Everything United In Her
/It's a comfortable truism that the novels of Jane Austen are all things to all readers. But ... a life-instruction manual? From the OLM Archives, a review of A Jane Austen Education
Read MoreOh, the futility! Adapting Jane Eyre
/Its early readers found the novel shocking, unfeminine, un-Christian, revolutionary. So why are film adaptations of Jane Eyre so studiously inoffensive?
Read MoreThe Old Stories
/Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Sure, but should they steal whole characters? plots? authors? Robert Coover and the writers of Re: Telling steal it all and let their readers sort it out.
Read MoreMichigan Falls
/Scott Sparling's first novel Wire to Wire has rushed up at the reading world full of glue-sniffers, freight-hoppers, wedgeheads, and knives midair -- so what's it really about?
Read MoreThe Zither and the Worm
/French trailblazer Raymond Roussel created teeming and fertile worlds from a secret process of wordplay. Two of his most spectacular works are coming back into print after a long, undeserved absence.
Read MoreAh, the Merry Widows!
/Widowhood is lonely, darkly comic, defiant, and emotionally vital in Michelle Latiolais's new story collection. Jeff Bursey reviews.
Read MoreThe Obscure Object of Financial Fiction
/How to write a great novel of the financial crisis? One contender has published his attempt, and it features an updated version of that bugbear figure from Shakespeare and Trollope: the Jewish banker.
Read MorePost-Communist Literature or How to Cure Baldness
/Walking talking cats? mysterious birthmarks? ancient secrets? Bogdan Suceava takes us to a strange place (Romania, present day) in his newly translated novel.
Read MoreInvisible Man
/The omissions in Javier Marías's beguiling, enigmatic novels are just as important as what appear on the page, and two newly translated books are marked by this juggling of the known and the unknown.
Read MoreBright Sparkling Speeches
/Francis Spufford's new story collection blends fact and fiction to explore the truths and towering delusions of the Soviet economic system--and its production model, the American fast food chain.
Read MoreThe Tiger Whelp
/Tea Obreht's "The Tiger's Wife" is one of the most heralded fiction debuts of the season. Kevin Frazier weighs the switch-ups of its tone against the beauties of its prose.
Read MoreA Novelist in Tahrir Square
/It's fitting that Ahdaf Soueif is narrating this exciting new chapter in Egypt's history: for decades she has offered her readers richer, more complicated stories of the Middle East than the commonplace ones of submission and extremism.
Read MoreThe Wanderer
/The protagonist of Teju Cole's "Open City" roams New York, gathering and subtly processing observations; Andrew Martin trails this enigmatic walker in the city.
Read MoreI Is Someone Else
/Death-in-a-Box meditates on sameness, doubling, and identity’s dissolve. So who is this Alta Ifland? And what sets her apart?
Read MoreMad, Vlad, and Dangerous to Know
/Bram Stoker's "Dracula" is the epitome of lurking evil -- but two recent novels do their best to unearth the smoldering bad-boy behind the murderous facade. So: Was Mina Harker smitten before she was bitten?
Read MoreStrange Silence
/Stanley Elkin's fiction is marked by verbal wizardry and a searing comic vision; does a new biography do justice to his underappreciated artistry?
Read MoreForever Nell
/She was an orange-seller, an actress, a whore, and the most popular of Charles II's many mistresses: Nell Gwynn stars in two new novels.
Read MoreWife Number Five
/Teenage Catherine Howard weds the older and ailing Henry VIII to serve her family's ambition, and uses her status to take lovers of her own - risking everything. Novelist Suzannah Dunn spins a fine tale out of the girl's brief rise and fall.
Read More“He had become my Tarzan”
/Tarzan is one of the most popular fictional creations in modern times. Does the Ape Man define something essential in the human experience - or do we keep redefining Tarzan to suit our ever-changing needs?
Read MoreThe Muse of Trouville
/‘She’s a drug; I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.' Victoria Best explores the fraught relationship between Marguerite Duras and the young man whose love inspired and tormented her.
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