Book Review: A Darkling Sea
/A murder at the bottom of an alien ocean looks likely to spark an interstellar war
Read MoreBook Review: An Explorer's Notebook
/An exuberant collection of essays and reviews by trailblazing natural historian Tim Flannery
Read MoreBook Review: A Burnable Book
/14th century court poet John Gower is brought in by his friend Geoffrey Chaucer to solve the mystery of a book whose very existence threatens the realm
Read MoreBook Review: Why Kings Confess
/A seemingly random murder leads our hero Sebastian St. Cyr into the dark and dangerous world of international espionage in C. S. Harris's latest novel
Read MoreBook Review: The Medicean Succession
/In 1537, teenager Cosimo dei Medici became the first citizen of Florence, and in the following decades, he set about fashioning a 'sacral' rulership for himself - a complicated process at the heart of this fascinating new study
Read MoreThingamajig Unbound
/B. J. Novak, the gamine and unassuming star of the American version of The Office, has written a collection of short stories, and that collection, remarkably, got published. Justin Hickey decides to judge it on its merits.
Read MoreThe Art of the Con
/Years ago, while on the hunt for writing material, Walter Kirn befriended an eccentric, dog-loving raconteur named Clark Rockefeller. Then Rockefeller was charged with murder, kidnapping and identity fraud, and Kirn had his book. G. Robert Ogilvy reviews Blood Will Out.
Read MoreThe Idea of Kenya
/A dazzling, kaleidescopic debut novel journeys through Kenya's fraught post-colonial history while unpacking the tangled question of what it means to be a Kenyan.
Read MorePistols and Pearls
/It’s Melbourne in the late 1920s and violence keeps intruding into the elegant world of jazz clubs, cocktails, and fabulous fashion. No matter: Phryne Fisher is on the case.
Read MoreTitle Menu: 7 Books on Art Crime
/Art crimes aren't really sexy: they are an offense against humanity. Leah Triplett offers up a catalog of recent studies that explain the criminal attraction to art.
Read MoreThe Danelaw
/In her brilliantly scathing new book, Elaine Scarry charges that US Presidents, in maintaining and augmenting an enormous nuclear arsenal, have broken the social contract and become monarchs in all but name.
Read MoreA Place Out of a Story Book
/A close reading of Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return reminds us that the dream of every returning exile is to savor not only a lost land but a lost time.
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “The past lies in wait to ambush the present”
/A veteran master of suspense, Gerald Seymour enhances his track record with The Dealer and the Dead. Scott O’Connor’s Half World is a chilling fictional take on a secret CIA mind control program activated in the middle of the last century.
Read MorePedestaled in Triumph: Robert Browning in Italy
/The great and problematic poet Robert Browning drew some of his most powerful poetic inspirations from the lore and lure of Italy; Luciano Mangiafico traces the complicated relationship of the man to his "adopted homeland."
Read MoreFrom the Archives: Two From Saturnalia Books
/John Cotter looks into new mixed-media books of poetry by Bill Knott and John Yau to discover shades of meaning in the interplay of artwork and verse.
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