- 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: “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 Lives of Margaret Fuller” review.
This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Pearl Buck in China.”
Emphasizing the imagination’s power to “make bearable things too ugly to confront directly,” Spurling sensitively traces the biographical background of Buck’s writing. Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent nearly all of the first forty-two years of her life in China, and her childhood . . ....
- 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.)...
- Books: “1493.”
In this engaging investigation of the ecological underpinnings of the modern age, Mann argues that Columbus did not discover a new world but, instead, created one, igniting a period of biological exchange and “convulsive transculturation” that continues to this day. Trading in the earliest commodities of globalization— . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto.”
A Finnish sanatorium huddled deep in the woods is the setting of this gothic début, a modern reimagining of Euripides’ “The Bacchae.” In the upper ward of the hospital, a group of women suffering from vague ailments—a touch of pyromania here, a physical . . ....
- Books: “Grand Pursuit” review.
This ambitious, sprawling survey of modern economics, from the Victorian era to the end of the twentieth century, tracks the emergence and growth of two parallel arguments against determinism: a rejection of the view of poverty as “a natural phenomenon” and the insistence that market spikes and crashes . . . (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: “Freefall.”
Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning leader of the New Keynesians, traces how Wall Street, under ideological cover from the Chicago school, conspired with Washington, first to peel away the regulations that might have prevented the mortgage bubble, and then to shield the financial sector from losses once the bubble ruptured . . ....
- Books: “The Man in the Moon” review.
This gorgeously strange picture book, the first in a projected series, traces the origins of the Man in the Moon, who, after losing his parents in a battle with the King of Nightmares, is raised by a retinue of giant glowworms and mice in tasselled sailor caps. Joyce’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Nuruddin Farah: “Youngthing.”
A Yankee cap- and Ray-Ban-wearing boy of indeterminate age gets out of a car that has just stopped. He climbs out gingerly, one foot at a time, like a spider creeping up a crevice. Then he retrieves a carryall from the trunk of the car without help from . . . (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: “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: “How It All Began” review.
In this mischievous novel, Lively traces the genealogy of randomness that messes up the lives of strangers. A mugging on a London street ripples out into an interconnected urban universe, shaking marriages and ruining businesses. A retired teacher moves in with her daughter to convalesce, the daughter’s employer . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
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Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Cod,” “Salt,” and “The Big Oyster,” among many other books, discusses his latest release, “World Without Fish,” an illustrated assessment of the future of the oceans. (163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. April 20 at . . ....
- Books: “The Enchanter.”
Zanganeh writes a love letter to literature and to Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who has charmed her with his “demonic artistry of words” and with the “joyousness of pure knowledge.” Zanganeh, once a reluctant reader, picks up “Ada, or Ardor” and quickly discovers that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “James Madison.”
One of only two delegates to attend every session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison transcribed the deliberations. He decided to publish this “most exact account” posthumously, reasoning that “the distance of time like that of space” lends to everything an “attractive” lustre. In . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Patricia Marx: Biblical retractions.
Yes, there were slipups. I changed “Pharisee” to “Philistine” and “the corner of Locust Valley and Donkey Drive” to “Road to Damascus.” When I said it rained for forty days and forty nights, I neglected to add “not in a row . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and “The Arbor.”
The suspect is an unknown male, around six feet tall. He is dressed in winter clothes. He has weapons training and proven survival skills. He may well be armed, so approach with caution. There may be traces of paint on one palm. He can best be identified by a crooked . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Reader on Reading.”
Lectures, columns, and other occasional writings are gathered here to form a meditation on “the art of reading.” Thoughtful interrogations of the value of identity labels like “Jewish fiction” or “gay fiction” and the relationship between writers and editors mix with ruminations on the . . ....
- David Denby: “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “We Bought a Zoo” reviews.
8220;Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is an example of what happens when an author’s fluent literary conceits give way to the sight of all-too-human people moving and talking in the real-world spaces of a movie. Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel is . . ....
- Books: “The Intimates.”
This first novel traces the lives of two friends, Robbie and Maize, from high school to their first post-college year. Sassone focusses on discrete episodes in the lives of his characters: Maize’s deflowering by a college interviewer; Robbie’s trip to Rome to visit his father . . . (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.)...
