I Can’t Tell You But I Will by Magda Szubanski review – an insightful, elegant, anti-celebrity memoir (opens on The Guardian)
Szubanski’s latest book delves into both her mother’s decline, and her triumphant fight for marriage equality
Reviews
The headline, standfirst and reviewer from each outlet. Each links to the full review and to the book’s page here.
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Why America Looks the Way It Does (opens on The New Yorker)
From vast grids to winding suburbs, Americans have spent two centuries remaking the landscape around property.
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How America Became Antifascist (opens on The New Yorker)
Franklin D. Roosevelt was slow to confront the threat of Fascism. A new history explores how he—and the country—finally came around.
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‘Ply,’ by Hernan Diaz (opens on The New York Times)
“Ply,” by Hernan Diaz, is set in a dystopian future where the state has been dismantled and one company controls the energy supply.
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‘Holding Lightning’ by Emily Lordi (opens on The New York Times)
In “Holding Lightning,” the critic Emily Lordi takes on the complicated legacy and misunderstood artistry of the late singer.
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Range by Dorthe Nors review – an astrophysicist at odds with reality (opens on The Guardian)
In the Danish writer’s latest novel, an eminent scientist withdraws to the countryside
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Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965-66 by David Kynaston review – a tour de force of popular history (opens on The Guardian)
From the Beatles and the World Cup to racism and homophobia, the latest instalment in Kynaston’s series captures a society in the throes of change
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‘Man in the Mirror,’ by Anand Giridharadas (opens on The New York Times)
“Man in the Mirror,” by Anand Giridharadas, is a searching investigation into the 2023 death of Jordan Neely and the trial of the man who held him in a chokehold.
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‘Darkness Becomes Bright,’ by Emily Ogden (opens on The New York Times)
An engaging new book shows the master of American Gothic to be a deeply disturbed man who embraced the darkness most of us flee.
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‘Mestra,’ by Madeline Miller (opens on The New York Times)
In “Mestra,” Madeline Miller follows the daughter of the king of Thessaly on her endless, self-destructive quest to satisfy her insatiable father.
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‘Dodge City,’ by Patrick deWitt (opens on The New York Times)
“Dodge City,” by Patrick deWitt, follows a young man on a road trip to Canada to avoid conscription in Vietnam.
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Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Michael Cragg review – what’s the secret of Kylie’s genius? (opens on The Guardian)
The pop star emerges as a great unifier in this in-depth yet heartfelt portrait of an Aussie icon
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‘Writing on One Table’ (opens on New York Review of Books)
Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
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The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa (opens on New York Review of Books)
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 last, I was intrigued by what that farewell to fiction might involve. How would this prodigious author of eighteen other novels—among them the…
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The Slave’s Power (opens on New York Review of Books)
Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive of slavery produced by those who built and benefited from it.
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‘I Taste Ashes in the Wind’ (opens on New York Review of Books)
Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the…
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Sad-Maxxing (opens on New York Review of Books)
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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Nothing Stays Buried (opens on New York Review of Books)
Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
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Posterity Avenged Him (opens on New York Review of Books)
In a society still solidly creationist in outlook, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first working scientist to embrace the modern idea that species or lineages of organisms can evolve over time.
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Flow Chart of Paris (opens on New York Review of Books)
Books are no substitute for experience, and yet for most of us certain places are either out of reach or too expensive to inhabit for more than a tourist’s week or two; we nourish and enhance our geographic obsessions by reading. Paris is one of the great destinations not only of the traveler but…
