Gaspard Koenig © AFP Koenig sets out to write a novel on contemporary ecology and ends up with something that just fits the current mood—a book that claims to think, but really just circulates familiar ideas everyone already knows. Honestly, the starting point sounds pretty solid. You get two agronomy students, Kevin and Arthur, each heading down totally different paths to rethink our relationship with the earth: one bets on the market, the other goes all-in on radical cultiv

Giorgio Agamben © Andreas Solaro/​AFP A book like this shows up when an author starts thinking their signature style is enough, that their name can stand in for real substance. Self-Portrait in the Studio tries to be a self-portrait without directly showing the self—it pieces together objects, images, names, and passing encounters. If you know Agamben’s work, you know the move: fragments lined up so that meaning kind of sparks between them. He sticks with the same structure h

Byung-Chul Han Photo credits: Album/Alamy A familiar complaint keeps circulating: the book asserts, simplifies, refuses the long argument. The complaint misses the method. Han does not aim at a treatise. He works by reduction. He removes connective tissue until a structure appears. The starting point is widely sensed and rarely clarified: something has shifted in how stories operate under platform conditions. Commentary often repeats a formula—content displaces narrative, per