True Books

Those of you who know Jane Mount only from her colorful illustrations of shelved and stacked book spines might be surprised—as I was—that her new book of literary "miscellany" is as miscellaneous as i... (Tom)

Heavy is a book unsatisfied with itself, by a writer unsatisfied with himself, and with us. He begins by saying he "wanted to write a lie," a happier, less messy memoir, but he couldn't. Instead, he w... (Tom)

We had heard about this book for a while—it was wildly popular and a "book of the year" in the UK, and Macfarlane, Britain's leading nature writer, is becoming beloved in the States too. But seeing it... (Tom)

What happens when you put people with contempt for government in charge of the government? Lewis takes his eye for the untold story into the unglamorous—but, as he demonstrates, desperately necessary—... (Tom)

The Prix Goncourt is France's highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It's an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it's re... (James)

Poetry is such a compressed art that for me it often requires some space, some context, in which to breathe. Terrance Hayes has taken an entire book to put the work—really a single poem, the appropria... (Tom)

From the very start of his career, Thoreau has been one of the most divisive members of the American literary canon—visionary or crank? self-reliant or sponge?—in large part because he offered his own... (Tom)

The recently announced longlist for the first National Book Award for translated literature inspired me to pick up, finally, a book I'd had my eye on: this remarkable account of Iraqi women who escape... (Tom)

Part of what made the documentary Bill Cunningham New York so fascinating was the enigma of its subject: the photographer infatuated with fashion who himself lived an ascetic and deeply private life.... (Tom)

A few weeks ago I recommended Origo's diary from the first years of the war, but this book, for good reason, is the one that made her famous, in part for the understated clarity of her style, and in p... (Tom)

Is there such a thing as a tree of life, or is it closer to a web? With his explanation of the branching of species, Darwin made the tree one of the central images of biology. But the last half-centur... (Tom)

How do you tell the story of America's decade and half at war (during a time when much of America hardly felt like it was at war at all)? Chivers, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent and... (Tom)

Origo, a wealthy Englishwoman who supervised a Tuscan estate with her Italian husband, was (justly) made famous by another diary (also reissued by NYRB Classics): The War in Val d'Orcia, covering the... (Tom)

This is a book framed by grief—Broks's wife died of cancer in middle age—but it is not the usual memoir of loss. Broks has long been a scientist of consciousness, and he sees death, as well as the mir... (Tom)

New Book About Old Books of the Week Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics As regular readers may know by now, there are few parts of the literary ecosystem I like better than th... (Tom)

Sale Book of the Week The New Family Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen In our kitchen we have a shelf for our most-used cookbooks. And on this shelf there is one cookbook that is (clearly) the most u... (Tom)

"Wisconsin is a laboratory for the rest of the country." Those are words that might have once applied to the progressive "Wisconsin Idea," but in Kaufman's book are spoken by a conservative activist a... (Tom)

Maybe you saw that recent map that showed that the most common job in 29 of the 50 states is truck driver, but when was the last time you read a book by one? Finn Murphy is an anomaly: the black sheep... (Tom)

First of all, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is not about football. (It's just a funny cover.) It is, ostensibly, about the general store Tamara Shopsin's parents ran in Greenwich Village, which they turned in... (Tom)

Summer might feel like it's slipping away already (it does to me!), but we still have a month and a half left till Labor Day, which is plenty of time if you're doing Summer Book Bingo with the Seattle... (Tom)

Phinney Oblivion: A Memoir This is, as the title implies, a very sad book. So sad, in fact, that I thought twice about sending it out to our Phinney by Post subscribers. But the sadness is inseparable... (Tom)

Perhaps you read Snyder's bracing pamphlet, On Tyranny (or the Facebook post it was based on)—from its title, I had imagined this new, much larger book as an expansion of those ideas, but, while it's... (Tom)

That is a banger of a book! (Peter)

This is a little book, written in a modest style, but its claims are large. Despite her title, Ginzburg wants us to set aside the "little virtues" of frugality, caution, and tact for the greater ones... (Tom)

The Silicon Valley startup in question is Theranos. Perhaps you heard of it: the company, led by the young, Steve Jobs-wannabe CEO Elizabeth Holmes, that was going to disrupt health-care with pin-pric... (Tom)

I was drawn to this book, the third in Rovelli's recent series of short introductions to the mind-blowing propositions of modern physics, by its inexhaustibly poignant and fascinating subject: time. H... (Tom)

It's always a surprise to me that our infinitely complex systems don't melt down more than they do. Perhaps that's changing (for the worse), but that they don't is an ongoing tribute to the thankless... (Tom)

A different book about the art and science of flavor might be called "How We Taste," but Becky Selengut, local chef and (you can tell) beloved cooking instructor, emphasizes the "to" in her title. Tas... (Tom)

David Maurer, a linguistics professor, was drawn to the underground by its lingo, but he stuck around to lovingly describe an entire subterranean culture of grifters, marks, and intricately constructe... (Tom)

For 6,000 years, the human alliance with the horse has been unparalleled—more stable even than our relationship with our gods, argues Raulff—but for two centuries we have been gradually withdrawing fr... (Tom)

In the first years of China's boom, frantic dispatches from the "New China" came back almost daily, but Hessler settled there for the long haul, first with the Peace Corps and later as a New Yorker co... (Tom)

If The Wire is the height of pop-culture art, Yacht Rock is mainly a punchline, a lovingly ironic gag about the cheesy hits that dominated the airwaves in the '70s and early '80s. (But greatness lies... (Tom)

All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire "How did something this good actually get made?" That's the underlying question at the heart of this superb oral history, because The Wire still see... (Tom)

I once considered making Tejaratchi's hilarious LiarTownUSA Tumblr page a Link of the Week (because it so often features fake book covers) but thought better of it because, well, there's a lot of stuf... (Tom)

Mailhot's memoir is short, but she doesn't let it go down easy. She knows how indigenous memoirs like hers, are taken. "I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle," she writes on... (Tom)

Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet): they may not be household names (though Borlaug did win the Nobel Peace Prize for launching the "Green Revolution" in agriculture), but Mann... (Tom)

Though it’s hard to say exactly what happens in this memoir, I can tell you it is worth every moment spent reading it. Lockwood’s sharp eye, poet's language, and anthropological approach to the absurd... (Kim)

Lampedusa is a tiny island off the coast of north Africa, but it's part of Italy and therefore Europe, which means that in recent years its 6,000 inhabitants have often been joined, daily, by hundreds... (Tom)

If you're a Jeopardy! aficionado, you might remember the brilliant and wonderfully good-natured Joon Pahk, whom I was fortunate to get to know, and even more fortunate not to have to play against, dur... (Tom)

Phinney Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back If organized labor was flat on its back when Geoghegan, a middle-aged Chicago labor lawyer, wrote this fantastic, funn... (Tom)

Like the real world, the internet contains places just too unpleasant to visit oneself. So I am grateful to intrepid online explorer Angela Nagle for letting me sit in my armchair and be queasily fasc... (Liz)

An aside in the new Robert Frank biography led me to this item, a reprint in the Books on Books series of a landmark 1945 photo book, the only one the legendary Brodovitch (editor and mentor to Frank... (Tom)

Our tiny art shelves were suddenly full this year of biographies of major American photographers: Vivian Maier, Richard Avedon, Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, and this one, which I picked up almost on a w... (Tom)

Last week: a scholar's loving appreciation of the glories of medieval book-making. This week: an equally loving tribute to the heyday of the pulpy horror paperback, from Rosemary's Baby to Silence of... (Tom)

This book about beautiful books is, as you would hope, a beautiful book itself. But more so, like the books it describes, it has personality. De Hamel, one of the world's experts on illuminated manusc... (Tom)

Austin was an unknown writer in her 30s, living near Death Valley, when this tiny book of desert sketches first appeared in 1903, but from its first sentences she writes with a startling and compellin... (Tom)

As impressive and conversation-changing as Coates's last book, Between the World and Me, was, it felt like part of a larger project, incomplete without his earlier memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and... (Tom)

What an idea: to trace Russia's revolutionary generation, from its utopian beginnings to the paranoid purges of its end, via the massive Moscow apartment complex that was built to house the party's el... (Tom)

Aside from a few novels (most notably Sleepless Nights) and a short and apparently wonderful biography of Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote essays, many of them published in the New York Review of Bo... (Tom)

"Once near a border, it is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something." The border Kassabova is drawn to is the territory where Turkey, Greece, and her native Bulga... (Tom)