Novelist Aminatta Forna writes about the lingering effects, fourteen years later, of having written a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, about the political hanging of her father in Sierra Leone.
The New York Review of Books
Robert B. Silvers, Editor of The New York Review of Books: 1929-2017
“I believe in the writer—the writer, above all.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
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Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell
In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on […]
In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their […]
If neither party is proposing effective solutions to the cost crisis, and political deadlock in Washington is preventing the consideration of new ideas, are we doomed to witness a slowly collapsing health care system that eventually will provide adequate care only to those who can afford to pay? In his latest book on health care, […]