Book Review: Notes from a Dead House
/Dostoevsky's great semi-fictionalized prison memoir gets a sterling new translation from the superstar team of Pevear and Volokhonsky
Read MoreBook Review: The Violent Century
/In a world very much like our own, super-powered clandestine operatives vie with each other on missions to save or destroy humanity
Read MoreThere's the Door, Spaceman
/DC Comics gives writer/artist Darwyn Cooke's masterpiece The New Frontier, a shrewd and powerful re-imagining of DC's iconic superheroes, the glorious hardcover edition it deserves. Justin Hickey re-reads.
Read MoreThe Art of Socialist America
/The Works Progress Administration did more than set thousand of Americans to building bridges and roads in the 1930s; it also fostered art, as an exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Art Gallery lavishly illustrates.
Read MoreBlame the Dog
/When Homo sapiens appeared in Europe 45,000 years ago, most of the long-established species there - including the Neanderthals - began to disappear. Did Homo sapiens wipe them out? And if so, did they have help from somebody right there in your living room?
Read MoreFlowers of Prison
/Controversial Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei set an art installation inside the walls of America's most notorious prisons - with surreal and sometimes beautiful results.
Read MoreLeviathan in the Offing
/Ron Howard's adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick's bestselling In the Heart of the Sea will soon appear, but even the trailers raise rich questions: Why does this story still have the power to fascinate? A Moby-Dick fan ponders.
Read MoreThe Familiar is Strange
/Stalking the pages of Thomas Pierce's debut story collection, where the surreal shares quarters with the ordinary, are dwarf mammoths, genetically modified guard dogs, baby Pippin monkeys, and a parakeet named Magnificent.
Read MoreOutrunning the Constables
/To shut down his internal censors, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote My Struggle at the astounding rate of over a thousand pages a year. The result is fiction that is vibrantly alive.
Read MoreThese Pictures are Themselves Little Souls
/A new reprint line from the New York Review of Books concentrates on literature from - and on - China's long literary history, and the first three volumes offer the strange, the familiar, and the beautiful.
Read More"Why, It's I!"
/Any new translation of a classic like Anna Kareninainevitably raises an awkward question: what was wrong with all the old translations? Debut writer Zach Rabiroff takes it line-by-line
Read MoreAprès moi, le déluge
/Charles Marville’s extraordinary photographs of 19th-century Paris are like a cautionary tale, urging us to preserve the best of what is left in our own cities.
Read MoreKitchen Witchery
/For centuries, women have handed down much more than recipes from their kitchens: they have shared the special alchemy that transforms the mundane into the magical.
Read MorePlying the Darkness
/Brian Turner’s complex, lyrical meditations on his tour of duty in Iraq make us ache with the privilege that is a war memoir.
Read MoreI Am Almost a Camera
/As the Smithsonian's new exhibit confirms, Richard Estes is the preeminent photo-realist painter of our time or--most likely--of any time. But to what extent is photo-realism an art worth practicing? And what does it do?
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 MoreEnlisted Again
/Once he'd led the Continental Army to victory, General George Washington retired to his Mount Vernon home - but the newborn country wasn't done with him yet. A new book looks at First Citizen Washington.
Read MorePointez, Pointez!
/Hugely talented biographer Andrew Roberts has written a big biography of Napoleon Bonaparte - but when it comes to such a well-known figure, are readers in danger of fatigue de bataille?
Read MoreAn Interview with Katy Bohinc
/Maureen Thorson interviews Katy Bohinc, poet and author of Dear Alain.
Read More#NotAllNazis
/What would you do if your artistic survival suddenly depended on the whims of a brutal dictatorship? How far would you compromise? How much would you risk? A new book studies artists in the Third Reich.
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