April 2010 Issue
/from "It Would Look Like..." (Project Row Houses) by Stephanie Diamond
Read MoreA Fire Bell in the Night
/President Polk isn't exactly a household name, and a new book seeks to change that. Will the facilitator of genocide and the originator of civil war get a fair shake? Read on!
Read MoreStephanie Diamond's Social Practice
/“Images are entryways. Into memories, into someone’s world, into someone’s story.” And Diamond keeps every one of those images.
Read MoreCarson 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.
Read MorePay Attention, Cynewulf
/The warrior tribes who chipped away at Rome's Western empire were pretty rough on each other, too. A new book examines the fight for fledgling Europe.
Read MoreRaymond Burr Is Not in this Movie
/You expected a monster movie, /the straight line progression of vandalism and death. /But this plot's triangular, a love story predicated /on deceit and betrayal /
Read MoreAdeste 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?
Read MoreRapture Crash
/There's a frightening possibility at the heart of Jaron Lanier's new manifesto You Are Not a Gadget: how often do we subjugate our own personalities to the fixed designs of computer software?
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreStrategikon
/The glory that was Rome lived on - in a strange new form - for a thousand years in the East, despite being beset by enemies on all sides. A new study illuminates how they managed it.
Read MoreShe 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.
Read MoreThe Music In Between Words and Werewolves
/Our own Marc Vincenz conducts a gothic conversation with the Canadian poet Jeramy Dodds
Read MoreYou Oughta Know that (Music) is a Battlefield
/"Sisters are doin' it for themselves" ... but the Spice Girls? Marisa Meltzer's "Girl Power" picks some strange hall-of-famers, and gets Megan Kearns shaking her head, "with friends like these ..."
Read MorePAX Ludorum
/Over the last weekend in Boston, thousands of video gamers gathered for PAX East, one of the largest East Coast gatherings of, er, their kind. Intrepid Phillip Lobo was on the scene.
Read MoreThe Napping Anthropologists
/They have been with us for fourteen thousand years, and they're sleeping on the couch right now; a new book takes a comprehensive yet personal look at dogs.
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “Three things come unbidden: fear, love, and jealousy”
/In her latest novel, False Mermaid, Erin Hart once again connects an ancient Celtic crime to a thoroughly modern mystery.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreAs If In a Glorious Hell
/In her 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.
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