- 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: “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” review.
This lively survey asks “what translation has done in the past and does today,” and “whether it is one thing or many.” In thirty-two wide-ranging chapters, Bellos variously corrects bits of misguided folk wisdom (Eskimo, it turns out, does not have a hundred words . . . (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 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: “A Voice from Old New York.”
Auchincloss’s posthumous book returns to the childhood territory covered in his classic memoir “A Writer’s Capital.” The short chapters on genealogy (his father was a third cousin of F.D.R.), education (Groton, Yale), and occupation (his mother discouraged him from writing) make up a mosaic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Voice from Old New York.”
Auchincloss’s posthumous book returns to the childhood territory covered in his classic memoir “A Writer’s Capital.” The short chapters on genealogy (his father was a third cousin of F.D.R.), education (Groton, Yale), and occupation (his mother discouraged him from writing) make up a mosaic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “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: “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 Thieves of Manhattan.”
Crime caper meets metafictional satire of the publishing industry in this mischievous novel. Ian Minot, a hard-up writer from Indiana, moonlights as a barista in Manhattan while he watches “raptors and poseurs” rocket to fame on implausible memoirs and derivative stories. When an editor suggests passing off . . ....
- 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: 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: “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: “Lives Other Than My Own” review.
Travelling in Sri Lanka in 2004, Carrère becomes close to a couple whose daughter dies in the tsunami. Upon his return to Paris, he learns that his girlfriend’s sister Juliette is dying of cancer. In this moving memoir, Carrère writes as “a witness . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Late for Tea at the Deer Palace.”
8220;Everybody asks me about my father,” the author writes, on the first page of this family memoir. But the story of the sprawling and wealthy Chalabi clan began long before Ahmad achieved infamy as the source of the “supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war . . . (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: “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: “Twin.”
The author was considered “special” when he began composing music at an early age. His twin sister, Mary, was also special: gifted with numbers, given to kissing her right arm and to uncontrollable bursts of rage. When the twins were eight, Mary was abruptly whisked off to “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Twin.”
The author was considered “special” when he began composing music at an early age. His twin sister, Mary, was also special: gifted with numbers, given to kissing her right arm and to uncontrollable bursts of rage. When the twins were eight, Mary was abruptly whisked off to “ . . . (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.)...
- Books: Amanda Coe’s “What They Do in the Dark” review.
Two schoolgirls strike up an unlikely friendship, with grim consequences, in this début novel. Gemma comes from a comfortable family in the midst of breaking up, as her mother takes her to live with a new boyfriend; Pauline lives with an indifferent extended clan and rarely sees her . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “The Dead Republic.”
Doyle’s ninth novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with “A Star Called Henry,” chronicles the return to Ireland, after almost thirty years of exile in America, of Henry Smart, a former I.R.A. assassin. The first section, in which Henry works with John Ford . . ....
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Emma Goldman” review.
Gornick’s arresting portrait of the anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), whom J. Edgar Hoover called “the most dangerous woman in America,” is less a political history and more an illumination of “the existential drive behind radical politics.” Goldman, a Russian immigrant who taught herself English . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Dora Malech: “Country Songs.”
My man does his crying on a fast horse.
I do my best dancing with strangers.
The child screams through the moment
of silent prayer, says “It’s a free country,”
says “You and what army.” You can’t
trespass on a river, you . . . (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: “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.)...
