Book Review: The Pilgrims
/When two London friends find a doorway leading to a magical realm, they think they're in luck - but Will Elliott's raucous new novel has some nasty surprises in store for them
Read MoreThe Embattled Canon in the Penny Press!
/The New York Times Book Review pauses to take note of the fact that it’s been twenty years since Harold Bloom wrote his big, controversial book The Western Canon, a little anniversary that had completely slipped my mind. To honor the occasion, the NYTBR enlisted two of our sharpest public thinkers, Pankaj Mishra and [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Lockstep
/When a tech-savvy young man wakes up fourteen thousand years after entering suspended animation, he finds the galaxy radically altered - and his brother firmly in charge
Read MoreBook Review: The Barrow
/Ancient magic talismans are almost always more trouble than they're worth, but that doesn't deter the rag-tag group of anti-heroes in Mark Smylie's energetically readable debut novel
Read MoreThe Kings of Vain Intent!
/Our book today is the lusty 1970 historical novel The Kings Of Vain Intent by Graham Shelby, a mid-20th century hack book reviewer who struck historical novel gold with his book The Knights of Dark Renown, the prequel to this present book. Shelby is a largely artless writer, but he knows full well the visceral [...]
Read MoreBook Review: A King's Ransom
/The larger-than-life story of captivity and struggles of King Richard the Lionheart
Read MoreMystery Monday: Red Dragon!
/Our book today is Thomas Harris’s ultra-famous 1981 novel Red Dragon, the perfect shard of falling crystal that triggered an avalanche of such proportions that most novelists don’t even dare to dream that anything like it will happen to them. The book was a moderate seller for Bantam in its modest original printing despite near-universal [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Day of the Dead
/A dead street-boy haunts the latest adventure of Commissario Ricciardi in this series set in 1930s Naples
Read MoreCelebrity Ashtrays in the Penny Press!
/I vaguely understand the value of the celebrity endorsement, the eye-catching strategy of linking stars to products, but I swear, if I live to be thirty I’ll never understand the pursuit of that strategy in open contradiction of its own meaning. Yes, of course if you’re a health magazine, you’d want to find some nice [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Land of Steady Habits
/An affluent suburban family breaks apart and re-forms in this remarkably assured debut novel
Read MoreBook Review: The Headmaster's Wife
/The confession of a man found wandering naked in Central Park grows more and more problematic as it unfolds
Read MoreBook Review: Cambridge
/A precocious young girl and her family travel far and wide from her beloved home of Cambridge, Massachusetts
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Crusades!
/Some Penguin Classics achieve a new relevance for the worst of reasons, and surely the head of that list is this venerable volume from 1963, Chronicles of the Crusades, featuring M. R. B. Shaw’s piously serviceable translation of Geoffroy De Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople and Jean de Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis, two of [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Words of Radiance
/Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy series set on a storm-raked world continues
Read MoreBook Review: Murder at Cape Three Points
/A dogged police inspector investigates two gruesome murders at the heart of Ghana's booming new oil economy
Read MoreMystery Monday: Judge Dee – Poets and Murder!
/Our book today is Poets and Murder, the last of Robert Van Gulik’s mysteries starring the redoubtable (and semi-mythical) 7th-century Chinese magistrate Judge Dee. It’s a series famously born in a bookstore – a used bookshop in Tokyo where Van Gulik found an old Chinese manuscript containing some adventures of the Dee character. Van Gulik’s [...]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Clark Ashton Smith!
/Some Penguin Classics will feel like a very long time coming, especially to their fervent adherents. When it comes to the work of pioneering 20th century fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, surely one of those fervent adherents is S. T. Joshi, the editor behind the Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft, who in the early [...]
Read MoreBook Review: From the Tree to the Labyrinth
/If the idea of a big collection of writings about socio-linguistics by the author of "The Name of the Rose" strikes you as a winning way to spend a weekend, Harvard University Press has some good news for you.
Read MoreCrackpot Letters to the Editor in the Penny Press!
/I ordinarily have very little patience with the various species of brontosaurus who decry all the electronic suburbs of the Republic of Letters. I’ve worn out my ‘they’re entitled to their beliefs’ credit-balance when it comes to people who sniff at online-only publication – nowadays I just clamp my mouth shut instead of belligerently pointing [...]
Read MoreBook Review: A Darkling Sea
/A murder at the bottom of an alien ocean looks likely to spark an interstellar war
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