Not surprisingly, Trump’s imperial designs on the country have not been warmly received there. In December 2024, before taking office, he began musing about his desire to acquire Greenland, a strategic landmass that has been at the center of U.S. policy in the Arctic since World War II. This proclamation was followed by a semiofficial […]
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Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block
every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.… after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live […]
Read MoreThe Perplexing Twist in Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead
Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation by Jen Percy Buy on Bookshop Doubleday, 272 pp., $29.00 These weren’t, perhaps, “normal” reactions, but what is normal about being raped—except that it is horrifyingly and statistically commonplace? In the United States, someone is sexually assaulted every 74 seconds; a rape is reported every 4.1 minutes. That some […]
Read MoreChris Kraus and the Art of the Landlord
Kraus’s third person provides enough distance between author and protagonist to allow a reader to forget, if they happened to already know, that she, too, was born in the Bronx, moved to Connecticut as a child, and went to high school in Wellington. But once the novel’s second section picks up, we are squarely back […]
Read MoreDo Liberals Need to Practice Originalism, Too?
Born Equal is on firmer ground in narrating the ways antebellum anti-slavery politicians hewed closely to the Constitution. To his credit, Amar doesn’t argue that the original Constitution was inherently anti-slavery. Instead, he maintains that, despite its many pro-slavery features, it had just enough Easter eggs for future anti-slavery politicians to utilize. The Adams family—beginning […]
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The New Republic’s Books of the Year 2025
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda HessDoubleday, 272 pp., $29.00“As a longtime reporter on internet culture for The New York Times and elsewhere, Amanda Hess excels at connecting our private online encounters to wider cultural shifts. In her debut memoir of ‘having a child in the digital age,’ she skewers […]
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The New Republic’s Books of the Year
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda HessDoubleday, 272 pp., $29.00“As a longtime reporter on internet culture for The New York Times and elsewhere, Amanda Hess excels at connecting our private online encounters to wider cultural shifts. In her debut memoir of ‘having a child in the digital age,’ she skewers […]
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North Carolina Ousts Entire Library Board Over Book With Trans Kid
Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday, alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail. The motive for the gruesome killing is not clear. But in Donald Trump’s mind, the murder is […]
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Holbein: ‘a superb and groundbreaking biography’
If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review. And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the […]
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The Self-Delusions of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto
I knew about beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, and I was frightened by beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, because she was the first girl through whom I learned that if you are beautiful you may get killed, and once you are killed you will become the property of the country, and the country […]
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Best poetry books of 2025
From daring contemporary collections to the long-awaited definitive edition from one of the major poets of the 20th century, this is our pick of the best poetry books of the year. Whether you’re a budding poet or you’re looking for the perfect gift for the bookworm in your life, these are the releases worth reading […]
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bodybuilding photobook captures strangely familiar sequences in melbourne’s streets
Melanie Cobham captures Melbourne’s urban atmosphere ‘Bodybuilding’ is a photographic series by Melanie Cobham exploring feelings of displacement and belonging through documentary and street photography. Shot on 35mm film, the images offer a contemplative yet playful portrait of Melbourne’s urban landscape from the perspective of an outsider. Created in a time marked by isolation, Cobham […]
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‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field and ‘The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare’ by Daniel Swift
‘Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right’ by Laura K. Field To truly understand MAGA, you need a person who’s “from that world, but not of it,” said Alexandre Lefebvre in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Though political theorist Laura K. Field cut ties with the conservative intelligentsia several years before its […]
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The Surprisingly Convincing Case Against Cars
Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek Buy on Bookshop Thesis Books, 304 pp., $28.00 Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek, authors of Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, certainly think so. Goodyear and Gordon host the […]
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Elizabeth Gilbert chooses books about women overcoming difficulty
The author of the global hit “Eat, Pray, Love” picks books about women overcoming difficulty. Her memoir, “All the Way to the River”, explores her relationship with a friend and lover who died in 2018. The Summer Book Tove Jansson, 1972 In this slim, magical novel, a wild young girl and her equally wild grandmother […]
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The Bard of China’s Gig Economy
Not all of Hu’s jobs were in customer-facing roles. In 2017, he worked at a logistics warehouse for D Company, where the pace was grueling and the tasks—moving pallets, breaking down shipments, stacking and restacking parcels—monotonous in the extreme. He averaged only four hours of sleep each day, often leaving his night shifts with his […]
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December’s books feature otherworldly tales, a literary icon’s life story and an adult royal romp
When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team. The end of the year brings the close of the 2025 publishing season, and there is plenty to look forward to. This December, readers will be gifted a few thought-provoking […]
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Storyteller: a ‘fitting tribute’ to Robert Louis Stevenson
Since his death, aged 44, in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson has had a “distinctly mixed” literary reputation, said Andrew Motion in The New Statesman. To many modernists, and especially the Bloomsbury Group, his adventure-filled novels – among them “Treasure Island”, “Kidnapped” and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” – “looked old hat”. Like […]
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Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife
Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important […]
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‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham and ‘When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’ by David Margolick
‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham “Mexico and Mexicans have had just about enough of being analyzed,” said Camilla Townsend in The Washington Post, and historian Paul Gillingham fully understands that. His “breathtaking” new book “reveals Mexican history in all its kaleidoscopic complexity,” and though his account does nothing to downplay the upheavals the […]
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How Police Harassed and Infiltrated Civil Rights Groups
It may be a pedantic distinction, but Davis tends to exclusively reach for the term “police violence” even when he is talking about, say, retaliatory prosecutions or judicial bias. U.S. courts and district attorneys’ offices are also weighted in favor of the status quo, but not in exactly the same way the police are; Davis […]
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We Did OK, Kid: Anthony Hopkins’ candid memoir is a ‘page-turner’
It may have involved “just 16 minutes of screen time”, but Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs” was “one of the great performances”, said Ed Potton in The Times. With his “hiss-slurp” modelled on the sound Bela Lugosi’s Dracula made when he saw blood, and his […]
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The Mushroom Tapes: a compelling deep dive into the trial that gripped Australia
“Between early May and early July of this year, much of Australia’s collective imagination was absorbed by the trial of Erin Patterson,” said Jason Steger in the Financial Times. The 51-year-old stood accused of murdering her estranged husband’s parents, along with one of his aunts, by serving them a beef wellington laced with death cap […]
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‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway and ‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith
‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway Scott Galloway’s best-selling book “begins in appropriately manly fashion,” said Brian Stewart in Commentary. Batting away a tenet of liberal orthodoxy, he declares that there’s no such thing as “toxic masculinity” because bullying and predation are the antithesis of authentic masculine behavior. “Real men don’t start bar fights,” […]
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The Man Who Wanted to Believe in Life on Mars
From there, things moved quickly. In the winter of 1895, Lowell returned to Boston, where he delivered four lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He proclaimed that “the telescope presents us with perhaps the most startling discovery of modern times—the so-called canals of Mars.” He urged that the canals were, in fact, evidence of […]
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Nick Clegg picks his favourite books
The former deputy PM and president of global affairs at Meta picks five favourites. He will be speaking about his book, “How to Save the Internet”, at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend. Life & Times of Michael K J.M. Coetzee, 1983 Possibly my favourite book of all time, mostly because of the taut, sparse prose. […]
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Motherland: a ‘brilliantly executed’ feminist history of modern Russia
In 1921, a Bolshevik pamphlet proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a “fairy-tale country” for women. “That was, of course, an exaggeration,” said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times. Nonetheless, women were granted sweeping rights during the Revolution (including to abortion and equal pay) and, from the early Soviet era on, many received a “formidable […]
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Dianarama examines the ‘extraordinary scale’ of Martin Bashir’s lies
As Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC over how his speech was edited by “Panorama”, journalist Andy Webb has “chucked a load of petrol on the bonfire” with his “extraordinary” new book, said Lucy Denyer in The Telegraph. “Dianarama: the Betrayal of Princess Diana” examines the “explosive” interview between Martin Bashir and Diana in […]
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Ian McEwan’s Haunting Vision of the Future
Climate change here is not backdrop but the lens through which all the characters must see the world. It muddies everything: the meanings of guilt, of authorship, of love. The irony that Metcalfe’s entire project—his attempt to reconstruct a bygone world from fragments—is perhaps animated by the same delusion that animated Blundy’s poetry does not […]
Read MoreMargaret Atwood’s memoir, intergenerational trauma and the fight to make spousal rape a crime: Welcome to November books
When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team. November books are not playing around. This month’s new releases are searing and serious stories of women’s suffering, wrath and progress. They include a non-fiction exploration of the laws surrounding […]
Read MoreMiddleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’
In a career of great breadth – from a deputy governor in Iraq to Harvard professor and now successful podcaster – Rory Stewart’s latest book represents “one of his quieter triumphs”, said Patrick Galbraith in Literary Review. But it’s “a triumph nonetheless”. It collects the fortnightly columns he wrote for the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald […]
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