New York Review Books

06/01/2026

Out now, interviews about Eve Babitz and Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) for “Private Life,” a podcast from . In this episode, Anolik and Earnest talk about Eve’s complicated legacy, the bittersweet discovery of the letters after her death, and why readers keep falling in love with her writing. It’s a fun listen.

03/10/2026

Out this week, Voices is Frederic Prokosch’s self-proclaimed memoir, a headily descriptive book that recalls the author’s encounters with twentieth-century greats such as Robert Frost, Hannah Arendt, E.M. Forster, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. But there’s a catch: Most of these encounters are entirely fictional, wild (and wildly convincing) acts of literary ventriloquism that Prokosch tried to play off as real. As Kathryn Davis writes in her introduction, “What Prokosch is doing a rare thing, unprecedented. . . . Prokosch is able to coax you, Hoodwinked Reader, slowly, insistently, across the threshold between knowing what you’re reading is fiction and forgetting that fact. Needless to say, writers often seek to bring the world they’re describing and the people in that world fully to life. But this is something more.”

03/09/2026

02/26/2026

This September, NYRB Classics will publish I Liked Rex, a new collection of stories by Diane Williams. The founder and editor of the avant-garde literary annual NOON, Williams is one of the most innovative and consistently surprising writers of short fiction alive today, a true original in American literature. The thirty-six stories in I Liked Rex are characteristically brief (all of them five pages or fewer) and characteristically strange: In one, a woman sees her soon-to-be ex-husband marching at the end of a line of geese, and in another, a guest arrives to an o**y uninvited and ends up taking a nap beneath a dusty carpet. Full of s*x, mystery, and the oddities of life and love, these stories will sneak up on you. They’ll disorient you, startle you, make you laugh, and always leave you somewhere different from where you began.

02/10/2026

Out this week, Godlike is the second novel by writer and legendary punk rocker Richard Hell. It transposes the tempestuous romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its grimy, glorious ‘70s heyday. It’s a book about two poets that is itself full of poetry, evoking and quoting from New York School figures such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. And it’s a book suffused with the uninhibited energy of New York City in that era. As Raymond Foye writes in his afterword, “This is a novel built upon the raw nerves that spring from the streets, where the art is still rooted in physical and emotional impulses. Like their author, these characters are living for those moments of disruption, when things fall apart and everything is seen for what it is: hopeless.”

02/10/2026

Next month, join us for the debut of a new book club with . At 7pm on the second Thursday of each month, we’ll meet to discuss a book from the NYRB Classics series at McNally’s Downtown Brooklyn location (445 Gold St). Each book club pick will be selected by an NYRB staff member, who will then participate in that month’s meeting. The inaugural selection is Felix Salten’s Bambi (trans. Damion Searls). Later in the year, we’ll talk about books by Elizabeth Taylor, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Janet Malcolm, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Richard Hughes, and more. Go to the link in our bio to sign up for the March discussion. We can’t wait to see you there.

02/05/2026

This fall, New York Review Books will publish Tom McCarthy’s new novel, The Rhyl Poster. Part legal thriller and part systems novel, it follows Benjamin Stanton, an Iraq War veteran now working in the Central Court of the European Union. He is employed as a referendaire, a key figure in the internal mechanisms of the court, digesting the evidence and testimony presented during each case and drafting the judgments and opinions handed down by his superiors. He acts behind the scenes, but in a sense, he is the one truly making the law. When Stanton meets an enigmatic man at a legal conference, he is offered a powerful new pharmaceutical drug in the form of a little blue pill. He quickly becomes reliant on these pills—but obtaining the drug ensnares him in a bewildering web of money and power that threatens his career, his allegiances, and his life. Intricate, lyrical, and at times even visionary in its scope, The Rhyl Poster is further proof that McCarthy is one of our best living novelists.

01/29/2026

Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman, Katherine Browne, who finds herself quickly imbedded in the gregarious, unruly, and thoroughly bohemian family of her academic mentor, Jacob Goldman. During her first visit to the Goldmans’ home, she falls in love with the eldest son, Roger, an affair that eventually collapses and sends a broken-hearted Katherine on an escape to Rome. But after ten years, she returns to England—and soon discovers that her story with the Goldmans is nowhere close to finished. Beloved by Rachel Cusk, Ann Patchett, Maria Semple, and many more, Trapido’s novel will be reissued by NYRB Classics this fall.

01/28/2026

César Vallejo’s Trilce is here. As with much of Vallejo’s work, Trilce is infamously difficult to translate. Full of neologisms and other forms of rhetorical invention, the poems are layered with mystery, erotic urgency, grief, and political rage. Rising to the challenge of their text, translators William Rowe and Helen Dimos have included artful glosses in response to each poem, providing a commentary that both guides and encourages the reader to find their own entryways into the poems. The NYRB Poets edition is bilingual, for those wondering. On sale now.

01/26/2026

Something old, something new: Proofs of two books by Nancy Lemann have arrived. First is her cult debut, Lives of the Saints, and second is her new novel, The Oyster Diaries, a more than worthy follow-up, and a chance to visit briefly with the unforgettable creation Claude Collier. Both books go on sale in early April.