NATURE
FIVE BOOKS
GRIN & TONIC
WRITING
Want to know what novelists really think about interviews? Just open one of their books. Essay by Tom LeClair.
THE THINKING READ
Alison Gopnik's research into the startling complexity of the infant mind, and why it helps illuminate the mental world of adulthood as well.
July 29: On this day in 1878 Don Marquis was born. Marquis wrote a handful of plays, a dozen books, and a lot of stories and poems, but his fame came mostly from "Archy and Mehitabel," the cockroach-cat relationship that began in 1916, created…
God bless visionary eccentrics, a type the British Isles are particularly good at producing. Without them, life would be merely a long dreary trudge through a bleak forest of…
Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
This first published collection of correspondence between the two leading lights of the Beat Generation illuminates the inspirations of the legendary authors of On the Road and Howl, tracing their fortunes and friendship from 1944 until Kerouac's death in 1969.
Murder in the High Himalaya
Casting the undeniable tragedy of a Tibetan nun's thwarted escape from Communist rule as a symbol of the oppression of an entire nation, journalist Jonathan Green depicts the ethical and realpolitik frigidity that mirrors the harsh physical conditions at the Roof of the World.
Faithful Place
An excellent new Dublin-set psychological thriller from Tana French, bestselling author of In the Woods and The Likeness.