From Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.
Reviews
2645 posts
Who’s the Narcissist?
Emily Gould may be the queen of oversharing—but you’re the one reading this review of her book.
The Black Minutes
A crime novel set in a fictional Mexican city delves into the unsolved murders of two decades.
A Rich, Prickly Sense of Expansion
In A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Becka Mara McKay reminds us that every language is a unique translation of a combination of desire and thought, both of which have…
From Old Notebooks
“As the writer wrestles with his book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer. It’s a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing.”
Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving
“Amnesia had long streaming hair bleached to a dazzling white and was always clad in black. Flying through the air she seemed like a Valkyrie warrior plunging down from Valhalla.”
I Know Why the Caged Bear Sings
A collection of stories from a Romanian-American writer, nominated for a Northern California Book Award, juxtaposes stories from the old country and the new.
Disinclined to Mislead Anyone
Lantz forces us again and again to reexamine the way we see through such juxtaposition of facts as well as through the voices of characters who search for and experience…
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes
David Grann compiles a decade of investigative profiles from The New Yorker and elsewhere in a compelling study of the dark side.
you are a little bit happier than i am
Reading these poems makes me want to write and this is a book that I will probably come back to often when I feel stuck or uninspired. The poems in…
The Dollhouse Within
What does it mean to be “in the house,” to be held in place in an age of motion, of fleeting relationships, realities, and contexts?
Bobcat Country
Page after page, Bobcat Country stirs both the counter-intuitively satisfying “Should I be reading this?” queasiness of the Confessional poetry of Berryman, Sexton, and Snodgrass, and the unsettlingly provocative “Is…