new york times book review tote

New York Review 60th Anniversary Tote Bag

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Celebrate with us!

This 100% cotton tote bag marks 60 years of  The New York Review of Books  with an original drawing of the facade of our new building.  Previously the studio of Milton Glaser and the offices where  New York  and  Ms.  magazines were founded, this Beaux Arts townhouse is now the home of the  Review,  which published its first issue in 1963. If you look carefully on the bag, you can see the line Milton had engraved in the transom above the front door: Art is Work.

This commemorative one-of-a-kind tote bag has been illustrated by celebrated artist Jim McMullan, who worked in the building and is well known for his iconic posters for Broadway plays.  James McMullan has created images for magazine stories, books for adults and children, record  covers, US stamps, murals and animated films, but he is most well known for the over eighty posters he has done for Lincoln Center Theater.  Among  the  most  recognized of these posters are Anything Goes, Carousel, South  Pacific, The King and I,  and   My Fair Lady .  A standout in McMullan’s work for magazines is the group of journalistic illustrations of a Brooklyn Disco that he painted for New York Magazine   that became the visual inspiration for the movie Saturday Night Fever.    

The sturdy limited-edition tote is a perfect fit for all your daily needs, including the most recent issue of the  Review . 

13″w x 14″h x 3″d gusset with 25" spun poly handles with a 12" drop. Made in the USA. 

Bag is orange with navy blue handles.

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Unpacking Berlin’s Mysterious, Ubiquitous Tote Bag

A design with no known author has wound its way through the German capital.

By Mikaella Clements

In Berlin, the bag is everywhere. Hot young dads slip it over one shoulder. Older German women pull knitting from its mouth. This canvas tote is carried by 12-year-olds on field trips, by harried white-collar workers with their laptops, by the homeless and by many, many stylish people.

Its design — black Gothic print interrupted by what vaguely resembles a red wax seal — is distinctive. It gives off the illusion of readable text, leaving passers-by squinting after it, trying to decipher its meaning.

The bag is to Berlin what a New Yorker tote is to that magazine’s namesake metropolis, or a London Review of Books tote is to its hometown (and, interestingly, Seoul ). Yet it signifies nothing in particular and has no known designer.

I cornered one of the sharply dressed start-up guys with the bag slung over his shoulder at Weinmeisterstraße U-Bahn to ask where he’d got it, and was met with a brusque “keine Ahnung” (no idea). Some weeks later, when I was too nervous to approach the tall, beautiful women walking down Hermannstraße with the bag, my sister obligingly chased after them to ask.

“Actually, I’m not sure,” one of them said. “I think I stole it from my roommate?”

Finally, in July, at Berlin’s Dyke March, a group of young women covered in glitter told me it was from Hugendubel, one of Germany’s largest bookstore chains. Walking into one of its locations in Berlin was at once revelatory and deeply embarrassing: The design was everywhere, even on the wallpaper, and the bags themselves were available in a stacked pile by the register for €1.50 a pop, or free with a purchase over €50.

If I had been looking in south Germany, I might have had discovered its provenance sooner. Sarah Orlandi , the chief marketing officer for Hugendubel, told me that in Munich, where the bookseller is based and the bags are just as popular, brand recognition is at almost 100 percent; in Berlin, she said, it’s more like 50:50. Recognized or not, the bag is beloved. Ms. Orlandi wouldn’t disclose official sales figures, but she said the company dispenses between 60,000 and 120,000 units across Germany each year.

When she joined Hugendubel, Ms. Orlandi met with Nina Hugendubel , the great-great-granddaughter of Heinrich Karl Gustav Hugendubel , who founded the company in 1893. “Mrs. Hugendubel said, ‘O.K., you can do anything you want, but don’t touch the bag,’” Ms. Orlandi said. She has honored that request: “We will never touch the bag. The bag is holy.”

Even within Hugendubel, the tote maintains its mystique. Ms. Orlandi could not tell me who designed it, or what the text on the bag means. Neither could Ms. Hugendubel, nor anyone else at the company. They know only that it was commissioned in the mid-60s from an unknown designer by Ms. Hugendubel’s father, Heinrich, who died in 2005. As for the typography …

“It’s a sentence in an old, I think, Greek writing,” Ms. Orlandi said. “But no one knows what it is because they cut the sentence in the middle and then they put it together, but not cleanly.” The word she uses is “verwächst”: two things that have grown together and become entangled, like branches on a tree.

The text likely originates from Low German or Middle Dutch. But the writing, as far as experts were able to tell, doesn’t mean anything at all. Horst Simon , a professor in the Freie Universität Berlin ’s department of German and Dutch philology, said, “There is neither a text nor a language to identify on this bag. What you see is a meaningless graphic representation of medieval textuality — not a text, not even letters.”

Dr. Simon guessed that the early Hugendubel designer took a collection of letters and perhaps words in black-letter writing, a form of script popular in western Europe in the late Middle Ages, before, as Ms. Orlandi suggested, cutting them horizontally and putting the images together randomly.

“Apparently, the bag’s designers wanted to create the idea of an old text without actually committing themselves to any particular real-life example,” Dr. Simon said. “In that sense it’s comparable to the ‘lorem ipsum’ place-holder text that is used by printers and book designers.” Now and then, “very rarely, by chance,” the letters form a word.

Lydia Zeldenrust , a lecturer in medieval literature at the University of York, agreed. “There are some recognizable words, but these are words that Middle Dutch and Low German have in common, so it’s hard to tell exactly which language it is.” Dr. Zeldenrust found words like “van god” and “legend,” which might suggest parts of the text come from a religious text or hagiography.

Berlin loves symbols, and is built around monumental ones that trace the highs and lows of the 20th century. There’s the Holocaust Memorial, with its enormous, claustrophobic blocks, and the TV Tower, completed in 1969, which rose eerily from behind the East German side of the Wall. Its nickname is “the Pope’s revenge”; when the sun hits it, a crucifix of reflected light appears.

The tote, on the other hand, doesn’t readily stand for anything. It invites interpretation but resists answers. And while it may now be sold by a brand, in the absence of a known creator, it belongs as much to the city as it does to anyone.

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10 Things You Didn’t Know About How the NY Times Book Review Works

Pamela paul on what goes into those pesky year-end lists.

Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review , hopped on reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about the Book Review and the recently published list of their editors’ picks for the 10 best books of the year . In addition to recommending a number of great books and writers (Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell, George Eliot, and more), dubbing Colson Whitehead one of the greatest novelists of our time, and suggesting that, of the Times ‘s Top 10, a Trump supporter might most enjoy The North Water , Paul shed a little light on how things work at the Book Review (a question that some of us have been asking ourselves lately!). Below, find a few things you may or may not have known about how books are assigned, reviewed, and considered for the year-end lists of the paper of record.

Way more books come out every year than you think.

“The Book Review at The Times reviews about 1% of the books that come out in any given year.”

Planning for the Year-End Notable Books List starts in January.

“Basically, the entire year is a winnowing process that culminates in the 10 Best Books. We start thinking about it in January. As we see books that we think are true standouts, we put copies aside so that all editors can read through contenders throughout the year, and weigh in. Books come on and off that list of contenders, and in the course of the year, we check in on it periodically and update it, depending on how people respond to individual titles. Toward the end of the year, around October, the process becomes more intense. I would describe the overall system as democratic, with a decisive wielding of the autocratic sword at the end. Ultimately, hard decisions have to be made, and not every editor at the Book Review will end up with all his or her favorites on the final list, but will hopefully have at least one book he or she lobbied hard for make the final cut.”

“Each week, we go through the previous issue and denote certain books as ‘Editor’s Choices’—these are the 9 books we especially like from that issue. At the end of the year, we pull together all of our Editor’s Choices and narrow them down to 100 Notable Books of the Year—50 fiction and 50 nonfiction. From those, we pick the 10 Best.”

The Book Review editors are probably hanging out right now.

“At The New York Times Book Review , we have no staff critics—we are all editors and we sit together and we talk all the time. I like to get up and walk around and have actual-human-contact with people. Our staff critics at The Times mostly work from home, though they do come in and we do talk to them, often on the phone. We are all people who like to talk about books, and having conversations around them—what books are you seeing, what looks good, what are you hearing, what do you like—are things we could talk about all day. Except we also have to read. And write. And edit.

Book reviews are generally a top-down process.

“Here at the Book Review , the editors select which books we want reviewed, and then we find reviewers to write about them. We review all genres, though our tastes reflect the tastes of our editors and those of readers of The New York Times . The staff critics for The Times choose which books they want to review themselves.”

“Each editor here handles a number of titles in a given week. They will come up with a list of possible reviewers and then bring it to my deputy and me. We then talk them over and sometimes add our own names to the list. Then we establish the order in which we approach people with the assignment. Sometimes, the first person on our list is too busy or has a conflict of interest (knows the author, shares an agent, blurbed an earlier book of theirs, etc.) and is disqualified, so we move to the next person on the list. In terms of finding reviewers, we are always on the lookout for smart new voices. Sometimes we find these among new authors, sometimes writers in other publications, sometimes people reach out to us directly with clips and a description of the kinds of books they’re interested in reviewing and their areas of expertise.”

There is lots of mail (you probably actually knew this).

“We have our mail opened several times a day. On most days, we have three large carts piled high with boxes and envelopes, plus 10-20 Postal Boxes filled to the top. So picture that!

There is a (loose) definition for “Best Books.”

“I like to think [the ten best books of the year] have little in common other than a high standard of ambition and excellence. By “Best Books,” we mean books that are extremely well executed in every sense: the scope of the work, originality of thought, writing on a sentence level, storytelling. It’s not necessarily about which books have the most “important” message or a position we agree with. It’s about books we think will stand the test of time, and that people will want to read 5, 10, 20 years from now.”

End of the year lists can have nothing to do with how books were reviewed.

“It is often the case that books we like don’t necessarily get hugely favorable notice in the Book Review . One recent case: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See got a negative review in the Book Review . But we still named it one of the 10 Best Books of the year at the time. Our 10 Best is when we editors get to exert our own opinions, no matter what our reviewers say.”

The best book reviews are emotional.

“I think the biggest mistake reviewers make is conflating a book review with a book report. Generally speaking, readers don’t want to know what happens in a book, and they certainly don’t want (nor should they get) plot spoilers. I hate that personally as a reader! Let me discover for myself. What I’m more interested in a review is seeing a writer engage with a book—intellectually and often, emotionally. I want some depth and context: What else has been written on the subject? What has this writer done previously? What kind of research did the writer do? I want to know what the writing is like—give me some examples, quote from the book, describe the style. I want to know what the writer does well and not so well. I want judgment. I want to know if a book is well done and if it’s worth my time. Is this a book I’ll actually want to read, or just read about? Hopefully, at least ONE of those things.”

Don DeLillo might have been in the Top 10 this year.

“ Zero K was one of the finalists! Almost made it.”

When it comes to reading, Pamela Paul is just like us.

“One year, when I didn’t have a job and I didn’t have a partner and I didn’t have kids and before the Internet, I read 76 books for fun, including “Moby-Dick.” That hasn’t happened since. I try to read a book a week, but big books sure do slow you down. As does life. The big sacrifice is TV; I never get to watch TV.”

“I’ve always wanted to read Dumas—one of those authors I’ve never actually gotten around to. But I also think life is too short to finish a bad book, unless you’re really getting something out of it.”

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The Coveted Tote Bags That Scream ‘Status’

About a year ago, stylish, young Korean women began visiting the London Review of Books’ Bloomsbury bookshop in droves. They weren’t Jenny Diski fans — rather, they were after the canvas tote bags for sale by the register. Then the phone calls started: people from South Korea asking to buy hundreds of the bags at once. “I assume they were selling them,” says Claire Williams, event coordinator at the store. “Because no one needs that many totes.” Upon further investigation, she found that the Korean tag for the bookstore on Instagram turned up pages and pages of photographs of the bag slung over chic shoulders: Evidently, the shop’s nondescript tote had become a thing . No one knows exactly who started it or what it is about the plain canvas bags that fed the hunger—the simple roman type? The graphic color blocks? But there’s no denying that prestige tote bags are on the rise. Something from WNYC announcing that you did your part to end the pledge drive is no longer enough: Totes communicate in a more nuanced language now—they are the nautical flags of the F train. A Judd Foundation option does a fine job of informing strangers you’ve been to Marfa, but a bag from the Get Go market there demonstrates a more discerning awareness of the local culture. Recently, a stranger offered to buy vintage collector Brian Procell’s discontinued ripstop Gagosian bag, after seeing it on Instagram, for $1,200. Procell, of course, declined.

The Cobble Hill bookstore hadn’t been open a year when a woman came in and bought 20 totes to sell at her pop-up shop in Japan. A month later, she bought 100 more.

This little grocery store in Marfa has been open for years. But in the last 18 months, its bag has been tagged over 450 times on Instagram (#TheGetGo), in locales as far afield as France.

In September, Off-White collaborated with Nike on a series of ten sneakers. For each pair purchased in person, the buyer got a matching tote. Now, they go for up to $80 on eBay.

These totes are sold in the lobby of BAM’s main building, as well as across the street at Fort Greene’s beloved Greenlight Bookstore — so wearing one is a good indication that you spend a significant amount of time on Fulton Street.

Sold in Bloomsbury, but unusually popular in Seoul.

This double-handled tote has duel credentials: It was designed by the nonprofit bookstore-slash-art-space Printed Matter, and produced by millennial-favorite reusable-bag company Baggu. As for the quote on the front — if you don’t know who said it, it might be best not to approach this tote’s wearer. (It’s the contemporary artist Lawrence Weiner.)

Everybody.World was started by a couple of American Apparel alums out in California who were ready to make their own socially conscious brand of basics. Last year, they released this massive bright-yellow tote that can carry just about everything. Now, you’ll see it on design-focused PR girls and anyone who might regularly hang around the Standard in L.A.

A not-so-subtle way to communicate that you’ve recently been to Donald Judd’s eponymous foundation in Marfa or his live-work space turned gallery in New York. You can’t buy this one online, but you can stop by 101 Spring Street  in New York or  104 South Highland Avenue  in Marfa and get one for $25 without even taking the tour.

Ones you can’t

At its anniversary party, Dimes gave away 50 of these tote bags. The restaurant’s newer tote is less exclusive, but still popular among DJs — it fits vinyl records just right.

This tote came with a purchase at the preeminent pharmacy of the Upper East Side. It will soon become even more exclusive, as Clyde’s recently closed for good.

This bag was available for sale at the gallery’s Upper East Side shop years ago, but has since been discontinued.

You cannot buy this Knoll tote — it’s given away to VIP clients and friends of the brand — which is why owning one has become a status symbol for architects and creative directors.

Grove Atlantic debuted this at the launch party for Literary Hub, its online venture — asking Joan Didion to lend her likeness before she agreed to those Céline ads.

The Catskills diner’s owner claims that the bag got him a book deal: “The publisher said she’d seen a lot of the tote bags in her office and decided to check us out.”

Associate publisher of the Penguin Random House imprint Jynne Martin likes to send this bag to carefully selected friends in media. She has spotted it at the Frida Kahlo House in Mexico City.

Two-hundred-and-fifty design and fashion people who were at Sight Unseen’s annual design show got a tote — plus Jenna Lyons, whom co-founder Jill Singer hunted down with the express purpose of offering her a bag.

This Chinatown yoga studio opened in 2016 and is where Carine Roitfeld does her “practice.” Every time owners Krissy Jones and Chloe Kernaghan print more totes, they sell out within weeks.

Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head , Office Space , and Silicon Valley , drew this promotional tote for the 1995 South by Southwest festival.

The ex–graffiti writer Kimou Meyer (a.k.a. Grotesk) designed but never sold these, giving them away instead to his fellow middle-aged reformed vandals.

Any self-respecting gallerist knows that the be-all-end-all status art-fair tote is Frieze’s 2015 collaboration between Shane Campbell Gallery and streetwear designer DRx Romanelli, which was made out of leather, suede, flannel, and the reincarnated remains of bags from previous Frieze fairs . But in lieu of that impossible-to-find bag, this slightly more generic version will do just fine.

If you live in Williamsburg and don’t worship the Tarlow family and their restaurants, move out. Prove your neighborhood know-how by carrying around this big whale — it’ll signal that you lived there before the finance bros moved in.

David Chang celebrated Momofuku’s ten-year anniversary with — what else — some sick merch. This tote, along with a Jason Polan–designed egg tee, was available to buy during service at the original Momofuku Noodle Bar for four days in 2014.

Outdoor Voices gives this bag away for free with a purchase. Consequently, every 20-something in color-blocked leggings has one surgically attached to their arm.

Verso Books, the self-described “largest independent radical publishing house in the English speaking world,” designed these totes to celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, making it the tote for hip New York City marxists (who didn’t luck out and win one of the shop’s Rosa Luxemburg giveaways).

*A version of this article appears in the February 5, 2018, issue of  New York Magazine. 

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The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History

From the longest-running, most influential book review in America, here is its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896,  The New York Times Book Review  has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the  Book Review ’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of  Anne of Green Gables  and a rave of  Mrs. Dalloway , along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the  Times ’s own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the  Book Review ’s coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.

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TaraShea Nesbit’s ‘Beheld’ listed on the New York Times Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000

Nesbit’s novel is a Notable Book of 2020

“Beheld,” a work of historical nonfiction by TaraShea Nesbit , novelist, nonfiction writer, and Miami University associate professor of English, is listed as a Notable Book of 2020 in the recent New York Times Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000 list. 

Nesbit, the 2024 writer-in-residence for the Cincinnati Public Library, was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for “ The Wives of Los Alamos” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Read more about “Beheld” in the Miami News story In her novel ‘Beheld,’ TaraShea Nesbit brings to life voices normally kept quiet in history.

Read the Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000 in the New York Times (May 3).

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She left the CIA in frustration. Now her spy novel is racking up awards.

I.S. Berry scored rave reviews and awards for her literary debut, “The Peacock and the Sparrow,” a novel mined from her time at the CIA.

She felt each boom like an electric jolt as she was trying to sleep in her Alexandria, Va., apartment.

It was August 2006, and Ilana Berry was then a 30-year-old Central Intelligence Agency case officer. Outside, construction crews were beginning work on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, knocking down the old expanse to make way for a new six-lane roadway.

But each rumble threw Berry off the steady anchors of time and place, hurling her back to her last year stationed in war-rocked Baghdad. There, she had spent sleepless nights alone in a trailer as insurgent mortars and rockets screamed into the Green Zone, the central area of the Iraqi capital where the American military, diplomatic and intelligence staffs were housed.

“I remember waking up and having the worst panic attack of my life,” she recalled. “I called my parents to say that we are all under attack.”

To cope, Berry began tracking when the crews would do demolitions and set an alarm for herself to stay awake. She began writing, caging the emotional fallout of her time in Iraq into the tidy frames of sentences. That writing would kick off a sequence of events that would pit her against the agency’s bureaucracy and end in her resignation.

But it would also start her second act as a celebrated, award-winning novelist — one that would be eventually be invited back to the CIA.

Berry applied to join the CIA while attending law school at the University of Virginia, believing it would combine her interests in international relations and intelligence work with her sense of patriotic mission.

Raised outside D.C., she was a 1994 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. She spent time in the Balkans after graduating from Haverford College, an experience that led to a position as an intelligence analyst with the Defense Department. “I loved the work of intel, and I wanted to make it my career,” Berry said. “So the CIA is the place to go, right?”

After being accepted, she trained at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Va., known as “The Farm.” Much of that training was about logistics — how to conduct surveillance, how to know if you are being surveilled. But the more in-depth psychological elements made Berry wonder if she was in the right place.

“Your whole training is basically how to find people’s vulnerabilities,” Berry said. “What are their motivations? Is it flattery or vanity or revenge, or do they hate their boss? That was never an easy fit for me.”

But Berry graduated with high marks and volunteered to be stationed in Iraq for a year-long assignment. She arrived in 2004 as doubts were beginning to stain America’s initial reasoning for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. Among the CIA team, there was a growing realization that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country — the main justification for the U.S.-led coalition’s invasion.

Berry found that the CIA trailers didn’t have the armored protections or safety protocols in place like their military counterparts. But when she advised CIA headquarters about the danger, she was ignored, she said.

“We weren’t taking the precautions that we should have been,” Berry said. “And it was clear we knew we weren’t.”

One specific incident left Berry with doubts about the CIA’s mission. She got a tip from an Iraqi informant about a possible suspect involved in the 2003 truck bombing of the U.N. Baghdad headquarters that left 22 people dead, including the commissioner for human rights at the time. Berry’s tip led to the suspect being taken into custody, but he claimed he was not involved. Still, he was carted off to a detention facility. Berry later heard from other officers that they were unsure of his guilt, and she worries he may have been wrongfully pulled into the maze of America’s post-9/11 detention system.

In response to Berry’s allegations about her time in Iraq, a CIA agency spokesperson did not address specific complaints or allegations but said the agency “is absolutely committed to fostering a safe, respectful, and equitable workplace environment for all our employees, and we have taken significant steps to ensure that, including strengthening the Agency’s handling of issues when they arise.”

The living conditions. The murky mission. All that seemed to Berry to fuel rampant alcoholism at the CIA station. “Baghdad really screwed me up,” she said.

Her tour done but still living with the emotional aftershocks in Virginia, Berry kept writing. “My goal was never to publish my account of Baghdad,” she said. “It was to make sense of what happened.”

She had volunteered to go next to Afghanistan and was enrolled in Farsi-language classes. During that time, Berry volunteered to the agency that she had been writing about her experience.

According to agency regulation, all current and former CIA employees must submit any writing they plan on releasing to the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board, which determines whether a potential book or screenplay or writing contains classified information. After the agency learned Berry was working on a memoir, she submitted the manuscript.

When her writing came back, it was covered in redactions that Berry felt made little sense. “They redacted my height and weight,” she said. “They redacted the color of the sky. These are clearly things that are not classified.”

Berry felt the pushback was all due to the unflattering light the account showed the agency. Her complaints in Iraq had already begun to hurt her prospects at the CIA. Her follow-up assignment in Afghanistan was pulled. She channeled her frustration into an appeal over her manuscript.

“I fought every single redaction, if for no other reason than to stick it to them that this was wrong,” she said.

Mark Zaid, a D.C. attorney who regularly represents CIA officers and helped Berry with her appeal, said he believes the board’s difficult responses were tied to the protective stance the agency assumed at the time. “There is a deep-seated paranoia and ignorance among security officers,” he said. “Their internal processes are geared for damage control, no matter whether there is damage or not.” Zaid later hired Berry into his law firm as an of counsel attorney.

In response to questions about Berry’s past conflicts with the review board, an agency spokesperson said the “CIA does not comment on details regarding specific prepublication reviews.” The spokesperson added that “the Board is open to authors’ requests to reconsider content they believe is unclassified.”

Eventually, the review board agreed with most of Berry’s appeal and removed most of the redactions from her manuscript.

By then, she had already resigned from agency, frustrated with the fight and her experiences in Iraq. She was married and a new mother. Though she had won the right to publish her account, she no longer wanted her own story — and the trauma and personal doubt she had put in writing — out there.

Write what you know

Despite her clash with agency, piling the mixed feelings about her time as a spy into a memoir reminded Berry how much she enjoyed writing. As she launched herself into a new career as an attorney and later followed her husband to Bahrain in 2012, Berry kept at it. Now it was fiction, but Berry found all her sentences echoed back to her time in Iraq.

The pages that would eventually become “The Peacock and the Sparrow,” a novel featuring a weary CIA officer caught in the turbines of Middle Eastern political change, include themes mined straight from Berry’s time at the agency. Its first lines plunge a reader into the morally ambiguous head space Berry learned in her training. “It was the ability to please that you learned as a spy: smoking a cigarette, offering compliments you didn’t mean, falling down drunk from having accepted too many vodkas,” Berry writes.

The novel’s CIA protagonist, Shane Collins, faces the same indifference from higher-ups that Berry said she saw in Iraq. She funneled the same problematic behavior she witnessed — the drinking, the war-zone infidelities — into her main character. The gnawing doubts about the guilt of the bombing suspect also popped up as a plot point.

Perhaps the most surprising element in her new work as a novelist was how easy it was to submit the manuscript to the review board. They demanded no significant redactions.

“Time had passed, and I had built up a good relationship with the board,” Berry said.

Berry’s debut novel, “The Peacock and the Sparrow,” was released by Atria Books in May 2023 under the pen name I.S. Berry. The book was feted by both the New Yorker and NPR on their annual lists of the best books of the year. This month, the novel also won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel by an American novelist, a significant industry award whose past recipients include Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tana French.

Even with that acclaim, Berry was still surprised when the CIA invited her to speak with Invisible Ink, a group of agency employees who are also writers.

“I was not exactly a poster child for the place,” Berry said. “But they assured me they valued authenticity over filtered plaudits, which were words I never thought I’d hear.”

Last September, Berry was sitting in her car in the ocean of parking spaces sprawling outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Even with her invitation, she felt “nervous as hell,” she said. “I did feel like it was a family reunion where I was estranged from my family.”

But Berry then met her agency contact, a member of Invisible Ink, who had asked her to come and speak. She was taken into a conference room where she spoke to about a dozen current agency staff members to discuss writing, publishing and working with the agency’s review board.

As she was leaving, Berry was asked to film a video about the career paths of officers after the agency. She agreed.

“This was such a formative part of my life,” she said. “They are people who have had that same singular experience as me.” Going back to the CIA, Berry said, “felt like I had rebuilt this broken bridge.”

In the meantime, she’s working away on a new novel. It’s another spy tale.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Berry visited Invisible Ink last February. It was last September. The article has been corrected.