For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

August 2026

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‘This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing.’
Washington Post

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in central London.

August 2026, Issue 554 Emma Smith on New World imports * Ian Thomson on Mario Vargas Llosa * Seamus Perry on Sylvia Plath * Hamish de Bretton-Gordon on biological warfare * Daisy Dunn on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey * Harrison Stetler on the French Right * Tanya Harrod on Anni Albers * Lorraine Daston on spiders * Andrew Crumey on UFOs * Llewelyn Morgan on Cicero * Stephen Smith on David Hockney * Philip Parker on Rex Juba * Tim Hornyak on Japan's lost buildings * Ritchie Robertson on Hannah Arendt * Colin MacCabe on John Berger * Peter Stothard on Pericles* Claudia Swan on Vermeer * David E Cooper on greyhounds * Sebastian Shakespeare on Alberto Manguel * Dennis Duncan on his identity double * Frances Cairncross on machine labour * Zoe Guttenplan on Rachel Cusk * Joseph Williams on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa * Simon Garfield on pens * and much, much more…

Emma Smith

A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England

By Lauren Working

On his visit to London in the autumn of 1599, Thomas Platter took in a performance at the newly built Globe theatre and trips to Hampton Court, Windsor Castle and Eton College. But it was a London house crammed with global curiosities curated by Walter Cope that captured his imagination. This outlandish exhibition included a unicorn’s tail, an embalmed child and the bauble and bells belonging to Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool. Pride of place was given to items from the Americas: Cope would later become a key investor in the Virginia Company, and he had already collected fabulous feathered Native American headdresses and hung a long, narrow canoe and oars from the ceiling. A few years later there were delighted reports of ‘Virginians’ demonstrating the handling of a canoe on the Thames... read more

Ian Thomson

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life

By Gerald Martin

Every time I hear the words ‘magical realism’ I want to reach for my revolver. Back in the 1970s, paperback editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez appeared in student bedsits more predictably than lava lamps and posters of Che Guevara (often with the back cover torn for marijuana spliff filters). Published in 1967, the Colombian saga spawned countless ‘magical’ imitations, not all of them ... read more

Seamus Perry

The Poems of Sylvia Plath

By Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds)

The last few years have seen a bumper crop for admirers of Sylvia Plath. Besides the heroic accomplishment of Heather Clark’s biography, Red Comet (2020), we have been treated to monumental editions of her letters (2017–18) and her Collected Prose (2024), and now here comes the crowning glory of the Poems themselves, nine hundred-odd pages painstakingly edited by Amanda Golden and Karen ... read more

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

Biological War: A Scenario

By Annie Jacobsen

The publication of this book could hardly be more timely. At a moment when biological threats are once again moving from the margins of security planning to the forefront of strategic concern, Annie Jacobsen has produced a compelling and deeply unsettling examination of how biological warfare could shape the next global catastrophe. Following the success of Nuclear War, Jacobsen turns her attention to ... read more

Stephen Smith

The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool

By James Cahill

James Cahill’s new book is the first about Sir David Hockney to appear since the artist’s death in June at the age of eighty-eight, and it arrives as the life and work are ripe for reappraisal. The motifs of the long and fruitful late career are familiar – the caps and the fags, the experiments with iPhones and the scenes of Bridlington and Normandy ... read more

Lorraine Daston

Arachnomania: Spiders and the Cultural Work They Do for Us

By Maria Tatar

We hate mosquitoes, but we fear spiders. Why? There are a few species of spiders that are dangerous to humans, but the chances of getting bitten by one, much less of becoming ill or dying from the bite, are infinitesimal. Spiders do not infect us with malaria, yellow fever, dengue or Zika; they don’t buzz annoyingly around our heads. They even eat the wretched ... read more

Llewelyn Morgan

Orator: The Life of Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic

By Catharine Edwards

Josip Strossmayer was a Croatian bishop and Pius IX’s most turbulent priest at the Vatican Council of 1869–70 (‘Vatican I’), passionately opposed to the dogma of infallibility for which the Pope was seeking to secure the Church’s approval. Unfortunately for Pius, Strossmayer was also, by general consent, the finest Latin orator at a council ... read more