Aimless Love
by Billy Collins (Random House, $26)
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All the Odes
by Pablo Neruda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40)
How could this book not have existed before? said John Timpane in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda spent a lifetime dashing off short odes to things of this world—“short, open, rapid, and often joyful poems” that let him have a bit of fun. Appearing here in Spanish with English translations, they fill 900 pages and become “a grateful, grief-stricken, revolving-in-wonder song of life on Earth.” Flip through it at will: “You’ll never find a better ode to french fries.”
Stay, Illusion
by Lucie Brock-Broido (Knopf, $26)
A kind of “frolicsome gravity” courses through Lucie Brock-Broido’s poetry, said Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker. Her latest collection, a National Book Award finalist, addresses subjects like death and aging, but has such a spontaneous air that the voice becomes “some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks.” When “The Story of Fraulein X” likens the self to a mental patient run amok, the result is “antic, comic,” and, in the poem’s last lines, “devastating.”
Dog Songs
by Mary Oliver (Penguin, $27)
“In a world full of modern and postmodern angst,” Mary Oliver’s optimism begins to look like true wisdom, said Doni M. Wilson in the Houston Chronicle. A lesser writer than the former Pulitzer Prize winner would be cloying in a collection dedicated solely to dogs. But Oliver’s Dog Songs “invites us to linger” in the small joys and dramas that come with canine companionship, creating a brief, welcome escape from the dour, all-too-civilized world of man.
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The vast horizons of the Puna de AtacamaThe Week Recommends The ‘dramatic and surreal’ landscape features volcanoes, fumaroles and salt flats
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Asylum hotels: everything you need to knowThe Explainer Using hotels to house asylum seekers has proved extremely unpopular. Why, and what can the government do about it?
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Crossword: November 16, 2025The daily crossword from The Week
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”