Displaying articles for: November 2009

The Talented Miss Highsmith

The life of one of the greatest of crime writers was as darkly shadowed as any of her creations. Read more...

Open

Can an athlete whose dazzling feats and outsize persona create a memoir that escapes the gravitational pull of his fame? Read more...

Eating: A Memoir

A lion of the publishing world on a life lived as much for the pleasures of the table as of the text. Read more...

Reading in the Brain

What you're doing with your eyes and brain right now is a lot more interesting than you realize. Read more...

Devil's Dream

The author of All Souls Rising bases his latest novel on the Civil War career of one of the Confederacy's most controversial figures. Read more...

The War That Killed Achilles

Caroline Alexander journeys back to the mother of all battles. Read more...

Too Much Happiness: Stories

One of the defining creators of contemporary short fiction suggests she has new territories in sight. Read more...

Changing My Mind

A wide-ranging collection of essays on topics that range from the nature of British comedy to the orations of Barack Obama. Read more...

The Original of Laura

The wizard of fiction's unfinished novel is published, and the Vladimir Nabokov's magic cabinet is unlocked for our perusal. Read more...

Sentencing the Suspects

Former National Book Award judge Tom LeClair takes a close look at this year’s fiction finalists. Read more...

Invisible

Veronique de Turenne explores the novelist's ambitious Invisible. Read more...

American Original

The remarkable career of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Read more...

The Lacuna

A adventures of a Zelig-like figure are the center of the new novel from the author of The Poisonwood Bible. Read more...

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s

A brash, revealing, and sometimes dishy chronicle of a gay writer's life in a bygone Manhattan. Read more...

Under the Dome

A town's mysterious encapsulation yields a nightmarish turn toward the brutal. Read more...

D-Day

"As the ramp went down we were getting direct fire right into our craft," wrote a soldier in the 116th on the western part of Omaha. "My three squad leaders in front and others were hit. Some men climbed over the side. Two sailors got hit." Read more...

Lit

The new memoir from the author of The Liars' Club charts life as an addict, poet, and survivor. Read more...

Googled

Do we really need another book about Google? Read more...

Super Freakonomics

Ezra Klein measures a sequel’s unintended consequences. Read more...

Cowboys Full

How a deck of cards gave birth to a legendary pastime that has come to stand for part of the American character. Read more...

The Humbling

An actor prepares for his climactic appearance. 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.