Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow (MCD). Reviewed by William Rice. “The phenomenon Doctorow so rudely but effectively describes is the tightening profit squeeze on everyone who interacts with Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and our other few corporate overlords. The inescapable nature of modern technology combined with decades of business consolidation — unimpeded by the rusting mechanisms of anti-trust laws — have created money-making monsters that can freely jack up the prices of their goods and services while simultaneously diminishing their quality.”

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother): A Novel by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press). Reviewed by Anne Eliot Feldman. “Reading and rereading Dostoevsky bolsters his confidence. Then, as civil war rages, a teenage Raja follows the wrong crowd, and things go horribly awry. That he survives is due in no small part to his mother, who breaks all boundaries — interrogating her son after every crisis, later meeting his students against his will — to help him heal. She drives him crazy — ‘I knew no one else who could use sighs as a lethal weapon’ — but he idolizes her, too. ‘It is said that a synaptic transmission occurs in less than one-thousandth of a second, but my mother was a hell of a lot quicker than that.’”

The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live by Alan Lightman and Martin Rees (Pantheon). Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas. “Seeing a public increasingly mistrustful of scientific institutions, and demagogues happily exploiting that mistrust, the authors set out to demystify science by humanizing the people who practice it. The Shape of Wonder treads what will be very familiar ground to all but the completely tenderfoot, who’ll find here an accommodating introduction to some of the ideas, the worries, and the glories of the scientific enterprise.”

Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories by David Haynes (McSweeney’s). Reviewed by Emily Mitchell. “Haynes writes sentences so sharp they could cut glass and descriptions that are both vivid and witty. On more than one occasion while reading, I laughed out loud. In the fall of 2025. This is saying something. Haynes is also a skilled observer of intimacy and attachment in all their forms. He shows the reader the vast range of ways that people can care for and hurt each other, sometimes at the exact same time. Which is not to say that these stories don’t give love its due, only that they look at it with a rare degree of clarity.”

The Durrells: The Story of a Family by Richard Bradford (Bloomsbury Caravel). Reviewed by Ananya Bhattacharyya. “And then, of course, there are the other two brothers — the foci of the biographer’s lens. Bradford spends many pages describing Larry’s treatment of the women in his life, which can be described in one word: appalling. From clutching random women’s breasts at parties to committing multiple infidelities to beating his wife, Larry seems to have excelled at misogyny, narcissism, and abuse even more than he excelled at creating high-culture literature. Gerry, on the other hand, didn’t have a high opinion of humans in general, and people of color in particular.”

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