The longing for emotional connection and the difficulty of transcending individuality are central themes of Silence in October. The narrator, a forty-four year-old art historian without a name, addresses feelings…
Billy Collins’ poetry has long been described as “accessible”—a term that has been used as both a compliment and a disparagement. There is no doubt that the simplicity of his…
As if to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most bitterly disappointed presidential campaigns in history, George McGovern, three-term South Dakotan Senator and one-time Democratic presidential candidate, has…
The unique magnetism Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six novels exert on critics and public alike lies not solely in the vividness of her characterization and the fecund richness of her plots. Murdoch’s…
In a 1996 Harper’s article, then-obscure novelist Jonathan Franzen made what has since become a much-publicized boast. He claimed that his next novel—his third—would combine social commentary with memorable characters,…
For several months after my friend Elizabeth died, when I was sixteen, I would be awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of a nearby shape. Not…
While the title creature of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal is drawn from a Yeats poem, a gimlet-eyed reader might attribute the reference to the dead horse that Roth continues…
At sixty-one years of age, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has crafted several treasures of contemporary fiction, including his most recent novel, Disgrace. The only author ever to win…
The Furies by Fernanda Ebserstadt Knopf, 464 pp, $26.00 reviewed by Daniel Kluger The Furies, Fernanda Eberstadt’s fourth, and most ambitious, novel to date, examines the complexities of motherhood, femininity,…
My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey Knopf, 288 pp, $24.00 reviewed by Teddy Goff My Life as a Fake culls its epigraph and much of its structure from…
Peter Ibbetson