The Plot Against America The Plot Against America
John Updike's Terrorist rips its plot from the headlines. But the book's Irish-Egyptian protagonist is paper-thin, and its jihad-lit plot remains stubbornly inanimate, devoid of pa...
Jun 26, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Jonathan Shainin
Boxed In Boxed In
In his new short story collection In Persuasion Nation, absurdist extraordinaire George Saunders offers a surreal depiction of the destruction of individuality through consumer meg...
Jun 8, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Vince Passaro
The Zionist Imagination The Zionist Imagination
As the founding father of the Zionist right, Vladimir Jabotinsky rejected Diaspora existence. Yet in his 1935 novel The Five he tenderly evoked it, offering a glimpse of something ...
Jun 8, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Jacqueline Rose
Supersize Misha Supersize Misha
Absurdistan is a stunning encore for novelist Gary Shteyngart, both the avatar of a new Jewish-American literature and an inveterate Eastern European trickster.
May 18, 2006 / Books & the Arts / J. Hoberman
Dead Souls Dead Souls
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.
May 18, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Carmen Boullosa
The Book of Daniels The Book of Daniels
Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island has at last landed on American shores, along with Pierre Mérot's Mammals.
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Christine Smallwood
Love in the Ruins Love in the Ruins
Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, published fifty-two years after she perished at Auschwitz, offers an unsparing critique of France under the German occupati...
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Alice Kaplan
Dead Man Dead Man
Philip Roth's Everyman is a contemporary morality play that explores the author's obsessions with health and virility, ecstasy and betrayal, and the certainty and solitude of death...
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / William Deresiewicz
Laughter in the Dark Laughter in the Dark
New translations of novels by exiled authors Roberto Bolaño and Ismail Kadare explore the bloody crossroads where literature, politics and self-absorption converge.
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / John Banville
A Darker Shade of Noir A Darker Shade of Noir
Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son is a serious novel about intimately connected yet diametrically opposed black and white stepbrothers.
Apr 20, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Robert Christgau