Reading for the New Year: Part Four
This is Obomsawin’s take on Kaspar Hauser, a nineteenth-century German man who claimed to have grown up in a dark cellar, without any human contact. We meet him as a Gumby-like figure,…
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A Début Novel About the Quest for Eternal Youth
Cash’s dialogue is the novel’s greatest trick. It’s blunt, even a little wooden, yet she wields it with a quicksilver touch, creating volleys of unblinking banter that read like a mashup…
What We’re Reading
Our editors and critics review notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Source link
An Artist Seeks Reinvention by Living Off the Grid in “Far West”
Lala Abaddon doesn’t have an address. Her home, made from scratch, sits off a rocky road, deep in the desert mountains of the American West. “I wrote the realtor, and he thought I was…
Adrian Tomine’s “Post-Vacation”
For the cover of the January 26, 2026, issue, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine depicted a scene that New Yorkers often encounter in the depths of winter. “I inevitably see some suntanned…
The Cold Comfort of a Helene Schjerfbeck Painting
In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of…
How to Kill a Fish
A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being…
Helen, Help Me: On the Phenomenology of Cheeseburgers
A New Yorker food critic answers questions about burger toppings, beef tallow, and the subjectivity of memory. Source link
Acts of Self-Destruction
Friedkin’s film sucked much of the humor and twisted romance from the play, I realized, treating it as straight horror. Although I have some issues with the latest interpretation, directed…
Bob Weir’s Feral Radiance
Although Weir was a serious person it was easy to make him laugh. He made you feel when you were with him that he had no other place to be, that things had worked out to bring the two of…
Erich von Stroheim’s Spectacular Art Is Back
As Steuben, Stroheim assumed a military bearing and status that he’d never approached in his actual Army days. The performance style that he thereby invented set the mold for most of his…
A President with His Finger on the Nation’s Pulse
© 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.…
Zach Bryan’s Stubborn, Shaggy New Album
In 2019, it seemed possible that the next big country star would be a Navy aviation ordnanceman from Oklahoma named Zach Bryan, who recorded scruffy videos of himself hollering fervent…
The New York Shooting That Defined an Era
“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed and his daughter raped by muggers and responds by…
Lagos Is a Vortex of Energy
The British Nigerian photographer Ollie Babajide Tikare took note of those aspects, capturing daily Lagos in his recent book, “Èkó,” a collage of scenes and portraits from the city, taken…
The Robot and the Philosopher
Sophia wasn’t particularly talkative that evening. Earlier that day, she’d been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were…
“Dead Man’s Wire” Is a Tangle of Loose Threads
The film draws a link between these journalistic versions and the unfolding action through the character of Linda Page (Myha’la), a TV reporter on the scene outside the office building.…
The Gospel According to Emily Henry
“I’m a huge dog person, which means that I experience death somewhat regularly, with the most beloved creature in my life,” she went on. “Every time that happens, you tell yourself, ‘I…
In Tracy Letts’s “Bug,” Crazy Is Contagious
In Cromer’s framing, that hollowness begins to feel like the play’s sad theme: when someone is on a desperate hunt for meaning, the source of it ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It…
The Zealous Voyagers of “Magellan” and “The Testament of Ann Lee”
Where does such a charge leave Magellan, despoiler of every Eden he encounters? The film, to its credit, does not skimp on paradisiacal visions. Every shot of the tropics is a painterly…
Dances of the Georgian Court and Countryside
Many will remember Daniil Simkin for his technically brilliant dancing at American Ballet Theatre. He is now a freelancer and a producer; his latest project, “Sons of Echo,” is an evening…
Béla Tarr’s Unbroken Visions
A titanic artist’s death is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I’d…
Barry Blitt’s “Guzzler”
When President Trump announced the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the cartoonist Barry Blitt decided that his image for the cover of the January 19, 2026,…
Reading for the New Year: Part Two
To start the new year, New Yorker writers are looking back on the last one, sifting through the vast number of books they encountered in 2025 to identify the experiences that stood out.…