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ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, by Omar El Akkad In his dystopian debut novel, “American War” (2017), Omar El Akkad describes a massacre at a refugee camp with calmly horrifying precision. “The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground,” he observes, through the eyes of a woman called Sarat. “There … Read more
THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O., by Karen Thompson Walker The man who mistook his wife for a hat; the girl so woefully abused that she developed more than a dozen distinct personalities: Psychiatry’s famous case studies can sound as fantastical as fiction. (And they sometimes were, in fact, too outrageous to be true.) The … Read more
DEATH TAKES ME, by Cristina Rivera Garza. Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers. The crime that opens Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Death Takes Me” is one of unusual violence, viscerally described with a poet’s compression: “A collection of impossible angles. A skin, the skin. … Ear. Foot. Sex. An open red thing. A context. A … Read more
Alvin F. Poussaint, a psychiatrist who, after providing medical care to the civil rights movement in 1960s Mississippi, went on to play a leading role in debates about Black culture and politics in the 1980s and ’90s through his research on the effects of racism on Black mental health, died on Monday at his home … Read more
Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years. An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century. Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, … Read more
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on books with a sharp comic edge that were adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to … Read more
THE LAST MANAGER: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball, by John W. Miller The greatest sight in Major League Baseball during the 1970s was almost certainly this one: the Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver storming out of the dugout to remonstrate over some perceived injustice to his players. He would be so incensed … Read more
In “The Richest Babysitter in the World,” Kit reflects upon her time spent caring for the child of a Jeff-Bezos-like character before he became a famous billionaire. In “White Women LOL,” Jill, a white woman, tries to redeem herself after she’s canceled online for telling a group of Black people who she believes are gate-crashers … Read more
THE SECRET PUBLIC: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream, by Jon Savage Jon Savage, the author of the epic punk history “England’s Dreaming,” returns with an even longer examination of the dual histories of pop music and gay life, from the beginning of the rock era in 1955 to the … Read more
Novels have always reflected technology. How we write fiction changed after the invention of photography, radio, film and email. This month we look at two romance novels that make a strong case for what we might call the Instagram or TikTok voice, as well as a historical that reminds us that the past is not … Read more