- 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: “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: “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: “In the Land of Believers”
When Welch, a Berkeley native who grew up “thinking I was born an atheist the way some people are born Italian,” moved to Virginia for graduate school, she was forced to confront her inherent fear of Evangelicals. The best way to conquer her anxiety, she decided, was to . . ....
- 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: “Destiny and Desire.”
The acclaimed Mexican author’s latest novel is narrated by the severed head of Josué Nadal, a young attorney employed by a powerful industrialist. His boss is an enigmatic figure who “anticipates reality” and appears to hold more power than Mexico’s President. The country . . . (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 . . ....
- 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: 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.)...
- 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: “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 . . ....
- 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.)...
- Yiyun Li: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”
8220;Here’s a fact for you America-philes,” a certain Major Tang, in the Army in which I had once served, liked to say when he caught us memorizing English vocabulary. “The moon in America is no bigger or brighter than the moon in China.” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “History of a Suicide.”
In 1990, Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old half sister Kim gassed herself on exhaust fumes in their mother’s garage, and this elegiac book is both a memoir of grief and an investigation into the depressive mind—“the inchoate and terrible power of inner demons . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Avatar” and “Sherlock Holmes.”
James Cameron’s “Avatar” is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years. Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Gay Talese: Kissinger’s colleagues on “Nixon in China.”
Henry Kissinger was one of several dignitaries invited by the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Peter Gelb, to the final dress rehearsal, last week, of “Nixon in China,” the opera by John Adams that reënacts the historic state visit that Richard Nixon made in 1972 . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Reeves Wiedeman: Pop star Michel Martelly runs for Haiti’s Presidency.
Rose Du-Jour, a Haitian immigrant with an accent more Queens than Port-au-Prince, was in Great Neck the other night, waiting to confront a politician. “You gotta catch them off guard, ask them questions they aren’t prepared for,” she said, lowering her voice. “ . . ....
- 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.)...
- John Cassidy: Why “state capitalism” is China’s biggest knockoff.
Currency wars, trade battles, threats of economic sanctions—these days, it’s hard to open a newspaper without encountering at least one story about rising tensions between China and the United States. With all the talk of how China could displace the U.S. as the leading financial superpower . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Driving Home.”
In 1990, Raban left London “on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons.” He met someone, he tells us, and made for Seattle, the “far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career.” The essays collected here describe, among other things, his attempts to get . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Voice from Old New York.”
Auchincloss’s posthumous book returns to the childhood territory covered in his classic memoir “A Writer’s Capital.” The short chapters on genealogy (his father was a third cousin of F.D.R.), education (Groton, Yale), and occupation (his mother discouraged him from writing) make up a mosaic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Voice from Old New York.”
Auchincloss’s posthumous book returns to the childhood territory covered in his classic memoir “A Writer’s Capital.” The short chapters on genealogy (his father was a third cousin of F.D.R.), education (Groton, Yale), and occupation (his mother discouraged him from writing) make up a mosaic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Jealousy.”
Millet’s previous memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” was a graphic résumé of her history in libertinism, including trysts with, by her own count, at least forty-nine partners. This follow-up is a chronicle of the “irreversible unravelling of my . . ....
