Book Review: Frog
/China's one-child social policy forms the grim backdrop to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mo Yan's latest translated novel
Read MoreThe Song of Hiawatha – and Other Poems!
/Our book today is one of the improbable gems from the old Reader’s Digest “World’s Best Reading” series, the 1989 volume The Song of Hiawatha and Other Poems, here decked out with lavish illustrations (lovely textured pictures and spot illustrations of “The Song of Hiawatha” itself by Frederic Remington, for instance, and Howard Chandler Christy’s […]
Read MoreBook Review: Blood-Drenched Beard
/In this newly-translated hit from Brazil, a young man goes in search of what really happened to his grandfather
Read MoreBook Review: Medieval Christianity
/An accessible new scholarly history looks at the millennium during which Christianity ruled the West
Read MoreInk Chorus: The War Against Cliche!
/Our book today is The War Against Cliche, the bottomlessly entertaining 2001 collection of many of the for-hire literary essays and book reviews the novelist Martin Amis wrote between 1971 and 2000, and taken as a snapshot of the working life of a semi-faineant freelancer (I’d wager that Amis actually only needed the paycheck – […]
Read MoreBook Review: Outline
/A writing instructor takes a brief trip to Athens in Rachel Cusk's much-praised new novel
Read MoreBook Review: Taking on Theodore Roosevelt
/A lively, authoritative new book examines one of the darkest stains on the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
Read MorePulps in the Penny Press!
/Naturally, reading Louis Menand’s story in the January 5 New Yorker, “Pulp’s Big Moment,” sent me irresistably to my own bookshelves, specifically to the bookcases of mass-market paperbacks I’ve been ruthlessly pillaging lately (as I’ve aggrievedly mentioned already, nobody needs four different mass market paperback copies of Mansfield Park; the ability to resist the urge […]
Read MoreMystery Monday: Sugawara Akitada!
/Our books today are the utterly delightful Sugawara Akitada mysteries of I. J. Parker, set in the Heian heyday of 11th-Century Japan and starring brainy but frustrated Sugawara Akitada, a low-level clerk in the Ministry of Justice whose father died while he was studying at university and who is therefore compelled to act as […]
Read MoreBook Review: A Pleasure and a Calling
/A small-town's mild-mannered real estate agent isn't done with your house after he's sold it to you - in Phil Hogan's new novel, he keeps a spare key, and he snoops around while you're away
Read MoreBook Review: Schubert's Winter Journey
/Schubert's haunting song-cycle "Winterreise," composed while he was mortally ill, was a mystery to his friends upon its first hearing. He assured them they'd grow to love it, and, in his latest book, Ian Bostridge certainly has
Read MoreBook News: The Gatekeepers!
/One piece of the day’s book-news comes, unfortunately, in the form of a windy, tweedy, leather elbow-patched throat-clearing in Slate by former Random House poo-bah Daniel Menaker, who’s upset – in his phlegmatic way – about the upshot of the much-publicized contest between Amazon and Hachette and Amazon’s unseemly desire “to have a say in […]
Read MoreBook Review: Black River
/In S. M. Hulse's debut novel, a former prison guard in small-town Montana is traumatized by the events of a riot the happened years ago
Read MoreBook Review: The Man Who Couldn't Stop
/According to modern medical diagnostics, thousands of people suffer (to varying degrees of severity) from OCD, and yet the science of understanding the condition is maddeningly vague - as science writer David Adam reports
Read MoreBook Review: The Last Warrior
/Decade after decade, one man has worked at the heart of the Pentagon, advising a long string of presidents and cabinet ministers about the role of American power in the world. A new book brings his story out of the shadows.
Read MoreBook Review: Glow
/Ned Beauman's new novel takes readers on a wild ride from London drug-raves to international conspiracies, with some extra-intelligent foxes thrown in along the way
Read MoreYesterday’s News in the Penny Press!
/Beginning any new year always means batting clean-up on the odds and ends of the old year, and this latest transition was no different: I wrapped up my annals of the Penny Press in mid-December, but the Penny Press didn’t know that – it kept pouring into the sainted Open Letters Monthly Post Office box […]
Read MoreBook Review: Why the Romantics Matter
/A new handbook in the Yale series enlists a famous biographer to analyze the appeal of the Romantic movement
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The House of the Dead!
/Some Penguin Classics don’t really seem to need updating. One such solid-looking piece of work is the translation David McDuff did for Penguin Classics of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1860 novel The House of the Dead. That translation appeared in 1985, and it – and all other translations of this particular book – are suddenly threatened […]
Read MoreBook Review: A Bad Character
/A proper young woman in Delhi meets a slightly improper young man - and a tragic, mesmerizing love story is born in this accomplished debut
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