The Ogre’s Guests
In his latest novel In Paradise Peter Matthiessen dramatizes a collision between the thoughtful philosophy of Zen and the worst of the 20th Century’s horrors.
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
William S. Burroughs’s notorious Cut-up Trilogy was his fiercest broadside against what he felt was the tyranny of linear thought. Steve Danziger delves into their Word Hoard.
Sermons from the Ivory Tower
A thoughtful exploration of what it means to teach the humanities would be a welcome intervention in the never-ending talk of crisis. Unfortunately, Why Teach? is not that book.
Title Menu: 10 Books that Might be Poetry
Are these 10 books collections of “poetry”? Does it matter? “As poetry” is the best way to read these hybrid titles.
Laylat-al-Qadr
A kaleidoscopic new book explores one of history’s sharpest paradoxes: the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
Two new books of poetry take different approaches to the written word and its conundrums. Can words express the truth, or are we asking too much of them?
“There Is No Enjoyment in This Life”
Iraqi lawyer and former exile Zaid al-Ali writes a bleak, sobering account of the state of his homeland in the post-”Mission Accomplished” era – but is there any reason for hope?
Not Just Cutting Ribbons
For the past 25 years, the Irish Presidency has been a wonder to behold: a place where passionate eccentrics can embody a complicated country.
Love in a Cold Climate
Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel is set in the frozen land of Nord, but its lush storytelling influences come from such legendary places as Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai
In the Land of the Free Brain
“Your field is the mind, mine is the brain – will the twain ever meet?” Master novelist E. L. Doctorow’s latest deals with the traumas of duality.
Doubleplusungood
Putin’s Soviet predecessors were masters of doublespeak. As Ukraine suffers again, it’s clear that their descendents are now in charge.
It’s a Mystery: “Memory: that place where personal recollections collide with history”
The Cairo Affair is an elegant new espionage thriller from the highly accomplished Olen Steinhauer. And in The Revenant of Thraxton Hall, Vaughn Entwistle teams Arthur Conan Doyle with Oscar Wilde – what could be better?
From the Archives: H.H. Kirst and the Problem of Evil
What do we do with great novels by a writer who was also a Nazi? Steve Donoghue investigates the terrible conundrum of H.H. Kirst.
From the Archives: Shining Wild Things
Shadow Country was the culmination of a thirty-year obsession with the notorious Everglades pioneer Edgar J. Watson. Sam Sacks treks into the beautiful and blood-soaked territory of Peter Matthiessen’s magnum opus.
OL Weekly »
Book Review: Hummingbirds
The world’s smallest and busiest birds are the subject of a pretty new book
Book Review: The Sea House
In Elisabeth Gifford’s impressive debut, two couples, separated by a century, each confront Scotland’s legends of the seal-folk.
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