- Books: “Noah’s Compass”
Tyler, returning once again to middle-class Baltimore, extends her characteristic good humor to a limp and oblivious protagonist. Liam Pennywell is sixty years old, a veteran of two marriages, and a largely absent father of three. Fired from his job as a fifth-grade teacher at a “second . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Books: “Contested Will.”
In this fascinating study, Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, casts skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works as a “long footnote to the larger story of the way we read now” and traces shifting assumptions about the relation between art and autobiography. Some fifty alternative . . ....
- Books: “The Dead Republic.”
Doyle’s ninth novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with “A Star Called Henry,” chronicles the return to Ireland, after almost thirty years of exile in America, of Henry Smart, a former I.R.A. assassin. The first section, in which Henry works with John Ford . . ....
- 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: “Walks with Men.”
Beattie’s novella is set in the Manhattan of literary aspirants’ dreams: a recent Harvard graduate, Jane, takes up with Neil, a man twenty-three years her senior, who provides an education in food, clothing, and sex. “You’re smart,” he says, “but you . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->“HAPPY ENDING @ JOE’S PUB”
The downtown reading-and-music series teams up with the “331/3” series of books about pop music. The authors Geeta Dayal, Christopher R. Weingarten, and Dan Kois read from their works. The musical guest is The Little Death . . ....
- 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: “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: Richard Mason’s “History of a Pleasure Seeker” review.
The hero of this artful evocation of the European Belle Époque, Piet Barol, is handsome, witty, charming, and poor. Eager to correct his only defect, he takes a post tutoring the troubled son of a rich Amsterdam hotelier. Soon he begins a love affair with his charge’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Last Stand.”
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer looked down through binoculars at an immense Indian village on the Little Bighorn River. All he saw were women and children; the men seemed to be away. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!” he shouted. “We’ll . . ....
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The War Lovers.”
Before embarking for Cuba, in 1898, the Rough Riders, led by Theodore Roosevelt, chanted, “Rough, tough, we’re the stuff / We want to fight and we can’t get enough / Whoopee!” In Thomas’s telling, that spirit—manliness so loudly asserted that it’ . . ....
- John Lahr: “Shlemiel the First,” at the Skirball.
All fans of the American musical who are sick of boulevard nihilism, movie retreads, choreographic cliché, dopey lyrics, and banal librettos, your ship has come in: “Shlemiel the First,” the terrific 1994 klezmer musical, adapted by Robert Brustein from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s play, is being . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Dance
goatTitle-->NEW YORK CITY BALLET
For sheer pleasure, one could do worse than the Sept. 23 program, consisting of Balanchine’s breathtaking “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” (1972), Alexei Ratmansky’s stylish, sexy “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement,” and Christopher Wheeldon’s rollicking gaucho ballet . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- James Wood: Teju Cole’s prismatic début novel, “Open City.”
Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind . . ....
- 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.)...
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
goatTitle-->“WATERMILL QUINTET”
The Guggenheim Museum’s “Works & Process” series presents a performance curated by the director Robert Wilson, featuring the works of five artists. Last summer, at the Watermill Center—Wilson’s artistic laboratory on eastern Long Island—the . . ....
- 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.)...
- Books: Toby Lester’s “Da Vinci’s Ghost” review.
This short, engaging book provides historical and intellectual contexts for one of the world’s most famous drawings, Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” in which a male figure is inscribed in both a circle and a square. Lester traces the conceptual origins of the drawing back to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Alex Ross: Philip Glass’s 75th birthday celebrations.
Philip Glass’s place in musical history is secure. His sprawling, churning, monumentally obsessive works of the nineteen-seventies—“Music with Changing Parts,” “Music in Twelve Parts,” “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha”—have fascinated several generations of listeners, demonstrating . . ....
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
THE THEATRE
ON THE RISE
Jan. 5-16
The Public’s annual “Under the Radar” series, which presents works by both up-and-coming and veteran theatrical innovators, includes a new piece by Taylor Mac, “The Walk Across America for Mother Earth”; “Ameriville,” by . . ....
- Goings on About Town: On the Horizon
THE THEATRE
ON THE RISE
Jan. 5-16
The Public’s annual “Under the Radar” series, which presents works by both up-and-coming and veteran theatrical innovators, includes a new piece by Taylor Mac, “The Walk Across America for Mother Earth”; “Ameriville,” by . . ....
- Books: “God’s Arbiters” review.
From 1898 to 1902, the United States was mired in the Philippines in a guerrilla war so heated it turned Mark Twain into an anti-imperialist and inspired Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” Those in favor of annexing the island nation championed the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Joan Mitchell”
8220;I’ve always painted out of omnipotence,” the renowned Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell wrote. Albers’s ambitious, capacious biography channels the notorious bravado of a woman it casts as an “eidetic synesthete,” who suffered from alcoholism, depression, and seasonal affective disorder. As we follow . . . (Subscription required.)...
