Shining Wild Things
/Shadow Country was the culmination of a thirty-year obsession with the notorious Everglades pioneer Edgar J. Watson. Sam Sacks treks into the beautiful and blood-soaked territory of Peter Matthiessen’s magnum opus.
Read MoreBook Review: Peace
/Richard Bausch takes his talents to Italy in World War II. Sam Sacks reviews Peace.
Read MoreBook Review: God's Middle Finger
/Richard Grant take a trip to the hellhole of the Sierra Madre a (barely) lives to tell about it
Read MoreWriting and Nothingness
/In My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru attempts to show the moral emptiness of antigovernment violence. The problem is, Sam Sacks thinks, Kunzru sees emptiness in everything he writes about.
Read MoreBook Review: The Blue Star
/Tony Earley's sequel to Jim the Boy is as rich and powerful as its predecessor. Sam Sacks reviews The Blue Star.
Read MoreThe Reserve
/Russell Banks pens a Lost Generation fairy tale. Sam Sacks reviews The Reserve
Read MoreEveryday Jacket
/Richard Price has called The Wire “as close to a novel as anything on TV.” Sam Sacks examines whether Price’s new book Lush Life is as close to TV as anything in a novel.
Read MoreCatalog Reading
/Sam Sacks reviews Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure, an old-fashioned reading guide that wants desperately to believe it hasn’t been made altogether anachronistic by the Internet, that elephant in the corner of the library.
Read MoreMemento Mori
/Sam Sacks contrasts the Nazis’ murderous theft of Irène Némirovsky’s life with the bright, redeeming light of her newly translated novel Fire in the Blood.
Read MorePeer Review: Enter Sophist
/James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michiko Kakutani, and many others have competed to put forth the definitive word on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. Sam Sacks is off to the races with them in this regular feature.
Read MoreRichard Russo’s Mirror on America
/Thomaston, the setting of his new novel Bridge of Sighs, is the most diverse and complicated town Richard Russo has yet created. Sam Sacks navigates its vivid highways and byways.
Read MoreThe Long Puzzling Absence of Junot Díaz
/Juno Díaz’ Drown was as impressive a debut as any in the 90s. Eleven years later, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is finally on the shelves. Sam Sacks reviews what the burden of expectation on the author’s shoulders has produced.
Read MoreTo the Outback and Back
/David Malouf may have written more thoroughly about Australia than any writer in history. Now that his Complete Stories is out, Sam Sacks assesses the fruit of his thirty-year career.
Read MoreUseful Disasters
/Like The Kite Runner before it, A Thousand Splendid Suns ownsreal estate on the top of the bestseller list. Sam Sacks dares tounlock the secret of Khaled Hosseini.
Read MorePeer Review: Sex on the Beach
/In our monthly feature, Sam Sacks clambers over the mountain ofreviews of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, spotting perspicacity,purple prose, and possible pickpocketing along the way.
Read MoreThe Evasionist
/Sam Sacks reviews the fun and flawed new novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and tries to answer the question on everybody’s lips: what exactly is Michael Chabon doing?
Read MoreChristploitation
/Sam Sacks laments the great divorce of Christianity from literature
Read MoreTwain in Vain
/Sam Sacks reviews Jon Clinch’s Finn, a novel about Huck Finn’s father, and decides that it owes a heavy debt to a literary figure apart from Mark Twain.
Read MorePeer Review: Paul Auster Perplexes
/In this monthly feature, Sam Sacks surveys the reviews of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, which caused some confused tail-chasing amongst its critics.
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