RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

I’m surprised that people are surprised when I say that I’m not neat. Something about me must suggest that I’m spruce.... Read More

In real life, you’re not supposed to look. You can’t be caught doing a double take at their sultry head tilts,... Read More

The bodies of male Olympic swimmers tend to differ from those of mere mortals in a few key areas. One: Large hands, which make it easier to... Read More

We’re not even halfway through 2026 yet, and it’s already been a banner year for new books. From sumptuous novels by Ben Lerner,... Read More

I knew marrying into a reality TV family would come with a learning curve. Cameras, schedules, and public attention: None of that surprised... Read More

This week I got involved in a Substack “discourse” about the state of working-class writing that was the result of... Read More

I now dread the supermarket. This, I assume, is a common feeling. There was a time, though, when I enjoyed it. On the cusp of adulthood, in... Read More

In a dramatic moment in the early 1990s, now famous among conservatives and libertarians, the author Ray Bradbury threw down the gauntlet... Read More

Lord of the Flies, William Golding‘s 1954 novel, is one of those properties that feels like it has constantly been adapted for the... Read More

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) dominated post-war European liberal philosophy. He dedicated his life to the rational foundation of a... Read More

Last week, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, suspended her campaign for the Senate. Her exit paves the way for her more... Read More

Philosophers and commentators have recognized for millennia that rhetors (political speakers) and poets occupy a similar corner of society... Read More

In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual... Read More

Marilyn Monroe read books. A lot of them. That’s the revelation of Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe,... Read More

Lord of the Flies looms so large in the canon of English-language allegory that it’s easy to forget the book is only... Read More

Last Thursday, I laced up my Timberlands and drove an hour west of San Antonio to join leaders of the MAHA movement, including skinny-jean... Read More

“How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It),” published this week in the New York Times by Dana... Read More

Getting into generational discourse is not unlike diving deep into astrology: Every vague, contradictory statement feels true, especially... Read More

I never got into the corporate thrillers of the 1980s, ’90s, and aughts, the subject of a new retrospective at the Criterion... Read More

Trickster, hypester, bullshit artist, Elon Musk is a profoundly ambiguous figure. A libertarian, an exponent of slashing the state, he built... Read More

This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount... Read More

It wasn’t until 2025 that the trouble reached my door. But it began long before that, in June 2020, after the death of George Floyd.... Read More

In the last days of 2025, among tech commenters in rarefied corners of X, a new consensus emerged: AGI was here. By AGI, they meant... Read More

Dwight Garner is the most prominent book critic at the New York Times which makes him, arguably, the most influential book critic... Read More

The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins in much the same way as the 2006 film. We see Andy Sachs, now twenty years into her journalism career,... Read More

There is a sentence on page 18 of GIRLS® around which nearly the entire book is structured. “I am not an expert or an... Read More

In Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear, the main character Natalie Heller Mills is a wealthy tradwife who gets her... Read More

Walking through the exquisite exhibition of Paul Klee’s late work at the Jewish Museum, faced with the maddening variety of themes,... Read More

Tweet enough times and you’ll end up here. It’s expected in my milieu. Cherries, lambs, Lana. Patron saint of the sensitive young... Read More

Twenty years ago, back when I’d first started telling people I was a writer, I was in a second-hand bookshop looking for books that... Read More

Andrew Breitbart was an angry man. He was angry because he found himself in a world where the mainstream media lied to the American people... Read More

If you have never encountered, or had to provide sustenance for, kiddos who eat a narrow, self-selected range of foods, count yourself among... Read More

For the contemporary movie nerd who consumes films then consumes all the media dissecting and discussing those films, Sean Fennessey looms... Read More

Last month, veteran media reporter Dylan Byers reported in Puck that Vox Media was being disassembled and sold off. The collection of... Read More