February 2010 issue
/"Dominium" by Katie Caron
Read MoreBad Books, Good Hooks
/They don't work as books, but they do work their way on us - insistently, insidiously. We throw them across the room, but we keep picking them up again.
Read MoreKatie Caron on Dominium
/"It is so easy to create illusions with film, but how can you create an engrossing visual experience with an object? I am obsessed with human nature's interest in being fooled."
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreA 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
Read MoreAll 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.
Read MoreThe Man and the Monument
/The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was peaceful, orderly, and above all sensible, or so says towering Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Two new books look at the man and the Revolution he so indelibly described.
Read MoreEverywhere There’s Georgia
/"opium" Georgias, "hotwired" Georgias, and "mercury" Georgias, are cataloged and blasted in Andrew Zawacki's new collection Petals of Zero / Petals of One. But who or what or where is Georgia's eponym?
Read MorePlaying 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.
Read MoreDavid R. Slavitt on Young John Milton
/Long before he wrote some of the most powerful poems in English, John Milton, as a brainy teenager, wrote verse in Latin. Celebrated translator David Slavitt tells us a little about them.
Read MoreWelcome 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.
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreWayward 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.
Read MoreDysentery and Other Childhood Memories
/If names like "Number Muncher," "The Oregon Trail," and of course "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" prompt nostalgic smiles for you, you'll love this affectionate look at educational video games
Read MoreReal Fake Flowers
/Karl Parker's moves are more than merely clever: I-less one minute, present & friendly the next, he darts behind masks and speaks IN BOLD, as our contributing editor discovers in her review.
Read MoreLaughin’ Louis
/In the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson both rose to greatness that reached across racial divides. Two new books look at the prices they had to pay.
Read MoreComing Out of the Room
/Stuart Weisberg's biography of Barney Frank may be scattered and incomplete, but it's got one huge saving grace: Frank's own witticisms on nearly every page.
Read MoreWorld Without End, Amen
/Mary Caponegro continues her chronicle of troubled intimacies in the story collection All Fall Down
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