- 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.)...
- Anthony Lane: “The King’s Speech” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.”
The object of “The King’s Speech” is to make us care, as deeply as possible, about the vocal impediment of a dead British monarch. This is not a topic that, until now, has received our most fanatical attention, but the film’s director, Tom Hooper . . ....
- 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.)...
- 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: “Leeches.”
Albahari’s protagonist is a newspaper columnist in Milosević’s Serbia, who, seeing a man slap a young woman, believes that the slap contains a hidden message of a secret society. “Spinning like a mindless weathervane,” the writer immerses himself in Jewish mysticism to learn . . . (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.)...
- Emily Nussbaum: NBC’s “Whitney” and CBS’s “2 Broke Girls.”
Whitney Cummings may be this year’s most unnerving success, having launched two network sitcoms, an unheard-of achievement for a newcomer. On “Whitney,” which airs on NBC, she stars as a version of herself; with Michael Patrick King, she’s the co-creator of “ . . ....
- George Packer: The Israeli novelist David Grossman’s long walk.
In February, 2004, the Israeli writer David Grossman set out to walk half the length of his country, along the Israel Trail, from the Lebanese border, in the north, down to his home, outside Jerusalem. The journey, a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, would provide material for a novel that . . ....
- 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 Quality of Mercy” review.
This sequel to Unsworth’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Sacred Hunger,” much of which was set on an eighteenth-century slave ship, trades the high seas for the courtroom, where a series of cases bearing on the legal status of black men in British society plays out . . . (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: “The Man in the Wooden Hat”
In this understated novel, Gardam returns to the successful barrister and judge Sir Edward Feathers, the protagonist of her deliciously acerbic “Old Filth.” The complementary tale, told largely from the point of view of Feathers’s wife, Betty, a fellow-“Raj orphan,” begins as the . . ....
- 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.)...
- Books: “Lit”
This affecting memoir—the third in a series that includes “The Liar’s Club” and “Cherry”—documents Karr’s alcoholism, the breakdown of her marriage, and the unlikely redemption she finds in the Catholic Church. Chased out of Texas by the memories . . ....
- 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.)...
- Books: “Luka and the Fire of Life.”
This sequel to “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” is a twenty-first-century myth, with tropes drawn from video games, a multicultural cast of gods and demons, and distinctly postmodern quandaries. Twelve-year-old Luka, a left-handed boy who is “slow to anger and quick . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams.”
8220;How much land does a man need?” Tolstoy asked, in his well-known fable of that name. His answer: Just enough to be buried in. The protagonist of Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18) needs just enough to be . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Financial Lives of the Poets”
The protagonist of Walter’s first novel since the National Book Award finalist “The Zero” is a former financial journalist turned proprietor of poetfolio.com, an ill-conceived Web site featuring investment advice written in verse. Having gambled everything on this quixotic idea, he finds himself hobbled by . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: “Gilgul.”
8220;You know,” she said almost shyly, “that I have the ability, if you wish, to look into your eyes and tell you when you will die?”
“No, I didn’t realize you could do that.” He hesitated for a moment. “And I . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Source Code” and “Meek’s Cutoff.”
8220;Source Code,” a techno-thriller about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from nuclear destruction, is much more enjoyable than “Inception,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Limitless,” and other fantastical jaunts of recent seasons. The movie may begin as a sci-fi . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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 . . ....
- John Lahr: “The Mountaintop” and “We Live Here” reviews.
Martin Luther King, Jr., may have had a dream, but it was not to be the subject of a Broadway show. Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” (directed by Kenny Leon, at the Bernard B. Jacobs) puts the great man in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- George Saunders: “Escape from Spiderhead.”
8220;Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out . . ....
