Advertisement
More from the Review
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest
Clair Wills’s latest book is Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets. (January 2026)
A Mind Cast Out
The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.
The Edge of the Alphabet
by Janet Frame
November 21, 2024 issue
Triumphs of Skepticism
Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing
by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson
May 23, 2024 issue
The Collector
For the characters in Jeremy Cooper’s novels, art—looking at it, talking about it, sending it in the form of postcards—is the currency of human relationships.
Brian
by Jeremy Cooper
November 23, 2023 issue
Family Lore
In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.
Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir
by Marina Warner, with vignettes by Sophie Herxheimer
September 22, 2022 issue
Letters from a Scattered Place
John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices.
The Letters of John McGahern
edited by Frank Shovlin
April 7, 2022 issue
The Wages of Virtue
Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.
The Chastity Plot
by Lisabeth During
November 4, 2021 issue
The Possessed
In Carl Frode Tiller’s trilogy of novels, the varied accounts of the narrator’s youth build to a judgment on the ethics of writing itself.
Encircling
by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Encircling 2: Origins
by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Encircling 3: Aftermath
by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
July 22, 2021 issue
Bildungsonline
Patricia Lockwood descends into Internet hell in her debut novel and winds up confronting America’s very real religious zealotry.
No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
February 25, 2021 issue
Learning to Grieve
A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.
Say Something Back and Time Lived, Without Its Flow
by Denise Riley, with an afterword by Max Porter
The Anatomy of Grief
by Dorothy P. Holinger
November 19, 2020 issue
A Woman’s Performance
Actress
by Anne Enright
No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship
by Anne Enright
July 2, 2020 issue
Ghost Story
On ‘The Mirror and the Light,’ the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s life of Thomas Cromwell
The Mirror and the Light
by Hilary Mantel
May 14, 2020 issue
Love in Plague Time
In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.
To Calais, in Ordinary Time
by James Meek
The Corner That Held Them
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
January 16, 2020 issue
The Unnameable
Milkman
by Anna Burns
Little Constructions
by Anna Burns
No Bones
by Anna Burns
March 21, 2019 issue
Prodigal Fathers
Colm Tóibín’s ‘Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce’
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce
by Colm Tóibín
December 20, 2018 issue
Subscribe and save 50%!
Subscribe now for immediate access to the latest issue and to browse the rich archive. You will have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and over 25,000 articles published since 1963!
Subscribe now
Subscribe and save 50%!
Get immediate access to the current issue, exclusive online content, and over 25,000 archive articles, plus the NYR App.
Already a subscriber? Sign in