- 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.)...
- Hilton Als: Frank Langella’s memoir “Dropped Names.”
When Frank Langella donned a trench coat after having sex with an emotionally available married lady in the 1970 film “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” he was telling us as much about his character’s improvisatory spiritual state and emotional chilliness as was possible in a single . . . (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: “The Girl with Glass Feet.”
In this wintry fable, Ida Maclaird finds her feet crystallizing into glass, and she travels to the archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land in search of an enigmatic hermit who she believes can cure her. St. Hauda’s, “a wilderness of recluses,” hides miniature moth-winged . . ....
- Richard Brody: “My Man Godfrey,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” on DVD.
paragraph class="noindent">The blithering rich at the center of many Depression-era white-tie-and-tails movies are depicted mainly as callous villains in Gregory La Cava’s comedy “My Man Godfrey” (new on DVD from Universal), from 1936. The title character, played by William Powell . . . (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: “The Great Leader” review.
Harrison’s novel follows a longtime Michigan State Police detective whose hobby in retirement is tracking down the founder of a religious cult—the Great Leader of the title. “I’m investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex,” he jokes. Harrison, a poet . . . (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: “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: “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.)...
- Hilton Als: “Greater New York,” at P.S. 1.
P.S. 1’s “Greater New York” is one of the season’s more emotionally rich and intellectually edifying shows: it challenges or reinvents aspects of painting and sculpture, with video and performance also high on the list of mediums that get a thorough look. While recent . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “In a Better World” and “Super.”
The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, “In a Better World,” is a tale of two countries. One is Denmark, the native land of Susanne Bier, the movie’s director. The other is an African state, and it is there that . . . (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: “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: “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’ . . ....
- 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.)...
- 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.)...
- 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.)...
- Books: Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” review.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Zona” (better known in English as “Stalker”), an outlaw-cum-shaman known as Stalker escorts two men, named Writer and Professor, through an uncanny, Chernobyl-like Zone in order to reach The Room, where innermost wishes are supposedly granted . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Mr g” review.
A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (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: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Mudwoman” review.
Because M. R. Neukirchen, the protagonist of Oates’s powerful novel, is a philosopher who plumbs “the perimeters of ‘knowing,’ ” it is no surprise that the book often misleads and confounds. At a young age, M.R. was abandoned by her Christian-fanatic mother in a . . . (Subscription required.)...
