Scrabulous Is Not a Word
After listening to Judith Thurman talk about her Scrabble addiction, in a companion podcast to her piece in this week’s issue, I wondered if we had ever encountered each other in the murky highways of...
View ArticleWaiting
A police car idled in the street outside the restaurant Busboys and Poets. On the curb, vendors hawked Obama T-shirts, First Family buttons, and twenty-dollar copies of the November 5, 2008, issue of...
View ArticleHow to Cook a Wolf
In these economically difficult times, when even the patrons of high-end concierge services are opting to fly first-class instead of hiring private jets, we, too, must tighten our thrift-store belts....
View ArticleThe Gulf
A few posts ago, Hendrik Hertzberg wrote about Dubai’s notoriously poor human-rights record. As if on cue, the first International Festival of Literature in Dubai is off to an inauspicious start, with...
View ArticleThe Gift
Last night, at a friend’s book-filled apartment, I came across a copy of the fall, 1979, issue of the Kenyon Review. Inside was a poem that seems fitting to reread in February, 2009, two hundred years...
View ArticleBookspotting: Cavalcade of Comedy
It’s hard to miss them when you walk into the room—the hipster-nerd couple next to the book table, lit by the warm glow from the vintage green-and-gold lamp. They are well matched in tweed (his...
View ArticleThe Exchange: Daniyal Mueenuddin
Last week, Daniyal Mueenuddin took a break from growing mangoes in southern Punjab to read to audiences across America from his début short-story collection, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.” Before...
View ArticleA Poet’s Shrine Destroyed
I had never heard of Rahman Baba before militants blew up his shrine in Pakistan a few days ago. I now know that he is a beloved Pashto mystic and poet. He lived in the seventeenth century and, legend...
View ArticleTest Kitchen: Koshari
The Guardian’s recipe swap has a finger on today’s pulse: people like to know intimate details of the famous—in this case, the culinary habits of writers—and, in a nod to the economy, are eating more...
View ArticleA Poet Speaks
Whether you are a “wanderer, worshipper, or lover of leaving,” there might be something for you at Zahra Partovi’s multimedia Rumi installation, “A Poet Speaks,” on display at the Center for Book Arts...
View ArticleSerendipity
From Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, the book I am reading right now:See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:The Late Late PhaseEat, Pray, LatinWhat We’re Reading This Summer
View ArticleKamala Das
Kamala Das died yesterday. One of India’s finest authors, she wrote in English and Malayalam, moving fluidly between poetry, memoir, and fiction. She was one of the first Indian authors I remember...
View ArticleCooking with the Oulipo
For those of us who remain undaunted by that lobster scene, and unintimidated by Regina Schrambling’s grim prediction that we will never cook from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Harry Mathews,...
View ArticleWise Man
It’s barely a week into the new year, and I have already managed to break all my resolutions. In need of serious intervention, I took myself to a lecture by Richard Wiseman, the author of “59 Seconds:...
View ArticleThe Devil and Mr. Casement
In 1910, the British government asked Roger Casement, a consular official, to investigate reports that a British-registered rubber-trading company was exploiting Barbadian workers in the Amazon....
View ArticleIn Pursuit of Silence
Prochnik’s quest for the many meanings of silence takes him on an adventure of profound listening. A Trappist monk says that silence offers a “radical confrontation with ourselves”; anti-noise...
View ArticleFire-Escape-Sitting Time
For those of us who are too overwhelmed to make it to the movies, concerts, plays, and games that have taken over New York City parks lately, there is always the fire escape. Basking with a book in the...
View ArticleThe Promise
This chronicle of the first year of the Obama Presidency argues that Obama took charge well before he was elected, when the economy imploded, in September, 2008. Operating in crisis mode since then, he...
View ArticleA Short History of Celebrity
Inglis sees the history of celebrity as a history of moral sentiment. Beginning in mid-eighteenth-century London, where the theatre provided a cast of leading men and ladies, the idea of celebrity...
View ArticleApropos of Nothing
Last week, at the Rubin Museum’s thoughtful new conversation series, Talk About Nothing, the philosopher Simon Critchley spoke with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri. “Nothing happens in your work,”...
View ArticleThe Killer of Little Shepherds
On October 26, 1898, Joseph Vacher, a vagabond with a history of mental illness, was brought to trial for the gruesome murder of a young shepherd in Bénonces, France. Vacher had previously admitted to...
View ArticleLuka and the Fire of Life
This sequel to “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” is a twenty-first-century myth, with tropes drawn from video games, a multicultural cast of gods and demons, and distinctly postmodern quandaries....
View ArticleThe Memory of Love
This ambitious novel, set in Sierra Leone, examines the lives of three men as they face the lingering consequences of civil war. Surrounded by both victims and perpetrators of violence, each man...
View ArticleWhen Tito Loved Clara
Nearly every character in this fast-paced début novel carries a hidden history or obsession. As the secrets start tumbling out, they trigger a series of betrayals and heartbreaks. The book zigzags...
View ArticleAn Atlas of Impossible Longings
Set in mid-twentieth-century India, this début novel spans generations and political upheavals as it follows the story of an orphan, Mukunda, and his childhood friend and, later, lover, a girl called...
View ArticleThe Good Muslim
In this portrait of postwar Bangladesh, a brother-sister duo symbolize, almost too neatly, the clash between secularism and fundamentalism. Maya, a doctor and rebel, is outraged by Sohail’s...
View ArticleIftar at J.F.K.
Tuesday was Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festival that marks the end of thirty days of Ramadan fasting with a day of feasting and a temporary cessation of family feuds. A few days earlier, I had braved the...
View ArticleCalling Mr. King
In this moody comedy, an American hit man’s admiration for a victim’s English country estate grows into a passion for European art and architecture that disrupts his career. The improbable plot moves...
View ArticleSquish Rabbit
Squish Rabbit lives in an unfriendly universe in which balloons float away and fruits fall thoughtlessly on his head. Battersby’s illustrations mix whimsical line drawings with touches of color from...
View ArticleWonderstruck
Two children set out on parallel journeys, fifty years apart, that culminate in New York City museums. Rose’s search for the mother who abandoned her and Ben’s quest for the man he suspects to be his...
View ArticleThe Missing of the Somme
Written nearly two decades ago but previously unpublished in the U.S., this idiosyncratic meditation on the way the British remember the First World War and its dead combines wide-ranging research with...
View ArticleHow It All Began
In this mischievous novel, Lively traces the genealogy of randomness that messes up the lives of strangers. A mugging on a London street ripples out into an interconnected urban universe, shaking...
View ArticleJack Holmes & His Friend
This story of two young men—one gay, the other straight—who come of age in literary New York in the sixties examines two unrequited passions: Jack’s love for Will, and Will’s literary ambitions, which...
View ArticleWatergate
Historical fiction that unfolds with the urgency of a thriller, this novel about the Watergate scandal is narrated from multiple points of view, from the President’s to the Plumbers’—a technique that...
View ArticleA Partial History of Lost Causes
Characters with caustic tongues disguise heartfelt quests for meaning as a fondness for futile causes, in this novel set mostly in contemporary Russia. A chess champion in the Kasparov mold becomes a...
View ArticleNo Time Like the Present
The lives of a mixed-race couple, Steve and Jabu, trace the frustrations of post-apartheid South Africa in this political novel. As former heroes are tarnished and corruption scandals become routine,...
View ArticleThe Folded Earth
Secret romances abound in this novel of life in a Himalayan hill station. The narrator, a young widow, slips into a relationship with an enigmatic trekking guide. A village girl runs away from her...
View ArticleThe Watch
The heartbreak and confusion of war are grimly distilled in this story of a dead man’s body and the battle of wills it occasions. A disabled Afghan woman wheels herself down mountains on a wooden cart...
View ArticleThe Thing About Thugs
Set in the nineteenth-century London of opium dens, tunnel people, seamen abandoned by skippers, and skull-collecting pseudoscientists, this novel is narrated in part by Amir Ali, a young man from an...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
All Joy and No Fun, by Jennifer Senior (Ecco). This far-ranging essay on modern parenting follows a variety of parents—stay-at-home, working, single—from parent support groups and Cub Scout sign-ups...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
The Splendid Things We Planned, by Blake Bailey (Norton). In this captivating memoir about his troubled family in Oklahoma, the author recounts his parents’ failings and his own. But the dark heart of...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld (Pantheon). Violence takes many forms in this suspenseful and melancholy novel. Sheep die mysteriously on a farm on a lonely British island; in Australia, a school...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
Capital, by Rana Dasgupta (Penguin Press). In the interviews with rich young Indians that make up much of this unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi, no telling detail seems to escape Dasgupta’s notice....
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