A roundup of what the Pittsburgh Review of Book’s class is reading the third week of February 2026:
“Renee Good’s Murder and Other Acts of Terror” from the Boston Review
“I’m not sure if it’s amnesia or just wishful thinking, but it seems like the well-documented terror tactics of municipal, county, and state police have just disappeared from people’s memory.”
Chosen by Sabikun Mazumder
“Gothic romance reaches new ‘Heights’ as fan communities collide” from NPR
“What I’ve learned in my limited research is that these intersecting communities of readers do much more to celebrate their affinities than drop reviews on Goodreads; for many, reading is the heart of a sparkling creative lifestyle. And music is a big part of the cozy bibliophile’s world.”
Chosen by Suzy Liss
“From Oriental Riviera to Global Asia: Hong Kong in Travel Posters” from JSTOR Daily
“Still, there’s much more to Hong Kong than the glamour of its modern skyscrapers.”
Chosen by Jinze Mao
“Living the Part” from parterre box
“When she talks about opera, she makes it live, through her own unique imagination and conviction. In conversation, Soviero’s energy is infectious, her opinions utterly sincere, her spontaneity and total lack of pretense an absolute joy.”
Chosen by Ursula Sturgeon
“The Left Owes a Lot to Jesse Jackson” from Jacobin
“It showed Jackson standing in Chicago’s Grant Park, holding a small American flag, with tears in his eyes, as he listened to Barack Obama speak to a huge crowd on the night he was elected president of the United States. The photo did not require a caption.”
Chosen by Kathryn Anne Langley
“Poetry Reminds Me of the Holes in My Memory” from Electric Literature
“I realized, eventually, that I wanted poetry and prose to do different things for me. I wrote poetry to replicate the way my life felt. I needed prose to help me understand it.”
Chosen by Rahaf AlMubarak
“Can He Really Do That? Black History Month in the Age of Trump” from Mother Jones
“How could Donald Trump, or anyone for that matter, have the final say over Black memory? How can Black History Month ever be aligned with MAGA’s ideological project?”
Chosen by Asia Thompson
“The Left has a Hyperpolitics Problem” from The New Republic
“These movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.”
Chosen by Jennie Tian
“Immune from the Law” from Lapham’s Quarterly
“Given the multiplying aspects of globalization that escape the limits of sovereign politics, is it any wonder that anxieties about the loss of sovereign power and freedom abound, even and
indeed especially in Western countries that set the rules for the modern state system and were its first and greatest beneficiaries?”
Chosen by Paul Beer
“How White Elites Drained Ancient Art of Its Color” from Hyperallergic
“This is all part and parcel of the ways we instruct the next generation on how to view a past — one that is, in this case, increasingly redacted, rewritten, and purged of people of color once again.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Pieces of Gaza” from the New York Review of Books
“As world powers debate Gaza’s future, the show asks, what will
remain of its past?”
Chosen by Sofia Johnson
“Princeps & Monsters” from Commonweal Magazine
“In [Suetonius’] work, we don’t find the broad sweep of things as we do in Tacitus, the grand stage of events and epochs. What we get instead is a close-up of human folly, warts and all…in
reading Suetonius, we’re forced to ask a question sadly relevant for our own time: Are institutions resilient enough to withstand the sin and incompetence of their leaders?”
Chosen by Elias Fox
“Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning To Dissolve?” from Quanta Magazine
“For what quantum mechanics actually supplies is the probabilities of measurement outcomes. That alone doesn’t permit us to deduce anything about what the world was
like before we made the measurement. It doesn’t tell us how the world is, only what we’ll see if we look.
Chosen by Maggie Hua
