Devil Twins
/Is Don DeLillo's short game as good as his long? Is it better? His first collection of short fiction -- or is it his first? -- offers occasion to take the much-lauded writer's measure.
Read More“The Desire for Motion”: Tagore’s Three Voices
/Prince of the Bengali renaissance, internationally feted poet, composer, painter, educator -- why don't we know Rabindranath Tagore today? And will a new book open our eyes?
Read MoreDesultory Vivacity
/Does marriage mean much anymore? Does the novel? Jeffrey Eugenides sets out to reinvent the classic literary story—but can he combine the style and the substance of the greats he hopes to update to our times?
Read MoreAn American in China
/A meticulously-researched rendition of the horrifying massacres that comprised the "Rape of Nanjing" is the backdrop for Ha Jin's latest telegraphic and affecting novel.
Read MoreThere Will Be No More Great Ideas
/Robert Musil's magnum opus The Man Without Qualities was groundbreaking not because it's unfinished but because it's unfinishable. A new study attempts to take scope of its deep and mesmerizing pointlessness.
Read MoreSkulking in the Sewers
/Umberto Eco's potboiling new novel The Prague Cemetery was denounced in Europe for anti-Semitism, and then went on to become a best-seller. Is the controversy valid? What strange creation has Eco brought forth?
Read MoreIn Lieu of a Drink
/Provocative public intellectual/muckraker Christopher Hitchens offers an enormous volume of collected essays and articles, probably his last.
Read MoreTime Wounds All Heels
/In Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child the renown of a minor English poet balloons and distorts in each succeeding decade after his death
Read MoreDown and Out in Luanda and Lisbon
/Novelist António Lobo Antunes' books are searing and wildly original indictments of Portugal's needlessly protracted and bloody colonization of Angola.
Read MoreA Crucible of the Human Spirit Guy
/Ben Lerner's arresting first novel sets a funhouse mirror before the author's own formative years as a poet, poseur, and pill-popper in Madrid.
Read MoreDisembodied Embodiment
/The late Akilah Oliver's poetry uses language to escape the trap of consciousness--verse "as rapture, as rupture" alike
Read MoreThe Birth of a Salesman
/Eleven years after her breakout novel The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt returns to satirize the chattering nonsense of the corporate world.
Read MoreRime Redux
/A new graphic novel reworks Coleridge's classic confrontation between man and nature for our times, taking us on a grand tour of environmental degradation.
Read More“Signs of the Real”
/Between the abstract and the solid, between Michigan and New York City, in and out of love, Gina Myers brings betweeness to the fore in her first collection of poems
Read MoreSatanic Maggots
/Colonialism, feminism, witchcraft, the Lord of Darkness — themes such as these once made Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels bestsellers. Now her charmingly subversive fiction is back in print.
Read MoreLove at First Glans
/Nicholson Baker's provocative new book is an attempt at mainstream literary pornography, but does it suffer from the same performance anxiety as other novelistic efforts to depict sex?
Read MoreThree for the Boys
/Newly released in paperback are three Young Adult novels aimed at that sometimes-elusive reading demographic: teen boys.
Read MoreByronic Interludes
/The larger-than-life exploits of Lord Byron drew an erratic and daunting trajectory through the lives of those nearest him. A trilogy of novels attempts to go where so many biographies have gone before.
Read MoreA Jester During the Third Reich
/Irmgard Keun depicted exceptionally naive women and seemed even to play the the role herself, even suing The Gestapo for banning her books. But was there a strategy behind playing dumb?
Read MoreThe Bad Man Comes to Stay
/A witty young woman meets a devastating man -- literally, he devastates her. From the wreck of her life she tells her tale, and it is a tale well told. Sex meets death in Deborah Kay Davies' brilliant True Things About Me
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