- Books: “Blood’s a Rover”
The final novel of Ellroy’s “Underworld U.S.A.” trilogy, following “American Tabloid” and “The Cold Six Thousand,” is a fittingly crazed and violent account of the years 1968 to 1972. Alternating chapters follow three henchmen with ties to a labyrinth of interconnected schemes . . ....
- Books: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “In Zanesville”
Beard opens her début novel with a babysitting predicament: “We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all.” For the teen-age narrator and her best friend, navigating ninth grade in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Katia Bachko: Tom Colicchio, Craft and “Top Chef.”
Besides okra, what Tom Colicchio hates most is being asked just how often he finds himself in a kitchen. It’s a dumb question, considering that he’s the main judge and an executive producer of “Top Chef,” which recently began its ninth season on Bravo . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: Why do people love Stieg Larsson’s novels?
Having got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books—“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’ . . ....
- Jill Lepore: Books about the birds and the bees.
It was in the living room. My father was reading the newspaper. I was reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. “By Jove, Peterson!” said he, “this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have got?” “A . . ....
- Books: Roger Crowley’s “City of Fortune,” review.
Crowley, a historian of Mediterranean conflicts, offers a brisk account of the rise of the Venetian Republic, which in the Middle Ages was “a shifting, supple matrix of interchanging locations, flexible as a steel net.” Venice’s power, at its height, extended along both shores of the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Source Code” and “Meek’s Cutoff.”
8220;Source Code,” a techno-thriller about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from nuclear destruction, is much more enjoyable than “Inception,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Limitless,” and other fantastical jaunts of recent seasons. The movie may begin as a sci-fi . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America.”
In 1967, when “Bonnie and Clyde” was rolled out across America, Warren Beatty, according to a publicist, “wrote personal notes to all the projectionists and stuck them in the film cans, with the projectionists’ names on each one.” (He wanted them to raise the volume . . ....
- Tad Friend: Andrew Stanton, “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” director tries live action.
If Andrew Stanton’s career has taught him anything, it’s the power of toys, fish, and robots. Stanton was the lead writer of Pixar Animation Studios’ “Toy Story” trilogy; he also wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” about a father fish’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->THE POWERHOUSE ARENA
Ben Greenman, an editor at this magazine, and the writer Neil Strauss celebrate the publication of Greenman’s new book, “Celebrity Chekhov,” and Strauss’s forthcoming volume, “Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness . . ....
- Books: “Family Britain, 1951-1957.”
The second volume of Kynaston’s epic social history of postwar Britain covers a period of stabilization: jobs abounded; food rationing ended; and though the Conservatives’ victory in 1951 was fuelled partly by Churchill’s derision of the “Queuetopia” created by Labour, his party did . . ....
- Hilton Als: Diane Keaton’s “Then Again.”
Part of what makes Diane Keaton’s memoir, “Then Again,” truly amazing is that she does away with the star’s “me” and replaces it with a daughter’s “I.” Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Mark E. Smith, the Fall, “Ersatz G.B.”
In 1976, four people living in an apartment behind a mental hospital in Prestwich, England, formed a group called the Fall. The band is about to release its twenty-ninth album, titled “Ersatz G.B.” Stephen Malkmus, of Pavement, once called the Fall’s only permanent member, Mark . . ....
- Joan Acocella: David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry Five.”
David Gordon has always been postmodern dance’s premier minimalist. So you could say he was almost showing off when, in 2004, he took on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”—with its massed armies, its take-charge king, its pretty princess—and made his own . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Dead Hand.”
A young Indian man spends a night in a flophouse in Calcutta and wakes up to find a child’s corpse in his room. This is the mystery that the narrator of this crime novel—Theroux’s tentative foray into the genre—is called upon to . . ....
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- David Denby: Sidney Lumet’s “Prince of the City”
Of Sidney Lumet’s trilogy of films about police corruption in New York—“Serpico” (1973), “Prince of the City” (1981), and “Q. & A.” (1990)—the middle film (screening on July 24 at Film Society of Lincoln Center) is probably the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Northwest Corner.”
In Schwartz’s triumphant “Reservation Road,” a hit-and-run accident left one boy dead and the father of another serving a prison sentence. In this sequel, set twelve years later, the two families are still haunted by loss and regret. Sam Arno, a talented baseball player . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.”
The author’s transformation from Southern California jock into “sexually neutered androgyne” began the summer after tenth grade, when he abruptly quit playing soccer, pierced his ears, and discovered lip gloss. Goulian’s choices have cost him professionally (he abandoned a law career, in part because . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Stalking Nabokov” review.
Boyd writes that as a high-school student he began reading Nabokov “so intensely that his way of seeing the world partly shaped mine.” He isn’t kidding. Boyd seems to have been put on this earth to savor, and annotate, Nabokov’s lavish, many-minded . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Siberian Education.”
The heart of this memoir, about growing up in a clan of “honest criminals” of Siberian origin in the Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria, is in the annotation. Lilin may have the birthright of a crook, but he has the eye of an anthropologist, and he trains it . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “The King’s Speech” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.”
The object of “The King’s Speech” is to make us care, as deeply as possible, about the vocal impediment of a dead British monarch. This is not a topic that, until now, has received our most fanatical attention, but the film’s director, Tom Hooper . . ....
- John Lahr: “Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward,” at N.Y.P.L.
Noël Coward claimed that his life was “one long extravaganza”; as if to prove it, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ “Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward” is a lavish, well-curated exhibit about the Master’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
