DeLillo and the Three Ps
/The nation's book critics naturally congregated when Don DeLillo's slim new book appeared. In the latest Open Letters Peer Review, John Rodwan supplies a scorecard for the players.
Read MoreLike Dust, and Memories
/In mythology, Alcestis is the model wife, willing to give up her own life for her husband's. In Katharine Beutner's lyrical retelling, the truth is more complex.
Read MoreFools in Love
/Like an overheated love letter, André Aciman's florid novel novel of obsession, Eight White Nights, is very easy to mock--but is it perhaps just as candid and emotionally powerful? Sam Sacks tests it against the truth of experience.
Read MoreIt’s Not All Gossip and Fangs
/The latest novels by Francisco X. Stork and Benjamin Alire Saenz remind us that there's much, much more to teen fiction than vampire fads.
Read MoreFacebook Fiction
/Justin Taylor's Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever raises the age-old question about 'hot' new collections: can they possibly live up to their own billing? Janet Potter turns in a verdict.
Read MoreThe Sweetness of Short Novels
/Doorstop literary tomes might still be the preferred signature grab for literary respectability, but short novels have always been every bit as compelling--and tougher to do well. Ingrid Norton introduces her Year with Short Novels.
Read MoreA Year with Short Novels: J.L. Carr's Chance for Renewal
/In A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr explores that most challenging emotion to capture in fiction: happiness
Read MoreAll the Sad Young Bankers
/Two new novels by Adam Haslett and Jonathan Dee attempt to show us the way we live now by exposing the quality of the characters who handle (or, as the case may be, mishandle) our money.
Read MoreWelcome to Highsmith Country
/When Patricia Highsmith was bored at parties, she would cover the dinner table with her pet snails. As Joan Schenkar shows in her new biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, this may have been the sweetest part of her personality.
Read MoreThe Creation, and Erasure, of Laura
/Dmitri Nabokov published The Original of Laura in the form in which his father had left it: in note-cards, which you can remove, rearrange, annotate, even add to...
Read MoreWayward Directions
/In Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, Tim Farnsworth walks away from his job and family, and also away from a novel of domesticity into one of ideas.
Read MoreWorld Without End, Amen
/Mary Caponegro continues her chronicle of troubled intimacies in the story collection All Fall Down
Read More"Did you en-joy the de-mon-stra-tion?"
/Boilerplate traveled the world at the turn of the twentieth century in attempt to dissuade humans from their many wars. Finally, his biography (can such things be?) is revealed, and Lianne Habinek reveals its astonishing contents
Read MoreVampires Are SO Last Year
/Lauren Kate's new young adult book Fallen is getting the full Twilight treatment, YouTube trailer and all. Kristin Brower Walker looks into what the book is about beyond all that promotional blitz
Read MoreThe Mysteries of Berkeley
/In Manhood for Amateurs novelist Michael Chabon visits the strange planet known as parenthood. John G. Rodwan, Jr. follows him where plenty have gone before.
Read MoreProspero’s Staff
/Philip Roth’s The Humbling is shrouded in the wintry landscape of his late style. Robin Mookerjee enters the cold.
Read MoreHave You Seene Me?
/As Laura Kolbe shows, A New Literary History of America throws every word of its own title into question—and that’s not the most exciting part of Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’ immense anthology
Read More“This Spider — No More!”
/In the 1970s, two giants of the Spider-Man comic book, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita, reunited for a daily newspaper comic strip. Paradise? Ask Khalid Ponte.
Read More2009 Standouts in Teen Fiction
/2009 was a strong year for the teen fiction genre, with inventive entries of every style. Kristin Walker selects three winners in a year-end roundup.
Read MoreThe Books and the City
/Dan Baum and Dave Eggers have made very different books on New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Thomas Larson separates sense from sensationalism.
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