Voices 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 MoreTwo From Tupelo Press
/Two poets gather up the treasures of the past, one by tossing them in a pile, the other by building a gallery. Chad Reynolds digs into new books by Amy England and Priscilla Sneff.
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 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 MoreJust So Stories
/Should the brain-cracking complexity of modern science be explained in pithy one-liners? Steve Donoghue says no, even as he yields to the charm of Ira Flatow’s Present at the Future.
Read MoreTwo From FSG
/John Cotter leads us to the interior of two extremely different books of poetry, Charles Wright’s reflective and naturalist Littlefoot and Frederick Seidel’s garish and weird Ooga-Booga.
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 MoreDeath by Landscape
/Annie Dillard’s distilled, introspective voice described marvels in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but can it power a novel? John Cotter tacks down The Maytrees.
Read MoreSome Assembly Required
/Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is a jarring experience, composed offractured images and plot strands. Karen Vanuska helps us put itspieces together.
Read MoreTwo from Black Ocean Press
/Chris Tonelli tackles the wily metaphysics of Zachary Schomburg’sThe Man Suit and Paula Cisewski’s Upon Arrival.
Read MoreUseful Disasters
/Like The Kite Runner before it, A Thousand Splendid Suns ownsreal estate on the top of the bestseller list. Sam Sacks dares tounlock the secret of Khaled Hosseini.
Read MorePeer Review: Sex on the Beach
/In our monthly feature, Sam Sacks clambers over the mountain ofreviews of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, spotting perspicacity,purple prose, and possible pickpocketing along the way.
Read MoreFumbling Men
/Don DeLillo’s new novel Falling Man confronts our naked desire to understand 9/11. Jeff O’Keefe tells us how it fares.
Read MoreOne Man’s César Vallejo
/John Cotter guides us through Clayton Eshleman’s translations of the startling, invigorating poetry of César Vallejo, one of the earliest and most underrepresented of the modernists.
Read MoreH.H. Kirst and the Problem of Evil
/What do we do with great novels by a writer who was also a Nazi? Steve Donoghue investigates the terrible conundrum of H.H. Kirst.
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