Displaying articles for: December 2008

Bone by Bone

An army investigator revisits a childhood trauma as new questions arise about his brother's disappearance. Read more...

The Art Instinct

A Darwinian account of the deep-seated love of beauty and the creative impulse. Read more...

From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776

From the Monroe Doctrine to the "Axis of Evil," a sweeping history of America's global relationships. Read more...

The Letters of Allen Ginsberg

The headlong and irrerepressible voice that defined Beat poetry was also a diligent chronicler of a generation's frenetic energies. Read more...

The Magician's Book

The surprisingly capacious world inside an Oxford don?s imaginary wardrobe. Read more...

The Hour I First Believed

From the author of She?s Come Undone, a novel that meditates on the nature of a modern horror. Read more...

The World Is What It Is

The peripatetic life and controversial career of a Nobel laureate. Read more...

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

The creator of Hogwarts waves her wand and produces five fairy tales for young wizards and witches. Read more...

Winnie and Wolf: A Novel

What if Hitler's love of Wagner's opera had been carried out in a different key? Read more...

The Silver Linings Playbook

A novel in which an unquiet mind finds an unlikely form of therapy. Read more...

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head

Exploring the world inside. Read more...

The Northern Clemency

A tale of two families struggling in Thatcher?s England becomes an epic of the everyday world. Read more...

Books for Kids: A Scouting Report, 2008

Our librarian correspondent once again comes to the rescue. Read more...

Samuel Adams: A Life

A new life of the revolutionary figure whose legacy is still an enigma. Read more...

The Prospector

The Nobel laureate's novel paints an idyllic portrait of Le Clézio's "ancestral home." Read more...

Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

The recent history of irrational exuberance, and its consequences. Read more...

Deaf Sentence

Mortality shadows the latest novel from the celebrated satirist of the intellectual world. Read more...

The Speculator: The New Weird

The fantastical rebirth of the "Weird Tale" Read more...

Editors Picks: The Review in 2008

A handful of some of the best writing of 2008, from the B&N Review Read more...

The Year's Best Nonfiction

Our contributors recommend the finest nonfiction of 2008. Read more...

The Year's Best Fiction

A look back at the best fiction of 2008 from our reviewers. Read more...

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir

A struggle with mental illness, seen from a parent's stricken vantage point. Read more...

Blindspot

A tale of art, murder, love and cross-dressing in Colonial Boston. Read more...

In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

A memoir of a life onstage keeps its spotlight trained on the actor's craft. Read more...

Lulu in Marrakech

The chronicler of transatlantic affairs turns her hand to a new kind of intrigue. Read more...

I See You Everywhere

A new novel from the author of Three Junes traces parallel lives. 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.