Last Book I Loved

Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts in terrorism—the 9/11 kind of terrorism. As an unarmed woman, she went into some of the world’s scariest countries, met some of the world’s scariest people, and lived to tell the…

Okay, so maybe most of you have already read this novel. Because it is a classic, because you went to college, because Oprah featured it on her book club. But if I’m not the only person in the world who…

In India, and for Hindus, the myths are how we explained the world and everything in it. And from those first musings about the true nature of things came countless epics, sub-epics, stories, fables, philosophies and prescriptions that have teemed…

Deborah Eisenberg’s Collected Stories just won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award, and last year she received a MacArthur. If you’ve been following the buzz but haven’t yet discovered the pleasures of her work, now is the time. Start with Transactions in…

Have you ever played at being an Arctic explorer? Looked at the icy expanse of your backyard as if it was the desolate plain of a frozen tundra? Come to the exciting realization that you and your best friend have…

It is a novel, not a cookbook, but my sister the full-on foodie insists that the recipes all look workable, and what could be more perfect than a story about New Orleans that incidentally teaches you how to make white…

Wendell Steavenson’s memoir of her time as a freelance foreign correspondent in Tblisi, Georgia, begins in her former Time Magazine office, where she and her friend Nina spin escape fantasies under the world map tacked above their desks. Nina has…

I knew I would love A Moveable Feast, as it deals with Hemingway’s personal life as a young writer in Paris in the 1920s. The book isn’t regarded as fiction, though the style is very similar to The Sun Also…

A couple of the more exciting book stumbles I’ve enjoyed recently are Geologist Dougal Dixon’s “zoology of the future,” After Man (1981), and its “anthropology of the future” sequel, Man After Man (1990). After Man is a credible paleontology/speculative fiction…

I feel like now is an inappropriate time to admit that the last book I loved is a book called After the Quake by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, a book more or less about Japan’s last devastating earthquake in Kobe.…

There’s literature and then there are books. You pick up a Rushdie or a Marquez or Bolaño–these are the kind of heavy works which aren’t works at all, but are more conveyances of the voice of the writer, inexhaustible, indulgent,…