Dervishes and Gypsies
/Legendary Indian author Saadat Hasan Manto's choicest short stories - depicting a teeming Bombay that's both long-vanished and eternal - receive an attractive new paperback edition from Vintage International
Read MoreThe Important Difference
/Is it really the immigrant writer’s job to represent third-world suffering for the sake of first-world catharsis? In All Our Names, Dinaw Mengestu resists the pressure to substitute autoethnography for art.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 8 books where bad decisions make good protagonists
/Characters never go wrong when their poor life choices make for fascinating reading. Kathleen Rooney supplies us with eight unmissable examples.
Read MoreThe Selves in Ourself
/In Valeria Luiselli's debut novel, a young Mexican woman imagines the real life of a long-dead man whose writings she has forged in the voice of a famous American poet. Then things get complicated.
Read MoreThe Ogre's Guests
/In his latest novel In Paradise Peter Matthiessen dramatizes a collision between the thoughtful philosophy of Zen and the worst of the 20th Century's horrors.
Read MoreTell Me Something I Don’t Know
/Two new books of poetry take different approaches to the written word and its conundrums. Can words express the truth, or are we asking too much of them?
Read MoreIn the Land of the Free Brain
/"Your field is the mind, mine is the brain - will the twain ever meet?" Master novelist E. L. Doctorow's latest deals with the traumas of duality.
Read MoreThingamajig Unbound
/B. J. Novak, the gamine and unassuming star of the American version of The Office, has written a collection of short stories, and that collection, remarkably, got published. Justin Hickey decides to judge it on its merits.
Read MoreThe Idea of Kenya
/A dazzling, kaleidescopic debut novel journeys through Kenya's fraught post-colonial history while unpacking the tangled question of what it means to be a Kenyan.
Read MoreA Place Out of a Story Book
/A close reading of Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return reminds us that the dream of every returning exile is to savor not only a lost land but a lost time.
Read MoreFrom the Archives: Two From Saturnalia Books
/John Cotter looks into new mixed-media books of poetry by Bill Knott and John Yau to discover shades of meaning in the interplay of artwork and verse.
Read MoreLost in Eliot
/The books we reread say a lot about who we are or who we hope to be. They also shape us, as Rebecca Mead discovers in exploring her own long relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Read MoreBigger with More and More
/Spike Jonze is the most mainstream of indie directors -- or the most indie of mainstream directors -- and his newest film Her is a triumph of quirky charm and visionary depth. Matt Sadler reviews.
Read MoreOffice Space
/When we read poetry, we want the transcendence of art: how is that compatible with being at work? A new collection of poems explores the possibilities.
Read MoreWhat Passes for Hope
/One could argue, from the evidence of cable TV ratings, that we've entered the age of the anti-hero. But why are they so popular? Adam Sternbergh's debut novel provides some unexpected answers.
Read MoreJanuary 2014 Issue
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Read MoreMuses Far From Home
/Romance, nostalgia and beguiling delusions are hallmarks of Lara Vapnyar's novels, including her sinuous newest, The Scent of Pine
Read MoreBridget of Sighs
/The new Bridget Jones novel will make you laugh and cry — but it might also make you fret, as it continues the series’ ongoing celebration of incompetence. Is blue soup really the best we can hope for, or the most we should strive for?
Read MoreStudio Matto e Disperatissimo: The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi
/He was the greatest Italian poet since Dante, but he was tormented by a strict upbringing, ruinous health, and moods of black pessmism. He was Giacomo Leopardi, and this is his story.
Read MoreThousands of Grids
/Building on his previous work, in New Poems Ben Mazer tries to find a balance between structure and fluidity.
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