December 18, 2025 Holiday Issue

Frances Wilson

Hearing Your Ears Pop

In Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, catching Covid intensifies a woman’s relationship to language.

Will There Ever Be Another You

by Patricia Lockwood

Lindsay Turner

‘A Cartoon Revival’

The illustrated poems, satirical ads, and talking shoes that filled the pages of C Comics.

The Complete C Comics

by Joe Brainard, with a foreword by Ron Padgett and an essay by Bill Kartalopoulos

Colin Grant

It Takes a Village

The Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays is relentlessly rude and crude, but also bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable.

Yesterdays

by Harold Sonny Ladoo, with a foreword by Kevin Jared Hosein

Susan Tallman

The Plunderers’ Dilemma

Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.

Paisley Currah

The Anti-Trans Playbook

The current crusade against trans people imperils not just their rights but the survival of the legal doctrine built to protect all women from discrimination.

Lindsay Turner

That Sinking Feeling

Memoirs of survival at sea plunge the reader deep into the heart of human nature.

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

by Sophie Elmhirst

76 Days Adrift

a documentary film directed by Joe Wein

Martin Filler

The Calders of Philadelphia

At Calder Gardens, art, architecture, and horticulture achieve a well-nigh perfect equilibrium.

Francine Prose

‘Botany of Sorrow’

The world, Georgi Gospodinov seems to say in his novel Death and the Gardener, will always remain split into two parts: before and after the catastrophe of losing a parent.

Death and the Gardener

by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Geoffrey O’Brien

Magic from Elsewhere

The best of British postwar cinema portrays a country in the aftermath of catastrophe and uncertain about its future.

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960

a retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland, August 6–16, 2025

Ishion Hutchinson

Inter Alia, North Carolina Trees

a poem

Diarmaid MacCulloch

An Outsider from the Beginning

Sifting the contradictions of the Bible can bring Jesus and Mary into sharper focus and illuminate their surprisingly human features.

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

by Elaine Pagels

The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus

by James D. Tabor

John Banville

Henry James’s ‘Dear Native Land’

The writer’s 1904 tour of America left him little less than horrified at what he encountered.

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

by Peter Brooks

The Correction of Taste: On the Late Novels of Henry James

by Denis Donoghue, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín

Yuri Slezkine

Why ‘The West’?

The idea of the West survived a once-shared civilization as a code for its fractious heirs. A new book suggests its enduring constants have been a fear of Russia and of internal decay.

The West: The History of an Idea

by Georgios Varouxakis

Pria Anand

The Plague That Won’t Die

As my recent diagnosis shows, tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide—and America is hardly immune.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green

Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History

by Vidya Krishnan

Jed S. Rakoff

It’s a Racket!

Cryptocurrency has largely managed to remain free of government regulation, and as a result has often become a vehicle for fraud and criminality.

Annette Gordon-Reed

Jefferson Divided

The progressive ideals that Thomas Jefferson aspired to in his writings were often at odds with the values of early America—and with the way he himself lived.

Lindsay Turner

Alcide De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats constructed the foundations of postwar Italian politics, in which what looked like one-party rule was in fact a complex interaction between the left and the right.

Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy

by Mark Gilbert

Andrew O’Hagan