- 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: “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.”
Abandoned by his wife and rebuffed by his estranged father, a middle-aged salesman named Maxwell Sim—“like a SIM card”—finds he has “lost all appetite” for “human contact.” Leaving behind seventy Facebook friends and the fake e-mail address he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Curfewed Night.”
Peer’s memoir of Kashmir chronicles a “fairy-tale childhood of the eighties”—samovars of kahwa tea drunk in paddy fields beneath the Himalayas—that gives way to “the horror of the nineties”: India’s rigging of the 1987 state elections and . . ....
- Books: “No Such Thing as Silence.”
In this concise survey, Gann, a composer and music critic, examines John Cage’s famously noteless composition “4′33″” from origins to afterlife. He lucidly catalogues the “specifically American mix” of influences—Duchamp, Zen, Erik Satie, Thoreau, Robert Rauschenberg—that fed . . ....
- Books: “The World That Never Was.”
This history follows the radical anti-authoritarians who flourished in the years between the Paris Commune, in 1871, and the First World War and the politicians, policemen, and agents provocateurs who opposed them, casting the conflict as “the first international ‘War on Terror.’ ” Butterworth shows how . . ....
- Books: “The Four Fingers of Death.”
Moody dedicates this sprawling novel, about a detached human arm infected with a killer bacteria incubated on Mars, to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, and Vonnegut’s influence is visible throughout—in the metafictional narrative, sci-fi touchstones, and depiction of a dystopian future characterized by enfeebling consumerism . . ....
- Books: “Solace.”
The Dublin of this début novel feels familiar—the city of Stephen Dedalus updated with pop music and a line of cocaine. Mark is a struggling Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College who makes wary trips home to help his father on the family farm. He embarks on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Imperfectionists.”
This acute début portrays the world of neurotic journalists—“as touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists”—at an English-language paper in Rome. Vignettes introduce us to various characters: a naïve Cairo stringer; an obituary writer unable to . . ....
- Books: “Lit”
This affecting memoir—the third in a series that includes “The Liar’s Club” and “Cherry”—documents Karr’s alcoholism, the breakdown of her marriage, and the unlikely redemption she finds in the Catholic Church. Chased out of Texas by the memories . . ....
- Books: “Trotsky”
8220;I hate Trotsky!” Winston Churchill told the Soviet Ambassador in 1938. “It’s a very good thing that Stalin has got even with him.” Trotsky, even before one of Stalin’s agents found him in Mexico and assassinated him with an ice axe, was . . ....
- Books: “Rat.”
Rat is a fifteen-year-old girl, “all elbows and moods,” who enjoys a sunburned and barefoot life in the South of France with her eccentric mother and adopted brother. Trouble at home leads to a familiar but finely constructed narrative, as the siblings set out for London . . ....
- Books: “Nothing Daunted.”
In 1916, the author’s grandmother and her best friend, two young Smith graduates from blueblood East Coast families, decided to abandon their cosseted lives of “bridge parties and automobiling” and venture across the country—by train, then wagon—to teach at a remote outpost . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Curfew.”
Ball’s fiction lies at some oscillating coördinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread. In previous books, the author—a poet with the mind of a cardsharp—has seemed giddy with his powers of invention, as his . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Ticking Is the Bomb.”
Flynn’s memoir, his second after “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” covers impending fatherhood, his mother’s suicide, revelations of torture, and his father’s alcoholism and dementia. The structure—a few pages on each subject—gives the book a jittery energy . . ....
- Books: “The Literary Conference.”
Aira, an experimental Argentine writer, has published more than sixty books, though only a few have appeared in English. At a literary conference, César, the protagonist—author and translator by day, mad scientist by night—hatches a plan to rule the world by creating an army . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- Books: “On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.”
In a provocative book, Margalit—a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton—claims that “rotten compromises are not allowed, even for the sake of peace.” Focussing on the . . ....
- Books: “Gustav Mahler,” by Jens Malte Fischer
In this mammoth biography, Fischer recounts how the conductor and beloved composer—born in Bohemia in 1860, to a family of “brandy distillers and soap boilers”—worked his way up to the dizzying heights of the Vienna Court Opera. As its director, he revolutionized production methods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Higher Ground” and “One Day.”
Speaking as someone chained to the past—or to an imaginary version, if the real one proves unavailable—I tend to inquire, when grading the current fortunes of an actress, not “How good are her movies?” but “How bright would the gleam have been in . . ....
- Books: Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” review.
The first sign that this is not an orthodox history is the “cast” list up front, in which real people mingle with fictional ones. This hybrid approach, Spufford argues, befits the “fairytale” nature of his subject: the Soviet Union’s attempt—via a centralized . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Book of Secrets.”
This elegant and quietly powerful book—part social history, part literary study, part memoir—takes its title from a diary and scrapbook, resembling a “dilapidated saddle of a horse,” kept by the minor British aristocrat Eve Fairfax, whom Holroyd describes, with a distinctive combination of empathy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Annabel.”
This début novel is set in a tiny settlement in Canada’s coastal north, where nature governs life: “Men of the cove generally were kings outside their houses—kings of the grounds and sheds and fences—and the women were queens of inner rooms . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Not for Profit.”
Nussbaum, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago, candidly describes her latest book as a “manifesto, not an empirical study.” She is alarmed by the degree to which the humanities are being pushed aside—at all levels of schooling and in countries around the world . . ....
- Books: “The Magnetic North.”
Fifteen years after braving Antarctica for the book “Terra Incognita,” Wheeler travelled around the Arctic Circle: Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway. “Pollution, plunder, the gleeful killings of the Norse sagas—the Arctic is not a white Garden of Eden,” she writes. Visiting Russian Gulags and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Upgraded to Serious”
McHugh is known as a challenging wordsmith, but, as this collection reveals, she is also a compassionate eyewitness. On earth, “there’s nothing / unastonishing—but get that too,” McHugh writes in “Webcam the World,” which lovingly takes on permanence as an obsession. Loss, after . . ....
- Books: “A Great Unrecorded History.”
This affectionate, though misconceived, biography of E. M. Forster is less about his writing than about the nearly fifty years of silence that followed the success of “A Passage to India,” in 1924—taking too seriously the idea, put forth by one of Forster’s friends . . ....
