Book Review: Young Eliot
/A lavishly-detailed new biography shows us Thomas Stearns Eliot in his slightly fussy, slightly feckless pre-fame years
Read MoreBook Review: The Fortunes of Francis Barber
/One of the only two people at the deathbed of Samuel Johnson was a young ex-slave to whom Johnson was, in his testy way, devoted. A new book finally gives Francis Barber the biography he's always deserved
Read MoreSupergirl!
/Our book today is the 2007 Supergirl volume of DC Comics’ “Showcase Presents,” which was brought to my mind by the recent announcement of a live-action WB TV “Supergirl” series coming up soon, starring a pleasant-faced young woman named Melissa Benoist (and also starring, in a bit of a casting coup, Dean Cain, who played […]
Read MoreBook Review: What Stands in a Storm
/A new book details the terrible destruction caused by a record-breaking series of tornadoes that struck the American South in 2011
Read MoreBook Review: The Fifth Heart
/In Dan Simmons' latest fantastic novel, Henry James finds himself teamed up with fiction's most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, in order to solve a very real - and very heartbreaking - mystery.
Read MoreQuacks and Pingbacks in the Penny Press!
/I’ve had occasion to comment many times here at Stevereads about some of the contradictions that seem hard-wired into the particular magazine sub-genre of the lad-mag “men’s” titles. They routinely feature ‘back to basics’ articles teaching their audience of over-salaried douche-dudes how to strip away the clutter from their lives and live simply and organically, […]
Read MoreBook Review: The War That Used Up Words
/At the outbreak of the First World War, American writers flocked to Europe and headed for the Western Front in order to find their Muse - and to make some quick cash. A new book follows a handful of these earliest chroniclers
Read MoreBook Review: Akhenaten & The Origins of Monotheism
/The rebel pharaoh who instituted a radical new monotheism gets a highly-detailed and revisionist investigation
Read MoreBook Review: The Wide World's End
/In the concluding volume of James Enge's gripping fantasy trilogy, a band of unlikely heroes is caught between warring godlike beings in a world quickly tearing itself apart
Read MoreOn Crime Writing!
/Our book today is another skimpy little thing, a 1973 Capra chapbook combining two essays by the crime fiction writer who worked under the pen name of Ross MacDonald, and although it fits in with our deep-breath respite from enormous whopping volumes, it’s also undeniable in this case that we probably don’t want this particular […]
Read MoreBook Review: Hissing Cousins
/The daughter of the first President Roosevelt and the wife of the second President Roosevelt had a long and sometimes cross-purposed relationship. A new book dishes the old dirt.
Read MoreThe Fur Hat!
/Our book today is a bit of an antidote to the massive doorstops we’ve been dealing with recently here on Stevereads: it’s The Fur Hat, a 120-page 1989 novella by caustic and sometimes brilliant Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, here translated into English by Susan Brownsberger. The book is a treat of hangdog sarcasm. It tells […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Red Queen
/In a dystopian future, a plucky young woman from a poor village suddenly finds herself at the heart of the corrupt power system and the focal point of a rebellion in "The Hunger Ga-" um, in Victoria Aveyard's "The Red Queen."
Read MoreBook Review: I Hate Myselfie
/Wildly popular YouTube phenomenon Shane Dawson now has a BOOK!
Read MoreIn the Modern Library: Keats & Shelley!
/Our book today is another whopper from the days of the old manilla-covered Modern Library era: The Complete Poems of Keats & Shelley, for those times when you want pages and pages of these near-exact contemporaries all running together, rather than hunting up your Oxford completes or your Penguin selects. Although the heft of this […]
Read MoreBook Review: Goldeneye
/Ian Fleming bought a run-down villa in Jamaica and used it as the workshop - and backdrop - for his world-famous James Bond novels. A new book takes us inside the world of Goldeneye
Read MoreIn the Modern Library: W. H. Prescott!
/Our book today is a biggie, a doorstop: it’s the combined volume Modern Library did of William Hickling Prescott‘s The History of the Conquest of Mexico and his The History of the Conquest of Peru. Prescott finished the first in 1843 and the second in 1847, and neither is exactly skimpy in terms of heft […]
Read MoreBook Review: Oscar Wilde's Chatterton
/For over a century, Oscar Wilde's notebook on Thomas Chatterton has been regarded as a 'smoking gun' of Wilde's plagiaristic tendencies. A new book radically re-examines the issue
Read MoreIn the Modern Library: Bulfinch’s Mythology!
/Our book today is a truly perennial classic, Bulfinch’s Mythology, a book that’s been consistently in print since it first appeared – and one of those curious items whose own author wouldn’t have recognized it. It’s a one-volume collection of three books by Thomas Bulfinch: The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858), […]
Read MoreBook Review: The Tapestry
/Joanna Stafford - niece of an executed man and distant cousin to King Henry VIII - is called to court, where she immediately becomes the focal point of deadly intrigues
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