- 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: “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 . . ....
- On the Water Front @ Atlantic Gallery
In conjunction with its current group show, “Water,” the Atlantic Gallery has organized a panel discussion. Jacques Leslie, the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment,” will join Elizabeth Royte, whose latest book is “Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water”;...
- Books: “The Secret History of Costaguana,”
8220;All Colombians are liars,” the narrator of this turbulent novel declares. He is, of course, Colombian, as is the author, who aims at a corrective to the fictionalized portrait of Colombia in Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo.” Vacillating between polemic and farce, Vásquez presents . . . (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: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.”
The author’s transformation from Southern California jock into “sexually neutered androgyne” began the summer after tenth grade, when he abruptly quit playing soccer, pierced his ears, and discovered lip gloss. Goulian’s choices have cost him professionally (he abandoned a law career, in part because . . . (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: “Townie.”
This charged memoir by the author of “House of Sand and Fog” begins as his parents’ marriage unravels, and his father, an acclaimed writer, leaves his mother struggling to support four kids. Living in poor towns in northern Massachusetts, Dubus and his siblings “roamed the neighborhoods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “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: “Funeral for a Dog.”
In this grave, gentle novel, Daniel Mandelkern, a journalist and former ethnologist, is sent to profile Dirk Svensson, the reclusive, childless author of a best-selling children’s book. He soon realizes that “the research intern did a terrible job”: Svensson does have a child, possibly two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: 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: “The World That Never Was.”
This history follows the radical anti-authoritarians who flourished in the years between the Paris Commune, in 1871, and the First World War and the politicians, policemen, and agents provocateurs who opposed them, casting the conflict as “the first international ‘War on Terror.’ ” Butterworth shows how . . ....
- Books: “The Escape.”
This philosophical meditation disguised as a sex farce does not quite succeed as either, despite voluptuous prose and the author’s formidable intellect. The novel’s frantic events concern the last hurrah of a septuagenarian roué at a mountain resort in the former Yugoslavia. His mission is . . ....
- Books: “Mice.”
Reece, the author of several children’s books, makes his adult début with a topical, tautly plotted novel that centers on a bullied teen-ager who discovers her own capacity for violence. Shelley, a meek and studious girl, retreats to an isolated cottage in the British countryside . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Princess Noire.”
8220;Princess Noire” was the original, unused title of Nina Simone’s autobiography, and Cohodas duly appropriates it for her account of the singer’s life and career. Simone, born Eunice Waymon and nurtured as a child prodigy, devoted her early years to classical piano. After a . . ....
- 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.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
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David Nicholls’s novel “One Day” was recently made into a movie staring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, and Patricia Clarkson. He reads from the book and discusses it with Lisa Birnbach, a co-author of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” and . . ....
- 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: “Nothing Daunted.”
In 1916, the author’s grandmother and her best friend, two young Smith graduates from blueblood East Coast families, decided to abandon their cosseted lives of “bridge parties and automobiling” and venture across the country—by train, then wagon—to teach at a remote outpost . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Curfew.”
Ball’s fiction lies at some oscillating coördinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread. In previous books, the author—a poet with the mind of a cardsharp—has seemed giddy with his powers of invention, as his . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Sly Company of People Who Care.”
Though billed as a novel, this wonderfully uncategorizable book moves freely between travel guide, cultural history, and picaresque adventure tale. The narrator (like the author) is a young Indian cricket reporter, and he spends a year in Guyana as “a slow ramblin’ stranger” after an earlier visit . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Betrayal” review.
The effects of repression replace those of deprivation in this sequel to Dunmore’s “The Siege,” which was set during the long siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. It’s now 1952, and Anna and Andrei have made a happy life for themselves and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
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Shel Silverstein, the irrepressible children’s book author whose career took off in 1964 with the publication of “The Giving Tree,” was also a noted songwriter (he penned Johnny Cash’s hit “A Boy Named Sue”), as well as . . ....
- Books: “Hitch-22.”
As contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author’s incessant output, this memoir is an effective coming-of-age story, regardless of what one may think of the resulting adult. The picture is highly selective: key areas (Hitchens’s two marriages; the nineteen . . ....
