Displaying articles for: January 2010

The Godfather of Kathmandu

As detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep crosses the border into Nepal, the karmic burdens weighing on Bangkok’s most honest cop get even heavier.

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Point Omega

The author of Underworld and Falling Man ensnares readers in another "imaginative act of empathy" and leaves us "suspended in its drama of time."

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Tracking the True Roberto Bolaño

Last interviews and an early novel from the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666.

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Ordinary Thunderstorms

A single mistake sets of a hurricane of consequences, battering a hapless climate scientist in this darkly comic, Dickensian tale.

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I.O.U: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay

How we drove the world's economy right off the road.

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Sleepless

In Charlie Huston’s surreal new thriller, zombie-like Los Angelenos find themselves up all night.

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Remarkable Creatures

In this novel of scientific discovery in Regency England, the human specimens are the most unusual.

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Just Kids

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, and a passionate friendship that rocked the music and art worlds. Read more...

The Unnamed

In the new novel from the author of Then We Came to the End, a dramatic and surprising combat between the flesh and the spirit.

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Doors Open

An art-heist in the heart of Edinburgh takes a wrong turn in this darkly comic caper. Read more...

The Ticking Is the Bomb

In an act of daring juxtaposition, the award-winning poet and memoirist meditates on the arrival of his child in a world shadowed by torture.

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36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Philosophy, religion, science, madness and love are all on the menu in this richly imagined novel of ideas.

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You Are Not a Gadget

A founding eminence of cyberspace inveighs against the digitization of culture. Read more...

The Swan Thieves

The new novel by the author of The Historian turns away from vampires to obsessions of more mortal flesh.

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Ransom

One of Australia’s most celebrated writers turns back to a chilling episode out of Homer: the rage of Achilles, and the terrible fate of Hector.

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Daring Young Men

The Berlin Airlift was supposed to be a stopgap measure until a diplomatic stalemate could be resolved. It became a pivotal victory in the Cold War. Read more...

Noah's Compass

A mysterious assault provokes a reassessment from a man who had resigned himself to a second-rate life. Read more...

Committed

The author of Eat, Pray, Love traces her circuitous route back to the altar. 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.