Displaying articles for: October 2009

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's most famous creation mingles with his maker and her circle. Read more...

Traveling with Pomegranates

The author of The Secret Life of Bees and her daughter pen an unusual memoir of travel and self-discovery. Read more...

Box 21

A tale of human trafficking and revenge, seen through multiple perspectives. Read more...

Parallel Play

A childhood seen through the high-precision lens of Asperger's syndrome. Read more...

The Tyranny of E-Mail

The editor of Granta looks at messages from Morse to Microsoft Outlook -- and sees the rise of an implacable electronic tide threatens to overwhelm us. Read more...

War Dances

A new collection of longer and shorter works from the award-winning novelist and poet trades in heartfelt sorrow and wicked humor. Read more...

The Music Room

A boy's life in a famed Tudor castle -- haunted by spirits of the past, and the present. Read more...

An Artist in Treason

The youngest general in the Continental Army was also an inventive schemer who nearly engineered the breakup of the fledgling Union. Read more...

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

Ralph Nader's public-policy fantasia pits noble tycoons against mega-corporations in what the author calls a "practical utopia." Read more...

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

A portrait of the auteur, through the lens of conversation. Read more...

Blame

A murderous accident is the departure for one woman’s surprising journey to something like redemption. Read more...

Infection by Volume

A reading list that may form a textual inoculation for viral anxiety.

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Chronic City

The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude imagines a Manhattan nearly replaced by its own simulacrum. Read more...

The Education of a British-Protected Child

The author of the classic Things Fall Apart uses his pen to set a cat among the pigeons. Read more...

Memories of the Future

Short stories as dreams with barbs, from a satirist of Soviet life under Stalin. Read more...

The Children's Book

In A. S. Byatt’s new novel, the Edwardian era is both disappearing Eden and the center of turmoil for one artistic family. Read more...

Bicycle Diaries

When David Byrne stops moving, does he fall over? And when stationary, is he liable to be found leaning carefully against a wall? Read more...

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel brings the intrigue of the Tudor court to life -- through the mind of one of its most elusive players. Read more...

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

Richard Pious listens in as President Clinton wrangles with speeches, maneuvers foreign powers, and faces catastrophe. Read more...

The Immortals

The complex rhythms of the raga pulse through a Jamesian rendering of Bombay. Read more...

Generosity: An Enhancement

Scientists and scribes pursue happiness in the new novel from the author of Galatea 2.2. Read more...

February 9: Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944. Thirty years after her Pulitzer winner The Color Purple, Walker continues to publish in many genres. Her most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir-meditation…

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.