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The bounty of hilarity published in the past 63 years made our task formidable and our criteria painfully limiting; we excluded many worthy nonfiction and short-story specialists. But we settled on a grouping that felt representative of the abundant varieties and evolving tastes of literary humorists, aware that some bits hit different now and others still slay decades later. Let us know what we snubbed, whose good names we’ve insulted with our criminal omissions. We’ll put your picks in a separate roundup — and in our reading queues. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first.

Persons: hilarity, howls, we’ve, We’ll

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability. With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war.

Persons: Sheila Heti, we’ve, Joseph Heller’s “, John Yossarian, Bob Dylan Locations: Vietnam

☆ 36 Authors Times ‘Fourteen Days’ Adds Up to a Mixed Literary Experiment
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-18 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

FOURTEEN DAYS, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas PrestonNew Yorkers generally don’t talk to their neighbors. This is to preserve psychological boundaries while living stacked on top of one another like ice cubes in trays. A new novellus about Lower East Side neighbors called “Fourteen Days” seeps creepy, in this fine tradition, through most of its 350-plus pages. “Novellus” is Latin for new, but the “us” sounds extra-right here because this is collaborative fiction, by 36 authors of various ages, ethnicities, genres and degrees of fame (John Grisham and Scott Turow are among the higher-flying contributors). Why would anyone organize such an experiment, with its air of an overbooked open-mic night with a few surprise guest stars and peanuts scattered on the sticky floors?

Persons: Margaret Atwood, Douglas Preston, —, Seinfeld, Ira Levin, “, John Grisham, Scott Turow Locations: Lower East

☆ A New Martha Graham Biography Is a Study in Grace and Balance
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-28 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

ERRAND INTO THE MAZE: The Life and Works of Martha Graham, by Deborah Jowitt“Old age is a pain in the neck,” Martha Graham wrote in her 1991 memoir, “Blood Memory.” Death, though, has been good to her. Already in the 2020s there has been a book devoted to Graham’s Cold War activity and another (more sweeping) that a reviewer for The New York Times found fact-choked and unevenly paced. Deborah Jowitt’s “Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham” is, by contrast, a study in balance and grace. That girlish enthusiasm peeps through “Errand Into the Maze,” named for a 1947 work that premiered at the original Ziegfeld Theater. It is also Jowitt’s first book in almost 20 years, since a biography of another titan of the field, Jerome Robbins.

Persons: Martha Graham, Deborah Jowitt “, ” Martha Graham, Gordon Bunshaft, Agnes de Mille, Deborah Jowitt’s, Martha Graham ”, Jowitt, Graham’s, Louis Horst, “, ”, Jerome Robbins, Graham, Horst, George Balanchine Organizations: New York Public Library, Performing Arts, The New York Times, The Village, Times, Cornish School Locations: Manhattan, ecstatically, Seattle

☆ ‘Who Owns This Sentence?’ Increasingly, Who Knows?
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-21 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

WHO OWNS THIS SENTENCE? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, by David Bellos and Alexandre MontaguDavid Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s surprisingly sprightly history “Who Owns This Sentence?” arrives with uncanny timing. How quaint Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” theory of the Romantic poets now seems, amid the current cut-and-paste panic. Like a corrupt police officer, artificial intelligence is scanning for more plagiarism perps, while itself stealing writers’ words. Bellos, a translator and biographer, and Montagu, a lawyer, step confidently behind the yellow tape to guide us around.

Persons: David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu’s, ”, Eve hangovers, Smokey Bear, Harold Bloom’s “, …, Montagu Organizations: WHO, “

☆ Can You Escape the Algorithm? ‘Filterworld’ Gives It a Try.
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-14 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle ChaykaThis dispatch began from an uptown location of Dig (formerly Dig Inn), a small chain of “fast casual” restaurants headquartered in New York City. The walls are white-painted brick, the tables are marble and the cardboard bowls are packed with colorful, healthy foodstuffs. Only the insipid pop music that blares through the speakers discourages lingering. Dig’s food, our “feeds”; their appetizers, our apps — they are all of a piece. Chayka has visited a lot of establishments with a similar aesthetic, which he has dubbed AirSpace, like a Nike sneaker, for its geographically neutral comfort.

Persons: Kyle Chayka, Kyle Chayka’s, “, ”, I’d, Chayka Organizations: Nike Locations: New York City, Kyoto

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.

Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, ”, Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine

☆ He Carried the Bags (and the Secrets) for the Beatles
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-15 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, by Kenneth WomackHe was a “gentle giant.” A “teddy bear” who once posed with a koala. A “lovable, cuddly guy.” Of all the people in the Beatles’ entourage, Mal Evans was indisputably the most Muppet-like. You may have seen the 6-foot-3 Evans looming over shoulders in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s blockbuster 2021 documentary. He was rarely called the fifth Beatle, as was his comrade in factotum-dom, Neil Aspinall, but certainly could have qualified as the sixth or seventh. Unlike Aspinall and so many other Beatles associates, however, Evans did not receive an obituary in The New York Times when he died at 40 on Jan. 4, 1976.

Persons: Mal Evans, Kenneth Womack, Evans, Peter Jackson’s, Paul McCartney, Maxwell’s, Neil Aspinall, Aspinall Organizations: Beatles, Cavern Club, New York Times Locations: Liverpool, Los Angeles

☆ The Success of Rebecca Yarros and Barbra Streisand’s Mammoth Memoir
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-10 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It’s dueling Alexandras on this week’s Book Review podcast. First, the reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her most recent pieces. One is about Georgette Heyer, the “queen of Regency romance,” and the recent attempts to posthumously revise her most famous works by removing offensive stereotypes. She also talks about her recent profile of Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year’s biggest hits: the “romantasy” novel “Fourth Wing.” The sequel, “Iron Flame,” has just been released. Then, staff critic Alexandra Jacobs joins to discuss her review of Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited memoir, “My Name is Barbra.”We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

Persons: Alexandra Alter, Georgette Heyer, Rebecca Yarros, ”, Alexandra Jacobs, Barbra Streisand’s

Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” is nearly a thousand pages of soul-baring and score-settling — with plenty of Yiddish thrown in. Wesley Morris and Alexandra Jacobs discuss the book’s most surprising revelations. Plus, we get a glimpse of Wesley’s visit with the living legend at her Malibu home. On today’s episode

Persons: Barbra Streisand’s, ”, baring, Wesley Morris, Alexandra Jacobs Locations: Malibu

☆ Her Name Is Barbra, but It Wasn’t Always
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-07 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

MY NAME IS BARBRA, by Barbra StreisandHello, enormous. Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach “Power Broker” proportions. For one thing, she is — fits of insecurity notwithstanding — a bona fide power broker: tearing down barriers to and between Broadway, Hollywood, the recording industry and Washington, D.C., like Robert Moses on a demolition bender. For another, as Streisand writes in “My Name Is Barbra,” a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process. After adding back material to her version of “A Star Is Born” for Netflix in 2018 — “I think I made it better.

Persons: Barbra Streisand, Barbra, Robert Moses, Streisand, ”, “, James Brolin, “ We’ll Organizations: Broadway, D.C, Netflix Locations: longhand, Hollywood, Washington

☆ Books Offer Shelter From the Storm of Dementia
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-31 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Well, it works too for dementia: that dull and darkening cloud that will dim more and more people’s lives as baby boomers enter old age. Alzheimer’s is the most common variant of dementia, like tequila is to mezcal — both of which might come in handy if you are helping care for someone with the disease. I’ve watched some version of it descend on both of my parents (hi Mom, for whom the print edition of The New York Times remains a blessed daily guidepost). A credit-card bill unpaid; a date forgotten; an episode of disorientation at a familiar train station — these might get excused and melt away. Then one day you wake up and realize you’re in a full-on blizzard.

Persons: “, ”, John Bayley, Iris, Iris Murdoch, —, I’ve Organizations: The New York Times Locations: Israel

☆ The Man Who Wrote Everything
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-17 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

BARTLEBY AND ME: Reflections of an Old Scrivener, by Gay TaleseGay Talese has a tic. I want to get this out of the way because in general I have such tremendous admiration for the man: that debonair eminence of ye olde New Journalism who is both a living landmark of Manhattan and his own best character. It’s a writerly tic, the retro habit of referring to women by the color of their hair, but as noun rather than adjective. If occasionally feeling as if you’re trapped in a Peter Arno cartoon is the price of admission to a new work by Talese, sign me up. But only one chunk of his latest book, “Bartleby and Me,” from which the above quotations are drawn, can fairly be called new.

Persons: Scrivener, Gay Talese Gay Talese, It’s, ”, you’re, Peter Arno, Nicholas Bartha Organizations: olde New Journalism Locations: Manhattan, Romanian

☆ Ann Patchett on Summer Love and Her New Novel
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-04 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” is set in northern Michigan during the early days of pandemic lockdown, and centers on a mother telling her grown daughters about the summer fling she had in her youth with an actor who went on to become a big star. “If a person writes a book about a serial killer, no one ever comes back around and says, This isn’t realistic,” Patchett says. It’s — do you want me to put some zombies in my novel? I have been on the receiving end of endless kindness and love in my life. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

Persons: Ann Patchett’s, Tom Lake, Alexandra Jacobs, Tom Lake ”, Gilbert Cruz, Patchett, It’s, ” Patchett, Thornton Wilder’s Organizations: Times, Parnassus Locations: Michigan, Nashville, Tenn

☆ ‘Tom Lake’ Finds Ann Patchett in a Chekhovian Mood
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-30 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Are you in possession of a hammock? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version. With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning.

Persons: Ann Patchett’s, Tom Lake, fritz, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks’s, —, Patchett, ” Locations: Nashville

☆ A New Arrival in ‘The Country of the Blind’
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-23 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew LelandAfter reading Andrew Leland’s memoir, “The Country of the Blind,” you will look at the English language differently. You will even look at the word “look” differently. While posing considerable challenges, this has given him what most authors of nonfiction crave: a definitive Big Topic. For now, Leland is mostly a visitor to the “country of the blind,” a title borrowed from an H.G. He’s studied its customs and concerns, and his liminal state lets him act as tour guide to an oblivious sighted citizenry.

Persons: Andrew Leland, Andrew Leland’s, Leland, Charlie, “ Flowers, Algernon, ”, he’s, Wells, He’s

☆ Grazed and Confused: In ‘The Vegan,’ a Guilty Hedge Funder Eats His Feelings
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-09 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | More About Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE VEGAN, by Andrew LipsteinWe should all be feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote, and at this point in climate change, we should probably also all be vegans (at least for part of the week). But in Andrew Lipstein’s ingenious second novel, avoiding meat and dairy is a sign that something has gone seriously wrong. Sort of like when Rosemary Woodhouse found herself nibbling on a raw chicken heart, part of the mounting evidence she was pregnant with Satan’s child, but in reverse. Like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Vegan” features young marrieds mulling conception and living in a highly desirable part of New York City — then, a four-room apartment in a Victorian building on the West Side of Manhattan; now, a brick townhouse in Cobble Hill— and a dinner party where a guest is effectively roofied. Only here the perpetrator is the protagonist, one Herschel Caine (which, were you to consult a naming dictionary, translates roughly to “deer killer”): partner at a quantitative hedge fund, with $2.8 million in his bank account, growing qualms about his line of work and a keep-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety about his neighbors, one of whom is a Guggenheim.

Persons: Andrew Lipstein, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Andrew Lipstein’s, Rosemary Woodhouse, nibbling, New York City —, Herschel Caine Organizations: Guggenheim Locations: New York City, Manhattan, Cobble

☆ Married to an Art Monster
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-02 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE EXHIBITIONIST, by Charlotte Mendelson“I prefer stories about squalor,” J.D. Esmé would have gone nuts for “The Exhibitionist,” the fifth novel by the English writer Charlotte Mendelson, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022. Set in sophisticated if not exactly moneyed quarters of London, with excursions to Edinburgh, it’s a model of tightly controlled domestic chaos. Google the word “exhibitionist” and you will surface some unsavory porn sites. There’s a big party planned, with a “full Mediterrfusion tasting menu” and early foreboding that it will not go well.

Persons: Charlotte Mendelson “, ”, Salinger’s Esmé, Esmé, Charlotte Mendelson, it’s, Ray Hanrahan, Ray, Al Locations: London, Edinburgh

☆ Becoming ‘Self-Made’ Stars in a Secular Age
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-25 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

SELF-MADE: Creating Our Identities from da Vinci to the Kardashians, by Tara Isabella BurtonThe Kardashians have sold so much to America — shapewear, cosmetics, beverage upon beverage — why not throw ideas onto the pile? That highly contoured family pulls up like a caboose at the end of Tara Isabella Burton’s “Self-Made,” a fast-moving train of a book that visits a series of individuals in western history who have changed in ways major and minor the way people represent and think of themselves. “Admirers thronged” to Brummell’s house, she recounts, to see an hourslong grooming process that included “exfoliation with a coarse-hair brush, followed by a bath of milk,” and spitting in a special silver bowl. (And you thought Dior’s $40 lip oil was excessive.) A novelist with a doctorate in theology from Oxford who has written widely on travel and religion, including for The New York Times, Burton is a confident conductor on this, an express voyage over several centuries, glossing an international lingo of self-determination: “sprezzatura” and “bon ton” and “Übermensch.”

Persons: Tara Isabella Burton, America —, Tara Isabella Burton’s “, Burton, Kim, Beau Brummell, thronged ”, ” Organizations: Oxford, The New York Times Locations: da Vinci, America

☆ A Cult ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ Amid the New York Brownstones
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-18 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE SULLIVANIANS: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander StilleLegal marijuana notwithstanding, true New Yorkers have long prided themselves on resisting certain Californish things. Denial: It’s not just a river in Egypt that’s much bigger than the Hudson. It’s also one of those slightly antiquated pop-psychology terms, like paranoia and transference, that used to get passed around cultured Manhattan living rooms along with glasses of Riunite and overchilled Brie on Triscuits. No one called it therapy, that soft millennial word. Like a hawk crouching on a grotesque at the fabled Apthorp building, which also makes a cameo in this tale, he gives us a keen bird’s-eye view.

Persons: Alexander Stille, Alexander Stille’s, isn’t, It’s, overchilled Brie Organizations: Columbia University Locations: American Commune, Manhattan, Egypt, Triscuits

☆ With Hollywood Change Stagnating, a Call to ‘Burn It Down’
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-11 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

BURN IT DOWN: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, by Maureen RyanAs I typed this, striking Writers Guild of America members were skipping the picket lines in New York City because of poor air quality, after smoke drifted down from wildfires in Canada. It was a grimly perfect backdrop to read “Burn It Down,” a new book about the pervasive moral shortcomings of Hollywood by the longtime entertainment reporter and critic Maureen Ryan. For the industry Ryan covers is suffering its own kind of climate crisis. Television seasons are shorter — that’s if it’s even relevant to call a collection of episodes that can be binged anytime a “season” anymore. official and private investigator.”Ryan also alludes briefly here, as she has in Variety, to having been the victim of sexual assault by an unnamed television executive.

Persons: Maureen Ryan, Ryan, Don, George Floyd, gingerly, ”, H.R, ” Ryan, Howard Beale Organizations: Guild of America, Television, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Variety Locations: Hollywood, New York City, Canada

☆ Lecher Actress Victim Spy
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-04 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

LUCKY DOGS, by Helen SchulmanThat Harvey Weinstein hired a private international spy agency called Black Cube to help squash stories about his sex crimes always seemed stranger than fiction. In an author’s note, Helen Schulman states explicitly that her seventh novel, “Lucky Dogs,” was inspired by two players in this globe-spanning chapter of the Weinstein saga. “How could one woman do this to another woman?” Schulman had wondered, reading ragefully about the case. The question might sound naïve: Has she not seen the foundational Hollywood text “All About Eve”? But her imagined answer, in the form of this book, is deeply knowing, properly indignant and — maybe the best revenge — very funny.

Persons: Helen Schulman, Harvey Weinstein, ”, Weinstein, Rose McGowan, Stella Penn Pechanac, McGowan, ” Schulman, Eve ”, Schulman, refashioned McGowan, Meredith “ Merry ”, who’s Organizations: Twitter Locations: Meredith “ Merry ” Montgomery, Paris

☆ Even After Debunking, ‘Sybil’ Hasn’t Gone Away
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Schreiber, who aspired to a literary career and at one time was romantically involved with the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s oldest son, wrote celebrity profiles and pop psychology pieces for outlets such as Cosmopolitan. And Wilbur, who had treated the actor Roddy McDowall — Case 129 in a book she co-authored about the causes and “treatment” of male homosexuality — craved the kind of broad audience that magazines then attracted. Rather than telekinetic powers, she develops a preternatural ability to assume different personas. Wilbur by any modern metric crossed the line from transference to enmeshment. She crept into her patient’s bed to administer electroshock treatment with an outdated device, doled out Pentothal (a barbiturate then wrongly thought to act as a truth serum) to the point of addiction, and took her on creepy road trips.

Persons: Schreiber, Eugene O’Neill’s, Wilbur, Roddy McDowall —, —, ’, Sybil ”, Dora, Truman Capote’s “, ”, “ Sybil Dorsett ”, Stephen King’s, Carrie, ” Sybil, dissociating, “, Peggy, Mike ”, Sid ”

☆ Nice Guy Meets Iron Man in the First Novel by Tom Hanks
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-07 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE, by Tom Hanks. Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “Imagine.” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid, bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson. Titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” the book arrives at a crossroads for Hollywood. The novel also acknowledges a fading time when leading actors, even avatars of Everyman decency like the author, were royalty: their work shown not in living rooms but red-velvet-swagged “palaces.”

☆ She Wrote Frankly About Divorce, and Suffered the Consequences
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The “young single woman in the city” genre feels almost as old as cities. Probably someone was wandering around ancient Athens in a fetching tunic with a papyrus scroll detailing how Hermes got handsy. But modern New York is where the genre has reached its apotheosis, from Edith Wharton to Beyoncé and beyond. In this mostly upward and exuberant history, the writer Ursula Parrott has been largely (and sadly) omitted. Their divorce would inspire “Ex-Wife,” the most successful of her 20 books.

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