Jesus Land: a memoir / Julia Scheeres.
Tayari Jones. 02/24/2026: Tayari Jones Still Needs To Read Anna Karenina: The Author of Kin Takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire.
Darcy Steinke. 02/24/2026: Darcey Steinke on the History (and Mystery) of Migraines. Excerpt from: This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith / Darcey Steinke.
Sayantani DasGupta. 02/24/2026: How Do We Keep Writing When They are Killing Poets? "Sayantani DasGupta Writers on Creating in a Time of Dread."
Eric Olson. 02/23/2026: “You Just Do Language.” Lauren Groff on Craft, Reading, and Her New Collection.
Eunsong Kim. 02/23/2026: On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare.
EJ Dickson. 02/23/2026: In Praise of Problematic Women: A Reading List of “Bad” Mothers.
Maris Kreizman. 02/19/2026: What Do You Do When the Biggest Platforms For Readers Are Kind of Evil?
Mark Haddon. 02/19/2026: On the Unlikely Origin of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Mark Haddon Recalls the Creative Process Behind His Stylistically Innovative Novel. Excerpt from: Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour / Mark Haddon; anchor link to: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel / Mark Haddon.
Lydia Millet. 02/19/2026: What Happens When Your Books (Don’t) Get Banned?.
Anne Fadiman, interviewer Diana Arterian. 02/19/2026: The Annotated Nightstand: What Anne Fadiman is Reading Now, and Next.
Kimberley Kinder. 02/18/2026: Whose Journey? On the Travel Writing of Displacement: Kimberley Kinder Considers the Blind Spots and Biases of Traditional Travel Narratives. Excerpt from: Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement / Kimberley Kinder (University of Minnesota Press).
Jess deCourcy Hinds. 02/13/2026: Have You Ever Tried Going on a Blind Date With a Book? "Jess deCourcy Hinds Offers 13 Ways of Looking at the Book World’s Latest Phenomenon."
Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav. 02/13/2026: Translating Holocaust Literature in Times of Genocide. Intro to: In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union / edited by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav.
Aron Solomon. 02/12/2026: When Presidents Slowly Fall: What Fiction Gets Right About the 25th Amendment.
Keza MacDonald. 02/11/2026: The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time. Excerpt from: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play / Keza MacDonald.
Kenan Orhan. 02/10/2026: Between Two Istanbuls: Telling Stories of a Place That No Longer Exists. "Kenan Orhan Explores the Intersection of Memory, Identity and Self-Imposed Exile."
Salvatore Scibona. 02/11/2026: A Saga in Miniature: On Halldór Laxness’s A Parish Chronicle. Introduction to a new translation of: A Parish Chronicle / Halldór Laxness; Philip Roughton (Translator).
Gerald Howard. 02/10/2026: In Praise of One of America’s All-Time Great Book Sections (RIP): Gerald Howard on the Washington Post Book World and the Further Enshittification of All Things.
Ed Simon. 02/10/2026: Why Does Contemporary Fascism Fetishize the Classics?
Evie Schockley. 02/09/2026. A Timeless Take on Autobiography: Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Schockley's foreword to: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name / Audre Lorde.
Maggie O'Farrell, interviewer Sasha Han. 02/06/2026: Maggie O’Farrell on Grief, Her History with Shakespeare, and Adapting Her Novel to the Screen. Regarding: Hamnet / Maggie O'Farrell.
Nancy Reddy. 02/06/2026: Nancy Reddy on Researching Beyond the Archives, or, Reading Sideways.
Gioia Woods. 02/06/2026: The Radical Power of a Bookstore: On Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights. Excerpt from: City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore / Gioia Woods.
Brittany Allen. 02/04/2026: The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.
Katherine Hollander. 02/04/2026: How Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin Pioneered a New Way of Creating: Katherine Hollander on Intellectual, Political and Artistic Collaboration Among the Exiled Mitarbeiter. Excerpt from: Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 / Katherine Hollander (Methuen Drama).
Katherine Kelaidis. 02/04/2026: On Russia’s New Official Dictionary and the Language of Authoritarianism.
Danie Poppick. 02/04/2026: Office Culture Follows Us Everywhere: Six Books About Work.
Toni Morrison. 02/03/2026: Toni Morrison on What Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction Reveals About Race in America.
65featherbear
Bruce Bawer. New Criterion, Feb 2026: Loving Malcolm Cowley. The Stalinist.
66featherbear
Gerd Gigerenzer. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics,Volume 18, Issue 1, Summer 2025, pp. 28–61https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v18i1.1075: The Legacy of Daniel Kahneman: A Personal View.
67featherbear
TLS February 6, 2026|No. 6398
Featured
Mary Beard. Digital tigers and techno time travel: What does an immersive exhibition about Pompeii tell us?. Review of: The Last Days of Pompeii: The immersive exhibition, Immerse LDN, Excel, London, until March 15.
Mary Hitchman. Lunar exploration: The Moon’s influence on literature and scientific inquiry. Review of: The Medieval Moon / Ayoush Lazikani.
Tom Seymour. Back to the bardo: George Saunders’s ghostly story of comfort and judgement. Review of: Vigil / George Saunders.
Paul Preston. Tainted legacies: How Franco and Juan Carlos have tried to cheat history. Review of: Franco / Julián Casanova -- El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, violence and the quest for greatness / Giles Tremlett -- Reconciliación: Memorias / Juan Carlos I, with Laurence Debray.
Mary Beard. The colour of stone. Blog post now on the current issue page!
Literature & Bibliography
Michael Caines. Literary associations: The shared library of Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. (Essay)
Thomas Keymer. Genre bending: The eighteenth-century novel’s debt to periodicals and jobbing printers. Review of: Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of print / Jennifer Buckley (Edinburgh University Press) -- The Novel and the Blank: A literary history of the book trades in eighteenth-century British America / Matthew P. Brown.
Jane Cooper. A talent to abuse: Political satire down the ages. Review of: State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English literature / Dan Sperrin.
Grace Moore. Grand tour: Travelogue and social commentary from Charles Charles Dickens’s year in Italy. Review of: Pictures from Italy / Charles Dickens.
Anna Aslanyan. Hints of future greatness: Chekhov’s juvenilia. Review of: Earliest Stories: Stories, novellas, humoresques, 1880–1882 / Anton Chekhov; Edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Elena Michajlowska.
Carol Apollonio. Tea with titans: Maxim Gorky in conversation with three Russian writers. Review of: Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev / Maxim Gorky; translated by Bryan Karetnyk.
Damian Maher. Taste and distaste: Readings of the Master that ‘turn wine into water.’ Review of: The Correction of Taste: On the late novels of Henry James / Henry James (Lilliput Press).
Elizabeth Brogan. Wanderlust: On the move in Henry James’s fiction. Review of: Henry James and the Writing of Transport / Alicia Rix.
Andrew Motion. A serious tall tale: Money, love and angels in Blitz-era London. Review of: Nonesuch: a novel / Francis Spufford.
Michael Kerrigan. Reading between the lines: Lacunae and creative inaction in action. Review of: Montevideo / Enrique Vila-Matas; translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott.
Nat Segnit. Census sensibility: India’s railways and social complexities. Review of: Railsong: a novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Clemmie Read. Acts of resurrection: A love story between the present and the past. Review of: May We Feed the King / Rebecca Perry.
Beejay Silcox. Ore struck: A quest for gold in the Canadian far north. Review of: White River Crossing / Ian McGuire.
Katharine Hodgson. ‘Maybe she’s an enemy of the people’: How Russian modernist poetry survived Stalin. Review of: All the World on a Page: A critical anthology of modern Russian poetry / Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky, editors.
April Yee. Stuck pens: Two Korean poets find freedom. Review of: Phantom Pain Wings / Kim Hyesoon; translated by Don Mee Choi -- Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class / Lee Seong-bok; translated by Anton Hur.
Mark Glanville. Bearing witness: A poet’s call to resistance. Review of: On the Slaughter / Hayim Nahman Bialik; selected and translated by Peter Cole.
Trevor Pateman. Treasure hunting in old letters: The fate of personal archives. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-century print culture and antislavery / Sarah Danielle Allison (Columbia University Press).
In Brief Review of: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; translated by Irina Sadovina (novel about the Nenets, an indigenous people of the Russian Far North).
M.C. NB: Savage Days: Cornering a critic, Rescuing the West End, Celebrating Dickensian women, Talking about book history.
Arts & Sports
Matthew Sturgis. Academician of the nursery: An artist who found freedom in illustrating children’s books. Review of: Walter Crane: Books in Colour / Francesca Tancini.
Adam Mars-Jones. Framing the past: Two films look back on cultural landmarks, failure and success. Review of the films Nouvelle Vague & Blue Moon.
John McMillian. Bigging up ‘the Boss’: Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album. Review of: Tonight: The making of Born to Run / Peter Ames Carlin.
Toby Lichtig. Do you feel our pain?: Exploring the membrane between the personal and the political. Review of the film All That’s Left of You.
Kirsty Gunn. Skin and wood: The singular music of the Highland bagpipes. Review of: The Bagpipes: A cultural history / Richard McLauchlan.
Mike Jakeman. Money ball: The journey of football’s biggest competition over a century. Review of: World Cup Fever: A footballing journey in nine tournaments / Simon Kuper -- The Power and the Glory: A new history of the World Cup / Jonathan Wilson.
Irina Dumitrescu. The unwanted child: Horror movies and medieval literature. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: She Died Young: A life in fragments / Brenda Fricker.
Philosophy
Jane O'Grady. Mind and matter: Modern philosophy begins with Descartes. Review of: The Cartesian Mind / Jorge Secada, Travis Tanner and Cecilia Wee (Routledge).
Mark Hannam. Non-German German: A critic of nationalism, authoritarianism and technocracy. Review of: The Philosopher: Habermas and us / Philipp Felsch; translated by Tony Crawford (Polity) -- Things Needed to Get Better: Conversations with Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman Yos / Jürgen Habermas; translated by Wieland Hoban.
Paul Sagar. Common good?: The religious foundations of big-state conservatism. Review of: Post-Liberalism / Matt Sleat.
N.J. Enfield. Playing by the rules: When games become a way of life. Review of: The Score: How to stop playing somebody else’s game (UK subtitle: How to stop playing someone else's game) / C. Thi Nguyen.
Science and Technology
Charles Foster. Flitting about: Bat stories ‘spiced up’ with human anecdote. Review of: The Genius Bat: Understanding our most mysterious mammal / Yossi Yovel (Oneworld).
Juhea Kim. Letter From Land of the Leopard: Big cats in ‘one of the remaining wild places on Earth.’ (Essay)
In Brief Review of: Speaking with Nature: The origins of Indian environmentalism / Ramachandra Guha.
In Brief Review of: Horses: A 4,000-year genetic journey across the world / Ludovic Orlando; translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.
In Brief Review of: The Medieval Horse / Anastasija Ropa.
In Brief Review of: What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to listen to what animals are trying to say / Amelia Thomas.
In Brief Review of: Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s lessons for a changing planet / David Farrier.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Larry Wolff. Baltic survivor: A nation that refused to die. Review of: Lithuania: A history / Richard Butterwick.
Fernando Cervantes. Know your enemy: A medieval bishop’s interest in Islam. Review of: On the Edges of Christendom: Maurice of Burgos and the church and culture of medieval Castile / Teresa Witcombe (British Academy).
Lucy Wooding. Succession acts: Did the Stuart dynasty begin honestly? Review of: The Stolen Crown: Treachery, deceit and the death of the Tudor dynasty / Tracy Borman.
Jonathan Healey. No king’s men: Charles I’s most radical opponents. Review of: The Fiery Spirits: Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution / John Rees.
Pablo Scheffer. Stories of England: How the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were made. Review of: Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles / Daniel Anlezark -- The Old English Chronicle: Volume 1: The A-text to 1001 and related poems / Janet Bately, Joseph C. Harris and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, with Susan Irvine, editors and translators.
Roger Atwood. It starts with an earthquake: The end of the world in history. Review of: Apocalypse: How catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures / Lizzie Wade -- Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse / Luke Kemp -- A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World: 3,000 years of getting it wrong (so far ...) / Tom Phillips (Wildfire).
Bronwen Everill. When the music stopped: Uganda's chequered postcolonial history. Review of: Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the making of the Ugandan state / Mahmood Mamdani.
Michael Reid. Checking out: Why Peru’s people are disillusioned with elites. Review of: Modern Peru: A new history / Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara, editors.
Jan Michielsen. High stakes: Why zombies and vampires won’t go away. Review of: Killing the Dead: Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World / John Blair.
In Brief Review of: Maremma Mia / N.D. Hopton (memoir of retirement in rural Italy) (Chiselbury).
In Brief Review of: The Indian Ocean and the Portuguese-Speaking World: Literary and cultural intersections / edited by Ana Mafalda Leite, Elena Brugioni, Jessica Falconi and Marta Banasiak.
Miscellaneous
Letters to the Editor. Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’: Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’, Eliot and Kipling, Turner and Constable, etc.
Featured
Mary Beard. Digital tigers and techno time travel: What does an immersive exhibition about Pompeii tell us?. Review of: The Last Days of Pompeii: The immersive exhibition, Immerse LDN, Excel, London, until March 15.
Mary Hitchman. Lunar exploration: The Moon’s influence on literature and scientific inquiry. Review of: The Medieval Moon / Ayoush Lazikani.
Tom Seymour. Back to the bardo: George Saunders’s ghostly story of comfort and judgement. Review of: Vigil / George Saunders.
Paul Preston. Tainted legacies: How Franco and Juan Carlos have tried to cheat history. Review of: Franco / Julián Casanova -- El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, violence and the quest for greatness / Giles Tremlett -- Reconciliación: Memorias / Juan Carlos I, with Laurence Debray.
Mary Beard. The colour of stone. Blog post now on the current issue page!
Literature & Bibliography
Michael Caines. Literary associations: The shared library of Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. (Essay)
Thomas Keymer. Genre bending: The eighteenth-century novel’s debt to periodicals and jobbing printers. Review of: Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760: Ecologies of print / Jennifer Buckley (Edinburgh University Press) -- The Novel and the Blank: A literary history of the book trades in eighteenth-century British America / Matthew P. Brown.
Jane Cooper. A talent to abuse: Political satire down the ages. Review of: State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English literature / Dan Sperrin.
Grace Moore. Grand tour: Travelogue and social commentary from Charles Charles Dickens’s year in Italy. Review of: Pictures from Italy / Charles Dickens.
Anna Aslanyan. Hints of future greatness: Chekhov’s juvenilia. Review of: Earliest Stories: Stories, novellas, humoresques, 1880–1882 / Anton Chekhov; Edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Elena Michajlowska.
Carol Apollonio. Tea with titans: Maxim Gorky in conversation with three Russian writers. Review of: Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev / Maxim Gorky; translated by Bryan Karetnyk.
Damian Maher. Taste and distaste: Readings of the Master that ‘turn wine into water.’ Review of: The Correction of Taste: On the late novels of Henry James / Henry James (Lilliput Press).
Elizabeth Brogan. Wanderlust: On the move in Henry James’s fiction. Review of: Henry James and the Writing of Transport / Alicia Rix.
Andrew Motion. A serious tall tale: Money, love and angels in Blitz-era London. Review of: Nonesuch: a novel / Francis Spufford.
Michael Kerrigan. Reading between the lines: Lacunae and creative inaction in action. Review of: Montevideo / Enrique Vila-Matas; translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott.
Nat Segnit. Census sensibility: India’s railways and social complexities. Review of: Railsong: a novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Clemmie Read. Acts of resurrection: A love story between the present and the past. Review of: May We Feed the King / Rebecca Perry.
Beejay Silcox. Ore struck: A quest for gold in the Canadian far north. Review of: White River Crossing / Ian McGuire.
Katharine Hodgson. ‘Maybe she’s an enemy of the people’: How Russian modernist poetry survived Stalin. Review of: All the World on a Page: A critical anthology of modern Russian poetry / Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky, editors.
April Yee. Stuck pens: Two Korean poets find freedom. Review of: Phantom Pain Wings / Kim Hyesoon; translated by Don Mee Choi -- Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class / Lee Seong-bok; translated by Anton Hur.
Mark Glanville. Bearing witness: A poet’s call to resistance. Review of: On the Slaughter / Hayim Nahman Bialik; selected and translated by Peter Cole.
Trevor Pateman. Treasure hunting in old letters: The fate of personal archives. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-century print culture and antislavery / Sarah Danielle Allison (Columbia University Press).
In Brief Review of: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; translated by Irina Sadovina (novel about the Nenets, an indigenous people of the Russian Far North).
M.C. NB: Savage Days: Cornering a critic, Rescuing the West End, Celebrating Dickensian women, Talking about book history.
Arts & Sports
Matthew Sturgis. Academician of the nursery: An artist who found freedom in illustrating children’s books. Review of: Walter Crane: Books in Colour / Francesca Tancini.
Adam Mars-Jones. Framing the past: Two films look back on cultural landmarks, failure and success. Review of the films Nouvelle Vague & Blue Moon.
John McMillian. Bigging up ‘the Boss’: Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album. Review of: Tonight: The making of Born to Run / Peter Ames Carlin.
Toby Lichtig. Do you feel our pain?: Exploring the membrane between the personal and the political. Review of the film All That’s Left of You.
Kirsty Gunn. Skin and wood: The singular music of the Highland bagpipes. Review of: The Bagpipes: A cultural history / Richard McLauchlan.
Mike Jakeman. Money ball: The journey of football’s biggest competition over a century. Review of: World Cup Fever: A footballing journey in nine tournaments / Simon Kuper -- The Power and the Glory: A new history of the World Cup / Jonathan Wilson.
Irina Dumitrescu. The unwanted child: Horror movies and medieval literature. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: She Died Young: A life in fragments / Brenda Fricker.
Philosophy
Jane O'Grady. Mind and matter: Modern philosophy begins with Descartes. Review of: The Cartesian Mind / Jorge Secada, Travis Tanner and Cecilia Wee (Routledge).
Mark Hannam. Non-German German: A critic of nationalism, authoritarianism and technocracy. Review of: The Philosopher: Habermas and us / Philipp Felsch; translated by Tony Crawford (Polity) -- Things Needed to Get Better: Conversations with Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman Yos / Jürgen Habermas; translated by Wieland Hoban.
Paul Sagar. Common good?: The religious foundations of big-state conservatism. Review of: Post-Liberalism / Matt Sleat.
N.J. Enfield. Playing by the rules: When games become a way of life. Review of: The Score: How to stop playing somebody else’s game (UK subtitle: How to stop playing someone else's game) / C. Thi Nguyen.
Science and Technology
Charles Foster. Flitting about: Bat stories ‘spiced up’ with human anecdote. Review of: The Genius Bat: Understanding our most mysterious mammal / Yossi Yovel (Oneworld).
Juhea Kim. Letter From Land of the Leopard: Big cats in ‘one of the remaining wild places on Earth.’ (Essay)
In Brief Review of: Speaking with Nature: The origins of Indian environmentalism / Ramachandra Guha.
In Brief Review of: Horses: A 4,000-year genetic journey across the world / Ludovic Orlando; translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.
In Brief Review of: The Medieval Horse / Anastasija Ropa.
In Brief Review of: What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to listen to what animals are trying to say / Amelia Thomas.
In Brief Review of: Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s lessons for a changing planet / David Farrier.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Larry Wolff. Baltic survivor: A nation that refused to die. Review of: Lithuania: A history / Richard Butterwick.
Fernando Cervantes. Know your enemy: A medieval bishop’s interest in Islam. Review of: On the Edges of Christendom: Maurice of Burgos and the church and culture of medieval Castile / Teresa Witcombe (British Academy).
Lucy Wooding. Succession acts: Did the Stuart dynasty begin honestly? Review of: The Stolen Crown: Treachery, deceit and the death of the Tudor dynasty / Tracy Borman.
Jonathan Healey. No king’s men: Charles I’s most radical opponents. Review of: The Fiery Spirits: Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution / John Rees.
Pablo Scheffer. Stories of England: How the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were made. Review of: Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles / Daniel Anlezark -- The Old English Chronicle: Volume 1: The A-text to 1001 and related poems / Janet Bately, Joseph C. Harris and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, with Susan Irvine, editors and translators.
Roger Atwood. It starts with an earthquake: The end of the world in history. Review of: Apocalypse: How catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures / Lizzie Wade -- Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse / Luke Kemp -- A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World: 3,000 years of getting it wrong (so far ...) / Tom Phillips (Wildfire).
Bronwen Everill. When the music stopped: Uganda's chequered postcolonial history. Review of: Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the making of the Ugandan state / Mahmood Mamdani.
Michael Reid. Checking out: Why Peru’s people are disillusioned with elites. Review of: Modern Peru: A new history / Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara, editors.
Jan Michielsen. High stakes: Why zombies and vampires won’t go away. Review of: Killing the Dead: Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World / John Blair.
In Brief Review of: Maremma Mia / N.D. Hopton (memoir of retirement in rural Italy) (Chiselbury).
In Brief Review of: The Indian Ocean and the Portuguese-Speaking World: Literary and cultural intersections / edited by Ana Mafalda Leite, Elena Brugioni, Jessica Falconi and Marta Banasiak.
Miscellaneous
Letters to the Editor. Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’: Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’, Eliot and Kipling, Turner and Constable, etc.
68featherbear
Elijah Granet. The Critic (UK), 02/05//2026: The accidental case against assisted dying. Review of: A Better Death: The Case for Assisted Dying / Jonathan Romain (Reaktion Books).
69featherbear
Antonio Melechi. MIT Press Reader, 02/02/2026: Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious.
70featherbear
As part of the Washington Post staff purge, the WaPo books section has apparently been eliminated. Since Amazon started out as an online books vendor, seems counterintuitive, but gotta pay the bills for the Melania documentary.
https://x.com/DwightGarner/status/2019077690653839444
see also Ron Charles Feb 5 essay in PRoB >62 featherbear:
in addition, beyond books:
https://x.com/byaaroncdavis/status/2019436393936670847
Ashley Parker. Atlantic, 02/04/2026: The Murder of The Washington Post.
Brittany Allen. LitHub, 02/04/2026: The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.
Adam Kirsch. Atlantic, 02/06/2026. shared link: What Happens When Books Aren’t News. "In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation."
Becca Rothfeld. New Yorker, 02/10/2026: The Death of Book World. "What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers."
Noticed that some recent WaPo >49 featherbear: book reviews have been farmed out to the opinion columns.
https://x.com/DwightGarner/status/2019077690653839444
see also Ron Charles Feb 5 essay in PRoB >62 featherbear:
in addition, beyond books:
https://x.com/byaaroncdavis/status/2019436393936670847
Ashley Parker. Atlantic, 02/04/2026: The Murder of The Washington Post.
Brittany Allen. LitHub, 02/04/2026: The Washington Post is gutting its books coverage.
Adam Kirsch. Atlantic, 02/06/2026. shared link: What Happens When Books Aren’t News. "In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation."
Becca Rothfeld. New Yorker, 02/10/2026: The Death of Book World. "What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers."
Noticed that some recent WaPo >49 featherbear: book reviews have been farmed out to the opinion columns.
71featherbear
NYRB Online Feb 26 2026
Literature
Larry Rohter. Chasing Ghosts. Review of: The Obscene Bird of Night / José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Alejandro Zambra (New Directions paperback).
Namwalli Serpell. Toni Plays the Dozens. "What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?"
Rachel Donadio. A Student of Power. Review of: Malaparte: A Biography / Maurizio Serra, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley -- The Kremlin Ball / Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee -- Diary of a Foreigner in Paris / Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian and French by Stephen Twilley, with an introduction by Edmund White -- Mussolini: Son of the Century / a television series directed by Joe Wright.
Vivian Gornick. Mother Trouble. Review of: Mother Mary Comes to Me / Arundhati Roy.
Maurice Samuels. Rescuing the Refugees. Review of: Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature / Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles.
Brenda Wineapple. Lost and Forgotten. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature / Gerald Howard.
Arts
Ingrid D. Rowland. Painted Sermons. Review of: Fra Angelico, an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, Florence, September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke, with Stefano Casciu and Angelo Tartuferi.
Philosophy
Ben Tarnoff. People Think. "Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free."
Science & Technology
Ian Tattersall. Call Me by Your Names. Review of: Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life / Jason Roberts. "The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon."
Julian Gewirtz. When the Chips Are Down. Review of: The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China / Ya-Wen Lei -- The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip / Stephen Witt -- The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant / Tae Kim.
History, Politics, & Society
Ben Rhodes. An American Reckoning. Review of: McNamara at War: A New History / Philip Taubman and William Taubman. "Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today."
Joy Neumeyer. Poland: Halfway to Democracy. Review of: Democratic Backsliding in Poland: Why Has Poland Gone to the Dark Side? / edited by Łukasz Zamęcki, Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, and Adam Szymański (Lexington) -- The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty / Jarosław Kuisz -- Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment / Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk -- Aborcja i demokracja: Przeciw-historia Polski, 1956–1993 = Abortion and Democracy: The Counterhistory of Poland, 1956–1993 / Marcin Kościelniak,
Oscar Lopez. Torn Asunder. Review of: Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala / Rachel Nolan -- Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador / Elizabeth Barnert, with a foreword by Philippe Bourgois.
Trevor Jackson. The Struggle for the Fed. Review of: Our Money: Monetary Policy As If Democracy Matters / Leah Downey -- Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America / Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta -- Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead / Kenneth Rogoff.
Fintan O'Toole. The Crime of Witness. (Article: "Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.")
Literature
Larry Rohter. Chasing Ghosts. Review of: The Obscene Bird of Night / José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Alejandro Zambra (New Directions paperback).
Namwalli Serpell. Toni Plays the Dozens. "What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?"
Rachel Donadio. A Student of Power. Review of: Malaparte: A Biography / Maurizio Serra, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley -- The Kremlin Ball / Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee -- Diary of a Foreigner in Paris / Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian and French by Stephen Twilley, with an introduction by Edmund White -- Mussolini: Son of the Century / a television series directed by Joe Wright.
Vivian Gornick. Mother Trouble. Review of: Mother Mary Comes to Me / Arundhati Roy.
Maurice Samuels. Rescuing the Refugees. Review of: Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature / Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles.
Brenda Wineapple. Lost and Forgotten. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature / Gerald Howard.
Arts
Ingrid D. Rowland. Painted Sermons. Review of: Fra Angelico, an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, Florence, September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke, with Stefano Casciu and Angelo Tartuferi.
Philosophy
Ben Tarnoff. People Think. "Asad Haider, the foremost socialist thinker of his generation, staked his philosophy on the principle that everyone should be fundamentally free."
Science & Technology
Ian Tattersall. Call Me by Your Names. Review of: Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life / Jason Roberts. "The quest to fathom the riotous diversity of nature is absorbingly told in a virtual double biography of the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his contemporary, the count of Buffon."
Julian Gewirtz. When the Chips Are Down. Review of: The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China / Ya-Wen Lei -- The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip / Stephen Witt -- The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant / Tae Kim.
History, Politics, & Society
Ben Rhodes. An American Reckoning. Review of: McNamara at War: A New History / Philip Taubman and William Taubman. "Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis facing American democracy today."
Joy Neumeyer. Poland: Halfway to Democracy. Review of: Democratic Backsliding in Poland: Why Has Poland Gone to the Dark Side? / edited by Łukasz Zamęcki, Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, and Adam Szymański (Lexington) -- The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty / Jarosław Kuisz -- Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment / Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk -- Aborcja i demokracja: Przeciw-historia Polski, 1956–1993 = Abortion and Democracy: The Counterhistory of Poland, 1956–1993 / Marcin Kościelniak,
Oscar Lopez. Torn Asunder. Review of: Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala / Rachel Nolan -- Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador / Elizabeth Barnert, with a foreword by Philippe Bourgois.
Trevor Jackson. The Struggle for the Fed. Review of: Our Money: Monetary Policy As If Democracy Matters / Leah Downey -- Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America / Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta -- Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead / Kenneth Rogoff.
Fintan O'Toole. The Crime of Witness. (Article: "Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence.")
72featherbear
Myra MacPherson, 1934-2026
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/05/2026: Myra MacPherson, Who Wrote Wrenchingly About Vietnam Vets, Dies at 91. "A political reporter at The Washington Post, she also wrote “Long Time Passing,” about the Vietnam War’s social, political and psychological aftereffects."
"Myra MacPherson, who set her sights on a journalism career when newsrooms were casually hostile to women and who went on to cover politics for The Washington Post and to write a book about the tenacious grip of the Vietnam War on the American psyche, died on Monday in Washington. She was 91.
"Interviewing for a job at The Detroit Free Press in the 1950s, Ms. MacPherson was told there were no openings in the women’s department. “I said I wasn’t considering the women’s department,” she recalled much later. “He looked at me as if I said I just shot my mother or something. He said, ‘We have no women in the city room.’”
"Ms. MacPherson found more accommodating employers, working in hard news and features at The Detroit News, The Washington Star and The New York Times. In 1968, The Post hired her to write for its newly created Style section, which borrowed from the vogue of New Journalism to inject irreverence and novelistic storytelling techniques into long articles about Washington power players.
"Ms. MacPherson profiled leading figures from the Watergate scandal and went on to cover five presidential elections.
"After observing the wife and children of Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine on the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 1972, she was inspired to write her first book, “The Power Lovers” (1975), about the pressures within politicians’ marriages.
"The book concluded that male elected officials were ipso facto egocentric, and thus their marriages were especially hard on wives and children. It included a memorable quotation from Marian Javits, who was married to Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York: “I am his mistress. His work is his wife.”
"In 1979, Ms. MacPherson recalled, she was brought to tears watching the TV movie “Friendly Fire,” in which Carol Burnett played a mother who had lost her son in combat in Vietnam. Ms. MacPherson proposed a series on Vietnam veterans for The Post, then took three years off to expand the material into a book, crisscrossing the United States and interviewing hundreds of veterans as well as their generational peers who had stayed home.
"That book, “Long Time Passing: Vietnam & the Haunted Generation” (1984), delved into the social, political and psychological aftereffects of the war.
"Its opening set piece is a wrenching joint profile of Chuck and Tom Hagel, Nebraska brothers who fought in the same combat unit. Chuck Hagel, a Medal of Honor recipient who became a U.S. senator from Nebraska and secretary of defense, thought the war was noble. Tom Hagel, who worked with veterans and later became a law professor, believed it was an abomination. He struggled with nightmares, crying fits and debilitating guilt about civilian deaths.
"His symptoms were recognized years later when the American Psychiatric Association included post-traumatic stress disorder in the 1980 edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the profession’s standard-setting guide. Ms. MacPherson’s book was one of the first to introduce general readers to PTSD, which affected hundreds of thousands of veterans.
"She left The Post in 1991. Her books included “All Governments Lie!” (2006), a biography of the independent journalist I.F. Stone, an early and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and its coverage in the news media; and “The Scarlet Sisters” (2014), a joint biography of sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, 19th-century suffragists, spiritual mediums and advocates of free love."
Myra MacPherson's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/macphersonmyra
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/05/2026: Myra MacPherson, Who Wrote Wrenchingly About Vietnam Vets, Dies at 91. "A political reporter at The Washington Post, she also wrote “Long Time Passing,” about the Vietnam War’s social, political and psychological aftereffects."
"Myra MacPherson, who set her sights on a journalism career when newsrooms were casually hostile to women and who went on to cover politics for The Washington Post and to write a book about the tenacious grip of the Vietnam War on the American psyche, died on Monday in Washington. She was 91.
"Interviewing for a job at The Detroit Free Press in the 1950s, Ms. MacPherson was told there were no openings in the women’s department. “I said I wasn’t considering the women’s department,” she recalled much later. “He looked at me as if I said I just shot my mother or something. He said, ‘We have no women in the city room.’”
"Ms. MacPherson found more accommodating employers, working in hard news and features at The Detroit News, The Washington Star and The New York Times. In 1968, The Post hired her to write for its newly created Style section, which borrowed from the vogue of New Journalism to inject irreverence and novelistic storytelling techniques into long articles about Washington power players.
"Ms. MacPherson profiled leading figures from the Watergate scandal and went on to cover five presidential elections.
"After observing the wife and children of Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine on the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 1972, she was inspired to write her first book, “The Power Lovers” (1975), about the pressures within politicians’ marriages.
"The book concluded that male elected officials were ipso facto egocentric, and thus their marriages were especially hard on wives and children. It included a memorable quotation from Marian Javits, who was married to Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York: “I am his mistress. His work is his wife.”
"In 1979, Ms. MacPherson recalled, she was brought to tears watching the TV movie “Friendly Fire,” in which Carol Burnett played a mother who had lost her son in combat in Vietnam. Ms. MacPherson proposed a series on Vietnam veterans for The Post, then took three years off to expand the material into a book, crisscrossing the United States and interviewing hundreds of veterans as well as their generational peers who had stayed home.
"That book, “Long Time Passing: Vietnam & the Haunted Generation” (1984), delved into the social, political and psychological aftereffects of the war.
"Its opening set piece is a wrenching joint profile of Chuck and Tom Hagel, Nebraska brothers who fought in the same combat unit. Chuck Hagel, a Medal of Honor recipient who became a U.S. senator from Nebraska and secretary of defense, thought the war was noble. Tom Hagel, who worked with veterans and later became a law professor, believed it was an abomination. He struggled with nightmares, crying fits and debilitating guilt about civilian deaths.
"His symptoms were recognized years later when the American Psychiatric Association included post-traumatic stress disorder in the 1980 edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the profession’s standard-setting guide. Ms. MacPherson’s book was one of the first to introduce general readers to PTSD, which affected hundreds of thousands of veterans.
"She left The Post in 1991. Her books included “All Governments Lie!” (2006), a biography of the independent journalist I.F. Stone, an early and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and its coverage in the news media; and “The Scarlet Sisters” (2014), a joint biography of sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, 19th-century suffragists, spiritual mediums and advocates of free love."
Myra MacPherson's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/macphersonmyra
73featherbear
Michael Parenti, 1933-2026
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/03/2026: Michael Parenti, Unapologetic Marxist Theorist and Author, Dies at 92. "A prolific writer and lecturer, he viewed U.S. history through the lens of class struggle. But some accused him of defending brutal regimes in the Soviet Union and Serbia."
"Michael Parenti, a Marxist political theorist with uncompromising views who published more than 20 books and lectured widely, but who was accused of being an apologist for brutal regimes, including in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, died on Jan. 24 in Amherst, Mass. He was 92.
"He was convicted of striking a state trooper at an antiwar protest in 1970, and he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Vermont in 1974 on the same third-party socialist ticket as Bernie Sanders (in Mr. Sanders’s first bid for the U.S. Senate, an unsuccessful one).
"By the 1980s and ’90s, when Dr. Parenti’s influence arguably reached its apogee, his books were read alongside those of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, two better known (and better selling) left-wing authors.
"His 1974 textbook, “Democracy for the Few,” which went through nine editions, was, like Mr. Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” a tour of American history and institutions through the lens of class struggle.
"In his 1986 book on the news media, “Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media,” Dr. Parenti argued that leading newspapers and TV networks promoted the interests of their corporate owners and that most of their content was “ruling class propaganda.”
"His support for nominally Marxist governments led him toward positions few others on the American left would take. In the 1980s, he defended the Soviet Union as it crumbled and its former satellites in Eastern Europe won independence. He took the side of Serbia and its murderous leader Slobodan Milosevic during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as that country fractured into independent nations and NATO carried out a bombing campaign against Serbia.
"He became a co-chair of an international committee to defend Mr. Milosevic, who died at 64 in 2006 while on trial for crimes against humanity, including genocide. In 2007, the International Court of Justice at The Hague found that Bosnian Serb troops had indeed massacred nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
"Dr. Parenti’s other books include “Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism” (1997) and “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” (2003).
"But he was almost never reviewed in the traditional press, a situation that frustrated him.
“He felt that was par for the course,” his son said. “If you stray too far to the left, you’re ignored by the mainstream.”
Michael Parenti's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/parentimichael
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/03/2026: Michael Parenti, Unapologetic Marxist Theorist and Author, Dies at 92. "A prolific writer and lecturer, he viewed U.S. history through the lens of class struggle. But some accused him of defending brutal regimes in the Soviet Union and Serbia."
"Michael Parenti, a Marxist political theorist with uncompromising views who published more than 20 books and lectured widely, but who was accused of being an apologist for brutal regimes, including in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, died on Jan. 24 in Amherst, Mass. He was 92.
"He was convicted of striking a state trooper at an antiwar protest in 1970, and he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Vermont in 1974 on the same third-party socialist ticket as Bernie Sanders (in Mr. Sanders’s first bid for the U.S. Senate, an unsuccessful one).
"By the 1980s and ’90s, when Dr. Parenti’s influence arguably reached its apogee, his books were read alongside those of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, two better known (and better selling) left-wing authors.
"His 1974 textbook, “Democracy for the Few,” which went through nine editions, was, like Mr. Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” a tour of American history and institutions through the lens of class struggle.
"In his 1986 book on the news media, “Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media,” Dr. Parenti argued that leading newspapers and TV networks promoted the interests of their corporate owners and that most of their content was “ruling class propaganda.”
"His support for nominally Marxist governments led him toward positions few others on the American left would take. In the 1980s, he defended the Soviet Union as it crumbled and its former satellites in Eastern Europe won independence. He took the side of Serbia and its murderous leader Slobodan Milosevic during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as that country fractured into independent nations and NATO carried out a bombing campaign against Serbia.
"He became a co-chair of an international committee to defend Mr. Milosevic, who died at 64 in 2006 while on trial for crimes against humanity, including genocide. In 2007, the International Court of Justice at The Hague found that Bosnian Serb troops had indeed massacred nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
"Dr. Parenti’s other books include “Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism” (1997) and “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” (2003).
"But he was almost never reviewed in the traditional press, a situation that frustrated him.
“He felt that was par for the course,” his son said. “If you stray too far to the left, you’re ignored by the mainstream.”
Michael Parenti's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/parentimichael
74featherbear
Christine Jacobson. The Public Domain Review, 02/04/2026: Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Women’s Labor behind Modern Literary Masterpieces.
75featherbear
February 2026 updates 01-07
Asian Review of Books Feb 07: breakneck China -- Feb 04: Scorpions -- Feb 03: Floodlines --Feb 01: Borneo >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 06: This Is Where the Serpent Lives; reading as practice -- Feb 02: Survivor!; getting students to read novels >53 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 5: assisted dying >68 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 07: Infinite Jest's 30th & worth a read -- Feb 06: poetry review roundup; Helen of Nowhere; Madeleine Dunnigan's Jean: a novel -- Feb 05: Mark Haddon memoir; Sajid Javid memoir (former UK Home Secretary) -- Feb 04: future of species; Holocaust comedy -- Feb 03: Marwan Barghouti on Palestine; Kate Pickett on progressive policy; Ian McGuire novel on colonial greed -- Feb 02: Neil Gaiman denies allegations; Rebel English Academy: funny and subversive novel reckons with life under martial law in late-70s Pakistan -- Feb 01: reading & parents' dementia >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 07: collection of folk horror from the Asian diaspora; Edward Salem's new poetry collection Monk Fruit -- Feb 06: Oedipus from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy -- Feb 05: new translation of Antônio Xerxenesky's Uma tristeza infinita -- Feb 03: Empire of Madness; Chagos Archipelago -- Feb 02: Edward Said & intellectuals >52 featherbear:
Literary Review (UK monthly) Feb issue selections >55 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 06: reading the archives; City Lights bookstore & Lawrence Ferlinghetti excerpt -- Feb 04: Bertolt Brecht & Walter Benjamin collaboration (excerpt from the book); WaPo gutting books coverage; Russian dictionary & authoritarianism; 6 books on office culture -- Feb 03: Toni Morrison on Flannery O'Connor >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 06: good taste -- Feb 04: 2 books on sports gambling -- Feb 02: Daniel Poppick's The Copywriter; revolutionists of the 70s -- Feb 01: Jackie Robinson & Paul Robeson >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 26: >71 featherbear: -- Feb 12 >59 featherbear:
NYT Feb 07: Michael Pollan on consciousness; fictional take on the ethnics of eradicating an invasive species; new Allegra Goodman novel This Is Not About Us -- Feb 06: the end of mass market paperbacks -- Feb 05: Toni Morrison essentials; CIA World Factbook ends run after 6 decades; Cannabis true crime book; Cristina Rivea Garza interview -- Feb 04: André Kertész bio; Wuthering Heights; Bernie Sanders bio; Family Snitch; collected poems of Larry Levis -- Feb 03: Emily Nemans's Clutch; Afghan American teenager in Patmeena Sabit's Good People novel; David Poppick's The Copywriter -- Feb 02: Chuck Klosterman on football -- Feb 01: Lily Meyer's End of Romance; Gavin Newsom memoir >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 06: interviewing the authors of Jailhouse Lawyer --Feb 05: what PRoB staff are reading in early Feb; book reviewer laid off from WaPo; essay on Stuart Hall -- Feb 04: excerpt from a history of classical China; Capitalism a global history -- Feb 03: Pittsburgh beyond steel >62 featherbear:
TLS Feb 6 >67 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 06: menopause -- Feb 05: Bad Bunny bio; updated Kinks book -- Feb 04: one of Ron Charles's last book reviews for WaPo; Bob Dylan -- Feb 01: Infinite Jest anniversary >49 featherbear:
WaPo book section eliminated >70 featherbear:
Washington Monthly Feb 02: rise of Bernie Sanders >56 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week
bbc culture >63 featherbear:
Comics Journal >57 featherbear:
Erasmus Journal for philosophy & economics >66 featherbear:
MIT Press Reader >69 featherbear:
New Criterion >65 featherbear:
Orion >51 featherbear:
Persuasion >58 featherbear:
The Public Domain Review >74 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 07: breakneck China -- Feb 04: Scorpions -- Feb 03: Floodlines --Feb 01: Borneo >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 06: This Is Where the Serpent Lives; reading as practice -- Feb 02: Survivor!; getting students to read novels >53 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 5: assisted dying >68 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 07: Infinite Jest's 30th & worth a read -- Feb 06: poetry review roundup; Helen of Nowhere; Madeleine Dunnigan's Jean: a novel -- Feb 05: Mark Haddon memoir; Sajid Javid memoir (former UK Home Secretary) -- Feb 04: future of species; Holocaust comedy -- Feb 03: Marwan Barghouti on Palestine; Kate Pickett on progressive policy; Ian McGuire novel on colonial greed -- Feb 02: Neil Gaiman denies allegations; Rebel English Academy: funny and subversive novel reckons with life under martial law in late-70s Pakistan -- Feb 01: reading & parents' dementia >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 07: collection of folk horror from the Asian diaspora; Edward Salem's new poetry collection Monk Fruit -- Feb 06: Oedipus from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy -- Feb 05: new translation of Antônio Xerxenesky's Uma tristeza infinita -- Feb 03: Empire of Madness; Chagos Archipelago -- Feb 02: Edward Said & intellectuals >52 featherbear:
Literary Review (UK monthly) Feb issue selections >55 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 06: reading the archives; City Lights bookstore & Lawrence Ferlinghetti excerpt -- Feb 04: Bertolt Brecht & Walter Benjamin collaboration (excerpt from the book); WaPo gutting books coverage; Russian dictionary & authoritarianism; 6 books on office culture -- Feb 03: Toni Morrison on Flannery O'Connor >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 06: good taste -- Feb 04: 2 books on sports gambling -- Feb 02: Daniel Poppick's The Copywriter; revolutionists of the 70s -- Feb 01: Jackie Robinson & Paul Robeson >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 26: >71 featherbear: -- Feb 12 >59 featherbear:
NYT Feb 07: Michael Pollan on consciousness; fictional take on the ethnics of eradicating an invasive species; new Allegra Goodman novel This Is Not About Us -- Feb 06: the end of mass market paperbacks -- Feb 05: Toni Morrison essentials; CIA World Factbook ends run after 6 decades; Cannabis true crime book; Cristina Rivea Garza interview -- Feb 04: André Kertész bio; Wuthering Heights; Bernie Sanders bio; Family Snitch; collected poems of Larry Levis -- Feb 03: Emily Nemans's Clutch; Afghan American teenager in Patmeena Sabit's Good People novel; David Poppick's The Copywriter -- Feb 02: Chuck Klosterman on football -- Feb 01: Lily Meyer's End of Romance; Gavin Newsom memoir >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 06: interviewing the authors of Jailhouse Lawyer --Feb 05: what PRoB staff are reading in early Feb; book reviewer laid off from WaPo; essay on Stuart Hall -- Feb 04: excerpt from a history of classical China; Capitalism a global history -- Feb 03: Pittsburgh beyond steel >62 featherbear:
TLS Feb 6 >67 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 06: menopause -- Feb 05: Bad Bunny bio; updated Kinks book -- Feb 04: one of Ron Charles's last book reviews for WaPo; Bob Dylan -- Feb 01: Infinite Jest anniversary >49 featherbear:
WaPo book section eliminated >70 featherbear:
Washington Monthly Feb 02: rise of Bernie Sanders >56 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week
bbc culture >63 featherbear:
Comics Journal >57 featherbear:
Erasmus Journal for philosophy & economics >66 featherbear:
MIT Press Reader >69 featherbear:
New Criterion >65 featherbear:
Orion >51 featherbear:
Persuasion >58 featherbear:
The Public Domain Review >74 featherbear:
76featherbear
Suzannah Lessard 1944-2026
Penelope Green. NYT, 02/07/2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/books/suzannah-lessard-dead.html">Suzannah Lessard Dies at 81; Stanford White Descendant Who Wrote a Haunting Family Memoir. "Growing up in a family of secrets, on a compound designed by her great-grandfather, made her a writer who investigated the built world with a wary eye."
"Suzannah Lessard, an author and writer for The New Yorker who examined the ways in which people are marked by place — and the ways in which they, in turn, mark the landscape — and whose best-selling memoir, “The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family,” explored the dark history of Mr. White, the Gilded Age architect who was her great-grandfather, died on Jan. 29 in Manhattan. She was 81.
"Ms. Lessard grew up in an extraordinary landscape, on a rambling compound that her family called “the Place” — much of it created by Mr. White — in a town on the North Shore of Long Island where her ancestors had settled in the 17th century.
"The extended White clan was artistic and aristocratic, the family tree dappled with Astors and Smiths. Ms. Lessard, her five sisters and their parents lived in a 19th-century farmhouse known as the Red Cottage. It had sloping floors, patched plaster walls and a fraught atmosphere, largely created by her father, who required quiet for his work as a composer, as well as other, more brutal concessions from his daughters.
"The centerpiece of the compound was Box Hill, a gabled confection designed by Mr. White, who was famous for the Beaux-Arts palaces he and his firm, McKim, Mead & White, created for America’s newly minted merchant-royals in the late 19th century — and for the scandal of his death.
"In 1906, while attending a musical performance on the roof of Madison Square Garden, one of the many Manhattan monuments of his design, he was fatally shot by Harry K. Thaw, a mentally unstable millionaire from Pittsburgh whose 21-year-old wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been sexually assaulted by Mr. White when she was 16.
"But his story, and those of Ms. Lessard’s eccentric and erratic family, were part of the environment: Willie Chanler, who threw his wooden leg to get a waiter’s attention; Uncle Johnny, who shot a horse because his mother mentioned that its upkeep was getting expensive; Amélie Rives, a novelist who by day took to bed and the succor of morphine, and by night roamed the woods in a white robe, where she was said to have been nearly shot by a servant who mistook her for a ghost.
"Ms. Lessard’s memoir was decades in the making. It was the book she could not write, and yet felt compelled to write, and the writer’s block she suffered often compromised her other work; for much of the time she was struggling with it, she was a staff writer at The New Yorker.
"She had grown up feeling nurtured and untethered by the beauty of the Place and the weight of its histories. In writing the book, she tried to untangle the roots of that precariousness, uncovering a legacy of destructive behavior and a code of silence that had been passed down from generation to generation.
"Ms. Lessard had never previously spoken about how her father had visited her in her bedroom when she was a child. Yet on New Year’s Day in 1989, one of her sisters called a meeting of the siblings and, one by one, each sister confided that she, too, had experienced sexual encounters with their father.
"Over the years, each had tried to convince herself that the encounters weren’t abuse — that their childhoods had been safe and that their father’s behavior was somehow normal. Their memories, finally voiced, gave Ms. Lessard “a sense of something like the sound barrier breaking,” she wrote, “a psychic reverberation.”
"With John Rothchild and Taylor Branch, she was one of the original editors of Washington Monthly, the iconoclastic magazine founded in 1969 by Charles Peters to poke holes in political orthodoxies and hold politicians to account.
"One of her first articles was about the gay liberation movement a year after the Stonewall uprising. It ran with the headline “Gay Is Good for Us All.”
"At The New Yorker, which she joined in the mid-1970s, Ms. Lessard had an enviable range: She wrote about Vietnam and the Cold War. She also wrote a meditation on waiting — for her baby, for a house to be built, for the Iran hostage crisis to end. She wrote about a ceramist who survived Stalin’s prisons. She wrote a social history of the two neighborhoods divided by 96th Street and Park Avenue, a vivid tale of wealth and scarcity.
"Ms. Lessard’s most recent book, “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape” (2019), was a collection of essays in which she plumbed the country’s layered geographies, noting the anomie of a bedroom in a hotel chain; the complicated history of Gettysburg, Pa.; and gentrification on the stoops of Brooklyn.
"“The connection to place remains deep,” she wrote, “touching the core of our being. Landscape is our mirror, our book of revelations, as always. This is where reorientation starts.”"
Suzannah Lessard's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/lessardsuzannah
Penelope Green. NYT, 02/07/2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/books/suzannah-lessard-dead.html">Suzannah Lessard Dies at 81; Stanford White Descendant Who Wrote a Haunting Family Memoir. "Growing up in a family of secrets, on a compound designed by her great-grandfather, made her a writer who investigated the built world with a wary eye."
"Suzannah Lessard, an author and writer for The New Yorker who examined the ways in which people are marked by place — and the ways in which they, in turn, mark the landscape — and whose best-selling memoir, “The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family,” explored the dark history of Mr. White, the Gilded Age architect who was her great-grandfather, died on Jan. 29 in Manhattan. She was 81.
"Ms. Lessard grew up in an extraordinary landscape, on a rambling compound that her family called “the Place” — much of it created by Mr. White — in a town on the North Shore of Long Island where her ancestors had settled in the 17th century.
"The extended White clan was artistic and aristocratic, the family tree dappled with Astors and Smiths. Ms. Lessard, her five sisters and their parents lived in a 19th-century farmhouse known as the Red Cottage. It had sloping floors, patched plaster walls and a fraught atmosphere, largely created by her father, who required quiet for his work as a composer, as well as other, more brutal concessions from his daughters.
"The centerpiece of the compound was Box Hill, a gabled confection designed by Mr. White, who was famous for the Beaux-Arts palaces he and his firm, McKim, Mead & White, created for America’s newly minted merchant-royals in the late 19th century — and for the scandal of his death.
"In 1906, while attending a musical performance on the roof of Madison Square Garden, one of the many Manhattan monuments of his design, he was fatally shot by Harry K. Thaw, a mentally unstable millionaire from Pittsburgh whose 21-year-old wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been sexually assaulted by Mr. White when she was 16.
"But his story, and those of Ms. Lessard’s eccentric and erratic family, were part of the environment: Willie Chanler, who threw his wooden leg to get a waiter’s attention; Uncle Johnny, who shot a horse because his mother mentioned that its upkeep was getting expensive; Amélie Rives, a novelist who by day took to bed and the succor of morphine, and by night roamed the woods in a white robe, where she was said to have been nearly shot by a servant who mistook her for a ghost.
"Ms. Lessard’s memoir was decades in the making. It was the book she could not write, and yet felt compelled to write, and the writer’s block she suffered often compromised her other work; for much of the time she was struggling with it, she was a staff writer at The New Yorker.
"She had grown up feeling nurtured and untethered by the beauty of the Place and the weight of its histories. In writing the book, she tried to untangle the roots of that precariousness, uncovering a legacy of destructive behavior and a code of silence that had been passed down from generation to generation.
"Ms. Lessard had never previously spoken about how her father had visited her in her bedroom when she was a child. Yet on New Year’s Day in 1989, one of her sisters called a meeting of the siblings and, one by one, each sister confided that she, too, had experienced sexual encounters with their father.
"Over the years, each had tried to convince herself that the encounters weren’t abuse — that their childhoods had been safe and that their father’s behavior was somehow normal. Their memories, finally voiced, gave Ms. Lessard “a sense of something like the sound barrier breaking,” she wrote, “a psychic reverberation.”
"With John Rothchild and Taylor Branch, she was one of the original editors of Washington Monthly, the iconoclastic magazine founded in 1969 by Charles Peters to poke holes in political orthodoxies and hold politicians to account.
"One of her first articles was about the gay liberation movement a year after the Stonewall uprising. It ran with the headline “Gay Is Good for Us All.”
"At The New Yorker, which she joined in the mid-1970s, Ms. Lessard had an enviable range: She wrote about Vietnam and the Cold War. She also wrote a meditation on waiting — for her baby, for a house to be built, for the Iran hostage crisis to end. She wrote about a ceramist who survived Stalin’s prisons. She wrote a social history of the two neighborhoods divided by 96th Street and Park Avenue, a vivid tale of wealth and scarcity.
"Ms. Lessard’s most recent book, “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape” (2019), was a collection of essays in which she plumbed the country’s layered geographies, noting the anomie of a bedroom in a hotel chain; the complicated history of Gettysburg, Pa.; and gentrification on the stoops of Brooklyn.
"“The connection to place remains deep,” she wrote, “touching the core of our being. Landscape is our mirror, our book of revelations, as always. This is where reorientation starts.”"
Suzannah Lessard's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/lessardsuzannah
77featherbear
The Critic (UK) February
Tista Austin. 02/23/2026: Nostalgic fantasies of the British Raj. Review of: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern India / Sam Dalrymple -- The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince / Imran Mulla.
Alexander Lee. 02/23/2026: Revolutionary faith: In just over 200 years, The Death of Marat has been copied, imitated and reimagined countless times. Review of: Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution / Thomas Crow.
The Secret Author. 02/20/2026: Publishing skewered — in 1939. Regarding: What's Become of Waring / Anthony Powell. "Anthony Powells’s pre-war novel is still the more reliable guide to the book business."
Michael Taube. 02/18/2026: The republican “we.” Review of: History Matters / David McCullough -- The Greatest Sentence Ever Written / Walter Isaacson.
John Ritzema. 02/17/2026: Power and the Crown. Review of: Royal Law: Prerogative Foundations / Robert Craig (Hart).
George Owers. 02/15/2026: Pollyannaish study is a missed opportunity. Review of: Being Victorian: How It Felt Then, Why It Matters Now / Jamie Camplin (Unicorn).
William Aslett. 02/13/2026: An elegant advocate for Van the man: John Vanbrugh may be the architect for our times. Review of: John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture / Charles Saumarez Smith.
Will Self. 02/12/2026: Life, imaginary love and forbidden lust. Review of: Blinding: The Left Wing / Mircea Cărtărescu; translator Sean Cotter -- The Ten Year Affair / Erin Somers -- A Domestic Animal / Francis King.
Tim Abrahams. 02/10/2026: The word from Britain’s streets: The gap between this history and today’s urban condition dilutes its relevance. Review of: The Modern British City 1945—2000 / edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler & Otto Saumarez Smith.
Andy Owen. 02/08/2026: The genre that came in from the cold: Why we love spy fiction.
Jeremy Black. 02/08/2026: Murders for February. Omnibus crime fiction review.
Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert. 02/08/2026: A persuasive critique of identity politics. Review of: Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us / Marie Kawthar Daouda (Polity).
Tista Austin. 02/23/2026: Nostalgic fantasies of the British Raj. Review of: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern India / Sam Dalrymple -- The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince / Imran Mulla.
Alexander Lee. 02/23/2026: Revolutionary faith: In just over 200 years, The Death of Marat has been copied, imitated and reimagined countless times. Review of: Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution / Thomas Crow.
The Secret Author. 02/20/2026: Publishing skewered — in 1939. Regarding: What's Become of Waring / Anthony Powell. "Anthony Powells’s pre-war novel is still the more reliable guide to the book business."
Michael Taube. 02/18/2026: The republican “we.” Review of: History Matters / David McCullough -- The Greatest Sentence Ever Written / Walter Isaacson.
John Ritzema. 02/17/2026: Power and the Crown. Review of: Royal Law: Prerogative Foundations / Robert Craig (Hart).
George Owers. 02/15/2026: Pollyannaish study is a missed opportunity. Review of: Being Victorian: How It Felt Then, Why It Matters Now / Jamie Camplin (Unicorn).
William Aslett. 02/13/2026: An elegant advocate for Van the man: John Vanbrugh may be the architect for our times. Review of: John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture / Charles Saumarez Smith.
Will Self. 02/12/2026: Life, imaginary love and forbidden lust. Review of: Blinding: The Left Wing / Mircea Cărtărescu; translator Sean Cotter -- The Ten Year Affair / Erin Somers -- A Domestic Animal / Francis King.
Tim Abrahams. 02/10/2026: The word from Britain’s streets: The gap between this history and today’s urban condition dilutes its relevance. Review of: The Modern British City 1945—2000 / edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler & Otto Saumarez Smith.
Andy Owen. 02/08/2026: The genre that came in from the cold: Why we love spy fiction.
Jeremy Black. 02/08/2026: Murders for February. Omnibus crime fiction review.
Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert. 02/08/2026: A persuasive critique of identity politics. Review of: Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us / Marie Kawthar Daouda (Polity).
78featherbear
fivebooks.com February 2026
Matt Abrahams, interviewer Benedict King. 02/25/2026: The best books on Communication:
Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up / Patricia Ryan Madson -- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die / Chip & Dan Heath -- Communicate with Mastery: Speak With Conviction and Write for Impact / J.D. Schramm w/Kara Levy -- Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life (And how anyone can harness it. Even you.) / Jennifer Aaker & Naomi Bagdonas -- Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves / Alison Wood Brooks.
Sofia Robleda, interviewer Cal Flynn. 02/24/2026: Historical Fiction Set in Latin America:
The Spanish Daughter / Lorena Hughes -- You Dreamed of Empires / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Winner -- A Ballad of Love and Glory: A Novel / Reyna Grande -- The House of the Spirits: A Novel / Isabel Allende -- The Great Divide / Cristina Henríquez.
fivebooks.com. 02/18/2026: Books Being Made into Movies in 2026 selected by Five Books.
Andrew Isenberg, interviewer Cal Flynn. 02/11/2026: The best books on Manifest Destiny:
Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 / Andrés Reséndez -- Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History) / Eric R. Schlereth -- Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States / Thomas Richards Jr. -- A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 / Daniel J. Burge -- The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History) / Andrew C. Isenberg.
Tuva Kahrs. 02/08/2026: The World’s Oldest Books:
The Literature of Ancient Sumer / Jeremy Black (Editor) -- Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic / translator Sophus Helle -- The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C. (Oxford World's Classics) / R.B. Parkinson -- The Rigveda (South Asia Research) / translators Stephanie W. Jamieson & Joel P. Brereton -- Book of Songs (Shi-Jing): A New Translation of Selected Poems from the Ancient Chinese Anthology (Chinese Bound) / Confucious; translator James Trapp.
Matt Abrahams, interviewer Benedict King. 02/25/2026: The best books on Communication:
Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up / Patricia Ryan Madson -- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die / Chip & Dan Heath -- Communicate with Mastery: Speak With Conviction and Write for Impact / J.D. Schramm w/Kara Levy -- Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life (And how anyone can harness it. Even you.) / Jennifer Aaker & Naomi Bagdonas -- Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves / Alison Wood Brooks.
Sofia Robleda, interviewer Cal Flynn. 02/24/2026: Historical Fiction Set in Latin America:
The Spanish Daughter / Lorena Hughes -- You Dreamed of Empires / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Winner -- A Ballad of Love and Glory: A Novel / Reyna Grande -- The House of the Spirits: A Novel / Isabel Allende -- The Great Divide / Cristina Henríquez.
fivebooks.com. 02/18/2026: Books Being Made into Movies in 2026 selected by Five Books.
Andrew Isenberg, interviewer Cal Flynn. 02/11/2026: The best books on Manifest Destiny:
Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 / Andrés Reséndez -- Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History) / Eric R. Schlereth -- Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States / Thomas Richards Jr. -- A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 / Daniel J. Burge -- The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History) / Andrew C. Isenberg.
Tuva Kahrs. 02/08/2026: The World’s Oldest Books:
The Literature of Ancient Sumer / Jeremy Black (Editor) -- Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic / translator Sophus Helle -- The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C. (Oxford World's Classics) / R.B. Parkinson -- The Rigveda (South Asia Research) / translators Stephanie W. Jamieson & Joel P. Brereton -- Book of Songs (Shi-Jing): A New Translation of Selected Poems from the Ancient Chinese Anthology (Chinese Bound) / Confucious; translator James Trapp.
79featherbear
Paris Review February 2026
Barrett Brown. 02/12/2026: The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept.
John Yau. 02/10/2026: At the Movies with John Ashbery.
Rosa Shipley. 02/06/2026: The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Barrett Brown. 02/12/2026: The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept.
John Yau. 02/10/2026: At the Movies with John Ashbery.
Rosa Shipley. 02/06/2026: The Garden of Earthly Delights.
80featherbear
Cleveland Review of Books February 2026
Isabel Jacobs. 02/10/2026: A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève.” Review of: The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève / Marco Filoni; translated from the Italian by David Broder -- Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography / Boris Groys.
Joshua Sperling. 02/03/2026: Capsules of Dismay: On A.S. Hamrah’s Anti-Criticism. Review of: Algorithm of the Night / A.S. Hamrah -- Last Week in End Times Cinema / A.S. Hamrah.
Isabel Jacobs. 02/10/2026: A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève.” Review of: The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève / Marco Filoni; translated from the Italian by David Broder -- Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography / Boris Groys.
Joshua Sperling. 02/03/2026: Capsules of Dismay: On A.S. Hamrah’s Anti-Criticism. Review of: Algorithm of the Night / A.S. Hamrah -- Last Week in End Times Cinema / A.S. Hamrah.
81featherbear
Aeon February 2026
Dane Leigh Gogoshin. 02/20/2026: Going-against-the-grainers: If our ethical beliefs come from our social environment, how do some people find the moral courage to defy convention? Review of the philosophical literature, using Huck Finn's moral dilemmas as a jumping off point. Touchstone: Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain.
Carlo Iacono. 02/19/2026: Books and screens: Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time.
Carlos Alberto Sánchez. 02/17/2026: Mexistentialism: The Mexican embrace of uncertainty, forged in the crucible of history, captures the true vulnerability of our existence.
Charlie Ericson. 02/12/2026: Subverting hell: In their visions of the underworld Dante and Milton were truly subversive, incorporating predecessors into their own repudiation.
Yogi Hale Hendlin. 02/10/2026: Compost modernity!: The vision of solarpunk: joining nature with technology in vibrantly inclusive ways to create a world that truly blooms.
Dane Leigh Gogoshin. 02/20/2026: Going-against-the-grainers: If our ethical beliefs come from our social environment, how do some people find the moral courage to defy convention? Review of the philosophical literature, using Huck Finn's moral dilemmas as a jumping off point. Touchstone: Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain.
Carlo Iacono. 02/19/2026: Books and screens: Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time.
Carlos Alberto Sánchez. 02/17/2026: Mexistentialism: The Mexican embrace of uncertainty, forged in the crucible of history, captures the true vulnerability of our existence.
Charlie Ericson. 02/12/2026: Subverting hell: In their visions of the underworld Dante and Milton were truly subversive, incorporating predecessors into their own repudiation.
Yogi Hale Hendlin. 02/10/2026: Compost modernity!: The vision of solarpunk: joining nature with technology in vibrantly inclusive ways to create a world that truly blooms.
82featherbear
Jacques L. Rancourt. Poetry Foundation, 01/12/2026: Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis.
83featherbear
Hudson Talbott, 1949-2026
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 02/10/2026: Hudson Talbott Dies at 76; Wrote and Illustrated Wide-Ranging Children’s Books.
"Before Mr. Talbott published more than 20 children’s books on subjects as diverse as Arthurian legend, the Holocaust and the 19th-century painter Thomas Cole, he was a freelance artist whose 1987 dinosaur calendar, published the previous fall, reimagined prehistoric creatures as oversize pets in contemporary settings — including a Tyrannosaurus Rex catching a Frisbee thrown by a boy.
“Drawing them gave me a sense of returning to something that I was very fond of when I was a little kid,” he told The Advocate of Stamford, Conn.
"David Allender, an editor of children’s books at Crown Publishers, spotted the calendar at a Barnes & Noble. He was so impressed with the amusing watercolors that he looked up Mr. Talbott in the Manhattan phone book, called him and asked him to write what became “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” (1987).
"In the book, the dinosaurs ingest multivitamins that turn them into intelligent beings. They are then transported to 20th-century New York, where they head to the American Museum of Natural History. But along the way they inadvertently start a panic when one of them greets a dinosaur balloon in a Thanksgiving parade, thinking it’s a friend, and accidentally destroys it.
"As a child, he showed artistic talent, but he had difficulty reading; he discovered later in life that he had dyslexia. In his semi-autobiographical book “A Walk in the Words” (2021), he wrote that drawing allowed him to disappear into a safe world all his own.
“I was the slowest reader in my class,” he wrote. “When everybody was turning to the next page, I was still on the first sentence. Nobody knew. But the books knew! And they were coming for me!”
"After working as an artist in Europe and Hong Kong, he moved to New York in 1974. Over the next dozen years, his clients included the Museum of Modern Art, which hired him in 1985 to illustrate his first children’s book, “How to Show Grown-Ups the Museum,” and Bloomingdale’s, for which he created greeting cards, calendars and posters to commemorate the Statue of Liberty’s centennial in 1986.
"After “We’re Back!,” Mr. Talbott’s books included two more about dinosaurs and four about Arthurian legend, including “King Arthur: The Sword in the Stone” (1991). Another, “Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust” (2000), focuses on his friend Jaap Penraat, who saved more than 400 Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by giving them forged documents; in 1997, Mr. Penraat was designated Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.
"Mr. Talbott won the Newbery Honor for his illustrations for Jacqueline Woodson’s “Show Way” (2005), tracing the history of seven generations of girls and women in Ms. Woodson’s family — all of them quilters — from enslavement to freedom.
"Mr. Talbott’s final book, “The Next Shiny Object,” is scheduled to be published later this year. It is another semi-autobiographical story, about a boy with an extremely active imagination — the term “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” never comes up — and a roaming curiosity, and the challenges he faces.
"The book is a natural sequel to “A Walk in the Words,” which ends with the boy learning to read by going slowly and savoring the words.
"In 2022, Mr. Talbott spoke by Zoom to dyslexic students at a school in Richmond, Va., telling them that, as a child, he had dealt with his own challenges by spending too much time alone — “and nobody was there to help me, and it wasn’t their fault because I was hiding it.”
“If I could go back in time,” he added, “I would try to say to me, as a little boy, ‘Don’t be ashamed. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You are who you are, and you read the way you read.’”
Hudson Talbott's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/talbotthudson
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 02/10/2026: Hudson Talbott Dies at 76; Wrote and Illustrated Wide-Ranging Children’s Books.
"Before Mr. Talbott published more than 20 children’s books on subjects as diverse as Arthurian legend, the Holocaust and the 19th-century painter Thomas Cole, he was a freelance artist whose 1987 dinosaur calendar, published the previous fall, reimagined prehistoric creatures as oversize pets in contemporary settings — including a Tyrannosaurus Rex catching a Frisbee thrown by a boy.
“Drawing them gave me a sense of returning to something that I was very fond of when I was a little kid,” he told The Advocate of Stamford, Conn.
"David Allender, an editor of children’s books at Crown Publishers, spotted the calendar at a Barnes & Noble. He was so impressed with the amusing watercolors that he looked up Mr. Talbott in the Manhattan phone book, called him and asked him to write what became “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” (1987).
"In the book, the dinosaurs ingest multivitamins that turn them into intelligent beings. They are then transported to 20th-century New York, where they head to the American Museum of Natural History. But along the way they inadvertently start a panic when one of them greets a dinosaur balloon in a Thanksgiving parade, thinking it’s a friend, and accidentally destroys it.
"As a child, he showed artistic talent, but he had difficulty reading; he discovered later in life that he had dyslexia. In his semi-autobiographical book “A Walk in the Words” (2021), he wrote that drawing allowed him to disappear into a safe world all his own.
“I was the slowest reader in my class,” he wrote. “When everybody was turning to the next page, I was still on the first sentence. Nobody knew. But the books knew! And they were coming for me!”
"After working as an artist in Europe and Hong Kong, he moved to New York in 1974. Over the next dozen years, his clients included the Museum of Modern Art, which hired him in 1985 to illustrate his first children’s book, “How to Show Grown-Ups the Museum,” and Bloomingdale’s, for which he created greeting cards, calendars and posters to commemorate the Statue of Liberty’s centennial in 1986.
"After “We’re Back!,” Mr. Talbott’s books included two more about dinosaurs and four about Arthurian legend, including “King Arthur: The Sword in the Stone” (1991). Another, “Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust” (2000), focuses on his friend Jaap Penraat, who saved more than 400 Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by giving them forged documents; in 1997, Mr. Penraat was designated Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.
"Mr. Talbott won the Newbery Honor for his illustrations for Jacqueline Woodson’s “Show Way” (2005), tracing the history of seven generations of girls and women in Ms. Woodson’s family — all of them quilters — from enslavement to freedom.
"Mr. Talbott’s final book, “The Next Shiny Object,” is scheduled to be published later this year. It is another semi-autobiographical story, about a boy with an extremely active imagination — the term “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” never comes up — and a roaming curiosity, and the challenges he faces.
"The book is a natural sequel to “A Walk in the Words,” which ends with the boy learning to read by going slowly and savoring the words.
"In 2022, Mr. Talbott spoke by Zoom to dyslexic students at a school in Richmond, Va., telling them that, as a child, he had dealt with his own challenges by spending too much time alone — “and nobody was there to help me, and it wasn’t their fault because I was hiding it.”
“If I could go back in time,” he added, “I would try to say to me, as a little boy, ‘Don’t be ashamed. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You are who you are, and you read the way you read.’”
Hudson Talbott's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/talbotthudson
84featherbear
Boston Review February 2026
Vivian Gornick. winter 2026: Turning a Blind Eye: A memoir of daily accommodation to fascism. Regarding the reissue of: Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood / Joachim Fest; translation Martin Chalmers.
Marie Gottschalk. winter 2026: The Making of the Deportation Machine. Review of: The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration / Brianna Nofil -- The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy / Jessica Pishko -- The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America / Michelle S. Phelps -- Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News / Alec Karakatsanis.
Vivian Gornick. winter 2026: Turning a Blind Eye: A memoir of daily accommodation to fascism. Regarding the reissue of: Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood / Joachim Fest; translation Martin Chalmers.
Marie Gottschalk. winter 2026: The Making of the Deportation Machine. Review of: The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration / Brianna Nofil -- The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy / Jessica Pishko -- The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America / Michelle S. Phelps -- Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News / Alec Karakatsanis.
85featherbear
Jonathan Bate. Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains, 02/10/2026: Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw: The History of a Misreading.
86featherbear
Cees Nooteboom, 1933-2026
Philip Oltermann. Guardian, 02/11/2026: Cees Nooteboom, Dutch novelist and travel writer, dies aged 92. "Writer made international breakthrough with 1980 novel Rituals and won acclaim for his travel writing."
Madeleine Thien. Guardian, 02/13/2026: The bristling wit and melancholy of Cees Nooteboom came to me when I needed it most.
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 02/19/2026: Cees Nooteboom, Voyaging Author of Enigmatic Novels, Dies at 92. "A prolific Dutch writer of fiction, poetry and travel books, he was often mentioned as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature."
Cees Nooteboom's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/nooteboomcees
Philip Oltermann. Guardian, 02/11/2026: Cees Nooteboom, Dutch novelist and travel writer, dies aged 92. "Writer made international breakthrough with 1980 novel Rituals and won acclaim for his travel writing."
Madeleine Thien. Guardian, 02/13/2026: The bristling wit and melancholy of Cees Nooteboom came to me when I needed it most.
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 02/19/2026: Cees Nooteboom, Voyaging Author of Enigmatic Novels, Dies at 92. "A prolific Dutch writer of fiction, poetry and travel books, he was often mentioned as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature."
Cees Nooteboom's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/nooteboomcees
87featherbear
Shawna Lipton. Public Books, 02/12/2026: Emily Brontë in Her Smut Era: The Romance Rebranding of “Wuthering Heights.”. Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte.
88featherbear
Mitchell Kaplan. Miami New Times, 02/11/2026: Worse Than Before: Florida Eyes New Tactics for School Book Bans. "New Florida bills would expand book bans and deny students literature’s full context and value."
89featherbear
February 2026 updates 08-14
Aeon Feb 12: subverting Hell -- Feb 10: nature & technology >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 14: Indian prisoners of war in WWII -- Feb 13: Kwan Ann Tan's The Waiter -- Feb 10: end of the Ottoman Empire -- Feb 09: Tojo >47 featherbear:
The Atlantic Feb 14: on the 30th anniversary of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations -- Feb 13: Brooke Neville's MeToo memoir; reactionary Rod Dreher profile -- Feb 12: Mellon Foundation & the humanities --Feb 10: Last Kings of Hollywood; Young Tennyson; Lionel Shriver's A Better Life -- Feb 08: Drew Gilpin Faust reviews new book on Confederate prison camps >53 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books Feb 10: 2 books on Alexandre Kojève >80 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 13: architect John Vanbrugh -- Feb 12: Will Self on novels by Mircea Cărtărescu, Erin Somers, & a reissue by Francis King -- Feb 08: why spy fiction is popular; February crime fiction roundup; critique of identity politics >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 11: Manifest Destiny -- Feb 08: the oldest books >78 featherbear:
The Guardian Feb 13: SF, fantasy, & horror roundup; Patmeena Sabit's mystery novel -- Feb 12: top ten literature call outs in songs; Super Nintendo; The True True Story of Raja the Gullible -- Feb 11: positive effect of reading/writing on dementia; Ian Buruma's new book on Berlin during WWII -- Feb 10: Black soldiers in Vietnam; plot to blow up St Paul's Cathedral (novel); ending slavery in the Americas -- Feb 08: interview with Michael Pollan regarding his new book on consciousness >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 13: baroque art & theological debates of the Counter-Reformation -- Feb 12: Pat Cadigan's Synners reissued; Grateful Dead & the limits of philosophy -- Feb 11: China outliers: 2 books on Taiwan & Hong Kong -- Feb 10: Urszula Honek's White Nights (stories) -- Feb 09: Terry Eagleton on modernism >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 13: dating tips for the bookish; Holocaust literature -- Feb 12: the 25th Amendment & fiction -- Feb 11: Super Nintendo; introduction to the translation of Halldór Laxness's A Parish Chronicle -- Feb 10: -- Feb 10: Gerald Howard on the end of the WaPo Bookworld; Kenan Orhan's 2 Istanbuls -- Ed Simon on the attraction of contemporary fascism to the classics -- Feb 09: Audre Lorde's Zami >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 14: excerpt from Christopher Beha's book on eschewing atheism -- Feb 10: death of WaPo's Book World -- Feb 09: origins of the toy industry in the US >54 featherbear:
NYT Feb 13: Kindle cure for insomnia (from Wirecutter) -- Feb 12: Ruby Ridge as portent; Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence to be a series on Netflix -- Feb 11: Elizabeth Bathory the Blood Countess; Young Tennyson; Emilio Pucci bio; publishers' designs frustrated by the latest news; Murder Bimbo -- Feb 10: How to Feel Loved; Baking and the Meaning of Life-- Feb 09: SARASWATI, by Gurnaik Johal; The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home; Iris Murdoch's poems found -- Feb 08: Lionel Shriver's A Better Life; profile of Haruki Murakami at 77 >48 featherbear:
Paris Review Feb 12: Rosicrucians as ur-conspiracy theory -- Feb 10: John Ashbery on movies -- Feb 06: Hieronymos Bosch >79 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 13: excerpt from Ed Simon's book on the Apocalypse -- Feb 12: interview w/Lauren D. Woods; PRoB class is reading ... ; misusing Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Feb 11: excerpt from forthcoming essay collection by Anna Badkhen; Joseph Bathanti's East Liberty; excerpt from By Flesh & Toil (the early French empire) -- Feb 10: excerpt from new book on Native Americans & race -- Feb 09: Thoreau's relevance; Ed Simon interviews Geoff Peck regarding City of Clans >62 featherbear:
Public Books Feb 13: rebranding Wuthering Heights >87 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 13: Super Nintendo -- Feb 12: Last Kings of Hollywood; 5 new historical novels -- Feb 08: canceling Pepys; Allegra Goodman's This Is Not About Us >49 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week
Aeon >81 featherbear:
Boston Review >84 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books >80 featherbear:
Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains >85 featherbear:
Miami New Times >88 featherbear:
Paris Review >79 featherbear:
Poetry Foundation >82 featherbear:
Aeon Feb 12: subverting Hell -- Feb 10: nature & technology >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 14: Indian prisoners of war in WWII -- Feb 13: Kwan Ann Tan's The Waiter -- Feb 10: end of the Ottoman Empire -- Feb 09: Tojo >47 featherbear:
The Atlantic Feb 14: on the 30th anniversary of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations -- Feb 13: Brooke Neville's MeToo memoir; reactionary Rod Dreher profile -- Feb 12: Mellon Foundation & the humanities --Feb 10: Last Kings of Hollywood; Young Tennyson; Lionel Shriver's A Better Life -- Feb 08: Drew Gilpin Faust reviews new book on Confederate prison camps >53 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books Feb 10: 2 books on Alexandre Kojève >80 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 13: architect John Vanbrugh -- Feb 12: Will Self on novels by Mircea Cărtărescu, Erin Somers, & a reissue by Francis King -- Feb 08: why spy fiction is popular; February crime fiction roundup; critique of identity politics >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 11: Manifest Destiny -- Feb 08: the oldest books >78 featherbear:
The Guardian Feb 13: SF, fantasy, & horror roundup; Patmeena Sabit's mystery novel -- Feb 12: top ten literature call outs in songs; Super Nintendo; The True True Story of Raja the Gullible -- Feb 11: positive effect of reading/writing on dementia; Ian Buruma's new book on Berlin during WWII -- Feb 10: Black soldiers in Vietnam; plot to blow up St Paul's Cathedral (novel); ending slavery in the Americas -- Feb 08: interview with Michael Pollan regarding his new book on consciousness >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 13: baroque art & theological debates of the Counter-Reformation -- Feb 12: Pat Cadigan's Synners reissued; Grateful Dead & the limits of philosophy -- Feb 11: China outliers: 2 books on Taiwan & Hong Kong -- Feb 10: Urszula Honek's White Nights (stories) -- Feb 09: Terry Eagleton on modernism >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 13: dating tips for the bookish; Holocaust literature -- Feb 12: the 25th Amendment & fiction -- Feb 11: Super Nintendo; introduction to the translation of Halldór Laxness's A Parish Chronicle -- Feb 10: -- Feb 10: Gerald Howard on the end of the WaPo Bookworld; Kenan Orhan's 2 Istanbuls -- Ed Simon on the attraction of contemporary fascism to the classics -- Feb 09: Audre Lorde's Zami >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 14: excerpt from Christopher Beha's book on eschewing atheism -- Feb 10: death of WaPo's Book World -- Feb 09: origins of the toy industry in the US >54 featherbear:
NYT Feb 13: Kindle cure for insomnia (from Wirecutter) -- Feb 12: Ruby Ridge as portent; Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence to be a series on Netflix -- Feb 11: Elizabeth Bathory the Blood Countess; Young Tennyson; Emilio Pucci bio; publishers' designs frustrated by the latest news; Murder Bimbo -- Feb 10: How to Feel Loved; Baking and the Meaning of Life-- Feb 09: SARASWATI, by Gurnaik Johal; The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home; Iris Murdoch's poems found -- Feb 08: Lionel Shriver's A Better Life; profile of Haruki Murakami at 77 >48 featherbear:
Paris Review Feb 12: Rosicrucians as ur-conspiracy theory -- Feb 10: John Ashbery on movies -- Feb 06: Hieronymos Bosch >79 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 13: excerpt from Ed Simon's book on the Apocalypse -- Feb 12: interview w/Lauren D. Woods; PRoB class is reading ... ; misusing Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Feb 11: excerpt from forthcoming essay collection by Anna Badkhen; Joseph Bathanti's East Liberty; excerpt from By Flesh & Toil (the early French empire) -- Feb 10: excerpt from new book on Native Americans & race -- Feb 09: Thoreau's relevance; Ed Simon interviews Geoff Peck regarding City of Clans >62 featherbear:
Public Books Feb 13: rebranding Wuthering Heights >87 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 13: Super Nintendo -- Feb 12: Last Kings of Hollywood; 5 new historical novels -- Feb 08: canceling Pepys; Allegra Goodman's This Is Not About Us >49 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week
Aeon >81 featherbear:
Boston Review >84 featherbear:
Cleveland Review of Books >80 featherbear:
Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains >85 featherbear:
Miami New Times >88 featherbear:
Paris Review >79 featherbear:
Poetry Foundation >82 featherbear:
90featherbear
Roy Medvedev, 1925-2026
Robert D. McFadden. NYT, 02/14/2026: Roy Medvedev, Soviet Era Historian and Dissident, Is Dead at 100. "His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions, Communist repressions and censorship, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia."
"Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian whose books on Stalin’s crimes and Communism’s excesses made him a political outcast for decades, and then a rehabilitated voice of conscience as an invalid Soviet Union stumbled toward collapse, died on Friday. He was 100.
"In the palindromic world of Soviet-speak, where things proclaimed false were often real and things proclaimed real were often false, Mr. Medvedev was an internationally known nonperson — a Marxist writer of power and insight who did not change his socialist democratic message, but came full circle, from villain to hero, as history turned around him.
"Taken together, his score of books and hundreds of essays became the story of the Soviet era from 1917 to 1991, documenting Stalinist executions that mounted into the millions; Communist dictatorships that imposed sweeping repressions, censorship and state controls over ordinary lives; and the transition under Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin to post-Soviet Russia.
"In the West, he was known as the most independent historian of the era. His major works, including his best-known book, “Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism” (1971), were published abroad, but circulated underground at home under the radar of censorship.
"Unlike other Soviet dissident writers, including his twin brother, Zhores A. Medvedev, who died in London in 2018, and the Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who died near Moscow in 2008, Roy Medvedev managed to avoid imprisonment and forced exile.
"But for 20 years after his calls for democratic reforms first appeared in samizdat (clandestine) journals in the mid-1960s, he was persona non grata. The authorities subjected him to house arrest, ransacked his apartment, seized his research, accused him of slandering the nation and expelled him from the Communist Party. Still, he remained loyal to the party and the nation and insisted that changes must come from within.
"In 1989, Mr. Medvedev was reinstated by the Communist Party, elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies and elevated to prominence as a social and political critic. A year later, he became a member of the party’s Central Committee, the ruling elite that had scorned him. “I didn’t change my views,” he said at the time. “A turnabout occurred in the party, the Central Committee. They stopped discriminating against me.”
"By then, there had even been calls for unbanning his books. The Communist youth weekly Sobesednik in 1988 portrayed him as an old hero. “We hope that soon the Soviet reader can also become acquainted with the works of our unyielding countryman, Roy Medvedev — sharp, polemical, controversial, appealing to the voice of conscience in each of us, surprisingly true and sincere,” it said. “The times demand these books.”
"Restored to respectability, Mr. Medvedev in 1989 published the most detailed accounting of Stalinist atrocities ever presented to a mass audience in the Soviet Union, writing in the national weekly Argumenti i Fakti (circulation 20 million) that 20 million people had died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions, and that 40 million had been arrested, driven from their lands or blacklisted.
In 1990, “Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation,” by Mr. Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent of the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità, detailed Mr. Gorbachev’s tenure in a nation battered by economic problems, crime and ethnic conflicts, and moving toward collapse even as Mr. Yeltsin began to emerge as his successor.
"Mr. Medvedev became a consultant to Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin and, over the next decade, he wrote political biographies of the Soviet leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev and Yuri V. Andropov, and volumes on capitalism and politics in post-Soviet Russia as well as on Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin as president.
"That book, sometimes translated as “Putin’s Time?,” appeared in 2002 and was soon on sale in the Kremlin bookshop. It detailed Mr. Putin’s K.G.B. work and the early stages of his rise to power and painted him, as he said in an interview at the time, as part of a “sober and pragmatic” generation born after World War II.
"The work’s hopeful portrait — of a leader with “character and intellect” — came too soon to document Mr. Putin’s suppression of Russian democracy and political opponents, his annexation of Crimea and his invasion of Ukraine, which drew international economic sanctions and condemnation.
"In “On Socialist Democracy,” published in the United States in 1975, Mr. Medvedev identified himself with a small group of Communists who favored democratization of Soviet society, civil rights, free elections, a multiparty system and decentralized government. To advance these ideas, he founded an underground journal, Twentieth Century, in 1975. The authorities closed it after 10 issues.
But his books reached the West with drumbeat regularity: “Khrushchev: The Years in Power” (1976), with Zhores; “Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov" (1977); “Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War” (1978), with Sergei Starikov; “The October Revolution” and “On Stalin and Stalinism” (both 1979); “Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years” and “On Soviet Dissent” (both 1980); “Leninism and Western Socialism” (1981); “An End to Silence” (1982); “Khrushchev” (1983); and “All Stalin’s Men” (1984).
"Roy and Zhores Medvedev often criticized what they regarded as abuses by the West, particularly in stockpiling nuclear armaments. In “A Nuclear Samizdat on America’s Arms Race,” published in The Nation in 1982, they condemned American Cold War attitudes as “primitive” and tending to “greatly oversimplify complex social and historical processes.” In 1983, Roy Medvedev accused President Ronald Reagan of bombast in calling the Soviet Union an “empire of evil.”
"Western critics sometimes disagreed with Mr. Medvedev’s evaluations, and some said his hopes for a democratic Russia were pipe dreams. He was often accused of biases of selection and of playing loose with facts for the sake of an argument. His writing, though exhaustive, was not of great literary quality, some said, but the patient reader was rewarded with thorough research, an insider’s knowledge and insightful conclusions."
Roy Medvedev LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/medvedevroy
Robert D. McFadden. NYT, 02/14/2026: Roy Medvedev, Soviet Era Historian and Dissident, Is Dead at 100. "His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions, Communist repressions and censorship, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia."
"Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian whose books on Stalin’s crimes and Communism’s excesses made him a political outcast for decades, and then a rehabilitated voice of conscience as an invalid Soviet Union stumbled toward collapse, died on Friday. He was 100.
"In the palindromic world of Soviet-speak, where things proclaimed false were often real and things proclaimed real were often false, Mr. Medvedev was an internationally known nonperson — a Marxist writer of power and insight who did not change his socialist democratic message, but came full circle, from villain to hero, as history turned around him.
"Taken together, his score of books and hundreds of essays became the story of the Soviet era from 1917 to 1991, documenting Stalinist executions that mounted into the millions; Communist dictatorships that imposed sweeping repressions, censorship and state controls over ordinary lives; and the transition under Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin to post-Soviet Russia.
"In the West, he was known as the most independent historian of the era. His major works, including his best-known book, “Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism” (1971), were published abroad, but circulated underground at home under the radar of censorship.
"Unlike other Soviet dissident writers, including his twin brother, Zhores A. Medvedev, who died in London in 2018, and the Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who died near Moscow in 2008, Roy Medvedev managed to avoid imprisonment and forced exile.
"But for 20 years after his calls for democratic reforms first appeared in samizdat (clandestine) journals in the mid-1960s, he was persona non grata. The authorities subjected him to house arrest, ransacked his apartment, seized his research, accused him of slandering the nation and expelled him from the Communist Party. Still, he remained loyal to the party and the nation and insisted that changes must come from within.
"In 1989, Mr. Medvedev was reinstated by the Communist Party, elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies and elevated to prominence as a social and political critic. A year later, he became a member of the party’s Central Committee, the ruling elite that had scorned him. “I didn’t change my views,” he said at the time. “A turnabout occurred in the party, the Central Committee. They stopped discriminating against me.”
"By then, there had even been calls for unbanning his books. The Communist youth weekly Sobesednik in 1988 portrayed him as an old hero. “We hope that soon the Soviet reader can also become acquainted with the works of our unyielding countryman, Roy Medvedev — sharp, polemical, controversial, appealing to the voice of conscience in each of us, surprisingly true and sincere,” it said. “The times demand these books.”
"Restored to respectability, Mr. Medvedev in 1989 published the most detailed accounting of Stalinist atrocities ever presented to a mass audience in the Soviet Union, writing in the national weekly Argumenti i Fakti (circulation 20 million) that 20 million people had died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions, and that 40 million had been arrested, driven from their lands or blacklisted.
In 1990, “Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation,” by Mr. Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent of the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità, detailed Mr. Gorbachev’s tenure in a nation battered by economic problems, crime and ethnic conflicts, and moving toward collapse even as Mr. Yeltsin began to emerge as his successor.
"Mr. Medvedev became a consultant to Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin and, over the next decade, he wrote political biographies of the Soviet leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev and Yuri V. Andropov, and volumes on capitalism and politics in post-Soviet Russia as well as on Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin as president.
"That book, sometimes translated as “Putin’s Time?,” appeared in 2002 and was soon on sale in the Kremlin bookshop. It detailed Mr. Putin’s K.G.B. work and the early stages of his rise to power and painted him, as he said in an interview at the time, as part of a “sober and pragmatic” generation born after World War II.
"The work’s hopeful portrait — of a leader with “character and intellect” — came too soon to document Mr. Putin’s suppression of Russian democracy and political opponents, his annexation of Crimea and his invasion of Ukraine, which drew international economic sanctions and condemnation.
"In “On Socialist Democracy,” published in the United States in 1975, Mr. Medvedev identified himself with a small group of Communists who favored democratization of Soviet society, civil rights, free elections, a multiparty system and decentralized government. To advance these ideas, he founded an underground journal, Twentieth Century, in 1975. The authorities closed it after 10 issues.
But his books reached the West with drumbeat regularity: “Khrushchev: The Years in Power” (1976), with Zhores; “Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov" (1977); “Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War” (1978), with Sergei Starikov; “The October Revolution” and “On Stalin and Stalinism” (both 1979); “Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years” and “On Soviet Dissent” (both 1980); “Leninism and Western Socialism” (1981); “An End to Silence” (1982); “Khrushchev” (1983); and “All Stalin’s Men” (1984).
"Roy and Zhores Medvedev often criticized what they regarded as abuses by the West, particularly in stockpiling nuclear armaments. In “A Nuclear Samizdat on America’s Arms Race,” published in The Nation in 1982, they condemned American Cold War attitudes as “primitive” and tending to “greatly oversimplify complex social and historical processes.” In 1983, Roy Medvedev accused President Ronald Reagan of bombast in calling the Soviet Union an “empire of evil.”
"Western critics sometimes disagreed with Mr. Medvedev’s evaluations, and some said his hopes for a democratic Russia were pipe dreams. He was often accused of biases of selection and of playing loose with facts for the sake of an argument. His writing, though exhaustive, was not of great literary quality, some said, but the patient reader was rewarded with thorough research, an insider’s knowledge and insightful conclusions."
Roy Medvedev LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/medvedevroy
91featherbear
TLS February 20 2026 No. 6399
Featured
Mary Beard. 02/17/2026 (from her blog on the TLS current issue page: Hotel reading.
Michael Dirda. The last chapter: Bidding farewell to the Washington Post’s Book World. (Essay)
Carlo Rovelli. Here and now: The nature of time: a conceptual revolution. Review of: In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment UK subtitle: The science and mystery of the present moment / Jo Marchant (US publisher: Liveright; UK: Canongate) -- Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, order, and a new law of nature / Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong.
Judith Herrin. Weathering the storm: How Byzantium survived for centuries. Review of: History of the Byzantine Empire / Fyodor Uspensky; translated and edited by Dean Marais (Based; 5 v.) -- Byzantium: Economy, society, institutions / James Howard-Johnston -- Byzantium in a Changing World / James Howard-Johnston -- Worlds of Byzantium: Religion, culture, and empire in the medieval Near East / Elizabeth S. Bolman, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and Jack Tannous, editors.
Nile Green. Friends of God: The sacred and the secular in Muslim histories. Review of: Islam: A new history from Muhammad to the present / John Tolan -- Worlds of Islam: A global history / James McDougall -- Crucible of Light: Islam and the Forging of European Civilization UK subtitle: Islam and the forging of Europe from the eighth to the twenty-first century / Elizabeth Drayson (US publisher: Pegasus Books; UK: Picador) -- Muslim Europe: A journey in search of a fourteen-hundred year history / Tharik Hussain.
Literature
Tim Parks. More of the same: Replicating a well-loved fictional series. (Essay)
James Purdon. More than a jingo: More than a jingo. Review of: John Buchan Reconsidered: Thirty-nine years of war and peace 1901–1940 / Marcus Paul, editor -- The Strange Stories of John Buchan / John Buchan; edited by James Machin (British Library).
Leon Craig. Devilish work: Marjorie Bowen’s supernatural fiction. Review of: Black Magic / Marjorie Bowen -- Julia Roseingrave / Marjorie Bowen.
John Garth. Master of Middle-earth: The inspiration behind J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbit craft. Review of: The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation / Michael D. C. Drout -- Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation / Giuseppe Pezzini.
Vanessa Curtis. Restless spirit: A tortured writer and the one man who stood by her. Review of: Katherine Mansfield: A hidden life / Gerri Kimber.
Emer Nolan. ‘I am feminine, morbid, perverse’: The youthful confessions of an Irish Decadent. Review of: Confessions of a Young Man / George Moore; edited by Matthew Creasy.
Andrew Holter. Cultivating her garden: Irreverent, serious and sarcastic essays by the Antiguan-American writer. Review of: Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– / Jamaica Kincaid.
Lily Herd. Welcoming her luck: Stories of New York subcultures and things hiding in plain sight. Review of: Joyride: A memoir / Susan Orlean.
Marco Ramírez Rojas. Just the unicorn: A survey of Julio Cortázar’s poetry. Review of: Poesía / Julio Cortázar (Alfaguara).
Amanda Dennis. No country for women: Femicide and revolution in Mexico. Review of: La Realidad / Neige Sinno (POL).
Eric Naiman. Among the living dead: The last gasp of Petersburg culture under the Bolsheviks. Review of: Goat Song / Konstantin Vaginov; translated by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula (NYRB Books).
Jonathan Gibbs. Unsighted but seen: An elemental struggle in the wilds of Patagonia. Review of: The Puma / Daniel Wiles.
M. John Harrison. High and hard to climb: A cinematic novel of cliff-face ambition. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Emily Barton. What’s with everyone?: Stories of brooding, obsession and wit. Review of: One Sun Only / Camille Bordas.
Rachel Gerry. A very big house in the country: A professor embarks on a journey into selfhood. Review of: Helen of Nowhere / Makenna Goodman.
Alberto Manguel. The war has begun!: An allegory of a declining empire. Review of: O Fim dos Estados Unidos de América: Epopeia / Gonçalo M. Tavares (Relógio d’Água).
Damon Galgut. Welcome to the club: Holocaust re-enactment in the Guatemalan forest. Review of: Tarantula / Eduardo Halfon; translated by Daniel Hahn.
In Brief Review of: The Land of Sweet Forever / Harper Lee.
In Brief Review of: Best British Short Stories 2025 / Nicholas Royle, editor.
In Brief Review of: Sons and Daughters / Chaim Grade; translated by Rose Waldman.
In Brief Review of: Take Six: Six Irish women writers / Tanya Farrelly, editor (Dedalus).
In Brief Review of: Eating Ashes / Brenda Navarrol / translated by Megan McDowell.
Arts
Rod Mengham. Modes of translation: An extraordinary Gerhard Richter retrospective. Review of the exhibition Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until March 2 & (one assumes) the exhibition catalog (same title, publishers Citadelles et Mazenod) by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota.
Susan Owens. Marriage pan-artistique: People and place in the works of Stanley Spencer. Review of the exhibition Love and Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, until March 22; Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham.
Emily May. Marvellous moondance: New resonances in Glenn Tetley’s choreography. Review of Pierrot Lunaire, Royal Opera House, London.
James Cook. DJ to the stars: Coming of age in New York’s music scene. Review of: Night People: How to be a DJ in ’90s New York City / Mark Ronson.
In Brief Review of: Travesty Actors: Self and theater in Stalinist culture / Boris Wolfson; edited by Simon Morrison ( Northwestern University Press).
Food & Drink
Darra Goldstein. Noble rot: The mastery of microbes in food and human evolution. Review of: Adventures in Fermentation: From ancient origins to culinary frontiers, an exploration of the microbes that shape the world we live in / Johhny Drain (Penguin).
Olivia Potts. Say cheese: Finding oneself in London’s oldest food market. Review of: The Cheese Cure: How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul / Michael Finnerty (US: Aevo UTP; UK: Mudlark).
Religion
Michael Symmons Roberts. The road to Rome: Artistic converts to Catholicism. Review of: Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, why so many became Catholic in the 20th century / Melanie McDonagh.
Science & Technology
Philip Ball. In the beginning was … what?: New theories about the origin of the universe. Review of Battle of the Big Bang: New tales of our cosmic origins / Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper.
History, Politics & Society, Culture (other than food)
Gigliola Sulis. Years of lead: Italy’s battle with political violence. Review of: The Red Brigades: The terrorists who brought Italy to its knees / John Foot.
Richard Overy. The price of victory: Britain’s war, at home and abroad. Review of: Advance Britannia: How the Second World War was won, 1942–1945 / Alan Allport.
Josh Ireland. Jarrow and all that jazz: The relentness novelty of the interwar years. Review of: A Shellshocked Nation: Britain between the wars / Alwyn Turner.
Edward Wilson-Lee. Crispina’s day in court: Edward Wilson-Lee. Review of: The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over life in a seventeenth-century West African port / Toby Green.
Julian Wright. More than a metaphor: France’s storeyed line of defence. Review of: The Maginot Line: A new history / Kevin Passmore.
Caroline Moorehead. Giving wings to a cause: An Italian poet turned anti-fascist martyr. Review of: The Life of Lauro de Bosis: Icarus the Anti-Fascist / Joseph Farrell (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
Roderick Bailey. On the run: Unearthing a PoW’s past. Review of: The Glass Mountain: Escape and discovery in wartime Italy / Malcolm Gaskill.
Katja Haustein. The long shadow: A writer builds a picture of her German great-grandfather. Review of: Sanderling / Anne Webber; translated by Neil Blackadder (Indigo Press).
Oliver Balch. Betrayal and regret: Spying on Argentina’s Jewish community. Review of: Iosi, the remorseful spy / Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzky.
Cedric Van Dijck. In the Aegean Boat: William Plomer’s disappearing act. (Essay)
Ros Taylor. Games with frontiers: How nationalism thrives on failed immigration policy. Review of: Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And how to make it better / Alan Manning.
Alex Dean. Remaining, remoaning: Lessons from Brexit, a decade on. Review of: No Second Chances: The inside story of the campaign for a second EU referendum / Morgan Jones (Biteback).
J.F. Martel. Mediarchy: Storytelling as ‘soft power.’ Review of: Mythocracy: How stories shape our worlds / Yves Citton; translated by David Broder.
In Brief Review of: The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing / Sebastian Sobecki, editor.
In Brief Review of: Eight Weeks: Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds / Lola Young (Penguin).
In Brief Review of: The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s most notorious prisons in sixteen recipes / Sepideh Gholian; translated by Hessam Ashrafi (OneWorld).
Featured
Mary Beard. 02/17/2026 (from her blog on the TLS current issue page: Hotel reading.
Michael Dirda. The last chapter: Bidding farewell to the Washington Post’s Book World. (Essay)
Carlo Rovelli. Here and now: The nature of time: a conceptual revolution. Review of: In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment UK subtitle: The science and mystery of the present moment / Jo Marchant (US publisher: Liveright; UK: Canongate) -- Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, order, and a new law of nature / Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong.
Judith Herrin. Weathering the storm: How Byzantium survived for centuries. Review of: History of the Byzantine Empire / Fyodor Uspensky; translated and edited by Dean Marais (Based; 5 v.) -- Byzantium: Economy, society, institutions / James Howard-Johnston -- Byzantium in a Changing World / James Howard-Johnston -- Worlds of Byzantium: Religion, culture, and empire in the medieval Near East / Elizabeth S. Bolman, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and Jack Tannous, editors.
Nile Green. Friends of God: The sacred and the secular in Muslim histories. Review of: Islam: A new history from Muhammad to the present / John Tolan -- Worlds of Islam: A global history / James McDougall -- Crucible of Light: Islam and the Forging of European Civilization UK subtitle: Islam and the forging of Europe from the eighth to the twenty-first century / Elizabeth Drayson (US publisher: Pegasus Books; UK: Picador) -- Muslim Europe: A journey in search of a fourteen-hundred year history / Tharik Hussain.
Literature
Tim Parks. More of the same: Replicating a well-loved fictional series. (Essay)
James Purdon. More than a jingo: More than a jingo. Review of: John Buchan Reconsidered: Thirty-nine years of war and peace 1901–1940 / Marcus Paul, editor -- The Strange Stories of John Buchan / John Buchan; edited by James Machin (British Library).
Leon Craig. Devilish work: Marjorie Bowen’s supernatural fiction. Review of: Black Magic / Marjorie Bowen -- Julia Roseingrave / Marjorie Bowen.
John Garth. Master of Middle-earth: The inspiration behind J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbit craft. Review of: The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation / Michael D. C. Drout -- Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation / Giuseppe Pezzini.
Vanessa Curtis. Restless spirit: A tortured writer and the one man who stood by her. Review of: Katherine Mansfield: A hidden life / Gerri Kimber.
Emer Nolan. ‘I am feminine, morbid, perverse’: The youthful confessions of an Irish Decadent. Review of: Confessions of a Young Man / George Moore; edited by Matthew Creasy.
Andrew Holter. Cultivating her garden: Irreverent, serious and sarcastic essays by the Antiguan-American writer. Review of: Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– / Jamaica Kincaid.
Lily Herd. Welcoming her luck: Stories of New York subcultures and things hiding in plain sight. Review of: Joyride: A memoir / Susan Orlean.
Marco Ramírez Rojas. Just the unicorn: A survey of Julio Cortázar’s poetry. Review of: Poesía / Julio Cortázar (Alfaguara).
Amanda Dennis. No country for women: Femicide and revolution in Mexico. Review of: La Realidad / Neige Sinno (POL).
Eric Naiman. Among the living dead: The last gasp of Petersburg culture under the Bolsheviks. Review of: Goat Song / Konstantin Vaginov; translated by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula (NYRB Books).
Jonathan Gibbs. Unsighted but seen: An elemental struggle in the wilds of Patagonia. Review of: The Puma / Daniel Wiles.
M. John Harrison. High and hard to climb: A cinematic novel of cliff-face ambition. Review of: Crux: a novel / Gabriel Tallent.
Emily Barton. What’s with everyone?: Stories of brooding, obsession and wit. Review of: One Sun Only / Camille Bordas.
Rachel Gerry. A very big house in the country: A professor embarks on a journey into selfhood. Review of: Helen of Nowhere / Makenna Goodman.
Alberto Manguel. The war has begun!: An allegory of a declining empire. Review of: O Fim dos Estados Unidos de América: Epopeia / Gonçalo M. Tavares (Relógio d’Água).
Damon Galgut. Welcome to the club: Holocaust re-enactment in the Guatemalan forest. Review of: Tarantula / Eduardo Halfon; translated by Daniel Hahn.
In Brief Review of: The Land of Sweet Forever / Harper Lee.
In Brief Review of: Best British Short Stories 2025 / Nicholas Royle, editor.
In Brief Review of: Sons and Daughters / Chaim Grade; translated by Rose Waldman.
In Brief Review of: Take Six: Six Irish women writers / Tanya Farrelly, editor (Dedalus).
In Brief Review of: Eating Ashes / Brenda Navarrol / translated by Megan McDowell.
Arts
Rod Mengham. Modes of translation: An extraordinary Gerhard Richter retrospective. Review of the exhibition Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until March 2 & (one assumes) the exhibition catalog (same title, publishers Citadelles et Mazenod) by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota.
Susan Owens. Marriage pan-artistique: People and place in the works of Stanley Spencer. Review of the exhibition Love and Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, until March 22; Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham.
Emily May. Marvellous moondance: New resonances in Glenn Tetley’s choreography. Review of Pierrot Lunaire, Royal Opera House, London.
James Cook. DJ to the stars: Coming of age in New York’s music scene. Review of: Night People: How to be a DJ in ’90s New York City / Mark Ronson.
In Brief Review of: Travesty Actors: Self and theater in Stalinist culture / Boris Wolfson; edited by Simon Morrison ( Northwestern University Press).
Food & Drink
Darra Goldstein. Noble rot: The mastery of microbes in food and human evolution. Review of: Adventures in Fermentation: From ancient origins to culinary frontiers, an exploration of the microbes that shape the world we live in / Johhny Drain (Penguin).
Olivia Potts. Say cheese: Finding oneself in London’s oldest food market. Review of: The Cheese Cure: How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul / Michael Finnerty (US: Aevo UTP; UK: Mudlark).
Religion
Michael Symmons Roberts. The road to Rome: Artistic converts to Catholicism. Review of: Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, why so many became Catholic in the 20th century / Melanie McDonagh.
Science & Technology
Philip Ball. In the beginning was … what?: New theories about the origin of the universe. Review of Battle of the Big Bang: New tales of our cosmic origins / Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper.
History, Politics & Society, Culture (other than food)
Gigliola Sulis. Years of lead: Italy’s battle with political violence. Review of: The Red Brigades: The terrorists who brought Italy to its knees / John Foot.
Richard Overy. The price of victory: Britain’s war, at home and abroad. Review of: Advance Britannia: How the Second World War was won, 1942–1945 / Alan Allport.
Josh Ireland. Jarrow and all that jazz: The relentness novelty of the interwar years. Review of: A Shellshocked Nation: Britain between the wars / Alwyn Turner.
Edward Wilson-Lee. Crispina’s day in court: Edward Wilson-Lee. Review of: The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over life in a seventeenth-century West African port / Toby Green.
Julian Wright. More than a metaphor: France’s storeyed line of defence. Review of: The Maginot Line: A new history / Kevin Passmore.
Caroline Moorehead. Giving wings to a cause: An Italian poet turned anti-fascist martyr. Review of: The Life of Lauro de Bosis: Icarus the Anti-Fascist / Joseph Farrell (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
Roderick Bailey. On the run: Unearthing a PoW’s past. Review of: The Glass Mountain: Escape and discovery in wartime Italy / Malcolm Gaskill.
Katja Haustein. The long shadow: A writer builds a picture of her German great-grandfather. Review of: Sanderling / Anne Webber; translated by Neil Blackadder (Indigo Press).
Oliver Balch. Betrayal and regret: Spying on Argentina’s Jewish community. Review of: Iosi, the remorseful spy / Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzky.
Cedric Van Dijck. In the Aegean Boat: William Plomer’s disappearing act. (Essay)
Ros Taylor. Games with frontiers: How nationalism thrives on failed immigration policy. Review of: Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And how to make it better / Alan Manning.
Alex Dean. Remaining, remoaning: Lessons from Brexit, a decade on. Review of: No Second Chances: The inside story of the campaign for a second EU referendum / Morgan Jones (Biteback).
J.F. Martel. Mediarchy: Storytelling as ‘soft power.’ Review of: Mythocracy: How stories shape our worlds / Yves Citton; translated by David Broder.
In Brief Review of: The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing / Sebastian Sobecki, editor.
In Brief Review of: Eight Weeks: Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds / Lola Young (Penguin).
In Brief Review of: The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s most notorious prisons in sixteen recipes / Sepideh Gholian; translated by Hessam Ashrafi (OneWorld).
92featherbear
Claire Dunning. Dissent, 02/12/2026: Philanthropy for Radicals. Review of: The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America / John Fabian Witt. "The Garland Fund was not a typical foundation, but its history shows the potential role philanthropy can play in moments of rising authoritarianism—and the tensions inherent in that role."
93featherbear
Michael Silverblatt, 1952-2026
Sam Roberts. NYT, 02/20/2026: Michael Silverblatt, NPR’s ‘Bookworm’ Who Interviewed Authors, Dies at 73. "His public radio show, “Bookworm,” was a literary salon of the air for 33 years, drawing guests like Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and David Foster Wallace."
"Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
"He died after a protracted illness, said Joan Bykofsky, his sister and only immediate survivor.
"In the course of promotional tours, authors often encounter radio, TV and print journalists who can appear grossly ignorant of the writers’ work. Mr. Silverblatt, by contrast, often left his literary guests reeling with the sense they were not in a basement studio of KCRW, the Southern California NPR affiliate, but in the electric ambience of a Bloomsbury salon or a Left Bank cafe.
"“Like others, I suspect, I’ve even had the sensation of being interviewed by him and thinking, ‘Is it possible that this guy has given more consideration to this passage than I, the author, did?’” David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and top editor of The New Yorker, wrote in an email.
"He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. (He lived in Fairfax District, near Hollywood, where he rented an apartment next door to use as a library.)
“He abhorred the ordinary, the banal, the easy,” Mr. Remnick wrote. “It was almost to the point where writers came to think that the best thing about publishing — well, almost — is that Michael Silverblatt would read you.”
"Guests on his program included Salman Rushdie, John Ashbery, William H. Gass, Grace Paley, Stephen Sondheim, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.
"“The purpose of the show is to help my listeners look through writers’ eyes,” Mr. Silverblatt told The New York Times in 1999.
"“It’s to show them,” he added, “whether they’re reading or not, how writers re-enchant the world, how they surround us with the miraculous. That’s what books do to me and what I want my show to do, to remind people how odd and special writers’ minds and imaginations are.”
"The novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in an email that Mr. Silverblatt was “gifted with what must have been a near-photographic memory for prose — idealistic, passionate, intense, a joy to be with — irreplaceable.”
"He was “the reader writers dream about,” she said.
"Mr. Silverblatt said Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was the book that had made him an avid reader as a child. The public library became a second home.
"After graduating from Bayside High School, he enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he met esteemed critics and authors, including John Barth, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Creeley, who taught there. They broadened his literary tastes to include the experimental and avant-garde.
"“There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”
A collection of his interviews: Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt / Michael Silverblatt.
Michael Silverblatt's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/silverblattmichael
And see also this spreadsheet of Bookworm episodes:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8a4xseel2GMYcPUKHxfAs5VvNenH05FZ-R3Lopp...
And furthermore:
Brittany Allen. LitHub, 02/19/2026: Five great episodes of Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, in honor of the late host.
Jynne Dilling. n+1, 02/20/2026: You’ve Done It Again, Michael: On Michael Silverblatt.
Sam Roberts. NYT, 02/20/2026: Michael Silverblatt, NPR’s ‘Bookworm’ Who Interviewed Authors, Dies at 73. "His public radio show, “Bookworm,” was a literary salon of the air for 33 years, drawing guests like Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and David Foster Wallace."
"Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
"He died after a protracted illness, said Joan Bykofsky, his sister and only immediate survivor.
"In the course of promotional tours, authors often encounter radio, TV and print journalists who can appear grossly ignorant of the writers’ work. Mr. Silverblatt, by contrast, often left his literary guests reeling with the sense they were not in a basement studio of KCRW, the Southern California NPR affiliate, but in the electric ambience of a Bloomsbury salon or a Left Bank cafe.
"“Like others, I suspect, I’ve even had the sensation of being interviewed by him and thinking, ‘Is it possible that this guy has given more consideration to this passage than I, the author, did?’” David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and top editor of The New Yorker, wrote in an email.
"He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. (He lived in Fairfax District, near Hollywood, where he rented an apartment next door to use as a library.)
“He abhorred the ordinary, the banal, the easy,” Mr. Remnick wrote. “It was almost to the point where writers came to think that the best thing about publishing — well, almost — is that Michael Silverblatt would read you.”
"Guests on his program included Salman Rushdie, John Ashbery, William H. Gass, Grace Paley, Stephen Sondheim, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace.
"“The purpose of the show is to help my listeners look through writers’ eyes,” Mr. Silverblatt told The New York Times in 1999.
"“It’s to show them,” he added, “whether they’re reading or not, how writers re-enchant the world, how they surround us with the miraculous. That’s what books do to me and what I want my show to do, to remind people how odd and special writers’ minds and imaginations are.”
"The novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in an email that Mr. Silverblatt was “gifted with what must have been a near-photographic memory for prose — idealistic, passionate, intense, a joy to be with — irreplaceable.”
"He was “the reader writers dream about,” she said.
"Mr. Silverblatt said Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was the book that had made him an avid reader as a child. The public library became a second home.
"After graduating from Bayside High School, he enrolled at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he met esteemed critics and authors, including John Barth, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Creeley, who taught there. They broadened his literary tastes to include the experimental and avant-garde.
"“There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”
A collection of his interviews: Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt / Michael Silverblatt.
Michael Silverblatt's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/silverblattmichael
And see also this spreadsheet of Bookworm episodes:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8a4xseel2GMYcPUKHxfAs5VvNenH05FZ-R3Lopp...
And furthermore:
Brittany Allen. LitHub, 02/19/2026: Five great episodes of Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, in honor of the late host.
Jynne Dilling. n+1, 02/20/2026: You’ve Done It Again, Michael: On Michael Silverblatt.
94featherbear
February 2026 updates 15-21
Aeon Feb 20: resisting the ethical beliefs of social environment -- Feb 19: books & screens & Focus -- Feb 17: Mexistentialism >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 21: Slavery & the Jews of Medieval Egypt -- Feb 20: Dorothy Tse's City Like Water -- Feb 18: the Chicken's Neck -- Feb 17: Kim Hyesoon's poetry collection The Hell of That Star -- Feb 16: Jagadish Chandra Bose on plants as sentient beings: excerpt from the introduction by Sumana Roy >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 20: on the loss of the WaPo Bookworld; Gisèle Pelicot memoir; WaPo Bookworld eliminated -- Feb 19: Does Writing Have to Be Hard?; book on "nudge politics" -- Feb 17: on Toni Morrison -- Feb 16: Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity >53 featherbear:
Boston Review winter 2025: Vivian Gornick on Jonathan Fest memoir; books on the recent history of deportation in the US >84 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 18: 2 books of self-reflection by popular historians David McCullough & Walter Isaacson -- Feb 17: Robert Craig on Royal Law in Britain -- Feb 15: Being Victorian >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 18: (5) Books Made Into Movies >78 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 20: I'll Be the Monster; the books in Georgi Gospodinov's life -- Feb 19: excerpt from Michael Pollan's consciousness book; Afghan women's book club; power of story; Tibet novel -- Feb 18: On Morrison; Russian guilt -- Feb 17: controversy over Houris by Kamel Daoud; Sophie Ward's Our Better Natures -- Feb 16: Gisèle Pelicot memoir; Maggie O'Farrell (Hamnet) top ten list; re-visioned Kenyan library; Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness; Frogs for Watchdogs -- Feb 15: Toni Morrison >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 20: Influencer Creep in art -- Feb 19: 2 books on revolutions; "the fears at the heart of 21st-century gothic literature" -- Feb 17: "conceptual affinities and historical convergences between psychoanalysis and Islamic philosophy;" Turkish erotica -- Feb 16: graphic novel & a Holocaust opera; 2 books on university exams & residency permits in today's China -- Feb 15: A.S. Hamrah's film criticism: review of 2 collections >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 19: digital platforms for booklovers can be run by unbenign capitalists; excerpt from Mark Haddon memoir regarding The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; on not having your book banned; what Anne Fadiman's reading now -- Feb 18: Kimberley Kinder book excerpt on what travel writers overlook >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 20: Alabama bookstore -- Feb 18: Lauren Groff's short fiction recommendations -- Feb 16: England's Royal Family, the slave trade, & Jeffrey Epstein >54 featherbear:
NYT Feb 21: Charleen Hurtubise's novel Saoirse -- Feb 20: Brian Platzer's novel The Optimists; Toni Morrison; poetry in subways -- Feb 19: review of Tayari Jones's Kin; profile of Tayari Jones; urban fantasy novels -- Feb 18: Injustice Town; So Old, So Young; 3 books on the economics of nature -- Feb 17: Rebel English Academy; language lessons to explorer; Christopher Beha on why he is no longer an atheist -- Feb 16: Namwali Serpell on (Toni) Morrison; Mark Haddon memoir -- Feb 15: Gisèle Pelicot memoir; Claire Oshetsky's Evil Genius >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 20: climate action requires more extraction; What We're Reading feature -- Feb 19: August Wilson book -- Feb 18: Doctor Zhivago from book to film; Is a Novel Alive? -- Feb 17: excerpt from Rahul Bhattacharya's novel Railsong -- Feb 16: essay on Plato, the right, & Western civilization >62 featherbear:
TLS Feb 20: >91 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 20: sports gambling -- Feb 19: former WaPo columnist's Eugene Robinson's personalized US history -- Feb 18: 2 books on the impact of Bernie Goetz shootings in the 80s -- Feb 17: Gisèle Pelicot memoir -- Feb 16: Mark Haddon memoir >49 featherbear:
February index >46 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
February updates 08-14 >89 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Dissent >92 featherbear:
Aeon Feb 20: resisting the ethical beliefs of social environment -- Feb 19: books & screens & Focus -- Feb 17: Mexistentialism >81 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 21: Slavery & the Jews of Medieval Egypt -- Feb 20: Dorothy Tse's City Like Water -- Feb 18: the Chicken's Neck -- Feb 17: Kim Hyesoon's poetry collection The Hell of That Star -- Feb 16: Jagadish Chandra Bose on plants as sentient beings: excerpt from the introduction by Sumana Roy >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 20: on the loss of the WaPo Bookworld; Gisèle Pelicot memoir; WaPo Bookworld eliminated -- Feb 19: Does Writing Have to Be Hard?; book on "nudge politics" -- Feb 17: on Toni Morrison -- Feb 16: Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity >53 featherbear:
Boston Review winter 2025: Vivian Gornick on Jonathan Fest memoir; books on the recent history of deportation in the US >84 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 18: 2 books of self-reflection by popular historians David McCullough & Walter Isaacson -- Feb 17: Robert Craig on Royal Law in Britain -- Feb 15: Being Victorian >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 18: (5) Books Made Into Movies >78 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 20: I'll Be the Monster; the books in Georgi Gospodinov's life -- Feb 19: excerpt from Michael Pollan's consciousness book; Afghan women's book club; power of story; Tibet novel -- Feb 18: On Morrison; Russian guilt -- Feb 17: controversy over Houris by Kamel Daoud; Sophie Ward's Our Better Natures -- Feb 16: Gisèle Pelicot memoir; Maggie O'Farrell (Hamnet) top ten list; re-visioned Kenyan library; Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness; Frogs for Watchdogs -- Feb 15: Toni Morrison >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 20: Influencer Creep in art -- Feb 19: 2 books on revolutions; "the fears at the heart of 21st-century gothic literature" -- Feb 17: "conceptual affinities and historical convergences between psychoanalysis and Islamic philosophy;" Turkish erotica -- Feb 16: graphic novel & a Holocaust opera; 2 books on university exams & residency permits in today's China -- Feb 15: A.S. Hamrah's film criticism: review of 2 collections >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 19: digital platforms for booklovers can be run by unbenign capitalists; excerpt from Mark Haddon memoir regarding The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; on not having your book banned; what Anne Fadiman's reading now -- Feb 18: Kimberley Kinder book excerpt on what travel writers overlook >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 20: Alabama bookstore -- Feb 18: Lauren Groff's short fiction recommendations -- Feb 16: England's Royal Family, the slave trade, & Jeffrey Epstein >54 featherbear:
NYT Feb 21: Charleen Hurtubise's novel Saoirse -- Feb 20: Brian Platzer's novel The Optimists; Toni Morrison; poetry in subways -- Feb 19: review of Tayari Jones's Kin; profile of Tayari Jones; urban fantasy novels -- Feb 18: Injustice Town; So Old, So Young; 3 books on the economics of nature -- Feb 17: Rebel English Academy; language lessons to explorer; Christopher Beha on why he is no longer an atheist -- Feb 16: Namwali Serpell on (Toni) Morrison; Mark Haddon memoir -- Feb 15: Gisèle Pelicot memoir; Claire Oshetsky's Evil Genius >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 20: climate action requires more extraction; What We're Reading feature -- Feb 19: August Wilson book -- Feb 18: Doctor Zhivago from book to film; Is a Novel Alive? -- Feb 17: excerpt from Rahul Bhattacharya's novel Railsong -- Feb 16: essay on Plato, the right, & Western civilization >62 featherbear:
TLS Feb 20: >91 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 20: sports gambling -- Feb 19: former WaPo columnist's Eugene Robinson's personalized US history -- Feb 18: 2 books on the impact of Bernie Goetz shootings in the 80s -- Feb 17: Gisèle Pelicot memoir -- Feb 16: Mark Haddon memoir >49 featherbear:
February index >46 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
February updates 08-14 >89 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Dissent >92 featherbear:
95featherbear
Susan Sheehan, 1937-2026
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/22/2026: Susan Sheehan, Chronicler of Lives on the Margins, Dies at 88. "As a journalist and author, she wrote meticulous portraits of people for The New Yorker. Her book “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” won the Pulitzer Prize."
"Susan Sheehan, a Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer whose meticulously built-up portraits of individuals trying to endure on the margins of society originally appeared in The New Yorker, and often were published later as books, died on Tuesday at her home in Washington. She was 88.
"Ms. Sheehan was the author of eight books, most notably “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” about a woman’s struggle with schizophrenia as she moves between her parents’ home, a supervised apartment and a mental hospital. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1983.
"The book, which began as a four-part New Yorker series, featured an indelible character in Sylvia Frumkin, the pseudonymous heroine, who was often disheveled, hostile and grandiose but who had a kind of genius for run-on, rapid-fire soliloquies. Through much of the book, she is a patient at the state-run Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.
"“I have schizophrenia — cancer of the nerves,” Sylvia declares. “My body is overcrowded with nerves. This is going to win me the Nobel Prize for medicine.”
"Reviewers called Ms. Sheehan’s unsentimental and rigorously observed account a journalistic tour de force; during two years of fly-on-the-wall reporting, the author sometimes slept on a cot in Sylvia’s hospital room.
"Ms. Sheehan also published deeply immersive accounts of a welfare mother in Queens; a prisoner at a maximum-security prison; and a teenager ensnared in the child welfare system. She described her reporting style as “third person invisible.”
"Ms. Sheehan’s book “A Prison and a Prisoner” (1978) scrutinized the penal system through the aperture of a single inmate of a maximum-security prison in New York. In “A Welfare Mother” (1976), Ms. Sheehan slept in the same room and spent seven pages itemizing the purchases of her subject off a welfare check.
"In “Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair” (1993), a title borrowed from the opening line of Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” Ms. Sheehan lays out failures of the foster care system through the stunted world of Crystal Taylor. A daughter of drug addicts, Taylor, who became a mother at 14, lives in a group home where she flails at school, steals and takes to abusive men.
"Ms. Sheehan and her husband, Neil Sheehan, a correspondent for The Times, both reported from Saigon during the Vietnam War, and they shared a professional partnership. In 1971, Mr. Sheehan secured what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War revealing how successive administrations escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam while privately doubting the chances of a victory.
"When Mr. Sheehan went to Cambridge, Mass., in 1971 to examine the 7,000 pages of government records leaked to him by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, Ms. Sheehan accompanied her husband. She helped photocopy the trove of documents under the suspicious eye of a copy shop owner who was nervous about the classified markings.
"Later, when Mr. Sheehan spent 16 arduous years writing a reckoning of the war, as told through the experiences of one idealistic officer, Ms. Sheehan typed and helped edit the multiple drafts. Both writers adopted nocturnal schedules, sleeping by day; their two daughters had breakfast at 8 a.m., and the parents ate their breakfast at 3 p.m.
"She met Neil Sheehan on a blind date set up by Gay Talese and David Halberstam, two Times reporters who went on to distinguished careers. Mr. Sheehan, who had covered the Vietnam War for United Press International, had just been hired by The Times to report from Southeast Asia, and the couple married in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1965.
"They soon moved to Saigon, where both covered the war. Ms. Sheehan contributed “A Reporter at Large” dispatches to The New Yorker, some of which were collected in a 1967 book, “Ten Vietnamese.”
"Ms. Sheehan reveled in the freedoms and editorial support she had as a writer for The New Yorker. “Where else could you say to the editor,” she told The Washington Post in 1982, “‘I want to write about an insane asylum,’ and he says, ‘fine,’ and you come back a year and a half later with over 100,000 words, and he prints them.”"
Susan Sheehan's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/sheehansusan-1
Susan Sheehan. New Yorker, 05/18/1981: The Patient: If medicine is an art in which science is employed, then the field of psychiatry may be the branch of medicine with the most art—and thus the greatest room for disagreement.
Trip Gabriel. NYT, 02/22/2026: Susan Sheehan, Chronicler of Lives on the Margins, Dies at 88. "As a journalist and author, she wrote meticulous portraits of people for The New Yorker. Her book “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” won the Pulitzer Prize."
"Susan Sheehan, a Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer whose meticulously built-up portraits of individuals trying to endure on the margins of society originally appeared in The New Yorker, and often were published later as books, died on Tuesday at her home in Washington. She was 88.
"Ms. Sheehan was the author of eight books, most notably “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” about a woman’s struggle with schizophrenia as she moves between her parents’ home, a supervised apartment and a mental hospital. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1983.
"The book, which began as a four-part New Yorker series, featured an indelible character in Sylvia Frumkin, the pseudonymous heroine, who was often disheveled, hostile and grandiose but who had a kind of genius for run-on, rapid-fire soliloquies. Through much of the book, she is a patient at the state-run Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.
"“I have schizophrenia — cancer of the nerves,” Sylvia declares. “My body is overcrowded with nerves. This is going to win me the Nobel Prize for medicine.”
"Reviewers called Ms. Sheehan’s unsentimental and rigorously observed account a journalistic tour de force; during two years of fly-on-the-wall reporting, the author sometimes slept on a cot in Sylvia’s hospital room.
"Ms. Sheehan also published deeply immersive accounts of a welfare mother in Queens; a prisoner at a maximum-security prison; and a teenager ensnared in the child welfare system. She described her reporting style as “third person invisible.”
"Ms. Sheehan’s book “A Prison and a Prisoner” (1978) scrutinized the penal system through the aperture of a single inmate of a maximum-security prison in New York. In “A Welfare Mother” (1976), Ms. Sheehan slept in the same room and spent seven pages itemizing the purchases of her subject off a welfare check.
"In “Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair” (1993), a title borrowed from the opening line of Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” Ms. Sheehan lays out failures of the foster care system through the stunted world of Crystal Taylor. A daughter of drug addicts, Taylor, who became a mother at 14, lives in a group home where she flails at school, steals and takes to abusive men.
"Ms. Sheehan and her husband, Neil Sheehan, a correspondent for The Times, both reported from Saigon during the Vietnam War, and they shared a professional partnership. In 1971, Mr. Sheehan secured what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War revealing how successive administrations escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam while privately doubting the chances of a victory.
"When Mr. Sheehan went to Cambridge, Mass., in 1971 to examine the 7,000 pages of government records leaked to him by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, Ms. Sheehan accompanied her husband. She helped photocopy the trove of documents under the suspicious eye of a copy shop owner who was nervous about the classified markings.
"Later, when Mr. Sheehan spent 16 arduous years writing a reckoning of the war, as told through the experiences of one idealistic officer, Ms. Sheehan typed and helped edit the multiple drafts. Both writers adopted nocturnal schedules, sleeping by day; their two daughters had breakfast at 8 a.m., and the parents ate their breakfast at 3 p.m.
"She met Neil Sheehan on a blind date set up by Gay Talese and David Halberstam, two Times reporters who went on to distinguished careers. Mr. Sheehan, who had covered the Vietnam War for United Press International, had just been hired by The Times to report from Southeast Asia, and the couple married in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1965.
"They soon moved to Saigon, where both covered the war. Ms. Sheehan contributed “A Reporter at Large” dispatches to The New Yorker, some of which were collected in a 1967 book, “Ten Vietnamese.”
"Ms. Sheehan reveled in the freedoms and editorial support she had as a writer for The New Yorker. “Where else could you say to the editor,” she told The Washington Post in 1982, “‘I want to write about an insane asylum,’ and he says, ‘fine,’ and you come back a year and a half later with over 100,000 words, and he prints them.”"
Susan Sheehan's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/sheehansusan-1
Susan Sheehan. New Yorker, 05/18/1981: The Patient: If medicine is an art in which science is employed, then the field of psychiatry may be the branch of medicine with the most art—and thus the greatest room for disagreement.
96featherbear
Stephanie Gorton. TNR, 02/23/2026: The Little Magazine That Defied American Censorship. "Margaret Anderson’s Little Review fought to bring the great works of modernist literature to the United States." Review of: A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature / Adam Morgan.
97featherbear
Edward Hoagland, 1932-2026
Margalit Fox. NYT, 02/23/2026: Edward Hoagland, Literary Explorer of Nature and Himself, Dies at 93. "In his lyrical writings, he examined physical landscapes as well as the interior terrain of his own life — up to the blindness that overtook him in his later years."
"Edward Hoagland, whose shimmering essays explored the wonders of the natural world, the sights of faraway places and his own journeys into blindness, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 93.
"Widely considered one of the country’s foremost essayists and often described as an heir to Thoreau, Mr. Hoagland was famed for transforming the modern nature essay into a vehicle for autobiographical introspection.
"His work simultaneously explored physical landscapes — including those of Africa, Alaska and British Columbia — and the terrain of his own life, from the speech impediment that isolated him throughout his youth to the blindness that overtook him in his 50s, the surgery that restored his sight for a time and his eventual return to blindness.
"In his hands, nature writing and personal history dovetailed impeccably, as if to declare that the subject matter of each was nothing less than life’s inexorable cycle.
"John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation,” and for Philip Roth, he was “America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist.” Critics praised Mr. Hoagland’s sinuous, polished, unsentimental prose; near-microscopic powers of observation; unflinching candor about his life; and generally unhectoring urgency about the earth’s.
"Reviewing his 1973 essay collection, “Walking the Dead Diamond River,” in The New York Times Book Review, Alfred Kazin wrote: “Anyone who writes for magazines on all manner of topics with regular, predictable brilliance, as Edward Hoagland does, invents a personality, a talisman of a hero who says, ‘I walked,’ ‘I saw,’ with a comeliness unknown to most pedestrians. This ‘I’ is usually up to everything he may encounter in this dizzying, overabundant world.”
"Mr. Hoagland’s many collections, which also include “The Courage of Turtles” (1970), “Red Wolves and Black Bears” (1976) and “The Tugman’s Passage” (1982), brought together essays first published in The Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere.
"Unlike many nature writers, he did not confine his gaze to pastoral settings. Dividing his time for many years between homes in Greenwich Village and Sutton, in northeast Vermont, he wrote with equal acuity about the city.
"“I loved the city like the country — the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook — and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good,” he wrote in “In the Country of the Blind,” an essay in “Compass Points: How I Lived” (2001).
"He continued: “My own solution to a sad spell was also to head outdoors and climb a spruce, find a pond, or hitchhike west, where I achieved an acquaintance with the frontiers that were left. In the city, it was to seek the most crowded places, Coney Island, Union Square, the Lower East Side, Times Square, on the same instinctive principle that life in bulk is good.”
"From childhood, Ted was affected by a severe stutter, which no amount of speech therapy would vanquish. He found comfort in books, and in solitary walks in the Connecticut countryside.
“Even when we still had a few bobcats in the woods the local snapping turtles, growing up to 40 pounds, were the largest carnivores,” Mr. Hoagland wrote in one of his most celebrated essays, the title piece of “The Courage of Turtles.” “You would see them through the amber water, as big as greeny wash basins at the bottom of the pond, until they faded into the inscrutable mud as if they hadn’t existed at all.”
"“I tended to downplay my various excitements in the house lest they be restricted or used against me,” he wrote in “Small Silences,” in his collection “Sex and the River Styx” (2011). “It was not a silly instinct because my parents did soon tell me I was reading too much, and by prep school were telling my favorite teachers that I was too intrigued by nature and writing; that these were dodges due to my handicap and might derail a more respectable career in law or medicine.”
"He studied writing with the poet Archibald MacLeish, who became an esteemed mentor. During the summers, he lit out for the kind of roustabout life that was considered part of a novelist’s compulsory education, working as a cagehand for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and fighting wildfires in California for the United States Forest Service.*
"He found his literary métier with his first nonfiction book, “Notes From the Century Before” (1969). A single long narrative of a trek through British Columbia, with its people and places indelibly portrayed, it drew rapturous critical praise.
"Throughout Mr. Hoagland’s nonfiction was woven a ruminative thread of memoir: the pain of isolation born of his stutter (“vocal handcuffs,” he called the condition); his difficulties with women (his first marriage, to Amy Ferrara, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Marion Magid, a longtime editor at Commentary magazine); the contents, and discontents, of his sex life; his bouts of suicidal thoughts; and his two bouts with blindness.
"In his 50s, Mr. Hoagland began to lose his eyesight to cataracts and damaged retinas. For three years he was legally blind, a particular grief for someone who a decade earlier had written, “To live is to see.”
"An innovative operation, involving the insertion of plastic implants into his eyes, reversed his condition, although his doctors told him that his newfound sight would not last.
"There followed, in the 1990s, years of tireless travel and ravenous seeing — taking in what he could, while he could, he wrote, “like a prisoner sprung from a dungeon.”
"The books that resulted were considered some of his finest, among them “Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life” (1999), which recounted journeys to India and Antarctica; and “Compass Points,” his most overtly autobiographical collection.
"In old age, Mr. Hoagland was overtaken by blindness once more.
“Blindness is enveloping,” he wrote in a 2016 essay in The Times. “Sights, like sounds, randomly evoke a surge of memories ordinarily inaccessible that lighten and brighten the day.”
"In December 1990, Bennington College, the Vermont school where Mr. Hoagland had taught for many years, declined to renew his contract amid accusations by some students of homophobia. The accusations stemmed from a brief passage in a long essay he had published that year in Esquire and later in The Guardian.
"In the essay, which bemoaned what he saw as the waning of literary dissent, he touched on the AIDS epidemic, which “spread with faxlike speed,” he wrote, “because of a gale of often icy promiscuity.”
"A public commotion ensued, with some observers tarring Mr. Hoagland as anti-gay and others condemning Bennington as hewing to extremes of political correctness.
"In June 1991, the college relented, and Mr. Hoagland was reinstated.
"Among his other books are the essay collection “Balancing Acts” (1992); a volume of short stories, “The Final Fate of the Alligators” (1992); the travel narrative “African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan” (1979); and the well-received novels “Seven Rivers West” (1986), “Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse” (2013) and “In the Country of the Blind” (2016), rooted in his renewed experience of the condition.
"In an autumnal essay published in The Times in November 1994, Mr. Hoagland turned his naturalist’s eye toward the closing chapter of life’s cycle.
“I don’t expect to rejoin or ‘miss’ these people in the hereafter,” he wrote of family and friends who had died, “yet, having spent a great deal of my personal and professional life riding a surf of wind-song, wolf howls, elephants snuffling, trees soughing, grasshoppers buzzing, frogs croaking, I do think I’ll mix in somehow with all of the above, the wine of human nature blending with the milk of outdoor nature in a mulligatawny soup of soil, rainwater and pondy chemicals, with infinite possibilities once again.”
*Ironically, the consummate US nature writer's father was a lawyer for Standard Oil; Hoagland's father tried (failed) to suppress his son's first novel, Cat Man: "Mr. Hoagland’s father, worried that his son’s unbridled depiction of that world and its myriad debaucheries would sully the elder Mr. Hoagland’s lawyerly reputation, tried to halt the book’s publication. He failed."
Here's a shared link to the NYT obit, though I quoted quite a bit of it: Edward Hoagland, Literary Explorer of Nature and Himself, Dies at 93.
Edward Hoagland's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/hoaglandedward
Margalit Fox. NYT, 02/23/2026: Edward Hoagland, Literary Explorer of Nature and Himself, Dies at 93. "In his lyrical writings, he examined physical landscapes as well as the interior terrain of his own life — up to the blindness that overtook him in his later years."
"Edward Hoagland, whose shimmering essays explored the wonders of the natural world, the sights of faraway places and his own journeys into blindness, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 93.
"Widely considered one of the country’s foremost essayists and often described as an heir to Thoreau, Mr. Hoagland was famed for transforming the modern nature essay into a vehicle for autobiographical introspection.
"His work simultaneously explored physical landscapes — including those of Africa, Alaska and British Columbia — and the terrain of his own life, from the speech impediment that isolated him throughout his youth to the blindness that overtook him in his 50s, the surgery that restored his sight for a time and his eventual return to blindness.
"In his hands, nature writing and personal history dovetailed impeccably, as if to declare that the subject matter of each was nothing less than life’s inexorable cycle.
"John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation,” and for Philip Roth, he was “America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist.” Critics praised Mr. Hoagland’s sinuous, polished, unsentimental prose; near-microscopic powers of observation; unflinching candor about his life; and generally unhectoring urgency about the earth’s.
"Reviewing his 1973 essay collection, “Walking the Dead Diamond River,” in The New York Times Book Review, Alfred Kazin wrote: “Anyone who writes for magazines on all manner of topics with regular, predictable brilliance, as Edward Hoagland does, invents a personality, a talisman of a hero who says, ‘I walked,’ ‘I saw,’ with a comeliness unknown to most pedestrians. This ‘I’ is usually up to everything he may encounter in this dizzying, overabundant world.”
"Mr. Hoagland’s many collections, which also include “The Courage of Turtles” (1970), “Red Wolves and Black Bears” (1976) and “The Tugman’s Passage” (1982), brought together essays first published in The Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere.
"Unlike many nature writers, he did not confine his gaze to pastoral settings. Dividing his time for many years between homes in Greenwich Village and Sutton, in northeast Vermont, he wrote with equal acuity about the city.
"“I loved the city like the country — the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook — and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good,” he wrote in “In the Country of the Blind,” an essay in “Compass Points: How I Lived” (2001).
"He continued: “My own solution to a sad spell was also to head outdoors and climb a spruce, find a pond, or hitchhike west, where I achieved an acquaintance with the frontiers that were left. In the city, it was to seek the most crowded places, Coney Island, Union Square, the Lower East Side, Times Square, on the same instinctive principle that life in bulk is good.”
"From childhood, Ted was affected by a severe stutter, which no amount of speech therapy would vanquish. He found comfort in books, and in solitary walks in the Connecticut countryside.
“Even when we still had a few bobcats in the woods the local snapping turtles, growing up to 40 pounds, were the largest carnivores,” Mr. Hoagland wrote in one of his most celebrated essays, the title piece of “The Courage of Turtles.” “You would see them through the amber water, as big as greeny wash basins at the bottom of the pond, until they faded into the inscrutable mud as if they hadn’t existed at all.”
"“I tended to downplay my various excitements in the house lest they be restricted or used against me,” he wrote in “Small Silences,” in his collection “Sex and the River Styx” (2011). “It was not a silly instinct because my parents did soon tell me I was reading too much, and by prep school were telling my favorite teachers that I was too intrigued by nature and writing; that these were dodges due to my handicap and might derail a more respectable career in law or medicine.”
"He studied writing with the poet Archibald MacLeish, who became an esteemed mentor. During the summers, he lit out for the kind of roustabout life that was considered part of a novelist’s compulsory education, working as a cagehand for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and fighting wildfires in California for the United States Forest Service.*
"He found his literary métier with his first nonfiction book, “Notes From the Century Before” (1969). A single long narrative of a trek through British Columbia, with its people and places indelibly portrayed, it drew rapturous critical praise.
"Throughout Mr. Hoagland’s nonfiction was woven a ruminative thread of memoir: the pain of isolation born of his stutter (“vocal handcuffs,” he called the condition); his difficulties with women (his first marriage, to Amy Ferrara, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Marion Magid, a longtime editor at Commentary magazine); the contents, and discontents, of his sex life; his bouts of suicidal thoughts; and his two bouts with blindness.
"In his 50s, Mr. Hoagland began to lose his eyesight to cataracts and damaged retinas. For three years he was legally blind, a particular grief for someone who a decade earlier had written, “To live is to see.”
"An innovative operation, involving the insertion of plastic implants into his eyes, reversed his condition, although his doctors told him that his newfound sight would not last.
"There followed, in the 1990s, years of tireless travel and ravenous seeing — taking in what he could, while he could, he wrote, “like a prisoner sprung from a dungeon.”
"The books that resulted were considered some of his finest, among them “Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life” (1999), which recounted journeys to India and Antarctica; and “Compass Points,” his most overtly autobiographical collection.
"In old age, Mr. Hoagland was overtaken by blindness once more.
“Blindness is enveloping,” he wrote in a 2016 essay in The Times. “Sights, like sounds, randomly evoke a surge of memories ordinarily inaccessible that lighten and brighten the day.”
"In December 1990, Bennington College, the Vermont school where Mr. Hoagland had taught for many years, declined to renew his contract amid accusations by some students of homophobia. The accusations stemmed from a brief passage in a long essay he had published that year in Esquire and later in The Guardian.
"In the essay, which bemoaned what he saw as the waning of literary dissent, he touched on the AIDS epidemic, which “spread with faxlike speed,” he wrote, “because of a gale of often icy promiscuity.”
"A public commotion ensued, with some observers tarring Mr. Hoagland as anti-gay and others condemning Bennington as hewing to extremes of political correctness.
"In June 1991, the college relented, and Mr. Hoagland was reinstated.
"Among his other books are the essay collection “Balancing Acts” (1992); a volume of short stories, “The Final Fate of the Alligators” (1992); the travel narrative “African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan” (1979); and the well-received novels “Seven Rivers West” (1986), “Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse” (2013) and “In the Country of the Blind” (2016), rooted in his renewed experience of the condition.
"In an autumnal essay published in The Times in November 1994, Mr. Hoagland turned his naturalist’s eye toward the closing chapter of life’s cycle.
“I don’t expect to rejoin or ‘miss’ these people in the hereafter,” he wrote of family and friends who had died, “yet, having spent a great deal of my personal and professional life riding a surf of wind-song, wolf howls, elephants snuffling, trees soughing, grasshoppers buzzing, frogs croaking, I do think I’ll mix in somehow with all of the above, the wine of human nature blending with the milk of outdoor nature in a mulligatawny soup of soil, rainwater and pondy chemicals, with infinite possibilities once again.”
*Ironically, the consummate US nature writer's father was a lawyer for Standard Oil; Hoagland's father tried (failed) to suppress his son's first novel, Cat Man: "Mr. Hoagland’s father, worried that his son’s unbridled depiction of that world and its myriad debaucheries would sully the elder Mr. Hoagland’s lawyerly reputation, tried to halt the book’s publication. He failed."
Here's a shared link to the NYT obit, though I quoted quite a bit of it: Edward Hoagland, Literary Explorer of Nature and Himself, Dies at 93.
Edward Hoagland's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/hoaglandedward
98featherbear
Carolina Abbott Galvão. Columbia Journalism Review, 02/16/2026: Inside the Reviewnaissance. "A new generation tries its hand at publishing “the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy.”"
99featherbear
Jessica Isserow. University of Chicago Press Journals, v.136, no. 2 (nd): Review of: Oppressive Praise / Jules Holroyd (Oxford University Press).
100featherbear
Ron Charles. roncharles.substack, 02/20/2026: Do I Still Matter?: Two new books — and a lot of free time — got me thinking about how we yearn to matter. Review of: Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose / Jennifer Breheny Wallace -- The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
101featherbear
Ann Godoff, 1949-2026
Sam Roberts. NYT, 02/25/2026, upd 2/26: Ann Godoff, a Top Editor and Publisher of Best Sellers, Dies at 76. "Considered an “author’s publisher” at Random House and then Penguin, she cultivated the careers of dozens of celebrated novelists and nonfiction writers."
"Ann Godoff, a percipient editor and intuitive publisher who cultivated the careers of dozens of novelists and nonfiction authors for more than three decades as the head of Random House and then of Penguin Press, died on Tuesday in Albany, N.Y. She was 76.
"Ms. Godoff spent her career wooing and nurturing literary novices and veterans alike. Her more celebrated authors included Ron Chernow, E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Alice Waters. The literary agent Esther Newberg called her “an author’s publisher.”
"At Random House, Ms. Godoff was named executive editor in 1991 and rose to editor in chief and publisher of its trade publishing group before being famously fired in a corporate restructuring in 2003. At Penguin Press, the American hardcover imprint she founded soon afterward, she was editor in chief and publisher.
"Many of the books she shepherded into print became best sellers, among them John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) and Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” (1995), both surprise blockbusters.
"More recently, she edited and published three top sellers: the memoir “A Hymn to Life,” by Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband at the time and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her in a trial that made global headlines; “Young Man in a Hurry,” a memoir by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California; and Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.”
"One of the last books she edited was a memoir by Frank Rich, the former critic and columnist for The New York Times; it’s slated to be published next year.
"“Ann influenced generations of editors and publishers by showing us, through her example, that you can champion works of cultural significance while still being commercially successful,” said Jonathan Karp, a former Random House editor in chief and a former publisher, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster.
"He added, “If there were a Hall of Fame for book publishing, Ann would be voted in on the first ballot.”
"Her early career was varied and peripatetic. She served tea to radio department colleagues at the BBC in London; tended bar in St. Thomas, in the Caribbean; drafted provocative questions for the TV psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers from the studio audience; studied architecture for a time; produced TV commercials for an advertising agency; and sold Oldsmobiles at a West Side dealership in Manhattan until she was hired part-time to type mailing labels for Alice Mayhew, a formidable editor at Simon & Schuster.
"Ms. Godoff later joined the house’s editing ranks and was ultimately promoted to senior editor. She worked for Simon & Schuster from 1980 to 1986, when the Atlantic Monthly Press hired her away to be its editor in chief. She joined Random House in 1991, becoming its executive editor, a post she held until 1996, and then president and editor in chief until 2003."
Franklin Foer. Atlantic, 02/26/2026: The Ruthless Benevolence of a Great Editor. "Ann Godoff, who died this week, cared passionately about her writers—and much less about her own ego."
Sam Roberts. NYT, 02/25/2026, upd 2/26: Ann Godoff, a Top Editor and Publisher of Best Sellers, Dies at 76. "Considered an “author’s publisher” at Random House and then Penguin, she cultivated the careers of dozens of celebrated novelists and nonfiction writers."
"Ann Godoff, a percipient editor and intuitive publisher who cultivated the careers of dozens of novelists and nonfiction authors for more than three decades as the head of Random House and then of Penguin Press, died on Tuesday in Albany, N.Y. She was 76.
"Ms. Godoff spent her career wooing and nurturing literary novices and veterans alike. Her more celebrated authors included Ron Chernow, E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Alice Waters. The literary agent Esther Newberg called her “an author’s publisher.”
"At Random House, Ms. Godoff was named executive editor in 1991 and rose to editor in chief and publisher of its trade publishing group before being famously fired in a corporate restructuring in 2003. At Penguin Press, the American hardcover imprint she founded soon afterward, she was editor in chief and publisher.
"Many of the books she shepherded into print became best sellers, among them John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) and Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” (1995), both surprise blockbusters.
"More recently, she edited and published three top sellers: the memoir “A Hymn to Life,” by Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband at the time and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her in a trial that made global headlines; “Young Man in a Hurry,” a memoir by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California; and Michael Pollan’s “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.”
"One of the last books she edited was a memoir by Frank Rich, the former critic and columnist for The New York Times; it’s slated to be published next year.
"“Ann influenced generations of editors and publishers by showing us, through her example, that you can champion works of cultural significance while still being commercially successful,” said Jonathan Karp, a former Random House editor in chief and a former publisher, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster.
"He added, “If there were a Hall of Fame for book publishing, Ann would be voted in on the first ballot.”
"Her early career was varied and peripatetic. She served tea to radio department colleagues at the BBC in London; tended bar in St. Thomas, in the Caribbean; drafted provocative questions for the TV psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers from the studio audience; studied architecture for a time; produced TV commercials for an advertising agency; and sold Oldsmobiles at a West Side dealership in Manhattan until she was hired part-time to type mailing labels for Alice Mayhew, a formidable editor at Simon & Schuster.
"Ms. Godoff later joined the house’s editing ranks and was ultimately promoted to senior editor. She worked for Simon & Schuster from 1980 to 1986, when the Atlantic Monthly Press hired her away to be its editor in chief. She joined Random House in 1991, becoming its executive editor, a post she held until 1996, and then president and editor in chief until 2003."
Franklin Foer. Atlantic, 02/26/2026: The Ruthless Benevolence of a Great Editor. "Ann Godoff, who died this week, cared passionately about her writers—and much less about her own ego."
102featherbear
Rose Lesniak, 1955-2026
Michael S. Rosenwald. NYT, 02/26/2026: Rose Lesniak, Poet Who Rescued Children and Trained Dogs, Dies at 70. "A magnetic personality, she reinvented herself twice, bringing the same spirit to investigating child abuse and communing with dogs that she did to writing poetry."
"Rose Lesniak, a feminist poet who dazzled and upended the male-dominated literary scene in New York during the 1970s before suddenly bolting to South Florida, where she worked as a child abuse investigator and then — in the final act of her kaleidoscopic life — became a dog trainer, died on Feb. 1 at her home in Miami. She was 70.
"Alluring and joyously queer, Ms. Lesniak moved to Manhattan in 1977 after graduating from college in Chicago, where she edited Out There, a literary magazine. She arrived with her skateboard, an elaborate wardrobe and a destabilizing energy.
"“You know how they say somebody lights up the room?” the poet Bob Holman, a close friend from those days, said in an interview. “Rose was actually the lightbulb. Being with her was like living on another planet. It was the Planet Rose.”
"With her friend Barbara Barg, Ms. Lesniak plunged into the avant-garde world that orbited the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. The stars were Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, John Giorno and other men. At readings, Ms. Lesniak and her friends would heckle them, calling out their sexist tropes, sometimes by making loud animal noises.
"The men weren’t altogether offended.
"For one thing, Ms. Lesniak and her friends were fun. “We’d all get high together, and we’d drink together afterward, and we’d get to know each other,” she said in the interview. Also, they knew she was a serious writer, working on poems that were later included in her books “Young Anger” (1979) and “Throwing Spitballs at the Nuns” (1982).
"Ms. Lesniak shared a spacious loft in Chelsea with Ms. Barg, a poet whose father, Louis S. Barg, was a wealthy businessman. The women hosted readings and parties attended by Mr. Ginsberg, Mr. Giorno and Andy Warhol.
"To help pay the bills, Ms. Lesniak worked for Majority Truckers, an all-female company that delivered gay male pornography to newsstands using old U.S. Postal Service trucks painted bright pink. (New York in the 1970s was something to behold.)
"Ms. Lesniak usually drove the truck.
"In the early 1980s, Ms. Lesniak helped start two prominent arts groups: Out There Productions, an organization that funded and staged performance art, and the Manhattan Poetry Video Project, which produced short films in which poets recited their work, in a more highbrow version of the music videos appearing on MTV. In one, Mr. Ginsberg performed “Father Death Blues” on Ellis Island.
"Burned out, she left New York in 1988, setting off for Miami, a city of refugees from weirder, messier lives up north — the sort of characters who sometimes showed up in Carl Hiaasen’s columns for The Miami Herald or Edna Buchanan’s crime stories.
"Having taught poetry in New York City schools, Ms. Lesniak decided that she wanted to help children. She got a job as an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families, working at an office in the special victims unit of the Miami Beach Police Department. Nobody there knew anything about her previous life.
"In 2003, she reinvented herself once again. After taking classes in positive-reinforcement, or “force-free,” dog training, she was soon working with clients throughout South Florida. “It brings Rose great joy to see a dog and their loved ones blossom from a once-dysfunctional household into a harmonious, happy household,” her website said.
"Ms. Lesniak told her friends that she had put poetry aside once she moved to Miami, but in fact she kept writing. In 2023, she published “What the Dogs Tell Me,” a collection of poems about her dogs, Martha and Joey."
Rose Lesniak's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/lesniakrose
Michael S. Rosenwald. NYT, 02/26/2026: Rose Lesniak, Poet Who Rescued Children and Trained Dogs, Dies at 70. "A magnetic personality, she reinvented herself twice, bringing the same spirit to investigating child abuse and communing with dogs that she did to writing poetry."
"Rose Lesniak, a feminist poet who dazzled and upended the male-dominated literary scene in New York during the 1970s before suddenly bolting to South Florida, where she worked as a child abuse investigator and then — in the final act of her kaleidoscopic life — became a dog trainer, died on Feb. 1 at her home in Miami. She was 70.
"Alluring and joyously queer, Ms. Lesniak moved to Manhattan in 1977 after graduating from college in Chicago, where she edited Out There, a literary magazine. She arrived with her skateboard, an elaborate wardrobe and a destabilizing energy.
"“You know how they say somebody lights up the room?” the poet Bob Holman, a close friend from those days, said in an interview. “Rose was actually the lightbulb. Being with her was like living on another planet. It was the Planet Rose.”
"With her friend Barbara Barg, Ms. Lesniak plunged into the avant-garde world that orbited the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. The stars were Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, John Giorno and other men. At readings, Ms. Lesniak and her friends would heckle them, calling out their sexist tropes, sometimes by making loud animal noises.
"The men weren’t altogether offended.
"For one thing, Ms. Lesniak and her friends were fun. “We’d all get high together, and we’d drink together afterward, and we’d get to know each other,” she said in the interview. Also, they knew she was a serious writer, working on poems that were later included in her books “Young Anger” (1979) and “Throwing Spitballs at the Nuns” (1982).
"Ms. Lesniak shared a spacious loft in Chelsea with Ms. Barg, a poet whose father, Louis S. Barg, was a wealthy businessman. The women hosted readings and parties attended by Mr. Ginsberg, Mr. Giorno and Andy Warhol.
"To help pay the bills, Ms. Lesniak worked for Majority Truckers, an all-female company that delivered gay male pornography to newsstands using old U.S. Postal Service trucks painted bright pink. (New York in the 1970s was something to behold.)
"Ms. Lesniak usually drove the truck.
"In the early 1980s, Ms. Lesniak helped start two prominent arts groups: Out There Productions, an organization that funded and staged performance art, and the Manhattan Poetry Video Project, which produced short films in which poets recited their work, in a more highbrow version of the music videos appearing on MTV. In one, Mr. Ginsberg performed “Father Death Blues” on Ellis Island.
"Burned out, she left New York in 1988, setting off for Miami, a city of refugees from weirder, messier lives up north — the sort of characters who sometimes showed up in Carl Hiaasen’s columns for The Miami Herald or Edna Buchanan’s crime stories.
"Having taught poetry in New York City schools, Ms. Lesniak decided that she wanted to help children. She got a job as an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families, working at an office in the special victims unit of the Miami Beach Police Department. Nobody there knew anything about her previous life.
"In 2003, she reinvented herself once again. After taking classes in positive-reinforcement, or “force-free,” dog training, she was soon working with clients throughout South Florida. “It brings Rose great joy to see a dog and their loved ones blossom from a once-dysfunctional household into a harmonious, happy household,” her website said.
"Ms. Lesniak told her friends that she had put poetry aside once she moved to Miami, but in fact she kept writing. In 2023, she published “What the Dogs Tell Me,” a collection of poems about her dogs, Martha and Joey."
Rose Lesniak's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/lesniakrose
103featherbear
Dan Simmons, 1948-2026
Eric Berger. ars technica, 02/27/2026: Hyperion author Dan Simmons dies from stroke at 77.
"Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion."
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 03/11/2026: Dan Simmons, Genre-Leaping Author of ‘The Terror,’ Dies at 77. "He moved easily and prolifically through science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, crime and historical fiction. His book “The Terror” was made into a cable TV series."
"Dan Simmons, whose many novels in multiple genres featured explorers stuck in the Arctic ice and terrorized by a giant monster; Sherlock Holmes and the writer Henry James investigating a death in Gilded Age America; seven pilgrims trekking to a war-torn galaxy; and a young Sioux warrior possessed by the spirit of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, died on Feb. 21 in Lakewood, Colo. He was 77.
"Mr. Simmons wrote more than 30 novels and short story collections under the rubrics science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, crime and historical fiction — always listening to his own muses.
"Mr. Simmons was perhaps best known for the “Hyperion Cantos,” a space opera in four volumes. The first, “Hyperion” (1989), is an apocalyptic epic about a galactic war set in the 29th century, where seven pilgrims travel to the doomed planet Hyperion to face off against the Shrike, a terrifying creature also known as the Lord of Pain.
"Mr. Simmons juggled horror and historical fiction in “The Terror” (2007), his take on the British explorer Capt. John Franklin’s failed Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage that began in 1845. Basing his book on the tragedy of more than 100 icebound men on two British Navy ships who would all perish, Mr. Simmons added a fictional mutiny, a tongueless Inuit woman and an enormous, supernatural polar bear-like creature.
"When “The Terror” was adapted into a 10-part series on AMC in 2018, it was “fun on all sorts of levels,” Mr. Simmons told Wabash magazine, a publication of Wabash College, his alma mater, in 2019. It boosted his hope — to date unrealized — that one of his books would be turned into a movie.
"Mr. Simmons’s honors included a Hugo Award for science fiction; two World Fantasy Awards; four Bram Stoker Awards for horror works; and a dozen Locus Awards, given in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres."
The NYT obit does not mention Simmons's extreme right wing turn later in life though it does get a mention in one of the obit comments; almost an echo of HP Lovecraft. Loved Simmons's vampire novel Carrion Comfort.
Dan Simmons's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/simmonsdan
Eric Berger. ars technica, 02/27/2026: Hyperion author Dan Simmons dies from stroke at 77.
"Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion."
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 03/11/2026: Dan Simmons, Genre-Leaping Author of ‘The Terror,’ Dies at 77. "He moved easily and prolifically through science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, crime and historical fiction. His book “The Terror” was made into a cable TV series."
"Dan Simmons, whose many novels in multiple genres featured explorers stuck in the Arctic ice and terrorized by a giant monster; Sherlock Holmes and the writer Henry James investigating a death in Gilded Age America; seven pilgrims trekking to a war-torn galaxy; and a young Sioux warrior possessed by the spirit of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, died on Feb. 21 in Lakewood, Colo. He was 77.
"Mr. Simmons wrote more than 30 novels and short story collections under the rubrics science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, crime and historical fiction — always listening to his own muses.
"Mr. Simmons was perhaps best known for the “Hyperion Cantos,” a space opera in four volumes. The first, “Hyperion” (1989), is an apocalyptic epic about a galactic war set in the 29th century, where seven pilgrims travel to the doomed planet Hyperion to face off against the Shrike, a terrifying creature also known as the Lord of Pain.
"Mr. Simmons juggled horror and historical fiction in “The Terror” (2007), his take on the British explorer Capt. John Franklin’s failed Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage that began in 1845. Basing his book on the tragedy of more than 100 icebound men on two British Navy ships who would all perish, Mr. Simmons added a fictional mutiny, a tongueless Inuit woman and an enormous, supernatural polar bear-like creature.
"When “The Terror” was adapted into a 10-part series on AMC in 2018, it was “fun on all sorts of levels,” Mr. Simmons told Wabash magazine, a publication of Wabash College, his alma mater, in 2019. It boosted his hope — to date unrealized — that one of his books would be turned into a movie.
"Mr. Simmons’s honors included a Hugo Award for science fiction; two World Fantasy Awards; four Bram Stoker Awards for horror works; and a dozen Locus Awards, given in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres."
The NYT obit does not mention Simmons's extreme right wing turn later in life though it does get a mention in one of the obit comments; almost an echo of HP Lovecraft. Loved Simmons's vampire novel Carrion Comfort.
Dan Simmons's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/simmonsdan
104featherbear
February 2026 updates 22-28
Asian Review of Books Feb 28: The Yellow Metaphor: Assamese poems in translation -- Feb 27: Rebel English Academy -- Feb 25: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China -- Feb 24: comics anthology -- Feb 23: Moonlight Saga >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 26: the puritain stain; 2 books on women journalists -- Feb 25: 9 books to widen your perspective -- Feb 24: Michael Pollan on consciousness book; Gavin Newsom memoir: father issues >53 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 23: 2 books on the end of the British Raj; David's Death of Marat >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 25: 5 books on communication >78 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 28: Asako Yuzuki on her new novel Hooked -- Feb 27: Cleopatra novel; British woods -- Feb 26: mental health -- Feb 25: Boss Lincoln; Homeschooled; how to make it in crypto -- Feb 24: Suckerfish by Ashani Lewis; Nonesuch fantasy novel by Francis Spufford; International Booker longlist; sayonara pocketbooks -- Feb 23: As If; Politics w/out Politicians -- Feb 22: Francis Spufford on the case for fantasy; over diagnosing mental issues? >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 28: Tim Berners-Lee book: but can the Internet be saved? -- Feb 26: new book on The Magic Mountain -- Feb 25: steamy sex -- Feb 24: 3 books on David Bowie; war technology & the environment -- Feb 23: Stephen King's Dark Half >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 25: pornographic memoir -- Feb 24: Tayari Jones answers some questions; Darcy Steinke on migraines; literary creation in a time of dread -- Feb 23: profile of Lauren Groff; art, capitalism, & reading; bad mothers in fiction >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 26: Wuthering Heights the novel; Native American enslavement; Moby Dick obsession -- Feb 25: Michael Pollan lists the influences on his new consciousness book; sexual fetishes & objects book; when do we become "adults"? -- Feb 23: new Walter Benjamin bio >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 26 >71 featherbear:
NYT Feb 28: James Cahill's The Violet Hour; Maria Stepanova's The Disappearing Act -- Feb 27: Michael Pollan book on consciousness -- Feb 26: royal fashion; Melissa Auf der Maur memoir -- Feb 25: 3 women journalists -- Feb 24: International Booker longlist; Mario Vargas Llosa's final novel; Gavin Newsom memoir; new Anna Quindlen novel; Red Dawn Over China (Dikotter book on history's helpers) -- Feb 23: Mixed Marriage Project; wake for WaPo Bookworld -- Feb 22: Lauren Groff stories; Lisa Rinna memoir >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 27: what to read for Black History Month; Mule Boy excerpt; Caliban's nipples -- Feb 26: On Morrison interview; what we're reading from the websites -- Feb 25: Vincente Luis Mora interview w/the translator of Mora's forthcoming historical novel; Eric Le May's forthcoming essay collection -- Feb 24: Black Studies book; interview w/the authors of Black Studies book -- Feb 23: De La Soul book; excerpt from book on Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy >62 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 22: White River Crossing >49 featherbear:
February index >46 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
Obituary index Jan-March >1 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
February updates 08-14 >89 featherbear:
February updates 15-21 >94 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Columbia Journalism Review >98 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >96 featherbear:
University of Chicago Press Journals >99 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Feb 28: The Yellow Metaphor: Assamese poems in translation -- Feb 27: Rebel English Academy -- Feb 25: Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China -- Feb 24: comics anthology -- Feb 23: Moonlight Saga >47 featherbear:
Atlantic Feb 26: the puritain stain; 2 books on women journalists -- Feb 25: 9 books to widen your perspective -- Feb 24: Michael Pollan on consciousness book; Gavin Newsom memoir: father issues >53 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Feb 23: 2 books on the end of the British Raj; David's Death of Marat >77 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Feb 25: 5 books on communication >78 featherbear:
Guardian Feb 28: Asako Yuzuki on her new novel Hooked -- Feb 27: Cleopatra novel; British woods -- Feb 26: mental health -- Feb 25: Boss Lincoln; Homeschooled; how to make it in crypto -- Feb 24: Suckerfish by Ashani Lewis; Nonesuch fantasy novel by Francis Spufford; International Booker longlist; sayonara pocketbooks -- Feb 23: As If; Politics w/out Politicians -- Feb 22: Francis Spufford on the case for fantasy; over diagnosing mental issues? >50 featherbear:
LARB Feb 28: Tim Berners-Lee book: but can the Internet be saved? -- Feb 26: new book on The Magic Mountain -- Feb 25: steamy sex -- Feb 24: 3 books on David Bowie; war technology & the environment -- Feb 23: Stephen King's Dark Half >52 featherbear:
LitHub Feb 25: pornographic memoir -- Feb 24: Tayari Jones answers some questions; Darcy Steinke on migraines; literary creation in a time of dread -- Feb 23: profile of Lauren Groff; art, capitalism, & reading; bad mothers in fiction >64 featherbear:
New Yorker Feb 26: Wuthering Heights the novel; Native American enslavement; Moby Dick obsession -- Feb 25: Michael Pollan lists the influences on his new consciousness book; sexual fetishes & objects book; when do we become "adults"? -- Feb 23: new Walter Benjamin bio >54 featherbear:
NYRB Online Feb 26 >71 featherbear:
NYT Feb 28: James Cahill's The Violet Hour; Maria Stepanova's The Disappearing Act -- Feb 27: Michael Pollan book on consciousness -- Feb 26: royal fashion; Melissa Auf der Maur memoir -- Feb 25: 3 women journalists -- Feb 24: International Booker longlist; Mario Vargas Llosa's final novel; Gavin Newsom memoir; new Anna Quindlen novel; Red Dawn Over China (Dikotter book on history's helpers) -- Feb 23: Mixed Marriage Project; wake for WaPo Bookworld -- Feb 22: Lauren Groff stories; Lisa Rinna memoir >48 featherbear:
PRoB Feb 27: what to read for Black History Month; Mule Boy excerpt; Caliban's nipples -- Feb 26: On Morrison interview; what we're reading from the websites -- Feb 25: Vincente Luis Mora interview w/the translator of Mora's forthcoming historical novel; Eric Le May's forthcoming essay collection -- Feb 24: Black Studies book; interview w/the authors of Black Studies book -- Feb 23: De La Soul book; excerpt from book on Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy >62 featherbear:
WaPo Feb 22: White River Crossing >49 featherbear:
February index >46 featherbear:
January index >2 featherbear:
Obituary index Jan-March >1 featherbear:
February updates 01-07 >75 featherbear:
February updates 08-14 >89 featherbear:
February updates 15-21 >94 featherbear:
Websites Added This Week:
Columbia Journalism Review >98 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >96 featherbear:
University of Chicago Press Journals >99 featherbear:
105featherbear
March 2026 Index
Aeon >111 featherbear:
American Scholar >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >108 featherbear:
Atlantic >114 featherbear:
Countercraft >160 featherbear:
Cultured >163 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >115 featherbear:
Granta >162 featherbear:
Guardian >107 featherbear:
Hedgehog Review >157 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >124 featherbear:
LARB >110 featherbear:
Literary Review >113 featherbear:
LitHub >120 featherbear:
The Nation >158 featherbear:
The New Republic see TNR below
New Yorker >117 featherbear:
NYRB Online Mar 12 >106 featherbear: -- Mar 26 >122 featherbear:
NYT (New York Times Online) >109 featherbear:
PRoB (Pittsburgh Review of Books) >112 featherbear:
Public Books >118 featherbear:
Quillette >132 featherbear:
TLS Mar 06 >119 featherbear: -- Mar 20 >141 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >159 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >161 featherbear:
Yale Review >148 featherbear:
Aeon >111 featherbear:
American Scholar >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books >108 featherbear:
Atlantic >114 featherbear:
Countercraft >160 featherbear:
Cultured >163 featherbear:
fivebooks.com >115 featherbear:
Granta >162 featherbear:
Guardian >107 featherbear:
Hedgehog Review >157 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >124 featherbear:
LARB >110 featherbear:
Literary Review >113 featherbear:
LitHub >120 featherbear:
The Nation >158 featherbear:
The New Republic see TNR below
New Yorker >117 featherbear:
NYRB Online Mar 12 >106 featherbear: -- Mar 26 >122 featherbear:
NYT (New York Times Online) >109 featherbear:
PRoB (Pittsburgh Review of Books) >112 featherbear:
Public Books >118 featherbear:
Quillette >132 featherbear:
TLS Mar 06 >119 featherbear: -- Mar 20 >141 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >159 featherbear:
Woman of Letters >161 featherbear:
Yale Review >148 featherbear:
106featherbear
NYRB Online March 12 2026
Literature
Colin Grant. If These Walls Could Talk. Review of: A House for Miss Pauline / Diana McCaulay.
Edward Mendelsohn. Deeper Than They Thought. Review of: The Feast / Margaret Kennedy -- Troy Chimneys / Margaret Kennedy.
Sophie Pinkham. The Poet’s Double. Review of: Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin / Konstantin Vaginov, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula, with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky.
Arts
Marina Harss. Alexei Ratmansky’s Leap of Faith. Review of: The Art of the Fugue, a ballet by Alexei Ratmansky at the Royal Danish Theatre, Copenhagen, November 1–18, 2025. "Having wrested himself from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the great choreographer has sought to remake himself and his work in Denmark."
Science & Technology
Alec Wilkinson. The Wandering Physicist. Review of: Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs /Alec Nevala-Lee. "Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs."
Religion
Magda Teter. ‘An Entirely New Domain of Knowledge.’ Review of: How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity / Krista N. Dalton. "The Torah scholars who came to be called “rabbis” emerged as figures of authority after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the later exile of Jews from Judaea—and created Judaism’s founding literature."
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Christopher Benfey. Road Trippers: In a thirty-three-day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States. Review of: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship / Louis P. Masur.
Carolina A. Miranda. Poisonous Objects: Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States. Review of: MONUMENTS, an exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, Los Angeles, October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Hamza Walker and Hannah Burstein -- Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 12, 2025–March 29, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Diana Naw.
Thomas Powers. A Real Live Socialist: What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument. Review of: Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place / Dan Chiasson.
Linda Greenhouse. As Kennedy Went: Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning. Review of: Life, Law and Liberty: a memoir / Anthony M. Kennedy.
Joshua Hammer. Paths of Resistance: Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance? Review of: The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them / Jonathan Freedland -- The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp / Lynne Olson -- The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising / Elizabeth R. Hyman.
Elaine Blair. Gaslight: The case of Gisèle Pelicot, who for more than a decade was violated by her husband and dozens of other men, should mark the end of the regime that puts on women the responsibility for avoiding assault. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Tim Judah. A Bitter Winter in Ukraine: Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. (Article)
David Shulman. Evil in the West Bank: As long as the daily horrors in the occupied territories continue and the extreme right remains in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core. (Article)
Anjan Sundaram. ‘We Think They’ll Kill Someone’: Indigenous communities in Mexico who oppose the construction of megaprojects on their lands do so at great risk. (Article)
Literature
Colin Grant. If These Walls Could Talk. Review of: A House for Miss Pauline / Diana McCaulay.
Edward Mendelsohn. Deeper Than They Thought. Review of: The Feast / Margaret Kennedy -- Troy Chimneys / Margaret Kennedy.
Sophie Pinkham. The Poet’s Double. Review of: Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin / Konstantin Vaginov, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula, with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky.
Arts
Marina Harss. Alexei Ratmansky’s Leap of Faith. Review of: The Art of the Fugue, a ballet by Alexei Ratmansky at the Royal Danish Theatre, Copenhagen, November 1–18, 2025. "Having wrested himself from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the great choreographer has sought to remake himself and his work in Denmark."
Science & Technology
Alec Wilkinson. The Wandering Physicist. Review of: Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs /Alec Nevala-Lee. "Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs."
Religion
Magda Teter. ‘An Entirely New Domain of Knowledge.’ Review of: How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity / Krista N. Dalton. "The Torah scholars who came to be called “rabbis” emerged as figures of authority after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the later exile of Jews from Judaea—and created Judaism’s founding literature."
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Christopher Benfey. Road Trippers: In a thirty-three-day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States. Review of: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship / Louis P. Masur.
Carolina A. Miranda. Poisonous Objects: Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States. Review of: MONUMENTS, an exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, Los Angeles, October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Hamza Walker and Hannah Burstein -- Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 12, 2025–March 29, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Diana Naw.
Thomas Powers. A Real Live Socialist: What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument. Review of: Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place / Dan Chiasson.
Linda Greenhouse. As Kennedy Went: Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning. Review of: Life, Law and Liberty: a memoir / Anthony M. Kennedy.
Joshua Hammer. Paths of Resistance: Those who challenged the Nazi regime knew they were almost certainly doomed to failure. What roused them from complacency to defiance? Review of: The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them / Jonathan Freedland -- The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp / Lynne Olson -- The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising / Elizabeth R. Hyman.
Elaine Blair. Gaslight: The case of Gisèle Pelicot, who for more than a decade was violated by her husband and dozens of other men, should mark the end of the regime that puts on women the responsibility for avoiding assault. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver.
Tim Judah. A Bitter Winter in Ukraine: Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid. (Article)
David Shulman. Evil in the West Bank: As long as the daily horrors in the occupied territories continue and the extreme right remains in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core. (Article)
Anjan Sundaram. ‘We Think They’ll Kill Someone’: Indigenous communities in Mexico who oppose the construction of megaprojects on their lands do so at great risk. (Article)
107featherbear
Guardian March 2026
Michael Cragg. 03/31/2026: Fainting in front of Michael Jackson and feuding with Monica: inside Brandy’s jaw-dropping memoir. Regarding: Phases: A Memoir – An Intimate Biography of the Multiplatinum Music Legend and Star of Moesha and Cinderella / Brandy Norwood.
Maya Yang. 03/31/2026: Tennessee library director fired after refusing to move LGBTQ+-themed kids’ books to adult section.
Emma Loffhagen. 03/31/2026: ‘Hope, insight and burning humanity’: 2026 International Booker prize shortlist announced.
Oliver Bullogh. 03/31/2026: The extraordinary story of Roger Casement. Review of: A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA / Rory Carroll.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/31/2026: A stunning exploration of technology and storytelling. Review of: Transcription: a novel / Ben Lerner.
Kathryn Hughes. 03/30/2026: The writing secrets of Stephen King. Review of: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King / Caroline Bicks.
Marcel Theroux. 03/30/2026: A Hungarian epic from a 22-year-old author: The fortunes of a single family are entwined with the turmoil of the 20th century in this ambitious, gothic-inflected debut. Review of: Lázár: A Novel / Nelio Biedermann; translator, Jamie Bulloch (S&S/Summit Books).
Amelia Hill. 03/29/2026: ‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books. "US release of horror novel Shy Girl cancelled and UK book discontinued after suspected AI use, as publishers feel ‘cold shiver.’
Caro Claire Burke. 03/29/2026: ‘Serve, smile, procreate’: Yesteryear author Caro Claire Burke on the rise of the tradwife. Regarding: Yesteryear: A Novel / Caro Claire Burke.
Woody Brown, interviewer Simon Hattenstone. 03/28/2026: ‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer.
Priya Elan. 03/27/2026: A vivid, vibrant, musical coming of age. Review of: No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene / Adele Bertei (Faber).
Michael Donkor. 03/27/2026: A homecoming tale with echoes of Brokeback Mountain. Review of: Love Lane / Patrick Gale.
Kate McLoughlin. 03/26/2026: Daunting, inspiring, comforting, terrifying: the writers who can make silence as eloquent as words.
Christopher Webb. 03/26/2026: How Elon Musk is reshaping the world. Review of: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed / Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.
Sarah Moss. 03/26/2026: High-concept adultery fable. Review of: Permanence: A Novel / Sophie Mackintosh.
Pratinav Anil. 03/25/2026: The strange case of Graham Greene and Kim Philby. Review of: The Writer and the Traitor: Graham Greene, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal / Robert Verkaik (Headline).
Rebecca Solnit, interviewer Zoe Williams. 03/25/2026: ‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate. Interview regarding The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change / Rebecca Solnit.
Christopher Shrimpton. 03/25/2026: A campus comedy for our end times. Review of: Black Bag: A Novel / Luke Kennard.
Kathryn Hughes. 03/24/2026: A man for all seasons. Review of: Enough Said / Alan Bennett.
Ibram X Kendi, interviewer Steve Rose. 03/23/2026: ‘In 20 years most of the world could be racist dictatorships’: Ibram X Kendi on book bans and far-right fear-mongering.
Dorian Lynskey. 03/23/2026: The terrifying new world of ransomware. Review of: We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware / Anja Shortland (Profile).
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/23/2026: Portrait of a working-class artist in New York. Review of: Minor Black Figures / Brandon Taylor. "This novel is stacked with ideas about Black art and aesthetics – but its language is too clumsy and academic to bring them to life."
Stephanie Convery. 03/21/2026: The Melbourne expert who has spent a lifetime uncovering ‘the archaeology of the printed book.’ "Prof Wallace Kirsop, 92, is one of Australia’s foremost experts in rare books – not just their contents but their makers, buyers and readers, and the stories they tell beyond the page."
Arwah Mahdawi. 03/20/2026: Anatomy of a conspiracy theory. Review of: Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age / Ibram X. Kendi. "This careful analysis of so-called ‘great replacement theory’ offers a lens through which to view our broken politics."
Florence Knapp. 03/20/2026: The books in my life: The Names author Florence Knapp: ‘I’d love to write with Maya Angelou’s warmth.’ "The debut author on the brilliance of Charlotte Brontë, coming late to Harper Lee, and aspiring to write like Claire Keegan."
Stephen Smith. 03/19/2026: The National Trust’s LGBTQ history revealed. Review of: A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust / Michael Hall.
Sandra Newman. 03/19/2026: Profound story of a woman’s love for a horse. Review of: Mare: A Novel / Emily Haworth-Booth.
Mythili Rao. 03/18/2026: The Indiana Jones of trees returns. Review of: When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World / Suzanne Simard.
Joanna Briscoe. 03/18/2026: A will-they-won’t-they queer romance. Review of: Almost Life: A Novel / Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
M. John Harrison. 03/17/2026: An afterlife of queues and bureaucracy. Review of: The Delusions / Jenni Fagan.
Joe Moran. 03/17/2026: What does it really mean to stand by someone? Review of: Solidarity: The Work of Recognition / Rowan William (Bloomsbury).
Lucasta Miller. 03/16/2026: Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked!
Alex Clark. 03/16/2026: A tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair. Review of: Howl: The powerful new novel from the Booker Prize winner / Howard Jacobson.
Tim Clare. 03/16/2026: The story of the man who changed the world. "A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner." Regarding: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence / Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press).
Shahrnush Parsipur, interviewer Dina Nayeri. 03/15/2026: Women Without Men, is published for the first time in the UK, the Iranian author looks back on a life of resistance and repression,"
John Self. 03/13/2026: A tantalising book of reflections. Review of: Light and Thread / Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth).
Lisa Tuttle. 03/13/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup: The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan; The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan; Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison; Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman; Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran.
Catherine Taylor. 03/13/2026: Follow-up to global hit Butter. Review of: Hooked: A Novel of Obsession / Asako Yuzuki; Polly Barton translator.
Daisy Johnson. 03/13/2026: The books of my life: Daisy Johnson: ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece.’
Andy Beckett. 03/12/2026: A surprisingly original prescription: A former New Labour minister tackles the question of our times with rigour and verve – but blindspots remain. Review of: Why Populists Are Winning And How to Beat Them / Liam Byrne (Apollo).
Kelly Burke. 03/11/202: Self-publish and be scammed: Jon’s tale of heartbreak highlights boom in fraudsters using AI to supercharge book swindles. "New wave of publishing scams mimic lonely hearts hoaxes of old – swapping promises of true love for the fantasy of literary acclaim. And the wooing process is now fully automated." Regarding: Angel of Aleppo: Can faith survive the Armenian Genocide? / Jon Cocks (Greenhill Publishing).
Kathryn Hughes. 03/11/2026: The case against euthanasia. Review of: Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death / Kathleen Stock (Bridge Street Press; US forthcoming July 07 2026).
Fiona Sturges. 03/10/2026: A heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance. Review of: Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! / Liza Minelli.
Alexander Cheves. 03/09/2026: ‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/09/2026: Yoko Ono before the Beatles. Review of: Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora / Paul Morley (Faber).
Clare Clark. 03/09/2026: A battle between millennials and boomers. Review of: Look What You Made Me Do: A Novel / John Lanchester.
Julia May Jonas, interviewer Hannah Marriott. 03/08/2026: Vladimir author Julia May Jonas: ‘We’re imprisoned by our obsessions.’ "As her debut novel becomes a Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, the American author talks about comparisons with Lolita, moving on from #MeToo and problematic authors." Touchstone: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.
Michael Amherst. 03/07/2026: A profound exploration of the inner life. "How are we to account for things that lie outside ordinary language? A woman’s emotions are precisely observed in a novel that brilliantly captures what it means to be human." Review of: A Beautiful Loan: A Novel / Mary Costello.
Saba Sams (the books in my life series). 03/06/2026: Saba Sams: ‘I’ve no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again.’ "The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark." Saba Sams's first novel: Gunk.
Lauren J. Joseph. 03/06/2026: From luxury ‘dupes’ to literary doubles: why doppelgangers are everywhere right now.
Ella Risbridger. 03/06/2026: A delicious comfort read. Review of: The Infamous Gilberts / Angela Tomaski.
Alice Jolly. 03/05/2026: Tender portrait of a woman with a learning disability. Review of: Gloria Don’t Speak / Lucy Apps.
Rebecca Nicholson. 03/05/2026: Queer goings on behind the curtains. Review of: Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains / John Grindrod (Faber).
Nina Allan. 03/04/2026: Raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire. Review of: The Quantity Theory of Morality / Will Self.
Aamna Mohdin. 03/04/2026: A powerful memoir of postcolonial unease. Review of: Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire / Simukai Chigudu.
Peter Bradshaw. 03/03/2026: The rise and reign of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Jude Cook. 03/03/2026: A novel to make the reader slow down and take notice. Review of: they / Helle Helle.
Melissa Harrison. 03/02/2026: Virtuoso portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s final year. Review of: The Daffodil Days: A Novel / Helen Bain (Scribner).
Anthony Cummins. 03/02/2026: The remarkable story of a cross-dressing 19th century novelist. Review of: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (Doubleday).
Fiona Sampson. 03/01/2026: Brave, visionary and queer: the Bohemian brilliance of author George Sand. Excerpt from: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (Doubleday).
Christina Applegate. 03/01/2026: Christina Applegate on life with multiple sclerosis: ‘I won’t lie and say any of this is a blessing.’ Excerpt from the forthcoming memoir: You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir / Christina Applegate.
Matthew Cantor. 03/01/2026: . The Pentagon says it’s ‘lethalitymaxxing’. Why has ‘incel’ slang crossed into the mainstream? "With the rise of influencer Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxers’, sexist language from niche memes has infiltrated official government accounts and NYT headlines."
Michael Cragg. 03/31/2026: Fainting in front of Michael Jackson and feuding with Monica: inside Brandy’s jaw-dropping memoir. Regarding: Phases: A Memoir – An Intimate Biography of the Multiplatinum Music Legend and Star of Moesha and Cinderella / Brandy Norwood.
Maya Yang. 03/31/2026: Tennessee library director fired after refusing to move LGBTQ+-themed kids’ books to adult section.
Emma Loffhagen. 03/31/2026: ‘Hope, insight and burning humanity’: 2026 International Booker prize shortlist announced.
Oliver Bullogh. 03/31/2026: The extraordinary story of Roger Casement. Review of: A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA / Rory Carroll.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/31/2026: A stunning exploration of technology and storytelling. Review of: Transcription: a novel / Ben Lerner.
Kathryn Hughes. 03/30/2026: The writing secrets of Stephen King. Review of: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King / Caroline Bicks.
Marcel Theroux. 03/30/2026: A Hungarian epic from a 22-year-old author: The fortunes of a single family are entwined with the turmoil of the 20th century in this ambitious, gothic-inflected debut. Review of: Lázár: A Novel / Nelio Biedermann; translator, Jamie Bulloch (S&S/Summit Books).
Amelia Hill. 03/29/2026: ‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books. "US release of horror novel Shy Girl cancelled and UK book discontinued after suspected AI use, as publishers feel ‘cold shiver.’
Caro Claire Burke. 03/29/2026: ‘Serve, smile, procreate’: Yesteryear author Caro Claire Burke on the rise of the tradwife. Regarding: Yesteryear: A Novel / Caro Claire Burke.
Woody Brown, interviewer Simon Hattenstone. 03/28/2026: ‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer.
Priya Elan. 03/27/2026: A vivid, vibrant, musical coming of age. Review of: No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene / Adele Bertei (Faber).
Michael Donkor. 03/27/2026: A homecoming tale with echoes of Brokeback Mountain. Review of: Love Lane / Patrick Gale.
Kate McLoughlin. 03/26/2026: Daunting, inspiring, comforting, terrifying: the writers who can make silence as eloquent as words.
Christopher Webb. 03/26/2026: How Elon Musk is reshaping the world. Review of: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed / Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.
Sarah Moss. 03/26/2026: High-concept adultery fable. Review of: Permanence: A Novel / Sophie Mackintosh.
Pratinav Anil. 03/25/2026: The strange case of Graham Greene and Kim Philby. Review of: The Writer and the Traitor: Graham Greene, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal / Robert Verkaik (Headline).
Rebecca Solnit, interviewer Zoe Williams. 03/25/2026: ‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate. Interview regarding The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change / Rebecca Solnit.
Christopher Shrimpton. 03/25/2026: A campus comedy for our end times. Review of: Black Bag: A Novel / Luke Kennard.
Kathryn Hughes. 03/24/2026: A man for all seasons. Review of: Enough Said / Alan Bennett.
Ibram X Kendi, interviewer Steve Rose. 03/23/2026: ‘In 20 years most of the world could be racist dictatorships’: Ibram X Kendi on book bans and far-right fear-mongering.
Dorian Lynskey. 03/23/2026: The terrifying new world of ransomware. Review of: We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware / Anja Shortland (Profile).
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/23/2026: Portrait of a working-class artist in New York. Review of: Minor Black Figures / Brandon Taylor. "This novel is stacked with ideas about Black art and aesthetics – but its language is too clumsy and academic to bring them to life."
Stephanie Convery. 03/21/2026: The Melbourne expert who has spent a lifetime uncovering ‘the archaeology of the printed book.’ "Prof Wallace Kirsop, 92, is one of Australia’s foremost experts in rare books – not just their contents but their makers, buyers and readers, and the stories they tell beyond the page."
Arwah Mahdawi. 03/20/2026: Anatomy of a conspiracy theory. Review of: Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age / Ibram X. Kendi. "This careful analysis of so-called ‘great replacement theory’ offers a lens through which to view our broken politics."
Florence Knapp. 03/20/2026: The books in my life: The Names author Florence Knapp: ‘I’d love to write with Maya Angelou’s warmth.’ "The debut author on the brilliance of Charlotte Brontë, coming late to Harper Lee, and aspiring to write like Claire Keegan."
Stephen Smith. 03/19/2026: The National Trust’s LGBTQ history revealed. Review of: A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust / Michael Hall.
Sandra Newman. 03/19/2026: Profound story of a woman’s love for a horse. Review of: Mare: A Novel / Emily Haworth-Booth.
Mythili Rao. 03/18/2026: The Indiana Jones of trees returns. Review of: When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World / Suzanne Simard.
Joanna Briscoe. 03/18/2026: A will-they-won’t-they queer romance. Review of: Almost Life: A Novel / Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
M. John Harrison. 03/17/2026: An afterlife of queues and bureaucracy. Review of: The Delusions / Jenni Fagan.
Joe Moran. 03/17/2026: What does it really mean to stand by someone? Review of: Solidarity: The Work of Recognition / Rowan William (Bloomsbury).
Lucasta Miller. 03/16/2026: Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked!
Alex Clark. 03/16/2026: A tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair. Review of: Howl: The powerful new novel from the Booker Prize winner / Howard Jacobson.
Tim Clare. 03/16/2026: The story of the man who changed the world. "A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner." Regarding: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence / Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press).
Shahrnush Parsipur, interviewer Dina Nayeri. 03/15/2026: Women Without Men, is published for the first time in the UK, the Iranian author looks back on a life of resistance and repression,"
John Self. 03/13/2026: A tantalising book of reflections. Review of: Light and Thread / Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth).
Lisa Tuttle. 03/13/2026: The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup: The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan; The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan; Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison; Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman; Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran.
Catherine Taylor. 03/13/2026: Follow-up to global hit Butter. Review of: Hooked: A Novel of Obsession / Asako Yuzuki; Polly Barton translator.
Daisy Johnson. 03/13/2026: The books of my life: Daisy Johnson: ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece.’
Andy Beckett. 03/12/2026: A surprisingly original prescription: A former New Labour minister tackles the question of our times with rigour and verve – but blindspots remain. Review of: Why Populists Are Winning And How to Beat Them / Liam Byrne (Apollo).
Kelly Burke. 03/11/202: Self-publish and be scammed: Jon’s tale of heartbreak highlights boom in fraudsters using AI to supercharge book swindles. "New wave of publishing scams mimic lonely hearts hoaxes of old – swapping promises of true love for the fantasy of literary acclaim. And the wooing process is now fully automated." Regarding: Angel of Aleppo: Can faith survive the Armenian Genocide? / Jon Cocks (Greenhill Publishing).
Kathryn Hughes. 03/11/2026: The case against euthanasia. Review of: Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death / Kathleen Stock (Bridge Street Press; US forthcoming July 07 2026).
Fiona Sturges. 03/10/2026: A heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance. Review of: Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! / Liza Minelli.
Alexander Cheves. 03/09/2026: ‘We all want to know what he was doing in the bedroom’: Kerouac’s unseen archive goes on show in New York.
Sukhdev Sandhu. 03/09/2026: Yoko Ono before the Beatles. Review of: Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora / Paul Morley (Faber).
Clare Clark. 03/09/2026: A battle between millennials and boomers. Review of: Look What You Made Me Do: A Novel / John Lanchester.
Julia May Jonas, interviewer Hannah Marriott. 03/08/2026: Vladimir author Julia May Jonas: ‘We’re imprisoned by our obsessions.’ "As her debut novel becomes a Netflix series starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, the American author talks about comparisons with Lolita, moving on from #MeToo and problematic authors." Touchstone: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.
Michael Amherst. 03/07/2026: A profound exploration of the inner life. "How are we to account for things that lie outside ordinary language? A woman’s emotions are precisely observed in a novel that brilliantly captures what it means to be human." Review of: A Beautiful Loan: A Novel / Mary Costello.
Saba Sams (the books in my life series). 03/06/2026: Saba Sams: ‘I’ve no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again.’ "The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark." Saba Sams's first novel: Gunk.
Lauren J. Joseph. 03/06/2026: From luxury ‘dupes’ to literary doubles: why doppelgangers are everywhere right now.
Ella Risbridger. 03/06/2026: A delicious comfort read. Review of: The Infamous Gilberts / Angela Tomaski.
Alice Jolly. 03/05/2026: Tender portrait of a woman with a learning disability. Review of: Gloria Don’t Speak / Lucy Apps.
Rebecca Nicholson. 03/05/2026: Queer goings on behind the curtains. Review of: Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains / John Grindrod (Faber).
Nina Allan. 03/04/2026: Raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire. Review of: The Quantity Theory of Morality / Will Self.
Aamna Mohdin. 03/04/2026: A powerful memoir of postcolonial unease. Review of: Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire / Simukai Chigudu.
Peter Bradshaw. 03/03/2026: The rise and reign of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola. Review of: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema / Paul Fischer.
Jude Cook. 03/03/2026: A novel to make the reader slow down and take notice. Review of: they / Helle Helle.
Melissa Harrison. 03/02/2026: Virtuoso portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s final year. Review of: The Daffodil Days: A Novel / Helen Bain (Scribner).
Anthony Cummins. 03/02/2026: The remarkable story of a cross-dressing 19th century novelist. Review of: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (Doubleday).
Fiona Sampson. 03/01/2026: Brave, visionary and queer: the Bohemian brilliance of author George Sand. Excerpt from: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand / Fiona Sampson (Doubleday).
Christina Applegate. 03/01/2026: Christina Applegate on life with multiple sclerosis: ‘I won’t lie and say any of this is a blessing.’ Excerpt from the forthcoming memoir: You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir / Christina Applegate.
Matthew Cantor. 03/01/2026: . The Pentagon says it’s ‘lethalitymaxxing’. Why has ‘incel’ slang crossed into the mainstream? "With the rise of influencer Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxers’, sexist language from niche memes has infiltrated official government accounts and NYT headlines."
108featherbear
Asian Review of Books March 2026
Jonathan Han. 03/31/2026: “The Traitor” by Kobo Abe. Review of: The Traitor: a novel / Kōbō Abe; Mark Gibeau (Translator) (Columbia University Press).
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 03/30/2026: “American Han” by Lisa Lee. Review of: American Han: a novel / Lisa Lee.
Phyllis Teo. 03/29/2026: “Sustaining Landscape: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture” by Wang Gerui. Review of: Sustaining Landscape: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture 960-1368 CE / Wang Gerui (HKU Press).
Mahika Dhar. 03/28/2026: “Jackson Alone” by Jose Ando. Review of: Jackson Alone / Jose Ando, translator, Kalau Almony.
Vikram Zutshi. 03/27/2026: “The Complex” by Karan Mahajan. Review of: The Complex: a novel / Karan Mahajan.
Prarthana Prakash. 03/25/2026: “Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire” by Julia Stephens. Review of: Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire / Julia Stephens.
Peter Gordon. 03/24/2026: “Japan: A History in Objects” by Angus Lockyer. Review of: Japan: A History in Objects / Angus Lockyer.
Sankha Maji. 03/22/2026: “Railsong” by Rahul Bhattacharya. Review of: Railsong: A Novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Ben Woollard. 03/21/2026: “Kokun: The Girl from the West” by Nahoko Uehashi. Review of: Kokun: The Girl from the West / Nahoko Uehashi, Cathy Hirano (trans).
Stuart Lloyd. 03/20/2026: “Island at the Edge of the World” by Mike Pitts Review of: Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Stephen Mercado. 03/18/2026: “Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II” by Evelyn Iritani. Review of: Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II / by Evelyn Iritani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Bárbara Fernández-Melleda. 03/17/2026: “The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate writer Octavio Paz’s Years in India” by Indranil Chakravarty. Review of: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate writer Octavio Paz’s Years in India / Indranil Chakravarty (Penguin India).
Lucas Tse. 03/15/2026: “The Last of Earth” by Deepa Anappara. Review of: The Last of Earth / Deepa Anappara.
Alan Ali Saeed. 03/14/2026: “Hyper” by Agri Ismaïl. Review of: Hyper: a novel / Agri Ismaïl ( Coffee House Press, January 2026; Vintage, September 2025).
Rosie Milne. 03/13/2026: “The Raven of Ruwi” by Hamoud Saud. Review of: The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman / Hamoud Saud, Zia Ahmed translator (University of Syracuse Press).
Rosie Milne. 03/11/2026: “A Mask the Color of the Sky” by Bassem Khandaqji. Review of: A Mask the Color of the Sky / Bassem Khandaqji. "Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is now available in English, translated by Addie Leak."
David Chaffetz. 03/10/2026: “The Shah’s Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed” by Robert Templer. Review of: The Shah’s Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed / Robert Templer (Hurst).
Ian Rapley. 03/07/2026: “The Ryukyu islands” by Gregory Smits & “The Legacy of The Ryukyu Kingdom” by Takara Kurayoshi. Review of: The Ryukyu islands: a new history from the Stone Age to the Present / Gregory Smits (University of Chicago Press) -- The Legacy of The Ryukyu Kingdom: an Okinawan History / by Takara Kurayoshi; Lina Terrell translator.
Angus Stewart. 03/06/2026: “My Destiny” by Liang Xiaosheng. Review of: My Destiny / Liang Xiaosheng; translator Howard Goldblatt (Long River Press).
Joshua Tan. 03/04/2026: “Art Is: A Journey into the Light” by Makato Fujimura. Review of: Art Is: A Journey into the Light / Makato Fujimura.
Francis P. Sempa. 03/03/2026: “The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit” by Eamonn Gearon. Review of: The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit / Eamonn Gearon.
Jill Baker. 03/01/2026: “In Search of Green China” by Ma Tianjie. Review of: In Search of Green China / Ma Tianjie (Polity)
Jonathan Han. 03/31/2026: “The Traitor” by Kobo Abe. Review of: The Traitor: a novel / Kōbō Abe; Mark Gibeau (Translator) (Columbia University Press).
Susan Blumberg-Kason. 03/30/2026: “American Han” by Lisa Lee. Review of: American Han: a novel / Lisa Lee.
Phyllis Teo. 03/29/2026: “Sustaining Landscape: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture” by Wang Gerui. Review of: Sustaining Landscape: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture 960-1368 CE / Wang Gerui (HKU Press).
Mahika Dhar. 03/28/2026: “Jackson Alone” by Jose Ando. Review of: Jackson Alone / Jose Ando, translator, Kalau Almony.
Vikram Zutshi. 03/27/2026: “The Complex” by Karan Mahajan. Review of: The Complex: a novel / Karan Mahajan.
Prarthana Prakash. 03/25/2026: “Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire” by Julia Stephens. Review of: Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire / Julia Stephens.
Peter Gordon. 03/24/2026: “Japan: A History in Objects” by Angus Lockyer. Review of: Japan: A History in Objects / Angus Lockyer.
Sankha Maji. 03/22/2026: “Railsong” by Rahul Bhattacharya. Review of: Railsong: A Novel / Rahul Bhattacharya.
Ben Woollard. 03/21/2026: “Kokun: The Girl from the West” by Nahoko Uehashi. Review of: Kokun: The Girl from the West / Nahoko Uehashi, Cathy Hirano (trans).
Stuart Lloyd. 03/20/2026: “Island at the Edge of the World” by Mike Pitts Review of: Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island / Mike Pitts.
Stephen Mercado. 03/18/2026: “Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II” by Evelyn Iritani. Review of: Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II / by Evelyn Iritani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Bárbara Fernández-Melleda. 03/17/2026: “The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate writer Octavio Paz’s Years in India” by Indranil Chakravarty. Review of: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate writer Octavio Paz’s Years in India / Indranil Chakravarty (Penguin India).
Lucas Tse. 03/15/2026: “The Last of Earth” by Deepa Anappara. Review of: The Last of Earth / Deepa Anappara.
Alan Ali Saeed. 03/14/2026: “Hyper” by Agri Ismaïl. Review of: Hyper: a novel / Agri Ismaïl ( Coffee House Press, January 2026; Vintage, September 2025).
Rosie Milne. 03/13/2026: “The Raven of Ruwi” by Hamoud Saud. Review of: The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman / Hamoud Saud, Zia Ahmed translator (University of Syracuse Press).
Rosie Milne. 03/11/2026: “A Mask the Color of the Sky” by Bassem Khandaqji. Review of: A Mask the Color of the Sky / Bassem Khandaqji. "Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is now available in English, translated by Addie Leak."
David Chaffetz. 03/10/2026: “The Shah’s Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed” by Robert Templer. Review of: The Shah’s Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed / Robert Templer (Hurst).
Ian Rapley. 03/07/2026: “The Ryukyu islands” by Gregory Smits & “The Legacy of The Ryukyu Kingdom” by Takara Kurayoshi. Review of: The Ryukyu islands: a new history from the Stone Age to the Present / Gregory Smits (University of Chicago Press) -- The Legacy of The Ryukyu Kingdom: an Okinawan History / by Takara Kurayoshi; Lina Terrell translator.
Angus Stewart. 03/06/2026: “My Destiny” by Liang Xiaosheng. Review of: My Destiny / Liang Xiaosheng; translator Howard Goldblatt (Long River Press).
Joshua Tan. 03/04/2026: “Art Is: A Journey into the Light” by Makato Fujimura. Review of: Art Is: A Journey into the Light / Makato Fujimura.
Francis P. Sempa. 03/03/2026: “The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit” by Eamonn Gearon. Review of: The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit / Eamonn Gearon.
Jill Baker. 03/01/2026: “In Search of Green China” by Ma Tianjie. Review of: In Search of Green China / Ma Tianjie (Polity)
109featherbear
NYT (New York Times Online) March 2026
Alex Marshall. 03/31/2026: International Booker Prize Shortlist: 6 Novels With ‘Burning Humanity.’
Daniel Mendelsohn. 03/31/2026: An Unearthed Trojan War Epic, With a Novel in the Footnotes. Review of: SON OF NOBODY / Yann Martel.
Cat Carnell. 03/31/2026: Did This Spurned Lover Accidentally Murder Her Ex? Review of: A Good Person / Kirsten King.
Emily Eakin. 03/30/2026: The Witch’s Magic Is Feeble, but Her Story Casts a Spell. Review of: The Witch: A Novel / Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump.
Dwight Garner. 03/30/2026: Confessions of a 17th-Century Diarist, Power Broker and Predator. Review of: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAMUEL PEPYS: Private Revelations From Britain’s Most Famed Diarist / Guy de la Bédoyère.
Jason Zinoman. 03/30/2026: Arsenio Hall Shares How the Shy Kid Became the Life of the Party. Regarding: Arsenio: A Memoir / Arsenio Hall (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing).
Alexandra Alter. 03/30/2026: ‘I Thought I Would Be Caged My Whole Life.’ "Doctors believed that Woody Brown would never be able to speak or process language. He went to graduate school and is publishing his debut novel." The novel is: Upward Bound: a novel / Woody Brown.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/29/2026: A Novel as Slim as an iPhone Has a Lot to Say About Technology. Review of: Transcription: A Novel / Ben Lerner.
Sarah Lyall. 03/28/2026: Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries. "George Clooney, Meryl Streep and other voice actors had to be persuaded, but a new PBS documentary (mostly) leads by example in stressing the first syllable."
Sarah Lyall. 03/28/2026: In Tana French’s New Novel, the Secrets Are Dark and Jagged. Review of: The Keeper / Tana French.
Miguel Salazar. 03/27/2026; upd 3/28: Overlooked No More: Gertrude Chandler Warner, Author of ‘The Boxcar Children,’
Alexandra Alter. 03/26/2026: shared link: Han Kang Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners. "This year’s winners include the latest novel by the South Korean Nobel laureate in literature and a memoir by one of India’s best known novelists."
Clare Rydell Arcenas. 03/26/2026: Is the U.S. Constitution Doomed to Fail? Review of: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION: A Thousand-Year History / Mark Peterson.
A.O. Scott. 03/25/2026: shared link: What Happens When We Die? This Poem Has Thoughts. "A.O. Scott contemplates the great unknown in Wallace Stevens’s “Of Mere Being.”
Jennifer Szalai. 03/25/2026: Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All? Review of: THE INSATIABLE MACHINE: How Capitalism Conquered the World / Trevor Jackson. (excerpt at LitHub Mar 25 >120 featherbear:)
Adam Nicholson. 03/25/2026: A Passionate Floral Manifesto. Review of: HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries / David George Haskell. (excerpt at LitHub Mar 25 >120 featherbear:)
Adam Dalva. 03/25/2026: Take Me Out to the (Simulated, Hallucinatory) Ballgame. "Just in time for Opening Day, Robert Coover’s prescient 1968 baseball novel is back in print." Regarding: THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP. / Robert Coover.
Mark Oppenheimer. 03/24/2026: Why Do Men Feel So Alone? These 2 Books Have Some Theories. Review of: AMERICAN MEN / Jordan Ritter Conn -- WHO NEEDS FRIENDS: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America / Andrew McCarthy.
A.O. Scott. 03/24/2026: When Shakespeare Took On Joe McCarthy. Review of: A TREACHEROUS SECRET AGENT: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare / Marjorie Garber.
David Streitfeld. 03/24/2026: The Life-Changing Power of a Book Review Before Algorithms. "How The Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World transformed the careers of two giants of American literature."
Adam Becker. 03/24/2026: Data Centers in Space? Faster-Than-Light Spaceships? Big Dreams Abound. Review of: OPEN SPACE: From Earth to Eternity — the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos / David Ariosto.
Stacey D'Erasmo. 03/24/2026: A Sexy Summer Leads to Decades of Trysts — and Heartbreak. Review of: ALMOST LIFE / Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
Marie Solis. 03/23/2026: What’s It Like to Be Back in Print After 20 Years? A Bit Odd. "Nancy Lemann published her first novel at 28. Then came “the doom.” Now she’s back in the spotlight, and not exactly comfortable with it."
Dwight Garner. 03/23/2026: Blackface: A Shameful History as American as Apple Pie. Review of: DARKOLOGY: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment / Rhae Lynn Barnes.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/22/2026: Teddy Bears and Groucho Glasses: How Jews Built the Business of Fun. Review of: PLAYMAKERS: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America / Michael Kimmel.
Helen Shaw. 03/22/2026: The 2,500-Year-Old Greek Heroine Whose Story Never Gets Old. "“Antigone” gave us the original “bad girl,” but its themes go beyond that. How do adaptations keep making Sophocles’ ideas about democracy and theater new?"
Joshua Hammer. 03/21/2026: The Motley Crew Who Saved America’s Birds. Review of: THE FEATHER WARS: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds / James H. McCommons.
Alan Light. 03/21/2026: Fab 5 Freddy Remembers Hip-Hop’s Global Takeover. Review of: EVERYBODY’S FLY: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture / Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy, with Mark Rozzo.
Alexandra Alter. 03/20/2026: Don DeLillo’s Ribald Hockey Romp Will Return to Stores. Regarding the Nov 17 reissue of: Amazons: An intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League / Don DeLillo writing as "Cleo Birdwell".
Alexandra Alter. 03/19/2026: A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. "Book publishing has few safeguards in place to prevent the unwitting publication of a novel heavily generated by artificial intelligence."
Alexandra Alter. 03/19/2026: Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use. "Its publisher, Hachette, will not release the novel in the United States and will discontinue its U.K. edition, citing its commitment to “original creative expression and storytelling.”
Jonathan Abrams. 03/19/2026: 2 Chainz, One of Hip-Hop’s Cheekiest Lyricists, Gets Serious. "The rapper known for his quirky turns of phrase and malapropisms is trying his hand at a memoir." Regarding: THE VOICE IN MY HEAD IS GOD / 2 Chainz.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/18/2026: Fake News, Ruined Lives and a 19th-Century Sex Panic. Review of: A SCANDAL IN KÖNIGSBERG / Christopher Clark.
Zain Khalid. 03/18/2026: A Novel Follows a Life in Exile: Always on the Move, Past in Tow. Review of: PARADISO 17 / Hannah Lillith Assadi.
Holly Bass. 03/18/2026: In Poems and Essays, a Writer Celebrates Black Excellence. Review of: WE (THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES) / Joshua Bennett -- THE PEOPLE CAN FLY: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time / Joshua Bennett.
Robert Sullivan. 03/17/2026: A Salty Ode to Nature’s Wonders. Review of: SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History / Caroline Tracey.
Sam Adler-Bell. 03/17/2026: How Did Great Replacement Theory Go Global? Review of: CHAIN OF IDEAS: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age / Ibram X. Kendi.
Alan Blinder. 03/16/2026: Professors Are Changing What They Teach, Even Far from Trump’s Gaze. "Harvard is the White House’s biggest target, but professors all over the country have been censoring themselves, avoiding provocative topics and rewriting grants."
Kevin Peraino. 03/16/2026: With the Third Reich at War, Most Berliners Just Carried On. Review of: STAY ALIVE: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Dwight Garner. 03/16/2026: The Hustlers of Tokyo Would Like to Pour You a Drink. Review of: SISTERS IN YELLOW / Mieko Kawakami; translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/15/2026: Truffles, Foie Gras and Sexism: Nouvelle Cuisine Served It All. Review of: THE SECRET HISTORY OF FRENCH COOKING: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern / Luke Barr.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg. 03/14/2026: shared link: As Mamdani Walks a Tightrope, His Father Pushes Boundaries. "At once, Mahmood Mamdani’s fame was eclipsed by his son’s. At the same time, the election of Zohran Mamdani has attracted new interest in his father’s work." Mahmood Mamdani's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/mamdanimahmood
Leah Greenblatt. 03/14/2026: Womanhood Is a Punishable Offense in This Bracing Novel. Review of: The Natural Way of Things: A Novel / Charlotte Wood.
Alexandra Alter. 03/13/2026: The Best Writing Tip? Get a Dog. "Best-selling and award-winning authors spoke to us about how canines can spark creativity."
Alexis Soloski. 03/13/2026: ‘It Ends With Us,’ but It Starts With Her. "The work of the novelist Colleen Hoover has become hot property in Hollywood. Here’s why studios clamor to adapt her books."
Mac Barnett. 03/13/2026: Without Her, These Beloved Classics Might Never Have Been Published. "From 1940 to 1973, Ursula Nordstrom transformed kids’ books into real art and big business. A new middle grade biography attempts to capture her magic." Regarding: BOOKS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU: The Storied Life of Ursula Nordstrom, Editor of Extraordinary Children’s Books / Nancy Hudgins.
Melissa Broder. 03/13/2026: Terminal Cancer Hasn’t Softened This Jewish Mother One Bit. Review of: NIGHT NIGHT FAWN / Jordy Rosenberg.
Jennifer Schuessler. 03/12/2026: Histories of Native American Treaties and Anti-Chinese Violence Win Bancroft Prize. Winners: Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States / Emilie Connolly -- John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law / Beth Lew-Williams.
Beatriz Williams. 03/11/2026: An Exiled TV Exec Sees Greek Tragedy Everywhere. Review of: THE GOLDEN BOY / Patricia Finn.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/11/2026: The Extravagant Secret Life of a Handbag Salesman, as Told by His Son. Review of: IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN: A Memoir / Tom Junod.
Louisa Hall. 03/10/2026: Chasing Fascists Through the London Blitz, With Time Travel and Angels. Review of: Nonesuch: A Novel / Francis Spufford.
Jonathan Dee. 03/10/2026: How Did the Worst Member of the Family Become a National Leader? Review of: The Complex: A Novel / Karan Mahajan.
Ben Greenman. 03/10/2026: 30-Something in a Radically Unstable America. Review of: Down Time: A Novel / Andrew Martin.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/10/2026: Liza Minnelli’s Memoir Has the Sequins, but Not the Sparkle. Review of: KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS! / Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein, with Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans (Grand Central).
Dwight Garner. 03/09/2026: Slouching Toward Bars, Booze and Babies. Review of: GUNK / Saba Sams.
Catherine Chidgey. 03/09/2026: Somebody Killed Her Assailant. Was Justice Served? Review of: WHIDBEY / T Kira Madden.
Elisabeth Egan. 03/08/2026: He Wrote Judy Blume’s Life Story. She Won’t Talk About It. "Mark Oppenheimer had many conversations with his subject for his new book. Then the relationship took a turn."
Joumana Khatib. 03/07/2026: The Companionable Brilliance of Helen Garner. Review of: STORIES: The Collected Short Fiction / Helen Garner (Pantheon).
Brenda Wineapple. 03/05/2026: Is America a Christian Nation? Review of: CHOSEN LAND: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity / Matthew Avery Sutton.
Charles Glass. 03/05/2026: The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad. Review of: DAYS OF LOVE AND RAGE: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution / Anand Gopal.
Rebecca Makai. 03/04/2026: This Big, Juicy Drama Gives ‘Blended Family’ a New Meaning. Review of: Lake Effect: A Novel / Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/04/2026: Did the Anti-Abortion Movement Begin in Ancient Rome? Review of: REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women / Sarah Ruden.
Zoë Schlanger. 03/04/2026: Life in Plastic: It’s Not Fantastic. Review of: PLASTIC INC.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet / Beth Gardiner.
Ken Kalfus. 03/04/2026: On a Train Across Europe, a Writer’s Despair Echoes the Continent’s. Review of: EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE / Ivana Sajko; translated by Mima Simic.
Meryl Gordon. 03/03/2026: Her Daughters Got the Press. Until Now. Review of: MUV: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother / Rachel Trethewey.
S.C. Cornell. 03/03/2026: A Burst of Memories Takes Her Back to an Impossible Age: 16. Review of: Repetition: a novel / Vigdis Hjorth; translated by Charlotte Barslund (Verso).
Kiersten White. 03/03/2026: A Woman’s Dream House Turns Into a Nightmare. Review of: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts: A Novel / Kim Fu.
Graeme Macrae Burnet. 03/02/2026: In This Novel, an Island Is a Petri Dish for Humanity. Review of: FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION: a novel / Eoghan Walls.
Dwight Garner. 03/02/2026: The Last Days of the Apaches and a Search for a Nation Erased. Review of: NOW I SURRENDER: a novel / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Elisabeth Egan. 03/01/2026: Christina Applegate Planned to Burn Her Journals. She Made a Memoir From Them Instead. Profile of Applegate regarding her forthcoming You With the Sad Eyes: a memoir.
Paul Begala. 03/01/2026: A Startlingly Vivid Portrait of El Paso, and of America. Review of: EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory / Jazmine Ulloa.
Alex Preston. 03/01/2026: A Rich Australian Epic That Binds Family Tragedy to the Landscape. Review of: A FAR-FLUNG LIFE / M.L. Stedman.
Cara Blue Adams. 03/01/2026: Two Sisters Explore the Complex Legacy of Their Mother’s Art. Review of: BACKSTITCH / Marian Mitchell Donahue (Galiot).
Alex Marshall. 03/31/2026: International Booker Prize Shortlist: 6 Novels With ‘Burning Humanity.’
Daniel Mendelsohn. 03/31/2026: An Unearthed Trojan War Epic, With a Novel in the Footnotes. Review of: SON OF NOBODY / Yann Martel.
Cat Carnell. 03/31/2026: Did This Spurned Lover Accidentally Murder Her Ex? Review of: A Good Person / Kirsten King.
Emily Eakin. 03/30/2026: The Witch’s Magic Is Feeble, but Her Story Casts a Spell. Review of: The Witch: A Novel / Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump.
Dwight Garner. 03/30/2026: Confessions of a 17th-Century Diarist, Power Broker and Predator. Review of: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAMUEL PEPYS: Private Revelations From Britain’s Most Famed Diarist / Guy de la Bédoyère.
Jason Zinoman. 03/30/2026: Arsenio Hall Shares How the Shy Kid Became the Life of the Party. Regarding: Arsenio: A Memoir / Arsenio Hall (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing).
Alexandra Alter. 03/30/2026: ‘I Thought I Would Be Caged My Whole Life.’ "Doctors believed that Woody Brown would never be able to speak or process language. He went to graduate school and is publishing his debut novel." The novel is: Upward Bound: a novel / Woody Brown.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/29/2026: A Novel as Slim as an iPhone Has a Lot to Say About Technology. Review of: Transcription: A Novel / Ben Lerner.
Sarah Lyall. 03/28/2026: Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries. "George Clooney, Meryl Streep and other voice actors had to be persuaded, but a new PBS documentary (mostly) leads by example in stressing the first syllable."
Sarah Lyall. 03/28/2026: In Tana French’s New Novel, the Secrets Are Dark and Jagged. Review of: The Keeper / Tana French.
Miguel Salazar. 03/27/2026; upd 3/28: Overlooked No More: Gertrude Chandler Warner, Author of ‘The Boxcar Children,’
Alexandra Alter. 03/26/2026: shared link: Han Kang Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners. "This year’s winners include the latest novel by the South Korean Nobel laureate in literature and a memoir by one of India’s best known novelists."
Clare Rydell Arcenas. 03/26/2026: Is the U.S. Constitution Doomed to Fail? Review of: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION: A Thousand-Year History / Mark Peterson.
A.O. Scott. 03/25/2026: shared link: What Happens When We Die? This Poem Has Thoughts. "A.O. Scott contemplates the great unknown in Wallace Stevens’s “Of Mere Being.”
Jennifer Szalai. 03/25/2026: Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All? Review of: THE INSATIABLE MACHINE: How Capitalism Conquered the World / Trevor Jackson. (excerpt at LitHub Mar 25 >120 featherbear:)
Adam Nicholson. 03/25/2026: A Passionate Floral Manifesto. Review of: HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries / David George Haskell. (excerpt at LitHub Mar 25 >120 featherbear:)
Adam Dalva. 03/25/2026: Take Me Out to the (Simulated, Hallucinatory) Ballgame. "Just in time for Opening Day, Robert Coover’s prescient 1968 baseball novel is back in print." Regarding: THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP. / Robert Coover.
Mark Oppenheimer. 03/24/2026: Why Do Men Feel So Alone? These 2 Books Have Some Theories. Review of: AMERICAN MEN / Jordan Ritter Conn -- WHO NEEDS FRIENDS: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America / Andrew McCarthy.
A.O. Scott. 03/24/2026: When Shakespeare Took On Joe McCarthy. Review of: A TREACHEROUS SECRET AGENT: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare / Marjorie Garber.
David Streitfeld. 03/24/2026: The Life-Changing Power of a Book Review Before Algorithms. "How The Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World transformed the careers of two giants of American literature."
Adam Becker. 03/24/2026: Data Centers in Space? Faster-Than-Light Spaceships? Big Dreams Abound. Review of: OPEN SPACE: From Earth to Eternity — the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos / David Ariosto.
Stacey D'Erasmo. 03/24/2026: A Sexy Summer Leads to Decades of Trysts — and Heartbreak. Review of: ALMOST LIFE / Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
Marie Solis. 03/23/2026: What’s It Like to Be Back in Print After 20 Years? A Bit Odd. "Nancy Lemann published her first novel at 28. Then came “the doom.” Now she’s back in the spotlight, and not exactly comfortable with it."
Dwight Garner. 03/23/2026: Blackface: A Shameful History as American as Apple Pie. Review of: DARKOLOGY: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment / Rhae Lynn Barnes.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/22/2026: Teddy Bears and Groucho Glasses: How Jews Built the Business of Fun. Review of: PLAYMAKERS: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America / Michael Kimmel.
Helen Shaw. 03/22/2026: The 2,500-Year-Old Greek Heroine Whose Story Never Gets Old. "“Antigone” gave us the original “bad girl,” but its themes go beyond that. How do adaptations keep making Sophocles’ ideas about democracy and theater new?"
Joshua Hammer. 03/21/2026: The Motley Crew Who Saved America’s Birds. Review of: THE FEATHER WARS: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds / James H. McCommons.
Alan Light. 03/21/2026: Fab 5 Freddy Remembers Hip-Hop’s Global Takeover. Review of: EVERYBODY’S FLY: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture / Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy, with Mark Rozzo.
Alexandra Alter. 03/20/2026: Don DeLillo’s Ribald Hockey Romp Will Return to Stores. Regarding the Nov 17 reissue of: Amazons: An intimate memoir by the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League / Don DeLillo writing as "Cleo Birdwell".
Alexandra Alter. 03/19/2026: A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. "Book publishing has few safeguards in place to prevent the unwitting publication of a novel heavily generated by artificial intelligence."
Alexandra Alter. 03/19/2026: Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use. "Its publisher, Hachette, will not release the novel in the United States and will discontinue its U.K. edition, citing its commitment to “original creative expression and storytelling.”
Jonathan Abrams. 03/19/2026: 2 Chainz, One of Hip-Hop’s Cheekiest Lyricists, Gets Serious. "The rapper known for his quirky turns of phrase and malapropisms is trying his hand at a memoir." Regarding: THE VOICE IN MY HEAD IS GOD / 2 Chainz.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/18/2026: Fake News, Ruined Lives and a 19th-Century Sex Panic. Review of: A SCANDAL IN KÖNIGSBERG / Christopher Clark.
Zain Khalid. 03/18/2026: A Novel Follows a Life in Exile: Always on the Move, Past in Tow. Review of: PARADISO 17 / Hannah Lillith Assadi.
Holly Bass. 03/18/2026: In Poems and Essays, a Writer Celebrates Black Excellence. Review of: WE (THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES) / Joshua Bennett -- THE PEOPLE CAN FLY: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time / Joshua Bennett.
Robert Sullivan. 03/17/2026: A Salty Ode to Nature’s Wonders. Review of: SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History / Caroline Tracey.
Sam Adler-Bell. 03/17/2026: How Did Great Replacement Theory Go Global? Review of: CHAIN OF IDEAS: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age / Ibram X. Kendi.
Alan Blinder. 03/16/2026: Professors Are Changing What They Teach, Even Far from Trump’s Gaze. "Harvard is the White House’s biggest target, but professors all over the country have been censoring themselves, avoiding provocative topics and rewriting grants."
Kevin Peraino. 03/16/2026: With the Third Reich at War, Most Berliners Just Carried On. Review of: STAY ALIVE: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Dwight Garner. 03/16/2026: The Hustlers of Tokyo Would Like to Pour You a Drink. Review of: SISTERS IN YELLOW / Mieko Kawakami; translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/15/2026: Truffles, Foie Gras and Sexism: Nouvelle Cuisine Served It All. Review of: THE SECRET HISTORY OF FRENCH COOKING: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern / Luke Barr.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg. 03/14/2026: shared link: As Mamdani Walks a Tightrope, His Father Pushes Boundaries. "At once, Mahmood Mamdani’s fame was eclipsed by his son’s. At the same time, the election of Zohran Mamdani has attracted new interest in his father’s work." Mahmood Mamdani's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/mamdanimahmood
Leah Greenblatt. 03/14/2026: Womanhood Is a Punishable Offense in This Bracing Novel. Review of: The Natural Way of Things: A Novel / Charlotte Wood.
Alexandra Alter. 03/13/2026: The Best Writing Tip? Get a Dog. "Best-selling and award-winning authors spoke to us about how canines can spark creativity."
Alexis Soloski. 03/13/2026: ‘It Ends With Us,’ but It Starts With Her. "The work of the novelist Colleen Hoover has become hot property in Hollywood. Here’s why studios clamor to adapt her books."
Mac Barnett. 03/13/2026: Without Her, These Beloved Classics Might Never Have Been Published. "From 1940 to 1973, Ursula Nordstrom transformed kids’ books into real art and big business. A new middle grade biography attempts to capture her magic." Regarding: BOOKS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU: The Storied Life of Ursula Nordstrom, Editor of Extraordinary Children’s Books / Nancy Hudgins.
Melissa Broder. 03/13/2026: Terminal Cancer Hasn’t Softened This Jewish Mother One Bit. Review of: NIGHT NIGHT FAWN / Jordy Rosenberg.
Jennifer Schuessler. 03/12/2026: Histories of Native American Treaties and Anti-Chinese Violence Win Bancroft Prize. Winners: Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States / Emilie Connolly -- John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law / Beth Lew-Williams.
Beatriz Williams. 03/11/2026: An Exiled TV Exec Sees Greek Tragedy Everywhere. Review of: THE GOLDEN BOY / Patricia Finn.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/11/2026: The Extravagant Secret Life of a Handbag Salesman, as Told by His Son. Review of: IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN: A Memoir / Tom Junod.
Louisa Hall. 03/10/2026: Chasing Fascists Through the London Blitz, With Time Travel and Angels. Review of: Nonesuch: A Novel / Francis Spufford.
Jonathan Dee. 03/10/2026: How Did the Worst Member of the Family Become a National Leader? Review of: The Complex: A Novel / Karan Mahajan.
Ben Greenman. 03/10/2026: 30-Something in a Radically Unstable America. Review of: Down Time: A Novel / Andrew Martin.
Alexandra Jacobs. 03/10/2026: Liza Minnelli’s Memoir Has the Sequins, but Not the Sparkle. Review of: KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS! / Liza Minnelli, as told to Michael Feinstein, with Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans (Grand Central).
Dwight Garner. 03/09/2026: Slouching Toward Bars, Booze and Babies. Review of: GUNK / Saba Sams.
Catherine Chidgey. 03/09/2026: Somebody Killed Her Assailant. Was Justice Served? Review of: WHIDBEY / T Kira Madden.
Elisabeth Egan. 03/08/2026: He Wrote Judy Blume’s Life Story. She Won’t Talk About It. "Mark Oppenheimer had many conversations with his subject for his new book. Then the relationship took a turn."
Joumana Khatib. 03/07/2026: The Companionable Brilliance of Helen Garner. Review of: STORIES: The Collected Short Fiction / Helen Garner (Pantheon).
Brenda Wineapple. 03/05/2026: Is America a Christian Nation? Review of: CHOSEN LAND: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity / Matthew Avery Sutton.
Charles Glass. 03/05/2026: The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad. Review of: DAYS OF LOVE AND RAGE: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution / Anand Gopal.
Rebecca Makai. 03/04/2026: This Big, Juicy Drama Gives ‘Blended Family’ a New Meaning. Review of: Lake Effect: A Novel / Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney.
Jennifer Szalai. 03/04/2026: Did the Anti-Abortion Movement Begin in Ancient Rome? Review of: REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women / Sarah Ruden.
Zoë Schlanger. 03/04/2026: Life in Plastic: It’s Not Fantastic. Review of: PLASTIC INC.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet / Beth Gardiner.
Ken Kalfus. 03/04/2026: On a Train Across Europe, a Writer’s Despair Echoes the Continent’s. Review of: EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE / Ivana Sajko; translated by Mima Simic.
Meryl Gordon. 03/03/2026: Her Daughters Got the Press. Until Now. Review of: MUV: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother / Rachel Trethewey.
S.C. Cornell. 03/03/2026: A Burst of Memories Takes Her Back to an Impossible Age: 16. Review of: Repetition: a novel / Vigdis Hjorth; translated by Charlotte Barslund (Verso).
Kiersten White. 03/03/2026: A Woman’s Dream House Turns Into a Nightmare. Review of: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts: A Novel / Kim Fu.
Graeme Macrae Burnet. 03/02/2026: In This Novel, an Island Is a Petri Dish for Humanity. Review of: FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION: a novel / Eoghan Walls.
Dwight Garner. 03/02/2026: The Last Days of the Apaches and a Search for a Nation Erased. Review of: NOW I SURRENDER: a novel / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Elisabeth Egan. 03/01/2026: Christina Applegate Planned to Burn Her Journals. She Made a Memoir From Them Instead. Profile of Applegate regarding her forthcoming You With the Sad Eyes: a memoir.
Paul Begala. 03/01/2026: A Startlingly Vivid Portrait of El Paso, and of America. Review of: EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory / Jazmine Ulloa.
Alex Preston. 03/01/2026: A Rich Australian Epic That Binds Family Tragedy to the Landscape. Review of: A FAR-FLUNG LIFE / M.L. Stedman.
Cara Blue Adams. 03/01/2026: Two Sisters Explore the Complex Legacy of Their Mother’s Art. Review of: BACKSTITCH / Marian Mitchell Donahue (Galiot).
110featherbear
LARB March 2026
Jodie Hare. 03/31/2026: What Does Translation Do?. Review of: Unlearning with Translation: A Critical and Collective Practice / Virginie Bobin (Sternberg Press).
Eileen G'Sell. 03/31/2026: In Praise of Difficult Poetry. "A new strain of contemporary women poets proves there is still a place for the rewardingly difficult in English-language poetics." Regarding: Battalion Shaped Girl / Temperance Aghamohammadi (Discount Guillotine) -- After You Were, I Am / Camille Ralphs.
Allyson Nadia Field, interviewer Robert Daniels. 03/28/2026: Labor of Love. Regarding: Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film / Allyson Nadia Field.
Benjamin R. Cohen. 03/25/2026: Consider the Waffle. Review of: Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better / Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg -- Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City / Kate Brown.
Francesca Mancino. 03/22/2026: House Without Men. Review of: A Very Cold Winter / Fausta Cialente. Translated by Julia Nelsen.
Sam Franzini. 03/21/2026: But It Feels So Real to Me. Review of: Dryback / Juan Ecchi (New Ritual Press).
Jason Francisco. 03/21/2026: Blot Out and Remember. Review of: PROTOCOLS: An Erasure / Daniela Naomi Molnar (Ayin Press).
Rodger D. Citron. 03/20/2026: They Don’t Make ’Em Like That Anymore. Review of: Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment / G. Edward White. "G. Edward White’s new biography explores the life of Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice revered by jurists from both ends of the political spectrum."
Na’amit Sturm Nagel. 03/17/2026: Ladies Who Still Lunch. Review of: Still Talking: stories / Lore Segal (Melville House).
Cara Benson. 03/17/2026: Small Creatures Such as We. Review of: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto.
Max Callimanopulos. 03/16/2026: Empty Hiss: The short story form is an uneasy vessel for Helen Garner’s particular intensity. Review of: Stories: The Collected Short Fiction / Helen Garner.
Robert N. Watson. 03/13/2026: To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood. "The most famous line in literature doesn’t mean what ‘Hamnet’ thinks it means."
Dennis Wilson Wise. 03/12/2026: Prestige Fiction Is Dead. Review of: Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 / Evan Brier (University of Iowa Press).
Samuel Fury Childs Daly. 03/12/2026: Big Men and Little People. Review of: A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda / Derek R. Peterson -- Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State / Mahmood Mamdani.
John Downes-Angus. 03/09/2026: Time-Wasting, Truth-Wasting Exercises. Review of: Banning Books in America: Not a How-To / Samuel Cohen (editor).
Tess Pollok. 03/09/2026: Elliptical Selfhood. Review of: Will There Ever Be Another You? / Patricia Lockwood.
Andrew Witt. 03/08/2026: Photography Gone to the Dogs. "John Divola’s photographs of the Southern California desert in the late 1990s get a second wind thanks to Nazraeli Press’s reissues." Regarding: Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (originally 2004).
Angela N. H. Creager. 03/06/2026: Doing Someone Else’s Crossword. Review of: Crick: A Mind in Motion / Matthew Cobb.
Angelica Hankins. 03/05/2026: Moving Through the World with Eyes Open. Review of: Long Distance: stories / Ayşegül Savaş.
Andrew Scull. 03/04/2026: Sadism as Psychotherapy. Review of: The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him / Jon Stock.
Gideon Leek. 03/03/2026: Let Down by Understatement. Review of: The Disappointment: a novel / Scott Broker.
Dan Friedman. 03/03/2026: World Cup Nausea. Review of: World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments / Simon Kuper.
Josha Hall. 03/02/2026: Finding Our God-Terms. "The work of literary critic Mark Edmundson offers a powerful vision for recentering the American university."
Jodie Hare. 03/31/2026: What Does Translation Do?. Review of: Unlearning with Translation: A Critical and Collective Practice / Virginie Bobin (Sternberg Press).
Eileen G'Sell. 03/31/2026: In Praise of Difficult Poetry. "A new strain of contemporary women poets proves there is still a place for the rewardingly difficult in English-language poetics." Regarding: Battalion Shaped Girl / Temperance Aghamohammadi (Discount Guillotine) -- After You Were, I Am / Camille Ralphs.
Allyson Nadia Field, interviewer Robert Daniels. 03/28/2026: Labor of Love. Regarding: Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film / Allyson Nadia Field.
Benjamin R. Cohen. 03/25/2026: Consider the Waffle. Review of: Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better / Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg -- Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City / Kate Brown.
Francesca Mancino. 03/22/2026: House Without Men. Review of: A Very Cold Winter / Fausta Cialente. Translated by Julia Nelsen.
Sam Franzini. 03/21/2026: But It Feels So Real to Me. Review of: Dryback / Juan Ecchi (New Ritual Press).
Jason Francisco. 03/21/2026: Blot Out and Remember. Review of: PROTOCOLS: An Erasure / Daniela Naomi Molnar (Ayin Press).
Rodger D. Citron. 03/20/2026: They Don’t Make ’Em Like That Anymore. Review of: Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment / G. Edward White. "G. Edward White’s new biography explores the life of Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice revered by jurists from both ends of the political spectrum."
Na’amit Sturm Nagel. 03/17/2026: Ladies Who Still Lunch. Review of: Still Talking: stories / Lore Segal (Melville House).
Cara Benson. 03/17/2026: Small Creatures Such as We. Review of: The Hour of the Wolf: a memoir / Fatima Bhutto.
Max Callimanopulos. 03/16/2026: Empty Hiss: The short story form is an uneasy vessel for Helen Garner’s particular intensity. Review of: Stories: The Collected Short Fiction / Helen Garner.
Robert N. Watson. 03/13/2026: To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood. "The most famous line in literature doesn’t mean what ‘Hamnet’ thinks it means."
Dennis Wilson Wise. 03/12/2026: Prestige Fiction Is Dead. Review of: Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 / Evan Brier (University of Iowa Press).
Samuel Fury Childs Daly. 03/12/2026: Big Men and Little People. Review of: A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda / Derek R. Peterson -- Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State / Mahmood Mamdani.
John Downes-Angus. 03/09/2026: Time-Wasting, Truth-Wasting Exercises. Review of: Banning Books in America: Not a How-To / Samuel Cohen (editor).
Tess Pollok. 03/09/2026: Elliptical Selfhood. Review of: Will There Ever Be Another You? / Patricia Lockwood.
Andrew Witt. 03/08/2026: Photography Gone to the Dogs. "John Divola’s photographs of the Southern California desert in the late 1990s get a second wind thanks to Nazraeli Press’s reissues." Regarding: Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (originally 2004).
Angela N. H. Creager. 03/06/2026: Doing Someone Else’s Crossword. Review of: Crick: A Mind in Motion / Matthew Cobb.
Angelica Hankins. 03/05/2026: Moving Through the World with Eyes Open. Review of: Long Distance: stories / Ayşegül Savaş.
Andrew Scull. 03/04/2026: Sadism as Psychotherapy. Review of: The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him / Jon Stock.
Gideon Leek. 03/03/2026: Let Down by Understatement. Review of: The Disappointment: a novel / Scott Broker.
Dan Friedman. 03/03/2026: World Cup Nausea. Review of: World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments / Simon Kuper.
Josha Hall. 03/02/2026: Finding Our God-Terms. "The work of literary critic Mark Edmundson offers a powerful vision for recentering the American university."
111featherbear
Aeon March 2026
Anne-Laure Le Cunff. 03/30/2026: The hypercurious mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information.
Sanya Osha. 03/23/2026: An African philosophy: Lansana Keita rejected Eurocentric ideas, tracing the philosophical tradition back to African Kemet or ancient Egypt.
Karen Stollznow. 03/20/2026: Bitch: a history. "The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?"
Peter Wolfendale. 03/19/2026: Geist in the machine. "As the 18th-century war between mechanism and romanticism returns, we face a new question: can we build artificial souls?"
Rita Ahmadi. 03/09/2026: The eye of the mathematician. "Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age?"
Catherine Taylor. 03/05/2026: On her own terms. "Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook remains shocking, necessary and imperfect – a dazzling experiment in living as a woman."
Federico Perelmuter. 03/02/2026: Who is Walter Mignolo?: A prominent architect of decolonial theory, his diagnosis of European colonial ills is both penetrating and flawed. Regarding the author of: The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization / Walter Mignolo -- Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking / Walter Mignolo -- The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options / Walter Mignolo -- The Politics of Decolonial Investigations / Walter Mignolo.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff. 03/30/2026: The hypercurious mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information.
Sanya Osha. 03/23/2026: An African philosophy: Lansana Keita rejected Eurocentric ideas, tracing the philosophical tradition back to African Kemet or ancient Egypt.
Karen Stollznow. 03/20/2026: Bitch: a history. "The word can morph from noun to verb to adjective, from dog to human, from female to male. What will it do next?"
Peter Wolfendale. 03/19/2026: Geist in the machine. "As the 18th-century war between mechanism and romanticism returns, we face a new question: can we build artificial souls?"
Rita Ahmadi. 03/09/2026: The eye of the mathematician. "Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age?"
Catherine Taylor. 03/05/2026: On her own terms. "Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook remains shocking, necessary and imperfect – a dazzling experiment in living as a woman."
Federico Perelmuter. 03/02/2026: Who is Walter Mignolo?: A prominent architect of decolonial theory, his diagnosis of European colonial ills is both penetrating and flawed. Regarding the author of: The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization / Walter Mignolo -- Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking / Walter Mignolo -- The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options / Walter Mignolo -- The Politics of Decolonial Investigations / Walter Mignolo.
112featherbear
PRoB (Pittsburgh Review of Books) March 2026
Amy Jo Burns, interviewer Jody DiPerna. 03/31/2026: Amy Jo Burns’ Appalachia. “Burns grew up at the actual wake of the steel industry. This was the sliding out time, the period after the rug had long been pulled, but everybody was still looking for it.” Also regarding: Wait for Me: A Novel / Amy Jo Burns (Celedon Books, 2026).
Suzy Liss. 03/31/2026: Innamorata is Ava Reid’s most off-putting book. Good. Review of: Innamorata (The House Of Teeth Duology Book 1) / Ava Reid.
PRoB Staff. 03/30/2026: Reading for Women’s History Month: PRoB Staff recommend books for Women’s History Month.
Derek Penwell. 03/30/2026: To Those Who Thought They’d Be Braver: A Monday Letter on shame, conscience, and this poor kind of heroism.. An essay taking off from: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 / Milton Mayer.
Ed Simon. 03/27/2026: Assured of the Singularity. “Those who adhere to this faith in the Singularity maintain that we are approaching an eschaton that will see the expansion of consciousness, the resurrection of the dead, and the triumph of the living spirit over dead matter (or at least the triumph of our minds as software).” Excerpt from: The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse / Ed Simon.
Thomas Dekeyser. 03/27/2026: Burning Down Artifice. “In the years that follow, anti-internet arsonists escalate their fiery intents, creating a string of attacks on fiber-optic networks in Munich, Toulouse, Paris, and plenty of other digital crossroads.” Excerpt from: Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine / Thomas Dekeyser.
John Sayles, interviewers Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill. 03/27/2026: John Sayles on Labor, Politics, and Money.
Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. 03/26/2026: Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, and White Supremacy. Review of: Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America / Howard Bryant.
PRoB Staff. 03/26/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of March 2026. "A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week."
Mark Rediker. 03/25/2026: Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker: Writing tips from the acclaimed writer and historian.
Ren Cedar Fuller, interviewer Lori Jakiela. 03/25/2026: When Writing Makes the World Bigger: An Interview with Ren Cedar Fuller.
Chiwan Choi. 03/25/2026: Chiwan Choi at Free Association. “As a multiple time immigrant, I’ve gotten used to having to constantly move and restart my life, but being used to it hasn’t changed the fact that finding a home is the one thing that I still yearn for. ... These poems were shared as a part of a Free Association Reading at City of Asylum."
Ross Reed. 03/24/2026: The Overweening Pride of the Masters of the Universe. “The Trial does not demonstrate that the universe is devoid of meaning, but only that its protagonist K.’s life seems meaningless.”
Frank Lehner, interviewer Jan Beatty. The Inscrutable Mind and Open Heart of Frank Lehner. "Jan Beatty talks with the inimitable poet, Frank Lehner, about his newest release, “Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey.” Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey: Poems (Working Lives Series, 12) (Bottom Dog Press)
Cristina Rivera Garza. 03/23/2026: Estación Camarón. Excerpt from: Autobiography of Cotton: a novel / Cristina Rivera Garza; translated by Christina MacSweeney. "“They are called ‘stations’ because they are transit points, but just as soon as they are erected, people begin to move in. They are rancherias, colonias, settlements that never reach city status but that spring up in the blink of an eye around a crossroads.”
Angela Flournoy, interviewer Anjali Sachdeva. 03/23/2026: Talking about Story with Angela Flournoy. Regarding The Wilderness / Angela Flournoy.
Hollis Robbins. 03/20/2026: Metannoying. “But LLMs are not Shakespeare (yet) and there’s no rhetorical reason for it and worse, there’s no limiting function, which is why you can get “not x but y” every other paragraph.”
Jo Marchant. 03/20/2026: I am the Fire. Excerpt from: In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment / Jo Marchant. “How can you tell a robot from a human? A Mars rover from a Martian? Or a mouse trap from a Venus fly trap?”
Chammah Kaunda. 03/19/2026: What is African Political Theology? “I look to a political theology that will feed the hungry, promote gender justice and equality, struggle for the liberation of creation from human bondage, liberate the oppressed, bring justice to the exploited, and give voice to the marginalized and voiceless.”
PRoB Staff. 03/19/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of March 2026.
Kevin Cantwell. 03/18/2026: Posthumous Plumly: A Review. Review of: Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly / ed David Baker & Michael Collier. (W W Norton. Review seems to lack citation, however)
David Harvey. 03/18/2026: Accumulation by Dispossession. Excerpt from: The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works / David Harvey.
Elias Fox. 03/17/2026: On Misunderstanding Joyce. “I am by no means a scholar of Joyce… But scholarship is no prerequisite for being moved by something.”
Jenny C. Mann. 03/16/2026: The Forms of Utopia. “What is utopia? An impractical scheme? An imaginary invention? A perfect society or a totalitarian nightmare?”
Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 03/13/2026: The New Misogyny. “For some men (and which men it might be is so unpredictable that women must act as if it is all men), rejection violates an unquestioned sense of entitlement to women’s time, attention, smiles, and adoration.” Excerpt from: Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism / Cynthia Miller-Idriss.
Sheila Carter-Jones. 03/13/2026: Sheila Carter-Jones at Free Association. “The poems I selected had to do with my obsession with locating violence in the lives of black men and boys.”
PRoB Staff. 03/12/2026: What We’re Reading the Second Week of March 2026. These used to be attributed to Carnegie Mellon students, but nowadays it's the "PRoB Staff." (unless ...?)
Rebecca Yang. 03/11/2026: The Paradox of Reading. “So, how do we get students to closely read and think critically about what they’ve read? Here’s a general prescription: we have to reframe the act of reading and the role it has in our lives.”
Grayson Skupin. 03/11/2026: It’s Less Wrong. Pronouns: “I stuck with the masculine, and gravitated towards what became, by virtue of proximity, linguistic affinity, and convenience, a close-knit group of mostly dorm living mostly Americans, all of whom used they/them for me in our English conversations.”
Daniel Rachel. 03/10/2026: Welcome to the Cabaret: Human League. Lou Reed. Spandau Ballet. Spear of Destiny. Excerpt from: This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich / Daniel Rachel.
Scott Silsbe. 03/09/2026: Judith Vollmer’s Poetics of Image and Imagination, Sound and Memory. Review/interview of the forthcoming: The Pavese Stone / Judith Vollmer (Alice James Books).
Nathan Pensky. 03/06/2026: At the Cartesian Theater. Excerpt from: Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds: Finding Descartes on the Early Modern Stage / Nathan Pensky (Edinburgh University Press).
PRoB Staff. 03/05/2026: What We’re Reading the First Week of March 2026. "Articles written under this byline are pieces collaboratively written by the staff and columnists of PRoB."
A. Natasha Joukovsky. 03/03/2026: The False Allure of Rarity. "From Shakespeare’s phoenix to Ovid’s clause, literary history reveals that rarity alone creates no value—only when paired with beauty and truth does art achieve lasting worth."
Sarah Fleming Steinberg. 03/03/2026: Is Queen Esther the First Conversa? “I loved Queen Esther: her glam, her grit, her mystery. I never thought of Queen Esther as a crypto-Jew, but that is exactly what she was (and the first one at that): a person who concealed her Jewish identity to survive in a hostile environment.”
Sunil Amrith, interviewer Shanzeh Afzal. 03/02/2026: Sunil Amrith on Environmental Hope. Interview with the author of: The Burning Earth: a history.
Naomi Baron. 03/02/2026: Can AI Read? “When AI reads and then writes, it conjures up results that are eerily akin to what human reading- plus-writing might come up with, at least in terms of compositional quality. Why does this matter?” Excerpt from: Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters / Naomi S. Baron.
Amy Jo Burns, interviewer Jody DiPerna. 03/31/2026: Amy Jo Burns’ Appalachia. “Burns grew up at the actual wake of the steel industry. This was the sliding out time, the period after the rug had long been pulled, but everybody was still looking for it.” Also regarding: Wait for Me: A Novel / Amy Jo Burns (Celedon Books, 2026).
Suzy Liss. 03/31/2026: Innamorata is Ava Reid’s most off-putting book. Good. Review of: Innamorata (The House Of Teeth Duology Book 1) / Ava Reid.
PRoB Staff. 03/30/2026: Reading for Women’s History Month: PRoB Staff recommend books for Women’s History Month.
Derek Penwell. 03/30/2026: To Those Who Thought They’d Be Braver: A Monday Letter on shame, conscience, and this poor kind of heroism.. An essay taking off from: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 / Milton Mayer.
Ed Simon. 03/27/2026: Assured of the Singularity. “Those who adhere to this faith in the Singularity maintain that we are approaching an eschaton that will see the expansion of consciousness, the resurrection of the dead, and the triumph of the living spirit over dead matter (or at least the triumph of our minds as software).” Excerpt from: The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse / Ed Simon.
Thomas Dekeyser. 03/27/2026: Burning Down Artifice. “In the years that follow, anti-internet arsonists escalate their fiery intents, creating a string of attacks on fiber-optic networks in Munich, Toulouse, Paris, and plenty of other digital crossroads.” Excerpt from: Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine / Thomas Dekeyser.
John Sayles, interviewers Nathan Pensky and Mason Stockstill. 03/27/2026: John Sayles on Labor, Politics, and Money.
Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. 03/26/2026: Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, and White Supremacy. Review of: Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America / Howard Bryant.
PRoB Staff. 03/26/2026: What We’re Reading the Fourth Week of March 2026. "A roundup of the most engaging recent pieces on the web read by the Pittsburgh Review of Books this week."
Mark Rediker. 03/25/2026: Sixteen Writing Tips from Marcus Rediker: Writing tips from the acclaimed writer and historian.
Ren Cedar Fuller, interviewer Lori Jakiela. 03/25/2026: When Writing Makes the World Bigger: An Interview with Ren Cedar Fuller.
Chiwan Choi. 03/25/2026: Chiwan Choi at Free Association. “As a multiple time immigrant, I’ve gotten used to having to constantly move and restart my life, but being used to it hasn’t changed the fact that finding a home is the one thing that I still yearn for. ... These poems were shared as a part of a Free Association Reading at City of Asylum."
Ross Reed. 03/24/2026: The Overweening Pride of the Masters of the Universe. “The Trial does not demonstrate that the universe is devoid of meaning, but only that its protagonist K.’s life seems meaningless.”
Frank Lehner, interviewer Jan Beatty. The Inscrutable Mind and Open Heart of Frank Lehner. "Jan Beatty talks with the inimitable poet, Frank Lehner, about his newest release, “Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey.” Mrs. Nussbaum's Monkey: Poems (Working Lives Series, 12) (Bottom Dog Press)
Cristina Rivera Garza. 03/23/2026: Estación Camarón. Excerpt from: Autobiography of Cotton: a novel / Cristina Rivera Garza; translated by Christina MacSweeney. "“They are called ‘stations’ because they are transit points, but just as soon as they are erected, people begin to move in. They are rancherias, colonias, settlements that never reach city status but that spring up in the blink of an eye around a crossroads.”
Angela Flournoy, interviewer Anjali Sachdeva. 03/23/2026: Talking about Story with Angela Flournoy. Regarding The Wilderness / Angela Flournoy.
Hollis Robbins. 03/20/2026: Metannoying. “But LLMs are not Shakespeare (yet) and there’s no rhetorical reason for it and worse, there’s no limiting function, which is why you can get “not x but y” every other paragraph.”
Jo Marchant. 03/20/2026: I am the Fire. Excerpt from: In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment / Jo Marchant. “How can you tell a robot from a human? A Mars rover from a Martian? Or a mouse trap from a Venus fly trap?”
Chammah Kaunda. 03/19/2026: What is African Political Theology? “I look to a political theology that will feed the hungry, promote gender justice and equality, struggle for the liberation of creation from human bondage, liberate the oppressed, bring justice to the exploited, and give voice to the marginalized and voiceless.”
PRoB Staff. 03/19/2026: What We’re Reading the Third Week of March 2026.
Kevin Cantwell. 03/18/2026: Posthumous Plumly: A Review. Review of: Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly / ed David Baker & Michael Collier. (W W Norton. Review seems to lack citation, however)
David Harvey. 03/18/2026: Accumulation by Dispossession. Excerpt from: The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works / David Harvey.
Elias Fox. 03/17/2026: On Misunderstanding Joyce. “I am by no means a scholar of Joyce… But scholarship is no prerequisite for being moved by something.”
Jenny C. Mann. 03/16/2026: The Forms of Utopia. “What is utopia? An impractical scheme? An imaginary invention? A perfect society or a totalitarian nightmare?”
Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 03/13/2026: The New Misogyny. “For some men (and which men it might be is so unpredictable that women must act as if it is all men), rejection violates an unquestioned sense of entitlement to women’s time, attention, smiles, and adoration.” Excerpt from: Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism / Cynthia Miller-Idriss.
Sheila Carter-Jones. 03/13/2026: Sheila Carter-Jones at Free Association. “The poems I selected had to do with my obsession with locating violence in the lives of black men and boys.”
PRoB Staff. 03/12/2026: What We’re Reading the Second Week of March 2026. These used to be attributed to Carnegie Mellon students, but nowadays it's the "PRoB Staff." (unless ...?)
Rebecca Yang. 03/11/2026: The Paradox of Reading. “So, how do we get students to closely read and think critically about what they’ve read? Here’s a general prescription: we have to reframe the act of reading and the role it has in our lives.”
Grayson Skupin. 03/11/2026: It’s Less Wrong. Pronouns: “I stuck with the masculine, and gravitated towards what became, by virtue of proximity, linguistic affinity, and convenience, a close-knit group of mostly dorm living mostly Americans, all of whom used they/them for me in our English conversations.”
Daniel Rachel. 03/10/2026: Welcome to the Cabaret: Human League. Lou Reed. Spandau Ballet. Spear of Destiny. Excerpt from: This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich / Daniel Rachel.
Scott Silsbe. 03/09/2026: Judith Vollmer’s Poetics of Image and Imagination, Sound and Memory. Review/interview of the forthcoming: The Pavese Stone / Judith Vollmer (Alice James Books).
Nathan Pensky. 03/06/2026: At the Cartesian Theater. Excerpt from: Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds: Finding Descartes on the Early Modern Stage / Nathan Pensky (Edinburgh University Press).
PRoB Staff. 03/05/2026: What We’re Reading the First Week of March 2026. "Articles written under this byline are pieces collaboratively written by the staff and columnists of PRoB."
A. Natasha Joukovsky. 03/03/2026: The False Allure of Rarity. "From Shakespeare’s phoenix to Ovid’s clause, literary history reveals that rarity alone creates no value—only when paired with beauty and truth does art achieve lasting worth."
Sarah Fleming Steinberg. 03/03/2026: Is Queen Esther the First Conversa? “I loved Queen Esther: her glam, her grit, her mystery. I never thought of Queen Esther as a crypto-Jew, but that is exactly what she was (and the first one at that): a person who concealed her Jewish identity to survive in a hostile environment.”
Sunil Amrith, interviewer Shanzeh Afzal. 03/02/2026: Sunil Amrith on Environmental Hope. Interview with the author of: The Burning Earth: a history.
Naomi Baron. 03/02/2026: Can AI Read? “When AI reads and then writes, it conjures up results that are eerily akin to what human reading- plus-writing might come up with, at least in terms of compositional quality. Why does this matter?” Excerpt from: Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters / Naomi S. Baron.
113featherbear
Literary Review March 2026, Issue 549
Richard Vinen. Not Funny, Not Forgotten. Review of: Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 / Jonathan Schneer (Oxford University Press) -- The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain / By David Torrance (Bloomsbury).
Peter Davidson. Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred.
Michele Pridmore-Brown. Baby Love. Review of: Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity – and the Hidden Costs for Women / Alev Scott (HarperCollins).
Joan Smith. Rare Insight. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon (Translated from French by Natasha Lehrer & Ruth Diver).
Jonathan Keates. Perpetual Strangers. Review of: The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews / Alexander Lee (Picador).
George Prochnick. Blood on the Canvas. Review of: Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art / Celeste Marcus.
Michael Burleigh. Frozen Assets. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic / Kenneth R Rosen.
Richard Vinen. Not Funny, Not Forgotten. Review of: Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 / Jonathan Schneer (Oxford University Press) -- The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain / By David Torrance (Bloomsbury).
Peter Davidson. Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred.
Michele Pridmore-Brown. Baby Love. Review of: Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity – and the Hidden Costs for Women / Alev Scott (HarperCollins).
Joan Smith. Rare Insight. Review of: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides / Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon (Translated from French by Natasha Lehrer & Ruth Diver).
Jonathan Keates. Perpetual Strangers. Review of: The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews / Alexander Lee (Picador).
George Prochnick. Blood on the Canvas. Review of: Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art / Celeste Marcus.
Michael Burleigh. Frozen Assets. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic / Kenneth R Rosen.
114featherbear
Atlantic March 2026
Andrew Zaleski. 03/30/2026: Will People Ever Stop Eating Animals?. Review of: Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—And Our Future / Bruce Friedrich.
Lily Meyer. 03/30/2026: How Long Can You Live Your Ideals?. Regarding: I Hope You Find What You're Looking For: A Novel / Bsrat Mezghebe -- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland / Patrick Radden Keefe -- Eat the Document: a novel / Dana Spiotta -- Retrospective: A Novel / Juan Gabriel Vasquez; Anne McLean (Translator) -- Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground / Zayd Ayers.
Robert Rubsam. 03/26/2026: A Novel About Women Who Trade One Kind of Captivity for Another. Review of: The Natural Way of Things: A Novel / Charlotte Wood.
Rafaela Jinich. 03/26/2026: A Life of Paying Attention: Revisiting Tracy Kidder’s work for The Atlantic.
Adam Kirsch. 03/23/2026: A Surprising Perspective on American Jewishness. Review of: Returning: A Search For Home Across Three Centuries / Nicholas Lemann.
Anna Holmes. 03/21/2026: What a Century-Old Sex Manual Got Right ... And very wrong. Regarding: Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique / Theodore Hendrik van de Velde (1926).
David Hajdu. 03/20/2026: Sondheim’s Confessions. Review of: Stephen Sondheim - Art Isn't Easy / Daniel Okrent.
Jacob Anbinder. 03/19/2026: What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics. "Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true."
Lily Meyer. 03/19/2026: The Seinfeld Principle of COVID Fiction. Regarding: Down Time: a novel / Andrew Martin.
Gary Shteyngart. 03/17/2026: The City Where Coetzee Is God. "Searching for the Nobel laureate in Cape Town, the city he left behind."
Anna Louie Sussman. 03/17/2026: Are We Still ‘The Intimate Animal’? Review of: The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love / Justin R. Garcia (Little, Brown Spark).
Isle McElroy. 03/16/2026: A New Direction for the Trans Novel. Review of: Night Night Fawn / Jody Rosenberg.
George Packer. 03/16/2026: The College-Educated Working Class. Review of: Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class / Noam Scheiber.
Colm Tóibín. 03/14/2026: The Last Days of Franco. Roig's introduction to: The Time of Cherries: A Novel / Montserrat Roig.
Henry Grabar. 03/14/2026: How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again.
Andrea Valdez. 03/14/2026: Salman Rushdie Doesn’t Want to Be Your ‘Free Speech Barbie.’ "Speaking with George Packer at the New Orleans Book Festival, the author was eager to return to the subject of fiction."
Lily Meyer. 03/13/2026: A Deft Portraitist of Class in America. Review of: Kin: a novel / Tayari Jones.
Emma Sarappo. 03/13/2026: How Not to Recommend a Book.
Luis Parrales. 03/12/2026: What Atheism Could Not Explain. Regarding: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Jake Lundberg. 03/12/2026: Raymond Chandler and the Case of the Split Infinitive. "An Atlantic copy editor suddenly found herself at odds with the famous writer over one edit."
Kaitlyn Tiffany. 03/12/2026: What Was Grammarly Thinking? "A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats—and a bunch of other random people, including me."
Joel Halldorf. 03/09/2026: Books Are Meant to Be Slow. "The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas."
Heath W. Carter. 03/09/2026: How Christian Nationalist Became an Epithet. Review of: Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity / Matthew Avery Sutton.
Carolina A. Miranda. 03/05/2026: A Western That Goes Where Cormac McCarthy Wouldn’t. Review of: Now I Surrender: A Novel / Álvaro Enrigue; translator Natasha Wimmer.
Gal Beckerman. 03/03/2026: shared link: Why Iranians Are Weeping for a Tyrant.
Honor Jones. 03/03/2026: Vigdis Hjorth’s Family Secrets. Review of: Repetition: A Novel / Vigdis Hjorth; translator, Charlotte Barslund (Verso).
Eric Magnuson. 03/02/2026: Literature Has a Stay-at-Home-Dad Problem. "Unemployable, emasculated, blundering: In novels, full-time fathers seem to always be falling short."
Andrew Zaleski. 03/30/2026: Will People Ever Stop Eating Animals?. Review of: Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—And Our Future / Bruce Friedrich.
Lily Meyer. 03/30/2026: How Long Can You Live Your Ideals?. Regarding: I Hope You Find What You're Looking For: A Novel / Bsrat Mezghebe -- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland / Patrick Radden Keefe -- Eat the Document: a novel / Dana Spiotta -- Retrospective: A Novel / Juan Gabriel Vasquez; Anne McLean (Translator) -- Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground / Zayd Ayers.
Robert Rubsam. 03/26/2026: A Novel About Women Who Trade One Kind of Captivity for Another. Review of: The Natural Way of Things: A Novel / Charlotte Wood.
Rafaela Jinich. 03/26/2026: A Life of Paying Attention: Revisiting Tracy Kidder’s work for The Atlantic.
Adam Kirsch. 03/23/2026: A Surprising Perspective on American Jewishness. Review of: Returning: A Search For Home Across Three Centuries / Nicholas Lemann.
Anna Holmes. 03/21/2026: What a Century-Old Sex Manual Got Right ... And very wrong. Regarding: Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique / Theodore Hendrik van de Velde (1926).
David Hajdu. 03/20/2026: Sondheim’s Confessions. Review of: Stephen Sondheim - Art Isn't Easy / Daniel Okrent.
Jacob Anbinder. 03/19/2026: What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics. "Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true."
Lily Meyer. 03/19/2026: The Seinfeld Principle of COVID Fiction. Regarding: Down Time: a novel / Andrew Martin.
Gary Shteyngart. 03/17/2026: The City Where Coetzee Is God. "Searching for the Nobel laureate in Cape Town, the city he left behind."
Anna Louie Sussman. 03/17/2026: Are We Still ‘The Intimate Animal’? Review of: The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love / Justin R. Garcia (Little, Brown Spark).
Isle McElroy. 03/16/2026: A New Direction for the Trans Novel. Review of: Night Night Fawn / Jody Rosenberg.
George Packer. 03/16/2026: The College-Educated Working Class. Review of: Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class / Noam Scheiber.
Colm Tóibín. 03/14/2026: The Last Days of Franco. Roig's introduction to: The Time of Cherries: A Novel / Montserrat Roig.
Henry Grabar. 03/14/2026: How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again.
Andrea Valdez. 03/14/2026: Salman Rushdie Doesn’t Want to Be Your ‘Free Speech Barbie.’ "Speaking with George Packer at the New Orleans Book Festival, the author was eager to return to the subject of fiction."
Lily Meyer. 03/13/2026: A Deft Portraitist of Class in America. Review of: Kin: a novel / Tayari Jones.
Emma Sarappo. 03/13/2026: How Not to Recommend a Book.
Luis Parrales. 03/12/2026: What Atheism Could Not Explain. Regarding: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer / Christopher Beha.
Jake Lundberg. 03/12/2026: Raymond Chandler and the Case of the Split Infinitive. "An Atlantic copy editor suddenly found herself at odds with the famous writer over one edit."
Kaitlyn Tiffany. 03/12/2026: What Was Grammarly Thinking? "A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats—and a bunch of other random people, including me."
Joel Halldorf. 03/09/2026: Books Are Meant to Be Slow. "The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas."
Heath W. Carter. 03/09/2026: How Christian Nationalist Became an Epithet. Review of: Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity / Matthew Avery Sutton.
Carolina A. Miranda. 03/05/2026: A Western That Goes Where Cormac McCarthy Wouldn’t. Review of: Now I Surrender: A Novel / Álvaro Enrigue; translator Natasha Wimmer.
Gal Beckerman. 03/03/2026: shared link: Why Iranians Are Weeping for a Tyrant.
Honor Jones. 03/03/2026: Vigdis Hjorth’s Family Secrets. Review of: Repetition: A Novel / Vigdis Hjorth; translator, Charlotte Barslund (Verso).
Eric Magnuson. 03/02/2026: Literature Has a Stay-at-Home-Dad Problem. "Unemployable, emasculated, blundering: In novels, full-time fathers seem to always be falling short."
115featherbear
fivebooks.com March 2026
Iris Jamahl Dunkle, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/31/2026: The Best Biographies: The 2026 NBCC Shortlist. NBCC=National Book Critics Circle:
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled / Alex Green (winner winner chiken dinner) -- Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star / Mayukh Sen -- Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution / Amanda Vaill -- Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore / Ashley D. Farmer -- Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford / Carla Kaplan.
ChatGPT, interviewer Sophie Roell. 03/29/2026: The Best AI Books in 2026.
Karen Jennings, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/27/2026: The Best Historical Fiction Set in South Africa:
Fiela's Child (Phoenix Fiction) / Dalene Matthee -- Islands: A Novel / Dan Sleigh -- Braids & Migraines / Andile Cele (Holland House Books) -- Mhudi / Sol T. Plaatje -- To Kill A Mans Pride: And Other Stories From S. Africa / Norman Hodge, editor.
Jessamy Hibberd, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 03/25/2026: The best books on Overthinking. 5 recommendations, or you could just read the Albertine volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
International Thriller Writers Awards. 03/20/2026: The Best Thriller Books of 2026:
Cross My Heart: A Novel / Megan Collins -- ZigZag Girl / Ruth Knafo Setton -- The Burning Library / Gilly Macmillan -- The Locked Ward: A Novel / Sarah Pekkanen -- So Happy Together: A Novel / Olivia Worley.
Lori Inglis Hall, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/16/2026: The Best World War II Novels. Her choices, but where's Life and Fate / Vasily Grossman & The Thin Red Line / James Jones?:
Life After Life: A Novel / Kate Atkinson -- Atonement / Ian McEwan -- The Zone of Interest / Martin Amis -- The Heat of the Day / Elizabeth Bowen -- Suite Française / Irène Némirovsky.
Sophie Roell. 03/14/2026: The Best Mystery Books of 2026. Actually a 2025 retrospective it appears. "The Edgar Award for Best Novel is one of the most prestigious prizes in the mystery and crime fiction genre, and an excellent starting point if you're looking for a flavour of what kind of books are out there. As we start our list of the best mystery books of 2026, Five Books editor Sophie Roell runs us through this year's shortlist, from Dickensian London to the wilds of the Southern Ocean."
7 books!:
The Inheritance: A Novel / Trisha Sakhlecha -- Presumed Guilty (Presumed Innocent, 3) / Scott Turow -- The Dream Hotel: Novel / Laila Lalami -- Hard Town (Kurt Argento, 2) / Adam Plantinga -- Wild Dark Shore: Reese's Book Club Pick (A Novel) / Charlotte McConaghy -- The Big Empty (An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel) / Robert Crais -- Fagin the Thief: A Novel / Allison Epstein.
Julia Buxton, interviewer Benedict King. 03/13/2026: The best books on Venezuela:
The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela / Fernando Coronil -- The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (American Encounters/Global Interactions) / Miguel Tinker Salas -- Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution / Richard Gott -- Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela / Sujatha Fernandes -- The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012–2020 (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development) / Francisco Rodríguez (University of Notre Dame Press).
Jo Walton, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 03/11/2026: The Best Fairy Books for Adults:
Lud-in-the-Mist / Hope Mirrlees -- The Broken Sword / Poul Anderson -- The Wood Wife (Fairy Tales) / Terri Windling -- Thomas the Rhymer / Ellen Kushner -- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell / Susanna Clarke.
Jeff Brouws, interviewer Romas Viesulas. 03/10/2026: The best books on Industrial Artifact Photography:
Industrial Landscapes / Hilla Becher & Bernd Becher -- Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania / Lee Friedlander -- Portraits in Steel / Milton Rogovin -- Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Creating the North American Landscape) / Frank Gohlke -- Manhole Covers / Mimi & Robert A. Melnick.
Ian Mortimer, interviewer Sophie Roell. 03/08/2026: The best books on Daily Life in Medieval England:
Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD / Colin Platt -- Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Clarendon Paperbacks) / Barbara Harvey -- The Great Household in Late Medieval England / C. M. Woolgar -- Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) / Christopher Dyer -- Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England / Carole Rawcliffe.
Philip Mirowski, interviewer Benedict King. 03/01/2026, updated 03/02: The best books on Friedrich Hayek:
Reinventing Liberalism: the politics, philosophy and economics of early Neoliberalism, 1920-1947 (Springer Studies in the History of Economic Thought) / Ola Innset -- Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 / Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger -- The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times) / Thomas Biebricher -- Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Near Futures, 9) / Quinn Slobodian -- Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism / Naomi Beck.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/31/2026: The Best Biographies: The 2026 NBCC Shortlist. NBCC=National Book Critics Circle:
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled / Alex Green (winner winner chiken dinner) -- Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star / Mayukh Sen -- Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution / Amanda Vaill -- Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore / Ashley D. Farmer -- Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford / Carla Kaplan.
ChatGPT, interviewer Sophie Roell. 03/29/2026: The Best AI Books in 2026.
Karen Jennings, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/27/2026: The Best Historical Fiction Set in South Africa:
Fiela's Child (Phoenix Fiction) / Dalene Matthee -- Islands: A Novel / Dan Sleigh -- Braids & Migraines / Andile Cele (Holland House Books) -- Mhudi / Sol T. Plaatje -- To Kill A Mans Pride: And Other Stories From S. Africa / Norman Hodge, editor.
Jessamy Hibberd, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 03/25/2026: The best books on Overthinking. 5 recommendations, or you could just read the Albertine volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
International Thriller Writers Awards. 03/20/2026: The Best Thriller Books of 2026:
Cross My Heart: A Novel / Megan Collins -- ZigZag Girl / Ruth Knafo Setton -- The Burning Library / Gilly Macmillan -- The Locked Ward: A Novel / Sarah Pekkanen -- So Happy Together: A Novel / Olivia Worley.
Lori Inglis Hall, interviewer Cal Flynn. 03/16/2026: The Best World War II Novels. Her choices, but where's Life and Fate / Vasily Grossman & The Thin Red Line / James Jones?:
Life After Life: A Novel / Kate Atkinson -- Atonement / Ian McEwan -- The Zone of Interest / Martin Amis -- The Heat of the Day / Elizabeth Bowen -- Suite Française / Irène Némirovsky.
Sophie Roell. 03/14/2026: The Best Mystery Books of 2026. Actually a 2025 retrospective it appears. "The Edgar Award for Best Novel is one of the most prestigious prizes in the mystery and crime fiction genre, and an excellent starting point if you're looking for a flavour of what kind of books are out there. As we start our list of the best mystery books of 2026, Five Books editor Sophie Roell runs us through this year's shortlist, from Dickensian London to the wilds of the Southern Ocean."
7 books!:
The Inheritance: A Novel / Trisha Sakhlecha -- Presumed Guilty (Presumed Innocent, 3) / Scott Turow -- The Dream Hotel: Novel / Laila Lalami -- Hard Town (Kurt Argento, 2) / Adam Plantinga -- Wild Dark Shore: Reese's Book Club Pick (A Novel) / Charlotte McConaghy -- The Big Empty (An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel) / Robert Crais -- Fagin the Thief: A Novel / Allison Epstein.
Julia Buxton, interviewer Benedict King. 03/13/2026: The best books on Venezuela:
The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela / Fernando Coronil -- The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (American Encounters/Global Interactions) / Miguel Tinker Salas -- Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution / Richard Gott -- Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela / Sujatha Fernandes -- The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012–2020 (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development) / Francisco Rodríguez (University of Notre Dame Press).
Jo Walton, interviewer Sylvia Bishop. 03/11/2026: The Best Fairy Books for Adults:
Lud-in-the-Mist / Hope Mirrlees -- The Broken Sword / Poul Anderson -- The Wood Wife (Fairy Tales) / Terri Windling -- Thomas the Rhymer / Ellen Kushner -- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell / Susanna Clarke.
Jeff Brouws, interviewer Romas Viesulas. 03/10/2026: The best books on Industrial Artifact Photography:
Industrial Landscapes / Hilla Becher & Bernd Becher -- Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania / Lee Friedlander -- Portraits in Steel / Milton Rogovin -- Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Creating the North American Landscape) / Frank Gohlke -- Manhole Covers / Mimi & Robert A. Melnick.
Ian Mortimer, interviewer Sophie Roell. 03/08/2026: The best books on Daily Life in Medieval England:
Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD / Colin Platt -- Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Clarendon Paperbacks) / Barbara Harvey -- The Great Household in Late Medieval England / C. M. Woolgar -- Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) / Christopher Dyer -- Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England / Carole Rawcliffe.
Philip Mirowski, interviewer Benedict King. 03/01/2026, updated 03/02: The best books on Friedrich Hayek:
Reinventing Liberalism: the politics, philosophy and economics of early Neoliberalism, 1920-1947 (Springer Studies in the History of Economic Thought) / Ola Innset -- Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 / Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger -- The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times) / Thomas Biebricher -- Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Near Futures, 9) / Quinn Slobodian -- Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism / Naomi Beck.
116featherbear
Mary Gaitskill, interviewer Yass Queen. The Republic of Letters, 02/28/2026: An Interview With Mary Gaitskill.
117featherbear
New Yorker March 2026
Giles Harvey. 03/30/2026: The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel. Review of: Transcription: a novel / Ben Lerner.
Becca Rothfeld. 03/30/2026: How to Measure the Good Life. Review of: The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness / Arthur C. Brooks.
Louise Erdrich. 03/25/2026: Louise Erdrich on Novels of Parentless Children.
Matt Weinstock. 03/25/2026: Liza Minnelli’s Uncharacteristic Pivot to Self-Disclosure. Review of: Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! / Liza Minelli.
Adam Gopnick. 03/23/2026: Engels in the Outfield. Review of: Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team / A. M. Gittlitz.
Anthony Lane. 03/22/2026: How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? Review of: Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots / Roger Kreuz.
Katy Waldman. 03/16/2026: Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want? Review of: The Life You Want / Adam Phillips.
Katy Waldman. 03/18/2026: “Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography. Regarding: Judy Blume: a life / Mark Oppenheimer.
Adam Gopnick. 03/16/2026: Who Bankrolled the American Revolution? Review of: The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821 / Richard Vague & Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution / Charles Rappleye.
Alex Ross. 03/14/2026: What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann? "An eyewitness recalls the fraught encounter between a precocious American college student and a titan of German literature."
Moira Donegan. 03/13/2026: The Feminist Visionary Who Lost the Plot. Review of: Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life / Ellen Carol DuBois.
Elizabeth Kolbert. 03/09/2026: Life in Hitler’s Capital. Review of: Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Manvir Singh. 03/09/2026: How God Got So Great. Review of: God: An Anatomy / Francesca Stavrakopoulou -- The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism: ‘God is One,’ From Antiquity to Modernity / David Michael Grossberg -- Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species / Will M. Gervais.
Chang Che. 03/08/2026: How China Learned to Love the Classics. "The Chinese Communist Party has embraced the study of Greek and Latin—as, in some ways, an antidote to the modern West."
Sarah Chihaya. 03/03/2026: Why a Woman Would Rather Love a Statue Than a Man. Review of: When the Museum Is Closed: A Novel / Emi Yagi; translator Yuki Tejima.
Margaret Talbot. 03/02/2026: The Sexologist Who Unlocked the Female Orgasm. Revisiting The Hite Report * A Nationwide Study Of Female Sexuality / Shere Hite.
Giles Harvey. 03/30/2026: The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel. Review of: Transcription: a novel / Ben Lerner.
Becca Rothfeld. 03/30/2026: How to Measure the Good Life. Review of: The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness / Arthur C. Brooks.
Louise Erdrich. 03/25/2026: Louise Erdrich on Novels of Parentless Children.
Matt Weinstock. 03/25/2026: Liza Minnelli’s Uncharacteristic Pivot to Self-Disclosure. Review of: Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! / Liza Minelli.
Adam Gopnick. 03/23/2026: Engels in the Outfield. Review of: Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team / A. M. Gittlitz.
Anthony Lane. 03/22/2026: How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? Review of: Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots / Roger Kreuz.
Katy Waldman. 03/16/2026: Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want? Review of: The Life You Want / Adam Phillips.
Katy Waldman. 03/18/2026: “Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography. Regarding: Judy Blume: a life / Mark Oppenheimer.
Adam Gopnick. 03/16/2026: Who Bankrolled the American Revolution? Review of: The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821 / Richard Vague & Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution / Charles Rappleye.
Alex Ross. 03/14/2026: What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann? "An eyewitness recalls the fraught encounter between a precocious American college student and a titan of German literature."
Moira Donegan. 03/13/2026: The Feminist Visionary Who Lost the Plot. Review of: Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life / Ellen Carol DuBois.
Elizabeth Kolbert. 03/09/2026: Life in Hitler’s Capital. Review of: Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 / Ian Buruma.
Manvir Singh. 03/09/2026: How God Got So Great. Review of: God: An Anatomy / Francesca Stavrakopoulou -- The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism: ‘God is One,’ From Antiquity to Modernity / David Michael Grossberg -- Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species / Will M. Gervais.
Chang Che. 03/08/2026: How China Learned to Love the Classics. "The Chinese Communist Party has embraced the study of Greek and Latin—as, in some ways, an antidote to the modern West."
Sarah Chihaya. 03/03/2026: Why a Woman Would Rather Love a Statue Than a Man. Review of: When the Museum Is Closed: A Novel / Emi Yagi; translator Yuki Tejima.
Margaret Talbot. 03/02/2026: The Sexologist Who Unlocked the Female Orgasm. Revisiting The Hite Report * A Nationwide Study Of Female Sexuality / Shere Hite.
118featherbear
Public Books March 2026
Charlie Tyson. 03/20/2026: B-Sides: Thomas De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach.” Touchstone: The English Mail-Coach and other essays / Thomas De Quincey.
Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia. 03/19/2026: Salsa For Salsa’s Sake. Review of: Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings / Marisol Negrón (Duke University Press).
Alexis Clement. 03/12/2026: The Once and Future Bathhouse. Review of: Undesigning the Bath / Leonard Koren -- Towards a Nude Architecture: A Visual Compendium of Japanese Hot Springs / Yuval Zohar.
Spencer J. Weinreich. 03/10/2026: There Are More Prisons in Heaven & Earth… Review of: The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy / Jacob Abolafia.
Michael Bérubé & Urmila Seshagiri. 03/04/2026: Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny. How Guillermo del Toro adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Hamish Dalley. 03/03/2026: B-Sides: Maurice Gee’s “Going West”. Regarding: Going West / Maurice Gee.
Charlie Tyson. 03/20/2026: B-Sides: Thomas De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach.” Touchstone: The English Mail-Coach and other essays / Thomas De Quincey.
Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia. 03/19/2026: Salsa For Salsa’s Sake. Review of: Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings / Marisol Negrón (Duke University Press).
Alexis Clement. 03/12/2026: The Once and Future Bathhouse. Review of: Undesigning the Bath / Leonard Koren -- Towards a Nude Architecture: A Visual Compendium of Japanese Hot Springs / Yuval Zohar.
Spencer J. Weinreich. 03/10/2026: There Are More Prisons in Heaven & Earth… Review of: The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy / Jacob Abolafia.
Michael Bérubé & Urmila Seshagiri. 03/04/2026: Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny. How Guillermo del Toro adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Hamish Dalley. 03/03/2026: B-Sides: Maurice Gee’s “Going West”. Regarding: Going West / Maurice Gee.
119featherbear
TLS March 6, 2026|No. 6400
Featured
Mary Beard. 03/04/2026: Byron in Ravenna. Mary Beard's blog post from the TLS landing page
Christy Edwall. Read all about it?: The value and uncertain future of the written word. Review of: Books: A manifesto / Ian Patterson -- The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation: Essays on nurturing a passion for reading / Jennie Orchard, editor -- Relearning to Read: Adventures in not-knowing / Ann Morgan.
Madoc Cairns. Many hands: How the Bible came into existence. Review of: Who Really Wrote the Bible: The story of the scribes / William M. Schniedewind -- God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the making of the Bible / Candida Moss -- The Bible: A global history / Bruce Gordon.
Francesca Wade. ‘Blood, blood, blood’: The Russian Revolution through the eyes of a young English tutor. (Essay)
James Hall. Right place, right time: The first portraitist to put an indelible mark on an era. Review of: Holbein: Renaissance master / Elizabeth Goldring.
Literature & Bibliography
Galin Tihanov. From Homer to Ferrante: Erich Auerbach and the appeal of ‘mixed style’. Review of: Auerbach’s Renaissance: Rebirths of an Aesthetic from Shakespeare to Ferrante / Christopher Warley.
Amir-Hussein Radjy. The old town: The old town. Review of: I Found Myself ... : The last dreams / Naguib Mahfouz.
Norma Clarke. Fears into fiction: How Mark Haddon found a home in writing. Review of: Leaving Home: A memoir in full colour / Mark Haddon.
Toby Lichtig. How literature works: Memories from a life steeped in books. Review of: Look Closer: How to get more out of reading / Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
Sarah Lonsdale. https://www.the-tls.com/literature/literary-criticism/clemence-dane-and-good-hou.... Much more than a glossy: Women’s journalism and the life of the mind Review of: Clemence Dane and Good Housekeeping: Modernity and common reading / Stella Deen (Edinburgh University Press).
Adam Watt. The ideal reader: Jacques Rivière, linchpin of the belle époque. Review of: Critique et création / Jacques Rivière; afterword by Agathe Rivière, preface by Jean-Yves Tadié (Robert Laffont).
J. Michael Lennon. Middleman of American letters: A portrait of Malcolm Cowley and his famous authors. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the triumph of American literature / Gerald Howard.
D. Quentin Miller. Prophet of love: Sexuality in the life of James Baldwin. Review of: Baldwin: A love story / Nicholas Boggs.
Margaret Drabble. A modern Moll Flanders: Social history and unreliable narrators in Joyce Cary’s first trilogy of novels. Review of: Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse’s Mouth / Joyce Cary; introduction by Christopher Reid (Everyman).
Beci Forest. Let it all out: The charms and failures of Richard Aldington’s poetry. Review of: A Fool i’ the Forest: A phantasmagoria / Richard Aldington; edited by Michael Copp and Elizabeth Vandiver.
Natasha Randall. Feeding the beast: Memory and complicity with the Russian Leviathan. Review of: The Disappearing Act / Maria Stepanova.
David Annand. Manifest captivity: Between the Apache Wars and the present day. Review of: Now I Surrender / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Susie Mesure. Where charity begins: A family looks to escape a broiling, near-future Kolkata. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief / Megha Majumdar.
Beejay Silcox. Hell’s kitchen: A novel of intergenerational animus and vol-au-vents. Review of: Look What You Made Me Do / John Lanchester.
Kyle Wyatt. I feel my luck could change: The life of a cryptic crypto investor. Review of: My Bags Are Big / Tibor Fischer (Salt).
Annie McDermott. Men performing badly: Men performing badly. Review of: As If / Isabel Waidner.
Michael Hughes. Life is elsewhere: A fantasy of literary celebrity. Review of: Cameo / Rob Doyle.
Lisa Hilton. Mute violence: Autofiction inspired by an ancestral home. Review of: La Maison Vide / Laurent Mauvignier.
Michèle Roberts. ‘Your heart beats for me’: The struggle for power in a mother–daughter relationship. Review of: Lili Is Crying / Hélène Bessette; translated by Kate Briggs.
M.C. NB column: Only human: Artificial angst, American agonies, Collecting Jack Kerouac "Readers of the previous issue of the TLS will know what Michael Dirda, formerly of the Washington Post, thinks of the widely reported cuts to that newspaper’s staff, and in particular the closure of Book World, the esteemed literary section of the Post, with which he had been associated for almost five decades. There was always going to be a lot more to say on this grim subject, though, and now some of Mr Dirda’s former colleagues have gone ahead and said it."
In Brief Review of: Favorita / Michelle Steinbeck; translated by Jen Calleja (Faber).
In Brief Review of: Jack the Modernist / Robert Glück (NYRB Classics).
In Brief Review of: My Clavicle, and Other Massive Misalignments / Marta Sanz; translated by Katie King.
Arts
Colin Grant. On the road to Lagos: Resentments and reconnections in a debut film. Review of Akinola Davies Jr’s film My Father’s Shadow.
Rod Mengham. The raw and the cooked: The questions and actions of Joseph Beuys. Review of the exhibition Joseph Beuys: Bathtub for a Heroine, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, until March 28.
David McAllister. Companion figures: Two painters who became ‘one artistic organism’. Review of the exhibition Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, lovers, outsiders, Charleston in Lewes, East Sussex, until April 12 and the book The Two Roberts / Damian Barr.
Maria Margaronis. Breaking bonds: George Eliot’s early life, on stage. Review of Alexi Kaye Campbell's play Bird Grove, Hampstead Theatre, London, until March 21.
In Brief Review of: New Deal Art / John P. Murphy.
Science, Technology, Medicine
Richard Dunn. Less haste: The upsides and downsides of doing things quickly. Review of: Speed: How it explains the world / Vaclav Smil.
Fay Bound Alberti. All at sea: A journalist analyses her mother’s experience of dementia. Review of: A Silent Tsunami: Swimming against the tide of my mother’s dementia / Anthea Rowan (Bedford Square).
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Keggie Carew. Call of the wild: Pets reveal our paradoxical relationship with animals. Review of: Pets and Their People / Charles Foster.
David Kynaston. Joggers, muggers and hipsters: British cities since the Second World War. Review of: The Modern British City 1945–2000 / Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, editors.
Eric Rauchway. When the bubble bursts: Was one man to blame for the Great Depression? Review of: 1929: The inside story of the greatest crash in Wall Street history / Andrew Ross Sorkin.
David Throsby. Dirty money: The failure to combat laundering. Review of: Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How money laundering won / Oliver Bullough.
Benjamin Nathans. Our hopeless cause: The lives of dissidents. (Essay)
Ian Sansom. England at war with itself: An Orwellian dilemma over defence spending. Essay regarding George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn."
In Brief Review of: The Powerful Primate: How Homo Sapiens came to dominate the planet / Roland Ennos.
In Brief Review of: Richard the Lionheart: In life and in legend / Heather Blurton.
Featured
Mary Beard. 03/04/2026: Byron in Ravenna. Mary Beard's blog post from the TLS landing page
Christy Edwall. Read all about it?: The value and uncertain future of the written word. Review of: Books: A manifesto / Ian Patterson -- The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation: Essays on nurturing a passion for reading / Jennie Orchard, editor -- Relearning to Read: Adventures in not-knowing / Ann Morgan.
Madoc Cairns. Many hands: How the Bible came into existence. Review of: Who Really Wrote the Bible: The story of the scribes / William M. Schniedewind -- God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the making of the Bible / Candida Moss -- The Bible: A global history / Bruce Gordon.
Francesca Wade. ‘Blood, blood, blood’: The Russian Revolution through the eyes of a young English tutor. (Essay)
James Hall. Right place, right time: The first portraitist to put an indelible mark on an era. Review of: Holbein: Renaissance master / Elizabeth Goldring.
Literature & Bibliography
Galin Tihanov. From Homer to Ferrante: Erich Auerbach and the appeal of ‘mixed style’. Review of: Auerbach’s Renaissance: Rebirths of an Aesthetic from Shakespeare to Ferrante / Christopher Warley.
Amir-Hussein Radjy. The old town: The old town. Review of: I Found Myself ... : The last dreams / Naguib Mahfouz.
Norma Clarke. Fears into fiction: How Mark Haddon found a home in writing. Review of: Leaving Home: A memoir in full colour / Mark Haddon.
Toby Lichtig. How literature works: Memories from a life steeped in books. Review of: Look Closer: How to get more out of reading / Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
Sarah Lonsdale. https://www.the-tls.com/literature/literary-criticism/clemence-dane-and-good-hou.... Much more than a glossy: Women’s journalism and the life of the mind Review of: Clemence Dane and Good Housekeeping: Modernity and common reading / Stella Deen (Edinburgh University Press).
Adam Watt. The ideal reader: Jacques Rivière, linchpin of the belle époque. Review of: Critique et création / Jacques Rivière; afterword by Agathe Rivière, preface by Jean-Yves Tadié (Robert Laffont).
J. Michael Lennon. Middleman of American letters: A portrait of Malcolm Cowley and his famous authors. Review of: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the triumph of American literature / Gerald Howard.
D. Quentin Miller. Prophet of love: Sexuality in the life of James Baldwin. Review of: Baldwin: A love story / Nicholas Boggs.
Margaret Drabble. A modern Moll Flanders: Social history and unreliable narrators in Joyce Cary’s first trilogy of novels. Review of: Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse’s Mouth / Joyce Cary; introduction by Christopher Reid (Everyman).
Beci Forest. Let it all out: The charms and failures of Richard Aldington’s poetry. Review of: A Fool i’ the Forest: A phantasmagoria / Richard Aldington; edited by Michael Copp and Elizabeth Vandiver.
Natasha Randall. Feeding the beast: Memory and complicity with the Russian Leviathan. Review of: The Disappearing Act / Maria Stepanova.
David Annand. Manifest captivity: Between the Apache Wars and the present day. Review of: Now I Surrender / Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Susie Mesure. Where charity begins: A family looks to escape a broiling, near-future Kolkata. Review of: A Guardian and a Thief / Megha Majumdar.
Beejay Silcox. Hell’s kitchen: A novel of intergenerational animus and vol-au-vents. Review of: Look What You Made Me Do / John Lanchester.
Kyle Wyatt. I feel my luck could change: The life of a cryptic crypto investor. Review of: My Bags Are Big / Tibor Fischer (Salt).
Annie McDermott. Men performing badly: Men performing badly. Review of: As If / Isabel Waidner.
Michael Hughes. Life is elsewhere: A fantasy of literary celebrity. Review of: Cameo / Rob Doyle.
Lisa Hilton. Mute violence: Autofiction inspired by an ancestral home. Review of: La Maison Vide / Laurent Mauvignier.
Michèle Roberts. ‘Your heart beats for me’: The struggle for power in a mother–daughter relationship. Review of: Lili Is Crying / Hélène Bessette; translated by Kate Briggs.
M.C. NB column: Only human: Artificial angst, American agonies, Collecting Jack Kerouac "Readers of the previous issue of the TLS will know what Michael Dirda, formerly of the Washington Post, thinks of the widely reported cuts to that newspaper’s staff, and in particular the closure of Book World, the esteemed literary section of the Post, with which he had been associated for almost five decades. There was always going to be a lot more to say on this grim subject, though, and now some of Mr Dirda’s former colleagues have gone ahead and said it."
In Brief Review of: Favorita / Michelle Steinbeck; translated by Jen Calleja (Faber).
In Brief Review of: Jack the Modernist / Robert Glück (NYRB Classics).
In Brief Review of: My Clavicle, and Other Massive Misalignments / Marta Sanz; translated by Katie King.
Arts
Colin Grant. On the road to Lagos: Resentments and reconnections in a debut film. Review of Akinola Davies Jr’s film My Father’s Shadow.
Rod Mengham. The raw and the cooked: The questions and actions of Joseph Beuys. Review of the exhibition Joseph Beuys: Bathtub for a Heroine, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, until March 28.
David McAllister. Companion figures: Two painters who became ‘one artistic organism’. Review of the exhibition Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, lovers, outsiders, Charleston in Lewes, East Sussex, until April 12 and the book The Two Roberts / Damian Barr.
Maria Margaronis. Breaking bonds: George Eliot’s early life, on stage. Review of Alexi Kaye Campbell's play Bird Grove, Hampstead Theatre, London, until March 21.
In Brief Review of: New Deal Art / John P. Murphy.
Science, Technology, Medicine
Richard Dunn. Less haste: The upsides and downsides of doing things quickly. Review of: Speed: How it explains the world / Vaclav Smil.
Fay Bound Alberti. All at sea: A journalist analyses her mother’s experience of dementia. Review of: A Silent Tsunami: Swimming against the tide of my mother’s dementia / Anthea Rowan (Bedford Square).
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Keggie Carew. Call of the wild: Pets reveal our paradoxical relationship with animals. Review of: Pets and Their People / Charles Foster.
David Kynaston. Joggers, muggers and hipsters: British cities since the Second World War. Review of: The Modern British City 1945–2000 / Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith, editors.
Eric Rauchway. When the bubble bursts: Was one man to blame for the Great Depression? Review of: 1929: The inside story of the greatest crash in Wall Street history / Andrew Ross Sorkin.
David Throsby. Dirty money: The failure to combat laundering. Review of: Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How money laundering won / Oliver Bullough.
Benjamin Nathans. Our hopeless cause: The lives of dissidents. (Essay)
Ian Sansom. England at war with itself: An Orwellian dilemma over defence spending. Essay regarding George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn."
In Brief Review of: The Powerful Primate: How Homo Sapiens came to dominate the planet / Roland Ennos.
In Brief Review of: Richard the Lionheart: In life and in legend / Heather Blurton.
120featherbear
LitHub March 2026
Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder. 03/31/2026: A Brief and Essential History of the Most Important Food Ever Invented: The Pickle. Excerpt from: The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles / Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder (Chronicle Books).
David George Haskell. 03/25/2026: The Origin of Our Species: How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind. Excerpt from: How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries / David George Haskell.
Irina Sadovina. 03/25/2026: On the Complexities of Navigating Indigenous Life in a Relentlessly Modern World. Regarding: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; translator Irina Sadovina.
Trevor Jackson. 03/25/2026: What Did European Life Look Like at the Dawn of Capitalism? Excerpt from: The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World / Trevor Jackson.
Brittany Allen. 03/24/2026: A new series on Charles Dickens takes your favorite Victorian novelist to the streets.
Sara Vladic. 03/24/2026: Nazis in America, c. 1938-1941. Excerpt from: The Dangerous Shore: How a Motley Crew of Scientists, Mobsters, Double Agents, Retirees, Volunteer Pilots (and a Boy Scout) Stopped the Invasion of America / Sara Vladic.
Leanne Ogasawara. 03/23/2026: Mieko Kawakami on Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Hope in the Darkness: In Conversation With Her Translators, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.
Maris Kreizman. 03/20/2026: Paperback vs. Hardcover: Which is Better For Readers (and For Writers)?
Ellen O'Connell Whittet. 03/20/2026: If You Want to Understand the Enduring Appeal of Wuthering Heights, Read This Book. Review of: Fifteen Wild Decembers / Karen Powell.
Svetlana Satchkova. 03/18/2026: From Glasnost to Silence: The Collapse of Literary Freedom in Russia.
Literary Hub. 03/17/2026: The “outstandingly original scholar” Lyndal Roper has won the 2026 Holberg Prize.
Wayne Koestenbaum. 03/17/2026: What Wayne Koestenbaum Learned From Gilligan’s Island (And Why He Will Never Finish Reading Marx’s Capital).
Scott Kurashige. 03/16/2026: Understanding the Complex History of Anti-Asian Racism. Excerpt from: American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism / Scott Kurashige (forthcoming: University of California Press).
Kerry Clare. 03/16/2026: Beyond “Women’s Fiction...” On the Quiet Brilliance of Barbara Pym. "Kerry Clare In Praise of Writing Stories Attuned to the Details of Everyday Life."
A. Natasha Joukovsky. 03/16/2026: On the Genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s Most Important Literary Predecessor. "Natasha Joukovsky Considers Ahead-of-Their-Time Novels Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress and Evelina."
Genevieve DeGuzman. 03/16/2026: Crying in the Multiverse: On the Potential of Possibility as a Literary Device.
Paul Rosier. 03/14/2026: Benjamin Franklin Was One of Many Early Americans Who Spread Genocidal Propaganda About Indigenous Nations. Excerpt from: Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025 / Paul Rosier. plus lots of angry comments!
Sandy Ernest Allen. 03/12/2026: What Was Lost: A Queer Accounting of the NY Times Book Review, 2013-2022: Thirteen Essential Books by Trans and Queer Writers, Reviewed by Trans and Queer Writers. Rediscovering reviews of: Real Man Adventures / T. Cooper (2013) -- Nevada / Imogen Binnie (2013) -- Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars / Kai Cheng Thom (2016) -- Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit / Aisha Sabatini (2017) -- How We Get Free / Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor (2017) -- I'm Afraid of Men / Vivek Shraya (2018) -- Gender Queer / Maia Kobabe (2019) -- Manhunt / Gretchen Felker-Martin (2020) -- LOTE / Shola Von Reinhold (2020) -- A Dream of a Woman / Casey Plett (2021) -- Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League / Frankie de la Cretaz & Lyndsey D'Arcangelo (2021) -- Darryl / Jackie Ess (2021) -- Beating Heart Baby / Lio Min (2022).
Rahul Bery. 03/11/2026: Freedom Through Structure: On Translating Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa Regarding: Centroeuropa / Vicente Luis Mora.
Christopher Clark. 03/10/2026: Matters of the Spirit: A Pastor, a Noblewoman and a Mysterious Bout of Melancholy: On the Intersection of Mental Health and Christian Faith in 19th-Century Prussia. Excerpt from: A Scandal in Königsberg / Christopher Clark.
Lauren W. Westerfield. 03/09/2026: Why Jane Austen Adaptations Just Keep Coming—And We Keep Watching.
Robert Morgan. 03/09/2026: Robert Morgan on Reading War and Peace For the First Time. Touchstone: War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy.
Jess Decourcy Hinds. 03/06/2026: 8 Badass Librarians We Need to Celebrate This International Women’s Day. "Jess deCourcy Hinds on the Librarians Who’ve Inspired Her."
Lucie Britsch. 03/06/2026: No Stars, or: Are We Reviewing Ourselves to Death?
Marissa Levien. 03/05/2026: What We Lose When We Gamify Reading.
Leslely Janike. 03/05/2026: On Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House Though the Lens of Childrearing. Touchstone link: The Haunting of Hill House / Shirley Jackson.
Maris Kreizman. 03/05/2026: Why We Must Fight to Stop HR 7661 Before It Destroys the Lives of American Children. "Maris Kreizman on a Proposed Bill That Could Outlaw Books By or About LGBTQ+ People."
Stephen Harding. 03/05/2026: Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound? Excerpt from G.I. G-Men: The Untold Story of the FBI's Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe / Stephen Harding (Citadel Press).
James Folta. 03/03/2026: The American Library Association’s workers have formed a union.
Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder. 03/31/2026: A Brief and Essential History of the Most Important Food Ever Invented: The Pickle. Excerpt from: The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles / Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder (Chronicle Books).
David George Haskell. 03/25/2026: The Origin of Our Species: How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind. Excerpt from: How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries / David George Haskell.
Irina Sadovina. 03/25/2026: On the Complexities of Navigating Indigenous Life in a Relentlessly Modern World. Regarding: White Moss / Anna Nerkagi; translator Irina Sadovina.
Trevor Jackson. 03/25/2026: What Did European Life Look Like at the Dawn of Capitalism? Excerpt from: The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World / Trevor Jackson.
Brittany Allen. 03/24/2026: A new series on Charles Dickens takes your favorite Victorian novelist to the streets.
Sara Vladic. 03/24/2026: Nazis in America, c. 1938-1941. Excerpt from: The Dangerous Shore: How a Motley Crew of Scientists, Mobsters, Double Agents, Retirees, Volunteer Pilots (and a Boy Scout) Stopped the Invasion of America / Sara Vladic.
Leanne Ogasawara. 03/23/2026: Mieko Kawakami on Sisterhood, Survival, and Finding Hope in the Darkness: In Conversation With Her Translators, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.
Maris Kreizman. 03/20/2026: Paperback vs. Hardcover: Which is Better For Readers (and For Writers)?
Ellen O'Connell Whittet. 03/20/2026: If You Want to Understand the Enduring Appeal of Wuthering Heights, Read This Book. Review of: Fifteen Wild Decembers / Karen Powell.
Svetlana Satchkova. 03/18/2026: From Glasnost to Silence: The Collapse of Literary Freedom in Russia.
Literary Hub. 03/17/2026: The “outstandingly original scholar” Lyndal Roper has won the 2026 Holberg Prize.
Wayne Koestenbaum. 03/17/2026: What Wayne Koestenbaum Learned From Gilligan’s Island (And Why He Will Never Finish Reading Marx’s Capital).
Scott Kurashige. 03/16/2026: Understanding the Complex History of Anti-Asian Racism. Excerpt from: American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism / Scott Kurashige (forthcoming: University of California Press).
Kerry Clare. 03/16/2026: Beyond “Women’s Fiction...” On the Quiet Brilliance of Barbara Pym. "Kerry Clare In Praise of Writing Stories Attuned to the Details of Everyday Life."
A. Natasha Joukovsky. 03/16/2026: On the Genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s Most Important Literary Predecessor. "Natasha Joukovsky Considers Ahead-of-Their-Time Novels Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress and Evelina."
Genevieve DeGuzman. 03/16/2026: Crying in the Multiverse: On the Potential of Possibility as a Literary Device.
Paul Rosier. 03/14/2026: Benjamin Franklin Was One of Many Early Americans Who Spread Genocidal Propaganda About Indigenous Nations. Excerpt from: Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025 / Paul Rosier. plus lots of angry comments!
Sandy Ernest Allen. 03/12/2026: What Was Lost: A Queer Accounting of the NY Times Book Review, 2013-2022: Thirteen Essential Books by Trans and Queer Writers, Reviewed by Trans and Queer Writers. Rediscovering reviews of: Real Man Adventures / T. Cooper (2013) -- Nevada / Imogen Binnie (2013) -- Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars / Kai Cheng Thom (2016) -- Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit / Aisha Sabatini (2017) -- How We Get Free / Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor (2017) -- I'm Afraid of Men / Vivek Shraya (2018) -- Gender Queer / Maia Kobabe (2019) -- Manhunt / Gretchen Felker-Martin (2020) -- LOTE / Shola Von Reinhold (2020) -- A Dream of a Woman / Casey Plett (2021) -- Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League / Frankie de la Cretaz & Lyndsey D'Arcangelo (2021) -- Darryl / Jackie Ess (2021) -- Beating Heart Baby / Lio Min (2022).
Rahul Bery. 03/11/2026: Freedom Through Structure: On Translating Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa Regarding: Centroeuropa / Vicente Luis Mora.
Christopher Clark. 03/10/2026: Matters of the Spirit: A Pastor, a Noblewoman and a Mysterious Bout of Melancholy: On the Intersection of Mental Health and Christian Faith in 19th-Century Prussia. Excerpt from: A Scandal in Königsberg / Christopher Clark.
Lauren W. Westerfield. 03/09/2026: Why Jane Austen Adaptations Just Keep Coming—And We Keep Watching.
Robert Morgan. 03/09/2026: Robert Morgan on Reading War and Peace For the First Time. Touchstone: War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy.
Jess Decourcy Hinds. 03/06/2026: 8 Badass Librarians We Need to Celebrate This International Women’s Day. "Jess deCourcy Hinds on the Librarians Who’ve Inspired Her."
Lucie Britsch. 03/06/2026: No Stars, or: Are We Reviewing Ourselves to Death?
Marissa Levien. 03/05/2026: What We Lose When We Gamify Reading.
Leslely Janike. 03/05/2026: On Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House Though the Lens of Childrearing. Touchstone link: The Haunting of Hill House / Shirley Jackson.
Maris Kreizman. 03/05/2026: Why We Must Fight to Stop HR 7661 Before It Destroys the Lives of American Children. "Maris Kreizman on a Proposed Bill That Could Outlaw Books By or About LGBTQ+ People."
Stephen Harding. 03/05/2026: Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound? Excerpt from G.I. G-Men: The Untold Story of the FBI's Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe / Stephen Harding (Citadel Press).
James Folta. 03/03/2026: The American Library Association’s workers have formed a union.
121featherbear
American Scholar March 2026
Bill Hayes. 03/19/2026: Thinking in the Margins: What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.
John Kaag. 03/05/2026: An American Prophet of the Natural World. Review of: The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary / Terry Tempest Williams.
T.M. Luhrmann. 03/02/2026: Who Is Thinking?: The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Bill Hayes. 03/19/2026: Thinking in the Margins: What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.
John Kaag. 03/05/2026: An American Prophet of the Natural World. Review of: The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary / Terry Tempest Williams.
T.M. Luhrmann. 03/02/2026: Who Is Thinking?: The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question. Review of: A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness / Michael Pollan.
122featherbear
NYRB Online March 26 2026
Literature
Aaron Matz. All of Us Yahoos: A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice. Review of: State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature / Dan Sperrin.
Meghan O'Gieblyn. The Island That Held Them. Review of: The Book of I / David Greig.
Nathan Thrall. ‘Dirty Work’: The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed. Regarding Khirbet Khizeh / S. Yizhar.
Arts
Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Rembrandt’s DNA. Review of: Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection, an exhibition at the H’ART Museum, Amsterdam, April 9–August 24, 2025, and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 25, 2025—March 29, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Birgit Boelens, Paul Mosterd, Elizabeth Nogrady, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. -- ; edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Elizabeth Nogrady
Available at www.theleidencollection.com.
Ingrid D. Rowland. Artistic License: When an angel in a recently restored Roman chapel was seen to resemble Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, it touched off a very Italian scandal.
Religion
Erin Maglaque. God’s Impertinent Prophets: A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un unfiltered knowledge of God. Review of: Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century / Naomi Baker.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Catherine Nicholson. A Most Particular Life: The diary of the sixteenth-century physician Felix Platter is without precedent in early modern literature. Review of: Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance / Felix Platter, translated from the German by Seán Jennett and with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt.
Jacob Weisberg. Tick, Tick…Boom!: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash reminds us that financial bubbles are inevitable—and that another one may be about to pop. Review of: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation / Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Mark Lilla. Clown Show: In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès. Review of: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès / Sergio Luzzatto.
Orville Schell. China’s Leader Manqué: Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan. Review of: Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887–1975 / Alexander V. Pantsov, translated from the Russian by Steven I. Levine -- The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949 / Xavier Paulès, translated from the French by Lindsay Lightfoot.
David Cole. Diversity by Other Means: Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.. Review of: The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education / Justin Driver.
Marilynne Robinson. Who Speaks for Us?: The representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people. (Essay)
Robert G. Kaiser. Post Mortem: When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t. (Essay)
Anne Enright. ‘The Devil Himself’: Sifting through a single day of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails reveals a surprising amount about the man and his many enablers. (Essay)
Literature
Aaron Matz. All of Us Yahoos: A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice. Review of: State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature / Dan Sperrin.
Meghan O'Gieblyn. The Island That Held Them. Review of: The Book of I / David Greig.
Nathan Thrall. ‘Dirty Work’: The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed. Regarding Khirbet Khizeh / S. Yizhar.
Arts
Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Rembrandt’s DNA. Review of: Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection, an exhibition at the H’ART Museum, Amsterdam, April 9–August 24, 2025, and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 25, 2025—March 29, 2026; catalog of the exhibition edited by Birgit Boelens, Paul Mosterd, Elizabeth Nogrady, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. -- ; edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Elizabeth Nogrady
Available at www.theleidencollection.com.
Ingrid D. Rowland. Artistic License: When an angel in a recently restored Roman chapel was seen to resemble Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, it touched off a very Italian scandal.
Religion
Erin Maglaque. God’s Impertinent Prophets: A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un unfiltered knowledge of God. Review of: Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century / Naomi Baker.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Catherine Nicholson. A Most Particular Life: The diary of the sixteenth-century physician Felix Platter is without precedent in early modern literature. Review of: Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance / Felix Platter, translated from the German by Seán Jennett and with a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt.
Jacob Weisberg. Tick, Tick…Boom!: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash reminds us that financial bubbles are inevitable—and that another one may be about to pop. Review of: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation / Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Mark Lilla. Clown Show: In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès. Review of: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès / Sergio Luzzatto.
Orville Schell. China’s Leader Manqué: Chiang Kai-shek had enormous flaws as a leader, but something was nonetheless lost to China when he and his Republican government were forced into exile on Taiwan. Review of: Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887–1975 / Alexander V. Pantsov, translated from the Russian by Steven I. Levine -- The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949 / Xavier Paulès, translated from the French by Lindsay Lightfoot.
David Cole. Diversity by Other Means: Progressives may have lost the battle for racial affirmative action, but ironically, Supreme Court decisions should allow colleges to give advantage to groups defined by their income, geography, or heritage.. Review of: The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education / Justin Driver.
Marilynne Robinson. Who Speaks for Us?: The representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people. (Essay)
Robert G. Kaiser. Post Mortem: When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t. (Essay)
Anne Enright. ‘The Devil Himself’: Sifting through a single day of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails reveals a surprising amount about the man and his many enablers. (Essay)
123featherbear
António Lobo Antunes, 1942-2026
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 03/05/2026: António Lobo Antunes, One of Europe’s Most Revered Writers, Dies at 83. "In a career studded with literary awards, he was the author of dozens of books that grappled with his nation’s legacy of dictatorship and colonialism."
"António Lobo Antunes, a prolific Portuguese novelist whose multilayered narratives dissecting the faultlines of Portuguese society made him a literary giant in his native country and further afield, died on Thursday in Lisbon. He was 83.
"In more than 30 novels and collections of other writings, Mr. Antunes charted Portugal’s halting emergence from the crippling dictatorship of Gen. António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968, and its failed colonial wars in Africa. His career was studded with literary awards, including the Jerusalem Prize in 2005 and the Camões Prize, Portugal’s highest literary honor, in 2007.
"His adventurous approach to form allowed him to transcend his identity as an often difficult writer from an overlooked second-rank European country. He was on many critics’ Nobel Prize shortlist for literature, with some feeling that he deserved it more than his Portuguese compatriot José Saramago, who won in 1998. His friends said he felt some bitterness at not receiving it.
"His work as a doctor provided him a lens through which he explored the battered psychology of his diminished nation. For 27 months, from 1971-73, he served as an army medic in his country’s war in Angola, witnessing the brutality of Portugal’s futile attempts to keep its African colonies.
"The novels, especially the early ones, were also a no-holds-barred exposure of suppressed truths about the hypocrisies of Portuguese society. His first two works, “Elephant Memory” and “South of Nowhere,” both published in 1979, centered on those experiences and brought him overnight acclaim in his homeland and abroad.
"His experiments with form and language drew the attention of major critics like Harold Bloom and George Steiner, who set Mr. Antunes high in the ranks of modernist writers. Mr. Bloom considered him “one of the living writers who will matter most,” and Mr. Steiner called him “a novelist of the very first rank,” likening him to Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner.
"Mr. Antunes often eschewed punctuation, clear plotlines and chronology. Individual voices were deliberately mixed and intertwined, sometimes in the same paragraph or in the course of a sentence, such as in one of his most esteemed novels, “Fado Alexandrino” (1983).
"He uses similar techniques in other major novels, such as “The Inquisitors’ Manual” (1996), which focused on a brutal former minister under Salazar’s dictatorship; and “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” (2001), which depicted the uneasy mental excursions of the son of a Lisbon drag queen.
"Some critics were less convinced of Mr. Antunes’s technique. Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times that while the author’s stream-of-consciousness style could be “magnificent” at times, “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” was excruciating. “I’d rather pull a toenail off with rusty pliers than march through its punishing 585 pages again,” he wrote. Richard Eder, another Times critic, wrote that the Nobel committee had made the right choice in picking Mr. Saramago over Mr. Antunes.
"In the English-language world, Mr. Antunes’s works remain obscure. Richard Zenith, one of Mr. Antunes’s translators, noted in The Times Literary Supplement in 1997 that all four of his translated novels were by then out of print in Britain. “Anglo-Saxon literature really likes a good story,” Mr. Zenith said in a phone interview from his home in Portugal. “English doesn’t put up as easily with ambiguity. Latin literature revels in it.” In addition to which, “he’s not an easy read.”
"In the English-language world, Mr. Antunes’s works remain obscure. Richard Zenith, one of Mr. Antunes’s translators, noted in The Times Literary Supplement in 1997 that all four of his translated novels were by then out of print in Britain. “Anglo-Saxon literature really likes a good story,” Mr. Zenith said in a phone interview from his home in Portugal. “English doesn’t put up as easily with ambiguity. Latin literature revels in it.” In addition to which, “he’s not an easy read.”
"From the beginning, Mr. Antunes’s war experience in Angola, and the scars they left, was a central impetus of his work.
"The war, in his telling, was a black hole of cruelty, where Portuguese officers casually whipped out their pistols and dispatched captured rebels, and raped Africans at gunpoint, with no legacy beyond despair. The war’s children were stunted and unable to cope with what passed for ordinary life back in Portugal.
"“I just wanted to return alive,” he recalled to The Paris Review in 2011. “I remember we kept calendars and would cross off each day that we were still alive! I’ve talked to people who were in the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, and I’ve understood them perfectly.”
"His first three books were concerned with haunted war veterans, and war marked his subsequent novels, too.
"An author who practiced psychiatry, he wanted his writing to mirror the vagaries of the human mind. What he was attempting was to “put myself into a state close to that of a dream,” he told the critic Raphaëlle Rérolle in Le Monde in 2005, “so that my internal political police lowers its guard.”
"It was that “police,” he explained, “that forbids us from thinking in a non-Cartesian way,” explaining his belief in the non-linearity of human perception. Shedding such constraints allowed Mr. Antunes to “grasp the world ‘as it is,’ before we have aligned it with our social categories of perception,” the French writer Hédi Kaddour wrote in Le Monde, comparing him to Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.
"Explaining his concept of the novel, Mr. Antunes called it “structured delirium.”"
Emma Loffhagen. 03/06/2026: António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist who chronicled dictatorship and war, dies aged 83. "Author of more than 30 novels, including Fado Alexandrino and The Inquisitors’ Manual, was widely seen as one of the most important voices in modern Portuguese literature."
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 03/06/2026: António Lobo Antunes’s exhilarating novels forced Portugal to confront its darkest moments.
António Lobo Antunes's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/antunesantoniolobo
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 03/05/2026: António Lobo Antunes, One of Europe’s Most Revered Writers, Dies at 83. "In a career studded with literary awards, he was the author of dozens of books that grappled with his nation’s legacy of dictatorship and colonialism."
"António Lobo Antunes, a prolific Portuguese novelist whose multilayered narratives dissecting the faultlines of Portuguese society made him a literary giant in his native country and further afield, died on Thursday in Lisbon. He was 83.
"In more than 30 novels and collections of other writings, Mr. Antunes charted Portugal’s halting emergence from the crippling dictatorship of Gen. António de Oliveira Salazar from 1932 to 1968, and its failed colonial wars in Africa. His career was studded with literary awards, including the Jerusalem Prize in 2005 and the Camões Prize, Portugal’s highest literary honor, in 2007.
"His adventurous approach to form allowed him to transcend his identity as an often difficult writer from an overlooked second-rank European country. He was on many critics’ Nobel Prize shortlist for literature, with some feeling that he deserved it more than his Portuguese compatriot José Saramago, who won in 1998. His friends said he felt some bitterness at not receiving it.
"His work as a doctor provided him a lens through which he explored the battered psychology of his diminished nation. For 27 months, from 1971-73, he served as an army medic in his country’s war in Angola, witnessing the brutality of Portugal’s futile attempts to keep its African colonies.
"The novels, especially the early ones, were also a no-holds-barred exposure of suppressed truths about the hypocrisies of Portuguese society. His first two works, “Elephant Memory” and “South of Nowhere,” both published in 1979, centered on those experiences and brought him overnight acclaim in his homeland and abroad.
"His experiments with form and language drew the attention of major critics like Harold Bloom and George Steiner, who set Mr. Antunes high in the ranks of modernist writers. Mr. Bloom considered him “one of the living writers who will matter most,” and Mr. Steiner called him “a novelist of the very first rank,” likening him to Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner.
"Mr. Antunes often eschewed punctuation, clear plotlines and chronology. Individual voices were deliberately mixed and intertwined, sometimes in the same paragraph or in the course of a sentence, such as in one of his most esteemed novels, “Fado Alexandrino” (1983).
"He uses similar techniques in other major novels, such as “The Inquisitors’ Manual” (1996), which focused on a brutal former minister under Salazar’s dictatorship; and “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” (2001), which depicted the uneasy mental excursions of the son of a Lisbon drag queen.
"Some critics were less convinced of Mr. Antunes’s technique. Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times that while the author’s stream-of-consciousness style could be “magnificent” at times, “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” was excruciating. “I’d rather pull a toenail off with rusty pliers than march through its punishing 585 pages again,” he wrote. Richard Eder, another Times critic, wrote that the Nobel committee had made the right choice in picking Mr. Saramago over Mr. Antunes.
"In the English-language world, Mr. Antunes’s works remain obscure. Richard Zenith, one of Mr. Antunes’s translators, noted in The Times Literary Supplement in 1997 that all four of his translated novels were by then out of print in Britain. “Anglo-Saxon literature really likes a good story,” Mr. Zenith said in a phone interview from his home in Portugal. “English doesn’t put up as easily with ambiguity. Latin literature revels in it.” In addition to which, “he’s not an easy read.”
"In the English-language world, Mr. Antunes’s works remain obscure. Richard Zenith, one of Mr. Antunes’s translators, noted in The Times Literary Supplement in 1997 that all four of his translated novels were by then out of print in Britain. “Anglo-Saxon literature really likes a good story,” Mr. Zenith said in a phone interview from his home in Portugal. “English doesn’t put up as easily with ambiguity. Latin literature revels in it.” In addition to which, “he’s not an easy read.”
"From the beginning, Mr. Antunes’s war experience in Angola, and the scars they left, was a central impetus of his work.
"The war, in his telling, was a black hole of cruelty, where Portuguese officers casually whipped out their pistols and dispatched captured rebels, and raped Africans at gunpoint, with no legacy beyond despair. The war’s children were stunted and unable to cope with what passed for ordinary life back in Portugal.
"“I just wanted to return alive,” he recalled to The Paris Review in 2011. “I remember we kept calendars and would cross off each day that we were still alive! I’ve talked to people who were in the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, and I’ve understood them perfectly.”
"His first three books were concerned with haunted war veterans, and war marked his subsequent novels, too.
"An author who practiced psychiatry, he wanted his writing to mirror the vagaries of the human mind. What he was attempting was to “put myself into a state close to that of a dream,” he told the critic Raphaëlle Rérolle in Le Monde in 2005, “so that my internal political police lowers its guard.”
"It was that “police,” he explained, “that forbids us from thinking in a non-Cartesian way,” explaining his belief in the non-linearity of human perception. Shedding such constraints allowed Mr. Antunes to “grasp the world ‘as it is,’ before we have aligned it with our social categories of perception,” the French writer Hédi Kaddour wrote in Le Monde, comparing him to Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.
"Explaining his concept of the novel, Mr. Antunes called it “structured delirium.”"
Emma Loffhagen. 03/06/2026: António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist who chronicled dictatorship and war, dies aged 83. "Author of more than 30 novels, including Fado Alexandrino and The Inquisitors’ Manual, was widely seen as one of the most important voices in modern Portuguese literature."
Yagnishsing Dawoor. 03/06/2026: António Lobo Antunes’s exhilarating novels forced Portugal to confront its darkest moments.
António Lobo Antunes's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/antunesantoniolobo
124featherbear
Danny Robb. JSTOR Daily, 03/03/2026: Edgar Allan Poe’s Mechanical Imagination. "Behind The Raven’s melancholy lies a theory of composition shaped by magazines, machines, and modernity."
125featherbear
March 2026 updates 01-07
Aeon Mar 05: revisiting Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook -- Mar 02: On Walter Mignolo & decolonization theory >111 featherbear:
American Scholar Mar 05: Terry Tempest Williams -- Mar 02: Michael Pollan's consciousness book >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 07: 2 books on the Ryuku Islands -- Mar 06: translation of Liang Xiaosheng's novel My Destiny -- Mar 04: Makato Fujimura & slow art -- Mar 03: The Arab Bureau -- Mar 01: Green China >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 05: Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender -- Mar 03: tears for a tyrant; new translation of Vigdis Hjorth's novel Repetition -- Mar 02: stay at home dads in novels >114 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 01: recommended Friedrich Hayek books >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 07: Mary Costello's A Beautiful Loan -- Mar 06: Saba Sams self-interview; dopplegangers!; Infamous Gilberts -- Mar 05: Gloria Don't Speak; Tales of the Suburbs -- Mar 04: Will Self's Quantity Theory of Morality; Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu -- Mar 03: Last Kings of Hollywood; Helle Helle's they -- Mar 02: Plath/Hughes novel; George Sand bio review -- Mar 01: excerpt from George Sand bio; Christina Applegate memoir; incel slang enters the mainstream >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 06: Francis Crick bio -- Mar 05: Ayşegül Savaş's Long Distance stories -- Mar 04: sadistic psychotherapy -- Mar 03:"Scenes from a (Gay) Marriage’ with undertones of Stephen King;" World Cup history -- Mar 02: Mark Edmundsen >110 featherbear:
Literary Review March issue >113 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 06: badass librarians; reviewing ourselves to death -- Mar 05: don't game-ify reading!!; reading The Haunting of Hill House as a manual on childrearing; HR 7661; Ezra Pound, traitor -- Mar 03: American Library Association workers form union >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 03: Emi Yagi on female objectification "When the Museum Is Closed" -- Mar 02: revisiting Shere Hite's book on female sexuality >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 07: Helen Garner's collected short fiction -- Mar 05: Christian America & the 1st Amendment; Syrian revolution -- Mar 04: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney's Lake Effect novel; anti-abortion beginning in the ancient world; plastic & Big Oil; Every Time We Say Goodbye (novel) -- Mar 03: Muv Mitford bio; new translation of Vigdis Hjorth's Repetition novel; Valley of Vengeful Ghosts -- Mar 02: Field Notes from an Extinction; Apache wars novel -- Mar 01: Christina Applegate memoir; El Paso; Australian epic; Backstich >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 06: Cartesian theater (excerpt) -- Mar 05: What We’re Reading the First Week of March 2026 -- Mar 03: rarity vs worth in literature; mythical conversa stories -- Mar 02: Sunil Amrith interview; can AI read? >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 04: Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Mar 03: B-Sides Going West by Maurice Gee >118 featherbear:
TLS Mar 06 >119 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
American Scholar >121 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >124 featherbear:
The Republic of Letters (Feb 28) >116 featherbear:
Aeon Mar 05: revisiting Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook -- Mar 02: On Walter Mignolo & decolonization theory >111 featherbear:
American Scholar Mar 05: Terry Tempest Williams -- Mar 02: Michael Pollan's consciousness book >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 07: 2 books on the Ryuku Islands -- Mar 06: translation of Liang Xiaosheng's novel My Destiny -- Mar 04: Makato Fujimura & slow art -- Mar 03: The Arab Bureau -- Mar 01: Green China >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 05: Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender -- Mar 03: tears for a tyrant; new translation of Vigdis Hjorth's novel Repetition -- Mar 02: stay at home dads in novels >114 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 01: recommended Friedrich Hayek books >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 07: Mary Costello's A Beautiful Loan -- Mar 06: Saba Sams self-interview; dopplegangers!; Infamous Gilberts -- Mar 05: Gloria Don't Speak; Tales of the Suburbs -- Mar 04: Will Self's Quantity Theory of Morality; Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu -- Mar 03: Last Kings of Hollywood; Helle Helle's they -- Mar 02: Plath/Hughes novel; George Sand bio review -- Mar 01: excerpt from George Sand bio; Christina Applegate memoir; incel slang enters the mainstream >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 06: Francis Crick bio -- Mar 05: Ayşegül Savaş's Long Distance stories -- Mar 04: sadistic psychotherapy -- Mar 03:"Scenes from a (Gay) Marriage’ with undertones of Stephen King;" World Cup history -- Mar 02: Mark Edmundsen >110 featherbear:
Literary Review March issue >113 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 06: badass librarians; reviewing ourselves to death -- Mar 05: don't game-ify reading!!; reading The Haunting of Hill House as a manual on childrearing; HR 7661; Ezra Pound, traitor -- Mar 03: American Library Association workers form union >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 03: Emi Yagi on female objectification "When the Museum Is Closed" -- Mar 02: revisiting Shere Hite's book on female sexuality >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 07: Helen Garner's collected short fiction -- Mar 05: Christian America & the 1st Amendment; Syrian revolution -- Mar 04: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney's Lake Effect novel; anti-abortion beginning in the ancient world; plastic & Big Oil; Every Time We Say Goodbye (novel) -- Mar 03: Muv Mitford bio; new translation of Vigdis Hjorth's Repetition novel; Valley of Vengeful Ghosts -- Mar 02: Field Notes from an Extinction; Apache wars novel -- Mar 01: Christina Applegate memoir; El Paso; Australian epic; Backstich >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 06: Cartesian theater (excerpt) -- Mar 05: What We’re Reading the First Week of March 2026 -- Mar 03: rarity vs worth in literature; mythical conversa stories -- Mar 02: Sunil Amrith interview; can AI read? >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 04: Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Mar 03: B-Sides Going West by Maurice Gee >118 featherbear:
TLS Mar 06 >119 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
American Scholar >121 featherbear:
JSTOR Daily >124 featherbear:
The Republic of Letters (Feb 28) >116 featherbear:
126featherbear
Andrew Holter. Boston Review, 03/09/2026: The Novelists and the Warmongers: Reading Mary McCarthy on Vietnam in a new era of wartime illusions.
127featherbear
Emma Alpern. Vulture, 03/10/2026: There Are No Great Pandemic Novels. Review of: Down Time: a novel / Andrew Martin.
128featherbear
The Critic (UK) March 2026
Ben Sixsmith. 03/11/2026: Self’s the man. Regarding: The Quantity Theory of Morality / Will Self.
Jeremy Black. 03/08/2026: Murders for March. The month's UK crime fiction.
Ben Sixsmith. 03/11/2026: Self’s the man. Regarding: The Quantity Theory of Morality / Will Self.
Jeremy Black. 03/08/2026: Murders for March. The month's UK crime fiction.
129featherbear
Walid Khalidi, 1925–2026
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/12/2026: Walid Khalidi, Scholar Called Father of Palestinian Studies, Dies at 100. "As a historian and diplomat, he gave intellectual shape to his people and made sure that they played a role in negotiating their future."
"Walid Khalidi, a scholar of Middle Eastern history whose deep family roots in Jerusalem, encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s politics and extensive work behind the diplomatic scenes of the Arab world earned him a reputation as the father of Palestinian studies, died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 100.
"Mr. Khalidi, who came from a widely respected family of academics and politicians, spent much of his career in Beirut, at the Institute for Palestine Studies, which he helped found in 1963, and at Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
"He had been an eyewitness to much of the Palestinian experience during the 20th century. He grew up under the British Mandate; watched as the creation of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including his own family, from their homes; and participated in the decades of complex politics and diplomacy that followed.
"His long life and career gave him first-hand insight into some of the region’s most enduring and complicated questions: What are the continued consequences of European domination of Arab lands in the 19th and 20th centuries? What have been the successes and failures of diplomacy in the Arab world? And, above all, what does it mean to be Palestinian, a stateless people, nearly 80 years after the founding of Israel?
"Beginning in the 1950s, he played a central role in creating the intellectual architecture of the Palestinian community — identifying a people with a particular history, culture and politics — and ensuring that the fate of Palestinians remained at the top of the Pan-Arab political agenda.
"He centered his early work on pushing back against the received interpretation of events surrounding the 1948 founding of Israel. At the time, the consensus held that Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to flee the territory claimed by the new Israeli state.
"Through extensive work in publicly accessible Israeli archives, Mr. Khalidi showed that such orders never went out, and that many Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to stay. Further, he uncovered documents that outlined a plan by Jewish forces to expel Palestinians from their lands.
"“He was the first scholar to dismantle the narrative that said Israel was completely blameless in the Nakbah,” the Arabic term for the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel, Rashid Khalidi, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and a cousin of Mr. Khalidi, said in an interview. “He showed there was ethnic cleansing.”
"The Institute for Palestine Studies, an independent organization, became the center point for his efforts. It provided a platform for scholarship, an incubator for young researchers and a clearinghouse for information; one institute service translated Israeli government documents and news media into Arabic.
"Through a wide network of political contacts, Mr. Khalidi connected nationalist leaders from across the Arab world and ensured that Palestinian officials had a seat at the table of any Pan-Arab conversation.
"Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria, Mr. Khalidi and other Palestinian leaders began to worry that the Arabs would reach a long-term settlement with Israel that did not include Palestinian input.
"In the war’s aftermath, he and others, including Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, began to talk about reviving the idea of a grand settlement grounded in a two-state solution, with shared control of Jerusalem and limits placed on a future Palestinian military.
"Mr. Khalidi outlined the idea of an independent but militarily constrained Palestine to Western readers in a 1978 article in Foreign Affairs, entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State.”
"The Foreign Affairs article was, in retrospect, quite moderate. But it and its author were frequently criticized over the ensuing decade for their ties to Mr. Arafat, whom many in Israel and the West considered a terrorist for his years linked to guerrilla warfare.
"Mr. Khalidi never joined the P.L.O., and, while he occasionally advised Mr. Arafat, he insisted on keeping some distance from the Palestinian leader. “I’m not anyone’s close adviser,” he told the columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times in 1983. “I’m myself. He has asked my opinion sometimes, but I wish he had taken my advice more often.”
"Mr. Khalidi was a nationalist and no friend of Israel. But he was also a moderate who insisted that the only solution to the conflict in the Middle East was a negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israel — even if such a settlement seemed then, and later, a distant prospect.
“It is singularly appropriate for Palestinians and Israelis to talk directly to one another,” he wrote in a guest essay in The Times in 1984. “Unless these two peoples can themselves move toward conciliation, no third party can significantly contribute to a negotiated settlement of their conflict.”
Walid Khalidi's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/khalidiwalid
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/12/2026: Walid Khalidi, Scholar Called Father of Palestinian Studies, Dies at 100. "As a historian and diplomat, he gave intellectual shape to his people and made sure that they played a role in negotiating their future."
"Walid Khalidi, a scholar of Middle Eastern history whose deep family roots in Jerusalem, encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s politics and extensive work behind the diplomatic scenes of the Arab world earned him a reputation as the father of Palestinian studies, died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 100.
"Mr. Khalidi, who came from a widely respected family of academics and politicians, spent much of his career in Beirut, at the Institute for Palestine Studies, which he helped found in 1963, and at Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
"He had been an eyewitness to much of the Palestinian experience during the 20th century. He grew up under the British Mandate; watched as the creation of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including his own family, from their homes; and participated in the decades of complex politics and diplomacy that followed.
"His long life and career gave him first-hand insight into some of the region’s most enduring and complicated questions: What are the continued consequences of European domination of Arab lands in the 19th and 20th centuries? What have been the successes and failures of diplomacy in the Arab world? And, above all, what does it mean to be Palestinian, a stateless people, nearly 80 years after the founding of Israel?
"Beginning in the 1950s, he played a central role in creating the intellectual architecture of the Palestinian community — identifying a people with a particular history, culture and politics — and ensuring that the fate of Palestinians remained at the top of the Pan-Arab political agenda.
"He centered his early work on pushing back against the received interpretation of events surrounding the 1948 founding of Israel. At the time, the consensus held that Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to flee the territory claimed by the new Israeli state.
"Through extensive work in publicly accessible Israeli archives, Mr. Khalidi showed that such orders never went out, and that many Arab leaders had urged Palestinians to stay. Further, he uncovered documents that outlined a plan by Jewish forces to expel Palestinians from their lands.
"“He was the first scholar to dismantle the narrative that said Israel was completely blameless in the Nakbah,” the Arabic term for the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel, Rashid Khalidi, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and a cousin of Mr. Khalidi, said in an interview. “He showed there was ethnic cleansing.”
"The Institute for Palestine Studies, an independent organization, became the center point for his efforts. It provided a platform for scholarship, an incubator for young researchers and a clearinghouse for information; one institute service translated Israeli government documents and news media into Arabic.
"Through a wide network of political contacts, Mr. Khalidi connected nationalist leaders from across the Arab world and ensured that Palestinian officials had a seat at the table of any Pan-Arab conversation.
"Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria, Mr. Khalidi and other Palestinian leaders began to worry that the Arabs would reach a long-term settlement with Israel that did not include Palestinian input.
"In the war’s aftermath, he and others, including Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, began to talk about reviving the idea of a grand settlement grounded in a two-state solution, with shared control of Jerusalem and limits placed on a future Palestinian military.
"Mr. Khalidi outlined the idea of an independent but militarily constrained Palestine to Western readers in a 1978 article in Foreign Affairs, entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State.”
"The Foreign Affairs article was, in retrospect, quite moderate. But it and its author were frequently criticized over the ensuing decade for their ties to Mr. Arafat, whom many in Israel and the West considered a terrorist for his years linked to guerrilla warfare.
"Mr. Khalidi never joined the P.L.O., and, while he occasionally advised Mr. Arafat, he insisted on keeping some distance from the Palestinian leader. “I’m not anyone’s close adviser,” he told the columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times in 1983. “I’m myself. He has asked my opinion sometimes, but I wish he had taken my advice more often.”
"Mr. Khalidi was a nationalist and no friend of Israel. But he was also a moderate who insisted that the only solution to the conflict in the Middle East was a negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israel — even if such a settlement seemed then, and later, a distant prospect.
“It is singularly appropriate for Palestinians and Israelis to talk directly to one another,” he wrote in a guest essay in The Times in 1984. “Unless these two peoples can themselves move toward conciliation, no third party can significantly contribute to a negotiated settlement of their conflict.”
Walid Khalidi's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/khalidiwalid
130featherbear
Peter Schneider 1940-2026
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/11/2026: Peter Schneider Dies at 85; His Novels Explored a Divided Germany. "His best-known work, “The Wall Jumper,” proved prescient in its contention that the country would remain split even after reunification."
"Peter Schneider, a German writer whose novels like “Lenz” and “The Wall Jumper” charted his country’s tortuous course through the late 20th century, from the social tumult of the 1960s through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uneven reunification of West and East, died on March 3 at his home in Berlin. He was 85.
"Mr. Schneider was widely considered one of the most important literary figures of his generation, in part because his long life was so closely intertwined with the postwar German experience.
"He was born at the beginning of World War II and raised in the prosperous postwar West Germany. As a young man in West Berlin, he wrote speeches for the center-left politician Willy Brandt, and then drifted further left into revolutionary Marxism and Maoism, becoming a leader of the 1968 student protest movement.
"Though he never disavowed his left-wing beliefs, he soured on the violent radicalism of the 1968 movement, a disillusionment that he documented in his first novel, “Lenz,” which appeared in 1973 and immediately cemented his reputation as a writer.
"Mr. Schneider broke onto the international literary scene a decade later with his most successful novel, “The Wall Jumper” (1982). Though formally a fictional narrative, the book is also an extended, roaming essay on the meaning of the Berlin Wall, and the separation between East and West Germany, in the collective German mind.
"It contained what became Mr. Schneider’s most famous sentence, which in its prescience could stand as an epigraph for the subsequent decades of German history: “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”
"By “the Wall in our heads,” Mr. Schneider meant the lasting economic, political and ultimately psychological divide between eastern and western Germany. It was a condition that he repeatedly dissected in subsequent novels — among them, two sequels to “The Wall Jumper” — and in guest essays, book reviews and reported articles for outlets in Germany and the United States, including The New York Times.
"Mr. Schneider was likewise interested in the way that Germany’s sense of guilt over the crimes of the Nazi era percolated and transmogrified through the generations. Like other German intellectuals, he struggled with the tension between his country’s seemingly endless moral debt and the need to somehow, someday move on.
"In one particularly insightful essay for Harper’s Magazine in 1987, he examined how the generations that came after World War II had mishandled their country’s shameful legacy by finding ways to deflect guilt and identify fascism in others, including Israel.
"Well into the new century, Mr. Schneider remained a harsh critic of what he considered the botched reunification of East and West Germany. Among other mistakes, he said, it fostered a notion that those who remained in the east were ignorant and talentless, a stereotype that he said fueled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, known as the AfD.
“Let’s not kid ourselves: Reunification has gone wrong,” he said in a 2025 interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. “The worst part is that the AfD emerged from it, and the other parties have no idea how to deal with this outcome.”
Peter Schneider's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/schneiderpeter-1
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/11/2026: Peter Schneider Dies at 85; His Novels Explored a Divided Germany. "His best-known work, “The Wall Jumper,” proved prescient in its contention that the country would remain split even after reunification."
"Peter Schneider, a German writer whose novels like “Lenz” and “The Wall Jumper” charted his country’s tortuous course through the late 20th century, from the social tumult of the 1960s through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uneven reunification of West and East, died on March 3 at his home in Berlin. He was 85.
"Mr. Schneider was widely considered one of the most important literary figures of his generation, in part because his long life was so closely intertwined with the postwar German experience.
"He was born at the beginning of World War II and raised in the prosperous postwar West Germany. As a young man in West Berlin, he wrote speeches for the center-left politician Willy Brandt, and then drifted further left into revolutionary Marxism and Maoism, becoming a leader of the 1968 student protest movement.
"Though he never disavowed his left-wing beliefs, he soured on the violent radicalism of the 1968 movement, a disillusionment that he documented in his first novel, “Lenz,” which appeared in 1973 and immediately cemented his reputation as a writer.
"Mr. Schneider broke onto the international literary scene a decade later with his most successful novel, “The Wall Jumper” (1982). Though formally a fictional narrative, the book is also an extended, roaming essay on the meaning of the Berlin Wall, and the separation between East and West Germany, in the collective German mind.
"It contained what became Mr. Schneider’s most famous sentence, which in its prescience could stand as an epigraph for the subsequent decades of German history: “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”
"By “the Wall in our heads,” Mr. Schneider meant the lasting economic, political and ultimately psychological divide between eastern and western Germany. It was a condition that he repeatedly dissected in subsequent novels — among them, two sequels to “The Wall Jumper” — and in guest essays, book reviews and reported articles for outlets in Germany and the United States, including The New York Times.
"Mr. Schneider was likewise interested in the way that Germany’s sense of guilt over the crimes of the Nazi era percolated and transmogrified through the generations. Like other German intellectuals, he struggled with the tension between his country’s seemingly endless moral debt and the need to somehow, someday move on.
"In one particularly insightful essay for Harper’s Magazine in 1987, he examined how the generations that came after World War II had mishandled their country’s shameful legacy by finding ways to deflect guilt and identify fascism in others, including Israel.
"Well into the new century, Mr. Schneider remained a harsh critic of what he considered the botched reunification of East and West Germany. Among other mistakes, he said, it fostered a notion that those who remained in the east were ignorant and talentless, a stereotype that he said fueled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, known as the AfD.
“Let’s not kid ourselves: Reunification has gone wrong,” he said in a 2025 interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. “The worst part is that the AfD emerged from it, and the other parties have no idea how to deal with this outcome.”
Peter Schneider's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/schneiderpeter-1
131featherbear
Zak Cheney-Rice. New York Magazine Intelligencer, 03/11/2026: Ibram X. Kendi Can’t Separate His Fame From How to Be an Antiracist His new book deserves to be judged on its own terms. Regarding Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age & its relation to How to be an anti-racist, both Ibram X. Kendi.
132featherbear
Quillette March 2026 (never sure when the paywall is in effect; I was able to access these the last time I checked):
Steven Pinker. 03/25/2026: The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026).
James Kierstead. 03/21/2026: What Makes the West Western? Review of: The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives / Naoíse Mac Sweeney ("Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s new book tries to convince readers that Western civilisation doesn’t exist."
Joan Smith. 03/17/2026: The Original Ladies of Letters. Review of: Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England / Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.
George Case. 03/13/2026: Hearts of Darkness. Review of: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right / Laura K. Field. paywall seems to be off, at least temporarily
Steven Pinker. 03/25/2026: The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026).
James Kierstead. 03/21/2026: What Makes the West Western? Review of: The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives / Naoíse Mac Sweeney ("Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s new book tries to convince readers that Western civilisation doesn’t exist."
Joan Smith. 03/17/2026: The Original Ladies of Letters. Review of: Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England / Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.
George Case. 03/13/2026: Hearts of Darkness. Review of: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right / Laura K. Field. paywall seems to be off, at least temporarily
133featherbear
March 2026 updates 08-14
Aeon Mar 09: mathematical beauty on the wane? >111 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 14: "an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries" -- Mar 13: stories from Oman -- Mar 11: Palestinian novel by Bassem Khandaqji -- Mar 10: the Shah's party -- Mar 08: new book (in translation) by Michio Hoshino >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 14: Colm Toibin's intro to The Time of Cherries (Montserrat Roig); (re-)learning to love Barnes & Noble; Salman Rushdie not your free-speech Barbie -- Mar 13: Tayari Jones's Kin; how not to recommend a book -- Mar 12: why Chris Beha isn't an atheist; Raymond Chandler & the split infinitive; Grammarly thinking? -- Mar 09: slow reading; Christian nationalism >114 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Mar 11: Will Self -- Mar 08: March crime fiction >128 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 14: 7 best 2025 crime fiction novels nominated for Edgars -- Mar 13: best books on Venezuela -- Mar 11: fairy books for adults -- Mar 10: manhole covers & other aspects of industrial architecture -- Mar 08: daily life in Medieval England >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 13: Han Kang's Light and Thread; Lisa Tuttle on the best science fiction, fantasy, & horror; Asako Yukuzi's Hooked; the books in Daisy Johnson's life -- Mar 12: how to beat populists in the UK -- Mar 11: self-publish & be scammed; euthanasia -- Mar 10: Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 09: Jack Kerouac archive; Yoko Ono bio; John Lanchester's Look What You Made Me Do -- Mar 08: Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir, interview >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 13: To Be or Not To Be vs Hamnet -- Mar 12: decline of prestige fiction; 2 books on Idi Amin's Uganda -- Mar 10: book-banning anthology -- Mar 09: Will There Ever Be Another You? by Patricia Lockwood -- Mar 08: photography book Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 14: Benjamin Franklin's genocidal propaganda -- Mar 12: large trove of trans/queer classics reviewed by their peers though ignored by NYT -- Mar 11: translating Centroeuropa -- Mar 09: Jane Austen adaptations; reading War & Peace for the first time >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 14: when Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann -- Mar 13: Elizabeth Cady Stanton bio -- Mar 09: Berlin 1939-1945; monotheism -- Mar 08: Greek & Latin Classics enter the Chinese curriculum >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 14: Zohran Mamdani's father's books in the spotlight; sexual shame dystopia novel -- Mar 13: dogs & writers; novelist Colleen Hoover profile; Ursula Nordstrom bio; Night Night Fawn -- Mar 12: Bancroft Prize winners -- Mar 11: Patricia Finn's novel Golden Boy; Tom Junod memoir -- Mar 10: Francis Spufford's magic realism historical novel Nonesuch; Karan Mahajan's The Complex, "fortunes of a political family in a rapidly changing India;" Andrew Martin novel about life during a pandemic; Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 09: Saba Sams's Gunk; T Kira Madden's Whidbey -- Mar 08: profiling Mark Oppenheimer, author of a forthcoming bio of Judy Blume >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 13: excerpts on misogyny & Sheila Carter-Jones poems -- Mar 11: reading; pronouns -- Mar 10: pop music & the Third Reich -- Mar 09: Judith Vollmer's poetry collection The Pavese Stone >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 12: 2 books on bath houses -- Mar 10: incarceration >118 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
Boston Review >126 featherbear:
Intelligencer >131 featherbear:
Quillette >132 featherbear:
Vulture >127 featherbear:
Aeon Mar 09: mathematical beauty on the wane? >111 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 14: "an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries" -- Mar 13: stories from Oman -- Mar 11: Palestinian novel by Bassem Khandaqji -- Mar 10: the Shah's party -- Mar 08: new book (in translation) by Michio Hoshino >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 14: Colm Toibin's intro to The Time of Cherries (Montserrat Roig); (re-)learning to love Barnes & Noble; Salman Rushdie not your free-speech Barbie -- Mar 13: Tayari Jones's Kin; how not to recommend a book -- Mar 12: why Chris Beha isn't an atheist; Raymond Chandler & the split infinitive; Grammarly thinking? -- Mar 09: slow reading; Christian nationalism >114 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Mar 11: Will Self -- Mar 08: March crime fiction >128 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 14: 7 best 2025 crime fiction novels nominated for Edgars -- Mar 13: best books on Venezuela -- Mar 11: fairy books for adults -- Mar 10: manhole covers & other aspects of industrial architecture -- Mar 08: daily life in Medieval England >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 13: Han Kang's Light and Thread; Lisa Tuttle on the best science fiction, fantasy, & horror; Asako Yukuzi's Hooked; the books in Daisy Johnson's life -- Mar 12: how to beat populists in the UK -- Mar 11: self-publish & be scammed; euthanasia -- Mar 10: Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 09: Jack Kerouac archive; Yoko Ono bio; John Lanchester's Look What You Made Me Do -- Mar 08: Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir, interview >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 13: To Be or Not To Be vs Hamnet -- Mar 12: decline of prestige fiction; 2 books on Idi Amin's Uganda -- Mar 10: book-banning anthology -- Mar 09: Will There Ever Be Another You? by Patricia Lockwood -- Mar 08: photography book Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 14: Benjamin Franklin's genocidal propaganda -- Mar 12: large trove of trans/queer classics reviewed by their peers though ignored by NYT -- Mar 11: translating Centroeuropa -- Mar 09: Jane Austen adaptations; reading War & Peace for the first time >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 14: when Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann -- Mar 13: Elizabeth Cady Stanton bio -- Mar 09: Berlin 1939-1945; monotheism -- Mar 08: Greek & Latin Classics enter the Chinese curriculum >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 14: Zohran Mamdani's father's books in the spotlight; sexual shame dystopia novel -- Mar 13: dogs & writers; novelist Colleen Hoover profile; Ursula Nordstrom bio; Night Night Fawn -- Mar 12: Bancroft Prize winners -- Mar 11: Patricia Finn's novel Golden Boy; Tom Junod memoir -- Mar 10: Francis Spufford's magic realism historical novel Nonesuch; Karan Mahajan's The Complex, "fortunes of a political family in a rapidly changing India;" Andrew Martin novel about life during a pandemic; Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 09: Saba Sams's Gunk; T Kira Madden's Whidbey -- Mar 08: profiling Mark Oppenheimer, author of a forthcoming bio of Judy Blume >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 13: excerpts on misogyny & Sheila Carter-Jones poems -- Mar 11: reading; pronouns -- Mar 10: pop music & the Third Reich -- Mar 09: Judith Vollmer's poetry collection The Pavese Stone >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 12: 2 books on bath houses -- Mar 10: incarceration >118 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
Boston Review >126 featherbear:
Intelligencer >131 featherbear:
Quillette >132 featherbear:
Vulture >127 featherbear:
134featherbear
Jürgen Habermas, 1929-2026
Gal Beckerman. NYT, 03/14/2026, upd 03/15: Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96; One of Postwar Germany’s Most Influential Thinkers. "In dozens of books, he rejected postmodern cynicism about truth and reason, arguing that rational communication was the best way to redeem democratic society."
"He was best known for introducing in the early 1960s the notion of a “public sphere.” He theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur. That concept has since swept through a number of academic fields, from political science and history to media studies, spawning thousands of papers and books.
"Though a disciple and eventual leader of the famed Frankfurt School of critical social theory, Dr. Habermas had more faith in the promise of modernity than mentors like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, believing that the Enlightenment was an “unfinished project” that could be corrected through a focus on improved communication.
"Starting in the 1970s, he wrote about the “ideal speech situation,” one in which people would come together on equal footing and through a process of rational dialogue arrive at the truth — an idea he expanded on in his major work, “The Theory of Communicative Action” (1981). This sort of consensus-building through conversation — subjecting ideas to, as he frequently put it, an “acid bath of relentless public discourse” — would allow citizens to “exercise collective influence over their social destiny,” he wrote.
"If the death and destruction of World War II had soured most thinkers on reason and its power to lead to the common good, Dr. Habermas saw rational communication as a chance to redeem democratic society. “I was always convinced that there is in everyday communicative life, everyday communication, also a kind of push to give reasons, to be more or less reasonable, to give answers to the questions, ‘Why did you say that? Why did you do that?,’” he said in a 2005 interview. “And so that was the motivation to pursue a bit further the issue of the kind of reason that is built-into our everyday language.”
"Though reading his philosophic writing, often impenetrable in its density, was likened by at least one American intellectual to chewing glass, Dr. Habermas also worked in another register, responding to issues of the moment with countless opinion essays that appeared in German newspapers with great frequency. His abiding concern was the state of democracy and the fear of backsliding into the exclusionary and violent social order that he experienced in his youth.
"He warned against the rise of nationalism and any attempt to forget or relativize the Holocaust. “There is the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany — even if no one else were to feel it any longer — to keep alive, without distortion and not only in intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands,” he wrote.
"Dr. Habermas was often criticized as naïve, attacked at various moments by members of the postmodern left, who could not abide his belief in universal truths. At the same time, those of the neoconservative right mistrusted his insistence on compromise and consensus.
"His relentless hopefulness about the possibility of human society to talk its way into stable democracy and integration was particularly striking coming from a man whose teenage years were spent in the Hitler Youth. “He was a figure of hope, emerging from the background of a dark history,” Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.
"He had a cleft palate and throughout his youth had a number of surgeries to correct it, with only partial success. This left him with a speech impediment and a heightened sensitivity, he would later say, to “the medium of linguistic communication without which individual existence would also be impossible.” Bullied as a boy, he was also attuned to those who were excluded from society.
"In 1953, at the age of 24 — he was then studying at the University of Bonn, where he would receive his Ph.D. in philosophy the next year — Dr. Habermas took to task Martin Heidegger, at the time Germany’s greatest living philosopher, for not coming to terms with his Nazi past. Heidegger’s 1935 work, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” had been reissued, leaving in place a reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi Party.
"From 1956 to 1959, Dr. Habermas worked as Theodor Adorno’s first assistant at the renowned Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School, where neo-Marxist Jewish intellectuals were trying to rebuild their understanding of the world by applying philosophical ideas to social problems.
"But Dr. Habermas did not share in what was an understandably fatalistic tone to the critical theory developed by Adorno and Horkheimer. The war had made them skeptical about modernity, and as Dr. Habermas characterized it, they saw capitalism’s mass consumer culture as a “total system of delusion” that quashed individuality.
"“He was a rationalist when it was unfashionable to be one,” Matthew Specter, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of a 2010 biography of Dr. Habermas, said in an interview. “He developed a more chastened conception of reason — plural, dialogic, fallible — that convinced generations of postwar Europeans that the Enlightenment faith in critique and progress could be made meaningful again after the disasters of 20th-century Fascism and Communism.”
"The best counterweight to the destructiveness of both global capitalism and nationalism, he believed, was the sort of integrated democratic union of states that the E.U. was supposed to represent, and he was saddened by what he saw as the erosion of this idea by market and social forces. In numerous headlines in the early 2010s, he was referred to as “the last European.”
"Dr. Habermas also turned his attention to the place of religion in the public sphere. Prompted in part by the hostility toward Muslims in Europe, he wrote in a number of books about what he called a “post-secular” society in which he sought to reconcile the atheistic tradition of the Enlightenment with modern religion, and reflexive faith with the institutions of democracy.
"It was part of a lifelong ideal that imagined the greatest number of citizens deliberating together about the state of their society. As he wrote in a 2010 guest essay in The New York Times, in which he deplored the renewal of nationalistic tendencies in European politics: “Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.”"
Donna Ferguson and Philip Oltermann. Guardian, 03/14/2026: Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and sociologist, dies aged 96. "Habermas’s political consensus-building theory argued formation of public opinion vital for democracies to survive."
Matt McManus. Jacobin, 03/15/2026: Jürgen Habermas Showed What Philosophy Could Be.
Cass Sunstein. Cass's Substack, 03/14/2026: On the Death of Jurgen Habermas: A Day to Mourn, A Hero to Celebrate.
Alexander C. Carp. Politico, 03/20/2026: My Time with Jürgen Habermas, Europe's 'Last Intellectual.'.
Jürgen Habermas's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/habermasjrgen
Gal Beckerman. NYT, 03/14/2026, upd 03/15: Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96; One of Postwar Germany’s Most Influential Thinkers. "In dozens of books, he rejected postmodern cynicism about truth and reason, arguing that rational communication was the best way to redeem democratic society."
"He was best known for introducing in the early 1960s the notion of a “public sphere.” He theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur. That concept has since swept through a number of academic fields, from political science and history to media studies, spawning thousands of papers and books.
"Though a disciple and eventual leader of the famed Frankfurt School of critical social theory, Dr. Habermas had more faith in the promise of modernity than mentors like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, believing that the Enlightenment was an “unfinished project” that could be corrected through a focus on improved communication.
"Starting in the 1970s, he wrote about the “ideal speech situation,” one in which people would come together on equal footing and through a process of rational dialogue arrive at the truth — an idea he expanded on in his major work, “The Theory of Communicative Action” (1981). This sort of consensus-building through conversation — subjecting ideas to, as he frequently put it, an “acid bath of relentless public discourse” — would allow citizens to “exercise collective influence over their social destiny,” he wrote.
"If the death and destruction of World War II had soured most thinkers on reason and its power to lead to the common good, Dr. Habermas saw rational communication as a chance to redeem democratic society. “I was always convinced that there is in everyday communicative life, everyday communication, also a kind of push to give reasons, to be more or less reasonable, to give answers to the questions, ‘Why did you say that? Why did you do that?,’” he said in a 2005 interview. “And so that was the motivation to pursue a bit further the issue of the kind of reason that is built-into our everyday language.”
"Though reading his philosophic writing, often impenetrable in its density, was likened by at least one American intellectual to chewing glass, Dr. Habermas also worked in another register, responding to issues of the moment with countless opinion essays that appeared in German newspapers with great frequency. His abiding concern was the state of democracy and the fear of backsliding into the exclusionary and violent social order that he experienced in his youth.
"He warned against the rise of nationalism and any attempt to forget or relativize the Holocaust. “There is the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany — even if no one else were to feel it any longer — to keep alive, without distortion and not only in intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands,” he wrote.
"Dr. Habermas was often criticized as naïve, attacked at various moments by members of the postmodern left, who could not abide his belief in universal truths. At the same time, those of the neoconservative right mistrusted his insistence on compromise and consensus.
"His relentless hopefulness about the possibility of human society to talk its way into stable democracy and integration was particularly striking coming from a man whose teenage years were spent in the Hitler Youth. “He was a figure of hope, emerging from the background of a dark history,” Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018.
"He had a cleft palate and throughout his youth had a number of surgeries to correct it, with only partial success. This left him with a speech impediment and a heightened sensitivity, he would later say, to “the medium of linguistic communication without which individual existence would also be impossible.” Bullied as a boy, he was also attuned to those who were excluded from society.
"In 1953, at the age of 24 — he was then studying at the University of Bonn, where he would receive his Ph.D. in philosophy the next year — Dr. Habermas took to task Martin Heidegger, at the time Germany’s greatest living philosopher, for not coming to terms with his Nazi past. Heidegger’s 1935 work, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” had been reissued, leaving in place a reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi Party.
"From 1956 to 1959, Dr. Habermas worked as Theodor Adorno’s first assistant at the renowned Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School, where neo-Marxist Jewish intellectuals were trying to rebuild their understanding of the world by applying philosophical ideas to social problems.
"But Dr. Habermas did not share in what was an understandably fatalistic tone to the critical theory developed by Adorno and Horkheimer. The war had made them skeptical about modernity, and as Dr. Habermas characterized it, they saw capitalism’s mass consumer culture as a “total system of delusion” that quashed individuality.
"“He was a rationalist when it was unfashionable to be one,” Matthew Specter, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of a 2010 biography of Dr. Habermas, said in an interview. “He developed a more chastened conception of reason — plural, dialogic, fallible — that convinced generations of postwar Europeans that the Enlightenment faith in critique and progress could be made meaningful again after the disasters of 20th-century Fascism and Communism.”
"The best counterweight to the destructiveness of both global capitalism and nationalism, he believed, was the sort of integrated democratic union of states that the E.U. was supposed to represent, and he was saddened by what he saw as the erosion of this idea by market and social forces. In numerous headlines in the early 2010s, he was referred to as “the last European.”
"Dr. Habermas also turned his attention to the place of religion in the public sphere. Prompted in part by the hostility toward Muslims in Europe, he wrote in a number of books about what he called a “post-secular” society in which he sought to reconcile the atheistic tradition of the Enlightenment with modern religion, and reflexive faith with the institutions of democracy.
"It was part of a lifelong ideal that imagined the greatest number of citizens deliberating together about the state of their society. As he wrote in a 2010 guest essay in The New York Times, in which he deplored the renewal of nationalistic tendencies in European politics: “Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.”"
Donna Ferguson and Philip Oltermann. Guardian, 03/14/2026: Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and sociologist, dies aged 96. "Habermas’s political consensus-building theory argued formation of public opinion vital for democracies to survive."
Matt McManus. Jacobin, 03/15/2026: Jürgen Habermas Showed What Philosophy Could Be.
Cass Sunstein. Cass's Substack, 03/14/2026: On the Death of Jurgen Habermas: A Day to Mourn, A Hero to Celebrate.
Alexander C. Carp. Politico, 03/20/2026: My Time with Jürgen Habermas, Europe's 'Last Intellectual.'.
Jürgen Habermas's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/habermasjrgen
135featherbear
Johanna Thomas-Corr. The Times (of London), 03/13/2026: Colm Tóibín: why I’ll never be an American oversharer. "From his New York home, the author of Brooklyn talks about his new collection of short stories, attending a Nobel prize dinner and shovelling snow for Zohran Mamdani."
136featherbear
Paula Doress-Worters, 1938-2026
Penelope Green. NYT, 03/15/2026: Paula Doress-Worters, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 87. "She wrote about postpartum depression when it was an unmentionable like abortion or birth control, and her research on her own suffering helped countless women."
"Paula Doress-Worters was in her mid-20s, and still known as Paula Brown, when she left a job in accounting to become a community organizer. It was the early 1960s, and she was appalled by the racism she had been seeing around her since growing up in Roxbury, Mass., when Black families had started to move into her neighborhood.
"She began by working for a Black congressional candidate, helping women on welfare get the services they needed. Soon, she was canvassing to mobilize opposition to the Vietnam War.
"By the end of the decade, she had added feminism and women’s health to her activism. She joined a group of young women, some of them new mothers like herself, who were confounded by the sexism of the health care system — in 1960, only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women — and how it was failing them, and how little they knew about their own bodies.
"They set about figuring out for themselves how to address the issues that were uniquely theirs, and began to compile an encyclopedia of women’s health, by women and for women.
"They called themselves the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and in 1970, when the New England Free Press published the first rough version of what would become “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they had no idea that they were creating what would become a global best seller and cultural touchstone for generations of woman.
"In the years that followed, college students would pass around dog-eared copies of the book like samizdat. Mothers would give it to their daughters in lieu of having “the talk.” The activist author Barbara Ehrenreich proclaimed it a manifesto of medical populism. The Moral Majority, the Christian right organization founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, declared it obscene.
"Ms. Doress-Worters, a founding member of the collective, died on Feb. 21 at her home in Redwood City, Calif. She was 87.
"“Our Bodies, Ourselves” tackled all sorts of unmentionables, like masturbation, birth control and abortion, which was illegal in 1970. There were helpful diagrams and images — among them, illustrations of six variations of hymens — as well as instructions on how to view one’s vagina with a mirror.
"The women divvied up subjects. Ms. Brown — who was now Ms. Doress, having married Irvin Doress, a like-minded psychologist, in 1964 — and Esther Rome took on postpartum depression, a harrowing condition that obstetricians of the era downplayed.
"Back home with her new baby, she became severely depressed, with periods of mania. She was medicated, against her will again — she was proud that it took two doctors to subdue her and inject a sedative — and hospitalized for three weeks. She had few memories of her time in the hospital, though she did recall demanding better pay for the nurses, using mini-placards she made out of tongue depressors and index cards.
"She could find no substantive popular books on her condition, and no professional guidance. But from her own research, she discovered studies that suggested that postpartum depression was brought on by a combination of factors: physical stress, isolation, hormonal imbalance and, crucially, social stress — a reaction to the shibboleth of the blissed-out mother, the myth of maternal attachment and the burden of gender roles. One study compared postpartum depression to combat fatigue.
"The chapter that she and Ms. Rome first crafted was a scant 10 pages, “but it packed a punch,” Rachel Louise Moran wrote in “Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America” (2024).
"In subsequent editions of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they expanded the section to include more testimonies from women who had suffered as Ms. Doress had, and proposed solutions all the way up to the policy level, including free child care and parental leave.
"Ms. Doress-Worters taught women’s studies courses at Emerson and Boston Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Boston, and published “Mistress of Herself,” a compilation of writing by the 19th-century women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose, in 2008.
"The nonprofit organization Our Bodies Ourselves, founded after the book was published, continues to provide health resources and information to women; it is now based at Suffolk University, Ms. Doress-Worters’s alma mater. The book, which was last updated in 2011, has sold more than four million copies and has been translated into 34 languages.
"In later editions, Ms. Doress-Worters contributed chapters on sexual relationships, parenting and women after midlife. This led to a spinoff, “Ourselves, Growing Older” (with two editions, in 1987 and 1994), which she wrote with Diana Laskin Siegal.
"In “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973” (2024), an oral history of second-wave feminism by Clara Bingham, Ms. Doress-Worters recalled the collective’s first meetings, held in a building at Emmanuel College in Boston, which was run by Catholic nuns.
"“They thought we were just these nice girls,” she said of the nuns who had graciously donated their space. “They had no idea.”"
Paula Doress-Worters's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/doressworterspaulab
Penelope Green. NYT, 03/15/2026: Paula Doress-Worters, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 87. "She wrote about postpartum depression when it was an unmentionable like abortion or birth control, and her research on her own suffering helped countless women."
"Paula Doress-Worters was in her mid-20s, and still known as Paula Brown, when she left a job in accounting to become a community organizer. It was the early 1960s, and she was appalled by the racism she had been seeing around her since growing up in Roxbury, Mass., when Black families had started to move into her neighborhood.
"She began by working for a Black congressional candidate, helping women on welfare get the services they needed. Soon, she was canvassing to mobilize opposition to the Vietnam War.
"By the end of the decade, she had added feminism and women’s health to her activism. She joined a group of young women, some of them new mothers like herself, who were confounded by the sexism of the health care system — in 1960, only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women — and how it was failing them, and how little they knew about their own bodies.
"They set about figuring out for themselves how to address the issues that were uniquely theirs, and began to compile an encyclopedia of women’s health, by women and for women.
"They called themselves the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and in 1970, when the New England Free Press published the first rough version of what would become “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they had no idea that they were creating what would become a global best seller and cultural touchstone for generations of woman.
"In the years that followed, college students would pass around dog-eared copies of the book like samizdat. Mothers would give it to their daughters in lieu of having “the talk.” The activist author Barbara Ehrenreich proclaimed it a manifesto of medical populism. The Moral Majority, the Christian right organization founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, declared it obscene.
"Ms. Doress-Worters, a founding member of the collective, died on Feb. 21 at her home in Redwood City, Calif. She was 87.
"“Our Bodies, Ourselves” tackled all sorts of unmentionables, like masturbation, birth control and abortion, which was illegal in 1970. There were helpful diagrams and images — among them, illustrations of six variations of hymens — as well as instructions on how to view one’s vagina with a mirror.
"The women divvied up subjects. Ms. Brown — who was now Ms. Doress, having married Irvin Doress, a like-minded psychologist, in 1964 — and Esther Rome took on postpartum depression, a harrowing condition that obstetricians of the era downplayed.
"Back home with her new baby, she became severely depressed, with periods of mania. She was medicated, against her will again — she was proud that it took two doctors to subdue her and inject a sedative — and hospitalized for three weeks. She had few memories of her time in the hospital, though she did recall demanding better pay for the nurses, using mini-placards she made out of tongue depressors and index cards.
"She could find no substantive popular books on her condition, and no professional guidance. But from her own research, she discovered studies that suggested that postpartum depression was brought on by a combination of factors: physical stress, isolation, hormonal imbalance and, crucially, social stress — a reaction to the shibboleth of the blissed-out mother, the myth of maternal attachment and the burden of gender roles. One study compared postpartum depression to combat fatigue.
"The chapter that she and Ms. Rome first crafted was a scant 10 pages, “but it packed a punch,” Rachel Louise Moran wrote in “Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America” (2024).
"In subsequent editions of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they expanded the section to include more testimonies from women who had suffered as Ms. Doress had, and proposed solutions all the way up to the policy level, including free child care and parental leave.
"Ms. Doress-Worters taught women’s studies courses at Emerson and Boston Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Boston, and published “Mistress of Herself,” a compilation of writing by the 19th-century women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose, in 2008.
"The nonprofit organization Our Bodies Ourselves, founded after the book was published, continues to provide health resources and information to women; it is now based at Suffolk University, Ms. Doress-Worters’s alma mater. The book, which was last updated in 2011, has sold more than four million copies and has been translated into 34 languages.
"In later editions, Ms. Doress-Worters contributed chapters on sexual relationships, parenting and women after midlife. This led to a spinoff, “Ourselves, Growing Older” (with two editions, in 1987 and 1994), which she wrote with Diana Laskin Siegal.
"In “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973” (2024), an oral history of second-wave feminism by Clara Bingham, Ms. Doress-Worters recalled the collective’s first meetings, held in a building at Emmanuel College in Boston, which was run by Catholic nuns.
"“They thought we were just these nice girls,” she said of the nuns who had graciously donated their space. “They had no idea.”"
Paula Doress-Worters's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/doressworterspaulab
137featherbear
Paul Ehrlich, 1932-2026
Keith Schneider. NYT, 03/15/2026: Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93. "His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature."
"Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
"As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.
"Six months later, encouraged by David Brower, the executive director of the environmental group the Sierra Club, to write a book on the subject, Dr. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” In 233 pages, he asserted that the planet’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly in the 1950s, when the rate of population growth exceeded the increase in food production — or, as he put it, when “the stork passed the plow.” He called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.
"Witty, knowledgeable and not at all reticent, Dr. Ehrlich gained a huge audience on television, especially on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” which he appeared on roughly 20 times. His forecast of food riots in the United States and of imminent global famines caused by escalating population growth found a worldwide readership.
"One of the best-selling nonfiction books about the environment to date, “The Population Bomb” sold three million copies and transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders. His influence motivated international governments to convene conferences on controlling population, and his message was heard in private homes across the industrialized world as couples conceived fewer children.
"Dr. Ehrlich expanded on his thesis in “The End of Affluence” (1974), which he wrote with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, who wrote or edited 15 books with him. The book forecast a “nutritional disaster” in the 1970s, predicting that “before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”
There was"... a national backlash to American environmentalism in the early 1990s, led by free-market conservatives and industrial executives who questioned the movement’s scientific data.
"Dr. Ehrlich and his wife responded in 1996 with “Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future,” a book that defended the predictions made in his earlier work and explored the partisan and ideological roots of the attacks on them.
"A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Ehrlich was a founder of Zero Population Growth (now known as Population Connection) in 1968, and Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology in 1984. He was the author, co-author or editor of 50 books and hundreds of scientific articles. He won a MacArthur prize in 1990, and many other prestigious national and international environmental science and achievement awards, several of which were shared with his wife.
"In the last years of his life, journalists would occasionally remind Dr. Ehrlich about some of his dire predictions that had not come to pass: that 65 million Americans would starve to death, for example, or that there were fair odds that “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
"But he stood by his fundamental convictions. In 2018, he told The Guardian that an unsustainable focus on “perpetual growth” — leading to climate change and loss of biodiversity — meant that the collapse of civilization was “a near certainty in the next few decades.”
"And in 2015, he told The New York Times that his analysis in the 1960s had actually been somewhat conservative, adding: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”"
Jacob Anbinder. Atlantic, 03/19/2026: What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics. "Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true."
Paul Ehrlich's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/ehrlichpaulr
Keith Schneider. NYT, 03/15/2026: Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93. "His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature."
"Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
"As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.
"Six months later, encouraged by David Brower, the executive director of the environmental group the Sierra Club, to write a book on the subject, Dr. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” In 233 pages, he asserted that the planet’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly in the 1950s, when the rate of population growth exceeded the increase in food production — or, as he put it, when “the stork passed the plow.” He called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.
"Witty, knowledgeable and not at all reticent, Dr. Ehrlich gained a huge audience on television, especially on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” which he appeared on roughly 20 times. His forecast of food riots in the United States and of imminent global famines caused by escalating population growth found a worldwide readership.
"One of the best-selling nonfiction books about the environment to date, “The Population Bomb” sold three million copies and transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders. His influence motivated international governments to convene conferences on controlling population, and his message was heard in private homes across the industrialized world as couples conceived fewer children.
"Dr. Ehrlich expanded on his thesis in “The End of Affluence” (1974), which he wrote with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, who wrote or edited 15 books with him. The book forecast a “nutritional disaster” in the 1970s, predicting that “before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”
There was"... a national backlash to American environmentalism in the early 1990s, led by free-market conservatives and industrial executives who questioned the movement’s scientific data.
"Dr. Ehrlich and his wife responded in 1996 with “Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future,” a book that defended the predictions made in his earlier work and explored the partisan and ideological roots of the attacks on them.
"A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Ehrlich was a founder of Zero Population Growth (now known as Population Connection) in 1968, and Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology in 1984. He was the author, co-author or editor of 50 books and hundreds of scientific articles. He won a MacArthur prize in 1990, and many other prestigious national and international environmental science and achievement awards, several of which were shared with his wife.
"In the last years of his life, journalists would occasionally remind Dr. Ehrlich about some of his dire predictions that had not come to pass: that 65 million Americans would starve to death, for example, or that there were fair odds that “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
"But he stood by his fundamental convictions. In 2018, he told The Guardian that an unsustainable focus on “perpetual growth” — leading to climate change and loss of biodiversity — meant that the collapse of civilization was “a near certainty in the next few decades.”
"And in 2015, he told The New York Times that his analysis in the 1960s had actually been somewhat conservative, adding: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”"
Jacob Anbinder. Atlantic, 03/19/2026: What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics. "Ehrlich’s lurid predictions of imminent planetary doom captivated the public, but they did not come true."
Paul Ehrlich's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/ehrlichpaulr
138featherbear
Len Deighton, 1929-2026
William Grimes. NYT, 03/17/2026: Len Deighton, Author of Espionage Best-Sellers, Dies at 97. "His Cold War thrillers “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin” brought a documentary-style realism to the spy genre."
"Len Deighton, the British author who brought a documentary-style realism to the spy genre in 1960s Cold War thrillers like “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin,” the film versions of which helped make Michael Caine an international star, died on Sunday at his home in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France. He was 97.
"Mr. Deighton, the son of a chauffeur and cook, had a background as a military photographer, globe-trotting airplane steward and commercial illustrator before turning to literature on a whim. The result was “The Ipcress File” (1962), which he regarded a riposte to the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming
"Instead of Bond’s cartoonish and morally simplistic take on spycraft, Mr. Deighton offered a shadow world through which his unnamed hero — christened Harry Palmer for the film versions — made his way, beset by disinformation, triple-crosses and dim bureaucrats.
"Unlike the impossibly suave, action-oriented Bond or George Smiley, John le Carré’s dumpy, cerebral, upper-class spy hero, Mr. Deighton’s central character is self-consciously proletarian, with a jaded, frequently hostile attitude toward his superiors, a droll sense of humor and a love of cooking.
"Mr. Deighton took a sardonic view of his sudden achievement as a brand-name writer. “All you need is a profound inferiority complex, no training as a writer and growing up a victim of the English class system,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1993.
"Although he remained best-known for his early titles, including “Funeral in Berlin” (1964), he continued to write prolifically. His unnamed hero appeared in two other novels, “Horse Under Water” (1963) and “Billion-Dollar Brain” (1966), and another recurring character, the middle-aged, discontented intelligence officer Bernard Samson, played the central role in three spy trilogies with interlocking titles released starting in the mid-1980s.
"The first trilogy consisted of “Berlin Game,” “Mexico Set” and “London Match” (often referred to as the “Game, Set and Match” trilogy), followed by “Spy Hook,” “Spy Line and “Spy Sinker” (known as “Hook, Line and Sinker”). The final series, published in the 1990s, was “Faith,” “Hope” and “Charity.”
“He is the master of the intricately plotted espionage thriller that offers an antihero with his roots demonstrably in the British people, rather than the civil-service aristocracy,” said Lars Ole Sauerberg, a professor of literature at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of “Secret Agents in Fiction” (1984). “I can think of no other writer of secret-agent fiction with a comparable command of the reality behind the clandestine games.”
"Mr. Deighton also wrote several works of historical fiction, set during World War II, that critics put on a par with his best spy novels. These included “Bomber” (1970), about a failed Royal Air Force raid on the Ruhr in 1943, and the counterfactual “SS-GB” (1978), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation in 1941.
"Leonard Cyril Deighton was born on Feb. 18, 1929, in London’s Marylebone neighborhood. His father, also named Leonard, worked as a chauffeur and mechanic for a the family of Campbell Dodgson, a curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum.
"Mr. Deighton liked to tell interviewers that he “grew up in a house with 15 servants,” before noting that his parents were two of them. His Irish mother, Dorothy (Fitzgerald) Deighton, was a part-time cook.
"In part to escape his father’s brutal temper, he said, he spent ample time in the kitchen with her. Based on what he learned, he briefly worked as a chef’s assistant in his 20s and gave the same kitchen skills to the hero of the early novels.
"While vacationing with his first wife, Shirley Thompson, in France on an island off Toulon, Mr. Deighton wrote the first half of “The Ipcress File.” The novel’s cryptic title refers to a mind-control technique used by foreign intelligence operatives to make British scientists forget their own research.
"Although Mr. Deighton never worked for the British government or any of its intelligence agencies, he was an avid amateur historian and cultivated a wide circle of well-informed sources thanks to his many jobs and travels.
"In an introduction to the 2009 reissue of “The Ipcress File,” he wrote that the Old Etonians at his London advertising agency provided him with a storehouse of visual material and personal mannerisms when it came time to create the fictional intelligence offices of his novels.
"Julian Symons, reappraising the novel in The New York Times Book Review in 1979, awarded the author high marks: “The verve and energy, the rattle of wit in the dialogue, the side-of-the-mouth comments, the evident pleasure taken in cocking a snook at the British spy story’s upper-middle-class tradition — all these, together with the teasing convolutions of the plot, made it clear that a writer of remarkable talent in this field had appeared.”
"Mr. Deighton sometimes said that he saw his central character not as an antihero but as a romantic, incorruptible figure, not unlike Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective. And he was most certainly not a one-man killing machine, like James Bond.
“When I started writing, I had rules,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2009. “One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”
Len Deighton's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/deightonlen
William Grimes. NYT, 03/17/2026: Len Deighton, Author of Espionage Best-Sellers, Dies at 97. "His Cold War thrillers “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin” brought a documentary-style realism to the spy genre."
"Len Deighton, the British author who brought a documentary-style realism to the spy genre in 1960s Cold War thrillers like “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin,” the film versions of which helped make Michael Caine an international star, died on Sunday at his home in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France. He was 97.
"Mr. Deighton, the son of a chauffeur and cook, had a background as a military photographer, globe-trotting airplane steward and commercial illustrator before turning to literature on a whim. The result was “The Ipcress File” (1962), which he regarded a riposte to the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming
"Instead of Bond’s cartoonish and morally simplistic take on spycraft, Mr. Deighton offered a shadow world through which his unnamed hero — christened Harry Palmer for the film versions — made his way, beset by disinformation, triple-crosses and dim bureaucrats.
"Unlike the impossibly suave, action-oriented Bond or George Smiley, John le Carré’s dumpy, cerebral, upper-class spy hero, Mr. Deighton’s central character is self-consciously proletarian, with a jaded, frequently hostile attitude toward his superiors, a droll sense of humor and a love of cooking.
"Mr. Deighton took a sardonic view of his sudden achievement as a brand-name writer. “All you need is a profound inferiority complex, no training as a writer and growing up a victim of the English class system,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1993.
"Although he remained best-known for his early titles, including “Funeral in Berlin” (1964), he continued to write prolifically. His unnamed hero appeared in two other novels, “Horse Under Water” (1963) and “Billion-Dollar Brain” (1966), and another recurring character, the middle-aged, discontented intelligence officer Bernard Samson, played the central role in three spy trilogies with interlocking titles released starting in the mid-1980s.
"The first trilogy consisted of “Berlin Game,” “Mexico Set” and “London Match” (often referred to as the “Game, Set and Match” trilogy), followed by “Spy Hook,” “Spy Line and “Spy Sinker” (known as “Hook, Line and Sinker”). The final series, published in the 1990s, was “Faith,” “Hope” and “Charity.”
“He is the master of the intricately plotted espionage thriller that offers an antihero with his roots demonstrably in the British people, rather than the civil-service aristocracy,” said Lars Ole Sauerberg, a professor of literature at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of “Secret Agents in Fiction” (1984). “I can think of no other writer of secret-agent fiction with a comparable command of the reality behind the clandestine games.”
"Mr. Deighton also wrote several works of historical fiction, set during World War II, that critics put on a par with his best spy novels. These included “Bomber” (1970), about a failed Royal Air Force raid on the Ruhr in 1943, and the counterfactual “SS-GB” (1978), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation in 1941.
"Leonard Cyril Deighton was born on Feb. 18, 1929, in London’s Marylebone neighborhood. His father, also named Leonard, worked as a chauffeur and mechanic for a the family of Campbell Dodgson, a curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum.
"Mr. Deighton liked to tell interviewers that he “grew up in a house with 15 servants,” before noting that his parents were two of them. His Irish mother, Dorothy (Fitzgerald) Deighton, was a part-time cook.
"In part to escape his father’s brutal temper, he said, he spent ample time in the kitchen with her. Based on what he learned, he briefly worked as a chef’s assistant in his 20s and gave the same kitchen skills to the hero of the early novels.
"While vacationing with his first wife, Shirley Thompson, in France on an island off Toulon, Mr. Deighton wrote the first half of “The Ipcress File.” The novel’s cryptic title refers to a mind-control technique used by foreign intelligence operatives to make British scientists forget their own research.
"Although Mr. Deighton never worked for the British government or any of its intelligence agencies, he was an avid amateur historian and cultivated a wide circle of well-informed sources thanks to his many jobs and travels.
"In an introduction to the 2009 reissue of “The Ipcress File,” he wrote that the Old Etonians at his London advertising agency provided him with a storehouse of visual material and personal mannerisms when it came time to create the fictional intelligence offices of his novels.
"Julian Symons, reappraising the novel in The New York Times Book Review in 1979, awarded the author high marks: “The verve and energy, the rattle of wit in the dialogue, the side-of-the-mouth comments, the evident pleasure taken in cocking a snook at the British spy story’s upper-middle-class tradition — all these, together with the teasing convolutions of the plot, made it clear that a writer of remarkable talent in this field had appeared.”
"Mr. Deighton sometimes said that he saw his central character not as an antihero but as a romantic, incorruptible figure, not unlike Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective. And he was most certainly not a one-man killing machine, like James Bond.
“When I started writing, I had rules,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2009. “One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”
Len Deighton's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/deightonlen
139featherbear
Sonja Anderson. Smithsonian Magazine, 03/16/2026: Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. Just Ask the Publishers Who Printed the Seventh Commandment as ‘Thou Shalt Commit Adultery’ in 1631. "A new exhibition at Yale Library explores the history of typos across five centuries. Visitors will see corrections that were listed inside copies of works by James Joyce, Upton Sinclair and Nicolaus Copernicus."
140featherbear
Charles Carman. The New Atlantis, winter 2026: The Cassandra of ‘The Machine.’ "Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of technologized modernity is frustratingly broad. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong."
141featherbear
TLS March 20, 2026|No. 6401
Featured
Mary Beard. 03/17/2026: Wandering lonely as a cloud? From the TLS current issue landing page
Ian Sansom. Clock stopper: The many lives of W. H. Auden. Review of: Auden / Peter Ackroyd.
Alan Jenkins. Darkness visible: The struggle between good and evil in William Golding’s fiction. Review of: William Golding: the Faber letters / Tim Kendall, editor.
Tim Crane. The feeling of being alive: Why do we experience consciousness? Review of: A World Appears: A journey into consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Emily Jones. All-seeing eye: Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, the controversial US tech company. Review of: The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the rise of the surveillance state / Michael Steinberger.
Literature & Language
Philip Cooke. Mafia man: The life of one of Italy’s greatest modern writers. Review of: A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the rise of the mafia and the struggle for Italy’s soul / Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus).
Joseph Bristow. Falsehoods and filth: Oscar Wilde in the twentieth century. Review of: After Oscar: The legacy of a scandal / Merlin Holland.
Gwendoline Riley. Soppy sad: Beryl Bainbridge’s novels of small, unhappy lives. Review of: The Bottle Factory Outing / Beryl Bainbridge -- An Awfully Big Adventure / Beryl Bainbridge.
Lucy Silbaugh. Incantatory music: The quiet and austere poetry of Cesare Pavese. Review of: Hard Labor / Cesare Pavese; translated by William Arrowsmith (NYRB Poets).
Rachel Hadas. Between sleep and waking: Jay Wright’s collected poems ‘wander far afield and return home.’ Review of: Transfigurations: Collected poems / Jay Wright.
John Banville. A kind of peace: stories of a neglected Irish master. Review of: An Arrow in Flight / Mary Lavin; selected by Colm Tóibín.
Alison Kelly. A life of one’s own: Stories of exile and homecoming. Review of: The News from Dublin: stories / Colm Tóibín.
Lucy Thynne. Like a child: Coming of age in 1980s Dublin. Review of: A Beautiful Loan: A Novel / Mary Costello.
Charlie Lee. In the spectral dusk: Tales that flicker between different worlds. Review of: Brawler: stories / Lauren Groff.
Lamorna Ash. Summer light: Grace and artistic reawakening in New York. Review of: Minor Black Figures: A Novel / Brandon Taylor.
Jude Cook. What we were taught: How October 7 has played out for Jews in the West. Review of: Howl / Howard Jacobson.
In Brief Review of: Nabokov and the Russian Diaspora: In the margins of totalitarianism / Bryan Karetnyk (Palgrave Macmillan).
In Brief Review of: Invading the American Canon: Translators of Russian literary fiction, 1863–1984 / Muireann Maguire.
In Brief Review of: Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Power and resistance in the contemporary novel / Sarah Colvin.
In Brief Review of: Postcards, translators and Esperanto pioneers: An alternative history of international communication / Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck and Claire Taylor (University of London Press).
In Brief Review of: Rapture of the Deep / Robert Irwin; completed by Andrew Crumey.
Arts
Zoe Guttenplan. Wild typography: The relationship between film and the written word. Review of: Read Frame Type Film, Or, Written on the screen / Enrico Camporesi, Catherine de Smet and Philippe Milot.
Lillian Crawford. More Hamlet than King Leer: The fine line between art and pornography in the work of two Hollywood directors. Review of: Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA / Will Sloan -- Man of Taste: The erotic cinema of Radley Metzger / Rob King.
Kathryn Kalinak. Knowing the score: Two composers who defined the emotional landscape of film. Review of: Hitchcock and Herrmann: The friendship and film scores that changed cinema / Stephen C. Smith -- John Williams: A composer’s life / Tim Greiving.
Oliver Harris. Popcorn or politics?: Paul Greengrass’s ‘shakycam’ realism. Review of: The Greengrass Papers: A film-maker’s journey: To Bourne and back / Tom Shone (Faber).
Toby Lichtig. Events do not add up: Repression, delusion, obsession: Ishiguro on film. Review of Kei Ishikawa's film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel A Pale View of Hills.
Larry Wolff. Potions of love and death: Wagner’s medieval epic, for ‘a good pair of singers.’ Review of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, Metropolitan Opera House, New York, until April 4 (featuring Lise Davidsen & Michael Spyres).
Emily Gowers. Flesh, flower, fur and stone: Art inspired by Ovid’s great poem of transformations. Review of the exhibition Metamorphoses, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until May 25.
In Brief Review of: The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on history, theory, and the avant-garde / Tom Gunning; edited by Daniel Morgan.
Science, Technology, & Natural History
Nessa Carey. The last grand old man: Francis Crick’s part in cracking the code of DNA. Review of: Crick: A mind in motion – from DNA to the brain / Matthew Cobb.
Gregory Radick. The stranger within: How the human body carries traces of other people. Review of: Hidden Guests: Migrating cells and how the new science of microchimerism is redefining human identity / Lise Barnéoud.
Darra Goldstein. Tree cover: Forests in Russia’s history and imagination. Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A forest history of Russia and its empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Barbara J. King. Backward march of the penguin: How climate change threatens the survival of the flightless bird. Review of: An Inconvenience of Penguins: Epic voyages in pursuit of the world’s most beloved bird / Jeremy Lafferty -- The Penguin Book of Penguins: An expert’s guide to the world’s most beloved bird / Peter Fretwell and Lisa Fretwell (Viking).
In Brief Review: Interrupted Journeys: Badgers and other roadside distractions / Adrian Potter.
In Brief Review of: Here Comes the Sun: A last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization / Bill McKibben.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Paul Levy. Foraging for funghi: An Italian chef’s classic recipes and his field guide to mushrooms. Review of: A Passion for Mushrooms: The classic cookbook / Antonio Carluccio (Pavillion).
Gregory Woods. A milkman at Mother Clap’s: Gender non-conformity in the eighteenth century. Review of: Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers / Anthony Delaney.
Tim Parks. Mission impossible: In search of the spirit of the Risorgimento in Sicily. (Essay)
Charles King. The loneliest metropolis: A portrait of Moscow, a city that ‘does not believe in tears.’ Review of: A Kingdom and a Village: A one-thousand-year history of Moscow / Simon Morrison.
Isabel Hilton. Luck of the devil: Chance and ruthlessness in the rise of Communist China. Review of: Red Dawn over China: How Communism conquered a quarter of humanity / Frank Dikötter.
Julian Evans. Feast and famine: The threat to food, family and homeland in Ukraine. Review of: Strong Roots: A Ukrainian family story, interrupted / Olia Hercules (Bloomsbury) -- Bread and War: A Ukrainian story of food, bravery and hope / Felicity Spector.
Nick Holdstock. Ring of fire: How China censors the internet. Review of: The Wall Dancers: Searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese internet / Yi-Ling Liu.
Regina Rini. Afterthoughts: The raft of myth: Democracy and "truthful history." (Essay)
Ben Bollig. Letter from: Buenos Aires. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: Queens at War: England’s medieval queens / Alison Weir.
In Brief Review of: Swap: A secret history of the new Cold War / Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson.
Featured
Mary Beard. 03/17/2026: Wandering lonely as a cloud? From the TLS current issue landing page
Ian Sansom. Clock stopper: The many lives of W. H. Auden. Review of: Auden / Peter Ackroyd.
Alan Jenkins. Darkness visible: The struggle between good and evil in William Golding’s fiction. Review of: William Golding: the Faber letters / Tim Kendall, editor.
Tim Crane. The feeling of being alive: Why do we experience consciousness? Review of: A World Appears: A journey into consciousness / Michael Pollan.
Emily Jones. All-seeing eye: Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, the controversial US tech company. Review of: The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the rise of the surveillance state / Michael Steinberger.
Literature & Language
Philip Cooke. Mafia man: The life of one of Italy’s greatest modern writers. Review of: A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the rise of the mafia and the struggle for Italy’s soul / Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus).
Joseph Bristow. Falsehoods and filth: Oscar Wilde in the twentieth century. Review of: After Oscar: The legacy of a scandal / Merlin Holland.
Gwendoline Riley. Soppy sad: Beryl Bainbridge’s novels of small, unhappy lives. Review of: The Bottle Factory Outing / Beryl Bainbridge -- An Awfully Big Adventure / Beryl Bainbridge.
Lucy Silbaugh. Incantatory music: The quiet and austere poetry of Cesare Pavese. Review of: Hard Labor / Cesare Pavese; translated by William Arrowsmith (NYRB Poets).
Rachel Hadas. Between sleep and waking: Jay Wright’s collected poems ‘wander far afield and return home.’ Review of: Transfigurations: Collected poems / Jay Wright.
John Banville. A kind of peace: stories of a neglected Irish master. Review of: An Arrow in Flight / Mary Lavin; selected by Colm Tóibín.
Alison Kelly. A life of one’s own: Stories of exile and homecoming. Review of: The News from Dublin: stories / Colm Tóibín.
Lucy Thynne. Like a child: Coming of age in 1980s Dublin. Review of: A Beautiful Loan: A Novel / Mary Costello.
Charlie Lee. In the spectral dusk: Tales that flicker between different worlds. Review of: Brawler: stories / Lauren Groff.
Lamorna Ash. Summer light: Grace and artistic reawakening in New York. Review of: Minor Black Figures: A Novel / Brandon Taylor.
Jude Cook. What we were taught: How October 7 has played out for Jews in the West. Review of: Howl / Howard Jacobson.
In Brief Review of: Nabokov and the Russian Diaspora: In the margins of totalitarianism / Bryan Karetnyk (Palgrave Macmillan).
In Brief Review of: Invading the American Canon: Translators of Russian literary fiction, 1863–1984 / Muireann Maguire.
In Brief Review of: Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Power and resistance in the contemporary novel / Sarah Colvin.
In Brief Review of: Postcards, translators and Esperanto pioneers: An alternative history of international communication / Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck and Claire Taylor (University of London Press).
In Brief Review of: Rapture of the Deep / Robert Irwin; completed by Andrew Crumey.
Arts
Zoe Guttenplan. Wild typography: The relationship between film and the written word. Review of: Read Frame Type Film, Or, Written on the screen / Enrico Camporesi, Catherine de Smet and Philippe Milot.
Lillian Crawford. More Hamlet than King Leer: The fine line between art and pornography in the work of two Hollywood directors. Review of: Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA / Will Sloan -- Man of Taste: The erotic cinema of Radley Metzger / Rob King.
Kathryn Kalinak. Knowing the score: Two composers who defined the emotional landscape of film. Review of: Hitchcock and Herrmann: The friendship and film scores that changed cinema / Stephen C. Smith -- John Williams: A composer’s life / Tim Greiving.
Oliver Harris. Popcorn or politics?: Paul Greengrass’s ‘shakycam’ realism. Review of: The Greengrass Papers: A film-maker’s journey: To Bourne and back / Tom Shone (Faber).
Toby Lichtig. Events do not add up: Repression, delusion, obsession: Ishiguro on film. Review of Kei Ishikawa's film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel A Pale View of Hills.
Larry Wolff. Potions of love and death: Wagner’s medieval epic, for ‘a good pair of singers.’ Review of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, Metropolitan Opera House, New York, until April 4 (featuring Lise Davidsen & Michael Spyres).
Emily Gowers. Flesh, flower, fur and stone: Art inspired by Ovid’s great poem of transformations. Review of the exhibition Metamorphoses, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until May 25.
In Brief Review of: The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on history, theory, and the avant-garde / Tom Gunning; edited by Daniel Morgan.
Science, Technology, & Natural History
Nessa Carey. The last grand old man: Francis Crick’s part in cracking the code of DNA. Review of: Crick: A mind in motion – from DNA to the brain / Matthew Cobb.
Gregory Radick. The stranger within: How the human body carries traces of other people. Review of: Hidden Guests: Migrating cells and how the new science of microchimerism is redefining human identity / Lise Barnéoud.
Darra Goldstein. Tree cover: Forests in Russia’s history and imagination. Review of: The Oak and the Larch: A forest history of Russia and its empires / Sophie Pinkham.
Barbara J. King. Backward march of the penguin: How climate change threatens the survival of the flightless bird. Review of: An Inconvenience of Penguins: Epic voyages in pursuit of the world’s most beloved bird / Jeremy Lafferty -- The Penguin Book of Penguins: An expert’s guide to the world’s most beloved bird / Peter Fretwell and Lisa Fretwell (Viking).
In Brief Review: Interrupted Journeys: Badgers and other roadside distractions / Adrian Potter.
In Brief Review of: Here Comes the Sun: A last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization / Bill McKibben.
History, Politics, Society, & Culture
Paul Levy. Foraging for funghi: An Italian chef’s classic recipes and his field guide to mushrooms. Review of: A Passion for Mushrooms: The classic cookbook / Antonio Carluccio (Pavillion).
Gregory Woods. A milkman at Mother Clap’s: Gender non-conformity in the eighteenth century. Review of: Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers / Anthony Delaney.
Tim Parks. Mission impossible: In search of the spirit of the Risorgimento in Sicily. (Essay)
Charles King. The loneliest metropolis: A portrait of Moscow, a city that ‘does not believe in tears.’ Review of: A Kingdom and a Village: A one-thousand-year history of Moscow / Simon Morrison.
Isabel Hilton. Luck of the devil: Chance and ruthlessness in the rise of Communist China. Review of: Red Dawn over China: How Communism conquered a quarter of humanity / Frank Dikötter.
Julian Evans. Feast and famine: The threat to food, family and homeland in Ukraine. Review of: Strong Roots: A Ukrainian family story, interrupted / Olia Hercules (Bloomsbury) -- Bread and War: A Ukrainian story of food, bravery and hope / Felicity Spector.
Nick Holdstock. Ring of fire: How China censors the internet. Review of: The Wall Dancers: Searching for freedom and connection on the Chinese internet / Yi-Ling Liu.
Regina Rini. Afterthoughts: The raft of myth: Democracy and "truthful history." (Essay)
Ben Bollig. Letter from: Buenos Aires. (Essay)
In Brief Review of: Queens at War: England’s medieval queens / Alison Weir.
In Brief Review of: Swap: A secret history of the new Cold War / Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson.
142featherbear
Alfredo Bryce Echenique, 1939-2026
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 03/17/2026: Alfredo Bryce Echenique, 87, Dies; Novelist Bared Peru’s Privileged Class. "“The other Peruvian” (alongside Mario Vargas Llosa), he exposed the heedlessness of the upper crust, which he knew well, and the suffering of the underclasses."
"Alfredo Bryce Echenique, a Peruvian novelist who wrote with an insider’s touch about the heedlessness of his country’s upper crust and the quiet suffering of the classes underneath, died on March 10 at his home in Lima. He was 87.
"Mr. Bryce Echenique was sometimes considered “the other Peruvian,” to distinguish him from his friend the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. And he was occasionally lumped in with the other Latin American novelists of the literary “boom” of the 1960s and ’70s, like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortazar of Argentina.
"But Mr. Bryce Echenique was not so easily categorized. An understated chronicler of the elevated milieu from which he came, he eschewed the surreal distortions of Mr. García Márquez’s magical realism and the high politics and morality that infused the work of Mr. Vargas Llosa. In Mr. Bryce Echenique’s novels, the critique of disparities and inequality is implicit.
"“Bryce Echenique’s first instinct as a writer is to be witty rather than moralistic,” Jonathan Thacker, a professor of Spanish studies at the University of Oxford, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 2003, reviewing the author’s “El Huerto de Mi Amada” (“The Garden of My Lover”).
"His best-known work, “A World for Julius” (1970) — one of only two of his 12 novels that have been translated into English, in 1992 — is a tender, ironic evocation of an upper-class childhood in 1940s Lima: his own.
"In The New York Times Book Review in 1993, Robert Houston, a novelist who lived and taught in Lima, called the book, more than 20 years after its publication in Peru, a “masterpiece of Latin American fiction.” It is “like the best of Dickens’s novels,” he wrote, and “a great fat book that completely engages a reader with its characters and places.”
"By the time “Julius” was published, Mr. Bryce Echenique was nearing a long, self-imposed exile in France and Spain, some of it spent as a lecturer at the Sorbonne. Numerous novels followed. In France, he remained deeply critical of Peru’s politics, telling Le Monde after a brief return to his native country in 1999 that terrorism by the leftist Shining Path guerrillas and successive dictatorships had left “misery everywhere” and “no more middle class.”
"None of his subsequent novels achieved quite the renown of “A World for Julius,” which won France’s best foreign novel prize in 1974. It received Peru’s national literature prize in 1972. Among other awards, Mr. Bryce Echenique received Spain’s national narrative prize in 1998 for “Reo de Nocturnidad” (“A Night Owl”).
"His epistolary novel, “Tarzan’s Tonsillitis” (1998), told partly through love letters exchanged between male and female protagonists, received mixed reviews. Suzanne Ruta wrote in The Times Book Review that “her grateful, desperate and often moving letters alternate with his less absorbing commentaries and updates.” It was Mr. Bryce Echenique’s only other book translated into English.
"One of his most admired books in the Spanish-speaking world, “La Vida Exagerada de Martin Romaña” (1981), tells the story of a leftist Peruvian revolutionary in 1960s Paris who is given an unlikely commission to write a book about Peruvian fishing unions. It was praised by the author and translator Adam Feinstein in The Times Literary Supplement for its “tender intelligence, energy and humor.”
"Mr. Bryce Echenique himself told Le Monde in 1999: “I always start from reality, but from an angle to which nobody else paid the slightest attention. And from there, I invented, and so people in my set called me a liar.”
"In later years, he was dogged by charges of plagiarism, for having passed off others’ newspaper columns as his own work in the Spanish and Peruvian media. In 2009, a Peruvian administrative court fined him about 42,000 euros for having plagiarized 15 articles by 16 different writers, according to the Spanish newspaper El País."
Alfredo Bryce Echenique's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/echeniquealfredobryc
Adam Nossiter. NYT, 03/17/2026: Alfredo Bryce Echenique, 87, Dies; Novelist Bared Peru’s Privileged Class. "“The other Peruvian” (alongside Mario Vargas Llosa), he exposed the heedlessness of the upper crust, which he knew well, and the suffering of the underclasses."
"Alfredo Bryce Echenique, a Peruvian novelist who wrote with an insider’s touch about the heedlessness of his country’s upper crust and the quiet suffering of the classes underneath, died on March 10 at his home in Lima. He was 87.
"Mr. Bryce Echenique was sometimes considered “the other Peruvian,” to distinguish him from his friend the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. And he was occasionally lumped in with the other Latin American novelists of the literary “boom” of the 1960s and ’70s, like Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortazar of Argentina.
"But Mr. Bryce Echenique was not so easily categorized. An understated chronicler of the elevated milieu from which he came, he eschewed the surreal distortions of Mr. García Márquez’s magical realism and the high politics and morality that infused the work of Mr. Vargas Llosa. In Mr. Bryce Echenique’s novels, the critique of disparities and inequality is implicit.
"“Bryce Echenique’s first instinct as a writer is to be witty rather than moralistic,” Jonathan Thacker, a professor of Spanish studies at the University of Oxford, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 2003, reviewing the author’s “El Huerto de Mi Amada” (“The Garden of My Lover”).
"His best-known work, “A World for Julius” (1970) — one of only two of his 12 novels that have been translated into English, in 1992 — is a tender, ironic evocation of an upper-class childhood in 1940s Lima: his own.
"In The New York Times Book Review in 1993, Robert Houston, a novelist who lived and taught in Lima, called the book, more than 20 years after its publication in Peru, a “masterpiece of Latin American fiction.” It is “like the best of Dickens’s novels,” he wrote, and “a great fat book that completely engages a reader with its characters and places.”
"By the time “Julius” was published, Mr. Bryce Echenique was nearing a long, self-imposed exile in France and Spain, some of it spent as a lecturer at the Sorbonne. Numerous novels followed. In France, he remained deeply critical of Peru’s politics, telling Le Monde after a brief return to his native country in 1999 that terrorism by the leftist Shining Path guerrillas and successive dictatorships had left “misery everywhere” and “no more middle class.”
"None of his subsequent novels achieved quite the renown of “A World for Julius,” which won France’s best foreign novel prize in 1974. It received Peru’s national literature prize in 1972. Among other awards, Mr. Bryce Echenique received Spain’s national narrative prize in 1998 for “Reo de Nocturnidad” (“A Night Owl”).
"His epistolary novel, “Tarzan’s Tonsillitis” (1998), told partly through love letters exchanged between male and female protagonists, received mixed reviews. Suzanne Ruta wrote in The Times Book Review that “her grateful, desperate and often moving letters alternate with his less absorbing commentaries and updates.” It was Mr. Bryce Echenique’s only other book translated into English.
"One of his most admired books in the Spanish-speaking world, “La Vida Exagerada de Martin Romaña” (1981), tells the story of a leftist Peruvian revolutionary in 1960s Paris who is given an unlikely commission to write a book about Peruvian fishing unions. It was praised by the author and translator Adam Feinstein in The Times Literary Supplement for its “tender intelligence, energy and humor.”
"Mr. Bryce Echenique himself told Le Monde in 1999: “I always start from reality, but from an angle to which nobody else paid the slightest attention. And from there, I invented, and so people in my set called me a liar.”
"In later years, he was dogged by charges of plagiarism, for having passed off others’ newspaper columns as his own work in the Spanish and Peruvian media. In 2009, a Peruvian administrative court fined him about 42,000 euros for having plagiarized 15 articles by 16 different writers, according to the Spanish newspaper El País."
Alfredo Bryce Echenique's LT page:
https://www.librarything.com/author/echeniquealfredobryc
143featherbear
Benjamin Balthaser. Boston Review, winter 2026: Antisemitism’s Afterlives. Review of: On Antisemitism: A Word in History / Mark Mazower.
144featherbear
Michael Chaouli. Yale Review, 03/16/2026: Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?: A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page.
145featherbear
Calvin Tomkins, 1925–2026
David Remnick. New Yorker, 03/20/2026: Remembering Calvin Tomkins, a Master of the Profile.
Calvin Tomkins's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/tomkinscalvin
David Remnick. New Yorker, 03/20/2026: Remembering Calvin Tomkins, a Master of the Profile.
Calvin Tomkins's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/tomkinscalvin
146featherbear
March 15-21 updates
Aeon Mar 20: bitch -- Mar 19: mechanism vs romanticism & the soul >111 featherbear:
American Scholar Mar 19: Oliver Sacks's reading & annotation >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 21: Nahoko Uehashi's Kokun novel -- Mar 20: Easter Island -- Mar 18: safe passage (the subtitle explains it all) -- Mar 17: Octavio Paz in India -- Mar 15: Deepa Anappara's The Last of Earth >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 21: ideal marriage -- Mar 20: Stephen Sondheim's autobiographical bits in his musicals -- Mar 19: Paul Ehrlich; Seinfeld principle in Covid fiction -- Mar 17: J.M. Coetzee's homeland; Intimate Animal -- Mar 16: trans novel; working class unionists >114 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 20: 5 best thrillers for 2026 recommended by International Thriller Writers Awards -- Mar 16: 5 best WWII novels >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 21: Australian Prof Wallace Kirsop, 92, is one of Australia’s foremost experts in rare books -- Mar 20: Ibram X. Kendi's Chain of Ideas; books in my life: Florence Knapp -- Mar 19: National Trust & Queer Inheritance; horse novel -- Mar 18: when the forest breathes; almost life -- Mar 17: the afterlife; solidarity -- Mar 16: better than Wuthering Heights; Howard Jacobson's Howl; Demis Hassabis bio (AI pioneer) -- Mar 15: Shahrnush Parsipur, author of Women Without Men, interviewed >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 21: toxic masculinity novel; Protocols & the Jews -- Mar 17: Lore Segal stories; Fatima Bhutto memoir of an abusive relationship plus a Jack Russell terrier -- Mar 16: Helen Garner collected stories >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 20: paperback vs hardcover; Fifteen Wild Decembers & the Brontes -- Mar 18: literary freedom (not) in Russia -- Mar 17: historian Lyndal Roper wins Holdberg prize; Wayne Koestenbaum interview -- Mar 16: excerpt from forthcoming book on Anti-Asian racism; Fanny Burney, predecessor of Jane Austen; multiverse as literary device; Barbara Pym >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 16: the life you want; 2 books on the financing of the American revolution >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 21: birds of a feather; Fab 5 Freddy memoir -- Mar 20: Cleo Birdwell reissue -- Mar 19: Alexandra Alter has 2 articles on AI & publishing; 2 Chainz memoir -- Mar 18: scandal in Königsberg; Palestinian émigré novel; 2 books by Joshua Bennett -- Mar 17: salt lakes; replacement theory -- Mar 16: self-censoring in academia; Berlin 1939-1945; Mieko Kawakami's latest novel (bar hostesses) -- Mar 15: Luke Barr's history of nouvelle cuisine >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 20: LLMs not Shakespeare; excerpt from In Search of Now -- March 18: Stanley Plumly's collected poems; excerpt from The Story of Capital -- Mar 17: misunderstanding Joyce -- Mar 16: Utopia >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 20: Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach -- Mar 19: Fania records & salsa >118 featherbear:
Quillette Mar 21: did the West ever exist? -- Mar 17: English female poets & critics of the 17th century >132 featherbear:
TLS Mar 20: >141 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
March 08-14 updates >133 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
Boston Review >143 featherbear:
The New Atlantis >140 featherbear:
Smithsonian Magazine >139 featherbear:
The Times (of London) >135 featherbear:
Yale Review >144 featherbear:
Aeon Mar 20: bitch -- Mar 19: mechanism vs romanticism & the soul >111 featherbear:
American Scholar Mar 19: Oliver Sacks's reading & annotation >121 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 21: Nahoko Uehashi's Kokun novel -- Mar 20: Easter Island -- Mar 18: safe passage (the subtitle explains it all) -- Mar 17: Octavio Paz in India -- Mar 15: Deepa Anappara's The Last of Earth >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 21: ideal marriage -- Mar 20: Stephen Sondheim's autobiographical bits in his musicals -- Mar 19: Paul Ehrlich; Seinfeld principle in Covid fiction -- Mar 17: J.M. Coetzee's homeland; Intimate Animal -- Mar 16: trans novel; working class unionists >114 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 20: 5 best thrillers for 2026 recommended by International Thriller Writers Awards -- Mar 16: 5 best WWII novels >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 21: Australian Prof Wallace Kirsop, 92, is one of Australia’s foremost experts in rare books -- Mar 20: Ibram X. Kendi's Chain of Ideas; books in my life: Florence Knapp -- Mar 19: National Trust & Queer Inheritance; horse novel -- Mar 18: when the forest breathes; almost life -- Mar 17: the afterlife; solidarity -- Mar 16: better than Wuthering Heights; Howard Jacobson's Howl; Demis Hassabis bio (AI pioneer) -- Mar 15: Shahrnush Parsipur, author of Women Without Men, interviewed >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 21: toxic masculinity novel; Protocols & the Jews -- Mar 17: Lore Segal stories; Fatima Bhutto memoir of an abusive relationship plus a Jack Russell terrier -- Mar 16: Helen Garner collected stories >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 20: paperback vs hardcover; Fifteen Wild Decembers & the Brontes -- Mar 18: literary freedom (not) in Russia -- Mar 17: historian Lyndal Roper wins Holdberg prize; Wayne Koestenbaum interview -- Mar 16: excerpt from forthcoming book on Anti-Asian racism; Fanny Burney, predecessor of Jane Austen; multiverse as literary device; Barbara Pym >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 16: the life you want; 2 books on the financing of the American revolution >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 21: birds of a feather; Fab 5 Freddy memoir -- Mar 20: Cleo Birdwell reissue -- Mar 19: Alexandra Alter has 2 articles on AI & publishing; 2 Chainz memoir -- Mar 18: scandal in Königsberg; Palestinian émigré novel; 2 books by Joshua Bennett -- Mar 17: salt lakes; replacement theory -- Mar 16: self-censoring in academia; Berlin 1939-1945; Mieko Kawakami's latest novel (bar hostesses) -- Mar 15: Luke Barr's history of nouvelle cuisine >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 20: LLMs not Shakespeare; excerpt from In Search of Now -- March 18: Stanley Plumly's collected poems; excerpt from The Story of Capital -- Mar 17: misunderstanding Joyce -- Mar 16: Utopia >112 featherbear:
Public Books Mar 20: Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach -- Mar 19: Fania records & salsa >118 featherbear:
Quillette Mar 21: did the West ever exist? -- Mar 17: English female poets & critics of the 17th century >132 featherbear:
TLS Mar 20: >141 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
March 08-14 updates >133 featherbear:
Websites added this week:
Boston Review >143 featherbear:
The New Atlantis >140 featherbear:
Smithsonian Magazine >139 featherbear:
The Times (of London) >135 featherbear:
Yale Review >144 featherbear:
147featherbear
The Critic (UK) March 2026
Daniel Johnson. 03/31/2026: Making the case for liberalism. Review of: Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism / Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane).
Lolah Salem. 03/31/2026: Is this the end of art? Review of: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century / W. David Marx.
Neil Armstrong. 03/30/2026: From Wigton to Wadham College. Review of: Another World: The Oxford Years: A Memoir / Melvyn Bragg (Sceptre).
John Self. 03/27/2026: Spirits, a seven-year-old and a death camp. Reviews of 3 novels: Vigil / George Saunders -- Frogs for Watchdogs / Seán Farrell -- Vengeance is Mine / Friedrich Torberg; translated by Stephanie Gorrell Ortega.
Edward Howell. 03/24/2026: The Arctic circle: a game of ice and fire. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic / Kenneth R. Rosen.
Andy Owen. 03/22/2026: The story of a lifetime: Whole life novels lay bare the randomness and haphazardness of life. Regarding David Szalay's "WLN" Flesh.
Daniel Johnson. 03/31/2026: Making the case for liberalism. Review of: Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism / Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane).
Lolah Salem. 03/31/2026: Is this the end of art? Review of: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century / W. David Marx.
Neil Armstrong. 03/30/2026: From Wigton to Wadham College. Review of: Another World: The Oxford Years: A Memoir / Melvyn Bragg (Sceptre).
John Self. 03/27/2026: Spirits, a seven-year-old and a death camp. Reviews of 3 novels: Vigil / George Saunders -- Frogs for Watchdogs / Seán Farrell -- Vengeance is Mine / Friedrich Torberg; translated by Stephanie Gorrell Ortega.
Edward Howell. 03/24/2026: The Arctic circle: a game of ice and fire. Review of: Polar War: Submarines, Spies and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic / Kenneth R. Rosen.
Andy Owen. 03/22/2026: The story of a lifetime: Whole life novels lay bare the randomness and haphazardness of life. Regarding David Szalay's "WLN" Flesh.
148featherbear
Langdon Hammer. Yale Review, 03/16/2026: The Elusive Poet of Desire: Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down.
149featherbear
Tracy Kidder, 1945-2926
John Schwartz. NYT, 03/25/2026; updated 3/26: shared link: Tracy Kidder, Author of ‘The Soul of a New Machine,’ Dies at 80. "A Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative journalist, he wrote deeply reported books that often focused on heroic goodness in people."
"Tracy Kidder, a wide-ranging journalist and author whose deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated worlds as diverse as home construction, disease prevention and — as portrayed in his prizewinning 1981 breakthrough book, “The Soul of a New Machine” — the computer industry, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 80.
"In a market increasingly dominated by quick hits and hot takes, Mr. Kidder’s immersive narratives stood apart. He highlighted people who had mastered their realms, placing them as characters in accounts that rang true because they were based on staggering amounts of research.
"For “Among Schoolchildren” (1989), he spent an entire school year in a Massachusetts classroom. For “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World” (2003), Mr. Kidder followed Dr. Farmer — the founder of Partners in Health, an organization that provides care to some of the world’s poorest people — to his hospital in Haiti as well as to Peru, Cuba, Russia and elsewhere.
"His most lauded book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” introduced readers to the physical parts and electronic bits that go into creating a business computer. The book arrived just as the PC revolution was gearing up.
"When he took on the project, he told a reporter for The New York Times, he was not familiar with the field and relied on his subjects at Data General Corporation to teach him.
"“Some of them despaired over my lack of technological background,” Mr. Kidder said, “but most of them were pleased that an outsider was interested in what they were doing.”
"While he had to get the technology right, it was not what he most cared about. “It was the people themselves,” he said, “their incredible passion for this thing.”
"The book won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, launching his career.
"His 1985 book, “House,” depicted the process of planning and building a home and the collaboration and tensions between owners, architects and builders. In The Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it “one of the few books about building that is actually the story of people.”
"His parents took him out of public school at 13 and sent him to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. He went on to Harvard, entering it as a political science major. But he soon found the subject dull.
""“During a lecture by Henry Kissinger, I got up and left the room,” he recalled. “I was just bored to death.”
"He switched to English and took a creative writing course from the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, producing stories that impressed the teacher and fellow students alike. Fitzgerald, he said, “made me feel that writing could be a high calling, possibly available to me.” He graduated in 1967.
"Military service followed. He had joined the R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War to avoid being drafted, going through officer training and expecting to be sent to Washington to do the communications intelligence he’d been trained for.
"Instead, he got shipped off to Vietnam. He spent a year there and saw no combat, instead monitoring radio transmissions in the rear echelon. He reached the rank of first lieutenant and received a Bronze Star.
"Mr. Kidder wrote in endless drafts. “Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward,” said Jonathan Harr, author of the best-selling book “A Civil Action.” “He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”
"His later books focused on heroic virtuousness, including “Mountains Beyond Mountains” and “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People” (2023). In “Strength In What Remains” (2010), he told the story of Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a refugee from Burundi who arrived in the United States with nothing and who made his way through medical school, ultimately building a nonprofit public health clinic back in Burundi.
"Mr. Kidder was, in effect, doing what he had told his wife while courting her: writing about deep, even intimidating, goodness.
“I’m drawn to that,” he said. “I don’t know why the world is such a miserable place.”
AP. Guardian, 03/25/2026. Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies aged 80.
Rafaela Jinich. Atlantic, 03/26/2026: A Life of Paying Attention: Revisiting Tracy Kidder’s work for The Atlantic.
Tracy Kidder's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/kiddertracy
I hope the shared link works; discovered a number of Kidder works from the obits I wasn't aware of; the quoted excerpts don't cover everything in his career but I wanted to get in the touchstone links; his later works clearly affected many people & I wasn't aware of their effect or even their existence -- 153 comments which NYT won't keep up for long; hope I get a chance to read more of Kidder's books. PS: the NYT obit doesn't mention 1993's Old Friends, cited in the Guardian obit which allows me to add a touchstone in addition to my list of books to look out for.
John Schwartz. NYT, 03/25/2026; updated 3/26: shared link: Tracy Kidder, Author of ‘The Soul of a New Machine,’ Dies at 80. "A Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative journalist, he wrote deeply reported books that often focused on heroic goodness in people."
"Tracy Kidder, a wide-ranging journalist and author whose deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated worlds as diverse as home construction, disease prevention and — as portrayed in his prizewinning 1981 breakthrough book, “The Soul of a New Machine” — the computer industry, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 80.
"In a market increasingly dominated by quick hits and hot takes, Mr. Kidder’s immersive narratives stood apart. He highlighted people who had mastered their realms, placing them as characters in accounts that rang true because they were based on staggering amounts of research.
"For “Among Schoolchildren” (1989), he spent an entire school year in a Massachusetts classroom. For “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World” (2003), Mr. Kidder followed Dr. Farmer — the founder of Partners in Health, an organization that provides care to some of the world’s poorest people — to his hospital in Haiti as well as to Peru, Cuba, Russia and elsewhere.
"His most lauded book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” introduced readers to the physical parts and electronic bits that go into creating a business computer. The book arrived just as the PC revolution was gearing up.
"When he took on the project, he told a reporter for The New York Times, he was not familiar with the field and relied on his subjects at Data General Corporation to teach him.
"“Some of them despaired over my lack of technological background,” Mr. Kidder said, “but most of them were pleased that an outsider was interested in what they were doing.”
"While he had to get the technology right, it was not what he most cared about. “It was the people themselves,” he said, “their incredible passion for this thing.”
"The book won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, launching his career.
"His 1985 book, “House,” depicted the process of planning and building a home and the collaboration and tensions between owners, architects and builders. In The Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it “one of the few books about building that is actually the story of people.”
"His parents took him out of public school at 13 and sent him to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. He went on to Harvard, entering it as a political science major. But he soon found the subject dull.
""“During a lecture by Henry Kissinger, I got up and left the room,” he recalled. “I was just bored to death.”
"He switched to English and took a creative writing course from the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, producing stories that impressed the teacher and fellow students alike. Fitzgerald, he said, “made me feel that writing could be a high calling, possibly available to me.” He graduated in 1967.
"Military service followed. He had joined the R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War to avoid being drafted, going through officer training and expecting to be sent to Washington to do the communications intelligence he’d been trained for.
"Instead, he got shipped off to Vietnam. He spent a year there and saw no combat, instead monitoring radio transmissions in the rear echelon. He reached the rank of first lieutenant and received a Bronze Star.
"Mr. Kidder wrote in endless drafts. “Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward,” said Jonathan Harr, author of the best-selling book “A Civil Action.” “He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”
"His later books focused on heroic virtuousness, including “Mountains Beyond Mountains” and “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People” (2023). In “Strength In What Remains” (2010), he told the story of Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a refugee from Burundi who arrived in the United States with nothing and who made his way through medical school, ultimately building a nonprofit public health clinic back in Burundi.
"Mr. Kidder was, in effect, doing what he had told his wife while courting her: writing about deep, even intimidating, goodness.
“I’m drawn to that,” he said. “I don’t know why the world is such a miserable place.”
AP. Guardian, 03/25/2026. Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies aged 80.
Rafaela Jinich. Atlantic, 03/26/2026: A Life of Paying Attention: Revisiting Tracy Kidder’s work for The Atlantic.
Tracy Kidder's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/kiddertracy
I hope the shared link works; discovered a number of Kidder works from the obits I wasn't aware of; the quoted excerpts don't cover everything in his career but I wanted to get in the touchstone links; his later works clearly affected many people & I wasn't aware of their effect or even their existence -- 153 comments which NYT won't keep up for long; hope I get a chance to read more of Kidder's books. PS: the NYT obit doesn't mention 1993's Old Friends, cited in the Guardian obit which allows me to add a touchstone in addition to my list of books to look out for.
150featherbear
Picked this up from X/Twitter; a link to CalTech's Feynmann Lectures on Physics, "(Designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape. Text, figures & equations can all be zoomed without degradation.)"
"Vol. I: Mainly mechanics, radiation, and heat
Vol. II: Mainly electromagnetism and matter
Vol. III: Quantum mechanics
-Feynman's Tips on Physics: Problem-solving supplement to Feynman lectures on physics
-Feynman's Messenger Lectures
-Lecture Recordings 1961‑64
-Lecture Photos 1961‑64
-Feynman's Notes
-Original Course Handouts 1961‑63
-Student handouts"
Richard Feynmann, Robert Leighton, Matthew Sands. Posted 3/26/2026: The Feynmann Lectures on Physics. "we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read, look at and listen to online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of the book The Feynman Lectures on Physics, its photos or tape recordings, for any purpose."
"Vol. I: Mainly mechanics, radiation, and heat
Vol. II: Mainly electromagnetism and matter
Vol. III: Quantum mechanics
-Feynman's Tips on Physics: Problem-solving supplement to Feynman lectures on physics
-Feynman's Messenger Lectures
-Lecture Recordings 1961‑64
-Lecture Photos 1961‑64
-Feynman's Notes
-Original Course Handouts 1961‑63
-Student handouts"
Richard Feynmann, Robert Leighton, Matthew Sands. Posted 3/26/2026: The Feynmann Lectures on Physics. "we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read, look at and listen to online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of the book The Feynman Lectures on Physics, its photos or tape recordings, for any purpose."
151featherbear
Robert Trivers, 1943-2026
Michael S. Rosenwald. NYT, 03/27/2026: Robert Trivers, Eccentric Scientist Who Probed Human Nature, Dies at 83. "A visionary evolutionary biologist, he drew comparisons to Charles Darwin with his theories on the genetic roots of seemingly detrimental behaviors like self-deception."
"Robert Trivers, a visionary, eccentric and volatile evolutionary biologist who explored the genetic reasons humans cooperate, compete and deceive each other, drawing comparisons to Charles Darwin in a career filled with intellectual highs and behavioral lows, died on March 12, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 83.
"Professor Trivers was a rebellious figure in academia who joined the Black Panthers, clashed with colleagues and spoke in support of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, from whom he accepted research money. He was often stoned and nearly always armed with a knife for self-defense.
"“Robert Trivers was unlike any other academic I have known,” David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, wrote in a remembrance of Professor Trivers for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “In another life, he might have been a hoodlum.”
"Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)
"In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.
"“I was an intellectual opportunist,” he wrote in “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” (2002). “The inability of biologists to think clearly on matters of social behavior and evolution for over a hundred years had left a series of important problems untackled.”
"His first paper, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism” (1971), tackled a puzzling question about evolution: Why do people help those they aren’t related to, even at a cost to themselves? Professor Trivers used game theory to show how the concept of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” is a kind of genetic bargain.
"Helping a nonrelative, he argued, is evolutionarily beneficial if there is a high probability that the roles will be reversed in the future. The caveat is that the system works only if cheaters are punished. Emotions like gratitude, sympathy, guilt, trust and moralistic outrage evolved as a behavioral detection system and policing tool.
"In “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection” (1972), Professor Trivers proposed a novel theory of mate selection, arguing that the gender that invests more energy in offspring tends to be choosier about picking partners. In humans, this is the female, owing to pregnancy, childbirth and nursing. (In sea horses, it’s the male, because the males are the ones who bear offspring.)
"His most counterintuitive paper during that time was “Parent-Offspring Conflict” (1974). For centuries, scientists had viewed the relationship between parents and their offspring as fundamentally harmonious. Professor Trivers saw it as more of a wrestling match between cooperation and conflict.
"The reason: Parents share 50 percent of their genes with every child, so they are genetically programmed to value all of their children equally. But children want more than they are entitled to, resulting in sibling rivalry and temper tantrums.
"Perhaps his most provocative intellectual bombshell came in 1976, when he laid out a theory of self-deception in the foreword to “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.
"Deceit, Professor Trivers argued, is fundamental to animal communication, so organisms naturally evolve to spot it. In humans, this evolutionary arms race leads to self-deception, or burying lies in the unconscious to keep them from being detected by others.
"“If I’m unaware of the fact that I’m lying to you,” Professor Trivers said, “those avenues of detection will be unavailable to you.”
"In 1977, Time magazine featured his research in a cover story with the headline “Why You Do What You Do.” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the work in 2007 when it awarded him the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, widely considered the Nobel Prize for biology.
“I don’t know of any comparable burst of creativity by another scientist,” Professor Haig said in an interview. “It’s a bit like Albert Einstein’s miracle year, when he brought out the theory of relativity in the beginning of quantum mechanics.”
"During this creative burst, Professor Trivers struggled with mental health issues and was hospitalized at least once for bipolar disorder. He applied for early tenure at Harvard, but the decision was postponed because of concerns about his mental health.
"At Harvard, he initially studied math and then switched to American history.
"During his junior year, he suffered the first of several mental breakdowns. After a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital, he considered studying psychology, sensing that “it might be a useful subject to know,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist” (2015). But he decided against it, convinced that the field was “not yet a science.”
"The many contretemps in Professor Trivers’s life included comments he made to Reuters in 2015 about Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, with whom he had corresponded and socialized, and who had helped fund his research.
"He called Mr. Epstein a person of integrity and minimized his crimes against teenage girls, saying that “by the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago.”
"Later in life, Professor Trivers reflected on his self-destructive tendencies.
"“Inside me there are two voices,” he wrote in Skeptic magazine. “One cries out, ‘Bob, you have made this mistake 630 times in the past and regretted every single one. Why not forgo it this time?’ Then comes a stronger voice, ‘No, Bob, this time is different,’ and there goes 631.”"
See also:
Steven Pinker. 03/25/2026: The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026).
Robert Trivers's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/triversrobert
Michael S. Rosenwald. NYT, 03/27/2026: Robert Trivers, Eccentric Scientist Who Probed Human Nature, Dies at 83. "A visionary evolutionary biologist, he drew comparisons to Charles Darwin with his theories on the genetic roots of seemingly detrimental behaviors like self-deception."
"Robert Trivers, a visionary, eccentric and volatile evolutionary biologist who explored the genetic reasons humans cooperate, compete and deceive each other, drawing comparisons to Charles Darwin in a career filled with intellectual highs and behavioral lows, died on March 12, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 83.
"Professor Trivers was a rebellious figure in academia who joined the Black Panthers, clashed with colleagues and spoke in support of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, from whom he accepted research money. He was often stoned and nearly always armed with a knife for self-defense.
"“Robert Trivers was unlike any other academic I have known,” David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, wrote in a remembrance of Professor Trivers for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “In another life, he might have been a hoodlum.”
"Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)
"In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.
"“I was an intellectual opportunist,” he wrote in “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” (2002). “The inability of biologists to think clearly on matters of social behavior and evolution for over a hundred years had left a series of important problems untackled.”
"His first paper, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism” (1971), tackled a puzzling question about evolution: Why do people help those they aren’t related to, even at a cost to themselves? Professor Trivers used game theory to show how the concept of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” is a kind of genetic bargain.
"Helping a nonrelative, he argued, is evolutionarily beneficial if there is a high probability that the roles will be reversed in the future. The caveat is that the system works only if cheaters are punished. Emotions like gratitude, sympathy, guilt, trust and moralistic outrage evolved as a behavioral detection system and policing tool.
"In “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection” (1972), Professor Trivers proposed a novel theory of mate selection, arguing that the gender that invests more energy in offspring tends to be choosier about picking partners. In humans, this is the female, owing to pregnancy, childbirth and nursing. (In sea horses, it’s the male, because the males are the ones who bear offspring.)
"His most counterintuitive paper during that time was “Parent-Offspring Conflict” (1974). For centuries, scientists had viewed the relationship between parents and their offspring as fundamentally harmonious. Professor Trivers saw it as more of a wrestling match between cooperation and conflict.
"The reason: Parents share 50 percent of their genes with every child, so they are genetically programmed to value all of their children equally. But children want more than they are entitled to, resulting in sibling rivalry and temper tantrums.
"Perhaps his most provocative intellectual bombshell came in 1976, when he laid out a theory of self-deception in the foreword to “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.
"Deceit, Professor Trivers argued, is fundamental to animal communication, so organisms naturally evolve to spot it. In humans, this evolutionary arms race leads to self-deception, or burying lies in the unconscious to keep them from being detected by others.
"“If I’m unaware of the fact that I’m lying to you,” Professor Trivers said, “those avenues of detection will be unavailable to you.”
"In 1977, Time magazine featured his research in a cover story with the headline “Why You Do What You Do.” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the work in 2007 when it awarded him the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, widely considered the Nobel Prize for biology.
“I don’t know of any comparable burst of creativity by another scientist,” Professor Haig said in an interview. “It’s a bit like Albert Einstein’s miracle year, when he brought out the theory of relativity in the beginning of quantum mechanics.”
"During this creative burst, Professor Trivers struggled with mental health issues and was hospitalized at least once for bipolar disorder. He applied for early tenure at Harvard, but the decision was postponed because of concerns about his mental health.
"At Harvard, he initially studied math and then switched to American history.
"During his junior year, he suffered the first of several mental breakdowns. After a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital, he considered studying psychology, sensing that “it might be a useful subject to know,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist” (2015). But he decided against it, convinced that the field was “not yet a science.”
"The many contretemps in Professor Trivers’s life included comments he made to Reuters in 2015 about Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender, with whom he had corresponded and socialized, and who had helped fund his research.
"He called Mr. Epstein a person of integrity and minimized his crimes against teenage girls, saying that “by the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago.”
"Later in life, Professor Trivers reflected on his self-destructive tendencies.
"“Inside me there are two voices,” he wrote in Skeptic magazine. “One cries out, ‘Bob, you have made this mistake 630 times in the past and regretted every single one. Why not forgo it this time?’ Then comes a stronger voice, ‘No, Bob, this time is different,’ and there goes 631.”"
See also:
Steven Pinker. 03/25/2026: The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026).
Robert Trivers's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/triversrobert
152featherbear
Coleman Barks, 1937-2026
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/27/2026: Coleman Barks, Who Popularized the Islamic Poet Rumi in the West, Dies at 88. "Although he did not speak a word of Persian, his interpretations of the 13th-century mystic’s work made Rumi a New Age icon for millions."
"One day in 1976, the poet Robert Bly handed his close friend Coleman Barks an old translation of several works by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian writer, encouraging him to render them in modern free verse.
"“Release the poems from their cages,” Mr. Bly said.
"Mr. Barks, though a poet himself, was an unlikely choice for this task: Tennessee born and bred, he did not know a word of Persian. He taught English at the University of Georgia and had begun to build a reputation as a Southern writer in the vein of James Dickey and Charles Wright.
"He set Rumi aside.
"But a year later, he had a dream. In it, a man sat cross-legged on a cliff, surrounded by a warm light. Not long after, Mr. Barks said, he met that same man — a Sufi mystic named Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen — at a gathering in Philadelphia.
"Mr. Barks took the encounter as a sign.
"Over the subsequent decades, he produced more than a dozen books of Rumi’s poetry, taking older Persian-English translations and reworking the language and meaning for a modern readership.
"Thanks in large part to Mr. Barks, who died on Feb. 23 at 88, Rumi is now one of the best-selling poets in America, some 750 years after his death. Mr. Barks’s renditions of his poems, in books like “The Essential Rumi” (1995), have sold more than a million copies.
"Quotes from Barks-as-Rumi appear on Valentine’s Day cards, throw pillows and inspirational posters. In 2015, the band Coldplay included a clip of Mr. Barks reading Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” on the song “Kaleidoscope,” off its album “A Head Full of Dreams.”
"Not everyone was enamored of Mr. Barks’s work. Some scholars of Islamic literature said he played too loosely with Rumi’s texts, excising references to Islam and the Quran and passing off a religious poet as more secular and humanistic than he really was.
"Mr. Barks conceded that his version of Rumi was not entirely faithful to the original. But his goal, he said, was to extract a certain sensibility from the poems that he hoped would resonate with readers — even if it didn’t communicate the full force of the work.
"“The attunement to Rumi isn’t as deep as I’d like, but maybe it’s a way of introducing Rumi to a wider audience, so it’s good and bad,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “Maybe some 17-year-old in the Midwest will latch on to it, and his life will be changed.”
"Mr. Barks published several books of his own poetry, starting with “The Juice” in 1972. In a review, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raved about his writing, saying it “startled through playfulness and leaps of the imagination.”
"He became an adept interpreter of Rumi onstage as well as in print. He would often speak with a musical accompaniment, the way Rumi was said to have done.
"Rumi — and Mr. Barks, as his interpreter — got a big boost after Sept. 11, 2001, when both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences saw his writing as an antidote to the Islamic extremism that drove the attacks on the World Trade Center.
"Rumi’s “branch of Islam, the Sufism part, is the cure for Talibanism,” Mr. Barks told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “It’s the exact opposite of fundamental zealousness. It’s the part that dances in the streets and embraces everyone. Its followers live in the moment.”"
Coleman Barks's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/barkscoleman
Clay Risen. NYT, 03/27/2026: Coleman Barks, Who Popularized the Islamic Poet Rumi in the West, Dies at 88. "Although he did not speak a word of Persian, his interpretations of the 13th-century mystic’s work made Rumi a New Age icon for millions."
"One day in 1976, the poet Robert Bly handed his close friend Coleman Barks an old translation of several works by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian writer, encouraging him to render them in modern free verse.
"“Release the poems from their cages,” Mr. Bly said.
"Mr. Barks, though a poet himself, was an unlikely choice for this task: Tennessee born and bred, he did not know a word of Persian. He taught English at the University of Georgia and had begun to build a reputation as a Southern writer in the vein of James Dickey and Charles Wright.
"He set Rumi aside.
"But a year later, he had a dream. In it, a man sat cross-legged on a cliff, surrounded by a warm light. Not long after, Mr. Barks said, he met that same man — a Sufi mystic named Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen — at a gathering in Philadelphia.
"Mr. Barks took the encounter as a sign.
"Over the subsequent decades, he produced more than a dozen books of Rumi’s poetry, taking older Persian-English translations and reworking the language and meaning for a modern readership.
"Thanks in large part to Mr. Barks, who died on Feb. 23 at 88, Rumi is now one of the best-selling poets in America, some 750 years after his death. Mr. Barks’s renditions of his poems, in books like “The Essential Rumi” (1995), have sold more than a million copies.
"Quotes from Barks-as-Rumi appear on Valentine’s Day cards, throw pillows and inspirational posters. In 2015, the band Coldplay included a clip of Mr. Barks reading Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” on the song “Kaleidoscope,” off its album “A Head Full of Dreams.”
"Not everyone was enamored of Mr. Barks’s work. Some scholars of Islamic literature said he played too loosely with Rumi’s texts, excising references to Islam and the Quran and passing off a religious poet as more secular and humanistic than he really was.
"Mr. Barks conceded that his version of Rumi was not entirely faithful to the original. But his goal, he said, was to extract a certain sensibility from the poems that he hoped would resonate with readers — even if it didn’t communicate the full force of the work.
"“The attunement to Rumi isn’t as deep as I’d like, but maybe it’s a way of introducing Rumi to a wider audience, so it’s good and bad,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “Maybe some 17-year-old in the Midwest will latch on to it, and his life will be changed.”
"Mr. Barks published several books of his own poetry, starting with “The Juice” in 1972. In a review, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raved about his writing, saying it “startled through playfulness and leaps of the imagination.”
"He became an adept interpreter of Rumi onstage as well as in print. He would often speak with a musical accompaniment, the way Rumi was said to have done.
"Rumi — and Mr. Barks, as his interpreter — got a big boost after Sept. 11, 2001, when both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences saw his writing as an antidote to the Islamic extremism that drove the attacks on the World Trade Center.
"Rumi’s “branch of Islam, the Sufism part, is the cure for Talibanism,” Mr. Barks told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “It’s the exact opposite of fundamental zealousness. It’s the part that dances in the streets and embraces everyone. Its followers live in the moment.”"
Coleman Barks's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/barkscoleman
153featherbear
Alexander Kluge, 1932-2026
A.J. Goldmann. NYT, 03/27/2026: Alexander Kluge, 94, Revolutionary Filmmaker in Postwar Germany, Dies. "As a director, theorist and prolific author, he was one of his country’s towering artists and public intellectuals."
"Alexander Kluge, a movie director who became a pre-eminent figure in the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s and ’70s and one of his country’s towering public intellectuals as an author, died on Wednesday in Munich, where he lived. He was 94.
"In a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed films, books, television productions and art installations, Mr. Kluge attempted to distill the entire intellectual, literary and artistic history of modern Germany, including the trauma and often-suppressed guilt of the postwar period.
"In his filmic use of montage, he incorporated flurries of photographs, archival footage, paintings, drawings and intertitles. His soundtracks might feature voice-overs, ambient sounds, air-raid sirens and classical or contemporary music, any of which may or may not relate to the scene.
"With his nontraditional approach, he tried to reward the viewer’s imagination, the film scholar Michelle Langford wrote in the publication Senses of Cinema in 2003.
"“Rather than putting these fragments together with a final ‘ideal meaning’ in mind, Kluge places the emphasis on the role of the spectator in the production of meaning,” Ms. Langford observed. “His theory of montage is interested in involving the spectator in the production of meaning, effectively making them ‘co-producers’ of the film.”
"Working into his 90s, Mr. Kluge rarely stood still. His vast output included films that ranged in duration from less than one minute to nine-and-a-half hours; more than 1,700 hours of television programs; and thousands of pages of fiction, nonfiction and theoretical writings.
"If not overtly commercial, his films stirred decades of discussion in academic journals, art publications and other erudite outlets. The author and essayist Susan Sontag once wrote that Mr. Kluge exemplified “what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist.”
"Outside of Germany, Mr. Kluge was less known than New German Cinema compatriots like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Nevertheless, he was hailed for making some of the defining films of that movement, which sought to break from the bourgeois conformity of post-World War II German cinema with works that were far more thematically daring politically, socially and sexually.
"In 1962, Mr. Kluge was among the 26 young filmmakers who signed “The Oberhausen Manifesto,” often seen as the founding charter of New German Cinema. It called for a new direction for German filmmaking, one that would be more creatively independent and free of commercial constraints.
"The document took its title from a city that is home to one of the world’s oldest and leading short-film festivals. The Oberhausen Group, as the signatories came to be known, bluntly asserted, “Papa’s cinema is dead.”
"One of Mr. Kluge’s key contributions to that effort was his 1966 feature film debut, “Yesterday Girl,” which starred his sister, Alexandra Kluge, as a Jewish woman from communist East Germany trying to start a new life in the capitalist West.
"The film was sexually frank and employed an audacious montage sequence to critique postwar German society. It won the top directing prize from the Venice Film Festival.
"Mr. Kluge’s 1968 film, “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed,” an allegorical circus-set drama starring Hannelore Hoger, a frequent actress in his movies, took home the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.
"Both films earned the director comparisons to the French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard for their bold use of montage and political engagement. But where Mr. Godard wielded wit and a “sense of cinematic tradition” in films like “Breathless” and “Band of Outsiders,” the film historian David Thomson wrote, Mr. Kluge’s movies were far more “pondering” works of philosophical seriousness, concerned mostly with “the past and Germany’s inexplicable escape from it.”
"Over the next four decades, Mr. Kluge made dozens of essay-films, often shot on video. Many were for a television production company he founded in the late 1980s and included interviews with artists and thinkers, among them Mr. Godard and the German playwright and director Heiner Müller.
"One of Mr. Kluge’s essay-films, “News From Ideological Antiquity” (2008), took nine-and-a-half-hours to examine the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s failed effort in the late 1920s to make a movie based on Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” Mr. Kluge referred to his own film as a “poetic documentary.”
"Mr. Kluge had a particularly long collaboration with the German sociologist philosopher Oskar Negt, whom he met in 1969. They collaborated on three books about political and social subjects, including Marx’s historical materialism and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the bourgeois public square. They also conducted about 60 television interviews together.
"As a teenager during World War II, Alexander witnessed the near-total destruction of his hometown by U.S. bombers. Three decades later, he wrote an account of the attack, “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945,” which became one of his best-known pieces of writing. The German man of letters Hans Magnus Enzensberger described it as a “kind of film made of words and still photographs.”
"Mr. Kluge’s parents divorced in 1943, an event he recalled in an interview as “more shattering and devastating than the fact of our parental home burning down during the bombing raid.”
"After the war, he and his mother lived in Berlin; his father and younger sister, Alexandra, remained in Halberstadt, which became part of East Germany.
"Mr. Kluge studied law, modern history and church music at Marburg University, where he also received a law degree in 1956. He then worked for a law practice and at Goethe University in Frankfurt but was increasingly drawn to literature and film.
"Mr. Kluge was legal counsel for the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, with which the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno was long affiliated. Dr. Adorno, who became an intellectual mentor, secured him an internship with the filmmaker Fritz Lang, who was making the adventure movie “The Tiger of Eschnapur” in Berlin in 1959.
"The experience was eye-opening for the young Mr. Kluge, as he witnessed the renowned Lang being undermined by the decisions of a producer. It left Mr. Kluge disillusioned with the studio system and convinced that independent cinema was his only path forward.
"A year later, Mr. Kluge made his first short film, “Brutality in Stone,” a provocative 12-minute-long documentary, co-directed by Peter Schamoni, that sought to address a seeming public amnesia in Germany about the Nazi period.
"The film mixed archival and new footage of Nazi architecture in Nuremberg and words by Hitler and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Its use of jarring montage in the service of rendering social critique anticipated much of Mr. Kluge’s subsequent work.
"Mr. Kluge’s first collection of short stories, “Case Histories” (also published as “Attendance List For a Funeral,” 1962), brought him accolades for its empathetic depiction of characters trying to navigate a country defeated in war. His experimental novel “The Battle,” which appeared two years later and focused on the Battle of Stalingrad as seen through German eyes, won the Bavarian State Prize for Literature.
"In his short stories and novels, Mr. Kluge often included documentary material like photos, maps and diagrams, which could complicate narratives that were neither entirely factual nor, strictly speaking, fictional. (Perhaps the best-known writer to be influenced by Mr. Kluge’s vivid use of photographs was the novelist W.G. Sebald, whose work is similarly haunted by German postwar trauma and memory.)
"Though his career ranged widely, Mr. Kluge always considered himself foremost an author.
"“This is because books have patience and can wait, since the word is the only repository of human experience that is independent of time,” he explained in his acceptance speech on receiving the Heinrich Böll Prize in 1993.
"“Books are a generous medium, and I still grieve when I think of the library burning in Alexandria,” he continued. “I feel in myself a spontaneous desire to rewrite the books that perished then.”"
Alexander Kluge's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/klugealexander
A.J. Goldmann. NYT, 03/27/2026: Alexander Kluge, 94, Revolutionary Filmmaker in Postwar Germany, Dies. "As a director, theorist and prolific author, he was one of his country’s towering artists and public intellectuals."
"Alexander Kluge, a movie director who became a pre-eminent figure in the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s and ’70s and one of his country’s towering public intellectuals as an author, died on Wednesday in Munich, where he lived. He was 94.
"In a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed films, books, television productions and art installations, Mr. Kluge attempted to distill the entire intellectual, literary and artistic history of modern Germany, including the trauma and often-suppressed guilt of the postwar period.
"In his filmic use of montage, he incorporated flurries of photographs, archival footage, paintings, drawings and intertitles. His soundtracks might feature voice-overs, ambient sounds, air-raid sirens and classical or contemporary music, any of which may or may not relate to the scene.
"With his nontraditional approach, he tried to reward the viewer’s imagination, the film scholar Michelle Langford wrote in the publication Senses of Cinema in 2003.
"“Rather than putting these fragments together with a final ‘ideal meaning’ in mind, Kluge places the emphasis on the role of the spectator in the production of meaning,” Ms. Langford observed. “His theory of montage is interested in involving the spectator in the production of meaning, effectively making them ‘co-producers’ of the film.”
"Working into his 90s, Mr. Kluge rarely stood still. His vast output included films that ranged in duration from less than one minute to nine-and-a-half hours; more than 1,700 hours of television programs; and thousands of pages of fiction, nonfiction and theoretical writings.
"If not overtly commercial, his films stirred decades of discussion in academic journals, art publications and other erudite outlets. The author and essayist Susan Sontag once wrote that Mr. Kluge exemplified “what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist.”
"Outside of Germany, Mr. Kluge was less known than New German Cinema compatriots like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Nevertheless, he was hailed for making some of the defining films of that movement, which sought to break from the bourgeois conformity of post-World War II German cinema with works that were far more thematically daring politically, socially and sexually.
"In 1962, Mr. Kluge was among the 26 young filmmakers who signed “The Oberhausen Manifesto,” often seen as the founding charter of New German Cinema. It called for a new direction for German filmmaking, one that would be more creatively independent and free of commercial constraints.
"The document took its title from a city that is home to one of the world’s oldest and leading short-film festivals. The Oberhausen Group, as the signatories came to be known, bluntly asserted, “Papa’s cinema is dead.”
"One of Mr. Kluge’s key contributions to that effort was his 1966 feature film debut, “Yesterday Girl,” which starred his sister, Alexandra Kluge, as a Jewish woman from communist East Germany trying to start a new life in the capitalist West.
"The film was sexually frank and employed an audacious montage sequence to critique postwar German society. It won the top directing prize from the Venice Film Festival.
"Mr. Kluge’s 1968 film, “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed,” an allegorical circus-set drama starring Hannelore Hoger, a frequent actress in his movies, took home the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.
"Both films earned the director comparisons to the French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard for their bold use of montage and political engagement. But where Mr. Godard wielded wit and a “sense of cinematic tradition” in films like “Breathless” and “Band of Outsiders,” the film historian David Thomson wrote, Mr. Kluge’s movies were far more “pondering” works of philosophical seriousness, concerned mostly with “the past and Germany’s inexplicable escape from it.”
"Over the next four decades, Mr. Kluge made dozens of essay-films, often shot on video. Many were for a television production company he founded in the late 1980s and included interviews with artists and thinkers, among them Mr. Godard and the German playwright and director Heiner Müller.
"One of Mr. Kluge’s essay-films, “News From Ideological Antiquity” (2008), took nine-and-a-half-hours to examine the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s failed effort in the late 1920s to make a movie based on Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” Mr. Kluge referred to his own film as a “poetic documentary.”
"Mr. Kluge had a particularly long collaboration with the German sociologist philosopher Oskar Negt, whom he met in 1969. They collaborated on three books about political and social subjects, including Marx’s historical materialism and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the bourgeois public square. They also conducted about 60 television interviews together.
"As a teenager during World War II, Alexander witnessed the near-total destruction of his hometown by U.S. bombers. Three decades later, he wrote an account of the attack, “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945,” which became one of his best-known pieces of writing. The German man of letters Hans Magnus Enzensberger described it as a “kind of film made of words and still photographs.”
"Mr. Kluge’s parents divorced in 1943, an event he recalled in an interview as “more shattering and devastating than the fact of our parental home burning down during the bombing raid.”
"After the war, he and his mother lived in Berlin; his father and younger sister, Alexandra, remained in Halberstadt, which became part of East Germany.
"Mr. Kluge studied law, modern history and church music at Marburg University, where he also received a law degree in 1956. He then worked for a law practice and at Goethe University in Frankfurt but was increasingly drawn to literature and film.
"Mr. Kluge was legal counsel for the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, with which the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno was long affiliated. Dr. Adorno, who became an intellectual mentor, secured him an internship with the filmmaker Fritz Lang, who was making the adventure movie “The Tiger of Eschnapur” in Berlin in 1959.
"The experience was eye-opening for the young Mr. Kluge, as he witnessed the renowned Lang being undermined by the decisions of a producer. It left Mr. Kluge disillusioned with the studio system and convinced that independent cinema was his only path forward.
"A year later, Mr. Kluge made his first short film, “Brutality in Stone,” a provocative 12-minute-long documentary, co-directed by Peter Schamoni, that sought to address a seeming public amnesia in Germany about the Nazi period.
"The film mixed archival and new footage of Nazi architecture in Nuremberg and words by Hitler and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Its use of jarring montage in the service of rendering social critique anticipated much of Mr. Kluge’s subsequent work.
"Mr. Kluge’s first collection of short stories, “Case Histories” (also published as “Attendance List For a Funeral,” 1962), brought him accolades for its empathetic depiction of characters trying to navigate a country defeated in war. His experimental novel “The Battle,” which appeared two years later and focused on the Battle of Stalingrad as seen through German eyes, won the Bavarian State Prize for Literature.
"In his short stories and novels, Mr. Kluge often included documentary material like photos, maps and diagrams, which could complicate narratives that were neither entirely factual nor, strictly speaking, fictional. (Perhaps the best-known writer to be influenced by Mr. Kluge’s vivid use of photographs was the novelist W.G. Sebald, whose work is similarly haunted by German postwar trauma and memory.)
"Though his career ranged widely, Mr. Kluge always considered himself foremost an author.
"“This is because books have patience and can wait, since the word is the only repository of human experience that is independent of time,” he explained in his acceptance speech on receiving the Heinrich Böll Prize in 1993.
"“Books are a generous medium, and I still grieve when I think of the library burning in Alexandria,” he continued. “I feel in myself a spontaneous desire to rewrite the books that perished then.”"
Alexander Kluge's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/klugealexander
154featherbear
Eric Overmyer, 1951-2026
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 02/29/2026: Eric Overmyer, Who Wrote for Modern Television Classics, Dies at 74. "Trained as a playwright, he got his first TV writing job on “St. Elsewhere,” then worked on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Bosch.”"
"Eric Overmyer, a playwright known for his linguistic gymnastics who shifted largely to working in television in the mid-1980s and contributed scripts to prestigious, gritty series like “St. Elsewhere,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Bosch,” died on March 16 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 74.
"“His scripts have a remarkable ability to thrill, enlighten and bemuse,” Tom Fontana, a writer and producer of the NBC medical drama “St. Elsewhere,” who recruited Mr. Overmyer to write for the show, said in an online tribute. They had known each other as young playwrights.
"During the filming of an episode of “Homicide” written by Willie Reale, Mr. Overmyer, then a supervising producer of the Baltimore-set NBC police procedural, added a line to a scene when two detectives see a murder victim’s sliced-off nose being grilled on a backyard barbecue.
""“As we contemplated the scene, Eric started giggling,” said David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote the book “Homicide” was based on, created “The Wire,” and developed “Treme” with Mr. Overmyer.
"Mr. Overmyer first proposed that one detective say to the other, “Forget it, Falsone, it’s Highlandtown,” noting the Baltimore neighborhood while also paying homage to the oft-quoted final line of the 1974 detective film “Chinatown.” But, Mr. Simon recalled in a phone interview, Mr. Overmyer then thought it was funnier to say, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Highlandtown,” much closer to the original “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
"When Mr. Simon joined the writing staff of “Homicide” in its fourth season, Mr. Overmyer was one of his supervisors. He watched episodes that Mr. Overmyer had written, and admired them, and also studied Mr. Overmyer’s scripts as he handed them in. The first drafts, which focused on structure, initially took him aback — “I didn’t see any Eric Overmyer voodoo” — then built on them dramatically in subsequent drafts, as if to say, “I’m going to write the hell out of the characters and dialogue.”
"Mr. Overmyer, who was a writer and executive producer for the NBC series “Law & Order” from 2001 to 2005, became a writer and consulting producer the following year on “The Wire,” in the fourth season of Mr. Simon’s acclaimed HBO crime drama series about dysfunctional institutions in Baltimore.
"The fourth season’s thematic focus was on the failure of the inner-city school system, even as it continued with the series’s overarching story lines involving the police, politicians and gang bangers.
"Then, on “Treme,” about the resurrection of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which ran on HBO from 2010 to 2013, Mr. Overmyer and Mr. Simon — both lovers of the life and culture of New Orleans — were the showrunners, in charge of all aspects of running a series. He shared in two Emmy nominations for “Treme,” and a Peabody Award in 2011.
"By then, the best-selling mystery novelist Michael Connelly was planning to turn Harry Bosch, the Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective featured in many of his books, into the central character of a TV series. Mr. Connelly and his producing partner, Henrik Bastin, hired Mr. Overmyer to develop “Bosch” and then to be the showrunner of the series, which starred Titus Welliver. “Bosch” ran on Amazon Prime from 2014 to 2021.
"“When we worked on the pilot,” Mr. Connelly said in an interview, “there were no other writers, and he improved things every time. As we moved to the series, with other writers, everything went through him, and I saw that he improved everything he touched. That included me. I’m the first to say I needed heavy rewriting.”
"At Reed College, in Portland, Ore., Mr. Overmyer was a theater arts major who directed, acted and wrote his first plays. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1973, he performed and directed in Portland theaters, where he won a local theater prize called the Drammy Award for his supporting role in Sam Shepard’s “The Tooth of Crime,” a play with music about a battle between rock stars.
"He left for New York in 1979 to study playwriting at Brooklyn College but did not get a postgraduate degree. In 1980, he began working as the business manager and then literary manager at the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons.
"“On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” the best known of his 12 plays and adaptations, was a time-traveling comedy about three Victorian-era female adventurers searching for the last uncharted territory on Earth. It has been performed for decades at regional theaters around the country.
"Mel Gussow, in his New York Times review of the play’s 1985 premiere at Baltimore Center Stage, described Mr. Overmyer’s writing as a cross between “the wordplay of S.J. Perelman” and the “world- in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill.”
"That year, at Mr. Fontana’s urging, Mr. Overmyer started working on “St. Elsewhere,” about the doctors, nurses and patients at a city hospital in Boston.
"The experience launched his television career, where his writing credits included “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” a dramedy on NBC and then Lifetime that starred Blair Brown; a 1998 ABC-TV remake of the 1954 Hitchcock thriller “Rear Window,” starring Christopher Reeve and Daryl Hannah; “Homicide: The Movie,” a 2000 NBC-TV movie follow-up to the series, written with Mr. Fontana and James Yoshimura; and “Saints & Strangers,” a 2015 National Geographic channel two-part film about the Pilgrims’s trip to America.
""During the filming of “Treme,” Mr. Simon recalled, he and Mr. Overmyer were filming a funeral scene in a cemetery in New Orleans. During a half-hour delay caused by clouds that required a lighting change, craft services brought out food.
"“We’re sampling the roast beef po’ boys and listening to the Treme Brass Band,” Mr. Simon said, “and Eric turns to me and says, ‘This is the most fun we’ll ever have on television,’ and to this day, he’s been proven right.”"
Eric Overmyer's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/overmyereric
Richard Sandomir. NYT, 02/29/2026: Eric Overmyer, Who Wrote for Modern Television Classics, Dies at 74. "Trained as a playwright, he got his first TV writing job on “St. Elsewhere,” then worked on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Bosch.”"
"Eric Overmyer, a playwright known for his linguistic gymnastics who shifted largely to working in television in the mid-1980s and contributed scripts to prestigious, gritty series like “St. Elsewhere,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Bosch,” died on March 16 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 74.
"“His scripts have a remarkable ability to thrill, enlighten and bemuse,” Tom Fontana, a writer and producer of the NBC medical drama “St. Elsewhere,” who recruited Mr. Overmyer to write for the show, said in an online tribute. They had known each other as young playwrights.
"During the filming of an episode of “Homicide” written by Willie Reale, Mr. Overmyer, then a supervising producer of the Baltimore-set NBC police procedural, added a line to a scene when two detectives see a murder victim’s sliced-off nose being grilled on a backyard barbecue.
""“As we contemplated the scene, Eric started giggling,” said David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote the book “Homicide” was based on, created “The Wire,” and developed “Treme” with Mr. Overmyer.
"Mr. Overmyer first proposed that one detective say to the other, “Forget it, Falsone, it’s Highlandtown,” noting the Baltimore neighborhood while also paying homage to the oft-quoted final line of the 1974 detective film “Chinatown.” But, Mr. Simon recalled in a phone interview, Mr. Overmyer then thought it was funnier to say, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Highlandtown,” much closer to the original “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
"When Mr. Simon joined the writing staff of “Homicide” in its fourth season, Mr. Overmyer was one of his supervisors. He watched episodes that Mr. Overmyer had written, and admired them, and also studied Mr. Overmyer’s scripts as he handed them in. The first drafts, which focused on structure, initially took him aback — “I didn’t see any Eric Overmyer voodoo” — then built on them dramatically in subsequent drafts, as if to say, “I’m going to write the hell out of the characters and dialogue.”
"Mr. Overmyer, who was a writer and executive producer for the NBC series “Law & Order” from 2001 to 2005, became a writer and consulting producer the following year on “The Wire,” in the fourth season of Mr. Simon’s acclaimed HBO crime drama series about dysfunctional institutions in Baltimore.
"The fourth season’s thematic focus was on the failure of the inner-city school system, even as it continued with the series’s overarching story lines involving the police, politicians and gang bangers.
"Then, on “Treme,” about the resurrection of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which ran on HBO from 2010 to 2013, Mr. Overmyer and Mr. Simon — both lovers of the life and culture of New Orleans — were the showrunners, in charge of all aspects of running a series. He shared in two Emmy nominations for “Treme,” and a Peabody Award in 2011.
"By then, the best-selling mystery novelist Michael Connelly was planning to turn Harry Bosch, the Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective featured in many of his books, into the central character of a TV series. Mr. Connelly and his producing partner, Henrik Bastin, hired Mr. Overmyer to develop “Bosch” and then to be the showrunner of the series, which starred Titus Welliver. “Bosch” ran on Amazon Prime from 2014 to 2021.
"“When we worked on the pilot,” Mr. Connelly said in an interview, “there were no other writers, and he improved things every time. As we moved to the series, with other writers, everything went through him, and I saw that he improved everything he touched. That included me. I’m the first to say I needed heavy rewriting.”
"At Reed College, in Portland, Ore., Mr. Overmyer was a theater arts major who directed, acted and wrote his first plays. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1973, he performed and directed in Portland theaters, where he won a local theater prize called the Drammy Award for his supporting role in Sam Shepard’s “The Tooth of Crime,” a play with music about a battle between rock stars.
"He left for New York in 1979 to study playwriting at Brooklyn College but did not get a postgraduate degree. In 1980, he began working as the business manager and then literary manager at the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons.
"“On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” the best known of his 12 plays and adaptations, was a time-traveling comedy about three Victorian-era female adventurers searching for the last uncharted territory on Earth. It has been performed for decades at regional theaters around the country.
"Mel Gussow, in his New York Times review of the play’s 1985 premiere at Baltimore Center Stage, described Mr. Overmyer’s writing as a cross between “the wordplay of S.J. Perelman” and the “world- in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill.”
"That year, at Mr. Fontana’s urging, Mr. Overmyer started working on “St. Elsewhere,” about the doctors, nurses and patients at a city hospital in Boston.
"The experience launched his television career, where his writing credits included “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” a dramedy on NBC and then Lifetime that starred Blair Brown; a 1998 ABC-TV remake of the 1954 Hitchcock thriller “Rear Window,” starring Christopher Reeve and Daryl Hannah; “Homicide: The Movie,” a 2000 NBC-TV movie follow-up to the series, written with Mr. Fontana and James Yoshimura; and “Saints & Strangers,” a 2015 National Geographic channel two-part film about the Pilgrims’s trip to America.
""During the filming of “Treme,” Mr. Simon recalled, he and Mr. Overmyer were filming a funeral scene in a cemetery in New Orleans. During a half-hour delay caused by clouds that required a lighting change, craft services brought out food.
"“We’re sampling the roast beef po’ boys and listening to the Treme Brass Band,” Mr. Simon said, “and Eric turns to me and says, ‘This is the most fun we’ll ever have on television,’ and to this day, he’s been proven right.”"
Eric Overmyer's LT page: https://www.librarything.com/author/overmyereric
156featherbear
Mar 22-31 updates
Aeon Mar 30: ADHD as a form of hypercuriosity -- Mar 23: African philosophy >111 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 31: Kobo Abe's The Traitor -- Mar 30: American Han by Lisa See -- Mar 29: governance & ecology in Chinese visual culture -- Mar 28: Jackson Alone: novel about a mixed race Japanese-African man -- Mar 26: Indian family life novel -- Mar 25: Indian diaspora in the British Empire -- Mar 24: history of Japan in objects -- Mar 22: “Railsong” by Rahul Bhattacharya >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 30: don't eat meat book; books (& a notable film) on revolutionaries -- Mar 26: traditional women; Tracy Kidder's Atlantic articles -- Mar 23: Nicholas Lemann memoir >114 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Mar 31: lost genius of liberalism; end of art? -- Mar 30: Melvyn Bragg's Oxford memoir -- Mar 27: Will Self reviews novels by George Saunders, Seán Farrell, & Friedrich Torberg -- Mar 24: Arctic Circle hotspot -- Mar 22: Whole Life Novels aka WLNs >147 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 31: best 2026 bios nominated by NBCC --Mar 29: ChatGPT recommends best AI books -- Mar 27: historical fiction set in South Africa -- Mar 25: overthinking >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 31: Brandy memoir; Tenessee library director fired; International Booker Prize finalists; Roger Casement bio; Ben Lerner's Transcription -- Mar 30: secrets of Stephen King; Hungarian epic -- Mar 29: AI terrorizing publishing; serve, smile, procreate -- Mar 28: interview of Woody Brown, an autistic author -- Mar 27: No Wave & the women who shaped it; Patrick Gale's Love Lane -- Mar 26: silence; Muskism; adultery novel -- Mar 25: Graham Greene & Kim Philby; Rebecca Solnit interview; Black Bag: campus comedy -- Mar 24: new Alan Bennett memoir installment -- Mar 23: Ibram X Kendi interview; hacking & ransomware menace; Minor Black Figures >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 31: translation politics; 2 collections of difficult poetry -- Mar 25: 2 books on nutrition: waffles vs tiny gardens -- Mar 22: Fausta Cialente’s ‘A Very Cold Winter’ >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 31: excerpt from New York pickle book -- Mar 25: Flowers excerpt; indigenous life; excerpt from Insatiable Machine -- Mar 24: UK Dickens TV series to encourage reading; Nazis in America excerpt -- Mar 23: Mieko Kawakami in conversation >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 30: Ben Lerner's Transcription; The Meaning of Your Life -- Mar 25: Louise Erdrich recommends novels about parentless children; Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 23: The Mets & class struggle -- Mar 22: plagiarism >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 31: International Booker Prize; Trojan War reimagined; murder of spurned lover (novel) -- Mar 30: Witch's Magic novel; new Samuel Pepys bio; Arsenio Hall memoir; Woody Brown, autistic author -- Mar 29: Ben Lerner's Transcription -- Mar 28: pronouncing Henry David Thoreau's last name; final novel in Tana French's Cal Hooper trilogy -- Mar 27: belated obit for Gertrude Chandler Warren (The Boxcar Children) -- Mar 26: National Book Critics Circle winners -- Mar 25: A.O. Scott on Wallace Stevens's Of Mere Being & what happens after we die; capitalism; flowers; baseball -- May 24: 2 books on male friendship (& loneliness); Marge Garber book on literature vs Joe McCarthy; power of the book review pre-algorithms; space exploration -- Mar 23: lesbian sexy summer; rediscovering Nancy Lemann, a profile; Darkology -- Mar 22: Jews & the toy industry; Antigone >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 31: Amy Jo Burns interview; review of Inamorata by Ava Reid -- Mar 30: reading for Women's History Month; a poor kind of heroism -- Mar 27: excerpt from Ed Simon's book on The Singularity; excerpt from Techno-Negative book; interview w/John Sayles -- Mar 26: Howard Bryant's book on Jackie Robinson & Paul Robeson; PRoB staff on notable articles for week 4 of March -- Mar 25: writing tips from Marcus Rediker; Ren Cedar Fuller interview; Chiwan Choi on his poems -- Mar 24: Kafka's The Trial; interview of Frank Lehner regarding his new poems -- Mar 23: excerpt from Cristina Rivera Garza's novel Autobiography of Cotton; Angela Flournoy interview >112 featherbear:
Quillette Mar 25: Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers >132 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
March 08-14 updates >133 featherbear:
March 15-21 updates >146 featherbear:
Websites added this (long) week:
Countercraft >160 featherbear:
Cultured >163 featherbear:
Feynmann Lectures in Physics >150 featherbear:
Granta (originally posted Mar 12) >162 featherbear:
Hedgehog Review >157 featherbear:
Jewish Review of Books (spring 2026) >155 featherbear:
The Nation >158 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >159 featherbear:
Woman of Letters (originally post Mar 17) >161 featherbear:
Yale Review (originally posted Mar 16) >148 featherbear:
Aeon Mar 30: ADHD as a form of hypercuriosity -- Mar 23: African philosophy >111 featherbear:
Asian Review of Books Mar 31: Kobo Abe's The Traitor -- Mar 30: American Han by Lisa See -- Mar 29: governance & ecology in Chinese visual culture -- Mar 28: Jackson Alone: novel about a mixed race Japanese-African man -- Mar 26: Indian family life novel -- Mar 25: Indian diaspora in the British Empire -- Mar 24: history of Japan in objects -- Mar 22: “Railsong” by Rahul Bhattacharya >108 featherbear:
Atlantic Mar 30: don't eat meat book; books (& a notable film) on revolutionaries -- Mar 26: traditional women; Tracy Kidder's Atlantic articles -- Mar 23: Nicholas Lemann memoir >114 featherbear:
The Critic (UK) Mar 31: lost genius of liberalism; end of art? -- Mar 30: Melvyn Bragg's Oxford memoir -- Mar 27: Will Self reviews novels by George Saunders, Seán Farrell, & Friedrich Torberg -- Mar 24: Arctic Circle hotspot -- Mar 22: Whole Life Novels aka WLNs >147 featherbear:
fivebooks.com Mar 31: best 2026 bios nominated by NBCC --Mar 29: ChatGPT recommends best AI books -- Mar 27: historical fiction set in South Africa -- Mar 25: overthinking >115 featherbear:
Guardian Mar 31: Brandy memoir; Tenessee library director fired; International Booker Prize finalists; Roger Casement bio; Ben Lerner's Transcription -- Mar 30: secrets of Stephen King; Hungarian epic -- Mar 29: AI terrorizing publishing; serve, smile, procreate -- Mar 28: interview of Woody Brown, an autistic author -- Mar 27: No Wave & the women who shaped it; Patrick Gale's Love Lane -- Mar 26: silence; Muskism; adultery novel -- Mar 25: Graham Greene & Kim Philby; Rebecca Solnit interview; Black Bag: campus comedy -- Mar 24: new Alan Bennett memoir installment -- Mar 23: Ibram X Kendi interview; hacking & ransomware menace; Minor Black Figures >107 featherbear:
LARB Mar 31: translation politics; 2 collections of difficult poetry -- Mar 25: 2 books on nutrition: waffles vs tiny gardens -- Mar 22: Fausta Cialente’s ‘A Very Cold Winter’ >110 featherbear:
LitHub Mar 31: excerpt from New York pickle book -- Mar 25: Flowers excerpt; indigenous life; excerpt from Insatiable Machine -- Mar 24: UK Dickens TV series to encourage reading; Nazis in America excerpt -- Mar 23: Mieko Kawakami in conversation >120 featherbear:
New Yorker Mar 30: Ben Lerner's Transcription; The Meaning of Your Life -- Mar 25: Louise Erdrich recommends novels about parentless children; Liza Minelli memoir -- Mar 23: The Mets & class struggle -- Mar 22: plagiarism >117 featherbear:
NYT Mar 31: International Booker Prize; Trojan War reimagined; murder of spurned lover (novel) -- Mar 30: Witch's Magic novel; new Samuel Pepys bio; Arsenio Hall memoir; Woody Brown, autistic author -- Mar 29: Ben Lerner's Transcription -- Mar 28: pronouncing Henry David Thoreau's last name; final novel in Tana French's Cal Hooper trilogy -- Mar 27: belated obit for Gertrude Chandler Warren (The Boxcar Children) -- Mar 26: National Book Critics Circle winners -- Mar 25: A.O. Scott on Wallace Stevens's Of Mere Being & what happens after we die; capitalism; flowers; baseball -- May 24: 2 books on male friendship (& loneliness); Marge Garber book on literature vs Joe McCarthy; power of the book review pre-algorithms; space exploration -- Mar 23: lesbian sexy summer; rediscovering Nancy Lemann, a profile; Darkology -- Mar 22: Jews & the toy industry; Antigone >109 featherbear:
PRoB Mar 31: Amy Jo Burns interview; review of Inamorata by Ava Reid -- Mar 30: reading for Women's History Month; a poor kind of heroism -- Mar 27: excerpt from Ed Simon's book on The Singularity; excerpt from Techno-Negative book; interview w/John Sayles -- Mar 26: Howard Bryant's book on Jackie Robinson & Paul Robeson; PRoB staff on notable articles for week 4 of March -- Mar 25: writing tips from Marcus Rediker; Ren Cedar Fuller interview; Chiwan Choi on his poems -- Mar 24: Kafka's The Trial; interview of Frank Lehner regarding his new poems -- Mar 23: excerpt from Cristina Rivera Garza's novel Autobiography of Cotton; Angela Flournoy interview >112 featherbear:
Quillette Mar 25: Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers >132 featherbear:
March Index >105 featherbear:
February Index >46 featherbear:
January Index >2 featherbear:
March 01-07 updates >125 featherbear:
March 08-14 updates >133 featherbear:
March 15-21 updates >146 featherbear:
Websites added this (long) week:
Countercraft >160 featherbear:
Cultured >163 featherbear:
Feynmann Lectures in Physics >150 featherbear:
Granta (originally posted Mar 12) >162 featherbear:
Hedgehog Review >157 featherbear:
Jewish Review of Books (spring 2026) >155 featherbear:
The Nation >158 featherbear:
TNR (The New Republic) >159 featherbear:
Woman of Letters (originally post Mar 17) >161 featherbear:
Yale Review (originally posted Mar 16) >148 featherbear:
157featherbear
Hannah Katznelson. Hedgehog Review, spring 2026: Getting to Know the Know-It-Alls: On a new history of pedantry. Review of: On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All / Arnoud S.Q. Visser.
158featherbear
David Schurman Wallace. The Nation, 03/30/2026: The Enigma of Gertrude Stein: Why do we misunderstand one of modernism’s great writers?
159featherbear
Paul Elie. TNR, 03/23/2026: Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever. "Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around us."
160featherbear
Lincoln Michel. Countercraft (Substack), 03/31/2026: What Memoir Scandals Tell Us about Two LLM Writing Scandals: On James Frey, Amy Griffin, Shy Girl, and LLM book reviews.
161featherbear
Naomi Kanakia. Woman of Letters, 03/17/2026: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry. (agents?)
162featherbear
Christian Lorentzen. Granta, 03/12/2026: Crews Control. Frederick Crews vs Sigmund Freud.
163featherbear
Emmeline Clein. Cultured, 03/25/2026: Why Cookbooks Are the Next Frontier for Narrative Writing. "Ella Quittner and Tanya Bush discuss their new cookbooks, which lean into the intricate subjectivity of food culture, instead of its algorithm-friendly optimization."
This topic was continued by Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2026-02 April-June.
