Everyday Jacket
/Richard Price has called The Wire “as close to a novel as anything on TV.” Sam Sacks examines whether Price’s new book Lush Life is as close to TV as anything in a novel.
Read MoreLost in the Verisylum
/Lianne Habinek maps the postmodern mazes of Jesse Ball’s maddening, memorable debut novel Samedi the Deafness.
Read MoreCatalog Reading
/Sam Sacks reviews Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure, an old-fashioned reading guide that wants desperately to believe it hasn’t been made altogether anachronistic by the Internet, that elephant in the corner of the library.
Read MoreThe Life of the Tail Gunner
/In her new novel Day, A.L. Kennedy places a World War II veteran on the set of a war movie; unfortunately, Joanna Scutts writes, the characters of her book are not much more dimensional than the movie set.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: Between the River and the Mountains
/In our regular feature, Steve Donoghue revisits Giovanni Guareschi’s Little World of Don Camillo, an eternally comforting fictional oasis set in the heart of the Cold War.
Read MoreThe Latest from Yasnaya Polyana
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With so many versions of War and Peace to choose from, is there anything that translators can do to set themselves apart? Yes, says Steve Donoghue, they can make old mistakes.
Read MoreVoices in the Woods
/John Cotter champions one of the most promising debuts in years, Joshua Harmon’s bold, symphonic novel Quinnehtukqut.
Read MoreMemento Mori
/Sam Sacks contrasts the Nazis’ murderous theft of Irène Némirovsky’s life with the bright, redeeming light of her newly translated novel Fire in the Blood.
Read MorePeer Review: Enter Sophist
/James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michiko Kakutani, and many others have competed to put forth the definitive word on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. Sam Sacks is off to the races with them in this regular feature.
Read MoreUnder the Microscope
/Andrea Barrett’s novels and stories have been quiet, restrained affairs, but, as Karen Vanuska reports, her new book The Air We Breathe is given a stimulating shot in the arm by the intrusion of World War I.
Read MoreImagination as Witness
/Chad Reynolds muses on the power of storytellers to model and even change reality: the harsh reality of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip and Stephen Marche’s strange new world in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea.
Read MoreRichard Russo’s Mirror on America
/Thomaston, the setting of his new novel Bridge of Sighs, is the most diverse and complicated town Richard Russo has yet created. Sam Sacks navigates its vivid highways and byways.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: I Could Wake Up in Nirvana and Laugh
/In this regular feature, Steve Donoghue celebrates the life and letters of John Jay Chapman, an eloquent American wit now forgotten, whose writings once provoked and delighted an enthusiastic public.
Read MoreTo Wider, Stranger Worlds
/Virginia Woolf buried the late John Evelyn with a single review. Now Leah Lambrusco lets us know whether Gillian Darley’s resurrected the diarist in John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity. (Yes, he’s the other restoration diarist).
Read MoreThe Long Puzzling Absence of Junot Díaz
/Juno Díaz’ Drown was as impressive a debut as any in the 90s. Eleven years later, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is finally on the shelves. Sam Sacks reviews what the burden of expectation on the author’s shoulders has produced.
Read MoreThe Songs, the Singers, and the Sung-To
/Myths and legends reveal the most about the people who re-imagine them. Gardner Linn explores two provocative reshapers in the music-driven graphic novels Stagger Lee and Phonogram: Rue Brittania.
Read MoreOne Encounter: On Reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, translated from the French
/Reading a book rendered from Polish to French to English is like playing a game of Telephone. In our regular feature, Andrew Crocker expounds on the pleasures of translations.
Read MorePeer Review: Onion Skins and Grass Cuttings
/In our regular feature, Joanna Scutts is judge and jury over the reviewers of Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion, who rather too frequently forgot they were supposed to be considering a book.
Read MoreTo the Outback and Back
/David Malouf may have written more thoroughly about Australia than any writer in history. Now that his Complete Stories is out, Sam Sacks assesses the fruit of his thirty-year career.
Read MoreFenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses
/James Fenimore Cooper’s greatness as a novelist has been almost completely lost behind a single, hilarious skewering from Mark Twain. Steve Donoghue reviews a new biography that tries desperately to win back the poor man’s reputation.
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