Lost in Eliot
/The books we reread say a lot about who we are or who we hope to be. They also shape us, as Rebecca Mead discovers in exploring her own long relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Read MoreBridget of Sighs
/The new Bridget Jones novel will make you laugh and cry — but it might also make you fret, as it continues the series’ ongoing celebration of incompetence. Is blue soup really the best we can hope for, or the most we should strive for?
Read MoreAn Inglorious Life
/Elizabeth Gilbert’s ambitious novel imagines the life of a 19th-century woman botanist, as insightful as Darwin but lost to history. It’s an interesting project, and a worthy one, but does the novel live up to its premise?
Read MoreIt Might Have Been
/In life there are no second chances, no do-overs. But what if we could keep trying until we got it right? Kate Atkinson explores the possibilities in a novel that just might win her a coveted literary prize or two.
Read MorePerformance Anxiety
/What does it mean to say “only the music matters?” In her bleakly intelligent new novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz challenges us to consider what we really value in music and how our own demand for superhuman perfection strips it of its soul.
Read MoreBook Review: The Life of George Eliot
/A careful and discerning new biography tackles that most daunting of all great Victorian novelists, George Eliot - with largely praiseworthy results.
Read MoreAll the World to Nothing
/The real mystery of Richard III is not the fate of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, but why we never tire of telling and re-telling his story. What do we really see when we stare at his enigmatic portrait?
Read MoreAbandonment, Richness, Surprise
/Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.
Read MoreDesultory Vivacity
/Does marriage mean much anymore? Does the novel? Jeffrey Eugenides sets out to reinvent the classic literary story—but can he combine the style and the substance of the greats he hopes to update to our times?
Read MoreMemo to a Colleague
/Is Marjorie Garber's defense of literary studies balm to the beleaguered English professor's soul? Not yet, anyway.
Read MoreA Novelist in Tahrir Square
/It's fitting that Ahdaf Soueif is narrating this exciting new chapter in Egypt's history: for decades she has offered her readers richer, more complicated stories of the Middle East than the commonplace ones of submission and extremism.
Read MoreA Woman of High Courage
/For nearly three decades, Sara Paretsky has used the familiar form of the private eye novel to turn a critical eye on contemporary America. Rohan Maitzen reviews the latest in her V.I. Warshawski series.
Read MoreGeorge Eliot for Dummies
/Free thinker, strong-minded woman, scholar, lover, novelist: George Eliot lived a courageous life that should be known and celebrated. But does Brenda Maddox's biography do it justice?
Read MoreThe Idea of Her
/Her stature has only grown over time, dominating bookstores, television, movie theaters, and now the Internet. She's Jane Austen, the world's least likely pop star.
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