Book 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 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 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 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
Read MoreBook Review: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure
/In 1503, the city of Florence commissioned two artists to paint the walls of their city hall - two men named Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. A new book assesses the after-effects of this greatest of all artistic competitions.
Read MoreBook Review: The Empty Throne
/Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales continue with a lean, gripping tale of blood and armor
Read MoreBook Review: How to Read the Solar System
/A easily-accessible new guidebook to our home solar system
Read MoreComics: Action Comics - What Lies Beneath
/The revamped Man of Steel embarks on a new series of adventures in Action Comics
Read MoreBook Review: The Revenant
/The scout for a fur-trapping party in 1823 is mauled by a bear and left for dead - but he doesn't die, which is very bad news for the fur-trapping company in Michael Punke's super-effective novel
Read MoreWhat Jona Knew
/It’s comforting to believe there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, or to treat it as a story about the triumph of the human spirit. Jona Oberski’s Childhood rightly refuses us these consolations.
Read MorePlying the Darkness
/Brian Turner’s complex, lyrical meditations on his tour of duty in Iraq make us ache with the privilege that is a war memoir.
Read MoreBiography: J
/James Laughlin started a publishing imprint, New Directions, by selling what would become a syllabus of Modern writing from the trunk of his car.
Read MoreI Am Almost a Camera
/As the Smithsonian's new exhibit confirms, Richard Estes is the preeminent photo-realist painter of our time or--most likely--of any time. But to what extent is photo-realism an art worth practicing? And what does it do?
Read MoreRequiem for the Aral Sea
/a poem, translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes
Read MoreTitle Menu: 6 Lyric Voices of Witness
/The voice of poetry can often be the voice of lyric witness, turning our attention to moments in history that would have eluded us, or that might never have been felt as well as understood. These titles perform this function about as well as it can be done.
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