-
May 21, 2026
A Little Bit Bad, the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he...
-
May 14, 2026
Douglas Stuart, author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain, is becoming a problem. With the publication of his third novel, John of John, we’re running out of superlatives.
-
May 12, 2026
Let’s get the bad news over with first.
We’ve grown used to book banners going after novels like Beloved, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale. But now the censors are...
-
May 6, 2026
Every eight months, someone publishes an essay announcing the rediscovery of Stoner. By now, John Williams’s 1965 novel about an English professor has been lost and found...
-
Apr 29, 2026
Tom Perrotta is best known for his comic novel Election — and for anticipating by 25 years the advent of Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, a comparison...
-
Apr 22, 2026
Alarm bells ring so loudly at the start of T.C. Boyle’s new novel that I expected my wife to yell, “Turn that thing down!”
No matter: I wouldn’t have heard...
-
Apr 15, 2026
Chances are good that Maria Semple’s Go Gentle will be the only zany comedy about Stoic philosophy published all year.
We haven’t heard from Semple, the...
-
Apr 13, 2026
The Queen of Mean may have been indelicate, but she wasn’t entirely wrong.
I recently took a break from swearing at TurboTax (Thou infernal instrument of vexation!) to read a...
-
Apr 1, 2026
Dawn and I learned that when you have a child with profound physical and intellectual disabilities, the end of public school — soon after age 21 — is a brusque ejection...
-
Mar 25, 2026
Fifteen years after Amy Chua popularized the Tiger Mom, that stereotype still claws at our cultural imagination.
Chua’s memoir, which unleashed a flood of contentious op-eds,...
-
Mar 18, 2026
Great domestic novelists, like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, routinely create such witty and poignant worlds that readers risk growing accustomed to their genius. It’s an...
-
Mar 11, 2026
In the 20th century, when Freudian theory clung on as tightly as Hamlet to his mother, everybody had a complex. We struggled with inferiority complexes, endured bosses with...
-
Mar 9, 2026
In the first TV ad for Joe Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, a somber narrator warned Americans that the values we hold most dear were “under attack by an extreme...
-
Mar 4, 2026
In 2012, M.L. Stedman’s debut novel, The Light Between Oceans, bounded onto bestseller lists around the world like a globetrotting kangaroo. Her story of a couple on a...
-
Feb 25, 2026
In one of his loveliest and most idealistic sonnets, Shakespeare writes,
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the...
-
Feb 18, 2026
Mohammed Hanif’s incendiary comic novel, Rebel English Academy, makes strong demands on American readers — and rewards them. Among its many pleasures is the...
May 21, 2026A Little Bit Bad, the debut novel by Cassandra Neyenesch, starts with a man falling off a ladder. Reading this gleefully disorienting story, you’ll know how he...
May 14, 2026Douglas Stuart, author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain, is becoming a problem. With the publication of his third novel, John of John, we’re running out of superlatives.
May 12, 2026Let’s get the bad news over with first. We’ve grown used to book banners going after novels like Beloved, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale. But now the censors are...
May 6, 2026Every eight months, someone publishes an essay announcing the rediscovery of Stoner. By now, John Williams’s 1965 novel about an English professor has been lost and found...
Apr 29, 2026Tom Perrotta is best known for his comic novel Election — and for anticipating by 25 years the advent of Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, a comparison...
Apr 22, 2026Alarm bells ring so loudly at the start of T.C. Boyle’s new novel that I expected my wife to yell, “Turn that thing down!” No matter: I wouldn’t have heard...
Apr 13, 2026The Queen of Mean may have been indelicate, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. I recently took a break from swearing at TurboTax (Thou infernal instrument of vexation!) to read a...
Mar 18, 2026Great domestic novelists, like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, routinely create such witty and poignant worlds that readers risk growing accustomed to their genius. It’s an...
Mar 4, 2026In 2012, M.L. Stedman’s debut novel, The Light Between Oceans, bounded onto bestseller lists around the world like a globetrotting kangaroo. Her story of a couple on a...