Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five different novellas in a Read More
SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIORBy Ori Brafman and Rom BrafmanDoubleday, 206 pages, $21.95
THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVESBy Leonard MlodinowPantheon, 252 pages, $24.95
ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO, THE WORLD of economics Read More
I missed the deadline with this book review. Although I had plenty of time to work on it (having pitched it in December), I procrastinated and ultimately pulled an all-nighter to get it in. This sacrificed Read More
We’ve waited a long time for a novel from Junot Díaz. The Dominican-American author blasted the publishing world in 1996 with Drown, a book of short stories mainly about the macho scrambling of Dominican immigrants in industrial New Jersey. Fresh and Read More
"God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books.” This wistful observation comes from an aging, drunken, failed poet in The Savage Detectives, the grand novel that made Roberto Bolaño famous in Latin America when it was published in 1998. The tension between vitality and Read More
Office life—that Beckettian game of Whac-a-Mole—is the subject of Then We Came to the End, an amusing debut novel from Joshua Ferris. Told in the collective first-person, a know-it-all “we” (like The Virgin Suicides), this is a book about the disposable, often awkward, sometimes precious, usually tedious moments of the workday. “How we hated our Read More
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95. With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, Read More
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95.
With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, Read More
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely satisfying memoir, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. The book traps us in the overactive, lovesick mind of a Read More
The mind plays tricks on us when we look for logic in matters of the heart. “Such are the loopholes that reality offers us from itself,” writes Grégoire Bouillier in The Mystery Guest, a perversely satisfying memoir, translated from the French by Lorin Stein. The book traps us in the overactive, lovesick mind of a Read More
In his surrealist fiction, Donald Antrim likes to send up human failing, nudging the anxieties of flawed, hyper-aware characters into the realm of the absurd. His neurotic protagonists want to be liked, despite their own misanthropy. And their impulses—whether they involve torturing and murdering a little girl ( Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World) Read More
In his surrealist fiction, Donald Antrim likes to send up human failing, nudging the anxieties of flawed, hyper-aware characters into the realm of the absurd. His neurotic protagonists want to be liked, despite their own misanthropy. And their impulses—whether they involve torturing and murdering a little girl (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World) or Read More
“Everyone in my family tells this story, but everyone starts it in a different way.” That’s how Rich Cohen begins his own story about Sweet’N Low, the artificial sweetener developed by his grandfather, Benjamin Eisenstadt, in 1957. It turns out that the iconic condiment, with its pink packet and 50-year-old musical logo, has a sordid Read More
“Everyone in my family tells this story, but everyone starts it in a different way.” That’s how Rich Cohen begins his own story about Sweet’N Low, the artificial sweetener developed by his grandfather, Benjamin Eisenstadt, in 1957. It turns out that the iconic condiment, with its pink packet and 50-year-old musical logo, has a sordid Read More
Black Hole, by Charles Burns. Pantheon, 368 pages, $24.95.
Journalists have been heralding the rise of the graphic novel for decades. Ever since Will Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, the adult comic book has hovered on the scene, always imminent, occasionally praised as a serious art form—as in the case of Art Read More
