The New Republic

The Dream of the CeltBy Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Edith Grossman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 358 pp., $27)   READ MORE >>

James Joyce: A New Biography By Gordon Bowker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 608 pp., $35) READ MORE >>

Each year, June 16 marks Bloomsday, a celebration where Dubliners, fans of James Joyce, and the hardy souls who count themselves among the few who have actually finished Ulysses commemorate the life of the great Irish novelist. It was this day in 1904 that Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s magnum opus, spent wandering the streets of the Irish capital. In his authoritative review of the novel in TNR, Edmund Wilson reflects on the scale of the work, whose first edition weighed in at 730 pages. READ MORE >>

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume I, 1907-1922 Edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge University Press, 431 pp., $40) Hemingway: A Life in Pictures By Boris Vejdovsky with Mariel Hemingway (Firefly Books, 207 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. 2: 1941-1956Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge University Press, 791 pp., $50) In February 1950, David Greene, who was then a professor of English at New York University, asked a twenty-three-year-old protégé on a Fulbright year in Paris to track down Samuel Beckett.  READ MORE >>

In 135 years of major league Baseball, only 20 pitchers have thrown a perfect game. Tonight Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers was the 21st. Except for his last out, umpire James Joyce called the batter safe: It's just a crazy call. It wasn't even close. Joyce, after the game, was distraught: READ MORE >>

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge University Press, 782 pp., $50)   I. READ MORE >>

by Eric Rauchway We went to see Tom Stoppard's Travesties at ACT over the weekend. It was, per ACT usual, a brilliant production. Herewith some thoughts about its arguments on art, including the question: Does Travesties (first staged 1974) still need its second act? READ MORE >>

V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life By Jeremy Treglown (Random House, 334 pp., $25.95) READ MORE >>

I. Kafka is the novel’s bad conscience. His work demonstrates a purity of intention, a precision of language, and a level of metaphysical commitment that the novel partially comprehends but is unable to replicate without, in the process, ceasing to be a novel at all. Consequently, Kafka makes novelists nervous. He doesn’t seem to write like the rest of us. Either he is too good for the novel or the novel is not quite good enough for him—whichever it is, his imitators are very few. READ MORE >>