The Buildup of Erasure
/Claudia Rankine articulates the truths of the black experience so poignantly in her celebrated collection Citizen by putting them, paradoxically, both plainly and artfully.
Read MoreBook Review: Sympathy for the Devil
/Michael Mewshaw comes not to praise Gore Vidal but to bury him in this new memoir of a friendship that did not outlast Mr. Vidal's funeral.
Read MoreWhat Jona Knew
/It’s comforting to believe there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, or to treat it as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. Jona Oberski’s Childhood rightly refuses us these consolations.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 6 Lyric Voices of Witness
/The voice of poetry can often be the voice of lyric witness, turning our attention to moments in history that would have eluded us, or that might never have been felt as well as understood. These titles perform this function about as well as it can be done.
Read MoreShort Tales on a Tight Rein
/The contemporary American short story is a kind of stunt double for the novel. Monica McFawn’s Bright Shards of Someplace Else is one such collection, each of its eleven stories posturing like a dare accepted.
Read MoreHarm Him, Harm Me
/Historical novelist Andrew Levkoff stuffs the last installment of his "Bow of Heaven" trilogy with battles, love, loyalty betrayed, crucifixion, cross-purposes, loyalty regained, and deep reflections on what it all means.
Read MoreJames Wood and the Fall of Man
/Book critic James Wood is a fascinating collection of contradictions: an apostate true believer, a champion of experimental fiction, an earnest searcher in empty temples. Sam Sacks reads one of our foremost readers.
Read MoreA Long Time in the Making
/Nora Webster may be Colm Tóibín’s slightest novel yet, but his later novels are born from and echo this wise and intimate investigation of the interior life.
Read MoreDouble Consciousness
/Literature by post-Yugoslavian writers is often about identity in flux. That includes the books of David Albahari, one of the most widely read of contemporary Serbian authors and one of the most worth reading.
Read MoreSomething Beyond the Chaos
/The author made immortal by the novel Dune also wrote a career's worth of short stories. Robert Minto looks at the first-ever complete collection of those stories.
Read MoreThe Fighter
/Norman Mailer was as fiery and mercurial a letter-writer as he was a novelist and journalist - and ten times as prolific. A big new volume collects the highlights of a lifetime in the post.
Read MoreKeep on Losing
/Now back in print: an English translation of iconic Polish writer (and compulsive re-inventor of himself) Marek Hlasko's most powerful novel.
Read More"Cambridge should come to us"
/"Our belief in Literature has collapsed" Lars Iyer once wrote, but his new novel Wittgenstein Jr, the story of a passionate philosophy professor and his apathetic students, bristles with literary faith.
Read MoreI Think We’re Alone Now
/Two poetry volumes - one concerned with how to be ourselves, alone, inside, the other concerned with making multifacted connections with external reality - are reviewed in a gentle dialogue with each other.
Read MoreStop Their World Spinning
/Against a pervasive American sports culture, author Steve Allmond pits a devastating critique of the savage violence - and staggering toll in injuries and deaths - of football.
Read MoreThe Attempt to See
/Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson returns to small-town Iowa in this new novel full of deceptive calms and clear mastery.
Read MoreAn Unfolding Elegy
/When sudden death claimed poet Jake Adam York at the age of 40, it cut short his life's work of commemorating all the martyrs of the American Civil Rights movement; Teow Lim Goh re-reads the man and his work.
Read MoreTerminal Lost and Found
/Martin Amis' new novel not only delves into the souls of a small group of characters involved in the running of concentration camp - it also interrogates the very nature of Holocaust fiction. Jack Hanson reads the latest from the author of Time's Arrow.
Read MorePost Re-Bop
/James Ellroy begins a second L.A. Quartet with his new novel Perfidia. But does it harness the demonic madness and stylistic panache of the author's earlier works of historical crime fiction?
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