|
The Whore's Child: And Other Stories by Richard Russo
A review by Charles Taylor
Most fiction readers, if they're honest, will admit that how fiction writers do what they do is an absolute mystery to them. I'm not talking about the writers who wow us with rich, incident-crammed plots or wild flights of language. I'm talking about the subtler mystery of writers who impart a sense of urgency and weight to closely observed tales in which, plotwise at least, not much seems to happen. It's an especially baffling accomplishment coming from writers who stay securely within the bounds of naturalism. Nothing drives me to despair more quickly than drab, earnest stories of ordinary, ...
Laughing Gas (36 Edition) by P.g. Wodehouse
A review by Adrienne Miller
Right then. We're just so frightfully pleased by Overlook Press's sensational new Wodehouse program, reissuing eight of the old so-and-so's books and all that. This event is indeed cause to rub one's fingers together in oily glee. Oh, you certainly know who this P.J. Wodehouse fellow is. He published over ninety novels, so 'tis true that this program is an ambitious one, as was the writer of such ha-has as, "We Havershots are men of action, even when we have been turned into kids with golden curls smelling, I now perceived, of a rather offensive brand of brilliantine" (from Laughing Gas, in...
Iris Murdoch: A Life by Peter J Conradi
When She Was Good
A review by Martha C. Nussbaum
How is moral philosophy related to narrative fiction? One would think that the relationship ought to be an intimate one. Both genres are concerned with character and choice, with motives and imaginings, with the vicissitudes of passion. And yet, from the time when Plato attacked the tragic artists, the relationship has often been characterized by mutual suspicion, philosophers viewing narrative literature as indulgent, emotional, and lacking in normative clarity, writers of fiction viewing philosophers as intolerant moralists who lack appreciation of what Proust calls the "intermittences...
|
The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
A review by Allen Barra
"There's nothing you could want to know about American crime in this century," James Ellroy promised me in an interview five years ago, "that you won't know by the time I've finished these books." "These" books were his proposed trilogy, "Underworld U.S.A.," of which American Tabloid (1995) was the first. I've just finished Ellroy's latest installment, The Cold Six Thousand, and he can stop right there, because he's told me everything I ever wanted to know about crime in this country and a great deal I'm pretty sure I didn't want to know and wish now I could buy back my introduction to.
Read the entire review
More reviews from Salon.com
You Don't Really Know Me: Why Mothers and Daughters Fight, and How Both Can Win by Terri Apter
Forever embedded
A review by Katherine Duncan-Jones
Female adolescence, as a discrete phase of development, first received detailed attention in the era of blue jeans and jiving. We can measure some of the distance between the generally biddable, always firmly suppressed girls of the Early Modern period and the fully-fledged teenagers of the 1950s by looking at the radical adaptations made to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents in the musical West Side Story (1956). While the chief aim of Robbins and his collaborators was to transplant Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers from medieval Verona to urban America...
Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
How high am I?
A review by Jonathan R
Alain de Botton is a philosopher. But he is also a professional writer, and with the fabulous sales of works like How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy he has taken philosophy to the kind of readers who might otherwise be overdosing on Bridget Jones, Harry Potter, or Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The source of his success is his eccentric but ingratiating style: where other media-minded intellectuals offer their readers a diet of know-it-all certitudes garnished with sarcasm and raucous indignation, de Botton is always solicitous, unopinionated and self-...
|
Don't Miss
