Displaying articles for: December 2009

Appetite City

A history of eating out in New York city, from the Colonial coffee house to 21st-century “event dining.”

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Summertime

The Nobel laureate continues to explore the slippery nature of truth in a funny, moving, and deceptive new book. Read more...

Concerning E. M. Forster

One of the most celebrated critics of English literature examines the achievement of the beloved but "enigmatic" novelist. Read more...

20 Books We're Waiting For

James Mustich runs down a score of the coming year's books we're eager to get our hands on.

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Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

An ambitious novel brings urgent suspense to a philosophical question: how we can know what our words really mean? Read more...

Charles Dickens

The first major biography of the writer in two decades offers a stunningly detailed portrait of a life steeped in words. Read more...

Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons

A half-century's worth of the cartoonist's exuberant, creepy, and unforgettable creations. Read more...

Gifts for Young Readers

Lisa Von Drasek's third annual "scouting report" provides assistance for the uncertain, the busy, the overwhelmed, with literary gift ideas to please kids of all ages.

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Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

Thomas Mallon follows up A Book of One's Own with a turn from the privacy of the diary to the fellowship offered by the daily mail. Read more...

Wishing for Yesterday

Our resident children's librarian looks at young readers' classics, redux. Read more...

The Best Books of 2009: Editors' Picks

The editors of the Barnes & Noble Review select their favorite titles of the year -- fiction, nonfiction, and beyond.

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The Death of Bunny Munro

Amy Benfer on the irrepressible cad on the loose in Nick Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro. Read more...

The Man in the Wooden Hat

Jane Gardam's companion novel to Old Filth is not a sequel, but a fresh perspective on a complex relationship. 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.