Reviews

Reviews

43 Million Books and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Thirteen publishers are suing WeLib for pirating over 43 million books. Dani Carrasco asks the question the press releases avoid.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 17, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

The Novel That Contains Itself: On Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book

Catherine Lacey's new novel The Möbius Book folds a revenge narrative around an embedded mystery novella. Sigrid Nørgaard considers what it means when a book has no discernible outside.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 15, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

Carlos Labbé Wrote the Soccer Novel Nobody Knew They Wanted

The Murmuration, Carlos Labbé's Chilean novel about the 1962 World Cup, arrives in English translation. It is stranger than its premise suggests, and better than that strangeness deserves to go unnoticed.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 14, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

The Life That Refuses to End: Francesca Wade Wins the Plutarch Award for Her Stein Biography

Francesca Wade's Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife has won the 2026 Plutarch Award, the only prize for biography judged exclusively by biographers. A moment to consider what biography does — and what it cannot.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 6, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

What Remains: Siri Hustvedt Writes Through Paul Auster's Ghost

Siri Hustvedt's new book 'Ghost Stories' is described by El Cultural's Alberto Gordo as a 'deep and moving work' where she merges with Paul Auster's ghost. Two years after his death, the question the book poses is both literary and unbearable: what does a writer do with the story they cannot tell?

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 4, 2026 · 4 min read

Reviews

Men in Love: Irvine Welsh Returns to His Favourite Territory

Irvine Welsh's new novel 'Hombres enamorados' lands with El Cultural describing it as 'Trainspotting's hangover of drugs, sex and class.' Which is, more or less, what every Irvine Welsh novel has been described as since 1993.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 4, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

What Robert Macfarlane’s Rivers Know That We Have Forgotten

As ‘Is a River Alive?’ arrives in paperback this June, it feels like the right question for the wrong moment — or perhaps the right moment for the only question that matters.

N Nicolas Parola · Jun 2, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

A Biography That Reinvents Biography: Francesca Wade Wins the Plutarch Award

Francesca Wade has won the 2026 Plutarch Award for Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, described by a jury of biographers as groundbreaking. A book that doesn't just tell a life — it questions what telling a life can mean.

N Nicolas Parola · May 30, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

A Machine Walks into Granta: The Commonwealth Prize and the Question No One Wants to Answer

A story published in Granta as a Commonwealth Foundation regional finalist was almost certainly written by AI. The institution is reviewing its process. Perhaps it should also review its assumptions.

N Nicolas Parola · May 29, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

How True Does a Memoir Have to Be?

The New Yorker investigated Belle Burden's bestselling memoir Strangers and found that the author who described terror at losing her homes in divorce had a net worth of over ten million dollars. An uncomfortable question about the genre.

N Nicolas Parola · May 28, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

Tana French Closes the Cal Hooper Trilogy, and She Has Nothing Left to Prove

The Keeper, the third and final novel in Tana French's Cal Hooper series, is an NYT bestseller and a worthy conclusion to one of the finest crime trilogies in recent memory. French refuses to hurry, and she is right not to.

N Nicolas Parola · May 27, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

What Remains of a Generation When History Tries to Erase It? Queer Poetry, AIDS, and Memory

Steven Reigns and Sara Youngblood Gregory publish queer poetry collections about AIDS from opposite angles: lived memory and generational absence. Together they make something urgent.

N Nicolas Parola · May 26, 2026 · 3 min read