The Oceanic Feeling The Oceanic Feeling
John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys about what...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Claire Messud
Succès de Scandale Succès de Scandale
American readers have long felt guilty about loving Lolita. As Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet heroine turns 50, Lila Azam Zanganeh traces the impact of a novel that has become both an ...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Lila Azam Zanganeh
The Dying Animal The Dying Animal
Gabriel García Márquez's new novella begins as an autobiography, but the passion-filled story of an old man, mad with love and clinging to life, weaves Marquez's othe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood
All About My Mother All About My Mother
The Caribbean island of Vieques is a fitting setting for Captain of the Sleepers, Cuban novelist Mayra Montero's engrossing story premised on violations of the dead.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Kate Levin
In Kars and Frankfurt In Kars and Frankfurt
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature wrote this 2005 editorial in The Nation, addressing the issue of the artistic imagination at risk in a repressive state.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Orhan Pamuk
Agee’s Gospel Agee’s Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Phillip Lopate
The Uncertainty Principle The Uncertainty Principle
By writing a novel about a conventional novelist writing about a conventional man, J.M. Coetzee's latest work illuminates the role of the novel and cuts through typical and tired t...
Oct 26, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Pankaj Mishra
Another Country Another Country
Chronicling the final, devastating months of the Civil War, E.L. Doctorow's new novel, The March, reveals the author's complex love for an earlier version of America.
Oct 12, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Vince Passaro
Frontier Injustice Frontier Injustice
In Andrew Jackson: A Life and Times, the frontier president is cast as a one-man beacon for democracy. But Jackson's core belief was a fervent defense of land.
Oct 12, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Anatol Lieven
Rearranging the Furniture Rearranging the Furniture
For prose scholar Viktor Shklovsky, who lived by the code of style and studied its depths, an unhappy love affair can be as much a personal tragedy as a plot device for more writin...
Oct 6, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Elif Batuman