How do you write a 560-page book about the Rolling Stones without using the word “egotist”? Stephen Davis, the author of a new chronicle of the rock legends, tries to…
Sir Ernst Gombrich, the venerable humanist and scholar of art who died last year at the age of ninety-two, was not a great believer in historical epochs, but his passing…
As the British broadcaster Bernard Falk once said, “Americans are rather like bad Bulgarian wine; they don’t travel well.” Perhaps it is with these words in mind that British writer…
The penis goes by many names: “dipstick,” “peenie-weenie,” “lovepump,” “wonder worm.” Jonathan Franzen culls these synonyms from a list of no fewer than 45 in Dr. Susan Block’s 10 Commandments…
V. S. Naipaul was born into a world where books made little mention of life as he knew it. The books Naipaul read during his Trinidadian youth—fairytales, works of Moliere,…
Kathryn Harrison’s most recent novel is a finely detailed if somewhat dull historical fiction that considers the development of one man’s character in the context of developing scientific technology. In…
The award-winning Swedish novel April Witch is the dark and powerful tale of Desirée, a severely disabled woman abandoned at birth by her mother to spend her entire life in…
“My mother keeps every key to her house on a ring attached to her bag,” says seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Thea early in Lynn Freed’s beautifully told fifth novel, House of Women .…
Meera Nair’s first book, Video , is a collection of ten short stories with a wide range of settings and protagonists. She moves from a small Indian village to Phoenix,…
In the preface to The Black Veil, Moody writes that the “book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative,” clarifying his description of…
Peter Ibbetson