OLM Favorites: 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.
Read MoreTell Them They’re Not Trees
/How can one be both a Jew and a Romanian? This quandary is at the heart of Mihail Sebastian’s brilliant novel For Two Thousand Years, now in a sparkling new translation.
Read MoreBodies in Trouble
/A new novel about a notorious Viennese clinic aims to do justice to the lives of those the Nazis declared were utterly without value.
Read MoreThe Devil in the Hills
/A new book about Primo Levi’s morally questionable acts as a Partisan can’t cut him down to size: his own self-critique makes that superfluous.
Read MoreBoy, Interrupted
/For the protagonist of Jim Shepard's heartbreaking novel The Book of Aron it is terrible to be a poor Jew in anti-Semitic prewar Poland – but it is hardest of all to be a child, at the mercy of everyone else.
Read MoreWhat Jona Knew
/It’s comforting to believe there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, or to treat it as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. Jona Oberski’s Childhood rightly refuses us these consolations.
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreSermons 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.
Read MoreFrom 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.
Read MoreTrauma 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?
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