Review Book Reviews Racing From Art To Revolution And Back Again In 'The Flamethrowers' April 4, 2013 • The young heroine of Rachel Kushner's new book The Flamethrowers negotiates art and revolution from the back of a motorcycle — both the late-1970s art scene in Manhattan and the Italian radical left of the same era. Reviewer Maud Newton says The Flamethrowers has "timeless urgency."
Review Book Reviews An Unflinching Examination Of The Human Heart April 20, 2010 • The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg combines the writer's four books of short stories into one impressive display of talent. Eisenberg's volume shows a mastery over the art of illustrating human emotion and complexity.
Review Book Reviews The (Imaginary) Illness Makes The Man February 26, 2010 • The Hypochondriacs, Brian Dillon's book about nine historical figures who battled obsessions and fears about their health, shows how these afflictions bled into the work that defined their careers.
Books 'Paris Review' Author Interviews: 50 Years Of Insight November 11, 2009 • For a half-century, the literary journal's interviews, under the banner "The Art of Fiction," have unlocked the mysteries of writing and the eccentricities of writers. Critic Maud Newton reviews a new boxed set, The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes I-IV.
Review Book Reviews A Candid Take On The Evolving Immigrant Experience November 5, 2009 • In his wide-ranging, expertly curated anthology Becoming Americans, Ilan Stavans collects four centuries of immigrants' stories.
Review Book Reviews In Bogota, An Intricate Web Of Secrets, Betrayal October 5, 2009 • Gabriel hasn't spoken to his father since the senior writer's review proclaiming his son's first book a failure. When impending heart surgery reunites the men, generational tensions surface along with WWII-era intrigue in Juan Gabriel Vasquez's inventive and intricately plotted The Informers.
Review Book Reviews Ardent Polemic On Behalf Of Passion August 28, 2009 • Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love makes an engaging case for raw attraction — where lust, emotion and intellect converge. Feminism, Nehring argues, has given us innumerable opportunities. Now how about the right to be romantic?
Review Book Reviews Adventures In The Art World: 'American Painter' July 15, 2009 • Assistant to a celebrity painter, whom she also sleeps with, Emma has stopped making her own art. Written by Jeff Koons' former assistant, The American Painter Emma Dial is a riveting inquiry into the creative impulse and a knowing portrait of the art world.
Review Book Reviews Madness, A Mansion And Overtones Of the Occult June 5, 2009 • Although her past works have focused on lesbian themes, class anxiety is the animating force behind Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, a chilling and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II.
Review Book Reviews After The Colonizers Depart May 18, 2009 • Sudanese author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North is an engaging and complicated novel about two men who leave Africa to study in England and afterward belong in neither place. The novel has become a classic of postcolonial literature.
Review Book Reviews From Beyond, Mark Twain Lets Loose May 1, 2009 • Among the previously unpublished writings left behind at Twain's death were squibs, rants and unfinished essays that capture the folksy icon's furious but often repressed compulsion to tell the world what he really thought of its tedious platitudes and received wisdom.
Review Book Reviews After Storms Literal and Metaphoric, Rebuilding April 29, 2009 • Frederick Barthelme's novel Waveland parallels the fate of the town it was named for, which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It's about loss — of property, love and family — but also about starting over and, just maybe, building something better this time.
Review Book Reviews Horror And Slapstick In A Brutal, Timeless Parable April 17, 2009 • It's Kafka meets Stephen King and The Three Stooges in this tale of a young man unwillingly inducted by psychotic clowns into a lethal circus act. Will Elliott's The Pilo Family Circus is a gripping psychological satire.
Review Book Reviews Flannery O'Connor's Complex, Flawed Character March 31, 2009 • In its painstaking honesty, Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor is both a gift and a curse to O'Connor's fans, displaying as it does the racial insensitivity and other flaws of one of America's greatest short-story writers.
Review Book Reviews Writing Well About Writing Beautifully February 25, 2009 • Kitty Burns Florey's history of penmanship is definitely not an exercise in hand-wringing about handwriting. Her engaging exploration is filtered through her own obsession with handwriting as an act of self-expression.
Review Book Reviews New Delhi Dad Has Big Family, Bigger Problems February 19, 2009 • If his 13 children didn't give Mr. Ahuja plenty to worry about, his career presiding over development in sprawling Delhi is also in trouble. Karan Mahajan's highly entertaining debut novel, Family Planning, shows a rare level of concision, insight and humor.
