Displaying articles for: January 2010

The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival

A new arrival in a sleepy Louisiana parish wakes things up in this sly small-town comedy. Read more...

Churchill: A Life

One of the most contradictory personalities of the 20th century turned out to be one of its most pivotal. Read more...

Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis

A Dutch physician unveils the history -- both mythological and medical -- of a sensitive area. Read more...

The She-Devil in the Mirror

A tart-tongued society woman is the centerpiece of this audacious satire on a ruling class's way of life. Read more...

The Exiles

Three young Native Americans leave the reservation and try to make their way in the wilderness of 1950s Los Angeles. Read more...

A Good Talk

The novelist and editor offers an essay on the art of conversation worthy of Montaigne. Read more...

Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession

The author of Julie and Julia pens a follow-up memoir that cuts a little closer to the bone. Read more...

Becoming Jane Eyre

The creation of one of fiction's most enduring heroines makes rich fodder for a tale of a young writer's ambition. Read more...

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary

A legendary work of graphic memoir reappears -- in all of its disturbed glory.

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John Brown's Trial

After his failed raid on Harper's Ferry, the man some called a traitor and others a hero was brought to a final, sensational trial. Read more...

Zoot Sims in the Jazz Loft

A horn player lost between eras, found again in a glorious new work of photography. Read more...

February 11: Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day in 1990. The recent anthology Conversations with Myself samples from decades of archived material in an attempt to "give readers access to the Nelson Mandela…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.