April 9, 2026 Issue

Pankaj Mishra

A Bitter Education

In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.

Pablo Scheffer

The Tennissance

Two young tennis stars have revived the sport by embodying the sort of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Nadal and Federer so fascinating.

The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay

by Christopher Clarey

Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis

by Giri Nathan

Yi-Ling Liu

Shenzhen Express

In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

by Dan Wang

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company

by Eva Dou

Miranda Seymour

Deciphering Dame Muriel

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel

by Frances Wilson

The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume 1: 1944–1963

edited by Dan Gunn

Timothy Donnelly

‘Not Insane!’

The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.

Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums

by Jeremy Braddock

David A. Bell

Who Built France?

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire

by Mélanie Lamotte

Joshua Hammer

A Man-Made Disaster

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb

by James M. Scott

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

by Malcolm Gladwell

Jenny Uglow

The more we learn about J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals

an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, November 27, 2025–April 12, 2026

Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape

by Nicola Moorby

Constable

by Tim Barringer, with an essay by Nicholas Robbins

Turner

by Ian Warrell, with an essay by Gillian Forrester

Ben Lerner

Crowds and Lovers

In his novel G., John Berger shifts between the revolutionary possibilities of mass demonstrations and of erotic encounters, ultimately writing a historical novel about the present.

Dan Rockmore

In Defense of Algebra

The mathematician Paul Lockhart believes to his core that math is the purest of the arts, and anyone can learn to love it.

The Mending of Broken Bones: A Modern Guide to Classical Algebra

by Paul Lockhart

Arithmetic

by Paul Lockhart

Measurement

by Paul Lockhart

A Mathematician’s Lament

by Paul Lockhart, with a foreword by Keith Devlin

Omari Weekes

Possessing the Painful Parts

Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.

We Are a Haunting

by Tyriek White

Robert Pogue Harrison

Interminable Ignorance

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

by Mark Lilla

On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays

by Emily Ogden

Ange Mlinko

Mother Daughter Sister Wife

A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.

Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women Poets from Hungary

translated from the Hungarian by Anna Bentley, Erika Mihálycsa, Ottilie Mulzet, Ivan Sanders, George Szirtes, and Clare Pollard with Anna T. Szabó, edited with an introduction by Ottilie Mulzet

Cathleen Schine

The Possibility of Humor

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

A Fool’s Kabbalah

by Steve Stern

James Romm

The Marbles & the Muses

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and Their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

by A.E. Stallings

Michael Dirda

Dantès’s Inferno

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

The Count of Monte Cristo

an eight-part television series directed by Bille August

Fintan O’Toole