RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

FOR THE LAST five decades, the writer and critic George Scialabba has been carrying the torch for two traditions vital to the well-being of... Read More

At some point in the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, the author-narrator is struggling with feelings of... Read More

Yesterday, maybe you heard, Bob Dylan met The Pope. Photos of Dylan’s Vatican summit with Pope Leo XIV took over the internet. The man... Read More

In late 2025, I issued frank warnings about AI in a series of posts for premium subscribers: On August 8, 2025, I alerted readers to the... Read More

Of the many internships and part-time jobs I had in college, the worst one was, by far, a fact-checking internship at a major American news... Read More

A modern reader looks at the title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, and sees two words that mean pretty much the... Read More

I saw Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, in the same (similarly packed) theater... Read More

In the desert, as the song goes, you can remember your name. So it’s fitting that Matt Damon has come here—to a sweltering... Read More

The novelist A.S. Byatt is widely beloved in highbrow literary circles. Her work has won many literary prizes, including the Booker Prize,... Read More

Friedrich Hölderlin was the most enigmatic figure of German Romanticism. His lyric poems, hymns, and dramas constitute the furthest... Read More

Although the end of year marks a slow period for publishing, the upcoming slate of books from now into 2027 surely exude the maxim of quality... Read More

“These people shouldn’t even have children,” my co-worker railed. Another piped in: “The parents should be arrested... Read More

What does it mean to speak well and what connection—if any—is there between speaking well and speaking the truth? In his 2024... Read More

An interview with Jana Prikryl Read More

Across forty years, Tom Cruise’s career has chronicled the decline and fall of America in the public imagination. When Top Gun first... Read More

Despite using it every day, and spending a lot of time thinking and worrying about it, nobody can quite agree on what money is, or why it so... Read More

Sir Patrick Stewart has died at the age of 86, after a career of six decades that took him from the Royal Shakespeare Company in... Read More

In her recent video installation Boring Billion, the artist Yuyan Wang traces a strange genealogy of machines.1 Pieced together from found... Read More

To ask what Tolkien thought of God is rather like asking what Marx thought of socialism or how Samuel Pepys regarded the business of... Read More

I know that many gen zers are having sex frequently and happily — I have overheard real Sex and the City-type brunches and walked into... Read More

It’s a gross exaggeration to say that television is a lost art, but we can maybe agree that it has changed. Big-time. But sadly, not... Read More

It’s 3 p.m. at the Sunset Tower Hotel, the purgatory hour between lunch and dinner at one of Hollywood’s favorite places to... Read More

When I was teaching at the University of Kansas in the unusual spring of 2020, I noticed an uptick in the number of students telling me they... Read More

Sacha Baron Cohen’s durag-wearing poseur is back for “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” released Oct. 23. Critical reception has been... Read More

I’m writing this on Halloween and hear that the sponsors of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale are going door-to-door wearing... Read More

We’re all about festive cheer, but Thanksgiving is getting squeezed out by spooky cobwebs and nativity scenes. It’s time to chuck... Read More

We may never know exactly what happened at the Chi Pi fraternity on the Cornell campus on an October night in 2024. Memories fade and become... Read More

“Warning: this chapter contains attempted sexual assault, gore, and eye trauma.” So reads a content note in the popular... Read More

BEYOND THE OFFICIAL, job-related labels we can assign him—writer, teacher, filmmaker—it is difficult to define what British-born... Read More

Beneath the seventeenth-century Palace of Westminster there was a hidden Medieval undercroft, enduring like a line of erased poetry not fully... Read More