December 2, 2025 Bookmarks The Eyelashes of the Twentieth Century By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (newly reissued by Riverhead), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones: He was often prone to falling into a mindless state, staring at the world in front of him as if it were a picture. Down below, people walked along the asphalt road, herding cows; dogs were running, a man burst into sudden laughter, little bells tinkled on the sheep’s necks, skin itched, higher up a man carried a hare he’d poached, he waved to someone, smoke from the chimneys drifted into the sky and birds flew to the west. This picture goes on forever; it seems to be eternal. It’s a scene that people happen to, rather than it happening to people. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve this young border guard, with a face as ruddy and glowing as a Bath bun, was riding his huge motorbike slowly through the snow. Read More
November 4, 2025 Bookmarks Rotten Tomatoes By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte), a daily bulletin of movie news: April 28, 2024 Selling point of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it doesn’t require any “Marvel homework” WBD and Amazon “may have unknowingly” used North Korean companies for animation work on two of their TV series Studios have begun hiring some directors based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores of their recent movies Kalshi, a financial exchange and predictive-market company, offers a betting product for Rotten Tomatoes scores. “Now anyone can make money by being a movie critic,” is how they sell it WBD CEO David Zaslav’s $49.7 million salary is more than the entire operating budget of WBD’s Turner Classic Movies, flagship channel of American film history Instead of reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix will use a new metric they call “Fandom,” which is based on how many people watch trailers or parts of trailers on their platform. “Over six billion impressions every month,” they claim, as if that means anything Comedian–Unfrosted director Jerry Seinfeld says “the movie business is over,” replaced by “depression, malaise, confusion—disorientation.” This succinct, not untrue statement has got him mocked on social media Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, completed the day before he died, will debut at Cannes, then be distributed and sold by an NFT company, Roadstead Rapper-director Kanye West launching adult entertainment studio, Yeezy Porn Writer-director Aaron Sorkin is planning an antidisinformation J6 movie that is also a sequel to The Social Network Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom star Chris Pratt and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, author of the book The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable, have torn down the architecturally significant modernist Zimmerman House in Brentwood, built 1950. The couple purchased the house for $12.5 million and will replace it with a 15,000-square-foot “modern farmhouse”-style mansion A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles. Using too much of it too quickly is causing an endemic zombielike look, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks Things Change writer-director David Mamet insists his two actor daughters, Zosia and Clara, are not nepo babies, because learning from being on set earned them a spot in the bigs. “They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” he says Writer-director-actor Ben Stiller announces he was shocked no one liked Zoolander 2. The comedy sequel came out in 2016 Lucasfilm has partnered with a dairy company to make and sell Star Wars Blue Milk. Formerly only available at Disney theme parks, the liquid food product will be sold in grocery stores and through DoorDash Tram derails at Universal Studios Hollywood as it passes too quickly through the Jurassic Park exhibit. Fifteen injured, some seriously. California Highway Patrol investigating. Read More
October 2, 2025 Bookmarks On Progress and Regression By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Nora Claire Miller’s Groceries (Fonograf Editions), a book-length poem: I hand ▯s to the teller, imperfect amount after imperfect amount. ▯s aren’t money but they can come close. shapes, we call them, because there is no living thing with which a ▯ lines up. we call something good when we don’t feel like performing a comparison. we call something lit up when its conceit cannot be described. we call something impractical when it has a meaning we are not involved in. we call something dumbfounding when it is floating in thin air. From Lance Richardson’s biography True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Pantheon): Peter had started seeing a woman in Reno named Lisa Barclay Bigelow, a great beauty (she would model on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar) who’d been in Nevada to secure a divorce of her own. Lisa lived in New York, and on November 19, Peter took her and his two children to the Coney Island aquarium, which had recently installed an Amazon River scene complete with piranhas and live tropical birds. Along the way, they all stopped at Pier B in Red Hook to examine the MV Venimos, which would soon ferry Peter to the genuine Amazon. “I don’t think I’ve ever been around the world,” Luke said after hearing the plan. Peter pointed out that his seven-year-old son was nevertheless a world traveler of sorts, having sailed from Italy on the Andrea Doria, which was now at the bottom of the Atlantic after sinking near Nantucket in 1956. Sara Carey, aged five, listened to this shocking news, then warned her father that he, too, would end up at the bottom of the ocean if he tried to go around the world, and sharks have “very sharp teeth.” She did not believe he was really leaving on the MV Venimos. He could barely believe it himself, though he showed no sign of trepidation. The next day at the pier, he said goodbye to Bill Styron, who’d come to bid him bon voyage. Styron was struck by his friend’s equanimity: “his spectacles planted with scholarly precision on his long angular face, he might have been going no farther than Staten Island, so composed did he seem, rather than to uttermost jungle fastnesses where God knows what beast and dark happening would imperil his hide.” Read More
August 29, 2025 Bookmarks Objects of Art and Virtue By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics): ‘We specialize in porcelain and bronzes and small objects—you know the kind of thing.’ ‘Objets d’art et de vertu,’ she murmured, with a delightful accent. ‘Exactly.’ Humphrey bent towards her admiringly to refill her glass with the hock he had chosen as being particularly appropriate to the occasion. That this exquisite creature should have been exposed to the contaminating presence of the dealers, for the sake of some trifling little Victorian flower book, hardly bore thinking of and filled him with horror. A book sale was certainly no place for a woman; had it been a sale of pictures or porcelain, fetching the sort of inflated prices that made headline news, or an evening sale—perhaps being televised—to which a woman could be escorted after being suitably wined and dined—that might have been another matter altogether. Read More
August 4, 2025 Bookmarks Sundress: What a Beautiful Shiny Word By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky: Sundress: what a beautiful shiny word; my mother used to wear a light blue one that she sewed for herself. She made everything she wore with her own two hands, she was a dressmaker. For a few months in 1954, she even had a shop, which she called her butík. But she made more clothes for herself than for her clients, and she knew how to make herself look far more beautiful than any of the women who paid her to make them look good. Even when she had to go out to buy bread or fruit, she’d walk out of our low-income building looking like a rich movie actress, like a different mother entirely, whether she had on her winter coat with its astrakhan collar, or a pencil skirt, or a bell skirt, or her sundress. And maybe she actually was a different woman, that’s how I see her now anyway, my eyeglasses briny with the sea air, my nerves shot, cataracts clouding my sight. When she went in the water, she’d never go in deep and she always swam the breast stroke: her long neck extended, her chin held high, her mouth closed so as not to swallow the salt water, her small ears with their delicate lobes. She often lost things on the beach she considered precious, and when she started digging desperately in the sand, we children would always try and help. Read More
June 30, 2025 Bookmarks Who Cares About Dogs? By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Michael Clune’s PAN (Penguin Press), his first novel: When there’s nothing solid behind the present moment, when there’s no real past, no tradition, when everything’s basically exposed to the future, everything’s constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing. The gate and the mailboxes and the name were like pieces dropped off of real houses. In a spiritual sense they were the heaviest objects around. They helped to weigh the place down, on nights when the future hung its open mouth above us, and the years burned like paper in our dreams. From Marlen Haushofer’s Killing Stella (New Directions), translated from German by Shaun Whiteside: Stella was one of the living. More than a person, she was like a big gray cat or a young deciduous tree. She sat at our table, thoughtless and innocent, waiting for fate. From Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos (NYRB Classics), translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush: Who cares about dogs? Who could care less about a dog’s pain, when its mother couldn’t give a fig? It’s very true that nothing will come from this research into polyvinyl, since specialists in gleaming laboratories in all civilized countries throughout the world have already proved that a dog’s vital tissues won’t tolerate polyvinyl. But who knows what a dog from this neck of the woods can tolerate, a dog that doesn’t piss, a dog Amador stuffs with dry bread dunked in water? From Leonora Carrington’s first novel, The Stone Door (NYRB): I galloped around the Palace thinking all the while of my loneliness and of the creature dressed in wool and smelling of cinnamon and dust. Try as I would I could not evoke his real presence and he remained a thought. The formula for this evocation is somewhere hidden inside of me, I feel small and ignorant and this pleases me not at all. I cannot accept this, I want to feel enormous and powerful. (I secretly believe that I am a goddess with very short moments of incarnation.) From John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (McNally Editions): I always cried at Catholic funerals. But ultimately church-going became like watching too many Rose Parades; year after year the same petaled floats, tea roses and floribunda and grandiflora and climbers and polyantha and perpetuals and damasks and moss roses and French roses and cabbage roses and musk roses and albas and Bourbons and Noisettes and China roses and sweetbriers and shrub roses and tea roses, millions and millions of petals of every variety and every hybrid and every color, but finally, only roses. One remembered the Rose Parade fondly, but with no real desire to go back next year. In this twilight of habit, we sliding Catholics were left with only belief, and there was the rub. From Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction (Riverhead): To break January in, we threw a seven-day open-house party starting on Boxing Day and busied our bodies with tokes on lines on bowls on pills on tabs on shots on shots on shots. No sleep; just casual passing out for a slice of time and then springing back to our feet because our favorite jam was playing, or because where the fuck was the last person we were talking to, and what even is this headache? It just made sense to do. From Gary Shteyngart’s Vera or Faith (Random House): She always looked forward to recess until it started.