What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
Kingdom of Shadows, the sixth of Alan Furst's novels of historical espionage fiction, was hard for me to put down--and when I did, I couldn't wait to pick it up again.
Oct 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Peter I. Fifield
Man’s Best Friend Man’s Best Friend
As Stevie Smith once wrote, while impersonating God, "I will forgive you everything,/But what you have done to my Dogs/I will not forgive." About Dan Rhodes's novel Timoleon Vi...
Oct 16, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Caleb Crain
Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness
John Coetzee's new book reads like a suicide note.
Oct 16, 2003 / Books & the Arts / John Banville
La Japonaise La Japonaise
With each last reverberation from the world of 1960s and '70s radicalism--the recent parole of Kathy Boudin, for example, a member of the Weather Underground who served twenty-...
Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan
The Man Without Qualities The Man Without Qualities
The hero of The Namesake is an American of Bengali parentage named Gogol Ganguli.
Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / David Bromwich
Local Color Local Color
A review of Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem.
Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Melanie Rehak
London Kills Me London Kills Me
Monica Ali was recently named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists--an A-list of red-hot literary youth writing some of the most promising books on the contemporary ...
Oct 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Diana Abu-Jaber
She’s Gotta Have It She’s Gotta Have It
In his 1997 song "Highlands," Bob Dylan reports a conversation between himself and a waitress. "She says, You don't read women authors, do you?/...
Sep 18, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Claire Dederer
Bleak Haus Bleak Haus
Though still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989 at the age of 57, is widely recognized as ...
Sep 11, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Mark M. Anderson
An Empire of Their Own An Empire of Their Own
"I have never had such a bad feeling about a war ever before," wrote Sha Twa Nee on the Prophecy Club message board in April.
Sep 4, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Melani McAlister