September 19, 2024 Fall Books Issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Secret Agent

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.

Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Ben Tarnoff

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

Jed Perl

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line

an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 17–September 29, 2024

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle

by Jonathan Crary

The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935

by Sjeng Scheijen

Laura Marsh

Not So Bad Guys

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, is a workplace drama that also manages to animate the forces that are fracturing our politics.

Godwin

by Joseph O’Neill

David Shulman

An ‘Unlawful Presence’

The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal, yet this will do little to reduce the settlers’ savage violence against Palestinians or force Israelis to become conscious of it.

Regina Marler

Culpability and the Culture

In Francine Prose’s memoir 1974, she recounts a brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

1974: A Personal History

by Francine Prose

Fintan O’Toole

Kamala’s Moment

Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?

Charlie Lee

Between a Joke & a Prophecy

Ed Park’s latest book—rich with errant wordplay, historical high jinks, and a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial—takes its place in the great tradition of the American systems novel.

Same Bed Different Dreams

by Ed Park

Marina Warner

Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.

Ian Frazier

Can We Talk!

Can Babel work? An exhilarating new book about preserving the languages of the most linguistically diverse city in history believes it can.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

by Ross Perlin

Claudio Lomnitz

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder

Marcela Turati’s account of the massacres in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, is arguably the most thorough piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.

San Fernando, Última Parada: Viaje al crimen autorizado en Tamaulipas [San Fernando, Last Stop: A Journey Through Organized Crime in Tamaulipas]

by Marcela Turati

Elaine Blair

Satire in a Skittish Time

In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, a canceled writer never quite makes the case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

The Book of Ayn

by Lexi Freiman

Joe Kloc

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

a poem

Jed S. Rakoff

The Most Conservative Branch

In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism

by Stephen Breyer

Jenny Uglow

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

Silk: A World History

by Aarathi Prasad

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

Warsaw Testament

by Rokhl Auerbach, translated from the Yiddish by Samuel Kassow

Andrew Katzenstein

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

by Grégoire Halbout, translated from the French by Aliza Krefetz

Becoming Nick and Nora: The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy

by Rob Kozlowski

Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges

by Stuart Klawans

Lynn Hunt

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

by Fareed Zakaria

Colm Tóibín

Haunted by Fiction

In Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

by Mark O’Connell

Rumaan Alam

Monsters Real & Imaginary

In a novel that fuses horror with historical fiction, Victor LaValle explores the lives of African American women who went west around the turn of the twentieth century.

Lone Women

by Victor LaValle

Charlie Savage

A Terrible Mistake

Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq

by Steve Coll

Lola Seaton

Major Details

In Ordinary Human Failings, Megan Nolan works to balance her novel’s ambitious scale and grave themes with an attention to emotional minutiae.

Ordinary Human Failings

by Megan Nolan

William Neuman

Chavismo’s Chokehold

The party of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro maintains a strong hold on state institutions, but it has lost the people’s mandate. Will there be a transfer of power to the opposition candidate, Edmundo González—the true victor of this summer’s election?

Issue Details

Cover art
Julien Posture: Untitled, 2024
Series art
Daniel Salmieri: Untitled, 2024