An Arts & Literature Review
Brown was young when she became Vanity Fair’s editor – she turned thirty in 1983 - but she was by no means a newbie to the magazine-business. Before moving to the United States, she had been editor-in-chief at the British Tatler which she transformed from a nearly defunct 270-year old dinosaur into a successful modern society glossy.
Read MoreAs they should, the essays collected in The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online offer a mixed assessment of the literary culture the Internet has both transformed and distorted. By now it is clear that online literary culture is no longer seen as an appendage to the “real,” more serious and authoritative culture originating in print but is now a fully functioning source of both literary writing and commentary about that writing—it might be argued, in fact, that it now provides the largest and most significant part of the latter.
Read MoreAt the start of Strangers, Joanna Berrigan is home alone in her house near Munich when she is confronted by a man who is a complete stranger to her. He has let himself into the house with a key and insists he’s Erik Thieben, her fiancé, and that they live together. As he talks, attempting familiarity, nothing he says makes sense. The more he tries to comfort, the greater her terror. Furthermore, there is nothing in the house that suggests anyone else lives there. So why, the creepier he becomes, does she feel like she’s the one who’s crazy?
Read More“Personal space is the fundamental scaffold of human interaction,” writes Michael Graziano in his new book The Spaces Between Us. Graziano is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton University, is studying specifically in these pages the human startle reflex and more broadly the nature and mechanics of how humans manage what he refers to as the protective 'bubble' that surrounds each person and responds to sudden stimuli before the brain can process and interpret things.
Read MoreIt's oddly comforting that the only lazy or derivative thing about James Lee Burke's 21st novel featuring tough-guy New Orleans sheriff's detective Dave Robicheaux is its title; there's no good reason why this latest book should be called simply Robicheaux – or alternately, no good reason why any of the previous 20 couldn't have been called that; it feels like the title you'd give the final book in your series, the one in which your hero finally heat-shots and throat-punches his way to Valhalla.
Read MoreLucy Hughes-Hallett comes to the world of fiction after writing nonfiction, including The Pike, a very good book about Italian writer and gold-plated weirdo Gabriele D'Annunzio. Her opulent new book Peculiar Ground, her debut work of fiction, is probably predictably steeped in history, split between two very different eras.
Read MoreOff to a running start, Michael Moreci's debut novel Black Star Renegades opens with young provincial nobody Luke Skywalker, whose backwater planet Tatooine is in the grip of the evil Empire. Despite Luke's humble origins, wise old Jedi Knight Ben Kenobi believes he's a figure chosen by destiny to wield an enormous power against the Empire. Ben Kenobi takes Skywalker into tutelage, but the two of them fall in with a group of rogues and scoundrels and droids, and their plans are almost derailed. Luke falls in love with a tough young woman who. . .
Read MoreJungian analyst Michael Gellert, in his new book The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God's Inner Journey, sifts through the Old Testament, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Hadith in order to trace the mental and moral growth of the central character, the God of the three Abrahamic religions. The goal of The Divine Mind is to make some sense out of the figure Richard Dawkins refers to as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”; in these pages, Gellert is asking the same question Scriptural scholars have asked all the way back to Saint Augustine and that believers have been asking in one phrasing or another since Adam and Eve were bustled out of the Garden of Eden: “What is it with this Guy?”
Read MoreIn the great hierarchy of book genres, the media tie-in novel occupies a tier decidedly close to the bottom: higher than coloring books or street maps, but lower than, say, Jesus, Life Coach.
Read MoreFor such an enduringly popular writer, Alexandre Dumas, pere, has been surprisingly ill-served by his English-language translators.
Read MoreReaders 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 MoreIt'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 MoreMary 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 MoreTime has a funny way of turning scoundrels into icons.
Read MoreAs 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 MoreAny 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, 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 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 MoreChrist 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 MoreThe 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 MoreAn arts and literature review.
Steve Donoghue
Sam Sacks
Britta Böhler
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Eric Karl Anderson
Olive Fellows
Jack Hanson
Jennifer Helinek
Justin Hickey
Hannah Joyner
Zach Rabiroff
Jessica Tvordi
