Displaying articles for: May 2010

Hitch-22

The controversial journalist recalls his formative radicalism and illustrious friendships in an entertaining memoir.

Read more...

Chasing the Game

America takes its first steps in the soccer cleats the rest of the world puts on daily. Read more...

Bad writing: What is it good for?

Rotten prose is our most abundant resource -- let's put it to work.

Read more...

Forget Sorrow

A moving graphic memoir of a prominent Chinese family's perilous passage through 20th-century history.

Read more...

The Bradshaw Variations

Rachel Cusk's new novel attempts a contemporary reprise of a Tolstoyan melody.

Read more...

Quantum

A new history of the birth of quantum physics brings the weird, protean, paradoxical subatomic world to life. Read more...

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

A stimulating exploration of the motives that have driven people to find other authors for Shakespeare's plays.

Read more...

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

A "so-called believer" explores the argument and art of Philip Pullman's reimagining of gospel narratives.

Read more...

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer

A new look at an Austrian novel that charts a doctor's unique and uncertain path to redemption.

Read more...

Fear and Delight: The Fiction of Shirley Jackson

Helen Oyeyemi on why the enigmatic author of "The Lottery" retains her grip on the dark side of our imaginations.

Read more...

Role Models

The filmmaker and provocateur transforms a lifetime of fascinations into a memorable and moving set of essays.

Read more...

The Finger: A Handbook

A playful and pointed account of the means by which we make our contact with the world around us.

Read more...

Cartographies of Time

A fascinating new illustrated history looks at how we visualize the vast territory of the past.

Read more...

On Mr. Arkadin and Orson Welles

A Welles scholar offers reflections on the director's vexed legacy, prompted by some recent publications.

Read more...

Empires of the Indus

2,000 miles down the Indus with a writer stepping in the literary footsteps of Leigh Fermor and Chatwin.

Read more...

The Good Son

Michael Gruber's The Good Son turns a hostage crisis in Pakistan into an exploration of our most primal longings.

Read more...

Design and Truth

A vision of an ethical design that honestly approaches its environment and endeavors to cooperate with it.

Read more...

The Changeling

The latest novel from the 75-year-old Japanese Nobel Prize winner blends mystery and memory.

Read more...

The Great Reset and The Rational Optimist

New books by Richard Florida and Matt Ridley that try to put recent economic turbulence in perspective.

Read more...

The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis's new novel remembers the sexual revolution as it was "well into its Reign of Terror phase."

Read more...

Ill Fares the Land

A distillation of the historian's career-long engagement with the vicissitude of 20th-century history and ideology.

Read more...

The Imperfectionists

A novel mourning the death of journalism, centered on the decline and fall of an English-language paper in Rome.

Read more...

War

From the author of The Perfect Storm, a searing report on the reality of the war in Afghanistan's Korengal valley.

Read more...

The Lonely Polygamist

A gifted and confident storyteller plots the loneliness of a husband of four and father of 28.

Read more...

Operation Mincemeat

The author of Agent Zigzag reveals the true story of Britain's most ingenious WWII espionage ploy.

Read more...

Last Call

A scintillating, sweeping, and eye-opening account of the birth, maturity, and afterlife of the 18th Amendment.

Read more...

Private Life

The latest novel from Jane Smiley anatomizes a marriage in an era of tumultuous change.

Read more...

The Last Stand

The historic battle at Little Bighorn, from the award-winning author of Mayflower.

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.