How Literature by Black Authors Shaped One Scholar’s Life
In “Read Until You Understand,” Farah Jasmine Griffin explores how books have served as instruction manuals to guide her through difficulty and triumph.
Alan Cumming Took Ecstasy to Quell His Nerves on Tony Night, ‘and It Worked’
And other revelations from the actor’s second memoir, “Baggage.”
One Factory and the Bigger Story It Tells
Farah Stockman talks about “American Made,” and Benjamín Labatut discusses “When We Cease to Understand the World.”
For Tiphanie Yanique, Black Love Comes With Baggage
In “Monster in the Middle,” parents beget children who inherit their pain, their care and their madness.
When William Faulkner and Langston Hughes Wrote Children’s Books
You might think that celebrated adult authors writing for kids is a new trend. It isn’t.
Review: ‘The Bell Jar,’ by Sylvia Plath
To our reviewer, the poet’s novel was “the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell.”
Review: ‘The Complete Stories,’ by Flannery O’Connor
This collection — which appeared seven years after the Southern Gothic writer’s death in 1964 — was reviewed by Alfred Kazin.
Review: ‘Song of Solomon,’ by Toni Morrison
In the deep, sprawling 1977 story of Milkman Dead, the reviewer Reynolds Price found evidence for “the possibility of transcendence within human life.”
Review: ‘The Golden Notebook,’ by Doris Lessing
In 1962, our reviewer described this radically feminist novel — now considered Lessing’s most influential work — as “a coruscating literary event.”
Review: ‘The Jeweler’s Eye,’ by William F. Buckley Jr.
Mario Puzo, who reviewed this collection of the conservative thinker's essays, found himself charmed despite the politics.
Review: ‘The Liars’ Club,’ by Mary Karr
The Times would later call this 1995 memoir of a hardscrabble Texas childhood “one of the best books ever written about growing up in America.”
The Birth of The New York Times Book Review
The paper’s rich literary tradition can be traced back to its very first issue on Sept. 18, 1851.
‘Weather’
In 2020, as Covid-19 raged and protests swept the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, Claudia Rankine wrote this poem for the Book Review.
Interview: Isabel Allende
The Chilean novelist was living in exile when her first novel was published in 1985. “In a way, I feel that I am working for my country, even if I don’t live there,” she told us.
Peeved, Irritated and Annoyed: Early Letters to the Editor
The Book Review’s letters page — the internet message board of its day — was filled with lively, opinionated missives from readers and authors.
Review: ‘The Woman Warrior,’ by Maxine Hong Kingston
This brilliant 1976 memoir evokes the author’s Chinese immigrant family and summons the ghosts who haunt it.
Review: ‘Sister Carrie,’ by Theodore Dreiser
The novel’s headline-making candor and explicitness led the Book Review to assure its readers, “It is a book one can very well get along without reading.”
Review: ‘O Pioneers!’ by Willa Cather
In 1913, The Times declared Cather’s “novel without a hero” to be “American in the best sense of the word.”
Interview: Ralph Ellison
“It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel,” Ellison told us when “Invisible Man” was published in 1952. “That’s not true.”
Review: ‘The Road,’ by Cormac McCarthy
In 2006, our reviewer correctly predicted that this father-son tale would eclipse the popularity of McCarthy’s 1992 hit, “All the Pretty Horses.”
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