Coalition of the Chilling
/A British historian's richly-sourced accounting of Molotov-Ribbentrop offers fresh insights into this Nazi-Soviet pact of "non-aggression."
Read MorePeer review: Elena Ferrante’s Hunger, Rebellion, and Rage
/The critical consensus around reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is enough to make you suspect collusion - but to what end? and at what cost? Rohan Maitzen reviews the reviewers.
Read MoreWords Plucked from Our Tongues
/Can Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda heal Canada’s colonial relationship with its First Nations? Why should we expect literature to succeed where our leaders have failed?
Read MoreAll Manner of Damned-Fool-Bravery
/A disaffected British colonial officer with a yearning for heroism is relegated to a doomed imperial outpost where he meets a native boy with a yearning for heroes - and from this unlikely pairing, Nick Harkaway's Tigerman weaves its fantastic, moving story.
Read MoreA Kind of Humanity: Herzog at 50
/It's been half a century since the appearance of Saul Bellow's seminal novel Herzog - Jack Hanson revisits the work to see how Bellow's various machinations have held up over time.
Read MoreCall It His Soul
/Christopher Beha's new novel Arts and Entertainments aims to be that weirdest of all things: a serious, even elegant, book about ... reality television. As our reviewer reports, the oddity is that it was even attempted, and the wonder is that it succeeds so well.
Read MoreA Walker in the City
/In the world of Julie Hayden's stories, the contingency of all experience, let alone of literary creation and reputation, is inescapable.
Read MoreThe Very Edge of Fiction
/Ben Lerner has followed his breakout novel Leaving the Atocha Station with a metafictional tale of a second-time novelist trying to throw a book together. Is it more than a game?
Read MoreGrand Affiliations
/Metaphor: a tool for poets and rhetoricians, but also, perhaps, the way that people connect to the world at large. Lianne Habinek reviews a gamesome new study by the great literary critic Denis Donoghue.
Read MoreA Picture Book
/Cover art from Omni, the new-age science mag of yore, is now a coffee table book: Giger, Frazetta, and Grant Wood are all here, but something crucial has been left out.
Read MoreTo Brave the Swollen Waters
/Powerful South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin's second novel to be translated into English tells a touchingly human tale set in a world which, for most of her Western readers, could scarcely be more alien.
Read MoreDream-to-Desk
/Michael Cunningham's beautiful new novel The Snow Queen follows the wisdom of fairy tales: its revelations occur at dusk, because the hour of despair is the most fertile of the day.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 12 Hot Summer Reads
/It's summer at last, and you won't find any relief from the heat in our editors' round-up of the hottest books they know.
Read MoreWilson 2.0
/Daniel Wilson's first book, Robopocalypse was a straightforward adventure story about robots rising up against their human makers. His new book takes that simple premise and expands on it in complex and timely ways.
Read MorePassing Roncesvalles Again
/The new Scribner "Hemingway Library" edition of The Sun Also Rises offers annotations, rough drafts, and alternate line-edits - but how much light does it shed on its "near-perfect work of fiction"?
Read MoreTheir Bloody Instruments
/A ticking clock hangs ominously over every page of Craig DiLouie's genuinely creepy new horror novel, filled with beings who aren't quite zombies and not quite vampires. Our resident horror maven Deirdre Crimmins tells us all about it.
Read MoreThe Sun Was Bad
/Rusty Barnes' debut novel Reckoning is both a hardbitten Appalachia noir and tender coming of age tale, both real art and real fun.
Read MoreTempus Fugit
/Maxine Kumin, friend of Anne Sexton, master of poetic form and meter, died just before her eighteenth book was published. Maureen Thorson dives into her allusive, welcoming last poems.
Read MoreCoral Waxwork Classic
/Rjurik Davidson's stunning debut - an epic of espionage, magic, and beasts migrated out of mythology - isn't the sixth in a series, or the tenth, or the fifteenth; it's that rare thing in the genre: a stand-alone novel
Read MoreThe 5 Commandments
/Major Kolt "Racer" Raynor doesn't salute the U.S. flag - it salutes him. He punches bad guys so hard their grandkids are born with bruises. He garrotted a terrorist using a string made from his own eyelashes. He stars in Dalton Fury's action novel - and if you don't read the book, he'll know.
Read More
