Displaying articles for: April 2009

Sag Harbor

A beachfront coming-of-age in the '80s, from the author of The Intuitionist. Read more...

The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight

Gourmets face off against geese (and their protectors) in an increasingly heated cultural showdown. Read more...

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East

A reporter?s career in the Middle East yields insights that don?t always make the front page. Read more...

Nobody Move

A gambler pushes his luck in a freshly hard-boiled tale. Read more...

Impossible Man

How the seeming paradox of "Muslim punk" grew out of the even more complex dreams of an American teenager. Read more...

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century

The life of an internationally celebrated poet whose voice embodies "inscrutable simplicity." Read more...

Flying

Youthful flights of fancy take wing on a colossal tall tale -- and return comically to earth -- in this exuberant novel. Read more...

The Philosopher and the Wolf

A memoir of an unlikely human-animal partnership, and a meditation on life through lupine eyes. Read more...

The Long Fall

The creator of Easy Rawlins introduces a detective for the 21st century. Read more...

Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book

Our newest -- and oldest -- contributor on the enduring perils of publishing. Read more...

On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

A literary and personal meditation on the power of changes in scene. Read more...

Lowboy

A young man sets out on a subterranean voyage, hoping to save an overheated planet. Read more...

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

A trial more than half a century old remains the stage for a hard-fought political struggle. Read more...

The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them

An advice columnist?s bracing memoir of raising her daughter -- and herself -- in Freeville, NY. Read more...

Don't Cry

Life stripped bare by a harsh and forbidding eye. Read more...

An Oresteia

An experiment in antiquity rediscovers the fates of Agamemnon, Elektra, and Orestes. Read more...

Castle

An ex-soldier returns to his hometown to discover anomalies in the land -- and in his own memories. Read more...

The Impostor

Under the guise of a nation's rebirth, old crimes and fresh corruptions. Read more...

Philip Jos� Farmer: A River Ran Through Him

Exploring the perpetually overflowing imagination of the late Philip José Farmer. Read more...

When Skateboards Will Be Free

The child of would-be revolutionaries on growing up as a socialist in America. Read more...

The Lost City of Z

An Amazonian Shangri-la and the hapless adventurers who sought its secrets. Read more...

Ablutions: Notes for a Novel

A visionary portrait of lives on the rocks, glimpsed from behind the bar. Read more...

Humbug

A new collection celebrates the improbable magazine created by a quintet of Mad geniuses. 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.