The Disgraceful Lowlands of Writing
/Reiner Stach's masterful, epic biography of Kafka is finally complete. Never has the man been less mysterious, but can it illuminate the confounding, beguiling mystery of his writing?
Read MorePassion Rules the World
/Boris Dralyuk's new translation of Isaac Babel's Odessa Tales brings its Jewish gangsters back to more vibrant life than ever. Robert Minto reviews.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: An Intellectual All The Time
/An old book by a monk may be the best thing ever written about the practice of thinking. Robert Minto revisits The Intellectual Life.
Read MoreLight Puppets
/In Moonstone, Icelandic author Sjón tells a story of 1918 Iceland through the longings and alienation of a sixteen-year-old orphan named Mani. Robert Minto reviews.
Read MorePatricide Deferred
/Stuart Jeffries has written the first truly accessible account of the Frankfurt School. Robert Minto reviews.
Read MoreSocrates of Amazonia
/What exactly is a philosopher? As it turns out, that question may have more than one answer. Robert Minto shares the exciting results of Justin Smith's new history.
Read MoreA Question of Character
/In an entertaining new study of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and company, the existentialist movement becomes a personality-driven piece of public performance.
Read MoreAnother Way To See
/John Berger's writing on art often feels more dramatic than analytic, a passionate study of the unspoken transaction between artist and viewer. Robert Minto looks at Portraits.
Read MoreOur Year in Reading 2015
/In the course of the year, many, many books cross the paths of OLM's editors, and the end of the year is a natural time for reflecting on that endless stream. Our editors each pick a book from their year-in-reading that stood out from the rest.
Read MorePeer Review: Front Row Seats
/Biographer Zachary Leader takes his readers on a long, detailed tour of the first half of Saul Bellow's life, and while those readers may be loving it, the critics have been complaining!
Read MoreFather Knows Best
/He shaped the morals and manners of a vast country and put an indelible stamp on the world's thinking, but he himself couldn't get the job he wanted. Robert Minto reviews a new history of Confucianism.
Read MoreThe Schizophrenic Prophet
/A sumptuous new Library of America volume contains a rich sampling of the work of Reinhold Niebuhr - whom reviewer Robert Minto refers to as "the premiere establishment theologian of the 20th century."
Read MoreThinking in Quotations
/On its schematic blueprints, the latest book by noted literary polymath Alberto Manguel is "about" Dante's Divine Comedy - but as Robert Minto discovers, this author is at his best when he's digressing.
Read MoreInheritance of Anger
/The great Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa claims he became a writer in order to annoy his father; his new novel takes up this age-old theme of the strife between fathers and sons.
Read MoreSomething Beyond the Chaos
/The author made immortal by the novel Dune also wrote a career's worth of short stories. Robert Minto looks at the first-ever complete collection of those stories.
Read MoreThinking in Common
/The great critic and essayist Irving Howe laid claim to a great many decayed traditions - and then elevated them all to high art. A new collection of his prose presents some of his gems.
Read MoreWoven and Severed
/For millennia, the mighty tales in the epics of Homer have challenged and enthralled the world; a thought-provoking new book seeks to understand why.
Read MoreThe Done Thing
/England had been at war with France almost continuously since the Norman Conquest, but in the Hundred Years War, the conflict became especially heightened - and transformative. A new history tells the story as a rattling good yarn.
Read MoreBook Review: Demon's Brood
/Before the headline-grabbing Tudor dynasty, England was ramped from end to end by an even greater and more terrible family of kings and queens. They were the mighty Plantagenets, and a new book tells their story
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