Light Puppets
/In Moonstone, Icelandic author Sjón tells a story of 1918 Iceland through the longings and alienation of a sixteen-year-old orphan named Mani. Robert Minto reviews.
Read MoreNeither Entirely Real Nor Imagined
/"The Wonderments" allow the hero of Bill Broun's spellbinding debut novel Night of the Animals to talk to the animals in Regent's Park Zoo. Justin Hickey reviews.
Read MoreKeeping the Faith, Keeping the Feast
/The masterful essays in Gregory Wolfe's The Operation of Grace range from Mel Gibson to Thomas More, from Annie Dillard to Christopher Hitchens. Martyn Wendell Jones reviews.
Read MoreBook Review: Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment
/Long before Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Russian thinkers and writers were haltingly, passionately fashioning their own peculiar brand of Enlightment
Read MoreTwilight Cowboys
/Once upon a time, Westerns were a staple of American fiction. Now they've all but disappeared. Zach Rabiroff asks why cowboys rode off into the sunset.
Read MoreSo Much Bastard Beauty
/A lovely rural landscape is seen throught urban-trained eyes in Ada Limon's poetry collection Bright Dead Things. David Nilson reviews.
Read MoreOut of Some Bygone Era
/Master stylist Donald Ray Pollock returns in a violent, beautifullly-written novel about three brothers on a murderous rampage. Aaron Botwick reviews The Heavenly Table
Read MoreComfort and Joy
/Mary Balogh’s Survivors’ Club novels are romances, which means they tell hopeful stories about people whose struggles end happily. Why should that optimism earn them such disdain?
Read MoreHow We Got From There to Here
/A thoughtful new book about Victorian concepts of space, nation, and mobility reminds us that our own world is vulnerable to unraveling as we move from here to wherever’s next.
Read MoreThe Smooth Handle
/Did Thomas Jefferson love his slave, the mother of his children Sally Hemings? A new novel asks the question factually and counterfactually, and Kenyon Gradert sums up the results.
Read MoreA Question of Character
/In an entertaining new study of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and company, the existentialist movement becomes a personality-driven piece of public performance.
Read MoreInterior, with Music
/The tension between the material and the abstract creates the complex music that threads through Ben Mazer's new volume of poetry, The Glass Piano.
Read MoreBoth Sides, Now
/If everybody's a critic, as New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott claims in his new book, then where does that leave criticism? Sam Sacks reviews.
Read MoreI Am Jack's Contested Legacy
/The book Fight Club - and even more so the movie adaptation - have cult fixtures in American culture. But after twenty years, is there anything left for a sequel to subvert? Justin Hickey reads Fight Club 2.
Read MoreThe Loneliest Number
/Is loneliness a failure, or just a sign that one is alive? Olivia Laing’s new book explores the paradox of being alone in one of the world’s most crowded cities.
Read MorePunching Up
/Can fiction be overtly political without becoming doctrinaire? A new novel about the Seattle W.T.O. protests succeeds by emphasizing the human complexities involved.
Read MoreHere to Write
/Kay Boyle, friend to William Carlos Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, and Samuel Beckett, was famous for her short stories but also wrote a lifetime's worth of fascinating letters, now sampled in a new anthology.
Read MoreCreole to Queen’s English
/The richly diverse voices in A Brief History of Seven Killings paved the way for the novel's success, but does the whole justify up to the hype?
Read MoreSentience Over Skin
/In a distant future without humans, genetically engineered members of other Earth species have evolved societies of staggering - and problematic - complexity.
Read MoreNo Storm of Roses
/Lilliet Berne, hero of Alexander Chee's highly-anticipated new novel Queen of the Night, enjoys the glamorous life of a diva -- but what's below the surface is both more sordid and more tragic.
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