Innholdsfortegnelse for January 15, 2026 i The New York Review of Books

Robert P. Baird is the author of the novel The Nimbus. Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King, the second book in his trilogy about Suleyman the Magnificent, was published in the UK this year. Jeremy Denk is a concert pianist and writer. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of several collections of essays, including Classics for Pleasure and Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books. Joe Dunthorne’s books include the poetry collection O Positive and the memoir Children of Radium. Helen Epstein is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, among other books. Nicholas Guyatt…

I am very tall. I also am tall. I have these great big treesthat bristle my ridges. Rare cresses softenmy altitudes. And morels burstlike fists from my fragrant earthin locations I disclose onlyto select foragers. I refuse to be foraged.Okapi graze me exclusively,their great spiral hornscatching the late sunas it scatters the riverlight.And when they dietheir monumental skullsare overcome with pillow-softmoss untouched by— You should see me at sunsetwhen my snowdrifts fizzin a crosswind and the lightis strung between the verylarge trees I mentioned earlier. Great spouts blastfrom my plateauat irregular intervalswhich is just one reasonmultiple research bodiesconsider me active. You will well recallI did shred the skyand stub out the sunin a time beyondthe reach of human science. I do not recall. You will well recallall life swallowedby an…

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford. Gallery, 272 pp., $18.99 (paper) You Are (a Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-Up Comedy by Maria Bamford. Audible Originals, $14.95 (audiobook) Hogbook and Lazer Eyes by Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy. Fantagraphics, 64 pp., $19.99 Maria Bamford ends her latest comedy special, Local Act (2023), with a story about her husband building her a Little Free Library in front of their house. After complaining that they got “Dan Browned” (“Take out your own fucking trash”), she says that she fell in love with a children’s book she found in the box, from Richard Scarry’s Busytown…

Collected Speculative Works: An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848–1854); The Diamond Lens and Others (1855–1858); What Was It? and Others (1858–1864) by Fitz-James O’Brien, selected and with an introduction by John P. Irish. Dublin: Swan River Press, 3 volumes, 699 pp., €120.00 Back in the early 1930s Gilbert Seldes—a literary critic and early champion of popular culture—was asked to contribute an introduction to a volume of stories by Fitz-James O’Brien, now often regarded as the most original American writer of supernatural fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. At first Seldes declined, confessing that he’d never read anything by the man. But when the publisher jogged his memory, Seldes remembered that in some anthology or another he had in fact come across “The Diamond Lens,” O’Brien’s 1858 account of…

Who Owns Beauty? by Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, translated from the French by Andrew Brown. Polity, 220 pp., $29.95 Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting by Dan Hicks. Hutchinson Heinemann, 571 pp., $47.99 In 1891 the Metropolitan Museum of Art set about raising $100,000 (about $3.5 million today) to purchase a collection of plaster casts large enough to compete with those in Boston (777) and Chicago (247), if not Berlin (more than 2,000). Casts were an accepted way to fulfill the museum’s mission of improving local audiences through great art, especially since, as a Met spokesman at the time explained, “we can never expect to obtain any large collection of original works.” Oh, the difference 135 years makes. Today the Met holds…

I am remaking myself, quite literally. I’m getting rid of toxic red blood cells and making clean new ones. Each week I go to an NHS clinic at my local hospital in North London, where a pair of friendly and efficient nurses (trained in the Philippines) relieve me of a pint of blood. It takes about fifteen minutes for it to pour through a needle inserted into the vein in the crook of my left elbow, into a bag balanced on a set of souped-up bathroom scales on the floor under my chair, while one of the nurses keeps a weather eye on the digital display. Then she uncouples the line and throws the bag into a big yellow bin. My job is to make more blood, for next week.…

Flesh by David Szalay. Scribner, 353 pp., $28.99 The furtive ghost of Philip Larkin haunts the English novel—the English novel, at least, as written by men. Early in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star (1994), for instance, the narrator, a bookish, inexperienced private tutor named Edward Manners, enters the “one gay bar” of a small Flemish town and flirts with a tattooed stranger. When Edward strokes the stranger’s arm and says, “I don’t want to read books all day,” the stranger asks, “Why not?” Edward hesitates, and then says, “Books are a load of crap.” The stranger is unimpressed: “You’re a teacher. Books are your life.” And then “he walked away from me, leaving me with nothing but the private and lonely satisfaction of my quotation, which perhaps proved his final…

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat. Zondervan, 218 pp., $29.99 There’s a view of the human situation that goes something like this: 14 billion years ago, give or take, the universe exploded into being. The Big Bang didn’t create everything, but it did provide everything necessary to create everything else: a collection of immutable physical laws, a hot soup of subatomic particles, an unthinkably vast quantity of energy. After 10 billion or so years of expansion and cooling, the universe contained some trillion trillion stars, and at least as many planets. Around that time, on one of those planets orbiting one of those stars, a random series of chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules. Chemistry made way for biology as four billion years of further chance developments generated a…

i.m. Saskia Hamilton I opened the windowto clouded sun + a floodof jasmine or was it fakejasmine the scentrushed in the room asudden garden + you werealready dead I did not know ityou did not know itnow I feel nothingthe feelings will comea surprise like the jasmineperfuming a city renownedfor its bankers and tradeits strade nuove its glorious republicits ingenious voyagers and you“a noble soul”it wasn’t sentimentalfor your friend to say fare forward voyager ∞ the old men with beautiful mannersfound their surprising heir in you who would not say what happenedyet did + did + did your spirit’s bark is driventhe Golfo Paradiso nearbydead poets stupid deathstupid writing but thisis what we sometimes dowomen have other namesto make or lose or carry, marO marewhat’s inaccessible growing largeas the fin…