Norman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Nadia Boulanger
/Nadia Boulanger deferred to the music of her short-lived sister Lily and barely spoke of herself as a composer. Two releases, newly landed, may help to adjust that misperception.
Read MoreBook Review: Clement Attlee
/A boisterous new biography re-examines the life and legacy of the enigmatic British Prime Minister and Labor leader Clement Attlee
Read MoreBook Review: The Gulf
/The whole sweep of the Gulf of Mexico's nature and history is the subject of a fascinating and passionate new book.
Read MoreBook Review: Gunmetal Gray
/In the latest "Gray Man" novel, Mark Greaney's tough-as-nails title character is on the hunt in Southeast Asia for a vanished Chinese super-hacker.
Read MoreThe Tools We Need
/In times of crisis, what good are books, exactly? Two explorations of the virtues of reading and writing make the hard sell for literature's continued relevance.
Read MoreA Year with the Tudors II: A Flash, a Thud, a Crimson Deluge
/Poor innocent Lady Jane Grey has been an ostentatious martyr to the Protestant cause for centuries; a new book tells her brief but familiar life story as continues.
Read MorePhantasm Banged Into Fact
/Under Stalin, Socialist Realism drove the Soviet fabulists into obscurity from which writers like Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky are only now emerging.
Read MoreJubilant Cosmos
/The inimitable and meteoric Margaret Cavendish is the subject of a captivating new historical novel by Danielle Dutton.
Read MoreThis Poem Will Resist With Joy
/a poem
Read MoreOnce Upon a Time in Kerala
/A pivotal work of Indian literature, Chemmeen is both a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers and a stinging critique of women’s oppression.
Read More“In Some Bright Place”
/Storyteller George Saunders has written his first novel. Lincoln in Bardo hits many of the old, familiar notes, but there is something new and unexpected as well.
Read MoreState Mandated Therapy Session
/a poem
Read MoreLessons from History
/In the new novel from the author of The Historian, a young American woman travels across present-day Bulgaria and delves into the country's dark past.
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “Truth doesn’t always come from truthful men”
/In two new thrillers - one starring a bitter spy brought back into the fold and the other starring a group of misfit cops - complicated forces converge to bring terrorism to the streets of London.
Read MoreBook Review: Stalin and the Scientists
/The Soviet Union billed itself as a scientific utopia, and yet, as a tremendously readable new history illustrates, the awkward of marriage of state and science gave rise to a parade of absurdities.
Read MoreNormal Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Tishchenko's 8th
/Try as I might, I can’t stop listening to these late works of a Russian composer who was close to Shostakovich but never tried, as others did, to imitate him.
Read MoreBook Review: The Inkblots
/You've all seen the famous Rorschach inkblots; a fantastic new book tells the story not only of the inkblots but also of the odd, fascinating man behind them.
Read MoreBook Review: Homo Deus
/The author of the popular-science hit Sapiens returns with a book that looks not to humanity's distant past but rather to its immediate future.
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Hungarian Treasures
/The unique selling point of this release is what appears to be the first recording of Bartok’s piano quartet in C minor. Unfortunately, it's not very good.
Read MoreBook Review: The President Will See You Now
/A warm, engaging memoir takes readers inside the post-presidency years of Ronald Reagan
Read More
