A Woman of High Courage
/For nearly three decades, Sara Paretsky has used the familiar form of the private eye novel to turn a critical eye on contemporary America. Rohan Maitzen reviews the latest in her V.I. Warshawski series.
Read MoreA Visit from the Prince
/You think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble... Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham's paradoxical novel "By Nightfall".
Read MoreStill Hoping for Her Close-Up
/Molly Allgood was only a young, up-and-coming actress when her fiance J.M. Synge died of cancer. Joseph O'Connor's novel "The Ghost Light" imagines how the rest of her life played out in the shadow of that loss.
Read MoreOne Common Reader
/Virginia Woolf imagined the Almighty seeing us coming towards Paradise, books in hand: "We have nothing to give them, they have loved reading." But does reading always bring salvation?
Read MoreFallout, Carry On
/Lance Olsen's page-turning experimental novel-in-stories mugs, flirts, ends the world, and dares the reader to make a rondel of intuitive leaps.
Read MoreYoung Jew Telling Jokes
/Assimilation is the nightmare of Joshua Cohen's daring novel "Witz," and the book is therefore designed to be strange and prickly to the gentiles who try to read it.
Read MoreEtched in Carbon
/Tom McCarthy's new palimpsest of microscripts, C, attempts a new technocratic and poetical re-imagining of its protagonist's life story. What's at stake, and what's won?
Read MoreLiterature is Dead, Long Live Literature
/Is the death of literature finally dead? If not, it's been dealt a healthy blow by Gregory Jusdanis' Fiction Agonistes, even it art does have to “justify itself in a way not necessary before.”
Read MoreThe Prodigal Brothers
/Ever since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes -- and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
Read MoreA Different Sort of Englishness
/John le Carré not only has a new novel -- all his old ones are being inducted into the pantheon of UK Penguin Classics. Has this indefatigable crafter of spy novels transformed into the litterateur in our lifetime?
Read MoreBluebeard in Japan
/In Yoko Ogawa's beautiful, violent take on the Bluebeard legend, a stern old man and a biddable girl meet in a hotel and embark on a sexual journey of surprising poignancy.
Read MoreTemporarily Miracle-Sodden
/The most Bellovian figure of all may have been the man who lent us the term. A new collection of Saul Bellow's letters present the man in all his exuberant passion and thorny short-temper.
Read MoreGoing Back to the Well
/In his latest book, Stephen King works in extremely familiar territory -- ordinary people presented with extraordinary moral choices, with a dash of the eerie thrown in. Do an old hand's usual tricks still entertain?
Read MoreA Book Every King Should Read
/George R. R. Martin's epic "Song of Fire and Ice" has sold millions of copies and is about to be a new HBO production. A timely appreciation gives you some idea of what all the fuss is about.
Read MoreGeorge Eliot for Dummies
/Free thinker, strong-minded woman, scholar, lover, novelist: George Eliot lived a courageous life that should be known and celebrated. But does Brenda Maddox's biography do it justice?
Read More“Someone New to Love”
/A teacher seduced by the fame of his star pupil? Or two great minds meeting despite differences in age and station? Annabel Lyon's celebrated new novel "The Golden Mean" dramatizes the relationship between Aristotle and the boy who would go on to become Alexander the Great.
Read MoreUnlies His Mother Told Him
/Emma Donoghue's story of a boy raised in perfect (if penitential) solitude with his mother and then thrust into the wide world is parable about the isolation of affection--or is it a commentary on how alien our society has become?
Read MoreIt's... James Franco!
/Hollywood heartthrob James Franco follows a different Muse and delivers his debut collection of short stories. You're just a bit curious, aren't you?
Read MoreThe Curious Disposition
/Some of the greatest works of English literature grapple with the dark, knotted roots of anti-Semitism, and the audience is always complicit. A new book studies the tangle of art and atrocity in writers Chaucer to Marlowe to Shakespeare
Read More
