new yorker review books

• Awards Season
• Big Stories
• Pop Culture
• Video Games
• Celebrities

A Look Inside The New Yorker’s Editorial Process: From Pitch to Publication

The New Yorker is a legendary publication that has been in existence for nearly a century. It is known for its in-depth reporting, insightful commentary, and captivating fiction. But what goes on behind the scenes at this prestigious publication? In this article, we’ll take a closer look at The New Yorker’s editorial process from pitch to publication.

Pitching Ideas

Before an article can be written, it must first be pitched to The New Yorker’s editors. This can be done by anyone, from staff writers to freelance contributors. The key is to have a unique perspective or angle on a topic that hasn’t been covered before. Once an idea is pitched, it goes through several rounds of review by the editors before being accepted or rejected.

Writing and Editing

Once an idea has been accepted, the writer begins the process of researching and writing their article. This can take anywhere from a few days to several months depending on the complexity of the topic. During this phase, the writer works closely with their assigned editor who provides feedback and suggestions for improvement.

After the initial draft has been completed, it goes through multiple rounds of editing and fact-checking. This ensures that the article is accurate, well-written, and adheres to The New Yorker’s high standards of journalism.

Art Direction

In addition to its outstanding writing, The New Yorker is also known for its striking visual imagery. Each article is accompanied by custom illustrations or photographs that are carefully chosen by art directors who work closely with writers and editors.

The art direction team helps bring each story to life visually through design elements such as typography, color palettes, and layout.

Publication

Finally, after all these steps have been completed successfully – pitching ideas; writing and editing; art direction –the article is ready for publication. The New Yorker is a weekly publication, so each issue contains a variety of articles that have gone through this rigorous editorial process.

Once published, the article is promoted through various channels such as social media, email newsletters, and the magazine’s website. This helps ensure that it reaches as many readers as possible.

In conclusion, The New Yorker’s editorial process is a complex one that involves many different stages. From pitching ideas to writing and editing to art direction and publication, each step is carefully managed by a team of dedicated professionals. The result is a magazine that continues to set the standard for quality journalism and storytelling.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

MORE FROM ASK.COM

• What do you want to do?

Our staff and contributors share their latest enthusiasms in books, music, podcasts, movies, TV, and more.

A Neuroscientist’s Poignant Study of How We Forget Most Things in Life

By David Kortava

March 30, 2021

Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty. In “ Remember ,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it; in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.”

Forgetfulness is our “default setting,” and that’s a good thing. The sixty or so members of our species whose brains are not sieves have their own diagnosis: highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. While the average person can list no more than ten events for any given year of life, people living with H.S.A.M. “remember in excruciatingly vivid detail the very worst, most painful days of their lives.” The most studied case concerns Solomon Shereshevsky, an early-twentieth-century Russian journalist who, like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, “felt burdened by excessive and often irrelevant information and had enormous difficulty filtering, prioritizing, and forgetting what he didn’t want or need.” Desperate to empty his mind, Shereshevsky practiced, with some success, various visualization exercises: he’d imagine setting fire to his memories or picture them scrawled on a giant chalkboard and then erased. (He also turned to the comforts of the bottle and died of complications from alcoholism , although Genova doesn’t mention this.)

An efficient memory system, Genova writes, involves “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal.” To retain an encounter, deliberate attention alone will get you most of the way there. “If you don’t have Alzheimer’s and you pay attention to what your partner is saying, you’re going to remember what they said.” (Distracted spouses, take note.) Also, get enough sleep. (An exhausted Yo-Yo Ma once left his eighteenth-century Venetian cello, worth $2.5 million, in the trunk of a New York City yellow cab.) Other strategies include leaning on external cues, such as checklists—every year, U.S. surgeons collectively leave hundreds of surgical instruments inside their patients’ bodies—chunking information into meaningful units, and the method of loci, or visualizing information in a familiar environment. Joshua Foer employed the latter device, also known as a “memory palace,” to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship.

The business of “motivated forgetting” is more complicated. Genova advises aspiring amnesiacs to avoid anything that might trigger an unwanted memory. “The more you’re able to leave it alone, the more it will weaken and be forgotten,” she writes. Easier said than done, especially with respect to the recurring, sticky memories that characterize conditions such as P.T.S.D. Here, Genova points to promising therapies that take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency to edit episodic memories with every retrieval. In the safe keeping of a psychiatrist’s office (and sometimes with the benefit of MDMA), a patient deliberately revisits the painful memory “with the intention of introducing changes,” revising and gradually overwriting the panic-inducing memory with a “gentler, emotionally neutral version of what happened.” Not quite “Eternal Sunshine,” but if it works, it works.

Genova, a neuroscientist by training, has spent most of her working life writing fiction about characters with various neurological maladies. Her novel “ Still Alice ,” from 2007, centered on a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In “Remember,” her first nonfiction work, Genova assures her readers that only two per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are of the strictly inherited, early-onset kind. For most of us, our chances of developing the disease are highly amenable to interventions, as it takes fifteen to twenty years for the amyloid plaque that is mounting in our brains to reach a tipping point, “triggering a molecular cascade that causes tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and pathological forgetting.” What do those interventions look like? Genova’s guidance is backed by current science, but is mostly just parental: exercise, avoid chronic stress, adopt a Mediterranean diet, and enjoy your morning coffee—but not so much as to compromise deep sleep, which is when “your glial cells flush away any metabolic debris that has accumulated in your synapses.”

One of the more interesting studies that Genova cites followed six hundred and seventy-eight elderly nuns over two decades, subjecting them to all manner of physical and cognitive tests. When a nun died, her brain was collected for autopsy. Curiously, a number of the nuns whose brains showed plaques, tangles, and shrinkage exhibited “no behavioral signs” of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers theorized that these nuns had a high degree of “cognitive reserve”; they tended to have more years of formal education, active social lives, and mentally stimulating hobbies. Even as many old neural pathways collapsed, they were paving “new neural roads” and taking detours along as-yet undamaged connections, thereby masking, if not postponing, the onset of the disease. All pretty straightforward. Now all we have to do is build a society in which everyone has the time and resources for adequate sleep, exercise, nutrition, self-care, and a few good hobbies.

A Cocktail Book That Brings Flair to Life in Lockdown

By Julia Bush

February 27, 2021

Mixing tiki drinks may seem like a warm-weather endeavor, but shaking and stirring my way through Shannon Mustipher’s beautiful, inventive “ Tiki: Modern Tropical Cocktails ” has supplied a much-needed serotonin boost in this extremely indoor winter. “Tiki,” which came out in 2019, is one of very few cocktail books by an African-American bartender. In it, Mustipher weaves her knowledge through a lavishly photographed guide, presenting the recipes for her layered, balanced drinks and—for those with the confidence to improvise—outlining principles for concocting your own.

It’s immediately obvious that Mustipher knows her rum. She was the beverage director at Gladys Caribbean, a rum bar in Brooklyn, before it closed under pandemic-related pressure in June, and her book is committed to imparting at least a bit of tiki history to its readers. In the first recipe, for a predecessor to the Old-Fashioned called the Bombo, Mustipher suggests a Navy-style rum or an extra-aged or blackstrap rum—spirits that were used when the drink was invented, she writes. Before the world shut down, I would likely pull out the Bacardi Superior and call it a day. Now, without dinner plans, or travel plans, or any plans at all, I obsessively hunt for Mustipher’s suggested bottles: an aged white rum for a variation on the Daiquiri, a rhum agricole blanc for a drink called the Royal Peacock, a pot-still Jamaican rum for a spin on a Mai Tai.

Mustipher takes the presentation of her drinks just as seriously as the spirits she mixes into them. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she threw speakeasy -themed parties complete with “installation pieces,” including beer fridges stacked with forties and champagne chilled in bathtubs. Her penchant for flair seeps into “Tiki.” A garnish “is never an afterthought or arbitrary decoration,” Mustipher writes. “Garnishes fulfill an essential function, engaging all five senses to complete the drink.” To present the Flaneuse, a cocktail that calls for rhum agricole , sherry, and coconut syrup, she suggests an edible flower, a dehydrated pineapple wedge, and a banana leaf. For the S.O.S. Mai Tai, Mustipher explains how to D.I.Y. a flaming lime shell using a sugar cube soaked in 151-proof rum. “Sprinkling ground cinnamon over the flame will create impressive, if brief, sparks,” she writes, before a bolded paragraph of safety tips.

A year into a global pandemic , I’ll take any thrill I can get. So, on a recent thirty-seven-degree school night, I perched a sugar cube on a Mai Tai, lit it until it glowed blue, and shook a jar of cinnamon over the top. An orange flare shot about four inches above the glass, lighting up the kitchen in my tiny studio apartment for less than a second. By the time I gasped, the fire was gone and my counter was coated in cinnamon. The drink, though, was sublime.

A Pioneering Video-Art Curator Chronicles the Medium in “Video/Art: The First Fifty Years”

By Andrea K. Scott

February 14, 2020

Don’t be fooled by the straightforward title of the lively new book “ Video/Art: The First Fifty Years .” A better description of Barbara London’s indispensable and enticingly personal history arrives two pages in, when she writes, “This book describes the madcap trajectory of a pliable medium.” Few guides are more qualified to lead readers through the rapid rise of the once renegade art form, which is now so ubiquitous that screens and paintings share walls in museums—London was the very first curator to introduce video to the Museum of Modern Art, where she championed tech-based experiments for forty-three years. (She retired in 2013.) What makes her book such a fun read is that it’s not exactly the comprehensive survey its title implies. Instead, it’s as much memoir as exegesis, an idiosyncratic front-line report from a deeply informed, intrepid, and passionate pioneer who is still in the trenches. (London now teaches graduate students at Yale, and her exhibition on sound art is about to commence a five-year tour.) Even her curatorial path was unconventional: the native New Yorker was pursuing a graduate degree in Islamic art when she traded the classroom for downtown haunts, like Max’s Kansas City, which was the Cedar Tavern of the electronic avant-garde—or “scenester intermedia mavericks,” in London’s words.

So, although readers won’t learn about, say, Christian Marclay’s iconic twenty-four-hour video installation “ The Clock ,” from 2010 (the artist merits a mention, but not regarding his most famous work), they will travel with London to meet Chinese artists in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou, in 1997. (Full disclosure: I was part of a team in New York that produced London’s daily online diary of that visit for MOMA , a blog before the word existed.) Any history of video must begin with the wizardly Korean innovator Nam June Paik (1932-2006), who is widely acknowledged as the medium’s founding father. Paik plays a major role in London’s story, but, in addition to contextualizing him as a towering historical figure, she shares personal anecdotes, including this vivid description of his studio: “I would crawl over and through a maze of electrical wire, tubes, and old circuitry to find Paik often standing in rubber boots, so as not to be electrocuted.”

Similarly, an in-depth account of the work of the influential New York artist Joan Jonas—who has been combining performance with technology since the late sixties and whose bewitching room-sized installation “Mirage” (conceived in 1976), a six-part game of drawing and erasure, is a highlight of the new MOMA —includes the astrological tidbit that both the curator and the artist are Cancers. (London writes, of this cosmic affinity, “Once we met, I identified with her tenaciousness, imagination, and loyalty as a sympathetic friend.”) One special merit of London’s perspective is her emphasis on the role of women in the medium’s evolution, from familiar names like the pop-culture crossover artist Laurie Anderson to equally important but lesser-known figures like Dara Birnbaum, whose deliriously feminist spin on a DC superhero is also now on view at MOMA, in the five-minute video “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman.” Not a bad label for the pathbreaking insights of London herself.

Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” Is Still One of Our Sharpest Portraits of Female Desire

By Michele Moses

February 10, 2020

“ The Best of Everything ,” Rona Jaffe’s best-seller from 1958, is what you would get if you took “Sex and the City” and set it inside “Mad Men” ’s universe. A novel about three young women who meet while working in the typing pool of a publishing house, it has the white-gloved, Scotch-swilling aesthetic of the fifties but also an unflinching frankness about women’s lives and desires—a combination that makes it feel radical, prescient. In order to write it, Jaffe interviewed fifty women about “the things nobody spoke about in polite company”: losing their virginities, getting abortions, being sexually harassed. “I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile,” Jaffe wrote, in the foreword to the 2005 reissue of her novel. Put simply, she wanted it to say, “Me, too.”

“The Best of Everything” centers on Caroline Bender, April Morrison, and Gregg Adams. Caroline is a self-possessed Radcliffe graduate who was engaged until her fiancé took a six-week trip to Europe and left her for the first familiar girl he ran into on the ship. She has professional aspirations, which immediately earns her suspicion from her bosses. April is a starry-eyed girl from Colorado who just wants to meet a nice boy but instead falls in with a handsome upper-crust cad who works at Merrill Lynch. And Gregg is an actress who becomes infatuated with an emotionally unavailable theatre director. “Some people are made to be hurt,” Caroline says at one point. “Gregg is that type.” The three become close, search for love, and navigate the indignities of being a woman in the workplace.

Chief among them is Mr. Shalimar, the editor-in-chief of one of the imprints at Fabian Publications and a serial abuser who would fit right in at Leslie Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret. He asks April, on a night when he requested she work late, “Tell me, what kinds of things do the young boys do when they make love?” and later tries to kiss her in his office. He teases Caroline with the possibility of a promotion and then puts his hand on her knee at after-work drinks. And, most memorably, at the office Christmas party, Mr. Shalimar asks Barbara Lemont, an assistant editor at one of the publisher’s magazines, whether she has nice legs, and, when she doesn’t answer, he crawls under the table to appraise them. “You have beau-ti-ful legs,” he concludes. When he reëmerges, he leans in to kiss her, but she dodges him. “What did you think I wanted to do, rape you?” he cries. “You’re fired. Don’t you dare come into this office on Monday.”

Refreshingly, Jaffe doesn’t treat this episode with cheerful permissiveness, doesn’t present it as having a kind of louche glamour. Instead, she stays close to Barbara. “For the first time that evening her feelings were revealed completely on her face—resolution, fury, and desperation. ‘I need this job,’ she said. ‘He’s not going to take it away from me if I have to go to Mr. Fabian himself.’ ”

It’s no better outside of work, either. On dates, which Barbara describes as “hand-to-hand combat,” men force themselves on the women. At a wedding, the bride’s drunk uncle pinches their cheeks and squeezes their waists as they try to politely signal that they’d rather be left alone.

Yet “The Best of Everything” imparts this vision with sly humor, top-notch banter, and a sudsy plot that made me gasp out loud. The book still reads like a romance, still gets its propulsiveness from the question of whether the characters will find the love they desire and happiness therein. Will Caroline’s fiancé come back to her? Will April’s socialite boyfriend commit to her? Will the married man whom Barbara Lemont is in love with leave his wife for her? And do we even want them to? Or are they all bad news? In fact, Jaffe uses the badness of men to raise the stakes for finding a good one; love becomes a heroic quest rather than a doomed endeavor. In this sense, “The Best of Everything” cunningly enacts a tragic irony: the worse men behave, the more fervently the characters turn to men to find exceptions to the rule.

The Bleak Antarctic Saga of “The Impossible First”

January 30, 2020.

If you’re going to traverse Antarctica on cross-country skis, it’s advisable to go in a group, ideally with psychologically sturdy comrades in preternaturally good shape. You might bring kites, to harness the propulsive power of the wind, or arrange to have caches of food deposited along your route. The continent has seen sixteen such successful crossings. Four years ago, Henry Worsley, a retired lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, made the first attempt at an unassisted solo expedition, dragging a sled of provisions weighing more than three hundred pounds at the journey’s start. (Worsley died; David Grann wrote about his endeavor for this magazine.) Not long after, Ben Saunders, another British polar explorer, set out on the ice, but he misjudged how much food he’d require and was forced to abandon his mission at the South Pole. Finally, in late 2018, a thirty-three-year-old American endurance athlete named Colin O’Brady pulled it off: an unsupported, nearly thousand-mile hike across one of the most unforgiving landscapes on the planet.

In O’Brady’s new memoir, “ The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone ,” he describes the undertaking less as a matter of grit than as a “brutal math problem,” the main variables being “miles, calories, hours, days.” Pack as much nutrient-dense food as you can carry—enough to sustain you but not so much that it’s impossible to haul—and make it to the other side before the twenty-four-hour sunshine of Antarctic summer gives way to the unbroken darkness of winter. O’Brady had budgeted for a daily intake of seven thousand calories, but he ended up burning more than ten thousand a day—a starvation diet, unsustainable for much longer than the two months he had planned for the trek. Even the pace at which energy is expended in subzero temperatures is a careful balancing act: too little exertion and hypothermia sets in, but too much will result in sweat-dampened clothes, which can rapidly freeze against the body. One veteran explorer advised O’Brady on how to use plastic bags to keep the insides of his footwear dry. “A frozen boot never thaws in the deep cold,” he warned. “That’s it. Frostbite. Toes goodbye.”

Beyond the physical perils lies an even greater danger. Marching twelve or thirteen hours a day, often in a sensory void, O’Brady felt “the quiet erosion of judgment and reason and sanity.” His thoughts would race, descending into “that place of obsessive what-if fears.” He contemplated the probable outcome should a freak squall send his tent flying: “I’d die alone, in the cold, my body temperature falling. I’d grow sleepy, then increasingly irrational, and finally I’d just lie down.” At times, he’d stare absently at his compass and feel as though he were falling into it, relinquishing “the sense that it was separate from me.” One night, while he was setting up camp, everything went blank. He stood there, shovel in hand, unsure of what he was doing or why, “as though my mind had just sort of walked off the field.”

The obvious question is: Why do this to yourself? A charitable reading would credit O’Brady for testing the limits of human potential and furnishing us with a rich metaphor for chasing our dreams. A cynic might see naked ambition and a competitiveness verging on the colonial. (Louis Rudd, the second person to complete the crossing, along a parallel route, two days after O’Brady, had told the Telegraph : “It’s really important it’s a Brit that cracks this journey first.”) For the last seventy-seven miles, O’Brady gave up on sleep entirely and trudged on for thirty-two straight hours. “I was a reduced man, stripped to his essence,” he writes. “Everything unnecessary in the universe was gone.” After fifty-four days of severe cold and isolation, and having lost twenty-five pounds, he reached a solitary wooden post, set into the frozen ground by the United States Geological Survey, marking the end of the continent and the beginning of the Ross Ice Shelf. In itself, O’Brady’s story is neither cautionary nor inspirational; it’s a Rorschach test for one’s own character and aspirations. To what extremes would you go, and how much punishment would you endure, in the service of a single goal? If there is a lesson, it’s that the path of the reduced man can lead to triumph, or madness, or both.

The Tender Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, a Lost Giant of Latin-American Literature

By Jonathan Blitzer

December 20, 2019

A friend of the late Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti once said that he had muy buena salud frágil —excellent fragile health. Mainly, it was a reference to the last twenty years of Onetti’s life, when he lived in Madrid and spent much of his time in bed. In photos from the period, he’s propped on pillows, reading, next to piles of books, a bottle of whiskey, and an ashtray the size of an overturned umbrella. This life style made his death, in 1994, at the age of eighty-four, seem like a special feat of longevity. Yet Onetti’s “excellent fragile health” made even more sense in relation to his work. One of the greatest Latin-American writers of the twentieth century, he published six novels and dozens of stories and novellas, most of which are set in a fictional town called Santa María, which is populated with jaded eccentrics, castaways, and addled dreamers. In Onetti’s fiction, characters are forever in limbo, between the world they actually inhabit and the one they’d prefer to imagine for themselves.

Onetti never received the international recognition of his peers, such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who all admired him. Some of that was the result of his inscrutable personality. Onetti was taciturn and recessive, and he avoided political causes. But there was a literary reason for his obscurity, too. His novels can be hard to read, and harder still to translate. The sentences are dense and layered, evoking comparisons to Faulkner; his characters routinely drift into existential reveries. His most famous novels—a trilogy published in the fifties and sixties—are entrancing, but not especially inviting to the uninitiated. The first one, “ A Brief Life ,” tells the story of Juan María Brausen, who glumly dreams up the alternate reality that becomes Santa María, where the next two novels (“ Bodysnatchers ,” “ The Shipyard ”), about a grizzled pimp named Larsen, take place.

Onetti thrived in shorter forms, and the first major English translation of his collected stories, “ A Dream Come True ,” brings the author’s talents into full view. The book, which was published, in November, by Archipelago, and translated by Katherine Silver, shows Onetti’s usual darkness brightened by a hint of tenderness for his characters, who are lost but still trying to find their way. The volume’s title comes from one of Onetti’s trademark stories, in which a sardonic theatre impresario is approached by a woman who wants to pay him to stage a mysterious dream that she’s had. The director acts like money is his primary motivation, but something else impels him to take the job, an understanding he comes to grasp “as clearly as if it were one of those things one learns forever as a child and words are later useless to explain.” Another classic—and a personal favorite—is “Welcome, Bob,” a character study of an aging lover wracked by guilt about who he’s become. He grows obsessed with his younger girlfriend’s judgmental brother, Bob. The story is devoted to him, like a deranged love letter, and the narrator counts the days until Bob, too, will get older, fall short of his own expectations, and spend his hours nursing the continual ache of disappointment.

Onetti published sporadically in his later years, and the stories in this volume span roughly six decades of his writing, from his early published fiction to the final years before his death. Aging and senescence are frequent themes, as they let Onetti explore the world of frustrated dreams. You’d think this would make the stories slow and meditative, but the effect is the opposite. Some of them have a special power of suspense; you’re never sure whether a person’s interior or exterior life will win out. (In fact, it’s often not clear what divides them.) “Presencia,” which was published in 1978, a few years after Onetti arrived in Madrid as a political exile, is a case study in this suspense, and one of the sharpest pieces of fiction ever written about the disappearances of the seventies and eighties. In it, a man hires a private investigator to locate his former lover, who was arrested in a military crackdown. But the investigator is a drunk and a scam artist. The man knows this, and pays him anyway, clinging to the hope that his lover can be found. By the end, he’s commissioning the investigator to invent stories he can believe in, and even be bothered by, as long as they come up short of the more painful truth. “On my world map,” he says, at one point, “there were twenty centimeters between Santa María and Madrid.”

Alison Roman’s “Nothing Fancy” and the Art of the Unpretentious Dinner Party

November 28, 2019.

“ Nothing Fancy ,” the new book by the food writer Alison Roman, makes the case that nobody should be too daunted by etiquette to have people over for a meal. “For anyone looking for tips on how to fold linen napkins or create floral arrangements, I am not your girl,” she writes. Instead, Roman teaches her readers to make “unfussy food”: homey meals that can be thrown together and snacks to hold you over when the throwing runs long. Roman gives cooks “permission to be imperfect.” It doesn’t matter if you don’t own wine glasses and your guests drink out of mugs, or if some people have to sit on the floor. What matters—and this is the core of Roman’s vision—is that a roomful of people can share food without pretense.

Roman is no ordinary food writer. Given the viral success of #TheStew and the popularity of her book “ Dining In ,” from 2017, she’s more like a phenomenon. When “Nothing Fancy” came out, it jumped to the top of the Times best-seller list, and, when Roman announced a book tour, she sold out events in all thirteen cities. Like high-waisted pants or Sally Rooney novels, she’s now a style signifier for the creative class—a part of a shared vocabulary. Part of the appeal is her grasp of her audience: the financially unsteady millennial generation, which has turned “nothing fancy” into an aesthetic choice. Her cooking also mirrors a shift in thinking about nutrition. The culture has reëmbraced fat, and Roman uses it with gusto: butter, chicken fat, ricotta, labneh, coconut milk. She flavors her food with tastes from across the spectrum—earthy turmeric and tahini, bright citrus and fresh herbs—and then adorns everything with flaky Maldon salt. But her signature is accent ingredients, such as anchovies and preserved lemon, that are briny, tangy, funky, and polarizing. Without prohibitive costs or cook times, Roman makes food more interesting.

“Nothing Fancy” has served me as Roman intended. At a Sunday dinner that started two hours later than planned, I put out her labneh dip with sizzled scallions and chili, and everyone declared it “bomb.” On a weeknight, I made her “Casual Apple Tart with Caramelized Buttermilk” for my roommates (the people I’m always “having over”), and they called it the best apple pie they’d ever had. But my favorite discovery is her “Perfect Herby Salad”: half lettuce and half herbs (parsley, cilantro, tarragon, mint), drizzled with lemon, olive oil, and, of course, Maldon. Like many of her best ideas, it has a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simplicity.

The accessibility of Roman’s food is matched by the accessibility of her persona. On her Instagram Stories, she answers questions from her followers (What if I don’t have this ingredient? Is it O.K. if I skip this step?), and in “Nothing Fancy” she writes with chatty informality and self-deprecating humor. But her friendliness toward her readers is less convincing—and less interesting—than her annoyance at her guests, which she cloaks in recipe tips. About her D.I.Y. Martini bar, she writes, “Since making individual ’tinis for everyone who walks through the door is not on my agenda for any evening, I like to make one giant batch.” Or, on “Smashed Eggs and Fancy Fish on Crackers,” she writes, “Not to be rude but if you’re coming over, I am already doing a lot of work and I don’t feel like I need to assemble a cracker for you.” These moments lend her a queen-bee charisma. Whereas Ina Garten and Martha Stewart are prim and gracious, Roman, with her crackling chicken skin and red lips and nails, is libidinous and a little bit mean. Lots of cookbooks promise to help you entertain with ease, but “Nothing Fancy” makes that idea briny, tangy, funky, and a little polarizing: Why play hostess when you can be the life of the party?

“Mobituaries,” Mo Rocca’s Curious, Endearing Collection of Lives Forgotten

By Michael Schulman

November 12, 2019

Some years ago, I was seated at a play next to Mo Rocca, the television and radio personality known for “The Daily Show” and, more recently, “CBS Sunday Morning.” Out of nowhere, he turned to me and asked, in his unmistakable voice, “Do you know anything about Venus flytraps?” I’ve forgotten the tidbit about Venus flytraps that followed, or the reason they came up at all—what I remember is Rocca’s enthusiasm for knowing things for the sake of knowing them. That enthusiasm courses through his new book, “ Mobituaries ” (written with Jonathan Greenberg), an offshoot of his podcast of the same name. A Mobituary, as Rocca defines it, is “an appreciation for someone who didn’t get the love she or he deserved the first time around.” Some chapters are dedicated to “Forgotten Forerunners,” such as Elizabeth Jennings (1827-1901), a black woman who boarded a whites-only streetcar in Manhattan, a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. Jennings sued the Third Avenue Railroad, and Rocca, who has a thing for obscure nineteenth-century Presidents, notes that her lawyer was the twenty-four-year-old Chester A. Arthur.

Obituaries tell us about lives lived, but also about whom we value. The Times’ project Overlooked has tried to right historical wrongs by giving obituaries to figures the paper previously ignored. Rocca isn’t as ideological as that—he’s driven by the desire to absorb great facts and pass them on. The quirks of history delight and vex him. He seems genuinely aggrieved that Audrey Hepburn died on the same day as Bill Clinton’s Inauguration and didn’t get her proper due. Same goes for Farrah Fawcett, who died on the same day as Michael Jackson. (One of the book’s many humorous sidebars lists other notable people who died on the same day, in case you were wondering what Margaret Thatcher had in common with Annette Funicello.) There’s even a chapter on historic figures memorialized by rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike—a motley bunch that includes Walt Whitman, Vince Lombardi, and Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. Mobituaries are not reserved only for people; Rocca also revisits the “deaths” of fashion trends (R.I.P., the codpiece), sitcom characters (pour one out for Judy Winslow, of “Family Matters”), and the country of Prussia.

The final Mobituary in the book is for Rocca’s father, Marcel (1929-2004), told through his love of the trumpet, a teen-age hobby that Marcel resumed at the age of fifty, practicing in the cellar of their family home, in Bethesda, Maryland. Rocca credits Marcel with his love of long car rides, the music of Jerome Kern, and obituaries—curiosity paid forward. Also, Rocca notes, would you believe that the famous trumpet player Lee Morgan was shot onstage at Slugs’ Saloon, by his common-law wife? In our fact-challenged times, Rocca’s joyful tour through the “didja know”s of history is an unexpected antidote.

“Love and Capital,” an Ode to the Relationship That Saved Karl Marx

By Sheelah Kolhatkar

November 6, 2019

With populist movements surging around the world, there is no better moment to reacquaint oneself with the work of Karl Marx, who predicted our current economic condition back in the eighteen-hundreds. Fortunately, we have Mary Gabriel’s book “ Love and Capital ,” which tells the story of Marx’s life and work through the prism of his marriage. The book, from 2011, reads like a Flaubert novel; it humanizes Marx, and shows him as a flawed family man who likely never would have produced his world-changing writings if it weren’t for his long-suffering wife, Jenny. Although Jenny was born to an aristocratic Prussian family, she remained devoted to Marx through enormous hardship, often collaborating with him to get his ideas on paper.

Marx’s theories were inspired by events that bear some similarities to ones seen today. In the Silesian region of Prussia, for example, the thriving textile industry went into severe decline after demand for handspun cloth plummeted. The industrial revolution had created a glut of machine-produced textiles, which depressed prices; meanwhile, the Prussian government refused to supply anti-poverty benefits to aid the newly unemployed. The factory owners responded to the decline in demand by cutting workers’ pay, driving them to desperation. In June, 1844, thousands of workers rebelled and destroyed the mansions of textile barons and industrialists. (The uprising was put down by force.) A few years later, during a debate on free trade, Marx disputed the idea that such trade would benefit workers, describing it as “freedom of Capital to crush the worker.” He publicly supported the policy, though, because he felt that it would cause so much suffering among the working class that it would hasten their eagerness for revolution.

Gabriel’s book lends a sense of texture and intimacy to this history, giving us a ground-level view of how Marx’s ideas took shape. But it also reveals the relationship that enabled those theories. Marx spent more than a decade struggling to complete his masterwork, “ Capital ,” in which he hoped to show the world that capitalism existed primarily to exploit workers. He and Jenny lived during those years in worsening poverty, moving between London, Paris, and Brussels and trying to keep their children out of starvation. The first installment of “Capital” received little acclaim when it was published, in 1867; today, it stands as one of the most influential texts ever written. Without Jenny, Gabriel suggests, it never would have seen the light of day.

“The Grammarians” Gives Voice to the Laws of Language

By Lauren Leibowitz

October 18, 2019

There are plenty of misconceptions about the discipline of copy editing—not to mention the temperament of the copy editor. Foremost among them is the idea that the laws of language are cold, hard, and immutable, and that a copy editor ought to guard against the perversion of the texting, tweeting masses. In practice, though, the principles that govern usage are ever-changing and open to interpretation; the trick is knowing when, and how, they should be broken.

Cathleen Schine’s new novel, “ The Grammarians ,” is a rich study of the factions that attempt to define how language should be used. Schine, a former copy editor herself, gives voice and backstory to the opposing teams: the prescriptivist, who, pun intended, follows rules to the letter, and the descriptivist, who, rules be damned, strives to make the written word more closely match its meaning. “The Grammarians” personifies this conflict with a set of twins, Laurel and Daphne. When they’re five years old, the girls’ father inherits an old copy of Webster’s Second, and places it on a literal altar for their perusal; they collect and play with the quirkier words they find like other children would play with paper dolls. We follow Laurel and Daphne into adulthood, in New York City, in the nineteen-eighties. They move in together and get jobs: Laurel starts as a kindergarten teacher in a private school on the Upper West Side, and Daphne answers phones for a downtown alt-weekly. As twins in fiction are wont to do, the two switch places one day, and Laurel, as Daphne, stumbles her way onto the paper’s copy desk. When the real Daphne returns to work, she excels as a copy editor; in the ensuing chapters and years, she goes on to become the copy chief and a renowned language columnist. Under the guise of “The People’s Pedant,” Daphne writes screeds about grammar and usage—much like The New Yorker’s Comma Queen , if she were more concerned with correcting speakers’ conversational tics. “I am a professional scold, and I like it,” Daphne realizes, after she’s gained notoriety.

As Daphne’s prescriptivism becomes more pronounced, it seeps into her relationship with her sister, who has discovered the wonders of Fowler’s Modern English . “He saw language as if it were living and breathing and muddling through like everyone else,” Laurel remarks, of Fowler. The book leads her to seek out more historical examples of language in its natural habitat, including letters collected by the Department of War. “The misspellings strike her as painfully eloquent, not mistakes at all, but cries of the heart, documentation of upheaval in a family, in a social order,” Schine writes. Laurel turns the letters into poetry, and breathless critics liken her creations to the revelatory samplings of a hip-hop artist. But, as Laurel awakens to the raw beauty of idiomatic writing, Daphne clings harder to the regulations that she sees her sister as flouting. The rift that’s been developing since the girls moved out on their own deepens into a full-on split.

I’ve been copy-editing professionally for six years now, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t guilty of some of Daphne’s judgment when I’m off the clock. But, as I watched Laurel exhort the vitality and depth of imperfect grammar, I kept thinking about how she was the one who had awakened the People’s Pedant in the first place. While Schine’s twin grammarians advance distinct philosophies, the rest of us must reconcile the two, and consider each writer’s words on their own merit. “Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors,” Daphne says early on, before occupational hazards wreak havoc on what drew her to the job in the first place. But sometimes those misconceptions stem from the tools at the author’s disposal. Mediating between the Laurels and the Daphnes can be agonizing, but, at its finest, copy-editing ought to be an exercise in empathy—to serve the source text, the writer, and, above all, the reader, who should never sense that such deliberations occurred.

About The New Yorker Recommends

The New Yorker Recommends is where our critics, staff, and contributors share their enthusiasms. In “Read,” our writers recommend new and notable books, series, and essays. For more of The New Yorker’s literary coverage, check out Books , where our critics review the latest in fiction and nonfiction; Second Read , where writers revisit old favorites; and the fiction in the magazine. You can also sign up for The New Yorker Recommends newsletter , which culls from both this page and the magazine’s wider cultural coverage. Subscribe to The New Yorker for access to the full contents of the magazine, as well as the entirety of its archives.

• Books & Culture
• Fiction & Poetry
• Humor & Cartoons
• Puzzles & Games

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

• The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks.com
• The Reader's Catalog and NYR Shop: gifts for readers and NYR merchandise offers
• New York Review Books: news and offers about the books we publish
• I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list.
• Hidden Form Source

December 21, 2023

Current Issue

Jane Austen Gets Dressed

Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.

December 21, 2023 issue

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History , Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

Shooting Werner Herzog

The director’s memoir, packed with unlikely incident, suggests that Herzog has always been his own greatest creation.

The Weight of One Story

The speakers in Bushra al-Maqtari’s oral history of Yemen’s civil war each narrate only a single incident: the violent death of a family member or friend.

An Unhealthy Definition of Rights

For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government’s power to protect public health.

“No Stegosaurus ever choked on a shopping bag. No ichthyosaur expired in the sludge of an oil spill. A documentary liberated from these regrets and worries frees the audience to appreciate nature’s abundance with unalloyed joy.”

A New Language of Modern Art

An ambitious exhibition of the work of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas demonstrates their affinities and their shared ambition to revolutionize painting.

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

The Ghost in the Labyrinth

Inspired by the disgrace and silencing of an African novelist half a century ago, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Memory of Men both satirizes and embraces an overwrought belief in literature.

How America Ends and Begins Again

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew.

A Leaf or Two from Whitman

The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.

The Dream of a Universal Library

Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame?

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

The Emptied Cosmos

Bringing readers on a walking tour of Rome’s churches, Gabriel Pihas argues in a new book that for over a millennium, nature was God’s chief display board.

Becoming European

Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands traces the development of his passionate identification with Europe and the continent’s unsteady experiments with unity

In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony , the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

Ever-New Sound Worlds

Henry Threadgill’s memoir is a spirited account of his lifelong search for imaginative musical improvisation and new systems of composition.

Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II , James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Patterns of Uprooting

On opposite sides of the world—Poland and Uruguay—the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki share a close attention to their own languages.

A Bitter Season in the West Bank

The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.

Thoughtfully chosen gifts for readers and writers

Combatants for Peace

We are a group of former Israeli soldiers and formerly imprisoned Palestinians. Our work is a model for the nonviolent way forward.

November 23, 2023

Bad Facts, Bad Law

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

November 25, 2023

Inexorable Motion

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 29, 2023

Waiting for a New Poland

Five weeks after the opposition won Poland’s legislative elections, its supporters are looking ahead to the country’s future.

November 24, 2023

The Forest/Wanting a Child

To Our Indolent Cancer

Biden’s Selective Outrage

The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard.

November 14, 2023

‘Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom’

The first Lebanon War helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s escalations of violence in Gaza. Who will heed its warnings?

November 9, 2023

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023

Israel: The Left in Peril

Since October 7, Israel’s left has encountered unprecedented repression. Could its ideas nonetheless point the way forward?

November 12, 2023

Free from the Archives

“In some cases, Degas rises above the sordidness of these situations to imagine scenes of slapstick comedy. In La Fête de la Patronne , the girls, naked, save for stockings and slippers, laugh as they give enormous bouquets to the madam—who in her cheap black dress looks like nothing so much as an old cook—and shower her with kisses.”

The Man Who Was France

“Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.”

January 16, 2020 issue

The Truth About the Resistance

Who were the resisters, what were they resisting, and what difference did they really make?

February 25, 2016 issue

France Without Glory

“The political authorities born of the Resistance thought it prudent to speak and act as though the Vichy government of 1940–1944 had been a brief, unhappy interlude, a sort of illegitimate interruption of republican continuity…. This unity of purpose, however, was bought at the price of an incomplete confrontation with the memory and experience of the occupation years.”

May 23, 1996 issue

French Collaborators: The New Debate

“A striking fact about the Frenchmen indicted for crimes against humanity is that…each of them had an entirely successful career in France after the war.”

June 25, 1992 issue

What the Little Woman Was Up To

An exhibition of books, ephemera, and realia made by women over the past five hundred years makes tangible the kind of contributions that typically go ignored.

March 26, 2020 issue

Old Wives’ Tales

“The oral contraceptives and abortifacients known to the Greeks and Romans were both effective and also safer than one might have expected.”

November 18, 1993 issue

Darn that Darning

“Despite our view of them as repressed and exploited, we know that nineteenth-century women had contraceptive practices, orgasms, used nursing bottles and abortifacients; in Michigan at one period, one-third of pregnancies were terminated by abortion.”

April 12, 1984 issue

An Abortion War Solution: The Celibacy Amendment

In the interest of equity, the anti-abortion zealots would honor their obsession by proposing a sort of balancing of the human budget: a Celibacy Before Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution. Let us see how that goes down.

June 17, 2019

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

The Genius in Exile

“You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.”

November 6, 2014 issue

The Man with Many Qualities

“From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.”

March 18, 1999 issue

Art of a Nasty Time

Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York.

June 26, 1980 issue

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

The Witch Hunters’ Crusade

Why did sixteenth-century investigators of witchcraft place such an inordinate emphasis on demonic sex, and why did they concentrate their inquiries on women?

September 26, 2002 issue

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Arthur Kern's Creatures

Arthur Kern’s unsettling, grotesque sculptures bring to mind twins fighting for space within the womb, disembodied heads frozen in cryogenic pods, an astronaut doomed to float forever through outer space.

June 1, 2016

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

March 19, 2021

The Endless Occupation, a New Understanding

“Today’s reality in Israel-Palestine is at odds with everything the United States claims to stand for.”

March 20, 2021

Israel Without Illusions

“No one who regularly visits the Palestinian territories controlled by Israel has to speculate about whether or not Israel is engaged in the routine abuse of human rights.”

December 17, 2009 issue

“A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

August 3, 1967 issue

Basic Principles of Humanity

“Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.”

November 18, 2023

When the Brain Becomes Data

“Ever since we became ‘the product,’ we’ve been trading vast amounts of personal data for the privilege of engaging online.”

November 4, 2023

Where the Mistery Lurkes

“Change remains the lifeblood of literary tradition.”

October 28, 2023

The latest releases from New York Review Books

Loved and Missed

Robert Glück

Pier Paolo Pasolini

An Ordinary Youth

Walter Kempowski

Amelia Rosselli

Poor Helpless Comics!

Ed Subitzky

The Lost World

Free calendar offer!

Read the latest issue as soon as it’s available, and browse our rich archives. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and 25,000 articles published since 1963.

Give the gift they’ll open all year.

Save 55% off the regular rate and over 75% off the cover price and receive a free 2024 calendar!

Spend $75 or more for free US shipping

Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading., is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series let us know.

• Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
• Opens in a new window.

Supported by

Book Review

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

Would You Like Some Murder and Mayhem With Your Eggnog?

Our columnist recommends six new thrillers.

  By Sarah Lyall

Francis Ford Coppola Talks a Big Game, and for Good Reason

Sam Wasson’s supremely entertaining new book, “The Path to Paradise,” tracks the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a remarkable career.

  By David Kamp

Tim Dorsey, Who Turned Florida’s Quirks Into Comic Gold, Dies at 62

Long before Florida Man became a meme, he mined the Sunshine State’s weirdness for enough material to fill 26 darkly funny crime novels.

  By Clay Risen

The Best Thrillers of 2023

They include an espionage caper, the tale of a murderous librarian and a high-stakes adventure that takes place inside the various stomachs of a whale.

A Masterpiece That Inspired Gabriel García Márquez to Write His Own

For decades, Juan Rulfo’s novel, “Pedro Páramo,” has cast an uncanny spell on writers. A new translation may bring it broader appeal.

  By Valeria Luiselli

John Nichols, Author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War,’ Dies at 83

After decamping from New York to New Mexico, he wrote what was, for a time, among the most widely read novels about Latinos.

  By Sam Roberts

How American Evangelicalism Became ‘Mister Rogers With a Blowtorch’

In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.

  By Jennifer Szalai

The Essential Larry McMurtry

A wildly prolific son of Texas, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions. Here’s where to start.

  By Andy Greenwald

Advertisement

Books of The Times

For Women ‘Art Monsters,’ Both Beauty and Excess Are Key

The new book by Lauren Elkin examines artists who’ve defied conventions and expectations, including Carolee Schneemann, Eva Hesse and Kara Walker.

The Good Old Days of Book Publishing, Martinis and All

“Among Friends” is a history of an industry transformed by consolidation and shifting tastes.

  By Dwight Garner

Eat the Rich? How About Dine With Them Instead.

In “Flight of the WASP,” the inveterate dirt-digger Michael Gross gives America’s elite families the white-glove treatment.

  By Alexandra Jacobs

A Wine Guide for a Changing World (for Better and for Worse)

Ray Isle’s “The World in a Wineglass” is a broad survey of vintners with a focus on sustainability and organic methods.

By Sam Roberts

By Clay Risen

Two Books to Keep You Company While You Wait

Molly recommends a 19th-century “Dumb and Dumber” and a collection of essays about the weirder corners of the business world.

Christopher Paolini Wanted a Job Involving Dragons, So He Created One

Paolini, a best-selling author of young adult fantasy novels, has a new book out, “Murtagh.” In it, he returns to the world of “Eragon” and the adventures he began creating as a teenager.

By Stefano Montali

By Sarah Lyall

All Things in Moderation, Especially When They’re Toxic

In “Most Delicious Poison,” Noah Whiteman explores nature’s fine line between killing and curing.

By Robert Sullivan

A Complicated Return for a Prodigal Daughter

In “Welcome Home, Stranger,” Kate Christensen takes readers inside the best kind of fictional family: a dysfunctional one.

By S. Kirk Walsh

5 Books to Read About Sandra Day O’Connor

Justice O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, was a swing vote on polarizing issues before a closely divided court. These books offer insight into her life, career and legacy.

By Wilson Wong

6 Paperbacks to Read This Week

Selected paperbacks from the Book Review, including titles by Evette Dionne, Erica Jong, Chetna Maroo and more.

By Shreya Chattopadhyay

Holiday Gift Books for Children

From a 200th-anniversary edition of Clement C. Moore’s Christmas Eve tale to lightheartedly loopy poems for every day of the year.

By Catherine Hong

• Recent Reviews

Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided

“An engrossing story of the tumultuous final years of a movie icon.”

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

“Maddow's research reflects the danger inherent in an authoritarian state.

The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case

“Whatever the reader concludes, this book makes an exciting reading adventure, built on an enlightening study on analyzing legend and challenging popular history with scholarship and scienc

Illustrators' Sketchbooks: Inside the Creative Processes of 60 Iconic and Emerging Artists

“be ready to be inspired by what dreams, doodles, desires, and destinations start to show up.”

Delivering Destruction: American Firepower and Amphibious Assault from Tarawa to Iwo Jima (Studies in Marine Corps History and Amphibious Warfare)

“Chris Hemler, a historian who spent ten years on active duty in the U.S.

New Notable Now

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• NYJB Editing Services
• Review Requests

• Discussions
• Reading Challenge
• Kindle Notes & Highlights
• Favorite genres
• Friends’ recommendations
• Account settings

Books about The New Yorker Magazine

A book’s total score is based on multiple factors, including the number of people who have voted for it and how highly those voters ranked the book.

People Who Voted On This List (4)

Post a comment » Comments

Featured news & interviews.

• Create New List
• Lists I Created
• Lists I've Voted On
• Lists I've Liked

Anyone can add books to this list.

Saving My Votes

Friends votes, how to vote.

To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes.

To vote on books not in the list or books you couldn't find in the list, you can click on the tab add books to this list and then choose from your books, or simply search.

Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.