Best New Yorker Books
The New Yorker's Books section features literary criticism, book reviews, and essays about literature. These pieces examine fiction, nonfiction, and the publishing world with insight and depth.
50 picks · 1927–2024
Top authors: Louis Menand (9), Clifton Fadiman (2), Edmund Wilson (2)
Jill Lepore reviews Walter Isaacson’s new book, about a founder of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of the social-media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Louis Menand reviews “A Most Tolerant Little Town,” by Rachel Louise Martin, and explores a forgotten civil-rights episode.
Rebecca Mead on a new memoir by the Duke of Sussex detailing his relationships with Meghan Markle, Princess Diana, King Charles, Prince William, and Kate Middleton.
He thought his success was just a matter of hard work and good luck. Other people had a different perspective. Louis Menand on “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir,” by Paul Newman.
Louis Menand on Andrew Kirtzman’s “Giuliani,” a lively new biography that explores how the man once celebrated as “America’s mayor” fell into disgrace.
From the velocipede to the ten-speed, biking innovations brought riders freedom. But in a world built for cars, life behind handlebars is both charmed and dangerous. Jill Lepore on Jody Rosen’s “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.”
Among the most masterful entertainers of his age, he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted—almost. Louis Menand on Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s “The Turning Point: 1851—A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World.”
Margaret Talbot on Joshua Prager’s “The Family Roe” and the all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade, who captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.
David Denby on the memoir that captures what it’s like being raised by a man with mythic successes and long-held secrets.
She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women’s movement. Why haven’t you heard of her?
When central bankers rescued, then ruined, the world.
Contributors to the Winter Fiction Issue recommend books that they particularly enjoyed in 2006.
The Armenian genocide and the politics of silence.
What drugs taught Walter Benjamin.
Thomas Mallon discusses a biography of Harper Lee and her process in writing “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
What happened at Haymarket.
Keith Gessen on the Soviet writer’s life and work.
Jim Holt ·
The life and death of Alan Turing.
Putting predictions to the test.
The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir.
Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike new novel.
A new biography of Christopher Isherwood.
Louis Menand on the strange career of Eugene McCarthy.
Larissa MacFarquhar writes on Stanley Coren’s “The Pawprints of History,” which suggests that dogs have been scanted in the historical record.
Searching for Bruno Schulz.
What does "Saturday Night Live" have in common with German philosophy?
The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters.
The curious coupling of science and religion.
The newest Grove Dictionary tries to bring it all together.
The Potter story is a fairy tale, plus a bildungsroman, plus a murder mystery, plus a cosmic war of good and evil, Joan Acocella wrote.
Anthony Lane on the photographer who awakened America to modernism.
Paul Berman on the author, from 1998: “His ear could locate the underground noises of moles and ants. His eyesight could zoom in, binocularlike, on the farthest distances.”
Adam Gopnik reviews Joyce Milton’s “Tramp,” a biography of Charlie Chaplin, and reflects on the comedian’s grounding in British music-hall tradition, his leftist politics, and the childlike purity of his art.
BOOKS review of "Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate."
Hilton Als on the photographer who looked when the rest of us turned away.
Louis Menand on the novel that rewrote our understanding of race in America.
Judith Thurman reviews A. S. Byatt’s “Possession,” an epistolary novel about the romance of literary research.
Judith Thurman reviews Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Beloved,” which takes place a few years after the Civil War and explores meanings of slavery, melodrama and maternal love.
V. S. Pritchett’s 1981 review of Rushdie’s breakout novel, “Midnight’s Children,” plus “The Hangwoman,” by Pavel Kohout.
Erica Jong’s “Fear of Flying” belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” John Updike writes in this 1973 review of the novel.
BOOKS review of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.”
W. H. Auden on how the author of “Mrs. Dalloway” left behind, in her diary, the most truthful record of what a writer’s life is actually like.
BOOKS review of John O’Hara’s “A Rage to Live and Mary McCarthy’s “The Oasis.”
In his 1949 review, Lionel Trilling writes that George Orwell’s “1984” is about a state power that was coercing, not cosseting, its citizens into soullessness.
Edmund Wilson’s 1944 review.
Clifton Fadiman reviewed a new novel by James Joyce, in 1939. “The world would doubtless be amazed at Mr. Joyce’s achievement, assuming the world understood it,” he wrote, of “Finnegans Wake.”
Clifton Fadiman reviews John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” and George R. Leighton’s “Five Cities.”
Dorothy Parker reviews the author and socialite Emily Post’s notorious guide to manners, “Etiquette.”