New York Review of Books

Joyce Carol Oates
Disaster Was Her Element

Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once is a richly detailed and warmly sympathetic look at Jean Rhys’s turbulent, disjointed life.

David Motadel
My Husband the War Criminal

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

Joshua Hammer
Promise and Disillusion in South Africa

Despite a shift in political power, the country is plagued by racial divisions and economic inequalities.

Adrian Nathan West
Brick, Mortar, and Rot

The novels of the late, contrarian Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes have come to seem prophetic.

Text and art by Molly Crabapple
In the Shadow of Invasion

Across Ukraine, people fight, grieve, sing, skateboard, selfie. “We will think of our pain after victory.”

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s April 28, 2011, issue—one day before Prince William married Catherine Middleton in a $34 million ceremony, one month after 400,000 people took to the streets of London to protest the Conservative government’s extreme budget cuts, and two weeks before the Scottish National Party won a landslide victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections on the promise of a referendum for Scottish independence—Jonathan Freedland asked why, despite a series of scandals and the threat of the United Kingdom’s dissolution, “the royals’ appeal remains resilient.”

Jonathan Freedland
Windsor Knot

“What might explain the durability of a brand that, in so many other respects, would seem to have sustained irreparable damage? A first clue lies, paradoxically enough for an institution that likes to project itself as ancient, in a notion that is quintessentially modern: celebrity.”