Under Review

The New Yorker’s editors and critics choose this year’s essential reads in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Fear of what the dead might do to us didn’t start with Dracula, and it didn’t end with him, either.

Two recent books follow young religious converts down the winding back roads of belief.

For the characters in Lee Lai’s “Cannon,” home is the place most resistant to real emotion.

In Ha Jin’s “Looking for Tank Man,” uncovering the past doesn’t guarantee making peace with the present.

When the young writer began analysis with Wilfred R. Bion, both men were at the beginning of their careers. Their work together would have a transformative impact.

“American Canto” arrives following a media bonanza around the reporter's relationship with R.F.K., Jr. The book itself isn’t nearly as interesting.

“Coyote,” a new biography by Robert M. Dowling, recounts how the cowboy laureate of American theatre invented himself.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the country’s literature was widely considered provincial. Then Malcolm Cowley set about championing writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as uniquely American.