Tag: Books

In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.

“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”

Summer Brennan talks about femininity and suffering, beauty and biology, and the startlingly dark turn she found herself taking when writing about women and power in her new book ‘High Heel.’

“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”

America binged on expansion, relying on land grabs as an engine of growth and a way to externalize racial hatred. Historian Greg Grandin asks, without a frontier, what can America be?

Journalist Will Hunt, who made the crossing with a group of urban explorers, recounts being menaced by rainwater and rats — and meeting fellow subterranean wanderers along the way.

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about pasts and futures, and how lineages stretch across time.

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.

True crime’s massive gender gap (95% of murderers are male) isn’t really one that needs fixing. And yet, since the beginning, a steadfast minority of Ripperologists have argued that Jack was really Jill.

Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story.

“I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom.”

Ann Leckie talks about “The Raven Tower,” the erasure of women writers from the canon, the privilege inherent to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ and the power of tradition.

Journalist Evan Ratliff has uncovered the shocking reach of Paul Le Roux’s criminal enterprise — a global network of pawns, most of whom were unaware of the full extent of the empire.

On Lampedusa, history is never far from the islanders’ thoughts, and they are preoccupied by its contradictions. Is Lampedusa a stop on a long journey, or is it a graveyard? Does every fence need a hole in it?

Digitization has changed the way readers experience literature — and examine themselves.

Recent books by economists who hope to “save capitalism” dismiss popular ideas as “just politics.” But why assume the popular is the enemy of the good?

In Mark Doten’s “Trump Sky Alpha,” a journalist who has survived Trump’s nuclear apocalypse gets an assignment from what’s left of the New York Times Magazine: find out what people were tweeting as the bombs fell.

Activist and author Robin Marty says the biggest threat facing women in a post-Roe America would be arrest, not death.

In a new memoir, Sophia Shalmiyev attempts to reunite with her missing mother through scraps, signs, and surrogates.

This month’s books newsletter is jam-packed with scammers, censors, and … other books.

In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.

To write “Lost Children Archive,” Valeria Luiselli studied the refugee crisis “obliquely,” reading about other historical moments of children’s mass displacement, amassing a reader’s archive of loss.

In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.

Laskar’s debut novel imagines an alternate ending to an incident from her real life: When law enforcement agents raided her home, and confiscated her unfinished novel, what if she had refused to comply?

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.

An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.