Two New York Review Books titles, Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus and Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West), both landed on The New York Times Book Review’s ‘100 Notable Books of 2021’ list. Below, read excerpts from write-ups of the novels in the NYTBR from earlier this year:
The Netanyahus: “Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.”
When We Cease to Understand the World: “A gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris. . . . [Labatut] casts the flickering light of gothic fiction on 20th-century science. In five free-floating vignettes, he illuminates the kinship of knowledge and destruction, brilliance and madness. . . . His prose is masterfully paced and vividly rendered in Adrian Nathan West’s magnetic translation.”