The New York Review of Books
@nybooks.com
‘The premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.’
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October 8, 2026 Issue
Table of Contents
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Our 10/8 issue is now online, with @fotoole.bsky.social on Roy Cohn, Anahid Nersessian on the middle-aged manosphere, Jerry Brown on nuclear apocalypse, Frances Wilson on the Lambs, Ariel Dorfman on Vargas Llosa’s last, @rachelbnolan.bsky.social on mass protest, and much more.
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"Fiction always feels like it has a higher potential for embarrassment, because you’re trying to sustain an illusion, to hold someone’s attention over a prolonged period of time when the entire thing is an act of imagination."
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
‘A Certain Grain of Stupidity’ | Christopher Alessandrini, Nandini Krishnan
In 1961, on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West and her husband founded a residency, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP).
www.nybooks.com
September 21, 2026 at 10:00 PM
"Fiction always feels like it has a higher potential for embarrassment, because you’re trying to sustain an illusion, to hold someone’s attention over a prolonged period of time when the entire thing is an act of imagination."
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
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Jerry Brown in NYRB looks at recent work on the world's nuclear apocalypse "blindness," highlighting the Cold War and contemporary distrust and the grim, bipartisan expedience that drives leaders to stockpile these horrifying weapons of mass murder. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
September 23, 2026 at 5:28 AM
Jerry Brown in NYRB looks at recent work on the world's nuclear apocalypse "blindness," highlighting the Cold War and contemporary distrust and the grim, bipartisan expedience that drives leaders to stockpile these horrifying weapons of mass murder. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
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Rachel Nolan reviews the rerelease of Vincent Bevins's book on mass protest, its popularity, and its general futility. Activists around the world try to learn from each other, but run into the same problems, counterattacks, etc. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
September 23, 2026 at 6:02 AM
Rachel Nolan reviews the rerelease of Vincent Bevins's book on mass protest, its popularity, and its general futility. Activists around the world try to learn from each other, but run into the same problems, counterattacks, etc. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Reposted by The New York Review of Books
"Ignazio Silone said once that nobody could write about anything that happened to him after he was twelve years old." From "Tennessee Williams" By Murray Kempton @nybooks.com March 31, 1983 issue www.nybooks.com/articles/198...
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) | Murray Kempton
In his late years; Tennessee Williams missed out on a bit of our attention; but he could never forfeit the tenderness of his claim on the memory, which
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September 22, 2026 at 5:39 PM
"Ignazio Silone said once that nobody could write about anything that happened to him after he was twelve years old." From "Tennessee Williams" By Murray Kempton @nybooks.com March 31, 1983 issue www.nybooks.com/articles/198...
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#NYFF64
“The reemergence of [Paula Delsol’s] LA DÉRIVE [1964] is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium.”
Erika Balsom @nybooks.com — www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
“The reemergence of [Paula Delsol’s] LA DÉRIVE [1964] is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium.”
Erika Balsom @nybooks.com — www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
Sand Castles | Erika Balsom
To begin, a guessing game. The February 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma includes a “Dictionary of New French Cinema” comprising capsule commentaries on
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September 23, 2026 at 2:35 PM
#NYFF64
“The reemergence of [Paula Delsol’s] LA DÉRIVE [1964] is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium.”
Erika Balsom @nybooks.com — www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
“The reemergence of [Paula Delsol’s] LA DÉRIVE [1964] is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium.”
Erika Balsom @nybooks.com — www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
“She averts her dark- ringed eyes from the viewer, but they are not downcast,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland of Queen Isabella Farnese’s self-commissioned portrait. “Isabella is a queen, after all, subordinate to no one but the God who anointed her.” — Ingrid D. Rowland
Cherchez les Femmes | Ingrid D. Rowland
A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
www.nybooks.com
September 23, 2026 at 5:31 AM
“She averts her dark- ringed eyes from the viewer, but they are not downcast,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland of Queen Isabella Farnese’s self-commissioned portrait. “Isabella is a queen, after all, subordinate to no one but the God who anointed her.” — Ingrid D. Rowland
The tragedy of the musician Billy Preston had to do “less with the familiar story of racism in rock than with the Black church and the closet,” writes Brian Seibert—“what one old friend of Preston’s calls the ‘things that he held in.’”
In Billy’s Band | Brian Seibert
Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969,
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September 22, 2026 at 11:22 PM
The tragedy of the musician Billy Preston had to do “less with the familiar story of racism in rock than with the Black church and the closet,” writes Brian Seibert—“what one old friend of Preston’s calls the ‘things that he held in.’”
“The preferred term now is ‘expert,’ which feels less redolent of pompous chicanery and more inclusive of objective science: connoisseurs had loupes and dusty archives; experts have OptiVISORS and macro X-ray fluorescence scanning.” — Susan Tallman
Looking Class | Susan Tallman
Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
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September 22, 2026 at 10:56 PM
“The preferred term now is ‘expert,’ which feels less redolent of pompous chicanery and more inclusive of objective science: connoisseurs had loupes and dusty archives; experts have OptiVISORS and macro X-ray fluorescence scanning.” — Susan Tallman
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www.nybooks.com/articles/202...: 'The Copenhagen City Heart Study, an ongoing epidemiological research project begun in 1976, has found that recreational tennis players live on average 9.7 years longer than people who don’t regularly exercise'
Sad-Maxxing | Anahid Nersessian
Ashton Politanoff's new novel tells the story of sad dads and washed-up jocks vying for a phantom ideal of masculinity.
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September 18, 2026 at 9:31 PM
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...: 'The Copenhagen City Heart Study, an ongoing epidemiological research project begun in 1976, has found that recreational tennis players live on average 9.7 years longer than people who don’t regularly exercise'
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Flaubert helped Vargas Llosa discover that the author must be like God, present everywhere and visible nowhere, never intervening with his opinions. This undeviating principle is flouted in I Give You My Silence.
Ariel Dorfman in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Ariel Dorfman in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa | Ariel Dorfman
When Mario Vargas Llosa announced in October 2023 that his new novel, Le dedico mi silencio—now published in English as I Give You My Silence—would be his
www.nybooks.com
September 18, 2026 at 7:57 PM
Flaubert helped Vargas Llosa discover that the author must be like God, present everywhere and visible nowhere, never intervening with his opinions. This undeviating principle is flouted in I Give You My Silence.
Ariel Dorfman in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Ariel Dorfman in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Reposted by The New York Review of Books
Seriously, if you live in the Bay Area, go see this show!
“It was by stumbling into dead ends that Maren Hassinger found her métier as a sculptor.” —@cmonstah.bsky.social
An Ecosystem of Her Own | Carolina A. Miranda
Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.
www.nybooks.com
September 19, 2026 at 12:04 AM
Seriously, if you live in the Bay Area, go see this show!
Martin Filler on the day he went to Roy Cohn’s office, where he was “startled to find that behind the imposing limestone façade of this midblock Beaux-Arts mansion were interiors as shabby and barren as a Morningside Heights frat house.”
Doing Business with the Devil | Martin Filler
Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,1
www.nybooks.com
September 21, 2026 at 3:17 PM
Martin Filler on the day he went to Roy Cohn’s office, where he was “startled to find that behind the imposing limestone façade of this midblock Beaux-Arts mansion were interiors as shabby and barren as a Morningside Heights frat house.”
“The disparity between the high artifice of [Dolly Parton’s] appearance and the authenticity of her personality—not to mention the reality of her artistry—became a dialectic that drove the public’s fascination.” —Jarrett Earnest
‘I Wish You Love’ | Jarrett Earnest
On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two
www.nybooks.com
September 21, 2026 at 5:51 AM
“The disparity between the high artifice of [Dolly Parton’s] appearance and the authenticity of her personality—not to mention the reality of her artistry—became a dialectic that drove the public’s fascination.” —Jarrett Earnest
At Shakespeare in the Park, “nothing is locked in. Staging may be set, but every performance is different because the audience (or the sky or the sounds of the city) finishes the work with you” —Raúl Esparza
‘The Jealousy Comes from Nowhere’ | James Shapiro
For actors in The Winter’s Tale, the fractured marriage at the center of the play is a barometer of relationships in our own time.
www.nybooks.com
September 20, 2026 at 10:54 PM
At Shakespeare in the Park, “nothing is locked in. Staging may be set, but every performance is different because the audience (or the sky or the sounds of the city) finishes the work with you” —Raúl Esparza
“The threat to morality today is less our consciousness of its diversity than the growing consensus that it’s a sucker’s game.” —Susan Neiman
Is Morality Universal? | Susan Neiman
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
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September 20, 2026 at 6:31 PM
“The threat to morality today is less our consciousness of its diversity than the growing consensus that it’s a sucker’s game.” —Susan Neiman
“Ray Charles once introduced [Billy Preston] as the young man he wanted to carry on the work he started, and that’s what Preston did.... He pushed Charles’s gospel-derived rhythm and blues into a kind of funk that could cohabitate with flower-power pop-rock.” —Brian Seibert
In Billy’s Band | Brian Seibert
Among the many astonishing moments in Get Back—the 2021 documentary that Peter Jackson made from rehearsal footage of the Beatles in January 1969,
www.nybooks.com
September 20, 2026 at 1:58 PM
“Ray Charles once introduced [Billy Preston] as the young man he wanted to carry on the work he started, and that’s what Preston did.... He pushed Charles’s gospel-derived rhythm and blues into a kind of funk that could cohabitate with flower-power pop-rock.” —Brian Seibert
Lost at Sea depicts the anchor-outs as the inheritors of an old tradition: the pilgrimage to the far edge of the country in pursuit of riches, a break with the past, or simply the unknown.” —@psfrench.bsky.social
Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay | Piper French
Joe Kloc’s portrait of a group of outsiders living on boats in Marin County provides a record of a community many wish would quietly disappear.
www.nybooks.com
September 20, 2026 at 2:21 AM
Lost at Sea depicts the anchor-outs as the inheritors of an old tradition: the pilgrimage to the far edge of the country in pursuit of riches, a break with the past, or simply the unknown.” —@psfrench.bsky.social
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, “what starts as a possible journalistic assignment turns into an opportunity for crime.” —James Walton
Data & Dames | James Walton
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
www.nybooks.com
September 19, 2026 at 2:55 PM
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, “what starts as a possible journalistic assignment turns into an opportunity for crime.” —James Walton
The National Institutes of Health’s little-known Undiagnosed Disease Program is “a clinic of last resort” that can provide “meaningful relief for patients who learn [their affliction is] not all in their heads.” —Jerome Groopman
Unraveling Medical Mysteries | Jerome Groopman
Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
www.nybooks.com
September 19, 2026 at 9:09 AM
The National Institutes of Health’s little-known Undiagnosed Disease Program is “a clinic of last resort” that can provide “meaningful relief for patients who learn [their affliction is] not all in their heads.” —Jerome Groopman
“She averts her dark- ringed eyes from the viewer, but they are not downcast,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland of Queen Isabella Farnese’s self-commissioned portrait. “Isabella is a queen, after all, subordinate to no one but the God who anointed her.” — Ingrid D. Rowland
Cherchez les Femmes | Ingrid D. Rowland
A new initiative at the Prado calls visitors’ attention to the many works in the collection acquired by royal women.
www.nybooks.com
September 19, 2026 at 8:22 AM
“She averts her dark- ringed eyes from the viewer, but they are not downcast,” writes Ingrid D. Rowland of Queen Isabella Farnese’s self-commissioned portrait. “Isabella is a queen, after all, subordinate to no one but the God who anointed her.” — Ingrid D. Rowland
“A good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine.” —Omer Bartov
Where Hatred Lies | Omer Bartov
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed an...
www.nybooks.com
September 18, 2026 at 9:01 PM
“A good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine.” —Omer Bartov
“It was by stumbling into dead ends that Maren Hassinger found her métier as a sculptor.” —@cmonstah.bsky.social
An Ecosystem of Her Own | Carolina A. Miranda
Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.
www.nybooks.com
September 18, 2026 at 7:13 PM
“It was by stumbling into dead ends that Maren Hassinger found her métier as a sculptor.” —@cmonstah.bsky.social
In Cloudthief, “an ecojournalist engaged in a comprehensive reckoning with his trade” finds himself at the center of a “contemporary thriller and journalistic thought provoker.” —James Walton
Data & Dames | James Walton
In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.
www.nybooks.com
September 18, 2026 at 6:24 PM
In Cloudthief, “an ecojournalist engaged in a comprehensive reckoning with his trade” finds himself at the center of a “contemporary thriller and journalistic thought provoker.” —James Walton
A patient’s suffering can be “amplified by physicians who dismiss their complaints as...in their heads,” Jerome Groopman writes. “A doctor’s ego may be an obstacle to admitting being stumped in making a diagnosis.”
Unraveling Medical Mysteries | Jerome Groopman
Patients with undiagnosed conditions suffer not only from their symptoms but also from the uncertainly of not knowing what afflicts them.
www.nybooks.com
September 18, 2026 at 6:05 PM
A patient’s suffering can be “amplified by physicians who dismiss their complaints as...in their heads,” Jerome Groopman writes. “A doctor’s ego may be an obstacle to admitting being stumped in making a diagnosis.”