The New York Review of Books

10/30/2025

Our November 20 issue is now online, with Fintan O’Toole on Kamala’s pointless campaign memoir, Jonathan Lethem on One Battle After Another, Anne Diebel on the trials of infertility, Colin B. Bailey on Watteau’s sad clowns, Linda Kinstler on the invention of sovereign states, Langdon Hammer on James Schuyler’s customary freshness and precision, Samuel Stein on NIMBYs and YIMBYs, Miranda Seymour on Frankenstein’s mother, Adam Shatz on Alice Coltrane, a poem by Rae Armantrout, and much more.

Table of Contents

10/29/2025

Mark Krotov on the Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari and his grammars of fantasy

My daughter Daria and I first encountered Antony Shugaar's translation of Gianni Rodari's Telephone Tales several years ago, peering out at us from the

10/29/2025

“Guy Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye.” —Wyatt Mason

The correspondence of Guy Davenport is a syllabus for the twentieth century.

10/29/2025

“Augustine considered himself primarily a member of a universal church, and he was prepared to insist on Africa’s place in that community but not to claim that it was special.” —Josephine Quinn

How did Saint Augustine's African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?

10/29/2025

A report by Jérôme Tubiana on El-Fasher, the besieged Sudanese city

In February 2004, a year after the rebellion broke out in Darfur, government-backed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (“devil horsemen”) attacked

10/29/2025

“Innovations [in science] have increased the two-way traffic through this gray zone [between life and death]: everyone eventually enters, but more and more of us are returning.” —Nitin K. Ahuja

Can the tools of science be used to investigate the mysteries of death?

10/29/2025

“In September the United Nations...found that Gaza contained 61 million tons of rubble, equivalent to ‘fifteen Great Pyramids of Giza,’” Sara Roy writes. “It could take a hundred trucks fifteen years to clear it all.”

On Friday, October 10, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, I heard from a Palestinian friend in the Strip. Gaza had been celebrating

10/28/2025

“[Enlightenment] ideas about the diversity and malleability of the human species were not inherently racist, but they had arguably provided a theoretical foundation for modern racism.” —David A. Bell

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

10/28/2025

I met a devil at the crossroads. We struck no bargain but walked, arm in arm, westward, for slow miles as starlings flocked. It steadied me, and little by

10/28/2025

Fintan O’Toole on Kamala Harris’s pointless campaign memoir

Kamala Harris's memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.

10/28/2025

Sara Roy on the empty promise of “day after” plans in Gaza

On Friday, October 10, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, I heard from a Palestinian friend in the Strip. Gaza had been celebrating

10/27/2025

“Augustine’s experience in Africa of the limitations of translation convinced him that the specific wording of a biblical text was less important than its communicative power.” —Josephine Quinn

How did Saint Augustine's African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?