Book Review: Snowden
/The life of infamous NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, in comic book form
Read MoreBook Review: Self and Soul
/A spirited defense of humanist intangibles in a culture obsessed with material gain
Read MoreBook Review: A River Runs Again
/The huge environmental problems facing India form the backdrop for Meera Subramanian's fantastic first book
Read MoreBook Review: The Gates of Evangeline
/A mother grieving the loss of her own son investigates the 30-year-old disappearance of a powerful Southern family's little boy in this haunting debut
Read MoreRomancing the Convention
/Think romance novels aren’t worth taking seriously? The Romance Writers of America's annual convention brings together thousands of smart, self-aware readers and writers ready and able to prove you wrong.
Read MoreOn Venusberg by Anthony Powell
/Anthony Powell's name is synonymous with his twelve-volume behemoth "A Dance to the Music of Time." But he had a long and varied writing career, and his early novel Venusberg, Levi Stahl contends, is well worth searching out in the shade of "Dance."
Read More“I am eager to play chess – I have mastered nine skills”
/At the beginning of the 19th century, a small trove of elaboratedly carved chess pieces was uncovered on a remote beach - a lively new book traces the history and strange charisma of the Lewis chessmen.
Read MoreFosse's Dark Vision
/Director Bob Fosse dreamed that his 1983 movie Star 80 would put him in the front ranks of Hollywood, but what resulted was both stranger and - our reviewer urges - more powerful than it first seemed.
Read MoreCottonwoods
/a poem
Read MoreBoy, Interrupted
/For the protagonist of Jim Shepard's heartbreaking novel The Book of Aron it is terrible to be a poor Jew in anti-Semitic prewar Poland – but it is hardest of all to be a child, at the mercy of everyone else.
Read MoreKnow Your Name
/Game of Thrones is remarkably faithful to George R. R. Martin’s original epic series, except for one vital element: it transforms his subversive morality into conventional fantasy.
Read MoreKnowledge of the Life
/What are literary biographies good for, anyway? Do they provide insight into the work or just tittle-tattle about the life? Scott Donaldson's The Impossible Craft offers a brief on this endlessly alluring genre.
Read MoreMoving at the Speed of Love
/Poet Alex Caldiero's Some Love is tangled in the poetic complexities of love, and yet, as reviewer Scott Abbott discovers, the poems here can be every bit as fleshy and uncomplicated as the real thing.
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “The only species that is dangerous to humans is other humans”
/A mystery trio: Louise Penny’s 11th Gamache novel is a stellar addition to the series; Elsa Hart’s debut is a fine historical murder mystery set in 18th-century China; Bernhard Aichner’s first appearance in English is spine-chilling.
Read MoreAn Impressionistic Outlier
/Lesser-known - and perhaps just plain lesser? - French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte gets his first major American retrospective.
Read More
