Book Review: Moral Agents
/A collection of profiles of eight pivotal American literary men of the 20th century - Robert Minto reviews
Read MoreBook Review: The Poetry of John Milton
/A sumptuous new book studies the work of one of the English language's greatest poets. Robert Minto reviews.
Read MoreStarship Captains Do It On Impulse (Unfortunately)
/In fan-favorite Ernest Cline's new book, a young man raised on video games and cheesy sci-fi movies finds that they just might be the key to Earth's salvation. But is the 80's nostalgia of Armada self-defeating?
Read MoreThe Edge of Sin
/Robyn Cadwallader centers her debut novel on a young nun who volunteers to be walled away from all human contact for the rest of her life. Such women existed and, surprisingly, their lives were enormously full.
Read MoreEileen Chang’s Changes: from Love in Redland to Naked Earth
/Eileen Chang would never have written her hot-button anticommunist masterpiece Naked Earth without US Government encouragement and support. What should contemporary readers make of this?
Read More“A Reputable Outlaw”
/Was the duel at twenty paces a cancer on civil society or a gesture of defiance and an expression of individuality? Touche: The Duel in Literature looks to provide the reader satisfaction on that question.
Read MoreThe Happy Misanthrope
/Milan Kundera's newest and possibly final novel returns to the ideas he's pursued across his career, including his "categorical disagreement with being." Y. Greyman reviews.
Read MoreThe Truth of a Thing
/Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life emphasized the contingency of any single story. In contrast, her new novel focuses on one life lived to the full. But for better or for worse, Atkinson can’t resist the lure of metafiction…
Read MorePeer Review: Front Row Seats
/Biographer Zachary Leader takes his readers on a long, detailed tour of the first half of Saul Bellow's life, and while those readers may be loving it, the critics have been complaining!
Read MoreThe Whip Descends
/Why do we read the same story over and over? In Virginia Woolf's case, it's to learn again how great art emerged from her strange life of privilege and grief.
Read MoreThe Book and the Boy
/A thousand years ago, a refined lady at the Japanese Court wrote the first and one of the greatest novels of all time, The Tale of Genji; Dennis Washburn does the latest translation of this immense work, with stunning results.
Read MoreA Moon, A Girl … Romance!
/Sure, we all know Superman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man - but what about the also-rans? Who played the Captain and Tennille to the Avengers' Sonny and Cher? Zach Rabiroff looks at the heroes who didn't quite make the prime-time cut.
Read MoreAll Our Revels Ended
/For decades, famed academic and critic Harold Bloom has been tilting against the windmills of cultural fads and forgettings. But in his latest (and last?) book, he strikes a different pose.
Read MoreNobody’s Novel
/In Anna North's new novel, many narrative voices attempt to tell the story of film director Sophie Stark - but can any number of perspectives reveal an essentially unknowable character? Katie Gemmill reviews.
Read MoreBook Review: Where I'm Reading From
/The Tim Parks essays collected in this pretty volume range over the whole landscape of the book-world, from endangered copyright to foreign-lit chic to the inescapability of Jonathan Franzen
Read MoreThe Great Blacksby
/If Richard Pryor had spent time in the ghettos of L.A. County and had any interest in writing a novel, he might have come up with a book like Paul Beatty's The Sellout: a beautifully offensive meditation on riches and race.
Read More“Are You Living or Dead?”
/Usually Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators implicate us in their world, reminding us of all we have in common. But in his new novel we are strangers looking at an unrecognizable landscape.
Read MoreIn the Flesh
/Into an unremarkable marriage comes a major disruption: the wife stops eating meat. Suddenly, everything in their usually orderly world goes out of control.
Read MoreProtean Things
/Hilary Mantel's best-selling Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have made their way to the stage on the expert handling of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zach Rabiroff had front row center.
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