‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Ann Schmiesing

Positive The Washington Post Schmiesing’s biography doesn’t shy away from pointing out strains of racism, misogyny, sexism and antisemitism in the brothers themselves, especially Jacob, and in their writing ... To make up for this paucity of striking biographical detail, Schmiesing proffers careful descriptions of the brothers’ research ... Some of this contextual material risks seeming dry or excessive to those readers primarily interested in the background to one of the world’s most influential books.

Richard Flanagan

Rave The Washington Post Somewhat mystical ... Interweave[s] beautifully evoked memories of the author’s childhood in a poor and extended Catholic family in Tasmania ... To bring this richly layered book to a close Flanagan re-creates, in harrowing detail ... Significant.

Evan Friss

Rave The Washington Post He has produced a work of popular history that is both entertaining and informative ... Despite its high degree of anecdotal liveliness, The Bookshop slowly grows quietly, unavoidably elegiac ... Clear-eyed.

Ed Simon

Positive The Washington Post These highly charged and politicized arguments about the evils of late capitalism transform Devil’s Contract from a work of cultural history into something close to a polemic, one with which you may or may not agree. Simon’s style, moreover, can sometimes veer into the over-emphatic ... Still, these cavils aside, Devil’s Contract reminds us of how often we deludedly exchange something of inestimable value... for what is ultimately glittery trash.

Anne Curzan

Mixed The Washington Post In her own prose, Curzan tries hard to downplay any soupçon of the didactic by adopting an up-to-date, friendly cheeriness. For my taste, she goes too far ... I do agree with Curzan about the importance of what she calls “kinder,” more inclusive language and usage that avoids giving offense. To advocate for such sensitivity is a key purpose of her book ... Curzan doesn’t stress strongly enough the consequences of using vulgar, ugly and slovenly English.

Jason Roberts

Positive The Washington Post Let me end by stressing how much this failed biology major enjoyed Roberts’s lively study of Linnaeus, Buffon and the later thinkers they influenced.

Nicholas Shakespeare

Rave The Washington Post Huge, immensely detailed ... A dazzling, even dizzying achievement, despite that ludicrous-sounding subtitle ... Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming.

Andrew Stauffer

Rave The Washington Post We hear Byron’s rapid-fire conversational voice on the page ... To each letter, Stauffer then appends an engaging, fact-rich essay, augmented by relevant quotations from Byron’s poetry and insightful comments of his own ... A physically elegant volume, one you’ll enjoy holding as well as reading.

Christopher de Hamel

Rave The Washington Post De Hamel also re-creates what it would be like to meet and converse with each of his fellow enthusiasts for medieval missals, Books of Hours, scrolls and codices. Opinions may obviously differ, but I occasionally found these imaginary dialogues just a bit twee. That cavil aside, everything else about The Manuscripts Club is absolutely riveting ... Does not neglect to interlace de Hamel’s own insightful comments about the many and varied works pictured across its pages. Throughout, these reproductions of jeweled bindings, miniature paintings on vellum and examples of exquisite calligraphy, as well as portraits or photographs of the owners of these treasures, convincingly illustrate key points in his observations and arguments ... Anyone interested in medieval illumination, intellectual history, book collecting or the evolution of the art market should obviously seek out The Manuscripts Club, but so should readers who simply enjoy New Yorker-style profiles of the learned, colorful and obsessive. Christopher de Hamel could happily spend an evening studying a medieval Book of Hours, while his own marvelous book delivers, in its way, hours and hours of comparable instruction and delight.

Jeanette Winterson

Positive The Washington Post Moving ... Winterson can...elicit...visceral thrills.

Sarah Ogilvie

Rave The Washington Post Wonderful ... Essentially a delightful grab-bag of brief biographies ... Emphatically demonstrates that even seemingly dry-as-dust scholars weren’t that at all.

Gay Talese

Positive The Washington Post Talese’s conversational style — openhanded, easygoing, characterized by fact-rich yet perfectly balanced sentences — invites the reader to sit back and relax. His book proved just the right tonic for my downcast spirits.

Harvey Sachs

Rave The Washington Post Brisk and engaging ... Sachs makes a compelling case for some of the most difficult and intimidating music ever written.

Peter Brown

Rave The Washington Post Commemorates an immensely erudite academic community, a global Republic of Letters, drawn from many nations and disciplines. Now in his late 80s, Brown looks back on those years and the people he met with nostalgia and gratitude ... Brown explores the complexities of late antiquity by asking seemingly simple questions with sometimes unexpected answers ... Besides being an enthralling account of an eminent scholar at work, Journeys of the Mind can also function as an annotated guide to dozens of important works of intellectual history ... Brown’s prose is pellucid, meditative, courteous ... I’ve read lots of autobiographies...but none that quite so vividly depicts a life, a deeply enviable life, centered on humanistic research and the reading and writing of scholarly works. In its way, Journeys of the Mind may well be the most romantic book of the year.

James Campbell

Positive The Washington Post A uniquely personal miscellany of wit, weirdness and waspish provocation ... In one minor way, NB by J.C. may disappoint some readers ... It’s hardly \"A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement,\" as its subtitle promises.

Sarah Hart

Rave The Washington Post The Gresham professor often sounds as if she were conducting a class and pausing occasionally to scribble formulas on a blackboard ... Her prose throughout is clear, direct and jokey ... Once Upon a Prime is generally awesome... though some parts may require patience and close attention.

Lynne Olson

Positive The Washington Post Excellent ... It was quite a life. Certainly Empress of the Nile tells her story well, embedding it in the history of modern Egyptian archaeology, though at times it does approach the hagiographic. This lack of shading can grow tiresome ... A welcome and needed work of both rescue and reclamation.

Jonathan Carroll

Rave The Washington Post \"While Mr. Breakfast is pure pleasure to read, it does call to mind the themes and sleights-of-hand associated with films such as Inception, Total Recall, Groundhog Day and Back to the Future ... Mr. Breakfast is the first Carroll novel in several years, but it seems to me as masterly as his earlier books. It will surprise you, make you laugh and scare you — and then, just when you think it’s over, add several extra twists before bringing this Rubik’s Cube of a story to just the right, emotionally muted conclusion.\

Matthew Dennison

Positive The Washington Post \"Without supplanting either Jeremy Treglown’s pioneering Roald Dahl: A Biography (1993) or Donald Sturrock’s authorized biography, Storyteller (2010) — both of which I recommend, especially the latter — this succinct new biography provides just enough information for all but the most ardent Dahl devotee.\

Michael Hingston

Rave The Washington Post ... a wonderfully entertaining book ... Hingston relates all this whimsy, with abundant anecdotes, in the manner of A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic, The Quest for Corvo, which transformed writing a biography into an intensely personal adventure ... Hingston’s quest reaches its inevitable climax when he travels to the actual Redonda on a mini-expedition that devolves into frivolity, confusion, exhaustion and near-disaster. How could it be otherwise? What really matters isn’t the island itself, but the idea of this literary Neverland, this magic kingdom of the imagination.

John Keay

Rave The Washington Post Excellent...examines a complicated reality.

Darryl Pinckney

Rave The Washington Post This memoir of that apprenticeship — by one of our most distinguished writers on African American culture, literature and history — provides a \'you are there\' account of those thrilling years ... Because Pinckney, now in his late 60s, kept detailed journals in his younger days, he has been able to re-create conversations with \'Lizzie,\' as she was known to intimates, while also providing incisive vignettes of the Review’s co-editors ... No reader will be indifferent to the gossipy stories in Come Back in September.

Robert Crawford

Rave The Washington Post ... mesmerizing ... Crawford details, with remarkable scholarly evenhandedness, a life of almost soap-operatically \'complex, contradictory messiness\' ... Crawford’s concentration on Eliot’s private life results in a partial picture, one that shifts the poet’s intellectual and artistic accomplishments to the background. So while these often harrowing revelations do grant us deeper insight into Eliot and consequently into his work, it is ultimately the poetry itself — and the criticism and drama — that we care about.

Mat Johnson

Positive The Washington Post ... awareness of echoes and borrowings merely enriches an already exciting story ... simply quoting a few passages from Invisible Things hardly conveys its bounce and energy, though matters do grow a bit heavy-handed in the second half ... For a final act of pulp chutzpah, Johnson’s last page suddenly presents a melodramatic image that could have easily graced the cover of some 1940s issue of Astounding or Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Marina Warner

Rave Washington Post At first, Esmond and Ilia could be a fairy-tale romance ... Besides evoking the vanished pomps of yesterday, Esmond and Ilia periodically enlarges its perspective to include chapters about Victorian adventurers in the Middle East ... Needless to say, Esmond and Ilia lacks a fairy-tale ending — after all, it’s about real life — but it is nonetheless wondrously entertaining, an ideal book for a long, hot summer.

James Campbell

Positive The Washington Post Throughout, I kept pausing over parallels with aspects of my own youth in the 1960s and ’70s, even though I grew up in Ohio, not Scotland. That self-identification certainly lent the book a supplementary charm for me, as it will for anyone who came of age in those years. Other readers will just enjoy the memoir for what it is: an engrossing account of a young man discovering what he wants to do with his life ... Throughout these reminiscences, Campbell offers vivid portraits of fellow wanderers and seekers.

Steve Paul

Rave The Washington Post ... superb ... devotes some fascinating pages to how the judging panel chose the 1973 National Book Award in fiction, and lays out in considerable detail the scripting and production of both the film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge and the TV adaptation of Son of the Morning Star.

Merve Emre

Positive Washington Post Like similar volumes, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway provides a scholarly and biographical introduction, lots of illustrations and extensive marginal notes that explain obscurities, identify people and places, and provide interpretive comment. Emre, however, isn’t critically neutral; she draws mainly on the work of her teachers and contemporaries, while pretty much ignoring older Woolf scholarship ... Emre prefers a relatively lean but elegant annotated edition, resolutely focused on explicating the work’s meaning and mysteries ... As befits an Oxford professor, Emre’s commentary on all this is both learned and lucidly expressed ... You may quibble with Emre’s The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, as I have, but it’s an invaluable adjunct to Woolf’s haunting masterpiece.

Claire Tomalin

Rave The Washington Post ... plainly written, packed with incident and justly admiring without being uncritical...also quite openly personal ... Three excellent full-length biographies chronicle Wells’s colorful life in full. But for a compact overview of this endlessly fascinating man and writer, Tomalin’s The Young H.G. Wells is hard to beat, being friendly, astute and a pleasure to read.

O Henry ed. Ben Yagoda

Rave The Washington Post Even though O. Henry revels in puns and wordplay, period slang and colorful rhetorical exaggeration, he keeps his narrative voice intimate and confiding ... Given that Ben Yagoda’s excellent selection — emphasizing stories set in New York — reprints only two-fifths of O. Henry’s total work, it’s not surprising that some famous stories have been left out ... Still, the absence of this trio from the Library of America volume isn’t grievous but is simply an encouragement to acquire one or two additional O. Henry collections. Happily, these are readily available, both new and secondhand.

Richard Osman

Rave The Washington Post What makes The Man Who Died Twice so delicious, even adorable, derives from its lighthearted tone and a witty style based on antithesis. To build tension, short chapters shift rapidly from one viewpoint and scene to another. More crucially, though, Osman’s heroes, while trying to solve brutal murders and decipher cryptic messages, never stop being concerned with their health, grandchildren and the pleasure of just sipping wine and bantering with one another. They are ordinary old people yet, like all old people, much deeper and complicated than they appear ... Veteran mystery readers will doubtless recognize one or two red herrings, but other clues will only be remembered in retrospect. Osman keeps you guessing, which is just as it should be. This is, in short, a wildly entertaining book—even for people a long way from their 70s.

Gideon Defoe

Positive The Washington Post Defoe, who works in film and animation, here writes a revved-up prose a bit like Hunter S. Thompson’s, but more jokey and with an English accent; it took me a while to get used to his sass, but I came to enjoy it immensely.

Dean Jobb

Positive The Washington Post Jobb writes clean, efficient sentences and re-creates Cream’s heartless life in short, highly dramatic chapters. Though subtitled The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, his book could be described more accurately as Scotland Yard’s quest for the evidence that would convict the one man they suspected all along.

Margalit Fox

Positive Washington Post Fox, however, goes far beyond Jones’s autobiographical account by enlarging its scope. She does this by interweaving two supplementary narrative threads that help explain why this improbable scam actually worked. First, at appropriate intervals, she reminds us of the era’s scientific and pseudoscientific beliefs, especially the vogue for spiritualism, telepathy and Ouija boards. Second, she links Jones and Hill’s ultimate success to their mastery of the deceptive skills and subtle mind games practiced by stage magicians, con artists and lawyers ... she never loosened her grip on my attention. Start The Confidence Men and you too will turn page after page, eager to find out what happens next ... The overall narrative gains richness, strength and a kind of polyphony by mixing Fox’s crisp exposition with quotations from Jones’s memoir and the reminiscences of other prisoners. Having been the senior obituary writer for the New York Times, Fox long ago learned the reader-appealing usefulness of the melodramatic sentence and weird anecdote ... exceptionally entertaining.

Ruth Scurr

Positive The Washington Post Scurr elegantly explores Napoleon’s inner Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher who extolled nature and the simple life. Among the vast acreage of Napoleonic studies, it’s good to have at least one book that emphasizes flower beds instead of battlefields.

John Tresch

Positive The Washington Post Tresch packs quite a lot into his book—there’s even an ingenious deconstruction of the title page of Poe’s nautical novel, the macabre and tantalizingly enigmatic \'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.\' Still, prospective readers of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night should be aware that it isn’t a sustained, detailed exposition of Poe’s life so much as a rich assemblage of biographical vignettes, brief story analyses and mini-essays on the era’s scientific beliefs. In general, Tresch’s overall thesis—that Poe’s \'deep familiarity with science was the fulcrum on which his thought balanced\'—seems unarguable, given the presence of the \'ratiocinative\' in so much of what he wrote. Yet, ultimately, it is Poe’s other aspect, his ability to convey monomaniacal intensity, verging on hysteria, that we are drawn to, his gift for expressing what D.H. Lawrence floridly called \'the prismatic ecstasy of heightened consciousness.\'

Mark Aldridge

Positive The Washington Post Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World exhaustively and entertainingly surveys the book, stage, radio, magazine and film appearances of that fussy little Belgian ... encyclopedic ... Aldridge particularly shines in his behind-the-scenes account of the David Suchet television series ... Aldridge’s text should have been more closely copy-edited, not just to catch some minor factual errors—forthrightly listed on his website—but also to fix a number of loose and baggy sentences.

Erika Fatland

Rave The Washington Pose Over the course of eight months in 2017, she traveled to all these places, seeking answers to one unspoken question: What is life like when you live next door to an aggressive bully? ... Again and again, this young Norwegian journalist listens to weary-hearted accounts of survival and loss in the midst of war, displacement, ethnic and racial enmity, famine, and genocide ... Her linguistic abilities — she speaks English, Russian, French and several other languages — often allow her to talk with, or sometimes eavesdrop on, ordinary people. Despite sometimes considerable privation, nearly everyone she meets is welcoming, though often cautiously guarded in what they say ... so well translated by Kari Dickson that you’d think it was written in English — still has much of Eastern and Northern Europe to cover. In Belarus, Fatland alights in Vitebsk, birthplace of the artist Marc Chagall, then later hears sickening accounts of Nazi atrocities in the former Minsk ghetto. Finally heading north toward home, she quietly closes the circle by kayaking along the periphery between Norway and Russia ... should be enjoyed in small chunks, if only because of a certain sameness in the kind of stories it contains. All in all, though, Erika Fatland deserves both applause and thanks for this impressive mix of history, reportage and travel memoir.

Selina Hastings

Positive The Washington Post ...gossipy ... Notwithstanding all the detail in these packed pages, Hastings somehow never quite accounts for what must have been a case of extraordinary charisma ... Appropriately enough, Sybille Bedford makes just the right pendant to Selina Hastings’s excellent earlier biographies of Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh. All three of these domineering, self-centered writers regularly behaved monstrously to others, sometimes unforgivably so. But their books, ah, their books!

Dorothy Gallagher

Rave The Washington Post Its style, as I noted years ago, is \'darting, anecdotal, slightly bemused, possessing a lilting irony that makes for compulsive readability. There is also something funny, sexy or shocking on every page.\' ... Every page in this little book is beautifully composed, but Gallagher never leaves us doubting how much she still misses Sonnenberg.

Anthony Horowitz

Rave The Washington Post ... anyone seeking a few evenings’ respite from the emotional roller-coaster of last week’s election need look no further ... To begin with, you’ll get two books for the price of one. Quite literally ... If all this sounds dizzyingly postmodern, it is and it isn’t. Horowitz’s plotting certainly rivals that of Ruth Rendell’s notoriously complex Barbara Vine mysteries, yet his prose moves along as briskly as that of Dick Francis at his best. Moreover, the whole metafictional twistiness of his current work — The Word Is Murder includes Anthony Horowitz himself as a major character — actually carries on from the gamelike nature of Golden Age whodunitry ... Horowitz showcases a cleverness and finesse that even Dame Agatha might envy. Moonflower Murders resembles a super Mobius strip, interlacing multiple degrees and levels of fictiveness.

Rosanna Warren

Positive The Washington Post Who was Max Jacob? That’s the question poet and University of Chicago professor Rosanna Warren circles around in this detailed, nearly 600-page biography, a project she has worked on for over 30 years ... Being a distinguished poet herself, Warren pays particularly close attention to the richness of Jacob’s language and what she neatly calls his \'controlled phonetic delirium.\' .... Given its length and scholarly detail, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters isn’t sprightly, but it is definitive and chockablock with entertaining anecdotes.

Alex Ross

Rave The Washington Post New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ magnificent new book ... makes his subject less Wagner himself—although he has plenty to say about the music and the problematical man—than the way we absorb ideas and attitudes, how they can grow into cancers or panaceas ... Every culture has its own issues with Wagner, and Ross’ even hand is especially impressive when taking on the Big One. His explication of Hitler’s rise and the legacy of Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a moving lamentation, yet it lays bare the contradictions ... In the end, the inconsistencies are what made Wagner matter, and what make Ross today’s perfect Wagnerite.

Diane Johnson

Rave The Washington Post The originality and jazzy brilliance of The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith will be immediately apparent to anyone who starts Diane Johnson’s deeply felt portrait of a vivacious 19th-century woman virtually erased from history ... takes frequent potshots at the standardized Great Man tradition of biography and discards its typically macho, triumphalist narrative for a mosaic of vignettes, quotations and tiny, sharp essays. Johnson bounces around in time, too, with novelistic gusto and aplomb ... Yet Johnson’s overall sprightliness covers a ground bass of melancholy and lament ... Johnson’s sometimes bitter, sometimes bemused incredulity over male condescension and insensitivity, as well as her subtly eviscerating wit and inquisitive intelligence, will of course reappear in her future bestsellers, Le Divorce and L’Affaire. As she declares in one of this book’s endnotes, a biographer should be not just a historian \'but also a novelist and a snoop.\'

Edwin Frank

Rave The Washington Post As founding editor, Frank aimed to create a library of \'good books, books to delight and enlighten and surprise readers,\' yet one \'surprising in its own right, making connections with a spark.\' In particular, the whole \'had to be recognizable as a series.\' To achieve this, Frank decided to draw on \'all sorts of extraordinary books that had never even been translated into English,as well as \'the literature hidden away in publishers’ backlists.\' It is this restless, elegant eclecticism, along with a truly global reach, that keeps the NYRB Classics so exhilarating ... From Andrei Platonov to Victor Serge, with stops along the way for Leonardo Sciascia, Tove Jansson, Mavis Gallant, Balzac, Vasily Grossman and Kenji Miyazawa, this sampler underscores that great writing recognizes no borders.

Joseph O'Connor

Rave The Wash ... a gorgeously written historical novel about Stoker’s inner life ... I wasn’t prepared to be awed by his prose, which is so good you can taste it ... O’Connor dazzles ... O’Connor’s virtuosity more quietly reveals itself in his descriptions ... Joseph O’Connor’s magnificent novel does even more than fly, it soars.

Nicholas A Basbanes

Rave The Washington Post Basbanes’s Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then, is well timed, though it will chiefly interest three classes of reader ... First of all, it will appeal to those fascinated by 19th-century \'Boston Brahmin\' culture and the interconnections among prominent New England families ... Second, the book is the portrait of a marriage, devoting considerable attention to Longfellow’s second wife, Fanny (his first died young) ... Third, Cross of Snow will attract those who like capacious biographies that emphasize primary materials ... Given the richness of Cross of Snow, it may seem churlish to point out what the book doesn’t do. To start with, it isn’t a “critical” biography: Basbanes pretty much ignores the poetry as poetry and provides no guidance to it. Rather he simply presents Longfellow as a man, husband, friend and cultural monument of 19th-century America ... Like any newspaperman, Basbanes helpfully identifies the many, often fascinating people mentioned in his text ... In the end, if you’re already interested in Longfellow’s life and milieu, Basbanes is definitely your man.

Hermione Lee

Positive The Washington Post For much of the country, sheltering in place over the past three weeks has been a wearisome but essential civic duty ... But where or what is home? According to one old saying, home is where the heart is, and, according to the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer song, it’s anywhere we hang our hats ... Having done heaps and heaps of living in Casa Dirda this March, how could I resist Lives of Houses, ... The book’s contributors are as distinguished as its two editors and include novelist Julian Barnes writing about the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s home Ainola; historian David Cannadine on Chartwell, where Winston Churchill lived; Yeats biographer Roy Foster describing the poet’s richly symbolic but clammy and inhospitable tower retreat Thoor Ballylee; and Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear’s Villa Emily in San Remo ... A few of the best essays, however, aren’t about famous people.

Claude McKay

Rave The Washington Post ... less shocking than strikingly woke, given that its themes include disability, the full spectrum of sexual preference, radical politics and the subtleties of racial identity ... McKay writes in a loose, somewhat elliptical style, with a fair amount of slangy dialect, but he does occasionally grow quite lyrical ... The editors surround McKay’s text with a mildly academic introduction, a discussion of the manuscript’s textual history and 30 pages of explanatory notes. Their critical apparatus sets the novel in its own time and establishes its importance ... Had McKay’s novel been published when it was first written, it would now look right at home in the proletarian company of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), James M. Cain’s noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and even, from certain angles, Nathanael West’s bleak comedy Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

Donna Rifkind

Positive The Washington Post As one expects from a widely admired literary journalist, Rifkind writes engagingly and often passionately, though her book’s introduction—Salka’s reconstructed reveries in old age—may strike some readers as a bit strained, as will a few overly poetic flourishes ... Yet Rifkind can also capture a complex character with a single snapshot-like sentence ... Throughout these pages, Rifkind returns again and again to her serious central themes—anti-Semitism abroad and at home, the rescue of refugees through the efforts of the European Film Fund, and Salka as a Hollywood mother-confessor and wheeler-dealer. Still, the book does have its lighter moments ... [Salka\'s] had been a remarkable life and she had been blessed with extraordinary friends, as Rifkind again shows us, with much additional detail, in The Sun and Her Stars.

D. J. Taylor

Rave The Washington Post ... enthralling ... If the BBC knows its business, The Lost Girls will soon be a sexy, soap-operatic, partner-swapping, highly addictive miniseries ... Today’s readers may feel that Lys, Sonia, Barbara and the others, despite their proclaimed independence, were still defining themselves through the men in their lives. Perhaps so. Still, because of D.J. Taylor’s vivid and affecting group biography, the \'lost girls\' will never be lost again.

Emmanuel Carrere Trans. by John Lambert

Positive The Washington Post Carrère is daring in his choice of subjects ... Carrère’s likable style isn’t just conversational, it’s openly confessional ... In various essays Carrère, without a hint of sensationalism, analyzes his erotic fantasies and sexual experiences. In his final piece, he probes the astonishing charisma of France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. \'No matter what you think of him, whether you see his rise as a political miracle or a mirage destined to fade away, everyone agrees: he could seduce a chair.\' Carrere’s own writing possesses a similar power.

D.H. Lawrence, Ed. by Geoff Dyer

Rave The Washington Post ... vividness runs through the \'selected essays\' of The Bad Side of Books,...As Geoff Dyer stresses in his penetrating introduction, Lawrence ignores genre straitjackets as he blends travel writing, memoir, philosophical musings, storytelling and a novelist’s flair for portraiture and description ... No matter what he writes about, though, Lawrence generates — in language crackling with passion and conviction — an intensely reimagined experience. Jonathan Swift, when challenged, could produce a brilliant essay about a broomstick; Lawrence outdoes him in his tour-de-force Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ed. by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy

Rave The Washington Post Surely, I told myself, Think, Write, Speak would consist mainly of archival leftovers — and yet I couldn’t resist devouring its 500 pages. Like Oscar Wilde or W.H. Auden, Nabokov fearlessly professes such \'strong opinions\' — the title of the previous collection of his nonfiction — that he’s always immense fun to read ... Overall, there’s no doubt that Think, Write, Speak will chiefly appeal to the Nabokov completist. Still, any sensitive reader will linger over the beautiful sentences with which Nabokov enriches even his most casual prose.

Harold Bloom

Positive The Wall Street Journal After 50 or so books, it’s not surprising that Mr. Bloom isn’t breaking any fresh ground in his two latest ... Mr. Bloom typically assumes previous familiarity with the many poems, novels, plays and stories he praises or dissects. Beyond that, he is always advancing a Bloomian agenda, arguing for the literary centrality of Emerson...or undertaking a sprightly demolition job on Poe or detecting unexpected affiliations between authors, even finding Whitmanian elements in the laconic Hemingway. Still, Mr. Bloom wins our allegiance when he sounds less the scholiast and more the passionate fellow reader ... Whether you agree or disagree with what he writes, Mr. Bloom always—as the French say—makes you furiously to think. More than that, though, he stands for a rare intellectual purity, being not only a kind of shaggy saint in his devotion to literature but also, like so many saints and prophets, a gadfly, a doomsayer and a great teacher. So here’s to you, Harold Bloom, with thanks for 60 years of magnificent and rewarding provocation.

Ted Gioia

Rave The Washington Post I can’t speak highly enough about Music: A Subversive History. Though Gioia can be subtly boastful at times, it’s never egregious, and he is always fun to read ... I suspect that academic scholars will pooh-pooh aspects of Music: A Subversive History. That’s as it should be. Despite his awards, Ted Gioia remains something of an outsider critic, convinced that the passion for destruction can be a creative passion.

Orlando Figes

Positive The Washington Post While Figes relies on his triumvirate’s ups and downs to propel a data-rich, gossip-packed narrative, he aims at more than potted biography ... In a sense, Figes’s book is all digressions ... consequently something of a grab-bag, albeit one filled with nothing but goodies ... Despite occasional repetition and a few minor mistakes, The Europeans makes for ideal winter reading. It is long, superbly entertaining and vastly informative. But just as important, it serves — in Figes’s closing words — \'as a reminder of the unifying force of European civilization, which Europe’s nations ignore at their peril.\'

James Grant

Positive The Washington Post No rapt idolater of his subject, Grant never shies away from pointing out Bagehot’s personal failings, such as priggishness and a supercilious condescension toward the uneducated ... Throughout his book, Grant quotes abundantly from Bagehot’s economic thought but slightly shortchanges the essays and biographical sketches. These \'estimations\' are a delight ... One detects a certain ambivalence ... In a superb, deliberately contrarian piece about Edward Gibbon, Bagehot neatly mocks English prejudice when he describes the future historian’s temporary conversion to Catholicism.

Graeme Davis

Positive The Washington Post Holmes authority Leslie S. Klinger opens the anthology with a generous background essay, after which Davis reprints a variety of excellent stories ... My recommendation: Buy any and every collection you see titled The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes..

Jonathan Bate

Positive The Washington Post ...any study of classical influences can readily come across as either daunting or soporific, but Bate eschews jargon, writes a forceful, clear prose, provides translations of Latin quotations and makes sure that his arguments are easy to follow. As a result How the Classics Made Shakespeare stands as a model of sensitively marshaled humanist learning and thoughtful appreciation ... How the Classics Made Shakespeare deserves an accolade too seldom awarded to academic works: Besides being eminently readable, it proffers illuminating observations and facts on every page ...

Robert Morrison

Rave The Washington Post Morrison probes the era’s passion for gambling, horse-racing, boxing and opium ... He thrillingly describes the Battle of Waterloo, tracks the War of 1812 in North America and offers a global tour d’horizon of Britain’s colonies in Canada, India and Australia. But he doesn’t neglect the arts and sciences, devoting several pages to the painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, the visionary computer-scientist Charles Babbage and the engineer who pioneered the steam locomotive, George Stephenson. Not least, he regularly turns for insight to the era’s two most famous novels: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Given such plenty, what more could one ask from a work of cultural history?

Stuart Kells

Positive The Washington Post ... unquestionably a lively, even sprightly book, nearly as entertaining as S. Schoenbaum’s capacious Shakespeare’s Lives, to which it is a kind of pendant ... In the end, Kells decides that the genius of Shakespeare — whoever he was — lay in his flair for \'appropriation, revision and synthesis.\' Of course, he also had something of a way with words.

Leo Damrosch

Rave The Washington Post \"Contemporary paintings and caricatures, all closely scrutinized by Damrosch, further enrich our feel for the age’s high and low life ... Because it tracks at least a dozen figures, The Club can’t compare in scholarly depth with Damrosch’s superb critical biographies of Rousseau and Swift. Nonetheless, the now retired Harvard professor of English has brought “the common reader”— Johnson’s term — an exceptionally lively introduction to late 18th-century English thought and literature. No doubt the book grew out of what must have been a dazzling survey course on the age of Johnson. If you’re already an aficionado of this period, you will recognize that Damrosch compresses a vast amount of detail into his narrative and relates many of the best anecdotes and verbal bonbons associated with Johnson or his friends. I did miss seeing one of my favorite Johnsonisms, though ... Damrosch seamlessly mixes learned exposition with striking factoids and observations ... a magnificently entertaining book.\

Stephen Greenblatt

Mixed The Washington Post The Swerve...is a work that a journalist or a hard-working amateur might have produced, a sprawling paraphrase of other people’s research ... this is a book that feels a little mushy and over-sweetened, in the way of so much popular history with an eye on the bestseller list ... To those who have never read much classical literature or know little about the Renaissance, The Swerve may well seem fresh, even though it trots out one historical golden oldie after another ... a sense of the scattershot, of elegant padding, remains ... he takes every possible opportunity to meander away from his thesis about \'how the world became modern\' ... By no means a bad book, The Swerve simply sets its intellectual bar too low, complacently relying on commonplaces in its historical sections and never engaging in an imaginative or idiosyncratic way with Lucretius’s great poem as a work of art.

Katy Butler

Rave The Washington Post Not surprisingly...this \'practical guide to a good end of life\' delivers on its subtitle, offering detailed advice on dealing with—in poet Philip Larkin’s phrase—\'age, and then the only end of age.\' Butler’s factual, no-nonsense tone is surprisingly comforting, as are her stories of how ordinary folks confronted difficult medical decisions. In short, if you’re coming up on three score and 10 or have already passed that biblical term limit for earthly existence, you will want to read The Art of Dying Well and keep it handy, if only for its lists of what to do as one’s physical condition changes.

Boris Fishman

Positive The Washington Post \"The result is a work of reminiscence and celebration that should appeal to a wide range of readers. If you like books about affectionate, colorful families... If you’re a fan of food memoirs... Anyone of Jewish or Slavic ancestry... will find the accounts of raucous, argument-filled holiday dinners hilariously familiar ... While Fishman, like all of us, sometimes feels ambivalence about his family, there’s no uncertainty about its food. His descriptions of even the simplest meals are mouthwatering ... [Fishman\'s] obvious flair as a fiction writer may explain my own tiny misgivings about “Savage Feast.” All memoirs tread a thin line between art and artfulness. Without design, a life narrative becomes a tedious jumble; with too much design, it starts to merge into fiction. In general, Savage Feast struck me as a bit too long: The stories tend to be overly drawn out, the often gorgeous prose slightly overwrought. More problematically, I wondered where memory left off and imaginative re-creation began ... Many readers will find this perfectly acceptable, but, alas, as a journalist, I always wonder about the degree of factuality ... Oh, well. Please don’t make too much of my cavils, especially when balanced against Fishman’s smorgasbord of humor, pathos and emotional insight. I very much enjoyed Savage Feast, and so will you.\

Dave Eggers

Positive The Washington Post \"The reader soon adjusts to the leisurely, almost desultory pace of the story, to the relative austerity of the prose. Sometimes Eggers offers neat capsule vignettes ... At other times Eggers grows sententious, perhaps deliberately in Alan’s letters to Kit, but apparently without irony in several vaguely philosophical passages ... A diverting, well-written novel...\

Ernst Jünger, Trans. by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen

Positive The Washington Post Always intended for eventual publication, the journal eschews soul-searching and avoids anything overtly confessional ... Overall, Jünger remains essentially contemplative, an observer by instinct ... the stark and appalling descriptions of what he saw on the Eastern Front recall Goya’s famous etchings of the disasters of war ... He despises the forces, industrial and ideological, that reduce people to machines or automatons ... Such high-minded ideals don’t preclude shrewd understanding about life in a police state ... Some critics argue that his transcendental-mystical bent tends to aestheticize horror and suffering, which to some extent it certainly does. Still, Jünger himself deserves to be honored as a serious, if morally and politically complicated, European humanist.

James Geary

Rave The Washington Post Wit’s End juggles scholarship, humorous anecdote and critical insight with a diabolical, almost sinister dexterity. No shrinking violet, Geary fully intends to strut his stuff, to glitter and beguile, and he does so with remarkable ingenuity and chutzpah ... the advancing text kaleidoscopes from philosophical dialogue to sermon to scholarly paper to ode to an over-the-top emulation of 1920s African American jive. The book’s designer even complements this narrative jazziness by varying the typefaces and page layouts. Geary’s intellectual reach is just as dizzying. He parses both enigmatic Buddhist koans and the put-downs used in playing the Dozens, the African American game of competitive insults ... Geary’s aim isn’t to make you laugh (or grimace), it’s to make you think. To begin with, he grants the pun a kind of foundational primacy, viewing it as the template for every sort of wit ... Geary’s scholarship, supported by 30 pages of endnotes identifying his sources, could easily be heart-sinking, if his own prose wasn’t so frisky ... Geary manages to be both [serious and witty], as one might expect from an avid juggler whose day job is working as deputy curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation.

Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner

Rave The Washington Post Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner has been for me, and will be for many others, the most intellectually exhilarating work published in 2018 ... the book’s redoubtable editor, Edward M. Burns, identifies every name, reference and allusion, elevating his sometimes essaylike notes into an integral, invaluable part of the correspondence itself ... [Kenner\'s] own darting prose, abounding in surprising factoids and anecdotes...makes his writing vastly entertaining ... Davenport ranges more widely, not just discussing scholarly undertakings but exuberantly relating holidays with girlfriends and, more cagily, with motorcycling boyfriends. A brilliant draftsman, he works up humorous pen-and-ink caricatures for Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett while also starting to develop his assemblages, sui generis composites of speculative fiction, literary history, artwork and criticism ... As gossip alone, Questioning Minds is irresistible ... In a world of fast-buck bestsellers, Counterpoint has brought serious readers a lasting treasure.

Edited by Leslie S. Klinger

Positive The Washington Post The stories deliberately leave out the messiness of real life, of real emotions, thus allowing the reader to mentally just amble along, mildly intrigued, feeling comfortable and even, yes, cozy ... This hefty volume (1,126 pages) opens with an essay by our preeminent authority on the mystery genre, Otto Penzler, followed by excellent brief introductions to each author and novel from Klinger. What’s more, Pegasus has produced as handsome a volume as you could ask for, starting with the gold-embossed lettering on its cinema-marquee style dust jacket. The whole package cries \'terrific holiday gift,\' which it is ... And yet duty requires me to issue a few caveats. Not only is this book is huge, but it’s also heavy and unwieldy: Will people actually read it? ... Annotation is obviously a minefield and know-it-all reviewers heartlessly pounce on the occasional mistake, so let me stress that there’s a treasure house of illuminating and useful information here—even if the third note for the Queen novel is wrong.

Alec Nevala-Lee

Positive The Washington Post Throughout the book Astounding, Nevala-Lee smoothly interweaves a wide variety of sources, written and oral, as he tracks the careers of his four Golden Age giants ... Did you know that Heinlein, Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp all worked together in a Philadelphia Navy laboratory during World War II? Or that Heinlein practiced nudism and open marriage?

Julie Dobrow

Rave The Washington Post \"... mesmerizing ... [This book review can\'t do justice to the] years of research by Dobrow ... Some of the book’s interpretative chapters do grow repetitive, however, and one or two points are over-emphasized... No matter. If you’re interested in \'America’s greatest poet,\' intellectual property issues or juicy behind-the-scenes literary history, After Emily is your book.\

John Zubrzycki

Pan The Washington Post Oxford University Press has done an immense disservice to John Zubrzycki’s fascinating Empire of Enchantment: The Story of Indian Magic. Apart from some print-on-demand atrocities, I’ve seldom encountered a book in which so many words have been repeated, dropped, misspelled or misused. I can only suppose that this slovenliness — \'damming\' for \'damning,\' sentences garbled because of a missing verb or pronoun — indicates over-reliance on a computerized auto-correct function. No competent proofreader would have allowed such an embarrassing farrago to go to press. Oxford’s delinquency is particularly annoying because Zubrzycki, an expert on South Asian history, clearly worked hard to produce what is, despite its textual irritations, a valuable and entertaining book ... Empire of Enchantment should be regarded as quite a good book—though it could have been even better had somebody done a proper job of proofreading. As writers and magicians both know, details matter. One slip may be forgiven but a slipshod presentation breaks the spell.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Positive The Washington Post The reader’s interest never flags...[there is] an air of cozy menace...Enjoyable as the book is, a purist will nonetheless fault its loose construction...diverting, light entertainment. It’s always fun to see one Holmes brother or the other dazzle with a showy deduction and Mycroft and Sherlock offers plenty of these.

James Mustich

Rave The Washington Post Some years ago, the reader and former bookseller James Mustich asked himself: \'What if I had a bookstore that could hold only 1,000 volumes, and I wanted to ensure it held not only books for all time but also books for the moment, books to be savored or devoured in a night? A shop where any reading inclination — be it for thrillers or theology, or theological thrillers — might find reward.\' This, he concluded, would be \'a browser’s version of paradise.\' It would also be an apt description of his...impressive 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ... Organized alphabetically by author’s name and enlivened with numerous illustrations, Mustich devotes three or four paragraphs to describing each chosen title ... It’s hard to imagine that such a massive compendium could have been done better or demonstrate a more supple and catholic taste.

Ward Farnsworth

Rave The Washington Post As befits a good Stoic, Farnsworth’s expository prose exhibits both clarity and an unflappable calm ... Throughout The Practicing Stoic, Farnsworth beautifully integrates his own observations with scores of quotations from Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and others. As a result, this isn’t just a book to read—it’s a book to return to, a book that will provide perspective and consolation at times of heartbreak or calamity.

Julia Boyd

Positive The Washington Post Historian and biographer Julia Boyd opens her riveting Travelers in the Third Reich with ... firsthand accounts by foreigners to convey what it was really like to visit, study or vacation in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. Throughout, Boyd draws on contemporary letters, diaries and memorandums written by diplomats and politicians, college students, social workers, famous authors and Englishwomen married to Germans ... Shockingly few of these observers managed to see through the Nazis’ smoke and mirrors ... As Julia Boyd emphasizes, too many people allowed reverence for a nation’s glorious past to warp their judgment about its morally repugnant present. That’s a lesson still worth thinking about.

Tom Shippey

Rave The Washington Post Writing for a popular audience has clearly punched up Shippey’s prose, which is lively, friendly and occasionally barbed (mostly when alluding to academic stodginess) ... Though its many Norse names may seem off-putting, Shippey’s magnum opus provides not only an exhilarating, mind-expanding appraisal and retelling of Viking history but also an invitation to discover the cold-iron poetry and prose of the medieval North. Take up that invitation. Most adult readers only occasionally feel the wonder and enchantment that books so easily, so regularly evoked in us when we were young.

Diogenes Laertius, Trans. by Pamela Mensch

Rave The Washington Post Its stories and quips, its quotations and insights are central to European literature. Thus a modern reader can—like Montaigne, who loved the book—still read Diogenes for intellectual entertainment, especially in this magnificent new edition packed with illustrations and notes. Its extensive appendix, moreover, adds learned background essays...as well as a detailed guide to further reading ... Above all else, Diogenes humanizes otherwise Olympian thinkers ... this isn’t just a book to read—it’s a book to return to, a book that will provide perspective and consolation at times of heartbreak or calamity.

Kathryn Hughes

Rave The Washington Post \"Sometimes a book just bowls you over with how good it is ... Kathryn Hughes’s Victorians Undone is just amazing, and her Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum are so various, so imaginatively structured, so delicately salacious and so deliciously written that I sighed with pleasure as I turned the pages and even felt those tiny prickles along the neck that A.E. Housman once claimed were the sign of true poetry ... As is Victorians Undone in its entirety. While some readers may find it gossipy or even sensational in a negative rather than positive sense, I’m not one of them. This is popularized history done right, done with panache. Hughes has infused new life into dry-as-dust facts to produce a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.\

Jenny Uglow

Rave The Washington Post ...capacious and astute ... Among the many pleasures of this biography are its frequent quotations from Lear’s journals and fanciful letters ... Among Uglow’s most valuable and personal chapters are those devoted to Lear’s fantastic, in all senses, drawings and verse. Some of his later poems, such as \'The Dong With a Luminous Nose,\' can be decidedly pensive or bittersweet, but as Uglow writes, the limericks in his first collection, A Book of Nonsense (1846), are \'comprehensible as both the foolery of childhood and the foolery of carnival, turning the world upside down.\'

Christopher Buckley

Positive The Washington Post ...civilized, light entertainment ... The Judge Hunter, then, is a historical novel, albeit one that adopts the breezy, cheeky manner of George MacDonald Fraser’s accounts of the Victorian scoundrel Flashman ... This new novel reminds us that every sort of prejudice, brutality and fanaticism formed part of the tangled root-ball of our nation ... an enjoyable, if slightly uneven patchwork of the comic, serious, satirical, historical, tragic and utterly inconsequential.

Audrey Schulman

Rave The Washington Post Audrey Schulman has...written a riveting page-turner about bonobos — yes, the chimplike primates — and set the action in a very near and dire future ... Sharply observant of primate behavior (both human and animal), Schulman’s quick-moving and dramatic prose doesn’t really lend itself to ready quotation. Burke, like many a New Yorker, believes Midwestern humor consists mainly of 'knee-slapping guffaws, as intellectual as euchre.' More poetically, she recognizes that 'each important moment in life has about it a stillness, an extra beat, an awareness of the edges.' As a result, when she finds herself falling in love 'something inside her clicked. Some animal part of her brain.' Let me add that in creating white-knuckle tension or describing sudden violence, Schulman can rival any our of our more famous thriller writers.

Nick Harkaway

Rave The Washington Post \"Imagine, if you will, a Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films Inception and The Matrix, Raymond Chandler’s quest romances about detective Philip Marlowe, John le Carré’s intricately recursive Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the dizzying science fiction of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Iain Pears’s hypertextual Arcadia and Haruki Murakami’s alternate world IQ84 and even this week’s Washington Post story about China’s push for \'total surveillance\' ... Harkaway divides up and parcels out these four narratives over the course of Neith’s investigation. Each, I should stress, is genre-novel exciting just on its own ... Despite the richness of its invention and virtuosic tricksiness, Gnomon is probably a bit too long. Still, it means to dazzle and it does, while also raising serious questions about identity, privacy, human rights and the just society.\

Judith Flanders

Rave The Washington Post In Christmas: A Biography, social historian Judith Flanders questions the widespread assumption that ‘a deeply solemn religious event’ has been ‘sullied’ by our own secular, capitalist society … as Flanders repeatedly shows: Yuletide has almost always been more rowdy and secular than reverent or religious … Christmas: A Biography grows increasingly sociological, just as the holiday itself grows increasingly oriented toward children … Throughout, too, her writing remains brisk and witty.

Helen Smith

Rave The Washington Post ... prizeworthy literary biography...Like Scribner’s Max Perkins, Garnett was, in all senses of the phrase, an editor of genius ... Edward Garnett was staunchly, even narrowly, realistic in his approach to fiction: Literature, he felt, should focus on and reveal life as it is ... In structure, An Uncommon Reader might be likened to a portrait gallery ...introduces us to Garnett’s various 'discoveries' and literary confidants ... Though An Uncommon Reader is Helen Smith’s first book, one would never know it: She delivers uncommonly good reading, and anyone interested in Edwardian fiction, the history of publishing or literary biography will find it a treat.

James Salter

Rave The Washington Post In Don’t Save Anything, despite its paradoxical title, Kay Eldredge Salter assembles her late husband’s bread-and-butter journalism — yet how delicious good bread and butter can be! ... As always, Salter emphasizes simple, vivifying details. To understand the challenge of ascending the vertical rock face of Yosemite’s El Capitan, 'Imagine a wall more than twice as high as the Empire State Building.' Describing a hospital lab technician, he writes, 'She has blond hair and the decent, American face of a girl in the emergency room who is there when your eyes open and you love her from then on.'”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Trans. by Lucia Graves

Rave The Washington Post It is a long novel that will remind readers of a good many other novels. This isn't meant as criticism but as an indication of the story's richness and architectonic intricacy. Before everything else, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's European bestseller is a book about a mysterious book, and its even more mysterious author … As the reader tries to figure out the links between modern Spanish history, two passionate and forbidden love affairs and an enigmatic novelist, Carlos Ruiz Zafon periodically lessens the tension of his dark melodrama by introducing humorous interludes or eccentric secondary characters … Suffice it to say that — and here's yet another critical formula — anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up The Shadow of the Wind.

Ingrid Rowland & Noah Charley

Mixed The Washington Post How these two scholars came to work together isn’t made clear, but their book’s subtitle, Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, seems a somewhat audacious claim. Perhaps ‘the invention of art history’ would be more accurate? Though mainly a life of Vasari — and one contending that he is a major — their book also touches on many of the civic, intellectual and aesthetic currents of 16th-century Italy … Such historical tidbits are unquestionably entertaining, but they also render The Collector of Lives a bit of a hodgepodge — unless, of course, the authors are deliberately emulating what the period’s rhetoricians called ‘copia,’ a flowery abundance. After a sensationalistic opening — Could there be a lost Leonardo behind a Vasari fresco? — the book does settle down, but many points are tediously repeated … Because of these blemishes, The Collector of Lives lacks anything approaching Raphael-like perfection. You should read it anyway.

Alan Bennett

Rave The Washington Post That self-deprecation is characteristic, but Keeping On Keeping On — which covers the years 2005 to 2015 — also shows us this kindly, cultured man enraged and despondent over the state of England and its increasing \'nastification\' ... Mostly he deals with the vicissitudes of age — cancer checkups, surgery for a stomach aneurysm, worsening deafness — while getting on with new work...an increasing sense of the valedictory in these pages... Such dry humor, about himself and the world around him, is typical of Bennett... While the first half of this massive volume is devoted to Bennett’s diaries, the latter 300 or so pages reprint talks about books, the opera and theater, the texts of two unproduced plays and notes made...the perfect book at bedtime, providing bite-size diary entries, lively anecdotes and, yes, a quite comforting teddy bearishness — if you allow for the occasional swipe from some surprisingly sharp claws.

Thomas Pynchon

Rave The Washington Post Imagine the cult film The Big Lebowski as a novel, with touches of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential thrown in for good measure. Imagine your favorite Raymond Chandler or James Crumley mystery retold as a hippie whodunit, set in Gordita Beach, Calif., at the very end of the 1960s. Imagine a great American novelist, one who is now a septuagenarian, writing with all the vivacity and bounce of a young man who has just discovered girls. Most of all, imagine sentences and scenes that are so much fun to read that you wish Inherent Vice were twice as long as it is. Imagine saying that about a Thomas Pynchon novel … a terrific pastiche of California noir, wonderfully amusing throughout...and a poignant evocation of the last flowering of the '60s, just before everything changed and passed into myth or memory.

Kevin Young

Positive The Washington Post Despite its many merits, including a terrific annotated bibliography, Bunk may strike some readers as overlong and somewhat ramshackle. While usually clear and journalistic, Young’s prose constantly shifts registers, sometimes veering into cultural theorizing, at other times opting for sassily hip street talk. This tonal restlessness certainly adds a variety and richness to the book, but also reinforces the impression that Young can’t stop talking and can’t bring himself to leave anything out. Still, excess hardly matters when there’s so much to enjoy and learn from in this encyclopedic anatomy of American imposture and chicanery.

John Crowley, Illustrated by Melody Newcomb

Rave The Washington Post ... Ka — an exploration of the bond between the living and the dead — may be a challenge for some readers ...crows have long been regarded as 'death-birds.' Eaters of carrion and corpses, they are sometimes even said to convey the soul into the afterlife. Crowley’s title itself alludes to this notion... Throughout his fiction he returns repeatedly to the notion of recollection, whether of past selves, lost wisdom or secret history ...depicts quiet loneliness — because Dar Oakley connects human and crow cultures he isn’t quite at home in either — and achingly evokes the spring-fever of dawning love ... As that suggests, Ka is nothing if not syncretic. More than a book of stories nested in stories, it is, as the Skeleton implied, a book about Story.

Anne Fadiman

Rave The Washington Post ...a wonderfully engaging memoir of both her father, Clifton Fadiman, and of what it was like to grow up in a highly bookish and privileged household ... By recording both her past experiences and her current thoughts about those experiences, she keeps The Wine Lover’s Daughter consistently absorbing and, once begun, you will be hard-pressed to stop reading, even though the book should probably be savored like a grand cru rather than guzzled down like cheap beer. Either way, though, you’re in for a good time ... Anne Fadiman’s prose, like a proper gentleman’s suit, is beautifully tailored without drawing attention to itself ... [a] clear-eyed and loving memoir.

Sarah Waters

Rave The Washington Post A novel that initially seems as if it might have been written by E.M. Forster darkens into something by Dostoevsky or Patricia Highsmith. It also becomes unputdownable. Not that the first part is less so; it’s simply slower, more leisurely in its depiction of a troubled marriage and two sad-hearted women who gradually look to each other for companionship, a little conversation, an occasional picnic together … In The Paying Guests she has written both a beautifully delineated love story and a darkly suspenseful psychological novel. While I’ve been coy about revealing too much about how the plot develops, I will just whisper that the reader is in for a seriously heart-pounding roller-coaster ride.

Thomas Pynchon

Rave The Washington Post Bleeding Edge is set in New York City, and the looming shadow of 9/11 touches every page. Nonetheless, many of those pages are outrageously funny, others are sexy, touchingly domestic, satirical or deeply mysterious. All are brilliantly written in Pynchon’s characteristically revved-up, even slightly over-revved style — a joy to read, though the techno-babble of various computer geeks can take SOME getting used to. Still, as spring passes into summer and summer approaches fall, our anxiety grows and intensifies … Bleeding Edge swarms with amazing characters, many of them verging on caricature, although convincing enough on the page … There are, in fact, jokes and puns and put-downs on nearly every page of Bleeding Edge — the conversations between Maxine and her lifelong friend Heidi are particularly catty, affectionate and vulgar. But laughter can’t stave off the book’s encroaching darkness.

John McPhee

Positive The Washington Post ...this insider’s guide to long-form journalism, though somewhat meandering, is a book that any writer, aspiring or accomplished, could profitably read, study and argue with. However, its opening two chapters, in which McPhee presents his various systems for structuring articles, do require a bit of perseverance ... For over half a century, John McPhee — now 86 — has been writing profiles of scientists, eccentrics and specialists of every stripe. All are exceptional at what they do. So, too, is their discerning chronicler.

Daniyal Mueenuddin

Positive The Washington Post Many of Mueenuddin's stories conform to a common dynamic: We learn about a character's past, then zero in on the central crisis of his or her life and, even while we expect more development, suddenly find everything wound up in a paragraph or two: ‘The next day two men loaded the trunks onto a horse-drawn cart and carried them away to the Old City.’ (Flaubert or Chekhov might have written that.) In other instances, even so minimal a resolution remains cloudy: Mueenuddin just stops, having given us all that we need to know about the future or lack of future in a love affair or a marriage … As should be clear, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection full of pleasures.

Richard Ford

Rave The New York Review of Books While Canada sets up numerous scenes that teeter on the edge of the comic, they usually slide into the pathetic, macabre, or hallucinatory. The novel’s forlorn tone—of thoughts that lie too deep for tears—quite naturally grows out of the narrator’s painful recollections of a close family destroyed by a foolish act of parental desperation. Ford really excels, however, in his virtuoso command of narrative suspense. He makes us wait … Each part of Canada is superb in its own way, and, as Dell tells us, there are links between them. Nonetheless, the two halves differ as much as the Parsons twins do. While the Montana chapters might be likened to a modernized western (Indians, cattle rustling, a bank holdup), the second half presents a Southern Gothic vision of the North, complete with the depraved half-breed servant, the elegant, corrupt master, dark family secrets, good ol’ boys drinking, whoring, and hunting, and finally the awaited revenant from the buried past.

Margaret Atwood

Rave The Washington Post In this frightening, but not wholly unfamiliar world, Atwood focuses on the interactions of a small group of rebels: the brilliant but unstable genetic scientist Crake; his sidekick, Jimmy, and Oryx, the woman they both love; a bioterrorist group known as MaddAddam, which communicates through a computer game called Extinctathon; and a pacifist religious cult called God’s Gardeners … Does all this sound totally grim, Brave New World meets Blade Runner meets Escape From New York meets The Road Warrior? It’s not. Atwood’s three-part masterpiece is one of those stories that are thrilling and funny and romantic and touching and, yes, horrific by turns and sometimes all at once. Best of all, MaddAddam, like the final volumes of many other trilogies, draws multiple plot strands together, showing how seemingly disparate elements from the earlier books are really deeply interconnected.

Mattias Boström

Rave The Washington Post \"...the best account of Baker Street mania ever written ... what Bostrom has accomplished supremely well is to relate, as his subtitle proclaims, \'the story of the men and women who created an icon.\' In effect, he shows us how Sherlock Holmes enchanted the world ... more than a treat, it’s a smorgasbord ... be aware that Bostrom’s narrative style verges on the melodramatic: Each chapter is a short vignette, often ending with a cliffhanger. This can take getting used to, but remember that Holmes himself could never resist a theatrical flourish.\

Jon K. Lauck

Positive The Washington Post This may sound dull as ditch water to those who believe that the 'flyover' states are inhabited largely by clodhoppers, fundamentalist zealots and loudmouthed Babbitts. In fact, Lauck’s aim is to examine 'how the Midwest as a region faded from our collective imagination' and 'became an object of derision.' In particular, the heartland’s traditional values of hard work, personal dignity and loyalty, the centrality it grants to family, community and church, and even the Jeffersonian ideal of a democracy based on farms and small land-holdings — all these came to be deemed insufferably provincial by the metropolitan sophisticates of the Eastern Seaboard and the lotus-eaters of the West Coast ... From Warm Center to Ragged Edge is scholarly — there are as many pages of notes as of text — and Lauck does favor long sentences, which may take getting used to. But this is an important book and these days, especially, deserves to be read and debated.

Laurent Binet, Trans. by Sam Taylor

Positive The Washington Post Like Umberto Eco’s conspiracy classic, Foucault’s Pendulum, or Zoran Zivkovic’s Papyrus Trilogy, Laurent Binet — a professor of French literature in Paris — has produced an intellectual thriller that will be catnip to serious readers ... Before long, as in many golden-age mysteries, various characters start to die while mumbling enigmatic words such as 'Sophia,' 'Elle sait' and 'Echo.' None means what it seems ... Like HHhH, Binet’s post-modernist novel about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, The Seventh Function of Language doesn’t just tell a story. Binet is also exploring the relationship between fiction and reality ... To my mind, Binet doesn’t really do enough with these familiar metafictional tropes, and he’s much better at satire and suspense.

Adam Begley

Rave The Washington Post The Great Nadar lacks the obvious commercial appeal of Begley’s previous biography, a capacious, revealing life of the novelist John Updike, so that it comes across as a labor of love. Yet the word 'labor' hardly characterizes the suavity, swiftness and economy of its text. The book is a pleasure to read, though one could almost buy it just for the pictures ... In a substantial appendix, titled 'Mementos of Nadar’s World,' he presents a gallery of the notables who visited the photographer’s studio.Begley quotes from the funny and eccentric comments these and other clients left in Nadar’s guest book. The result makes for a delightful close to a concise and delightful biography.

Peter Matthiessen

Rave The New York Review of Books ...a novel of Faulknerian power and darkness, one that embraces the American experience from the time of the Civil War to the first years of the Depression … While Shadow Country gradually conveys what is known about Watson from records and reminiscences, Matthiessen imagines conversations and the background for certain characters and encounters, even as he deepens the ambiguities of his increasingly tantalizing story … While Book I draws on the down-home voices of the islanders and Book II uses the prose of a good reporter, Book III is written in a rather formal, old-fashioned style, suitable for the scion of proud, if now indigent, Southern aristocrats … Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.

Susanna Clarke

Mixed The Washington Post Neil Gaiman calls Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell 'the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years' ... Clearly Gaiman likes this book a whole lot ...at heart a book about the present's relationship to the past. In its pages Clarke takes the accepted fabric of English culture and inserts just a single new thread: that during the Renaissance, magic actually worked ...I wonder if this encyclopedic mirroring of so many Romantic styles and situations doesn't slightly weaken the novel by making it too capacious, too loose and baggy...Amid so much richness, I occasionally found myself yearning for a somewhat leaner narrative, but other readers may wallow in just this triple-decker plumminess. At any event, here is God's plenty, and there's plenty of it.

Alan Hollinghurst

Rave The Washington Post Hollinghurst interlaces three different plots – a Condition of England novel set during the Thatcher era of the 1980s, a Jamesian psychological inquiry cum social comedy about the well-to-do Fedden family and their friends, and a gay coming-of-age story … Throughout Nick remains the center of consciousness, always sympathetic, even as he grows increasingly coarse in his sexual sophistication (and taste for cocaine). What makes the book so fine, though, is its writing -- suffused with enough wit to keep the diction original and lively without overpowering the reader with campiness or excess … Hollinghurst is, in general, singularly adept at choosing just the right words, making unexpected observations and pulling off neat rhetorical gestures. One can, in fact, enjoy The Line of Beauty just for its lines of beauty.

Margaret Atwood

Mixed The Washington Post The Blind Assassin is, to use an appropriately old-fashioned phrase, grand storytelling on a grand scale. That's not meant to be ironic: For three days I could hardly put the book aside. Still, the novel sometimes verges close to the sentimental and often sounds like a pastiche of period writers … As in so many intricately structured stories, the greatest pleasure derives from the timing of revelations … The Blind Assassin may not be a groundbreaking work of art, but its smoothness, wit and mournful wisdom are deeply ingratiating.

Haruki Murakami, trans. Jay Rubin & Philip Gabriel

Positive The Washington Post Once you start reading 1Q84, you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished it. Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling … The world has ‘switched tracks,’ and [Aomame] has entered a kind of parallel reality, which she eventually dubs 1Q84. Not much seems terribly different at first, but gradually she learns that certain aspects of history (and cosmology) have changed, and that nearly all these changes are linked to a mysterious commune called Sakigake … Despite its great length, Murakami’s novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting.

Zadie Smith

Rave The Washington Post Her new novel is masterly on almost any level — impressive in its command of every register of English, never tiresome despite its length and astonishingly sympathetic to every sort of human frailty ...center stage stands the Belsey family, arguing, slamming doors, increasingly beleaguered, confused and heartbroken ... As the novel progresses, Smith smoothly shifts into and out of the minds of the various Belseys, as they sigh, quip and agonize against the backdrop of Wellington classes, parties, lectures and faculty meetings ... At times she can be a little extravagant in her imagery...but her overall tone suggests a kindly Voltairean (or, more appositely, Forsterian) tolerance for human weakness. None of the novel's characters is wholly admirable, and yet nearly all are, somehow, loveable ... But after The Autograph Man and now On Beauty, it's evident that Smith is a writer for the long haul, an artist whose books we will look forward to every few years, a real and deeply satisfying novelist. E.M. Forster would be proud.

Marilynne Robinson

Rave The Washington Post There's nothing flashy in these pages, and yet one regularly pauses to reread sentences, sometimes for their beauty, sometimes for their truth … The time span of Gilead is roughly a hundred years – from the 1850s to 1956, when Ames sets down his story. Implicitly, it looks far into the future – Ames imagines his little boy as an old man – and in spirit back to Biblical times. Eventually one realizes that beyond a portrait of the human condition – prey to isolation and loneliness, ever needful of faith and love – Robinson has subtly introduced that great heartbreaking theme of American history, the often divisive, unfulfilled quest for social and racial justice.

Michael Chabon

Positive The Washington Post Chabon takes us everywhere: to the back streets of Prague, the headquarters of the Aryan-American League, a gay party, an Alaskan military outpost during the war, Louis Tannen's celebrated magic shop, the fictional Long Island suburb of Bloomtown. We meet fretful bigwigs, mournful artistes, two-bit fanatics … Ah, but there are so many good things in this novel, it's hard to limit oneself … Michael Chabon has written a long, lovely novel about the American Dream and about comic books (the two, it turns out, may be much the same thing). It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal – smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read

Neil Gaiman

Positive The Washington Post Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose – American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages … As this apocalyptic novel progresses, Gaiman balances several different narratives…To keep the story from growing too grandiose, Gaiman throws in a fair amount of humor … On the whole the story accelerates crisply toward its surprise ending.

Lyndal Roper

Positive The Washington Post ...her book situates this revolutionary thinker and his thought in the sociological, political and religious crosscurrents of contemporary Germany ... Let me stress that Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet isn’t written by an atheistical Christopher Hitchens wannabe, but by a highly respected historian. Roper’s tone throughout is one of evenhanded scholarly inquiry. Along the way, though, she drives home a harsh truth: People who are reasonable, empathetic and civilized make ideal neighbors but it’s usually the zealots and extremists who, for good or ill, change the world.

Emmanuel Carrère

Positive The Washington Post ...an intense, compulsively readable book about the mystery of faith, seen from both an autobiographical and historical perspective. In it, Carrère depicts his spiritual journey and attendant confusions with a self-accusatory honesty that recalls both Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. But that’s just the beginning. He also speculates about the composition of the Acts of the Apostles and the four Gospels, proffering heterodox interpretations that aren’t just novel but novelistic.

Richard Holmes

Rave The Washington Post ...Holmes’s books, while biographically persuasive, always feel subtly personal. The 'Footsteps principle' allows the narrative to build on clearly visualized scenes, even as the overall tone is that of intimate, civilized conversation. Above all, Holmes never comes across as stiff or stuffy ... All in all, This Long Pursuit offers an abundance of literary entertainment and instruction.

Edmund Gordon

Positive The Washington Post The Invention of Angela Carter, while an exceptionally thoughtful and engrossing biography, has left me wondering whether it’s such a good idea to read about contemporary writers one admires. In the case of Carter, Gordon traces an inner life of intense self-scrutiny, marked at times by melancholy desperation, an almost hysterical search for love, and periodic callousness toward family and friends ... As Gordon, a lecturer at King’s College London, repeatedly points out, any hard-line view of Carter as a champion of gender politics diminishes her as a writer. She was, he stresses, never ideologically pure and 'never saw the oppression of women as categorically different from other forms of oppression' ... As I finished Edmund Gordon’s admirable biography, it struck me that Carter’s constant refrain of love — yearned for and lost — as well as her use of symbolic autobiography in her fiction and a general approach to life as performance, reminded me of just one other great and daring 20th-century writer: Colette.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Positive The Washington Post There are no half measures to Kay Redfield Jamison’s medico-biographical study of poet Robert Lowell. It is impassioned, intellectually thrilling and often beautifully written, despite being repetitive and overlong ... Nonetheless, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire achieves a magnificence and intensity — dare one say a manic brilliance? — that sets it apart from more temperate and orderly biographies. Above all, the book demands that readers seriously engage with its arguments, while also prodding them to reexamine their own beliefs about art, madness and moral responsibility. Reading this analysis of 'genius, mania, and character' is an exhilarating experience ... Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire would be an unqualified triumph were it not for Jamison’s penchant for overkill: Everything is treated a bit too expansively, many points and anecdotes are repeated twice or three times, and rather than quoting one authority, she quotes a half-dozen.

Neil Gaiman

Positive The Washington Post \"Gaiman’s sentences appear so simple and plain that one wonders if the book is actually intended for 9-year-olds. At the same time, the author’s penchant for short paragraphs, some of only a single sentence, adds an air of portentousness. This combination of the faux-naif and the melodramatic is then further complicated by the diction of the gods. They speak a bit like comic-book superheroes ... In fact, despite the mishmash of its styles and the sometimes irritating egregiousness of Gaiman’s celebrity, Norse Mythology turns out to be a gripping, suspenseful and quite wonderful reworking of these famous tales. Once you fall into the rhythm of its glinting prose, you will happily read on and on, in thrall to Gaiman’s skillful storytelling.\

James Stourton

Rave The Washington Post Kenneth Clark is outstanding from every viewpoint: Its author knows the art world, having been a chairman of Sotheby’s UK, his research draws on every available resource, and he tells us both about Clark’s private life and public career in equally fascinating detail. The chapters on the making of Civilisation are particularly engrossing. All in all, this is one of the best and most enjoyable biographies of the year.

David J. Skal

Mixed The Washington Post ...comes across as part psychosexual case study and part loose and baggy monster ... Striking factoids abound ... Skal particularly shines in his treatment of 'Hollywood Gothic' and he produces insightful pages about the silent film masterpiece Nosferatu, and the differing interpretations of Dracula ... Something in the Blood consistently represents Stoker as essentially a masochistic homosexual and Dracula as a book packed with homosexual frissons. The evidence for both claims is certainly there...But Skal truly belabors the psychosexual ... All in all, Something in the Blood simply feels overly speculative.

Robert Gottlieb

Positive The Washington Post ...[a] spledid memoir ... In these pages the account of one blockbuster follows another in a colorful procession of bestsellers...The brilliant failures, the idiosyncratic minor classics, the good, solid novels by dependable mid-list authors — these are essential to a healthy literary culture, and it would have been good to hear about some of them ... Despite my few cavils, Avid Reader will be avidly read by anyone interested in the publishing world of the past 60 years.

Denis Boyles

Positive The Washington Post Denis Boyles doesn’t mention red rot or, for that matter, the minuscule type of the smaller-size cloth-bound edition of the 11th, but Everything Explained That Is Explainable doesn’t overlook much else. Boyles’s account of how this classic reference work came to be published in 1910-1911 makes for enthralling business history...Besides being a biographical and narrative history, Everything Explained That is Explainable is something of a dossier as well. Not only does Boyles reproduce many photographs and period illustrations, he also quotes frequently and at length from myriad letters, Haxton’s various advertisements, newspaper reports and the memoirs of Janet Hogarth, who oversaw the indexing of the 11th and outlived all her colleagues. Even Boyles’s notes and appendices proffer additional anecdotes and useful bits of information.

Kelly Link

Rave The Washington Post Link [once] declared that she loves two kinds of fiction: the kind that 'takes things which are comfortable and familiar and makes them really strange, or else...takes things which are strange and impossible and finally makes them feel comfortable, to a certain extent.' The stories in Get in Trouble do both ... The titles of Kelly Link’s three previous collections — Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters — better suggest her deadpan tone and fantastic subject matter than Get in Trouble. Still, only the marvelous contents of these books can demonstrate Link’s mastery and self-confidence as an author: She believes in her stories, no matter how off the wall they might seem, and she makes her readers believe in them, too.

Laura Claridge

Pan The Washington Post Few would doubt that Blanche Knopf was denied full credit for all she brought to the success of the company she co-founded. Nonetheless, Claridge depicts her less as a businesswoman or “literary tastemaker extraordinaire,” than as a cosseted, albeit troubled and unhappy socialite who regularly slept around. There is, in fact, a thread of salaciousness that runs through these pages...

Paul Mariani

Pan The Washington Post While certainly valuable to the student, these pages of close reading are a drag on the book as a narrative ... While Wallace Stevens is certainly a major American poet, in Mariani’s pages he seldom comes across as a particularly interesting fellow, let alone a likeable or happy one.

Stevie Smith

Rave The Washington Post While the 1976 Oxford University Press edition of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems is an exceptionally handsome book, and probably sufficient for many readers, those crazy about this wonderful and strange poet will obviously want Will May’s splendid All the Poems. It includes not only much hitherto uncollected material but also pages of concise bibliographical notes.

Jack Lynch

Positive The Washington Post Despite its high anecdotal and amusement quotient, Jack Lynch’s fine book does deal with some fairly arcane material. Consequently, it should probably be enjoyed slowly rather than read straight through. Like so many reference-shelf classics, You Could Look It Up even invites browsing. A chapter or two in the evening could be just about right.

Iain Pears

Rave The Wall Street Journal Perhaps some of these apparent loose ends are tied up in the digital edition of Arcadia, available as an app that includes both extra material and tools for tracking the storylines. That said, most readers will probably prefer the carefully orchestrated book version. “Qui moderatur tempus intelligit omnia,” goes the Lytten family motto: 'He who controls time understands everything.' Doesn’t that actually describe the art of plot construction and its master, Iain Pears?

Herman Wouk

Mixed The Washington Post Sailor and Fiddler is enjoyable but a little bland, serving chiefly to reintroduce Wouk’s novels to contemporary readers who might only know their names, if that.

Christine L. Corton

Rave The Washington Post “Along with historical accounts of the city’s fogs, Corton’s 'biography' looks closely at their representation in art and literature. Her book is packed with newspaper illustrations, reproductions of hazy ‘impressionistic’ paintings by Whistler and Monet, many photographs, and even stills from films about Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes”

Jonathan Bate

Mixed The Washington Post ...Bate — a distinguished Shakespeare scholar as well as provost of Worcester College in Oxford, England — proudly calls his book 'unauthorized,' implying its intellectual independence. But that word can’t help but suggest those sleazy tell-alls about Hollywood movie stars. In fact, this biography reads like two books: one an intelligent, even donnish work of criticism that connects the poems to the life, the other a sensationalistic anthology of gossip and subdued malice.

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