Book Reviews

The Song of Songs is one of three very odd books in the Bible.  Ecclesiastes expresses a deep mournful existential angst not found anywhere else in the Jewish and Christian [...]

Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, published in Italian in 1975, is a literary memoir of high art and broad ambition.  It covers the waterfront. The periodic table, of course, is [...]

Near the very end of Julia Keller’s latest Acker’s Gap novel The Cold Way Home (Minotaur, 306 pages, $27.99), Jake Oakes wants something that he knows he may never get, [...]

Granny Weatherwax hears a noise outside her witch’s cottage: There was something in the garden.It wasn’t much of a garden.  There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a [...]

Two-thirds of the way through Raymond Chandler’s novel Playback, Philip Marlowe is having a conversation with Henry Clarendon IV, an aged, wealthy man who spends his days sitting in a [...]

Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois is an important book of American literature, a significant work in the development of the field [...]

Two dead men. Long ago, the first tried to kill the second with a horrible torture but was killed by an act of a god. The second lived a long, [...]

On the last page of Elmore Leonard’s 1983 novel La Brava, his title character, Joe La Brava, is told by former screen siren Jean Shaw, “It’s not the movies, Joe.” [...]

On one of the final pages of his 1995 study Edward Hopper: Portraits of America, Wieland Schmied emphasizes the starkness, bleakness and harshness of light in Hopper’s paintings, especially those [...]

Lady Eleanor, a young ruler in the county of Dorset in southern England, is quiet and thoughtful, sitting alone in Corfe Castle with her seneschal, John Faulkner.  Just hours earlier, [...]