- 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: “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: “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” review.
Schappell’s second collection is framed by two stories about a woman named Heather. She first appears as a high-school student, “a good girl with a bad reputation,” who dreams of becoming a marine biologist. In the later story, she tries to discourage her teen-age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “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.)...
- John Lahr: “The Cherry Orchard,” “Bonnie & Clyde” reviews.
As a stagestruck boy, Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the gallery.) Later, he came to see Russian theatre as “the venereal disease of the cities.” “I . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Nadine Gordimer’s “No Time Like the Present” review.
The lives of a mixed-race couple, Steve and Jabu, trace the frustrations of post-apartheid South Africa in this political novel. As former heroes are tarnished and corruption scandals become routine, the couple move from city to suburb, and careers and children edge them into “the normal life . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Friends with Kids,” “Attenberg” reviews.
In order to understand “Friends with Kids,” think of it as “Friends” with kids. The place is the same—a pocket of New York—and the math is identical. Six long-standing pals: three women, three of the opposite flavor. Four of them divided . . ....
- 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.)...
- Driving With Friends
Driving with your friends might seem like a lot of fun, but it can also be incredibly dangerous if you are not careful. When my younger brother was in high school, one of his classmates was killed in a motor vehicle accident shortly after leaving school for the day. He had just gotten his permit to drive and was driving himself and his girlfriend home from school....
- 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: 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: “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.)...
- Ben Greenman: Robbie Robertson’s “How to Become Clairvoyant.”
paragraph class="noindent">Few members of the classic-rock pantheon have had more problematic solo careers than Robbie Robertson. After the dissolution of the Band’s original lineup, Robertson took nearly a decade to surface as a solo artist: his eponymous début was a landmark of late . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Inner Life of Empires.”
The eleven Johnstone siblings of Westerhall, in Scotland, were “a large and disorderly family,” whose lives, playing out on three continents between 1723 and 1813, illuminate what Rothschild calls an “empire of intimate exchanges.” The subject is well chosen and provocatively explored. One brother was a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Sense of an Ending” review.
In Barnes’s elegant, playful, and remarkable novella, Tony Webster, divorced and retired, confronts the “imperfections of memory” as he recalls his youth in sixties England. He recalls his school days as being like “kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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 . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
goatTitle-->“CALL ME ISHMAEL”
“Moby-Dick” has inspired many folks to do many things, from students who have pulled their hair out over it to landlubbers who have gone on sea adventures. Patrick Shea, an elementary-school teacher who lives in Brooklyn, has embarked on . . ....
- Sherman Alexie: “The Facebook Sonnet.”
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s all . . . (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: “The Cookbook Collector.”
Goodman’s charming reworking of “Sense and Sensibility” follows two sisters—Emily, the C.E.O. of a promising data-storage startup in Silicon Valley, in the late-nineties, and Jess, a tree-hugging vegan who meanders through graduate school at Berkeley while moonlighting at an antiquarian bookstore . . ....
- David Denby: “Ride the High Country,” at BAM.
In the nineteen-fifties, Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) and George Stevens (“Shane”) tried to freeze the Western genre into a single archetypal film, while directors like Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann were taking it in bitter new directions. “Ride the High Country,” Sam Peckinpah . . ....
- Books: “Old Border Road.”
This début novel, set in the open spaces of the Southwest in an indeterminate modern age, traces the disappointments and betrayals of a young woman’s first year of marriage. Katherine’s feckless mother and absent father leave her ill-equipped to refuse a quick union . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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.)...
- Books: “The Chairs Are Where the People Go.”
After Heti decided that “the world should have a book of everything” that Glouberman knows, the two friends drafted a list of promising topics. Then Glouberman, a well-known performance artist, talked, Heti transcribed, and the result is a triumph of what might be called conversational philosophy. Heti . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “This Beautiful Life.”
An underage girl at a private school makes a pornographic video for a classmate; unsurprisingly, it ends up going viral. Drawing on a real-life school scandal and using multiple narrators, Schulman’s novel examines the effects of the incident on the family of the teen-aged boy who . . . (Subscription required.)...
