RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

Last week, the novelist Helen DeWitt announced that she turned down the Windham-Campbell Prize, an unrestricted $175,000 grant funded by a... Read More

“More poetry is said to come from Wisconsin than from any other state in the Union,” read a clipping from an 1885 issue of... Read More

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up... Read More

In the video, the penguin waddles across a frozen expanse. He is heading away from his colony, into Antarctica’s vast interior, alone.... Read More

In Sophie Mackintosh’s fourth novel, Permanence, adulterers are whisked away to an otherworldly sanctuary where they can live... Read More

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” President Trump’s Truth Social post about Iran has... Read More

I  Saint Fillan’s left arm glowed in the dark, the better to read Scripture in his cave. He was born in Munster with a stone in... Read More

Last Halloween, a clever costume “won the Internet,” as the saying goes. Kate Snyder of Brooklyn posted a picture of herself in a... Read More

Like many millennial women, I’ve seen Bridget Jones’ Diary an embarrassing number of times. I had not, however, seen the film... Read More

Traveling the publicity circuit in 2025 for For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), the fourth album from her dreamy-indie-pop act... Read More

Wendell Berry is unquestionably America’s foremost agrarian visionary. His fiction is largely set in a semi-fictional town called Port... Read More

What happens when a group of hot, smart people come together? The Whitney Review of New Writing! Founded by Whitney Mallett,... Read More

Last year 40% of Americans didn’t read a single book. Print book sales are rising, but not necessarily in any return to... Read More

Let us check in briefly with onetime presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, who is currently in the final year of his term as Florida governor.... Read More

You may not agree with Francis Fukuyama's politics - I, for one, mostly do not - but his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the... Read More

In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies... Read More

The man who edited the Odyssey papyri went blind,” a a Greek professor of mine once remarked, a reminder that there is always a... Read More

Chances are good that Maria Semple’s Go Gentle will be the only zany comedy about Stoic philosophy published all year. We... Read More

Some years ago, when I was a middle-school history teacher,  I mentioned my family’s backyard garden while discussing the... Read More

Is a civil war tearing apart the American Right? The question, which doubles as a threat, has haunted Donald Trump’s second term.... Read More

Years ago in the Sri Lankan highlands, Michael Ondaatje’s Aunt Christie, only 25 years old, volunteered to have “a total... Read More

Is the independent girlboss dead? Maybe she never existed to begin with. The release of Lindy West’s latest cringeworthy... Read More

Somewhere deep in the heart of America, in the back of a bus hurtling down some godforsaken highway, Walmarts and cemeteries and Civil War... Read More

OH, NO. Did I just call Charles Melton a himbo? We’re an hour into lunch at Millie’s Cafe in Los Angeles and I’ve... Read More

Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It turns fifty this year. Its author was a retired English professor from the University of... Read More

In a short story called “Wireless,” published in Scribner’s in 1901, Rudyard Kipling described “a glass... Read More

“The money runs out but the title remains.…” observed the original head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,... Read More

Lena Dunham lights up when asked about her pet pigs, Victor and Cherry. She adopted Victor in 2024 — followed by Cherry — during... Read More

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as... Read More

Who or what is Narcissus? Is it me staring admiringly at myself in a mirror? Or is Narcissus the image staring admiringly back at me? Does it... Read More

WILLIAM H. GASS, the portly pontiff of English prose, felt for literature an intense ardor that imbues his audacious fiction and his... Read More

Peter Schweizer, Steven Mosher, Brian Kennedy, John Tamny, and Jan Jekielek join RCP's David Desrosiers to discuss the war with Iran and why... Read More

The text wasn’t completely unexpected. Still, I was shocked.     Last year, a writer named Cathy Alter asked to... Read More

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with... Read More

On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, in western France. He was... Read More

Let’s start with the acknowledgments, usually the best place to begin in a political memoir. Here the author admits that he is less... Read More