Book Reviews

Barbara Pym wrote Some Tame Gazelle in the mid-1930s, shortly after she graduated from Oxford University, and it was rejected by several publishers.  After World War II, she revised it, [...]

Here’s how Celia Dale’s 1943 novel The Least of These ends. I’m going to tell you this because, at the moment, the odds are very much stacked against your ever [...]

  Somehow, somewhere, I obtained a fairly solid copy of P.G. Konody’s small book Filippo Lippi, published in London in 1911 as part of a series titled Masterpieces in Colour. [...]

In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant [...]

A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]

“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]

Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, [...]

Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published.  It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t.  Williams writes of William Stoner with [...]