THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

APRIL 4. 2026

Novels of the Future

“Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire, ” writes Aaron

APRIL 2. 2026

A Devotee of Deception

In Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea, an elderly writer looks back across a life in which he has always sought distance and control rather than passion.

Reimagining the Future of Ireland

Two writers from different parts and traditions of the island argue with each other and themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of Irish unification.

Blood in the Game

For two novels that address the escalating violence, rampant corruption, and class resentment poisoning our society, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach are also surprisingly funny.

Misjudgment at Nuremberg

In James Vanderbilt’s film Nuremberg, about the trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the questioning of Russell Crowe’s all too charming Hermann Göring becomes a moment of invented high drama.

‘To Share Is Our Duty’

Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that “communication is health. ”

The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

The Throwaway Planet

Three books raise political and moral questions about human consumption—and the value we place on those who clean up the waste.

Living Through the Civil War

George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.

‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

The Aging Class

Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.

World of His Fathers

Nicholas Lemann’s Returning traces his Louisiana family’s gradual distancing across generations from its Jewish faith and his own efforts to reembrace it.

Heaven’s Elegist

Alfred Tennyson's poetry addressed the central anxiety of his day: how to live in a world where scientific discoveries were slowly replacing religious faith.

Why ‘The West’? : An Exchange

To the Editors: In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West , Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of