Review of the 2011 debut novel by Ben Lerner in which a young American goes to Spain on the US…
Read MoreCanonical fodder about a little boy with a man’s mind, who becomes a fully grown man in a little boy’s…
Read MoreTraitor? Spy? Loyal American or self-serving amoralist? Howard W Campbell Jr tries to write his own get out of jail…
Read MoreKing Charles, Oliver Cromwell, a vagrant narrator, hedge mazes and dreaded puritans – Jeanette Winterson goes historical fiction on us again…
Read MoreHans Erich Nossack’s rare first person account of the 1943 destruction of Hamburg is served with a side of WG…
Read MoreAn interview with author, professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, spy of our inner selves, examiner of the lies we live,…
Read MoreIs there anything better than the story of a master forger? If there is, I don’t know it. This time…
Read MoreThings are not what they appear to be, and not even what they appear later to be. Foxes are animals…
Read MoreEnter the eminently other world of Malte Laurids Brigge – and don’t plan on coming back in one piece. The…
Read MoreDid we like this novel? What does it mean to like? What is our past, really, if we continue to…
Read More‘They believe what they say in the moment they say it.’ And then the moment is gone, and someone’s stuck with…
Read MoreThe Messiah is coming! His arrival is imminent! That’s the bad news. The good news is his arrival and social…
Read MoreFeel like making glove?? That’s not a typo. This week we discuss perhaps the best passage in any of Philip…
Read MoreA novel that says it’s based on Wuthering Heights is taking a risk – because Wuthering Heights is a crazy…
Read MoreSt Matthew is going to poke out your eyes. Or some such. After what seemed like a millennium of exile…
Read MoreLike a precocious fireballer at top of the prospect rankings … a kid who has shown so much promise and…
Read MoreEverything’s more or less normal in the little town of N until Piotr Stepanovich and his equally psychopathic sidekick, Nikolai…
Read MoreFrom particle physics to market predictions, we thought scientists, right or wrong, traded in the world of facts. What we…
Read MoreMorbidly obese misery of a writer – and Nobel Laureate (topical) – more than meets his match in the slender…
Read MoreOne man goes against the system he helped create and the results are not encouraging. Koestler fictionalizes the Moscow Show…
Read MoreA novel that includes displaced persons, new countries, war, Cyprus, the OED, Venice, Blood Libel and Othello – this should…
Read MoreFall forward into one of the stranger stories you’ll encounter this year – or any other. Maxi, a young man…
Read MoreGauss and Humboldt set off to the same destination in opposite directions and unfortunately this novel was written about it.…
Read MoreAt the end of his days, sitting in his villa outside Rome, the Emperor Hadrian writes a long letter to…
Read MoreThe name Michael Arlen will mean nothing to most readers but Arlen was once the cream of the jazz age…
Read MoreOne of the world’s great authors goes back in time and space – from the Jerusalem of the 1940s to…
Read MoreAuthor David Lodge stars as his thinly disguised protagonist, Old Man Bates, who is entering retirement, uselessness, and, worst of…
Read MoreCan’t seem to shake the memoirs thing . . . This time it’s James Joyce writing about himself as the…
Read More1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. Be3 Bg7 5. Qd2 c6 6. f3 b5 7. Nge2…
Read MoreA history of one aspect of the Nazi genocide is brought to present day Parisian suburbs via a massacre in…
Read MoreSpare parts make up the engine of this rickety ride from here to there. One solipsistic young man from England…
Read MoreMedical intern sent by boss to spy on a painter named of Strauch. What the intern finds is the gaping…
Read MorePinneberg is the Little Man; What Now is what everyone is asking at the outset of the Depression, when this…
Read MoreThe real life murder mystery of a CBS reporter is foreground and backdrop for a modern day high school student…
Read MoreHartmann and Fibitch arrived in England as refugees on the Kindertransport and then they had had wives and children and…
Read MoreMonk on the run in 14th Century England has more to worry about than building himself a time machine to…
Read MoreTender Asher Lev has a gift – he can draw exceptionally well – and a drive to be an artist.…
Read MoreMordecai Richler CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The…
Read MoreIn the quiet Jura region of France, a physician goes completely haywire in a series of crimes that are hard…
Read MoreImportant news from Eric!
Read MoreNew Jersey stands in for Algeria, not that Frank Bascombe would have noticed, living the good life and everything’s okay…
Read MorePart Two of Ghosh’s ‘Ibis’ Trilogy looks at the run-up to the Opium Wars. From Bombay to Canton, Mauritius to…
Read MoreJan and Dirk were inseparable as teenagers, right up till the moment they separated. That didn’t end the friendship, though,…
Read MoreElena is friends with Lila, whom hurts Elena in all kinds of ways that Elena finds fascinating, and painful. Slums,…
Read MorePart one of Pat Barker’s justly renowned trilogy about WWI (re)introduces us to Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Dr…
Read MoreSomebody please hand me a glossary of terrible non-puns from the 1910s, although no post-rationalisation is going to save this…
Read MoreA sliver of a book unfolds as a triptych, brilliant and beautiful, the subtlest of writing making the greatest of…
Read MorePart One of the Doyle’s The Last Roundup charts the raising, rising and falling of Henry Smart, scamp of Dublin,…
Read MoreA heavyweight tale in featherweight prose. A beautiful story about a boy who slips away into adulthood. A ghost story…
Read MoreThe man who keeps surviving terrorist attacks and the person who is determined to finish him off once and for…
Read MorePermanent winter in a desert climate, a dentist with no face, a woman finding material wealth in the midst of…
Read MoreIs it a novel? Memoirs? A book of geology? Anthopology? Marine Biology? Yes yes yes.
Read MoreInterview with Todd Hasak-Lowy – author and translator of novels from Hebrew to English, including Dror Burstein’s Netanya – with…
Read MoreFrom King David (aka Kid Bethlehem) to Meyer Lansky via Bugsy Siegel, and the many pulled in their wake, a…
Read MoreA soldier reflects on a just-finished mission to systematically round up and expel those left behind in the small village…
Read MoreStart a story that never began and won’t end, spreading like chill to everything made of words, the kind of…
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