November 2009
Deep in a forest somewhere in Europe, darkness has fallen on a small village. A government clerk named Brodeck goes out into the chilly evening, sent by his housekeeper Fedorine on an errand –...
October 2009
Dalia Sofer’s highly acclaimed first novel takes places in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in a country where “once-dapper men and women have become bearded shadows and black...
September 2009
In an unnamed country at the end of an unnumbered world war, inmate Paul Malinowski leaves a labor camp that his captors have just fled in the face of approaching American liberators. Paul’s...
July/August 2009
The men and women who populate Sana Krasikov’s debut short story collection, One More Year: Stories, are émigrés from the former Soviet Union...
June 2009
In The Believers, Zoe Heller lays bare the contradictions of the mind, asking what happens to political and religious ideology as it meets everyday life. At the center of The Believers is the...
May 2009
All Other Nights opens in March 1862 with nineteen-year-old Jacob Rappaport, the key protagonist in Horn’s fast-moving yet deeply meaningful novel, “inside a barrel in the bottom of a...
April 2009
There are two narratives in Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, both involving Yiddish, lies, love, and translation. In the frame story, a recent college graduate – a Catholic who lost his...
March 2009
Roth’s dark disquisition in his 29th book is about chance and the inability to live outside of history, and about the stupid randomness of fate and “the series of mishaps” that ends...
February 2009
Breakdowns – an important new book that includes the Portrait series and a complete reprint of Spiegelman’s first collection of comics from the ‘70s – should help alert fans...
August 2008
In an opening passage that rings with the tone of epic poetry, the Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon writes, “The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908...
