This Week’s Top 5 Book Reviews You Must Read

This week’s quartet of esteemed reviews features Hillary Kelly exploring M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, Merve Emre evaluating Tom Overton’s John Berger, Ed Park examining Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, Ryan Ruby delving into Emily Ogden’s Darkness Becomes Bright, and Josef Burton assessing Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“The End of Everything is concise and puzzling; it also shows little regard for the usual rules of dystopian storytelling. The narrative unfolds roughly twenty to thirty years ahead, largely in the small coastal towns of Kent, where unusual phenomena—perhaps aliens, bio-machines, or something else entirely—wash ashore. The ‘artefacts,’ as they are called, appeared around the same period as the iGhetti; together they disrupt life as everyone once knew it, making Britain almost unrecognizable within ten years. As one man, Phillip Tennent, traverses this unsettling new order, the familiar conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction recede, giving way to a sharper, more urgent insight: the apocalypse might not be an end in itself but a long succession of bewildering, disorienting episodes.”

Writers have contemplated various doomsday scenarios for millennia—the Noah’s ark tale is one ancient example among many about humanity’s possible extinction. Yet the anxiety that haunts contemporary minds is that catastrophe may finish with a whimper rather than a bang. Through eruptions against late-stage capitalism, that infamous dog-in-a-fire meme, and other expressions of alarm, it’s become common to joke or worry that the world is undergoing a rolling apocalypse—a sequence of catastrophes so slow that you can still browse a J.Crew sale while everything else collapses.

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“Yet the central aim of Harrison’s experiment extends beyond a single referendum on geography—or any single Event at all. He appears to be asking how people will respond once they collectively discover they no longer control the planet’s fate. In truth, The End of Everything is a novel about surrender. ‘The apocalypse,’ one character writes, ‘seemed to withhold itself, quickly becoming just another line in history. In other words, we grew accustomed to it. No one anticipated the utter banality of that.’”

Harrison’s sociological portrait is tuned to a common belief: disaster can quickly lose its teeth or become too familiar to notice. Horrific visions of ruined cities and submerged villages now flicker across phones between makeup tutorials and political chatter. Contemplating barbarity or ruin is as easy as choosing a lunch option. So what would people do if the tide turned against humanity itself, if the End Times finally arrived? In Harrison’s view, they would shrug.

As bleak as this reading may sound, the novel remains expansive rather than dismissive. It seeks connection, feeling at once wildly inventive and, on a psychic level, surprisingly recognizable. In a compact novel, Harrison crafts not just a world but a worldview in a wholly original way. It seems he understood the need to forge a language and imagery capable of expressing the emotional truth of a world that feels “disconnected from itself.” As John Ashbery noted in 1977, “You can’t say it that way any more.” The same holds true today.”

–Hillary Kelly on M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything (The Atlantic)

“Biographers do not present themselves as mediums. Yet the fantasy persists—that a biography’s subject will arise from the pages, place a hand on the writer’s shoulder and another on the reader’s, and make the past breathe again. It’s a fantasy that lends romance to the craft of intruding on the dead: flattering the family, interrogating the neighbors and former lovers, sorting through fragments in archives. Left unchecked, it can turn a biographer into a sentimental illusionist. He touches a smudge on a letter. He walks into a bedroom and sniffs the air. He seems to glimpse the man himself: his features fine and lined, his shirt unbuttoned, his mouth slightly agape as if about to speak.”

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“In reading Berger, one finds that his Marxist aesthetic is less a doctrine than a generous justification for the kind of art he admired. What makes Berger notable are, as he wrote about Picasso, ‘not his individual works, but his existence, his personality,’ his ‘new ways of looking at the world.’ Berger was an ideologue; most magnetic figures tend to intimidate as they age. He was spared this fate by his restless pursuit, across mediums and forms, of the purest expression of his perspective.”

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“Overton, who grew close to Berger while organizing his papers at the British Library, and who uncovered a stash of diaries and drafts in a shelter used for storage, possessed a wealth of material to shape a dense, restrained portrait. Yet his biography remains anything but strictly archival. Like Berger, Overton aims to render a life from multiple viewpoints. He refers to his subject as ‘John,’ sometimes addressing him directly, and frequently shifts into the present tense to speculate on what John is thinking or feeling in the moment. The smallest details are amplified, while major events drift by almost unremarked. I found it hard to keep Berger’s lineup of spouses and lovers straight, but I did sense the blue window shutters—on which he would inscribe lines from A Winter’s Tale—at a Gloucestershire home where he lived for a stretch. The biography reads as random, repetitive, uneven, and blurred, which makes it an unusual and thrilling experiment, even if not entirely successful.”

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“Having previously encountered Sperling’s biography, I carried no strong judgments about Berger’s treatment of women. It wasn’t shocking to learn that men on the left did not extend the same equality to their partners as they did to humanity in the abstract—that they could betray or abandon their children, while invoking the rigidity of marriage as justification. I was surprised, however, by Overton’s choice to absolve his subject. ‘Perhaps you didn’t meet every expectation of a contemporary father, but you were there,’ he writes. The dead do not return as we wish. They remain coated in the grime and stench of life. It’s not the biographer’s job to erase that.”

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“In interviews, Berger described his turn toward the pastoral as the fruit of his ‘Romantic Marxism.’ Overton uses the Romantic Marxist figure as a historical type, aiming to reform a sentimental reverence for Berger among the British left into a concrete case for his significance. Yet what kind of person is a Romantic Marxist? A class-conscious libertine? A womanizer who supports women’s liberation? The late, grandiloquent tone of Berger’s political pronouncements hints at clues. He sided with what seemed good: animal, peasant, migrant, and political prisoner rights. Yet he showed little interest in their particular histories. If he embodies anything, it’s not a Romantic Marxist but what the late Hungarian thinker G. M. Tamás called a Rousseauian socialist: someone devoted to equality among the people but without a radical commitment to abolishing class. Berger longed instead to return to ‘a more natural (and possibly entirely natural) way of living’ and championed ‘the folk-art virtues.’

Class became an abstraction, and Berger grew to detest abstraction. Yet the people could be embodied, drawn close, and lived among. Still, his peasant fictions drained his writing of revolutionary energy, replacing it with a moral imperative—less a method of seeing—more a nostalgic mode of living. Berger himself anticipated this critique. In A Painter of Our Time, a London gallery director dismisses Janos as a ‘Desperate Optimist’: ‘They’re sentimentalists at heart. They idealize what’s called The People. But, believe me, people just aren’t like that.’ The final phase of Berger’s life argued otherwise, with an almost stubborn optimism of the will. A touch more intellectual pessimism would have been welcome.”

–Merve Emre on Tom Overton’s John Berger: From Life (The New Yorker)

“We are privy to these intimate and scattered details because Cleo Birdwell published her intentionally loose memoir, Amazons, in 1980—the same year Team USA toppled the Red Army at Lake Placid, and a moment between Paul Newman’s Slap Shot (1977) and Ken Dryden’s The Game (1983), capturing the in-season mood when Cleo and Floss could still be found in the public eye. Out of print for years, Amazons has just been reissued by Scribner to ride the wave of the homoerotic hockey series Heated Rivalry.

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“Amazons feels strangely contemporary in 2026. At times it evokes the audacious, chunky, passion-driven fiction of that era—John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)—as well as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), though Birdwell’s tale remains free of trauma. In Cleo you can detect echoes of Renata Adler’s cool wit in Speedboat (1976) and of Didion as herself in The White Album (1979). The intervening decades make Cleo’s ‘intimate memoir’ read almost like a playful historical novel—a hockey time capsule, a nostalgia rush for veterans of the sport, a world in which Guy Lafleur still skates for Montreal, Minnesota’s team remains the North Stars, and players (except for rookies) could still glide without helmets, hair streaming in the cold air.”

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“But here we have Amazons, freshly packaged and available once again: the return of the suppressed. I contend that, rather than merely an oddity in DeLillo’s twentieth-century canon, the novel sits at the core of his oeuvre. Take this literally. Amazons arrives two years after Running Dog and two before The Names; if included in the official bibliography, it would stand at the midpoint of his most fruitful stretch. It’s not just a racy indulgence amid weightier works, though it is that too. The cover’s depiction of a hockey bench strewn with jerseys, skates, lingerie, and heels; earlier editions leave even less to the imagination. It’s fitting that DeLillo—master of cults and conspiracies, scarcity and aura—would conceal his finest piece behind such trashy packaging.”

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“DeLillo’s strongest novels blend humor with depth; even darker works like Players carry moments of exhilaration, yet his post–Underworld writings can feel solemn and overbearing. In 1980, DeLillo and Buck embraced lighthearted absurdity, swapping solemn profundities for a string of silly set pieces and tangled sex scenes, while gently poking fun at the sports memoir, pornography, science fiction, Southern Gothic, conspiracy lore, and other forms, literary and otherwise.”

The freedom is exhilarating, even anarchic. Moments linger beyond their welcome, and Cleo’s energy propels them forward. DeLillo has crafted many memorable female characters, though seldom in the first person, and rarely with such exuberance. One can sense him gleefully stretching, perhaps eager to impress a friend. Though DeLillo has been married since 1975, and neither he nor Buck’s partner (as far as can be told) had children, the heroine of Amazons feels like their imagined daughter—the product of an ad veteran’s wit and a veteran novelist’s craft. Cleo is a successful, entirely fictional figure. Her parents adore her, and so do we.”

–Ed Park on Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons (Bookforum)

“Poe is undeniably canonical, yet his status persists more as a living ghost than a current fixture. Although editions of his collected tales and poems—those editions that feel engineered to unveil hidden shelves of the library—remain in print and continue to sell, I’m told he no longer graces many high school curricula. The other canonical voices—Cormac McCarthy’s gods of creation, Pynchon’s paranoid sleuths—owe something to his macabre imagination, and Stephen King, Dennis Cooper, Marilynne Robinson, and Joyce Carol Oates have all claimed him as an influence; yet, offhand, I can’t name a prominent American writer under seventy who has followed suit (Ottessa Moshfegh would be a natural pick).”

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“Ogden’s path to Poe differed from mine, which is why I trust her measured judgment about his work more than my own instinct. Initially skeptical—and not without reason—she grew to take Poe seriously only after she was asked to teach a course on his writings at his alma mater, the University of Virginia, where she serves as a professor of English. Her shift—from reluctance to guarded admiration—provides the through line in Darkness Becomes Bright. Ogden argues that Poe’s drive to face the most daunting corners of human experience supports her belief that what we share as people are not only our strengths but our demons as well, and that stories allow us to live for a while inside the worst of ourselves. Poe’s work, in particular, demonstrates how horror can yield beauty, offering a meaningful consolation in a world that is deeply frightening. Borrowing a structural frame from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, her book functions as a Swiss army knife of scholarly pleasures: part biography, part reception history, part personal essay, and part meditation on why a life is spent reading.”

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“Ogden’s readings of Poe seem at first to lean on psychoanalytic insights. Yet her true method is personal: ‘For the biographer,’ Ogden writes, ‘the most fundamental instrument of understanding is one’s own life experience.’ So alongside readings of Poe’s ideas about perversity as a precursor to the death drive, or his notion of the effect as a form of analytic transference, or the nightmarish scenes that Calvino-like travel through, Ogden lights the matches of her own childhood memories, fears, phobias, and encounters with death to illuminate the hidden chambers of the human mind where Poe’s tales take place.”

These intimate anecdotes, revealing how Ogden became the reader she is, stand out as the most compelling and consequential parts of Darkness Becomes Bright. She acknowledges that approaching texts in this way is controversial because it challenges the pretensions of scholarly detachment. Yet if interpretation is, at its core, an art rather than a science, it works precisely because understanding a work also means forming a relationship with it—knowing it, in a sense, as you know your own city, your partner, and yourself.”

–Ryan Ruby on Emily Ogden’s Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe (Bookforum)

“The concluding years of the Biden administration unfolded like a slow, unchecked slide toward catastrophe—marked by mounting Palestinian deaths, the deliberate destruction of hospitals and universities, and a humanitarian crisis on a scale that stunned many observers. For many, myself included, the White House’s response felt disorientingly self-defeating: instead of using American leverage to curtail or embargo the aggression, officials leaned on legalistic maneuvers and internal dissent to push Israel’s campaign forward unchecked.”