‘… to ourselves and our posterity …’
/Richard Beeman, in his Plain, Honest Men, reminds us that the Founding Fathers weren’t demigods. Thomas J. Daly measures their feet of clay.
Read MoreNo Hugging, No Learning
/Colson Whitehead, one of our most intellectually satisfying writers, has written a “novel” that meanders suspiciously like a memoir. Sam Sacks reviews Sag Harbor.
Read MoreNotes from a Crritic
/John Goodman, John Glover, and Nathan Lane are currently starring on Broadway in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece; Andrew Martin’s got an aisle seat, and reports back on a surprisingly sunny Waiting for Godot.
Read MoreStillbourne
/Eric van Lustbader throws every cliche in the kitchen into Robert Ludlum’s endless Bourne saga, attempting to keep the pot boiling. Greg Waldmann tastes the stew.
Read MoreReader, I Disemboweled Him
/Intrepid reporter Deirdre Crimmins tackles that last literary taboo: Regency zombies.
Read MoreDelightful Gumbo or Strange Brew?
/Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck displays a long list of literary influences; John Madera asks what these well-made stories have to say.
Read MoreMay the Horse Be with Him
/Before Arthas was a character in a new novel, he was a character in a video game (World of Warcraft, naturally) – which makes him fair game for our gaming expert, Phillip Lobo.
Read MoreMurder on the Fractureline
/China Mieville’s latest book features two cities nervously co-existing in the same space. Khalid Ponte looks at both sides now.
Read MoreUppity Blues
/Master of the mannered sneak-attack, Kazuo Ishiguro has enraptured readers for years – including Karen Vanuska, who walks us through Nocturnes, his collection of linked stories.
Read MoreThis Book Will Shoot You
/Shifting from a Vietnam epic, newly-minted National Book Award winner Denis Johnson goes noir in Nobody Move; John Matthew Fox leads us down these new mean streets.
Read MoreJoseph Conrad's Tragic Predicament
/“A sorry business this scribbling,” Joseph Conrad once confessed, and we remember him problematically. John Rodwan reappraises the murky nature of his books.
Read MoreReview of Before I Lose My Style
/Steve Donoghue reviews the structurally bold gay novel "Before I Lose My Style".
Read MoreReview of The Great Perhaps
/Steve Donoghue review "The Great Perhaps," "Joe Meno’s best book to date by several orders of magnitude."
Read MoreRom Zom Com
/Exiled to the basement, pelted with garbage, and unlucky in love: zombies have it rough in S.G. Browne’s new novel Breathers. Dierdre Crimmins lends a sympathetic ear (figuratively, of course).
Read MoreTen Questions for Sarah Ruden
/Sarah Ruden, the latest and greatest translator of Vergil’s Aeneid, offers a funny and fascinating glimpse inside the classicist’s world in this Open Letters interview.
Read MorePostal Worker? Poodle?
/Poet’s poet Lyn Hejinian has turned poet’s novelist in Lola, half of her new collection Saga/Circus. John Cotter circles its sagacity.
Read MoreRoots Into Entrails
/A Nazi picaresque wouldn’t seem to be a likely read, but Karen Vanuska reviews a new reprint of Jakov Lind’s 1962 World War II novel Landscape in Concrete and finds its grim, absurd power undimmed by the years.
Read MoreLightning Strikes and Pen Strokes
/Veteran comics illustrator David Mazzucchelli takes center stage writing and drawing his first full-length graphic novel, Asterios Polyp, and Sharon Fulton takes a look at the result.
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