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A Bear of Very Little Brain still has a surprising amount to teach us Illustration by E.H. Shepard from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” by A.A. Milne (E.P. Dutton, 1926) “Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself.” It has, indeed, been a very long time. In fact, this month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The Tuesday Review To say it’s no Demon Copperhead hardly seems fair. But that’s the unenviable starting point for Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita. One squints to read it in the glaring light of its predecessor. Trailing clouds of glory from Charles Dickens’s classic, Demon Copperhead lounged for more than a year on the bestseller list in hardback, eventually dominated the paperback list, sold more than 3 million copies, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Twenty years ago, Patricia McCormick’s “Sold” united readers around the horrors of child trafficking. Now it’s one of America’s most banned books. (Little, Brown) Every author hopes their work will endure. But Patricia McCormick’s novel Sold has attained a painful kind of currency. In 2025, almost 20 years after it was published, Sold was the most challenged book in the United States (full list).

In Patrick deWitt’s “Dodge City,” a young man sets off for Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. The Tuesday Review (Ecco) Dodge City might sound like a throwback to Patrick deWitt’s celebrated western, The Sisters Brothers, but that’s only the first feint in his wry new novel. Like that gunslinging story about fraternal assassins, Dodge City offers another deadpan picaresque of America, though this “Dodge” has nothing to do with the Wild West, and our hero wants nothing to do with guns.

When I was a child, a boy across the street shot himself in the head with a handgun. About a decade later, a young man who lived on the street behind us shot himself in the head with a handgun. In many countries, that would be an extraordinarily high acquaintance with gun deaths. But in many places in America, that’s mercifully low. At the start of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, The American Way of Killing, he talks with a Chicago doctor who’s lost 15 “close friends” to guns.

The sins of a book critic are mostly sins of omission. Sure, I get things wrong — the sentimental drama I swooned over, the future classic I panned. But my biggest mistakes take place right at the point of selection from a tower of books. There are, after all, so many new titles to choose from. Stepping obliviously over a vein of gold is almost inevitable.

The Tuesday Review In this strand of the multiverse, the I that is me is not entirely sure what happens in Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party. I can only hope this review is smarter in a different dimension. But at least I’m being honest. Anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.

(Three Hills/Cornell University Press) Outside the city hall in Elko, Nev., steel doves fly above a short I-beam taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center some 2,400 miles away. A pair of architects who work out of their bar-slash-gallery designed this soaring 9/11 memorial, then turned the plans over to a local welder. It’s just one of more than 1,500 monuments built around the country — and the world — from twisted pieces of the Twin Towers.

The Tuesday Review We just don’t do gonzo publishing stories like we used to. Twelve years ago, publicity focused on Emma Cline like sunlight through a magnifying glass. The 25-year-old unpublished novelist had secured a three-book deal reportedly worth $2 million.

Austin’s Central Library. (Photo by Ron Charles) Read the Room Tuesday morning, PEN America released a grim report detailing the swarm of attacks pushing our public libraries toward “a breaking point.” Right-wing prigs and other enemies of literary liberty have marched beyond old-fashioned book bans to disrupt author events, defund libraries, and even harass librarians.