Season of Saul
A review of the first volume of Zachary Leader's new biography of Saul Bellow.
All Reviews
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
Traversing the tense, torqued territory between orient and occident, indigenous and empirical, history and amnesia...language makes and unmakes.
A Patron Saint for Sadsacks: What Snark Says About Failure — and What Literature Says Back
If the violence of these stories is often shocking, their logic is predictable. A would-be novelist experiences catastrophe.
Chance and Sausage
In Simic, it’s safe to say, the sausage, that shapely staple of many cultures’ cuisines, has found its Homer.
Will the Real Harun Please Stand Up?
Is Kamel Daoud's "The Meursault Investigation" a critique of Jean-Baptiste set in a different dispensation? Or it is an attempt to go him one better?
The Fame Conspirators
"The Ghost Network," Catie Disabato's innovative and troubling debut novel, takes seriously the idea of a celebrity conspiracy theory.
Stitching Out a Life in Graphic Memoir
With "Baddawi," Leila Abdelrazaq joins women cartoonists engaged in life writing. Not just Satrapi, but Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, and Phoebe Gloeckner.
A Force That Could Not Be Restrained
Elizabeth Berg's voluptuous new novel, "The Dream Lover," deftly illuminates the interior life of French Romantic writer George Sand.
Vulnerable Creatures and the Wounded World-Soul
In The Scarlet Gospels, Barker shows us a demon who has been obsessed with the body, its pleasures and its torments, discovering that, beneath the surface of his own pursuits of the flesh breathes the insistent ache of absence.
From the Fiery Land of the Buddha: War Crimes, Counterterrorism, and the Aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War
Six years on, a series of new books and films are struggling to account for Sri Lanka’s civil war.
That Fine Line Between Hero and Traitor: What Can We Learn from the Snowden Disclosures?
In After Snowden, six legal and media experts explore the ramifications of Snowden’s conduct and the legal landscape that has led to the NSA’s practices.
The Illusion of Choice: How the Government Makes the Public Think Spying Is Good for Us
Jessica Pishko reviews They Know Everything About You.
Luminous Loss
Elizabeth Alexander explores her deeply expansive identity as the loving wife, the smart wife, the American wife in 'The Light of the World'.
Never Too Far
Oliver Sacks the doctor removes his white coat and beneath it reveals one helluva handsome biker who hung out with Hells Angels and played with death.
Humor Is Vengeance
Where satire is an act of lifting the veil to expose the truth, in "The Sellout" Paul Beatty lifts the veil over race in America to find several contradictory truths.
Wild Minds, Only in Fragments
Poet Amy Gerstler gathers meaning from shards of chaos. Her new collection, "Scattered at Sea," is sorely needed in this particular poetic and political moment.