Travel Agents
Patrick O'Brien's A Book of Voyages - available in America for the first time - spans the globe with some of history's most adventurous writers. Review by Michael O'Donnell.
New Beauty Myths
YA star power.
Rick Atkinson
His Memorial Day picks.
And the Mountains Echoed
Hosseini's triumph.
James Braly
Marriage and mania.
GRIN AND TONIC
The Considerably Older Guy
A chat with Bruce Jay Friedman.
READING ROMANCE
To Serve and Protect
Hearts behind the badges.
FIVE BOOKS
American Battles
Great soldier stories.
LIVES
Woman of Iron
Margaret Thatcher's life and career,
at suitably epic scale.
ROCK AND ROLL AND
Voices from a Desert War
Robert Christgau on Saharan musical traditions ancient and modern, in a region riven by conflict.
Dan Brown
On stoking Inferno.
Anthony Marra & NoViolet Bulawayo
How a novel becomes a novel.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace
A campus corrupted.
Matthew Goodman
On history's narratives.
Daybook

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

more »
Previously in Daybook
In the Margin

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

more »
Earlier Posts
advertisement
The Long List
Books, CDs, DVDs to know about now
The Philadelphia Chromosome

Expounding the well-known link between genetics and cancer, this scientific history recounts the initial discovery of a gene mutation that eventually led to enormous breakthroughs in the fight against leukemia. 

She Left Me the Gun

Emma Brockes' mother Paula escaped from South Africa with a smuggled pistol and a dark secret.  A daughter unravels her family's covert past -- and a suspenseful legal drama -- in this hard-boiled memoir of survival.

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Expand your memory, puzzle-solving skills, and sense of metaphysical wonder with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's tasting menu of user-friendly neuroscience and poetic lingual pursuits.