The Very Edge of Fiction
Elisa Gabbert on Ben Lerner's new novel
Title Menu:
10 great "minor" works by major hands
A Picture Book
Adam Golaski on the art of Omni
The Grey Zone
Dorian Stuber on a new biography of Gertrude van Tijn, savior and collaborator
Twenty Feet Tall!
Steve Donoghue on Rick Perlstein's Ronald Reagan
The Very Edge of Fiction
Ben Lerner has followed his breakout novel Leaving the Atocha Station with a metafictional tale of a second-time novelist trying to throw a book together. Is it more than a game?
The Grey Zone
Gertrude van Tijn helped more than 20,000 Jews escape occupied Holland. What does it mean that, in saving their lives, she had to collaborate with Nazis?
An Ignorant Highbrow
If you think distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art are stuffy Victorian relics, our beleagured Stephen Akey says, you’re just not paying enough attention. So are you a highbrow? And should you be? And should everybody be?
Title Menu: 10 Great “Minor” Works by Major Writers
The great writers of the ages were hardly (often) one-hit wonders. In praise of diversity, the staff at OLM celebrate the lesser-known b-sides of some pretty well known pens.
Grand Affiliations
Metaphor: a tool for poets and rhetoricians, but also, perhaps, the way that people connect to the world at large. Lianne Habinek reviews a gamesome new study by the great literary critic Denis Donoghue.
Socrates Offside
What place do deep questions about the meaning of life have in our technological age? Is philosophy more important than ever?
A Picture Book
Cover art from Omni, the new-age science mag of yore, is now a coffee table book: Giger, Frazetta, and Grant Wood are all here, but something crucial has been left out.
Troubled Sheep
William Deresiewics has written-up some admonitions for gifted children of privilege: beware of status-mongering, ignorance of other classes, greed. But is his book itself just a wee bit … privileged?
Twenty Feet Tall!
The third voume of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland trilogy is sure to fly off the shelves, but those flying copies will be light to the tune of a few needed footnotes, omissions our managing editor finds, to say the least, troubling.
Sleeping In
Sam Harris, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement, has written a book about how to live a spiritual life without religion. But does this anti-preacher book come off a bit preachy? Maybe even, awkwardly enough, dogmatic?
Giddy Discomfort
How ought we to read the reactions of viewers to a piece of provocative art? What if that piece, like Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” is entirely to do with race?
It’s a Mystery: “My world is a jungle of threats”
A Colder War is the latest from Charles Cumming, one of the best at depicting the frail and brutal world of spydom. Neely Tucker’s The Ways of the Dead marks the debut of what promises to be a first-rate series.
To Brave the Swollen Waters
Powerful South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin’s second novel to be translated into English tells a touchingly human tale set in a world which, for most of her Western readers, could scarcely be more alien.
From the Archives: Playing the Shadow Game
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.
OL Weekly »
Book Review: The Cemetery of Swallows
A morose misanthrope police superintendent investigates a killing in which the murderer traveled half-way around the world in order to murder a total stranger
Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Almanac
A key element of science fiction DNA is the whole concept of time travel, and a gigantic new anthology assembles all the greatest time travel stories ever told
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