Reviews
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Winston Smith Is 39
1. Winston Smith is 39. And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
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Rediscovering the West
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
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The Eyes of Our Skin Are Closed
The enchantment of Dangerous Laughter is not merely a function of the tales themselves, but also of the way in which Millhauser tells them – with careful, attentive prose that is rich in detail yet never overwhelming.
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How Judges Think
When it comes to trying to understand people, Richard Posner is an American Sigmund Freud.
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A Questioning Faith
A Review of Dan Albergotti’s The Boatloads I have a special place in my heart for literature that juxtaposes the sacred and profane, that challenges perhaps the most successful meme ever to spring from the human brain: the belief that…
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The Sky Below
A.J. Liebling once remarked that the authors of newspaper obituaries are “a frustrated and usually anonymous tribe.” That’s certainly true of Gabriel Collins, narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s unusual new novel, The Sky Below.
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle
A review of Vienna Triangle, by Brenda Webster Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures.
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The Axis of Empathy
Much has been written recently about Pakistan, most of it having to do with George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Where exactly is bin Laden hiding? Is the Pakistani government doing enough to help find him? And what of A.Q.…
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What Happened To Sheila
“Don’t worry, I’m not dying,” said my wife Sheila. But she was. This was about three days before it happened, and she sat up in her hospice bed and gave me one of those complicated looks she had: comforting and…