For our December monthly newsletter, we asked NYRB staff members to write about their favorite reading experiences of the year, NYRB and non-NYRB books alike.

Simon Critchley has shared “five key insights” from Mysticism, his new work of philosophy from New York Review Books, in an article for the magazine of the Next Big Idea Club. The club selected Mysticism as one of its “October 2024 Must-Read Books.”

In 2026, NYRB Classics will publish Max Lawton’s translation of The Norm, one of the earliest novels written by Russian iconoclast Vladimir Sorokin. Though 1985’s The Queue was his first published novel, he began work on The Norm years earlier. Banned in the pre-Perestroika USSR, the full Russian text was finally published in 1994. It has never before been available in English.

Ferit Edgü, a beloved writer and publisher of Turkish literature, has died at the age of 88. A novella and a collection of short stories by Edgü, The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (trans. Aron Aji), was published in a single volume by NYRB Classics in 2023 and was named a finalist for the EBRD Literature Prize.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is #83 on The New York Times’s ongoing list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”