Article Archive for May 2011
Book Review: The Good Thief
A heartfelt novel tells the story of the “Good Thief” who was crucified alongside Jesus at Calvary.
Book Review: Queen of Kings
Queen of the Nile, Queen of the Damned? “Queen of Kings” teaches a valuable lesson about not judging a book by its killer hook.
Book Review: Spectrum 17
The latest epic collection of fantasy art in the Spectrum series features hundreds of weird visions (and half a dozen very different trips over the rainbow).
Book Review: Geneaology of the Pagan Gods
A massive, lively, entertaining work by Boccaccio that isn’t “The Decameron”
Book Review: Hounded
A new fantasy series about a sexy druid (two thousand years young) fighting supernatural threats in present-day Arizona.
Book Review: Worlds Made By Words
New in paperback: a book that illuminates the slightly abstruse joys of scholarship.
Book Review: The Mighty Thor by Walter Simonson
The fabled Walter Simonson issues of “The Mighty Thor” are finally collected in one massive volume – and they’ve never looked better.
Book Review: Bismarck
An excellent new biography gives us the man behind the so-called Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck
Book Review: Moontusk
The first volume of a fantasy series set in a richly-imagined world of woolly mammoths and exotic tribesmen.
Book Review: American Masculine
A new collection of short stories is set in an American West that’s masculinely bleak – or is it bleakly masculine?
Book Review: A Taint in the Blood
The first book in a new vampire series shows all the veteran author’s signature strengths.
Book Review: The Morning Star
Overlook Press publishes a powerful and disturbing posthumous work by Andre Schwarz-Bart, author of the masterpiece “The Last of the Just”
Book Review: The Life of Polycrates
An interesting – if problematic – collection of short stories by the author of “Metrophilias”
Now in Paperback: The Annotated Origin
Now published in paperback: a fantastic annotated edition of Charles Darwin’s eternally-relevant bombshell, “On the Origin of Species”
Book Review: She-Wolves
An immensely enjoyable new book looks at four women who ruled England in the centuries before Queen Elizabeth I.
Review of A Fortunate Age
Steve Donoghue grapples with the initial irritations and eventual pleasures of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age: “The process that changes your reaction will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been seduced by New York (a sordid, delectable experience that can happen repeatedly throughout your life – and against which there is no known vaccine).”
Book Review: Faith
In her latest novel, Jennifer Haigh explores the impact of the Boston Catholic Church sex abuse scandal on the lives of one close-knit family.
Book Review: As We Are Sung
There is nothing conventional about Christina Mengert’s new book of poetry, nor can it be read the same way twice.
The Obscure Object of Financial Fiction
How to write a great novel of the financial crisis? One contender has published his attempt, and it features an updated version of that bugbear figure from Shakespeare and Trollope: the Jewish banker.
Grandpapa England
In The King’s Speech, King George V is depicted as a fanatical tyrant; but his legacy is one of dignified flexibility in the face of revolutionary changes, and his temperament may have helped save the monarchy
Bohemia Rundown
Semiotext(e) is famous for theory and provocation. So what happens when its co-founder takes on the art world in the latest installment of their manifesto series? To begin with, she doesn’t write a manifesto…
When the Sewing Needles Dropped
Anne Roiphe was raised in privilege, educated at Smith, and joined in marriage to a successful playwright; her new memoir reveals how painfully constricting that life came to be.
Pros Take On the Cons
A con man, an ambitious office boy, and two Mormons–it sounds like the set-up to a punch line. But is the joke on Broadway? Our theater critic examines the “why” of musicals, the limits of Harry Potter, and the perfidy of Canada.
Memo to a Colleague
Is Marjorie Garber’s defense of literary studies balm to the beleaguered English professor’s soul? Not yet, anyway.
On the Scent: The Odorants in Deodorants
Our resident nose sniffs those most populist of perfumes: the ones we rub under our arms. Join her on a guided tour through the pharmacy aisle.
Post-Communist Literature or How to Cure Baldness
Walking talking cats? mysterious birthmarks? ancient secrets? Bogdan Suceava takes us to a strange place (Romania, present day) in his newly translated novel.
Invisible Man
The omissions in Javier Marías’s beguiling, enigmatic novels are just as important as what appear on the page, and two newly translated books are marked by this juggling of the known and the unknown.
It’s a Mystery: “No person is without a shadow”
Kurt Wallander’s touching swan song shows why his creator Henning Mankell is an acknowledged master of the police procedural.
Bright Sparkling Speeches
Francis Spufford’s new story collection blends fact and fiction to explore the truths and towering delusions of the Soviet economic system–and its production model, the American fast food chain.
Second Glance: Astonish Us
Pauline Kael is out of print today and perhaps known best for the enemies she made. But any immersion into her passionate, intelligent writing shows her to have been one of the best movie critics–or critic of any kind–of the past century.
As Crazy Quentin Knows
Frame narratives, rags-to-riches angles, gender-swapping, the wages of grief, and …. love. Yes, we’re talking about a video game, specifically Dragon Age 2.
laying down record player
A conversation with cover artist Julie Schustack about LA, worlds under glass, Frankenstein devices, and building a house just to take it apart.
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