“Emily St. John Mandel’s novels remind me of swimming pools,” Katy Waldman writes. Over seven works of fiction, Mandel has explored beauty, in nature and in fine art. “Her writing has an aqueous quality: things slip or ripple or hold a soft glow; rain mists down; ships glide forward in the night,” Waldman continues. Her latest novel, “Exit Party,” is “an elegant, gracefully written crime story with sci-fi shadings.” Set in 2031, it presents two parallel time lines that comment in opposite ways on contemporary politics: one in which the United States has disintegrated into warring territories, and another in an authoritarian surveillance state. For more reading recommendations, visit our ongoing list of the best books of 2026 so far: newyorker.com/best-books-202…

“The Disappearers,” the latest novel by Marlon James, is evocative, vibrant, and raggedly lyrical. “James’s dialogue fountains down the page, as if a tap has been opened. Life pours from him,” Katy Waldman writes. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

"The Disappearers,” Marlon James’s most recent novel, follows a group of gay men in Jamaica who seek love, connection, and restitution after a bloody homophobic attack. The first of five sections is composed of journal entries, written by the earnest, good-natured 19-year-old Eddy Porteous, who is absent when a mob of men ambushes the other players in a theatre production of which he is also a part. The rest of the book is the aftermath. “ ‘The Disappearers’ uses the tricks of fiction to pull off something extremely difficult,” Katy Waldman writes: “giving full weight to tragedy and injustice without implying that some lives are over before they’ve begun.” Read her full review: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Unlike the unremittingly bleak and occasionally self-serious “I Who Have Never Known Men,” “The Broom Closet,” a newly published story by Jacqueline Harpman, is arch, light-fingered, and very funny, Katy Waldman writes. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/s6…

The photographer Kent Nishimura began reporting on the White House at the tail end of the first Trump Administration. He stayed on through the Biden Presidency and now works as a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse. In a new series, commissioned by The New Yorker, he turns his gaze to the backstage labor that allows the political show to go on: the work of the White House press corps. Nishimura said that he hoped to capture “slices of life in between scripted moments,” and “to take it down to the bare essence of what is happening,” letting “the people and the moments and the images themselves do the heavy lifting.” There is something powerful, Katy Waldman argues, about seeing these politicians and newscasters without being able to hear them. “Nishimura’s compositions offer truthful portraits of artifice,” she writes. See Nishimura’s full series: newyorker.com/culture/photo-…

For most of history, “men were the great experts in friendship,” the scholar Tiffany Watt Smith writes in her new book. How did friendship start to shade female—and at what cost? newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

New books, articles, and shows lament a crisis of connection among American men. But the picture of friendship that emerges can feel romanticized and brittle. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Maggie O’Farrell’s “Land” delights in the interplay between historical fact and fictional world-building. “Her characters may die of plague or starve in famines, but she appears to be enjoying herself,” Katy Waldman writes. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…