Anthony Curtis Adler on "The Master of Contradictions": "Jensen doesn’t so much explain the novel through Mann’s life as explain Mann through the novel. There’s a risk in this, however." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-mann-magic-mountain-master-contradictions-jensen-review/

Lauren Groff joins this week's #LARBRadioHour to talk about her new short story collection "Brawler." Listen now on our site, or wherever you get your podcasts: https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/lauren-groffs-brawler-interview-podcast/

"At the core of these alternate endings is control." Andy Hageman on going to Stephen King's newly opened archive and reframing the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stephen-king-dark-half-revisited-archives-richard-bachman/

My essay for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social on transnational links among fascist movements in the 1930s, and their legacies and lessons today:

From the LARB archive: When Ulysses Jenkins joined the #LARBRadioHour to talk about his first retrospective: https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/kate-wolf-speaks-to-john-markoffwhole-earth-the-many-lives-of-stewart-brand-ulysses-jenkins/

Sebastian Langdell on Bill Callahan's latest album, exploring fatherhood, time, and forgiveness: "He gets to the heart of a certain kind of gratitude that can befall a man on an ordinary day in middle life." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bill-callahan-my-days-58-album-review-songwriter/

“There were no special toilets for women because women, in particular those of the upper class, had no public needs.”

"Fascist ideas were hiding in plain sight." Juliette Bretan on what transnational links among fascist movements in the 1930s can tell us about the Far Right today: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/transnational-fascism-united-states-nazis-hungary-yugoslavia-germany/

Calvin Gimpelevich on enjoying the sauna: "I could feel the eyes of queer people on me in the baths and realized it didn’t matter, really, how I thought of myself or what anyone’s rhetoric was." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/calvin-gimpelevich-bath-houses-saunas-queer-trans-spaces/

"It is perhaps a critical failure of Jensen’s book, admirable in so many ways, that it allows the myth of genius to conceal an all too-human truth." Anthony Adler on “The Master of Contradictions.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-mann-magic-mountain-master-contradictions-jensen-review/

"The guitar can be a megaphone calling outwards or a carapace behind which you hide." Sebastian Langdell on Bill Callahan’s "My Days of 58": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bill-callahan-my-days-58-album-review-songwriter/

Applications are still open for the 10th @larb-workshop.bsky.social! Join LARB staff and 60+ publishers this summer for an intensive online workshop and start your career in publishing in 2026. Apply today! https://lareviewofbooks.org/publishing-workshop/

Kaya Genç on "One Thousand and One Kisses": "These vivid glimpses of Istanbul are invaluable to all curious readers, depicting the mores of a bygone age, much as 'Sex and the City' did with New York City." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/istanbul-anonymous-erotic-stories-one-thousand-one-kisses/

Tim Hirschel-Burns on Nicolas Niarchos’ “The Elements of Power”: "In Niarchos’s coverage, everything comes down to power—and those with the least of it are the ones digging up the elements." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elements-power-nicolas-niarchos-cobalt-exploitation

Colin Marshall on three books about Bowie, and what they tell us about him: "We miss David Bowie, but perhaps we miss even more the conditions that could give rise to David Bowie." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-bowie-books-morley-ormerod-larman-rock-star

"To recognize a tyrant, it helps to have some experience with tyranny. A daughter of the 19th century, Woolf knew coercion when she saw it." Cynthia Zarin traces the rise of fascism through the diary entries of Virginia Woolf: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dont-close-your-teeth/

Interesting piece in the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social looking at three recent Bowie books - Alex Larman's, Paul Morley's and mine, which is described as 'a highly readable biographical overview, suitable for the non-Bowieologist'. Pleased about this! lareviewofbooks.org/article/davi...

"Minneapolis, we’ve always ridden the frost. We’ve always broken the ice." Jaida Grey Eagle and David Treuer write about Minneapolis under siege: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/minneapolis-saint-paul-ice-siege-resistance-photo-essay/

"The baffling truth—or paradox—of my life is that we have bodies, are bodies, perhaps, and not discorporate spirits." Calvin Gimpelevich on experiencing life as a sweaty body in saunas: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/calvin-gimpelevich-bath-houses-saunas-queer-trans-spaces/

"The genius of the innocuous phrase 'Good evening, we are from Ukraine'—nothing more, really, than a greeting and a statement of fact—is in how cleverly it masks its radicalism." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/good-evening-we-are-from-ukraine-the-subversive-radicalism-of-a-viral-wartime-slogan/

"Authorship and identity become fluid and the author(s) of 'The Dark Half' tangle with their meaning inside the intellectual crawlspace the notes create." Andy Hageman visits the Stephen King archive: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stephen-king-dark-half-revisited-archives-richard-bachman

"David Lynch has always had a way of elevating peripheral performances to derail our sense of narrative logic. But no work of Lynch’s has been so gloriously digressive as 'Twin Peaks: The Return.'" https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-lynchs-late-style/

"How can you go against the times?" @zosha.bsky.social on "No Other Choice": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-other-choice-park-chan-wook-unemployment-murder/

I reviewed Nicolas Niarchos' new book on battery supply chains and Congolese mines. I wrote about an energy transition that touches just about everything, and how "we" should think about a humane energy transition when there's no "we" in charge of it

"Even at the end of his life, he operated with an understanding of the way culture worked in a fully connected world that compensated for the diminishment of his medium." Colin Marshall on three new Bowie books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-bowie-books-morley-ormerod-larman-rock-star/

"'The Elements of Power' portrays an energy transition more akin to an amoral free-for-all." Tim Hirschel-Burns reviews Nicolas Niarchos’ “The Elements of Power.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elements-power-nicolas-niarchos-cobalt-exploitation/

Jaida Grey Eagle and David Treuer on Minneapolis under siege: "It’s no surprise that Minneapolis is giving hope to the rest of the country in its stand against hatred and brutality." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/minneapolis-saint-paul-ice-siege-resistance-photo-essay/

Want to keep up with everything LARB? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest on all our events, writing, book clubs, and more. https://lareviewofbooks.org/about/newsletter/

“Bishop is working in the tradition of Howard S. Becker…[but she] is not interested in moralizing or claiming that #influencers are ruining art; her goal instead is to understand how “influencer creep affects artistic production and how art becomes visible to audiences.” #influencercreep👌🏾

“I began to think of the archive as a 'paper sematary' where interred ideas still speak to, and through, researchers who enter and open themselves to listen.” Andy Hageman visits the Stephen King archive: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stephen-king-dark-half-revisited-archives-richard-bachman/

"Anyone who has spent time browsing new positions on LinkedIn would understand: who wouldn’t kill to stop networking?" Zosha Millman on Park Chan-wook’s "No Other Choice" and the job-search grind: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-other-choice-park-chan-wook-unemployment-murder/

"The book illuminates the European project's paradox: that democracy and law coexist in tension, sustained as much by belief as by legal obligation." Mark S. Ellis on "Justice in the Balance": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/justice-balance-jessica-greenberg-european-court-human-rights

"There’s an openness that one gets to have when you just look without trying to make so much meaning that it excludes the viewer. Read more from our excerpt of Larry Sultan's "Water over Thunder": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/larry-sultan-water-over-thunder-photography-mack-excerpt/

Jack Jacobs on the unease he felt reading two books on historical revolutions: "We ought to distrust our own longing for world-remaking dawns." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revolutions-russia-china-cuba-simon-hall-donald-sassoon/

"These books make clear that if China is to reform one system, it has to address the other." Susan Blumberg-Kason explores two books that tackle bureaucracy in China: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/manipulating-authoritarian-citizenship-highest-exam-china-class-education/

“Minneapolis is the heart of the heartland, and as such, it has many chambers, some of them known, others secret. Some let blood in, and some let it out.” Jaida Grey Eagle and David Treuer on Minneapolis: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/minneapolis-saint-paul-ice-siege-resistance-photo-essay/

Sarah Brouillette on Sophie Bishop’s "Influencer Creep": "For Bishop, algorithmic gossip is, in contrast to official lore, a more demotic response to the anxiety-inducing work of marketing via platforms." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/influencer-creep-sophie-bishop-social-media-art-algorithm/

Brian James Schill speaks with the founders of "Punk" magazine about whether they were surveilled by the feds: "As any underground band from the 1970s and 1980s can attest, politics never considered punk boring." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/punk-magazine-fbi-cia-sabotage-new-york-cbgb/

"For me art making is a means of exploring and articulating the complexities, contradictions, and wonders of being alive." -Larry Sultan in “Water Over Thunder.” Read more from our excerpt: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/larry-sultan-water-over-thunder-photography-mack-excerpt/

Mark S. Ellis on Jessica Green's "Justice in the Balance": "For those looking for an accessible introduction to European human rights law, it may be a formidable challenge, but well worth the effort." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/justice-balance-jessica-greenberg-european-court-human-rights/

Tracy Fernandez Rysavy on Timothy Rideout’s "Gothic Precarity": "The omnipresent precarity among the middle and working classes powers the fears at the heart of 21st-century Gothic literature." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gothic-precarity-capitalism-horror-sci-fi-timothy-rideout

Jack Jacobs on the unease he felt reading two books on historical revolutions: "After everything we know about revolutionary terror, why do these books still stir with the romance of revolution?" https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revolutions-russia-china-cuba-simon-hall-donald-sassoon/

Namwali Serpell joins this week's #LARBRadioHour to talk about her latest book, "On Morrison"; how Toni Morrison is often misread; and why her books speak, as ever, to the present moment. Listen now: https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/namwali-serpell-on-morrison-interview-podcast/

“The 2026 Color of the Year supposedly represents a ‘fresh start,’ but it looks a lot like accepting the status quo.” Lida Zeitlin-Wu digs into Pantone's "Cloud Dancer": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pantone-color-year-cloud-dancer-whiteness-fascism-eugenics/

"When the context is the production of an environment safe for brands, social media identities collapse into light apolitical content conducive to a buying mood. There is little room for confusion about who you are, what your work is about, and whom it’s for."

What role should place play in our nonfiction writing? Let Sierra Crane Murdoch be your guide in our upcoming Spring educational workshop. Class is online at 5-7 p.m. PST from April 14 to May 19, 2026. Sign up today: https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/writing-in-place-w-sierra-crane-murdoch/

"Instagram-ready art may be one small part of a vast and complex art-ecosystem, but it reflects broader pressures that creative people face." Sarah Brouillette reviews Sophie Bishop’s "Influencer Creep": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/influencer-creep-sophie-bishop-social-media-art-algorithm/

"Embracing contradiction as a style, Hamrah interrogates its function in and between politics and art, the cinema and the world." Georgie Carr on A. S. Hamrah’s new books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/as-hamrah-end-times-cinema-algorithm-night-review/

Sometimes the sickbed as the best seat in the house from which to see our sick society clearly. Join “Dead Weight” author Emmeline Clein’s 6-week online class to learn how to craft nonfiction that renders illness honestly: https://lareviewofbooks.org/event/writing-about-illness-with-emmeline-clein/

"Embracing contradiction as a style, Hamrah interrogates its function in and between politics and art, the cinema and the world." Georgie Carr on A. S. Hamrah’s new books and front-row seat to Hollywood’s decline: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/as-hamrah-end-times-cinema-algorithm-night-review/