Ruth Rendell
/Ruth Rendell
Read MoreBook Review: Lords of the Sith
/In the latest Star Wars novel, Darth Vader and his evil Emperor are trapped on a hostile world, being hunted by man and beast
Read More'I'm the Top Goddess – How Could I Fail to Make Trouble?'
/Renowned classicist and historian Peter Green has at last produced a translation of the Iliad - and it comes with its own Greek Chorus. Steve Donoghue investigates.
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 MoreThe Schizophrenic Prophet
/A sumptuous new Library of America volume contains a rich sampling of the work of Reinhold Niebuhr - whom reviewer Robert Minto refers to as "the premiere establishment theologian of the 20th century."
Read MoreA Cycle of Horrifying Songs
/Schubert's bleak, tumultuous song cycle, Winterreise, is the subject of tenor Ian Bostridge's passionate new book. Greg Waldmann examines Schubert's Winter Journey, and the trouble with hard-to-love classical music.
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 MoreReading Poetry
/From Wallace Stevens to Seamus Heaney to Jorie Graham, the latest collection of critical pieces by Helen Vendler celebrates the worth of a wide array of writers. Jack Hanson reviews The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.
Read MoreSomething and Not
/a poem
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 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 MoreIt’s a Mystery: “The person with the secret is the person with the power”
/Donna Leon’s 24th book starring the charismatic Commissario Guido Brunetti, Falling in Love, is every bit as spellbinding as we expect it to be. Martin Walker’s seventh featuring Bruno, Dordogne’s favorite chief of police, The Children Return, finds his small town shockingly targeted by a terrorist network.
Read MoreBook Reivew: Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War
/Max Planck, the great physicist and father of quantum theory, gets a marvelous and empathetic new biography
Read MoreBook Review: Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator
/A new biography takes advantage of recently-opened Soviet archives
Read MoreBook Review: Infamy
/In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States summarily imprisoned thousands of its Japanese citizens for the duration of the war. Richard Reeves' passionate new book tells the story
Read MoreBook Review: In These Times
/Jenny Uglow's new book goes into lively detail about how ordinary people in Britain experienced the cataclysmic events of the wars of the Napoleonic era
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer
/Author Thom Hatch promises mind-blowing new revelations in his book on the Battle of Little Bighorn. And in other news, Rutherford B. Hayes is rumored to be contemplating a run for president.
Read MoreIn Paperback: Saved by the Sea
/In his moving account, now in paperback from New World Library, David Helvarg recounts the wonders and wealth of the world's oceans
Read MoreBook Review: Of Noble Family
/Mary Robinette Kowal's sparkling "Glamourist" fantasy series comes to a complex and intriguing conclusion
Read MoreBook Review: Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature
/Cuckoos use other species of birds to raise the young they abandon, and they've been doing it for thousands of years without getting arrested. An absorbing new book isn't precisely rooting for them, but still ...
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