Book Review

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.

For Pride Month, we asked people ranging in age from 34 to 93 to share an indelible memory. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.

Frederick Seidel’s 19th book, “So What,” is filled with politics, disease, luxury and provocation. At almost 90, he’s one of our best contemporary poets.

Rather than bemoan pop culture’s most divisive genre, Emily Nussbaum spends time with the creators, the stars and the victims of the decades-long effort to generate buzz.

He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.

In his beautiful memoir, “Do Something,” Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.

Two decades after his death, a collection of over 800 works that the first president of Senegal owned is moving from France to Dakar.

In “A Gentleman and a Thief,” Dean Jobb vividly recounts the life and times of the notorious criminal — and tabloid fixture — Arthur Barry.

A massive, mysterious grizzly takes on symbolic weight in Julia Phillips’s moody and affecting second novel.