Book Reviews

  Carrie’s husband Bill doesn’t make an appearance in Sharyn Skeeter’s Dancing with Langston until near the end of the novel.  And, when he does show up at the Harlem [...]

    Elmore Leonard was in his early 30s and still learning his craft when, in 1956, he published The Escape from Five Shadows. Missing is the snappy dialogue that [...]

The 29-year-old Elmore Leonard had been a professional writer for just three years when, in 1954, he published his second novel The Law at Randado.  It’s a book that displays [...]

Xavier X. Salomon ends his short, beautifully produced, extravagantly illustrated 2016 book The Art of Guido Cagnacci by quoting two words from a letter that two Italian luminaries exchanged nearly [...]

On the surface, Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is about two highly controversial verses that may or may not have been in Qur'an. Certainly, that’s what got Rushdie [...]

The scribbled telegram text, sent by messenger from the top of Mount Everest, was bleak — but also a bit odd. Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop [...]

Here is the sad reality at the center of Leo Steinberg’s 2001 book Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper: Of Leonardo’s Last Supper we have only an after-image….[O]f the original surface — [...]

  David R. Slavitt’s 2001 The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation is a post-Holocaust reading of the short biblical work inconsolably grieving the destruction of the Temple in [...]

In 1972, when P.D. James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she’d been a novelist for just a decade. Her first four books were centered on Adam Dalgleish, a [...]