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• Books & the Arts
• April 21, 2022

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What does the future hold for one of united states’ oldest literary institutions, “the new york times” is failing its readers badly on covid “the new york times” is failing its readers badly on covid.

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The Supreme Court Just Got a Gun Ruling Right—for Completely Bonkers Reasons The Supreme Court Just Got a Gun Ruling Right—for Completely Bonkers Reasons

Elie Mystal

The Lifelong Incoherence of Biden’s Israel Strategy The Lifelong Incoherence of Biden’s Israel Strategy

David Klion

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Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy

492 episodes

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

The Book Review The New York Times

• 4.1 • 3.4K Ratings
• JUN 21, 2024

Griffin Dunne on His Joyful and Tragic Family Memoir

The actor and director Griffin Dunne joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about his family memoir, "The Friday Afternoon Club."

• JUN 14, 2024

10 Books to Check Out This Summer

Summer is upon us and you're going to need a few books to read. Book Review editors Elisabeth Egan and Joumana Khatib join host Gilbert Cruz to talk through a few titles they're looking forward to over the next several months.

• JUN 7, 2024

Elin Hilderbrand on Her Final Nantucket Summer Book

For many years now, Elin Hilderbrand has published a novel every summer set on the island of Nantucket. With her 30th book, 'Swan Song,' the bestselling author says she will step off that hamster wheel and try something new. On this week's episode, she and host Gilbert Cruz talk about her career, what she's reading, and what's next.

• MAY 31, 2024

Let's Talk About Percival Everett's 'James'

In this spoiler-filled conversation, a panel of Book Review editors discuss Percival Everett's reworking of Mark Twain's “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

• MAY 17, 2024

Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

The year 1986 was notable for two big disasters: the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in the United States. The journalist Adam Higginbotham wrote about Chernobyl in his 2019 book, “Midnight in Chernobyl.” Now he’s back, with a look at the American side of the ledger, in his new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.” On this week’s episode, Higginbotham tells host Gilbert Cruz why he was drawn to both disasters, and what the Challenger explosion revealed about weaknesses in America’s space program.

• MAY 10, 2024

Fantasy Superstar Leigh Bardugo on Her New Novel

In the world of fantasy fiction, Leigh Bardugo is royalty: Her Grishaverse novels are mainstays on the young adult best-seller list and her adult novels “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” established her as a force to reckon with in dark academia. This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bardugo about her first work of historical fiction, "The Familiar."

• © 2023 The New York Times Company

Customer Reviews

3.4K Ratings

I like the new book club feature (tho MJs speaking voice for radio needs oomph) but they would need to be more frequent to up the chance of even occasionally having read the book in question. And please at least 2x a month bring back the classic episodes with several books covered, author interview, etc.

I used to be a regular listener but now weeks or months go by where I don’t hit play at all. I miss the old crew and format.

Dumbed down, way down

The new format seems to be covering lots of what I call “airport lit”. I miss the old days when more substantive literature was covered, and I actually learned something.

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A Reviewer’s Life

The material constraints of writing criticism today.

I have been a freelance book reviewer for twenty years, which means that several times a week, the postal carrier delivers packages of books—some that I requested, some that I didn’t know I wanted, and some that I won’t ever want. A year and a half ago I received in this manner a book that I did want, Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September, about his friendship and apprenticeship with the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. The front cover features a photo of Hardwick looking prim and elegant on the low steps outside 15 West Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, where she lived in a top-floor duplex from 1961 until her death in 2007. On the back cover are two photographs of her dramatic two-story living room.

I often think about this room. Its ceilings appear to be twenty feet high. Next to the built-in bookshelves and requisite rolling ladder, swag curtains frame an enormous window, giving a the­atrical effect. A Juliet balcony gently interrupts one wall. Floating in the middle of the room is a writing desk, really a library table, from which a ceramic bust of a young man rises, like a gravestone, between two lamps. I showed the pictures to my husband once. “Oh,” he said. “She lived in the Morgan Library.”

My own desk is wedged into one corner of the bedroom I share with my husband, behind the children’s trampoline, between a hulking armoire and an ugly IKEA thing exploding with file boxes and rolls of scribbled-on paper that I really ought to throw away. Cairns of books are at my feet. If I turn my head just so I can glimpse a cluster of grocery bags brimming with toys and still more books, which I plan, someday, to sell or give away. Sometimes I pile the bags on top of each other to reduce their footprint, and when they threaten to topple, spread them out again.

What interests me about the photographs of Hardwick’s living room is that they provide evidence of the environment in which a brilliant and original mind worked. The couch on which she sat when she thought about Donne or Melville expressed a sensibility, but it also incubated one. On my way to my own desk, I catch a glimpse of the bags filled with crap. Whether or not I acknowledge it, the crap is always buried in the piece. Sometimes it rises right to the top.

criticism is an act of autobiography. The work of making an argu­ment, coming to a judgment, or simply choosing which books or objects to give time and attention to is inevitably, helplessly, an expression of values—and an expression of self. Our tastes tell on us as much as our syntax and tone; that mysterious compound called sensibility is formed by some strange alchemy of innate tendencies, life experiences, and material circumstances. In the pursuit of explicating a text, observing its patterns and structure, how it works, what it means, I also explicate myself—revealing what catches my interest, where my attention lingers. I might do this more, or less, intentionally, but I always do it.

Whatever is going on in the life of the critic is going to show up in her reading; it can’t not. Reading, writing, and thinking have experiential texture. The place and context in which I do those activities shapes them. Whether we are informed by political events or everyday life, it is not always possible, or desirable, to block out the noise of the world. When I write criticism, then, I try to use this fact of myself in some way. I might openly acknowledge why I am so invested in some aspect of a work. I might try to think through myself, pushing to arrive at a point at the very far edge of what I can see. I am a passionate adherent of close reading, the practice of being carefully attentive to words that are not our own. But close reading always involves the critic layering her own point of view over or next to the text’s, even as she observes, explains, interprets, evaluates. What I should not do is pretend that my reading is definitive, neutral, objective, or somehow free of myself and my environment. I write criticism to encounter an object, and I read criticism to encounter another person encountering an object. If I wanted a randomized controlled trial, I would be in the sciences.

There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a mes­sage in a bottle or sending up a flare.

Of course, the money one is paid to write a piece is one of the material constraints that shapes the work of criticism. Word rates have not increased in decades, while the cost of living goes up every year. According to Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick , beginning in the late 1990s Hardwick was paid about $4,000 per New York Review of Books essay—an amount com­parable to what writers are paid to write long book reviews today at a marquee publication like NYRB or The New Yorker . (Small publications pay much less.) Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the culture, but no one could pay the rent writ­ing for those outlets alone. If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether. It is impossible to know what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.

if the criticism I write is always limited by the fact that it is I who am writing it, bounded as I am by material constraints, it is also true that within that limit a profound freedom of thought persists. Sometimes when I read, I do have the sensation of blocking out the immediate physical world, journeying to an entirely different place, losing the sense of my body. It’s not just leaving myself behind that is freeing; it’s discovering myself. Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works. I get closer to and farther away from myself in the process, even as I know that I will inevitably ask questions that betray myself and my interests. The question I am most aware of asking has to do with point of view: I want to understand an object’s way of looking at the world. What would I have to believe about the world in order for this book to be true ? This is the kind of question I get most excited about asking.

Criticism is a relationship with an object, and as such it involves all of the regular psychic drama—idealization and fantasy; avoid­ance, hostility, and disappointment; the desire to know and a fas­cination with what is unknown; displacement from our own life onto the object. The person writing criticism has to always be on guard that the irritations and frustrations of writing do not get taken out on the object under review. Even pieces that begin in love and admiration can end in resentment and hate. I have noticed that after writing a review, I often lose interest in the author or resist reading their next book. If reviewing is a way to know something deeply, it’s also a way to say goodbye.

in the popular imagination , the critic is usually evil, sneering, vicious, or frustrated at their own thwarted artistic dreams. But the truth is, people who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career. It’s for people who still believe, against all practicality, that a life organized around lit­erature is worth more than a life organized around money. “Making a living is nothing,” Hardwick once wrote. “The great difficulty is making a point, making a difference—with words.”

I always say that I write for myself, to find out what I think or what I can do. But it’s also true that the main reason I write reviews is because people ask me to. Writing a novel that might end up in the drawer makes sense to me; writing a review that might end up there does not. Criticism is a conversation—with oneself but also with one’s editors, with readers, and with other reviewers. There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a mes­sage in a bottle or sending up a flare. I’m at my little desk, trying not to look at the bags on the floor. Who knows where the person who will read the piece is sitting?

Louise Glück’s Late Style

The critic as friend, rachel cusk, you might also like, white noise, new and improved, the feminism of elizabeth hardwick, new perspectives, enduring writing..

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New York Review Books publishes NYRB Classics , NYRB Kids , New York Review Comics , and NYRB Poets . Download our latest catalogs here.

New York Review Books

The New York Times has called The New York Review of Books “the country’s most successful intellectual journal.” According to the Times , “The secret of its success is this: its editors’ ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas.” New York Review Books brings together some of the finest writing in science, philosophy, history, politics, the arts, and literature from the Review’s contributors along with new fiction and nonfiction from literary and artistic mavericks such as Amit Chaudhuri, Jonathan Buckley, and Celia Paul. Included are volumes by such distinguished writers as Freeman Dyson, Martin Filler, Fritz Stern, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joan Didion, Darryl Pinckney, Renata Adler, and Tim Parks, as well as original works from luminaries such as Isabella Tree, Brian Dillon, and  Benedetta Craveri .

NYRB Classics

The NYRB Classics series is dedicated to publishing an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction from different eras and times and of various sorts. The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres , tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. NYRB Classics are, to a large degree, discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.

Literature in translation constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, simply because so much great literature has been left untranslated into English, or translated poorly, or deserves to be translated again, much as any outstanding book asks to be read again.

The series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well fresh translations of  Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, Curzio Malaparte, and Jean Giono ; fiction by modern and contemporary masters such as Vasily Grossman, Magda Szabó, Walter Kempowski, Tove Jansson, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, William Gaddis, Uwe Johnson, Leonora Carrington, and John Williams; tales of crime and punishment by Kenneth Fearing, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Jean-Patrick Manchette; masterpieces of narrative history and literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, cookbooks, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Iris Origo, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip , Lyall Watson's  Heaven's Breath , and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy .

Published in handsome uniform trade paperback editions, almost all NYRB Classics feature an introduction by an outstanding writer, scholar, or critic of our day. Taken as a whole, NYRB Classics may be considered a series of books of unrivaled variety and quality for discerning and adventurous readers.

Download Reading Group Guides for NYRB Classics.

What the press has said about NYRB Classics…

“ The New York Review Books Classics series is possibly the richest source in the entire world of great books you never heard of.”— Michael Cunningham, The New York Times Book Review

“ The series…. specializes in one-offs rather than oeuvres , in pleasures rather than obligations. The classics of NYRB Classics are not classics in the sense that they are canonical; they are classics in the sense that they have no reason for being revived other than that they are somehow still alive, and so constitute a canon all their own.”— Tom Junod, Esquire

“ …I would like to have the feeling that I am discovering lost treasures, even though these treasures have been necessarily dug up by someone else…. And that, more than anything is what the NYRB series offers…”— Wendy Lesser, The Guardian

“ NYRB Classics— one of the very few happy innovations in contemporary publishing. —Benjamin Schwarz , The Atlantic

“ …amazingly fine in its choice of titles and in the design of the books.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“ Be grateful for second chances and head to the shore with any one of these slim paperbacks.”— Town and Country

“ Congratulations to NYRB Classics … they have been putting out an extraordinarily good list lately, and I have been torn as to which one to choose.” —Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

“ We all owe the people at NYRB Classics a great debt of thanks.” —John Garvey, Commonweal

“ Sometimes the second time’s the charm in publishing… New York Review Books [is] finding unlikely success in the overcrowded book industry by turning out reprints of decades-old titles. Some are even getting noticed by Hollywood.” — The Wall Street Journal

“ The real contribution that New York Review Books makes [is] it helps you to see that the world is more different than you thought. By teaching you what the American novel has been, they teach you what it can be and in turn what the American people have been and can be… When you are in the hands of a reprint series as good as this one, what’s old is made new again.” —D.T. Max, Los Angeles Times

“ … picks up on…readerly passion with an eclectic lineup of backlist titles, all prefaced by authors who (for the moment) are better known than the writers they’re introducing… Looking for reading suggestions? Here’s a good place to start.” —Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

“ I’ve looked through the NYRB Classics catalogue with close attention and increasing wonder. Whoever picks the titles for this spectacularly eclectic series of stylish-looking reprints of insufficiently remembered books of the past (many but by no means all of which are novels) deserves some sort of prize for good taste… Has there ever been so quirkily adventurous a paperback reissue line? Not in my memory.” —Terry Teachout, commentarymagazine.com

“ Overall the collection is faultless. Once you have discovered the series it’s as if you’ve just gained an incredibly well-read friend who consistently lends you obscure yet highly enjoyable books…. Collecting them can become compulsive.” — Vogue

“ For the past four decades, The New York Review of Books has tirelessly championed liberal causes. It comes, therefore, as a welcome surprise that the magazine’s new book-publishing imprint—New York Review Books Classics—is performing a nonpartisan service, excellently.” — The National Review

“ The New York Review of Books Classics Series is one of the most exciting recent developments in publishing…. Simply reading through the list from beginning to end would provide a rare education.” — The Boston Phoenix

“ New York Review Books… has found a thriving niche by reissuing forgotten classics.”—Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times

New York Review Books started a children’s book publishing program in 2003 in an attempt to reward readers who have long wished for the return of their favorite titles and to introduce those books to a new generation of readers. NYRB Kids publishes picture books for preschoolers through to chapter books and novels for older children. Praised for their elegant design and sturdy bindings, these books set a new standard for the definition of a “classic.” Among the titles you will find Wee Gillis , a Caldecott Honor Book by the creators of The Story of Ferdinand ; Esther Averill’s time-honored Jenny and the Cat Club series; several titles by the award-winning team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, including their Book of Norse Myths and Book of Animals ; Otfried Preussler’s chapter books The Little Witch and The Little Water-Sprite ; Meet Monster by Ellen Blance and Ann Cook with illustrations by the great Quentin Blake; and Maira Kalman's books about Max the Dog.

Not to be missed are Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories , a perfect introduction to the bard for young readers; three titles from the great Roger Duvoisin, Donkey-donkey , The Frog in the Well , and The House of Four Seasons ; Madhur Jaffrey’s Seasons of Splendour: Tales, Myths and Legends of India with illustrations by Michael Foreman; and The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales .

In 2015 we added line of paperback editions designed to be especially attractive to young readers, with both brand-new volumes and titles from our hardcover list. Portable and affordable, these are books with enough depth, humor, and pure artistry to rival any so-called “adult” literature. In the series you’ll discover great works of many sorts: tales of daring and adventure like Jan Terlouw’s Winter in Wartime and Sheila Burnford’s Bel Ria: Dog of War ; yarns of magic and whimsy like Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music ; and stories of bravery and resistance like Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War and Anita Desai’s The Village By the Sea .

Praise for The New York Review Children’s Collection and NYRB Kids…

New York Review Comics

NYRC publishes comics of all sorts, from intimate memoirs to absurdist gags, lyrical graphic novels to dizzying experiments, united in their affirmation of the strange and wonderful things that only comics can do. Some are in paperback, some in hardcover, and trim sizes vary. The series launched in 2016 with Mark Beyer’s Agony , a darkly humorous depiction of urban despair originally published in 1987, now with an introduction by super-fan Colson Whitehead. It was followed by the beautiful historical saga Peplum , by the acclaimed French cartoonist Blutch, in a new translation by Edward Gauvin; and Almost Completely Baxter , a judicious collection of new and selected work by the beloved, inimitably hilarious artist Glen Baxter. It continued with Soft City , a majestically surreal tour of an office dystopia by Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner, drawn and then lost in the early 1970s, with a new introduction by Chris Ware; Belgian artist Dominique Goblet’s searing experimental memoir Pretending Is Lying , translated from the French by Sophie Yanow—Goblet’s first book to appear in English; and What Am I Doing Here? , a long out-of-print collection by postwar America’s forgotten master of the existential gag, Abner Dean. There are now nearly two dozen books in the series. A few recent highlights include Marion Fayolle's gorgeous allegorical memoir, The Tenderness of Stones; a collection of eccentric romance comics by a mid-twentieth-century oddball, Return to Romance: The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney ; and Yoshiharu Tsuge's contemplative, dismally humorous manga, The Man Without Talent .

The NYRB Poets series continues the eclectic, adventurous spirit of NYRB Classics with a focus on the most vital, various, and universal form of literature: poetry. Featuring the work of poets from around the world, classical and modern, ancient and contemporary, in elegant, pocket-size editions, the series demonstrates the countless different shapes that poetry can assume, from simplest song to lyrical essay to visual image to scientific treatise, among much else. Poetry explores the boundaries of feeling, knowledge, and expression like no other art. NYRB Poets offers an unparalleled opportunity for readers to explore poetry’s limitless possibilities, through collections by outstanding poets such as Pierre Reverdy, Alexander Vvedensky, Sakutarō Hagiwara, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Willis, Najwan Darwish, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raúl Zurita, Silvina Ocampo, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Denise Riley.

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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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Need a summer read? Here are 17 books from our experts

If you’re lucky enough to have a quiet place to retreat from the heat this summer, we’ve got a symphony of suggestions for novels and nonfiction to keep you entertained.

WATCH: Amy Tan turns her literary gaze on the world of birds in ‘The Backyard Bird Chronicles’

Ann Patchett, acclaimed writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, recently joined PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown to share their picks for summer reading.

”Sandwich” by Katherine Newman

“If you want a book that has you from ‘hello,’ this is the one. Family goes to the Cape every summer for two weeks. They have kids in their 20s, they have elderly parents and they eat sandwiches, they are very near Sandwich and they are the sandwich generation.” – Ann Patchett

“Sipsworth” by Simon Van Booy

“This is an elderly woman who’s very isolated. She meets a mouse, and the mouse brings all of these wonderful people into her life. It sounds hokey. It’s not.” – Ann Patchett

“Bear” by Julia Phillips

“Two young sisters working so hard in a very tough existence on an island off the coast of Washington. It all changes when a bear comes to their neighborhood and it drives the sisters apart.” – Ann Patchett

WATCH: How Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novels teach kids it’s OK to have ‘big feelings’

”Crook Manifesto” by Colson Whitehead

“If you want some mystery, some cops and robbers, some corruption, some great writing.” – Ann Patchett

“Swan Song” by Elin Hilderbrand

“I’ve only been to Nantucket for two hours on, like, the coldest day that I can recall, so I have no idea what it’s like to be there in the summer. But I sort of do, because I’ve read a dozen Elin Hilderbrand books.” – Gilbert Cruz

“Horror Movie” by Paul Tremblay

“This is about, essentially, an independent horror movie that was made years and years ago. A bunch of tragedies happened. It’s become a cult film. And the only person left from the production has started to encounter some weird things.” – Gilbert Cruz

“The Bright Sword” by Lev Grossman

“There have been many retellings of the King Arthur legend – books, movies, musicals. This one is sort of a sequel.” – Gilbert Cruz

“There’s Always This Year” by Hanif Abdurraqib

“This is a collection of essays about family and love and grief and fathers. But most importantly, it’s all woven together through the lens of basketball.” – Ann Patchett

“My Black Country” by Alice Randall

“Alice is a fiction writer and a scholar, but she is also the only Black woman to have written a No. 1 country song. This is a story of all the people who have been erased in country music’s past, and she is restoring them into the landscape.” – Ann Patchett

WATCH: Beyoncé brings new audience to country music and highlights the genre’s Black roots

”Consent” by Jill Ciment

“Jill Ciment was 16 years old when she first kissed her art teacher, who was 46. They got married and they stayed together until he died at 86. And it is her looking back on her life and thinking, ‘It was a happy marriage, but knowing what I know now, maybe there was something a little wrong about that?’”

And a bonus…

“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer

“…a great book that just came out in paperback that could be read as a companion piece.” – Ann Patchett

”The Future Was Now” by Chris Nashawaty

“The summer of 1982 – if you care about science fiction, fantasy, stuff like that – was one of the biggest summers of all time. So it had “E.T.”, “Poltergeist,” “Blade Runner,” “Tron,” a “Mad Max” sequel, a “Star Trek” sequel. And this is essentially a history of that summer, a history of those movies.” – Gilbert Cruz

“Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” by Emily Nussbaum

“Emily Nussbaum does an amazing job of sort of sketching that whole history and what they’re billing as sort of the first comprehensive history of this very important genre.” – Gilbert Cruz

And a few for the youngest readers…

• “The Old Boat” by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey (board book)
• “The Old Truck” by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey (board book)
• “Ahoy” by Sophie Blackall
• “Ferris” by Kate DiCamillo

In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

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“T he New York Times is pure propaganda,” tweeted Elon Musk , a tech mogul, in March. Mr Musk was responding not to the newspaper’s coverage of his companies or of Donald Trump, but rather to the newspaper’s latest bestseller list. “Troubled”, a book by Rob Henderson , a social critic, about the hypocrisy of America’s elite, had been excluded from the hardcover non-fiction list despite selling 3,765 copies in its first week. According to data from Circana Bookscan, a firm that claims to track 85% of print book sales in America, “Troubled” outperformed the books that ranked in the fourth and fifth slots that week. Many saw the omission as a sign of political bias.

Such criticism is not wholly new. The New York Times, which has kept a tally of bestsellers since 1931, came under fire in 1983, when William Peter Blatty, author of “The Exorcist”, sued the paper for omitting his book “Legion” from the fiction bestseller list. (His case was eventually dismissed.) And last year James Patterson , who has had nearly 290 New York Times bestsellers, complained that the paper was “cooking the books” when a non-fiction title of his did not make the cut. Like Coca-Cola, the New York Times guards its proprietary formula; exactly which retailers report sales, how they are weighted and which sales are screened out is shrouded in mystery.

Whenever the New York Times snubs a prominent conservative book it rekindles a debate about whether the newspaper discriminates against right-wing authors. Alleged victims include Ted Cruz, a Republican senator, who wrote “A Time for Truth” in 2015 and Clay Travis, a radio host, who published “American Playbook” in 2023. “It’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating,” says Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under George W. Bush. Mr Fleischer’s book, “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias”, did not make the list in 2022 despite healthy sales.

Some may be tempted to cast aside such complaints as sour grapes, a popular delicacy in both publishing and politics. But a study by The Economist suggests that accusations of bias against conservative books may have merit.

To determine whether such claims are fact or fiction, The Economist compiled 12 years’ worth of Bookscan data from Publishers Weekly and identified books by 12 publishers that describe themselves as politically to the right of centre. These include Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins that specialises in “conservative non-fiction”, and Regnery Publishing, which bills itself as America’s “leading publisher of conservative books”.

Our search of books released between June 2012 and June 2024 yielded 250 titles, out of a total of 4,169 that made the Publishers Weekly top 25 hardcover non-fiction list in at least one week. We then built a statistical model to predict whether books would appear in the New York Times weekly “hardcover non-fiction” and “advice, how-to and miscellaneous” rankings in order to determine whether books by conservative publishers were included on these lists more or less often than their sales data would suggest.

We estimate that, on average, books by conservative publishers are seven percentage points less likely to make it onto New York Times weekly bestseller lists than books by other publishers with similar sales figures. This disparity does not tend to affect the leading conservative bestsellers. For example, in the past 12 years, Bill O’Reilly, a former Fox News host, has made the non-fiction list as author or co-author with 17 titles, more than anyone else of any political persuasion; in second place is Mr O’Reilly’s sometimes co-author, Martin Dugard, and in third is Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host.

Instead, the bias is concentrated in the lower rungs of the list. Among titles that sell fewer than 5,000 copies per week, books from conservative imprints have a much worse chance of making the list than those from other publishers that sold similar amounts. Those that rank in the bottom ten of 25 slots on the Publishers Weekly bestselling non-fiction books list in a given week are 22 percentage points less likely to make it onto the New York Times list (see chart 1).

Conservative books that do become New York Times bestsellers rank 2.3 notches lower on the non-fiction list, on average, than those published by other presses with similar sales, though the effect varies by publisher (see chart 2). Again, books that are not top bestsellers fare even worse: those at the bottom of the Publishers Weekly ranking place five spots lower.

Not the right stuff

Sceptics might point out that books by conservative publishers primarily focus on politics, and it is possible that the bias experienced by conservative authors is, in fact, a bias against all political books, regardless of their ideological orientation.

To test for this possibility, we matched our data set with data from ISBN db.com, a book database. This archive contains a “subject” field for around 40% of the books, enabling us to categorise them as political if their subjects included words like “politics” or “president”. To classify whether the remaining books are political, we trained a machine-learning algorithm based on their titles, authors, publishers and, when available, the  New York Times’ s descriptive blurbs. We then repeated our tests for bias on this smaller set of political books and found the estimated effect to be even greater than in the full sample.

The New York Times did not dispute or confirm our analysis on the record but says: “The political views of authors or their publishers have absolutely no bearing on our rankings and are not a factor in how books are ranked on the lists.” They add that “There are a number of organisations with bestseller lists, each with different methodologies, so it is normal to see different rankings on each.”

What explains conservative books’ potential disadvantage? Politics is the most common refrain. “The New York Times has a view of an acceptable kind of conservative,” says Michael Knowles, a right-wing commentator. His book “Speechless” (2021) sold 17,587 copies in its first week, ranking at the top of the Publishers Weekly list, and sold strongly for several more weeks. But it never appeared on the New York Times list. Mr Knowles, whose book argues that conservatives should actively suppress the speech of their opponents, believes this is because his views are unacceptable to the Grey Lady’s staff.

But there are also differences in the way conservative publishers sell their books. Many of the conservative books that do make the New York Times list may rank much lower than their sales would suggest because of supposed “bulk buying”, purchases that the paper determines are made by institutions or groups, rather than by individual readers. Titles thought to include bulk buys are marked with a “dagger” symbol and can have their rank adjusted. According to the newspaper, “Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of the New York Times bestseller list desk editors based on standards…that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.”

Treating bulk buys differently is meant to make the list harder to game by billionaires, bosses and politicians who want their tomes to top the list and can afford to buy up copies. Though there have been reports in the past of conservative groups attempting to manipulate the list through bulk purchases, our data suggest that use of the dagger is remarkably lopsided: 53% of books from conservative publishers are marked with a dagger, versus just 10% of other books.

Indeed, bulk sales do not appear to explain the bias that we observe in our data. We separated political  New York Times  bestsellers into one group flagged with a dagger and another without it and found that, in both groups, books from conservative imprints were ranked lower on average than those from other publishers with similar sales.

A final plausible explanation for the bias faced by conservative authors is the way the New York Times bestseller list is compiled. Rather than weighting all sales equally, some publishing veterans believe that the paper may place greater weight on sales at independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores than online retailers. Independent bookstores, which select titles to order and display, may not stock or give prominence to books by conservatives; online everything is available, and right-wing books fly off virtual shelves.

The New York Times list has emerged as a battle in a broader culture war over American publishing. After January 6th 2021 Simon & Schuster cancelled the publication of a book by Josh Hawley, a Republican senator who offered a fist pump of apparent support for the protesters before they ransacked the Capitol . Publishers also got flak for signing former members of the Trump administration. There is a “baked-in, systemic bias” in corporate publishing houses against conservatives, says an executive who works at one of the major ones.

The fairness of the New York Times list is not merely a question of politics. Bestseller status helps an author sell more books , generate speaking fees and negotiate better contracts for future book deals. As other newspapers have done away with their lists and bookstores have closed in recent decades, the New York Times list is even more important. It is supposed to function as a reflection of what the public is reading—and influences what consumers may want to.

A more transparent list would also be more useful. If Alex Jones , a controversial far-right conspiracy theorist, was indeed the second-place bestselling author in America—as Bookscan says he was in August 2022, with a title that was omitted from the New York Times list—people should probably know that. His enduring popularity says a lot about the country and its readers, who are not willing to close the book on him. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Is the New York Times bestseller list politically biased?”

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Review: ‘Crazy for You’ serves up romance, dazzling tap moves in Ogunquit

Chockablock with Gershwin songs, the show is now at the Ogunquit Playhouse. The 'inimitable' Sally Struthers plays 2 comedic parts.

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Taylor Aronson, center, and the ensemble in “Crazy for You” at the Ogunquit Playhouse. Photo by Nile Scott Studios

“Who could ask for anything more?” is a famous line from “I Got Rhythm,” a classic tune by George and Ira Gershwin that’s included in the latest show at the Ogunquit Playhouse. It’s not a bad question to ask.

Theater review

WHAT: “Crazy For You”

WHERE: Ogunquit Playhouse, 10 Main St., Ogunquit

REVIEWED: June 16 (matinee); continues through July 13

TICKETS: starting at $40.

CONTACT: 207-646-5511; ogunquitplayhouse.org

You’ve got two solid stars up front, dozens of attractive singers and dancers behind them, and a wealth of both clever and romantic Gershwin songs. And, as if that weren’t enough, the inimitable Sally Struthers comes onstage to fill two comedic roles that supply some of the best laughs in the show.

Chalk it up to a production still coming together, but “Crazy For You” showed a few seams in terms of pacing in its first performance after opening night. But the impeccably performed vintage music and the let’s-put-on-a-show spirit of the book by Ken Ludwig carried the 2½-hour show through for an entertaining afternoon at the venerable summer theater on the southern coast of Maine.

The dynamic Max Clayton sang and danced like a veteran performer who knows where the audience-pleasing theatrical goodies are hidden. His banker character Bobby soon became a faux showbiz master as he falls for a girl and decides to revive her father’s theater in Nevada rather than foreclose on the property.

Clayton’s tap talents are many and were all smoothly executed with whirling flourishes that truly dazzled. His voice sold such long-time Gershwin favorites as “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” the latter accompanied by an impressive chorus of lovely, talented female singer/dancers.

Max Clayton (Bobby Child) and Taylor Aronson (Polly Baker) in “Crazy for You” at the Ogunquit Playhouse. Photo by Nile Scott Studios

Taylor Aronson plays Bobby’s love interest Polly, adding her own very natural-sounding delivery to such classics as “Someone To Watch Over Me” and “But Not For Me.” Aronson also held her own in romantic song and dance duets with Clayton on such tunes as “Shall We Dance” and “Embraceable You.” Director Angelique Ilo’s take on the show’s original dance moves, choreographed by Susan Stroman, fit the pair well in both upfront showy and more elegantly flowing moments. Advertisement

The 76-year-old Struthers again proved her brilliant comedic timing in scenes with Clayton and Jim Borstelmann, the latter as a companionable British twit. Her double takes and little exclamations were hilarious as were some timeless bits of physical comedy performed by others throughout the show.

Angie Schworer and Peter Kendall got hot and heavy on “Naughty Baby” while a Cowboy Trio and a group of layabout ex-miners spiced up several pieces. Alexandria Van Paris, Delaney Bailey, Jack Doyle and Tony Roach also stood out in secondary roles. All were backed by a jauntily swinging offstage band led by Ken Clifton while some occasional onstage percussion from the players, tapping feet and more, served to bring things forward.

The sets by Adam Koch and costumes by William Ivey Long mix old-style Broadway flash and rustic cowboy folksiness, placing the audience in a world closer to an earlier, 1930s incarnation (The Gershwin brothers’ “Girl Crazy”) on which this award-winning 1992 show was based.

Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.

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June 20, 2024

Current Issue

Table of Contents

January 18, 2024

Ultra Hardcore

by Walter Isaacson

Transmissions from Another World

by Annelyse Gelman

by Elisa Gonzalez

Bodies That Flow

Rubens and Women

an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, September 27, 2023–January 28, 2024

Song of the Diet Cola

Eldest statesmen, even as a ghost.

Brotherless Night

by V.V. Ganeshananthan

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka

Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic

The Pandemic Paradox: How the Covid Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure

by Scott Fulford

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

by Steven W. Thrasher

Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from Covid-19

by Zachary Parolin

Chile’s Count Dracula

a film directed by Pablo Larraín

The Fate of Free Will

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

by Kevin J. Mitchell

Across the Moominverse

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words

by Boel Westin, translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella

The Discovery of Europe

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

by Caroline Dodds Pennock

A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance

by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, with an afterword by W.G. Sebald

Song of the Disgraced Person

Follow the light.

Alex Katz: Gathering

an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 21, 2022–February 20, 2023

Issue Details

Cover art Hugo Guinness: Toast , 2023 Series art Lisa Naftolin: Weave Paintings , 2022

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