Literature
April 12, 2011
Thoughtful Torture
Cerebral imagery is typical of Ranko Marinković, whose narrative epic—set in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1940s—is based on Ulysses, which had a
April 11, 2011
Reading Deeply
In a time when reading has devolved into a means for the efficient conveyance of information, and sustained reading is in decline even as the techniqu
April 07, 2011
Swiche Glaringe Eyen
Sheila Fisher is an academic, a professor of English literature, and her sparkling introduction to the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer is by far the best
April 06, 2011
After Dark
In Pleasure Bound, Deborah Lutz treads on familiar ground writing that she “wanted to steadily question certain assumptions we have today about the Vi
April 05, 2011
The Boulders
The literary career of Imre Kertész has been as full of improbable twists as any melodrama. It took him a decade to complete his first novel, an accou
March 30, 2011
Praise the Heavy Lift
It seemed for a time that the long novel had hit a lull. In a society that prefers to snack on information rather than dine on knowledge, the long nov
March 29, 2011
All Whooshed Up
All Things Shining turns out to be, rather surprisingly, a prime example of the current religious revival in America. This is a spiritual self-help bo
March 28, 2011
Quiet Desperation
No book is as closely associated with the rise of second-wave feminism as The Feminine Mystique, but many feminists regard it with deep ambivalence. I
March 24, 2011
Not Now! Not Here!
In 1981, in an introduction to a book of stories by Stefan Zweig, John Fowles noted that “Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclips
March 09, 2011
The Temple Mount in New York
For Michael Weingrad, it is precisely the marginality, even the perversity, of the American Hebraist project that makes it so immensely interesting. “
