Every week, the critics and editors at The New York Times Book Review pick the most interesting and notable new releases, from literary fiction and serious nonfiction to thrillers, romance novels, fantasies, mysteries and everything in between.
You can save the books you’re most excited to read on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts.
Narrative Nonfiction
Redemption
by Lawrence Wright
Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, examines seven women sentenced to execution in Texas, and the close bonds they formed with a band of nuns who come to offer spiritual comfort. Despite the moral polarity of his subjects, Wright highlights the women’s commonalities — for starters, each group is kept apart from society, whether by choice or by legal judgment — and wrestles with questions of redemption and faith. Read our review.
Cultural History
The Last Best Place on the Internet
by Richard Cooke
In this wry and readable new book, Wikipedia emerges as “an escapee from a parallel universe, a refugee of the internet as it should have been, instead of the internet as it is.” Cooke, a journalist, zeros in on the all-too-human dimension of the website’s history, the tragic, pedantic and comic episodes that help explain its staying power in an age of A.I. slop. Read our review.
HORROR
Off the Reservation
by Stephen Graham Jones
Jones is a master of horror, and draws on true atrocities in his novels focusing on Native characters. Nathan Yellow Tail, who was last seen in Jones’s 2020 novel “The Only Good Indians,” is enlisted to help recover the remains of a Blackfeet boy who died at the real-life Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, only to discover that something sinister has gotten there first. Read our review.
Literary criticism
Love and Death in the American Novel
by Leslie A. Fiedler
First published in 1960 and reissued earlier this year, this is an exposé of the secrets American literature didn’t know it was keeping. It is a tour de force of literary criticism — strange, ecstatic, a kind of séance — that puts classics like “The Scarlet Letter,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick” under a portable Freudian lens, as if Fiedler were chasing the American psyche with a Steadicam. Read our review.
science
Bogland
by Merritt R. Turetsky
In folklore, boglands are often places of magic and dread, mist-shrouded realms where supernatural creatures lurk. The facts of the matter are more prosaic, but arguably just as astonishing. Amid the serious science of “Bogland” is a story that may lack goblins or pixies, but is full of enchantment and drama.. Read our review.
Graphic Memoir
I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex
by Lisa Hanawalt
From the illustrator behind “BoJack Horseman” comes a glorious and messy cartoon memoir featuring a horny pony named Juniper and plenty of other bizarre displays. Hanawalt’s anxieties and libido are on full view (including an eroticized Mister Rogers), but her comic sensibility doesn’t obscure the book’s bigger questions about misogyny, trauma and self-determination. Read our review.
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