All About My Mother All About My Mother
The Caribbean island of Vieques is a fitting setting for Captain of the Sleepers, Cuban novelist Mayra Montero's engrossing story premised on violations of the dead.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Kate Levin
In Kars and Frankfurt In Kars and Frankfurt
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature wrote this 2005 editorial in The Nation, addressing the issue of the artistic imagination at risk in a repressive state.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Orhan Pamuk
Agee’s Gospel Agee’s Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Phillip Lopate
The Uncertainty Principle The Uncertainty Principle
By writing a novel about a conventional novelist writing about a conventional man, J.M. Coetzee's latest work illuminates the role of the novel and cuts through typical and tired t...
Oct 26, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Pankaj Mishra
Another Country Another Country
Chronicling the final, devastating months of the Civil War, E.L. Doctorow's new novel, The March, reveals the author's complex love for an earlier version of America.
Oct 12, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Vince Passaro
Frontier Injustice Frontier Injustice
In Andrew Jackson: A Life and Times, the frontier president is cast as a one-man beacon for democracy. But Jackson's core belief was a fervent defense of land.
Oct 12, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Anatol Lieven
Rearranging the Furniture Rearranging the Furniture
For prose scholar Viktor Shklovsky, who lived by the code of style and studied its depths, an unhappy love affair can be as much a personal tragedy as a plot device for more writin...
Oct 6, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Elif Batuman
A Hero for Our Time A Hero for Our Time
Critics have been trumpeting Benjamin Kunkel as the voice of his generation. But his first novel, Indecision, about a 28-year-old empty vessel, is little more than an empty vessel...
Oct 6, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Mark Lotto
The Blank Verses The Blank Verses
A Rick Moody novel is generally about one thing and that is Rick Moody's ability to write very long, occasionally graceful sentences.
Sep 22, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Christine Smallwood
Rushdie’s Receding Talent Rushdie’s Receding Talent
It has almost become a sadness to review a novel by Salman Rushdie. Shalimar the Clown is no exception.
Sep 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Lee Siegel