David Nasaw writes that Joseph P. Kennedy was always “the most vital, the smartest, the dominant one in a room” who “imposed his will on family members, friends, and acquaintances, [...]
The idea of alternative universes is old hat. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter just published The Long Mars, the third installment in their Long Earth series about uncountable millions of [...]
555 Hudson Street, New York, the former home of Jane Jacobs On a recent trip to New York City, I went looking for Jane Jacobs and found the Gay [...]
It’s easy enough to miss or disregard several faint Biblical echoes in Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland. After all, this is a very modern story about Indians born in [...]
I suspect that Jim Brosnan and Anne Hollander never met. They moved in different circles. They died eight days apart — Brosnan on June 29 at the age of 84, [...]
The stellar Penguin Lives series, published from 1999 to 2011, was a collective act of courage and chutzpah. Each of the 34 writers in the series dared to tell the [...]
Jim Crace’s 2001 book The Devil’s Larder is a collection of 64 very short stories centering on food. There are stories here about strip fondue and about a waiter who [...]
Is Terry Pratchett a fan of John Barth? I never gave it any thought until I read Pratchett’s 2012 collection of short fiction A Blink of the Screen which contains [...]
Sir Reginald Reginaldson, the son of a Danish merchant, grew up in the well-to-do mercantile community of Houndstooth-upon-Tweed on High Street in London during the second half of the reign [...]
A book about five Hollywood directors in World War II? Well, OK. It was a book selected by one of my book clubs so I got a copy of Five [...]