Reviews Archives

New Books

“Chalk Drawings,” by Aziz Hazara © The artist. Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata, India With David Unger’s brilliant translation of Mr. President (Penguin Classics, $17.99), by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Asturias, readers…

When the Monsoon Winds Turned

by Nadifa Mohamed,

The lost worlds of Abdulrazak Gurnah

Dutch Master

by Francine Prose,

On Willem Frederik Hermans

New Books

by Claire Messud,

“Domestic Pig—Sus scrofa domestica,” by Henry Horenstein, from the series Animalia © The artist Gustave Flaubert famously wanted to write “a book about nothing,” sustained only by “the internal force…

The Shock Jock of Russian Letters

by Jennifer Wilson,

On Vladimir Sorokin

The Secret History

by Jonathan Dee,

Hernan Diaz dismantles the American dream

New Books

by Claire Messud,

“Representation #16?18 (matchbook),” by Cynthia Greig © The artist. Courtesy Clark Gallery, Lincoln, Massachusetts Readers of Elif Batuman’s delightful first novel, The Idiot, will need no introduction to its sequel,…

The Love Feast

by Alan Jacobs,

Seeing Auden in a new light

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Future Nostalgia

by Lauren Oyler,

Jennifer Egan’s old-world internet novel

Who Killed Louis Le Prince?

by Nat Segnit,

On the forgotten father of film

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Self-portrait with Scorpion, by Leonor Fini, from Leonor Fini: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, which was published last year by Scheidegger & Spiess © Leonor Fini Estate, Paris/Artists Rights…

Peculiar Things, Yet Intimately Familiar

by Gabriel Winslow-Yost,

The elusive fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett

The Man with Night Sweats

by Matthew Bevis,

On Thom Gunn

Every Child an Emperor

by Rivka Galchen,

On Maria Montessori

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Schiller’s Garden House, Jena, by Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger © akg-images By the year 1800, the French Revolution was over, the ancien régime a thing of the past, the…

National Treasure

by Dan Piepenbring,

The ecstatic cult of Nicolas Cage

The Mosaicist

by Gemma Sieff,

On Evan S. Connell

Ad Nauseam

by Rebecca Panovka,

Hanya Yanagihara and the pandemic novel

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Women in Calcutta waiting in line for food during the Bengal famine of 1943 © William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock As the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen approaches ninety, he…

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Haile Selassie I © Chronicle/Alamy If you’ve considered accidental divinity—mortal men being worshipped as gods—you’ve probably thought it a rare phenomenon, something relegated to a distant past. But as Anna…

Desperately Seeking Sebald

by Lauren Oyler,

A writer’s quest

New Books

by Claire Messud,

Battle at Langada and Komboti, by Panagiotis Zographos. Courtesy AUTH Archive Collections This year marks the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution, which freed the territory from the Ottoman Empire and…

Forbidding Planet

by Matthew Sherrill,

George R. Stewart’s novels of natural disaster

I Multiplied Myself

by Benjamin Kunkel,

The forty-seven lives of Fernando Pessoa

New Books

by Claire Messud,

A church destroyed by the Islamic State in Qaraqosh, Iraq, December 2016 © Chris McGrath/Getty Images The longtime war reporter Janine di Giovanni’s powerful new book, The Vanishing (Public Affairs,…