Our Editions, Ourselves
/How many copies of Middlemarch does one person need? When the edition is as lovely as this, there's always room for one more.
Read MoreBook Review: The Norton Critical Lazarillo de Tormes
/The great Renaissance classic gets a spryly-translated new Norton edition
Read MoreWatching the Waves Roll In
/Robert Lax was always moving, both poetically and geographically. A new biography tells the story of his uncommon life.
Read MoreThis Fatal Land
/Ukraine is a haunted, confounding country.Yuri Andrukhovych tries to match his prodigious technique to its complexity.
Read MoreRomantics without Rebellion
/In the 1930s, a handful of clubbable Christian scribblers got together for tea and conversation and produced both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. What on earth went on there?
Read MoreThe One Who Gets Wounded
/Adam Johnson’s stories cast us adrift in moral, emotional, even existential uncertainties; the only reassurance they offer lies in the excellence of the fiction itself.
Read MorePen and Tell Her
/Elizabeth Gilbert wants you to be creative, without fear. Whatever brings you to life, whether it’s learning a dance, writing a song, or drawing on the wall, just do it! But what if you want to review her book?
Read MoreFriends on the Patio
/Essayist, critic, novelist, and public gadfly: Gore Vidal's long career took many forms and sprang from a life as dramatic as his work. Has that life finally found a biography to do it justice?
Read MoreNever Have Hands Been So Vital to a Creature
/In Zachary Thomas Dodson's visionary and inventive debut novel, a violent past and a dystopian future are woven together into a tale of families, legacies ... and bats. Justin Hickey reviews Bats of the Republic.
Read MoreInsurrections of the Bland
/The New Republic once embodied a vibrant, eclectic liberalism. A new anthology inadvertently tells a depressing story about the decline of that vision.
Read MoreNo Laughing Matter
/In Timur Vermes’s bestselling novel, newly translated from the German, it’s 2011, the Führer is back, and he’s not happy at how the world has changed. Is it OK to find that funny?
Read MoreOpen Letters Bestseller List Feature 2015
/The Open Letters team of writers and editors divvies up the Fiction list of the venerable New York Times bestseller list and dives right in - with decidedly mixed reactions.
Read MoreOpen Letters Bestseller List Feature 2015 Continues
/The Open Letters Bestseller Feature continues, and the body-count rises!
Read MoreUnstable Atoms
/Anne-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset is full of extraordinary encounters. For Kerry Clare, some of them are between her own past and present, her life and her (re)reading.
Read MoreBorder Reports
/How do we become ourselves? For Vivian Gornick, wandering the city streets is one way to both ask and answer that question; for us, her book becomes a bracing guide to doing the same.
Read MoreNot One to Eschew the Everyday
/From the tension between candor and formal presentation, Daniel Brown fashions the moments of discovery that comprise his new volume of poetry, What More?.
Read MoreBoy, Interrupted
/For the protagonist of Jim Shepard's heartbreaking novel The Book of Aron it is terrible to be a poor Jew in anti-Semitic prewar Poland – but it is hardest of all to be a child, at the mercy of everyone else.
Read MoreKnow Your Name
/Game of Thrones is remarkably faithful to George R. R. Martin’s original epic series, except for one vital element: it transforms his subversive morality into conventional fantasy.
Read MoreMoving at the Speed of Love
/Poet Alex Caldiero's Some Love is tangled in the poetic complexities of love, and yet, as reviewer Scott Abbott discovers, the poems here can be every bit as fleshy and uncomplicated as the real thing.
Read MoreBook Review: Latest Readings
/Ailing cultural critic Clive James turns in what may very well be his final collection of essays. Robert Minto reviews.
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