Reviews

Reviews

A Novel That Resists Being Filmed, and a Star Who Doesn't Care

Richard Gere is set to play aging novelist Ezra Blazer in a film adaptation of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry. A great book about power and attention — and a casting choice that raises as many questions as it answers.

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

Reviews

Librarians Are Running for Office. Maybe They Should Have Done It Sooner.

Across the United States, library professionals are running for state political offices, motivated by book ban records. When shelves get emptied, someone has to change who decides what goes on them.

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

Reviews

Survey Confirms What Everyone Suspected: Nearly Half of Publishing Pros Use AI

A BISG and BookNet Canada survey finds that 47% of North American publishing professionals already use AI tools — despite significant copyright concerns. Ambivalence, it turns out, is the new industry standard.

N Nicolas Parola · May 1, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

Zadie Smith Reads Mostly Women. The Interesting Part Is Why That's Still News.

Zadie Smith told an audience she reads mostly women. A brief statement — but one worth sitting with. On canon, attention, and the parts of the library that were always there.

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

Reviews

John Banville in Venice: On Not Caring About the World

John Banville's new novel arrives from Venice with the author's declaration that 'society, wars, and the world matter little' to him as a writer. A meditation on what literature owes—or doesn't—to the present.

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

Reviews

Two Americas, Two Books, One Industry That Cannot Say No

Ted Cruz is writing a Clarence Thomas biography. Tim Walz is writing about Minnesota and ICE. Both books will share a shelf. James Whitmore on the political memoir as a genre that refuses to die.

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

Reviews

Five Lives Worth Reading: The 2026 Plutarch Award Shortlist and What Biography Can Still Do

The 2026 Plutarch Award shortlist — five biographies covering James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Brontë, Kwame Nkrumah, and a nineteenth-century Native American leader — makes a quiet argument for the form's continuing ambition. Winner announced May 28.

N Nicolas Parola · Apr 25, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

The Snail, Ukraine, and Everything We're Trying to Save: Maria Reva Wins the Aspen Words Prize

Maria Reva wins the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize with Endling — a novel about two sisters searching for their missing activist mother in Ukraine and a scientist racing to save an endangered snail species. The jury called it audacious. They're right.

N Nicolas Parola · Apr 25, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

92NO: The Writers' Boycott That Won't Let the 92nd Street Y Look Away

Since 2023, a collective of writers and artists has been pressuring one of New York's most storied cultural institutions over its cancellation of a Viet Thanh Nguyen talk. The campaign is still growing.

N Nicolas Parola · Apr 24, 2026 · 3 min read

Reviews

The Ghost in the Manuscript: Why AI Detection Is Publishing's Least Interesting Problem

Publishing's answer to the AI problem is apparently more AI. Maris Kreizman's sharp new essay argues the real issue is not the technology — it is the industry's long war on its own editors.

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

Reviews

The O. Henry Prize Returns to the Republic of the Short Story

Tommy Orange’s selections for the 2026 O. Henry Prize span five languages and a dozen magazines, proving the short story remains literature’s most portable form.

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

Reviews

Helen DeWitt Turned Down $175,000. The Literary World Has Opinions.

When Helen DeWitt announced she had rejected a Windham-Campbell Prize this spring, the internet did what it does — divided cleanly into camps. But the story underneath is more unsettling than the takes.

N Nicolas Parola · Apr 13, 2026 · 4 min read