Bonfire of the Inanities
/A murder, a trip to the dump, and oh yah - September 11. That wacky Thomas Pynchon is at it again!
Read MoreEternal Blazon
/Led on by a "shared obsession," a philosopher and a psycyhoanalyst have teamed up to offer their interpretation of Hamlet. With the ghosts of countless critics looming before them, how has this pair fared?
Read MoreWhat Does an African Woman Want in America?
/Chimananda Ngozi Adichie's expansive novel Americanah centers on a Nigerian woman's immigration to the United States and eventual return to Nigeria. Orem Ochiel explores what her story says about complex, often traumatic experience of being black and African in the West.
Read MoreSpray-Paint It Black
/Vintage records, black dogs, and lost souls fill Dead Set, a teen novel for readers (of all ages) who are sick of half-hearted Hunger Games clones.
Read MoreThe Art of Losing
/A light mantle of frost settles over the crowded events of Jumpha Lahiri's new novel, which is "about" loss in the way that Anna Karenina is "about" love
Read MoreIn Search of Lost Tirades
/Jonathan Franzen has translated and annotated a collection of essays by Karl Kraus, the Austrian polemicist known as the Great Hater and one of the signal curmudgeonly influences behind Franzen's fiction.
Read MoreOctober 2013 Issue
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Read MoreConnect the Dots
/What kind of reader would she be, our Poetry Editor asks, if she didn't allow herself to be susceptible to Ange Mlinko's sublime, piercing unreason?
Read MoreAn Inglorious Life
/Elizabeth Gilbert’s ambitious novel imagines the life of a 19th-century woman botanist, as insightful as Darwin but lost to history. It’s an interesting project, and a worthy one, but does the novel live up to its premise?
Read MoreBeyond Thought
/The style of Clarice Lispector's unconventional and uneasy fiction was driven by both social anxiety and physical pain. How did this transubstantiation take place?
Read MoreSomebody Ate Her Gerbil
/Fearless reporter Renata Adler's novel "Speedboat" has been stirring debate and controversy since it was published in 1976; now, in a new reprint from the New York Review of Books, it retains its power to shock, subvert, and just maybe seduce.
Read MoreJoseph and his Brothers
/To many the scriptural story of Joseph is ancient and arcane. But its exploration into divine and authorial omniscience make it seem powerfully contemporary.
Read MoreHot and Cold
/Distance is complicated: it measures intimacy, but in unpredictable ways. Rebecca Solnit’s evocative new book explores the meaning of distance and closeness.
Read MoreSeptember 2013 Issue
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Read MoreBehold the Man
/The meek and peaceful Jesus has become the standard Christian image of the Messiah. Religious scholar Reza Aslan's controversial new book shatters that image and replaces it with something very different: a violent revolutionary who came not to bring peace but a sword.
Read MoreIn Prague on an Errand
/In Caleb Crain's debut novel, a young man puts his ordinary life on hold and goes to post-revolution Prague in search of all the usual things young people go searching for in Prague. But, as reviewer Yulia Greyman observes, "false selves are a part of love."
Read MoreSparta, Iraq
/“We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Roxana Robinson's riveting novel challenges us to imagine how we can do that as we work for peace.
Read MoreHome, Where the Art Is
/In "Belmont," Stephen Burt, poet of Boston's byways, offers readers verses that so court the senses as almost to confound them, shifting from technical confidence to unstructured questioning. As Kirsten Kaschock writes, "Burt attempts in these pages what Shylock did not dare" ...
Read MoreAugust 2013 Issue
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Read MoreLord of the Round Table
/The Lord of the Rings draws on many medieval stories and myths. Oddly absent, however, are overt references to the one myth that ruled them all. A recently published poem fills that gap – but it may bemuse Tolkein's usual readers.
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