OLM Favorites: Seer Blest
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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.
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OLM Favorites: Macaroni and Cheese
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"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.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: A Great and Sustaining Mystery
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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.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: Not A Boating Accident
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It wouldn’t be summer without a giant killer shark novel, so Steve Donoghue goes for a fun swim with the, er, mother of them all, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: Rarest Spun Heavenmetal
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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.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: 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.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: 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.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: Learning How To Read-William Goldman's The Temple of Gold
/In Stephen Akey's personal essay, the sex and squalor of William Goldman's The Temple of Gold appeals to the thirteen-year-old he was when he first encountered it - and prompts an adult reassessment.
Read MoreOLM 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 MoreOLM Favorites: The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
/William S. Burroughs's notorious Cut-up Trilogy was his fiercest broadside against what he felt was the tyranny of linear thought. Steve Danziger delves into their Word Hoard.
Read MoreOLM Favorites: This Drifty State of Being
/Two Idiots: Dostoevsky's classic and the new novel by Elif Batuman. What, if anything, do they have in common, and what do their differences say about each author's attitude toward fiction?
Read MoreNo Trace of Lipstick
/An outstanding new biography argues convincingly that Olivia Manning is one of the most undervalued woman novelists of the 20th century. But was Manning a “woman novelist”? She thought not.
Read MoreA Bygone Present
/An eerie atmosphere and finely-watched details are among the strange strengths of Fiona Mozley's odd debut novel Elmet - and among its weaknesses.
Read MoreMeta-Pleasure
/The bewildering literary project author Mark Danielewski has undertaken - 27 mammoth and genre-defying novels in one series - continues.
Read MoreMemory Sickness
/Madeleine Thien's Dogs at the Perimeter - getting its first US publication - uses the Khmer Rouge atrocities as a backdrop against which to explore its characters' various losses.
Read MoreBeyond “Ma”
/A new novel re-imagines the beloved character of "Ma" from Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books.
Read MoreSearching for Him
/Zinzi Clemmons' much-discussed debut novel blurs the line between memoir and fiction; Britta Böhler reviews What We Lose.
Read MoreThe Continuing Enterprise of the Poem
/Veteran translator David Ferry tackles that Mount Everest of the translator's art, Virgil's Aeneid.
Read MoreSeeing Through Hypocrisy
/Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges is a response to the European refugee crisis, but can fiction address reality by stripping it of all its details?
Read MoreTry the Right Angle
/Since his 1997 debut, novelist Daniel Kehlmann has been subverting the familiar comforts of science and society. Up next: his new book You Should Have Left.
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