Displaying articles for: February 2009

Fool

Can Shakespeare survive the antics of a 21st-century jester? Read more...

The Unforgiving Minute

A young Army officer's life, in training and in action. Read more...

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

A life spent "between the house and the chicken yard" nurtured a writer whose short fiction plumbed the depths of the soul. Read more...

The Accordionist's Son

The story of a Basque activist is wrapped in a mediation on translation's pitfalls. Read more...

Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire

A new history argues that British Empire's sun rose not over the colonies, but the Continent. Read more...

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918

A new biography sheds light on a little-known civil rights pioneer. Read more...

Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age

The high spirits and low lights of a celebrated generation. Read more...

The Vagrants

An uncompromising, haunting vision of life in China in the late 1970s. Read more...

Visible Songs: Jazz Icons on DVD

Jazz giants in performance, at the height of their powers. Read more...

The Women

The genius of Taliesin had a genius for romantic torment as well. Read more...

Picturing Langston Hughes

Three new illustrated volumes for children bring an exuberant visuality to the verse of an American master. Read more...

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings

The surprisingly revealing look at the writer's nine-to-five persona. Read more...

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The voice of contemporary Pakistan emerges as a polyphonic symphony in this new collection. Read more...

The Associate

A young lawyer, a diabolical conspiracy -- the tools of a past master of the page-turner. Read more...

The Speculator: Four Anthologies

Fresh gatherings of science fiction and fantasy tales prove the short story is alive and well. Read more...

A. Lincoln: A Biography

The obsessive, paradoxical genius of the most revered American president. Read more...

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food

A food writer's memoir of a globe-trotting life. Read more...

Cutting for Stone

Moral medicine. Read more...

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

The correspondence between two great poets yields a portrait of a friendship and a treasure trove of language. Read more...

The Good Parents

She's leaving home. 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.