Displaying articles for: September 2009

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

An anthology for the child (with a stash of well-read comic books) in everyone. Read more...

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

A bibliophile gone bad is the center of this intriguing investigatory work. Read more...

Rose's Heavenly Cakes

An excursion to a bakers' paradise, guided by the author of The Cake Bible. Read more...

Mathilda Savitch

In this first novel, we find an adolescent Mathilda Savitch all abuzz with urgent questions and unsettling emotions... Read more...

Truelove's Gutter

"Anyone here like rockabilly?" It was December 2007, and Richard Hawley was asking his audience at Los Angeles' Troubadour if they were ready for an upbeat number from his then-latest album, Lady's Bridge... Read more...

No Impact Man

Michael O'Donnell reviews a journalist's record of his attempt to live in harmony with the earth -- from his Manhattan apartment. Read more...

Born Round

Jennifer Weiner savors Frank Bruni's memoir. Read more...

The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard

In J.G. Ballard's stories, the world is always ending. Read more...

Wind's Poem

Mount Eerie mastermind Phil Elverum calls the music on Wind’s Poem "black metal." Read more...

You Were Always Mom's Favorite!

Heller McAlpin on the new book by the author of You Just Don't Understand. Read more...

The Weeping Goldsmith

"One of my jobs," writes Smithsonian Institution botanist Kress, "is to travel to remote areas to document the remaining unknown plant diversity." ... Read more...

The Human Condition

The mother of all war movies, Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition clocks in at almost ten hours and features an all-star Japanese cast... Read more...

The Love Children

By the time of her death at age 79, in the late spring of this year, Marilyn French had published five novels and many works of nonfiction... Read more...

Glover's Mistake

David Pinner, the caustic, self-absorbed malcontent at the center of Nick Laird’s new novel, is a tough sell... Read more...

That Summertime Sound

Former film executive Matthew Specktor makes his fiction debut with this gossamer yet feverish coming-of-age novel about a nameless 19-year-old lost boy who spends the summer of 1987 slinking around Columbus, Ohio... Read more...

Stitches

A stitch in time can save nine, but Caldecott-winning children’s book author David Small’s unloving parents spared him not a one... Read more...

February 10: The Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke at the British Navy's expense, occurred on this day in 1910. Among the young Bloomsbury conspirators was Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and, though she played only a minor…

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.