Articles in Fiction
It Might Have Been
In life there are no second chances, no do-overs. But what if we could keep trying until we got it right? Kate Atkinson explores the possibilities in a novel that just might win her a coveted literary prize or two.
Snobs of Extraordinary Ability
In Andre Aciman’s latest novel, a man recalls his time as a graduate student at Harvard, revisiting the early days of a long-estranged friendship.
The Madwoman and the Critic
On Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and the crime of dismissive criticism in both Bookforum and The LA Review of Books
Balkan Zoology
Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife was universally acclaimed by critics, but behind its beautiful writing lie some dangerously unexamined stereotypes about the Balkans. Pedja Jurisic digs beneath the mythology.
Second Glance: Another City
Mark Wallace’s novels won’t be found at a Barnes & Noble, and that may be a shame beyond words: both Dead Carnival and The Quarry and the Lot reveal haunting truths and wrestle language into terrifying attitudes.
Razing Hell
In a new memoir packed with garbled madness, we get a funhouse-mirror autobiography of the legendary Richard Hell, who did more than anybody to invent punk rock and only haphazardly survived to tell the tale
No Kaddish For Old Men
Does love create an unbridgeable distance between two souls? Marco Roth’s searching memoir of his microbiologist father alternates between longing and numbness in its search for what, if anything, binds fathers and sons
Infinite Reflection
Born of ancient Buddhist philosophy into the fragments of the modern world, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge asks essential questions about what it means to be human.
It’s a Mystery: “Half of the future is buried in the past”
Two seductive thrillers: one starring a fearless female cop, the other a boatload of washed-up MI5 spies.
From the Archives: Fools in Love
Like an overheated love letter, André Aciman’s novel Eight White Nights is easy to mock–but is it perhaps just as candid and emotionally powerful?
From the Archives: The Tiger Whelp
Tea Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife” is one of the most heralded fiction debuts of the season. Kevin Frazier weighs the switch-ups of its tone against the beauties of its prose.
In the Shadow of a Hero: Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Traumatized by her baby’s kidnapping and murder, disappointed in her marriage to a fallen hero, Anne Morrow Lindbergh found hope in the beautiful, fragile shells she found on the beach. The result was her gentle masterpiece Gifts from the Sea.
Master of the Morbid
The lurid pathology of Patrick McGrath’s fiction – its endless procession of madmen, derelicts, and misguided psychiatrists – can often blind us to the fact that he is first of all a historical novelist – and a great one.
Of Mice and Men
Why, asks James Meek’s latest novel, should the rich get smoother, easier lives than their less well-paid fellow men? And what can an innovative novelist do with the oft-visited ‘immoral rich versus honorable poor’ premise?
The Night Train for Naples: Gorky in Italy
The great Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s heart may always have been in Russia, but for years his intermittent stays in Italy stirred his creativity and fired his passion. “In love you discover everything right away,” he wrote – and he loved Italy.
I Groan In Silence
The media just won’t leave old man Voltaire alone! We run a transcript of the latest interview.
From the Archives: Embossed Coins
Elie Wiesel once claimed “a novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or not about Treblinka.” How does Steve Sem-Sandberg grapple with representing the unrepresentable in his sweeping chronicle of the Łódź ghetto, The Emperor of Lies? A review from our archives.
Troppo Sottile
Venice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison’s science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.
Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plums
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is beloved for its wit and wisdom. But behind its many beauties lurks a disquieting conclusion: that misery is the price we must pay for morality.
The Flimsiness of Difference
After fictionalizing his experiences in his previous four books, Aleksandar Hemon revisits his memories in a new collection of essays.
Exit the Dragons
Yes, we know Sam Lipsyte’s stories are laugh-out-loud funny. But all that low comedy–the pratfalls, the dirty jokes–serves as the ballast for some of the darkest stories in contemporary fiction. Steve Danziger elaborates.
Trauma Room
To make something we must first unmake or take apart something else. Why, then, in a novel preoccupied with acts of destruction and reconstruction, does Pat Barker not offer a corresponding deformation of form? Has her critique of Modernism led her to disavow art altogether?
Unhappy In Its Own Way
Car crashes, suburban swingers’ societies, accidental prostitution, Nixon enthusiasts, and a cameo performance by Don DeLillo – in her latest novel, A.M. Homes maintains her equilibrium
It’s a Mystery: “The most successful criminals don’t look the part”
Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs, is a dazzling debut that deserves a place as a benchmark of the crime-thriller genre
From the Archives: Seer Blest
Frank Kermode consumed all of the tumultuous 20th century’s literary theories without being consumed by them. A look at the work of this wisest of secular clerics.
Queen of the Gypsies
Spoiler alert! It’s a familiar warning — but isn’t it also a silly one? There’s so much more to novels than their plots. And yet what if we’re better readers for not knowing? Consider The Mill on the Floss, for example.
Puce Needle Diggings
When the Paris Review, long regarded as a literary standard-bearer, publishes a volume on the art of the short story, it flushes a flurry of conversations into the open: what is a short story? What constitutes an anthology-worthy example? What’s the audience for this kind of thing? And: can these stories answer such questions?
Flowers in the Pit
“The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karenina,’” wrote Virginia Woolf; “A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says ‘that is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.’” Joe Wright’s cinematic adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic avoids the pitfalls of such literalism.
A Little Cryptic, A Little Proud, A Little Mad
In M. John Harrison’s lyrical Viriconium trilogy, the high science of quantum physics meets the low art of fighting giant locusts. Justin Hickey finds a quiet spot to watch the chitin fly.
Epstein’s Kaleidoscope
Joseph Epstein has a cult following as a sharp-tongued critic and essayist. His latest collection showcases his love of words and ideas as well as his caustic wit.
Absent Friends: “Warm, funny, sad, true … It is Perfect”
“The proper function of a critic is to save a tale from the artist who created it” wrote D. H. Lawrence, but sometimes – most of the time – despite the best efforts of the best critics, both tale and artist disappear. What do we do with the criti-cal darlings of yesteryear, now filling the library bargain sale? And what of the critics, who called them imperishable?
Humor: Wayward Authors Nabbed!
The startling revelations in Anonymous turn out to be only the beginning: literary sleuths have uncovered a slew of other authorial misdemeanors.
Back, Back, Down the Old Ways of Time: D. H. Lawrence in Italy
Year after year, D. H.Lawrence found love, lust, and gainful employment in Italy – and through the strange alchemy of the place, he also found the inspirations for some of his most enduring works of art.
Fiona’s Gambit
John le Carré is still as popular as he’s ever been, but what about Len Deighton? Our correspondent has gone back to Deighton’s novels and found their Cold War intrigue and human dramas as rewarding as ever.
It’s a Mystery: “To the dead we owe only truth”
Watching the Dark, the latest in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, shows the master crime writer at the top of his form.
From the Archives: Everything United In Her
It’s a comfortable truism that the novels of Jane Austen are all things to all readers. But … a life-instruction manual? From the OLM Archives, a review of A Jane Austen Education
From the Archives: A Map of Faces
In 2011, Aleksandar Hemon chooses his favorite short fiction from all across Europe. From our archives, Kevin Frazier celebrated these bracing imports.
Tom and Em
It is said that Thomas Hardy fell deeply in love with his wife, Emma, only after she died. Stephen Akey revisits the stunning, elegiac poetry he wrote in her memory.
Tea with the Pushkins in Brussels
Say “Evgeny Onegin” to any educated Russian and you will trigger the first stanza or two of Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Now Russia’s national poet is finally coming into his own in the West as well.
Thinking God Knows What: James Joyce and Trieste
Unsettled and penniless, James Joyce’s exile was initially more imrpovised than cunning. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story of his early years on the continent.
Being Jonathan Harker: recollections of The Dead English
Not every actor gets the plum role of vampire hunter and romantic lead Jonathan Harker. Steve Brachmann reflects on his part in the Dracula-inspired rock musical The Dead English
It’s a Mystery: “Life is what happens to ‘trust no one’”
Dan Fesperman’s The Double Game is a complex literary novel of intrigue that makes spy fiction a central character, “doubling” the reading pleasure.
Moving-Away
The Hemingway Library has given us a variorum edition of A Farewell to Arms with 39 alternate endings. But how might Hemingway himself have felt about the resulting collage?
American Aristocracy: Gods of Copley Square – Centerpiece 5
A rumor of Narnia at Trinity Church prompts two questions. Can a building have a spiritual life? Can a work of art not? Phillips Brooks and the idea of ecstasy
From the Archives: Mad, Vlad, and Dangerous to Know
Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is the epitome of lurking evil — but two recent novels do their best to unearth the smoldering bad-boy behind the murderous facade. So: Was Mina Harker smitten before she was bitten?
The Prince of the Powers of the Air
Anthony Burgess is famous, but not for his best book. John Cotter sees your A Clockwork Orange and raises you the new Europa edition of Earthly Powers.
A Great and Sustaining Mystery
Anthony Burgess the novelist had dreams of being a composer. He had little success, but along the way he delved deep into the nature and meaning of music.
Closest to Perfection
Europa Editions has reprinted Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Earthly Powers. Our editors talk about that seminal volume which has inspired an issue wide celebration of Burgess and his work.
Real Full Rich Rank
Respectable novelists are solemn, meditative, and deliberate–they certainly don’t churn out book reviews every week. Anthony Burgess smashed that fussy mold and left us a lifetime’s work of brilliant, omnivorous literary journalism.
Rarest Spun Heavenmetal
A Clockwork Orange turned 50 this year and received the gift of an anniversary edition. Justin Hickey looks anew at the novel Anthony Burgess claimed to have knocked off in three weeks, and which made him famous.
Unorientalized
Anthony Burgess’ first novels were a series of dark comedies set in colonial Malaya. Did he fall prey to Edward Said’s Orientalist crtitique, or did he anticipate it?
Entitled to Extravagance: Some Historical Fictions of Anthony Burgess
Some of Anthony Burgess’ most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe’s England and Jesus’ Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Ou-Boum
“I knew my trip would mean an encounter with Adela Quested”: Victoria Olsen reflects on what she found, and what was lost in translation, when she travelled to India with E. M. Forster on her mind.
It’s A Mystery: “Three things that come without asking: fear, love and jealousy.”
A city in northern England and a remote Scottish island are appropriately bleak settings to launch two impressive new series.
A Year in Reviews at OL Weekly
Open Letters Weekly has been the venue for hundreds of book reviews in 2012. For your reading pleasure and holiday book-buying convenience, we gather them here in chronological order.
The Ghosts of Monmouth County
Bossophilia: The idolization of Bruce Springsteen that comes from midlife nostalgia and a fear of dying. Steve Danziger confronts the phenomenon, and a new biography.
Never-Neverland
The fairy tale has been through several metamorphoses; the next might result in its extinction. Max Ross reviews Jack Zipes’s cultural history of the genre.
Borges and You
Although I would rather do almost anything than attend a literary reading (like, for instance, stay home and read), I made an exception for Jorge Luis Borges when he lectured to a packed house at …
Performance Anxiety
What does it mean to say “only the music matters?” In her bleakly intelligent new novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz challenges us to consider what we really value in music and how our own demand for superhuman perfection strips it of its soul.
It’s a Mystery: “The only way a man learns the true spirit of a rock is to stub his toe on it”
William Kent Krueger and Steve Hamilton, authors of two critically acclaimed series, have winning new detective novels. Irma Heldman reviews.
This Light is Enough
Renowned reviewer and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn has a scintillating new collection of his recent work; John Cotter and Steve Donoghue compare notes on “Waiting for the Barbarians”
The Least Inauthentic Self
How can writers depict the fragmented modern soul? For Zadie Smith, the solution is an untidy, fragmented novel. M.K. Hall reviews NW
Book Review: London Eye
In the opening volume of the “Toxic City” series, London is cut off from the rest of the world and filling up with super-powered mutants – two things which have been true on YouTube for some time now.
First Person Singular
Can a famously cold and impersonal writer like Paul Auster make a memoir of aging that works against his strengths? And are they strengths after all?
Nine Ways of Looking at D’Annunzio
Madman, lothario, despot, drug fiend, friend and enemy of Mussolini – and immortal poet. Gabriele D’Annunzio was all of these things and many more in his whirlwind of a life.
Claiming the Future
Julio Cortázar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez brought Latin American fiction to the attention of the world. Now a young crop of writers are trying to move beyond magical realism–a new anthology charts the diverse approaches.
It’s a Mystery: “Nobody escaped the desire for vengeance. Nobody.”
The seventeenth Lee Child is vintage Jack Reacher and the eighth Louise Penny is, as always, compelling and charismatic
Book Review: The Exceptions
The son of a powerful crime family falls in love with a young woman in the Witness Protection Program – a young woman his family wants dead! Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Other Than Faith
What does the soul-searching writer do when the concept of the soul–to say nothing of God–has lost its currency? Two new confessional novels try to navigate that uncharted territory.
Books Before and After
It’s a bridge, a barrier, and a burden; it’s used in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the outhouse. Leah Price helps us think again about what we can, should, or want to do with that most fetishized of objects: the book.
Wagner’s Inferno
The worlds of fine art, porno, hollywood, meth addiction, and quality lit cross and recombine in Bruce Wagner’s latest Dead Stars. We made this culture, now what do we make of it?
Attainted: The Life and Afterlife of Ezra Pound in Italy
Pound wrote The Pisan Cantos on toilet paper while prisoner in an open-air metal cage during WWII, and he spent many of the following years in mental hospitals. “I can get along with crazy people,” he quipped. “It’s only the fools I can’t stand.”
Trouble in Mind
What would it mean if history were a joke, a shaggy dog story? J. G. Farrell’s bleakly funny Troubles reflects the struggle of post-war British literature to come to terms with the inheritance of modernism.
Therapeutic Wordsworth
There are warring schools of fad and interpretation, there are critical readings of an hour or a season – and then there’s Wordsworth’s verse itself, annotating and amplifying the personal reading experience.
It’s a Mystery: “No one is infallible or invisible”
A rare film is the centerpiece of Syndrome E, a cutting-edge, mesmerizing thriller.
From the Archives: A Voyeur in the Archives
“Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers…their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has balls.” This and other gleanings from a trip to the David Foster Wallace archives.
Good in the Good Sense: Antonio Machado
The great Antonio Machado loved his native Spain and was disgusted by its descent into fascism; that fusion of enchantment and grief vivifies his unforgettable poetry.
It’s a Mystery: “Every man has his price”
Two scalpel-sharp political thrillers that mark the welcome return of the thoroughly winning, charismatic protagonists: Charlie Muffin and Joe DeMarco.
‘Glory, Maiden, Glory!’: The Uncomfortable Chivalry of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
You think you know Ivanhoe: it’s the original swash-buckling adventure story, full of fights, escapes, ambushes, and then, of course, a happy ending. But what you see if you look more closely may make you think twice about its chivalric ideals.
From the Archives: Cato of the Antipodes
Open Letters mourns the loss of Gore Vidal, sine qua non, ne plus ultra
Summer Reading 2012
As the haze and heat of summer kick into full swing, the folk of Open Letters break out their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Summer Reading 2012 Continues
Our feature continues, as more Open Letters folk share their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Humane to Hornets: The Poetry of James Schuyler
The verses of the neglected poet James Schuyler seem to ramble, but they don’t really ramble; they seem dishevelled, but they aren’t; they seem miniaturist, but they contain whole worlds. Stephen Akey makes the case for your renewed attention.
Much God damned Entropy
2012, a William Gaddis renaissance year, sees the reissue of the author’s awesome, strangely prescient 1975 novel J R. Greg Gerke and Gabriel Blackwell discuss their experiences tackling the tome.
The Twilight(ing) of the Superhero
Nerdy teenager Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider – and a super-franchise was born! As a new blockbuster Spider-Man movie hits the summer theaters, Justin Hickey takes us on a tour of the character’s colorful – and often tortured – past!
A Measure of the Master: Georges Simenon’s romans durs
The inventor of the beloved Inspector Maigret was gigantically prolific – hundreds of novels, churned out at lightning speed (80 pages a day, according to the author himself) – and in this as in many other things, Georges Simenon was a world unto himself.
“In Advance of Failure Foreseen”: Why James Agee Still Matters
John Updike once affably damned James Agee as a wasted talent who failed to cultivate his craft. Liza Birnbaum replies with a defense of the glories of Agee’s ragged, heartfelt work.
It’s a Mystery: “A good detective assumes nothing”
Cop to Corpse, the 12th in Peter Lovesey’s Detective Supt. Peter
Diamond series, finds the master at the top of his form.
Peer Review: Home
Book reviewers are split on whether Toni Morrison’s new novel is a further triumph or a falling off. Or have these critics only found what they anticipated? We review the reviews, then we review the book.
Endless Forms Most Brutal
As Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” takes movie-goers back to the world of his “Alien” classics, we take a look at the long and lively history of modern cinema’s most famous monsters.
The Dangers of Failing to Lesnerize
Dubbed the Voltaire of science fiction, Robert Sheckley often denied that there was anything serious in his fabulations. But a new collection belies the claim, displaying inventive satire mixed with wisdom
Macaroni and Cheese
“You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni” is a terrible line, a symptom of all the reasons George Eliot’s Romola is a failure. But is failure really such a bad thing? Maybe a novelist’s reach should exceed her grasp.
Second Glance: The Conrad Connection
This picaresque classic by Colombian novelist Álvaro Mutis doubles as an extended valentine to the author of Heart of Darkness. Robert Latona revisits it.
It’s a Mystery: “Life is an ever-unfolding panoply of marvels”
Carsten Stroud’s Niceville is a wildly edgy thriller with the heart of a dark comedy–our resident mystery maven reviews
From the Archives: Supping with Glaucus: A Tour of Roman Historical Fiction
Steve Donoghue takes the emperor’s box to thumbs-up or thumbs-down an array of Roman historical novels, as “A Year with the Romans” continues.
From the Archives: Second Glance: The Radicalism of Felix Holt
Felix Holt, the Radical may be one of George Eliot’s least-read novels, but its questions about a democracy that puts power in the hands of “ignorant numbers” still have both moral and political resonance.
Affliction Fiction
Brian Evenson’s work is a violent exploration of a violent medium: language. His new novel Immobility and the stories collected in Windeye continue that journey into dark territory.
All the World to Nothing
The real mystery of Richard III is not the fate of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, but why we never tire of telling and re-telling his story. What do we really see when we stare at his enigmatic portrait?
Facts, And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Art, Truth, Data, Sex, and Facebook–rabble-roused by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact, Max Ross connects them in a key to all nonfiction aesthetics
Monumental and Fragile
No form of literature seems as thoroughly doomed in the 21st century as the printed encyclopedia, but even dinosaurs can have rich and rewarding life-stories. Where did we go, before we all went to the Internet?
Ghost Town Apostle
Ken Layne’s political writing is sharp and raucus, and a novel about a financially devastated near-future United States would seem like a perfect vehicle for more anger. But though that fire is still there, a gentle-but-compelling spiritualist tone has risen to to the fore.
Bad for You
Known as much for how she exited her life as for the poetry she wrote during it, Sylvia Plath remains a polarizing figure in the world of verse. What are we reading, when we subject ourselves to her poems?
A Rasp in the Air
A thumping mix-tape of dystopian fantasy and gangster noir, Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane defies easy categorization–but does it offer a story to match its stylistic bravura?
Into the Breach: Battle Royale and Hunger Games
The box office record-setting movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the latest incarnation of an unsettling children-as-prey plot that’s been with us in one form or another for a long time – and never more vividly than in Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale
Downright Rude: Reading Catullus
The raw sexuality of the Catullus’ love poems keeps them alive even today, and the things he implied about Julius Caesar STILL can’t be repeated in polite conversation – how do we deal with this young man who’s always making us feel just a bit uncomfortable?
The People’s Prisoner
When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2010, it was given to an empty chair. Its recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was in prison for advocating human rights in China. Though he is still incarcerated, a collection of essays sheds light on his thought and struggle.
Second Glance: Seth Morgan and the Kamikaze Novel
With its headspinning wordplay and lunatic cast of characters, Seth Morgan’s 1990 novel Homeboy blazed like a comet into the literary pantheon. Steve Danziger revisits this grime crime classic.
American Aristocracy – Harvard Pulpit: Boston Brahmin Liberalism
To the quintessential virtues the Puritans lent to a fledgling republic – globality, philantropy, and autonomy – the ‘speaking aristocracy’ of the Boston Brahmins added one more: the love of learning
Making the List
Long-time critic John Sutherland’s latest book The Lives of the Novelists takes readers on a biographical tour of 294 creators’ lives. But does it work? Long-time critic Steve Donoghue and novelist John Cotter try to figure that out.
It’s a Mystery: “The world is a great honeycombed thing”
In Nick Harkaway’s altogether remarkable novel Angelmaker, blistering gangster noir meets Rabelaisian comedy
Humanitarian Disaster Romance
In The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson evokes the brutality of North Korea’s authoritarian regime by way of an over-the-top love story. Joyce W. Lee investigates whether torture and romance can coexist in one novel.
Shore to Shore
For two generations, the great American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson has been instructing and delighting his readers – and inspiring some of them to become critics themselves.
Queen Elizabeth the First
Elizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it – which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
The Tigers of Wrath
Where would Lionel Trilling, godfather of the liberal imagination, fit into our contemporary culture of ideas? And how much of that culture is of his making?
Aid in the Labyrinth
Randall Jarrell was suspicious of attempts to turn criticism into a science: he wrote as a reader, for other readers, with the work itself foremost in his mind.
The Knower and the Sayer
Most criticism is reactive, but in his essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proved prophetic. He set a challenge and Walt Whitman took him up on it.
Acts of Rendition
Richard Poirier was one of the great bridge-builders–his sorely neglected classic A World Elsewhere drew upon the writing of Emerson but presciently anticipated the postmodernist ideas that would soon enter the mainstream.
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lane
The best of Anthony Lane’s many New Yorker reviews and essays were collected in Nobody’s Perfect, a big volume that amply displays this writer’s wit and subtlety.
A Talent for Deception
Agatha Christie has received praise from wide and varied corners, and mystery columnist Irma Heldman adds to the chorus with this retrospective on the life and work of the Queen of Crime.
A Fine Romance
Is there more to romance fiction than perfect people meeting cute and living happily ever after? Sarah Wendell thinks so, but her arguments in defense of this most reviled of genres may themselves sell it short.
Wallace Stevens: A Spirit Storming
Wallace Stevens, so long considered the driest and most cerebral of poets, can in fact touch the soul. It all hangs on the nature of poetry itself, what it is.
Trompe L’oeil
Eli Gottlieb’s novels are built on dissimulation: lies to be cruel, lies to be kind … how does this formula hold in The Face Thief, and what is Gottlieb getting at?
Falling for the Big Con
This new novel has all the grit, violence, and hopelessness we expect of the noir sub-genre, but here it’s infused with an almost philosophical edge.
Crowd Control to Major Tom
Tom McCarthy’s Derrida-inspired linguistic and narrative fixations are once again on full display in Men in Space, his first novel now reissued after the popularity of Remainder and C
Recognizably Human: Larkin and the Sentimental
Nobody would accuse the mature Larkin of being a greeting card poet, and yet a warm and even vulnerable sentimentality bubbles up in his verse, often when it’s least expected.
It’s a Mystery: “He’s the gray cardinal of the Kremlin”
The Silent Oligarch is a smashing debut thriller that has Chris Morgan Jones assuming the le Carré mantle in his own very original way
Looking for Laura
She’s a shadow, an absence, that haunts the letters, diaries, and novels of her famous half-sister Virginia Woolf. What can we really know about Laura Stephen?
Radical Acceptance
Ayad Akhtar’s debut novel American Dervish describes joins a Pakistani-American boy’s coming-of-age story with the exploration of a Muslim family’s assimilation into picket-fenced suburbs. What traditions will be kept or compromised? And more importantly, how well does the author present his vision?
Coterminous
If anything’s taboo in our society it’s a thoughtful, humanistic portrait of a terrorist, which is why more established writers failed where Jarett Kobek delivers something new.
The Quiet One
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is usually overshadowed by her sisters’ masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but this gripping novel, a startling exposé of Victorian patriarchy, deserves a turn in the spotlight.
Devil Twins
Is Don DeLillo’s short game as good as his long? Is it better? His first collection of short fiction — or is it his first? — offers occasion to take the much-lauded writer’s measure.
It’s a Mystery: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery”
P.D. James takes on Jane Austen: a match made in elite whodunit heaven.
“The Desire for Motion”: Tagore’s Three Voices
Prince of the Bengali renaissance, internationally feted poet, composer, painter, educator — why don’t we know Rabindranath Tagore today? And will a new book open our eyes?
Between the Devil and Aunt Edna
His own life was the great tragedy he was never quite able to write. Michael Adams assesses the career of playwright Terence Rattigan.
Over Grinton Bridge: Riding into the Heart of Reformation
A rich, beautiful, but sadly neglected historical masterpiece: Hilda Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey is the War and Peace of the English Reformation
It’s a Mystery: “Small clues save you. Small errors kill.”
Carte Blanche is bestselling author Jeffrey Deaver’s new take on James Bond—bringing Agent 007 into the post-9/11 age.
“Writing Against Time”: An Interview With Benjamin Markovits
“I made no particular effort to keep the portrait of Byron consistent from one novel to another. I wanted to show him in different lights, from different angles.” Joshua Lustig interviews the author of the esteemed Byron Trilogy.
Desultory Vivacity
Does marriage mean much anymore? Does the novel? Jeffrey Eugenides sets out to reinvent the classic literary story—but can he combine the style and the substance of the greats he hopes to update to our times?
An American in China
A meticulously-researched rendition of the horrifying massacres that comprised the “Rape of Nanjing” is the backdrop for Ha Jin’s latest telegraphic and affecting novel.
There Will Be No More Great Ideas
Robert Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities was groundbreaking not because it’s unfinished but because it’s unfinishable. A new study attempts to take scope of its deep and mesmerizing pointlessness.
It’s a Mystery: “A Father’s No Shield for His Child”
A gripping thriller, the debut collaborative work from a duo of Danish writers, is the first in a trilogy you won’t soon forget.
Skulking in the Sewers
Umberto Eco’s potboiling new novel The Prague Cemetery was denounced in Europe for anti-Semitism, and then went on to become a best-seller. Is the controversy valid? What strange creation has Eco brought forth?
In Lieu of a Drink
Provocative public intellectual/muckraker Christopher Hitchens offers an enormous volume of collected essays and articles, probably his last.
Time Wounds All Heels
In Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel The Stranger’s Child the renown of a minor English poet balloons and distorts in each succeeding decade after his death
Down and Out in Luanda and Lisbon
Novelist António Lobo Antunes’ books are searing and wildly original indictments of Portugal’s needlessly protracted and bloody colonization of Angola.
A Crucible of the Human Spirit Guy
Ben Lerner’s arresting first novel sets a funhouse mirror before the author’s own formative years as a poet, poseur, and pill-popper in Madrid.
The Birth of a Salesman
Eleven years after her breakout novel The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt returns to satirize the chattering nonsense of the corporate world.
It’s A Mystery: “He had never tried to hide from himself his taste for the hazard of sin.”
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A Death in Summer is the fourth and best addition to the literate, elegant mystery series by Benjamin Black, the pen name of an award-winning author.
Satanic Maggots
Colonialism, feminism, witchcraft, the Lord of Darkness — themes such as these once made Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novels bestsellers. Now her charmingly subversive fiction is back in print.
Love at First Glans
Nicholson Baker’s provocative new book is an attempt at mainstream literary pornography, but does it suffer from the same performance anxiety as other novelistic efforts to depict sex?
Oblivion
One of the most significant voices of the Harlem Renaissance was Jessie Redmon Fauset — novelist, essayist, translator, and editor. She’s become obscured behind many of the male writers she published, but Joanna Scutts returns her poignant work to the main stage
Three for the Boys
Newly released in paperback are three Young Adult novels aimed at that sometimes-elusive reading demographic: teen boys.
Byronic Interludes
The larger-than-life exploits of Lord Byron drew an erratic and daunting trajectory through the lives of those nearest him. A trilogy of novels attempts to go where so many biographies have gone before.
‘What a Brain must Mine be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth
Once considered a credible rival to Dickens and Thackeray, W. H. Ainsworth is nearly forgotten today. It’s our loss: his historical novels – full of sensuous detail – run the gamut of romance and horror, tragedy and comedy.
A Jester During the Third Reich
Irmgard Keun depicted exceptionally naive women and seemed even to play the the role herself, even suing The Gestapo for banning her books. But was there a strategy behind playing dumb?
The Bad Man Comes to Stay
A witty young woman meets a devastating man — literally, he devastates her. From the wreck of her life she tells her tale, and it is a tale well told. Sex meets death in Deborah Kay Davies’ brilliant True Things About Me
Oh, the futility! Adapting Jane Eyre
Its early readers found the novel shocking, unfeminine, un-Christian, revolutionary. So why are film adaptations of Jane Eyre so studiously inoffensive?
Sorokin’s Tyrannical Chosen
Vladimir Sorokin’s gruesome (and frequently censored) satires puncture Russia’s surprising nostalgia for the glory days of Stalin and Khrushchev; Amelia Glaser reviews two newly released works.
Not merely because of the fate of character
The self is strange and divided in Jenny Boully’s new book of poetry; Karen Hannah tries to piece it together.
On the Barricades with the Bourgeoisie
Visionary novelist J.G. Ballard’s penultimate book “Millennium People,” about an outbreak of middle-class revolution and terrorism, has finally been published in the U.S.
The Old Stories
Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Sure, but should they steal whole characters? plots? authors? Robert Coover and the writers of Re: Telling steal it all and let their readers sort it out.
Michigan Falls
Scott Sparling’s first novel Wire to Wire has rushed up at the reading world full of glue-sniffers, freight-hoppers, wedgeheads, and knives midair — so what’s it really about?
The Zither and the Worm
French trailblazer Raymond Roussel created teeming and fertile worlds from a secret process of wordplay. Two of his most spectacular works are coming back into print after a long, undeserved absence.
Ah, the Merry Widows!
Widowhood is lonely, darkly comic, defiant, and emotionally vital in Michelle Latiolais’s new story collection. Jeff Bursey reviews.
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.
Memo to a Colleague
Is Marjorie Garber’s defense of literary studies balm to the beleaguered English professor’s soul? Not yet, anyway.
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.
A Novelist in Tahrir Square
It’s fitting that Ahdaf Soueif is narrating this exciting new chapter in Egypt’s history: for decades she has offered her readers richer, more complicated stories of the Middle East than the commonplace ones of submission and extremism.
The Wanderer
The protagonist of Teju Cole’s “Open City” roams New York, gathering and subtly processing observations; Andrew Martin trails this enigmatic walker in the city.
I Is Someone Else
Death-in-a-Box meditates on sameness, doubling, and identity’s dissolve. So who is this Alta Ifland? And what sets her apart?
It’s a Mystery: “A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught”
The premise of this elegantly wrought thriller puts a chilling new spin on the notorious British spy ring, “The Cambridge Five.”
Strange Silence
Stanley Elkin’s fiction is marked by verbal wizardry and a searing comic vision; does a new biography do justice to his underappreciated artistry?
Forever Nell
She was an orange-seller, an actress, a whore, and the most popular of Charles II’s many mistresses: Nell Gwynn stars in two new novels.
Wife Number Five
Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family’s ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own – risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl’s brief rise and fall.
“He had become my Tarzan”
Tarzan is one of the most popular fictional creations in modern times. Does the Ape Man define something essential in the human experience – or do we keep redefining Tarzan to suit our ever-changing needs?
The Muse of Trouville
‘She’s a drug; I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.’ Victoria Best explores the fraught relationship between Marguerite Duras and the young man whose love inspired and tormented her.
Squid Pro Quo
Matt Taibbi is the foremost political-writing muckraker of his generation, matching an acerbic wit with a pressure-cooked prose style. But is there substance behind the bluster?
A Woman of High Courage
For nearly three decades, Sara Paretsky has used the familiar form of the private eye novel to turn a critical eye on contemporary America. Rohan Maitzen reviews the latest in her V.I. Warshawski series.
A Visit from the Prince
You think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble… Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham’s paradoxical new novel “By Nightfall”.
Still Hoping for Her Close-Up
Molly Allgood was only a young, up-and-coming actress when her fiance J.M. Synge died of cancer. Joseph O’Connor’s novel “The Ghost Light” imagines how the rest of her life played out in the shadow of that loss.
One Common Reader
Virginia Woolf imagined the Almighty seeing us coming towards Paradise, books in hand: “We have nothing to give them, they have loved reading.” But does reading always bring salvation?
Fallout, Carry On
Lance Olsen’s page-turning experimental novel-in-stories mugs, flirts, ends the world, and dares the reader to make a rondel of intuitive leaps.
Year with Short Novels: The Nihilism of Nathanael West
His short novels are the ‘ugly stepchildren’ of 20th century fiction, and yet his admirers are legion; A Year with Short Novels takes a look at Nathanael West and his two best-known works.
Young Jew Telling Jokes
Assimilation is the nightmare of Joshua Cohen’s daring novel “Witz,” and the book is therefore designed to be strange and prickly to the gentiles who try to read it.
Of Form, E-Readers, and Thwarted Genius: End of a Year with Short Novels
In our Internet-fueled new century, can the in-between genre of the short novel survive? Or have novellas – with their speed and feral intensity – finally come into their own? Our Year with Short Novels concludes.
Etched in Carbon
Tom McCarthy’s new palimpsest of microscripts, C, attempts a new technocratic and poetical re-imagining of its protagonist’s life story. What’s at stake, and what’s won?
Literature is Dead, Long Live Literature
Is the death of literature finally dead? If not, it’s been dealt a healthy blow by Gregory Jusdanis’ Fiction Agonistes, even it art does have to “justify itself in a way not necessary before.”
The Prodigal Brothers
Ever since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes — and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
A Different Sort of Englishness
John le Carré not only has a new novel — all his old ones are being inducted into the pantheon of UK Penguin Classics. Has this indefatigable crafter of spy novels transformed into the litterateur in our lifetime?
Year with Short Novels: True Grit & Greatness
Charles Portis’s “True Grit” features a young girl who’s all business and a grizzled gunslinger who’s all heart — but there’s far more complexity and humor to the story than the Hollywood pairing implies. Ingrid Norton looks at a great American novella.
Apartness
A new collection of Nadine Gordimer’s short fiction illuminates the stark realities of apartheid and showcases the literary talents of the woman who saw it all.
Bluebeard in Japan
In Yoko Ogawa’s beautiful, violent take on the Bluebeard legend, a stern old man and a biddable girl meet in a hotel and embark on a sexual journey of surprising poignancy.
Temporarily Miracle-Sodden
The most Bellovian figure of all may have been the man who lent us the term. A new collection of Saul Bellow’s letters present the man in all his exuberant passion and thorny short-temper.
Misfiring the Canon
Of the charismatic Yale lecturer one adoring student wrote, “Charles Hill is God,” and in his new book, Hill moves in mysterious ways. He claims that statecraft and the Western canon are inextricably linked — but there are doubters in the temple.
Going Back to the Well
In his latest book, Stephen King works in extremely familiar territory — ordinary people presented with extraordinary moral choices, with a dash of the eerie thrown in. Do an old hand’s usual tricks still entertain?
The Platypus
For more than fifty years and more than fifty novels, Louis Auchincloss chronicled the lives of New York’s upper class. His last book is a memoir of his life among that upper class — but is truth stranger than fiction?
The Purposes of Creation
As reproductive technology has become more advanced, the value of those engineered lives has become more complicated. Two recent novels provide a striking perspective on this growing conflict.
A Book Every King Should Read
George R. R. Martin’s epic “Song of Fire and Ice” has sold millions of copies and is about to be a new HBO production. A timely appreciation gives you some idea of what all the fuss is about.
George Eliot for Dummies
Free thinker, strong-minded woman, scholar, lover, novelist: George Eliot lived a courageous life that should be known and celebrated. But does Brenda Maddox’s new biography do it justice?
A Year with Short Novels: Of Dogs & Men
J. R. Ackerley’s complex and marvelous novella “We Think the World of You”–in which two lonely, repressed people contend for the affections of a glorious dog–is the next work featured in “A Year with Short Novels.”
“Someone New to Love”
A teacher seduced by the fame of his star pupil? Or two great minds meeting despite differences in age and station? Annabel Lyon’s celebrated new novel “The Golden Mean” dramatizes the relationship between Aristotle and the boy who would go on to become Alexander the Great.
Unlies His Mother Told Him
Emma Donoghue’s story of a boy raised in perfect (if penitential) solitude with his mother and then thrust into the wide world is parable about the isolation of affection–or is it a commentary on how alien our society has become?
…then we are “jingoes”
A new book argues that Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst stampeded the United States into the Spanish-American War to feed imperial ambition and sell some newspapers. Are the roots of modern America rotten?
“Perception at the Pitch of Passion”
A catch-all collection of James Baldwin’s essays, letters, and speeches reveals a social commenter whose observations retain their relevance and universality to this day
It’s…James Franco!
Hollywood heartthrob James Franco follows a different Muse and delivers his debut collection of short stories. You’re just a bit curious, aren’t you?
Against the Wind
It’s one of the iconic bestsellers of the 20th century, an epic of love and war — but how well does “Gone With The Wind” hold up, as a book? A personal journey through a problematic classic.
The Curious Disposition
Some of the greatest works of English literature grapple with the dark, knotted roots of anti-Semitism, and the audience is always complicit. A new book studies the tangle of art and atrocity in writers Chaucer to Marlowe to Shakespeare
“What Seems Simple”
“Pride and Prejudice” has been so thoroughly revised, modernized, and sequelized that its subtleties risk being overlooked. A new annotated edition seeks to yield up its many secrets.
Keeping Up with the Romans: The Senator Investigates
He toadied to a succession of emperors and trembled at the mere thought of being mugged — on the surface, it looks odd to cast Pliny the Younger as a detective. A new mystery novel takes that chance.
Year with Short Novels: Elizabeth Smart, Queen of Sheba
A wild fever-dream of a book, “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” careers between thrilling emotion and absurd histrionics–that spiky course is charted in this installment of The Year with Short Novels
The Sorcerer
Donald Sturrock’s hefty new biography of Roald Dahl shows both the troubled, temperamental family man and the conjurer of wicked, entrancing stories
Gary Shteyngart, Old Man
Who is Gary Shteyngart to call thirty-somethings old? Perhaps a thirty-something himself, bringing forth his most mature novel to date.
Year with Short Novels: Love, the Limits of Narrative, & The Pilgrim Hawk
The twisty boundaries of narrative reliability are at the heart of Ingrid Norton’s discussion the neglected classic “The Pilgrim Hawk” as “A Year with Short Novels” continues.
The Crossing
Warmth and pleasure are scarce commodities in Per Petterson’s new novel “I Curse the River of Time,” but Janet Potter reveals where they’re hidden
I Don’t Find My Jokes Funny Anymore
The classic epistolary novel is given a new, notably misanthropic turn in Sam Savage’s The Cry of the Sloth — Jeff Bursey reviews
Encountering Kundera
“Art is dying,” Milan Kundera writes in his essay collection “Encounter,” “because the need for art is dying”; John G. Rodwan, Jr. assesses his attempt to re-stoke that need
Fetch My Embroidery!
Was Eleanor of Aquitaine a power in medieval politics or a glittering figurehead? This wife of two kings and mother of four stars in a new novel by Alison Weir – but will the real Eleanor please stand up?
The Original Wasn’t Better
Amardeep Singh rebuts the oldest of film-goer complaints with a defense of adaptations of classic literature, the more inventive the better
Illuminations
Alberto Manguel’s library of 30,000 books is his Holy of Holies, and his new essay collection is a spiritual (and at times gnomic) journey through its most sacred texts
Dame Alice
Alice Perrers is reviled by history for insinuating her way into Edward III’s bed and Queen Phillipa’s jewels. Now Emma Campion’s new novel aims to rescue her tattered reputation.
Midlife Magic
Emmanuel Carrere’s memoir is an uneasy blend of sexual fantasy and archival records, of a future with a beautiful young woman and a past haunted by a possible Nazi collaborator
Year with Short Novels: Diving into Atwood’s Surfacing
This new installment of the Year with Short Novels immerses itself in Margaret Atwood’s haunting second novel, Surfacing
The Sound and the Furry
Werewolves have no ur-text, so, as a new anthology demonstrates, they’ve been portrayed in scores of different, and often conflicting, ways in literature and film
The Morality of Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
Thackeray’s seminal big baggy monster of a novel is a satiric romp across all levels of English society – and every bit as enjoyable now as it was when it was the talk of London in 1847
Year with Short Novels: Breakfast at Sally Bowles’
Readers have adored Truman Capote’s iconic Holly Golightly; they might be amazed, then, by how much Capote borrowed from Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles
Crazy in the City
In Craig Dilouie’s new thriller Tooth and Nail, American troops are called home to New York from war-torn Iraq, only to find there are some horrors far worse than those of war
On the Bunny Slopes of Helicon
Steven Moore’s big new book seeks to give an ‘alternative history’ to that most familiar of literary forms, the novel. But at what point does history become wishful thinking?
The Idea of Her
Her stature has only grown over time, dominating bookstores, television, movie theaters, and now the Internet. She’s Jane Austen, the world’s least likely pop star.
Write, Repeat Redux
In his new memoir, Christopher Hitchens regales his readers with one good story after another. But as John Rodwan shows, we’ve heard most of them before – lots of times.
Year with Short Novels: The Rooms of the Past
Ingrid Norton’s Year with Short Novels continues in this installment about William Maxwell’s problematically nostalgic novella So Long, See You Tomorrow
Counterfeit Wit
Liars and impostors have been Peter Carey’s bread and butter for 30 years–so he’s up to mischief when he takes on the beloved and upright Alexis de Tocqueville in a new novel.
A Year with Short Novels: Awash with Conrad
It was only a matter of time before our Year with Short Novels got around to the most famous one of them all and traveled deep into The Heart of Darkness.
The Nautilus
When John Ruskin, the foremost architectural critic of the Victorian era, discovered Venice, he fell in love. An elaborate new work paints the picture in great detail.
The Playground of the Gods
Hermes, god of thieves and liars, is the narrator of John Banville’s new novel The Infinities. Janet Potter looks into the story he’s got to tell.
Zen and the Art of Skull-Impaling
Even in these fractious times, we can all agree that zombies are bad, and that killing zombies is good. But how exactly do you do it? A new book hones your technique.
Onward, Muriel, Onward!
Perceptive, cosmopolitan British novelist Muriel Spark has at last received an enormous and long-promised biography. Is justice done – or perhaps overdone?
Carson McCullers and Her Crowd
She’s been praised by Oprah and cut by Joyce Carol Oates; the nature of Carson McCullers’ prose has always confounded some readers and pleased others. We read her again.
A Year with Short Novels: On Lifting Veils
The Lifted Veil, George Eliot’s dalliance with Gothic horror, turns out to be nearly as dense and cerebral as her masterpieces; though of course, in keeping with the theme of this monthly feature, it’s far far shorter.
Adeste Fideles
Woe to the critic who calls Edith Grossman’s translations “seamless.” In her combative new treatise she argues for a greater recognition of the artistry of translation–but how many liberties can a translator take while staying true to the original?
The Once and Future Arthur
He pulled a sword from a stone and became a legend, and for a thousand years, that legend has changed and shifted. Two new Young Adult novels take up the old familiar story in new ways.
She Paints for Them
Sofonisba Anguissola was the best-known female painter of the Renaissance, but before that, she was art instructor to a willful young queen. A new novel revives those sad, glorious days.
As If In a Glorious Hell
In a debut collection of stories, Tiphanie Yanique attempts to capture in prose the complexities of modern-day life and racial identity in a Caribbean behind the tourism ads.
Through the Keyhole
Mikhail Chekhov’s Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir has at last been published in English in its entirety, and its flaws and omissions make it almost as revealing as one of Anton’s own stories.
A Year with Short Novels: “There is a bridge….”
The jewel-like perfection of Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” is the subject of Ingrid Norton’s scrutiny in this latest installment of “The Year of Short Novels”
Peer Review: DeLillo and the Three Ps
The nation’s book critics naturally congregated when Don DeLillo’s slim new book appeared. In the latest Open Letters Peer Review, John Rodwan supplies a scorecard for the players.
Like Dust, and Memories
In mythology, Alcestis is the model wife, willing to give up her own life for her husband’s. In Katharine Beutner’s lyrical retelling, the truth is more complex.
The Lost Library: Donald Windham’s Two People
Donald Windham may not have intended his 1965 novel Two People to be trailblazing, but its unsentimental frankness set it apart just the same. Philip Gambone reads it again.
It’s Not All Gossip and Fangs
The latest novels by Francisco X. Stork and Benjamin Alire Saenz remind us that there’s much, much more to teen fiction than vampire fads.
Facebook Fiction
Justin Taylor’s Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever raises the age-old question about ‘hot’ new collections: can they possibly live up to their own billing? Janet Potter turns in a verdict.
The Sweetness of Short Novels
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.
A Year with Short Novels: J.L. Carr’s Chance for Renewal
In A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr explores that most challenging emotion to capture in fiction: happiness
All the Sad Young Bankers
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.
Welcome to Highsmith Country
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.
The Creation, and Erasure, of Laura
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…
Wayward Directions
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.
World Without End, Amen
Mary Caponegro continues her chronicle of troubled intimacies in the story collection All Fall Down
“Did you en-joy the de-mon-stra-tion?”
Boilerplate traveled the world at the turn of the twentieth century in attempt to dissuade humans from their many wars. Finally, his biography (can such things be?) is revealed, and Lianne Habinek reveals its astonishing contents
Vampires Are SO Last Year
Lauren Kate’s new young adult book Fallen is getting the full Twilight treatment, YouTube trailer and all. Kristin Brower Walker looks into what the book is about beyond all that promotional blitz
The Mysteries of Berkeley
In Manhood for Amateurs novelist Michael Chabon visits the strange planet known as parenthood. John G. Rodwan, Jr. follows him where plenty have gone before.
Prospero’s Staff
Philip Roth’s The Humbling is shrouded in the wintry landscape of his late style. Robin Mookerjee enters the cold.
It’s a Mystery: “Sooner or later, everybody pays”
Irma Heldman reviews The Ghosts of Belfast, Stuart Neville’s grand Irish thriller debut in which the anti-hero, Gerry Fegan, a former IRA hitman, is “touched” as in crazy, and long ago would have been given the death sentence if they’d had anyone with the moxie to kill him.
Uncertainty Principles
In Changing My Mind novelist Zadie Smith, long a literary essayist, gathers together her burgeoning belles-lettres. Is it just a chance collection or does a common theme run through them? Sam Sacks reviews her views.
Have You Seene Me?
As Laura Kolbe shows, A New Literary History of America throws every word of its own title into question—and that’s not the most exciting part of Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’ immense anthology
“This Spider — No More!”
In the 1970s, two giants of the Spider-Man comic book, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita, reunited for a daily newspaper comic strip. Paradise? Ask Khalid Ponte.
2009 Standouts in Teen Fiction
2009 was a strong year for the teen fiction genre, with inventive entries of every style. Kristin Walker selects three winners in a year-end roundup.
The Books and the City
Dan Baum and Dave Eggers have made very different books on New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Thomas Larson separates sense from sensationalism.
A Real Island
For a season, Maurice Sendak’s iconic Wild Things have become specifically what Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze want them to be … but what is that? Janet Potter goes out to meet them.
The Fixer
Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novel Wolf Hall recently won the Man-Booker Prize. Each part of that sentence was guaranteed to attract Steve Donoghue’s attention.
Damage Assessment
Perennially underrated novelist Pete Dexter’s latest, Spooner, continues his fascination with damaged characters. Sam Sacks tours a body of work composed mostly of battered bodies.
Chaos, and a Stranger Arrives
Hairy slugs, warring souls, and sexy goblins – Young Adult Fiction is alive and well. Kristin Walker hunkers down with three recent thrillers.
Naught for the Naughty
In The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt tells the long and complicated story of a family’s secrets; Karen Vanuska sheds some light in the corners.
Second Glance: A Weight that Won’t Go Away
Readers are familiar with the uncompromising dissections of Apartheid South Africa in J.M. Coetzee’s Booker winners Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K, but Greg Gerke wants us to be equally aware of the haunting vision of Coetzee’s 1990 novel Age of Iron
#1
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#2
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#3
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#4
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#6
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#7
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#8
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#9
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
#10
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
2009 Bestseller Feature
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
Second Glance: Reading Anthony Trollope
He wrote over 40 novels, many of which a classics, and that sheer quantity can be daunting. Rohan Maitzen tells us how best to approach the literary dynamo that was Anthony Trollope.
It’s A Mystery: “Men engaged in warfare are all ghosts in the making”
From Charles Todd, author of the critically acclaimed Ian Rutledge series, comes A Duty to the Dead, introducing Bess Crawford, a World War I nurse, who is feisty, fearless, and fascinating. Irma Heldman joins Crawford on her inaugural adventure.
Mothers and Daughters
Young adult fiction today is as varied and challenging as young adult life has become. Kristin Brower Walker reads two promising new titles, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and When You Reach Me, that seem destined to make the next Newbery Award shortlist.
Avatar Bazaar
Fans of Dan Chaon’s complex, intellectual fiction have eagerly awaited his newest, Await Your Reply. Janet Potter tries to pin down the book’s many identities.
Oh Naomi
In her new story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy depicts men and women (but mostly men) who want to eat their cake and have it too. Lianne Habinek tells us how successful these characters, and Meloy, turn out to be.
New York Trilogy
A local, a booster, and a tourist take on New York; Sam Sacks tours the city with E.L. Doctorow, Colm Tóibín, and Colum McCann.
Forgive Us Our Risks
Lydia Peelle revisits the territory of Southern fiction in her short story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, and Karen Vanuska treks the vivid terrain
The New, Improved Undead
Hot-ticket director Guilermo del Toro has co-written a vampire novel that just happens to be about 50 percent flawed. Coincidence? Zombie expert Deirdre Crimmins is on the case.
It’s a Mystery: History Plays for Keeps
In Dan Fesperman’s meticulously crafted World War II thriller, The Arms Maker of Berlin, he opens up old war chests and lets the genies of the past wreak havoc upon the present. Irma Heldman is on the case.
I am Man, Hear Me Whimper
The primitivism of small-town life gets a thorough examination in Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians; Joshua Garstka strolls these suburbs and reports back
These Disunited States
Brian Evenson’s stories are populated by wanderers, ciphers, and schizophrenics lost in the fog of their own frustrations. John Madera attempts to navigate the miasma of Fugue State.
It’s a Mystery: With Caviar Comes Money
Meet Artie Cohen, a Russian Jewish cop with a conscience. In Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad, he’s got the weight of the world on one shoulder and New York crime on the other. Irma Heldman follows his travels in the latest “It’s a Mystery.”
‘02
J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel Commencement has been compared to fellow Seven Sister Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Laura Tanenbaum assesses how Sullivan fills some mighty big shoes.
Very Scared People
Who’s the greatest hater, a killer or his victim’s avenger? Deirdre Crimmins takes a stab at David Moody’s Hater.
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