RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

What should everyday Americans think about aliens? My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the... Read More

An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New... Read More

Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to... Read More

I head east on a warm November day to the Texas A&M Forest Service office in La Grange to meet forester Logan McMillan. With rosy cheeks... Read More

Experience has its advantages, and in four years of covering baseball, I’ve learned to tune out the music that blares from the speakers... Read More

To become a Martian colonist, I first had to fill out a Google Form. It asked me about my aviation know-how, medical training, and experience... Read More

Last week, I visited, for the 20th or more time, the always much-anticipated Whitney Biennial — wild and wacky, ponderous and... Read More

On March 19th Hachette Book Group made headlines for terminating a book contract with author Mia Ballard over her alleged use of AI in... Read More

Iris Murdoch is best known as a writer of novels. She wrote twenty-six of them, most focusing on the lives of middle-class professionals in... Read More

Last autumn, I sat in a community arts building in a pocket of north London, among young creatives sipping negronis, and watched Sam Altman... Read More

Having a sense of humor is an intangible quality that can brighten up your life, the lives of others, and, as a writer, brighten up the page... Read More

In the last 10 years, the Extremely Online among us have reappropriated virtually all cartoon IP into memes. The aesthetics range from... Read More

I. Imagine, for a moment, the district of Tondo in capital city Manila, colonial-era Philippines—water-bound, fishing boats, traders,... Read More

A year or so ago in this space, I argued that genuine universal literacy was never really tried. Drawing on Adam Fox’s Oral... Read More

A recent ruling by a German court at first glance could be seen as a victory for freedom of speech. But on closer inspection, it shows why... Read More

I watched it because it kept coming up in the queue, and because I have two young boys, but the new Louis Theroux documentary Inside the... Read More

Over the past year, our feeds have become saturated with AI-generated content and endlessly recycled recommendations, favoring speed and... Read More

Last week, the novelist Helen DeWitt announced that she turned down the Windham-Campbell Prize, an unrestricted $175,000 grant funded by a... Read More

“More poetry is said to come from Wisconsin than from any other state in the Union,” read a clipping from an 1885 issue of... Read More

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up... Read More

In the video, the penguin waddles across a frozen expanse. He is heading away from his colony, into Antarctica’s vast interior, alone.... Read More

In Sophie Mackintosh’s fourth novel, Permanence, adulterers are whisked away to an otherworldly sanctuary where they can live... Read More

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” President Trump’s Truth Social post about Iran has... Read More

I  Saint Fillan’s left arm glowed in the dark, the better to read Scripture in his cave. He was born in Munster with a stone in... Read More

Last Halloween, a clever costume “won the Internet,” as the saying goes. Kate Snyder of Brooklyn posted a picture of herself in a... Read More

Like many millennial women, I’ve seen Bridget Jones’ Diary an embarrassing number of times. I had not, however, seen the film... Read More

Traveling the publicity circuit in 2025 for For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), the fourth album from her dreamy-indie-pop act... Read More

Wendell Berry is unquestionably America’s foremost agrarian visionary. His fiction is largely set in a semi-fictional town called Port... Read More

What happens when a group of hot, smart people come together? The Whitney Review of New Writing! Founded by Whitney Mallett,... Read More

Last year 40% of Americans didn’t read a single book. Print book sales are rising, but not necessarily in any return to... Read More

Let us check in briefly with onetime presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, who is currently in the final year of his term as Florida governor.... Read More

You may not agree with Francis Fukuyama's politics - I, for one, mostly do not - but his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the... Read More

In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies... Read More

The man who edited the Odyssey papyri went blind,” a a Greek professor of mine once remarked, a reminder that there is always a... Read More

Chances are good that Maria Semple’s Go Gentle will be the only zany comedy about Stoic philosophy published all year. We... Read More

Some years ago, when I was a middle-school history teacher,  I mentioned my family’s backyard garden while discussing the... Read More

Is a civil war tearing apart the American Right? The question, which doubles as a threat, has haunted Donald Trump’s second term.... Read More