Thursday, May 15th   The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel by Lionel Trilling

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Novel Or Nothing A Review by Cynthia Ozick I. One of the several advantages of living long is the chance to witness the trajectory of other lives, especially literary lives; to observe the whole, as a biographer might; or even, now and then, to reflect on fame with the dispassion of the biblical Koheleth, for whom all eminences are finally diminished. When we look around at the contemporary scene, we are in the dark, we cannot tell who will live on into the next generation, and who will be dismissed or, worse yet, eclipsed and forgotten. The luminaries of our youth and our prime may turn out to be strangers in the world of our old age. The "we" and the "our" of the previous sentences are readily seen to be usurpations of Lionel Trilling's characteristic manner -- or would be, if Trilling's prose style, and Trilling himself, were familiar to twenty-first-century readers. But Trilling's stature, once prodigious, is so reduced as to have become a joke to certain young critics who favor flippancy and lightness and who, if...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online

Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg Innocence meets experience A Review by Elsbeth Lindner Contemplating Sylvia Brownrigg's short new novel, the adjective quirky comes to mind time and again. Bold, dry, eccentric, Morality Tale cries out for a descriptive term that can pinpoint its oddness hand-in-hand with its likeability. Quirky it will have to be, for this curious, teasing, idiosyncratic and strangely charming book. It's a twenty-first-century cautionary tale whose generic title also evokes the morality play, an allegorical and didactic model common in the fifteenth century. The novel's central relationship pivots on a married man's choice to start an affair because he and...   Read the entire review More reviews from San Francisco Chronicle				The Portrait of a Lady (Bantam Classics) by Henry James Classic Review [Ed. Note: This review was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1882.] The Atlantic may fairly claim to have exercised its critical function upon the just completed novels by Mr. James and Mr. Howells before the reader had begun to enjoy them, and to have reserved the right, when the reader should be in full possession, of explaining why and how much it liked them. Yet a book has, after all, a life distinct from the interrupted existence of a magazine serial, and it is quite possible to take up these comely volumes and receive a new impression of the integrity of the...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri Displaced Passions A Review by Sarah Kerr Jhumpa Lahiri is, and is not, an old-fashioned writer. She is too natural to be anyone's imitator. Yet the kind of relationship she invites readers into can feel familiar from some of the books we were drawn into long ago, when we were first learning about the good company reading can provide. Among the pleasingly varied, carefully sequenced notes struck in Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Lahiri's first collection of stories, there are a couple of almost mythical-feeling character studies, painful in content but comic in execution, of unlucky Calcutta women and their watchful neighbors. A...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books				The Lolita Effect: Why the Media Sexualize Young Girls and What You Can Do about It by M. Gigi, Ph.d. Durham More than a Little Naughty A Review by Brenda R. Weber The Lolita Effect makes alarmingly clear that Lolita, the flirty, 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, has grown into cultural shorthand for a "prematurely, even inappropriately sexual, little girl." M. Gigi Durham argues that the media oversexualizes girls and supports her case with an accounting of a range of products advertised for them, such as the Little Miss Naughty push-up bras for preteens and Peekaboo Pole Dancing kits for children. These products, as well as television, music, magazines and print ads, conspire to turn young girls into what Durham terms "prosti-...   Read the entire review More reviews from Ms. Magazine
Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman Fun Physics for Literary People A Review by Doug Brown Perelman was a Russian author who wrote a classic two-volume set of books called Physics for Entertainment in the 1930s, introducing physics concepts to the chelovek on the street. As volume one of the set was unavailable, this translation is only of volume two. However, the volumes were clearly meant to stand alone; there is no disorienting impression of coming in midway through the semester. The title of this book may sound like an oxymoron to many readers, but it really is a fun volume filled with everyday simple experiments and observations. A common theme through the book could be...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com				The Outlander by Gil Adamson Into the Wild A Review by Ron Charles Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page: Men with hounds are chasing a young woman through the woods at night. Nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton has murdered her husband and now, still wearing a black mourning dress made from curtains, she's running from her brothers-in-law, massive, red-headed twins with rifles across their backs. Welcome to The Outlander, an absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World