Boy, 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 MoreNone of the Above
/Political scientist Ian Bremmer's new book looks at the changing nature of American power in the 21st century, but just how many false premises does the book employ?
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 MorePoor People are Like Oysters: The Life of Giovanni Verga
/Most people today know him only from the libretto of one short opera, but in his own day, he was a famous poet, playwright, and scholar - and a compulsive litigant. Luciano Mangiafico looks at the life of Giovanni Verga.
Read MoreThe Management of Savagery
/Many new books - some excellent, some awful - are now seeking to explain the terrorist group ISIS, but the group's own origins dynamics are dauntingly complex. Greg Waldmann tries to make sense of it all.
Read MoreNo Doubters in the Shipyards
/Celebrated biographer H. W. Brands has written the first full-dress of Ronald Reagan since the former president's death in 2004 - but does Reagan elude him, as he has so many biographers? Steve Donoghue reviews.
Read MoreBook Review: The Great War of Our Time
/A former deputy director of the CIA reflects on his time on the front lines in this frustrating memoir
Read MoreBook Review: The Unraveling
/A former key player in the Coalition's conquest and administration of Iraq reflects on her time there
Read MoreHectic Hyperborea
/Michael Pye's new book provides a rich history of the North Sea in human culture - and pokes holes in some crass nationalist myth-making along the way. Matt Ray reviews The Edge of the World.
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.
Read More“Il n’y a pas d’Israël pour moi”
/In Michel Houellebecq’s uncannily timely new novel, the triumph of an Islamist government relieves the dreary banality that defines the secular France of the 21st century.
Read MoreMary Anne and the Adventurer
/Traditional cynicism has always maintained that Benjamin Disraeli married Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis primarily for her money, but a new book argues that the real picture was a good deal more complex - and interesting - than that.
Read MorePress Enter
/Author Jacob Silverman contends in his new book that the intrusions of social media into our private lives has reached sometimes intolerable extents. But what does he mean by "intolerable"? And who is he counting as "our"?
Read MoreMembers in Good Standing
/Two books by Mark Leibovitch create a picture of Beltway wheelings and dealings that's almost unbearably incestuous, with virtually no lines drawn between elected officials and profiteering lobbyists. Greg Waldmann plumbs the depths and reports back.
Read MoreUnmaking L'empereur
/The 2nd Light Battalion King's Division played a pivotal role at the Battle of Waterloo, as a slim new history by Brendan Simms demonstrates. Matt Ray reviews the book in his Open Letters debut.
Read MoreThe Art of Socialist America
/The Works Progress Administration did more than set thousand of Americans to building bridges and roads in the 1930s; it also fostered art, as an exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Art Gallery lavishly illustrates.
Read MoreBook Review: The Reagan Era
/A new book takes an intense look at the presidency of Ronald Reagan
Read MoreBook Review: A Superpower Transformed
/A paradigm-shifting new book looks at the turbulent decade of the 1970s in United States politics and the re-shaping of the world
Read MoreThe 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 MoreFaith-Based Initiative
/In his new book City of Rivals, James Grumet takes a gloomy close-up look at America's deeply dysfunctional Congress and offers some solutions. But are those solutions dysfunctional too?
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