What Jona Knew
/It’s comforting to believe there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, or to treat it as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. Jona Oberski’s Childhood rightly refuses us these consolations.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 6 Lyric Voices of Witness
/The voice of poetry can often be the voice of lyric witness, turning our attention to moments in history that would have eluded us, or that might never have been felt as well as understood. These titles perform this function about as well as it can be done.
Read MoreShort Tales on a Tight Rein
/The contemporary American short story is a kind of stunt double for the novel. Monica McFawn’s Bright Shards of Someplace Else is one such collection, each of its eleven stories posturing like a dare accepted.
Read MoreHarm Him, Harm Me
/Historical novelist Andrew Levkoff stuffs the last installment of his "Bow of Heaven" trilogy with battles, love, loyalty betrayed, crucifixion, cross-purposes, loyalty regained, and deep reflections on what it all means.
Read MoreThose Rascally Parthians! An Interview with author Andrew Levkoff
/Open Letters Monthly interviews the author of Blood of Eagles, book three of the Bow of Heaven series.
Read MoreA Long Time in the Making
/Nora Webster may be Colm Tóibín’s slightest novel yet, but his later novels are born from and echo this wise and intimate investigation of the interior life.
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 MoreThe Fighter
/Norman Mailer was as fiery and mercurial a letter-writer as he was a novelist and journalist - and ten times as prolific. A big new volume collects the highlights of a lifetime in the post.
Read MoreKeep on Losing
/Now back in print: an English translation of iconic Polish writer (and compulsive re-inventor of himself) Marek Hlasko's most powerful novel.
Read More"Cambridge should come to us"
/"Our belief in Literature has collapsed" Lars Iyer once wrote, but his new novel Wittgenstein Jr, the story of a passionate philosophy professor and his apathetic students, bristles with literary faith.
Read MoreTitle Menu: A list of great political books that doesn't include What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
/Just in time for the November midterm elections, we do what doubters said couldn't be done: we present you with a list of ten great political books that doesn't include Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.
Read MoreThe Attempt to See
/Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson returns to small-town Iowa in this new novel full of deceptive calms and clear mastery.
Read MoreMore Faith, Better Grounded
/A reissue of James Agee's letters to Father Flye give a picture of the writer's naked ambition, excoriating self-hatred, and unrefined genius. But it also raises the question: Do we remember Agee more for what he wrote or what his addictions prevented him from writing?
Read MoreTitle Menu: 8 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Classics Hollywood Should Ignore
/As Hollywood looks to science fiction and fantasy novels for the 'source material' of its newest CGI spectaculars, Justin Hickey picks ten sci-fi/fantasy books he hopes the studios never find and ruin ...
Read MoreTerminal Lost and Found
/Martin Amis' new novel not only delves into the souls of a small group of characters involved in the running of concentration camp - it also interrogates the very nature of Holocaust fiction. Jack Hanson reads the latest from the author of Time's Arrow.
Read MorePost Re-Bop
/James Ellroy begins a second L.A. Quartet with his new novel Perfidia. But does it harness the demonic madness and stylistic panache of the author's earlier works of historical crime fiction?
Read MorePeer review: Elena Ferrante’s Hunger, Rebellion, and Rage
/The critical consensus around reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is enough to make you suspect collusion - but to what end? and at what cost? Rohan Maitzen reviews the reviewers.
Read MoreWords Plucked from Our Tongues
/Can Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda heal Canada’s colonial relationship with its First Nations? Why should we expect literature to succeed where our leaders have failed?
Read MoreAll Manner of Damned-Fool-Bravery
/A disaffected British colonial officer with a yearning for heroism is relegated to a doomed imperial outpost where he meets a native boy with a yearning for heroes - and from this unlikely pairing, Nick Harkaway's Tigerman weaves its fantastic, moving story.
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