Books
387 results
Page 29
Recent fiction recommendations
You don’t have to choose between Hannibal Lecter and Emma Bovary
You have to do a little work to find them, but novelists and short story writers are still turning out books about people who aren’t adulterers and serial killers.
Articles
4 minute read
Charles Dubow's 'Girl in the Moonlight'
Obsession as a lifelong project
Obsession, even if recognized, is rarely controlled and often involves a blind spot.
Articles
3 minute read
Cordelia Biddle’s ‘Saint Katharine’
Who was Katharine Drexel?
Katharine Drexel’s canonization in 2000 has galvanized the faithful but complicated the search for the real woman. It’s tough to write objectively about a saint, especially when the market demands genuflection.
Articles
9 minute read
George Pelecanos’s 'Martini Shot'
Evenhanded complexity
George Pelecanos has the ability to make us care about people in the humblest walks of life, including those on criminal paths, through dialogue that sounds like real people talking.
Articles
3 minute read
Jonathan Kozol's 'The Theft of Memory'
Tackling the memoir
For Jonathan Kozol, summoning up vivid memories as he wrote a memoir of his father's battle with Alzheimer's was mostly a pleasant process. It kept his father, as well as his mother, alive for him after their deaths. But the last few months of concluding the book were hard and painful, he said, because it meant saying good-bye to his parents all over again.
Articles
5 minute read
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Renee Blitz's 'Poet of Transparency'
Kafka in the hot tub
Renee Blitz's creations — stories? feuilletons? a unit? — lack what we usually expect of prose, or poetry, or even the customary avant-garde.
Jonathan Gottschall’s 'Professor in the Cage'
Trading in dry erase markers for arm bars
Not all men of letters turning 40 buy sports cars.
Articles
4 minute read
'A Pleasure and a Calling' by Phil Hogan
Is it possible to stalk everybody?
Is a slow-motion thriller possible? Is there such a creature as an omni-stalker? Phil Hogan tackles these questions in his 2015 release.
Articles
3 minute read
Enough with the adultery plots
After a life spent reading about every possible variation on the theme of people attempting to escape the bonds of holy matrimony, I’ve come to the point that whenever a book starts to turn into Yet Another Adultery Novel, I close it, return it to the library, and try again.
Articles
3 minute read
Dennis Lehane’s ‘World Gone By’
The luck of the Irish versus very bad karma
Will your evil itself kill you, or the evil milieu you have chosen — or will you skate? Dennis Lehane packs a Russian novel's worth of plot and meditations on morality into his newest.
Articles
3 minute read