Cash’s dialogue is the novel’s greatest trick. It’s blunt, even a little wooden, yet she wields it with a quicksilver touch, creating volleys of unblinking banter that read like a mashup of a twisted after-school special with the existential musings of a Hal Hartley film: sometimes brutal, sometimes winning, and—like the paddle bearing the insignia … Read more
Our editors and critics review notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka. In the summer of 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent were embroiled in a high-wattage—and highly manufactured—promotional showdown. Both rappers had albums dropping on the same day in September and, to boost their respective first-week sales, were squaring off in as … Read more
Lala Abaddon doesn’t have an address. Her home, made from scratch, sits off a rocky road, deep in the desert mountains of the American West. “I wrote the realtor, and he thought I was crazy,” Abaddon recalls, about choosing the remote land. She made the move after feeling overwhelmed and depressed while living in New … Read more
A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being disappointed by fish from the supermarket, its flavor so often muddy or bitter, with the occasional bracing whiff of ammonia. … Read more
Atlas’s Bones, by D. Vance Smith (Chicago). Encompassing Africana studies, medieval scholarship, historiography, and philosophy, this book surveys centuries of literature, history, and theology to argue for Africa’s influence on Europe’s self-conception. Hegel’s fantasy that Africa “is no historical place in the world” guides Smith as he leaps from ancient civilizations, such as those of … Read more
For the cover of the January 26, 2026, issue, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine depicted a scene that New Yorkers often encounter in the depths of winter. “I inevitably see some suntanned subway rider, just back from a beachy getaway, and it almost seems like they’re gloating,” Tomine said. “In all fairness, I’ve occasionally been that … Read more
“Self-Portrait with Black Background” (1915).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine … Read more
It is only in the modern era that women’s own experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering begins to be widely recorded, and here, too, there is an omnipresent sense of the contingency of maternal life. In seventeenth-century England, there was a vogue for books by pregnant women addressed to their unborn offspring, offering preëmptive guidance … Read more
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians … Read more