The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
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For such an enduringly popular writer, Alexandre Dumas, pere, has been surprisingly ill-served by his English-language translators.
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The Wife by Alafair Burke
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Readers who enjoyed Alafair Burke's 2016 crime-thriller The Ex for its sharply-drawn main character, hard-fighting high-profile trial attorney Olivia Randall will be pleased to know that she makes a return appearance in Burke's new book, The Wife. Readers who were kept eagerly turning pages by Burke's thriller-writing expertise will likewise be pleased to know that their author hasn't lost a single step--
Read MoreMy Pillow Keeps Moving! By Laura Gehl
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It's a cold winter day outside the Pillow Palace as Laura Gehl's delightful My Pillow Keeps Moving begins, and a dog and cat are huddling together against the chill. The dog decides to go into the shop and flop down in a pile of pillows just as a portly mustachioed man enters the shop, looking for a “guaranteed soft and cuddly” pillow. When he leaves, the little dog is in his shopping bag – the chilly cat watching in dismay.
Read MoreFrankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon
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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein turns a ripe old 200 in 2018, and one of the first of a probable flood of books to commemorate that bicentennial is this volume Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon, edited by Sidney Perkowitz and Eddy Von Mueller. The anthology is divided into three unequal parts: Part One is about Shelley's book itself (including Laura Otis' very strong “Frankenstein: Representing the Emotions of Unwanted Creatures”); Part Two concentrates on Frankenstein in the media; Part Three consists of two essays about Frankenstein and science, with the standout piece being “Frankenstein and Synthetic Life: Fiction, Science, and Ethics” by Perkowitz.
Read MoreThe Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works
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Time has a funny way of turning scoundrels into icons.
Read MoreIn the Shadow of Agatha Christie
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As the great editor (he of last year's excellent The New Annotated Frankenstein) Leslie Klinger notes in his Introduction to In the Shadow of Agatha Christie: Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Writers, 1850-1917, Christie will always be considered “the Queen of Crime.” This kind of sobriquet naturally invites readers to search for predecessors – and naturally invites editors to assemble books like this one. Even half a century ago the exercise was in full swing with Hugh Greene's now-venerable The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
Read MoreHigher Calling: Cycling's Obsession with Mountains by Max Leonard
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Any book that seeks to sing the praises of manifestly irrational behavior must strap on its dancing shoes pretty much from Page 1 and just keep tappa-tappa-tapping for all its worth. Anything less, any slowing of the tempo to the pace where normal life is lived, will result in readers blinking, holding the book at arm's length, and saying, “This is not my beautiful wife.”
Read MoreOliver Loving by Stefan Merrill Block
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Oliver Loving, the quirky, smart, awkward, immediately likable 17-year-old main character in Stefan Merrill Block's new novel Oliver Loving, occupies the center of the book like a black hole (kudos to Keith Hayes for his Flatiron Books US cover design showing exactly that), an absence that's also a presence, a ravitational pull so strong it swallows light and bends time. Oliver lives in Bliss, Texas with his father Jed, his mother Eve, and his brother Charlie, and he's making his way through the relatively ordinary life of an optimistic, bookish teenager when everything suddenly changes.
Read MoreThe Tools We Need
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The panic that arose across the country as the incredible reality of a Trump presidency began to sink in hit the book world with particular force. In his temperament, style and values, the new president seems almost purpose-built to oppose everything Barack Obama has stood for and accomplished. (The only things they appear to have in common are a love of golf and an on again-off again friendship with Hillary Clinton.) In few aspects is the gulf wider than in their respective attitudes to reading.
Read MoreThe Great Apes: A Short History by Chris Herzfeld
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Christ Herzfeld's Petite histoire des grands singes appeared originally in 2012 and now has an English-language translation from Yale University Press by Kevin Frey that ably captures both Herzfeld's sweeping viewpoint and his sharply inquisitive tone; the book presents readers with a fast-paced and engaged history of humanity's historical and scientific encounters with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees and broadens whenever it can to larger issues of ethology and primatology.
Read MoreBook Review: Christopher Hitchens - The Last Interview
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The thriving “Last Interview” series from Melville House features slim volumes collecting the final public comments made by a wide variety of public figures – geniuses, charlatans, comedians, artists, successful frauds, and the occasional transcendent intellectuals. Here we get reflections in winter (whether they knew it or not) from such people as David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Hannah Arendt, Philip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut, and this month the series takes in the late Christopher Hitchens, political commentator, outspoken atheist, and author of the bestselling God is Not Great.
Read MoreThe Twilight(ing) of the Superhero
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The principle of sexual selection, wrote naturalist Charles Darwin, deals with “the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in respect of reproduction.” A peacock’s tail, its marvelous length and iridescence sculpted by female choice, is the iconic example. Beetle horns, the elaborate nests of bower birds, and even the human brain, engine of art, music and speech, further illustrate the power of a positive feedback loop. The more refined a trait, the better suited to attracting mates shall a specimen be. Life, when not about brute struggle, becomes both beauty pageant and talent show.
Read MoreThe Cute One Redux
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Picking a favorite Beatle is a rite of passage akin to choosing a political party or deciding between the Yankees and the Mets.
Read MoreA Bygone Present
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At the heart of Elmet is the idea that societal systems aren’t designed to protect the vulnerable – women, the poor, the landless, the uneducated.
Read MoreMarilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy
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Marilynne Robinson began her novel Housekeeping while completing a dissertation on Shakespeare as a graduate student. Initially she wrote what now form the book’s preliminary scenes as exercises in extended metaphors. Evoking her childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho, a lake town in the panhandle of the state (in the book she renames it Fingerbone) and remotely drawing off her ancestors, Robinson simply wanted to see if she could still write something other than scholastic essays. Also, she has said, she wanted to impress her friends.
Read MoreWorlds Undone
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A pseudonym, though it obscures, is not always successful as a bid for obscurity. Witness Elena Ferrante: while her work stands on its own, the added mystery of authorial absence has no doubt contributed to the years-long international firestorm of publicity and speculation.
Nevertheless, a pen name may still give personal shelter to the author who chooses it.
Read MoreBoth Sides, Now
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To the naysayers who complain that critics are nothing more than parasites of art and culture, A. O. Scott has dismaying news: You too are a critic, that very opinion constitutes criticism, welcome to the club, pull up a chair. The premise of his new book Better Living Through Criticism is that the act of criticism is synonymous with the act of thinking, in the manifold ways this can done—wondering, questioning, investigating, examining, shaping ideas, forming judgments. You might imagine criticism to be a more professional pursuit—in Scott’s case, for instance, in his capacity as a film critic for the New York Times, it sometimes involves writing in-depth excurses on the latest superhero blockbuster.
Read MoreNot One to Eschew the Everyday
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Daniel Brown is, if his poetry is any indication, a very patient man. “I’m as open as the next guy,” he writes in “The Biggie,” a poem from his latest collection, What More?, “to the counterintuitive.” This he proves again and again, in both openness and unexpectedness. What More? begins with Brown asking an honest question, one so honest that an animating tension is introduced between the candor of the content and the art of its presentation.
Read MoreAll Our Revels Ended
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After a long career spent in the throes of literary battle, Harold Bloom wants to tell us that he is done fighting.
He began his combat in the mid-fifties by defending the English Romantics against the New Critics who, inspired by T.S. Eliot, maligned Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and others to such an extent that study of them was virtually banned in American universities until Bloom took up the call.
Read MoreReading Poetry
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Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter Professor at Harvard University, begins her new book with what she calls an “account of [her] life as a critic” – a reasonable subject for an introduction, given that, at the time this review is published, Vendler will have just passed her 82nd birthday. More relevant, though, is that The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar is the latest of nearly 30 books authored or edited by Vendler since the 1960’s, over the course of which, in addition to hundreds of reviews and essays, she has become known as perhaps the finest living critic of poetry in America.
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