The New Republic

The Thing Around Your Neck By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)   READ MORE >>

For some unknown reason--perhaps to "balance" its anti-Roman Polanski editorial--The New York Times op-ed page decided to give 1000 words to the novelist Robert Harris and his defense of Polanski. Harris gives the game away at the start, by writing: READ MORE >>

The Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, Low Company By Daniel Fuchs (Black Sparrow Books, 927 pp., $24.95) READ MORE >>

Elmore Leonard is perhaps the most cinematic novelist writing in the English language. This is partly due to his usual subject matter--strong men and beautiful women on the edge of the law--but still more to the fact that his books read very nearly in real-time. Unlike most crime writers, for whom no physical or emotional detail is too small, Leonard has an extraordinary gift for concision: In any given scene he tells you just enough for the scene to play, and nothing more. READ MORE >>

In the introduction to Home Movies I noted that, given the ascendance of video rental over theater attendance, movies are generally reviewed months before most people will see them. One exception, of course, is movies that aren't reviewed at all, having never been released theatrically. Ripley's Game, which Fine Line Features has put out on video after declining to distribute it to theaters, has not quite suffered this fate: A minor cause célèbre, it has gotten some attention in the press, and even enjoyed a three-night, sold out run in New York earlier this year. READ MORE >>

Some two million Israeli homes recently received in the mail the 47-page text of the Geneva Accord, which claims to be the comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Accord, a European-funded effort secretly negotiated by Palestinian officials and Israeli public figures for two years--and signed in a symbolic, lavish ceremony in Geneva this week--states that Israel will withdraw to the 1967 borders, a Palestinian state will emerge with its capital in Jerusalem, and the two peoples will recognize each other's right to statehood and resolve the refugee issue. READ MORE >>

In its long and distinguished history, The New Republic is again about to break new groun: the first four fold table in a book review. (I am feeling the same pangs of achievement as when I invented the "illustrated footnote" while writing a history of American political cartoons.) The purpose of the following table is to establish some distinctions for reviewing a novel that is not by Saul Bellow and does not pretend to be. READ MORE >>