On the Lam in the Wild West, With Bounty Hunters Trailing
Kevin Barry’s new novel follows a fugitive couple from Butte, Mont., in the late 19th century.
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![The Montana badlands, where two lovers flee their many troubles in Kevin Barry’s new novel.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/08/multimedia/08barry-review-gwzv/08barry-review-gwzv-thumbLarge.jpg?auto=webp)
![The Montana badlands, where two lovers flee their many troubles in Kevin Barry’s new novel.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/08/multimedia/08barry-review-gwzv/08barry-review-gwzv-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?auto=webp)
Kevin Barry’s new novel follows a fugitive couple from Butte, Mont., in the late 19th century.
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More than 500 writers and notable book lovers have shared their picks for the best books of the 21st century. Now it’s your turn.
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“Long Island Compromise,” the new novel by the author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” fictionalizes a true story.
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Todgers, vampires and celebrity book clubs: It’s been quite a ride.
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A Silence Is Shattered, and So Are Many Fans of Alice Munro
Admirers said they were “blindsided” by revelations that Munro’s youngest daughter had been abused by her stepfather — and that Munro stayed with him even after she learned of it years later.
By Alexandra Alter, Elizabeth A. Harris and
The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
As voted on by 503 book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
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The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000
Looking for your next great read? We’ve got 3,228. Explore the best fiction and nonfiction from 2000 - 2023 chosen by our editors.
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Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book
Reading picks from Book Review editors, guaranteed to suit any mood.
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Best-Seller Lists: July 21, 2024
All the lists: print, e-books, fiction, nonfiction, children’s books and more.
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Back When Women Were Told to ‘Write Like a Man’
For the midcentury New York intellectuals, Ronnie Grinberg writes in a new book, a particular kind of machismo was de rigueur — even for women.
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The Angel of Death Has Some Reservations About His Job
Joy Williams distills much learning — from philosophy, religion and history — into 99 stories about the guy who takes your soul.
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Jailhouse Correspondence Gives Bernie Madoff the ‘Final Word’
The journalist Richard Behar communicated extensively with the disgraced financier. His rigorous if irreverent book acknowledges his subject’s humanity.
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Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues.
A brisk new biography by the National Book Award-winning historian Tiya Miles aims to restore the iconic freedom fighter to human scale.
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Have You Heard the One About the School for Stand-Up Comedy?
In “The Material,” Camille Bordas imagines the anxious hotbed where the perils of being a college student and the perils of being funny meet.
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In books and articles he wrote about the militarization of space and believed that investing in exploration would ultimately “protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity.”
By Sam Roberts
Her writing, from the late 1920s to the late ’40s, about sex, marriage, divorce, child rearing and work-life balance still resonates.
By Marsha Gordon
Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.
By Juan A. Ramírez
In her most recent book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” the best-selling author revels in a newfound preoccupation with birds — and drawing.
By Margaret Roach
Prague has survived wars and political strife — and through it all, its literary scene has thrived. Jaroslav Kalfar, the author of “Spaceman of Bohemia,” recommends books that connect readers to the city.
By Jaroslav Kalfar
Stacey D’Erasmo’s exploration of sustained creativity, “The Long Run,” is poignant, exhilarating and full of wise advice from lives well lived.
By Mary Gabriel
In “The Anthropologists,” Aysegul Savas celebrates the “unremarkable grace” of a couple’s ordinary days. It’s enchanting.
By MJ Franklin
With “Husbands & Lovers,” Beatriz Williams delivers a multigenerational yarn and a memorable ending.
By Michelle Ruiz
This week’s Title Search puzzle challenges you to find a dozen works of fiction that were published during the last years of the 20th century.
By J. D. Biersdorfer
We asked some literary luminaries to share their full ballots.
By The New York Times Books Staff
An organizer and author, she believed that a union was only as strong as its members and trained thousands “to take over their unions and change them.”
By Margot Roosevelt
Andrea Skinner said in The Toronto Star that her stepfather sexually abused her at age 9, and that her mother stayed with him after she learned of it.
By Elizabeth A. Harris
Bookstores once shunted romance novels to a shelf in the back. But with romance writers dominating the best-seller lists, a network of dedicated bookstores has sprung up around the country.
By Alexandra Alter
His moving and often painful free-verse observations on friends’ deaths, the Holocaust and other topics won him many devoted fans.
By Robert D. McFadden
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A philandering father; a literary affair.
The 1991 novel turns a private disturbance into bracing social commentary.
By Boris Fishman
Laura van den Berg’s new book, “State of Paradise,” sends readers down surreal portals to ask: How do we distinguish reality from its opposite — whatever that might be?
By Ruth Franklin
Recommended reading from the Book Review, including titles by Jhumpa Lahiri, Kerry Howley, Djuna and more.
By Shreya Chattopadhyay
Starting on July 8, we’ll unveil a list of 100. Make sure you’re among the first to find out.
It can be thrillingly dangerous and profoundly comforting at the same time.
By Mac Barnett
In “Private Revolutions,” Yuan Yang follows the lives of women in a rapidly changing modern superpower.
By Michelle T. King
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
Want to indulge in juicy, page-turning escapism? We’ve got some recommendations.
By Elisabeth Egan
But “I’m averse to entertaining the thought that what I’m working on is a first draft,” she says, “which implies the necessity of a second, even a third.” Her new book is “Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael.”
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A New York Times Book Review editor recommends four books for the summer.
By Joumana Khatib, Karen Hanley and Claire Hogan
After 60 years and almost as many books, the novelist and travel writer, 83, will stop when he falls out of his chair.
By Guy Trebay
A digital book, “Drawing for Nothing,” highlights some of the best art from canceled animation projects like “Me and My Shadow.”
By Robert Ito
The second annual Queen’s Reading Room Festival at Hampton Court Palace celebrated what Queen Camilla has called the “great adventure” of the written word.
By Jennifer Harlan and Alice Zoo
Recent books by Ghostface Killah, Kathleen Hanna, Michael McDonald and Darius Rucker hit notes both high and low.
By Alan Light
In an online exhibition, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research will explore the account of Yitskhok Rudashevski. He was 13 when the Germans took over Vilnius, Lithuania.
By Joseph Berger
In July, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Patricia Highsmith’s classic 1955 thriller about wealth, status, obsession and murder.
By MJ Franklin
In Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God of the Woods,” a pair of missing siblings spark a reckoning on the banks of an Adirondack lake.
By Kate Tuttle
Maureen Callahan’s lurid “Ask Not” paints the Kennedys as mad, bad and dangerous for women to know.
By Louis Bayard
She wrote memorably about her upbringing by a circle of maternal elders and the life lessons they imparted, and of her yearning for the mother she lost.
By Penelope Green
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Kadare received the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005. In his books, the prolific Albanian author offered a window into the psychology of oppression. Here’s where to start.
By Amelia Nierenberg
This short quiz tests your knowledge of certain Revolutionary War events and books about the era.
By J. D. Biersdorfer
Often compared to Orwell and Kafka, he walked a political tightrope with works that offered veiled criticism of his totalitarian state.
By Rusha Haljuci
Ikbal and Idries Shah delighted London society with their romantic tales of the East. The only problem? They made them up.
By Robyn Creswell
J. Courtney Sullivan’s “The Cliffs” is a haunted house mystery steeped in historical context.
By Alice Elliott Dark
Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.
By Lyta Gold
The writer and director, famous for making theatergoers squirm in their seats, says he feels most at home wherever the outsiders gather in his native city.
By Megan McCrea
The books in this month’s column have something in common: unforgettable main characters.
By Sarah Weinman
In a memoir and a novel, the characters deal with grief by singing in front of strangers.
In “All the Worst Humans,” Phil Elwood recounts a career spent engineering headlines for some of the world’s villains.
By Jim Windolf
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In “Swimming Pretty,” Vicki Valosik connects the evolution of an unlikely sport with the century-long struggle of women to be taken seriously in the water.
By Jennifer Schuessler
In Fernanda Trías’s novel “Pink Slime,” one woman holds out in her town after an environmental disaster, trapped in a limbo of indecision.
By Lydia Millet
Selected paperbacks from the Book Review, including titles by Darrin Bell, Maggie Smith, David Friend and more.
By Shreya Chattopadhyay
Bullwinkel’s debut novel sheds light on the culture of youth women’s boxing through an ensemble cast of complicated characters. It packs a punch.
New novels from J. Courtney Sullivan and Liz Moore, a memoir by a “hacktivist” member of Anonymous — and more.
Our columnist reviews June’s horror releases.
By Gabino Iglesias
From silly rhymes to lively sound effects to stealthily-building suspense, these old standbys and new classics have something for everyone.
By Elisabeth Egan
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.
By John Yoon
The author of “Funny Story” churned out five consecutive No. 1 best-sellers without leaving her comfort zone. How did she pull it off?
By Elisabeth Egan
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For Pride Month, we asked people ranging in age from 34 to 93 to share an indelible memory. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.
By Nicole Acheampong, Max Berlinger, Jason Chen, Kate Guadagnino, Colleen Hamilton, Mark Harris, Juan A. Ramírez, Coco Romack, Michael Snyder and John Wogan
“It doesn’t make me esteem Wharton less. If anything, I take comfort in it, as a novelist.” Her own smash book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is out in paperback.
In “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the futurist Ray Kurzweil reckons with a world dominated by artificial intelligence (good) and his own mortality (bad).
By Nathaniel Rich
Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.
By Daisy Fried
Rather than bemoan pop culture’s most divisive genre, Emily Nussbaum spends time with the creators, the stars and the victims of the decades-long effort to generate buzz.
By Eric Deggans
He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.
By Adam Nossiter
In his beautiful memoir, “Do Something,” Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.
By Andrew O’Hagan
Two decades after his death, a collection of over 800 works that the first president of Senegal owned is moving from France to Dakar.
By Aida Alami
In “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Dean Jobb vividly recounts the life and times of the notorious criminal — and tabloid fixture — Arthur Barry.
By Darrell Hartman
A massive, mysterious grizzly takes on symbolic weight in Julia Phillips’s moody and affecting second novel.
By Jess Walter
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A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.
By Scott Veale
Richard Hatch gave up a career as a physicist to become a magician — and a one-man historical preservation society dedicated to a German author killed in the Holocaust.
By David Segal
Summer is here! Try this short quiz about books that happen to be set in popular vacation destinations.
By J. D. Biersdorfer
“The New Breadline,” by Jean-Martin Bauer, a veteran food aid worker, chronicles a growing problem that should not exist — along with the harmful policies that have exacerbated it.
By Alec MacGillis
In “Frostbite,” Nicola Twilley travels the cold chain that preserves what we eat and helps it get around the world.
By Sallie Tisdale
Tracy O’Neill’s memoir, “Woman of Interest,” recounts her yearlong quest, which culminates in a trip to Korea.
By Sloane Crosley
With her new book, “Children of Anguish and Anarchy,” Adeyemi is wrapping up her best-selling Legacy of Orïsha series. The journey hasn’t been easy.
By Wilson Wong
Our columnist has summery new recommendations.
By Olivia Waite
A dinner party at the other woman’s house; the evening before a jail sentence.
After getting her start by self-publishing, Freida McFadden is now the fastest selling thriller writer in the United States.
By Alexandra Alter
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Starring an undergraduate student at Oxford, Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is exquisitely attuned to the thrill and boredom of academic life.
By Brian Dillon
Santiago Jose Sanchez’ debut novel, “Hombrecito,” follows a young immigrant as he grows up in the United States, struggling to identify with a masculinity he’s never felt and a country he never knew.
By Miguel Salazar
In “The Friday Afternoon Club,” the actor and director recalls his years growing up around performers, writers and the Hollywood set.
After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.
By Jennifer Schuessler
This week's selection includes titles by Gabrielle Zevin, Peace Adzo Medie, Patrick Mackie and more.
By Shreya Chattopadhyay
In her latest book, Olivia Laing makes an impassioned case for the garden — as repository of natural beauty, as democratic ideal, as writerly inspiration.
By A.O. Scott
For young magazine readers with literary pretensions, it wasn’t just our best option; it was our only option.
By Sadie Stein
“Contemporary Art Underground” showcases hundreds of artworks commissioned by the M.T.A., by artists like Alex Katz, Kiki Smith and Vik Muniz.
By Erica Ackerberg
He turned “an insignificant trade house” into a powerhouse, publishing best sellers like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “All Creatures Great and Small.”
By Sam Roberts
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
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“The material that he uses for the songs is powerfully moving, involving his own personal losses,” the 88-year-old poet says. Also name-checked in “So What”: an Italian motorcycle magnate.
In “Adventures in Volcanoland,” the geologist Tamsin Mather takes us on a global and historical investigation of her life’s passion.
By Carl Zimmer
Across two new books, the ideal of a global free market buckles under pressure from protesters, politicians of all stripes and the Covid pandemic.
By Matthew Zeitlin
In her memoir, “Pets and the City,” Amy Attas reflects on three decades of caring for animals (and, by extension, humans) right in their own homes.
By Elisabeth Egan
As a journalist and later as a Yale professor, she provided the intellectual tools to help actors, directors and audiences understand challenging theatrical work.
By Clay Risen
She received a diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer late in her second pregnancy and described her experience in a book, “Little Earthquakes: A Memoir.”
By Richard Sandomir
Andrew O’Hagan’s ambitious state-of-England novel finds a cosseted academic facing up to the hard lives and ethical shortcuts he’d prefer to ignore.
By Francesca Peacock
In Munir Hachemi’s novel “Living Things,” four young men seek adventure for “literary capital” and find exploitation.
By Rob Doyle
Is the Mob Museum on your list? The writer and illustrator sees his new guide to North America’s museums as a way to help families plan their summer vacations.
By Amy Virshup
In “The Indispensable Right,” Jonathan Turley argues that the First Amendment has been deeply compromised from the start.
By Jeff Shesol
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In “The Language Puzzle,” the archaeologist Steven Mithen asks exactly how our species started speaking.
By Dennis Duncan
In a frank but measured memoir, “On Call,” the physician looks back at a career bookended by two public health crises: AIDS and Covid-19.
By Alexandra Jacobs
In her new novel, “Sandwich,” Catherine Newman explores the aches and joys of midlife via one family’s summer week at the beach.
By Cathi Hanauer
In “A Place of Our Own,” June Thomas considers “six spaces that shaped queer women’s culture.”
By Anne Hull
“Same as It Ever Was,” by Claire Lombardo, is a 500-page, multigenerational examination of the ties that bind.
By Hamilton Cain
This quick quiz challenges you to identify a film’s source material based on a photo. Click here to play!
By J. D. Biersdorfer
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