They don’t work as books, but they do work their way on us – insistently, insidiously. We throw them across the room, but we keep picking them up again.
“It is so easy to create illusions with film, but how can you create an engrossing visual experience with an object? I am obsessed with human nature’s interest in being fooled.”
Doorstop literary tomes might still be the preferred signature grab for literary respectability, but short novels have always been every bit as compelling–and tougher to do well. Ingrid Norton introduces her Year with Short Novels.
In A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr explores that most challenging emotion to capture in fiction: happiness
Two new novels by Adam Haslett and Jonathan Dee attempt to show us the way we live now by exposing the quality of the characters who handle (or, as the case may be, mishandle) our money.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was peaceful, orderly, and above all sensible, or so says towering Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Two new books look at the man and the Revolution he so indelibly described.
“opium” Georgias, “hotwired” Georgias, and “mercury” Georgias, are cataloged and blasted in Andrew Zawacki’s new collection Petals of Zero / Petals of One. But who or what or where is Georgia’s eponym?
Since the days of T.E. Lawrence, reporters have been providing the West with carefully-wrought (or overwrought) tales of the Middle East. A new book comments on the excesses–and maybe commits a few too.
“Whoever devotes himself to decency and to virtue /
he beguiles with deceptions, corrupting their temptingly innocent hearts….”
Long before he wrote some of the most powerful poems in English, John Milton, as a brainy teenager, wrote verse in Latin. Celebrated translator David Slavitt tells us a little about them.
When Patricia Highsmith was bored at parties, she would cover the dinner table with her pet snails. As Joan Schenkar shows in her new biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, this may have been the sweetest part of her personality.
Dmitri Nabokov published The Original of Laura in the form in which his father had left it: in note-cards, which you can remove, rearrange, annotate, even add to…
In Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed, Tim Farnsworth walks away from his job and family, and also away from a novel of domesticity into one of ideas.
If names like “Number Muncher,” “The Oregon Trail,” and of course “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” prompt nostalgic smiles for you, you’ll love this affectionate look at educational video games
Karl Parker’s moves are more than merely clever: I-less one minute, present & friendly the next, he darts behind masks and speaks IN BOLD, as our contributing editor discovers in her review.
In the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson both rose to greatness that reached across racial divides. Two new books look at the prices they had to pay.
Lou Berney in his fast and funny debut novel, Gutshot Straight, owes more than a little to Elmore Leonard, in the best of all possible ways. As for Elmore Leonard’s latest, Road Dogs, the master is in top form.
Stuart Weisberg’s biography of Barney Frank may be scattered and incomplete, but it’s got one huge saving grace: Frank’s own witticisms on nearly every page.
Mary Caponegro continues her chronicle of troubled intimacies in the story collection All Fall Down
