Abandonment, Richness, Surprise
/Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.
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 MoreThe Greatness that was Downton
/Julian Fellowes' "Downton Abbey" was shot in a castle, but it may have a nearer relationship to "Mad Men" than "Brideshead Revisited." Joanna Scutts tracks the evolution of the British costume drama.
Read MoreThe Platypus
/For more than fifty years and more than fifty novels, Louis Auchincloss chronicled the lives of New York's upper class. His last book is a memoir of his life among that upper class -- but is truth stranger than fiction?
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?
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