The New York Review of Books

10/20/2025

The poem as trick pony rooting in a feed bag full of truth The poem as wonder cabinet stocked with whatever was close at hand The poem as celestial

10/20/2025

At the Met’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, “sonic saturation is joined [to] a visual saturation aspiring to replicate the experience of watching an enormous comic book unfold page by page.” —Geoffrey O’Brien

Mason Bates's operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic b...

10/20/2025

“The sexualization of poetics in the early modern period made rhetoric a complicated thing for female writers to master,” Clare Bucknell writes. They turned to “unexpected forms: letters, prefaces, dedications, and their poetic practice.”

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

10/20/2025

“Adam and Eve in Paradise suggests that despite the long and often bitter conflict between creationists and evolutionists, there’s no reason these apparently contradictory theories can’t be reconciled.” —Francine Prose

A nineteenth-century novella daringly suggests that there's no reason the apparently contradictory theories of creationism and evolutionism can't be reconciled.

10/19/2025

“There are differences with regard to particular policies and countries, but Democrats and Republicans are united in consensus that America’s role in the world is a militarized one.” —Cora Currier on the legacy of the “war on terror”

Rich Beck's Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.

10/19/2025

Regina Marler on Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, a woman who preferred to remain in the shadows of some of modernism’s biggest names

In a 1966 interview, Marcel Duchamp remarked on the propensity of twentieth-century artists to pair up. He gave the examples of Picasso and Braque,

10/19/2025

Peter E. Gordon on the curious entanglement between sociology and religion

In its efforts to define religion, modern sociology has also sought to define itself.

10/19/2025

Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin’s love

Nicolas Boggs structures his moving new biography of James Baldwin around the writer's most important relationships with men.

10/19/2025

“One moment you’re in the OR, the next moment you’re in recovery, but the tubes and wires run between those experiences, and when they pull them, they tug some of the controlled trauma into consciousness.” —Ben Lerner

After open-heart surgery

10/18/2025

Like Gertrude Stein, “Lucinda Childs’s work, too, holds the viewer in the moment and dramatizes the experience of time passing even as it seems to stand still.” —Francesca Wade on Lucinda Childs’s Stein

It begins with a white chair slowly gliding across the stage behind a giant gauze curtain. Then two dancers emerge, one from each wing, approaching one

10/18/2025

“I sense a lot of disgust with the contemporary world among young people today, and I keep meeting those who are returning to religion or converting for the first time.” —Mark Lilla, interviewed by Daniel Drake

“I sense a lot of disgust with the contemporary world among young people today, and I keep meeting those who are returning to religion or converting for the first time.”

10/18/2025

“Americans might do well to ask fundamental questions about the history of immigration in their country.” Mae Ngai writes. “When and why have we valorized some forms of migration and denigrated others?”

The second Trump administration has undone the division between political and economic migrants. Did it make sense to separate them to begin with?