Tag

book reviews

The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university…

When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One…

That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three…

Burch tracks these cases, and has conducted her own research on plaintiffs’ experiences. Her findings are sobering: plaintiffs almost…

The worry that taste is deceptive or distracting haunts seemingly every narrative in which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders how…

In the beginning of Ha Jin’s new novel, “Looking for Tank Man,” a sophomore at Harvard seems to be on the verge of throwing her life away.…

Once Crawford slipped into her style, she never slipped out of it—not publicly. “Never in the thousands of times in our association, was…

Kate Riley’s ambitious début novel, “Ruth,” opens in 1963, the year that its protagonist, Ruth Scholl, is born into a scrupulously managed…

“A person’s tennis,” John McPhee writes in “Levels of the Game,” from 1969, “begins with his nature and background and comes out through…