Displaying articles for: June 2009

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us

The anatomy of a bubble. Read more...

The Ignorance of Blood

The city of Seville broods over intrigues both domestic and international in Robert Wilson's new novel. Read more...

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

The astounding career of the "Million Dollar String Bean." Read more...

Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Can the answer to modern anomie be found in the act of rebuilding a car engine? Read more...

The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

A new book throws light on what often seems the most shadowy aspect of the U.S. intelligence community. Read more...

Let the Great World Spin

A man's unlikely balancing act lends momentary grace to the chaos of a fragmenting city. Read more...

Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

A young man's eastward odyssey from Minnesota to Princeton and beyond. Read more...

White Is for Witching

A malevolent house works its will on a family in this heady gothic tale. Read more...

Lean, Mean, and High-Toned Too: Richard Stark's Parker Novels

The enduring appeal of Richard Stark's dedicated crime professional, Parker. Read more...

Stone's Fall

The death of a turn-of-the-century arms tycoon uncovers a shadow world of finance. Read more...

A Brain Wider than the Sky: A Migraine Diary

The pain-fueled odyssey of a migraineur. Read more...

Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime

A father's mission to complete his son's book -- left unfinished when he was killed in the line of duty. Read more...

The Thing Around Your Neck

From the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, tales of life caught between the Old World and the New. Read more...

In the Kitchen

In her new novel, the author of Brick Lane finds urban unease simmering on a restaurant's stoves. Read more...

Four Freedoms

The author of Little, Big turns from fairyland to life on the home front during WWII. Read more...

Between the Assassinations

In these tales from the author of The White Tiger, India?s diverse cultures are united by the pursuit of wealth and power. Read more...

Is God a Mathematician?

An argument that playing with numbers is the quintessentially human trait. Read more...

The Story Sisters

A novel of three sisters whose charmed lives prove not so charming. Read more...

Bubble Gum-shoes: The Rise of the Kid Sleuth

The boy detective grows up, in a manner of speaking. Read more...

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Is the modern conception of work an unpleasant necessity? An evolutionary aberration? Or a key to happiness? Read more...

My Father's Tears and Other Stories

Updike's final collection of stories reveals an imagination continually alive to the astonishments of reality.

Read more...

Red April

A darkly comic thriller in a Peruvian town haunted by the memory of terror. Read more...

Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities

Elizabeth Edwards returns to the scene of her husband's marital crime, in search of its lessons. Read more...

How to Sell

The world of high-end jewelry salesmen rendered in diamond-hard prose. 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.